Fire on the Mountain notes with proletarian approval that the Freedom Road Socialist Organization / Organización Socialista del Camino para Libertad has made a timely release of this year's Official Slogans for one of the most widely observed of revolutionary holidays,Comrade Valentine's Day. We reprint them here to ensure the broadest possible circulation, urge others to do the same (linking to FRSO/OSCL, of course), and note that historians of the left can find some earlier years' slogans here at FotM.
Toilers And Oppressed People Of Every Nation:
Let The Dauntless Spirit Of Comrade Valentine Illuminate The Bright Red Path Of Revolutionary Romanticism!
Love And Desire Are The Birthright Of The Working Masses And Must Be Defended Against Rapacious Capital's Drive To Reduce Them To Shoddy Commodities!
Never Waver In The Battle To Smash Reactionary Feudal And Bourgeois Worldviews Which Deny Agency To Women And LGBTQ People!Read more!
Where I sit every day at a high school in the Bronx, there’s not yet the same kind of Obama fervor and hope that others have reported—though there is some sympathy and interest.
From Black working-class parents and staff members, there is one overwhelmingly most frequent comment: “I think they’ll kill him if he gets it.” The “it“ is either the nomination or the presidency itself,
It’s like you’re setting this man up for an early demise if you support him. It seems to have a paralyzing effect, not only on electoral participation but on any kind of activism. That's mostly from the parents and staff. From the students who think about social issues on a regular basis—a minority at my school—elections aren’t really on their horizon. They’re into 9-11 conspiracy videos on the net. For example, both the history teacher and I (the social worker) have been asked by some of the smart, sorta emo kids to watch a video at “zeitgeistmovie.com.” I plan to do so and hope I can find a way to dialogue with the students about this. They understand it might take a minute because us old fogies have old computers that it’s hard to watch videos on.
I ‘m curious about whether others are running into either or both of these reactions to current politics.
in a few days, after it's made the rounds of teh Intertubes, but it's a pretty damn funny anti-McCain version of the massively viral Obama video I blogged about here a few days ago.
And I may not. It does after all make the point that McCain's soft white underbelly is his rah-rah enthusiasm for the occupation of Iraq, and highlights the fact that neither of the annointed Democratic candidates is willing to take him on or even talk about the fucking issue much at all. Meanwhile, watch and enjoy.
I spent a good chunk of yesterday at a memorial celebration for a great comrade, Gideon Rosenbluth, who died last fall. 80 people--family, neighbors, fellow union members and veterans, and, in large numbers, those who had been his comrades in the '70s and '80s--gathered to remember him.
Rather than starting this post at the obvious place, by reprinting the short review of Gideon's life from the memorial flier everyone present was given, I want to reprint the moving message Michael McPhearson, the executive director of Veterans For Peace, sent from St. Louis. His message cites the connection between Gideon and another comrade who died last year, Dave Cline, whose life Fire on the Mountain has posted about extensively, starting here.
Michael's words also contain a profound and sorrowful insight, which I have taken the liberty of highlighting in boldface, because they resonate so strongly with me:
I last spoke to Gideon Rosenbluth sometime ago after he left NYC. He was in good spirits and wanted to know what was happening nationally. He asked me about VFP vets in Kentucky and if they were active. We talked for a while. Before I hung up I promised to call him back and said I hoped to see him in the near future. Unfortunately, we never talked again.
Gideon was one of the first veterans I met when I joined Veterans For Peace. He, with a handful of others, was the first WWII vet outside of my uncle with whom I really had a chance to sit and talk. I met him during one of the NYC veteran meetings. I was impressed with his sharpness and fierce resistance to the hypocritical and immoral actions of our government. At the time he was also on the VFP board. I was recently reading past VFP board minutes and guess who nominated David Cline for VFP Board of Directors President on January 13, 2002 in Saint Louis ? That’s right, Gideon.
Gideon’s death is very sad for me because I wanted to know this great man better, but the demands of the struggle against this war have taken over all of our lives, and at the time his as well. Ironically the war has brought people together who would have never know each other, like me and Gideon. Then it steals our time and emotions from us so that we cannot fully enjoy life with each other. Gideon is a comrade VFP will sorely miss and one we are all happy and lucky to have known.
