The American Party of Labor

The American Party of Labor’s website:

http://www.americanpartyoflabor.org/

Party Platform & Draft Program:

generalinfo.html

The APL newspaper online:

http://theredphoenix.wordpress.com/

Random Thoughts I

1) Shakespeare DID write his own plays, you assholes. This has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Ask any literary scholar. Those rumors that he didn’t were a bunch of conspiracy theory fluff.

2) China was never a socialist state. What kind of “socialist” society pays the bourgeoisie 1/4^th of the profits from their old factories? What kind of “Marxist” invents the Three Worlds Theory? What kind of “communist” has a meeting with Nixon and Kissinger where he tells them he likes rightists?

3) The word “clown” used to mean “peasant.” It then came to have two meanings: 1) a person dressed in ridiculous makeup and colorful outfits, or 2) a vulgar person to be looked down upon. Just goes to show you the class nature of words.

4) The Dalai Lama is a piece of shit, not a hero and not a pacifist either. He personally owned 6,170 field serfs and 102 house slaves in the old Tibetan order, and lived in a 1,000 room mansion.

5) Shakespeare was not a sexist, a racist or a homophobe, despite what the critics may say. They never look at the context—most of his characters of different races or sexes are shown as being equally capable and strong, sometimes more so, than their male, Christian and European counterparts. Witness Shylock in the Merchant of Venice and Othello in the play of the same name. Witness also how most plays that don’t take place in a military setting have the women equally capable and sometimes cleverer than the men. Homophobia is shown as a trait of Shakespeare’s villains, and is always punished in the end.

6) Protesting against Iran when they are under attack by American imperialism is stupid and reactionary. Attacking Iran on the woman question is also hypocritical, since there is no country on earth where women are treated with respect, including the US.

7) My favorite literary movement is by far Modernism, even though most of the authors of that era, such as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, were very reactionary.

8 ) I was reading James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle from late 1909. They are available online for free after someone bought them at auction for almost $500,000 back in 2004. They are some of the filthiest things I have ever read. James Joyce was apparently a big freak in the bedroom.

Link: http://johnhamilton.us/2/jamesjoyceletters.htm

9) You just know that Aquaman HAD to be the loser of the Superfriends and Justice League. He can talk to fish—that has to be the most useless superpower ever.

Poetry Corner

The development of a few poems has pleased me immensely. As I’ve told others, I was glad to see at least one fully-formed poem with a semi-literate structure whose purpose I made passable by adequate emotion, not-too-obvious meaning and a suitably eloquent lyrical composition. Most of the stuff in the cheap poetry mags I used to read is utterly and irredeemably bland because of the lack of substance or, if it has that, the idiotic obviousness.

I long for the sleek, machine-like style with which Stephen King seems to produce his books. Sadly, I have rarely obtained that in the past few years, despite the sharpening of my talents. My only resolve now is to pass this immense test and let the creative writing pile up for whatever ultimate destination it might be set for, trying my professional luck with any story I happened to complete, which at this point I could count on one hand.

On Stalinist Art & Militarism in Media

As a writer, I am called an artist. The last thing I was to be is a liberal “the-masses-are-asses” artist, otherwise known as a “highbrow,” “artsy” or “indie” artist and author. This is a Platonic political line that promises elitism, Jeffersonianism and euro-centrism in art, not to mention gross class discrimination in the form of looking down on the lower classes. Obviously this is a line that must be defeated. We must build strong, independent institutions to defend the oppressed.

Many criticize Stalin as well as “Stalinist” or “totalitarian” art, which in this case I suppose means state-sponsored art, and hence pure evil to a liberal. This of course, causes them to say good things about liberal cappie movies and Yugoslav “independent” filmmakers. Under socialism, there is obviously a call for our class to stand up and for workers and peasants to make their own art. I nevertheless defend state-sponsored art as entirely necessary under the dictatorship of the proletariat, as well as the suppression and banning of reactionary art.

Sex and violence have reached pornographic levels these days. Mainstream imperialist producers use it as a tool to sell more copies. I do not oppose violence in media on idealist or pacifist grounds. I oppose it because the violence in reactionary media serves no purpose other than to make violence fun. The American Empire leads the world in both violence at home and violence abroad, that is, in violence to keep the oppressed under control, and also people deciding to shoot up their local workplace. To justify this bloody empire, one must promote violence and terror and necessary and as part of human nature.

This is a new and different way of glorifying war that has not been seen before—not glorifying war because it is glorious, as in the old British WWI propaganda, but glorying it because it is nasty.

Warmongering films bring the glorification of the nastiness of war several steps forward, such as “Apocalypse Now,” which is supposedly anti-war but ends up making it look like an eternal, indispensable part of human nature that shall never be changed, and not the simple logical result of global imperialism and capitalism’s need to ceaselessly expand.

