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Today's
Stories
January 17 / 18, 2003
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
January 12, 2004
Ben Tripp
No Stan
for the Kurds
Norman Solomon
The
Dixie Trap: Democrats and the South
Mike Whitney
O'Neill's Revenge
Jason Leopold
From the Very First Instant It Was About Iraq
Uri Avnery
Syria's
Peace Proposal
January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
January 9, 2004
David Lindorff
The
Misers of War: Troop Strength and Chintzy Bonuses
Kurt Nimmo
Saddam's Defense: Summon Bush Sr. to the Stand
Mike Whitney
Orange Jumpsuits for the Bush Clan?: The Carnegie Report on Iraq's
Non-existent WMDs
Deb Reich
Palestinians and Israelis: This War is Unwinnable
David Vest
Disabled
Vets Fire Back at Rumsfeld
January 8, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israeli
Refuseniks Sentenced to Jail
Lenni Brenner
Dr.
Dean and the Godhead
Ray McGovern
Bush: Driving Without Breaks
Mark Scaramella
Inside
the DA's Office: Lies, Errors and Tedium
Yves Engler
Bush's Mexican Gambit
James Hollander
Journalists
Under Fire: the Death of José Couso in Baghdad
January 7, 2004
Democracy Now!
Uncharitable
Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured
Greg Weiher
The
Bush Administration's Ongoing Intelligence Problem
Ben Tripp
The Word of the Year, 2003
Dave Lindorff
Dean and His Democratic Detractors
Michael Leon
The NYT Does Chomsky
Bob Boldt
God Talk
Ramon Ryan
Small
Victories and Long Struggles: the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista
Uprising
January 6, 2004
Dave Lindorff
RNC
Plays the Hitler Card: MoveOn Shouldn't Apologize for Those Ads
Ron Jacobs
Drugs
in Uniform: Hashish and the War on Terrorism
Josh Frank
Coffee and State Authority in Colombia
Doug Giebel
Permanent Bases: Leave Iraq? Hell No, We Won't Go
John Chuckman
Sick Puppies: David Frum's New Neo-Con Manifesto
Rannie Amiri
The Politics of the Iranian Earthquake
John L. Hess
A Record
to Dissent From
Thacher Schmid
A Cheesehead's Musings on the Sunday NYT
David Price
"Like
Slaves": Anthropological Thoughts on Occupation
January 5, 2004
Al Krebs
How
Now Mad Cow!
Kathy Kelly
Squatting
in Baghdad's Bomb Craters
Jordy Cummings
The Dialectic of the Kristol Family: Putting the Neo in the Cons
Fran Shor
Mad Human Disease: Chewing the Fat Down on the Farm
Fidel Castro
"We Shall Overcome": On the 45th Anniversary of the
Cuban Revolution
Gary Leupp
North
Korea for Dummies
January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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Weekend
Edition
January 17 / 18, 2004
Call Out the Instigator...
A
Review of Revolution in the Air
By RON JACOBS
I can remember the moment as if it were
yesterday. I was at a 1973 Impeach Nixon rally in NYC when some
rather loud young people marched into the park where the rally
was being held. I took a leaflet proffered by one of the folks
in the group and looked for their name, something I almost always
do when handed a piece of propaganda. On the bottom of the second
side it read "Attica Brigades." This group was the
youth-student wing of the Revolutionary Union, which was one
of many Marxist-Leninist groups in existence at the time. That
was my introduction to the Seventies Left in the United States.
Max Elbaum's new book, Revolution
In the Air, introduces today's reader to the milieu. In addition,
it explains many of the nuances I missed during my involvement-something
that was easy to do since my perspective was colored by my involvement
with the Attica Brigades successor-the Revolutionary Student
Brigades.
Elbaum's text traces the history of what
many called the New Communist Movement in the United States.
This movement, which was made up of several groups espousing
variations of Marxist-Leninist (usually with a good deal of Mao
thrown in) thought, was born out of the disintegration of various
organizations in the antiracist/antiwar struggle, especially
the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS). and the growing realization among
many of the period's most committed activists that the New Left's
rather amorphous politics were  not enough to rid the world of US imperialism.
Another trend that rose from this disintegration was that of
armed struggle/terrorism-a trend best exemplified by the Weatherman/Weather
Underground Organization and the Eldridge Cleaver wing of the
Black Panther Party (which eventually gave birth to the Black
Liberation Army). Revolution in the Air, like much of
the Sixties literature, pinpoints 1968 as the year that forced
a realization among many US left activists that revolution was
the solution to the systemic racism and war they were opposing.
Likewise, Elbaum also discards the so-called "good sixties/bad
sixties" dynamic favored by many Sixties commentators whose
politics since that period have moved to the right. This dynamic
assumes that the early days of SDS and SNCC-before the takeover
of Columbia in Spring 1968 and Black Power-were the best days
of the Movement and the days post-1968 were "bad' because
that's when the Marxist-Leninists and crazy anarchists bent on
revolution took over. When one operates from this context, s/he
is likely to present an incomplete and ultimately unlikely history.
For one who was there, Revolution
in the Air is like a flashback without the rhetoric. Elbaum
details the New Communist Movement's attempts to educate itself
in the Marxist-Leninist canon and apply it to the events of the
early 1970s in the United States. He identifies the key players:
the groups from which the activists came-organizations organized
along revolutionary nationalism representing African-Americans,
Latinos and Asian-Americans, mostly white radical youth and student
groups, revolutionary worker's organizations, and the independent
socialist weekly The Guardian. In addition, he tells how and
why the young activists of the anti-racist and antiwar movement
moved towards party-building and away from the spontaneity of
the popular extra-parliamentary movements of the Sixties decade.
