“Pusimos la bomba – ¿y qué?” [“We Planted the Bomb – So What?”]

Alicia Herrera, 3rd Edition (Havana: Editorial Política, 2001) [1st Edition, Venezuela 1981]

A recent passenger on a Cubana airlines flight from Mexico to Havana was pleasantly surprised when she began her onboard meal. It wasn’t just the tasty food and strong, sweet Cuban coffee she was served, but the fact that the meal included real metal silverware: fork, spoon and knife. Since 9/11/2001 most airlines had replaced such silverware with its less threatening plastic counterparts.

But, if other airlines had cause to feel nervous, this airline had a special vulnerability. Just a few days earlier, an immigration judge in El Paso, Texas had refused to deport Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born anti-Castro exile with Venezuelan citizenship, long ties to the CIA, and an even longer list of terrorist bombings and assassinations under his belt. It appeared the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Department was giving a green light to terrorists as long as they were taking aim at Bush’s enemies. And Posada’s greatest claim to fame in the world of terror was his part in orchestrating the mid-flight bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455, killing all aboard. The date was October 6, 1976. That act of terrorism – not September 11, 2001 – was the first such use of a passenger plane as a political target.

1976 was a particularly bloody year in this hemisphere: “dirty wars,” death squads, disappearances, and Operation Condor were raging throughout Latin America. Pinochet's Junta and its secret police, DINA, ruled in Chile. In Venezuela the repressive agency was called DISIP and was directed by Joaquín Chaffardet – a figure who will come back to haunt us. DISIP’s assistant director was Luis Posada Carriles, who had left it (with Chaffardet as his silent partner) to form a private “security agency” in Caracas the year before. In September 1976, former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, and his associate Ronnie Karpen Moffitt, were assassinated by a car-bomb on Washington DC's "Embassy Row". Two weeks later, minutes after making a stop in Barbados, the Havana-bound Cubana flight 455 was blown from the air. The hands, minds and wallets that set off this chain of events were more often than not the same.

George H.W. Bush, father of the current US president, was director of the CIA that year. He was vice-president when Posada (by then having escaped from a Venezuelan prison while on trial for the plane bombing) went to work for Oliver North’s Contra supply network, and was the person North reported to when one of the small Cessnas illegally transporting guns to the Contras was shot down over Nicaragua. And he was President when Orlando Bosch, the reputed co-mastermind of the Cubana bombing, sneaked back into the United States. Over the objections of the Immigration, Justice and State Departments, President Bush allowed his former operative to remain in Miami – where later a street was named after him and he sat on the platform at fundraising dinners for the junior Bush.

Meanwhile, the two terrorist ringleaders continued their violent attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro. Posada, remaining in the shadows outside the US (except for occasional clandestine visits to Miami), was the more outspoken in claiming credit for his deeds. In 1998 he boasted to two New York Times reporters that he had organized a string of bombings in Cuban tourist hotels that had injured at least a dozen and killed a young Italian-Canadian visitor. Posada told the Times he lost no sleep over that. The dead man had just been “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

In 2000, Posada and three of his gang were arrested in Panama during a Latin American summit meeting, charged with plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro by blowing up a public auditorium where Castro was to speak before an audience of some 1,500. After a lot of pressure from Miami and Washington, they were ultimately convicted only of "endangering public safety" because of their possession of large quantities of explosives."¹Notes 1. One of the three terrorists picked up with Posada was Guillermo Novo, a long-time associate of Bosch and Posada, who earlier had been convicted of participating in the Letelier assassination. After all four were pardoned by outgoing Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso (under further pressure from Florida’s Cuban-American Congressmen), the three returned to a hero’s welcome in Miami. Posada, for his part, hid out in Honduras until things cooled down, and then sneaked in later, unannounced.

The blowing up of the Cubana airline had been buried in the American media consciousness until the spring of 2005, when it was brought to life by Posada’s illegal re-entry into the US, which was denounced by the Cuban government and others for over a month while the Bush administration pretended they didn’t know he was here. Finally, after the notorious terrorist held a press conference in a clandestine location in Miami, and numerous newspapers began editorializing about Bush’s double standard on terrorism, Homeland Security was forcedto arrest him. Venezuela immediately sought his extradition under a 32-year-old extradition treaty with the US, but the Bush administration has ignored that request. Their hostility toward the Chávez government is so great that they ultimately decided to not even deport Posada – although he admittedly doesn’t qualify for political asylum due to his violent past – allowing him to take shelter under the pretext that he would be “tortured” if he were returned to Venezuela to face trial. The basis for this decision was the lone, uncontested testimony of none other than Joaquín Chaffardet, Posada’s old friend, collaborator and former boss at DISIP. That fact was never brought out by the Homeland Security prosecutor, who didn’t even bother to cross-examine Chaffardet.

Posada’s re-entry, along with the timely release by the National Security Archives of tell-tale documents regarding the Cuban exiles, and the resulting media attention on their violent past, gives special relevance to this book by Venezuelan journalist Alicia Herrera. In its original 1981 publication, the book might have been dismissed as an interesting but not necessarily convincing thriller. Now, virtually everything Herrera wrote has been corroborated by declassified FBI and CIA documents. The book will also appear soon in an updated English edition.

The seriousness of this journalistic exposé isn’t at first apparent. It begins like a typical suspense novel, with the fictional reconstruction of the events leading up to, and immediately after, the 1976 explosion that took the lives of 73 innocent passengers. With no names, but with physical descriptions easily recognized later in the book, we see and hear Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, and two employees at Posada’s “security agency,” Hernán Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, make plans and carry out the mass murder. We hear a cryptic, bone-chilling telephone message confirming the success of the mission: “A bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all perished.”

The reader knows the author wasn’t with the plotters and bombers in that restaurant, in their cars, on board the plane, and later in the hotel to which the bombers fled. Herrera didn’t overhear the phone conversations she describes word for word. So the reader’s mind relaxes, not having to deal with this as a real-life horror story in which crew-members and passengers – most of whom were Guyanese students and young Cuban athletes – were plunged screaming to their deaths at sea in a burning airplane cabin. This all seems at first like a Stephen King novel.

But by the next chapter, one gets a sense that Alicia Herrera is writing about real people and real events. The “historical fiction” is dropped. We see the Venezuelan journalist walking into the military prison where her former colleague, photographer Freddy Lugo, is being held – mistakenly, she believes – on charges of being involved with the bombing of the plane. She finds him in a suite of cells complete with kitchen and patio along with his “cellmate” – Cuban exile leader Orlando Bosch.

And so begins the delicate, hesitant relationship between Alicia Herrera, who was editing a women’s magazine at the time, and some of the hemisphere’s most notorious anti-Castro terrorists, their families, friends, and supporters. The book’s real-life characters include both the anti-Castro exile community in Caracas and some key members of the Venezuelan government of that time – all the way up to the presidency.

It would be an understatement to say that the two men “confessed” to Herrera. Bragged would be a better word. Increasingly, as she gained their confidence, Lugo admitted that he had in fact placed the bomb at the behest of Posada and Bosch, along with Ricardo Hernán. Bosch, Posada and their wives boasted of their success in bombing the airliner and their plans to continue their terrorist campaign against Revolutionary Cuba. Herrera served (we can only assume as a means to get closer to them) as a conduit for some of their fundraising activities among right-wing Cuban exile supporters, by selling paintings the men did in prison as a cover for the money wealthy exiles poured in to finance their terrorist activities.

Eventually, Alicia Herrera’s initial doubts that her mild-mannered photographer friend could have been one of the men who physically placed the bomb on Cubana Flight 455 dissipated, and she decided to abandon her work at the women’s magazine and return to investigative journalism. Although she doesn’t explain this in “Pusimos la bomba…” (an unfortunate omission), we know from later interviews that she began to make mental notes of every conversation, and rushed to write them down as soon as she left the prison each day. She began to keep notes on her social encounters with the wives of Bosch and Posada, with whom she developed an ostensible friendship.

Conversations at the beach, at lunch, or out shopping with the wives revealed their pride, and even delight, in their husbands’ horrendous acts, which they clearly viewed as heroic. The women exposed the complicity of the greater Cuban exile community in Venezuela. Their families’ lifestyles and the men’s terrorist actions were fully supported by donations to the “cause” (only sometimes disguised as purchases of landscape paintings). Interestingly, the FBI and CIA documents released under the Freedom of Information Act during the last years of the Clinton Administration corroborate in grisly detail the financial backing these men received. One CIA memo reports a $1000-a-plate fundraising dinner presided over by Orlando Bosch at which he stated: "Now that our organization has come out of the Letelier job looking good, we are going to try something else.” Several days later, another US government memo reports, Posada boasted that "we are going to hit a Cuban airplane" and "Orlando has the details."

Nothing was done about it. No one warned Cuba that one of their civilian passenger planes was about to be attacked, although the US government was aware of these plans all along. Another FBI document described a secret meeting that had been held on June 11, 1976 in Santo Domingo, where a Cuban “exile umbrella organization” was created, run by Bosch and Posada, named CORU (Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations). The informant’s report said that a series of bombing attacks were planned at that meeting, including the bombing of a Cubana airliner. Another of the released memos relates in great detail how Orlando Bosch was met by Luis Posada and other anti-Castro exiles in Caracas on September 8, 1976. There a deal was struck with Venezuelan authorities about the kind of activities the Cubans could organize with their support or acquiescence – as long as they didn’t take place on Venezuelan soil. The Letelier assassination in DC occurred less than two weeks later; the Cubana airlines bombing, the following month.

Herrera’s book is all the more powerful because in a simple, conversational style, she is telling us from her own experience what the documents released decades later make clear – that the Venezuelan government of that time was complicit in the terrorist activities of the Cuban exiles and that the US government at the very least knew of the plans to blow up a Cuban passenger plane.

 A Venezuelan government document Herrera received after the publication of the first edition of her book also reports in detail the behind-the-scene efforts in Caracas to obtain the early release of Bosch and Posada from prison.Those efforts are referred to regularly by the real-life characters in Herrera’s book – showing Bosch’s patient confidence, Lugo’s nervous concern, and Posada and Hernán’s impatience and doubt about the much-promised government actions to assure their aquittal.

The book recounts numerous monologues by Orlando Bosch boasting of his destructive and sometimes deadly counterrevolutionary activities as if he were reminiscing about high school football. He actually enjoys the sound of shattering glass, the sight of crumbling walls – he’s thrilled by them. His obvious comfort in telling his story to a reporter whom he had just come to know underlines his conviction that his audience would share his view – and his confidence that he was in no danger of being punished for his actions.   Herrera has said she did not come forward with her testimony before 1981 because she thought that, despite Bosch’s confidence, there was ample evidence of their guilt. She believed that the Venezuelan judicial system would certainly bring the four murderers to justice. She was clearly surprised that they were acquitted of the crime. But this acquittal – as she fails to make sufficiently clear – referred only to the first trial, which was held in right-wing military courts.

The original civilian judge assigned the case had tossed it like a hot potato to the military tribunals after receiving numerous threats. Later, a military judge was the object of an assassination attempt which took the lives of his son and driver. We don’t know from the book, but we do from updated reports focusing on Posada Carriles, that the military “acquittal” was ruled null and void and that the retrial of all four was referred to a civilian court.

By this time, the Venezuelan government was caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they couldn’t just let terrorists guilty of bombing a passenger plane go unpunished. On the other hand, if they pushed too hard, Posada and Bosch might just reveal that high-level government officials – some say all the way up to President Carlos Andrés Pérez² – had condoned and given them the green light to carry out such actions so long as they weren’t done in a way that would implicate the Venezuelan government. (Both Venezuelan and FBI-CIA documents obtained since then explicitly confirm the repeated assertions by Bosch and others who spoke to Herrera that DISIP and members of Carlos Andres Pérez’s staff were working behind the scenes to free them.) Ultimately, the government decided to convict the two men hired to do the job by Posada and Bosch, and let the more dangerous ringleaders go free.

