Published bimonthly since 1986, Against the Current is a Solidarity sponsored analytical journal for the broad revolutionary left. The September/October ATC continues its coverage of '68 with articles by Gerd-Rainer Horn and Michael Lowy plus an interview with Dr. Gwen Patton, who joined SNCC while at Tuskegee University in the early '60s. The issue also features Peter Rachleff on the Postville ICE raids, Terry Eagleton on "The God Question," and Au Loong Yu on "The New Chinese Nationalism." Dorothy Pinkney tells the story of her husband's imprisonment for quoting Deuteronomy 28:15.
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is the monthly English-language magazine of the Fourth International. IV is a window to radical alternatives world-wide, carrying reports, analysis and debates from all corners of the globe. Correspondents in over 50 countries report on popular struggles, and the debates that are shaping the left of tomorrow.
Bomb kills 60, injures 250 at Islamabad Marriott: Most of the 60 dead and over 250 injured as a result of suicide attack on a five-star Marriott Hotel in Islamabad were security guards and drivers. Read More...
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- Update on Troy Davis and a letter from Troy
by Isaac posted on 09/30/08
- Some Talking Points on the Financial Crisis
by Kate G posted on 09/30/08
- Labor Goes to Wall Street
by subcomandante micah posted on 09/30/08
- Capitalist Absurdity of the Week #2 - Well, of course, the meltdown, "regulation" etc.
by JohnM posted on 09/29/08
- Thinking about the antiwar movement
by Dianne posted on 09/25/08
- Troy Davis: "I'll be 40 my next birthday"
by Isaac posted on 09/23/08
- Troy Davis is innocent.
by Isaac posted on 09/23/08
- Party Like Its 1929: Understanding the Crisis on Wall Street
by Kate G posted on 09/21/08
from the Webzine
A Brief To-Do List for the Next President's First Day...
New from Solidarity! This brief, four-page leaflet asks what a true progressive agenda for the next president might look like. Inside, a brief overview of this historic election cycle, and our endorsement of Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente's campaign with the Green Party.
Regroupment & Refoundation of a U.S. Left
As part of the preparation for our 2008 Convention, members of SOLIDARITY have begun a political document describing some perspectives for socialist renewal in the twenty-first century. We welcome responses to this initial draft of the document. Some of the themes here have also been developed in Solidarity's Founding Statement and our 1997 pamphlet, “Socialist Organization Today.”
New Pamphlet: Hell on Wheels
New from Solidarity! Long time transit worker activist Steve Downs has written a pamphlet charting the twenty year story of New Directions, a rank and file caucus in New York City's transit union that he helped build and develop - including the challenges of keeping the rank and file democracy movement alive after New Directions won control of the local.
Read a review and order your copy today!Bill Banta 1941-2008
Bill Banta, a member of the Chicago branch and founding member of Solidarity, died of pancreatic cancer in a Chicago hospice on August 20th. He was 67. Bill was a revolutionary socialist his entire adult life.
From Abortion Rights to Reproductive Justice
New from Solidarity's Feminist Commission, this leaflet responds to the right wing attack on reproductive freedom and argues that the movement must go beyond "pro-choice" to true reproductive justice. This socialist and anti-racist feminist agenda would take up issues such as access to health and child care, forced sterilization, and the division of "productive" and "reproductive" labor.
Download the pamphlet...
Obama's pastor was right
Submitted by John B. Cannon on March 17, 2008 - 10:47pm.
Has anyone noticed how Obama and Clinton have been rushing to outdo each other in "rejecting and denouncing" controversial figures associated with their campaigns? First it was Obama, with Farrakhan. I was disappointed to see Obama "reject and denounce" Farrakhan himself - rather than rejecting and denouncing his anti-Semitic statements, which are worthy of being rejected. But I figured it was par for the course. Farrakhan has always been a lightning rod of presidential politics; Obama was really just distancing himself (again) from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Then there was Samantha Power, who is an annoying apostle of human rights liberalism, I believe, and I wasn't sad to see her go. Then there was Geraldine Ferraro, on the Clinton side, who doesn't seem to have aged gracefully, making remarks which might have had some core sense to them but were expressed in basically openly racist terms.
