Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, superstar

Yes she's young, charismatic, boricua, bilingual, sharp as a scalpel and sassy as hell. But what's made her a superstar is not just that, but that she's got class. Working class.

"Una de las nuestras," one of ours, said a campaign button

Not her roots or her job, because it's not about her, it's about us. Occupy Wall Street was the first step, and perhaps the most important. "We are the 99%" showed that the working people are realizing that we are a "we," we have to defend our own interests against the very rich and their well-paid lackeys.

That realization has now led to an explicitly political movement  of working people determined to create our own political instrument, because both parties have been dominated by the interests of the 1%. Our working class political movement is what has made her a superstar.

Alexandria Ocasio may have contested a Democratic primary, but she refused to act like a mainstream Democratic candidate, begging for Corporate and Lobbyist money, or even hitting up her friends on Wall Street for that $2,700 maximum donation. But even if she had such friends it would not have done her any good once they saw her campaign based on a guaranteed job, a living wage of $15 an hour, Medicare for all and tuition-free access to higher education.

"Women like me aren't supposed to run for office. I wasn't born to a wealthy or powerful family: mother from Puerto Rico, father from the South Bronx." That's how her campaign video starts, and not because some consultant's idea played well with a focus group.

She wrote the script herself after two members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Detroit that started a video production company heard about her and offered their help. The streets are the ones she's walked, the people campaigning aren't actors shot on carefully prepared sets, they just shot her and her supporters as they really are.

It is that honesty and transparency that found fertile soil among regular people who have realized we need our own people in Congress, not "friends" who spend hours every day dialing for dollars.

Columnist Kruta terrified by right to healthcare & living wage

And that response is scaring the shit out of the right. Daily Caller columnist and Fox News contributor Virginia Kruta was aghast in a piece she wrote a couple of weeks ago about an Ocasio speech in support of another candidate.

"I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be ... to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education," Kruta wrote.

Worse, "I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a 'living wage' was a human right." Fortunately, her faith in "our nation’s founding and its history" reminded her that in America, we still have the right to be ignorant, sick and impoverished.

Nevertheless, Kruta had her picture taken with the devil herself, "in part to remind myself of that time I crashed a rally headlined by a socialist, but also in part to remind myself that there, but for the grace of God, go I."

--José G. Pérez

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What's behind the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America?

On July 26, National Public Radio's website ran a story, "What You Need To Know About The Democratic Socialists Of America." A week earlier, Morning Edition had aired a substantial segment on the group, "Getting To Know The DSA." Two days earlier, CNN had taken its turn with "'We want to democratize everything': Inside DSA's rise with its leader."

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

I think these and similar articles should lead socialists and activists in social movements to think about this: the DSA is closing in on 48,000 members. What's up with that?

Because a group with 4,000 members is double the size of one with 2,000 members, and one with 8,000 four times as large. But a group with 48,000 members is not just 24 times larger: it is a qualitatively different phenomenon.

DSA began to grow with the Bernie Sanders campaign, but membership really took off after November 2016. Responsible news organizations suggest it had started at around 5,000 and reached 32,000 by the end of 2017.

In 2018 it was 35,000 by April, then 39,000 on June 25, the day before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory. A month later, on July 25, the National Office tweeted that the number had reached 47,000, including the  more than 1,000 people had signed up the day after her victory.

That this was due to the extensive and very favorable coverage of a young, articulate and charismatic Latina woman who had just sent the fourth-ranking House Democrat packing is obvious. But it is only part of the story.

The other part is that there were tens of thousands of people who saw that coverage and thought to themselves, "I should join that group," and 8,000 who actually went to the web site or got a hold of someone and joined.

This is a social and political phenomenon, not just individual decisions. A new mass socialist movement is emerging in this country, and that is a clear sign of increasing class consciousness among working people.

For many decades until the economic crash of 2008, there was no working class movement worthy of the name in the United States. By that I mean a grass-roots movement of working people, comparable to the Black movement or women's movement. I specifically do not mean the (mostly ossified) "organized labor movement" inherited from the 1930s.

Think about it: for decades there has been mass consciousness about the need to fight sexism, racism, ableism, etc., but nobody talked about "classism." People got denounced for "playing the race card" but not for "playing the class card." Gays were accused of practicing "identity politics" but who ever heard criticism of workers as such for indulging in "identity politics"?

That absence of the working class as a self-and-other recognized political force changed in 2011. The Occupy movement with its central slogan, "we are the 99%," was the first time in decades that there was a mass expression of at least rudimentary class consciousness. And look at the polls from the fall of 2011 that asked about Occupy and its issues. The movement immediately had the sympathy and support of tens of millions of people, and all it had done was to raise the flag of the working class and copy that old movie Network by shouting, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.