The violence in the media is chiefly violence against oppressed groups, such as the proletariat, oppressed ethnics and nationalities, women, homosexuals, homeless people and other such strata. The postmodernists of course, have all fallen in line with this violent fanfare, defending such trash as merely “human nature,” which has been the endless justification for war, racism, slavery, fascism, invasion, colonialism and subjugation throughout history.

Violent media desensitizes people to violence and makes it look casual. Some charlatans defend military films, which promote fascism and reactionary values, by asking, “Well, how can you judge what goes on in the battlefield? What would you want soldiers to do?”

In a better society, such as that of socialist Albania, the military existed to serve the people. In America, the military and the soldiers exist to kill enemies and commit terrorism. Movies are thus made for children to glorify these hired assassins in uniform by making their jobs look like “senseless violence,” but maintaining the illusion that its not only entirely necessary, but in fact indispensable.

I Am Anti-Liberal

I am not a Maoist, but one of my favorite pamphlets is written by Mao, entitled “Combat Liberalism.” It defined the very essence of liberalism as a manifestation of opportunism. As a communist, defending liberalism is in no way, shape or form on my agenda. I despise liberalism as the essential face of imperialism. I would go so far as to say I seek a liberal-free world.

Liberalism is what Americans learn in elementary school classes. Its chief tenets include the belief that capitalism is the best system possible, that the USA is a “free country” and that everyone—every person existing, regardless of context or class content—should have the “equal” right to express their opinions without fear of repression. This highlights two excellent examples of liberal drivel already. One is the denial of class analysis in favor of terms like “the people,” and the other is idealism and denial of actually existing conditions in favor of one’s own personal opinions.

Liberalism also discourages confrontation and violence of any sort and demands one not try to “control” the thoughts of others. In this manner liberalism discourages violence of the oppressed and thus prolongs violence of the oppressors. Communists say that “control” is not a crime, particularly in a world filled with starvation, imperialist war and homelessness. In a word such as this, there needs to be much more control than there is, a control of the peace-creating kind. After there is no such massive preventable suffering, then perhaps we can discuss the merits of this “freedom” you speak of.

Expanding on this, liberalism says “everyone has a right to be wrong.” Communists say no, and certainly say no when it comes to questions of life-and-death that may literally affect the entire planet and the future of the human race. There is no place for “opinion” in light of science.

For a liberal, what happened in this country or that country, such as what happened in Chile under Augusto Pinochet or Indonesia under Suharto, needs no explanation whatsoever. It was just pure evil, plain and simple. Yes, evil happened, and figuring out the material causes of why it happened is just being a hopeless ideologue (not to mention insulting all those poor people who died). According to liberals, people like Lenin and Stalin didn’t actually care about the proletariat, it was all just one big ploy for power. They were just pure evil and that’s all there is to it, defying material conditions and any kind of logic.

Marxist-Leninists define “progressive” as that tending to abolish gender, nation and class oppression. This is based on nothing but objective science—it would be difficult to argue that to provide the most livable life for the greatest amount of people would not represent a qualitatively higher stage in the development of humans.

One must always be sure what one is about when one approaches a particular task. Marxists have their priorities straight and urge liberals to give up their postmodernism and subjectivism for science. Repressive measures, even up to violence and the banning of reactionary works, are completely necessary. If liberals want their people to be “free” so badly then they should give up liberalism and become communists, as the sooner we reach a socialist world, the sooner repressive organs like the state will become outdated. The sooner we arrive at a world with little or no preventable deaths from imperialist war, starvation, disease, homelessness etc., the sooner we can begin yapping about equality and freedom for all under the law. Until then, it is pure idealism.

Communists have sometimes united with liberals over fascists, since the existence of liberalism presupposes limits on the repressive powers of the bourgeois dictatorship, whereas fascism places no such limits and resorts to the most blatant reactionary terrorism. We therefore recognize the differences in the particular form of bourgeois governments, while recognizing at the end of the day they all come from the same class origin. Fascism is merely another form of imperialism and capitalism, much the same way liberalism is. It would be easy to take a Comintern/ George Orwell line on this question and end up in the “they are exactly the same thing” camp, which would be suicidal. This unity strategy lead to the Soviet official Dimitrov’s famous “United Front Against Fascism” strategy during World War II. In these dark times, unity can be a positive, but this is not the same as communists turning into liberals ourselves. Now that the rule of the bourgeoisie is threatened internationally, the threat of fascism comes from the continued existence of liberalism. The liberals of today are the fascists of tomorrow.

