Mediaboss Marketing

On the back of encouraging polls including one that eliminated the Tory lead on the economy Keir Starmer started the new year with a speech linking the months of Tory corruption and incompetence to a wider argument about Britain.

Though the Labour leader is surely correct to acknowledge that his party cant just rely on Tory collapse, there is some way to go to turn the headings of security, prosperity and respect into something that can capture the public imagination.

Tucked away near the start of his speech was a small reference to the other Keir, Hardie, in the context of a point about patriotism. The Labour party is a deeply patriotic party. Keir Hardie once said that British socialism must wear a local garb. He meant that British socialism was rooted in the everyday concerns of working people.

But while Hardies socialism was quoted, we heard no more from the present Keir about his own. It is something he must address but seems reluctant to.

In an interview last month, Starmer was asked whether he was a socialist. He refused to say, asking what does that mean?, moving quickly past the question. It was a strange response.

Each Labour leader has had to define where they stood in relation to socialism. Labour was established through an alliance including trade unionists and socialists. Through clause IV of its constitution it was committed to a form of widespread common ownership. Leading figures from all parts of the party have argued about what socialism is. That contested nature is a reflection of its role in the political life of the party.

There are two broad considerations that flow from Starmers answer. One is the perennial need to engage with and answer what is, or should be, a central question; and it is worth noting that leaders from the partys centre and right have done so to further their own purposes as much as the left. Answering it, with certainty and clarity, certainly need not be a barrier to electoral success.

But, the other is that the crises of the 21st century the pandemic and climate surely cry out for a politics based on socialism.

Reaction to Starmers positioning was not limited to Labours left. The commentator John Rentoul, hardly a proselytist for the left, argued that he ought to have answered yes, of course, and then should have defined what socialism means to him.

The Labour leaders answer was particularly unusual because in 2020, he had set out his view of socialism in a Guardian article. If I see something wrong or spot an injustice, I want to put it right, he argued, adding: We can win again if we make the moral case for socialism, a moral socialism, that is relevant to peoples everyday lives and the challenges we face as we move into the 2020s and 2030s.

I took part in the discussion that preceded the publication of Starmers article. There was never any question that such a statement of political values was unnecessary or a hostage to fortune. It was a function of being a senior Labour politician that you set out a wider philosophy.

His was not everyones view of socialism. But in a sense, it was his attempt to answer in advance the question put to him more recently. That moral socialism piece, so carefully thought through, makes the Labour leaders subsequent non-answer all the more perplexing. Why resile from it?

Perhaps Labours leadership is inclined to avoid anything that nods to the wider left. Yet all Labour leaders, left and right, have to resolve their approach to socialism. Ed Miliband said he was bringing it back. Tony Blairs replacement for clause IV declared the Labour party is a democratic socialist party. Neil Kinnock, well versed in the language of the labour movement, was interviewed for Marxism Today, whose analysis was seen to be of use to a Labour leader moving the party rightwards.

Some may say that any talk of socialism is a turn-off, but no one is so naive as to believe that Labour ought to fight the next election with socialism as its slogan. Jeremy Corbyns overarching platform was not vote Labour for socialism, but for the many not the few.

People will vote for left politicians of every stripe because their stances and policies connect to the direct interests and values of the voters. The challenge is to work out how to apply socialist ideas in order to advance at an electoral level.

Our times demand more, not less, socialism. Polling consistently shows high levels of support for socialism among young people to the alarm of rightwing analysts. Even among the wider population, including in the US, positive and negative views of capitalism and socialism poll closely together.

More importantly, the free market has offered no solutions to the most fundamental aspects of the present pandemic. The state has had to intervene, massively and repeatedly. Ninety-seven per cent of the funding for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine came from the public sector and charities, for example. The vaccines would have been impossible without the state.

Gordon Browns demand for global action to end the scandal of undervaccination around the world should remind us that this is an unequal planet, organised to the benefit of a relatively small number of rich countries. A socialist view looks at the contending class interests in society. In any given situation socialists will ask, who pays?

So it is with the fallout of this pandemic. No new furlough for the Omicron wave has left huge numbers of workers in the lurch. The TUC highlighted the worst Christmas wage squeeze in nearly a decade. Many key workers, having seen the economy through the phases of the pandemic, can now expect a pay cut. The Treasurys case that public sector pay settlements should not keep pace with inflation equates to a real-terms reduction.

The pandemic has seen our society gripped by questions long-raised by socialists: internationalism, collectivism, inequality, class interests, planning, public ownership and state intervention versus the free market. The same applies to the climate crisis. Labour appears reluctant, but it simply must engage with where it stands on socialism.