The two Venezuelans who placed the bomb were convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. The documents that would have convicted Bosch and Posada had by this time mysteriously disappeared from police custody or were ruled inadmissible. (For instance, the police report of the blurted confessions by Lugo and Hernán to the Trinidad police, in which they stated they had been hired by Posada and Bosch, was thrown out because it was written in English!) But the nervous Posada, not trusting their friends in the Venezuelan hierarchy to come through for them, bribed his way out of prison before the trial was over. He is thus a fugitive from justice in Venezuela, on the Interpol’s “watch list” – something that did not stop the US government from employing him in Oliver North’s Contra supply network some months after his escape in 1985.

None of this is included in the earlier version of the book, which is strictly a memoir of Herrera’s interactions with the culprits and their families, with little of the background or context that is available today in FBI and CIA documents. But Herrera’s revelations, based on what is now known from the NSA-released CIA and FBI memos, as well as Venezuelan government documents that have since been discovered, strike home more often than not, and show us a part of history that many political figures of the 70s would rather have kept hidden.

What the newest Spanish edition gives us are the recently published documents corroborating practically everything in the first edition. These declassified documents support the guilt of the four and expose the complicity of the Venezuelan government. They demonstrate that, at the very least, the US government was aware of the involvement of Bosch, Posada, and the Miami-based CORU organization in the plans to blow up a Cuban airliner.

If the forthcoming English version of this book had come out sooner, there might have been more outrage and broader involvement in the movement to bring Posada Carriles to justice. Homeland Security lawyers might have been forced to cross-examine the only witness making the claim that Posada would be tortured if returned to Venezuela – the former DISIP head, Posada’s friend, colleague and co- conspirator, Joaquín Chaffardet. By the time this goes to print, Posada may well be walking the streets of Miami with his comrade-in-arms, Orlando Bosch. He may even get a street named after him.

There is still the potential that the information could prove useful in freeing the five Cuban security agents who were sentenced to up to two life terms for infiltrating the anti-Castro terrorist organizations in Miami. The threats posed to Cubans by these Miami-based terrorist groups fully justify the actions of the “Cuban Five” as necessary to protect the Cuban people. Ultimately, the anti-Castro terrorist Posada could be the spark leading to the acquittal of these five men (whose original convictions were overturned by the appellate court in 2005).

 

2. In July 2005, in an interview with the newspaper El Nacional, Pérez, now in opposition to the government of President Hugo Chávez, called for Chávez’s removal by violence. Speaking from Miami, Pérez denied being involved in a plot to assassinate Chávez, but said Chávez "must die like a dog, because he deserves it" <www.venezuealanalysis.com>. (In February 1989, as president, Pérez had sent the military into the country's streets to crack down on popular riots against the government's neoliberal "reforms." Estimates of how many people died during the crackdown range from 400 to 1000, but the government obstructed investigations into the precise number of deaths.)

Victor Grossman (Stephen Wechsler), Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) reviewed by Gerald Meyer.

Crossing the River adds a previously missing voice to the rather large literature in English on the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—the perspective of an American Communist, Victor Grossman, who in 1952, while serving in the United States Army, defected there and to this day continues to call it his home. While telling a picaresque tale of an individual Communist’s adjustment—and contribution—to this beleaguered outpost of socialism, he adds to our understanding of what has been lost by its demise and why the GDR and the rest of the socialist camp ultimately collapsed.             . Grossman, who was born in 1928 to Jewish American parents, had been raised in Free Acres, a small community in central New Jersey loosely fashioned on the principles of Henry George. Grossman gravitated to Free Acres’ Communist residents, which met with no opposition from his parents (especially his mother), who were sympathetic to that cause. Consequently, at the age of fourteen Victor joined the Young Communist League; and by seventeen he had joined the Communist Party.

As a Harvard undergraduate, Grossman and other members of his campus party club helped collect 100,000 signatures to place Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace on the Massachusetts ballot in 1948. Upon graduation in 1949, Grossman attended a series of special classes in Marxism-Leninism in New York City as preparation for work as a concealed Communist in an upstate New York factory. There he shared the insecurity, exhaustion, and indignities endured by American industrial workers and waited for an unspecified moment when he would be able to influence his co-workers to struggle for a more democratic and militant union. That time arrived when the union leadership in an appliance factory in Buffalo presented to the workers a contract offering an extremely paltry pay raise and recommended their approval. Grossman joined the more militant workers in demanding a better contract. He could do little more. His Party membership effectively precluded running for union office; the recently passed Taft-Hartley Act required a sworn affidavit from elected union officers that they were neither members of the Party nor of any other organization the government deemed affiliated with the Party. Noncompliance with this clause led to suspension of all National Labor Relations Board services, including the certification of a union’s collective bargaining certificate.           From his experiences working in factories and earlier at Harvard, Grossman documents one of the greatest strengths of the Party, that is, its central focus on African American liberation. At Harvard when an African American student had been denied admittance to a student pub, the Party club helped organize a nightly picket line. Grossman reports that the campaign attracted considerable publicity and ended in success. Upon arriving in upstate New York, Grossman joined leftist students at Syracuse University in the campaign organized by the Party-led Civil Rights Congress to free the “Trenton Six,” six Black men falsely charged with murder, who, in large measure because of these activities, were ultimately acquitted. At that time, Grossman met the Communist Party leader Mattie Timpken, an African American matriarch who lived with four generations of her family in a large house “sparsely furnished with cheap religious prints on the wall,” deep in the Buffalo ghetto. Nine of Mattie’s ten children had followed her into the Party, where they became a mainstay of its work in this large blue-collar city. Several of her children and their friends joined with the white “colonizers” to form a chapter of the Labor Youth League, which among other things conducted a campaign to integrate a day-liner that sailed from Buffalo. In this instance, their efforts led to arrests, the beating of one of the Timpkin’s sons, and no conclusive victory.           In addition to his trade union activities, in August 1949 Grossman traveled to Peekskill, New York, to help protect Paul Robeson’s concert from organized mob attacks and to participate in the Stockholm Peace petition drive. Both these efforts were largely abortive. Once the Korean War began, the range of political possibilities constantly contracted, and Grossman’s contact with the Party became increasingly limited. His Party activities came to a sudden halt when he was drafted into the Army and sent to West Germany.           In his second year in the Army, Grossman became fearful that the Army had likely discovered his Party affiliation. One day prior to an appearance before an investigator, he swam across the Danube River to the Soviet-administered zone of Austria. From there, he was removed to Bautzen a provincial town near East Germany’s Polish border, which was the center of the Sorbs, a Slavic-speaking minority, whose linguistic and other cultural rights were fostered by the socialist state.

In the GDR, Grossman initially worked in a lumberyard, where he unloaded wooden planks from trucks and ate lunches of potatoes and cheese. Grossman did not find this work worse than upstate New York factory jobs, where he had experienced physical discomfort and potential danger to life and limb. He reports that there was much less friction between workers and supervisors, as well as a greater concern for the workers’ safety. Moreover, unlike post-war Buffalo, jobs in East Germany were plentiful and secure, and vacation time longer and portable so that workers who changed jobs did not lose accumulated vacation time. The greater contrasts between the two systems, however, were not so much at the workplace as in daily life. At this time, power shortages were frequent in the GDR, and items of daily consumption, such as handkerchiefs and washcloths, disappeared from the stores for months at a time. When new razorblades became scarce, Grossman joined the lines of men waiting to have his supply of dull blades sharpened.                     Supporters of the new state ascribed these economic hardships to exogenous causes. They pointed to Soviet insistence that East Germany, relatively much poorer than Western Germany, deliver 20% of its capital goods to the Soviet Union as reparations (at a time when West Germany was the largest beneficiary of Marshall Plan aid). They also cited the constriction in the production of consumer goods brought about by the West’s imposition of an economic boycott and military encirclement. Far exceeding these losses, however, was the constant outflow to the West of the best educated and most highly skilled workers, who before departing for the West first took advantage of free higher education, unavailable at that time in West Germany, so that they could benefit from the higher wages prevalent in West Germany.           More disturbing, and seemingly inherent in the system, was the nature of the GDR’s political life, which the Communist Party monopolized. During coffee breaks at the factory where Grossman worked, party cadre held informal meetings where workers were encouraged to commit to political positions, such as acceptance of the GDR’s eastern border (beyond which lay the vast areas of pre-World War II Germany that had been transferred to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union) and condemnation of listening to US-sponsored radio. In this and other instances, Grossman shows how individuals’ political differences with the regime—in thinking as well as in action—potentially entailed the withholding of advancement, privileges and rewards. The result was, of course, a virulent brew of dissembling and resentment.           Then there was the orchestration and ritualization of political life by the Party and its affiliates. Grossman describes a celebration in Bautzen of the tenth anniversary of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad. Many of the workers who had been assembled at their workplaces to march to the rally simply wandered away in large numbers, while others who arrived at the rally left before its end. While there were few jeers or sarcastic remarks from the assembled workers, for most the event represented yet another “boring rally and meeting—and a chance to get home earlier.” The sphere of Party control was not limited to political ideas and activities. At a Free Democratic Youth (equivalent of the Young Communists) meeting, Grossman witnessed a girl of 17 being severely criticized for using lipstick. Within the Party and its youth affiliate, conformity was enforced by denunciations for such transgressions as assuming a French name while singing chansons in order to earn some pocket money and buying a sweater when visiting West Berlin.           As a politically active Communist during the McCarthy Era, Grossman knew that the benefits of American-style democracy were largely limited to those who accepted the basic premises of the capitalist system. Nonetheless, he struggled with this conundrum. The curtailment of American civil liberties in this period did not seem to damage the capitalist system. However, the unraveling of the socialist system in the GDR and its ultimate dénouement was organically tied to the absence of democracy. Ultimately, the lack of genuine mass participation in its political life led to almost universal acquiescence in the demise of the GDR, and consequently of socialism, by those for whom it was intended—and whom it frequently did in fact benefit. Over time, most of its citizens had withdrwn into a private world of family and immediate community. (Ironically, there is a great nostalgia among former East Germans, including Grossman, for what many now describe as immensely satisfying society.) Others manipulated this system for self-advancement. In a society where being a Communist was no longer dangerous, heroism was increasingly replaced by cronyism, sycophancy, lethargy, and a prevalent bureaucratic mentality.                  Grossman’s educational background, but surely too his political reliability, resulted in his advancement from the factory floor to the position of director of the cultural club for the extraordinarily diverse group of “defectors” that the GDR had settled in Bautzen for safekeeping. There is not very much to be learned from this section of the book except that the motivations of those who opted for life in the GDR were not in every case the most pristine. In addition to a few leftist war resisters who had refused to fight in Korea, the others included: “a Deep South check forger, a Pennsylvania thief, alcoholics from all over, Charlie the boxer, and an innocent Indiana farm boy who insisted on marrying a motherly woman almost twice his age.”           During this period, Grossman married Renate, to whom he remains married and with whom he has raised two sons. Renate came from a rural family; her father supported the GDR and had helped organize one of its first collective farms. In this and other instances, Grossman provides scant explanation as to why some East Germans, often ardently, supported the regime and not much more about why others were so opposed. We do learn, for instance, that teachers generally were staunch supporters of the GDR, but the author does not explain what was cause and what effect. Were they appointed to these positions because of their loyalty or did they choose this profession, in part at least, as a type of political act? Similarly, aside from mentioning that the large numbers of postwar refugees (“re-settlers” in approved GDR jargon) from Silesia, the Sudetenland, and East Prussia opposed the GDR, we learn little about the motivations of others with similar beliefs.          Grossman was accepted by Leipzig University in 1955 to study journalism. At this point, the author invites the reader to consider other aspects of life in “real socialism.” These included periods of “voluntary labor” harvesting the potato crop in October and mining lignite in January as well as the contribution of a week’s wages towards funds for international solidarity, such as the liberation struggle in Algeria. On other occasions, university students worked clearing rubble remaining from the wartime bombing of Leipzig, weeding sugar beets, or helping to build sports stadiums. These features of life in the GDR, which from a socialist perspective were admirable and congruent with the goals of an avowed workers’ state, were counterbalanced by single-slate elections that challenged voters who disagreed with the candidates or the process to enter a flimsy balloting booth, in plain sight of the authorities, to mark a ballot.           The GDR’s rationale for building the Berlin Wall in 1961, Grossman reminds us, was based on its urgent need to stop speculation with its currency and the sale of its subsidized produce in West Germany. Even more pressing, of course, was the unstated need to staunch the hemorrhaging of the GDR’s best educated and most highly skilled workers to the West (who were often lured there by specific offers of lucrative employment and excellent housing), which resulted in vast losses of the state’s investment in their education and greatly disrupted production. While the Wall did in fact resolve these and other problems, Grossman does not speculate as to what set of conditions would have allowed the GDR’s government to feel secure enough to demolish the Wall. As it happened, the Berlin Wall and other barriers to the West proved to be as useless in protecting the GDR as the Great Wall of China had been in protecting the Middle Kingdom from invasion. As soon as Hungary opened its borders to Austria in 1989, first East German tourists in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and then other residents of the GDR joined an unstoppable and constantly enlarging caravan of emigrés to the German Federal Republic.           Grossman’s gradually improving living conditions mirrored the steady, albeit incremental, increases in the GDR’s initially very modest standard of living. In 1956, the Grossmans moved from one furnished room with a shared bathroom and no bathing privileges to a two-room apartment with a private bathroom and a kitchen. By this time, stores stocked staples and a selection of specialty items from other socialist countries. By 1960, he acquired a much-prized small three-room apartment (without central heating) in Berlin. Grossman’s wife and sons could now leave Leipzig and join him in East Berlin. In 1961, the Grossmans moved to a three-room apartment, with a separate kitchen, on Karl Marx Allee with a view of the Oder River. The building’s residents organized parties, travel lectures, card games, excursions to local lakes, and occasional outings to East Berlin’s excellent theaters and operas (including the Berliner Ensemble which presented the works of Bertolt Brecht) as well as participating in twice-a-year clean ups of lawns, and pruning of shrubs and trees.           Soon after the GDR government erected the Berlin Wall, Grossman began working with Seven Seas Books, a small publishing house (managed by Gertrude Heym, an American Communist married to the writer Stefan Heym, who like Anna Seghers and other anti-fascist German intellectuals opted to live in the East) that produced books in English (including works by blacklisted American writers, such as Meridel LeSueur, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ring Lardner, Jr., and Albert Maltz) which advanced, in the widest possible terms, the Communist perspective on art and culture for circulation in East Europe (and, to a very limited extent, in the United States.)           Grossman’s inability to get along with the imperious Gertrude caused him to accept employment with the Democratic German Report, an English-language biweekly newsletter, which reached audiences in the West beyond the true believers. Its semi-official status allowed it to present the GDR’s perspective and accomplishments in ways which were more realistic and therefore more credible than those emanating from official channels. These initiatives helped advance the GDR’s goal of achieving diplomatic recognition from the United States, which finally occurred in 1972.           In 1964, Grossman was given an opportunity which even further connected his truncated life as a leftist in the United States with his commitment to helping build socialism in the GDR. The much lauded African American cartoonist, Oliver (Ollie) Harrington, who had settled in the GDR, invited Grossman to translate and produce programming for Radio Berlin. This soon resulted in his hosting a biweekly program that wove together narrative with the type of folk music—labor songs and songs with political themes—integral to the culture around the American Communist Party in the forties. This led to a concert by Pete Seeger in East Berlin. It also ignited criticism within Party circles, including in Neue Zeitung, the Party’s newspaper, that the influence of American culture was becoming too great! Consequently, in order to accommodate official dissatisfaction, the Hootenanny Club (which Grossman had organized as a means of promoting political song) was renamed the October Club, in honor of the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1970, the October Club organized the first of a series of annual Festivals of Political Songs that invited singers from six countries to perform in East Berlin. Eventually, as many as fifty singers or groups from thirty countries arrived in the GDR to take part in this event. Performers included a near complete international pantheon of left artists in the arena of political song, including: Quilapayún, Silvio Rodríguez, Miriam Makeba, Mikis Theodorakis, Mercedes Sosa, Billy Bragg, Ewan McCall, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Eventually, as many as 70,000 attended concerts in East Berlin during these festivals. Grossman also helped establish a Paul Robeson archive, which sponsored a major exhibit and helped produce a large public meeting to celebrate Robeson’s seventieth birthday.

