RE: [Marxism] Michael Moore, Wesley Clark and Jose Perez

["Jose G. Perez" <elgusanorojo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Friedman writes, "Nevertheless, in no previous period have there
been such systematic efforts to reshape institutions, laws and
ideologies to quash political dissent and allow for political
repression; to institutionalize repression and delegitimize dissent in a
permanent way. Previous instances were conducted under the amparo of
existing law (the internments, even McCarthyism) or were isolated
instances (the shootings at Kent and Jackson State Universities)."

I obviously have a very different evaluation. In my view the cold-war
McCarthyite witch-hunt was both deeper and more far-reaching than the
"anti-terrorist" witch-hunt so far; even on the formal level, laws newly
enacted then included the Voorhis Act; Taft Hartley and McCarran-Walter
Act as well as countless other federal, state and local measures. Not to
mention things like creation of the CIA and NSC, restructuring of the
military into the "Defense Department," etc., etc., etc. 

By the late 1960's every significant police department from those of
small cities on up had a "red squad" under one or another name as the
center for political police activities. They kept extensive files on
activists. 
"Black bag" jobs (break-ins), wiretaps and other forms of surveillance
were commonplace, routine, carried out many thousands of times in those
years. The cops sent in spies and provocateurs into many groups,
including the CPUSA, the SWP, SDS, the Panthers, the Chicano Moratorium,
etc. etc. etc.

I don't believe the "instances" of political assassinations in the
1960's and early 70's were "isolated." Just to recall some well-known
names and places should convince us otherwise: Medgar Evers, Birmingham
church bombing, Malcolm X, Orangeburg massacre, Martin Luther King, Kent
State, Jackson State, Chicano Moratorium, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and
Wesley Bad Heart Bull (and literally dozens of others on the Pine Ridge
Indian reservation in a reign of terror that lasted for years). There
were simply too many in too many places in too varied circumstances over
a period of several years to be explained away as happenstance.

These were not isolated because they relied on and were instrumented by
the political police apparatus that had been structured in the labor
upsurge of the 30's and the McCarthyite witch-hunt that followed. These
structures grouped around them and interpenetrated with the KKK, white
citizen's councils, John Birchers, as well as the mafia and individual
criminal and lumpen elements. That not all of these assassinations had
been centrally planned or approved at the very top level does not make
them "accidental" expressions of purely local conditions or "isolated"
instances, no more than the wave of lynchings from the 1880's through
the early 1960's, were "isolated" instances, or police killings in the
barrios and ghettos today (often tied to the "war on drugs") are
isolated instances, even if they have a more general social rather than
specifically sharply focused political character.

The other thing we need to look at is how that repression subsided. The
mechanism of it was the Watergate and ensuing scandals, however, what
*forced* the ruling class to (at least pretend to, and in any case
sharply curtail the use of) those methods were the massive social
movements and most especially the Black movement and the antiwar
movement. At any rate, when people who got visited by the FBI or local
red squad pigs refused to be cowed, and instead publicly denounced the
harassment and attacks on constitutional rights, the approach the
government was taking had clearly outlived its usefulness. That
"courage" was not an individual virtue of those involved, but rather the
expression through individuals of the power of the mass movements. 

The argument that the despicable Bush junta represents some sort of
unique and especially grave danger that requires us to put aside good
strategic sense and the lessons of the past in order to preserve some
semblance of bourgeois democracy and the political space it affords
working people is fundamentally flawed. What the Bushites are doing is
not unique, nor is it --thus far-- especially far reaching. 

It seems so to us because the ruling class was forced to abandon, go
underground, or modify the modalities of its repression so extensively
by its defeats of the 1960's and 1970's. But that should not blind us to
reality. 

For example, the thing about the Florida voter purge in the year 2000.
That was based on a law that has existed since the Jim Crow
counterrevolution against radical reconstruction prohibiting those
caught in the maws of the criminal justice system -- and it is a
*criminal* system of "justice," if ever there was one-- from voting even
after they have "paid their debt to society."  

This is a DEMOCRAT law, I believe it can be shown in every single
instance it is a Democrat law put in and kept in place over the decades
by the white ruling class to maintain the disenfranchisement and
subjugation of Black people. It was of a piece with the literacy
requirements, poll taxes, property owner only elections, grandfather
clauses and other requirements through which the disenfranchisement of
Black people was carried out by the bourgeois two-party system.

And in an overall way, the politically-focused McCarthyite repression of
the 50's and 60's was not simply abandoned, it was *replaced* by the
socially-focused repression of the "war on drugs," which instead of
being centered on militants and leaders and groups, targets the
immediate potential base of any truly powerful social movement in the
United States, the youth of the oppressed nationalities. The purpose of
the "war on drugs" is eminently political and can be summarized in three
words: "No new SNCC."

That especially white liberals and radicals fail to see the *new* forms
through which the bourgeois state carried out repression beginning under
Nixon as the old forms became unviable helps to explain why NOW, faced
with a re-emergence of the old forms under new "anti-terrorist"
rhetoric, this seems like a catastrophe to THEM. 

Couple that with the uniquely ahistorical consciousness of white
Americans, for whom anything that happened before the year 2000 is
ancient history unconnected with today's situation, and you get this
hysterical abandonment of good sense, exemplified by genuinely good and
conscious fighters like Michael Moore arguing that people should work to
elect Wesley Clark, that a genocidal war criminal like Clark would be a
step up from Bush.

>From the point of view of Black people especially, however, there is a
continuity from the chains on slave ships to the lash of the slave
driver to the lynchings of the Jim Crow era, to the dogs of Bull Connor
and the assassinations of Medgar, Malcolm, Martin and so many others, to
the war on drugs today. 

A very similar argument can be made in terms of the experiences of
Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and other Latinos, the war on drugs, and for
immigrants, the status of an "illegal." (In that regard, it never ceases
to surprise me how many people when talking about attacks on immigrants
and so on, focus overwhelmingly or exclusively on the post-9/11 attacks
on Arab immigrants, and completely "forget" Latino immigrants who are
targeted just for being "illegal.")

The "uniqueness" of Bush, from stealing the 2K election to repression
today argument is thus one that does not address and does not reflect
the real experience of the most oppressed and exploited layers of
working people, the oppressed nationalities, who are heart and soul of
any struggle against capitalism in this country.

José


_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism