Michael Lebowitz’s “The Socialist Alternative”

Michael Lebowitz’s The Socialist Alternative
by Louis Proyect

Book Review

Lebowitz, Michael A.: The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, Monthly Review Press, New York, ISBN 978-1-58367-214-3, paperback, 191 pages.

(Swans – June 6, 2011)   Despite his identification with the Venezuelan revolutionary process, Michael Lebowitz differs from “20th Century Socialists” who hitched their wagon to an “actually existing” system. For obvious reasons, Soviet, Maoist, and even Cuban socialism has too often tended to foster the rigid pursuit of a certain kind of model, either economically or organizationally. There was an unfortunate but understandable need to elevate Soviet-style planning or “Bolshevik” party-building methods (even if they were never actually pursued by Lenin) into some kind of catechism for the Marxist faithful to follow.

Obviously, none of this applies to Venezuela — a country that is still capitalist by strict definitions. Marxist theory is challenged to describe the ever-shifting reality of a society permeated by working-class power and institutions that represent profound challenges to the existing system. Co-ops, for example, are a principal medium for economic development outside the profit system. If one has no patience for explaining contradictions, then one might be advised to avoid Venezuela.

full: http://www.swans.com/library/art17/lproy70.html

Costa Rica notes, part 2

One of the reasons I was anxious to see Costa Rica with my own eyes is that the country was hailed throughout the 1980s as an alternative to Sandinista Nicaragua. Liberals and social democrats always held up Costa Rica as being within Nicaragua’s grasp rather than the socialist model embraced by the FSLN leaders.

There was something seductive about this argument given the two countries’ obvious similarities. Both had an abundance of volcanoes that erupted periodically, spilling natural fertilizers into the soil. Both were endowed by natural beauty, an asset that clearly could have benefited the tourist industry. One imagines that this model might have been in the back of the FSLN leaders’ minds despite their lip service to Cuba. With their go-slow attitude toward agribusiness, some Marxists often accused them of being sell-outs. Perhaps they always considered development along Costa Rican lines as a contingency. Unfortunately, the animosity of Washington condemned them to follow a path much more like Haiti’s.

Costa Rica enjoys the reputation of being the Switzerland of Central America, a nation that is democratic, egalitarian and pacifist. In other words, it is the polar opposite of Nicaragua, as well as every other country there. Why? While this image promoted heavily by Costa Rican bourgeois historians doesn’t take into account the brutal commonalities that exist between banana republic Costa Rica and banana republic Honduras, there is still some truth to it.

Unlike Guatemala, colonial Costa Rica had a relatively small number of indigenous peoples at the time of Spanish rule. Those who were there rose up against the Europeans, but were decimated by superior arms as well as diseases from which they lacked immunity. It was also remote from the colonial capital in Guatemala. This created a “modest and rustic life” according to historian Carlos Monge Alfaro. The yeoman farmer who flourished in Costa Rica became a pillar of bourgeois democracy, so the argument goes. The oxcarts they used to transport coffee beans became a symbol for the country, whose likenesses can be seen in souvenir shops all around the country.

This view of rural egalitarianism is quasi-mythical according to Marxist historians. There was much more income discrepancy than formerly known and there was extensive military rule. Yet the bourgeois version of Costa Rican history exists as an actuality in dialectical tension with the Marxist critique. For example, one of the military dictators, Tomas Guardia, who ruled in the 19th century, promoted public education and abolished capital punishment.

With a smaller Indian population than the other Central American countries, the colonial rulers were less reliant on a military apparatus to control the natives who the temerity to resist slave labor. A smaller military, therefore, is rooted in the peculiarities of Costa Rican history.

Costa Rica received its independence peacefully from Spain in 1821. It had to make a decision whether or not to join the Mexican empire. Costa Rican conservatives favored this, while bourgeois republicans resisted it. Costa Rica did finally join with Mexico, but its relationship was much looser than one that was desired by the conservatives.

The conflict between the gentry and the democrats was not resolved, however. In 1821 the democrats took power after a brief struggle. They instituted structural reforms such as a sound judicial system. Most importantly, they resisted the temptation to build a standing army. They instead created a citizen’s militia which, according to Alfaro, had “honest citizens, peaceful laborers, artisans and workers who devote themselves to honestly and constantly to their private tasks…and who have no aspiration beyond fulfilling their domestic duties and defending the State when the law calls them.”

The most important factor in the evolution of Costa Rican society, however, was the cultivation of coffee. Costa Rica spearheaded the production of this agricultural commodity. What was important about coffee cultivation is that required free rather than servile labor, as well as a market in land. Coffee’s introduction in Central American in the 1870s to 1890s was associated with liberal reforms that broke the back of the church and the landed gentry.

Coffee growing is highly capital and labor-intensive. The conditions of production are inimical to the semi-feudal relationships that existed in colonial Central America. “Free” labor and “free” soil were required in exactly the same way that the north required them prior to the American Civil War.

A good description of pre-coffee Central America can be found in Robert G. William’s “States and Social Evolution: Coffee and the Rise of National Governments in Central America”. Williams is also the author of “Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America”, a book that explores the contradictions of cattle ranching in Central America. He says this about coffee:

After independence, the Central American landscape was divided into large landholdings held by private individuals and by the church, communal lands held by Indian communities, municipal lands held by townships, and ‘tierras baldias’, unoccupied lands that were under the official jurisdiction of higher-order state institutions. None of these forms, even large landholdings in which vast areas were left idle, were naturally conducive to a rapid conversion to coffee, and in many places people held strongly to their traditional practices regarding land rights. As coffee became more profitable, a struggle over land rights began, and public institutions at various levels, from the township to the department and, finally, to the national state, became involved. The way that state institutions at these various levels intervened in the land question differed from time to time and place to place, greatly influencing the coffee boom, the turbulence of the transition, and the ultimate structures of landholding with coffee.