In addition to these activities, Grossman regularly lectured to youth groups, schools, teachers’ clubs, and factory workers on a wide range of topics, most often in connection with American folk music. Motoring about East Germany to deliver these lectures, he came to know almost every nook and cranny of this country, which he discovered was filled with “historic sites, ancient towns, and beautiful scenery: Romanesque churches from the tenth and twelfth centuries... the white cliffs on the Baltic.” He reports: “I grew to love the place.” Grossman also notes at this point that in the early ‘80s, his mostly pro-GDR audiences began to become older and smaller. Clearly, sentiment had begun to shift away from acceptance and even active support for the socialist state.           Grossman’s perspective as a sympathetic outsider allows him to arrive at some insightful observations on the causes of the collapse of socialism in the GDR, and by extension the rest of the socialist bloc. He notes that the largest group of people in the GDR, albeit somewhat grudgingly, had become accepting of a system that had become familiar and which provided definite advantages. However, the nature of the system promoted a mindset where a specific setback or disappointment—a fight with a supervisor or the inability to obtain a better apartment—led to renunciation of the entire system. After all, the point that the GDR was socialist was constantly put before people, whereas in the West, similar experiences rarely caused individuals to question capitalism. Grossman also points out that there was no apparent class struggle in East Germany, so that the endless anti-capitalist appeals sounded hollow and unconvincing.

The German Democratic Republic, though hardly a beacon radiating hope and inspiration, did attract interest and support from many leftists outside its borders. Its relatively higher standard of living within the socialist bloc (by 1990, 40% of its households owned cars, and the ownership of televisions and refrigerators was near universal) made its way of life more comprehensible to Western leftists. The GDR’s extensive solidarity work in assisting liberation struggles in Africa and aiding refugees from Chile and elsewhere made the existence of “real socialism,” regardless of its shortcomings, seem valuable. However, the main reason why this mid-sized country of some 17 million earned greater attention on the left than other socialist-bloc countries was that it evinced more genuine interest in socialism—in its educational system, wage structure, and solidarity work—than did the Soviet Union’s other European allies. In fact, it had little choice but to do so: The GDR represented only a fragment of its nation. Unlike the emigrés from the GDR entering West Germany, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians, etc., who emigrated left much more than socialism behind. Moreover, “Goulash Communism” was never the solution for the GDR. The GDR knew that it had little chance of besting West Germany in a competition for more and better consumer goods; however, it believed it could promise a more egalitarian society which renounced Germany’s fascist past and expressed solidarity with socialism wherever it appeared and most particularly with the Soviet Union. These goals were, to a significant extent, pursued by a leadership that included veterans of the Spanish Civil War and many Communist and Socialist trade union leaders who had only barely survived Nazi concentration camps. Always on the front lines against anti-socialist provocation, the GDR went further than the other Eastern bloc countries (except perhaps the Soviet Union) to equalize living standards, provide a comprehensive social-service network, and develop an alternate culture. Nonetheless, the GDR collapsed as quickly and as completely as those other states which had moved less far toward socialist goals.           Building socialism in East Germany took place within the context of total political control by the Communist Party and an Orwellian system of secret-police informers that numbered as many as one million. Threats to its existence from without, opposition from within, and an ingrained contempt for “bourgeois democracy” all contributed to this denial of democratic rights. This in turn alienated and pacified the general population and corrupted those who held or sought power, thereby creating the conditions for a massive implosion. Yet, the establishment of democracy within a socialist society seems to depend on a number of unlikely occurrences. Among these is the acquiescing to this system by those (such as managers and professionals) who could gain more under capitalism and the acceptance by highly skilled groups of workers (such as electricians and master craftsmen) of less remuneration so that overall levels of income become more or less equalized. Crossing the River lays before the reader these great dilemmas of building socialism.           Grossman shows that, in any case, the GDR’s egalitarianism did not ensure the populace’s devotion to the system. When visiting Hungary, he notes that compared to the GDR, there was less equality but a far greater supply of consumer goods. This mix seemed to result in a far more contented population. When visiting Poland, which had a generally lower standard of living than the GDR, he witnessed still greater degrees of inequality but far more individual freedom. Nonetheless, in contrast with the other socialist states, the substantial vote for the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor party for East Germany’s Communist Party—which in the last election, running on a strongly left program, garnered 25% of the vote (including majorities in most of the former East Berlin)—demonstrates that in the former GDR there remains a more sanguine attitude on the part of the people toward its socialist past as well as more continued support for socialism than in the other successor states in Eastern Europe.           Grossman reminds his readers that West Germany did not so much liberate as colonize East Germany. The GDR’s cultural institutions—publishing houses, film studios, theaters, newspapers and journals, research academies—have been disbanded. Four million of the GDR’s 9.5 million jobs disappeared, including those of two-thirds of the farmers during the process of decollectivization. Marriages have declined by one half and the birthrate has plummeted by two-thirds. For Grossman, reunification has meant the end of his work and an increase in his rent from 114 to 950 marks per month. For him and leftists everywhere, the demise of the GDR raises an additional disturbing question: “Where can I flee, if necessary?”

Sean McMeekin, The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) reviewed by Peter Waterman.

