Come Back, Africa

Starting a one-week run tonight at the Film Forum in New York, a new 35 mm restoration of Lionel Rogosin’s “Come Back, Africa” is a truly special event. Made in apartheid South Africa in 1959, it is the first film to lift up a rock and expose the racist system to the light of day.

In defiance of the prevailing Cold War conformity and the Hollywood film industry’s assembly-line production of schlock, Rogosin became a guerrilla fighter using a Bolex camera rather than a machine gun. He had pledged to resist racism wherever he saw it and apartheid South Africa was about as tempting a target as could be imagined.

The National Party had won the elections in 1948 and instituted the system that was finally abolished with the legalization of the ANC and Nelson Mandela’s presidency. But in 1959 the system was in full bloom. Just a year after Rogosin and his tiny crew wrapped up production, the Sharpeville Massacre took the lives of 69 peaceful protesters. It was a reflection of the reactionary mood of Cold War America that he found it virtually impossible to book the film in theaters. Fortunately, his family wealth enabled him to buy a theater in New York where, paraphrasing A.J. Liebling, he acted on the precept: “Freedom of the motion picture is guaranteed only to those who own a theater.” That theater was named the Bleecker Street Cinema, a temple of fine art beloved by everybody who attended it over the decades until its demise.

“Come Back, Africa” is a mixture of documentary and fiction inspired respectively by two of Rogosin’s idols, Robert J. Flaherty and Italian neo-realism. Using a non-professional cast, Rogosin sought to tell the story of the Black working class whose lives had been destroyed by a system that was symbolized above all by the pass law.

The main character is Zachariah (Zachariah Mgabi), who has been forced to seek for work in Johannesburg after famine strikes his native KwaZulu. The film opens with crowds of whites and Blacks on the streets of Johannesburg going about their business filmed on location by Rogosin. The class differences are manifested by their dress. The whites are in business suits and dresses and the Blacks are dressed shabbily. Zachariah, who we spot among the crowd, is wearing a threadbare suit and a weather-beaten fedora.

His first stop is a gold mine, where sympathetic co-workers tell him that without a permit, he will be fired. His only recourse is to look for work in the informal sector as a “house boy”. In a scene that is highly reminiscent of Ousmane Sembene’s “Black Girl”, a film about the super-exploitation of a Senegalese maid by a French couple, he goes to work for a brutally racist white woman who insists on calling him “Jack” after deciding that “Zachariah will not do.” When he accidentally discards some mushroom soup she had cooked, she speaks out loud to her husband about how backward the natives are.

Ironically, the woman who plays Zachariah’s boss was a South African Communist named Myrtle Berman. Monty Berman, also a Communist and a Jew, played her husband. All of the whites cast in the film were leftists of one sort or another. (Myrtle Berman is interviewed in “An American in Sophiatown”, a 2007 documentary about the making of “Come Back, Africa” that was directed by Lloyd Ross and that should be showing up in theaters sometime this year. Look for it.)

For men like Zachariah, a work permit functions like the bicycle in De Sica’s masterpiece. Without it, he is forced to wander from one low-paying insecure position to another, depending all the while on a network of fellow Black South Africans trying to survive in an oppressive system.

One of the pillars of that support network is the shabeen, a kind of speakeasy where Blacks felt comfortable talking about their plight without having the gaze of the white oppressor upon them. In perhaps the most remarkable scene in an altogether remarkable film, we see Zachariah listening in on a conversation by a group of Black intellectuals in a shabeen. Among them are Lewis Nkosi and William “Bloke” Modisane, the co-authors of Rogosin’s script. Their discussion about racism, the limits of Alan Paton-style liberalism, and other topics appear unscripted and certainly reflect the state of mind in Sophiatown, the neighborhood in Johannesburg that was home to many Black activists and artists. In a crowning scene, the men welcome a very young Miriam Makeba into their midst and listen to her sing two songs. When Steve Allen saw Rogosin’s film, he was so mesmerized by her performance that he pulled strings to get her admitted into the U.S. so she could perform on the Tonight show.

As Rogosin filmed in Sophiatown, you can see evidence of an “urban removal” underway as the Afrikaner government sought to eliminate a semi-autonomous presence that had the same relationship to Johannesburg that Harlem had to New York City. Even if Sophiatown was hospitable to Rogosin’s progressive filmmaking project, he had to keep a close eye on the presence of cops. His stay in South Africa depended on a clever ruse, namely that he was there to film street musicians as part of a travelogue for a tour company. Indeed, the footage of various musicians, including a pennywhistle band, serves as a kind of connective tissue in a somewhat rambling plot.

“Come Back, Africa” was Rogosin’s second film. In “An American in Sophiatown”, he describes “On the Bowery”—his first—as a kind of preparatory work that enabled him to learn how to use a camera and organize a production. That’s quite a mouthful considering the fact that “On the Bowery” is also a classic. (All of the Rogosin films mentioned in this review are part of the inventory of Milestone Films, a 21-year-old company dedicated to making classic cinema available once again.)

Rogosin was part of a cadre of filmmakers in the New American Cinema Group who decided to buck the Eisenhower era trends and make politically and artistically audacious works such as “Come Back, Africa”. Their contribution cannot be overstated. Formed by Jonas Mekas, the founder of Anthology Film Archives, they issued a statement on September 30, 1962 that included a comment on the film scene of the day that still has currency unfortunately:

The official cinema all over the world is running out of breath. It is morally corrupt, esthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring. Even the seemingly worthwhile films, those that lay claim to high moral and esthetic standards and have been accepted as such by critics and the public alike, reveal the decay of the Product Film. The very slickness of their execution has become a perversion covering the falsity of their themes, their lack of sensibility, their lack of style.

For an idea of the rebellious spirit that animated this group, look no further than “Come Back, Africa”, a film that symbolizes a marriage between art and radical politics so necessary for the period we are living in today.

Mangling the Party: Vol. 1 of Tony Cliff’s Lenin By Pham Binh

Mangling the Party:
Vol. 1 of Tony Cliff’s Lenin
By Pham Binh
January 24, 2012

 The following is dedicated to anyone and everyone has sacrificed in the name of “building the revolutionary party.”

Tony Cliff’s Lenin: Building the Party published in 1975 was the first book-length political biography of Lenin written by a Marxist. As a result, it shaped the approach of subsequent investigations by academics like Lars T. Lih as well as the thinking of thousands of socialists in groups like the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP, founded by Cliff), the U.S. International Socialist Organization, and Paul LeBlanc, author of Lenin and the Revolutionary Party and former member of the American SWP (no relation to Cliff’s group).

Cliff begins his biography by debunking the U.S.S.R.’s official state religion of Lenin-worship that “endowed [Lenin] with superhuman attributes.” Yet throughout the book Cliff refers to these “superhuman attributes”:

 Lenin adapted himself perfectly to the needs of industrial agitation.

 [Lenin] combined theory and practice to perfection.

If these passing remarks were the main flaws of Cliff’s book it would still be useful to read, full of political and historical lessons. Sadly, this is not the case.

Cliff’s errors and distortions begin with Lenin’s political activity in mid 1890s. According to Cliff:

Ob Agitatsii had a mechanical theory of the relation between the industrial struggle, the struggle against the employers, and the political struggle against tsarism, based on the concept of “stages.” … [W]hatever the official biographers may say, the truth is that in the years 1894-96, [Lenin] did not denounce Ob Agitatsii as one-sided, mechanical, and “economist.” His writings of the period coincide exactly with the line which it put forward.

To show that Lenin’s writings of this period “coincide exactly” with the arguments of Ob Agitatsii, Cliff quotes Lenin’s 1895 draft Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) program and cites his article What Are Our Ministers Thinking About? in which Cliff claims “Lenin urged the expediency of leaving the Tsar out of the argument, and talking instead about the new laws that favored employers and of cabinet ministers who were anti-working class.”

Cliff later states in Building the Party that “[n]ot to point out the direct connection between the partial reform and the revolutionary overthrow of Tsarism is to cheat the workers, to fall into liberalism.” Did Lenin fall into liberalism at this early stage of his career?

Anyone who reads either document will find that Lenin’s views do not “coincide exactly” with those of Ob Agitatsii. Neither the draft program nor the article Cliff cites are mechanical, one-sided, stageist, or “economist.” In What Are Our Ministers Thinking About? Lenin did not “urge the expediency of leaving the Tsar out of the argument.” Lenin did not fall into liberalism.

These egregious misrepresentations of Lenin’s views occur throughout Building the Party.

“Bending the Stick”

Cliff closes chapter two by claiming that Lenin’s penchant for “bending the stick” was “a characteristic that he retained throughout his life.”

[Lenin] always made the task of the day quite clear, repeating what was necessary ad infinitum in the plainest, heaviest, most single-minded hammer-blow pronouncements. Afterwards, he would regain his balance, straighten the stick, then bend it again in another direction.

Throughout the book Cliff makes reference to Lenin’s “stick bending,” by which Cliff means deliberately and one-sidedly overemphasising something one day and then the opposite thing the next day in different circumstances.

If “stick bending” was Lenin’s political method, it would mean that none of his writings should be taken at face value. Each piece would suffer from one-sided overemphasis and distortion. Such a method would also call into question Lenin’s intellectual and political honesty. How could anyone be sure what Lenin really meant or thought if his arguments were always exaggerated in some way? Furthermore, why would anyone in the Russian socialist movement take what Lenin had to say seriously if the only thing that was consistent about his message was its exaggerated character? Such a method would create a culture of disbelief and cynicism among Lenin’s followers that would grow more toxic with each “bend.”

Lenin’s letter to Georgi Plekhanov on the economist trend that Cliff uses to illustrate “stick bending” tells us something very different from what Cliff claims:

The economic trend, of course, was always a mistake, but then it is very young; while there has been overemphasis of “economic” agitation (and there still is here and there) even without the trend, and it was the legitimate and inevitable companion of any step forward in the conditions of our movement which existed in Russia at the end of the 1880s or the beginning of the 1890s. The situation then was so murderous that you cannot probably even imagine it, and one should not censure people who stumbled as they clambered up out of that situation. For the purposes of this clambering out, some narrowness was essential and legitimate: was, I say, for with this tendency to blow it up into a theory and tie it in with Bernsteinism, the whole thing of course changed radically … The overemphasis of “economic” agitation and catering to the “mass” movement were natural.