Clearly the “liberalizing” coffee bourgeoisie needed a proletariat to work its farms. Labor was in short supply since much of it was attached to traditional land holdings. Overthrow traditional relationships in the countryside and not only do you “liberate” labor, you also free up land for capitalist exploitation. This, of course, was the sort of thing that occurred in Scotland and Ireland in earlier centuries. Ideologists like John Locke embraced these changes, as did liberal ideologues in Central America. It is useful to keep in mind that liberalism historically doesn’t mean Roosevelt’s New Deal. It means thoroughgoing and consistent support of capitalist property relations in town and countryside. Republican values– democracy, separation of church and state–were important, but only as a way of maintaining the free flow of labor and land.

While coffee-dominated agriculture led to upheavals in the rest of Central America, in Costa Rica–with its weak colonial institutions and small indigenous population–it did not lead to an immediate proletarianization of the peasantry or violent reaction from conservative forces.

Most importantly, since small farmers held most of the good coffee-growing land in the central part of the country, the income distribution was more equalized. The capitalist class in Costa Rica, unlike the rest of Central America, derived its wealth from processing and marketing coffee rather than through farming. These were the underlying class realities that gave Costa Rica its exceptional character.

An odious character by the name of Paul Berman used to write viciously anti-FSLN pieces during the 1980s in the Village Voice, a liberal newsweekly in NYC. He always used to hold up Costa Rica as a positive alternative to Nicaragua as if it was up to the Sandinistas to model themselves on a state whose peculiar social and economic realities had evolved over a hundred year period.

Costa Rica’s coffee bourgeoisie adopted a liberal political program that was in line with the needs of free land and labor in the 19th century. Early on they also decided to attack the semi-feudal privileges of the Catholic Church. The state they created was modernizing and secular. This was easier to achieve in Costa Rica than in the rest of Central America because the population was sparser and this allowed the formation of small proprietor coffee farming. As long as land in the interior was plentiful, a substantial rural petty-bourgeoisie could develop.

Another important element of the particularism of the modern Costa Rican state and society was the events surrounding the Presidency of Rafael Calderon in the 1940s. Calderon was a Roosevelt-styled reformer who won the election in 1942 and proceeded to institute a number of progressive social measures including Social Security, a first for Central America. Like Roosevelt, he instituted many of these measures from the top down and had no intention of allowing the working-class or peasantry to go beyond the boundaries this caudillo had set.

He had two powerful allies in this enterprise: the Catholic Church and the Communist Party of Costa Rica. The CP had a substantial base among banana plantation workers and under the influence of the popular front threw its full support behind Calderon in the same way its sister party supported FDR.

Calderon’s development model was based on export agriculture and for the most part had a goal to undermine the power of the traditional oligarchies. While Costa Rica’s bourgeoisie was not as vicious as El Salvador’s, it still had no intention of allowing full-scale agrarian reform.

Calderon’s paternalism and his development model alienated much of the country’s emerging urban petty-bourgeoisie. They preferred a more modern capitalism that was diversified and less oriented to export agriculture. Furthermore, Calderon, like many of Central America’s traditional caudillos, was corrupt. The corruption was not as blatant as Somoza’s but it was just enough to anger the urban petty-bourgeoisie.

The most politically advanced members of this modernizing middle-class started a think tank called the “Center for the Study of National Problems” in 1948 that was sharply anti-imperialist. It viewed Calderon’s export-oriented model as ceding too much to the United Fruit Company and other foreign companies. They produced studies that fed into popular discontent against Calderon.

They could be properly called “petty-bourgeois nationalists”, a formulation that perhaps could have described large numbers of Sandinistas in the 1980s. They believed that Costa Rica’s main problem was domination by foreign and domestic capital, without accepting those aspects of Marxist theory that posited the working class as the class that was best suited to exercise power.

This group became allied with a faction within the powerful Democratic Party of Costa Rica called Democratic Action that was led by Jose Figueres. Figureres’s group joined with the urban middle-class professionals in the Center for the Study of National Problems and created Costa Rica’s Social Democratic Party in 1948. This party also attracted the support of many of Costa Rica’s oligarchs who were nervous about Calderon’s populism and his Communist Party support.

When the anti-Calderon forces lost the elections in 1948, they launched a civil war that targeted many CP members. Martial law was declared and the junta threw its support to the Social Democratic rebellion. The civil war, while bloody, was inconclusive. The two factions eventually made peace and formed a coalition government. The contending class forces in the civil war were incapable of achieving victory and led to a stalemate. The contradictions between them remained unresolved for the next several decades.

In order to mediate between themselves, they made a decision to suspend warfare and co-exist within parliamentary forms. They also decided to dissolve the army since they calculated that it could be counted on as a reliable ally to either faction. This act was unprecedented in Central American history. The irony, not at all understood by liberal critics of the FSLN is that it required a bloody civil war to result in the abolition of the armed forces of Costa Rica.

Costa Rica managed to avoid the deep-going conflicts that marked the rest of Central America in the post WWII era largely because both factions eventually accepted Calderon’s welfare state model. This model allowed the bourgeoisie to coopt popular struggles. It has remained a successful co-optation strategy as long as export agriculture remained viable. In my next post I will take a look at the economic problems faced by Costa Rica that threaten its exceptionalism.

 

Ray Bryant, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 79

NY Times June 3, 2011

By NATE CHINEN

Ray Bryant, a jazz pianist whose sensitivity and easy authority made him a busy accompanist and a successful solo artist, beginning in the mid-1950s, died on Thursday. He was 79.

His wife of 20 years, Claude Bryant, said he died at New York Hospital Queens after a long illness. He lived in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Mr. Bryant had a firm touch and an unshakable sense of time, notably in his left hand, which he often used to build a bedrock vamp. Even in a bebop setting, he favored the ringing tonalities of the gospel church. And he was sumptuously at home with the blues, as a style and a sensibility but never as an affectation.

All of this contributed to his accomplishment as a solo pianist. His first solo piano album was “Alone With the Blues,” in 1958, and he went on to make a handful of others, including “Alone at Montreux,” “Solo Flight” and “Montreux ’77.” His most recent release, “In the Back Room,” was yet another solo album, recorded live at Rutgers University and released on the Evening Star label in 2008.

