The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Mon Jul 07, 2014 2:35 pm

http://nycantifa.wordpress.com/2014/07/ ... -citizens/

Maine Governor Meets with Sovereign Citizens

Posted on July 7, 2014 by valdinoci

Recently, it’s come to light that Maine Governor Paul LePage met with a group of Sovereign Citizens who told him they hoped to execute his Democratic rivals in the state government. As Steve Mistler summarizes:

The first chapter of Mike Tipping’s book, “As Maine Went,” was published…on the political news website Talking Points Memo. The book is based in part on emails, memos and other documents he requested from LePage’s office under the Freedom of Access Act, and the records have since been obtained by the Portland Press Herald…. The first chapter describes the governor’s eight meetings with a handful of individuals who are members of a Maine group associated with the Sovereign Citizens movement, although one of the members denied that association Monday. The citizens movement, a conspiracy organization, believes the government is plotting a Christian holocaust via the mass collection of firearms, that it runs mind-control operations and that it was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Sandy Hook school shootings.


The governor is reported to have have long meetings met with the group at least eight times. Some Sovereign Citizens – best known for filing bogus legal paperwork against federal officials – have turned extremely violent in recent years. Which should come as no surprise,as (despite the presence of people of color in their movement) their origins are tied up in the white supremacist and antisemitic underground.


Read the first chapter of Mike Tipping’s book here: “Why Did Maine’s Governor Conspire With ‘Sovereign Citizen’ Extremists?
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Sun Dec 21, 2014 1:56 pm

http://www.pmpress.org/content/article. ... 1085951942


Today Cuba, Tomorrow...

by Noel Ignatiev

For some time it has been clear that U.S. attempts to isolate Cuba diplomatically and blockade it economically were not in the interests of U.S. capital. President Obama, a representative of the most conscious and farseeing members of his class, has taken steps toward reversing the policy, against the opposition of a powerful lobby. President Clinton sought to reverse the policy in 1999. At that time baseball commissioner Bud Selig watched a ballgame in Cuba with Fidel Castro (the updated version of the “ping-pong diplomacy” that preceded Nixon’s 1970 recognition of the People’s Republic of China). Clinton thought he was in a position to do so after the controversy over the return of Elian Gonzales to his father, when for the first time the Cuba lobby – what one of my students, herself a Florida Cuban, referred to as “those fucking rightwing Florida Cubans” – found itself at odds with the majority of the American people, but his own weakness after the Monica affair stopped him. Now Obama has decided the time is ripe (although the Cuba lobby may block further steps in Congress).

That is the way the U.S. political system works. It is fashionable among U.S. radicals to speak of a “ruling class,” and of course in a society in which the capitalist mode of production prevails the owners of capital make up the ruling class. But the term should not be taken literally. There is no mechanism through which the tens (hundreds!) of thousands of owners of capital come together to work out a single, unified policy for themselves, let alone for society as a whole. The capitalist system is not a capitalist plot, nor do the Illuminati, the Jews, the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission or any other secret or semi-secret, real or imagined conspiratorial group determine policy, although one or another of these, to the extent it exists, may seek to influence and may even succeed in influencing policy at one or another moment. Issues are fought out mostly in the light of day, and advocates of various points of view strive to win public support, which plays a part in determining the outcome. (Not the whole part: in 2008, when Congress was rushing through the bailout package for banks and insurance companies, one Congressman said, “We had better pass this quick; my mail is running ten-to-one against it.”)

Some issues that are most contentious to the general public are of no consequence to capital. For example, while individual employers may hold strong views, and use their wealth to promote their views, legalizing abortion, allowing people who like to engage in sex with others who have the same body parts as theirs to be married (the main beneficiaries of that will be divorce lawyers), and teaching evolution in public schools (which are not teaching anything anyhow) have no effect on the ability of capital to extract surplus value from unpaid labor. The same is true for gun control. I am open to argument, but it seems to me that the couple of firearms I use for hunting will be of little use should the state descend on my home and haul me off to a detention center, and although militia-types may disagree with me neither will their assault rifles and grenade launchers.

Though these issues are of no direct interest to capital as such, they play a role in forging a political majority. (In the past marginal issues have been important in shaping political alignments, for example, the antimasonic, know-nothing and temperance movements.) Right now the Republican Party is the home of the gun-nuts, anti-abortionists, anti-Darwinians and opponents of same-sex marriage. But alignments could change.

President Obama’s opening to Cuba should put to rest the theory held by some “anti-imperialists” that the embargo represented capitalist interests, as well as the theory that the “fucking rightwing Florida Cubans” were running the country. The same with Israel. Those who suggest that U.S. Middle East policy is decisively influenced by Jews open themselves to the accusation of antisemitism. To counter that accusation, some have strained to demonstrate that the U.S. policy of total, unconditional and one-sided support of Israel serves the interests of U.S. imperialism. Others, rejecting that mistaken idea, describe the U.S. as a Zionist colony in which the Israel Lobby constitutes a distinct interest comparable to the slaveholders before the Civil War – notwithstanding that Jews are not based in a mode of production and that therefore their attachment to Israel, however fervent, is merely sentimental.
The Netanyahu government must be feeling the heat, wondering if it is in line to be dumped. Last summer’s massive attack on Gaza cost Israel a lot of support, in Europe and even in the U.S. However cynical, Hamas’s provocation worked, although its full effects are yet to be felt. The Israel Lobby is a lot stronger than the Florida Cubans, and will be harder to bring to heel. But the handwriting is on the wall.

Of course, just as the diplomatic opening to Cuba does not mean the end of U.S. exploitation of the Caribbean, forcing the Israeli government to come to terms with the Palestinians will not mean the liberation of Palestine – which can only be accomplished by abolishing the Jewish state, allowing the refugees to return, and establishing a single democratic state for all the people of the area.

What of Ferguson and, more generally, the struggle against the police?
Capital is race-blind; the capitalist mode of production (cmp) tends to reduce all human beings to abstract, undifferentiated, homogenous labor power. However, the pure cmp exists nowhere; all existing societies, including those in which the cmp prevails, contain elements left over from the past as well as elements that are the product of the political intervention of various groups.

Racial oppression is not universal to capital. Four places developed historically on the basis of racial oppression: the U.S., South Africa, Ireland, and Palestine.

By racial oppression I do not mean the ethnic or religious bias that exists widely, or inequalities among census groups (defined by color or any other feature), but a system of oppression that incorporates by definition portions of a subordinate class in the subjection of other members of that class, thereby constituting them as a race. The hallmark of racial oppression, as Ted Allen taught, is the reduction of every member of the subject group to a status beneath that of any member of the dominant group: Huck Finn’s Pap could push W.E.B. DuBois off the sidewalk. In addition to what it meant for the masses, it confined black entrepreneurs and professionals to a segregated market.

The system of racial oppression did not arise out of a bourgeois plot but out of specific historic circumstances; once it developed it became part of the U.S. social formation. Only value production is essential to capital; racial oppression is contingent, although under some circumstances it may become so vital to bourgeois hegemony that its fall would decisively weaken the entire system. (That was the underlying assumption of STO, which argued the centrality of the fight against white supremacy on strategic grounds.)

The attachment of the capitalist class and of individual capitalists to racial oppression is subject to modification based on various considerations, most of all, what is necessary to maintain political stability. Beginning in the 1950s (and perhaps earlier), important sectors of the capitalist class came to the conclusion that racial oppression as defined above was costing more than it was worth. They were pushed to this view in part by the cold war, in part by changes in production (the mechanization of agriculture) and in part by the struggle of black Americans and their allies. And so they moved to bring about change.

The Supreme Court decision calling for desegregation of public schools (followed by other decisions desegregating public facilities) was not mere talk. Nor were the Civil Rights and Voting Right Acts, the striking down of provisions that excluded black people from juries, the Labor Department’s forcing the construction unions to open their doors to black workers, regulations outlawing “steering” by real-estate agents, affirmative-action policies in education, the Justice Department’s order that police keep records by race of those they stop, the multimillion-dollar fines against oil company executives caught on tape practicing explicit race discrimination. Eric Holder’s visit to Missouri, aimed at dragging Ferguson into the twenty-first century, was not mere talk. By the way, Holder is a prime example of what I mean: a vigorous defender of corporate interests, including the right to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process, he is an opponent of race discrimination.