It is just over 30 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. At the time, many on the right hoped that seismic event would also mean the end for a politics that looked to a future beyond capitalism. It was never likely then, and the twin global challenges of Covid-19 and climate emergency must surely lead to the opposite conclusion now.

Simon Fletcher is a former adviser to Keir Starmer, Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband. He previously served as chief of staff to the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, from 2000 to 2008

See the original post here:
Starmer still has to answer the big question: where does Labour stand on socialism? - The Guardian

Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden, Germany. Everett Collection

Circulating on Telegram channels lately has been a 12-second video of a Chihuahua puppy snuggling up to a tiny, chirping chick, eventually resting its head upon the chick and falling asleep. The caption reads, Love Animals, Hate Antifa. If such a politicized caption to an innocuous video proves a surprise to readers, the purveyor of the content will come as a shock: WAP1488, an unabashed neo-Nazi community with more than 1,000 subscribers.

READ MORE

This is just one of a score of videos with the Love Animals, Hate Antifa label circulating in recent months, and one small part of an even larger phenomenon of national socialists using animals to promote their message. Defying the more commonly-identified brutal aesthetic, certain national socialist circles have jumped on a bandwagon elsewhere used on dating profiles and in advertising: gain appeal by featuring animals.

WAP1488 serves as one of the most unadulterated manifestations of this attempt to wed animal rights and national socialism. The name of the organization alone signals its ideological disposition the numbers being a reference to the 14 Words, a slogan of the white power movement, and to the Nazi salute Heil Hitler (H being the eighth letter in the Roman alphabet).

There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany among the countrys leadership, the groups pinned post reads. Adolf Hitler and his top officials took a variety of measures to ensure animals were protected. What follows is a list of the various conservationist and anti-hunting efforts by the likes of Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goring, men more widely known for their role in orchestrating World War II and the Holocaust.

The post goes so far as to observe that Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels described Hitler as a vegetarian whose hatred of the Jewish and Christian religions in large part stemmed from the ethical distinction these faiths drew between the value of humans and the value of other animals, a statement followed by an observation that Hitler planned to ban slaughterhouses in the German Reich following the conclusion of World War II. This last comment is perhaps most jarring to mainstream audiences, given the morbid irony of Hitlers use of slaughterhouses in the form of concentration and extermination camps that killed millions of Jewish people, individuals with disabilities, sexual minorities, Romani, intellectuals and political opponents.

Beyond these written arguments articulating Nazi care for animals are scores of photographs and videos of Nazis with animals. Not only is there an array of images of Nazi soldiers playing or relaxing with German Shepherds and cats, but also dozens of images of Hitler posing with dogs, rabbits and fawns. At times, the images do not feature humans at all, and yet they still publicize this line of reason, typically through tea-cup-sized animals perched among Nazi uniform.

This is not just a strategy of WAP1488, though. It is a tactic used by many supporters of national socialism. Telegram channels such as the NSDAP International (almost 10,000 subscribers), the NSDAP (more than 5,000 subscribers) and the nSDAP International (almost 2,500 subscribers) now all fairly prominently feature animal-centric images and rhetoric.

Meanwhile, on Reddit, several subreddits discussing national socialism post both official Nazi propaganda of animals and unofficial Nazi-animal content. Perhaps exemplary of this is one private subredding called r/awwschwitz, which describes itself as a subreddit for pictures of adorable or cute things that one would not normally associated with positive emotions, and which an observer characterized as a dispenser of all your cutesy Hitler needs.

More than just cute photos and references to Hitlers alleged vegetarianism, a common refrain among neo-Nazis across various platforms is one claiming that the current German animal welfare legislation is the descendant of Nazi policy. In fact, contemporary national socialists depict Nazis as being trailblazers of animal rights and preservation of the natural world. The obscuring of these facts are then denounced as attempts by biased media to unjustly vilify Nazism and all its devotees.

Universal cuteness of fuzzy baby animals aside, it appears that there exists a propagandistic through-line between the arguments of Nazis then and certain national socialists now. Current national socialists rely heavily upon the plethora of staged animal-Nazi propaganda produced and initially disseminated in and by the Third Reich itself. Scholars such as Norbert Bromberg and Verna Small, Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax and Jan Mohnhaupt have described high-ranking Nazis as demonstrating a public interest in animal welfare due to some mixture of personal affection for animals and political messaging.