Raphael Homer Bryant was born on Dec. 24, 1931, in Philadelphia, and made his name in that city during its considerable postwar jazz boom. Along with his brother, Tommy, a bassist, he played in the house band at the Blue Note Club in Philadelphia, which had a steady flow of major talent dropping in from New York. (Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were among the musicians they played with there.) In short order Mr. Bryant had plenty of prominent sideman work, both with and without his brother.

One early measure of his ascent was the album “Meet Betty Carter and Ray Bryant,” released on Columbia in 1955. It was a splashy introduction for him as well as for Ms. Carter, the imposingly gifted jazz singer. It was soon followed by “The Ray Bryant Trio” (Prestige), an accomplished album that introduced Mr. Bryant’s composition “Blues Changes,” with its distinctive chord progression.

That song would become a staple of the jazz literature, if less of a proven standard than “Cubano Chant,” the sprightly Afro-Cuban fanfare that Mr. Bryant recorded under his own name and in bands led by the drummers Art Blakey, Art Taylor and Jo Jones.

Mr. Bryant had several hit songs early in his solo career, beginning with “Little Susie,” an original blues that he recorded both for the Signature label and for Columbia. In 1960 he reached No. 30 on the Billboard chart with a novelty song called “The Madison Time,” rushed into production to capitalize on a dance craze. (The song has had a durable afterlife, appearing on the soundtrack to the 1988 movie “Hairspray,” and in the recent Broadway musical production.) He later broke into the Top 100 with a cover of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” released just a few months after the original, in 1967.

But Mr. Bryant’s legacy never rested on his chart success or his nimble response to popular trends. It can be discerned throughout his own discography and in some of his work as a sideman, notably with the singers Carmen McRae and Jimmy Rushing, and on albums like Dizzy Gillespie’s “Sonny Side Up,” on Verve. “After Hours,” a track on that album, begins with Mr. Bryant and his brother playing a textbook slow-drag blues.

Along with his wife, Mr. Bryant is survived by a son, Raphael Bryant Jr.; a daughter, Gina; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Leonard and Lynwood. Mr. Bryant’s sister, Vera Eubanks, is the mother of several prominent jazz musicians: Robin Eubanks, a trombonist; Kevin Eubanks, the guitarist and former bandleader on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno”; and Duane Eubanks, a trumpeter.

 

Reflections on the World Socialist Web Site

Although I mostly go to the World Socialist Web Site for their movie reviews, I often find other issues covered there worth reading.

For example, they have an informative piece on the tornado that killed 3 people in Massachusetts. It is obviously drawn from the bourgeois press, but it includes enough analysis to let the reader know what side of the barricades they are on:

The small town of Monson, with a population of about 8,000, took a direct hit. Like many towns in the area, Monson was once a thriving mill town but has now fallen on hard times. Remarkably, no one in the town was killed, but homes and businesses sustained severe damage. The steeple was ripped off the church and was lying in the front yard.

So out of curiosity, I checked their Alexa rating to get a handle on how much traffic they are getting:

Site Information for wsws.org

Alexa Traffic Rank: 38,549

United States Flag Traffic Rank in US: 23,233

Sites Linking In: 4,146

This is simply fucking amazing.

For comparison’s sake:

Site Information for counterpunch.org

Alexa Traffic Rank: 33,853

United States Flag Traffic Rank in US: 11,038

Sites Linking In: 6,052

Given the high profile of Alexander Cockburn and the people whose articles appear there on a regular basis such as his brother Patrick et al, it is amazing that the two websites have comparable ratings.

Perhaps I should have realized this since my wife, who teaches at 2 NYC colleges, once told me that her students are always citing wsws.org in their term papers.

I am sure that the key to their success rests on the fact that they are a daily newspaper, except for Sunday. I gather that they discontinued their print version some time back. Also, despite their ultra-sectarian politics, they tend to offer straightforward radical journalism of the sort that you might have seen in the Guardian newsweekly, a radical U.S. publication that folded in the 1980s.

By another standard of comparison, Socialist Worker, the newspaper of the leading socialist group in the U.S.—the ISO—ranks much lower than the Socialist Equality Party, the sect responsible for wsws.org:

Site Information for socialistworker.org

Alexa Traffic Rank: 153,945

United States Flag Traffic Rank in US: 45,178

Sites Linking In: 922

To some extent this might be comparing apples and oranges, since the ISO’s newspaper is primarily designed to be sold as a print publication to students, trade unionists, and participants in the mass movement. It is also a weekly newspaper embodying the traditions of the “vanguard” press going back to Iskra, at least as understood by those following such a tradition. Perhaps given the Internet revolution that is to the 20^th century what the Gutenberg press was to the 17^th century, it is a time to rethink these paradigms.

A few years after the Guardian ceased publication (it was probably 1992 or so, just around the time I was discovering the Internet), I approached Barry Cohen of the Committees of Correspondence (a group I belonged to for five minutes until I realized how embedded in the Democratic Party they were) with a proposal to start something like the Guardian again. Barry had been the editor of the People’s World, the CPUSA newspaper, and knew the business inside and out.

Barry was adamant that economics was making print publishing a thing of the past. The costs were prohibitive, from office space to the printing press itself. He thought that a newspaper was probably needed, but that it should be based on the Internet. With the Internet, you no longer had the problem of laying out a newspaper that had to fit into an even number of pages, etc. Of course, the C of C never went anywhere with this, choosing instead to focus on Portside, a daily aggregation of articles that many people subscribe to (excluding me).

Speaking for myself (who else, obviously), I am leaning strongly in the direction of launching an online daily newspaper after retiring from Columbia University. I think there is a crying need for a publication that has no ideological agenda other than to promote the kind of broad-based socialism that the Guardian newsweekly once stood for. I would hope that such a web-based publication would welcome open debate among Marxists. Our political culture has tended to encourage newspapers, either print or web based, to see themselves as disseminating a “party line” to the exclusion of opposing viewpoints, even in the form of letters. This not only robs the left of having the exchange of clashing viewpoints that are so necessary to drive the dialectic forward.