What, in this globalised and informatised capitalist world order, are we to make of Willi Münzenberg, who lived and died fighting in and against a national and industrial capitalist world order?           Sean McMeekin, in an otherwise overwhelmingly scholarly work, ends up by presenting Münzenberg as a brilliant but corrupt and vicious propagandist exploiting anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and anti-fascism to threaten the pluralistic West. He even suggests he was a forerunner of the ‘Islamic terrorists [who] exploit the very openness of our society to move money, men and munitions across borders, and use our own technology to kill us’ (307). Well! One would have thought his title and subtitle sufficient to have Münzenberg hung, drawn and displayed—as a frightener—to the rest of ‘us’.           Münzenberg was born in Erfurt, Germany, in 1889, and died near Grenoble, France, in 1940. He was surely one of the most remarkable of the first-generation Communist internationalists. He was a young primary-educated worker when he was urging his brand of radical socialism on the already stolid, late-19th century, German Social Democratic Party. As a starving youth he made his way to Switzerland, where, during the great inter-imperialist carnage of 1914-18, he met Lenin and other early left social democrats and revolutionaries. He was involved in the creation of the German Communist Party (KPD) but is better known (where known at all) for his international organisational and media activities, which fell under the patronage of the Communist Third International (Comintern).           Münzenberg was, however, an innovator within both the national and international movement, commonly acting first and seeking, winning or imposing approval after. He initiated, shaped and dominated dozens of international solidarity and aid committees—all of them Communist fronts—addressed to the defence of the Soviet state, to famine victims in Russia or political prisoners elsewhere, to peace, national independence, anti-fascism. He was involved in international film production and distribution. He set up 15-20 journals, newspapers and popular illustrated magazines—some international. He created the Worker Photography Movement, which itself became an international one. He travelled Western Europe, visited Moscow on numerous occasions, was exiled in France. He survived both black and red terror, cautiously avoiding invitations to Moscow as the wave of trials and executions rose there.           Münzenberg juggled funds between numerous simultaneous projects, even using Moscow gold to finance the solidarity actions or aid that ostensibly flowed to the Soviet Union, either from the ‘workers of the world’ or from ‘democratic and peace-loving forces’. Although motivated by proletarian revolution, he over time developed a nice taste in suits, had a personal barber, stayed at fancy hotels, lived in a fine apartment. The Soviet Union and the Comintern, however, were moving, in the 1930s, away from their early revolutionary, creative and spendthrift beginnings—when there was room for charismatic individuals—into a conjoined bureaucratic apparatus responding only to the latest twitch of its master’s moustache.           Münzenberg, who lived on financial and political credit from the Soviet Union, eventually ran out of both, was rejected by the Stalin-purged Comintern, thrown out of the KPD, and died, under suspicious circumstances, as he attempted to flee Nazi-occupied France for Switzerland. Insofar as it seems possible that he was strangled by one of the NKVD agents who had for some years been spying on him, the expression ‘hoist with his own petard’ seems grimly appropriate. Indeed, the bloodless bureaucrats who survived him and ruled the German Democratic Republic, later killed him off 13 years before his actual death. An official East German chronology of the international labour movement gives him a last mention in 1927 (Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus 1986: 254)!           Despite this depressing detail, I still prefer to place Münzenberg within a certain history, or model, of internationalism, and of communication in relation to such. This is, in part, because I cannot see the history of the last 100 years or so in terms of the development of an ‘open’ and ‘self-critical’ world society threatened by mad extremisms (read: ‘evil empires’, ‘axes of evil’) called Communism, Anti-Imperialism or even Islamic Fundamentalism. I see it, rather as an unevenly liberal capitalist world—as also an imperialist, militarist and occasionally fascist one—which repeatedly recreates, to recall a phrase, its own gravediggers. Such gravediggers (pace Marx) are not necessarily civilised by the society that creates them. Nor are their methods necessarily more civilised. Rosa Luxemburg posed as alternatives Socialism and Barbarism. She forgot a third alternative, Barbaric Socialism. If Münzenberg was a monster, sacred to some, evil to others, then he was a monster not only of the capitalism that gave birth to him but also of the Communism he helped create.           This brings me to my other reason for interest in Münzenberg, a long-standing concern with internationalism, with communications and culture in relation to such, and with the bearers of these, the left or red internationalists (Waterman 2002). Paraphrasing Eric Hobsbawm (1988)—a later-generation German and cosmopolitan Communist—I once proposed a historical typology of red internationalists: the Agitators (often freelancers, ‘changing their countries more often than their shirts’); the Agents (working for a state or party, whether openly or clandestinely, whether as propagandists or as spies); and the Communicators (creating/instrumentalising/empowering mass action by providing relevant publics with information, ideas, son et lumière). It then occurred to me that these types need not just follow one another in succession; they could also coexist simultaneously, as forms or aspects of internationalist activity within each historical period. (Be it added that this was meant to be a heuristic typology—one that can be abandoned in the face of forceful criticism, or even stubborn evidence.) Let us try it out on the Münzenberg Case.           Within such a typology, Münzenberg could be seen as a young Agitator, early transformed into an Agent, and as a Communicator whose activities were determined by his Agent role. Upon these bones we have to place flesh and muscle. This means: the party and ideology, the social, economic and political history, the individual personality. Much of this is provided by McMeekin. What he does not show us, either literally by illustration, or figuratively by description, is the artifacts Münzenberg produced or was responsible for. Indeed, Münzenberg himself is quoted sparingly, except toward the end of his life and this book.           This shortcoming is fortunately compensated for by the pioneering two-volume work of Mattelart and Siegelaub (1979, 1983), Communication and Class Struggle. These volumes come out of a previous wave of emancipation and internationalism (we are undergoing a new one now), that of 1968. In the second of the two volumes we are not only given a text of Münzenberg on the International Worker-Photographer Movement. We are also shown sample pages, photos and contributions from Der Arbeiter-Fotograf from the early 1930s. These are usefully preceded by other remarkable statements from the German Communist movement of that time: Bertold Brecht on radio; and Hanns Eisler on the worker music movement. Brecht, with brilliant if premature and misplaced foresight, gives radio the democratic communication potential of the computer; Eisler (who invented a whole new musical genre for his party, class and international movement) takes an instrumental and pedagogical attitude to music (but check out the amazing music itself at http://eislermusic.com.); another article, on ‘the worker’s eye’, from Der Arbeiter-Fotograf itself, warns that the majority of proletarians are stumbling around with ‘a definitely petty-bourgeois eye’ (1979: 176). The worker’s eye clearly lies here in that of the beholder. Münzenberg’s own contribution is suggestive—though we must discount the achievements claimed—if predictable.           The point here is that in the Sturm und Drang of Weimar Germany—and around the world at that time —there was an explosion of left cultural activity, linked, for better or worse, with Soviet and international Communism. When Hitler came to power (due in large part to Communism treating Social Democracy as the greater threat), and as international Communism was reduced to Soviet Communism, this cultural internationalism pretty much disappeared. As did Münzenberg. ‘Our’ capitalism played its own part: the increasing technical sophistication, corporate concentration and commodification of what had previously been artisanal media, left decreasing space for both avantgarde artists and working-class culture.           Here a parenthesis is necessary, one not unconnected with the latest global solidarity movement. This has to do with Münzenberg’s Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (IAH, International Worker Relief). This was set up ostensibly to aid victims of the Soviet famine of the early 1920s—a famine for which Soviet policies were largely if not solely responsible. IAH was, however, also created as a Communist-controlled counterweight to not only the American Relief Administration (of the US Quaker, humanitarian and justly-forgotten future President, Herbert Hoover), but also the international Social-Democratic relief efforts initiated by the experienced left-socialist international union leader, Edo Fimmen (107-9).            Casting an eye backward, the IAH could be seen as an expression of that wide range of activities by which the inter/national working-class movement confronted the charity activities of a hypocritical and calculating inter/national bourgeoisie. Looking sideways one can see it as an expression of the war—always cold, sometimes hot—that Communism was carrying out against Social Democracy. Looking forward, we can see the outlines of inter/national ‘development cooperation’—today once again addressed to the East. The contemporary international trade union movement is active within this aid effort, but is also largely incorporated within both the institutional/financial practices and the ideological discourse of the liberal middle class.           The Communist project of Münzenberg destroyed itself by its financial and political shenanigans, and by his disastrous efforts to convert the IAH into some kind of international industrial and commercial contribution to Soviet development. Insofar as the contemporary international unions are beginning to see themselves as part of ‘global civil society’, there is clearly a need to reconsider this whole complex and disastrous experience, and then to reinvent international labour aid and solidarity activities on a more principled and independent basis.           Maybe we should see Münzenberg as the left equivalent of a robber-baron or maverick capitalist—a Bill Gates or George Soros of international Communism. After World War II the International Communists and Communicators were a dreary lot, as suggested by the very title of the official organ of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy. Even those who in Britain dredged its endless columns of turgid prose called it, disrespectfully, For-For. Left internationalist and cultural expression only revived with what I above called 1968. This was the era of the New Left, less Communist but retaining or reinventing its apocalyptic and creative edge. The most recent left wave is associated with the ‘global justice and solidarity movement’—that wide gamut of protest and propostion provoked by ‘our’ globalised networked capitalism. Thanks to the thoroughly post-industrial internet, this is becoming the first primarily communicative internationalism (and the first post-nationalist one), whilst simultaneously losing its dead albatross—the insurrectionary-apocalyptic zeal.           Neither of these New Lefts knows much about Münzenberg, though they certainly owe him something.  It is my belief that the latest of these movements is surpassing the mechanical Marxism of that industrial period, as well as the instrumentalisation of culture, the primarily didactic disposition, and almost all of the Parteilichkeit (partymindedness). It has a much more sophisticated understanding of international solidarity (commonly today pluralised). It no longer, with exceptions, considers that the proletariat needs grafted on to it (by any Herr Professor Doktor) a proletarian eye. It even has some ethical notions beyond that of the revolutionary end justifying the manipulative means. But I would say that it has much to learn from Münzenberg and his comrades. Mostly, of course, to do with avoiding his crimes and even his misdemeanours. We all know the one about those who ignore history…           We should therefore be grateful to McMeekin. Because if capitalism was partially responsible for creating Gravedigger Münzenberg, then there must be a Little Willi in ‘us’ (of the newest international left), ready to cut corners, to misuse funds, to conceal, to manipulate, to preach—and all in the name of a world or a word miraculously superior to those by which we are surrounded. What Münzenberg would never have understood, but we can, is that the means determine the ends. Our utopias are, Thank Goddess, not what they used to be. Insofar as we work out what they might be, we may escape both the brutal attentions of any contemporary NKVD and the tender mercies of any future Sean McMeekin.

References Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus. 1986. Geschichte der internationalen Arbeiterbewegung in Daten. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1988. ‘Opening Address: Working-Class Internationalism’, in F. van Holthoon & M. van der Linden, eds., Internationalism in the Labour Movement, 1830-1940. Leiden: Brill. Pp. 1-18. 

Mattelart, Armand, & Seth Siegelaub, eds. 1979, 1983. Communication and Class Struggle. Vols. 1-2. New York & Bagnolet: International General.

Waterman, Peter. 2002. 'Internationalists in the Americas: Agitators, Agents and Communicators', Paper Presented to 3rd International Congress of European Latin-Americanists (see www.antenna.nl/~waterman/saints.html).

Peter Waterman, co-editor, World Social Forum: Challenging Empires (2004) The Hague waterman@antenna.nl

Dave Zirin. What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005) reviewed by Hobart Spalding

[We present two reviews of this book; they complement one another. The duplication was unplanned but appears fortuitous in view of the book’s unusual outreach potential, given its appeal at once to Left activists and to people otherwise uninterested in politics. -- V.W.]

Interview #1 Sports play a huge role in US culture today, both among couch potatoes who watch endless contests and among millions of young people who play some form of organized sports and, just maybe, a pick-up game or two in the nabes with hopes of becoming a national star. Dave Zirin, a sports writer and columnist based in the Washington DC area, examines the exploitative nature of big-time sports, focusing particularly on the racism inherent in both media and fandom. He does this by examining the lives of famous athletes who have bucked the system (and of some who have knuckled under), looking at those who run big-time sports, and observing the connections between sports and blind patriotism. Much of the material is derived from personal interviews conducted by the author over the years.   The Introduction and first chapters take a historical tack. They look at how sports became a way for capital to train labor in good habits like team play and like gratitude to the owners who provided uniforms and equipment. He fails to note that industrial softball leagues also had the aim of keeping workers out of bars, places where around a pail of suds at the end of the workday they might discuss a different kind of teamwork—a union. He notes the seminal role of Lester “Red” Rodney, who, as sports writer for the Daily Worker (1934-58) wrote the first political sports page ever. Rodney scouted Jackie Robinson early on and, many claim, was largely responsible for Robinson’s rise to the major leagues.   Zirin notes the importance of the 1938 Louis-Schmeling heavyweight championship fight, which pitted the Black son of a sharecropper against the finest Hitler’s Master Race could produce (though perhaps not devoting enough space to Jesse Owens and his all-but-forgotten half dozen African-American Olympic teammates—including Jackie Robinson’s brother Mack, a medalist in the sprints). He then follows with chapters on Robinson and Muhammad Ali, both of whom placed the race issue squarely on the national agenda. In their own way, neither one would shut up nor compromise his principles when at work or at play. The book’s title comes from Ali’s line when he changed his name from Cassius Clay if people called him the latter or did not know what to say.

Most older people probably remember the famous photograph of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the victory podium during the 1968 Mexico Olympics, black-gloved fists raised in protest during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner. Few know, however, as Zirin notes, that they stood barefoot to protest poverty and wore tight-fitting necklaces to symbolize the lynchings of their people. Also largely unnoticed is the fact that the silver medalist in the event, Australian Peter Norman, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights button in solidarity with Smith and Carlos. Among the many, many details that abound in the text is the report by Zirin that the only team that openly supported Smith and Carlos (who were summarily dismissed from the US team by US Olympic Committee Chairman Avery Brundage, a known right-wing racist) was the heavyweight racing crew from Harvard, which wrote a public letter of support (reproduced in chapter 4).

Zirin includes a chapter on sexism and gay-bashing. He focuses on the athletic careers of Mia Hamm, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Katie Hnidis, and Esera Tuaolo. He notes that no active player in the Big Three professional men’s sports—baseball, football, or basketball—has come out of the closet. He theorizes that the risk of financial ruin and even physical harm for players who come overwhelmingly from poor to working-class backgrounds prevents this from happening. This section in general and, particularly in its treatment of gays and lesbians, lacks the same depth as the rest of the work.

