Rebuilding the Left
Press Action
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/mclellan06232004/
By Tracy McLellan
An exhilarating weekend was had by all of the more than 1,000 who attended the International Socialist Organization’s (ISO) “Socialism 2004: Ideas That Can Change the World” conference in Chicago the weekend of June 17-20.
Arriving at the Socialist Conference was like arriving in a different world, one of which you might actually want to be a part rather than the one being run and ruined by the capitalist masters. There was a tremendous sense of solidarity and camaraderie. It was as common to hear the greeting of “comrade,” or “brother,” or “sister” as it was to hear birds chirping in the summer morning.
The special and honored speakers included Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch, Alternative Radio’s David Barsamian, Socialist Worker editor Alan Maass, Ahmed Shawki, editor of International Socialist Review, and too many more to mention.
It was a profound experience to be together with people so profoundly engaged with political issues. There were more than a hundred different workshops crammed into 14 different time slots so that one of the most difficult things was choosing which particular workshop to attend. If that weren’t bad enough, or good enough depending on your perspective, it was impossible to undertake a conversation before or after the workshops without getting into an equally weighty discussion of political history, Marxism, the meaning of the Russian Revolution and Stalinism, Chinese and Cuban “socialism,” the nature of violence and war, consumption, welfare, or any one of a hundred other subjects.
The weekend was an amazing learning experience. The level of knowledge and wisdom of the ISO members was astonishing. It felt like this kind of political engagement could indeed change the world. The far-reaching grasp of the issues, the profound sense of the magnitude of the world’s political problems and their urgency, and the presentation of viable solutions were wonders to behold. I should say solution rather than solutions, because that solution is the overthrow of the capitalist masters and bosses, and the seizing of the means of production by the working class. Everything else follows from that and is all details. But what details!
After the Rally Against War and Empire Saturday night, I filtered out lingeringly thinking I would go outside and smoke a cigarette. As I was walking out a young woman I had talked to briefly the previous evening, Laura, and her friend David stopped me and said, “Tracy, it’s so good to see you. We wanted to talk to you.” Later she told me she actually had made a note. As I’m trying to quit smoking, I was glad that the nicotine fix was unusually soon forgotten. We talked for an hour about socialist issues including the Russian Revolution and its incredible success and the reasons for its failure. It was mostly a peasant and rural society which hadn’t yet industrialized, and thus vulnerable to the imperial West, 14 countries of which, fearful that an economic model other than capitalism might serve as an example, invaded in the early 1920s, absent from the conventional history books. Stalin, they confirmed for me, was a monster and counterrevolutionary and betrayed the revolution. Laura and David were both physicists, which I was stunned to discover because they were both so down-to-earth and unprepossessing.
Another time I struck up a brief conversation with Shujaa Graham, sometime after he had spoken at the same rally. Guilty of the crime of being black, he spent 13 years in San Quentin for a murder he didn’t commit while in prison in the 70s for political organizing with the Black Panthers. His co-defendant, also innocent, is still at San Quentin. He had calluses on top of calluses on his hands and had every reason in the world to be resentful and incurably angry. Instead he was as gentle as a puppy, and as endearing.
Writer and activist Rani Masria spoke at “The Occupation of Iraq” workshop I attended. She is exceptionally intelligent. On and on she went of the horrors, too many and too ghastly to even believe possible, occurring under the fist of the U.S. occupation, until they piled up into a mountain. For just one example, it was widely reported that the invasion began when the U.S. attempted a surgical strike with two 2,000-pound bombs upon a house at which Saddam Hussein was staying. Actually, said Masri, there were 50 such bombings, all of which missed their target, causing massive civilian casualties. Somebody not sympathetic to her arguments, which is to say, the truth, would probably have thought her shrill and hysterical, as I did on the rare moment. Then I reminded myself that what she was saying was the reality. I just hung my head low like a dog seeking benignity from its master, ashamed at what my country is doing.
Ralph Nader received strong support from many different quarters all weekend, as did the idea that it takes an electron microscope, as Jeffrey St. Clair put it, to discern any difference between Kerry and Bush. Issue for issue, point for point, they are the same entity in a different suit, right down to belonging to the same secret society. Peter Camejo, Green Party candidate for California governor in the recall election, and since announced as Nader’s running mate, electrified the crowd at the “Is There an Independent Left Choice in the 2004 Election” workshop.
Workshops I attended on “Drugs, Crime and Poverty: The Politics of Personal Responsibility,” “Vietnam: When the U.S. Lost a War,” “Are We Headed for Environmental Disaster,” and others, led by comrades I had never heard of before were every bit as stimulating as the others. The weekend closed with a lilting rendition of the Internationale.
The real work, it was made clear, was to begin when we left the conference. Need it be said that that is to organize? These are people and an organization who have a firm handle on the nature of the critical problems our world faces, and viable solutions. I hope it is in the cards for me to become a member of such a movement as I hope it is for you.
Tracy McLellan is an activist and writer living in the Chicago area. You may reach him at tracymacL@yahoo.com.