None of these measures represented the sort of intervention that revolutionaries would make. They did not address, except marginally, the effects of the past. They were all subject to reversal. Most important, none of them threatened the capital relation; at most they constitute political, not human emancipation. (See Marx, On the Jewish Question.) But they were not trivial, nor were they mere demagogy.

The most class-conscious, farsighted sectors of the ruling class have adopted the policy of neoliberalism, which aims at removing all barriers, including race, to the free flow of capital. It does not follow that they prevail in every situation (any more than FDR’s policy of benevolent neutrality toward labor unions prevented Chicago police from massacring Republic Steel strikers in 1937). As Engels pointed out, “[T]he final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition” (Letter to Bloch, 21 September 1890).

In Ferguson, the smart thing – and clearly what the Obama Administration wanted – would have been for the grand jury to return some kind of an indictment that made the protestors feel that justice had been served. Holder was up against the opposition of police unions local and national, an entrenched town bureaucracy, white bigotry, inertia, etc. The midterm elections may well have emboldened those forces to resist the pressure from Washington.

Since the Ferguson and Staten Island grand juries returned their reports various actions and statements from the Obama administration and leading political figures plus New York Timescoverage and editorials support my argument about what leading circles want. How long it will take them to get it – indeed whether they get it at all – cannot be predicted with certainty. (It was years between the 1954 Supreme Court decision and the changes of the Civil Rights era.) White supremacy is more deeply embedded in U.S. society than Zionism or blockading Cuba, and will take a lot more to modify.
Lastly, while the Obama Administration and its allies may wish to do away with the overtly white-supremacist character of law enforcement, any hope of ending police violence without revolution is an illusion. Violence is the essence of the police, and there can be no police without violence.
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Dec 21, 2014 2:13 pm

Lots of horseshit in the mix there.

That is the way the U.S. political system works. It is fashionable among U.S. radicals to speak of a “ruling class,” and of course in a society in which the capitalist mode of production prevails the owners of capital make up the ruling class. But the term should not be taken literally.


http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
I know it's a matter of Leftist doctrine that Charles Murray is a Horribly Wrong Man but his recent book on "Superzips" is also related and powerfully refutes this blithe assertion that there is not a ruling class in America. (Hint: there is, it's called the "upper class" -- the traditional location for such rulers.)

There is no mechanism through which the tens (hundreds!) of thousands of owners of capital come together to work out a single, unified policy for themselves, let alone for society as a whole.


There are dozens of such mechanisms and he's going to mention them in the next sentence, alongside with some strawmen for good measure. The simple existence of ALEC should suffice for our purposes.

The capitalist system is not a capitalist plot,


Aye, and history is just a bunch of words that none of us should read. At every turn, the global financial system has been plotted and designed by capitalists. Simply consult Daniel Yergin's massively documented "The Commanding Heights," not a work of conspiracy theory but an academic exercise in history. The notion that something like a Federal Reserve, or better yet the Bretton Woods System, just emerged out of chaos is infantile poison.

nor do the Illuminati, the Jews, the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission or any other secret or semi-secret, real or imagined conspiratorial group determine policy, although one or another of these, to the extent it exists, may seek to influence and may even succeed in influencing policy at one or another moment.


"Nothing to see here....although of course, that's real." Well played -- I especially like poisoning the well with "the Illuminati, the Jews" prior to naming real historical secret groups who have had a powerful effect on shaping the past 50 years for the world's affairs.
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby Elvis » Sun Dec 21, 2014 4:51 pm

the Illuminati, the Jews, the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission or any other secret or semi-secret, real or imagined conspiratorial group


Classic use of weasel words.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Sun Dec 21, 2014 5:50 pm

I like this one a lot:



http://anneboyer.tumblr.com/post/105175 ... -that-goes

Image

Poem by Silvia Federici

: “that bullet that goes through your head / was planned for you and me / since the beginning of / capital’s time”
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Dec 23, 2014 7:15 pm

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. This paper reports on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.


Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens - Gilens & Page

Although of course, beware both The Man of One Study and The Cowpox of Doubt.
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Tue Dec 23, 2014 8:03 pm

Yes- your post is very much in synch with the libertarian/class struggle perspectives of Silvia Federici and Noel Ignatiev, the two cited just upthread.
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Fri Jan 09, 2015 10:19 am

The Wall Street protesters and The Fed

http://newjewishresistance.org/article/ ... rs-and-fed

ARTICLE | OCTOBER 14, 2011 - 12:20AM | BY BILL WEINBERG

Image

Like the rest of our fellow lefties, we've been extremely heartened by the Occupy Wall Street movement—but we've also had to raise some comradely warnings about anti-Semitic tropes that have seeped into the rhetoric of some of the protesters and their supporters.

We therefore feel vindicated that Doug Henwood of the notoriously astute Left Business Observer blog on Oct. 13 similarly calls out some instances of the Wall Street protesters taking aim at the wrong targets (or at least targeting them for not quite the right reasons). Coming from a position (like ours) of critical support for the Occupy Wall Street movement, Henwood writes:


On the Federal Reserve

I have noticed some strange, Ron Paul-ish stuff about the Federal Reserve around Occupy Wall Street. I do want to file a complaint about those.

The Federal Reserve is admittedly manna for conspiracists. It's a fairly opaque institution that does work for the big guys. But it’s not their puppet exactly. A friend who spent many years at the New York branch of the Fed once told me that within the institution, the thinking is that bankers are short-sighted critters who come and go but the Fed has to do the long-term thinking for the ruling class. So it has more autonomy than the popular tales allow.

The founding of the Fed is also a great subject of mythmaking—like secret meetings involving more than a few Jews. (The conspiratorial mindset often overlaps with anti-Semitic stories about rootless cosmopolitans, their greed and scheming.) There were some secret meetings, but the creation of a central bank was a major project of the U.S. elite for decades around the turn of the 19th century into the 20th. There’s a great book on that topic by James Livingston that I urge anyone interested in the topic to read. It was a long, complex campaign, and not the task of a secret train ride to a remote island.

Although the Fed does put U.S. interests first, it is internationally minded, and consults constantly with its foreign counterparts. This is also rich soil for conspiratorial thinking—that, plus, of course the Jews. (Greenspan. Bernanke. You’d almost forget that 1980s Fed chair Paul Volcker’s middle name is Adolph.) You know the story—dastardly plots involving foreign financiers (with names like Rothschild) whose victims are good patriotic Americans. As anyone who watches the Fed closely, like me, could tell you, that's just not the case.

And it’s tempting to see this body as controlling everything—it's complicated and messy to think about how financial markets work, and the Fed’s relationship to those markets. Much easier to think of the Fed controlling everything. But in fact the Fed sometimes reacts to the markets, sometimes leads them, and on occasion fights with them.

In the 1980s, the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker ran a very tight ship. It deliberately provoked a deep recession in 1981-82 by driving up interest rates toward 20% to scare the pants of the working class. It was a very successful class war from above that led to a massive upward redistribution of income. More recently, the Fed handed out massive amounts of money—I’m not citing actual figures since they’re vague and mind-boggling, but they’re very big—with no strings attached to major banks. Something like this was necessary to keep everything from going down the drain, but it didn’t have to be done so secretly and with no accountability. Banks were basically given blank checks to restore the status quo ante bustum. That's terrible. You could say the same for the TARP bailout—massive giveaways with no accountability or restrictions. This is all odious.

But more recently, Fed chair Ben Bernanke has been about the only major policymaker in the world pushing for more stimulus for the U.S. economy. He's not a partisan of austerity, like the Republicans or much of the pundit class. For this he’s earned some criticisms on the right. The right would be happy to let things go down to prove a point. They think we need a "purgation." I was recently on a panel with a Fed-hating libertarian who invoked the concept of "purgatory," as if we’ve all sinned. But that would create far more misery than we know now.

There’s a video (#OWS Protester Nails It! Federal Reserve) of an Occupy Wall Street protester calling for an end to the Fed and urging a vote for Ron Paul. It, and the comments, are straight out of the right-wing critique of the Fed. I’ve seen signs calling for that around the occupation. This is bad news. Ron Paul has a coherent political philosophy. He's a libertarian. He may hate imperial war, but he also hates Social Security and Medicare. The reason he wants to end the Fed is that he wants to get the state out of the money business and return to a 19th century gold standard. A gold standard is painfully austere. The gold supply increases by less than 2% a year. That means tremendous pressure on average incomes. It's great if you're a big bondholder, but hell if you're a regular person. When we were on a gold standard in the 19th century we had frequent panics, crises, and depressions. Almost half of the last three decades of the 19th century was spent in recession or depression. It put both rural farmers and urban workers through the wringer.

