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Alice Neel painted the human comedy.

Its a phrase she repeated often in interviews and in text, throughout her life. It is the title of one of the sections of Alice Neel: People Come First, her outstanding and moving retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In one sense, what she meant is obvious. Memorable and interesting characters abound in her paintings, running from her many lovers to the luminaries of New Yorks Depression-era political and literary Left; from art celebrities like Andy Warhol to her acquaintances in the East Harlem neighborhood where she toiled in obscurity for decades; from the feminist activists and critics who championed her work in the 60s and 70s to her own self, shown naked, at 80, paintbrush in hand and gazing skeptically out at the viewer as if sizing them upone of the most indelible of all 20th-century self-portraits.

Alice Neel, Self-Portrait (1980). Photo by Ben Davis.

The text in the Mets The Human Comedy gallery explains that she meant the phrase as a reference to French author Honor de Balzacs story collection La Comdie humaine, which examines the causes and effects of human action on nineteenth-century French society. It notes that Neel wanted to chronicle suffering and loss, but also strength and endurance, as Balzac did.

Which is fine, as far as it goes, and falls in line with the shows framing of Neel as an anarchic humanist. But the effects of human action is a pretty vague phrase. As opposed to what? The effects of the movement of the planets?

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

The truth is that the words the human comedy had a lasting magic for Alice Neel because Alice Neel thought of herself as a Communist intellectual. Every artist with an interest in Marxism would have gotten the reference, becausealmost all of Communist aesthetic theory looked for legitimacy, in one way or another, to Marx and Engelss approving remarks on Balzacs La Comdie humaine.

The authors of the Communist Manifesto thought Balzac captured not just the spirit of his time, but provided a portrait of the pathologies of bourgeois society, the toll that money took on human relations (despite Balzacs aristocratic personal politics).

Alice Neels Pregnant Woman (1971) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Interviewed by the Yale Press podcast, the exhibitionss curators, Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey, seem very concerned with emphasizing that Neels politicswere independent, non-dogmatic, and that her affinities for Communist ideas softened as she aged. Which may be true: Times change, people change, art and politics and how they intersect change.

You see, its not so much that I am pro-Russia as that I am pro-dtente, she said onstage towards the end of her life. But she also said, around the same time, Reagan has said the government doesnt owe anybody anything. In the Soviet Union you get free medical careeverything is free. There the government owes you everything.

In 1981, just three years before she died, she contributed to a fundraiser for the Reference Center for Marxist Studies, a depository for Communist Party history located in the headquarters of the attenuated CPUSA. The same year she actually did a show in Moscow at the Artists Union, organized by Philip Bonosky, the Moscow correspondent for theDaily World, which was the successor to the CPs Daily Worker.(She had painted him three decades earlier, when he was editor at the Communist magazine Masses & Mainstream.)

Alice Neel, Phillip Bonosky (1948). Photo by Ben Davis.

Interviewed at the age of 82 by art historian Patricia Hills, Neel was still making the case for the significance of her portraiture by referencing Vladimir Lenins respect for Balzacs The Human Comedy (she kept a poster of Lenin in her apartment all her life, according to Phoebe Hobans 2010 biography) as well as Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukcss advocacy for Thomas Mann.

Neither Lenin norLukcs were names you brought up in the 1980s to win points for being with-it, artistically or politically.

Rather than trying to fit Neel into the framework of a rose-colored contemporary progressivism, it seems much more interestingand more accurateto consider how the artists actual, passionately felt, difficult allegiances shaped her: the sacrifices she made in her life; the specifics of her art; and her relation to the New Left feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s that pulled her from obscurity, and that now probably overdetermine the reading of her work still.

Born into small-town Pennsylvania respectability in 1900, Alice Neel went to study art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women looking for a more interesting life. I came out of that little town the most depressed virgin who ever lived, she remembers in a 2008 documentary directed by her grandson. She met and married Carlos Enrquez, a soon-to-be-important Cuban painter, and travelled to Cuba in 1926, where the sight of poverty in pre-revolutionary Havana radicalized her.

Alice Neel, Futility of Effort (1930). Photo by Ben Davis.

Returning to New York, she suffered the loss of her first child, Santillana, to diphtheriathe subject of the ghostly Futility of Effort (1930), later featured in a 1936 issue of the journal of the Artists Union, Art Front, retitled asPoverty. The couple would separate, and Enrquez would take their second child, Isabetta, back to Cuba.

New Yorks Greenwich Village was where Neel found her most lasting community, in the demimonde that swirled together leftist radicals and artistic strivers amid the hardship brought on by the Great Depression.