As soon as Occupy happened, mainstream political discourse got flipped on its head. Before, during the summer, there was much hand wringing about the deficit and the regretful suggestions that it would be necessary to reign in "entitlements" (cut Social Security and Medicare benefits).

A month afterwards (mostly empty) rhetoric about growing inequality was the talk of the town on the Potomac.

How could this happen so quickly? Because Occupy was a seed crystal dropped into a super-saturated solution of class grievance and resentment. Once it jelled,  it became a powerful political factor, even though the Occupy encampments themselves were dismantled in a couple of months.

Confirmation that working class consciousness is re-emerging in the United States and especially among younger workers came in the form of the Sanders campaign. He began very modestly on a quest to raise issues important for working people. People said he was a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, thinking they were giants.

And then the giants began to fall.

In a few weeks in the summer of 2015, Bernie went from being a crank to a serious candidate and then to a rock star who could fill  to overflowing the largest venues holding thousands of people.

That came overwhelmingly from below and from millennials. The Sanders campaign had an extremely sharp class edge, not just in "fight for $15" or "Medicare for all," but in the $27 shtick. That said this campaign is the property of the working people -- PAC money and the corporate control that comes with it not allowed.

And Sanders insisted in every speech that he could not change things. Only we could do so. This movement was of the working people, by the working people and for the working people.

The current DSA boom marks a third moment in this re-emergence of class consciousness. It is rooted in the change in the consciousness of masses of people captured in the slogan "we are the 99%." But it also marks a step forward over Occupy and even Sanders.

That because the DSA is an ongoing organization, one that is functioning at both the local and national levels, and one that is clearly a distinct political option, something like the tea party or its organized expression in Congress, the freedom caucus.

It is, in essence, the seedling of a worker's party, a class party, a self-and-other identified political expression or representation of a social force.

I know a lot of people, and especially long-time friends and comrades from the 20th Century left, will disagree violently with what I just said. They will be outraged that I could say a group that electorally operates almost exclusively within the Democratic Party is in any way, shape or form a workers party even in embryo. That the essence of a workers party is a break with bourgeois parties like the Democrats.

That deserves a very detailed discussion but for now, just three points:

First, lot of people misunderstand what Marx and Engels meant by the word "party." It was not necessarily and mostly not an electoral machine or identity, but rather a party in a more general sense, a side in a dispute or argument, like a party to a lawsuit. The Chartist Movement, which Marx said was the world's first working class party, resembled Occupy Wall Street much more than anything we would call a political party.

Second, you have to approach things dialectically. There is an obvious, blatant contradiction in a workers party gestating inside a bourgeois party. The role of socialists is not to denounce the existence of a contradiction but to work in and through it to a resolution.

Third, the mechanics of American elections are such that it is very difficult to break out of a two-party ballot line dynamic. But there is today a very clear recognition generally that there are different parties within the two major parties, for example the Tea Party and its associated "freedom caucus" in the House of Representatives. And there is a developing understanding of the two major "parties" as really alliances or blocs of different factions, and coverage of the different groups that are vying for domination of the alliance (and at this stage especially the republicans).

Past all that, there is something much more basic. We have to accept reality, that things have happened in  certain ways and forms and work from there, rather than insisting and demanding that they should have been some other way.

So never in a million years would I have arranged to have the beginnings of a reawakening of working class consciousness take the form of the Occupy movement, but that is what happened.

The same for Bernie. I would not have dreamed that a big step towards establishing the identity of the working class as a distinct political factor would be within the oldest bourgeois party in the world. But there it was.

And, finally, DSA. It does no good to insist it shouldn't have been what was regarded as a very mild and staid multi-tendency group with very loose organizational structures that would begin to grow into a real beginning of a mass socialist organization.

Yet IMHO, reality has already settled the question. This is the main form through which the process that began with Occupy is finding an outlet for right now.

This, in my view, also settles the question of the DSA's electoral tactics, at least at this point. Some 8,000 people joined in the last month, overwhelmingly because they identified with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory in New York and the approach that lay behind it. I feel safe in saying this is what they want to do: create two, three, many "Alexandrias."

And even if you think this is a bad idea, if you are a Marxist, a materialist and not an idealist, a preacher from some sect, you don't have a choice.

You have got to go through the experience with working people who are moving towards class political consciousness in this way, and then draw lessons on the basis of the common, lived experience. Engels once made the point that it is worse than useless to try to cram down people's throats things they can't possibly know for themselves right now, but will accept readily enough down the road. Worse than useless because you will only isolate yourself and not be heard when the time comes too draw the lessons.