We need to democratize the Fed, open it up, and subject money to more humane and less upper-class-friendly regulation. But let's not sign on with Ron Paul, please. And let's not join with the simple-minded right-wing critique that blames all of capitalism's systemic problems on government institutions.


Thanks, Doug. Those who want to sharpen their analysis as they beat bongos and chant slogans in the Financial District would do well to watch LBO...
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Fri Jan 09, 2015 11:06 am

http://newjewishresistance.org/blog/wal ... i-semitism

Wall Street protests marred by anti-Semitism

BLOG | OCTOBER 6, 2011 - 11:41PM | BY BILL WEINBERG

We are as encouraged as everyone else about the Occupy Wall Street movement—but we continue to be disturbed by anti-Semitic elements within the movement, and even more disturbed by the fact that nobody else seems disturbed by it. Seth Weiss, writing on the website of the Marxist-Humanist Initiative, brings more such ugly examples to light. Weiss asks us to consider Nathalie Rothschild's account in the Huffington Post of the noxious response elicited by her unflattering portrait of protesters in the online journal Spiked. According to Rothschild:

I received a string of indignant emails and tweets about my Jewish, kleptocrat banking connections; demands that I reveal the details of my pay checks and that I come clean about my not-so-hidden agenda. I was told that my family name disqualifies me from having any opinion about the protest and that I have 'the karma of a demon'. One reader posted my article online, headlining the post 'Journalist & Jew – Nathalie ROTHSCHILD'.


Weiss also notes reports of protestors at Wall Street holding signs with clearly anti-Semitic statements—like one instructing passersby to search on Google for "Wall St. Jews," "Jewish Billionaires," and the like. And was there (as we would hope?) immediate and widespread repudiation of this faux pas? Weiss finds:

A recent post on the online Public Forum of the NYC General Assembly, the decentralized grouping that has emerged as the leadership of the movement, notes that "It is common for statements to be made, placing overwhelming blame and responsibility on Jews for the economic crisis" and asks "what can be done about the existence of anti-Semitic statements made by so-called supporters of the protest?" The post has received responses accusing the author of pursuing a "witch hunt" and others suggesting that readers "Look into who was involved in setting up the Federal Reserve in 1913."


And Weiss recalls that the initial call for the Sept. 17 Wall Street protest came from the Canadian-based AdBusters, an activist publication focused on "culture jamming" and anti-consumerism—which once published a list of prominent neo-conservatives with the names of the Jewish ones flagged by asterisks.

The list appeared as part of a March/April 2004 piece, entitled "Why won't anyone say they are Jewish?" and written by AdBusters' co-founder and editor-in-chief Kalle Lasn, which alleges that neo-cons have a "special affinity for Israel" that shapes U.S. policy in the Middle East. Lasn, claiming to "tackle the issue head on," offers up "a carefully researched list" of "the 50 most influential neocons in the US" and stresses that "half of the them [sic] are Jewish."


We'd be more willing to overlook this if elements of the same kind of ugly thinking were not percolating up in the current Wall Street protests, seemingly to little concern of fellow activists. Weiss concludes:

The NYC General Assembly, in its "Principles of Solidarity – working draft," includes "Empowering one another against all forms of oppression" as a "point of unity." The General Assembly, and all supporters of the Wall Street occupation, would do well to pay this more than lip service. To do so demands not only unequivocally condemning anti-Semitism in all of its manifestations in movement, but struggling to get at its roots, too. Anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism have a long, complex, and intertwined history — and it is with good reason that August Bebel, one of the founders of German Social Democracy, described anti-Semitism as "the socialism of fools."


Let's hope principled voices in the Occupy Wall Street movement will start to call out their comrades on their foolishness.
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby Searcher08 » Fri Jan 09, 2015 12:49 pm

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This junk is from Bill Weinberg who is an Arab-hating http://ww4report.com/taxonomy/term/33, 9/11 Truth smearing douchebag, who considers David Icke a neo-Nazi (lulz) and who wraps his baloney in a progressive flag full of tick-box bs about indigenous struggles.
Sounds familiar?
Curious about his connections to pedophile Hakim Bey as he seems intimately connected to his organisation.
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 09, 2015 12:53 pm

Who the fuck is Bill Weinberg why is he getting spammed all over this board and why should I care at all? Is he a friend of that Mr. Built A. Burger guy?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 25, 2015 9:20 am

http://matthewnlyons.net/works-hosted-o ... -wing-101/

Right-Wing Movements 101

by Matthew N. Lyons

The following is the slightly revised text of a talk I gave at a political study retreat in Monroe, New York, on 5 June 2011.

I’m going to try to give you an overview of right-wing movements in the U.S. and how they’ve developed over the past several decades. This is not going to be comprehensive. Instead, I’ll focus on a few examples of specific movements and some of the kinds of issues and dynamics that I think are important for an overall understanding of the right. But before that, let me make a few general points about the right and how I approach it.

Rightward shift since the 1970s

The United States has seen a major upsurge of right-wing movements more or less continuously since the late 1970s — from the so-called New Right and the Reagan Revolution of thirty years ago to the Tea Party and the anti-immigrant movement of today. Part of the impact of this upsurge is that it’s helped to bring about a whole rightward shift in what people consider mainstream political discourse.

To help put this in perspective, here’s a little exercise: Imagine a president who expands affirmative action, actively promotes school desegregation, enacts important new laws in social welfare, environmental protection, occupational health and safety, and consumer protection, supports comprehensive health insurance and a system of guaranteed income for all citizens, and whose Justice Department opposes the RICO Act on the grounds that it gives the government powers that are much too broad and sweeping for prosecuting criminals. In 2011, such a president would be considered far to left of Barack Obama and far to the left of almost everyone in Congress. Forty years ago, such a president was called Richard Nixon. That’s the shift I’m talking about.

I’d also like to touch on some of the major factors that have contributed to this right-wing upsurge. First and foremost, the right of recent decades represents a backlash against “the sixties” — the Black liberation movement and all of the social change movements it helped to inform and inspire (really starting in the 1950s and continuing into the 1970s and later) and all the political, cultural, economic, and other changes that these movements helped to bring about. These changes included the partial erosion of traditional social hierarchies and systems of privilege based on race, gender, and so on. They also included a big expansion of the federal government’s role in society, in terms of protecting civil rights, expanding social programs, and expanding the regulation of business.

Other factors that have fueled the rightist upsurge include the relative decline of U.S. hegemony in the world — with the Vietnam War and other revolutionary struggles in various parts of the world, as well as the growing economic power of Europe, Japan, and other countries. So while the United States is still very powerful, it no longer dominates the capitalist world the way it did forty years ago. Connected with that, starting in the 1970s you had the end of the long economic boom that followed World War II, and the beginnings of capital flight and other economic restructurings that we now associate with globalization. Lastly, starting in the 1970s you had a major rightward shift in the business community, which meant that a lot more money and power was suddenly available for right-wing political groups.

Dynamics of right-wing movements

I also want to say a few things about how I approach the study of right-wing movements. One of my starting points is that right-wing movements are movements of regular human beings. The people who join these movements are not especially crazy or irrational or stupid or fanatical or mindless puppets — although unfortunately these are all common stereotypes. Right-wing movements attract and keep supporters because they speak to people’s hopes, fears, grievances, and human struggles. They may do that in a twisted and ugly way, but they do it — or they don’t last.

Another starting point is that it’s too simple to see political struggle as a binary conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed. It’s certainly true that many rightist movements represent ruling-class interests to an important degree, but many rightist movements also have a degree of autonomy from — or even conflict with — the ruling class. A major reason for this is that a lot of these movements offer people a two-part package. On one hand they offer people a way to defend the relative social privileges and power that they enjoy over oppressed groups, but on the other hand they also address people’s sense of disempowerment and being downtrodden by groups above them in the social hierarchy, by offering some form of anti-elitism that’s usually either simplistic or complete scapegoating. The classic version of this that comes up again and again in U.S. history is a movement that offers middle- or working-class whites a way to bolster their racial privilege over communities of color, while also attacking some group people identify with elites, such as big government, liberal intellectuals, the Trilateral Commission, Jewish bankers, global corporations, etc. This right-wing anti-elitism presents evil elites as a subjective, alien force, rather than an integral part of an entire system of power.