At this stage of the game, I don’t anticipate that such a newspaper would have any connections to an organization. Frankly, I am too old and too weary for that sort of thing. But given the absence of a newspaper or website that has no ” revolutionary program” to sell, like toothpaste or cereal, I think that most potential readers would find that a refreshing change.

Peter Camejo once told me that a program for the American revolution does not exist and that it can only take shape through the living class struggle where objective conditions and the relationship of class forces will help to clarify what goals should be advanced and what strategy and tactics would be best suited to achieve such goals.

As my retirement draws near, I will try to put flesh on these bones.

Rejoice and Shout

Without gospel music, there would not be Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles and a host of other great Black rhythm and blues musicians. And without these musicians, there would certainly not be rock-and-roll. Given its overarching significance for American popular culture, which after all is its greatest contribution to world civilization, we can only rejoice over the arrival of “Rejoice and Shout”, the definitive documentary on gospel music starting tomorrow at the Film Forum in New York.

Until now, the only other movie about gospel music was the very fine 1982 “Say Amen, Somebody”, a profile of Thomas A. Dorsey who is widely regarded as the father of gospel music, that can be rented from Netflix. The two films complement each other nicely. “Rejoice and Shout” is much more of an attempt to provide a scholarly framework for the genre’s evolution drawing upon interviews from experts in the field, both Black and white.

Starting out in the 1920s as something sounding quite a bit like white barbershop quartets, gospel became a much more soulful and even orgiastic form of expression in the 1940s. The film explains that Black field workers who emigrated to the north looked to the storefront churches as a place where they could “let loose” on a Sunday in the arms of the Holy Spirit. The music that evolved to meet this form of worship was more rhythmic and more blues-like than what was normally heard in churches dominated by the middle-class Blacks of the North.

The ties between early blues and gospel music are well-documented in the film. We learn from Mavis Staples that her father worked on the same plantation as Charlie Patton and modeled his gospel guitar on the great man’s blues style. We also learn that Thomas A. Dorsey held down two jobs at once. He was a blues pianist who wrote some of the raunchiest songs of the 1920s, while at the same time launching a career as a gospel musician and song-writer. Mahalia Jackson, best known for her deeply religious gospel and spiritual performances, got started as a singer after hearing Bessie Smith who she sought to emulate in her own way. And above all, there is Rosetta Tharpe who is featured prominently in the film. Tharpe got started as a guitarist playing with swing bands such as Lucky Millinder’s but like Al Greene discovered religion. Not surprisingly, the music sounded the same even though the lyrics changed. Instead of “I love you baby”, it was now “I love you God”.

Perhaps the most spine-tingling moments of “Rejoice and Shout” are old black-and-white film clips of some of the greatest male gospel groups of the classic period, from the 1940s and 50s. We see the Soul Stirrers, a group that would be led at one point by Sam Cooke, as well as the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Swan Silvertones and the Blind Boys of Alabama. For gospel fans, including me, this is like being in the presence of the gods. These groups featured lead singers who worked in the higher registers, even a falsetto in the case of the Swan Silvertone’s Claude Jeter. Customarily, the groups included a deep bass vocalist who would sing something like “Dum, biddy-dum” beneath the tenor, all in all anticipating the doo-wop groups of the 1950s that paved the way for rock-and-roll.

“Rejoice and Shout” is terrific movie and I urge New Yorkers to go see it. Hopefully, the film will be released nation-wide before long.

I want to conclude with some recollections about organizing a gospel concert at Bard College in 1965, the year I graduated. That year I was the entertainment director on campus and put a lot of effort in bringing musicians to campus whose talents I appreciated. This included jazz musicians such as Bill Evans, Freddie Hubbard, Art Farmer and the rhythm section of Miles Davis’s band at the time: Anthony Williams, Ron Carter and Herbie Hancock.

But I was also determined to get some gospel musicians to perform, having heard from friends who had graduated that a gospel concert from a few years earlier had been a big hit. Keep in mind that this was around the time that the Newport Jazz Festival was featuring gospel musicians, to George Wein’s everlasting credit.

My first step was to pay a visit to Ran Blake, a jazz pianist who had graduated Bard in 1960, a year before I entered as a freshman. Blake, who might be regarded as a musician’s musician, had organized the last gospel concert at Bard and urged me to bring back the same group that he had invited–the house band from Daddy Grace’s Church on 125^th Street in Harlem. You can actually see Daddy Grace baptizing parishioners in “Rejoice and Shout” but without his band. If you want to get a flavor of what it sounded like, you can listen to selections from “Night With Daddy Grace“, the only record they ever made at Amazon.com–a collector’s item selling for $50.

I made it up to Daddy Grace’s Church and was convinced at once that Ran was right. This was it. Just listen to track two of the record, which is Daddy Grace himself singing/rapping the Opening Prayer to the congregation. Amazing.

When I got back to Bard, I requested funding to bring Daddy Grace, his band, and his entourage up for a concert but only with the understanding that they conduct what amounted to a service in the chapel at Bard. The chapel was presided over by one Fritz Q. Schafer, the school’s Episcopalian chaplain and a religion professor I had taken classes with.

Schafer, who fancied himself a bit of a Zen hipster, turned out to be a real asshole. He refused to allow the chapel to be used by the African-American riffraff because they had degraded it last time—in his opinion—with their rollicking in the Holy Spirit. I often wish I could go back to such incidents from my youth in a time machine and let people like Schafer have it with both barrels. With all his Zen posturing, Schaffer was nothing but a racist.

When I called back Ran with the bad news, he told me that he would make some more contacts but it would take him about a week or so.

Meanwhile I got the bright idea to ride over to Kingston, NY—just across the Hudson River—on my motorcycle (with my girlfriend Dian on the back seat) on a Sunday morning to scout out the Black community. Yes, I know that this sounds like a scene from “Animal House” but we were deadly earnest, at least I was.

We first checked out Kingston’s premier Black church, in an impressive brick edifice. Like the middle-class churches described in “Rejoice and Shout”, the music was staid enough to put you to sleep. The next stop was a storefront church on a run-down street called something like “The First Church of Holiness and Salvation” or something like that. Inside was a scene that I will remember to my dying day. A woman in her eighties was sitting at a table with two young children, a boy and a girl, in their Sunday finest. In the middle of a singing/rapping bible lesson to them, she beckoned to us to sit down without missing a beat. We listened to her transfixed for about fifteen minutes. Her skills were almost as advanced as Daddy Grace’s but unfortunately she lacked the full complement of musicians to make it all worthwhile.