--Jose G. Perez

From the archives:A critique of Stalin's 1913 essay on 'Marxism and the National Question'

[The following is an edited version  of an article that was written for a discussion inside the U.S. socialist organization "Solidarity" in 2005. I'm republishing it here in response to comrade Tim Horras (of the Philadelphia socialists) commenting very favorably on 1930s writings by Harry Haywood, a Black leader of the Communist Party, USA, who advocated Black communists oppose what Haywood called "petty-bourgeois nationalism" in the Black community. I disagree completely with those politics. The nationalism of the oppressed should be supported; the nationalism of the oppressor must be fought.

[I want to stress that this has little or no bearing on the Stalin-Trotsky disputes (between the mainstream pro-Moscow communism of the 1930s and later, on the one hand, and the dissident communists who looked to Leon Trotsky, on the other).]

One of the biggest sources of confusion in the Marxist movement on the national question is the 1913 Bolshevik pamphlet, “Marxism and the National Question.”

Although authored by Stalin, it has been looked to by pretty much the entire spectrum of the Communist left – including Trotskyists -- as an authoritative text.

What is a nation?

The heart of Stalin’s pamphlet is generally perceived to be his definition of “nation”:

A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.(Emphasis in the original).

It is undoubtedly true that Stalin's pamphlet reflected the views the Bolsheviks at the time, and in reality, of much of the international current that Lenin called "revolutionary social democracy."

But I believe a reading of Stalin's pamphlet shows that it was a rigid and formalistic presentation of that position, and, at any rate, one that is today solely of historical interest, very much circumscribed to the European experience before World War I, dealing with it inadequately even then, with dubious politics for those days and with no political value for today.

Are Blacks a nation?

I'm not really very concerned with the right “definition” of the term “nation.”¹

That Blacks don't fit what’s been accepted as this “classic” Marxist definition of “nation” only shows that the classic definition is inadequate.

It is a goofy idea that somehow, because the Black community did not adjust itself to Stalin’s or the Bolshevik’s definition, we have “proved” that Blacks aren't a separate and distinct people, and therefore all revolutionary internationalists, and above all those from the white American nation, aren't absolutely duty-bound to support the struggle of Blacks as a people for their liberation by whatever means Black people themselves choose.

Because the truth points to itself. Black people are what they are, a separate and distinct people with a strong sense of self-identity in fighting for their liberation.

To say, sorry, but colonialism and imperialism have scattered you so much that you really don’t have a common territory or a fully developed class structure internal to the Black community and therefore you don’t qualify as a nation and don’t have the right to self-determination, that is a capitulation to imperialism and white supremacy via academic pedantry.

Moreover it highlights what is missing from Stalin’s definition that is central to understanding “nation” and the politics of the national question, and that is the subjective side of the question.

Basically, a community or population is not a nation until and unless it conceives of itself as having a common political project or destiny.

For example, Cuba existed as an island and a colony for hundreds of years before the consciousness emerged among these islanders that they were a separate and distinct people, something which as a widespread phenomenon did not take place until the early 1800’s.

And it wasn't until the second half of that century, under the impact of the antislavery revolution in the United States (so-called Civil War) that Cuba’s first War for Independence (known as the 10 year’s war) broke out, and it broke out as a struggle both for political independence and to abolish slavery.

Is nationalism always bourgeois?

But the problems with the analysis Stalin presents and the politics that flow from it are more important than the inadequacies of his definition.

Stalin says national movements are proper of the epoch of rising capitalisms. They are always bourgeois movements, in essence, moves by the bourgeoisie to consolidate a “home” market.

This described perfectly the historical evolution as rising and spreading capitalism overcomes localism and feudal divisions.

But he overlooks that what he is describing in his days is already a struggle between two “nationalisms,” that which he ascribes to the belatedly “rising” bourgeoisie, i.e., the nationalism of the oppressed nation, and the one he does not see, because he himself was infected with it to some degree, the nationalism of the bourgeoisie that has already risen, the nationalism of the oppressor nation.

He says even when other classes are drawn into a national movement, "In its essence it is always a bourgeois struggle, one that is to the advantage and profit mainly of the bourgeoisie."

He says, sure we're for self-determination, but that mostly as a way of trying to win workers away from nationalism, which is “always bourgeois.” And here he means the nationalism of the subjugated nation, for the nationalism of the subjugating nation for him does not exist.

What does exist is merely a “policy of national oppression,” which passes over into “a ‘system’ of inciting nations against each other, to a ‘system’ of massacres and pogroms.”

And he adds, “‘Divide and rule’ – such is the purpose of the policy of incitement.”

Thus his political prescription.

Noting that the 1905 Revolution and its temporary democratic conquests had awakened to political life the nations and nationalities oppressed by Tsarism, Stalin counterposes the class struggle of workers against bosses to the struggle for national liberation of these oppressed peoples.

Fighting ‘a wave of nationalism’

“The wave of nationalism swept onwards with increasing force, threatening to engulf the mass of the workers. And the more the movement for emancipation declined, the more plentifully nationalism pushed forth its blossoms.