But now Obama has thrown his poor old pastor under the bus which is sad because it looks to me like the pastor's controversial statements are absolutely right-on, and bold in the ways people on the left wish Obama would be bold. Pastor Jeremiah Wright seems to live up to his name, from the bit I've read; his indictment of American white supremacy and imperialism have a prophetic ring to them, in the classic sense of the original Biblical prophets, who bore public witness against social injustice. I don't know why - I wasn't going to vote for him anyway - but it makes me sad that Obama would throw away his relationship with the person who seems to have the sharpest wisdom in his camp. I would have felt just a little better about an Obama presidency with someone like Jeremiah Wright as a spiritual advisor. I wonder how Wright and the members of the church are feeling about the denunciations and Obama's thorough distancing of himself? Folks on the left: sorry, but if Obama won't stand up for the faith community he has been part of for 20 years, what's to prevent thorough opportunism once in office?
Of course many people supporting him on the left don't expect anything better than opportunism from him; they just hope that deep down that opportunism will be tempered by deeply-held-but-for-practical-reasons-must-be-concealed politics like ... those of Pastor Wright. (Or, they just expect him to be smarter, more eloquent, and less of a cowboy than GWB, to which I can only say, well, if your expectations are that low....) I don't know what to say to that kind of argument. I don't know how we're supposed to build a better politics even at an electoral level in this country if its most eloquent purveyors don't utter nary a peep of it. The comparisons with Jackson drive me crazy, because Jackson, for all his faults, put forth such a politics. Which is the last time that anything other than Third Way Clinton-Blair triangulation has been put out in the Democratic Party. Putting out such a politics would be an integral part of undoing what is still the long-term success of the Reagan Realignment. If Obama is a Kennedy-type, which he might well be, that means precisely nothing. Kennedy's policies were a continuation of Eisenhower's in most senses including Cold War, economic, and social policies. LBJ's Great Society was actually a much more substantive development in social liberalism than anything JFK developed.
I wonder if Pastor Wright would accept a nomination to be Cynthia McKinney's Vice Presidential candidate?
Returning to the more practical sphere: Obama has got to get out of this mindset that he has to reject, denounce, and fire every aide or associate who isn't as pure as the driven snow, and figure out some other way to deflect these punches. Wait, why do I care about that if I don't support him? Hmm. I can't answer that. Maybe the latte liberal who has grown up inside me, wanting to bust out, just can't help it.
Returning to the broader political issue: I wonder if all the right-wingers are right when they say that the anti-US sentiments expressed by Wright (and supposedly Michelle Obama in a famous gaffe) are completely out of tune with where a majority of Americans are at, excepting certain latte liberals? And would that out-of-tune-ness be so jarring as to justify a candidate like Obama running away from these views as fast as he can, or could he, if he were willing, conceivably make a political stand on this ground? Of course they're not completely right; for one thing, us anti-imperialists are over here waving, "Hey, we're still here, and lots of us couldn't give a fuck about a latte." True, but unfortunately not a significant voting bloc.
Secondly, I believe that sentiments combining real patriotism and love of country and people with a deep disgust with a lot of what the US is about exist broadly in Black communities. I don't believe these apparent contradictions are inchoate; in fact, Black culture is probably the best model there is of an "immanent critique" (as opposed to a total critique from anti-imperialists, which might not resonate very broadly at the moment) of US patriotism. I've sometimes thought that Allen Iverson's pride, after a third-place finish at the 2004 Olympics, when most of the media was bellyaching about the fall from "Dream Team" basketball supremacy, might be the model for what a positive post-imperial sense of self for someone from the US could be like, very, very distant though the reality of such a possibility might be.
Third, my experience is that in a lot of immigrant communities, while there is pride associated with success in coming to the US and being able to succeed, more or less, and maybe send something back for the family, this is also balanced often with a fairly realistic and informed sense of what the US is about internationally as well as its internal injustices.
Fourth, it is true that patriotic pride is often tied at the hip to closely defended white privilege among white workers - at least this is one strand. But it is hard to tell, anecdotally, how ubiquitous this strand really is. Would a moderate, sobering critique of the notion that "America is number one" and the US presence on the world stage, combined with an affirmation of a 1940s-Communist-Party-style multiracial-populist Americanism really drive white workers to vote for Reaction? (I'm assuming that this is the best we could hope of any presidential candidate, even a Third-Party candidate with some hope of resonance.) We certainly won't find out this year, because Obama is running scared from the implication that he might represent anything less than red-blooded, gung-ho patriotism. Again, conscious of my tendency to sound like a broken record here, I think Jesse Jackson is the closest we came to discovering where something like such a politics could go. Let's remember that - and this seems to have been lost in the political memories of most 2008 commentators - while Jackson never did particularly well with whatever was the 1988 equivalent of the "latte liberal," he did do quite well with working-class whites in several states, by speaking directly about class-based grievances as well as other issues. (I remember this being the case anecdotally in several states, but I'm not sure how the final votes broke down or whether anyone has ever analyzed the "Bradley effect" broken down by class in this election.)