Zirin astutely notes the post-World War II rise of sports as big business, helped immeasurably by the proliferation of television, which today includes several channels dedicated entirely to sports. Little mention is made, however, of the role of magazines, most of which shill for management or equipment makers. Moreover, sports have come to serve another purpose: that of deflecting harsh emotions and/or creating a false world in which people can hide rather than dealing with (or trying to change) reality. Anger at an umpire’s “wrong call,” or at one’s favorite team’s bad luck or failures, may in fact reduce tension generated by job pressures or by larger social issues such as racism. Sports violence thus helps curb individual wrath against capitalism. Zirin also argues tacitly that the ballpark or arena are places where people today can express racism or sexism without much fear of reaction.

Among the other themes that run through this book are that of unions in sports and the relationship of patriotism and big-time athletics. Although all major sports have unionized (which has helped most players economically), many athletes still toil at the mercy of the boss or owner. Boxing promoters, for example, brutally exploit those who work the undercards, and no system exists to help those hurt permanently by their time in the ring. The Joint Association of Boxing (JAB), founded by ex light heavyweight champ Eddie Mustafa, is an attempt to change that situation. Particularly since 9/11, openly visible patriotism has become an integral part of sporting events from Little League to professional levels. At the inaugural of the US Open in Queens, NY in late August, a huge flag covered the court and the announcers intoned, “Is there any doubt which open this is?” The fact that major league baseball enforces the singing of the US anthem even for games in Canada and “encourages” all ball players to participate—even ones from the Caribbean or some other foreign country—is indicative. Yet, despite such pressures, as happened during the Vietnam War (Ali being the most visible example), athletes are registering their protest against the Bush-Cheney foray into Iraq. Several big league ball players have done so (e.g. Carlos Delgado), as have the Etan Thomas of the NBA and Toni Smith of Manhattanville College, among hundreds of others.

Zirin does not miss the opportunity to flog team-owners and the media for their medieval attitudes and subservient ways. He cites example after example of right-wing, racist owners. He notes how ownership extorts communities by threatening to pull a team if a new stadium replete with luxury boxes does not get built, paid for with taxpayer dollars, of course. He consistently takes on the mainstream media in general and ESPN in particular, showing how they play the race card time after time. He contrasts treatment of Black and white athletes in the press—the former called aggressive or hostile, the latter moody. The author also notes the psychological toll on African-American athletes, many in their teens, playing before nearly all-white audiences, and people who come from class backgrounds quite different from theirs. Like “monkeys in the zoo” as one NBA player commented.

Zirin has some well-chosen words for those who have totally bought into the system, and he adds material on athletes who have straddled the issues. The section “Grilling George Foreman” and the pages on Michael Jordan form searing indictments of those who have embraced capitalist exploitation for the sake of personal gain. The fact that both Jackie Robinson and Ali in later life made peace with parts of the dominant system, however, should not detract from who they were or what they represented to communities of color and progressive forces in the US and around the world. The author also notes the price that many have paid for bucking the system, of which stripping Ali of his heavyweight title and banning him from boxing represents the most visible.

Much of this book reads as if it were written under a deadline for a sports column due in an hour. The author never misses using hyperbole, often to the detriment of his argument. Comparing Fenway Park to Bull Connor’s backyard is surely exaggerated. The issue of Latino ballplayers is also largely ignored. Zirin sees the sports world largely through a black-white prism. He is not wrong for the most part in what he says, but often there are more and other shades involved. The increasing Asian presence, at least in baseball, does not appear at all. His approach also demotes class factors (although he does bring them up sporadically) to a very distant second in understanding sports in the US today. Finally, the almost total lack of documentation—important given the number of quotes he cites or incidents he mentions—along with no bibliography nor index frustrate the reader who wants to know where to find out more, or just where and when that quote got published.

Any sports fan will enjoy reading this book. It is chock-a-block with details that will take one down memory lane, raise hackles as they did before, lead the reader to laugh and even cry. As Zirin says, in the final analysis sports are neither good nor bad. There is real beauty in seeing Henry Aaron swing, watching Bill Russell rebound, gasping at Pelé’s shot from midfield, or remembering Jim Brown galloping off tackle. Today’s athletes are no less talented and perhaps even more so, with advanced training techniques and better practice. It may be that the fans (as well as the players) have to begin to take sports back. Zirin sees a resistance building both among fans (most people I know smuggle food into the stadium rather than pay $5 for a frank) and participants. The trend is weak, but it is growing and hopefully will one day return sports to where they belong—with and for the people.

Interview #2

Dave Zirin. What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005) reviewed by Robert Roth

Of course there is exploitation but there is fun and beauty too. I mean, what’s more beautiful than a 6-4-3 double play perfectly executed where the shortstop fields a groundball and flips it toward second base in one motion, the second baseman takes the throw in stride, pivots, avoids the base runner, and fires it to first on time. That’s not a put-on. That’s not fake. That’s beyond all social analysis of the game. The idea of people coming together and amazing the rest of us.                        —Lester Rodney

As a freshman sportswriter for the Queens College Phoenix I was sent in 1962 to cover a baseball game. One of the players made a couple of errors and failed to get a hit, striking out three times. I used him as an object of humor throughout my piece. This is what sportswriters did and I was pretty pleased with what I had written. I thought I was very funny. The next time I saw him, he approached me with a kind of seriousness and respect I had never experienced before, and said, “What you wrote was hurtful. I was trying my best and there was really no need to mock me.” I apologized and thanked him. What’s My Name, Fool is written with compassion, insight and love. It is fueled by a profound social rage. Dave Zirin is the type of sportswriter I never encountered growing up. Reading his book is like speaking with an extremely knowledgeable friend on a subject I am nervous about. He has important information and analysis to share, but he does not shut down the space where exploration can take place. At a number of points, his book stimulated my imagination to go off in its own direction.

For example, when he writes about women in sports—“On the one hand, sexism of stomach-turning proportions prevails both within and surrounding sports, from cheerleaders to beer commercials. But sports have also provided a critical place for women to challenge sexist ideas about their abilities and potential”—I remember a friend, a long jumper who as a freshman in college, in a non-sanctioned meet, leapt past the too short sandpit and landed on the ground, breaking her ankle. The meet officials didn’t think a woman could jump that far. She recovered but never competed again.

He writes about homophobia and my mind flashes to the time my teammate, trying to get me to play better defense in a basketball game yelled, “Get up next to him. Fuck him if you have to.”

Throughout the book we see acts of compliance and acts of defiance continually playing themselves out. The event that inspired the book’s title highlights the truth of this. The title comes from a heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and Floyd Patterson. A faster, stronger, younger and certainly socially more courageous Muhammad Ali beat up on a physically courageous though vastly outmatched Floyd Patterson who insisted on calling him Cassius Clay. “This fight is a crusade to reclaim the title from the black Muslims,” said Patterson. “As a Catholic I am fighting Clay as a patriotic duty. I am going to return the crown to America.”

Zirin writes, “On the night of the fight, Ali brutalized Patterson for nine rounds, dragging it out yelling, ‘Come on, America! Come on, white America….What’s my name? Is my name Clay? What’s my name, fool?’” It was an assertion of pride, dignity and social/political/personal defiance. It was those qualities of his that electrified the world. But it was also one black man mercilessly pummeling another. In that way the fight was not all that different from the time when “Southern plantation owners amused themselves by putting together the strongest slaves and having them fight it out wearing iron collars.” What do you do with all that? I’m not sure. And this is the type of question I kept asking myself as I read the book.

Floyd Patterson’s iron collar that night was very clear. Muhammad Ali’s was not. But the collar he wore, as Zirin discusses in the chapter on Ali, would take a terrible toll in the long run. Floyd Patterson survived, and when Ali was stripped of his title and sentenced to jail, Patterson, a soulful and poetic person in his own right, said, “What bothers me is Clay is being made to pay too stiff a penalty for doing what is right. The prize fighter in America is not supposed to shoot off his mouth about politics, particularly if his views oppose the government’s and might influence many among the working class that follows boxing.”

Zirin in this book gives us an answer to a question that seemed to have eluded millions of baseball fans for decades. Why was it that for so many years the Boston Red Sox never won a World Series? The answer of course is that they were the last team to be integrated. “In 1959…the Sox removed their color bar by begrudgingly bringing marginal infielder Pumpsie Green up from the minors.”

A digression: To be considered the “marginal” player who integrated baseball’s most racist franchise twelve years after Jackie Robinson must have taken its own kind of courage and equilibrium. I looked him up on the Baseball Almanac website. In lieu of the corporate endorsements he could never get, I thought where else but Socialism and Democracy could the entrepreneurial fantasies of Pumpsie Green that I saw there be fully appreciated. “Some day I’ll write a book and call it ‘How I Got the Nickname Pumpsie’ and sell it for one dollar, and if everybody who ever asked me that question buys the book, I’ll be a millionaire” –Pumpsie Green in Baseball’s Greatest Quotes (1982). What’s My Name Fool, touches on, and to a degree discusses, what to me is a crucial question. In a world of winning and losing, is it possible to have anything but anxiety, humiliation and failure run rampant?

What happens for example when I watch a Michael Jordan soar through the heavens? Does it make it easier or harder for me to move freely? Can I fully appreciate Jordan’s athletic greatness without wanting to extract some measure of revenge? Conversely, how could Jordan soar like that and yet be so emotionally closed off to people suffering in Nike sweatshops? And is my asking that question the revenge I am speaking about? Is it stripping away some part of his vitality?

Even in the little neck of the woods many of us inhabit, in the section of the universe devoted to radical change, people are constantly compared and contrasted. Our work and talents are compulsively evaluated as people are assigned their proper place—winning and losing a constant drumbeat of concern.

I remember a woman saying in a public forum that she didn't feel ugly. She felt mildly attractive. That she didn't feel she was stupid. She felt that she was intelligent but not brilliant. And no one understood her humiliation. She brought me up short. For I always saw her as she felt she was seen. My own silent role in her oppression.           Dave Meggyesy, the former St. Louis Cardinal linebacker who wrote a moving and sensitive introduction to the book, was also interviewed in it. In the interview he speaks of the pain he felt when he was benched for his anti-Vietnam War activity. “…All kinds of self-doubts began to creep into my mind. Because one of the core values in sports from the athlete’s point of view is that it is a meritocracy: The best players play.… When someone messes with that, it messes with everything that is great about sports.” The big question here is: when the most glaring forms of injustice are alleviated and something like a meritocracy is achieved, what impact will that have on the howling sense of inadequacy that so often drives and destroys people in a world as pathologically competitive as this one? Many of the competitive attitudes that we often condemn in sports characterize so much of society in general, including even our left academic and artistic universe. It is again something that this book forces me to think about.           In the chapter on Jackie Robinson, a very deep and complex one, there is a pointed back-and-forth in public pronouncements between Robinson and Malcolm X where each brings his genius to bear as they struggle out various strategies for social change. The exchange often is quite nasty. Yet, “When Malcolm X was killed, Robinson wrote an obituary that, unlike most, didn’t bury Malcolm but praised him. He quoted Malcolm saying to him ‘Jackie, in the days to come your son and my son will not be willing to settle for things we are willing to settle for.’”           At one point a comment like Malcolm’s would have felt prophetic and inspiring. But knowing the massive tragedies that befell their families—Jackie Robinson’s son returning from Southeast Asia “carrying a gun, scared of shadows, and addicted to drugs”; Malcolm’s widow dying as the result of a fire set by their grandson—these words now have less resonance for me than they might once have had. The retreat of a later generation from social and political concern compounds my despair. Yet the fires of freedom continue to burn and at least a significant number of people still do refuse to settle.