“At this difficult time Social-Democracy had a high mission – to resist nationalism and to protect the masses from the general ‘epidemic.’ For Social-Democracy, and Social-Democracy alone, could do this, by countering nationalism with the tried weapon of internationalism, with the unity and indivisibility of the class struggle.”

To translate it to American terms, racism is a trick the bosses use to divide the workers: the strategic axis of a revolutionary policy is “Black and White, Unite and Fight!”

But the truth is that much more than “divide and rule,” was involved, and the policy was and remains inciting oppressor nations against oppressed nations. The tsarists weren't inciting Jewish pogroms against Russians. And by this way of formulating the question, “inciting nations against each other” what he is doing is putting an equals sign between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed.

Stalin's pamphlet is completely blind to the nationalism of the oppressor. Consider this passage: “But the unity of a nation diminishes not only as a result of migration. It diminishes also from internal causes, owing to the growing acuteness of the class struggle.

“In the early stages of capitalism one can still speak of a ‘common culture’ of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. But as large-scale industry develops and the class struggle becomes more and more acute, this ‘common culture’ begins to melt away. One cannot seriously speak of the ‘common culture’ of a nation when employers and workers of one and the same nation cease to understand each other. What ‘common destiny’ can there be when the bourgeoisie thirsts for war, and the proletariat declares ‘war on war’?”

August 1914

Stalin's article is dated January 1913. In August, 1914, it was seen that all his claims that there was no "common culture" in the already developed, capitalist (in reality imperialist) nations between the working class and ruling class were false.

European social democracy's leaders, with a few, very few, honorable exceptions, rallied each to the defense of “their own” fatherland. There was no “war on war” but rather abject capitulation to the bourgeois nationalism of the imperialist powers, which Stalin never even mentions.

Why was Stalin unable to see it? Because at that time neither he nor the rest of the Bolsheviks understood imperialism, whose central characteristic is the division of the world between a handful of exploiting, oppressor nations and a big majority of exploited and oppressed nations, colonies, and peoples.

For Stalin, “national oppression” was mainly a policy deployed to divide the working class. Just as he did not see the nationalism of the oppressor he also didn't see the privileges of the oppressor nation, nor the super-exploitation of the oppressed.

How mistaken Stalin was is shown by his own summary of his political approach:

“The fate of a national movement, which is essentially a bourgeois movement, is naturally bound up with the fate of the bourgeoisie. The final disappearance of a national movement is possible only with the downfall of the bourgeoisie. Only under the reign of socialism can peace be fully established.

“But even within the framework of capitalism it is possible to reduce the national struggle to a minimum, to undermine it at the root, to render it as harmless as possible to the proletariat. This is borne out, for example, by Switzerland and America. It requires that the country should be democratized and the nations be given the opportunity of free development.”

What does this say? That Stalin and his friends didn't get it. They had absolutely no clue!

No greater proof of it can there be than that “America,” that blood-drenched white-supremacist European crime against humanity constituted as a colonial settler regime based on stealing half of Mexico, on genocide against the Indians, on the enslavement and lynching of Blacks, and on the imperialist domination of the rest of the hemisphere is held up as an example of … national harmony! Of rendering the national question “harmless.”

As if!

Fortunately when the cluetrain made its stop in August of 1914, Lenin did take delivery. All this utopian poppycock about reducing the national struggle to a minimum, undermining it at the root, rendering it harmless – which in practice become really just so many ways of telling oppressed people not to struggle as a people against “my” imperialism --  were rejected by Lenin.

Support to national movements

The policy of trying to win the workers of oppressed nations away from the national movements was replaced by a policy of wholehearted, unconditional support to the national revolutionary movements of oppressed peoples against imperialism, which was now seen clearly, not as a divide-and-rule “policy,” but as a new stage of capitalism.

In that framework, the workers of the oppressed nations had to be organized to vie with the bourgeoisie for leadership of the national movements; and the workers of the oppressor nations had to be trained in their internationalist duty to aid the colonial movement against “their own” nation.

Contrast Stalin’s –- and the Bolsheviks’ -- 1913 approach with that of Lenin in 1920, at the Second Congress of the Comintern, presenting his “Theses on the National and Colonial Question” (which, be it said in passing, recognized the question of “Negroes in America” as a national question, like the Irish question.)

“What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our Theses? It is the difference between the oppressed and the oppressor nations. We emphasise this difference – in contrast to the Second International and bourgeois democracy....

“Imperialism is characterised by the fact that the whole world is now divided into a large number of oppressed nations and a very small number of oppressor nations that are enormously rich and strong in the military sense.... This idea of the difference between nations, their division into the oppressed and the oppressors runs through all the Theses....”