Fortunately, we heard back from Ran Blake a day or so after the Kingston trip. He introduced us to Johnny Peoples, a Brooklyn bus-driver who managed and was lead singer in two groups: the Brooklyn Skyways and the Mighty Clouds of Harmony. Johnny told us that he would be happy to perform at Bard, even if it was not in the chapel. Furthermore, much to our delight, he had no objections to us serving alcohol at the function. God and Satan would be serviced both in the same evening!

I whipped up some Unicorn Urine just for the occasion. This was a punch devised by Andrews Wanning, a literature professor at Bard who like fellow professor Tony Hecht was a hard drinker—just like everybody else who taught there except for Fritz Q. Schafer, I suppose. I even remember the recipe: one part vodka, one part Milem, and one part soda water.

At 7:30 on the evening of the concert that was scheduled to begin at 8, two Cadillacs pulled up to the gym where the concert was to be held. The musicians poured out in their white tuxedos, with their girl-friends and wives wearing chiffon dresses in pastel colors. They all had conked hair. This was well before Black Nationalism had kicked in.

The concert was just electrifying. It would be impossible for me to put into words what they sounded like except to note that they performed in the style that was deeply popular in the Black Community at the time, namely the Soul Stirrers/Swan Silvertones style.

When the concert ended the musicians began gathering at their cars, ready to make the trip back to Brooklyn. As they did, the most amazing thing happened. They began singing/rapping to us in the same style as Daddy Grace and the Kingston grandma. The words were not from scripture but improvised verses about how much they appreciated performing before an enthusiastic audience (helped along by Unicorn Urine obviously.)

For those who want to find out more about Ran Blake, a most articulate and deep-thinking jazz musician, I recommend this interview he gave to The Wire, a British publication.  Here he reminisces about studying with Lenny Tristano:

Right. I went out to Long Island and had a lesson. George Russell came and I had met him at Lennox. And what a great cook he was. Bill Russo came and Oscar Peterson even came down and gave me two lessons. It took me ten years to pay for one. I really was not a very good filer, but to absolutely see people I’d heard about, and to have my ears extended – to the Platters. Chris Connor was away that period, but I believe that was really the only non-black singer I appreciated. Tommy Talbert, but I liked all the Atlantic stars – MJQ, John Lewis, Percy Heath, Connie Kay, Milt Jackson…they would be dropping by and sometime some of them would say, “Ran, do you want to join us for coffee?” But I knew that I was just there. I began to feel worse and worse about my playing, because I really didn’t fit in with Clyde McPhatter, or the Tristano’s for speed. Laverne Baker was doing a Bessie Smith record and just to be at one of the great studios, was…It really was classic and it became very important. That was a big element in my life. There are so many people who play R&B better than I do. Maybe part of that doesn’t come out. But I keep coming back to Al Green and Ray Charles. But Tom had these great machines. The Ertugans were dapper. Naturally I had a little more in common with Neshui. So that was six weeks. And I would go back and forth. Bard was a wonderful school. I got to know the community. I had a newspaper route. We put on three to four festivals. A dog joined our combo, who could hit the bass drum.

What 5 years of Lexis-Nexis reveals about Libya and the West

Just around the time that the West began military operations against Libya, there were ex post facto attempts to describe the assault as the culmination of long-standing hostilities. The model for many, especially Diana Johnstone and Jean Bricmont, was Yugoslavia with Qaddafi serving as a Milosevic type figure. This approach struck me as incoherent in light of the evidence that Libya had been pursuing the same type of neoliberal economic policies as post-Milosevic Serbia for the better part of a decade.

There was also an attempt to equate the Benghazi-based rebellion as Libya’s version of the KLA. This involved attempts to uncover conspiracies by the West to stir up trouble in the eastern regions of Libya and get the “restless natives” to rise up against a benevolent leader who had showered them with wealth for the longest time.

The latest instance of this came to my attention in a post to the Marxism mailing list that linked to an article by Michel Collon that appeared—unfortunately—in Granma Internacional.  Collon is a member of the Axis for Peace, a project initiated by the Voltaire Network based in France. Collon described a plot that was hatched by the West well before the February 2011 uprising:

What was the role of secret services? In fact, the Libyan case didn’t start in February in Benghazi, but in Paris October 21st, 2010. According to the revelations of Italian journalist Franco Bechis (Libero, 24th of March) it is that day that the French secret service had prepared the revolt of Benghazi. They then “returned” (or perhaps even before) Nuri Mesmari, Chief of Protocol of Gaddafi, who was almost his right hand against him. He was the only one who enters the residence of the Libyan leader without knocking. Coming to Paris with his family for a surgery, Mesmari didn’t meet any doctor there, but on the other side, he would talk to several officials of the French secret services and Sarkozy’s close aides, according to the latest web Maghreb Confidential. On November 16th, at the Hotel Concorde Lafayette, he prepared a large delegation that would go two days later to Benghazi.

Pretty good stuff, I must say. If I were to turn this into a movie, I’d cast John Turturro as Nuri Mesmari and Tony Shalhoub as Qaddafi. And maybe Steve Martin as a French secret agent.

The Voltaire Network shares the mechanical anti-imperialism outlook of many in the pro-Qaddafi wing of the left, including MRZine, Counterpunch and Michel Chossudovsky’s Global Research. The Voltaire Network was founded by Thierry Meyssan who wrote “9/11: The Big Lie”. Like Hugo Chavez, Meyssan would appear to have a conspiratorial mindset when it comes to 9/11 and the Libyan uprising. It was the CIA whodunit. Since Collon spent 8 years reporting from Yugoslavia, it is not surprising that he sees Libya through the prism of Yugoslavia even though the facts do not support it.

