WE NEED TO EXPAND THE IRAQ WAR SYNDROME

Harry Targ

In a November/December 2005 Foreign Affairs article, “The Iraq Syndrome,” …. I argued that there would likely be growing skepticism about the notions that “the United States should take unilateral military action to correct situations or overthrow regimes it considers reprehensible but that present no immediate threat to it, that it can and should forcibly bring democracy to other nations not now so blessed, that it has the duty to rid the world of evil, that having by far the largest defense budget in the world is necessary and broadly beneficial, that international cooperation is of only very limited value, and that Europeans and other well-meaning foreigners are naive and decadent wimps.” Most radically, I went on to suggest that the United States might “become more inclined to seek international cooperation, sometimes even showing signs of humility.” John Mueller, “The Iraq Syndrome Revisited,” Foreign Affairs, March 28, 2011: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67681/john-mueller/the-iraq-syndrome-revisited

David Halberstam reported in his important book, “The Best and the Brightest,” that President Roosevelt directed his State Department to develop a position on what United States foreign policy toward Indochina should be after the World War in Asia was ended. Two choices were possible in 1945: support the Vietnamese national liberation movement that bore the brunt of struggle against Japanese occupation of Indochina or support the French plan to reoccupy the Indochinese states of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

 

As the Cold War escalated the United States rejected Ho Chi Minh’s plea for support for independence and began funding the French in their effort to reestablish colonialism in Indochina. When the French were defeated by the Viet Minh forces in 1954, the United States stepped in and fought a murderous war until the collapse of the US South Vietnamese puppet regime in 1975.

 

Paralleling the struggle for power in Indochina, competing political forces emerged after the World War on the Korean Peninsula.  With the Soviet Union and China supporting the North Koreans and the United States supporting a regime created by it in the South a shooting war, a civil war, between Koreans ensued in 1950 which continued until an armistice was established in 1953. That armistice, not peace, continues to this day as a war of words and periodic provocations.

Political scientist John Mueller analyzed polling data concerning the support for U.S. military action in Korea and Vietnam, discovering that in both wars there was a steady and parallel decline in support for them. Working class Americans were the most opposed to both wars at every data point. Why? Because working class men and women were most likely to be drafted to fight and their loved ones the most likely to suffer the pain of soldiers coming home dead, scarred, or disabled.

Polling data from the period since the onset of the Iraq war followed the pattern Mueller found in reference to Korea and Vietnam. In all three cases levels of support for U.S. war making declined as the length of the wars increased and casualties rose. The American people typically gave the Presidents some flexibility when the wars started and the rally round the flag phenomena prevailed. But then resistance grew.

Throughout the period from the end of the Vietnam War until the 1990s, each presidential administration was faced with what foreign policy elites called “the Vietnam Syndrome.” This was a pejorative term these elites used to scornfully describe what they correctly believed would be the resistance to foreign military interventions that they periodically wished to initiate.

President Reagan wanted to invade El Salvador to save its dictatorship and to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. He would have preferred to send troops to Angola to defend the anti-communist forces of Jonas Savimbi of UNITA. To overcome the resistance to launching what could become another Vietnam quagmire, policymakers had to engage in “low intensity conflict,” convert operations that would minimize what the American people could learn about what their government was doing and who it was supporting. Reagan did expand globally and sent troops to tiny Granada, but even Reagan’s globalism, militarism, and interventionism was somewhat constrained by the fear of public outrage.

President George Herbert Walker Bush launched a six-month campaign to convince the American people that military action was needed to force Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. Despite a weak endorsement of such action by the Congress, the American people supported Gulf War 1 because casualties were small and the war lasted only a month. During a press conference announcing the Gulf War’s end in February, 1991, Bush proclaimed that “at last we licked the Vietnam Syndrome.”

Clinton knew better. He limited direct US military action to supporting NATO bombing in the former Yugoslavia in 1995, bombed targets in Iraq in so-called “no-fly zones in 1998,” , bombed Serbia in a defense of Kosovo in 1999 and used economic embargoes to weaken so-called “rogue states” throughout his eight years in office.

It was President George Walker Bush who launched long and devastating wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration used the sorrow and anger of the American people after the 9/11 terrorist acts to lie, deceive, aggress, and qualitatively increase the development of a warfare state. As Mueller has suggested an “Iraq Syndrome” had surfaced by 2005 as the lies about that war became public, the war costs were headed toward trillions of dollars in expenditures, and troop deaths and disabilities escalated. And of course an historically repressive society, Iraq, was so destroyed that U.S. troops left it in shambles with hundreds of thousands dead, disabled, and in abject poverty.