Here, Lenin’s real method emerges. The one-sidedness Cliff lauds is not Lenin’s but a feature of a particular stage of the Russian socialist movement’s development, namely the transition from study circles and propaganda to the field of mass action and agitation. In this transition some mistakes were inevitable and “one should not censure people who stumbled as they clambered up out of that situation.” However, when people elevated inevitable mistakes, errors, and stumbles into a full-blown theory and then connected it with Bernstein’s revisionism “the whole thing of course changed radically.” Once the whole thing changed radically, Lenin wrote A Protest by Russian Social Democrats in 1899.

Cliff conflates features and stages of objective development with Lenin’s subjective responses to them:

[F]ear of the danger to the movement occasioned by the rise of Russian “economism” and German revisionism in the second half of 1899 … motivated Lenin to bend the stick right over again, away from the spontaneous, day-to-day, fragmented economic struggle and toward the organisation of a national political party.

Lenin did not transform from an armchair revolutionary in a study circle into an economist factory agitator, from economist factory agitator into top-down party-builder, and from top-down party-builder into a proponent of building the party from the bottom up around the elective principle in the name of the spontaneously socialist working class in 1905, attacking his own former positions all along the way. He continually grappled with the development of Russia’s worker-socialist movement through each of its distinct stages, each of which had unique challenges and opportunities (or “tasks”). Together, these stages were part of a single process that Lars T. Lih described as Lenin’s “heroic scenario” — the RSDLP would lead the workers, who, in turn, would lead the peasants, oppressed nationalities, and all of the downtrodden, exploited, and oppressed people of Tsarist Russia in a revolution that would destroy the autocracy, setting the stage for international socialist revolution.

In polemics Lenin typically reminded his readers about the importance of keeping the whole process of development in mind and instead of isolating its individual elements:

That which happened to such leaders of the Second International, such highly erudite Marxists devoted to socialism as Kautsky, Otto Bauer and others, could (and should) provide a useful lesson. They fully appreciated the need for flexible tactics; they themselves learned the Marxist dialectic and taught it to others (and much of what they have done in this field will always remain a valuable contribution to socialist literature); however, in the application of this dialectic they committed such an error, or proved to be so undialectical in practice, so incapable of taking into account the rapid change of forms and the rapid acquisition of new content by the old forms, that their fate is not much more enviable than that of Hyndman, Guesde and Plekhanov. The principal reason for their bankruptcy was that they were hypnotised by a definite form of growth of the working-class movement and socialism, forgot all about the one-sidedness of that form, were afraid to see the break-up which objective conditions made inevitable, and continued to repeat simple and, at first glance, incontestable axioms that had been learned by rote, like: “three is more than two”. But politics is more like algebra than elementary arithmetic, and still more like higher than elementary mathematics. In reality, all the old forms of the socialist movement have acquired a new content, and, consequently, a new symbol, the “minus” sign, has appeared in front of all the figures; our wiseacres, however, have stubbornly continued (and still continue) to persuade themselves and others that “minus three” is more than “minus two”.

It was Lenin’s appreciation for the totality of development, not “stick bending,” that led him to write polemics against economists, Mensheviks, followers of Bogdanov, liquidators, “left” communists, and Karl Kautsky, all of whom did not make the transition from one stage of the “heroic scenario” to the next by adapting themselves to the new “tasks”.

In chapter three, Cliff continues his “bending the stick” narrative:

It was fear of the danger to the movement occasioned by the rise of Russian “economism” and German revisionism in the second half of 1899 that motivated Lenin to bend the stick right over again, away from the spontaneous, day-to-day, fragmented economic struggle and toward the organisation of a national political party.

This is totally false. The 1895 draft RSDLP program Lenin wrote and Cliff cited in chapter two proves that Lenin sought to build a national political party years before the economist trend emerged:

The Russian Social-Democratic Party declares that its aim is to assist this struggle of the Russian working class by developing the class-consciousness of the workers, by promoting their organisation, and by indicating the aims and objects of the struggle. The struggle of the Russian working class for its emancipation is a political struggle, and its first aim is to achieve political liberty.

Anyone who reads Lenin’s draft program will know where he stood on the party question in 1895. Fear had nothing to do with Lenin’s commitment to organizing a national political party.

Lenin and Party Rules

Cliff’s chapter on Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? is unremarkable except for the section dealing with Lenin’s attitude towards party rules. Cliff quotes Lenin’s 1902 Letter to a Comrade on Our Organizational Tasks that was circulated as an RSDLP pamphlet in 1904 to show that Lenin had a “distaste for red-tape and rule-mongering.” Cliff goes on to say:

Lenin’s faction was for a long time very informal indeed. He started to build his organisation through Iskra agents. When, after the second Congress, as we shall see, he lost the support of his own Central Committee, he reorganised his supporters around a newly convened conference that elected a Russian Bureau.

There are a number of errors here.

The first is that the purpose of Iskra agents was to build the RSDLP, not an organization loyal to Lenin (another falsehood that runs throughout Building the Party is the notion that Bolsheviks and/or the central committee were “his”).

The second and more serious error is to use Lenin’s actions in the aftermath of the RSDLP’s second congress that gave birth to the Menshevik-Bolshevik split as proof of Lenin’s preference for informal or loose rules. One of the central charges that Lenin and his Bolshevik co-thinkers levelled at the Mensheviks was that their resignations, boycotts of party institutions, refusal to call a third congress despite the expressed will of the majority of the 1903 congress delegates, and declaration that the League of Social Democrats Abroad was autonomous from the RSDLP all violated the rules adopted at the 1903 congress.

Anyone who reads Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back will find that Lenin paid very close attention to rules, regulations, procedural minutiae, and abided by them. One of the central reasons why Lenin spent years working to convene the 1903 congress in the first place was to eliminate the informal rules and procedures that prevailed in the socialist circles and replace them with the formal rules necessary to govern the workings of a professional political party. In contemporary terms Lenin sought to overcome what feminist Jo Freeman described as “the tyranny of structurelessness.”

Lenin’s Letter to a Comrade on Our Organizational Tasks proves the opposite of what Cliff claims. In that letter Lenin writes:

It would be all the less useful to draw up such Rules at present [1902] since we have practically no general Party experience (and in many places none whatever) with regard to the activities of the various groups and subgroups of this sort, and in order to acquire such experience what is needed is not Rules but the organisation of Party information, if I may put it in this way. Each of our local organisations now spends at least a few evenings on discussing Rules. If instead, each member would devote this time to making a detailed and well-prepared report to the entire Party on his particular function, the work would gain a hundredfold.

 And it is not merely because revolutionary work does not always lend itself to definite organisational form that Rules are useless. No, definite organisational form is necessary, and we must endeavour to give such form to all our work as far as possible. That is permissible to a much greater   extent than is generally thought, and achievable not through Rules but solely and exclusively (we must keep on reiterating this) through transmitting exact information to the Party centre; it is only then that we shall have real organisational form connected with real responsibility and (inner-Party) publicity. For who of us does not know that serious conflicts and differences of opinion among us are actually decided not by vote “in accordance with the Rules,” but by struggle and threats to “resign”? During the last three or four years of Party life the history of most of our committees has been replete with such internal strife. It is a great pity that this strife has not assumed definite form: it would then have been much more instructive for the Party and would have contributed much more to the experience of our successors. But no Rules can create such useful and essential definiteness of organisational form; this can be done solely through inner-Party publicity. Under the autocracy we can have no other means or weapon of inner-Party publicity than keeping the Party centre regularly informed of Party events.

Here Lenin stressed the importance of reporting and inner-party publicity as opposed to rules because he believed (correctly) that proper decisions about rules could only be made if the RSDLP’s leaders were fully aware of the work each of its members engaged in. (Lenin viewed the centralization of information regarding members’ activity into the hands of the party leadership as a response to operating as an illegal organization; presumably information would be decentralized among the membership as a whole through the medium of a newspaper if the party was legal.)

Lenin closed this letter with the following words:

And only after we have learned to apply this inner-Party publicity on a wide scale shall we actually be able to amass experience in the functioning of the various organisations; only on the basis of such extensive experience over a period of many years shall we be able to draw up Rules that will not be mere paper Rules.

So while it is true that Lenin detested rule-mongering, it is equally true that Lenin spent the better part of 1904 and 1905 fighting in defense of the rules adopted by the 1903 congress and against the informal methods that the Mensheviks proved unwilling to part ways with.

Chapter five on the 1903 congress is again replete with errors. In discussing the famous debate between Lenin and Martov over what the definition of a party member should be, Cliff attacks Martov and Trotsky for supporting Lenin’s organizational plan as laid out in What Is To Be Done? and then opposing Lenin’s formulation on membership, writing:

To combine a strong centralist leadership with loose membership was eclecticism taken to an extreme. … [T]he revolutionary party cannot avoid making strong demands for sacrifice and discipline from its own members. Martov’s definition of party membership fitted the weakness of his conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Cliff fails to note that Martov’s membership definition became the basis for recruitment into the Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP for three years until the Mensheviks agreed (in conjunction with the Bolsheviks) at the 1906 party congress to a formulation in line with Lenin’s 1903 wording. According to Cliff’s logic then, the Bolsheviks during 1903-1906 were guilty of “eclecticism taken to an extreme” for combining “strong centralist leadership with loose membership” and “weakness” with regards to proletarian dictatorship, while the Mensheviks were innocent of these things after 1906 because they supported Lenin’s definition of party membership.

Eclecticism indeed!

In this regard, Cliff is like most other “Leninists” who invest the 1903 membership debate with an artificial and ahistorical significance. If Lenin did not mention the issue in his discussion on the “Principle Stages in the History of Bolshevism” in Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder  written for foreign communist audiences unfamiliar with RSDLP history it could not have been a terribly important issue from his point of view.

Cliff’s next egregious error comes in his discussion of Lenin’s actions after the 1903 Congress that gave birth to the Menshevik and Bolshevik trends within the RSDLP:

With the aid of Krupskaya in Geneva, and a group of supporters operating inside Russia, [Lenin] built a completely new set of centralised committees, quite regardless of Rule 6 of the party statutes, which reserved to the Central Committee the right to organise and recognise committees.

He goes on to say that these “completely new” and “centralised committees” began to agitate for a new RSDLP congress in 1904 to resolve the disputes that arose between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks at the end of the previous congress.