Right-Wing Hedonism

What hedonist postmodernists such as are revived and kept alive in the deeply conservative and libertarian writings of Anton LaVey and the Marquis De Sade probably like about perverted, forbidden things is their departure from and hostility to the commonplace. To Ayn Rand—whose imagination is not cosmic, life is rational egoism. People who are steeped in the orthodox myths of religion naturally find their fascination in the conception of outlawed horror. Such people take the idea of “sin” seriously and of course, drink in the dark allurement.

People like myself, with a materialist view of history, see little charm in things banned by religiousity. We recognize the primitiveness of religious attitude and thus find no element of attractive devil’s dance in the wholesale violation of its morality insofar as the action does not inherantly cause fun within itself outside of such “sin.” Meanwhile, the filth and perversion to which De Sade and LaVey’s obscenely orthodox minds visit upon their own universes seems like nothing more than a profound maladjustment, no more enlightening or interesting than a bout of fever. Now that the veil of hocus-pocus mystery has been ripped away from such carnal things by science, they are no longer sufficient distraction for the human being as a producer. We seek to produce new things outside of the carnal, which is merely a side-dish as of now. We must be obliged to hunt settings and constructions beyond the new designs for Caligula’s bedroom.

Decline of Empire

According to the “royalist” camp of reactionaries, populated by the likes of Michael Savage, Glenn Beck and Kelsey Grammar, all cultures perish sooner or later due to “moral decay,” which they interpret as collective senility, as opposed to their perfect world of Spartan discipline and imperialist-fascist militarism ala “Starship Troopers.”

The more dynamic they are, according to this bogus “crisis theory,” the quicker they go. This is what is happening to the American culture, they say with such glee. Comparing the life of the ancient Greek, Roman, Spanish, Persian and Carthaginian civilizations to America will certainly produce likenesses, but not in the way they intend. Rather, what we see is indeed the collapse of moral fiber not due to decadence per se, but due to the crumbling of the racist-imperialist and settler ideology that gave rise to those empires (including the American one) in the first place. Since the decline of the ideology, the decline of the empire soon follows.

Empires were always unstable things, even back to the tribal, slavery and feudal days. What we are seeing today is no mere “moral decline” because of the hedonistic joys of imperial plunder we as Americans all enjoy, but more like the natural ideological readjustment to a new set of living and working conditions. The ideological superstructure follows the economic base, and the base has been in up-and-down mode since the Great Depression and especially since Reaganomics. The same thing happened during the beginnings of the fall of Rome and leading up to the French Revolution.

In many ways a crisis in this rotten imperial civilization will be positive—a changing of the tides is necessary after 400 years of violence. It will eliminate a great deal of the absurd belief in bourgeois democracy as the bourgeoisie gets more desperate and terrorist in its methods, and it will wash away illusions of religious and economic obscurantism.

Regarding current political and social change, I don’t believe there is anything happening that hasn’t already been predicted since the wide application of industrialization and machinery. Certain causes produce determinate effects, and the current outcome has been inevitable since the mid-19^th century.

Once upon a time, Marx and Engels were confident in the victory of socialism—nowadays after the triumph of revisionism and counterrevolution in the USSR and Albania, the movement is hanging by a thread and nothing seems certain except the very collapse of capitalism which was to originally bring socialism to the rise. While the former “straight line” development of socialism has been a setback, the latter formula of crisis remains completely unaffected and charges ever onwards with suicidal temper. The crisis inherent in capitalism is astounding. Since the workers are not paid the full value of their labor and thus cannot buy back the products that they themselves produce, it becomes a giant pyramid scheme.

Rectification

In a recent post of mine, and in particular other ones that may be scattered around this blog, I vocalized support for the uprisings in Iran. Some may call it opportunism or political immaturity, but let’s face it: dialectics teaches us that nothing ever stops changing and that conflict and contradiction is inherent in matter and essential for life as we know it.

At the time, I thought it might bring about a revolutionary situation in Iran by which socialism might take power, manifested by the Communist Parties in Iran. This was nothing more than a severe error and ultra-leftism on my part.

After careful study of those who support the protests—John McCain, the Tea-Baggers, the Trotskyites such as the SWP and ISO and other counterrevolutionaries—plus a recent reading of mine revealing the true comprador nature of the RIM puppet Communist Party of Iran (Maoist), I came to the obvious conclusion that is not a revolution, but a counter-revolution. More specifically, it is a counterrevolution aimed at bringing back the days of the Shah of Iran and liquidating the gains of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

The Communist Party of Iran (Maoist) makes their intentions crystal clear in the document published by the RCP’s Revolution newspaper:

“It is clear that the people’s struggle should be focused against the main enemy, the IRI. As long as the IRI is in power, there cannot be any talk of aiming the struggle against the US and the regime equally” (1).