As we reflect on the ten-year anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War in March, 2003, the madmen inside the beltway are talking about increasing U.S. military involvement in Syria, not “taking any options off the table” in Iran, and threatening North Korea. Meanwhile the United States is beefing up its military presence in the Pacific to “challenge” rising Chinese power, establishing AFRICOM to respond to “terrorism” on the African continent, and speaking with scorn about the leadership in Latin America of recently deceased Hugo Chavez.

The American people must escalate commitment to its “syndromes” demanding in no uncertain terms an end to United States militarism. Mueller’s call for a U.S. foreign policy that emphasizes cooperation over conflict motivated by humility over arrogance is the least the country can do to begin the process of repairing the damage it has done to global society. 

 

 

 

 

TWO TRILLION DOLLARS AND THOUSANDS OF LIVES LATER

 

Published on Thursday, July 10, 2003 by USA Today

End U.S. Occupation Now

by Harry Targ

The great folksinger Pete Seeger sang in 1967 of the U.S. sinking deeper and deeper into "the Big Muddy" that was Vietnam, while "the big fool," President Lyndon Johnson, said, "Push on." For those of us who remember Vietnam, Iraq seems more and more like "the Big Muddy," as U.S. troops are targeted for assassination and Iraqis are killed indiscriminately in retaliation.  It is not that the circumstances involving the two U.S. military interventions are the same. In the Vietnam case, the U.S. engaged in a long and escalating neocolonial intervention from 1950 until the war was finally lost in 1975. In Iraq, the intervention that began with the Gulf War in 1991 did not involve growing troop commitments until the quick and brutal strikes by land and air against Iraqi targets this past March.  What is similar, however, is the colossal ideologically driven miscalculation that the growing guerrilla opposition today is the result primarily of malcontents from the Baath Party, who lost power and wealth with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and extremist Iraqis who relish engaging in acts of terrorism against U.S. and British troops. As in Vietnam, the explanation for growing violent opposition to U.S. military occupation is that a tiny and malevolent minority supported by foreign enemies is bent on undermining the "democratization" of Iraq. U.S. leaders just never seem to get it. When the U.S. engages in brutal economic strangulation, sends covert operatives to terrorize populations and launches air and land war on targeted populations, the victims of these actions do not regard the aggressors as liberators. The interests of the Iraqi people and the increasingly vulnerable young men and women of the U.S. military occupation would best be served if the United States negotiates the complete withdrawal of coalition troops and allows them to be replaced with a true international peace force under the aegis of the United Nations. Nothing less will stop the bloodshed. Harry Targ teaches U.S. foreign policy and international relations at Purdue University. He is the author of 11 books and 50 articles on these subjects. © Copyright 2003 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. ###

HOW DO WE SUSTAIN HUMAN LIFE? THE JOBS/INCOME PROBLEM

Harry Targ

In one way or another progressives are addressing fundamental questions basic to human sustainability. And as Pete Seeger has said: "Participation: that’s what’s going to save the human race."

First, more and more activists are raising concerns about the survivability of the natural environment in which we live: the land mass, the water systems, the productivity of the land, and the capacity of humans to continue to live on the land. Most visible to the naked eye are consequences of global climate change, including hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, storms, and blistering heat.

Second, there is a growing discussion of problems of access to the rudimentary resources for the maintenance of human life: food, water, and air. Because of the devastations of the environment to distorted and inadequate systems of production and distribution, people are living in poverty, are malnourished, and remain exposed to toxic air and water.

Third, Samir Amin estimates that one-half to two-thirds of the global population lives in conditions of “precariousness”. That is people lack access to secure jobs and income in global and national economies that systematically are able to produce more goods and services with fewer and fewer workers. However, global capitalism is based on a system of remuneration linking income to jobs. The need for fewer workers leads to fewer jobs and a downward spiral of wages and income.

Fourth, because of environmental devastation; declining access to food and clean air and water; and lack of the capacity to acquire monetary resources to sustain life, little time is left for discussions of what a better life and a better society might look like. 

In this blog I will address the access to remuneration, reducing “precariousness,” and having the resources in a money economy to sustain life. Recently, discussion of that dimension of human sustainability has been stimulated by President Obama’s call for raising the minimum wage and the jobs/income crisis faced by workers as a result of the sequester crisis. The data is familiar to most people.