To the latter point, it is clear that many of these images were staged rather than natural displays of affection, as signaled by the unnatural poses and contexts of the photographs soldiers patrolling war-zones bending over to play with cats, Hitler staring off into the distance flanked by a dog standing on hind-legs in the same pose, and kittens curled up in Nazi helmets that dangle from fences. All of these images may simply exist because the regime felt that an articulated interest in animal welfare for the purposes of presenting a compassionate and trustworthy side to the public, but also to normalize their social Darwinist ideas and vilify racial, ethnic and religious others that they strove to paint as cruel toward animals.

In the Third Reich, the other, and Jewish people in particular, were characterized as brutal toward animals. This was most frequently discussed in relation to alleged cruelty in the kosher butchering process, which Nazi propagandists noted as being evidence of Jews other status and depicted as ritualistic and sadistic. Meanwhile, Nazi attacks on intellectuals particularly Jewish ones also made use of animal welfare issues, claiming that Jewish scientists engaged in the practice of vivisection (operating on live animals for experimental purposes), tormenting their test subjects and fulfilling Jewish bloodlust.

Curiously, the Nazis also produced a plethora of propaganda that painted these others, their enemies, as animals in their own right, the only animals for which the Nazis did not show any care. The Nazis waged a relentless propaganda campaign dehumanizing their opponents, particularly Jewish people. Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as rats, snakes, spiders and other unpopular animals.

It is significant to note the animals most often chosen: those with multiple appendages, such as spiders and octopuses, to reflect the narrative of Jewish control over society; or dangerous, poisonous or diseased animals. The snake, for instance, harkens back to parallels of the creation story and Satan in the form of a snake, whilst rats carry diseases and spiders fatal venom.

National socialists today rely upon the exact same framing of these issues, though with an expanded pool of racial, ethnic and religious communities to vilify and with one additional purpose. Juxtaposed with other national socialist content, be it animal-Nazi propaganda or otherwise, are images of the other as subhuman or as animals, as well as animal cruelty perpetrated by non-white peoples.

In the latter case, the most commonly used scenarios are Jewish kosher slaughter practices and Kapparot (used by some communities in the lead up to Yom Kippur to cleanse the person of sin through the transference of sins to a chicken, which is then ritually killed in the street); halal slaughter practices by Muslim communities; the killing and consumption of dog meat in China and South Korea (taken as metonyms for all Asian cultures); detusking elephants and other killings of large animals; and vivisections by pharmaceutical companies.

The examples have been carefully selected, attempting to characterize non-white people as inherently violent, as Kapparot and the Yulin dog meat festival are annual, while the vivisections, religious slaughtering and big game hunting are relatively common practices. National socialists use these moments of violence against animals to make audiences wonder: Would these others attempt to mainstream such practices if given the opportunity?

Beyond this, though, is an implication of supremacism, with white people displaying the more advanced emotions of empathy and compassion absent in the uncivilized communities that commit animal cruelty. The videos and images are incredibly violent blood spurting, animals squealing and resisting their victimization, and carcasses in disrepair. Aside from being graphic in their own right (as any slaughter video, kosher, halal or otherwise, is want to be), the cruelty in these videos may be said to also encourage audiences to extrapolate if this is how these communities treat innocent animals, how might they treat white people?

Finally, in addition to the obvious attempts to paint the Nazis as less brutal than these other groups through their contrasting approaches to animal welfare, the use of animal content is meant to chip away at mainstream anti-Nazi sentiment. These images clearly seek to generate an implicit connection between viewer and subject, resulting in the humanizing of individuals involved in a regime considered so brutal that it is widely denounced as unequivocally inhumane.

As social media commenters in these sections even those professing not to be radicalized but mere observers of said content have noted, seeing and hearing about Nazis care for animals has the effect of chipping away at the whole evil characterization of the Nazis as depicted in mainstream history. According to the logic of neo-Nazi propagandists, if Nazis were not always cruel and instead cared for innocent animals, then the stories about Nazism and by extension national socialism are exaggerated; if stories of their cruelty are exaggerated in this regard, then perhaps they are dramatized in other areas as well, such as in relation to the Holocaust. Meanwhile, if Nazis were caring for animals, i.e., the innocent, then it would stand to reason that they vilified communities that were not innocent and instead the bloodthirsty others living in Germany. Thus, neo-Nazis use animal welfare concerns to pull at a thread of the metaphorical tapestry of Nazi evil, a thread that they want to tug to the point where it entirely unravels.