When I first began writing about the war in Kosovo, I made it a point to go through five years worth of Lexis-Nexis articles. In a reply to Solidarity, I made a point of citing Chris Hedges who I can now see in retrospect as one of the NY Times’s more honest reporters on Yugoslavia even though I had problems with his Central America coverage. On March 28, 1999 he reported:

The KLA splits down a bizarre ideological divide, with hints of fascism on one side and whiffs of communism on the other. The former faction is led by the sons and grandsons of rightist Albanian fighters — either the heirs of those who fought in the World War II fascist militias and the Skanderbeg volunteer SS division raised by the Nazis, or the descendants of the rightist Albanian rebels who rose up against the Serbs 80 years ago.

Although never much of a fighting force, the Skanderbeg division took part in the shameful roundup and deportation of the province’s few hundred Jews during the Holocaust. The division’s remnants fought Tito’s Partisans at the end of the war, leaving thousands of ethnic Albanians dead.

The decision by KLA commanders to dress their police in black fatigues and order their fighters to salute with a clenched fist to the forehead led many to worry about these fascist antecedents. Following such criticism, the salute has been changed to the traditional open-palm salute common in the U.S. Army.

I also tried to prove that the hostility toward Milosevic had a class basis. I cited Carol J. Williams article in the December 12, 1990 Los Angeles Times:

The choice of Milosevic and what amounts to hard-line communism isolates Serbia, the largest republic, from four other Yugoslav states that have elected center-right governments and set about repairing the economic damage inflicted by half a century of Marxism. The Socialists have remained popular in Serbia despite an anti-Communist mood in Eastern Europe…

I just spent about an hour doing the same kind of exercise for Libya. Nothing turned up about CIA or French intelligence plotting against Qaddafi, despite Mr. Collon’s best efforts. If anybody thinks that the articles below that are mostly about the economic interests shared by imperialism and Libya augur war, then there’s a bridge in Manhattan that I’d like to sell you cheap.

2006

Christian Science Monitor
January 27, 2006, Friday

Firms beat path to … Libya

By Simon Martelli Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

DATELINE: TRIPOLI, LIBYA

A Libyan official said this week he expected oil firms to help normalize US ties.

It’s not unusual for the five-star Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel which towers above this city’s waterfront to be completely booked, many of its 299 rooms filled with foreign oil tycoons eager to tap into the country’s untold reserves.

After more than 20 years as a global pariah, Libya is coming out of isolation. Most international sanctions have been lifted since its enigmatic leader, Col. Muammar Qaddafi, abandoned his weapons program, renounced terrorism, and accepted responsibility for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, compensating the victims’ families.

“With the end of the Lockerbie issue, relations returned to normal and there were many delegations of Congress who visited Libya. I think all efforts are heading towards ending animosity,” Colonel Qaddafi said in an interview with the United States-funded Arabic TV channel Al-Hurra last week.

Now, the companies that helped create Libya’s oil industry in the 1970s are returning as Qaddafi rebuilds bridges to the West that he burned long ago, and this may help to precipitate political, as well as economic, change.

In a major step, ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, signed an exploration and production deal with Libya last month. Marathon, Amerada Hess, and ConocoPhilips who together form the Oasis group also negotiated their return at the end of December since being forced out by sanctions in the mid-1980s, while Occidental returned in August last year. The Oasis group was producing 400,000 barrels of oil per day before it pulled out.

* * *

The New York Times
May 16, 2006 Tuesday

U.S. WILL RESTORE DIPLOMATIC LINKS WITH THE LIBYANS

By JOEL BRINKLEY; Matthew L. Wald and Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting for this article.

DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 15

The Bush administration announced Monday that it would re-establish full diplomatic ties with Libya because Libya had abandoned its nuclear and other unconventional weapons programs and helped in the campaign against terrorism.

The decision ends more than 25 years of hostility while sending a strong signal to Iran and North Korea to follow suit.

Along with the normalization of relations and the announced intention to open a new embassy in Tripoli, the administration removed Libya from the list of nations that are state sponsors of terrorism. The United States had reaffirmed Libya’s place on that list as recently as March.

The announcements were a result of Libya’s surprise decision in 2003 to renounce terrorism. At the time, senior American officials said they believed that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, had taken that step because he was chastened by the American invasion of Iraq. Since then, Libya has also destroyed its chemical weapons stockpiles and dismantled a secret nuclear weapons program.

”Libya is an important model as nations around the world press for changes in behavior by the Iranian and North Korean regimes,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said. Hers was just one of several similar statements on Monday from senior officials who worked hard to turn Libya’s change in behavior into a lesson for Iran as a resolution on Iran’s nuclear development program remains stalled in the United Nations Security Council.

So far, however, Iran has ridiculed Libya for its reconciliation with the West. But on Monday, Libya accepted the news enthusiastically and even promised to cooperate with the United States in at least one area in which it is ill equipped to offer help.

”We encourage America on the path of cooperation and we hope we will cooperate together through cultural debate to spread democracy around the world together,” said Mustapha Zaidi, who leads Libya’s Revolutionary Committees — an apparatus of Colonel Qaddafi’s iron-fisted control of the country.

2007

The Washington Post
November 6, 2007 Tuesday
Oil Wealth Fuels Gaddafi’s Drive For Reinvention

By Ellen Knickmeyer; Washington Post Foreign Service

DATELINE: TRIPOLI, Libya

Brother Leader Moammar Gaddafi still exhorts his people to greatness from billboards, banners and murals. But these days a different kind of command is driving Libya’s transformation as the newly opened country taps into oil wealth: “izala,” Arabic for “raze it to the ground.”

Surveyors are spraying the word in red paint up and down Libya’s Mediterranean coast. The orange-vested road crews are tagging for demolition the old Libya — low-rise, stucco Libya, sleepy under decades of Gaddafi’s socialist economy and international sanctions.

To rise in its place, Gaddafi’s officials say: the increasingly capitalist Libya, with new buildings for the country’s new stock exchange. Airports to ferry in and out a dreamed-of annual flow of 30 million oil workers, tourists and other travelers. The world’s second-largest port after Singapore. Railways. Highways. Hospitals. Schools. Luxury beachfront hotels.