Near the end of the book there is a wonderful interview with Toni Smith, the Division III basketball player who turned her back on the US flag during the playing of the national anthem to protest the war in Iraq. “But it wasn’t just the war,” she said. “It was everything before that. It was everything that the flag is built on, everything that is continuing to happen and things that haven’t happened yet.’’           There is a photo accompanying the interview. In Toni Smith’s bearing and posture you can feel the presence of so many others. There is Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Billie Jean King, Babe Didrikson, Muhammad Ali, Pumpsie Green and Mia Hamm. Maybe even Floyd Patterson. In the photo itself, two of her teammates are giving her support. “Two of my teammates always stood next to me during the national anthem,” she said, “one in front of me, one behind me, holding my hands—Melissa Solano and Dionne Walker. They were absolutely and completely supportive 100 percent, and would have taken a bullet for me.” The tenderness and strength of their love brought tears streaming down my cheeks.

Each night when I lie down to go to sleep I start making up baseball teams. Basketball teams. Tony Oliva, right field. I've done this since I was around twelve. Bill Sharman at guard. It calms me down. Left-handed black basketball players.

After reading this book I have whole new teams to make up. Teams of Resistance. People who inspire me during the day and help put me to sleep at night: Carlos Delgado 1b, Jackie Robinson 2b, Roberto Clemente rf, Pee Wee Reese ss, Toni….

I think this book will bring great pleasure and understanding to any number of people.

Marx-Engels Jahrbuch, vols. 1-2 (Amsterdam: Marx-Engels Foundation; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004, 2005) reviewed by Gerd Callesen.

What can the reader expect from a yearbook which is published in connection with the all-inclusive edition of the writings and manuscripts left by Marx and Engels, the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA)? Initially, information of various kinds by way of reviews, conference reports, new material that came to light only after publication of the relevant MEGA volumes, and finally articles of various types that expand our knowledge and understanding of the basis for Marx and Engels’s activities. The volumes of MEGA itself include text in a precise form (historisch-kritisch is the term applied), with appropriate annotations. In every volume, we find a brief introduction to the background for the texts, their internal relationship, and the historical context. In other words, the texts are presented in a scholarly form, but under no circumstances with an interpretation, because this is not (any longer) the objective of the MEGA.

While Vol. 2 of the yearbook fits the above description (as will probably most future volumes), Vol. 1 of the yearbook is completely different, as it contains a pre-print of part of a forthcoming MEGA volume (MEGA I/5) which will contain the manuscripts for The German Ideology. This resulted in Vol. 1’s remarkable achievement of making it to the list of non-fiction bestsellers in Germany in the summer of 2004. As any interested reader will know, the unfinished manuscripts have been exposed to the "gnawing criticism of the mice" (as Marx was later to put it) since the second half on the 1840s. Larger and smaller extracts of the manuscripts have been published by various editors at different times; it is now the intention to render the manuscripts back into their definitive form, i.e. the one in which the authors (Engels, Hess and Marx) left them, insofar as they are extant, that is, not to reconstruct a coherent text that did not exist at the time the project was abandoned. As early as 1996 the present editors submitted a well-argued proposal concerning the original content of the manuscripts (in MEGA-Studien [Amsterdam] 1997/2). The German Ideology did not exist in the form in which it was later published (e.g., in the Collected Works); it did not include the term ‘historical materialism,’ although it did counterpose ‘materialism’ against ‘idealism’ in the writing of history. The manuscripts reflect the two authors’ early endeavours to develop a fundamental perception on the basis of materialistic approaches to property, the state, legal systems, politics, religion, world history, etc. The inaccurate manuscripts published in 1932 formed the basis of lengthy and thorough discussions; this basis has now been radically altered.

Marx’s assessment was that the manuscripts had been useful in helping the two authors clarify their early theoretical position. Engels’s assessment in 1888 was that the manuscript demonstrated how limited their knowledge of economic history had really been forty years before. However, the opinion of its authors is not necessarily the be all and end all of the discussion. The manuscripts might well be of importance if for no other reason than that they show what the authors' point of departure was, and what they later made of their theoretical work of the 1840s. (Apparently it is incredibly difficult to work with these manuscripts, and their MEGA publication was delayed for years.)

Vol. 1 of the yearbook is, in fact, an anomaly. As important as it is, the yearbook cannot be evaluated on the basis of this volume. Vol. 2 provides a clearer indication of what can be expected generally from these yearbooks. Essentially the purpose seems to be well served. The guiding editorial principle, like that of the MEGA itself, is academic and thus steers clear of ideological confrontation.

Malcolm Sylvers attempts to summarize the somewhat sporadic comments by Marx and Engels about the development of the United States over a period of forty years during which capitalism in this country rapidly transformed its character. To some extent they saw this as emblematic of the nature of the system, but at the same time they continually noted its special characteristics. Sylvers develops a research program to determine whether Marx and Engels viewed the US model of capitalist development as substantially different from that of other countries. He suggests that the recently published MEGA edition of the third volume of Capital may reveal, through examination of the relevant manuscripts, new information on this subject. In this research program the 'American' features in writings, manuscripts, and letters play a considerable role.           One of the most difficult tasks in connection with the publication of the MEGA is to clarify the extent of Marx and Engels’s involvement in the editing of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (NRhZ). Because many of their contributions to several papers – especially the New York Tribune – were made anonymously, it has taken a strenuous effort to identify the articles written by them. The problem is considerably more intricate with the NRhZ, a paper on which they both were the central editors. One of their jobs was to edit contributions made by others, and it is often impossible to clarify their interventions. Francois Melis, however, has now been able to identify Marx’s own copy of the NRhZ and has thus made it possible to evaluate Marx’s contributions on the basis of his comments and notes. For many years Melis has been working on different aspects of the history of the NRhZ, and he is now the chief editor of vols. 7, 8, and 9 in the First Section of the MEGA. Of course, he bases himself on previous findings, for example previously identified NRhZ articles by Marx and Engels. Such discoveries are of particular importance because many original documents, copies of which were collected for the first MEGA, disappeared after 1933 as a result of Nazi ravages. The finding of Marx’s copy of the newspaper is also important for other MEGA volumes.           Rolf Dlubek's article is based on his work with a volume of letters covering the years 1860-61 (III/11), scheduled for publication in December 2005. Here the entire extant correspondence will be collected for the first time, and thus a basis provided for an analysis of Marx’s visit to Berlin in March/April 1861—the first time since 1849 that he was able to return to Germany. In this connection a plan was developed for publishing a large democratic opposition paper along the lines of the NRhZ, a paper of which Marx might become the editor together with Ferdinand Lassalle. There is no doubt that this plan appealed to Marx, but one precondition, that he could re-acquire his Prussian citizenship, could not be met. However, it also became clear that his and Lassalle's views about who should be editor-in-chief did not coincide, and that there were obstacles of personality and theory preventing the two from cooperating. Marx never again went back to Germany. He did not consider the political conditions to be sufficiently promising. During his visit he made a number of other important contacts, including with the Viennese daily Die Presse. This is an important episode in Marx’s life which is here analysed in depth for the first time.           Markus Bürgi surveys Engels’s various visits to Switzerland, of which the one he made in 1893 was the most important. Here Engels made an important speech to the International Socialist Congress referring to the principles of inner-party democracy and to the need for open discussion on the basis of revolutionary principles. He also paid a visit to his cousin Anna Beust, married to Friedrich Beust, an active participant in the 1848/49 revolution and later a co-founder of the Zurich section of the 1st International. Bürgi located five hitherto unknown letters by Engels, among them one of the very last he wrote before his death. These letters will probably be published in the 2005 yearbook. Their main relevance is the light they throw on private aspects of Engels’s life.           In addition to reports from relevant conferences and three reviews, the volume contains a letter written by Karl Schapper to Engels in 1846. This letter ought to have been included in MEGA vol. III/2, the correspondence from 1846-48. It reflects the discussions that took place in the precursor organization of the League of Communists, in this case in relation to issues of nationhood.            Some of the articles—such as an otherwise interesting piece by Thomas Welskopp discussing the German labour movement’s understanding of economic theory between the 1848 and 1878, a 1932 lecture by anti-Semite and Nazi Party-member Carl Schmitt, and the purely ideological article by Mario Iorio (who discusses Marx in a present-day setting)—seem more or less misplaced in the context of the yearbook. None of these contributions has any real bearing on the MEGA project.             The yearbook includes summaries in English of the articles, but this is not sufficient to reach an international public. The editing committee should at least publish some articles in English if they want the yearbook to have a future as an international publication.

         

“A Film Run Backwards”: Bukharin’s Voice from the Dead reviewed by David MacGregor

Nikolai Bukharin, Philosophical Arabesques, translated by Renfrey Clarke with editorial assistance by George Shriver; Introduction by Helena Sheehan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005).

After Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin may have been Stalin’s most illustrious victim. A founder of the Soviet Union and designer of its economic system, Bukharin was falsely convicted of terror and treason in a famous show trial publicized across the globe. He wrote Philosophical Arabesques in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison while enduring a cruel 13-month imprisonment. This important book reveals a different, more sophisticated form of Soviet Marxism than was ever available under Stalin; it offers a unique glimpse into the intellectual climate of pre-war Europe, and presents a challenging interpretation of Hegel and his relationship to Marx.

Bukharin was the most charming and beloved of the old Bolsheviks, but in 1937-38 these personal qualities of a hero of the Revolution hardly mattered to anyone outside his immediate family. He was an abandoned figure, his witch trial and execution by gunfire warmly approved by the public. Stalin’s justice extended to Bukharin’s wife Anna Larina who suffered two decades in the Gulag; his son was sent into adoption and his daughter imprisoned. Along with three other prison works—a discussion of socialist culture, a novel, and a book of poems, Philosophical Arabesques moldered in a Kremlin vault for half a century. Gorbachev had Bukharin rehabilitated in the Soviet Union just before its collapse; after 1991 the doomed Bolshevik leader once again slid into obscurity in his native Russia.

“Philosophical Arabesques,” observes Helena Sheehan in her riveting introduction, “was an ambitious and systematic work of philosophy.... It marshaled the motif of Arabic art to refer to a series of discourses on various themes interwoven with each other to form an intricate pattern.” How can one explain the ghastly origins of this complex and inspiring book? Why would Bukharin—pleading vainly with Stalin to execute him with poison “like Socrates” rather than a bullet—embark on this profound exploration of labour and thought, technology and nature? I think the reason lies in Bukharin’s enormous intellectual ambition, his internationalism, and his faith in the power of ideas. We know little of his experience in prison, but these aspects of his personality had received vivid expression six years earlier.

Bukharin spearheaded the Soviet delegation to the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology, held in London in 1931 and prophetically entitled “Science at the Cross Roads.” Together with his seven colleagues, Bukharin wrenched the historiography and sociology of science into the modern world. Themes from the 1931 Congress reappear in Philosophical Arabesques, where the author of worldwide best sellers The ABC of Communism and Historical Materialism wrestles with the material underpinnings of philosophy, technology, and society. Bukharin’s respect and admiration for western intellectual life, underlined by his enthusiastic participation at the Congress, is also affirmed in Philosophical Arabesques, which includes probing analyses of the sociology of knowledge and the thought of Max Weber and Georg Simmel. While Stalin and his agents engaged in secret diplomacy with Hitler that would culminate in an infamous peace treaty with Germany, Bukharin mocks the vulgar betrayal of modern thought prevailing in fascism and its exponents among racist scientists and philosophers.

Hegel is a towering figure in Philosophical Arabesques, cited twice as often as Marx himself. Bukharin alternately denounces the Berlin philosopher as an irredeemable idealist and celebrates his indispensable contribution to Marxism. In some respects, Philosophical Arabesques is a dull repetition of well-known phrases in Engels, Marx and Lenin. But the text soars beyond these standard conceptions. Had it been published in 1938 instead of disappearing into Moscow’s gigantic archives of terror, Bukharin’s text would have immeasurably advanced the reputation of Soviet Marxism—which was about to be fatally wounded by Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938) and Marxism and the Problem of Linguistics (1950). In my opinion, Bukharin’s intimate familiarity with Hegel’s works and his nuanced interpretation of key passages from “the dialectical maestro” make Philosophical Arabesque an insightful contribution to our understanding of Marxism and its relation to Hegel.

