A-list message, [A-List] Appreciating the Left

A message to my friends after the march in DC, January 18th.

I am having my first coffee on the morning after hundreds of thousands of people braved freezing temperatures to register opposition to the Bush administration's intentions to attack the Iraqi people. This attack is the one of many planned for the purpose of gaining control over the world's energy supplies to rescue a weakened US imperial hegemony.

I oppose this junta on moral grounds, but I was opposed to Clinton's government, too, and would have opposed Al Gore's regime, and on more than simply the amorality of a specific military action, or the legitimacy of a bourgeois election.

I want to see the end of US imperialism. I believe it is a positive danger to humanity and our future... as a system. It is the basis and the presupposition of the greatest evils in the world. US imperialism has no equal in the world as a priority for destruction as a system. It is this strategic, this "left", this revolutionary perspective that differentiates THE Left, when it is real, from liberals and so-called progressives.

And there were many liberals and "progressives" at the march yesterday. They are my allies at this point, in this period, and I am not here to disrespect or badger them. I do, however, ask them to pay attention to what I am saying now about the Left and why I am giving the Left special praise today in the wake of this march, which was conjoined with marches all over the world yesterday, and that have further and significantly weakened the Bush junta in its war drive, and therefore moved the day of their political destruction closer.

On September 11, 2001, as the images of the collapsing twin towers were replayed countless times on our televisions and in our heads, many progressive forces went to ground. There was a massive panic and retraction of struggle on many fronts, as chauvinism and racism and the banty rooster masculinity of reaction became palpable in the demeanor of our fellows and visible in the proliferation of flags.

But six days after the event, here where I live in North Carolina, LEFTISTS organized the first teach-ins, put forward the first real analysis, asked the first questions of the Bush administration, and even began organizing the first actions against the invasion of Afghanistan.

That refusal to step back from the struggle happened all over the country, and all over the world.

If people want to see the embryo of what happened yesterday in Washington DC. they should go back and see who the thousands were who spoke up loudly and clearly in the first week after 9-11.

When polls showed that only four percent of the country believed we had no excuse for war, it was the Left - those genuine revolutionaries now in the gunsights of faux-left moles like David Corn and Christopher Hitchens - who saw their responsibility to give that four percent a public voice.

So this is to them, those who kept the banner of anti-imperialism high when panic was in the atmosphere, that I want to express my gratitude and appreciation. I don't care which organization you are affiliated with, I thank you.

Special thanks should go from us all - without the ritual denunciations I hear more and more, initiated by both the infantile on the ultra-left, and the sell-outs like Hitchens, and Red-baiter Corn - to the International Action Center and WWP, for the tremendous work they did in organizing yesterday's event.

Special thanks should go out to the embattled and sometimes isolated Black radicals who have remained the lodestone and the conscience of this movement through decades of reaction and complexities in the struggle of a people seeking self-determination within the boundaries of the US.

It was, after all, MLK, not as conciliator and peacemeaker, but MLK the emerging anti-imperialist - the one who the main organs of the US press excoriated in 1968 up to the day he was gunned down - who was being cited and celebrated.

You on the Left, who will be told again and again, slow down, mute your message, come back to the center... thank you for understanding that this is a small part of a huge struggle that will transform the world, and topple the very system in which we ourselves are now embedded... a struggle that will determine whether our grandchildren's future is socialism or barbarism... thank you for not letting fear overwhelm your revolutionary will, because it was you that brought this movement so rapidly and decisively to the point where it is now.

I thought you should hear that.

Foward ever, backward never.

Stan

"...a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another."

Mao