Thank you Gideon from everyone in VFP and especially from those who had the honor to serve with you.
Michael T. McPhearson Veterans For Peace Executive Director
What follows is a brief outline of Gideon's life, in the form it was given out at the celebration. A slideshow by his nephew and testimony from many who knew him put flesh on these bare bones and conjured up the Gideon we know and loved. Some of us want to try and set up a permanent website where all of this material and more can be available to those who knew him and to the many more who might benefit from the lessons his life story holds.
Gideon 1919-2007
Gideon Irving Rosenbluth
Born to a working class family in 1919, Gideon grew up poor in a Jewish neighborhood in New York, as it was rocked by the Great Depression. His family, his community and the broader world became a school where he learned that survival required struggle and class solidarity.
Gideon enlisted in the Army right after Pearl Harbor in 1941. He served in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany, and was demobilized as T-5 (sergeant) in 1945.
After the war, Gideon became a garment worker. He worked in the needle trades for 35 years, and was an active rank and filer in his union, District 65. When he felt the union leadership was wrong, Gideon was not one to bite his tongue. Even after he retired in the 1980’s and District 65 was merged into the United Auto Workers, Gideon served for years as President of UAW Local 2179 Retirees.
Gideon also became active around veteran's issues at the war's end, joining the battle in NYC for housing for married vets. (He and his wife Phyllis needed it, for themselves and their daughter Karen Eve Pass.) This was another struggle he stuck with for the rest of his life. He was active in supporting Veterans from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, protested the Vietnam War as a veteran, and became a core member of Chapter 34 of Veterans For Peace, becoming especially active after the invasion of Iraq.
Gideon Rosenbluth was, and remained to his death, a revolutionary, convinced that a better world is possible and determined to help bring that world into being. Those who came to know him over the last two or three decades of his life were always surprised to hear how old he really was. His verve, his sense of humor, his appetite for living and for struggling, kept him in the thick of things until close to the end.
By way of introduction, let me lay out why I am writing this and why I hope others will chip in some thoughts in the comments section. Fire on the Mountain, splendid though it is, may not be the best place to house an extended non-sectarian discussion of issues related to the 2008 election, but I haven’t found any other venue that rings my chimes, so we’ll give it a shot.
To set the context, briefly, here's where I'm coming from:
I do not think work in the electoral arena in the US, especially above the local level, is a particularly worthwhile place for revolutionaries and socialists to be putting their energies in this time period.
Contrariwise, to act as if the 2008 elections aren’t taking place, and aren’t the principal lens through which the vast majority of the people of this country will be viewing all political issues is to engage in a willful denial of reality.
The weakness and fragmentation of the left in the US gives us a certain luxury—it is highly unlikely that anything we might do could significantly affect the outcome. And so we can analyze, do propaganda, debate approaches and test-run projects without risking much.
Okay, time to wade in and see if we can jumpstart some dialog. Herewith, 3 points on the campaign of Barack Obama, which has clearly created a bunch of dynamics we need to be thinking about very carefully. 1. Early on, the polls showed an interesting divide in the Black community, with many older African Americans, women in particular, backing Clinton. Some said they wouldn’t support Obama because a successful run would get him killed, like the Kennedys and King. As the winnowing process whittled the Democratic field down toward the media-friendly duel—white woman vs. Black man--the tide in the Black community to Obama was undeniable. The Clinton campaign’s effort to play the race card, especially Bill’s sniping at Obama and Hillary’s tin-eared claim that LBJ was the real hero of the Civil Rights Movement, intensified support for Obama throughout the Black nation.
What was reinforced here was the big lesson of Katrina—this society is still deeply racist and Black folk still have to stick together for survival. This is particularly noteworthy at a time when there has been a lot of attention paid to the Pew Research survey of last fall which argued that there is a deep and growing divide in "values" in African America between poor and "middle class" Blacks. While support for Obama was initially strongest in higher income, better educated layers of the community, the urban poor and low wage workers justifiably skeptical of his campaign’s obvious attempt to portray him as "above race" turned out in unexpectedly large numbers on Super Duper Tuesday. These days you hear less of the "he’s not Black, he’s a Halfrican" type disses in the community and on talk radio.