If Cliff’s statement is true, then Lenin was a hypocritical and ruthless faction fighter who attacked his political opponents for not playing by party rules that he exempted himself from. If true, it would have fatally undermined the whole basis of post-1903 Bolshevik agitation for a new congress because it was based on the following rule adopted by the second congress: “The Party Council must call a congress if this is demanded by Party organisations which together would command half the votes at the congress.” If Lenin himself violated these rules by creating “completely new centralised committees” it would have been impossible for him to attract support within the RSDLP for his claim in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back that it was the Mensheviks who were making a mockery of the RSDLP’s rules.

Cliff’s assertion has no footnote, so it is unclear what the source of his claim is. What is certain is that there is no mention of illegal (in the sense of being against the RSDLP’s rules) and “completely new set of centralised committees” in Krupskaya’s memoirs. Surely if Lenin had done what Cliff claims the Mensheviks would have pounced on this monstrous fact and included it in their bitter attacks on Lenin in the pages of the post-congress Iskra.

Another element that appears in this chapter and throughout Building the Party is Cliff’s “truisms” about a variety of topics that have no basis in things Lenin said or did. For example:

[T]he leadership of a revolutionary party must provide the highest example of devotion and complete identification with the party in its daily life. This gives it the moral authority to demand the maximum sacrifice from the rank and file.

Lenin certainly appreciated the sacrifices people made for the revolutionary movement, but this was not limited to those who were party leaders or even party members (for example, his attitude towards earlier generations of Russian revolutionaries, the Narodniks and Decembrists). At no time did Lenin use his position as a party leader to demand “maximum sacrifice from the rank and file.” This sounds like something from the Stalin era or from Mao’s Little Red Book which is full of timeless, moralistic phrasemongering.

Cliff’s references to Lenin’s imaginary disregard for rules serves an important purpose in the Building the Party narrative: Lenin has to constantly circumvent rules and fight against his own followers who become “conservative” and “formalistic” in their approach to politics by resisting Lenin’s continual “stick bending.” This narrative reaches its climax in chapter eight which celebrates Lenin’s fight at the third RSDLP congress held in April 1905 against the Bolshevik committeemen over two issues: recruiting workers to party committees and democratizing the party in the midst of the 1905 revolution. According to Cliff, “[b]uttressing themselves with quotations from What Is to Be Done? [the Bolshevik commiteemen] called for ‘extreme caution’ in admitting workers into the committees and condemned ‘playing at democracy.’”

The problem with Cliff’s account is that Lenin and the Bolsheviks never fought about either recruiting workers to party committees or democratizing the party at the third congress. It simply did not happen. Lih discovered that this episode in Building the Party was “lifted wholesale from Solomon Schwarz,” a Bolshevik-turned-Menshevik who wrote The Russian Revolution of 1905: the Workers’ Movement and the Formation of Bolshevism and Menshevism (“wholesale” meaning copied word for word).

Cliff’s plagiarism is a relatively minor issue compared to the real scandal: he evidently never bothered to read Lenin’s Report on the Third Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party written in May 1905! Had Cliff read Lenin’s account of the third congress he would have discovered that Lenin makes no mention of any conflict, debate, or friction over whether to recruit workers and democratize the party in light of the new conditions created by the 1905 revolution. The report is positively glowing about the results of the third congress, which included more clearly defined party rules (so much for Lenin’s alleged informality) and a series of resolutions guiding the RSDLP’s conduct during the 1905 revolution.

The conclusion is inescapable: either Cliff did not read what Lenin said about the 1905 third congress or he knowingly repeated a falsehood taken from someone else’s work in order to support his narrative of “Lenin versus the party machine he built.” Neither is acceptable for a political biographer of Lenin.

It is in this chapter that the contradictions embedded in Cliff’s “Lenin must continually fight the party machine he built” narrative become most apparent. Suppose that Cliff was right that the committeemen did indeed defeat Lenin on the issue of recruiting workers at the third congress and stubbornly resisted such recruitment efforts. The question then becomes: how did the Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP grow so rapidly? How could workers join the party against the will of the people who were the party? Cliff does not explain this impossibility but exclaims, “nevertheless it moves” and quotes figures showing the rapid growth of the Bolsheviks in 1905 and after. Cliff’s Lenin was evidently a magician who could make the party take actions the people who constituted the party opposed.

“Democratic Centralism” and Party Discipline

In chapter 15 Cliff’s litany of errors continues. The 1905 revolution created strong pressure from the RSDLP’s rapidly growing ranks to unite the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions. This unity was consummated at the RSDLP’s 1906 congress held in Stockholm. Cliff neglects to mention that this congress elected a central committee of three Bolsheviks and six Mensheviks. He recounts that an RSDLP conference in Tammerfors held in 1906 decided to create an electoral bloc with the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), a liberal party backed by big business. Lenin insisted that the decisions of this conference were not binding on local party bodies. A surprised Cliff writes:

What had happened to the democratic centralism so dear to Lenin? For years he had argued for the subordination of the lower organs of the party to the higher, and against the federal concept of the party. In One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, written February-May 1904, he had said that “the undoubted tendency to defend autonomism against centralism … is a fundamental characteristic of opportunism in matters of organisation.”

What Cliff means by “democratic centralism” is “subordination of the lower organs of the party to the higher” and a non-federal party. What Lenin meant by “democratic centralism” was altogether different.

The quote Cliff cites from One Step Forward, Two Steps Back is misplaced because Lenin was arguing against those, like Trotsky, who held that the editorial board of the party’s newspaper should be autonomous and not subject to the democratic control of the party congress, a very different issue from the autonomy of local committees or local party branches to make decisions regarding local work. The notion that local autonomy was a new element in Lenin’s thought in 1907 is mistaken. Lenin noted that the third congress of the RSDLP in 1905 affirmed this principle:

The autonomy of the committees has been defined more precisely and their membership declared inviolable, which means that the C.C. no longer has the right to remove members from local committees or to appoint new members without the consent of the committees themselves. … Every local committee has been accorded the right to confirm periphery organisations as Party organisations. The periphery organisations have been accorded the right to nominate candidates for committee membership.

The principle of autonomy was first affirmed at the RSDLP’s second congress in 1903:

All organisations belonging to the Party carry on autonomously all work relating specially and exclusively to the sphere of Party activity which they were set up to deal with.

Another element missing from Cliff’s account of “democratic centralism” is the following rule, also adopted at the second congress:

Every Party member, and everyone who has any dealings with the Party, has the right to demand that any statement submitted by him be placed, in the original, before the Central Committee, or the editorial board of the Central Organ, or the Party Congress.

This rule seems to have been designed to prevent secret expulsions and other abuses of power by party officials that plague all “Leninist” organizations, abuses which are almost always justified on the grounds of “democratic centralism.” The term has been abused to such an extent that it no longer conveys the organizational norms that prevailed within the RSDLP among Mensheviks (who first coined the term) and Bolsheviks alike until the 1917 revolution.

Lenin famously defined “democratic centralism” as “freedom of discussion, unity in action.” Cliff appropriately quotes Lenin on what this meant in practice:

After the competent bodies have decided, all of us, as members of the party, must act as one man. A Bolshevik in Odessa must cast into the ballot box a ballot paper bearing a Cadet’s name even if it sickens him. And a Menshevik in Moscow must cast into the ballot box a ballot paper bearing only the names of Social Democrats, even if his soul is yearning for the Cadets.

Note what “freedom of discussion, unity in action” did not mean. It did not mean that the minority had to publicly champion the “line” or argument of the triumphant majority. “Unity in action” for a dissenting minority simply meant acting in concert with the majority, not singing their tune or arguing for their “line.” Nowhere did Lenin say “a Bolshevik in Odessa must argue with his workmates that supporting the Cadets is the way to go,” or “a Menshevik in Moscow must convince everyone he knows to vote Social Democrat even if his soul is yearning for the Cadets.” A line of action and a line of argument are two different things; “unity in action” did not mean unity in argument or political position.

Given this understanding of what “democratic centralism” meant to Lenin and the RSDLP, the following lines by Cliff are wildly, unfathomably wrong:

A couple of months later, in January 1907, Lenin went so far as to argue for the institution of a referendum of all party members on the issues facing the party – certainly a suggestion that ran counter to the whole idea of democratic centralism.

Polling the party to determine the party’s course of action is antithetical to “democratic centralism” only if we use Cliff’s definition of the term and not Lenin’s. The answer to Cliff’s question, “What had happened to the democratic centralism so dear to Lenin?” is simple: nothing.

Cliff’s failure to understand the meaning of “democratic centralism” becomes a problem again in chapter 17 when he discusses a Menshevik-led party trial of Lenin in 1907. Surprisingly, Cliff agrees with the Mensheviks that Lenin was guilty of violating party discipline, writing:

Lenin’s behavior at the trial is very interesting, because it shows the relentless way in which he conducted a faction fight against the right wing of the party. As the trial opened, Lenin calmly acknowledged that he used “language impermissible in relations between comrades in the same party,” but he made absolutely no apology for doing so. Indeed, in fighting the Liquidationists and their allies in the movement, he never hesitated to use the sharpest weapons he could lay his hands on. Moderation is not a characteristic of Bolshevism.

The incident that precipitated the trail occurred after the Mensheviks in St. Petersburg created an electoral bloc with the Cadets in defiance of the majority of the local RSDLP organization. Lenin wrote a pamphlet attacking the Mensheviks for doing so. The Mensheviks retaliated against Lenin by having the RSDLP central committee, on which they had a majority, charge Lenin with violating party discipline. So it was the Mensheviks who were violating the rules of the RSDLP, not Lenin.

The Bolshevik Party: Not Formed in 1912

In chapter 17, Cliff discusses Lenin’s fight against the liquidationist trend in the RSDLP. He notes that a January 1910 RSDLP conference vote forced Lenin to disband the Bolshevik faction, close its newspaper, and break off relations with the “boycottists” in their ranks while the Mensheviks were obliged to do the same: disband their faction, close their newspaper, and break with the liquidators in their midst. Lenin dutifully complied. His Menshevik counterparts did not.

After the Mensheviks proved unwilling to follow through with their obligations, Lenin launched a new weekly paper at the end of 1910, Zvezda. Cliff omits this fact and instead picks up the story with the Prague Conference held in January 1912. He also omits the fact that this conference elected a pro-party Menshevik (one of two who attended) to the RSDLP’s central committee. This is important because the 1912 Prague Conference is almost always referred to as the beginning of the Bolsheviks as a separate party from the Mensheviks. Cliff evades this issue by referring to those elected to the central committee in 1912 as “hards,” a term used nowhere else in Building the Party.

