Defy the Stranglehold of Social Media, Join the New Progressive Economists Mailing List!

Michael Perelman, creator of the original PEN-L

COUNTERPUNCH, JUNE 25, 2021

Recently I created a mailing list called the Progressive Economist Network (PEN-L) in order to bring together academics and non-academics to exchange ideas from a left perspective. It honors the memory of Michael Perelman who created the original PEN-L in the early days of the Internet. Dying unexpectedly at the age of 81 in September 2020 before turning over moderation duties, his absence as moderator made it impossible to subscribe to the old PEN-L. It also left the list in limbo since Michael was no longer the helmsman.

When a former PEN-L subscriber asked for my help in getting resubbed, something beyond anybody’s capability, I decided to create a new list that can function as a forum for exchanges on the pressing issues of the day, such as the economic impact of the pandemic, the growing tensions between the USA and China, and prospects for Biden’s ambitious economic program. If the only result of this initiative is to make possible the kind of vigorous and productive discussions that distinguished the original PEN-L, it will have been more than worth it.

Not long after going to work at Columbia University in 1990, I noticed a daily email coming from the library (I believe) that listed dozens of mailing lists. At the time, I had no idea what a mailing list was. I strolled into the next cubicle and asked someone working in Academic Information Services what they were. He smiled at me and said, “Welcome to the Internet”. This was not only long before Facebook but long before AOL. At the time, you generally could not get on the Net unless you had a government or academic job.

As for the mailing lists, most of them were of little interest to me. Typically, they would be within the narrow confines of some academic discipline, such as clinical psychology or Jane Austen studies. Each day I scoured the lists to see if there might be something relevant to my own interests and was happy to spot PEN-L one morning. That was my introduction to the Internet and to Michael Perelman, who I considered a great friend even when I was wreaking havoc on PEN-L’s neo-Keynesians.

Michael was among the academics who helped create a culture of critical Marxist studies in the sixties. He understood that PEN-L could be part of the radical challenge to economics departments in the USA that were peddling liberal nostrums at odds with the reality of racism and imperialism. PEN-L stood arm and arm with the Union for Radical Political Economics, a group that continues to this day and that was an initial sponsor of the magazine Dollars and Sense. Other academics also helped to challenge orthodoxy, most notably those who created Science for the People. Sensing the need for a revival in a time of growing anti-science humbuggery generated by Trump and other Republicans, it began escalating its presence in 2014.

To round out this bird’s eye view of radical academics from the 1960s and their institutions, Monthly Review should be part of the mix. While Marxism and radical economics in general became more and more ingrown as the 80s and 90s wore on, MR always had its eyes on the prize. The magazine and the publishing wing always had an orientation to the working class and the Third World and will remain so as long as people like John Bellamy Foster and Michael Yates are on the editorial board. In addition to writing 19 books, Michael had a prolific presence online both through his blog and articles for various left publications. Six of them are on the Monthly Review website and well worth reading. Although Michael did not have any kind of special ties to MR, I always saw him in the same way I saw Harry Magdoff, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman. All such intellectuals understood exactly what Marx meant when he said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

As someone who created the Marxism mailing list (aka Marxmail) in 1998, I have given a lot of thought to the value of what some might consider antediluvian when compared to social media. While I am on Facebook and Twitter (barely so), I am still committed to the value of a mailing list. Let me explain why.

To start with, to have an intelligent discussion on Twitter is impossible since there is a 280 character limit. Furthermore, the ubiquitous use of fake names cheapens an exchange since you have no idea who you are really speaking to, a contrarian leftist or someone working in a Moscow basement. I generally use Twitter to circulate my blog posts and find few other uses for it. There are some exceptions to the sterility of Twitter that are worth mentioning. Adam Tooze always has something interesting to say and so do The Nation’s Jeet Heer and New Yorker magazine film critic David Brody. But of what possible value can there be the Tweets of someone identified as “DJ Quik is a goat in human’s clothing” (an Aaron Maté follower)?

With all the knocks against Facebook, I almost feel it is overkill to offer my own thoughts on its uselessness for a serious discussion of serious ideas. But let me indulge in a bit of overkill, anyhow. To start off, it is very difficult to track down a thread that occurred even a couple of days earlier. FB does have a search capability but it is so unfocused that you end up wasting your time. Furthermore, since FB is based on the idea that we are all “friends”, you end up with people having little background in, for example, the early history of the USSR, hijacking the discussion with puerile salutes to Stalin or Trotsky. As is the case with Twitter, I use FB to provide links to my blog posts or articles in the left press, as well as to receive valuable posts from serious contributors who are the counterpart of Twitter’s Adam Tooze. For example, Jairus Banaji’s are priceless. My recommendation is to see for yourself. I am not sure if only his friends can read them but I’d give it a try nevertheless at: https://www.facebook.com/jairus.banaji

Finally, on the benefits of the old-fashion mailing list. To start with, it is much easier to deal with trolls since a moderator controls who is a subscriber or not. While undoubtedly the new PEN-L would attract libertarians just as it did in its predecessor, it would be easy to keep them on a short leash. You also get searchable archives that always make it easy to look up a discussion that took place either yesterday or ten years ago. So, if you are interested in how the left regarded the Obama administration during his two terms in order to understand how his history is being repeated today, the archived messages can be highly revealing.

To subscribe to the new PEN-L, go to https://groups.google.com/g/pen-l/.

To subscribe to Marxmail, go to https://groups.io/g/marxmail

A Crime on the Bayou

I came a bit late to the documentary “A Crime on the Bayou” that opened on Friday at the Quad Cinema in NY and the Laemmle in Los Angeles. Since I am so used to “virtual cinema”, I assumed that this would be available as VOD just like every other film I’ve reviewed during the pandemic. As it happens, this is only being shown in the physical theaters and well worth your time, especially if you’ve been vaccinated (what are you waiting for?) 

Written and directed by Nancy Buirski, it tells  the story of Gary Duncan, a Black teenager from Plaquemines Parish, a sleepy strip of land south of New Orleans. For Blacks, this is about as oppressive an area as any in the Deep South since the long-time political boss was one Leander Perez, a Democrat who made Donald Trump sound like a Critical Race Theory advocate. He once said, “Do you know what the Negro is? Animal right out of the jungle. Passion. Welfare. Easy life. That’s the Negro.”