Alice Neel, Kenneth Fearing (1935) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

When the New Deals art projects started up in 33, Neel seized the opportunity as a lifeline, painting a canvas every six weeks on government wages, her eye turning for a time to urban scenes and public demonstrations in the mode of the day.

(An anecdote she liked to tell later in life is that Harold Rosenberg, the critic of abstraction, schemed his way onto the government payroll by submitting two Neel paintings as his own, before becoming an art writer.)

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

The Communist Party was enthusiastic about the New Deal Arts Projects and a force in pushing for their expansion, and Neel soon joined the Party. It might surprise us now that a figure of Neels scrappy, bohemian independence would be drawn to the CP, even given the fact that she joined in 35, when the USSRs foreign policy needs aligned with Roosevelts agenda, and the turn to the Popular Front opened the doors for fellow-traveling artists of all kinds.

Alice Neel, Nazis Murder Jews (1936). Photo by Ben Davis.

But Cold War dogma and our knowledge of the actual evils of the Soviet system cloud our assessment of the Communist Partys on-the-ground profile at the time. Its opposition to US social order led it to engage with both racism and sexism in ways that mainstream institutions often wouldnt. As Andrew Hemingway writes in his great history of the time, Artists on the Left, Neel is representative of that type of woman artist and intellectual who gravitated to the CP becausewhatever its limitationsit offered the most sustained critique available of class, racial, and sexual inequality.

Alice Neels Death of Mother Bloor (1951) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Neels role model would have been someone like Ella Reeve Bloor, aka Mother Bloor, the most well-known female leader in the CPUSA in the 20s and 30s. Born 1862, Bloor was a formidable organizer who supported six children while divorcing and marrying as she pleased. She was a comrade of Eugene Debs and Upton Sinclair, and her labor journalism inspired Woody Guthries song about the Ludlow Massacre. In her sixties, during the Great Depression, Bloor toured the Great Plains with her son, organizing farmers.

Detail of Alice Neels Death of Mother Bloor (1951) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Neel painted Mother Bloors funeral in a 1951 work. She is pictured, sainted, in a coffin as a multiracial crowd of mourners files past. A wreath above her head reads COMMUNIST, the word PARTY vanishing as it wraps around a bouquet of roses.

The curators of Alice Neel: People Come First cite approvingly a line by Neel saying that she was never a good Communist, because she hated bureaucracy and the meetings used to drive me crazy. But a distaste for bureaucracy or political meetings doesnt mean she didnt imbibe the party line. (It just means she was an artist.)

In the very same interview Neel also stresses that it [the Communist Party] affected my work quite a bit.

Its one thing to join the Communist Party at a time when Communist ideas were in vogue with the artistic mainstream, and capitalism was in a crisis that was plain for all to see. Many did in the Depression years. But Neel remained faithful to the movement long after.

Alice Neel, Alice Childress (1950). Photo by Ben Davis.

In the 40s and 50s, she studied philosophy at the Jefferson School for Social Research, an adult education school in New York run by the Communist Party. She delivered some of her first slide lectures about her art there.

One of her teachers, V.J. Jerome, chair of the Partys Cultural Commission, was convicted under the Smith Act for his 1950 pamphlet Grasp the Weapon of Culture!, which described mass culture as anti-human and a narcotic polluting the masses, arguing the need for a revolutionary art to bring down capitalism. Neel made sure to visit Jerome to show support after he was released from jail.

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

This was the high tide of McCarthyism, when most others of the so-called New York Intellectuals were abandoning their earlier, 30s-era Marxist commitments and turning hard towards Cold War liberalism and anti-Communism.

And yet the very title of the Met show, People Come First, comes from a line in a 1950 Daily Worker interview with Mike Gold, the foremost propagandizer of proletarian art in the United States. Even as Abstract Expressionism was being coronated at MoMA, Gold had quoted Neel: I am against abstract and non-objective art because such art shows a hatred of human beings.

(Incidentally, when figuration reemerged in the art world in the late 60s, it was in the form of Photorealismand Neel hated that too. She argued that it also sinned by treating humans the same as things, replicating capitalist ideology. She thought special attention should be reserved for the human. Her particular Marxist aesthetic, therefore, gives insight into the ways she set her subjects off from less defined backgrounds and the meaning she gave to the expressive, painterly qualities of her paintings in that era.)

Alice Neels Mike Gold (1951) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Gold championed Neel as a pioneer of socialist-realism in American painting, and she returned the love with a portrait from 1951. His weathered, tan features appear thoughtful and ready for debate. Depicted on the table before Gold in Neels painting is a copy of the Communist intellectual journal Masses.

Detail of Alice Neels Mike Gold. Photo by Ben Davis.

Beneath that is a newspaper. In what I take to be a deliberate suggestion of Neels continuing alignment with Golds output as a writer and propagandist, she has placed her own signature as if it is a part of the newspaper.

Neel had moved to Spanish Harlem in 1938 with her lover, the singer Jos Santiago Negrn (whom she had met when she was 35 and he a decade younger). For her, the paintings she did of neighbors, acquaintances, and comrades from the Puerto Rican community werent just sentimental or picturesque. Works such as Mercedes Arroyo, The Spanish Family, and T.B. Harlem made their debut in a show at the Communist-controlled New Playwrights Theatre, with an essay by Gold, and were presented explicitly as part of a Communist political-cultural project, bound up with the Partys advocacyand sometimes fetishizationof Third World struggle.

Alice Neel, The Spanish Family (1943). Photo by Ben Davis.

Gold quoted Neel like so: East Harlem is like a battlefield of humanism, and I am on the side of the people there, and they inspire my painting.

In the popular imagination, the story of the 60s New Left movements is that they raised issues of race and gender that the Old Lefts idealization of a white male factory worker had ignored. But its a little more complicated than that.

An interesting twist highlighted by recent museum shows reconsidering this period is that, as it turns out, the artists who were adopted as the most vital, heroic exemplars by the insurgent 60s social movements had, in fact, often been forged by the Old Left artistic scene. It was in terminally uncool Social Realism that the idea of an art that honored the experiences of the suffering, oppressed masses had been preserved and could be picked up again when new social movements rebelled against the reining formalism.

Charles White, the masterful social realist who was affiliated with the CPUSA until 1956 and was nurtured in some of the same Communist spaces and periodicals as Neel, was an example for the Black Power generation. Neel was an example for Womens Liberation.

Cover of Time magazine featuring Alice Neel painting of Kate Millet, on display at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

The Communist Party had all but imploded after Khrushchevs secret speech in 1956 revealing Stalins crimes. Without the new feminist movement, there would have been no Neel revival.

Neel, in turn, helped shape the image of the ascendant movement, doing a steely painting of writer Kate Millett for the 1970 cover of Time magazine on The Politics of Sex, just as Womens Liberation was moving into mainstream consciousness.

Alice Neel, Cindy Nemser and Chuck (1975). Photo by Ben Davis.

She painted the luminaries of the feminist movement as faces of their time, just as she had painted the earlier Communist intellectuals: art historians Linda Nochlin (with daughter Daisy) and Cindy Nemser (nude, with husband Chuck, also nude), Redstockings founder Irine Peslikis (described as Marxist Girl), and many more.

Alice Neels Nancy and the Twins (1971) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Neel also did numerous images of women nursing and pregnant nudes, among her most celebrated works. Here, her eye for honoring the realities of ordinary peoples lives hidden beneath bourgeois ideology met the feminist project of honoring the hidden world of womens work beneath the sentimental domestic cliches.

But Neel also had a famously difficult relationship with the Second Wave of feminism, even as she reveled in its attention and clearly believed in the importance of Womens Liberation. Partly, this was generational. Like Georgia OKeeffe (though a quarter-century younger) or Joan Mitchell (though a quarter-century older), Neel had spent a lifetime trying to escape the stigma of being patronizingly reviewed as a lady painter, and was suspicious of being touted for her gender.

Alice Neel, Marxist Girl (Irene Peslikis) (1972) in Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

But this was also partly political, inscribed in the very creed that had allowed her to hack it out all those lonely, unrecognized, pre-feminist-movement years. She had chosen a life of poverty out of an ideological belief in solidarity with the working class and the oppressed. With a combination of insight and narrow-mindedness, she considered a lot of the preoccupations of the new feminist artists she encountered to be self-absorbed and tritein a word, bourgeois.

In 1970, her work was included in the Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin-curated Women Artists, 15501950 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show had been the product of actual protests by feminists, who had threatened a Civil Rights complaint against the museum for not showing women.

Alice Neel, Linda Nochlin and Daisy (1973). Photo by Ben Davis.

Yet reflecting on the shows reception, Neel was characteristically salty and dismissive of those who didnt share her fundamental political outlook:

What amazed me is that all the woman criticsyou see, you are very respected if you paint your own pussy, as a womans libber. But they didnt have any respect for being able to see an abused Third World. So nobody mentioned that I managed to see beyond my pussy politically. But I thought that was really a good thing if they had a little more brain.

There is ego here: Alice Neel was never shy about saying why her art was better than anyone elses. But the judgement flowed directly from the Marxist theory she used to understand her practice, which held that capitalist life kept us wallowing in immediate subjective experiences, unable to generalize and so unable to change the world.InGeorg Lukcss 1938 essay Realism in the Balance, he had written:

[I]f we are ever going to be able to understand the way in which reactionary ideas infiltrate our minds, and if we are ever going to achieve a critical distance from such prejudices, this can only be accomplished by hard work, by abandoning and transcending the limits of immediacy, by scrutinizing all subjective experiences and measuring them against social reality. In short it can only be achieved by a deeper probing of the world.

You can see how this artistic theory of hard looking would resonate with Neels sense of what a portrait should be.Lukacsian realism was about neither simply life-like description nor the depiction of ordinary experiences in an accessible way; it was about art that moved through the specific case to a revelation of the overall social context that had shaped its meaning and identity.

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

When, in the Hills interview, Neel says that what she values most in her own art is that she tries to paint the complete person but also, though that depiction, to capture the spirit of the age, it is just such an operation she seems to have in mind.

The favorite author of Georg Lukcs was Thomas Mann, Neel continues, because Mann could see how sick the world was. But the sickness has now been transformed into junkiness. You see, the character of this era is its utter lack of values.

Alice Neels Dominican Boys on 108th Street (1955) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

How seriously did Alice Neel take the mission of her art to capture its time, which went considerably beyond the personal satisfaction she got from organizing paint on canvas or communing with her many interesting sitters?

So seriously that, when it came time to paint the character of the 70s and its utter lack of values, she would show it in the face of her own adult son.

Having lost two daughters, Alice Neel raised two sons on welfare, in poverty, all while committed to making unsellable art. In the 2008 documentary, Richard Neel remembers Alice tolerating a lover, Sam Brody, who beat him, because she was dependent on him for money and he flattered her artistic ego. Burned by the dispiriting instability of their upbringing, both sons would reject her communist and bohemian values, steering clear of the new movements of the 60s even as they elevated their mother. They became, respectively, a doctor and a lawyeras solidly middle class as you can get.

Alice Neel, Richard (1962). Photo by Ben Davis.

She had painted Richard warmly in the handsome Richard (1962), when he was 24, with five oclock shadow and a casual sweater.

By the time Richard evolved into the late-periodRichard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79), the real Richard had become an ardent Nixon supporter and chief executive council for Pan Am Airways. In the year she made the painting, Pan Am was okayed by Jimmy Carters Airline Deregulation Act to snap up National Airways for $437 million.

There are very few people as right-wing as I am, Richard says in the 2008 documentary. His mother would say that Richard in the Era of the Corporation was her attempt to capture how the corporation enslaved all these bright young men.

Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79). Photo by Ben Davis.

Now 40, Richard is shown again on a chair, this time in suit and tie. Compared to the earlier composition, this one is one step farther back, less intimate; the warm brown palette has yielded to a slightly icy climate.

Splashes of green linger around the mouth. Green veins trace his hands.

Detail of Richard in the Era of the Corporation. Photo by Ben Davis.

The 1979 Richard projects cool assurance, his legs casually crossed as beforebut the foot is suspended at a strained angle. Hes literally twisted.

Detail of Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79). Photo by Ben Davis.

The white patches in the hair in both the figure and his reflection suggest a man graying into middle age, but also make him look as if he is fading away or that something is literally missing from him.

Detail of Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79). Photo by Ben Davis.

But its his eyes that I notice. Childhood malnourishment had left Richards eyesight damaged. Uniquely among her bespectacled sitters (compare her own self-portrait from a year later), Neel has given Richard shark eyes, all pupils. His glasses, strangely left unfinished, float unevenly around them, agitated halos, as if he were spellbound or hypnotized.

Neel rightly gets credit for painting aspects of female experience that hadnt gotten a lot of play in art before, in her pregnant nudes and nursing mothers and scenes of childbirth.Richard in the Era of the Corporations depiction of political estrangement between mother and son is another intimate experience I am not sure had ever been depicted.

And this painting was telling, not just in terms of capturing a mood among the Neel family but in terms of capturing the larger zeitgeist.

The story of the backlash against the movements of the 1960s by the rising generation and the consolidation of corporate hold over life was indeed the story that defined the decades to comewith so many horrible consequences.

I love, fear, and respect people and their struggle, Neel told Hills in 1982, especially in the rat race we live in today, becoming every moment fiercer, attaining epic proportions where murder and annihilation are the end.

Banner for Alice Neel: People Come First outside the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Finally, why bother spending so much time on Alice Neels Communist affinities?

Theres enough Neel to go around in this show: Theres an erotic Neel; a familial Neel; a Neel as painter of wonky domestic still-lifes. But clearly we are more comfortable with these aspects of her work and are embarrassed by the Communism, rendering it as a soft-focus radicalism or classless feminism that she herself would have hated.

The topic is worth lingering on, but not because you need to defend Communism to defend Marxism or activism. The opposite is closer to the truth, in my opinion. For the entire period Neel was working, there were Marxists and activists who were critical of the CP, critical of the Soviet Unionthey were just much less visible than the CP.

But Communism was a motivating passion for Neel. Its sense of destiny kept her going. Its theory offered a model of intellectualism that was committed to speaking to ordinary people. It offered critical insights that werent easy to find elsewhere along with tragic blind spots. (If you are interested in what it felt like to live these difficult dynamics, Vivian Gornicks The Romance of American Communism cant be beat.)

Neels politics were bound up with all that other stuff that made her remarkable. The art-historical dilemmas they leave us with are heritage of the fact that the society she was trying to survive and depict was actually full of awful dilemmas. The best way to honor her as a painter of difficult truths is by not smoothing these over.

Alice Neel: People Come First is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 1, 2021.

Excerpt from:
Alice Neels Communism Is Essential to Her Art. You Can See It in the Battlefield of Her Paintings, and Her Ruthless Portrait of Her Son - artnet News

Two guests:

Richard -Gilman-Opalsky with his TEDxUofISpringfield talkWhat's Love Got to Do with Communism?

Joy Anna performs her original song Made It This Far

TEDxUofISpringfield talk from Richard Gilman-Opalsky on love and communism, an original song from Joy Anna, and Robert Smith's latest commentary on patience.

Richard Gilman-Opalsky is Professor of political theory and philosophy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He is the author of six books, including The Communism of Love, Specters of Revolt, Precarious Communism and Spectacular Capitalism. He has lectured widely throughout the world and his work has been translated and published in Greek, Spanish, French, and German editions. In 2018-2019, Dr. Gilman-Opalsky was named University Scholar, the highest award for scholarship granted at all three campuses of University of Illinois. Dr. Gilman-Opalskys work explores the powers of everyday people, particularly those typically regarded as powerless. He challenges the idea that politics is solely the business of the professional political class, and highlights how impoverished and marginalized people participate in changing the world in the most important ways.

Joy Annareceived the UIS Music Merit Award for her recording of her original song Made It This Far, released as part of the University of Illinois Songs of Hope Project. Made It This Far was recorded at the UIS Performing Arts Center and produced by UIS Electronic Media.

Continue reading here:
Love & Communism - Made it This Far | Community Voices - NPR Illinois

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New Delhi: In an encounter Saturday, 22 uniformed officers, including CoBRA commanders of the specially trained battalion, lost their lives in Chhattisgarhs naxal affected areas. In episode 717 of Cut the Clutter, ThePrints Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta traced the history of the rise of violent communism extremists in the region.

On their geographical location, he said, Chhattisgarh is a large state which is thinly populated. In fact, this is where Dandakaranya is located the region where Lord Ram goes for his vanvas in Ramayan.

The reason why it is an ideal location for such activities is because of the terrain and the socio-economic conditions in the region. This sparsely populated area has a large tribal population which has been ungoverned for years.

Indias violent or extreme revolutionary communist movement was born in what is now Telangana in 1948, he added.

Gupta said that at the time, In a very communist style, leaders of these groups declared that they were setting up communes in 3,000 villages. They started recruiting educated youth from cities to become a part of their movement. They also said that they were wedded to the Mao-kind of revolution Mao or Bolshevik Revolution which is continuing a war involving the entire population until you can change the entire system in India.

Also read:Unusual calm, sensed something is wrong: Eerie moments before Chhattisgarh Maoist attack

Gupta speculated that Saturdays attack was most likely a trap that had been laid by the Maoists for the armed forces. A naxal leader by the name of Hidma, (who) the Indian forces have been looking for since long, was believed to be in this region between Sukma and Bijapur. When a troop of 1,000 policemen and special forces entered these villages, they found these villages empty. This is an indication that it could have been a trap.

Gupta also described the style of attack that naxals follow. Naxals ambush the enemy and once the latter are injured, they surround them and steal their equipment, like guns, bulletproof vests and boots. Calling this mission a setback for the security forces, he added, If so many of our armed forces are killed and their equipment is stolen, how can the operation be a success? In addition to this, reports suggest that this operation was led by the same officer who led the 19 April 2010 operation in [which] 76 soldiers died. This was the second highest number of casualties in the history of the Indian Armed forces. So unless you can fix accountability for what has gone wrong, these things will keep on happening.

Gupta then talked of the number of casualties of recent encounters between the armed forces and the naxals: in March 2017, 12 CRPF men were killed, in April 2017, 26 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) members were killed in a place called Chintamani in South Bastar, on 21 March 2020, 17 security personnel were killed. These 17 included five CRPF and 12 district reserve group personnel, the local policemen. This year in March, five District Reserve Guard (DRG) soldiers were killed in Narayanpur district.