After chapter 17, Cliff claims the RSDLP’s daily newspaper Pravda played “a central role in building the Bolshevik Party,” declares that the Bolsheviks became “a mass party” in 1912-1914, and says that the Bolshevik Duma deputies “finally ended” relations with their Menshevik counterparts in late 1913 (when World War One broke out the deputies issued a joint statement, so this is false). Based on these claims it is clear that Cliff adheres to the myth that the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks separated into two parties in 1912.

However, a cursory glance at Lenin’s writings in 1912 reveals how wrong this view is. Shortly after the 1912 Prague Conference, Lenin wrote the following in an explanatory note to the International Socialist Bureau:

In all, twenty organisations established close ties with the Organising Commission convening this conference; that is to say, practically all the organisations, both Menshevik and Bolshevik, active in Russia at the present time.

The 1912 Prague Conference separated pro-party Mensheviks and Bolsheviks from the liquidators. The Menshevik-Bolshevik divide did not culminate in two separate parties until the 1917 revolution. Cliff’s account of the 1912-1914 period is terribly flawed because it is predicated on falsehoods. The Bolsheviks were not a party, therefore they could not “become a mass party,” nor could Pravda have played “a central role in building the Bolshevik Party” because such an entity did not yet exist. This explains why, when Lenin referred to Pravda’s success against its liquidationist rival Luch he wrote, “four-fifths of the workers have accepted the Pravdist decisions as their own, have approved of Pravdism, and actually rallied around Pravdism” instead of using the terms “Bolshevist” and “Bolshevism.”

Cliff’s treatment of the history of Lenin and Pravda is just as error-ridden as the rest of Building the Party. For example, he claims, “Lenin practically ran Pravda.” What he neglects to mention is that 47 of Lenin’s articles were rejected, and that many of Lenin’s published articles were heavily edited to weaken their factional content. If Lenin “practically ran Pravda,” why would he reject so many of his own articles and censor himself politically?

Pravda was run by a team of editors, not by Lenin, and the initiative for it came from the lower ranks of the party. It was not “Lenin’s Pravda” as Cliff claims, but a workers’ paper to which Lenin was one contributor among many (Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg, and Kautsky also wrote for it). The overwhelming majority of Pravda’s content, including poems and humor columns, was written by workers, not by higher-ups in the party or the paper’s editorial team.

Conclusion

Building the Party has so many gross factual and political errors that it is useless as a historical study of Lenin’s actions and thoughts. This conclusion is inescapable for anyone who reads the book closely and compares it with the writings of Lenin and the historical record. Those who read Building the Party and take it seriously will need to unlearn the falsehoods and misinformation contained in its pages if they want a reasonably accurate picture of Lenin’s work in the context of the Russian socialist movement of the early twentieth century.

Bookmarks in Britain and Haymarket Books in the U.S. should think twice before republishing, selling, and profiting from Building the Party since it contains so many errors, falsehoods, and lies about Lenin.

Pham Binh’s articles have been published by Occupied Wall Street Journal, The Indypendent, Asia Times Online, Znet, Counterpunch and thenorthstar.info, a collaborative blog by and for occupiers from across the U.S. His other writings can be found at www.planetanarchy.net

The bipartisan attack on democracy and human rights

Three articles appearing on page one of today’s NY Times overlap with each other in terms of what they say about the deepening erosion of democratic and human rights in the United States since the “war on terror” began after 9/11. It is difficult to decide which one is more outrageous. You can judge for yourself.

From the article titled “In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims”, we learn that a viciously Islamophobic film titled “The Third Jihad” was shown to 1489 N.Y. cops as part of their official training. When Tom Robbins, described as a former Village Voice columnist, was tipped off by a cop that the film was being shown, the police brass lied about it, saying that it had been mistakenly shown only a “couple of times” for a few officers. It should be stated that Robbins left the Voice under conditions very much related to the political morass the country finds itself in. When the newsweekly fired Wayne Barrett, a ferocious critic of metropolitan political abuses just like the one taking place in the police department today, Robbins resigned in protest. Nowadays the only full-time columnist for the paper is one Michael Musto, whose “La Dolce Musto” covers the gossip beat. His most recent column was titled “Keira Knightley Reveals the Secret Behind Her Spanking Scene!” There’s a place for that sort of thing, of course, but not at the expense of hard-hitting investigative journalism.

A half-hour version of “The Third Jihad” can be seen on Youtube:

The film is narrated by Zuhdi Jasser, a “devout Muslim” as he describes himself, who is a fixture on rightwing television and radio shows. Media Matters reported:

Jasser is also conspicuous in his willingness to appear on Fox News to mitigate the effects of their pundits’ anti-Islamic rhetoric. After Fox host Bill O’Reilly went on The View and declared that “Muslims killed us on 9-11,” triggering a walk-off of the show’s hosts, he turned to Jasser, who declared that he was “absolutely not” offended by O’Reilly’s comments and actually thanked the Fox host for making them. Likewise, after NPR fired Juan Williams for his own controversial comments about Muslims, Fox hosted Jasser, who was again “absolutely not” offended.

The Times reports that the film was produced by the Clarion Fund, a group bankrolled by Sheldon Adelson, a gambling casino magnate and ultra-Likudnik who is described in one of the other three NY Times articles as a major funder of the super-PAC that helped Newt Gingrich defeat Romney in the South Carolina primary. Zuhdi Jasser appeared in another ultraright film titled “America at Risk: The War with No Name”, a joint product of the Koch brothers’ Citizens United and Gingrich Productions.

The police department is stonewalling efforts by Faiza Patel, the director of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School, to get to the bottom of its sordid ties to the Clarion Fund’s political agenda. The Times states: “None of the documents turned over to the Brennan Center make clear which police officials approved the showing of this film during training. Department lawyers blacked out large swaths of these internal memorandums.”

For its part, the Clarion Fund has resisted efforts to come clean:

Repeated calls over the past several days to the Clarion Fund, which is based in New York, were not answered. The nonprofit group shares officials with Aish HaTorah, an Israeli organization that opposes any territorial concessions on the West Bank. The producer of “The Third Jihad,” Raphael Shore, also works with Aish HaTorah.

Sheldon Adelson is the perfect symbol of American support for Israel today. Against a backdrop of declining support by secular Jews, particularly the younger and college-educated, it naturally rests on the shoulders of a man who became a billionaire in the gambling casino business. He is the 8^th richest person in the U.S. and 16^th in the world, sitting atop a fortune of $21 billion. As the owner of the non-union Venetian hotel and other properties in Las Vegas, Adelson has staked out a viciously anti-labor position vis-à-vis the city’s militant trade union movement. In a profile on Adelson, Connie Bruck told New Yorker Magazine’s  readers:

Like all major Las Vegas hotel casinos, the Sands was a union hotel when Adelson bought it, but the Venetian was non-union. This sparked a singularly bitter war with the Culinary Union, which had for many years maintained good relations with most hotels on the Strip. (Adelson has said that the benefits he gives his employees are superior to union benefits.) After a rally in which a thousand union supporters picketed in front of the Venetian, Adelson tried to have them removed by the police, and when that failed he went to court, arguing that the sidewalks outside the Venetian were private property, and not subject to the First Amendment. The Venetian lost in the district court and the appellate court, and in 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Using his ill-gained fortune, Adelson has become a major player in Israeli politics as one of Netanyahu’s staunchest supporters. Bruck reports:

Adelson is also funding, with a $4.5-million grant, a think tank, the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, at the right-leaning Shalem Center, in Jerusalem. Netanyahu allies are on its staff. Natan Sharansky, the chairman of One Jerusalem, also chairs the Adelson Institute. Sharansky helped organize a “Democracy and Security” conference last June, in Prague, which was attended by President Bush. Iran was a major topic of discussion. A month after the Prague conference, Adelson attended a fund-raising event at the C.A.A. talent agency, in Los Angeles, for Steven Emerson, an investigative journalist specializing in Islamic extremism and terrorism, who was showing a ten-minute trailer for a film he wanted to make. Emerson introduced Sheldon and Miriam to the overflow crowd in C.A.A.’s two-hundred-seat theatre, saying that they were his generous supporters. After Emerson’s presentation, Pooya Dayanim, a Jewish-Iranian democracy activist based in Los Angeles, chatted with Adelson. Recalling their conversation, Dayanim observed that Adelson was dismissive of Reza Pahlevi, the son of the former Shah, who had participated in the Prague conference, because, Adelson said, “he doesn’t want to attack Iran.” According to Dayanim, Adelson referred to another Iranian dissident at the conference, Amir Abbas Fakhravar, whom he said he would like to support, saying, “I like Fakhravar because he says that, if we attack, the Iranian people will be ecstatic.” Dayanim said that when he disputed that assumption Adelson responded, “I really don’t care what happens to Iran. I am for Israel.”

Given his predilections, it is no surprise that Adelson would rally around the candidacy of Newt Gingrich who announced recently that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. While some might be tempted to describe Mr. and Mrs. Adelson’s donation of 10 million dollars to a pro-Gingrich super-PAC as a kind of bribe, the reality is that Gingrich needed no bribing. His Islamophobic views would be dispensed for free, although he could always use an extra 10 million dollars or so given his expensive tastes, including shopping sprees at Tiffany’s.

In the article titled “‘Super PAC’ for Gingrich to Get $5 Million Infusion”, N.Y. Times reporter Nicholas Confessore informed his readers:

A wealthy backer of Newt Gingrich will inject $5 million into a “super PAC” supporting his presidential bid, two people with knowledge of the contribution said on Monday, providing a major boost to Mr. Gingrich as he seeks to fend off aggressive attacks from Mitt Romney, his main Republican rival.

The supporter, Dr. Miriam Adelson, is the wife of Sheldon Adelson, a longtime Gingrich friend and a patron who this month contributed $5 million to the super PAC, Winning Our Future. Dr. Adelson’s check will bring the couple’s total contributions to Winning Our Future to $10 million, a figure that could substantially neutralize the millions of dollars already being spent in Florida by Mr. Romney and Restore Our Future, a super PAC supporting him.

Confessore connected this sordid business to the Supreme Court decision on behalf of the Koch-funded Citizen’s United, a co-producer of the Gingrich Islamophobic documentary “”America at Risk: The War with No Name”:

The contribution also underscored how the advantages built by Mr. Romney’s campaign, including a potent get-out-the-vote operation in Florida and tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions raised in chunks of no more than $2,500, are being challenged by new forces, including the high-profile debates that have elevated Mr. Gingrich and the emergence of new campaign finance rules in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United ruling.