Bukharin is slyly revealing about Hegel—almost noting that Marx’s derogatory image of Hegelian idealism (walking on one’s head) came from the master himself (105). The book’s structure eerily resembles Hegel’s Science of Logic, advancing from space and time; quality and quantity, through to teleology; the organism; truth; and the good, often using identical chapter headings. Bukharin identifies the dialectics of labour as a central Hegelian concept—anathema to the Stalinist construction of Hegel as bourgeois idealist, and still highly controversial. He indicates, for example, how Hegel foreshadows the triadic structure of Marx’s labour process, with the goal, means and object of production coming together in human practice. Reflecting on Hegel’s materialist analysis of the Stoics, Bukharin offers a jarring insight into his own circumstances at Lubyanka Prison: The conditions of life, social collapse, life constantly beneath the sword of Damocles, without any hope of an active breakthrough, lead in intellectual terms to the “ethical” abolition of the world, to training in order to resist “fear and desire.” The highest good lies in saying “A wise man is free even in chains, since he acts from within himself, without being suborned by fear or by desire.”

Bukharin exposes troubling aspects of Hegel that continue to feed debate about his work, including Hegel’s apparent hostility to the idea of evolution in nature, and his ethnocentric European view of Africa and Asia. But Philosophical Arabesques is mostly an appreciation of Hegel, even recognizing that the Logic is no dry, abstract compendium but a brilliant exposition of dialectics “developed in an extremely convincing and weighty form, with unusual subtlety and wit.”

Lenin tipped Bukharin as chief communist party theorist, but he worried that his favoured successor embraced a mechanistic view of Marxism. Philosophical Arabesques stands as Bukharin’s reconciliation with Lenin’s account of dialectics and Hegel in The Philosophical Notebooks. Lenin did not know of Marx’s early writings such as The German Ideology and The Paris Manuscripts, which were first published in 1932. But Bukharin was familiar with these writings and employs them to reconstruct a compelling version of Marxism.

I would argue that Bukharin does not go far enough in his recasting of Hegel. Philosophical Arabesques sees the Hegelian Idea too narrowly. My own view (which parallels Lenin’s in The Philosophical Notebooks) is that Hegel’s concept of ideality resembles Marx’s notion of “revolutionizing practice,” the unity of thought and being that comprises human action. The notion of ideality is best illustrated by a familiar social relationship—work. Work, observed Hegel in the Philosophy of Right,¹ is the “middle term between the subjective and the objective.” Because work transforms natural objects into instruments and expressions of human will, work is also the chief aspect of the transcendental, creative quality of consciousness. Hegel embraced this unity and extended it into the entire structure of logic, aesthetics, history, and society. But this is an argument for another day and hardly a criticism of Bukharin’s provocative exploration of dialectical thought.Philosophical Arabesques draws the reader back to Russia in 1938, when Hitler is about to strike and an agonized earth will soon gush blood and corpses. Sheehan calls this book “a voice from the dead... It is a voice inciting us to deal with the darkness of our own days and to reach for the future.” Bukharin is not the fictional character Rubashov, with whom he has often been compared, confessing in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to astronomical crimes to preserve his own hopeless, totalitarian vision. While Bukharin refers to Machiavelli’s dictum that any treachery should be countenanced if it would save the homeland, Philosophical Arabesques is an affirmation of freedom and ethical life in socialist society.

Bukharin twice refers to “a cinema film of the history of the world... run backwards.”

Note 1. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 126.

Louis Kontos, David Brotherton and Luis Barrios, eds., Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) reviewed by George P. Mason.

This collection of fifteen articles examines the question of gangs in society from a critical criminology perspective, challenging orthodox criminological and sociological approaches. Gangs and Society is a refreshing, timely and thought-provoking reader which confronts contemporary media imagery and stereotypical views of gangs. It demonstrates that to understand gangs one has to go beyond simply examining the etiology of crime. Gangs and Society is divided into six sections. The first is a theoretical one, in which the authors introduce their critical approach and demonstrate “the limits of conventional theorizing about gangs.” The second section deals with the political aspirations and goals of gangs, and how they are pursued through both criminal and non-criminal means. The next section examines how individual agency is fostered and alternative avenues for youth are created through religion and education. The fourth section provides a glimpse into the lives of women in relation to gangs. Section five introduces a sociology of law perspective on gangs with special attention to the state’s manufacture of social control. Finally, section six contains photo essays with very dramatic and compelling illustrations of life for a number of people involved in gangs.

Kontos, Brotherton and Barrios bring together a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of gangs. Sudhir Venkatesh, in the opening chapter, reviews the multifaceted critical approaches of urban sociological analysis from the early Chicago School (particularly ecological analyses), and reminds us that individualistic crime-oriented approaches fail to take into account real inequities. Avelardo Valdez, continuing in the Chicago School tradition while including more recent ecologically based ideas from William Julius Wilson’s Truly Disadvantaged, develops a typology of gangs which demonstrates that gangs are not inherently criminal and violent—that they exist for more than simply drug usage and trafficking.

Ric Curtis, in an especially significant contribution, demonstrates the usefulness of a Marxist-informed theoretical framework as an analytical starting point. He examines the relationship of gangs to drugs and asserts that gangs largely mirror the corporate structure and functions of the more formal capitalist economy—from a reserve pool of potential labor, and corporate disregard of communities, to the exploitative relationship between owners and workers. It seems as though the gang is simply another workplace in a capitalist society. Curtis criticizes the “sound-bite-driven analyses by the media and the reductionist approaches by many academics” and shows that, contrary to common perception, there is a disconnect between gangs and the prevalence of drugs.

Also of exceptional interest is Luis Barrios's examination of the function of religion within the Almighty Latin Kings and Queens Nation. Employing a classical Durkheimian approach, Barrios examines religion from the perspective of liberation theology, looking at its effect on the structure and solidarity of gangs. His focus on the Almighty Latin Kings and Queens Nation is not in terms of crime or deviance, but is presented as an example of existing “collective resistance to systems of domination”—an important corrective to prevailing assumptions.

The essays in Gangs and Society transcend typical studies of gangs in using a qualitative methodology. Most of the data in the volume come from ethnographic research through the Street Organization Project in New York organized through the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Apart from the New York-based Almighty Latin Kings and Queens Nation, the groups studied include the Asociación Ñeta (New York), Los Sólidos Nation (Hartford), 26 gangs in San Antonio, and even Los Angeles gangs with links to El Salvador. The reliance on qualitative ethnographic research puts these studies in the tradition of the early Chicago School by ‘doing’ sociology and getting on the inside of these groups for a more complete knowledge. This approach, as Albert Dichiara and Russell Chabot remind us in their chapter, demonstrates how the “blanket indictment of gangs as criminal organizations is both intellectually dishonest and sociologically baseless.”

In reading Gangs and Society, I find myself split in opinions and criticism. First, although many of the essays use Marxist analysis, they do not attempt to develop any comprehensive Marxist theory of gangs, remaining anchored instead in a kind of ecological and social-control orientation. This approach, common in much of the criminology literature, leads to accepting official definitions of deviance (imbued with class- and race-based criteria) and to applying, by way of explanation, an individualistic pathology located mainly in the so-called ‘underclass.’ In effect, the authors, despite their deployment of a range of critical approaches (Durkheimian functionalist, symbolic interactionist, liberal feminist, as well as ecological), do not develop the critical implications of their findings about gang culture.

Drugs and violence are categorically accepted as deviant or criminal. Rather than challenging this as a construct of the state, the various authors work to demonstrate how both are simply minor aspects in the cultural life of the people studied. I believe this to be shortsighted as it merely provides an acceptance of what is ‘normal’ and hegemonic for the mainstream in US society. While I believe most people would categorically abhor violence, the state simply criminalizes violent actions of the gang in an attempt to maintain its own monopoly over the use of violence as a means for social control. I would not justify or legitimize gang-banging or other forms of violence, but there is certainly no organization in our society which comes close to the level of state violence exercised by the police. As for drugs, I believe it to be hypocritical to talk of drugs such as marijuana as socially disruptive or criminal when the state, acceding to the demands of corporate power, keeps products such as tobacco, alcohol and certain prescription drugs easily available despite their adverse effects on individuals and society.

I am also disappointed in the range of gangs studied. Most are very large and ‘known’ gangs, and almost all of them are Latino. This gives the work a narrower focus than the title suggests. The book would have done well to include research on disparate groups such as Chicago's Vice Lords and Black Gangster Disciples Nation. A further gap, in view of the way most states define gangs legally, is the lack of a fully developed discussion of groups of youth targeted by the state under the guise of anti-gang enforcement—particularly when issues of race and class are at the core and the majority of the youth are targeted simply for being in groups of three or more. However, Loren Siegel does caution us that it “is impossible to avoid the similarities between anti-gang legal tactics today, and those that were in play against communists and other left-wing individuals during the McCarthy period.” The illustrations provided are indeed quite interesting as descriptions of gang life and culture. However, there is little analysis of the situation these youth face and certainly no contextualization into the broader socio-political structure of US capitalism and, to paraphrase Althusser, of an omnipresent repressive state apparatus.

While I have a number of criticisms of the various chapters, I believe that Kontos, Brotherton and Barrios offer an overall positive contribution to the study of gangs. In a time when media imagery focusing on criminal behavior of gangs and on individual pathology of gang members is ubiquitous, Kontos, Brotherton and Barrios sharply challenge the associated stereotypes. If gangs fascinate you or if you simply want to get past the hype of the mainstream media (and the unrelenting connection between gangs and drugs replicated by police, academics and popular culture), you will find this book very illuminating. The photo essays in the final section can move you by the dramatic and stark realities. Finally, Gangs and Society is worth reading for its own sake as an engaging application of neo-Marxist analysis. The book is an absolute must for any study on gangs and should also be seriously considered for studies on delinquency and more broadly for education on deviance and studies of race and race relations.

Kathy Kelly, Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison (Petrolia, CA: CounterPunch Books; Oakland: AK Press, 2005) reviewed by Seth Sandronsky.   In a civilized nation, Kathy Kelly’s peacemaking activities would make her widely known. Thus she has scant name recognition in the US. Against that backdrop, Kelly’s new book can help correct this situation.

In her book, we find compelling stories on what the US government does to harm human beings in the name of safety and security overseas and at home. Opposing this barbarity and cruelty, Kelly argues in deed and word for a nonviolent pacifism of resistance. Weighing 105 lbs., she is a resolute force in the face of tyrannical authority for the improvement of all humanity in the tradition of Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Kelly’s book has four parts. In part one, we learn of her working-class, Irish-Catholic roots in Chicago. Such personalization works well, helping us to understand the life processes that empowered her to make repeated humanitarian missions to the Balkans, Caribbean, Central America and the Middle East. A pivotal point in her life came in 1977 when she entered the Catholic Worker movement in her hometown.

Kelly meets Karl Meyer, her former husband and mentor with whom she remains a friend. He helps teach her how to work with others to resist oppression by employing the principles of pacifism to counter the dominant assumptions about armed violence as a means to settle differences.

Kelly blossoms in the light of the Catholic Worker group’s “collective determination” to better the human rights of the globe's poorest people as the highest form of personal responsibility. She meets Father Roy Bourgeois, a charismatic priest with the Maryknoll religious order who protests US intervention in Central America. He impresses her by receiving a prison sentence for publicly demonstrating against his friend’s death at the hands of a Central American death squad trained by the US government.

Two other influential people in Kelly’s life are Ernest Bromley and Maurice McCracken. Together, they teach her by example about militant nonviolence in the face of arrest and mistreatment—how to conquer fear and “catch courage.” From this duo Kelly learns: “Courage is the ability to control your fear, and courage is contagious.” There is more to her pacifism: “I’d add to those definitions an additional truism that can help dissolve fear: treat other people right, and you won’t have to be afraid of them.”