In 1966, the local high school was forced to integrate. Duncan’s nephew and cousin were harassed from day one once they started school. Nineteen at the time, Duncan noticed some sort of fracas on the sidewalk near the school with white teens lined up against the two boys. He stopped his car and walked over to calm things down. This involved laying his hand on a white boy’s arm.

That night, police came to Duncan’s trailer and arrested him for simple battery on a minor, misdemeanor under Louisiana law that does not require a jury trial. He was convicted and received a 60-day prison sentence and a fine of $150—all for touching a white boy’s arm. By 1966, there was an open battle for overcoming Jim Crow laws throughout the south and Duncan found himself allied with Richard Sobol, a liberal Jewish lawyer from New York like many who threw themselves into the civil rights movement. White southerners tended to see them as they saw the Carpetbaggers during Reconstruction. The term Carpetbaggers was a slander since the overwhelming majority of northerners were idealistic, like sixty men from the North, including educated free blacks and slaves who had escaped to the North and returned South after the war to be elected as Republicans to Congress. Also, the majority of Republican governors in the South during Reconstruction came down from the North.

Clearly, men like Leander Perez feared a second coming of Reconstruction and fought tooth and nail to intimidate Blacks in his parish as well as their white allies. He tried to control their activities by prohibiting outsiders from entering Plaquemines Parish via the bayou ferries, which were the chief way to cross rivers and enter the jurisdiction.

Sobol’s goal was to make jury trials mandatory, whatever the offense. When a judge had the power to decide who was guilty or not and then hand down the sentence, it put men and women like Gary Duncan at a disadvantage. Even if there were racists on a jury, the precedent for jury trials had to be established so that in the future a jury of one’s peers would be a safeguard against racist frameups.

Sobol was a dedicated and highly capable lawyer who fought to bring the case for trial by jury to the Supreme Court. In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 in favor of Duncan by arguing that the right to a jury trial in criminal cases was fundamental and central to the American conception of justice. Charges were dropped against him and he became a respected civil rights advocate in the parish as well as chairman of the fishing council.

Duncan is still going strong and the documentary benefits from his presence. Although Sobol died last year, there are many excerpts from interviews he gave over the years that help to establish his commitment to Black rights.

While nobody would have ever disqualified him from serving as Duncan’s attorney as if he were a latter-day Carpetbagger, Nancy Buirski cannot help but wondering about the relationship between powerful whites like Richard Sobol and their frequently poor and vulnerable clients. In the press notes, she writes:

As a filmmaker I’ve been engaged in exploring racist assumptions and dismantling them through storytelling. It’s been my privilege to do so; a responsibility I take seriously as a white filmmaker complicit with these acts. It is not just the acceptance of a racist legacy but a recognition of the small and big ways whites reenact aggressions today, unconsciously and otherwise.

There’s an important debate around allyship in the midst of the BLM movement. I’ve looked back over my last three films in this space and hope that they’ve helped culturally. Should they have been made by a white filmmaker – that is an open and lingering question. Do white filmmakers bring worthwhile perspectives in spite of not living the experience of BIPOC or do they simply occupy space and funding that should go to Black filmmakers? Are we allies in a change movement or obstacles?

For me, these questions are secondary when it comes to BLM since the most prominent lawyers involved with prosecuting killer cops happen to be Black. Instead, I see the charges that BLM is a tool of big corporations using their donations to burnish their image as much more important since it allows people like Adolph Reed Jr. to demonize the movement.

I strongly recommend “A Crime on the Bayou” to my readers since the story it tells is about a key moment in the fight against Jim Crow, and it tells it well as the 100 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes would indicate. Plus, it will be a great opportunity to enjoy your post-vaccination freedom and one far more worthwhile than hanging out in a sports bar.

Devils

COUNTERPUNCH, JUNE 18, 2021

Arriving with very little fanfare on Amazon Prime, the Italian TV series “Devils” is easily the most penetrating narrative drama on “banksters” I have ever seen. Set mostly on the trading floor of New York London Investment Bank, an obvious fictional version of Goldman Sachs, it stars Alessandro Borghi as Massimo Ruggero, who manages the hedge fund group and is in line to become the next co-CEO. He is opposed by a rival for the position who views Massimo’s cutthroat tactics as inimical to British banking’s glorious past, when the bank supposedly served the average citizen rather than speculators only interested in making a fast buck. He is not shy about telling Massimo to his face that Italians don’t belong in leading positions in such an august institution like NYLIB.

This 10-part series is based on the novel “Diavoli” that was written by Guido Maria Brera, an Italian who worked for a number of years in the financial industry. His experience help gives the book a palpable reality of the sort that makes ex-attorney John Grisham novels about law firms so compelling. Saying that, it is necessary for those viewing “Devils” to be prepared for financial industry minutiae, especially selling short—Massimo’s specialty. Showing little concern for the consequences of its impact, he left behind ruin everywhere he decided to make profits off ordinary peoples’ losses.

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Was American Indian Overhunting Responsible for the Near-Extinction of the Buffalo?

COUNTERPUNCH, JUNE 16, 2021

In the 1990s, there were repeated attempts to debunk the idea of an ecological Indian. Scholars and activists with seemingly little in common all sought to portray the Indian as wasteful of natural resources, if not even worse than the European settlers who have left the USA resembling a toxic dump as the 21^st century stumbles forward.

My first encounter with this trend was with Frank Furedi’s sect in the early 90s that published a magazine called Living Marxism, better known as LM. (They still exist as Spiked today, long after dispensing with the idea that they are Marxist.) When I saw an LM article around that time denouncing Survival International as a group that sought to keep the Brazilian indigenous peoples “preserved in amber” like in the Museum of Natural History, I could not believe my eyes. The Yanomami were in danger of extinction as a result of mining and ranching excursions into their territory and these self-described Marxists were attacking the main group trying to protect them.

