The Paul Street Report, 4.6.2023
Dear readers: Two things: (1) as I put this essay up I am watching the Republi-fascist-controlled state legislature of Tennessee potentially and likely carrying out the expulsion of three democratically elected representatives: a Black man from Nashville, a Black man from Memphis, and a white woman from Knoxville. The representatives’ purported transgression? Joining a loud public protest inside the legislative chamber on behalf of sane gun control measures in the wake of the nation’s latest school shooting in Nashville. If and when, as seems likely – not certain but probable – these expulsions take place, it is my sincere hope that all good people in those three cities and other cities and town in Tennessee will come out into the streets and public squares to shut the state down. In the meantime, I beseech you all to get serious (if you haven’t already) about the fascist and Republi-fascist/Christian white nationalist/authoritarian menace stalking this country. There’s nothing “semi-” about it.
(2). I can no longer afford to provide all my content for free here. Yesterday was the first day in which I made a piece fully readable only for paid subscribers. I don’t really like charging people for my writing. I also don’t like writing for less than minimum wage. I have bills and taxes to pay. Don’t blame the player, blame the game! And trust me, I have no expectation of getting affluent here. If that’s what I was all about I’d be tilting right-wing like certain folks here.
Now today’s essay, which comes in at a nifty 957 words (I can write pieces less than 3000 words, I really can 😊 )….
If you are or at least strive to be a principled radical or revolutionary socialist who embraces a scientific, evidence-based approach to reality, listening to people living in the open-air asylum that is the United States talk about politics and society can get really painful.
This includes people who identify as on “the left,” whatever that means anymore. I was at a sparsely attended peace conference recently where a progressive writer of the Trumpenleft and Putin Left sort was given ample speaking time on and against the Ukraine War and predictably failed to say a single, solitary thing about the criminality of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. They proceeded as if Putin wasn’t a blood-soaked imperialist butcher and as if the United States was the single and only actor in the US-Russian proxy war in Ukraine – and as if anyone at the conference needed lectures on the United States’ status as the world’s leading imperialist power or on the United States’ provocative and imperialist role in Eastern Europe.
They rightly noted that Donald Trump’s recent indictment is for the least of his transgressions and that Trump committed an epic war crime when he murdered the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil but failed to mention that Trump tried to overthrow what’s left of democracy in the United States in the fall and winter of 2020-21 – an effort that culminated in the attempted fascist coup of January 6.
Another left speaker, this one coming from a different perspective at the same conference, handed me a mini-pamphlet containing some “points for discussion” on the Ukraine War. This short document is rightly critical of the Putin left’s “refusal to acknowledge or condemn Russian aggression.” It correctly identifies the war as “principally an inter-imperialist conflict between the United States and Russia.”
Still, the document makes numerous egregious errors. It calls the war a fight “over who will dominate Ukraine.” That misses the main point. As the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) has been arguing, it’s not about Ukraine:
“The U.S. is using this war to maintain and expand their global domination up against another imperial power – and they are cynically using Ukrainian people as cannon fodder to do so. At the same time, the U.S. is ramping up threats against China, who the U.S. has called a ‘strategic’ rival. ….the U.S. is fighting for…control over a global system in which billions of people, especially in the global South, are brutally exploited….their goal is to stay TOP G – the top gangster at the head of a worldwide system of exploitation and oppression.” (Revcoms, “No U.S./NATO War With Russia!,” April 2, 2023).
The document claims that “a refusal to acknowledge or condemn Russian aggression, and in some quarters even a celebration of the Russian war of aggression” has become “nearly hegemonic” in the US antiwar movement. That is a gross exaggeration, contradicted by Code Pink leader Medea Benjamin’s repeated condemnations of Russia’s invasion. The Revolutionary Communist Party recently held antiwar rallies that started by calling the Russian invasion of Ukraine “a criminal act.”
The “points for discussion” document bizarrely claims that Democrats’ support for the war is driven by “a social base whipped up for war by Russiagate myths.” That is a preposterous assertion that deletes the core propaganda claim driving support for the war among the US-Americans: the false assertion that the conflict is a great battle between democracy, represented by Ukraine and its US and Western allies, and autocracy, represented by Russia.
The document asserts without evidence that the war has “empowered the most reactionary social forces in the United States.” (If anything, the war seems to have benefited Democrats more than the Republi-fascists.) It also strangely describes the longtime imperial Russian state as an “emerging imperialist power.”
The document criticizes “people who should know better” for having “bought into the chauvinist myths cranked out by the war machine,” something it attributes to “either…professional loyalty or Stockholm syndrome[-like captivity] to the Democratic Party.” It makes no reference to exactly what “chauvinist myths” the “war machine” has “cranked out.” The missing piece there is the ideology of US-imperialist nationalism, the notion of the US as the world’s leading beacon and agent of freedom and democracy. That core national-chauvinist myth goes much deeper and stretches far beyond whatever the document means by “the war machine.” Its power is about something much bigger and more pervasive than “professional loyalty” or mental enslavement to the Democrats. (The document earlier notes that “both political parties” have “supported the war.”)
Another missing piece in the document’s critique is the stealth “progressive” national chauvinism that pollutes much of the antiwar movement in the US: the call to “fund the American people’s needs, not the war machine.” As the Revcoms explain, as two nuclear superpowers are facing off in a conflict that could well lead to global nuclear catastrophe and as the US struggles to sustain its dominance atop a global system of imperial parasitism, exploitation and competition (and, I might add, ecocide), the point is to “identify and stand with oppressed and exploited humanity the world over,” NOT to obsess over Americans’ own pocketbooks (RCP, “Three Reasons Why the Demand ‘Fund the People’s Needs, Not the War Machine is Immoral and Impossible,” March 2023). The “left” needs to move off “butter, not guns for Americans” and on to revolution against capitalism-imperialism for all humanity.
Then there’s this completely bizarre line in the document: “These two positions, American chauvinism and Putin’s little left helpers, are united in their lack of faith in the potential of mass resistance to this war.” Say what? People caught up in “American chauvinism,” never defined, “lack faith” in prospects for “mass resistance” to a war that “American chauvinism” supports?! What an absurd thing to write!
That’s it for today: back to the Tennessee expulsion hearings. I am also keeping an eye on the remarkable and increasingly miltiant protests against Macron’s neoliberal pention “reform” (regression) in France.