That decision paved the way for super PACs, including the kind that have spent more than $30 million in the Republican primary so far: political committees run by each candidate’s former aides and financed by a few wealthy supporters. Because they are technically independent of the candidate, the groups can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, rendering less relevant the limits that Congress imposed in the 1970s on contributions to candidates.

As might be obvious at this point, even a lobotomized goose could connect the dotted lines between Adelson, the Likud, the NY Police Department, and Gingrich.

Now, lest anybody mistake me for the hysterical liberals at MSNBC who are rehearsing to get out the vote for Obama in 2012 as America’s last best hope for forestalling the Republican Party’s fascist bid, the last article on the front page of the N.Y. Times should dispel such illusions.

We learn from Charlie Savage’s article titled “Ex-C.I.A. Officer Charged in Information Leak” that one John Kuriakou has been arrested:

The Justice Department on Monday charged a former Central Intelligence Agency officer with disclosing classified information to journalists about the capture and brutal interrogation of a suspected member of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah — adding another chapter to the Obama administration’s crackdown on leaks.

In a criminal complaint filed on Monday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation accused John Kiriakou, the former C.I.A. officer, of disclosing the identity of a C.I.A. analyst who worked on a 2002 operation that located and interrogated Abu Zubaydah. The journalists included a New York Times reporter, it alleged.

“Safeguarding classified information, including the identities of C.I.A. officers involved in sensitive operations, is critical to keeping our intelligence officers safe and protecting our national security,” said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., in a statement.

While not exactly a Julian Assange, Kuriakou is being made an example in order to intimidate anybody in the intelligence corps who might be tempted to reveal one or another of America’s torture state infelicities. Ironically, despite being depicted by Holder as a threat to national security, Kuriakou was an advocate of water-boarding and not some latter-day Philip Agee.

However, the real eye-opener in the article is something buried within it and mentioned almost casually:

At the same time, the department on Monday cleared of wrongdoing a legal defense team for inmates at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for its efforts to identify officials involved in the coercive interrogations of “high value” suspects. The effort was a project by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to bolster the representation of detainees facing death sentences in military commissions.

I did a double-take after reading this. Why in the world would a legal defense team for inmates at Guantánamo Bay be under any kind of legal threat for trying to identify torturers? A legal defense team, I should add, that was made up of military men trained as lawyers. Given the legal reasoning underpinning the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, the real wrongdoing would be torture itself and Holder’s stubborn defense of the right of the torturers to remain free of the consequences of their actions. What kind of society are we living in when the President of the United States, a constitutional lawyer trained at Harvard University, ends up threatening lawyers in the same way that they are in countries like China, Zimbabwe or Iran for defending “enemies” of the state?

The ACLU was threatened back in 2009 as a result of showing some photographs to prisoners at Guantanamo as the Times reported:

The Justice Department is investigating whether three military defense lawyers for detainees at the Guantánamo prison illegally showed their clients photographs of C.I.A. interrogators, two leaders of civilian legal groups that are working with the defense lawyers said Thursday.

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation approached the three lawyers with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps nearly two weeks ago, said Anthony D. Romero, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is helping the military lawyers defend the detainees in military commissions.

The agents informed the uniformed lawyers of their right to remain silent, and then questioned them about whether they showed their clients pictures of Central Intelligence Agency officials — possibly including covert agents — that came from an “independent investigation” by the A.C.L.U. and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Mr. Romero said.

The lawyers were trying to identify the torturers not so much as an effort to have them arrested, as just as this might be, but to prevent their clients from being executed. If the torturers could be forced to testify to their deeds in court, then the court might have decided that their confessions were extracted illegally. What an amazing statement on life today in the U.S.A. when an African-American president and his African-American attorney general behave like a couple of goons from Pinochet’s Chile or some other rotten torture state.

If you want to get some insight into how Obama manages to sink to such depths, I recommend an article by Ryan Lizza in the latest New Yorker magazine. Lizza is a conventional liberal and supporter of the President but he is also a very good reporter. He has made a very convincing case in all of his articles on Obama that the man is about as progressive as Joe Lieberman, a politician he stumped for in his last election in Connecticut before voters decided they had enough of the creep.

Titled “The Obama Memos“, Lizza’s article describes the President as a right-leaning politician motivated both by ideology and a desire to win elections based on cynical calculations. Lizza writes:

Obama’s homily about conciliation reflected an essential component of his temperament and his view of politics. In his mid-twenties, he won the presidency of the Harvard Law Review because he was the only candidate who was trusted by both the conservative and the liberal blocs on the editorial staff. As a state senator in Springfield, when Obama represented Hyde Park-Kenwood, one of the most liberal districts in Illinois, he kept his distance from the most left-wing senators from Chicago and socialized over games of poker and golf with moderate downstate Democrats and Republicans. In 1998, after helping to pass a campaign-finance bill in the Illinois Senate, he boasted in his community paper, the Hyde Park Herald, that “the process was truly bipartisan from the start.”

Given the stupendously reactionary character of the contemporary Republican Party, this really tells us all that we want to know about Obama. His fence-straddling approach explains the bipartisan assault taking place today on democracy and human rights. The Republicans steam ahead to the right and Obama chases after them like a dog after a car, trying to catch up.

If the existing left can’t figure out a way to break with this filthy system, then some other left must come along and do a job we are incapable of carrying out. The future of humanity rests on it.

Eurovision, Turkey, and the Jews

(Hat tip to David Shasha of the Sephardic Heritage mailing list.)

Eurovision, Turkey, and the Jews

By: Rachel Amado Bortnick

I first heard of Can Bonomo less than a year ago, in an interview with him in the Istanbul Jewish weekly Şalom on the occasion of the release of his first CD, Meczup (Lunatic). But what drew my attention then was not that a Jewish boy was a popular musician (there have been, and are, many Jews that are popular musicians in Turkey) but that he was from Izmir, the city where I was born and raised. I thought, in fact, that he was probably the great grandson of the Mr. Bonomo who owned a bicycle repair shop in our neighborhood, as there was only one Bonomo family in Izmir. When later on, in June of 2011, I read that Can (pronounced as John) got a prize in the musical competition Altin Kelebek (golden butterfly) organized by the Turkish daily Hurriyet, I was happy, as I would be for a young relative who had done well.

But when I learned, on January 10, 2012 that Can Bonomo was nominated by the Turkish Television Network TRT to represent Turkey at the next Eurovision song competition – to be held in May in Baku, Azerbaijan – I was truly proud.The buzz about Bonomo’s nomination continues daily with the posting of a widely-seen You Tube video of his performances, and on Turkish websites, articles, TV and radio features and commentaries and interviews. In most cases, the commentators or interviewers are kind and happy for him, ignore or downplay his Jewishness, and just ask him about the songs he will submit, about his musical training, and so on, and wish him good luck.But unfortunately there has also been a barrage of Anti-Semitic articles and comments, some going as far as accusing the musician of being part of the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world! Can has been very dignified, and to all those that bring up his Jewish background as an issue, he has replied that “Music has no language, religion, or race”, and explaining that his family has been here for 540 years, he is a Turk, and can represent Turkey.

The Eurovision song contest, though not well known in America, is a big deal every year among the participating nations (its website states that approximately 125 million people watch it on TV) and winning it is a cause of national pride, akin to winning a “Miss Europe” contest. Jewish Americans probably heard about it in the years that Israel won (it did 3 times: 1978, 1979, and 1998) and are reminded of it especially when the popular song “Halleluyah” is introduced as “the Eurovision winner of 1979.” But this year Eurovision is in the Jewish media because a Jewish boy is going to represent a Muslim country!But it is not pride in a Jewish person’s achievement that is motivating the coverage, but rather criticism of Can’s statements regarding his Judaism, and countering the possible notion that Turkey is a tolerant country. At least this seems to be the case in the recent JTA article titled, “Turkish Jews celebrate country’s Eurovision pick, but singer would prefer quiet about his religion”

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2012/01/17/3091233/turkish-jews-celebrate-countrys-eurovision-pick-but-singer-would-prefer

The article objects to Bonomo’s statement, citing it as: “My family came from Spain 540 years ago. I am Turkish and I am representing Turkey, I will go out there with the Turkish flag … I am an artist, a musician. That’s all that everybody needs to know.”

The writer, Ron Kampeas (who is probably Sephardic also, judging by his last name) writes:

“Should Bonomo, who was born in the coastal city of Izmir, decide one day to shuck off his hesitancy about his Jewish roots, he might discover how they informed his music.

Jewish cafe singers drew crowds in the 1920s and 1930s with their modernized versions of their parents’ aching and ancient Ladino love ballads. A number of their modern Israeli interpreters, including Hadass Pal-Yarden and Yasmin Levy, have taken their acts to Turkey and won acclaim.”

The fact is that Bonomo’s statement, which even referred to his people’s history in Turkey, had no “hesitancy” about his Jewish roots. Nor has he ever tried to hide his Jewishness. Even though his first name, Can, is Turkish (it means “soul”), his surname is clearly is Sephardic, and, as probably everyone knows by now, means “good man” in Italian. (Some have mused that he may be a relative of the famous American clarinetist Benny Goodman!)

Mr. Kampeas has never interviewed Bonomo to find out what the musician knows about what “informed his music.” And who were the “Jewish cafe singers [who] drew crowds in the 1920s and 1930s …?”

There is no tradition of Jewish café singers in Turkey! Perhaps Mr. Kampeas was thinking of Roza Eskenazi, star of Rebetiko music, who is the subject of the movie “My Sweet Canary.”

[You can read her story in: http://www.mysweetcanary.com/PDF/bio.pdf ]

Roza is not typical of Sephardic women, who traditionally did not perform in public. The many Jews who were Turkish classical musicians and composers in Ottoman times were not “café singers” either.  Nor did Mr. Kampeas have to refer to Israelis who sing in Ladino today. There are wonderful Ladino musical groups and singers in Turkey, including Los Pasharos Sefaradis, Janet and Jak Esim, and the world’s only Ladino children’s chorus, Las Estreyikas d’Estambol. Additionally, the group Sefarad, made up of Jewish musicians, performs in Ladino and Turkish, has recorded several CDs, and remains extremely popular. But none of this adds or detracts from Bonomo’s personality as a Jew or a musician.