Furedi’s group in England was called the Revolutionary Communist Party that shared a name with Bob Avakian’s cult in the USA but little else politically except their belief that the left should not believe in the “noble savage”. In a debate with leaders of the American Indian Movement in 1980, Avakian’s spokesman referred to the “second harvest”, a practice from around 7,000 years ago when some indigenous peoples stored dried feces so that in the event of a famine, they could extract undigested seeds and other products for food. In other words, Indians ate shit.

The academic left wasn’t much better. In David Harvey’s 1996 “Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference”, he wrote that stone-age hunters had no way of determining whether they were overexploiting prey. This was the result of their inability to make connections between current and future animal populations. This would account for the disappearance of the Woolly Mammoth, for instance. He also fretted over Indian claims for land that was stolen from them in the 1800s. He feared that such “militant particularism” could  can foster “nationalistic, exclusionary, and some cases violently fascistic” elements.

Harvey’s book attracted little support and he even disavowed it a few years after its publication. But one book stood out for its impact on American Indian scholars, the broader academy, as well as on Jonah Goldberg, the founding editor of National Review Online. That was Shepard Krech’s 2000 “The Ecological Indian: Myth and History” that should have been properly titled “The anti-Ecological Indian”. It was an assemblage of all the charges ever levelled against the Indian, including the business about killing off the Woolly Mammoth.

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Joel Kovel spills the beans on Leon Botstein

Joel Kovel

Leon Botstein

Long-time readers of this blog probably recall that I have written numerous articles in opposition to Leon Botstein, the President of Bard College since 1975. My first reaction to Botstein was positive. But after Martin Peretz had joined the Board of Trustees, I changed my mind. As president of the board of Tecnica, a sort of small-scale radical version of the Peace Corps that sent volunteers to Nicaragua, the murder of Ben Linder in Nicaragua in 1987 hit home since we were providing material aid to his project. Ben was working on a weir—a small scale dam—that would produce electricity for peasants in the north. Meanwhile, Peretz was promoting the contras in The New Republic. That led me to write an angry letter to Botstein about the mockery he was making of educational values. While Peretz was attending Board meetings, his “freedom fighters” were burning schools and killing teachers.

Botstein wrote back taking great offense at having his values held up for scrutiny. Since he has an ego bigger than the Grand Canyon, the idea that he wasn’t perfect got his juices flowing. Within a few years, I went to work at Columbia University and began writing further critiques of Botstein around a number of questions including the addition of Pom Wonderful CEO Stewart Resnick to the board. Using his great wealth, Resnick got preferential treatment for his farms in California even at the expense of nearby people not being able to flush their toilet because the farms were sucking up all the available water.

A year after I wrote my letter to Botstein, Bard hired my old friend and comrade Joel Kovel to become the Alger Hiss professor, a post funded by his family. For a number of years Joel enjoyed an idyllic existence at Bard, not that different from what I experienced as a student. But when he began criticizing Israel, he got on Botstein’s wrong side. Botstein was a Zionist, a stance that probably had a lot to do with him adding Peretz to the Board. Peretz once said, “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.” He further questioned whether Muslim-Americans deserve the “privileges of the First Amendment.”

After he wrote “Overcoming Zionism” in 2007, the University of Michigan publishers decided to drop it after powerful Zionist donors to the school threatened to end their support.  A campaign around this censorship was mounted but Botstein did not say a word, implicitly siding with the move against him. Two years later, his contract as Alger Hiss chair was not renewed and his supporters, including me, began taking up his cause. Joel once told me that I should avoid using the word “fired” because he was in delicate settlement talks with the school that would be jeopardized by claims of their liability. When they arrived at a settlement, it included a non-disclosure agreement that he keep his views on Botstein and Bard College to himself.

In 2017, his memoir “The Lost Traveller’s Dream” appeared. A year later he was dead.

Recently, I got around to read it in the hope that he would spill the beans on Botstein and Bard despite the non-disclosure agreement. He did not disappoint. He must have got Leon even more pissed than my letter about Peretz. Below are 3 excerpts from the memoir that showed his utter contempt for Botstein but also revealed the rancor the relatively apolitical faculty held toward his haughty manner of running the school as if he were a feudal lord.

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Bard had a leader who preached pure progressivism while ruling like a despot (pages 233-236)

BUT WOODSTOCK WAS NOT ALL that gave me hope after 1988. I now had an academic home base, a nine-hundred-acre campus overlooking the Hudson River. There were magnificent trees, a few traditional buildings and a few modern ones, a pathetic library, and a lot of peace and quiet. As a boy in love with learning I used to fantasize about a place like this (though not the library), where I would walk about—in academic garb, no less—and talk of high things with high-minded people. There would be no father yelling imprecations, no strife-torn world invading the Arcadian sanctuary of learning. I had nearly forgotten this dream since I stepped into the turbulence of medicine and for many years thereafter. Now it seemed I had arrived in Arcadia, and at a senior level, no less. It was a glory to drive there from my Willow home across the gorgeous Hudson River. I could teach what I wanted and how I wanted, with no more than seven classroom hours a week for two courses, and students of a generally progressive disposition. There were no departmental limits, as I belonged to no department yet circulated through all; there was nobody looking over my shoulder, no need to jockey for aca-demic turf, no need to get caught ij in the endless minutiae of committee work, no bureaucracy in my way, plenty of tennis courts, and parking so abundant that I never had to worry about getting a place in my whole twenty-one years at Bard College, in the ghost town of Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. What could go wrong?

The man presiding over this riverine Shangri-La was tall, of a frowning, owlish aspect and formal ways. Reason tells us that Leon Botstein once must have been a tiny baby who needed his diaper changed. But sometimes one thought Leon might be a space alien planted in storied Annandale complete with bow-tie and Adorno-esque affectation, sent by the Gods to rule over the little fiefdom of Bard. This he did by the time-honored means of artful control over the funding process, by which the mainstream of the college’s fiscal blood supply originated from a hand-picked Board of Financiers held in place by his charisma, to be dispensed by Leon according to an ethos of Liberal Reason and Academic Freedom.