“I would like to emphasise the question of the bourgeois-democratic movement in the backward countries.... We debated whether it is correct in principle and theoretically to declare that the Communist International and the Communist Parties have a duty to support the bourgeois-democratic movements in the backward countries, and the outcome of this discussion was that we came to the unanimous decision to talk not about the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ movement but only about the national-revolutionary movement.

“There can be no doubt of the fact that any nationalist movement can only be a bourgeois-democratic movement, because the great mass of the population of the backward countries consists of the peasantry, which is the representative of bourgeois capitalist relations.... But objections were raised that, if we say ‘bourgeois-democratic’, we lose the distinction between the reformist and revolutionary movement which has become quite clear in the backward countries and the colonies recently.... [W]e believed that the only correct thing would be to take this difference into consideration and to replace the words ‘bourgeois-democratic’ almost everywhere with the expression ‘national-revolutionary.”

Returning to Marx and Engels

I want to add one more thing, which is that the politics outlined in the Stalin pamphlet were no just thrown completely overboard by the Bolsheviks during and after World War I. Those prewar politics were also not the politics of Marx and Engels. Quite the contrary.

For example, Stalin denounces "the segregation of the workers according to nationality" in the working-class movement.

But in 1872, when the Irish workers within England were called to task before the General Council of the First International for forming separate Irish branches, and a motion was put that this violated the rules of the International, and refusing to submit to the British Federal Council, Engels rose to their defense.

He based his political approach on what Lenin also eventually come to see as central question, the difference between the nationalism of the oppressed and the nationalism of the oppressor, and defended the former while denouncing the latter.

Engels on ‘true internationalism’

“Citizen Engels said the real purpose of the motion, stripped of all hypocrisy, was to bring the Irish sections into subjection to the British Federal Council [of the International], a thing to which the Irish sections would never consent, and which the Council had neither the right nor the power to impose upon them...

“The Irish formed a distinct nationality of their own, and the fact that [they] used the English language could not deprive them of their rights... Citizen Hales had spoken of the relations of England and Ireland being of the most idyllic nature... but the case was quite different. There was the fact of seven centuries of English conquest and oppression of Ireland, and so long as that oppression existed, it would be an insult to Irish working men to ask them to submit to a British Federal Council.

“[The motion] was asking the conquered people to forget their nationality and submit to their conquerors. It was not Internationalism, but simply prating submission. If the promoters of the motion were so brimful of the truly international spirit, let them prove it by removing the seat of the British Federal Council to Dublin and submit to a Council of Irishmen.

“In a case like that of the Irish, true Internationalism must necessarily be based upon a distinct national organization, and they were under the necessity to state in... their rules that their first and most pressing duty as Irishmen was to establish their own national independence....”

One more thought.

In defining “nation” or talking about the nationalism of the oppressed, yes, even 100 years ago and certainly today, any definition that doesn't place the material reality of imperialism and imperialist domination, oppression and exploitation at the center of it has got to be wrong.

--José G. Pérez

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¹Some people make a distinction between a “nation” –a fully formed nation -- and “nationalities” as well as “national minorities.” Thus a “nationality” is a nationlike community of people but that lacks some of the characteristics of a fully formed nation; a “national minority” is a fragment of a nation’s population outside the “national” territory.

These are useful distinctions, but I mostly do not employ them in this article as they are not relevant to what I am addressing, which is our overall political approach and stance towards oppressed peoples (whether you would consider a given instance a fully formed “nation,” a “nationality” or “national minority.”)

PA congressional contest: it wasn't about 'moderation' but about class

The usual TV talking heads and dead-tree scribblers from the liberal commentariat are all bloviating about the just-concluded contest to represent Pennsylvania's 18th Congressional District, which Hillary Clinton had managed to lose by 20 points to Donald Trump.

Lamb: played the class card, not the 'moderate' scam

The claim is that Conor Lamb's victory shows that to win in the fall, Democrats need to run militarized, prosecutorial tariff-supporting, gun-toting, right-to-lifers, Republicans lite.

"Lamb, 33, a handsome (and clean-shaven) military veteran, was straight from central casting and had no extensive political record to contradict stances so moderate and squishy that he could be mistaken, well, for a Republican," said columnist Frank Bruni in the New York Times.

So you'll be surprised to learn that as far as I can determine from Conor Lamb's campaign material on YouTube and the Internet, the axis of his campaign was not Washington litmus-test, left-right issues but class. As in working class.

What tipped me off that the Wall Street media was perhaps being less than 100% honest was listening to Lamb's election-night victory speech on MSNBC, which Brian Williams  interrupted after a couple of minutes.

Of course, it must have been a mere coincidence that Lamb had just begun talking about defending Social Security and Medicare. Because the broken news that Brian Williams delivered was that he and the rest of the press had no clue as to who had won the election. And what could possibly outweigh the urgency of the media's own cluelessness?