I agree with the interviewee Saporta in the article, who said that the antisemitic verbal attacks on Bonomo come from “political factions that deride minorities in general,” but unfortunately their pronouncements concerning Jews are as Anti-Semitic as one finds anywhere. Yet, Can Bonomo‘s popularity has prompted thousands in Turkey to express outrage at the racism and discrimination in the country, and to promote the traditional kindness and humanity of the Turkish people. As Jews, we have had a long history of living peacefully with and among Turks. We hope that Can Bonomo will win first place with his song in the 2012 Eurovision contest, and bring glory to Turks and Jews, with ripple effects for good will everywhere.

A blog worth bookmarking

http://unitedstatesofmarxism.com/

Rent and the Crisis of U.S. Capitalist Production

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms will appear.” Antonio Gramsci

The Crisis and Its Sources

Believe it or not, but Bloomberg does publish mildly interesting articles every once in a while, and by coincidence this one on the stagnation of U.S. manufacturing appeared last week (Carl Pope is a former chair of the Sierra Club):

America’s Dirty War Against Manufacturing

Put aside the author’s no doubt special pleading for low tax, unregulated “green and clean” manufacturing.  The fundamental point is correct, and supported by the statistical evidence: the bulk of manufacturing jobs have been lost “the old-fashioned way”, by the replacement of labor power by machines, and less so by the so-called neoliberal “wage arbitrage” of existing technique to low wage countries.  Remember this the next time a Democrat or an American trade union official starts into beating on “China” with their chauvinistic and implicitly racist demagoguery.  “The old-fashioned way” - in historical terms actually a new-fangled way of extracting a surplus product that emerged in force only in the mid-19th century – is what Marxism has called relative surplus value extraction, tending to raise the average organic composition of capital – the ratio of constant to variable capital, with “constant” representing the value of machinery, technique, raw materials, and manufactured means of production generally, and “variable” representing wages.   This raises the productivity – the volume of commodities a single capital can put out with a given variable capital – of those capitals who can successfully reduce their variable capital with new technique, thereby raising the rate and mass of their individual profit at the expense of their competitors.  It was counterposed by Marx to absolute surplus value extraction by means of lengthening the workday or workweek, and/or deepening the intensity of labor in any given work period.  This latter is the true “old-fashioned way” of the capitalist extraction of surplus value, and the predominant way of the capitalist mode of production throughout its history before the 19th century.

The problem that Mr Pope is pointing to, translated into Marxian terms, is quite real: the conditions of production in the United States work against advancing capitalist production along relative surplus value lines.  In other words, an “advanced capitalist” country where half the adult population believes a personal guardian angel watches over them, day in, day out, according to The Baylor Religion Survey (2008), may not be the most conducive to the advance of science and technology in production. These conditions are therefore both superstructural – involving the structures of the State, law, custom, ideology, culture – and infrastructural – this latter boiling down to the use of the land, water, air and ecosystem as a whole.  These two aspects are dialectically interrelated as a whole with their fulcrum in the State – this after all the final arbitrator both the of the use of infrastructure and preservation of the existing superstructure – and have as their antithesis the reproduction of labor power in the form of wage labor.  The question of all of these conditions for carrying on capitalist production in its specific “industrial” manufacturing sense are essentially those of the qualitative nature of the use values that comprise those conditions, and whose “solution”, should these conditions be a barrier to the advance of capitalist production –  is therefore not immediately reducible to applications of the law of (exchange) value, a.k.a. neoliberal “market solutions”. As will be seen, the neo-liberal approach has been leading to a very different and even opposed result.  The solution in historical fact requires the intervention of agencies operating outside the law of value:  either the existing State, in what Antonio Gramsci called “passive revolutions”, conservative reforms “from above”, or the intervention of the masses, and especially the subject of the capitalist mode of production and the law of value, the proletariat, in a social revolution.  Interventions from above and below occur simultaneously, of course, with the question being which class will get the upper hand. That is what the United States is facing today in the present crisis.  Ever since the Civil War – and beginning with that war – the U.S. ruling class has solved the problem of the conditions of capitalist production (whether or not the ruling participants understood what they were doing is besides the point here) through a series of conservative “passive revolutions” that run through the Progressive Era – rightly called the “Triumph of Conservatism” by Gabriel Kolko (1963), though not for the reasons he thought – and most of all, the New Deal era, the greatest conservative triumph of them all, as can be seen when we observe the social terrain at present.

full: http://unitedstatesofmarxism.com/2012/01/22/rent-and-the-crisis-of-u-s-capitalist-production/

The City Dark; Windfall

Two new documentaries resonate with me on a personal, political and more deeply philosophical level. The first is “The City Dark” that is now playing at the IFC Center in NY. It examines the phenomenon of “light pollution”, the seemingly benign phenomenon of electric lighting that makes star-gazing in places like New York virtually impossible. As someone who grew up in a tiny village in upstate New York in the 1950s with a breathtaking view of the starry sky, the film made me realize how much I miss this natural work of art that inspired Vincent Van Gogh’s most famous painting.

Opening on February 3^rd at the Quad Cinema in New York, Laura Israel’s “Windfall” is a cautionary tale about wind power, the “green” source of energy almost universally accepted as a sane alternative to fossil fuels. As it turns out, windmills, especially those that are 400 feet tall and financed by Goldman-Sachs using generous tax breaks, are not exactly that benign.

The two films complement each other politically and philosophically since they confront in their own ways the cost of maintaining what passes for “civilization” in an epoch of dwindling natural resources and stresses on the environment and the human body engendered by living on the grid. Viewing them raises the question of our future as a species on the most fundamental level even if the intention of their makers was more narrowly focused on a specific socio-political problem.

Growing up on a farm in rural Maine, Ian Cheney enjoyed the same vista I did in the Catskills. So captivated was he by the night sky as a young man that he built his own telescope and spent hours each evening gazing at the stars. I had the exact experience when I was 12 or 13 years old and begged my parents to buy me a telescope. But nothing prepared me for what I saw in the summer of 1962 when I was at home from my first year at Bard College when a display of northern lights appeared at around 10pm one evening. For about two hours I stood in wonderment on my front lawn at the green lights dancing across the dark sky.

Like me, Cheney ended up in New York City to pursue a career. He fell in love with the city’s dazzling skyline and the neon lights on Broadway even if it meant not being able to see more than a dozen or so stars at night. At one point in the film there is a sage observation that the modern city is an inversion of the natural order. The stars have fallen from the sky, only to appear as the streetlights and neon signs of the boulevards.

The longer Cheney lived in the city, the more he missed the starry skies of his youth. The loss was not just esthetic and spiritual. As he looked deeper into the problem of “light pollution”, the more aware he became of the environmental and health costs of living in an urban environment crowned by supposedly one of civilization’s brightest jewels: electrification.

When I was involved with Tecnica, a volunteer program for revolutionary Nicaragua, we worked closely with a young engineer from Portland named Ben Linder who was killed by contras while working on a small-scale hydroelectric dam that would generate electricity for isolated and impoverished rural villages in the north. There was nothing that better expressed our hopes for a new Nicaragua than the possibility of people being able to have lighted homes in the evening. It was the age-old dream of socialism to make this possible, symbolized by the poster below that includes the slogan “Communism is Power of the Soviets Plus Electrification” beneath a light-bulb.

As it turns out, there can be too much of a good thing, including electric lights. Considering the fact that animals, including homo sapiens, have lived for millions of years without artificial lights, it comes as no surprise that mother nature can throw us for a loop. The film shows the toll light pollution takes on animals. Thousands of sea turtles newly hatched on the Florida coast mistakenly head toward the city lights rather than the ocean, which they have been programmed genetically to seek out because of its relative brightness compared to the land. As an endangered species, the idea that their numbers are decreasing at an ever greater rate because of shopping mall lights, etc. makes you reconsider the question of progress.

Since ultimately we are part of the animal kingdom, it might be expected that artificial lights will affect our health and survival as well.  Richard Stevens, an epidemiologist interviewed by Cheney, believes that disrupted circadian rhythms can affect one’s health. For example, statistics indicate that night-shift women workers are twice as likely to develop breast cancer.  As Sciencenews.org reported:

Exposure to light at night can disrupt the body’s production of melatonin, a brain hormone best known for its daily role in resetting the body’s biological clock. Secreted primarily in the brain, and at night, melatonin triggers a host of biochemical activities, including a nocturnal reduction in the body’s production of estrogen. Some researchers have speculated that chronically decreasing nocturnal melatonin production—as with light—might increase an individual’s risk of developing estrogen-related malignancies, such as breast cancer.

Unlike a film about genetically modified food or climate change, there are no simple solutions to light pollution. You can easily enough keep Frankenfood out of your kid’s cafeteria, for example, but what do we do about millions of people herded together in a metropolis for economic reasons? Nobody would endorse a forced march into the countryside in Khmer Rouge fashion, but “A City Dark” really makes you think about what kind of alternatives are both sustainable and feasible. There are some measures that are obviously worth taking in the short run, like putting lights into public spaces that are appropriate. However, wouldn’t we better off in the long run finding a way to stay in touch with the same thing that captivated our forefathers millenniums ago–the starry night?

Laurie Israel lives in Meredith, New York, a small farming town in Delaware County, New York just to the northwest of Sullivan County, where I grew up. Like Sullivan County, it is an impoverished area marked by the collapse of the dairy industry.

As is so often the case, impoverished areas are susceptible to environmental super-exploitation. A farmer on the edge of bankruptcy might be enticed to sign a contract to allow natural gas fracking on his land even if it results in undrinkable water.

But Meredith was not approached by a natural gas drilling company. Instead it was a company devoted to wind power, an alternative energy source that was on the leading edge of a Green revolution talked about in the press and touted by liberal politicians such as Al Gore crusading against fossil fuels. As it turned out, the windmills were not the sort of thing you would think of when it comes to an “alternative” to corporate malfeasance.

They were in fact part of the same arsenal that energy companies draw upon to make big profits for their shareholders, the public be damned—especially the citizens of Meredith. As Laurie Israel put it in the press notes:

The first proposal in Meredith called for forty 400-foot tall turbines, sited 1,000 feet from people’s homes. These were not the friendly windmills I first pictured, nor would they be far off in the distance, like ones I’ve seen in the desert. Mountains would have to be clear-cut, and turbines embedded in tons of concrete to keep them standing. Roads would be widened to accommodate the huge blades, which can be up to 180 feet long. I found out about the potential for problems in homes close to turbines, such as low frequency sound and shadow flicker when the sun gets behind the moving blades. I started to question the scale of this type of development for the area, which is both rural and residential. I talked to others in the community, and found I was not alone in questioning the proposed development. In fact, many neighbors had gone through the same transition I had – initial excitement about helping to save the world quickly changing into concern for protecting the health and wellbeing of residents and the future of their community.

