Reds - Democratic Underground

blindpig

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Mon Oct-25-10 10:53 AM
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Reds

It was all supposed to be over: a dead ender side trip from the true path of liberal political evolution, now nearly forgotten.

With the end of the Soviet Union, the breakup of the Socialist Bloc and the arrival of the "End of Ideology", all that had been advancing, suddenly landed without ceremony into the dustbin of history. Not just the old "Reds" but the "Non-aligned", the "Movements for National Liberation", and all the rest disappeared in a flash. Even the remaining holdouts became "Communist" in name only, moving willingly or not towards the New Jerusalem of liberal democracy, globalization, a worldwide middle-class, incremental "improvements" and micro-loans for the rest. And the trend did not even stop with politics. Even the underlying social fabric had been "eliminated". The working class? Unions? The old social institutions? These were artifacts of a dead era.

It was time for new ideas to go along with new times.

The New Time lasted, at best, for 10 to 15 years. And then, it all started to unravel. War, competition, impoverishment, political competition rising to ever greater levels among the ever more reactionary competitors... until the top blew off New Jerusalem's resident volcano, ending with the worldwide Depression of 2008.

The New Time became the Uncertain Time... when all that had been was gone and all that had been promised showed itself to be an impossible lie. The ecstatic became morose, the hopeful became depressed, the New Ideas collapsed before they had even begun... and the Uncertain Time lasted for all of about 5 years.

And then a miracle happened...

This year, the working class showed up in the streets. They showed up, not by the thousands but by the millions... by the tens of millions, really. They showed up, not in one country, but in half a dozen moving to a dozen. They showed up, not in the most impoverished but in among the "most advanced" of capitalist countries. And they showed up, not in the disparate "tribes" of the "New Era", but as proletarians, organized into their unions and working-class communities and driving a general, entirely politicized and unified fightback:

Strikes, demonstrations, occupations, blockades - general strike - and in numbers representing ten times the paper strength of the unions leading them - and in each case driving against the policies of their state, regardless of its political affiliation (Conservative, Liberal, Socialist) and quite independent of the new, "permanent" political institutions established only a few years before.

Capitalists and Proletarians - The old class struggle returned in surprisingly young bodies.

And in each case... without exception... the whole was led by...

"Reds"

The old Reds. The Dead Reds. The Reds who were no longer a factor.
And the role of these Reds was independent of the degree of development of their underlying Communist parties or even of their present status. In Greece and Portugal, relatively strong Communist parties, survivors of a previous era, led the fight openly, mobilizing through the Communist leadership of the Communist Trade Union Federations, which inevitably pulled the Socialist and even Conservative Trade Union Federations in their wake, despite the growing disapproval of their political patrons.

In France and Spain, where the Communist parties remain in their sickbed... still trying to recover from a virulent bout of eurocommunism and electoral silliness, it is the Communist unions directly, the CGT and the Workers' Committees, who lead... and who pull the "Soshies" in their wake, sometimes tentatively, sometimes enthusiastically... but always there in a show of extraordinary... wait for it... Class Unity.

Even in poor Italy, where the biggest of all Communist Parties disbanded itself - with a depressing goodbye note - even in Italy, the formerly Communist Trade Union Confederation led by "former" Communists, just put between 1 and 2 million formerly communist workers out onto the streets. And it wasn't nostalgia.

Proletarians and Communists.

Reds.

And these aren't even new Reds. No new kinda democratic, decentralized, freedom-loving Reds. No advanced, new thinking Reds. No friends of Leon Trotsky. No Frankfurters. No Hamburgers. No Pinks. No Green Reds. No "Socialists" (who vacillated between hostility and tentative "support", at best). All of these "other reds" sit neatly on the sidelines, dividing half their digital ink between an insistence that all of it is "spontaneous" and a warning to the masses, who will not listen to them, that this is all a "sellout", by the very same Reds without whom there would be nothing at all.

Thus "debates" are settled in real life.

And, thus, the Reds are back.

Nothin' to lose but them chains.

Posted with permission of the author, Anaxarchos.