But it made me suspicious because I worked for 21 years at CNN and know Brian Williams was ordered to interrupt by the line producer talking in his ear from the control room, and the line producer was ordered to do so by higher-ups outside the control room.

The interruption purportedly was to make clear NBC News had not "called" the race for Lamb even though he had been introduced as congressman-elect from the podium. But if the anchor or the producer had thought it necessary, that would have come right after the intro, during the applause, or if that chance was missed, once Lamb finished speaking, not 2 minutes and twenty seconds into his speech when he'd just gotten to the meat. Nobody --not even Brian Williams-- has such bad news judgment.

So I searched for an uncensored version of Lamb's speech.

What does Lamb say he is for, how does he identify?

1) He is for Social Security and Medicare.
2) He is against dark corporate PAC money and did not have to take any thanks to some 86,000 (mostly) small donations.
3) He is proud to have been supported by, and to support, the union movement. His victory is part of the unions regaining their rightful place and influence.
4) He will work to make jobs and pensions secure.
5) He learned in the marines: "leave no one behind."
6) He inherited being an FDR democrat from his grandfather.

Here's another example of the same censorship, from Amber Phillips on the WaPo's political blog "The Fix."

Conor Lamb launched an ad over the weekend that makes him sound more like a Republican than a Democrat. He is campaigning on the fact that he won't support House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for House speaker if Democrats win back the House in November. 

“My opponent wants you to believe the biggest issue in this campaign is Nancy Pelosi,” Lamb said in the ad. “It's all a big lie. I've already said on the front page of the newspaper that I don't support Nancy Pelosi.” 

Even though Lamb has said he won't support Pelosi, so powerful are Republicans' Pelosi attacks that he felt he needed to shout about it in this ad.

Phillips stopped there, so, can we can assume that ad keeps on attacking Pelosi? Well, here's how Lamb continued:

The real issues are the ones that affect your lives. I'll protect Medicare and Social Security. My opponent would cut them. I'll protect health care and education. My opponent won't. My opponent will work for the special interests that are spending millions to elect him [over a newspaper clipping of 1.5 million in PAC money backing the Republican] .

The ad ends, "I'll work for you."

I leave aside that not being a Pelosi fan boy hardly makes you a Trump acolyte.

The plain fact is that Lamb centered his campaign on class identity.

Not on Pelosi and certainly not on abortion, guns or tariffs, the issues that the columnists and talking heads insist were key to establishing his "moderate" acceptability to the supposedly die-hard Trumpeteer voters of the district.

As for those issues, during his campaign he waffled.

On abortion: as a Catholic he is personally against but doesn't think the government should ban it.

On guns: He is for common sense gun control but against taking people's guns away. And likes to shoot.

On Trump's tariffs, this article claims both Lamb and his opponent supported them, but all it has are just garden variety declarations in support of protecting jobs and fair trade.

The more you look the plainer his campaign strategy becomes. Subtle it ain't.

His first TV ad says he went to a Catholic High School, college, was a marine (and "still loves to shoot," a safe way of not saying anything about gun control), was a prosecutor and now he's running for Congress.

Why?

"To fight for jobs, health care and social security." And "he's the only candidate that's refused corporate PAC money."

As for his much-touted opposition to Nancy Pelosi, the ad says he is also "the only candidate who says Democrats and Republicans need new leaders in Congress."

That may sound like a capitulation to gain Republican anti-Pelosi voters, but much more plausible is the suggestion that he wants to establish himself as independent from the Clinton party establishment. You know, like that Bernie guy.

And he attacked another congressional leader by name: House Speaker Paul Ryan. It is in a single-issue ad which starts "Paul Ryan will use term 'entitlement reforms' to talk about Social Security and Medicare as if it is undeserved or some form of welfare. But it's not any of those things. People paid for it." And it is Lamb himself that is speaking, not some off-camera voice of God.

My argument is not that Lamb is trustworthy, a working-class hero, Eugene V. Debs reborn or even a Sanders-wing Democrat.

It is simply that he did not run and he did not win by identifying as a "moderate" or "blue dog" Democrat, but as a working class Democrat.

The axis of Conor Lamb's campaign was class, which is at right angles to the left-right political spectrum that is the only thing the capitalist media understands or is willing to talk about.

--José G. Pérez

One more iteration of "X" is ruining America and poisoning its youth

One advantage of being on Medicare but not yet senile is that you're old enough to remember previous iterations of "whatever" -- in other words, the moral panic that the media and the politicians are pushing this week.