One of the implications of this kind of double-edged dynamic is that rightist movements can represent different types of threats. The most obvious one is the threat of intensifying oppression, exploitation, repression, and human misery, as well as directly attacking movements for human liberation. But there is also the threat that rightist movements can infect the left with right-wing ideas, for example by repackaging anti-elite conspiracy theories in ways that sound radical and get picked up by leftists in place of systemic or structural analyses of power. There is even the threat that rightists could supplant the left as the main opposition force, at least to a degree. I always come back to Tom Metzger, one of the key neonazi leaders in the 1980s, who urged his followers to “take the game away from the left.” What he meant was, the left is fighting the U.S. empire, but so are we, and we can do a better job than they can. It would be a big mistake to think that right-wingers who say this are just being hypocritical — or to assume that the left can do a better job than they can at offering people a radical alternative.

Sakai has a great quote about this in his essay “The Shock of Recognition,” which is in the book Confronting Fascism. He is talking about German Nazism as a radical movement, and he says, “We forget…that many youth in 1930s Germany viewed the Nazis as liberatory. As opposed to the German social democrats, for example, who preached the dutiful authority of parents over children, the Hitler Youth gave rebellious children the power to keep their own hours, have an active sex and political life, smoke, drink and have groups of their own.” (The quote is from page 104.) This may seem like a small example, but it’s the kind of thing that can have a big impact on where people choose to give their political loyalty.

During the rest of my presentation I’m going to discuss four examples of recent right-wing movements. The first movement I’m going to talk about, the paleoconservatives, is an example of what Keith Preston has called the “permanent opposition right.” A lot of rightist activism rises and falls depending on whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power, but the permanent opposition right doesn’t do that — it’s seriously opposed to both major parties. The other three movements I’m going to talk about are all examples of mass movements: the Christian right, the Tea Party, and the Patriot movement.

Paleoconservatism

The paleoconservatives are a relatively small network of intellectuals that took shape in the 1980s. Their roots go back to the America First tradition of conservatives who opposed U.S. entry into World War II. This “Old Right” current was backed by an outsider faction of the business community based in the Midwest and later the Sunbelt, which was hostile to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism and the Eastern elite/internationalist wing of big business that supported Roosevelt. To varying degrees, many of the America Firsters were sympathetic to fascism and fascist claims of a Jewish-British conspiracy.

During the Cold War, the American First/anti-New Deal right was largely submerged in the broader conservative movement and the anticommunist consensus that joined everyone from liberals to former Nazis in defining the Soviet Union as the main enemy. But when the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989-1991, this anticommunist consensus unraveled, and there was a big split in the conservative movement. The two main opposing poles in this split were the neoconservatives and the paleoconservatives, and I need to explain this briefly because it’s affected a lot of what’s happened since then.

The first neoconservatives were anticommunist liberals who moved to the right as a reaction against the “excesses” of the 1960s. They were predominantly Jewish and Catholic, which put them outside the ranks of old guard conservatism. Neocons glorify American capitalism and loudly promote the idea that the United States has a mission to spread democracy and freedom throughout the world — by persuasion if possible, by force if necessary. Along with supporting an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy, the neocons are also strongly pro-Zionist and want the U.S. to stay closely aligned with an aggressive, expansionist Israel. At the same time, the neocons tend to be relatively moderate on a number of other issues such as immigration, ethnic diversity, abortion, and to some extent the welfare state. The neocons have attracted lots of capitalist support and have played major political roles under both Reagan and George W. Bush.

In contrast to the neocons, the paleoconservatives have always been wary of “foreign entanglements.” They are generally hostile to interventionism, free trade, and globalization, and they’re also critical of the Israeli state — partly for geopolitical reasons, partly because of antisemitism. Paleocons tend to be unapologetic champions of white Christian culture, and they take a harder line on the culture wars and opposing social welfare programs than the neocons do. The paleocons have attracted little capitalist support and have mostly been frozen out of political power. But they have attracted significant popular support, as evidenced by Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns in the 1990s. They also played key roles in building the neo-Confederate and anti-immigrant movements, and to some extent paleocons have converged with more hardline white supremacists in building a broader white nationalist movement.

What’s interesting about the paleocons is that while they’re horrible on many domestic issues, on foreign policy the paleocons often sound very reasonable and sometimes even leftist. For example, after the September 11th attacks, neocons started talking about the War on Terror as a transcendent struggle between Good and Evil, and claiming that al Qaeda and its allies “hate us for our freedoms” The paleocons said, “That’s nonsense. They don’t hate us for our freedoms. They hate us because we’ve bombed their countries, because we have troops in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Holy Land.” They were saying that we have to treat al Qaeda as rational political actors, not demonize them as the neocons were doing.

Another important thing about the paleocons is that they’re not dying out. They’re continuing to attract new people, evolve politically, and participate in wider intellectual discussions. The web publication AlternativeRight.com is an example of this. Here we see paleocons interchanging with other rightist currents such as the European New Right, which is a smarmy, sophisticated offshoot of traditional fascism, and with right-wing anarchists such as the National-Anarchists and Keith Preston of AttackTheSystem.com. (Preston even argues that the “alternative right” represents an evolution beyond paleoconservatism to something younger and more radical. It’s something to watch.)

The three mass movements I’m going to discuss are the Christian Right, the Tea Party movement, and the Patriot movement. Each of these movements has helped to revitalize the right by mobilizing new constituencies, creating new organizations, and introducing new political themes and strategies. Each has a membership and support base that is predominantly but not exclusively white. Each of these movements also encompasses a significant amount of ideological diversity and, in particular, has been fueled by a dynamic interplay between hardline and moderate wings.

Christian Right

The Christian right came together in its modern form in the 1970s and 1980s as a backlash against feminism, the LGBT movement, and broader secularization trends in society, such as the court ban on prayer in schools, which happened in the 1960s. The Christian right’s central focus is on reasserting male dominance and compulsory heterosexuality in the framework of the so-called traditional family (which isn’t really that traditional). The movement’s strongest base of support is among Sunbelt suburbanites, but it has white middle-class support in all regions. The movement includes Christians of many different denominations — not just Protestant fundamentalists but also other types of conservative evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Catholics. This inclusiveness is a major achievement given how powerful sectarian conflict among Christians has been historically. The movement has built an extensive infrastructure ranging from national lobbying groups to local prayer circles, and it has significant global reach in the form of international media empires as well as foreign missionary work designed to promote a rightist agenda, such as building up homophobic campaigns in Uganda and other African countries.

The Christian right has strong connections with the capitalist elite. In particular, they have received a lot of support from an ultraconservative faction within the business community that’s based in the Sunbelt and is centered in oil (independent oil — not the big companies like Exxon-Mobil or Chevron), real estate, financial services, and some other industries. And as I said, some Christian right media companies have become major national or even international business enterprises in their own right.

The majority of Christian rightists and the movement’s most powerful organizations form a relatively moderate wing that wants to take power within the existing political system, primarily through the Republican party. But there is also a hardline faction that wants to overthrow the existing state and establish some kind of theocratic dictatorship. The hardliners are particularly strong in the terrorist wing of the anti-abortion movement — the people who carry out the assassinations and other targeted acts of violence. Many of the hardliners believe in a doctrine called Christian Reconstructionism, which is an offshoot of Presbyterianism that wants to impose a version of biblical law, complete with slavery, death by stoning, etc. The hardliners are a minority within the Christian right, but they’ve influenced the movement as a whole through a “softer” theocratic doctrine known as Dominion Theology, which says that Christian men have a responsibility to take charge of society. Most Christian right groups endorse some version of Dominion Theology.

The majority wing of the Christian right has been closely allied with the neoconservatives on foreign policy, and generally supports an aggressive military interventionism. This is partly about projecting U.S. power abroad and spreading the gospel of free enterprise, and partly about promoting their own political/media/religious reach internationally. Like the neocons, most of the Christian right advocates a close alliance with Israel — but their reasons are very different. In standard Christian right theology, the ingathering of Jews to the Holy Land is one of things that’s needed to set the stage for Christ’s return. This doctrine also says that all Jews who don’t convert to Christianity will be killed, so it’s pro-Zionist but antisemitic, a combination that’s a lot more common than many people realize. (Note that some hardline Christian rightists are closer to a paleoconservative position on foreign policy — much more anti-interventionist and critical of Israel — but they are definitely in the minority.)

