The US claims that it has no diplomatic relations with Cuba, of course they both maintain consulates in each others' countries. It isn't likely the Cuban 5 will ever be released unless it is part of an exchange for US spies held by the Cuban government. Cuban workers are now in a situation now where they face capitalist "reforms" regardless of their relationship to the US government. Workers in Cuba are getting crushed economically, because an island of "socialism", or rather a state-capitalist formation characterized by a high degree of concentration of national capital, cannot continue to exist forever, especially not when the broader capitalist world around it is falling apart.
The biggest spate of political arrests in the region where I am based, the upper mid-west, was at the Republican National Convention during the election. The main target of the regime's ire during the last presidential elections seemed largely to be directed at those the authorities here call "anarchists". The process of "kettling" during demonstrations is resulting in a greater level of brutality and a higher level of arrests for everyone generally. The pattern is for harassment and arrests of short duration, these are compounded with raids and seizures of property by police. Often the local "infoshops", set up as local news and organizing collectives of the Indymedia project, get targeted all the time.
While our comrades have received harassment, threats and brutality from authorities in other countries where our presence is larger, in the US we are miniscule enough to avoid negative attention that larger groups attract. Much positive organizing over the years has come out of the campaign to Free Mumia Abu Jamal, currently the most famous of US political prisoners. Sadly, the US government never admits a mistaken verdict in a trial, never. Even if he was found innocent beyond the shadow of a doubt, his conviction would still be valid and he would still be executed. Pennsylvania executes the second largest number of prisoners next to Texas from what I recall of execution statistics nationally.
Of the political forces in the US on the left, the foremost these days tend to look towards "anarchist" or "trotskyist" political traditions. The League for a Revolutionary Party is still organizing among transit workers in New York city. A pro-Cuban group, Socialist Action, has elected a representative to the government of the state of Minnesota. The World Socialist Website of the Socialist Equality Party tends to be one of the foremost exponents of the left press in the US online. The old line Marxist-Leninist groups either went into the Democratic Party or slowly disintegrated. The old Progressive Labor Party still exists, though to what extent I am not certain. The Revolutionary Communist Party has fragmented into grouplets, with odd names like "Monkey Smashes Heaven". The official CP here supports Obama and his policies, though not always at the level of rhetoric. The focus of the sixties "New Communist Movement", the paper the Guardian has now been defunct for at least eighteen years and a very different left has emerged. The Industrial Workers of the World have had something of a precarious rebirth, they tend to attract people who revere the memory of the old IWW. The oldest Socialist Party in the US, the Socialist Labor Party has had to shut its paper "The People" down as they can no longer afford to put out a paper. The costs of printing and mailing here have gone up to the point where few but the biggest and most compromised groups can afford to keep a decent press running.
Currently in the US there is little in the way of theory coming out. People are still deeply under the influence of their political slavery to the "progressive-wing" of the Democratic Party. Now that Obama is in charge, all the aims and actions of US imperialism are now the aims of the so-called "progressives". The left in the US tends to look elsewhere for its political theory, generally to the theorists of the left in Europe, like Tony Negri. The most famous left writers here are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Naomi Klein. These, however leftist they might sound at times, all supported the current regime in power and gave legitimacy to the current reactionary policies carried out by the regime.
For political theorists of a more revolutionary bent, professor Loren Goldner, even managed to get on the National Public Radio in California to explain the nature of the current economic crisis of capitalism on the Radio News Analysis program "Guns and Butter". Goldner is from a left-trotskyist background though is influenced greatly by "Bordigism" as expressed in the French publication Echanges et Mouvements. What is remarkable was that NPR in California even allowed him on the radio in the first place.