Today's bette noir is social media in general and Facebook in particular. Although that company is trying to clamp down, still many people are writing whatever they want on Facebook,undermining the company's efforts to help the government tell us what to think. Now, I know a lot of you are saying, "first amendment" but that's just wrong. The Constitution guarantees freedom of SPEECH, not freedom of WRITING (nor does freedom of the press cover it, since that belongs only to those who own one). So thus we have Marc Benioff, a tech company CEO, who told the World Economic Forum in Davos that Social networks would be regulated “exactly the same way that you regulated the cigarette industry.” “I think that, for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that product designers are working to make those products more addictive, and we need to rein that back as much as possible,” he added. You know, I heard the same thing about long hair on boys and AM radio on NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report in 1964 after the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. Later I discovered that the NBC news hacks had plagiarized old stories about Elvis Presley's hip swaying and Chuck Berry's guitar playing and just changed a few names. And over the years we've had both media (television, 8-track tapes) and content (folk music, hip hop) blamed for juvenile addiction. Along, of course, with the perennial triumvirate, sex and drugs and rock and roll. [And the utterly American bat-shit crazy collective hysterias, like the child care centers that engaged in Satanic ritual abuse that sacrificed children to drink their blood, etc., in the 1980s and1990s. [And, yes, it happened and, yes, people were accused, tried found guilty and sentenced. The main difference with the Salem witch trials of the 1690s being that after three centuries, we did not hang people for witchcraft, just sentenced them to prison until they died of their own accord.] So who is this Benioff character that is channeling network news anchors from half a century ago? The boss of Salesforce, which peddles "customer relations management", socalled "solutions." Which is why, I suspect, he's thinks Facebook is so dangerous -- because instead of listening to whatever his outfit is putting out on behalf of its client, we might ask our friends about some product. In other words, the modern incarnation of the noble race of door-to-door fuller brush salesmen. And its not just Benioff. "A string of Silicon Valley heads have spoken out in recent months about their fear that social media could be more psychologically damaging than anyone expected," reports the Guardian. You know, just like Elvis's hips and that pinko commie plot, Sesame Street. This would be hysterically funny except that in a country so farkled as to have Donald Trump become president after he lost by three million votes, anything is not just possible, but actually happens. All the time.

--José G. Pérez

Ping-Pong diplomacy revisited: The two Koreas Olympic love-fest

The lightning negotiations and cooperation between North and South Korea for the Olympics is being compared to the emergence of a bromance between President Nixon and Chairman Mao in  1971, almost a half-century ago.

Ping-pong diplomats: Zhuang Zedong and Glenn Cowan

In the midst of the Vietnam War which had dominated international relations and domestic politics for years, a chance encounter between Zhuang Zedong and Glenn Cowan, two participants in a table tennis tournament in Japan, and the resulting friendly exchanges between the two stars, one an American, the other Chinese, led to the Chinese to inviting the American team  to come on over and stage a few exhibition matches.

After 22 years of American refusal to recognize or even say "hello" to the government of China the contact over a few ping-pong games led to an official Nixon state state visit a few months later.

China's motive --to break its isolation-- was obvious, but how could this be with a rabid anticommunist like Nixon in the White House?

Well, it turned out that Nixon was not the character he'd been portraying in the soap opera of American electoral politics. But mostly, it was about the American defeat in Vietnam.

Defeat? Yes, defeat. War is the continuation of politics by other means. And the United States had been  politically defeated despite its overwhelming economic and military superiority.

Ping-pong diplomacy broke out in April of 1971, and here's how Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., one of the most highly regarded American military historians, described the situation in Vietnam in the Armed Forces Journal in June of 1971:

The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having _refused_ combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.... 

"Frag incidents" or just "fragging" is current soldier slang in Vietnam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs....

Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.

In one such division -- the morale plagued Americal -- fraggings during 1971 have been authoritatively estimated to be running about one a week.

Remember, this is a full-bird colonel, one step below a general, describing in real time the state of U.S. forces in the middle of a shooting war. Implicit in this description was not just defeat, but the danger of a mass rebellion or mutiny by troops in Vietnam and perhaps all over the world.

Basically, ping-pong diplomacy was about the Chinese taking advantage of the desperate situation of the United States in Vietnam to break Washington's economic, diplomatic and political blockade against them.

Russia also took advantage of this situation, through detente and deals to reduce military spending on things like nuclear bombs and ICBMs.

What both Moscow and Beijing could offer was to pressure North Vietnam to accept some sort of peace deal that Nixon could use to pacify antiwar public opinion and (hopefully) avoid an openly catastrophic defeat in a shooting war. Of course, little they cared that, as Che Guevara had explained, from a revolutionary perspective, Vietnam's fight was more important right then than either country's advancement of their economic and diplomatic goals, even if quite legitimate in and of themselves.

When politicians, gasbags and scribblers recall 1970s ping-pong diplomacy as the model for the rapidly escalating rapprochement between North and South, there's more than surface amity.

The United States has put itself in a no-win situation in the Korean peninsula. Since the end of World War II Washington has relied on its military superiority. Trump thought he could use bluff and bluster to score another "win" (I don't believe he cares about the outcome beyond "proving" the incompetence --or worse-- of previous administrations). He thought with America's "military might" he would succeed.