The Christian right promotes a strong cultural ethnocentrism, which means they glorify Western Civilization and European culture and regard other religions (with the partial exception of Judaism) as essentially evil. At the same time, most of the movement repudiates explicit racism and seems to be seriously interested in recruiting, or at least building alliances with, conservative Christians of color. For years, many evangelicals have promoted what they call “racial reconciliation,” which includes apologizing for the sin of segregation. And contrary to stereotype, major Christian right groups have not been particularly keen on scapegoating or excluding immigrants. They’d rather recruit them — especially Latino evangelicals, who are one of the fastest growing religious groups in the U.S.

Tea Party

The Tea Party is a much younger movement than the Christian right. It started in early 2009, as a direct reaction to Barack Obama’s election as president. It is organizationally decentralized and still taking shape as a movement. The Tea Party’s stated focus is on opposing big government and wasteful or intrusive government programs, but the movement also has strong racist and ethnocentric tendencies. Many Tea Party groups are strongly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim. Many Tea Partiers also claim that Obama was not born in the United States and therefore is not eligible to be president. Consciously or unconsciously, this is clearly a coded way of saying that we shouldn’t have a black man in the White House.

The Tea Party is mainly based among white middle-class and to lesser extent working-class people. There are more men than women in the movement, and the average age is older than for the overall population. Ideologically, the movement is pretty diverse. It includes conventional Republican types, libertarians, Christian rightists, anti-immigrant activists, Patriot movement supporters, and a few people involved in more hardcore far right groups.

Representatives of the Republican/corporate establishment have played a big role in shaping the Tea Party movement from the beginning. Best known are the Koch brothers and Dick Armey, but there are others as well. It’s an exaggeration to say that the Tea Party is an astroturf or fake grassroots movement, because it has tapped into real, broad-based political resentments, and corporate establishment forces don’t control the movement by any means. But I do think it’s fair to say that they represent the strongest and best organized political pole within a diverse, decentralized movement, so they are in the best position of anyone to shape the movement’s overall direction. One result of this is that taken as a whole, the Tea Party does not pose a radical challenge to the established political order. On the other hand, there are groups within the Tea Party whose politics are much more radical, especially some of the anti-immigrant and Patriot-oriented chapters. These forces have contributed to the movement’s insurgent style and have helped to give the movement an energy and dynamism that it would not have if Dick Armey were simply calling the shots.

Patriot movement

The Patriot movement is more starkly oppositional than either the Christian right or the Tea Party. The Patriot movement exploded in the mid-1990s based on fears that globalist elites were plotting to overthrow the U.S. constitution and impose a dictatorship. This sounds nutty but it was a response to specific, real acts of state repression, such as the federal assault on the Branch Davidians’ compound in Waco, Texas, which killed over 80 people. Many Patriot movement activists formed armed “citizen militias” to oppose the crackdown, or formed so-called common law courts that claimed legal authority in place of the existing court system. This was a defensive strategy, not a revolutionary strategy, but it involved building dual power institutions, which a lot of leftists only dream about doing.

Patriot movement ideology borrows heavily from the John Birch Society, which has circulated conspiracy theories about globalist elites for half a century, and from Posse Comitatus, which is a white supremacist group that developed in the 1970s. Posse Comitatus means “power of the county,” and the group rejects all government authority above the county level. There has also been some overlap between Patriot/militia forces and the Christian right’s hardline wing, including advocates of anti-abortion terrorism such as Matt Trewhella of the group Missionaries to the Preborn.

The Patriot movement’s base is more working class and more rural than either the Christian right or the Tea Party. All three movements are strong in the West and South, but the Patriot movement is probably strongest in the Midwest, which is unusual for a right-wing movement today. The movement has been on a roller coaster ride over the past fifteen years. The number of Patriot movement groups hit a peak of over 850 in 1996, then crashed partly because of a government crackdown. The movement was flat all through George W. Bush’s presidency, but then right after Obama’s election it took off again, and now there are almost as many Patriot groups as there were in 1996. This resurgence hasn’t received nearly as much media coverage as the movement did fifteen years ago, although some specific Patriot groups have gotten attention, such as Oath Keepers, which is geared toward military service people and law enforcement officers.

During the 1990s, there was a whole debate among critics of the right about the role of fascists in the Patriot movement. Some people treated the movement essentially as a front for neo-nazis, while other people said the nazi members were atypical. To my mind, it was a mistake to treat this as an either-or question. The key point — one of the most important things about the Patriot movement — was that it was the first U.S. political movement since World War II where fascists and non-fascists worked together on a mass scale. This doesn’t mean that most Patriot activists were won over to fascist politics, but fascist ideas and groups found a hearing and a measure of legitimacy among much wider circles than they had found in a long time. As far as I can tell, this is still true today.

At the same time, the Patriot movement’s race politics is more complicated than many people assume. Some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated in the movement have antisemitic roots, and some activists subscribe to doctrines that are based in white supremacist ideology, such as the idea that African Americans hold a different and inferior kind of citizenship than whites Americans do. But the movement has succeeded in attracting a few people of color and Jews, and some Patriot groups and leaders have made a sincere effort to exclude or challenge open bigotry.

Unlike the Christian right or the Tea Party, the Patriot movement has attracted very little elite support. It is openly hostile to the dominant wing of the ruling class and its visible representatives such as multinational corporations, the Federal Reserve, the Bilderbergers, etc. Patriot groups tend toward strongly isolationist politics, and tend to regard the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank as all part of the globalist conspiracy. However, Patriot movement politics do tie in with ruling class strategy in certain ways. For example, many Patriot groups are militantly opposed to government regulation of land use, which certainly meshes well with a lot of capitalist interests. As a very different example, the original idea for armed citizen militias is partly an offshoot of U.S.-sponsored counterinsurgency operations. Larry Pratt, who heads the ultraconservative group Gun Owners of America, proposed forming citizen militias at a meeting in 1992 based on his experience working with paramilitary death squad “citizen militias” in Guatemala and the Philippines. His idea was to take the same organizational form but instead of using it against communist guerrillas abroad, use it against a repressive government at home. This is an example of how anticommunist initiatives sometimes got repurposed after the end of the Cold War in ways that the U.S. empire definitely did not control. (Al Qaeda is another, more famous example.)

Conclusion

To sum up, I’d like to highlight a few major themes that we should watch for in the right in the years ahead. First, most right-wing movements will continue to have a complex — or even a contradictory — relationship with the established order, defending it in some ways, challenging it in others. In many movements, this plays out partly through a push-pull dynamic between hardline and moderate wings. I’ve referred to this in relation to the Christian right and the Tea Party, and we could also discuss it in relation to the white nationalist movement and other examples. Too many commentators try to reduce right-wing movements to either an extremist fringe or an astroturf creation of conservative elites. We should be very skeptical of both explanations.

Second, I expect that we will see right-wing movements taking a range of positions on race. There will still be a hard core of white supremacists promoting biological determinism, but the real growth will be among forces that take a more sophisticated approach, including active coalition-building with between whites and people of color. Demographic trends say that white people are going to become a minority in the U.S. in about 40 years, and we should assume that there are right-wing leaders who are planning for this, not just railing against the trend. There are significant right-wing nationalist currents within communities of color, ranging from the Nation of Islam to supporters of India’s Hindu nationalist movement, and growing class divisions among people of color could fuel the growth of the right.

Third and maybe most important, we should expect newness. Right-wing forces are not going to stand still — they will continue to grow and change, and if we’re not prepared for this, we will be in trouble. The Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher commented once that after World War I, many German leftists thought the main danger from the right was going to be efforts to restore the monarchy. They were blindsided when it turned out that the main danger was a movement that had no interest in restoring the monarchy, but instead carried a red flag and put both “Socialist” and “Workers” in the name of their organization. Whether or not we face a threat on the scale of Nazism, if we don’t pay attention we will be fighting the wrong battles.




American Dream » Wed May 14, 2014 7:48 am wrote:http://www.politicalresearch.org/resources/for-researchers/sectors-of-the-u-s-right/

SECTORS OF THE U.S. RIGHT

There is much overlap and sectors are not mutually exclusive.
 Methodologies range from cautious moderation, to militant activism, to insurgency, to violence.

Right-wing populist, apocalyptic, and conspiracist styles can be found in several sectors.

Forms of oppression—racism, xenophobia, sexism, heterosexism,
antisemitism, Islamophobia, Arabophobia, nativism, ableism, etc.—vary in each sector.