As the community began to doubt whether the windmills were appropriate for their community, your first reaction might be to link them with the wealthy denizens of Cape Cod who rejected them as a blight on the landscape—something that the Rush Limbaugh’s of the world never tire of denouncing as an example of rich, liberal “not in my backyard” hypocrisy.

But it was not just a question of esthetics. Studies of industrial windmills of the sort that would be imposed on Meredith reveal that there are health hazards that are nearly as costly as the night shift work discussed in “The City Dark”. Studies reveal that the low frequency sound is not just unpleasant to the ears; it is also linked to sleeplessness, headaches and nausea. While one can put up with relatively minor ailments such as this from time to time, the thought of suffering from them on a nearly daily basis would be enough to force one to sell one’s property at a loss. For many of the people living in Meredith for generations, this would be a devastating hardship.

The town divided along fairly predictable lines. Those who stood the most to gain were large land-owners who would profit by having windmills on their land, especially land-owners whose dairy farms were not producing the income they did decades ago. But for many, especially those who treasured the natural beauty of the rolling hills and green pastures whether they had lived in Meredith for generations or were new arrivals like Laurie Israel, the money was not worth it.

As is also the case with fracking (a burning issue in my home county and one facing Delaware County as well), neighbors grew alienated from each other based on how they stood on the windmill question. The film describes the genuine pain the townspeople felt over their estrangement from one another. The costs of forced industrial penetration are felt in many ways, both in the pocketbook and in ones’ hearts.

Like “The City Dark”, “Windfall” raises fundamental questions about life on earth as conditioned by “civilization”. Keeping in mind that the root of this word is derived from the Latin for city, we must acknowledge that any political solution to our problems (war, poverty, etc.) must eventually penetrate to the very core of social relations and our relationship to nature in order to enjoy the Good Life. Our energy crisis is related very much to the demands put on the economy in order to support cities of millions of people enjoying all the amenities that electricity can support. To keep your computer powered and to provide the light necessary to look at the illuminated pixels, a steady source of electricity is necessary. That in turn can lead to a town like Meredith being swamped by 400 foot windmills that look like they stepped out of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds”. And even if the electricity keeps flowing, there remains the problem of urban life itself which is at odds with nature in ways both known and unknown. The notion of birds bouncing off lighted buildings to their death is eerily similar to the images in apocalyptic films such as “Melancholia” and “Take Shelter”.

The only thing we can be sure of is that any solution to such intractable contradictions can only result from a society in which the wealthy no longer have the power to dictate the outcome. As was the case in Meredith, where an aroused citizenry rose up to challenge industrial windmills, a global democracy—based on political and social equality—will ultimately be the only power capable of creating a new kind of civilization that overcomes alienation between people and between people and nature.

The Financial Times on “capitalism in crisis”

The Financial Times is a salmon-colored British newspaper that covers the same beat as the Wall Street Journal but from a somewhat more “liberal” editorial position. Proof of that is their endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008, a sure sign that they knew what side of their bread was buttered. The Wall Street Journal once dubbed the FT as “orthodox Keynesian”, reason enough to question the value of pump-priming ideology to our current predicament.

Since things took a turn for the worse for the capitalist system in 2007, the newspaper has shouldered its responsibility for the class it represents by defending that system, even if it was forced to admit that Karl Marx was not all wrong. Last August Samuel Brittan wrote an FT article “Mistaken Marxist Moments” that despite its title accepted the possibility that “the system produced an ever-expanding flow of goods and services, which an impoverished proletarianised population could not afford to buy.” That’s quite a mouthful from an economist who defended Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy in 1981 against those 364 of his colleagues who had signed an open letter denouncing it.

The FT has once again taken up the question of capitalism in crisis, and once again concluding that despite its shortcomings it is the best economic system humanity has come up with. Considering the background of some of the contributors to this colloquium, it is not surprising that they lean that way. As “Deep Throat” put it in “All the President’s Men”, you need to follow the money.

Take for example the article titled “A letter to capitalists from Adam Smith” by one David Rubinstein that admits somewhat in a Marxoid vein that “that unfettered exuberance about wealth creation will produce unsustainable booms and inevitable crashes.” Rubinstein’s advice is about what you’d expect. Reduce debt, keep the Euro going, and educate the masses so that they will be able to fill all those openings for computer programmers.

Apparently Rubinstein thinks that after completing courses at a community college in C++ and Java, a 40 year old ex-auto worker will enter the workforce and begin to enjoy the rewards of a triumphant system that has treated Rubinstein so well:

This triumph has occurred because capitalism’s greatest strength – productive economic activity – has succeeded in creating more opportunities for more people than anyone – including me – ever imagined.

As co-founder of the Carlyle Group, Rubinstein has a leg up on the aspiring computer programmer to be sure. The Carlyle Group is a private equity firm that competes with Bain Capital and other cut-throat operations that makes its principals some of the richest bastards on the planet. Rubinstein was smart enough to line up some really qualified people on his board, people with proven track records building businesses:

[W]hen we were putting the board together, somebody came to me and said, look there is a guy who would like to be on the board. He’s kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. Needs a board position. Needs some board positions. Could you put him on the board? Pay him a salary and he’ll be a good board member and be a loyal vote for the management and so forth.

I said well we’re not usually in that business. But okay, let me meet the guy. I met the guy. I said I don’t think he adds that much value. We’ll put him on the board because–you know–we’ll do a favor for this guy; he’s done a favor for us. We put him on the board and spent three years. Came to all the meetings. Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones.

His name is George W. Bush. He became President of the United States. So you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn’t have been in that category. So you never know. Anyway, I haven’t been invited to the White House for any things.

Not surprisingly, Carlyle Group is one of the nation’s biggest investors in the military and has made deals with the Saudi ruling class worth billions of dollars–just the sort of outfit whose chairman can be relied upon for a dispassionate evaluation of the merits of private property.

If Samuel Brittan was audacious enough to refer to Karl Marx, he is trumped by FT contributor Gideon Rachman who finds something good to say about Gramsci in an article titled “We are all Austrians now”:

The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms will appear.” That statement from the Prison Notebooks of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci was a favourite of student Marxists when I was at university in the 1980s. Back then it struck me as portentous nonsense. But Gramsci’s observation does resonate now – in an age of ideological confusion.

Old certainties about the onward march of the markets are collapsing. But no new theory has established ideological “hegemony”, to use the concept that Gramsci made famous. Some ideas are, however, gathering new strength. The four strongest emerging trends that I can spot are, in very broad terms: rightwing populist, social democratic-Keynesian, libertarian-Hayekian and anti-capitalist/socialist.

One imagines that being able to quote Gramsci knowingly can’t but help an ambitious young man trying to climb to the top of the FT, a newspaper that expects more from its staff than the unsophisticated hard right ideology that pervades the editorial page of the WSJ. Of course, the whole point of quoting Gramsci is to prove that you are familiar with a writer you are about to dismiss.

As the article’s title indicates, it is really not that far from the free market garbage you can read from the WSJ hacks. Rachman confesses that despite his sympathies for social democracy, a political approach that is quite at home in the FT’s boardroom, he feels under such pressure from the pissed-off masses that he just might hook up with the current-day varieties of Reaganism/Thatcherism:

Under normal conditions I would probably sign up with the social democratic tendency. The Tea Party is not my cup of tea. But I spent the weekend reading newspaper accounts of the ever more incredible figures that may have to be poured into the bail-outs for banks and countries in Europe. Then I turned the page to read of demands for more protectionism and regulation in the EU. For light relief, I then went to see The Iron Lady – the new film about Margaret Thatcher. The whole experience has left me feeling strangely Austrian.

“Strangely Austrian”, to be sure, is just another way of saying that you know what side your bread is buttered on.

Of equal interest is how Rachman sizes up the left internationally:

The failure of the hard left to capitalise on the economic crisis testifies to how profoundly communism was discredited by the collapse of the Soviet system. But mass unemployment in Europe might yet produce the conditions for the revival of an anti-capitalist movement. Greece’s two far-left parties are currently at about 18 per cent in the polls. The diverse groups that campaign under the banner of Occupy Wall Street contain some genuine socialists. And China has a powerful “new left” movement that pays lip-service to Maoism.

Despite reading Gramsci 25 years or so ago, Rachman still has a long way to go to figure out what the great Italian Marxist meant when he wrote “The old is dying and the new cannot be born”. The collapse of the Soviet system did not discredit communism. It only discredited the monstrously bureaucratic system within whose bowels free market dogma would find hospitable conditions. Hayek and Von Mises became popular among the Soviet intelligentsia during Perestroika since it conformed to its desire for consumer goods and all the other benefits that accrued to their counterparts at the FT. If Rachman is adept at quoting Gramsci, so were they adept at one point quoting Stalin or Marx. You have to know your enemy in order to defeat him.

The Soviet Union collapsed because its ruling caste (or class—depending on the intro to Marxism class you took when young) proved incapable of resolving intractable social and economic problems exacerbated by an invasion of Afghanistan. While the USSR resisted the one solution to its problems that might have moved the country forward—direct democracy by the majority, including how and what they produced—the U.S. and the European Union are equally incapable. Communism (or socialism, the term I prefer) can only be realized when those who produce the wealth of society make the decisions about how it is allocated. That is something that frightened the bejeezus out of the state bureaucracy in the USSR and their counterparts on Wall Street today. In trying to defend the interests of the latter, the FT is playing the same kind of role that Pravda once served for the former—and will be about as successful.

Johnny Otis dies at 90; R&B singer wrote ‘Willie and the Hand Jive’

Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2012

Johnny Otis dies at 90; R&B singer wrote ‘Willie and the Hand Jive’

By Randy Lewis

Pioneering rhythm-and-blues singer, songwriter, drummer, bandleader and disc jockey Johnny Otis made the kind of conscious life choice early on that few people have the inclination, or circumstance, to carry out.

Born white, the son of Greek immigrant parents, and raised in a predominantly black neighborhood in Northern California in the 1920s, Otis decided as a youth that he’d rather be black.

The choice put him on a path to a life in music during which he created the sensually pulsing 1958 hit “Willie and the Hand Jive.” It also gave him a deep connection to black culture that helped him discover such future stars of R&B and rock as Etta James, Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard and Little Esther Phillips.

“Yes, I chose,” Otis told The Times in 1979, “because despite all the hardships, there’s a wonderful richness in black culture that I prefer.”