Bard therefore had a leader who preached a pure progressivism while governing a pure despotism. It was an excellent web to ensnare the liberal will, and it made Botstein larger than life in the eyes of the Bard community. Many a time in my early years did I wonder how the college would ever get by if he were hit by a bus, or was lured to another institution (indeed, it was rumored that he was being considered for Secretary of Education in the Gore administration). Would not the financial spigots be immediately turned off?1 Would not our tycoons go elsewhere? How helpless the school was against Botstein’s power; how fortunate that he was so enlightened. And how ridiculous that power was so centralized in one executive’s hands; how much would a decent new-fashioned bureaucracy have been appreciated instead of this arbitrary exertion of authority.

Soon after my arrival Leon and I had a few lengthy and interesting conversations in which we staked out, so to speak, the ground between us. I found him to be always on stage, always wary, and very bright—though not so bright as he thought. It also seemed that Botstein was trying to recruit me as a kind of agent to report to him about the Social Studies Division to which I belonged. He professed a considerable contempt for the hacks working there as he tried to set me up as a trusted insider working with him in a strategic way. So I inferred, and so I desisted—and after a while our intimate conversations wound down and I settled into a long and, for the first twelve years at Bard, pleasant routine.

I soon noticed that the first-rate circumstances of the college had done little to improve the esprit of the faculty. A cheerless bunch, they were united only by discreet hatred of their President, which they mainly shared endlessly with each other. By and large, I liked them and they seemed to like me, though there was quite a bit of circumspection in our interchanges, and none of the passion that bubbled so often through cracks in my rambunctious soul. Politically they were mostly on the left-liberal side of things, and seemed grateful for my presence and vicariously sympathetic to it, calling me “the conscience of Bard” and such for my various enthusiasms and outrages.

Hatred of Leon welled forth from his exploitation of the tenure process. I assume it is any college president’s prerogative to intervene in tenure. But no one I know of routinely turned this into a show trial, in which, after all the evidence had been painstakingly gathered, the college community would bate its collective breath and wait the definitive decision of the Lord High Executioner concerning the wretch whose career had been placed in presidential hands. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that every so often Leon would perversely overturn a tenure decision that had seemed overwhelmingly positive according to all the recognized criteria of academic virtue, simply to show everybody who was boss and in whom all the power lay as to the future of Bard. Never did any importuning or petitioning move the Liberal King to reverse an opinion of strategic importance. The inevitable results of these manipulations were, first, to stimulate a coterie of toadies and in-formers who would sidle up to mid-level administrative posts in the Permanent Botstein Administration; and, second, to secrete the elixir of fear and loathing that flowed through the collective veins of the faculty.

Tycoons like billionaire George Soros (pages 311-313)

As an active member of the Jewish community, I recognize that the American Jewish community is disproportionately generous to American higher education. For the president of an institution to express his or her solidarity with Israel is welcomed by a very important part of their support base.

— Leon Botstein, Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan 5, 2014

Bard College, where I spent the last 21 years of my academic career, was touted by the gaming pages that announce such things as the school that had “put the ‘liberal’ in liberal arts.” in this spirit the college’s van was turned over to students to drive the 250 miles to Washington, DC for a hearing ensuing upon arrest for protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court. As for myself, during my years as its Alger Hiss Professor, the college generously supported my race for the Senate in 1998, essentially giving me a leave of absence so long as I made it an open tutorial for students who wanted some rough and tumble exposure to the harsh world of electoral politics. The name of Bard College and that of Leon Botstein, its “President for Life,” may be regarded as freely interchangeable. It was Botstein cum Bard who saved my floundering career when I was down and out. This gave me the space to teach what I pleased no matter how contrary to established wisdom, to publish four substantial books, and do interesting things like march against the Apartheid regime of South Africa, cross the U.S. blockade of Cuba, or take over the reins of a quirky journal with the modest goal of bringing down the capitalist system to save the world from ecological degeneration and collapse. And it was Bard cum Botstein that crushed the selfsame career, In remarkably short order, hard times befell me: first, estrangement around the turn of the Millennium, then increasing exclusion, and finally, in 2009 upon return from the Belem Social Forum where we had launched the Second Ecosocialist Manifesto, outright expulsion.

THE BATTLE TOOK PLACE ACROSS two fronts. The first evolving from a funding mechanism to keep Bard afloat by turning the Board of Trustees into a reliable year by year source. Wealthy folk we needed, generous and eager to be swayed by a charismatic president; not old money then, but new and fluid money, such as comes from finance. In this way, small, dreamy Bard became an instrument of finance capital, the most dynamic sector of the Number One society of the United States of America.

Capitalism, based in the endless accumulation of money, itself the “liberal” society. The same word is advanced by “progressives” who stand for modernity, for example politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, philosophers like Karl Popper, and tycoons like billionaire George Soros — notwithstanding that capitalism widens the gap between rich and poor, leaves nature in ruins and for the last forty years, has inflicted upon our world the devastation we call “neoliberalism.” Thus liberalism breeds upon itself and turns into nightmare.

Soros was introduced to Bard, along with my Senate campaign of 1998, when Botstein announced association with the acclaimed financier as a structural change for the once lethargic college directly (though his wife was to join the Board of Trustees), but sort of a Godfather, with Leon Botstein as consigliere to carry out the global agenda of Soros’ Open Society Foundation and its numerous projects of “democracy enhancement.” It was not long before the Open Society college combined with the far more powerful forces of the Council on Foreign Relations, the beachhead for which was created when James Chase joined the faculty in 1989, a year after I assumed the Hiss Chair. Now poor Alger had to endure the further indignity of being posted on the ground taken over by the National Security State that had made him an outlaw. Soon, CFR was joined by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, just across the Hudson River, the combination transforming the school that put the liberal in liberal arts into a bastion of neo-conservatism. It got worse. Early in the new Millennium I returned from a leave of absence to learn that one Walter Russell Mead had occupied my office while I was gone. Mead was, believe it or not, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, a post he held until 2010. Quel Honneur! He became full-time at Bard after 2004 as the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities, a redoubt from which he could cheer on the invasion of Iraq.