SECULAR RIGHT

Secular Conservatism (Generic) — Share to some degree basic conservative, “Free Market,”& “Judeo-Christian traditional values,” but not categorized here as part of another sector.

Corporate Internationalism (Neoliberals) —Nations should control the flow of people across borders, but not the flow of goods, capital, and profit. Called the “Rockefeller Republicans” in the 1960s. Supports globalization on behalf of transnational corporate interests.

Business Nationalism—Multinational corporations erode national sovereignty; nations should enforce borders for people, but also for goods, capital, and profit through trade restrictions. Enlists grassroots allies from Patriot Movement. Anti-Globalists. Generally protectionist and isolationist.

Economic Libertarianism—The state disrupts the perfect harmony of the free market system. Modern democracy is essentially congruent with capitalism. Small government.

National Security Militarism—Support US military supremacy and unilateral use of force to protect perceived US national security interests around the world. A major component of Cold War anti-communism, now updated and in shaky alliance with Neoconservatives.

Neoconservatism—The egalitarian social liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s undermined the national consensus. Intellectual oligarchies and political institutions preserve democracy from mob rule. The United States has the right to intervene with military force to protect its perceived interests anywhere in the world. Suspicious of Islam, sometimes Islamophobic.


RELIGIOUS RIGHT

Religious Conservatism—Play by the rules of a pluralist civil society. Mostly Christians, with handful of conservative Jews, Muslims, Hindus and other people of faith. Moral traditionalists. Cultural and social conservatives. Sometimes critical of Christian Right.

The sectors above this line tend to accept the rules of pluralist civil society and PRA calls them part of the “Conservative Right.”

The sectors below this line tend to reject the rules of pluralist civil society and PRA calls them part of the “Hard Right”

Christian Nationalism (Christian Right: Soft Dominionists)—Biblicallydefined immorality and sin breed chaos and anarchy. America’s greatness as God’s chosen land has been undermined by liberal secular humanists, feminists, and homosexuals. Purists want litmus tests for issues of abortion, tolerance of gays and lesbians, and prayer in schools. Often a form of Right-Wing Populism.

Christian Theocracy (Christian Right: Hard Dominionists)—Christian men are ordained by God to run society. Eurocentric version of Christianity based on early Calvinism. Intrinsically Christian ethnocentric, treating non-Christians as second-class citizens, and therefore implicitly antisemitic. Includes Christian Reconstructionism and other theocratic theologies. Elitist.


XENOPHOBIC RIGHT

Patriot Movement (Forms of Right-Wing Populism: Tea Parties, Town Hall Protests, Armed Citizens Militias)—Parasitic liberal elites control the government, media, and banks. Blames societal problems on scapegoats below them on the socio-economic ladder who are portrayed as lazy, sinful, or subversive. Fears government plans tyranny to enforce collectivism and globalism, perhaps as part of a One World Government or New World Order. Americanist. Often supports Business Nationalism due to its isolationist emphasis. Anti-Globalist, yet supports unilateralist national security militarism.

Paleoconservatism—Ultra-conservatives and reactionaries. Natural financial oligarchies preserve the republic against democratic mob rule. Usually nativist (White Nationalism), sometimes antisemitic or Christian nationalist. Elitist emphasis similar to the intellectual conservative revolution wing of European New Right. Often libertarian.

White Nationalism (White Racial Nationalists)—Alien cultures make democracy impossible. Cultural Supremacists argue different races can adopt the dominant (White) culture; Biological Racists argue the immutable integrity of culture, race, and nation. Segregationists want distinct enclaves, Separatists want distinct nations. Americanist. “tribalist” emphasis echoes racial-nationalist wing of the European New Right. Often a form of Right-Wing Populism.

Ultra Right (Sometimes called Far Right or Extreme Right)—Militant forms of insurgent revolutionary right ideology and separatist ethnocentric nationalism. Reject pluralist democracy for an organic oligarchy that unites the homogeneous Volkish nation. Conspiracist views of power are overwhelmingly antisemitic. Home to overt neofascists and neonazis. Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity, Creativity Movement , National Socialist Movement, National Alliance. Often uses Right-Wing Populist rhetoric.
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 26, 2015 12:41 pm

American Dream » Sun Jan 25, 2015 8:20 am wrote: http://matthewnlyons.net/works-hosted-o ... -wing-101/

Right-Wing Movements 101

by Matthew N. Lyons

...Another starting point is that it’s too simple to see political struggle as a binary conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed. It’s certainly true that many rightist movements represent ruling-class interests to an important degree, but many rightist movements also have a degree of autonomy from — or even conflict with — the ruling class. A major reason for this is that a lot of these movements offer people a two-part package. On one hand they offer people a way to defend the relative social privileges and power that they enjoy over oppressed groups, but on the other hand they also address people’s sense of disempowerment and being downtrodden by groups above them in the social hierarchy, by offering some form of anti-elitism that’s usually either simplistic or complete scapegoating. The classic version of this that comes up again and again in U.S. history is a movement that offers middle- or working-class whites a way to bolster their racial privilege over communities of color, while also attacking some group people identify with elites, such as big government, liberal intellectuals, the Trilateral Commission, Jewish bankers, global corporations, etc. This right-wing anti-elitism presents evil elites as a subjective, alien force, rather than an integral part of an entire system of power.

One of the implications of this kind of double-edged dynamic is that rightist movements can represent different types of threats. The most obvious one is the threat of intensifying oppression, exploitation, repression, and human misery, as well as directly attacking movements for human liberation. But there is also the threat that rightist movements can infect the left with right-wing ideas, for example by repackaging anti-elite conspiracy theories in ways that sound radical and get picked up by leftists in place of systemic or structural analyses of power. There is even the threat that rightists could supplant the left as the main opposition force, at least to a degree. I always come back to Tom Metzger, one of the key neonazi leaders in the 1980s, who urged his followers to “take the game away from the left.” What he meant was, the left is fighting the U.S. empire, but so are we, and we can do a better job than they can. It would be a big mistake to think that right-wingers who say this are just being hypocritical — or to assume that the left can do a better job than they can at offering people a radical alternative.




http://souciant.com/2014/08/nazi-skinhead-economics/

Nazi Skinhead Economics

by Spencer Sunshine on Aug 7, 2014

ImageTom Metzger’s WAR (White Aryan Resistance) was always the archetypal Nazi skinhead group. Their newspaper was filled with crass cartoons of Jews and African-Americans (picture big noses and big lips,) but it was his cable-access TV show, Race and Reason, that was most popular with the neo-Nazi skinheads in the Deep South community I grew up in.

As I understood WAR at the tail end of the 1980s, they sought to instigate a violent revolution, and their vanguard was going to be the Nazi skinhead movement—resurrected brownshirts. Sporting Adolf Hitler tattoos, these skinheads were rather unreflective about the fate of the actual brownshirt leaders.

Much later, I learned that Metzger was one of the few racist leaders who had seriously courted the rising Nazi skinhead movement in the mid-1980s. Most organized racists, including his fellow National Socialists, were cultural conservatives—for some reason, many neo-Nazi professionals are dentists—and looked down on the skinheads. But Metzger only saw potential, and successfully recruited them while simultaneously promoting himself as a leader.

Some of this came through WAR’s alliance with the American Front, the first important national racist skinhead group; led by Bob Heick, they had held a White Workers Day march on May 1, 1988 in San Francisco, and were closely associated with industrial musician Boyd Rice. In 1989, WAR and American Front worked together to put on an “Aryan Woodstock” gathering. The two groups were different than many American racists because of their Third Position politics—that is, a kind of fascism that is anti-capitalist (but opposed to the Left), racial separatist (sometimes allying with non-white racial separatists), and, more recently, environmentalist. In Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism, Matthias Gardell, describes Metzger’s economic views as such:

Inspired by Jack London and populist icons Huey Long and Father Coughlin, Metzger construed an Americanized version of the “third position,” which advanced national socialism as an alternative to communism and capitalism, “neither left, nor right, but forward,” as with the left-leaning, national socialist continuation of Strasserite national socialism and the leftist tendency of early Italian fascism. While admiring Hitler, Metzger recognized as glaring errors the Night of the Long Knifes—the 1934 purge in the NSDAP the of leftist and National-Bolshevik elements—and the overturn of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—a non-aggression pact signed in 1939 between Germany and the Soviet Union and broken by Germany in 1941. Metzger believed that in suppressing the socialist wing of the NSDAP, Hitler had “stuck the wrong pig” and moved toward an alliance with capitalism. Had Hitler not attacked Soviet Russia, Metzger believed, the war might have ended differently and Soviet Russia would have developed a National Bolshevik ideology. From Metzger’s third-positionist point of view, revolutionary racism “can’t move much further with the right-wing in our way,” Metzger claimed. “Just as it was in our way in [national socialist] Germany, the right wing slows us down.” The “main problem” of today is that “transnational corporations…now virtually runs the world,” Metzger said. “All of the racial problems are a side issue that comes from economic problems caused by multinational corporations.”