The fact that the Black nation has swung behind Barack Obama in a big way doesn’t, of course, oblige any of us to do so as well, but it does means that those of us who aren’t Black, in particular, should be careful and respectful of this development. "I support Cynthia McKinney, the real Black candidate" probably won’t get you all that far in talking to friends and coworkers who are into Obama. I highly recommend that folks start reading The Black Commentator weekly, if you don’t already. The current issue has three interesting articles, one very sharply critical, on his campaign.
2. A key factor in the coming months will be the "Latino vote" and specifically how the various campaigns approach it. The Republican primary has featured a truly offensive mudwrestlng free-for-all over who can take the most ignorant and punitive stance toward immigrants, meaning that the growing claim of the Democratic Party on Latina/os will not be threatened. There is a very real danger here that sections of the Democratic Party machine supporting Clinton will try to play on and exacerbate existing contradiction between the Black community and Chicana/os and other Latina/o populations.
One important counterdevelopment to this took place in LA during the run-up to Super Duper Tuesday. The Clinton campaign had paid special attention to getting early endorsements from Mayor Villaraigosa and mobilizing the Democratic Party infrastructure there, part of a well-planned and well-financed California push which wound up giving her a two to one edge among Latina/o primary voters. A few days before the primary, though, the most listened-to radio deejay in the US, El Piolin (who was hugely influential in mobilizing over a million immigrants in LA during the immigrant levantamiento of two years ago), came out for Obama and featured Ted Kennedy on the show promoting his candidacy.
3. The Obama campaign has triggered a genuine wave of support and activity among young people of all nationalities which will bear close watching. He and his advisers are packaging him as an inspirational mass leader and his campaign as a movement. The battle cry is "Hope" and the rhetoric is inclusive, powerful echoes of the Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition campaigns of the 1980s.
One big problem here is that Obama implicitly pits his message against populism, and pro-equality populism was the heart of the Jackson campaigns. But in this campaign the banner of populism and defiance of giant corporations and their control of US politics was held high by John Edwards, and has been even been picked up and waved around by Clinton, however unconvincingly. And the talk of inclusion seems aimed mainly at suggesting that Obama will be able to transcend the political and cultural divisions in the country, and more concretely the stalemate in Congress. This part of his pitch drives many left liberals nuts—they see the central feature of the last two years as a near-incomprehensible collapse by a Democratic Congressional majority elected to end the war and rein in Bush. This sounds to them like more of the same and worse still, like a declaration that, if elected, Obama would be far too focused on "uniting" and creating "change" to pursue investigation and prosecution of the Bush/Cheney crew for their multiple and horrific crimes.
I’ll close here by posting a video which for me captures some of why Obama’s campaign, no matter how history-making, bothers me so much. Put together by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, and directed by Jesse Dylan, Bob's son, it’s a campaign ad in music video drag. And it’s brilliant. Watch it now (if it hasn’t already turned up in your in-box a dozen times over the last week or so).
Powerful, no? But look at what is really going on. There is no real content to the speech excerpt at the video's center, just platitudes. Audio and video references to the struggles of the '60s and '70s aim to evoke nostalgia among Boomers (and fauxstalgia among the video's real target, younger people who've learned about the period mainly in school or on public television). The casually dressed and almost self-effacing women and men who recite or sing Obama’s words as he orates are in fact celebrities and entertainment biz people acting out a charade of inclusivity. And since it’s evidently thought possible that we may be too damn dumb to get the message, we get HOPE and CHANGE flashed at us in big caps. Oh, yeah, and YES, WE CAN.
Yep, the video takes the great slogan of the Chicana/o National Movement, ¡Si, Se Puede!--usually rendered in English as "Yes, We Can!"--and transforms it from a defiant battle cry into a collective feel-good, patriotic mantra.
Yes, We Can. Hope. Change.
Uh-hunh. As a counterpoint, I post—-repost actually—-a much lower budget video commentary on the primaries, which channels David Bowie to make its point, short and sweet.