Of course many people supporting him on the left don't expect anything better than opportunism from him; they just hope that deep down that opportunism will be tempered by deeply-held-but-for-practical-reasons-must-be-concealed politics like ... those of Pastor Wright. (Or, they just expect him to be smarter, more eloquent, and less of a cowboy than GWB, to which I can only say, well, if your expectations are that low....) I don't know what to say to that kind of argument. I don't know how we're supposed to build a better politics even at an electoral level in this country if its most eloquent purveyors don't utter nary a peep of it. The comparisons with Jackson drive me crazy, because Jackson, for all his faults, put forth such a politics. Which is the last time that anything other than Third Way Clinton-Blair triangulation has been put out in the Democratic Party. Putting out such a politics would be an integral part of undoing what is still the long-term success of the Reagan Realignment. If Obama is a Kennedy-type, which he might well be, that means precisely nothing. Kennedy's policies were a continuation of Eisenhower's in most senses including Cold War, economic, and social policies. LBJ's Great Society was actually a much more substantive development in social liberalism than anything JFK developed.
I wonder if Pastor Wright would accept a nomination to be Cynthia McKinney's Vice Presidential candidate?
Returning to the more practical sphere: Obama has got to get out of this mindset that he has to reject, denounce, and fire every aide or associate who isn't as pure as the driven snow, and figure out some other way to deflect these punches. Wait, why do I care about that if I don't support him? Hmm. I can't answer that. Maybe the latte liberal who has grown up inside me, wanting to bust out, just can't help it.
Returning to the broader political issue: I wonder if all the right-wingers are right when they say that the anti-US sentiments expressed by Wright (and supposedly Michelle Obama in a famous gaffe) are completely out of tune with where a majority of Americans are at, excepting certain latte liberals? And would that out-of-tune-ness be so jarring as to justify a candidate like Obama running away from these views as fast as he can, or could he, if he were willing, conceivably make a political stand on this ground? Of course they're not completely right; for one thing, us anti-imperialists are over here waving, "Hey, we're still here, and lots of us couldn't give a fuck about a latte." True, but unfortunately not a significant voting bloc.
Secondly, I believe that sentiments combining real patriotism and love of country and people with a deep disgust with a lot of what the US is about exist broadly in Black communities. I don't believe these apparent contradictions are inchoate; in fact, Black culture is probably the best model there is of an "immanent critique" (as opposed to a total critique from anti-imperialists, which might not resonate very broadly at the moment) of US patriotism. I've sometimes thought that Allen Iverson's pride, after a third-place finish at the 2004 Olympics, when most of the media was bellyaching about the fall from "Dream Team" basketball supremacy, might be the model for what a positive post-imperial sense of self for someone from the US could be like, very, very distant though the reality of such a possibility might be.
Third, my experience is that in a lot of immigrant communities, while there is pride associated with success in coming to the US and being able to succeed, more or less, and maybe send something back for the family, this is also balanced often with a fairly realistic and informed sense of what the US is about internationally as well as its internal injustices.
Fourth, it is true that patriotic pride is often tied at the hip to closely defended white privilege among white workers - at least this is one strand. But it is hard to tell, anecdotally, how ubiquitous this strand really is. Would a moderate, sobering critique of the notion that "America is number one" and the US presence on the world stage, combined with an affirmation of a 1940s-Communist-Party-style multiracial-populist Americanism really drive white workers to vote for Reaction? (I'm assuming that this is the best we could hope of any presidential candidate, even a Third-Party candidate with some hope of resonance.) We certainly won't find out this year, because Obama is running scared from the implication that he might represent anything less than red-blooded, gung-ho patriotism. Again, conscious of my tendency to sound like a broken record here, I think Jesse Jackson is the closest we came to discovering where something like such a politics could go. Let's remember that - and this seems to have been lost in the political memories of most 2008 commentators - while Jackson never did particularly well with whatever was the 1988 equivalent of the "latte liberal," he did do quite well with working-class whites in several states, by speaking directly about class-based grievances as well as other issues. (I remember this being the case anecdotally in several states, but I'm not sure how the final votes broke down or whether anyone has ever analyzed the "Bradley effect" broken down by class in this election.)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T6-O8GIylQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T6-O8GIylQ
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