Wages and Income

-Economic Policy Institute analyses show clearly that worker productivity has increased over the last 40 years and wages have stagnated or declined with the exception of a bump in real wages during the late 1990s. For economist Lawrence Mishel, in terms of wages, the last decade has been “the lost decade.”

-Wage stagnation has affected all sectors of the working population, including those with college degrees.

-Wage and income inequality has increased dramatically over the last 40 years. As Mishel’s wrote: “This divergence has been demonstrated anew in the current recovery over 2009-2011 as real wages fell for the bottom ninety percent of the wage distribution but rose for the top five percent.”

-African Americans and Latinos have experienced wage and job stagnation at rates at least a third higher than whites.

-“The declining value of the minimum wage has played a key role in these trends….” (Mishel, February 21, 2013, Economic Policy Institute.)

Using the Indiana Story to Relate Wages, Jobs, and Poverty:

-Indiana’s job loss between 2008 and 2012 was 231,500.

-Indiana is among 17 states that have continued to experience absolute declines in its labor force since the recession began.

-Median family income fell by 29.6 percent in the past decade from $78,599 to $55,368. Only Michigan, among all states, has experienced a larger percentage decrease.

-Since 2000, Indiana has seen a 52 percent increase in poverty. In 2010, 15.3 percent of Hoosiers were living in poverty, nearly one million people. Childhood poverty rates have increased by the same amount. (“Status of Working Families in Indiana, 2011, Indiana Institute for Working Families, April, 2012).

One Response: Living Wage Campaigns

From the 1990s to 2004 living wage campaigns all across the United States grew, drawing together coalitions of community activists, led by labor, faith communities, and grassroots organizations such as ACORN. Ralph Nader in a recent essay (Common Dreams, February 16, 2013) referred to an apt definition of a living wage proposed by Theodore Roosevelt at the 1912 Progressive Party convention:

“We stand for a living wage…enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living-a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit a reasonable saving for our old age.”

The first major living wage victory occurred in the Baltimore campaign of 1994. A local coalition consisting of AFSCME and a group of 50 churches called BUILD, Baltimorean’s United in Leadership Development won a very modest ordinance requiring that companies with city service contracts pay workers a base wage of $6.10 increasing to $7.70 over five years.

While modest, the Baltimore campaign inspired coalitions and demands all across the country. Between 1995 and 1999, 37 additional ordinances passed sometimes including benefits with wage increases. In 2000-2001 mobilizations led to an additional 57 ordinances. By 2002, three quarters of these ordinances required health care benefits and wage rates from $9.77 to $11.10 without health care. An additional 70 campaigns were launched in small towns and big cities around the country, including New Orleans, Santa Monica, and San Francisco (S. Laurel Weldon and Harry Targ, “From Living Wages to Family Wages?” New Political Science , March 2004).

Stephanie Luce, Professor of Labor Studies, Murphy Institute, CUNY, updated the living wage story in 2012. She said that since Baltimore much has been accomplished “…winning more than 125 living wage ordinances in cities and counties, three city minimum wages, and state and federal minimum wage increases. Eight states have indexed their minimum wage to inflation because of activist pressure, and campaigns to raise and index state minimums are underway in 10 more states.”

Luce also described problems with living wage campaigns. They tended to target small sectors of the working class (usually public employees). They often did not include part-time workers. Restrictive provisions were included in ordinances which excluded certain corporate investors from the wage and benefit requirements. Also campaigns have been long and difficult, with growing opposition from ‘big box” and other huge corporations.

On the other hand, she suggested that the value of such campaigns included the impetus living wage coalitions provided for building community coalitions. Often these coalitions supported union organizing drives. They brought together African American, faith, and labor communities. They generated pressure for other campaigns such as for a minimum wage, prevailing wage, and worker rights.

For example, Luce reported: “After activists won a living wage in Tucson, Arizona, city workers contacted the Communications Workers and organized their own union….The San Francisco living wage coalition helped win card check from the airport commission, resulting in several thousand workers joining a handful of unions....The NEA has launched a national effort to use living wage campaigns as contract campaigns, to raise wages for school support staff.”  (http://www.labornotes.org, February 27, 2012).

Luce concluded that: “Many living wage campaigns were launched not because they were the best policy available but because they could use leverage where activists were most likely to have it: at the local level.”

Are Living Wage Campaigns Still Relevant Today

Although some living wage campaigns continue, often expanding their projects to include support for minimum wages, union organizing, and other local campaigns, 9/11, two wars, and the 2008-2012 recession reshaped the agenda of progressive groups. Assaults on worker rights throughout the heartland required mobilizing to save jobs, oppose Right-to-Work Laws, protect the right of public employees to form unions, and resist the privatization of every conceivable public institution.