Metzger differs from many other [white separatist] counterculture ideologues in not using global capitalism as an anti-Semitic euphemism. “I don’t take the extreme position and say that the Jews run everything, because they don’t. Take the 400 most important multinational corporations and you got your structure for the global government…and Jews are just a small faction of it.” While finding race to be an agitating issue—and seeking to fan the flames by using vulgar racist rhetoric in WAR—Metzger foresees a revolution sprung from conflicts generated by the world capitalist system. “As the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the massive influx of people from other nations, mostly nonwhite, and the exporting of more and more jobs from this country, you know, the chemistry is there, it’s like a bomb, waiting for someone to light the fuse.” The violent cleansing deemed necessary will, Metzger reasoned, most likely be triggered by riots in depressed black and Hispanic inner cities, wreaking havoc, which white revolutionaries will capitalize on. The future Aryan homeland will guarantee “free education,” “free medical and health care,” ecologically sustainable production, and “economic justice.” “Major white collar criminals would be publicly executed, so that poor people realize that justice is for everybody.” Moving units of production overseas will be banned and military intervention in foreign wars will cease. The border will be permanently sealed. Millions of non-Aryan immigrants will be deported by force, and negotiations with African Americans will set terms for racial separatism by “repatriation” or territorial division.

In his heyday, Tom Metzger took pains to reach out to the Left, and he had some success. WAR roped in Gary/John Jewell, a former member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who had served on one of the union’s national committees, as well as Wyatt Kaldenberg, a former Trotskyist who became the editor of the WAR newspaper. Metzger also claimed to have made inroads with Earth First! (although he never showed evidence of this being true.)

Image
Neither left nor right. Ivrea, January 2013.

Today, Tom Metzger continues this outreach. For example, in 2010 a participant at the Anti-Racist Action conference handed me a printout of a note Metzger had sent to an anarchist group in Phoenix, Arizona. It included Metzger’s current (and toned-down) ten-point program, which stressed a hatred of global capitalism and concern for the environment, and advocated eliminating corporate personhood, making the remaining American colonies and territories independent, and rebuilding infrastructure—as well as ending immigration, letting the 50 states “regain their individual sovereignty,” and revitalizing the Articles of Confederation. (There was nothing about repatriation of non-whites or creating an “Aryan homeland.”)

Metzger said he agreed with the group that “the system of white supremacy is a cross-class alliance between rich whites and working class whites,” the purpose of which was to maintain capitalism. He quoted the anti-Semite Hervé Ryssen (“The greedy and corrupt Right Wing / drives the Working Class to the Left / where Marxists scoop them up!”) before concluding: “We struggle for Left Wing racial separatism, and are Not supremacists. You probably don’t agree with All of Our Positions, but I bet we agree on most of them!”

Metzger never got more than a few cross-recruits from the Left; clearly the skinheads were his real constituency. However, the ideology of a political leader and that of his followers are not always the same. The economics of the Nazi skinheads that I remember were always vague. On one hand, they hated “communists” (and socialists, anarchists, liberals—as well as gay folks, people of color, and Jews—and not to mention their teachers, the police, Hollywood…so, really, pretty much everyone if you think about it.) On the other, you rarely saw free-market rhetoric bandied about, as you do today among racist agorists and anarcho-capitalists.

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Berlin, February 2014.

The various countercultures (at the time mostly punk, hippie, goth, and skinhead,) despite their differences, generally agreed on a few things: not working, cheap rent, a distinct fashion, music and art, drugs and alcohol, and a distrust of the institutional pillars of the system, including large economic interests—even if this economic view was more instinctual than any kind of a particular thought-out position. If there was one thing counter-culturalists could agree on, it might have been that we all hated businessmen. So, while there wasn’t necessarily a lot of heavy anti-capitalist rhetoric among the Nazi skinheads that I remember, it’s not surprising that it was a Third Positionist who was the one able to successfully reach out to them in the United States.

Lest I overstate my case here, there were others promoting Third Position and similar ideology in the same racist waters that Tom Metzger swam in. The National Front, the British party that the original Nazi skinheads were mostly affiliated with, was heavily influenced by Third Positionism around that time—having been introduced to it by Italians fleeing indictments for a mass-casualty bombing. They, in turn, were largely inspired by the Italian fascist philosopher Julius Evola, who is currently experiencing a revival in the more intellectual Far Right circles. Metzger’s rival, Willis Carto, was a populist who was also critical of contemporary capitalism, having been influenced by Francis Parker Yockey, whose work in turn presaged the New Right and Third Position developments in the fascist movement. And of course Third Positionism was not the only ideology influential on the neo-Nazi skinheads; they looked up to groups like the Aryan Nations, and where I am from, were also courted by the more conventionally racist Ed Fields, a locally based third-tier personality in the white nationalist world.

Metzger is still around, living in the house his mother left to him in Warsaw, Indiana (a famous SPLC civil suit, holding him liable for the death of an Ethiopian immigrant who was murdered by neo-Nazi skinheads, bankrupted Metzger.) He continues to write and appear on white nationalist Internet radio. (His appearance over a decade ago in Louis Theroux’s unkind documentary Louis and the Nazis is probably the most mainstream media attention Metzger has received in years.)

Tom Metzger’s influence in spreading Third Position ideas throughout the American Nazi skinhead and related white separatist movements can be seen today, as former Nazi skinheads have developed these ideas into new, post-Third Positionist directions. Taking reciprocal racial separatism, anti-capitalism, ecology, and outreach to the Left more seriously than their predecessors did, they have combined these notions (along with the influence of the New Right’s Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin) with an array of perspectives.

Hence today, we see a former leader of the American Front denouncing capitalism while supporting Dugin under the banner of the “Fourth Position.” Meanwhile, other former countercultural neo-Nazis created National Anarchism, which was designed as a kind of Third Position fascism with a greater level of decentralization. (The precursor group to the National Anarchists, the National Revolutionary Faction, was in a Third Position international with the American Front—surprise, surprise.) In 1988, Metzger had declared: “WAR believes that if it works, use it. If it doesn’t, try something else.” I would guess that Metzger—who donated money to the Nation of Islam and addressed the New Black Panther Party—looks with some mix of envy and admiration on these new developments.

Metzger’s moment has passed, but his legacy in spreading Third Positionism throughout America’s racist counterculture remains.
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 27, 2015 5:32 pm

http://ideasandaction.info/2015/08/libe ... iberalism/

Libertarianism is a Type of Socialism, NOT Classical Liberalism

By Geoff

Libertarianism is a socialist political philosophy which has its roots in the socialist workers’ movements of the 1800s and 1900s. It is especially associated with ideas that came out of the First International (IWA – 1864-1876), especially those of Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin. It was upon these ideas, as well as some of those which came later like those of Peter Kropotkin, that the libertarian syndicalists in Spain formed the CNT union in the early 1900s, with the goal of creating a libertarian (socialist) and workers’ self-managed society. What this means is they wanted emancipation of the working class, recognizing that class struggle comes as a result of resistance to management power over workers, because business owners’ aims are profit-based. This means that managers will submit workers to rigid control in the workplace, cut corners and compensation, heap stress on them, etc., in order to maximize profit.

The inequitable distribution of wealth that comes as a result of wage labor creates an economic, political and social power imbalance, since in the market your vote is your dollar, and wage labor in the workplace is an apparatus to give a minority of people more votes in the market than the rest. Libertarians historically wanted to replace these conditions with workers’ self-management and create a socialist society where people have control over their own work and in all economic planning and decision-making, as arranged through popular associations like unions, assemblies, councils and federations. There are various concrete proposals for these types of economies from people like Cornelius Castoriadis, Peter Kropotkin, GDH Cole and others.