Otis died Tuesday in the Los Angeles area, where he had lived for much of his life, said Tom Reed, a black-music historian. He was 90.

Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Otis continued leading a big band R&B, jazz, soul, gospel and roots-rock revue in recent years, literally and figuratively beating the drum for the music that fired his imagination.

“I get a wave of pride in America when I look back at what we’ve accomplished in the field of music,” Otis told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000. “People are going to wake up to this great reservoir of music we’ve created in America — cakewalks, one-steps, boogie-woogie, country and western. I had a bit to do with one of those traditions.”

“I’m not suggesting our music is the only music,” he told The Times in 1986 when the once-endangered musical style he helped create was staging a comeback, “but I am suggesting that there are certain elements in America’s culture that are so precious that it would be a shame for them to go down the drain.”

He was born John Veliotes on Dec. 28, 1921, in Vallejo, northeast of San Francisco, and was raised in Berkeley, where his father ran a grocery store in a largely black community.

“When I got near teen age, I was so happy with my friends and the African American culture that I couldn’t imagine not being part of it,” Otis told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 1991.

He started playing drums with big bands and jazz combos, and in his early 20s came to L.A. to join Harlan Leonard’s Kansas City Rockers, the house band at Club Alabam on the thriving Central Avenue jazz-blues-R&B club scene.

“Man, you could go into one club and there’d be [jazz saxophone giant] Lester Young jamming, go into another and you’d find T Bone [Walker, the Texas blues guitarist and singer], and down the street Miles [Davis] would be blowing,” Otis said in 1979. “Yeah, L.A. was happening.”

But tough times in the late 1940s forced bandleaders to pare their large ensembles back to a small handful of players — the perfect size, as it turned out, for the new styles of R&B and rock ‘n’ roll that were emerging.

“To compensate for all the instruments we were eliminating, we had to put in some new ones, each with a fuller sound: an electric guitar, a blues guitar, a boogie piano,” Otis told The Times in 1984, and “the sound changed too, into more of a cross between swing and country blues…. We ended up creating a whole new art form: a hybrid music that became known as rhythm and blues.”

Otis scored a signature hit of that nascent style in 1946 with the moody, saxophone-driven instrumental “Harlem Nocturne,” which was revived in 1960 by the white New Jersey rock group the Viscounts.

At one point, Otis was asked to judge a talent competition in Detroit and selected three winners: Wilson, Ballard and Little Willie John. Otis’ talent, he once said, was being able to “see something before anyone else.”

He wrote the song that became James’ first charting hit — vaulting her to No. 1 on the R&B chart in 1955 — with “The Wallflower,” popularly known as “Roll With Me Henry.” It was a female-centric response to Ballard’s sexually charged hit “Work With Me Annie” that raised eyebrows for its frankness.

Then he came up with a variant on Bo Diddley’s signature 1955 hit “Bo Diddley” using the same five-count “shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits!” beat and created a smash of his own in “Willie and the Hand Jive.” It’s been recorded dozens of times by a wide variety of musicians, most notably by Eric Clapton in 1974.

Otis wrote other R&B hits, including “So Fine,” “Double Crossing Blues” and “All Nite Long,” and produced early recordings for Little Richard, Big Mama Thornton and Johnny Ace.

He also hosted early radio and television shows in L.A. and later guided new generations of listeners through music history on oldies radio shows at KPFK-FM (90.7) in L.A. and a sister station in the Bay Area.

With the British Invasion in the early 1960s, “the white boys from England came over with a recycled version of what we created. We were out of business, man,” Otis said in 1994.

He saw a brief revival of interest in original R&B in the late 1960s and 1970s, when he performed with a band that included his teenage son, Shuggie, on guitar. But with the arrival of disco, then punk, hard rock and heavy metal in the 1970s, Otis was effectively forced to retire.

He turned his home in the West Adams District into the nondenominational Landmark Church and became its pastor, often leading a choir that included some of the greatest voices in pop music, including James and Esther Phillips.

In 1968, he published the book “Listen to the Lambs,” a sociological critique he wrote in the wake of the Watts riots. He chronicled the music scene he knew so well in the 1994 book “Upside Your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue.” Otis even found his way into politics, serving as deputy chief of staff for Mervyn M. Dymally as the Democrat rose in state politics and served in the U.S. House of Representatives.

While cultivating his interest in painting and sculpture, Otis tended homegrown crops in Altadena and in Sebastopol in Northern California’s wine country. He also opened a short-lived grocery store and for a time marketed Johnny Otis Apple Juice.

“Today’s musicians are better technically,” Otis said in 1979, “but that’s not a virtue in itself. What’s important is the emotional impact…. Most rock or disco today doesn’t stir up anything in my heart — not the way a Picasso does, not the way the blues or gospel does.”

Otis and his wife of 60 years, Phyllis, had several children and grandchildren.

Pro bono graphic artist needed

I have been working with Pham Binh to launch a group blog called The North Star. If you’ve read his articles on the Occupy movement and various pieces by the both of us about building a broad-based revolutionary movement, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what this publication will be about. Binh, who is the editor, selected the name North Star to connect it with Peter Camejo’s network of the early 80s of the same name. Peter chose the name since it was the same as Frederick Douglass’s newspaper and expressed his desire to build a movement that was rooted in our national traditions and a departure from the hammer-and-sickle iconography that had dominated the Marxist left for so long.

Right now there is a need for someone to work with us on the graphics since this is not one of our strong points. We especially need help on designing a masthead.

You can reach Binh here or me at lnp3@panix.com.

Thanks!

Gustav Leonhardt, Master Harpsichordist, Dies at 83

NY Times January 17, 2012

By ALLAN KOZINN

Gustav Leonhardt, the Dutch harpsichordist, organist and conductor who was a pioneer in the world of period instrument performance and research into Baroque performance styles, died on Monday at his home in Amsterdam. He was 83.

The New Church in Amsterdam, where Mr. Leonhardt was organist, announced his death in the newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Both as a keyboard soloist and as the founder and director of the Leonhardt Consort, Mr. Leonhardt made hundreds of recordings that, along with those of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, August Wenziger and a handful of others, were the defining discography of the historical performance movement in the 1950s and ’60s.

He systematically recorded Bach’s keyboard music, sometimes revisiting works like the “Goldberg Variations,” which he recorded in 1952, 1965 and 1979.

With his Leonhardt Consort, founded in 1955, he performed a broad selection of the Baroque chamber, orchestral and dramatic repertory, and helped revive works by Rameau, Lully, André Campra and other Baroque composers. But the group’s most important project was a collaboration with Mr. Harnoncourt and his Concentus Musicus of Vienna on a complete traversal of Bach’s church cantatas for the Telefunken (later Teldec) Das Alte Werke series.

The cycle, started in 1971, took nearly two decades to complete. Installments were released in boxed sets that included full scores of the cantatas. He later recorded Bach’s secular cantatas as well, for the Alpha label.

Mr. Leonhardt’s wife, Marie Leonhardt, a noted Baroque violinist, was the concertmaster of the Leonhardt Consort. She survives him, along with three daughters and a sister, the fortepianist Trudelies Leonhardt.

Even as the period instrument movement grew and younger performers like Christopher Hogwood, Trevor Pinnock, William Christie, Roger Norrington and Nicholas McGegan established ensembles in Europe and the United States, Mr. Leonhardt remained influential.

Mr. Leonhardt was born in the Netherlands on May 30, 1928. He began his musical studies at the piano when he was 6, and the cello when he was 10. His parents and his brother and sister were avid chamber music players, and when he was a teenager his parents bought a harpsichord for Baroque music performances. Mr. Leonhardt, as the family keyboardist, took up the instrument and made it his specialty.

In 1949 he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum, in Basel, Switzerland, to study organ and harpsichord with Eduard Miiller. After a year he moved to Vienna to study conducting and musicology, spending most of his time in libraries, he said, copying musical manuscripts and treatises by hand. He made his debut as a harpsichordist in Vienna in 1950, performing Bach’s “Art of the Fugue.” He also met Mr. Harnoncourt and began playing with his group.

He was soon engaged to teach the harpsichord at conservatories in Vienna and Amsterdam. He commuted between them until 1955, when he gave up the Vienna post. He also taught at Harvard in 1969 and 1970.

Mr. Leonhardt’s studio — where he insisted on never having more than five students at a time — produced several important harpsichordists and early-music conductors, among them Mr. Hogwood, Ton Koopman, Bob van Asperen, Alan Curtis, Pierre Hantaï and Skip Sempé.

Mr. Leonhardt began his recording career in Vienna in the 1950s, when American labels like Vanguard’s Bach Guild subsidiary, abetted by the strength of the dollar, discovered that the nascent period-instrument world in Vienna, Basel and London made Europe a fountainhead of inexpensive recordings that could feed a growing interest in Baroque music in United States.

Among his first recordings were collaborations with the countertenor Alfred Deller on music by Bach, Purcell, Matthew Locke, John Jenkins and Elizabethans. He also made recordings with his new Leonhardt Consort, at first concentrating on composers like Biber and Scheidt, who were little known then.

“We didn’t give many concerts, because the public for such repertoire was still quite small,” Mr. Leonhardt said in a 2003 interview with the online magazine Andante.com “But it was all a revelation to us, and if I listen now to the records we made then, it surprises me that although I can find things to criticize, I find nothing to be ashamed of.”

Back in Amsterdam, Mr. Leonhardt was appointed organist of the Waasle Kerk and later the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), both of which have historic instruments. He continued to teach, and he edited the Fantasies and Toccatas of the Dutch Baroque composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck for the complete edition of that composer’s work, published in 1968.

He also had a brief screen career, portraying Bach in Jean-Marie Straub’s “Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” (1968), a role that did not involve any dialogue but required him to perform, bewigged, in locations where Bach worked. He gave his last public performance on Dec. 12 at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.

As a harpsichordist and organist, Mr. Leonhardt pursued a straightforward style in which ornamentation was judicious rather than showy. And although he was dismissive of conducting — he described it as “too easy,” because it does not involve the risk of playing or singing a wrong note — he did just that in annual appearances with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra for many years.

He was also the founding music director of the New York Collegium, mainly a figurehead position that required few conducting appearances and petered out after a season or two. Even so, musicians in the orchestra who worked with him described the experience as “life changing.” One of them, the cellist Myron Lutzke, said in an interview, that Mr. Leonhardt had a way of “drawing sound from the instruments with a kind of effortless power, and without any of the ego that we’re perhaps more used to approaching music with.”