However, given the vision that animates the progressive majority and the need to build broad coalitions, rebuilding living wage campaigns could be an important part of its organizing future.

Living wage campaigns address one of the issues of sustaining humankind mentioned above; jobs, income and remuneration.

They would resonate with workers who survive on wages just above existing minimum wage laws.

They could work in conjunction with and parallel to mobilizations around minimum wage and jobs campaigns.

And, if the history of such campaigns is a good predictor, living wage campaigns would bring together broad coalitions of workers, faith-based activists, activists from African American and Latino communities, and activists for reproductive health.

Finally, living wage campaigns, whether committed to federal or local legislation in the past, have been grassroots movements shaped by local conditions and the particularities of organizing possibilities at the local level. Building a progressive majority requires parallel and interconnected organizing at the grassroots level and the national level. Each is informed by the other. And ultimately sustaining human life is both a global and a local project.

CELEBRATE THE "HISTORICAL REVISIONISTS:" Part 2

Harry Targ

The writings of 1960s historians who became known as the “revisionists,” challenged traditional interpretations of the interests, goals, and ideology underpinning United States foreign policy. Historians such as William Appleman Williams, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperowitz, Lloyd Gardner, Thomas Paterson  and others who were  discussed in a prior essay, http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/harry-targ-celebrate-historical.html,  offered a compelling explanation for sixties activists and those that followed them about why United States foreign policy was as it was.

First, the revisionists saw fundamental connections between economics and politics. Whether the theoretical starting point was Adam Smith or Karl Marx, these historians looked to the underlying dynamics, needs, and goals of the economic system as sources of policy. And, these writers began with the assumption that economic interest infused political systems and international relations. Revisionists argued that while security, ideologies, personalities of elites, and even human nature had some role to play in shaping policy, all of these forces were influenced in the end by economics. And economic interest shaped how political power was used.

Second, the behavior of dominant nation-states, from the seventeenth through the twentieth century, was propelled by trade, investment, financial speculation, the pursuit of slave or cheap labor, and access to vital natural resources. Economic gain, in the end, drove the system of international relations. Sometimes economic gain required cooperation; other times it necessitated war.

Third, since the use of the word “capitalism,” in the depth of the Cold War, signified that the user was some kind of Marxist, the reality that capitalism had been the dominant economic system from the fifteenth century on was ignored by most scholars. As more and more historians and social scientists employed the political economy point of view developed by the revisionists, it became apparent that as the economic system of capitalism changed over time international relations also changed. Capitalist enterprises and their supporting states accumulated more and more wealth, expanded at breakneck speed, consolidated both economic and political power, and from time to time built armies to facilitate further colonization and control on a global basis.

Analysts, borrowing from Marx, wrote about the evolution of capitalism using analyzes about the accumulation of capital and newer forms of the organization of labor. Some theorists wrote about the rise of capitalism out of feudalism highlighting how primitive accumulation was based on the enslavement of peoples, the conquest of territories, and the primacy of the use of brute force.

The slave system led to increased production and the rise of a global economy based on trade. Capitalists traversed the globe to sell the products produced by slave and wage labor. This era of commercial capitalism was followed by the emergence of industrial capitalism. New production techniques, particularly a factory system that brought workers together under one roof for mass production, increased pressure to promote the sale of products in domestic and global markets.

By the 1870s, in a number of capitalist countries the accumulation of capital, in products and profit created enormous surpluses. These required new outlets for sale, additional ways to put money capital to work, and ever expanding concentrations of capital in manufacturing and financial institutions.

Late-twentieth century theorists wrote about a new era of monopoly capitalism. Inspired by Lenin’s famous essay on imperialism, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, argued that a global economic system had developed in which most economic activities were controlled by small numbers of actors, multinational corporations and banks. Subsequently some theorists made a compelling case for the view that the new capitalism of the twenty-first century had become truly global, leading to the declining salience of the nation-state system from which it was launched.

It was the research contributions of the historical revisionists of the 1960s which overcame the historical amnesia about the connections between economic interests and international relations. In addition to analyses of economic and political trends they uncovered concrete cases of links between economics and politics. These included the influence of huge U.S. and British oil companies on the U.S. managed overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and the coup in Guatemala in 1954 after President Arbenz threatened to nationalize lands owned by the U.S. based United Fruit Company. The revisionists found long term patterns of economic domination and foreign policy. They also uncovered the aforementioned specific cases where particular economic elites influenced foreign policy such as to Iran and Guatemala. And revisionists saw that the globalization of capitalism was threatened by the spread of nationalism and forms of socialism as a world force.  

Fourth, the political economy approach regarded class structure as central to the understanding of the foreign policy of any nation. Since every society has class divisions, some classes dominate the political system at the expense of others. In capitalist societies, those who own or control the means of production dominate the political life of the country. Therefore, while conventional analysts prioritize states as the most important actors in world affairs, political economists saw states and classes as inextricably connected. Most international relations scholars saw states as important to world affairs but it was political economists/historical revisionists who demonstrated the connection between states and classes.

Finally, revisionist historians who wrote from the lens of classes controlling the foreign policy process tended to take a “hegemonic” view of that control. Their analysis of the concentration of economic and political power was a critical contribution to theory and practice. However, they often did not factor resistance into their theoretical frame. The end result was a perspective implied by many that the United States was omniscient, all powerful, unbeatable, and unchangeable in its conduct. After the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam War some analysts began to write particularly about the challenges that the hegemonic power the United States faced in the world, even from the Global South. But, in the main the historical revisionists developed a way of understanding international relations that was top down.

Many theorists and activists, therefore, remained intellectually ill-equipped to identify forces that resisted and constrained the drive for economic, political, and military hegemony throughout modern history. Lacking the more nuanced view of the drives for dominance and the resistance to it, activism sometimes shifted from radical enthusiasm to despair.

But in the end, contemporary analysts and activists owe a special debt of gratitude to those “historical revisionists” who offered a political economy explanation of why the United States role in the world (and before it other imperial powers) has been the way it was. Those of us who analyze the United States and the international system should add to the important theoretical contribution of the revisionists recognition of  patterns of resistance as they occur on a global basis and constitute an integral component of the way international relations works.

 

CELEBRATE THE HISTORICAL "REVISIONISTS:" Part 1

Harry Targ

The first modern organized opposition to U.S. global expansion began with the war on the Philippines in 1898. The Anti-Imperialist League, with such distinguished spokespersons as Mark Twain, decried United States expansion to Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. Later, critics of U.S. foreign policy, such as Eugene V. Debs, opposed President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I in 1917. In the 1930s journalists and activists raised concern about the United States role in world affairs, particularly its seeming indifference to the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany.

After World War II, skeptics about a U.S. policy that was leading to Cold War with the Soviet Union arose, coalescing around the third party presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace. After President Truman won election in 1948, opposition to the direction the United States was taking in the world was steadily silenced.  A virulent anti-communist repressive environment in academia, the media, and electoral politics ensued. By the 1950s analyses of United States foreign policy that focused on the U.S. as an imperial power virtually disappeared.

The Wallace candidacy which was soundly defeated was followed by the 1949 purge of eleven unions from the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) for their leftwing politics and during the 1950s anti-communist purges in radio, television, the movies and educational institutions. Labor organizers, cultural performers, educators, government employees and others tarnished with the charge of being “communists” lost jobs, livelihoods, and access to broad publics.

Academic fields were transformed to provide training grounds and ideological support for America’s mission in the world. In history and social science new scholarly works emphasized consensus versus class struggle, pluralist democracy rather than political elitism, and groups and political activity rather than class and class interests. Few remaining critical analysts of United States foreign policy highlighted economic interest, the pursuit of empire, or over-reaction to a Soviet threat.

However, some academic programs, such as the Department of History, University of Wisconsin, began to educate young scholars to examine the economic taproots of United States foreign policy. William Appleman Williams’ classic text, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, broke new ground in the early 1960s as opponents of the Cold War and the escalating Vietnam War policy began to challenge reigning orthodoxy. Williams, for many budding anti-war activists, provided information about an American empire that had grown ever since the end of the civil war. He and his students connected U.S. empire building with the conquest of the North American continent, the slaughter of millions of Native people, the taking of large amounts of the land mass from Mexico, and global expansion from the Philippines to the Caribbean and Central America.

In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, The Contours of American History, and The Roots of the Modern American Empire, Williams elaborated on the rise of agricultural production and the need for the American economy to find markets overseas. In addition, domestic outlets for U.S. productivity had been capped with the end of the “frontier.” Drawing upon Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” U.S. leaders, he wrote, believed that a new global American empire was needed to sell products, secure natural resources, and find investment opportunities.