Talking about the BJPs promise to solve this problem, Gupta said that over the past few years the government had not been able to deliver on this. In 2014, PM Narendra Modi, in his (poll) campaigns, had promised to bring a solution to this problem. In 2015, Home Minister Amit Shah, too, had claimed that the problem of naxalism in the region would be solved in two to three years. This has not happened yet.

Also read:Madvi Hidma, the ruthless Chhattisgarh Maoist 2,000 security personnel went hunting for

Gupta said the naxal movement had weakened since the UPA governments time. He then explained the origins of the naxal movement. In 1967, in northern Bengal, in a village that has now come to be known as Naxalbari, trouble was brewing between the tribals and the local landlords. When one of the tribals was killed (at) the hands of these landlords, the tribals retaliated against them and won. This is where the whole movement of retaliation began.

Recounting the contribution of the Community Party of India, Gupta explained, The CPI was formed in 1920 and was well received by the communist countries across the world. The group split after the war of 1962 with China because they were torn between Indian patriotism and their ideological loyalties to Mao. Charu Majumdar, who split from the CPI,became the leader of the extremist movement which gained the namenaxalism after the uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal.

Majumdar, with other leaders, came up with the idea of the annihilation line, which means to kill those who you have disagreements with or who are a threat to the people, which means landlords, businessmen, civil servants and policemen. Due to this, a lot of the killings occurred in urban areas of Bengal and eventually spread to other states.

As this problem escalated, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi decided to crush this movement. Explaining the operation of 1971, Gupta said, A covert operation by the name Operation Steeplechase was worked out under the leadership of then Lt General Manekshaw. The operation was said to be so discreet that there were no written instructions for it.

This operation is said to have broken the back of the naxal movement at the time.

Over the years, the increased vigil by the Indian government led the naxalites to take refuge in regions where it would be difficult to access, such as the Dandakaranya forest of Chhattisgarh.

Also read:Over 250 Maoists, trapped forces Why Chhattisgarh encounter led to high casualties

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How naxalism and the extremist communist movement grew and infested Chhattisgarh - ThePrint

MEDIA WATCH--In the wake of major league baseball abandoning Georgia to protest their new voter-suppression laws, a GOP that incessantly rants about "cancel culture" has continued its death spiral with increasingly crackpot attacks on things they used to love they now want to cancel - baseball, corporations, free speech, OMG the Easter Bunny - with sinister portents pickleball, apple pie, water polo or barbecues could be next. (Photo above: Fidel at (communist) bat.)

MLB's conscientious decision to re-locate their All-Star Game and draft, made after always-dangerous "thoughtful conversations" with players and management, has shifted the focus of right-wing hysteria against all things "woke" from football - always suspect given all those black guys, never mind that SOB Kaepernick - to, shockingly, "America's game," even though it's still pretty white so you'd think it would be okay.

Evidently intent on cancelling themselves by exposing their utter political and moral bankruptcy, the GOP has responded to the move with feverish and, even for them, staggeringly stupid attacks on "the liberal mob," "leftist loons," and, drawing a very wobbly line to a new deal with China to stream games, "the genocidal Communist Party of China," wait, what?!

"THREE STRIKES YOU'RE OUT MLB" shrieks a GOP tweet that frenziedly goes on to list their crimes: "A deal with a company in China backed by the COMMUNIST PARTY," "They've played games in Cuba with a COMMUNIST REGIME in power," and - not The Onion - "They require PHOTO ID to pick up tickets from will call." Talk about genocidal.

There's more. The Cuba-hating former guy urged his 17 remaining fans to boycott baseball. Jesus-loving, ever-offensive Mike Huckabee wrote, "Breaking wind from CNN! Coke will announce name change to 'Woke-A-Cola.'" Ms. QAnon Three Names celebrated GOP unity against "corporate communism."

Brian Kemp, architect of Georgia's travesty, said MLB's "knee-jerk decision (means) woke political activists are coming for every aspect of your life" and, in a stunning pot/kettle twist, "If the left doesn't agree with you, facts and the truth do not matter," citing Biden/Abrams lies about "a bill that expands access to the ballot box."

His own lies have proved unconvincing: A majority of "avid" baseball fanssay they support the move; so do about 200 companies, including Delta, Home Depot, AT&T and Woke-A-Cola, prompting a fat-cat-led GOP long sustained by corporations to suddenly turn on them and a you've-gotta-be-kidding hypocritical Mitch McConnel, whose PAC just took in $475 million of corporate cash, to proclaim companies should "stay out of politics." R-I-G-H-T.

Online, many wondered why in Trumpism's final death thrash it's only cancel culture if the left does it, why a party long backing a Russian asset now thinks it can play the tired communist card against a private organization exercising its right to free speech, why the GOP is "painting themselves into a corner where nobody wants to visit, let alone live." "I see we've moved from Caravan Monday to Communism Tuesday," noted one.