In line with this, I must announce that I do not support the reactionary, CIA-backed Color Revolution in Iran, and have not for many months now. It is a bourgeois, reactionary revolution made up of petty-bourgeois shopkeepers and well-to-do students in opposition to the Islamic Republic. It is a comprador, pro- Moussavi the commie-killer protest designed to take power for Moussavi through Zionist and American tanks.

I call upon all revolutionaries to ignore the television and oppose these protests. When police beat down anti-Iraqi-occupation protestors here, the television is silent. When the police beat down pro-US protestors overseas, it is treated as the worst horror ever portrayed on humanity.

I fully admit it: I was resolutely, absolutely, 100% wrong and I take back my former position. For those of you who I admonished for calling out the protests and the Color Revolution for what they were at the time, I sincerely apologize for any epitaphs I might have hurled at you.

I call on all Marxist-Leninists and revolutionaries to support the anti-imperialist government of Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Republic of Iran against CIA-backed coups.

For my Party’s position, follow this link:

http://theredphoenix.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/on-the-iranian-uprising-rebellion/

Sources:

1) http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/countries/iran/iranspyweed2.txt

“Gentlemen.”

I must say, at the risk of exposing some sort of reactionary longing for the past, I truly do regret being born too late to enjoy old-style Gentlemens’ Clubs and Smoking Rooms. The whole bourgeois idea is very attractive to me and I wonder where they all went nowadays. Whatever happened to the Liberal Club and the Reform Club, I wonder? Not that my politics are particularly fond of either one of those words.

I find the notion of the old early 20^th Century Gentlemens’ Clubs appealing. The idea of sitting around in a warmly-colored room dressed in a fancy smoking jacket, surrounded by fancy leather furniture, a full bar, poker playing and other men discussing economics and politics while smoking cigars and sipping brandy gives me a wonderful Victorian vibe. Imagine if I managed to start up a Communist Club with leather-bound works of Lenin and Stalin on the cherry-stained oak shelves. Imagine what stories could be told in places such as that that couldn’t be told in your average pub, not to mention we would have a fireplace and compare facial hair.

I propose starting up a new Communist Gentlemens’ Club. It will serve food, brandy, cigars and have all-leather furniture with a healthily-colored portrait of Lenin above the fire. It will be called “Gentlemen of the Red Flag.”

What do you say, chaps? Break out the humidors and let’s get it started!

Wealth

Out of money already—simply amazing. Well by Jove old boy, you’ve really done it this time now, hadn’t you? You didn’t see the rent check coming, no? The utilities almost as much as the rent, they were. The aircon was a pretty penny. Damn these Atlanta summers! Now you’re back to borrowing from Peter to pay Paul once again! Well, enjoy it while you can, old bean, since all students end up in debt.

I have continued to live quietly and frugally in Atlanta, working by night, sleeping by day. I am a helpless prisoner in my own study/bedroom during the hot summer, and exist as a wanderer during the spring, autumn and winter months. Of course, this simple formulation is not to garner sympathy. My position as a writer/recluse does not exclude occasional trips out of state or out of country, nor meeting with friends and foreign correspondents. Apart from frequent so-called “vacation” trips to places such as New Orleans, I customarily travel to Maryland during the Christmas holidays and visit members of the “old gang” on excursions through my beloved Atlanta.

During an era of economic depression in which literary employment is increasingly precarious, the most I have managed to obtain is a vague promise of a spot on a literary presentation forum to present a research paper, a few essay contests and perhaps a small shot at an assistantship. Please note that while all of these adventures are worthwhile and will raise my prestige, none of them pay a single cent. Right now my only dependable source of income is a rapidly diminishing savings reserve.

Despite my slight recognition as both a political and, to a far lesser and more writers-blocked extent, a fiction writer, I have recently become exceptionally critical of my work to the point of paralysis in the field of fiction, all the while writing political tracts more easily than ever. I have the problem of thinking of my fiction and science fiction as too uncompromisingly noncommercial for popular lists, and yet unworthy for preservation as a serious, hardcore literary endeavor. When judged by historians of the new nanotech age, if some shadow of a scholar bothers to write a dissertation on my efforts, they will find my financial situation due to writing is desperately poor, an abject failure even by depression standards. Though, how could it be otherwise for an overtly ambitious yet unpublished writer who spends his time protesting the capitalist system and all its machinations?

Still, what a man does for a living is not the final measure of him. What he is, his essence, is everything. I never ask what a man I have just met does for a living, because it does not interest me. Some are offended, since I do not ask, and when told forget quickly. But the essence of someone—that is wealth that shall persist far beyond death, and it shall be the only wealth I have for many years.