It warrants reiterating that absent from this modern national socialists analysis is any acknowledgment of the unprecedented violence and cruelty of the Nazi regime. No matter how many kittens SS officers held or dogs that Adolf Hitler posed beside, the reality is that the most brutal butchers of life were the German National Socialists themselves. All of the torturous behaviors Nazis projected onto the other experimenting on and brutally slaughtering living beings were acts that Nazis committed against other humans.

Advertisers and people on dating apps use animals in their content to grab attention, appear relatable and induce those positive thoughts that incline the viewer to further consider them. While for different goals, the same is true for national socialists today. Thus, a puppy falling asleep with a chick speaks less to national socialist interests in the cute and more with their hope that, in time, they can draw viewers near and make them dream of a national socialist world.

*[Fair Observer is amedia partnerof theCentre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observers editorial policy.

For more than 10 years, Fair Observer has been free, fair and independent. No billionaire owns us, no advertisers control us. We are a reader-supported nonprofit. Unlike many other publications, we keep our content free for readers regardless of where they live or whether they can afford to pay. We have no paywalls and no ads.

In the post-truth era of fake news, echo chambers and filter bubbles, we publish a plurality of perspectives from around the world. Anyone can publish with us, but everyone goes through a rigorous editorial process. So, you get fact-checked, well-reasoned content instead of noise.

We publish 2,500+ voices from 90+ countries. We also conduct education and training programs on subjects ranging from digital media and journalism to writing and critical thinking. This doesnt come cheap. Servers, editors, trainers and web developers cost money. Please consider supporting us on a regular basis as a recurring donor or a sustaining member.

{{policy}}

{{dismiss}}

{{deny}}{{allow}}

{{deny}}{{allow}}

' + o + "

Fair Observer All rights reserved

See the article here:
How Puppies and Kittens Feature in National Socialist Propaganda - Fair Observer

On June 25, 2021, White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL), a national organization of medical students, published its statement of vision and values. The dominant medical practice in the United States has been built on the dehumanization and exploitation of Black people, the document read, and WC4BL exists to rid the medical system of this allegedly pervasive racism. Doing so requires not only dismantling anti-Black racism, white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy, but also dismantling fatphobia, embracing Black queer feminist praxis, and unlearning toxic medical knowledge.

Terminology aside, WC4BL is no fringe organization. It boasts more than 70 chapters at medical schools across the country, including at such top institutions as the University of North Carolina, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin. In 2020, when physicians around the country participated in George Floyd protests, their rallies took the organizations name. Now the group hopes to keep the movement going by injecting the concepts of identity politics into the practice of medicine.

WC4BL seeks to transform the U.S. medical system. White supremacy, according to the statement, permeates every dominant American institution, including healthcare. Part of the reason is the current credentialing system for medical doctors. Physicians have utilized violence to oust women and femme healers primarily through the professionalization of the medical field, the statement reads. The power and prestige given to medical doctors in the U.S. today is not a direct result of scientific advancement or service to the larger community, but the intentional and often violent consolidation of power.

It can be easy to forget that the organization focuses on medical schools; evidently, equity in medicine also requires remaking society. Black queer feminists, it explains, have expanded socialism to further movements that critically approach class, gender, race, and sexuality. WC4BL is abolitionist, calling for the end of both prisons and police. Because prisons are associated with negative health outcomes, being dedicated to health requires us to abolish (not reform) prison and surveillance systems. The organization condemns fatphobia and cisheteropatriarchy, and proposes to destigmatize and decriminalize drug use, decriminalize sex work, offer universal access to abortion, end the use of BMI, and remove gatekeepers from gender-affirming healthcare.

WC4BL has every reason to play a strong hand. For more than a year, medical schools around the country have followed its lead. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recent guide to anti-racism planning highlights WC4BL by name, suggesting that universities develop a scorecard similar to the White Coats for Black Lives Racial Justice Report Card. Thats a significant endorsement. The AAMC cosponsors the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits medical schools.

WC4BLs other source of influence has come through direct pressure on medical schools. In June 2020, chapters of WC4BL around the country succeeded in effectuating change at medical schools. At UC Davis, WC4BL presented recommendations and its Racial Justice Report Card to the School of Medicine. The administration found them largely feasible and responded by creating the Administrative Action Plan to Address Racial Justice. The plan institutionalized, among other things, a clear system to ensure that perpetrators of racial microaggressions are required to complete corrective action. Meantime, the school of medicine at the University of Utah received demands from its chapter of WC4BL on June 12, 2020. By December 9, the School of Medicines Executive Committee had approved a long version of those demands, declaring that Racism is a Public Health Crisis and updating student evaluations to solicit feedback on the cultural humility of faculty.

At Columbia University, WC4BL played a part in inspiring the medical schools anti-racism initiative. One top recommendation in Columbias plan involves creating faculty development run by individuals grounded in critical race theory. At Michigan Medicine, the WC4BL chapter sent a letter demanding a curriculum redesign that employs an intersectional framework that incorporates critical race theory. Michigan Medicine adopted that demand almost verbatim, adding only that the new curriculum should draw from the work of Ibram X. Kendi.

These medical schools are being forthright about their new priorities. White Coats for Black Lives has already had much success in its mission to transform medical education. The next stop will be the medical field itself.

John Sailer is a research associate at the National Association of Scholars.

Photo by MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images

Go here to see the original:
'White Coats for Black Lives' and the Transformation of Medical Schools - City Journal

The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland, by Mark Kruger. 330 pages. October 2021. ISBN: 978-1-4962-2813-0

One of the most revolutionary events in American history is also one of the least known: In July 1877, the working class in St. Louis launched a general strike and seized power in the city, establishing a short-lived proletarian dictatorship. Led by the Workingmens Party of the United States (WP), a descendant of the First International, St. Louis workers elected an Executive Committee to direct the functions of government and oversee the economy for a brief day or two until the leadership vacillated and caved in the face of capitalist repression.

The St. Louis Commune of 1877 formed the revolutionary center of gravity of the spontaneous Great Railroad Strike, which started at the beginning of July and ended in September 1877. Ruthless wage cuts, unsafe working conditions, and unprecedented inequality triggered the uprising, which swept across the United States, coast to coast. Its scope and spontaneity rocked the very foundations of capitalist rule and ushered in a new epoch, with the working class stepping forward as a powerful force.

This rich history is found in a new book on the subject, The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland, written by Mark Kruger, a retired professor who lives in the city. Krugers book is valuable. Little has been written on the St. Louis Commune since David Burbanks Reign of the Rabble, published in 1966, a meticulous blow-by-blow narrative. The entire strike wave was covered by Robert Bruce in 1877: Year of Violence (1959) and Philip Foner in The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (1977).

Krugers book is a rebuke against the most basic lie of American history: that there has been no class struggle or socialism in the United States. Just one decade after the Civil War, socialism found fertile soil in America as workers were thrown into massive, and often bloody, struggle against the capitalists. The American working class, though ethnically and racially diverse, bitterly fought to raise its living standards, and for basic workplace rights, against the bourgeoisie.

But the Commune cannot be entirely understood separated from the international influence of socialism and the revolutionary uprisings of the mid-19th century. Krugers success is placing it within this broader context: the 1848 revolutions in Europe, the First International and the Paris Commune, all of which had profound influence on American politics and society.

Krugers book has valuable lessons. It should find a working class audience at a time when socialisms popularity is on the rise, capitalism is increasingly becoming a dirty word, and with the first strike wave in decades gathering force, uncorked by the COVID pandemic and the ruling classs criminal profit-over-lives policy which has killed over 800,000 people in the United States and millions across the world.

Out of the destruction of chattel slavery in the Civil War a new era emerged. Kruger sets the stage with discussion of the trends of industrial development and its depressions, the poverty and oppression of the working class, the vileness and corruption of the rich, and the growth of the massive railroad industry.

American capitalism entered into unprecedented expansion. Between 1865 and 1873, industrial production grew by more than 75 percent. The railroad industry would lead the way, linking city and country together, birthing andin objective termsuniting a restive working class.

All the growth was not the work of the invisible hand of the market. The government offered lucrative public land grants, contracts and subsidies, passing the Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1863. With government largesse the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869. And with the anti-competitive fostering of state and federal government, the Pennsylvania Railroad would grow into the largest corporation in the world, Kruger writes.

St. Louis, like many other cities, grew by leaps and bounds. Situated at the westernmost industrial portion of the country, St. Louis marquee location made it a potential gatekeeper for westward expansion. Vast sums of capital fed into the city in an effort to propel St. Louis to first place in a no-holds-barred race over competitors such as Chicago. John OFallon and James Lucas, two of the citys richest capitalists, rushed to finance the Iron Mountain Railroad and adjacent industries such as passenger and railroad car manufacture, meatpacking and coal production. Notorious Robber Barons such as Jay Gould gobbled up railroad market share. Profits grew to stratospheric levels.