Also, "Even the MLB lets people drink water." Still, because faux outrage is all they have left, it keeps spewing. The latest target: An Easter photo of the Bidens and the Easter Bunny, all masked. "THEY PUT A MASK ON THE BUNNY," they howled of "mind control" by the "#DemocratCommunistParty."

"Such sick people." True, that.

(CityWatch guest columnist Abby Zimet writes for CommonDreams.org where this piece was first posted.)

-cw

Originally posted here:
On Baseball as A Communist Plot: 794 Idiotic GOP Strikes and They're Out - City Watch

In September 2009, when newspapers reported that activist Kobad Ghandy had been arrested in Delhis Bhikaji Cama Place, there was a curious historical coincidence to the event.

Just over 90 years earlier, Madame Cama had been arrested for her efforts to further the cause of independence. Now, another privileged member of Indias tiny Parsi community had been taken into custody in an area named for the freedom fighter for his efforts to helped Indias most marginalised communities liberate themselves from the structures that perpetuated their exploitation.

The police alleged that Ghandy, who had attended Doon School and studied in London to be a chartered accountant, was a top ideologue of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist).

Ghandy, who is now 74, spent the next decade in jails across the country, facing a variety of charges. He was finally released on bail in October 2019. On March 16, Roli Books released his prison memoir Fractured Freedom, a chilling and engaging account of his experiences in Indias brutal jails.

In his book, Ghandy details his encounters with fellow prisoners. Amidst dons, rapists, and corrupt businessmen and people accused of political violence, two men earned his affection: Sudheendra Kulkarni, who had been arrested in the cash-for-votes case in 2011, and Afzal Guru, who had been convicted in the 2001 Parliament attack case and was later hanged.

Ghandy explains why he was attracted to Marxism as a volunteer with anti-racism groups in London in the late 1960s. His association with radical politics deepened when he returned to Mumbai in 1972, as he began to do social work in the Dalit-dominated Mayanagar slum near his home on the posh Worli Sea Face. He joined PROYOM, the Progressive Youth Movement, and came into contact with leaders of the citys most important trade unions.

Also a member of PROYOM was Arunadha Shanbag, who would become his wife and partner in the quest for social justice. Ghandys descriptions of her influence on his life and ideas make for some of the warmest sections on Fractured Freedom. In the last chapter, Ghandy suggests that the world could be transformed with the introduction of a new set of values that he describes as the Anuradha- model. She died of malaria in 2008.

In this interview, Kobad Ghandy talks about Indias present predicament and his vision for social change.

In the 1970s, when you became an activist and class struggle seemed to be the dominant concern, did you ever imagine that Hindu majoritarianism would be the main challenge to Indias social fabric?Actually, since the 1980s, the Congress themselves started playing the Hindutva card opening the locked gates to the Babri Masjid, engineering the Sikh killings after Indira Gandhis death in 1984 and all that type of stuff. The 80s also witnessed the introduction of the new liberalised economy. And Ramanand Sagars television programme on the Ramayana (just as TV was newly introduced) created a huge atmosphere for what was to come. As an economist, I had the impression that the two processes were linked.

Of course, neoliberalism was introduced in a big way after the 90s, when Manmohan Singh was finance minister and Montek Singh Ahluwalia was finance secretary, with the instructions of the International Monetary Fund. But the seeds were planted in the 80s itself, when talk about privatisation began.

Liberalisation is nothing but a word for big corporations amassing money at the expense of the poor. Now, even the middle class is finding employment only as contract labour etc.

Being involved with trade unions from the 1970s, we began to see how Bombays textile mills closed and work shifted on a contract basis to powerlooms. The textile strike of 1984 changed the nature of Bombay, transforming it from a working-class city to a financial hub.

I used to live in Worli at the time and when the mill shifts were about to begin, you could see a sea of humanity coming down the road. That has long ceased. The neoliberal system is a culmination of the seeds planted in the 1980s.

I now get the impression also that the Covid lockdown was also somehow linked to the ongoing depression in the world economies. Even as the poor have been further impoverished, the richest people have got much more wealthy.

The communal division was a necessary effort to divert the attention of the working class and the farmers away from the economic crisis they are facing. And I think, if you take it historically, the Congress has also played a big role in this game.

What is the source of Narendra Modis popularity?I dont really know as just after I came out of jail, we went into the Covid lockdown. Ive not really been able to interact with people and I dont know their psychology. But my feeling is that he and his party use the communal and nationalism cards very effectively. To do this, they have the media fully behind them. Some of those TV anchors, particularly, can become really rabid. This leads people to believe theres no alternative to Modi, which also is a reality at the national level.