Libyans and Westerners here cite a statement attributed to Gaddafi: Libya must destroy in order to rebuild.

“I can’t believe they’re going to do it,” one white-haired shopkeeper said this past weekend at his snack shop on the coast road east of the capital, Tripoli. “Izala” was scrawled across the front of his sandstone shop, marking it for bulldozing to clear the way for a highway.

“It’s going on all over the country,” the shopkeeper said, speaking out of earshot of the government officials who still often trail foreign reporters here. “They’re coming up with all these wild schemes, and no one knows if it’s going to happen.”

* * *

The Independent (London)

March 5, 2007 Monday

THE COLONEL WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD;

Thirty years ago, Muammar Gaddafi’s Green Book branded democracy a ‘problem’. Now, not even pan-Africanism can save Libya’s leader from the forces of change. Peter Popham reports;

Libya opens its doors to the West

By Peter Popham

The Great Leader did not disappoint. We might have asked for more, of course. He might have received us in his legendary tent, the one he brought to Brussels and Belgrade, his flock of camels cropping the grass outside.

He would have done us all a favour if he had ridden into the conference hall on a white stallion, his troop of cruelly beautiful, Uzi-toting female commandos sprinting alongside. But presiding over the 30th anniversary of his little Green Book, he was the man we had come to see, imperious behind his big sunglasses, this modern Ozymandias in a gleaming white dinner jacket with a cape around his shoulders, his jet-black hair teased into the familiar modified Afro, like a member of Mott the Hoople.

He published the Green Book on 2 March 1977, seven years after he seized power, aged 29, in a coup against King Idris, the West’s stooge. Since then, millions of copies have been distributed. It is Gaddafi’s answer to the Little Red Book of Mao, encapsulating what the colonel modestly calls the “Third Universal Theory” – following (and hopefully supplanting) those of capitalism and Marxism. Its subtitle is “The solution to the problem of Democracy”, and the crux of Gaddafi’s insight into that problem is summed up in posters in the desert town of Sebha during the celebration: “No representation without participation.”

Parliamentary representative democracy, according to Gaddafi, is a fraud; what he proposed instead was (as he put it in his speech on Friday) “direct democracy as it was once practised in Athens” through “committees everywhere”. Whether the Green Book revolution has lived up to its billing is a good question. But in one sense it has been a blistering success: it has made it impossible, ideologically and practically, for Gaddafi’s opponents inside Libya to organise themselves into political parties. “Political parties introduce evil in society and society goes corrupt,” Gaddafi declared on Friday. “Any attempt at this needs to be got rid of.”

And so it came to pass. Given the clarity of the word from on high, and saturation levels of plainclothes cops at street level, dissidents of the Islamist or any other variety do not appear to have obtained a toehold in the country. When they have tried to in the past they have been vigorously dealt with.

2008

The Washington Post
January 3, 2008 Thursday

Libya Officially Welcomed Back To the U.S. Fold;

Foreign Minister to Meet Rice Today

By Robin Wright; Washington Post Staff Writer

Abdel-Rahman Shalqam and his wife received a personal tour of the White House, an official escort on Capitol Hill and a luncheon with executives from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Occidental Petroleum and Raytheon, as well as the U.S. trade representative’s office.

So began the official redemption of Libya yesterday, as the foreign minister of a country once equated with “barbarism” became that nation’s highest ranking official to visit Washington in 35 years.

Shalqam continues meetings today with the secretaries of state, homeland security and energy, as well as the deputy secretary of defense, about ways to deepen ties between Washington and Tripoli, according to both U.S. and Libyan officials. At lunch yesterday, he virtually gushed about the importance of Libyan students getting an American education and U.S. companies doing business in Libya.

“Relations between the United States and Libya are very important to us. . . . We want a new friendship,” he said, trying to reassure Americans that Tripoli does not back the Islamic militancy of other governments and groups now targeting U.S. interests in the Middle East. “Our interpretation of Islamic heritage is completely different from the others who don’t accept the philosophy of coexistence.”

The visit marks a dramatic reversal of decades of U.S. policy.

* * *

The New York Times

September 6, 2008 Saturday

Isolation Over, Qaddafi Meets With Rice

By HELENE COOPER

DATELINE: TRIPOLI, Libya

For the first time in more than half a century, a sitting American secretary of state is in Libya. Condoleezza Rice arrived here on Friday to meet with the man whom Ronald Reagan famously called the ”mad dog of the Middle East.”

But that was then. Ms. Rice, after waiting at the Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel here for an hour as the Ramadan sun set, finally got word that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was ready to receive her at his Bab al Azizia residence — the same compound bombed by American airstrikes in 1986 during the height of tensions with Libya.

Amid a swarm of cameras and reporters, she walked into the receiving room where Mr. Qaddafi, clad in a long, flowing white robe, purple and gold sash, and a green Africa brooch, stood waiting to greet her.

He didn’t shake her hand; instead, he put his hand against his heart in a gesture that North African men often use to greet women, then motioned for her to take a seat. It was a very different Libyan leader, in the eyes of Ms. Rice and the Bush administration, from the man who had bedeviled six American presidents over the past four decades.

As far as the Bush administration is concerned, the Libyan leader is rehabilitated, his country removed from the State Department’s terrorism list, his debt to the families of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 on its way to being paid, Libya’s stockpiles of chemical weapons destroyed and its secret nuclear weapons program dismantled.

His initial chat with Ms. Rice could not have been more pleasant. He politely inquired about her trip; Ms. Rice thanked him for his hospitality. He asked about the hurricanes; she told him America had dodged Gustav but was bracing for Hanna. And that was it for the public chit-chat, as the Libyan authorities quickly shooed the press out of the room while Ms. Rice sat, smiling broadly.

”Quite frankly, I never thought I would be visiting Libya, so it’s quite something,” she had told reporters aboard her flight to Tripoli.

She said she had thought through what she planned to say to Colonel Qaddafi, and, not mentioning him by name, added, ”I look forward to listening to the leader’s worldview.”