Williams claimed that the so-called “open door” policy toward China proclaimed in the 1890s signified what the U.S. imperial vision was to be. This policy resulted from the disintegration of and civil war in China which was used as an opportunity by European powers and Japan to establish their own spheres of influence on the Asian mainland. In response to the nations that were carving up Chinese territory, the U.S. Secretary of State, John Hay, issued a warning to Europe demanding the right to have open access to markets in China. By implication the closing of such markets to U.S. goods might lead to confrontation.

For revisionists, such as Williams, the Open Door Notes illustrated the emerging U.S. global imperial vision. The demands that the world respect the U.S. right to penetrate economies everywhere would become the standard for the U.S. role in the world ever since. Again, the driving force behind the image of the Open Door was economics. Some of Williams’ writings seemed to emphasize material reality, the needs of capitalism. Other of his writings implied that United States behavior was motivated by elite beliefs that markets were a necessity.

In the 1960s several newer scholars began publishing their research emphasizing the connections between the necessities of U.S. capitalism and expansion or the belief foreign policy elites had that such expansion was necessary for economic survival. Gabriel Kolko who authored The Politics of War, and co-authored with Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power: United States Foreign Policy From 1945 to 1954 presented in compelling, graphic, and precise terms the material underpinnings of United States Cold War policy. The Kolkos emphasized the threat to the West that international communism, particularly the example of the Soviet Union and popular Communist parties in Europe, represented to the reconstruction of a global capitalist empire after World War II.

According to the Kolkos and other revisionists, the expansion of socialism constituted a threat to capital accumulation. After World War II, wartime demand for U.S. products might decline, leaving in its wake economic stagnation and a return to the economic depression of the 1930s. The Marshall Plan, applauded as a humanitarian economic assistance program for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe, was really a program to increase demand for U.S. products. With an engineered international communist threat, military spending, another source of demand, would help maintain customers, including the government itself, for U.S. products. The idea of empire, stressed in Williams’ work, was underscored by the materiality of capitalist dynamics.

            The Kolkos described the motivations of the Soviet Union and the United States. The former was not driven by a demonic ideology to dominate the world, they said. In addition,   United States foreign policy was not driven by principle. As to the former: “The Soviets played an essentially opportunistic, non-ideological role in Eastern Europe’s initial postwar development. They cared little about the previous policies or the ideology of the men in power in the coalition governments so long as they were not anti-Soviet in the post war period.”

            And the United States made "a sincere effort to secure the area for its framework of multilateral trade and an open door for American investment.” When this failed the Kolkos said, the United States “chose instead a policy of harassment and employed the image of an iron curtain to blur, for strictly political purposes, the variations in an area whose political experiences at the time ranged from pluralist Czechoslovakia to Bolshevik Yugoslavia.”  To expand the reach of post-war U.S. capitalism and oppose any resistance to it, the East-West conflict “became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“Celebrate the Historical Revisionists: Part 2” will discuss the enduring significance of their findings for understanding the United States role in the world today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ADVANCING A PROGRESSIVE COALITION

 

HARRY TARG

Workers are marching in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco for their rights. Activists for women’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of people of color are on the move. Environmentalists are saying “no” Tar Sands and “yes” to moving nationally and globally against the dangers of climate change. Everyone is demanding that the Obama Administration reject demands by the rightwing to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security while protecting tax breaks for the rich and excessive military spending.

Millions of us worked to defeat the far rightwing in the recent election and celebrated the historic reelection of an African American for President. During much of Obama’s first term, the President sought to compromise with the rightwing, avoiding radical reforms, for example the one that would have provided Americans with single payer health care. He was reluctant to defend American public institutions, such as schools and libraries, worker’s rights, and to demand adequate resources for rebuilding our physical infrastructure and saving our environment.

However, in President Obama’s 2013 inaugural address he affirmed his commitment to social and economic justice, peace, and protection of our precious and threatened environment. The president referred metaphorically to Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall to underscore his commitment to women, African-Americans, and gays and lesbians. While he should have added Flint, Michigan, site of worker sit-downs in 1937 where rights to organize where demanded, Obama clearly promised to work toward empowerment of some of the traditionally voiceless, usually not referred to in inaugural speeches. Obama also raised in a forceful way the problem of climate change. The President, without raising specifics, clearly articulated a progressive agenda for the next four years that we on the left should organize around.

In addition, there are signs that the Obama election organization is being transformed into what could become part of a social movement to support a progressive agenda in the Congress. Organizing for Action (OFA) promises to take the resources, human and financial, that were mobilized during the campaign to build constituencies to work on issues and campaigns in Congressional districts. Skeptics correctly suggest that OFA may serve more to channel and control growing militancy at the grassroots rather than unleash it. However, those of us at the base can use the OFA format and resources as part of our own organizing.