There are, of course, alternatives at the regional level. But these parties have a limitation on the national stage. Many had put their hopes in the Aam Aadmi Party but it is not playing the role it was expected to. They are playing the soft Hindutva card too. Some claim this is necessary if they are to fulfil their immediate electoral calculations. Besides, they too take no stand on neo-liberal policies, but of course they have done some good work on education and healthcare. But I dont know whether this will bring a long-term payoff.

How do you think it can be countered?Lets look to the farmers, I think. Lakhs of people are participating in the agitation. But so far, there is no political platform to capitalise on this. They pride themselves on not being political, like most trade unions and movements did in our days also. But I feel unless theres some political platform, its all a dead end. Ive seen this with many mass movements in my time.

Thats where the Naxalites also make a mistake by boycotting elections. Boycotts only help the most reactionary of the electoral forces.

What is your idea of Utopia?Thats a long, very far thing. I dont see it on the agenda anyway in the near future. I have spent 40 years as an activist thinking about this. What is equality to ensure the basic necessities of life? That is only economics. But what about social and human factors?

Utopia means people should be happy. No doubt that presupposes that they have the necessities of life. Without food, clothing, shelter, and medical care you cant be happy. Some of these rich religious types say that, oh, they might be poor, but they are happy with all our money and property, we have so much tension. If you actually live the life of a poor person, youll see the immense mental strain it brings.

Thats why I say that the goalposts should change to happiness, which is inclusive of the economic agenda. Capitalism has not provided any of the answers for the masses. And its only socialism of whatever type that has given some relief. Even in the East European countries, people now look back at how they had free education and free health care. Socialism has given benefits to the people. Even China, which has the largest number of billionaires in the world today, has lifted a vast part of the population to a middle-class level.

So economically, no doubt thats the answer. But with these economic gains, happiness, freedom, and democracy need to be linked. This in turn is inconceivable without a new set of values: the qualities of naturalness, straightforwardness, simplicity, without ego and manipulativeness. What I have outlined as the Anuradha-type values putting her as a model for others to emulate.

When I speak of freedom I am not speaking merely from the political context, it starts from oneself. Most of us are ourselves wrapped up in numerous knots where we are often alienated from ourselves. We ourselves are unable to understand our own emotions and have become what Marx called a crippled monstrosity. We get wrapped up in our own problems all the time, where subconscious emotions, programmed in our childhood, are in conflict with the actual reality. These are so deep-rooted in our subconscious mind that a mere change in ideology does not automatically bring in the new values.

The new economy must promote a new set of values, happiness and freedom. There are many different types of socialist models the Soviet one which only focused on the state sector, which everyones rejected, and the Chinese model of walking on two legs involving a balance between the state and private sectors. There are also examples to investigate in Latin America. Whatever the type of economics, it must be interwoven into a structure that generates happiness.

You have looked to ideas from Indias past to provide a model for our present.A major aspect that is preventing the democratisation and the development of our country in the true sense of the word is the caste system. This doesnt exist anywhere else in the world. In fact, when rulers from afar seek to conquer foreign countries, they try to impose a policy of divide and rule. But in India, with a country divided into 1,000 parts, we give it to them on a platter. Unless that aspect is broken, India cannot advance towards any democratisation as caste is not only divisive it is hierarchical and oppressive.

But we do have some models in our traditions. For instance, the egalitarianism of the Bhakti traditions, and even earlier the Charvaka and Buddhist past. We have to fully develop them and take these traditions forward, as Phule and Ambedkar did, and build on these democratic foundations to create a better India.

Since coming out of jail, though, Ive noticed that many of these traditions are being used for promoting Hindutva and its progressive essence is being lost. We need to reclaim them. Marxists negated the caste question and thought it was all about class struggle. That must change.

Are you still a communist?Of course, I still say that a form of socialist economy is the only alternative. The method by which it is to be achieved depends on the situation. Looking back, its clear that armed struggle has only been successful during World Wars. On the contrary, we also see peaceful communist movements have resulted in the most cruel massacres in Indonesia, Chile and numerous other countries.

Communism grows as scientific ideas develop and economic structures change. We have to take the experiences of the past and incorporate happiness, freedom and value systems into any model for change. We have to find a model for radical change to socialism depending on the concrete conditions prevailing in our respective countries.

In a way, the task has become easier as it is no longer the rich vs the poor. But with the international economy so polarised, it would be the 3,500-and-odd billionaires and the vast retinue of hangers-on vs the mass of the people. The wealth that these 3,500 families and agents in politics and bureaucracy hold will be more than sufficient to create a heaven on earth.

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Why I am a communist: Activist Kobad Ghandy on ideology and Utopia - Scroll.in