Joel says goodbye to Bard College (pages 329-331)

MEANWHILE, IN ANNANDALE ON HUDSON, the denouement of my Bard career was bring prepared as the calendar crept up on 2009 and the days of my contract dwindled down to a not-so-precious few. Having endured the first course in Zionism I had taught at Bard, I was off to Belem over Christmas for the World Social Forum and the Second Draft of the Ecosocialist Manifesto. I looked to my six months off campus coming up, but my five-year contract was expiring, and Bard had prepared a reckoning: too dreary to detail but necessary to ponder and in any case, to document. And so I will compress my version of what occurred to supply a selection of bulleted points before turning to the next stage of my travels.

My situation differed from most others of this kind in that the last thing I wanted was to have my job back, a fate akin to a prison sentence. My best hope was modest, a gracious departure, without rancor; and I tried to make this wish known. Whether because of sensitivity that any separation agreement might be seen as prejudicial on their part, or from sheer vindictiveness—or more likely, from both of these motives—Bard elected to claim that of course there was no question at all of any political motive by the college, and chose to get rid of me by alleging incompetence and irrelevance at a time of budgetary hardship (the “Great Recession” was then raging). It appeared a hastily prepared letter from Dean Michele Dominy with all the charm of a Pink Slip telling me to leave my identity card at the door.

I refused to accept what amounted to an allegation of senility and protested. This triggered a Blitzkrieg on the college’s part in which vindictiveness was rampant and all stops were pulled. Botstein turned a routine full-faculty meeting which I missed, in to character assassination, alleging my lying, psychopathy and paranoia; similar charges were launched over the faculty email list serve. Dean Dominy and Professor Amy Ansell from the Social Studies Division called a meeting of students in which my defects were laid forth. This provoked a revolt among sectors of the student body, my only ally in the furor, which included allegations from students assigned to the committee handling my case, that there seemed to be actual tampering with the evaluations used as evidence.

THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN VERY INTERESTING evidence for a lawsuit I could have brought alleging defamation of character. There were other major irregularities, for example, the fact that the faculty committee evaluating me was chaired by Prof. Bruce Chilton, an arch Zionist who among other things had spoken on national radio during the destruction of Gaza taking place at this time, opining that the havoc could be legitimated by Just War theory. Yes, that’s what tin. man said; after all, he was a theologian, the Episcopal chaplain at Bard (a fact of some interest in view of my forthcoming religious turn) and director of Bard’s extensive programs in this area. In better times at Bard, Chilton had been supportive of my work, including History and Spirit. He even said that he had supported my rehiring and had been deeply offended by my hostile reaction to his role, poor fellow.

All of this (and there is more) requires no further comment. My position was that I was being subjected to what amounted to an inquisition and that I had the option to seek recourse in a law suit that won, could be devastating to the college. I also had a lot of people on my side, including the group founded during the 2007 fracas with Overcoming Zionism. Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism, which contained a number of fine and prestigious lawyers, for example, Michael Smith, Michael Ratner (deceased, a great loss to humanity, in 2016), Abdeen Jabara, Barbara Harvey, and Dennis James, the latter of whom who served admirably as my first-line legal adviser, and added top-notch anti-Zionist intellectuals like Terri Ginsberg and Jonathan House, a psychoanalyst who had organized The NY Hospital System when we both were House Officers. ‘

PERSONALLY, I THOUGHT THE SUIT could be won, and that it would have positive political impact aside from the settlement itself. I was emotionally disposed to do so, having been driven into a fine rage by the treatment I had received over the years. Weighing against the decision to sue was a definite prospect: that suing would almost certainly ruin the later years of my life. I knew this myself and all my legal advisers felt the same—and that was that. So I had to forego the fond dream of seeing Leon Botstein, Bruce Chilton, et al. squirming in the Dock under oath. I wanted to be Free from Bard, Free at Last!, and a lawsuit of this kind is at base, nothing but a set of leg-irons.

I even wanted to be free from writing and talking about that desolate place, but not so free as would have been the case had I accepted the final terms demanded by Bard’s legal team, namely, that in exchange for a package of unspecified paltry “benefits” that is, “an “amicable settlement,” all I needed to do was to pledge: a) to never write or speak publicly about anything that transpired between the college and myself regarding this affair; and b) that in the spirit of this, I would see to it that all references to it as had found their way onto the internet, would be deleted. Rather akin to peeing while bathing in the ocean and removing all traces from the briny waves. Oh, and also: that I could never write this memoir. Next case!

Report from Colombia #1

(Written on June 1 by Anthony, a long-time resident of Bogota)

On Sunday, the national strike committee decided that it would work to remove road blocks throughout the country as a measure of goodwill toward the government in an effort to get substantive negotiations started

On Saturday, the Colombian government had announced, and had begun carrying out, a major increase of military/police/paramilitary repression against the National Work Stoppage (Paro Naciónal). President Ivan Duque announced the militarization of eight departments: Valle de Cauca, Cauca, Nariño, Huila, and Caquetá in the southwestern corner of Colombia, Risaralda which is closer to the center of the country, and  Norte de Santander which is in the north of the country on the Venezuelan border. Key cities which have been epicenters of the struggle are located in this region. They include Cali – the country’s third largest city and a major transshipment and industrial center, Buenaventura – the most important port on the Pacific, Tumaco – another Pacific port, and provincial captials and cities of Pasto, Popayan, Huila and Perira plus other cities which have been important centers of protest such as Yumbo and Tulua.

A spokesperson for the strike committee characterized the government’s announcement as “an internal coup d’etat.” Lawyers say the government has no real legal basis for the measures, since the law they are based on is designed for natural disasters and emergencies.

At the same time as the government announced this escalation, it also announced that it had rejected the pre-agreement on negotiations with the strike committee that had been mediated by the Catholic Church and the United Nations. Instead it announced a set of conditions for negotiations which amount to a rejection of all negotiations: a complete end to all demonstrations and road blockades.

The government has focused on the road blockades as its most important target. Thousands of roads have been temporarily or intermittently blockaded all over the country. At first, they caused many local shortages and panic buying that were accompanied by widespread local price gouging. Since then, the strike committee has modified its policy to allow food, medical supplies, gasoline and other essential items to pass through humanitarian corridors, and blockades have become intermittent rather than continuous. Nevertheless, the strike committee does not have control over all blockades which often are local demonstrations by working class youth, are sometimes organized blockades by masses of truck drivers, and are sometimes imposed by masked groups of “encapuchados.”