In the 1962 book “Capitalism & Freedom”, Milton Friedman says: “The rightful and proper label is liberalism…liberalism emphasized freedom as the ultimate goal and the individual as the ultimate entity in the society. It supported laissez faire at home as a means of reducing the role of the state in economic affairs and thereby enlarging the role of the individual; it supported free trade abroad as a means of linking the nations of the world…”. The word “libertarianism” became associated with right wing classical liberals in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to use the word for political opportunism. In “The Betrayal of the American Right”, Murray Rothbard said, “One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy…‘Libertarians’…had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over…”

An easy way to understand the major differences between libertarians and classical liberals is that libertarians prioritize positive liberty whereas classical liberals prioritize negative liberty. Positive liberty means having control over the decisions that affect you (self-management) and having access to the resources to fulfill your potential. Negative liberty means merely absence of external restraint. Because the employer doesn’t put a gun to your head to take a job, you’re supposedly “free” as far as the liberal is concerned. But in reality workers face a denial of positive liberty because they are forced to work for employers to afford access to resources they need to live their lives, and have no direct control over their own work or over economic planning decisions which affect their lives.

They also do not have direct control over how negative market externalities, like pollution, climate change and systemic risk, affect their lives. The freedom classical liberals desire includes the freedom to do things like exploit workers and pollute the earth. This contrasts starkly with the freedom desired by libertarians which is to create a political economy where people have direct control over their own work and over economic planning, as well as access to everything they need to fulfill their own potential.

Classical liberals’ prioritization of negative over positive liberty is taken to very extreme ends. Murray Rothbard said “…the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights… the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die…” It also led Ludwig von Mises to be an apologist for fascism: “It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.”

Fredrich Hayek, in regards to the dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile, said: “…a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.” Coincidentally, Milton Friedman was an unofficial economic advisor to Pinochet as part of the “Chicago Boys” economics group.

To conclude, classical liberalism, which prioritizes negative over positive liberty, leads to extremely despotic anti-democratic and anti-working class advocacy. This stands in stark contrast to libertarianism, which prioritizes positive liberty and has its roots in the socialist tradition. The word “libertarianism” in the U.S. was usurped by classical liberals for political opportunism, so it is important for actual libertarians, like those of us at WSA, to show this opportunism for what it truly is, and reject any and all association the word “libertarian” has with classical liberalism.
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Fri Mar 04, 2016 4:58 pm

http://antifascistnews.net/2016/03/04/f ... -politics/

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FASCIST ENTRYISM: ADBUSTERS AND THE PROBLEM OF HAZY POLITICS

MARCH 4, 2016

Note: Before we get started, we want to unequivacably say that we do not think that AdBusters is a fascist or fascist allied publication. We enjoy a great deal of what they publish, support their project, and will continue to re-post articles, videos, and art from them. Instead, AdBusters is just an example where the left creates open points that fascists can infiltrate.


The conventional political spectrum often betrays the actual process for radicalization that takes places on what we call the “far-right.” The term far-right is often negated by comparative fascist studies scholars because it lacks clear boundaries. Is it right populism? Was Hitler on the far-right, or Ron Paul? What we generally mean is anything that is within the fascism spectrum, from racialist to masculanist to other forms of militant right-wing politics. The defining feature of fascism is that it adopts many aspects of the left, while maintaining the values of the far-right. This means it may critique capitalism, argue for protection of the environment, and be anti-war, yet do it for reasons that are racialized, based on hierarchy, and opposed to democracy and equality. It is because of this that they have found easy entry points into the left, often using a lack of ideological coherence or the willingness to be open to conflicting views if they share some political affinity.

Fascist infiltration in left spaces is reported reasonably often, from participation in Palestinian support work inspired by their anti-Semitism to points when the American Freedom Party or National Socialist Movement will join actions against the TPP. When we get to vaguer left spaces, where analysis is growing and reshaping, this can be the perfect place to slide in and create doubt and complicate the analysis.

AdBusters has been a left institution for a couple of decades now. Coming out of the “Culture Jamming” period of the 1990s, it was really founded on anti-globalization principles that were critical of global capitalism because of the way it destroys human interactions, replaces consciousness with vapid branding, and generally destroys the earth, communities, and free thinking through compulsive consumerism. This type of analysis has become less and less popular since the 2008 financial crisis, largely because it is a critique of the excesses of capitalism. Today, many people would love to have access to that kind of suburban wasteland, but as poverty and the inability to join the working middle class grows, the focus on capitalism’s effects at creating “boredom” and general affluence is less central. That being said, they have continued to be an incredibly relevant publication, and they were the rhetorical beginning of Occupy Wallstreet, even if they did not do any real organizing work.

While they are often criticized for using the same flashy style as the media organizations they critique, they have used a beautiful design model to subvert conventional communication. They also attempt to go beyond the analysis of the left at many points and forgo conventional political essays in favor of appeals that are often more emotional, narrative, and experimental.

Within this model, a clear political line is lacking, and they likely support having a diversity of voices. Inside of that model, however, there has been a lacking of discernment for how some voices have become present. Part of this comes from the willingness to include voices that would be controversial, even on the radical left, and part of it comes from a lack of understanding among the editors of what fascist crossover politics actually look like.

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As is common in publications that deal with issues like American foreign policy, Palestinian oppression, and AIPAC, AdBusters has been accused of anti-Semitism. They would likely say that this is a buzzword used to denigrate supporters of Palestine, and it has been on occasion, but it is also incredibly accurate for many choices they have made. In a much publicized issue from March 2004, they ran a story called “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?,” which looked at the number of supposed Jews among the Neoconservative establishment of the time. This attempt to identify “Jewish power” is a major fascist talking point, and is often parroted by people like white nationalist academic Kevin McDonald, where they try and show that Neconservatism is a movement comes from former Trotskyists and is actually is a “far-left” and Jewish ethnic agenda. This comes from the idea that Jews operate on an ethnic interest collectively, and therefore they are actually allied with Israel instead of the U.S. The article itself outlines a key area of entryism: the inability to be discerning. Here, instead of having a clear analysis of Israel, its role in global capitalism, and then the politics key to the Bush administration, they focus in on something that has an incredible history of violent impression: whether or not they are Jews.

A lot of ink has been spilled chronicling the pro-Israel leanings of American neocons and fact that a disproportionate percentage of them are Jewish. Some commentators are worried that these individuals – labeled ‘Likudniks’ for their links to Israel’s right wing Likud party – do not distinguish enough between American and Israeli interests. For example, whose interests were they protecting in pushing for war in Iraq?

Drawing attention to the Jewishness of the neocons is a tricky game. Anyone who does so can count on automatically being smeared as an anti-Semite. But the point is not that Jews (who make up less than 2 percent of the American population) have a monolithic perspective. Indeed, American Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat and many of them disagree strongly with Ariel Sharon’s policies and Bush’s aggression in Iraq. The point is simply that the neocons seem to have a special affinity for Israel that influences their political thinking and consequently American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Here at Adbusters, we decided to tackle the issue head on and came up with a carefully researched list of who appear to be the 50 most influential neocons in the US (see above). Deciding exactly who is a neocon is difficult since some neocons reject the term while others embrace it. Some shape policy from within the White House, while others are more peripheral, exacting influence indirectly as journalists, academics and think tank policy wonks. What they all share is the view that the US is a benevolent hyper power that must protect itself by reshaping the rest of the world into its morally superior image. And half of the them are Jewish.


Again, in 2010 an issue had a cover comparing the Gaza Strip to the Warsaw Ghetto, which caused them to be pulled from shelves in different places. This may be a defensible point when discussing the open-air prison that Gaza had become, but it lacks a clear willingness to confront anti-Semitism as well when building a political analysis about the Palestinian people.

Lasn himself is fond of publishing 9/11-Truthers who blame the attack on the World Trade Center on “Zionist Jews.” This includes people like Bill and Kathleen Christison, who published their article “Elliot Abrams: Dual Loyalist and Neocon Extraordinaire.” Here they said that the former deputy national security adviser was behind the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon. We should look closely at their title, mainly “dual loyalist.” While they are trying to eschew direct connections, this is the kind of rhetoric that was employed for years in American anti-Semitism where it is said that Jews are actually loyal to Israel instead of the U.S. (hence they have “dual loyalties”). This is not a direct line, but more of a “dog whistle” to anti-Semitic images of Jews as secretive, diabolical, and using crypsis to hide in society.


Continues at: http://antifascistnews.net/2016/03/04/f ... -politics/
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