In the book’s second and longest part, Kelly bears witness, from Iraq, to the triumphs and tragedies of ordinary people during 14 years of trade sanctions, weapons inspections, US/UK bombing missions, and, finally, the US-led invasion in March 2003 and continuing occupation. Co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, a pacifist group begun in her Chicago apartment to help ordinary Iraqis under the US-led UN economic embargo that weakened them and strengthened former leader Saddam Hussein, Kelly deconstructs American elites’ view of that nation and its suffering people. To that end, she sheds ample light on the human rights nightmare in Iraqi hospitals and households, under-reported in America’s corporate-owned press. VitW has sent 70 humanitarian delegations to Iraq to bring its suffering populace medicine and toys. For their efforts, the group earned the wrath of the US Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. For Albright, the deaths of a half-million Iraqi children from the Iraq sanctions is deemed “worth it” in a CBS TV interview. If that is not an expression of barbarism, we need a new definition of the term.

Kelly, with a deft ear and eye, humanizes ordinary Iraqi people -- children, fathers and mothers. In her vivid prose, we meet Iraqis who perished and others who survived sanctions that prevented the nation from having normal commercial relations with other countries. Dr. Raad Towalha struggles to heal the sick with a lack of medical resources. Similarly, Umm Zainab, an Iraqi mother of nine, battles daily poverty to provide for her family under aerial bombardment before the March 2003 “Shock and Awe” attack.

Kelly writes from the Al Fanar hotel in Baghdad as that imperial air attack begins after historic antiwar protests by millions of people worldwide. “Often you could feel the floors shudder and hear the windows rattle. When an ear-splitting, gut-wrenching blast would shake the building, you could see the younger kids quickly checking the adults’ faces. If the adults seemed calm, the kids would note it and go on with play, games, meals, and conversation. Frequently, the response of Iraqi friends would be a clicking of the tongue, then ‘Laish, laish?’ -- Why, why?” US media did not file such reports on Iraqi civilians.

In part three, Kelly details daily life for her and other incarcerated women. One penal institution she writes from is the Pekin Federal Prison Camp. Kelly’s “crime”? She nonviolently protested at the US Army School of the Americas in spring 2004, joining with others to demand the end of combat training of soldiers there. Subsequently, these “graduates” of the SOA (re-branded the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) return to their Caribbean and Latin American nations to maim and murder fellow citizens.

Dubbed “Missiles” by her prison mates, Kelly cogently captures the heavy price paid by working-class women in the racist US war on drugs, worsened by mandatory minimum sentencing.  Imprisonment deeply wounds women’s relations with family members on the outside, she explains. In these prisoners’ stories, we meet Earline, Ernestina and Terry, who detail such hurt and humiliation. In response, they and Kelly provide mutual support to one another within the confines of the prison walls. Disproportionately nonwhite, the women prisoners are throwaway people in the era of neoliberal economic reform that has buried the practice and theory of a “rational capitalism.”

I winced, however, reading Kelly write that “we” Americans choose empire and its consumptive lifestyle. This is an analytical limitation. Working people of the US do not express their politico-economic power via consumption. Class power flows from the financial and industrial forces that control production and distribution, and the political system to which it is tightly linked.

A foreword by Milan Rai, founder of VitW in the UK, provides a chronology of the Iraq sanctions between 1990 and 2000. His critique of that barbarous decade is an education in itself. Heidi Holliday’s prologue offers a brief history of VitW from December 1995 to October 2003 (a continued history is at www.vitw.org).

Kelly, who has been arrested repeatedly for protesting war, has been a high school and community college teacher in the Chicago area for 31 years. In addition, she is a multiple nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, anti-nuclear weapons protester, and war tax resister. Significantly, Kelly’s book can be read by high school and undergraduate college students. Their political actions for a better world can help to build on what she and like-minded people have been and are doing to make that social reality emerge.

William M. Kunstler, The Emerging Police State. Edited by Michael Steven Smith, Karin Kunstler Goldman, and Sarah Kunstler (New York: Ocean Press, 2004) reviewed by Hobart Spalding.   This short book should be required reading for every left and liberal person in the US. Built around fifteen speeches by radical lawyer William Kunstler, in and out of the courtroom, it sometimes chillingly describes the emerging US police state. The texts date from the 1970s to 1995, the year Kunstler died. Taken together, they show two things: 1) the evolution of Kunstler’s ideas about the law and his role in defending accused persons, and 2) how in those decades the then emerging right had already begun to dismantle the Bill of Rights. The speeches thus anticipate what we are (arguably) experiencing today: the police state emerged. Ironically, several of the selections come from FBI files, courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act (a channel now no longer open because of the PATRIOT Act). Also included are two letters to the New York Times, one of which, entitled “The Movement is Not Dead,” protests the Times’s misreporting him to have said that the left was less militant.

Three chapters add depth. An introduction by Michael Ratner locates Kunstler as a stalwart defender of civil rights and traces his evolution from lawyer to radical lawyer. A second introduction by Michael Steven Smith concentrates more on Kunstler the human being, much of the material taken from the author’s personal experiences. An Afterword by Judge Gustin L. Reichbach reproduces his Appreciation of Kunstler as it appeared in the New York Law Journal in 1995.

From the 1960s until his death, Kunstler represented a Who’s Who of the US civil rights and radical movements. A short list would include: Freedom Riders in the South, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Chicago 7, students at both Kent and Jackson State, and members of the American Indian Movement. He successfully argued the unconstitutionality of the New York death penalty, and won the Supreme Court case which ruled that flag-burning was protected by the First Amendment.

By his own account, Kunstler only became a full-blown radical lawyer after the trial of the Chicago 7 in 1970 (the closing arguments for the defense are reproduced in Chapter 8). At that point he became totally convinced that the law, instead of being an impartial arbiter between people, in reality upheld the interests of capital and the rich, while discriminating against the masses, the poor, immigrants, and people of color.

In these speeches, many of them moving expressions of Kunstler’s humanism, the man’s sense of humor emerges time and again. In his lifetime he published two books of poetry, mostly sonnets, which he often used effectively in his speeches. Throughout, Kunstler’s enormous erudition stands out. He constantly makes analogies to US and world historical events and personages.

In the final analysis Kunstler’s politics defy definition. Clearly anti-capitalist (a system based on greed as he called it), anti-imperialist, and anti-racist, he was probably much too busy to even think about joining a political party, but obviously considered himself part of The Movement. While never an advocate of violence, he clearly saw that breaking the established (and discriminatory) law was sometimes necessary. He also defended the Weatherpeople’s right to wage an underground struggle against the system.

The logic of why people must struggle for a better world is irrefutable. The scary thing is that, as Kunstler constantly points out, those in power are dedicated to destroying, by force if necessary, the ones who carry out this struggle.

Salim Lamarani, ed., Superpower Principles: U.S. Terrorism Against Cuba (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2005) reviewed by Hobart Spalding.

This slim volume is packed full of information about US aggression against Cuba, but more specifically focuses on the case of the Cuban Five. These were the five Cubans who infiltrated terrorist groups in Florida, reported on the activities of these groups in order to try and prevent attacks against their homeland, and were subsequently arrested by the US government and convicted in a Miami courtroom (in 2001), under trumped up charges of conspiracy and, in one case, complicity in murder. (The Miami verdict was overturned in August 2005 by the Appeals Court in Atlanta, but as of this writing the Five remain in prison after more than seven years, under very harsh conditions.)

After a brief introduction the book contains two sections: “U.S Terrorism Against Cuba” and “The Story of the Cuban 5.” The first is mostly historical background of US designs and actions against the island as an integral part of imperial expansion from the 19th century to the present. The seven essays range from Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky discussing the long train of US attacks, to William Blum and Michael Parenti explaining why the Cuban Revolution so sticks in the US craw, to Piero Glieses’ article making the connection between Cuban policy in Africa, the Five (three of whom fought there), and US vindictiveness, to two essays showing the nature of the right-wing Cuban exile terrorist groups operating openly with government blessing in Florida, most specifically the Cuban American National Foundation.

The second section zeroes in on the case of the Five. Leonard Weinglass, who represents one of the defendants, concisely presents the major details of the case and its aftermath. The other writings in this section, by Wayne Smith, Saul Landau, Michael Steven Smith, and Ricardo Alarcón (President of the National Assembly and only Cuban represented), focus on various aspects of the trial and the larger picture of the contradictions involved in the US’s supposed stance against terrorism, its harboring of known terrorists, and its persecution of these five Cubans whose only crime was trying to stop terrorist attacks against their own people.

Although somewhat repetitive (inherent in 15 essays of this nature) and in need of more footnotes, the book makes an excellent informative read about the case. In all, it provides a comprehensive view of both local and international contexts, along with extensive background material about the travesty of justice that has imposed draconian punishment on five young men whose legal infractions did not extend beyond minor offenses such as falsification of IDs. The book could make a good discussion item in classrooms or study groups. It makes a solid introduction for those who have not followed this important case.

Ben Agger, Speeding up Fast Capitalism: Cultures, Jobs, Families, Schools, Bodies (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004) reviewed by Michael Buhl.

Another specter is haunting capitalism -- this time, fast acceleration and its uncertain consequences. This is a profound book and also a real adventure. Although its title sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, it is a critical, theoretically informed study of the changes and impacts associated with fast capitalism. Agger does a fine job in bringing a common public concern into the realm of sociological debate. He makes this clear from the start: “This book describes how fast capitalism has gotten even faster, and it traces the implications of all this for culture, work, schooling, childhood, diet and bodies” (3).

The first two chapters (“Faster Capitalism” and “Domination at the Speed of Light”) introduce the reader to the dynamics of fast capitalism and also to a Marxian analysis as developed by the Frankfurt School (e.g., Herbert Marcuse). Agger argues that under modern capitalism, “Faster production must be matched by faster consumption… [which] depends on insatiable needs, on planned obsolence, on striking the fancy of consumers increasingly inured to claims of The Next Big Thing” (17). The author stresses the importance of new media such as the Internet, among whose unintended consequences he mentions the “de-urbanization and perhaps even the ‘de-malling’ of America…” (18).

The third chapter focuses on the transformation of work. Although faster production and service may be convenient for consumers, its effect for workers at places like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s is to intensify “a cycle of poverty, despair, and anxiety” (75). Fast capitalism at the same time expands the sheer volume of work. Perhaps the most eye-opening chapter, however, is the fourth (“Fast Families and Virtual Children”), where Agger, using a feminist critique, brings out the effects of fast capitalism in the home, creating what he might have called Frankenstein Families and Zombie Children. He views women as suffering a disproportionate share of the stress produced by fast capitalism.           In "Fast Food, Fasting Bodies," he addresses how fast capitalism also enters the food chain, constructing fat and radically thin human bodies. As he points out, "Fast food appeals not only to people on the run…but also to people who seek standardization…in a world that is jumbled and chaotic" (113). Agger also uses feminist criticism to show how women have been influenced to fast excessively in order to achieve some ideal physical figure (121).

In his concluding chapter ("Slowmodernity"), Agger returns to influences from the Frankfurt School and critical theory. He argues: "The forces of capital… have colonized what used to be off limits to the social and political..., subjecting all of life… to scheduling, producing, connecting, messaging, immersing oneself in the quotidian and therefore losing sight of the bigger picture" (132). He closes with a very appealing 10-point agenda, including an admonition to “defy productivism -- use time to produce not commodities for market but selves for civil society and for family..." (158).           I think one can add a few lines here. It's not that most people are lazy and refuse to work; rather the problem is the extreme degree to which capitalism commodifies everything, including the worker. What is needed, I think, is work-alternatives like civil-work programs or citizen-works. Under this scheme (which is advocated by Ulrich Beck), citizens would get paid a basic income (citizens-wage) to cover living expenses in return for performing necessary functions required by civil society. These could include baby-sitting, community lecturing, health service-work and other forms of community service. An example is the European Union’s Erasmus program, which pays tax-free scholarship stipends for university students to acquire another European language, or to transfer to another European school.

Agger’s book performs the important service of carrying a radical critique of capitalism outside the academy. It is an excellent tool for political education.