African Conundrum

A Bolshevik whose blog I read regularly is Louis Proyect. Louis writes good review of foreign films from places such as Turkey, films we don't get to see very often. He writes interesting personal reminiscences (he grew up in what used to be called the Borscht Belt) and on anthropological topics, such as the controversies about the studies of the Yanomami and the pecadillioes of the ethnographers who studied them.

He also descends periodically into the depths of "unrepentant" Marxism, as in this piece, where he rakes Columbia B-school types over the coals for their doctrinaire free-market views about Africa.

The critique's easy enough. You can't understand modern Africa without an honest assessment of the ravages of slavery and colonialism. The colonialists built some infrastructure and to some extent, educated the predecessors of the current class of leeches who run the place. Current extractive industries, such as oil and diamonds, don't help the locals very much, and sometimes ruin things for them.

A socialist critic, though, needs to answer a few questions.

1. Since independence, many countries have been officially "socialist," without much to show for it. Why not?

2. Why have the small states of East Asia, also colonized, also ravaged by war, oppression and corruption, fared so much better than Africa?

3. Can any political and economic system develop African countries whose average IQs are in the 60s and 70s?

The Peace Crawl

Today is the day for the anti-Iraq War demonstration in DC.

There's a typically splenetic exchange in Marc Cooper's combox. Marc, it seems, thinks the speakers' list, studded with the usual celebrity suspects, along with the fact that the PR front woman for the march is a representative of the Communist Party USA (which I honestly did not know still existed), shows that whoever is responsible for these choices is "overtly dumb" and a "lunkhead." Marc wonders why.

Part of the answer is the fact that organizing one of these things is mind-numbingly dumb, especially when it's a "coalition" of fringe and front groups. Who has the motivation for showing up? It's people who might as well be selling the Watchtower at a Greyhound station by holding it up and hoping someone will buy. The Witnesses have God's telephone number, the sects have the key to history, and they've all set up a "Free Mumia" committee or whatnot. They're all trolling the coalition committees and at the demonstration will be trolling the crowd for recruits.

If you're just a citizen who thinks that Bush has blown the war, or starting it was a stupid idea, but you neither enjoy the thought of the U.S. losing nor think about being one of the 144,000 saved, you might show up. You won't be able to hear the speakers anyway, and if you do, they'll lose you soon enough with whatever flavor of cant they bring to the podium. What you won't do is find your way to the organizing committee, and insist on a sane speakers' list.

Michelle Malkin will have any easy time pointing out the prevalence of moonbats at the demonstration, of course, and on Monday the usual suspects will show up in their offices at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, and things will get back to normal.

Assigned reading: Robert Michels on the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and Hal Draper on the Anatomy of the Microsect.

A Different Red-Green Alliance

London's socialist Mayor, "Red Ken" Livingstone, had a debate on Islam with Daniel Pipes, the American Cassandra on the subject. HT: PowerLine.

First of all, it's hard to imagine a mayor of a major city in this country having a public debate on a political subject with a public intellectual. How this encounter came about is in itself an interesting question.

Pipes observed that some on the Left have been attempting an alliance with the extreme forms of Islam in their countries, even though the Left is generally hostile to religion:

Pipes then homed in on the strangest aspect of the present British situation: the alliance between the U.K.'s radical Left and fundamentalist Islamist ideology. Pipes identified the former as a phenomenon distinct from, and contrary to, the traditions of the Islamic faith.

The absurdity of the relationship between Islamism and Marxism--given that leftists are strident in their defense of modernism and feminism--was nicely illustrated by Livingston's choice of debating partner. The mayor chose Salma Yacoob, who represents the Respect party--best known as the shelter for George Galloway--in a local council in Birmingham. Yacoob appeared wearing a hijab, even though the Respect party is, in theory, an arm of the secularist Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Late in the discussion, Livingston declaimed his atheism and proposed that British parents should have no chance to opt their children out of the state school system in order to receive faith-based education. It would seem that these sorts of attitudes should make the Marxist-Muslim alliance trickier than it appears.

But of course, British left's adulation for Islamic fundamentalism is restricted to that single variety of religious experience. While Livingston flatters reactionary Muslim clerics such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, much of the Labour party spends its time assailing Catholic adoption agencies for declining to turn children over to homosexual couples. (Islam is generally opposed to adoption except by familial relatives, which might help square this particular circle for Britain's leftists; although Qaradawi has publicly called for homosexuals to be executed.)

The SWP has probably gone further than most communist groups. It's also interesting that the British SWP was founded by a Palestinian Jew (born before there was a State of Israel) named Yigael Gluckstein, pseudonymously Tony Cliff, among other monikers. Whether this alliance is simply a pushmeppullyou that can't last, or a harbinger of something more long-lasting remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the SWP seems to be pretty serious about the alliance, which could last until the British sharia state puts the Reds up against the wall.

Passing strange, in any case.

Quaker Picnic Talk From an Unrepentant Marxist

Of course, some of us who have quaint ideas about right and wrong and international law might quibble over the right of the U.S. Marines to invade and occupy such countries, an act that Marine General Smedley Butler once described as a “racket”."

-- Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect, of course, self-defines as "The Unrepentant Marxist."

It's quaint that a Marxist revolutionary cites "right and wrong" and "international law" to support his criticism of U.S. policy.

If I remember right, in most varieties of the Marxist glass bead game, "right and wrong" is merely the expression of class interest, and "international law" the operating rules of the tyrants' cartel.

In this calculus, blaming a bourgeois government for violating international law is like blaming a rattlesnake for being venomous.

There's a whole tradition in this country, of course, of leftists trying to wrap themselves in the flag. "Communism," said Earl Browder, "is 20th Century Americanism," and when Stalin sent American Communists to die for the Spanish Republic, their expeditionary force was styled the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade." And who can forget the "Ballad for Americans?"

In 1935 the Comintern proclaimed a Popular Front policy that downplayed revolution and emphasized alliances with reformers and other leftists against the common menace of fascism. Embracing this stance with the slogan "Communism is twentieth-century Americanism," the CPUSA shifted to support of Roosevelt and sought a cooperative role on the left of the broad New Deal coalition. Communists achieved a limited but nonetheless significant presence in main stream politics through their participation in New York's American Labor Party, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, the End Poverty in California movement, the Wisconsin Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation, and the Washington [state] Commonwealth Federation. Two members of Congress, Representatives John Bernard (1937–1938) of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party and Hugh De Lacy (1945–1946), a Washington State Democrat, became secret members. Two open communists won election to the New York City Council.

Communists also took leading although usually secret roles in numerous liberal-left advocacy groups such as the American League for Peace and Democracy, National Negro Congress, American Writers Union, and American Youth Congress. Communists had no role in founding the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), but in 1936, after secret negotiations, CIO leaders hired more than fifty communist organizers and brought into the CIO several small communist-led unions.

Source: here.

Years ago, a friend of mine, a "red diaper baby," told me of going to a Youth Congress in Russia. The slogan of the day was "Mir e Druzhba!" or "Peace and Friendship." They went around Mir-and-druzhbing. This, of course, was the language of a Quaker picnic, not class struggle.