The government’s announcements came in the middle of a major increase of police, military, and paramilitary repression, especially in the city of Cali and in the southwestern corner of the country. The internet is full of videos of police escorting armed men dressed in civilian clothes who are firing at demonstrators. In one case, a man in civilian clothes shoots two protestors and is subsequently, chased, caught and killed by other protestors. They pulled out his wallet and discovered his ID cards showing that he was an agent of the Fiscalia (equivalent to the office of the prosecuting attorney general). Subsequently, the Fiscalia confirmed his identity but disclaimed knowledge of, or responsibility for, his activity.

Nobody knows exactly how many people have been killed so far, nor how many have been wounded, arrested or simply disappeared. Over the weekend a strike committee spokesman said that the government had killed 70 demonstrators. As of May 20, the government admitted that 26 people had been killed, including 25 demonstrators or bystanders and one police officer. Indepaz, an independent NGO said that as of May 18, there had been 2,387 cases of police violence and 51 killings, 43 of which were presumably at the hands of the police.

The protest movement shows no signs of abating despite the repression. Over more than one month of mobilizations it has evolved but not relented.

The major demonstrations and work stoppages happen every Wednesday, but the strike committee has called other major events on other days, including last Friday. In between, the protests continue on a smaller, local and decentralized basis. It is truly impossible to keep track of.

One day walking day the street, a group of young people march by chanting and blocking the right of way of the bus mass transit system. That night there are reports of a major confrontation in a small town fifty miles from Bogotá. The next day, a conflict erupts between the riot squad and youth blockading a main thoroughfare in a previously quiescent working class neighborhood.

Road blockades occur on a stretch of highway at an unannounced hour of the day. The police and army show up to push the demonstrators back and remove the obstacles. The next day a blockade appears a few miles down the road.

The movement is large, but not really cohesive or well organized. It has numerous sectors. There are the unions: FECODE the teachers union, the CUT and CGT – the main union federations, and the USO – the petroleum workers union, there are various truck drivers’ and truck company federations, and there are small farmers’ organizations, LGBT organizations, indigenous communities, student organizations, pensioners and others.

There are also the unnamed armed participants collectively called the “encapuchados”. They include various anarchist groupings and presumably the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – National Liberation Army) and what are known as the dissident factions of the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The FARC dissidents are those parts of the FARC who rejected the peace agreements from the beginning, or who accepted them at first but later rejected them.

There are also armed groups of common criminal gangs that join in the protests, especially in the looting of stores and ATM machines.

In Cali, the “primera linea” – the first line of militant youth in the protests, close down road blockades at 8:00 PM, but after that time unidentified armed men – nobody knows whom – police provacateurs? Paramilitaries? The ELN?  FARC dissidents? move into occupy the contested streets. The nighttime gun battles that ensure have been falsely attributed to the protestors.

Together, the encapuchados and armed groups have been responsible for a lot of the massive destruction of property that has occurred. They target small community police stations, ATM machines, mass transit systems, and government buildings.

Most, or all, of these groups have been infiltrated by the police to one degree or another. For the last century, the Colombian police and military have built up a clandestine machine to infiltrate the left, the guerrilla movements, and opposition political parties. The budget for these operations is large, but secret. Infiltration is backed up by electronic surveillance which was vastly increased under Bill Clinton’s Plan Colombia.

In between the mass peaceful protest movement and the armed groups there is a growing layer of angry, militant urban youth who have manned the road blockades, control the urban street blockades, and who have engaged in confrontations with the police.

These groups have established “resistance points” at mass transit bus depots, major intersections, and parks in many of the main cities including Bogotá, Medellin and Cali.

In Bogotá, where I live, there are two main focal points: the Portal Resistencia (officially the Portal de las Americas), and the Los Heroes monument. These are twenty-four hour demonstrations with loose-knit organizations of thousands of young people who come and go and take turns. The Portal is one of the major mass transit bus depots serving the whole city of Bogotá. The youth there have not only renamed it Portal Resistencia, they have changed all the signage, too. They control whether the buses can enter or leave.

At the Los Heroes monument, there is a major traffic interchange and a major mass transit bus interchange, both of which can be opened or closed by the demonstrators at will.

The police attack these youth, especially at night, using rubber bullets and tear gas. The youth respond with rocks, sling shots, and improvised defensive gear including makeshift shields and bicycle helmets. The Red Cross and other NGOs have set up first aid stations for those injured in the exchanges.

Other points of resistance have formed throughout this city and u in other cities,  especially in working class neighborhoods. Some are momentary and ephemeral, some have taken on a semi-permanent existence.

There is a lot more to say, and I hope to write about some of it in future updates. Here are some of the topics I hope to write about:

–La Minga (the indigenous resistance)

–Neighborhood assemblies

–The “Reconciliation” march in Cali

–The May 2022 elections

–Political pressures and factions within the government

–Political parties and their positions

–The roles of the IMF, World Bank, Standard and Poor´s

–ANDI and Colombian business

–Drug dealers/Paramilitaries/trucking

–The media

–Human rights Inter American commission

–Appointment of retired Colonel in Cali by Green Mayor

–Duque’s loan program

–The hang over of guerillerismo

–The notion that this is an insurrection floated by Forrest Hylton (It isn’t)

–A discussion of the tactic of road blockades

Anthony

Edge of the World

“Edge of the World” is a biopic about James Brooke, the British ex-officer who became the Rajah of Sarawak in 1842. The film allows you to have a look at an obscure figure who was something of an outlier in the emerging British Empire even if it is through a funhouse mirror. He is portrayed as a benign figure who only agreed to become a Rajah to put an end to the slavery and beheading in a region in the northwest corner of the island of Borneo.