In the period known as the Gilded Agea double entendre coined by Mark Twain the bourgeoisie shamelessly pursued wealth and self-aggrandizement, flaunting status symbols. Kruger gives the example of William Vanderbilt, son of Cornelius, the tycoon of the New York Central Railway, who constructed a mansion in Midtown Manhattan mimicking the French Renaissance chateau. Its walls were decked out in Renaissance Italian tapestries depicting scenes from classical Greek and Roman mythology. A stained-glass window depicting King Henry VIIIs dtente with Francis I of France underscored the embrace by the emerging financial oligarchy in America of the blood-soaked, filthy-rich monarchies in Europe.

But this orgy of wealth was rudely interrupted by crises. In 1873, a global financial meltdown shocked the United States, and then the world, sending over half of railroad companies into receivership by 1876. Railroad stocks fell 60 percent. The depression lasted through the remainder of the decade, immiserating society and sharpening working class anger.

The considerable strength of Krugers book is his careful attention to international influences on American workers. The American working class, Kruger shows, has always been highly international.

An enormous share of the working class was comprised of first- or second-generation immigrants. Among them were thousands of radical German workers, many of them political refugees from the 1848 revolutions in Europe. They contributed a powerful and healthy impulse to American politics. Kruger shows that these immigrants contributed decisively to the victory of the Union in Missouri during the Civil Warthe Germans were overwhelmingly hostile to slaveryand he argues that these political exiles were indispensable to the general strike and Commune, providing the philosophy and leadership.

Sixty-three thousand Germans immigrated to the US in 1848, increasing to about 230,000 within six years. In St. Louis, one-third of the population had been born in Germany and the adult population consisted of 77 percent immigrants, mostly from Germany and Ireland. German newspapers proliferated, totaling 80 percent of all foreign-language newspapers by 1880. And St. Louis was not alone. Milwaukee, Chicago, Cincinnati and other major American cities had large German populations.

The most renowned German immigrant in St. Louis was Joseph Weydemeyer, a friend of Marx and the founder of the American Workers League, who became colonel of the Forty-First Missouri Infantry for the Union army in the Civil War. Credited with introducing socialism into the city, Weydemeyer moved to St. Louis in 1861 by suggestion of Friedrich Engels, who thought socialist ideas would resonate in the large German population. He edited a German-language newspaper, Die Neue Zeit, and was elected auditor of St. Louis County, advocating for the eight-hour workday. Weydemeyer died in 1866 in a cholera epidemic.

The banner of scientific socialism then shifted to the American section of a new organization of socialists and militant workers: the International Workingmens Association, or the First International, which had held its first Congress the same year as Weydemeyers death.

Events with the First International in Europe impacted American developments. In 1872 at the Hague Congress of the First International, after the irreparable split between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the one side and the anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin on the other, Engels introduced a motion to move the General Council to New York for fear of a Bakuninist coup. Friedrich Sorge, a German immigrant and leader of the German section of the International in New York, took on day-to-day management of the organization.

Saving it from a premature demise would pay historic dividends to the working class movement in the United States.

Kruger writes that at the First Internationals last Congress in 1876, dubbed the Unity Congress, 19 sections formed a new Marxist political party, the Workingmens Party USA. Albert Currlin, a baker and future leader of the Commune, marshalled the St. Louis delegation to this landmark achievement. WP members were elected to office in Chicago, Milwaukee and Cincinnati, publishing 24 newspapers in total.

Despite a short lifespan in the United States, dissolving in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July 1876, the First International sowed seeds in the young American labor movement. In 1871, it had a total of 19 sections, jumping to 35 by the end of the year. St. Louis had German, English, French and Czech language sections.

According to Kruger, the First International was the first time workers had organized on an international scale, disseminating radical ideas and spearheading the international fight for the eight-hour workday. The American branch, an eclectic mix of Marxists, anarchists, reformists and followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, supported strikes of over 100,000 workers in 32 different trades across the East and Midwest.

The Paris Commune, another seminal episode inspiring the international working class, germinated radical ideas among American workers. The First International, which had 17 members elected to the leadership of the Commune on March 28, 1871, brought this experience into its cadre and the international working class, notably in Marxs incisive pamphlet, The Civil War in France, which saw several editions within the first year and was translated into many different languages. Communist workers and members of the International supported the Commune and played an active role in its consummation, manning the barricades against the French army and the butcher Adolphe Thierswho would murder over 20,000 Parisians.

The Paris Commune also terrorized the American capitalists, sending them into panic and bloodlust. The pro-Democratic Party New York Herald ranted, Make Paris a heap of ruins if necessary, let its streets be made to run rivers of blood, let all within it perish, but let the government maintain its authority and demonstrate its power. In similar news articles and political speeches across the country, the American ruling class let workers know that it fully embraced Thiers methods.