Organizing at the grassroots in communities and states is particularly critical in the thirty states in which government is dominated by Tea Party and other conservative elected officials. And it is in these states and communities that outside money has poured in to reverse institutions and policies that service human needs. In many of the states, such as Indiana, advocates for reaction have gained an upper hand and threaten public institutions, social programs, and democratic representation. 

We, the left/liberal community, stepped back from activism after the 2008 election assuming that the new President would advance a people’s agenda. We were wrong. He adopted a cautious and pragmatic strategy incorrectly assuming he could achieve compromise policies with Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats. In 2010, a new group of Republicans opposed to virtually all public institutions, the so-called Tea Party Republicans, gained many seats in Congress, state legislatures, and governorships.

After the 2012 election the same progressive forces which withdrew from political combat after 2008 and sat out the 2010 elections mobilized to reelect the President in 2012. Since last November they have proclaimed that they will not become passive again.

We must stand for human progress inside the legislative/executive arena and everywhere in the public sphere. We must stand up for the populist agenda candidate Obama proposed in 2008 and was hesitant to deliver and he has articulated in his 2013 inaugural speech.

In short, we in labor, women’s, African-American, Latino, environmental, and civil liberties groups must build a coalition that recognizes that we share common needs and goals. We must realize we are all victims of an economic and political system that rewards the few at the expense of the many.

How do we come together? How should we relate to the electoral arena, in our communities and states? Should we work in the Democratic Party? A progressive segment of it and/or a Third Party? When and where should we protest? Can we begin to construct alternative institutions? How can we spread our messages through the media--print, electronic, public performance?

Perhaps most important is the question of our vision of the future. What kind of society would we want to create? How can we achieve economic and political justice for all?

These are heady questions but they can only be answered if we act together. As inspired by the Rebuild the American Dream campaigns and Occupy movements of  2011 we can begin to dialogue anew about building movements in our communities, identifying a range of issues to work on together, and, ultimately  advancing our states and society toward economic and social justice.

JOHN MCCARTNEY KNEW IDEAS CAN INSPIRE ACTIVISM

Harry Targ

“I am trying to carry students on a ‘voyage’ in which they transcend their immediate experiences and impressions, and encounter in the process a ‘new’ world of ideas, values, and aspirations.” (quote from a letter Professor McCartney  wrote to the Provost, Lafayette College).

John McCartney was a colleague of mine, a political comrade, and a long-time friend, even though we had not been in touch in recent years. He was on the faculty at Purdue University from 1970 to 1979, serving as Assistant Professor of Political Science, and the first director of a new program in African American Studies. He returned to Purdue University in January 2003 to participate in a conference sponsored by Purdue’s Committee on Peace Studies. He gave a lecture on “Martin Luther King Jr. and the Question of Peace.” We in Peace Studies shared our ideas about social change at this conference with McCartney, labor leader Noel Beasley, and peace researcher Betty Reardon.

At that time John invited me to an upcoming conference on “Paul Robeson: His History and Development” at Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania, where he was Department Chair. In April, 2005, John and I gave presentations at that gathering on “Marx and Engels’ Influences on the Development of Robeson’s Intellect.”

While clearing my desk a few days ago, I came across the Robeson paper and decided to seek its publication in The Journal of African American Studies. I started to submit the paper online. The journal’s application required the prospective author to submit names and e-mail addresses of three possible article reviewers. So I typed in John’s name and then searched the internet to secure his e-mail address when I found the entry, “Memorial Resolution for John T. McCartney.” http://www.lafayette.edu/about/news/2012/07/11/memorial-resolution-for-john-t-mccartney/2012/

My first reaction was emotional devastation. For me, John was always out there even though we did not keep in touch. On reflection I began to realize how important he was to me as an educator and activist and I decided to share some remembrances. I do so not to celebrate McCartney nor to provide an emotional release for me, but to underscore the power of ideas, the importance of the educational process, and the obligation of us in educational institutions to link our work to political practice.

John came to the Department of Political Science at Purdue University from the University of Iowa, where he was completing a Ph.D. Our department head reported that John would teach urban politics, because that was what people assumed scholars of African descent would teach. But no, to the department’s surprise John was a political theorist, specializing in medieval political thought. Along with teaching a course on the history of political theory, John taught courses on St. Augustine. He was such a wonderful teacher that one would see lots of students carrying around with them The City of God, not the usual political science text being studied in the early 1970s.