When he read a reference to Brooke in a footnote in a George MacDonald Fraser novel back in 2009, screenwriter Rob Allyn became consumed by the idea of making a film about a “good” colonist. When the film begins, Brooke and several other British army veterans arrive on the beach in Sarawak with the sole intention of collecting rare plants and animals, not extending the rule of Queen Victoria. If you’ve seen “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World”, you’ll be struck by his similarities with Russell Crowe’s ship surgeon who was far more interested in discovering new species than in seizing territory on behalf of the Crown. Not only that, Allyn’s Brooke repeatedly referred to his disillusionment with the role the British played in India—like Daniel Ellsberg breaking with imperialism after seeing the reality of Vietnam as a Marine.

Despite being an obscure figure, Brooke excited the imagination of writers far more important than Allyn. He was the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”, a 1888 story about two British soldiers who become “kings” of Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan. A very good John Huston movie based on the Kipling story starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine came out in 1975. Ironically, despite Allyn’s Brooke denouncing the idea of a “white man’s burden”, his character has far more in common with colonialism than Kipling’s grifters.

Brooke also became the model for Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim”, even if only in the second half of the novel. Despite any reference to Conrad having prior knowledge about Brooke, the similarities between his plot and the White Rajah are so pronounced that scholars will always be looking for hard evidence. Unlike Brooke, Jim is a common sailor like Kipling’s characters, endears himself to Malaysian villagers by fending off a bandit that has been terrorizing them after who the fashion of “Seven Samurai”. For his efforts, they begin to refer to him as “tuan” Jim, or Lord Jim. Postcolonial scholars don’t see the novel as advanced politically as “Heart of Darkness”, but they do see Jim as an example of Kipling’s “civilizing mission”.

Allyn not only portrays Brooke as renouncing imperial ambitions but as someone who “goes native” after the fashion of “Dances with Wolves” or the disabled lead character in “Avatar” who chooses to leave his human shell to become a big blue avatar. A key feature of the film is Brooke’s bromance with a Sarawak prince who clearly has a homosexual desire for the British Rajah that is never requited. However, most Brooke scholars surmise that he too was a homosexual who enjoyed sex with his subjects.

The main conflict in the film is between Brooke and Mahkota, a Sarawak warlord who coveted the title of Rajah and routinely beheaded the pirates that preyed on the island’s villagers. Law and order hardly meant very much in a place that was marked by a very loose interpretation of Islam and animistic beliefs. In the concluding scenes of “Edge of the World”, Brooke learns that he has to abandon his semi-pacifist ideals and destroy Mahkota to save “his” Sarawak. He ends up beheading the warlord and making Sarawak an idyllic place both for the natives and British investors exploiting its resources. Brooke and his descendants ruled Sarawak until WWII when the Japanese occupied Borneo.

Suffice it to say that most of “Edge of the World” is pure hokum. Brooke wrote a letter in 1846 in which he revealed his true goals. “Sarawak is very flourishing, and I look forward to a fair revenue from it in a few years without distress to its inhabitants”. In the film, the White Rajah’s mansion Astana is anything but. It sits on stilts and is about the size of a two-bedroom apartment in New Jersey, but windowless and sans indoor plumbing. In reality, Brooke’s mansion looks like this:

As for Allyn’s fixation on Brooke after reading a reference to him in a George MacDonald Fraser novel, I wonder if it is the one below since his character is obviously consistent with Fraser’s shrewd assessment:

 Brooke was one of the Victorians who gave empire-building a good name, whose worse faults, perhaps, were that he loved adventure for its own sake, had an unshakable confidence in the civilizing mission of himself and his race, and enjoyed fighting pirates. His philosophy, being typical of his class and time, may not commend itself universally today, but an honest examination of what he actually did will discover more to praise than to blame.

Of course, Allyn chose to ignore the business about Brooke’s “unshakable confidence in the civilizing mission of himself and his race” when writing his screenplay. That would only undermine his hagiographic film.

However, even his superiors in Queen Victoria’s court found him taking advantage of his power, even charging him with using what amounted to war crimes against the indigenous pirates who were far less lethal than the ships the Europeans sent around the world. After all, Brooke arrives on the shores of Sarawak with a sloop appropriately named “Royalist” with its six cannons used to subdue both pirates and warlords.

“Edge of the World” is available as VOD on June 21. Only recommended for those like me with a morbid curiosity.

Thinking like an Octopus

COUNTERPUNCH, JUNE 4, 2021

Just over five years ago, Inky the octopus became a folk hero because of his escape from a New Zealand aquarium. After squeezing through a narrow chink in his tank, he crawled across the floor and found an opening to a 164-foot-long drainpipe that led to the ocean. As much as I enjoyed the film based on Stephen King’s “The Shawshank Redemption”, which climaxes in Tim Robbin’s daring prison break, I only wish that a gifted animation team like the one that made “How to Train Your Dragon” could tell Inky’s story.

At the time, I made a mental note to myself to learn about octopuses. From the time that I read about Inky, interest in the creatures has increased dramatically with this year’s Oscar for documentary going to “My Octopus Teacher.” Nearly everybody who spends time looking at octopus YouTube videos, or going further and reading books about them, will be struck by both their intelligence and inscrutability.

This article will discuss Sy Montgomery’s best-selling “The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness” and Peter Godfrey-Smith’s “Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness.” It will also review “My Octopus Teacher.” Despite the inclusion of the word “consciousness” in both titles, there are vast differences between the two. Montgomery’s focus is on the interplay between humans and the octopus taking place in aquariums just like the kind that Inky fled, while Godfrey-Smith applies neuroscience and Darwinism to a creature that seemingly defies what these disciplines hold as sacrosanct. In either book, you’ll discover that both authors have the kind of love for the octopus that other authors had for the chimpanzee or the wolf. I, of course, am referring to Jane Goodall and Farley Mowat respectively.

Continue reading

The Socialist Equality Party Member who rejected sectarianism

On March 8^th, I received an email from Shuvu Batta, a former member of the NY branch of the Socialist Equality Party that publishes World Socialist Website. He had recently been expelled on the typical bureaucratic basis that Trotskyists seem to have purloined from 1930s Stalinism. He wrote:

I came across your site and while I may not agree 100% with what you’ve written, I think your critique on the SEP is correct. I was a former SEP member who after 2 and half years around the organization, have been forced to admit that the party line on the trade unions is absolutely incorrect and more-over an anti-worker stance. A former member wrote a scathing critique of the trade union line and our party politics which I was able to read. After sharing the critique to other comrades, I was put up for disciplinary action and eventually expelled.