The last chapters bring together these strands in 1877 St. Louis, where what started as a labor dispute against wage cuts and unsafe conditions transformed into a revolutionary uprising of the working class. In the authors words, the strike that began over bread-and-butter issues expanded its focus and took on the elements of class warfare.

American railroad magnates in May and June 1877 simultaneously slashed wages for the second or third time since the start of the depressionwage reductions totaling as much as 50 percentdespite raking in large profits and divvying up huge salary increases among managers and shareholders.

Railroad workers refused to be beaten into poverty. The Great Railroad Strike erupted in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland, on July 16. Alternatively called the Great Uprising, it still stands out for its spontaneity, massive scope and ferocious working class solidarity.

The strike snowballed, seemingly of its own volition. In Baltimore, box makers, can makers and sawyers joined the strike, demanding their own wage increases. Miners and boatmen stopped trains in West Virginia, unemployed workers snubbed overtures to scab, and railroad property such as the B&O fell into the hands of workers. Coal miners joined in Pennsylvania. The strike swept north and south, east and west, reaching as far as California. Massive eruptions took place in West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Missouri. Kruger says by July 22, over 1 million workers went on strike.

Caught off guard at first, governors rushed to dispatch militias to decapitate the growing movement, but some refused to fire on their class brothers or were overpowered by the sheer number and willpower of the masses. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in 3,000 federal troops to various locations. Violence rocked Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, Buffalo and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Hundreds were killed and wounded.

The bourgeois press smeared the workers as blood-thirsty communists, Ill-dressed, evil-looking, hard-featured, beetle-browed, grimy unkempt menscowling faces. And it warned that in St. Louis, a branch [the WPUSA] of the [Paris] Communeconspires for the overthrow of the Governments of the world.

The Workingmens Party, itself blindsided, had to catch up with events, throwing its weight behind the movement. On July 22, Philip Van Patten, the WP Corresponding Secretary, called on all sections of the party to support the strike, advocating demands such as an eight-hour day and nationalization of the railroad and telegraph industries.

It would be in St. Louis, however, where the 1,000-member-strong WP played the most consequential factor, as Krugers work shows.

The WP hurried to organize meetings to win over the movement and give it direction. At one meeting, Peter Lofgreen, financial secretary of the WPs English-speaking section, Albert Currlin, and Henry F. Allen, a utopian socialist and sign painter by trade, all members of the Executive Committee of the WP, demanded a return to the 1873 pay scale, amounting to a 50 percent raise, as well as nationalization.

On Monday, July 23, the WP called another mass meeting, bolstering its leadership credentials of the strike and steering the discussion to the crux of the problem, the capitalist system. Setting up three speakers stands so the enormous crowd could hear, WP members and workers called for revolution. Lofgreen asked, Why should we allow ourselves to be trodden upon by a few monopolists, who having the reins of government in their hands, are using the organized assassins to crush us? Cheers exploded.

The crowd roared when another speaker had said that the working class was taxed to sustain a standing army to be used to repel invasions by foreign powers, but the army is now used as a tool to oppress and slaughter innocent men, women, and children. Another decried, Why this state of things? Because its so, according to the law. Well, if thats law, then dn the law. [Prolonged cheers]. If that is the rule that governs society, then the sooner it is broken, the better.

Meanwhile the citys elite and two former Union and Confederate generals organized the Committee of Public Safety, whose new purpose was to put the working class under the jackboot of the bourgeoisie. Federal forces entered the city bringing manpower, arms and ammunition. A bloodbath was being prepared.

The high-water mark of the strike wave was Wednesday, July 25. The very next day the steam had dissipated. The Commune fell without much of a fight. Its leadership was rounded up and sent to jail in St. Louis and East St. Louis, located across the Mississippi River in Illinois. By Sunday, July 29, the ruling class regained the city. After the Communes fall, the citys elite created the Veiled Prophet organization, staging yearly parades celebrating the victory over the strike.

Kruger is somewhat speculative about the reasons for the St. Louis Communes defeat. The bulk of his analysis seems to imply that it was owed to a lack of decisiveness in the leadership, which never really attempted to conquer power. He also refers to the exploitation of racial and ethnic tensions among black, native white, German and Irish workers.

Though race and nationality divided the population, this was partly overcome during the strike, in opposition to the racist attitudes of some leaders such as Currlin. For instance, the Executive Committee of the WPUSA with several hundred multi-racial, multi-ethnic strikers and supporters, demanded that wages of boatmen, all of whom were black, be raised by 50 percent, the same amount railroad workers demanded. Black and white workers, armed with clubs, encouraged workers to join the strike, shutting down several workplaces. At one mass meeting a black worker asked the crowd whether or not white workers stand with him: the crowd responded, We will!