Primary to his analysis is the belief held by Elbaum and many
of the New Communist Movement's adherents that the events of
1968 were tantamount to the events of 1905 in Czarist Russia.
If one accepted this consciously or otherwise, than the next
step was to build a party that could make certain that the mistakes
made in the failed rebellions of 1968 would be corrected and
America would see a Seventies' version of the Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917.
On the other hand, if one is new to the
anti-capitalist movement and/or the Left, than reading this book
requires a short history lesson on the Sixties movement against
war and racism and the role of the Left in that movement. The
first chapter and the introduction are a good beginning to that
lesson, but today's young activists most likely will want to
read more. Elbaum does a more than adequate job on describing
the role of the Old Left in the U.S. and its influence on the
New Communist Movement, especially because much of the New Communist
Movement's analysis and activities were defined in reaction to
what they perceived to be the revisionism of the Left (especially
that of the CPUSA) that preceded it. Even more fundamentally,
today's young activists might wonder what was the attraction
of the Leninist model in the first place, given today's almost
religious insistence on decentralization and non-vanguardism
prevalent in most sectors of the current popular left and anarchist
movements. Revolution in the Air takes this question
seriously and answers it accurately and effectively.
This is done via a brief but workable
history of the development of Marxist-Leninist thought and its
application since the 1917 October revolution. The reader is
told how that development was affected by the application of
the theory and interpreted, or misinterpreted. For example,
how Lenin's firm belief in the necessity for dissenting opinions
within the revolutionary party while maintaining a unity of action
became Stalin's insistence on total allegiance to the party.
Unfortunately, many formations in the New Communist Movement
eventually echoed this intolerance, at least in their reaction
to other leftist organizations. Elbaum writes of the positives
of this movement-the energy, commitment and solidarity-and cautions
activists of the new century that "the fact that no movement
organization could sustain such positive features over the long
haul indicates that a better way of political organization than
Stalinist hierarchy needs to be found."
To prove his point, Elbaum relates the
next phase of the movement's history, writing about the turmoil
in the movement caused by the attempts by Boston government officials
to bus working-class and poor Black students from the Roxbury
section of Boston to the mostly white Southie and Charlestown
working-class sections. RU's dramatic turnabout regarding the
existence of a separate Black nation in the U.S. caused it to
see busing in Boston not as anti-racist but as an attempt by
the rulers to split the working-class along racial lines. Although
a couple other Marxist-Leninist groups (some composed primarily
of people of color) shared this analysis, only the Revolutionary
Union (RU) aligned itself with some of the more racist elements
of the anti-busing movement.
Meanwhile, RU was distancing itself from
many of its youthful supporters by opposing the counterculture,
homosexuality, and calling for those unmarried couples living
together to get married. All of this was in an attempt to relate
to what they considered to be the proletariat and stemmed from
their understanding of (and allegiance to) the communist theory
they were reading and discussing. Of course, RU was not alone
in its odd twists and turns. The shrinking base of support combined
with a fundamentalist adherence to the texts of Lenin, Stalin
and Mao caused many groups in the movement to make similar mistakes.
It was only because of RU's larger size and early leadership
that their mutations had a greater effect. After the busing
battle was over, RU's leadership in the movement was gone. What
followed was a series of struggles for leadership by other sects,
a virtual collapse and rebirth with different organizations at
the helm in the 1980s, and the eventual disintegration of the
movement after the fall of the Stalinist bureaucracies in Europe
and China's total embrace of capitalism. In a similar manner,
Elbaum describes the other issue that was even more decisive
in splitting the New Communist Movement. This was when China
shifted its foreign policy by identifying the Soviet Union, and
not U.S. imperialism, as the biggest enemy of the world's working
people. For a movement that had come out of one of the greatest
anti-imperialist struggles in the history of the United States-the
movement against America's war in Vietnam-this shift was like
an earthquake.
In short, the entire movement suffered
from ultra-leftism throughout most of its history. This was
not merely because of its members' attraction to this type of
communism. It was also related to their belief that the best
way to build a large party was to begin by building a small,
revolutionarily "pure" party. This insistence on purity
was bound to foment sectarianism and infighting, especially as
the movement's potential base of support-the US working class-turned
rightward while US capitalism went through recession after recession
and took it out on the workers. Despite its many faults, however,
the New Communist Movement honestly attempted to address every
aspect of US capitalist society. Furthermore, it took seriously
the task of organizing a revolutionary challenge to US imperialism.
Nothing was immune from its members' critical eye. Max Elbaum
does a more than credible job at documenting the movement's development,
its mistakes, its effects on the radical movement in the United
States, and its relation to the world. As histories of the Sixties
and their aftermath go, Revolution in the Air is one that
stands with the best, not only in regards to its approach and
style, but especially in the lessons both historians and activist
can learn from it. Like Elbaum comments in the text: "hindsight
should not be used to smugly dismiss [the New Communist Movement],
but to analytically disentangle its positive from its negative
side." This book is an essential part of that analysis.
Ron Jacobs
is author of The
Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground,
which is being republished by Verso.
He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
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