He included a number of attachments written by him and replied to by David North’s cohorts. I believe he has made an important contribution to Marxism by taking on the SEP’s grotesque misinterpretation of Trotsky’s ideas and demonstrates a keen awareness of Marxism that persuades me that a new generation of revolutionary socialists is being born. In the memorial meeting for Ernie Tate, Tariq Ali struck a rueful note about Marxism being at a low ebb. Unless you are preoccupied with the academic left that uses NLR or Historical Materialism to carry out its debates, you will miss the reality that thousands of people in their 20s to 40s are embracing Marxism at a higher level than I ever saw in the 1960s and 70s. When you read two of his contributions to the debate within the SEP, you’ll agree with me that Comrade Batta is part of the cream of the crop.

1. From a document titled “My Defense of Democratic Centralism and a Critique of Sectarian Politics”:

Are we sectarians?

The founding document of the Communist movement, of which we are a fragment, is the Communist Manifesto.

Near the end of this document it is written that:

The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of  the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.

Communists fight for the immediately achievable goals of the working class while preparing the ground for its ultimate aim of seizing political power on a worldwide scale. By denying the internal contradiction within the trade unions between the bureaucracy and the working class and furthermore by labeling virtually all left-wing movements as “psuedo-left” we have followed a clear sectarian line which has divorced us from the mass movements of the working class and revolutionary segments of the petty bourgeoise and youth, thereby divorcing us from the momentary interests of the working class. This has been increasingly apparent in our reaction to the gains won by Chicago Teachers in the CTU, our slander against Amazon workers fighting for unionization and our “intervention” in the George Floyd Protests.

Our participation in the George Floyd protests which involved tens of millions of workers and youth around the world was concentrated almost exclusively through our WSWS writing and social media activity. Furthermore the line advanced by our party failed to address the momentary needs of the masses in protest, calling for an end to racism and police brutality. Rather than employing the dialectical method, connecting the immediate needs of the masses with the ultimate goal, as so powerfully outlined by Trotsky in the Transitional Program, we offered no such demand to workers and youth. Rather our writing focused on simply laying out the case for socialism and calling on the working class to join our movement, a movement which had no significant role in the organization and in the on-the-ground agitation for this “world-historic” event.

Our denial of the trade unions as organizations in which cadre should have physical participation has placed us in a similarly sterile situation in regards to Chicago teachers. In our “Lessons of the Betrayal by the Chicago Teachers Union” we downplay and avoid the fact that immediate and real gains were won by Chicago teachers in their strike, namely that almost all grade school classes won’t open until March, teachers have been put on a priority list for vaccinations, and they can opt out of returning if they feel unsafe, though it’ll be unpaid leave.

These gains are by no means enough in granting the security and well being of teachers, but 68% of the membership voted FOR the deal. Had we had forces in the union, actually fighting with the teachers and explaining to them why they must reject the deal, and in its stead advance more radical, aka transitional demands, we would have been able to win further gains for workers and develop real ties to them. It is only in this dialectical process of struggling alongside the working class and against bourgeois consciousness that we will be able to win immediate and practical gains for the working class, and further aid them in the process of developing socialist consciousness.

Instead our policy on this issue has been to advance the demands for workers to join our rank and file committees while breaking from their union activity, thereby we are advancing a sectarian demand calling for the split between workers in our rank and file committees and the workers in the unions. As analyzed by C’s document, the correct, ie. the Trotskyist practice that we should adopt is to utilize both our rank and file committees as centers of organization and education for the advanced workers while developing consistent work within the trade unions to popularize increasingly radical demands and develop socialist consciousnesses with the workers where the workers are.

Our incorrect and sectarian line of the trade unions has now pitted us against militant sections of Amazon workers, who recognize the desperate need for organization and are reacting with enthusiasm to the unionization drive in the BHM1 plant in Bessemer, Alabama. In an article which I have written but now denounce titled “The unionization vote at Alabama Amazon facility”, we are calling on workers to vote NO to unionization despite the fact that it would provide a platform of organization for thousands of atomized workers while initiating a mass union drive in Amazon around the country. Furthermore it would provide a platform for cadre to radicalize workers within the union and build a strong nucleus. In effect by calling on workers to vote NO we are supporting the line of companies like Amazon and Walmart, which recognize that unionization would indeed bring immediate gains to workers and pose a threat to their profits, hence their ramping up of anti-union tactics and propaganda.

The line that we are following runs counter to our document “The Globalization of Capitalist Production and the International Tasks of the Working Class” written in 1993 in which we declared “The party must strive to create new forms of struggle among these workers [i.e. those already in unions], including factory committees and even trade unions, organized independently and in opposition to the AFL-CIO.”

The demands for factory committees within existing trade unions has been completely abandoned, and in pursuit of our “independent rank and file committees” we have abandoned the fight to create new trade unions among unorganized workers, instead advocating for workers to from what are essentially Soviets under the leadership of the party; we are demanding workers to immediately form revolutionary organs ignoring the transitional steps necessary to make this demand effective.

A thorough critique of our trade union line can be found in both C’s critique and the critique of Alex Steiner, in his article “The trade union form and the butchery of dialectics”. We have not responded to Steiner’s criticisms even though they reveal severe weaknesses in our practice that has on the whole been ignored. This is why it is essential for us to seriously discuss our party line and critically analyze the results of our sectarian politics over the past few decades.

2. Socialist Equality Party National Secretary Joseph Kishore spreads lies about an Amazon worker and former party member: The worker responds:

Comrade Batta advised me that this article that appeared on the Permanent Revolution website “is more current and gives a deeper exposure of the SEP.” So, the two together will give you a sense of how a grain of sand can create a pearl of political wisdom although sand hardly conveys the level of irritation the SEP can produce.

Statement by Emily Wilder, the AP reporter fired for her pro-Palestinian tweets.