2009

Scotland on Sunday

August 23, 2009, Sunday

Energy companies poised to exploit oil riches

By Terry Murden, Business Editor

THOSE who see oil as the motive behind all western dealings with the Middle East will no doubt be feeling vindicated by the deals currently being struck in Libya by British energy companies.

Libya is already Africa’s leading oil producer and also has huge natural gas resources, but it remains largely unexplored because of the effects of repeated sanctions on the country.

The UK government and British companies now joining the queue to invest are well aware that licences to explore depend on the goodwill of the Libyan regime. Lord Trefgarne, the former trade minister who chairs the Libyan-British Business Council, said last week that there would be “benefits” for British firms from the decision to release Megrahi. He said: “In Libya, business matters and political matters are inextricably entwined.”

It was during a visit to Libya two years ago by the then prime minister, Tony Blair, that BP and its joint venture partner, the Libya Investment Corporation, agreed a deal that would see the company return to the country after a 30-year absence. BP withdrew from Libya in 1974 when its oil industry was nationalised.

* * *

The Herald (Glasgow)

September 2, 2009 Wednesday

Commercial relations continue to prosper behind the political scenes;

By MICHAEL SETTLE

“LOCKERBIE is history, ” Saif al Islam, Colonel Gaddafi’s son, told this newspaper last week; not quite.

The political ramifications are still reverberating and are likely to do so for some time yet. However, amid the diplomatic kerfuffle over the Megrahi release, Britain’s commerical relations with Libya are on the up.

The latest correspondence has not disabused many of the idea that the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing was used as a pawn in the game of easing Libya, a one-time pariah state, back into the bosom of the international community.

Whitehall thought that Tripoli, in ending its bad old ways and returning to the family of nations, would produce gains not only on the security front but on the commercial one, too.

While Prime Minister Gordon Brown refuses to express a view on the Libyan’s release, in the background relations between London and Tripoli prosper.

In the past year or so three ministers have travelled to Libya, which has become something of a magnet for foreign politicians wishing to pave the way for lucrative contracts.

Although Prince Andrew, the UK Government’s business envoy, had to cancel his trip this month to Tripoli to avoid giving credence to suspicions that trade lay behind the al Megrahi release, it will no doubt reappear on the diary once the dust has settled. Meantime, business is bubbling away nicely.

Since Libya came in from the cold, imports and exports between it and Britain have been flourishing.

From 2004 to 2008, imports from Libya rose from GBP196m to GBP961m, almost 400per cent, and exports to Libya, mostly engineering equipment, rose from GBP216m to GBP280m, up almost a third.

2010

The New York Times

March 1, 2010 Monday

Unknotting Father’s Reins In Hope of ‘Reinventing’ Libya

By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

TRIPOLI, Libya — Prying open a closed economy is no easy job, especially if the country in question is Libya — a nation that has spent more than two decades with its back turned to the world. It becomes all the more challenging when doing so means taking on the legacy of your father and fighting an entrenched bureaucracy with little interest in serious change.

Yet that is the goal of Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the son and possible successor to Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, as he sets out to dismantle a legacy of Socialism and authoritarianism introduced by his father 40 years ago.

”It is hard work reinventing a country,” he said in an interview last month, as he slouched on a sofa in his villa in the hills above Tripoli, picking at a tray of fruit including fresh dates brought to him by a black-suited waiter. ”But that is what we are doing. We will have a new constitution, new laws, a commercial and business code and now a flat tax of 15 percent.”

* * *

The Washington Post

May 26, 2010 Wednesday

A Gaddafi for change with a chance to lead;

Charismatic son tests patience of his father and hard-liners in Libya

by Sudarsan Raghavan

Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi relaxed in an opulent suite in a swank new hotel where, just two hours earlier, he had defied Libyan hard-liners by announcing the release of 214 Islamist militants in an effort at national reconciliation.

The broad-shouldered 37-year-old has no official position in government. His power comes from one source: his father, Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi. Like so many of the younger Gaddafi’s initiatives in this North African nation, the releases brought into question just how much change his father and his influential clique will tolerate. After all, those freed included the leaders of a group that tried on three occasions to kill the Libyan leader.

Saif Gaddafi, the leader’s second-eldest son, is widely considered a possible successor to his 68-year-old father, who has ruled Libya for more than 40 years. He is competing with two brothers for the leadership, but many Libyans say he is the favorite, not least because of his commitment to political freedoms and free-market reforms.

* * *

The Christian Science Monitor

July 12, 2010 Monday

Libya’s path from desert to modern country – complete with ice rink;

Libya, a one-time global pariah whose leader’s son is sponsoring an aid boat to Gaza this week, has seen dramatic economic progress since the lifting of sanctions for funding terrorism, nuclear proliferation. Is this a model for Iran and North Korea?

by Sarah A. Topol Correspondent

Libya is on the rise.

From shiny new Hyundais cruising the capital’s wide palm-lined boulevards to cranes dotting the Mediterranean skyline, the long-time pariah is getting a modern face.

Seven years after the international community formally lifted the stringent sanctions it had imposed for state-sponsored terrorism, Libya has not only found its feet but is attracting international investment as well.

“There was huge interest by British and European countries in getting back, but the rewards in terms of contracts were quite slow in coming,” says Sir Richard Dalton, who was serving as British ambassador to Libya in 1999 when the sanctions were initially suspended. “[There's] now on the economic side a pretty unstoppable momentum…. It’s the place to be,” says Dalton, now an analyst at Chatham House in London.

Libya’s nominal gross domestic product (GDP) rose from 16.7 billion dinars ($12.8 billion) in 1999 to 114 billion in 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The year after the US lifted sanctions, the country’s economy surged 10.3 percent in 2005. Foreign direct investment increased more than 50 percent from $1.5 billion in 2000 to $2.3 billion in 2007, according to the World Bank.

Although economic growth rates have lessened amid the global financial turmoil, Libya continues to expand. The IMF projects the Libyan economy will grow 5.2 percent in 2010.

Ice rink and a 22-lane bowling alley

With oil money filling government coffers, the state is undertaking massive infrastructure projects, doling out international contracts for ambitious housing developments, constructing a national railway network, and slowly opening the country to private foreign investment.