He is acting the same way he did in business, where it led  his projects to multiple bankruptcies, forcing him eventually to become a reality TV star and "luxury brand" to (mostly foreign) suckers. Another Kardashian, but without the name or looks.

On the other hand Kim Jong-un played Trump like a violin in the hands of a concertmaster. He understood that Trump's posturing, bluffing and bluster would disrupt the united front against North Korea, and took advantage of it with a very public mad dash to obtain a nuclear deterrent, or at least a credible appearance of having one.

He understood there was nothing Trump could do about it without at least seeming to put South Korea and Japan on the brink of annihilation, as well as possibly provoking a response from China or Russia, both of which have land  borders with North Korea.

And Kim had an ace up his sleeve: the victory in South Korean elections of a party that has promoted better relations and mutual economic entanglement with the North. Not because this party is composed of angels, but its leaders reckon that given the South's overwhelming economic superiority, it had everything to gain by bringing North Korea under its wing and reducing American influence over the peninsula..

Having established --or at least convinced everyone-- of his capacity for nuclear retaliation, Kim now plays the "can't we all just get along card" with exquisite precision: on the eve of the Olympics and with a moving gesture --Koreans of the North and South marching together under the same banner-- that will bring a tear to the eye of everyone save the most hardened cynic.

--José G. Pérez

Late Season's Greetings: No Merry Christmas, no Happy New Year

[I wrote this on December 25. I didn't post it then, but after shithole and Hawaii ... ]

There was no Christmas in my house this year: nor in my heart.

I've spent hours and hours meditating on how I felt thirty years ago, and how I feel today.

Because then I was on the verge of despair. As I am today.

As 1987 came to a close, I was still in Managua, absorbing the collapse of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. Few on the left then even saw it, but somehow, pretty much as long as I'd been in Nicaragua I'd not been able to close my eyes to countless problems even though I trusted --more than that, I was convinced as a matter of religious faith-- that no matter how battered and bloodied, the Revolution would win through.

But by the end of 1987, I'd finally admitted to myself that it wasn't true. The essence of a people's revolution from below [not "regime change" from above] is the organized movement of masses of regular people trying to take control of society to forge a better future. In Nicaragua, by the end of 1987, that movement was dead. The militias, unions, associations of farmers and women and students were all hollowed-out shells rapidly being transformed into nests of bureaucratic privilege. I was losing my religion,.

After the truth became undeniable a couple of years later, many on the left blamed the Sandinistas. I did not. The poorest country on America mainland with an adult population about 1% that of the United States was unable to withstand Washington's onslaught, especially after the Soviets stabbed them in the back, refusing to provide the promised planes and choppers that the Sandinistas needed to fight the contras, and Western Europe provided only token, symbolic help.

The Nicaraguan revolution was drowned in the blood of the war, asphyxiated by the economic crisis it produced. But worse, its heart was ripped out by the way it was condemned to solitude, left twisting in the wind. There were many things that the Sandinistas did that people considered mistaken and debilitating. And there was an overriding question of the growing indications of the demoralization of the revolution's leadership, the FSLN.

And I don't mean just or mainly fighting spirit, although there was that too. I mean a loss of integrity and honesty, the taking of privileges that, minuscule as they may have seemed, simply devastated the trust of the population in the Sandinista Front given the desperate economic situation most people faced.

I left Nicaragua having made two interconnected decisions: that I would abandon politics and journalism.  I did then, at least for a little while but I went back to both, thinking the Cold War is over, we are living in a new world.

What has that to do with today?

The feeling of dread, that what we feared might come to pass has already become inevitable, that the ghost of Christmas future is here not to give us warning and a chance of redemption, but to mock our stupidity, especially the idea that we are "the resistance."

It's been more than a year since Trump achieved a majority in the slaveocracy's electoral college even though he lost the election by three million votes.

It is time to stop pretending that he doesn't know what he is doing, that he is alienating "our" allies or that he isn't accomplishing much on account of Congress.

It may all be an act or he may quite sincerely be delusional and even psychopathic. But you are what you pretend to be.

He acts as if he actually believes the United States is in a war of all against all, and "we" have been betrayed by "our" leaders who were trying to get along with many other countries instead of insulting them, threatening them militarily and confronting them economically.

I don't think there's a concept in current political discourse more wrong headed than that Trump is just playing to his base, throwing them a little red meat, protecting his narrow slice of the electorate and similar drivel.

What Trump is doing is to cohere a mass movement that is unconditionally loyal to him. He is doing so by constantly projecting himself as the sole embodiment of "America First," and saying the problems "regular" Americans face are due to betrayal, to treason.

He is not running for re-election, he is campaigning to become America's Putin -- actually, worse.

--José G. Pérez