In hindsight, it seems too much to have asked of history that there should have been a successful proletarian revolution in the US in 1877. The class struggle was new and powerful, but workers had accumulated little experience. Across the country, powerful strikes erupted without political leadership. In this sense, the success or failure of the St. Louis Commune can be attributed above all to the insufficient political consciousness of the working class on a national scale, even though in St. Louis the WP attempted to elevate this consciousness and reveal the necessity in seizing political power from the capitalist class. Though St. Louis was an important city, it was by no means comparable to the role of Paris in French national life.

What is astonishing is how far things went in 1877, especially in St. Louis. At its conclusion, none of the demands that workers had been fighting for were met, but the revolutionary potential of the American working class, though immature in its theoretical and organizational development, was in perfect display.

Over 140 years have passed since the events of 1877, but the experience still holds crucial lessons for the working class today as it confronts a capitalist system in terminal decline. It is imperative that before the next revolutionary outbreak happens, which will be international in scale, that its lessons are assimilated. The events of 1877, and the St. Louis Commune, show the enormous industrial power of the working class. But they also reveal the decisive nature of prepared revolutionary leadership, the necessity of raising the political consciousness of workers against the false promises of the ruling class, and the need for class unity in opposition to all efforts to divide workers along racial and ethnic lines.

Sign up for the WSWS email newsletter

The rest is here:
Book Review: The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland by Mark Kruger - WSWS

WASHINGTON, D.C. Today, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) issued the following statement:

"I have consistently stressed that there is no place in our country for violence in politics on either side. I condemned those who broke into the Capitol last year, and I'm grateful for the heroic efforts of police and first responders who kept us safe that day, and who keep our communities safe every day. It's outrageous that the leftist rioters and looters who ransacked our cities in the summer of 2020 have not been held to the same standard and prosecuted with the same aggressive zeal for the violence and mayhem they caused.

"Unfortunately, rather than work to get to the bottom of the security failures that allowed the Capitol to be breached, Speaker Pelosi chose to politicize the January 6th Select Committee and undermine its credibility by taking the unprecedented step of unilaterally rejecting Republican members Jim Banks and Jim Jordan, who were selected to serve on the Committee. Instead, she has turned it into political theater designed to distract from the many crises and failures of the Biden Administration that are hurting American families like inflation, high gas prices, the border crisis, and COVID mismanagement.

"The damage created by less than one year of total Democrat control in Washington is staggering, and is devastating hardworking families across America. Coronavirus is surging again across the country. Due to President Biden's failed vaccine-only strategy, we have a severe testing shortage and a deadly lack of therapeutic alternatives. Despite promising to shut down the virus, President Biden now admits he has no federal solution, and is turning to the same failed lockdown strategies, like allowing teachers unions to shut down schools after giving them billions of taxpayer dollars earlier this year to stay open. Because liberal and progressive politicians refuse to take responsibility for their extreme policies like defunding the police, crime is soaring in Democrat-run cities. Fentanyl overdoses are now the leading cause of death in Americans aged 18-45 as deadly drugs are inundating our open southern border. The price of everyday goods has skyrocketed because of Democrats' inflationary spending policies. Gas prices and home electricity costs are through the roof due to Democrats' anti-American energy policies like the Green New Deal. Our supply chain is broken, leading to empty shelves at the grocery store. Americans are suffering because of Democrats' broken promises and disastrous leadership. Big-government socialism has failed.

"Yet Democrats are not holding a town hall on CNN in the Capitol today with American families devastated by crime, overdoses, high cost of living, and an unstable economy. Instead they are engaging in political theater, talking about themselves and their singular obsession with a President who hasn't been in office for nearly a year. They have no plan, they have no agenda: they only want to politicize January 6th.

"If Democrats are ever interested in working in a bipartisan way with Republicans on real solutions to ensure the safety of our Capitol, we welcome that, and have called on Speaker Pelosi to embrace many of the recommendations by the Capitol Police Inspector General's report that have mostly been ignored by the Democrats running Congress. Until then, Republicans will continue to focus on the things that are affecting the hardworking Americans who are struggling under the failures of big-government socialism: being able to raise and support their families in safe and healthy communities with equal opportunities for all. We would encourage Democrats to join us and start focusing on these problems as well."

See more here:
Scalise Statement on the One-Year Anniversary of January 6th - Congressman Steve Scalise