John met philosophy professor Kermit Scott, another medievalist and dear friend of mine. Kermit and I worked with other activist faculty on a variety of student, anti-racism, and anti-war activities in those days. John and Kermit decided to team-teach an undergraduate seminar on medieval philosophy. Both were brilliant and had a small but determined following among students.

John led a mysterious life outside the classroom. Always kind, gentle, and caring he lived alone in a small apartment across the river in Lafayette and spent his free time talking with working folks who hung out downtown. At some point, Kermit and John started talking about post-medieval politics and to our surprise Kermit and I learned that John McCartney was the leader of the Vanguard Nationalist and Socialist Party of the Bahamas. Every summer he would return home and walk the streets of Nassau with his comrades talking with virtually every resident of the main island. His name would appear regularly in articles on the front page of the Nassau newspaper referring to “Dr. John McCartney, Purdue University Professor and Chairman of the Vanguard Nationalist and Socialist Party.”

It turns out that John, the oldest of 10 children, received a first-rate British colonial public school education, worked as an officer of the British Customs Service, received a bachelor’s degree at Drake University in Iowa, and his Ph. D at the University of Iowa.

Meanwhile John and a small coterie of comrades were constructing a Socialist party designed to challenge the elected leadership of the post-colonial government of the Bahamas. He was struggling to build a socialist movement to take power from many of those opportunistic Bahamian nationalists who were John’s school mates years earlier. So John, teaching St. Augustine, in Indiana, was sending his salary back home to support his nine siblings and the new Vanguard Party.

John and Kermit, who himself was increasingly drawn to the Marxist tradition,  decided to put their copies of The City of God back on the bookshelf and rework their seminar into an in-depth study of Marxism. In addition to a small but dedicated group of students several faculty would sit in on the seminar. I did so three times.

John was a hard driver as a teacher. Our first seminar assignment was to go through volume one of Das Capital. We would read the text line by line. Through most of the class John read a critical passage, explained it, and read it again. Over the three classes I took with John and Kermit we read theorists including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Lukacs, Gramsci, and Euro Communists.

John organized several of us into a reading group that met on Sunday nights. We read Nkrumah, Cabral, Che, and some of the women in our group insisted we add some feminist voices to our readings and discussion. John needed to be brought along on “the woman question,” but of course he was not alone.

Kermit and I, mostly Kermit, began to do some work for the Vanguard Party, writing short essays for study groups that members engaged in back home and Kermit wrote a thorough history of the Bahamas for the party called “The Struggle for Freedom in the Bahamas.” Kermit visited the Bahamas often and I did so once.

During one meeting in the party office, which Kermit and I attended, some young ultra-left members pulled a revolver demanding that the party march “over the hill” and seize state power. John stood up to the leader of the revolt, a gun inches from his face, and asked, “What next?” We could not hold power he added primarily because not enough people would support a violent “revolution.” Fortunately, the rebel withdrew his gun and the next day party members resumed their work, walking the streets, talking to people, explaining socialism, and asking for the people’s support. Most importantly, the regular work in the community was done with respect for different views. John, the medieval scholar, was as much a man of the people as any revolutionary one could think of.

By the middle of the 1980s, the party fell on hard times and John, who had left Purdue and academia in 1979, returned to the United States to take an academic position. He taught for the rest of his life at Lafayette College, a well-known and expensive liberal arts college in Eastern Pennsylvania. In that powerful memorial statement about John, it was pointed out that both the college and John were taking a big risk. Neither the Department of Government and Law nor John was sure that he could adapt to teaching students from wealthy families. But on reflection the decision was a “no-brainer.” John loved people. He could hang out with the guys on the stoop in downtown Lafayette, walk the streets among the people he grew up with, and work hard to teach young people of all kinds the ideas that he valued so much.

When my wife and I attended the conference John McCartney organized in 2005 we caught up on our many years apart only some of which we were able to discuss when he attended the Peace Studies conference at Purdue in 2003. He spoke about how wonderful Lafayette College was, how open and tolerant the students were, and how important it was to communicate ideas to them. He admitted on the side, however, that “I teach a course in the local prison every year to keep in touch with the working class.” A former student reported that when John got sick and did not stop by the local Wawa food market, workers there would say: “Where’s Doc?”

"Doc” knew that ideas mattered; that young people needed to study hard; that ideas had to be put to work changing the world.

Students, teachers, and political activists will miss John McCartney.