The current head of the AFL-CIO, the main trade union, Trumka of the United Mine Workers is a union leader complicit in the murder, and frame up trials during the Pittston Coal strike from 1989 to 1991. The unions themselves have gone from being the "rearguard of a retreating army" as the American socialist Daniel Deleon once famously said, to being the advance guard of the attacks on workers. Note the role played by the UAW in the recent contracts in the "Big Three" Automakers as a prime example of this. The union itself seated on the board of stock holders advocating a contract whereby all new autoworkers will earn half of the starting wage they would've gotten in the 1990s, resulting in one of the worst contracts in over half a century of the history of Labor in the US.
The mindless activism of much of the traditional left has put militant workers in an awkward position as most of the left is now implicated in support for the current regime which is turning out to be a major disappointment for all those workers who hoped things would be slightly better than what they had before. What must happen now is a break from the Democratic Party and the leading lights of the left are still pointing in the wrong direction. John Reed once characterized the old Socialist Party of America as having become the Socialist Party of "doctors, layers and teachers". Today the left in the US is dominated by academics, of an upper middle class variety who by conditioning and class interest cannot make a break from the Democratic Party and capitalist ideology on any level.
The essential theses of the left-communists have proven correct regarding state-capitalism and keynesianism being unable to alter the basic nature of capitalist society, that unions have become a second-tier of the management of the capitalist workforce, that national liberation movements can only exist by entering the orbit of one imperialist power or another. As our comrades believe that Rosa Luxemburg was correct on the National Question and not Lenin, and that this has been borne out as true in light of the historical experience of the 20th Century. It is a hard lesson to learn, that there is no easy opportunistic maneuver that can trigger the consciousness of the working class. I believe that the class here in the US has become like the battered spouse of its own bourgeoisie, that is to say beaten down, ashamed of itself and afraid to leave. In a state of "learned helplessness" to use the psychologists' terminology. What the working class here needs is encouragement in struggle and those struggles might have to start outside the US before workers here start taking greater action. There has been a renewed interest in theoreticians past, such as Anton Pannekoek, Otto Ruhle, Amadeo Bordiga and Rosa Luxemburg. With Pannekoek's work Worker's Councils and Rosa Luxemburg's work The Accumulation of Capital both being reprinted in recent years.
Currently the US government is privatizing public schools in the name of "Charter School Reform". The idea is to shut down a public school and reopen it with a private company running it and to get rid of all elected school boards (the local bodies that run or used to run US public school districts. In place of an elected school board is appointed a "CEO" of schools, as Chicago currently has. Obama is a pioneer and ardent supporter of public school privatization. Ironically this has resulted in the resegregation of public schools and division of students along both racial and class lines. School teachers, their wages, their working conditions are to be subjected to an unheard of wave of austerity. There is already a growing movement against this attack on the schools, hopefully it is something that can serve to unite workers here.
Health care reform under this regime will mean that workers are forced to pay for corporate health insurance plans or they will have to pay a tax penalty. It is something currently in effect in the state of Massachusetts. Now Obama's left supporters are faced with the hard fact that the candidate they supported is going to carry out even worse austerity measures than the previous Bush regime carried out. The outcome of health care reform is likely to be bitterly unpopular. Hospitals will go bankrupt with the promised fall in Medicare subsidies and workers will get forced to pay for one more thing they can't really afford.
The main factors at work here are the collapse of US imperialist power and how the bourgeoisie will react, and how the working class will react. The anti-war movement is over. It ended even before Obama came to power. Now all the ones who opposed the permanent imperialist war in the Middle East and Central Asia are now silent, tacitly supporting the regime in its imperialist aims. The failures of the anti-war movement were many. One of the main failures was the open support for the Islamicists that the International Socialist Organization, among others gave. Even to the point of issuing slogans such as "We are all Hamas and Hezbollah". In the protests in Chicago, they provided a platform for the Islamic fundamentalists and kept steering the issue of the war in Iraq towards the Palestinians and their struggle against Israeli oppression. This badly disoriented and disappointed much of the rank-and-file opponents of the war that attended their rallies nationally.
Groupe Internationaliste Ouvrier c/o R. St. Pierre CP 173 Succ "C" Montreal Canada H2L 4K1
