3205. Democratic Socialism: A Hot Commodity

By Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist, March 5, 2019

New York magazine has been around since 1968 and can generally be found in the reception area of doctors and dentists next to the more genteel and patrician New Yorker magazine. In contrast to the New Yorker, New York is focused on trends such as identifying which low-rent neighborhoods are on the verge of becoming “hip” through gentrification or lifestyle advice in articles such as The Best Automatic Pet Feeders and Water Fountains, According to Experts. I usually spend about a minute or two looking over the New York and New Yorker magazine websites on Monday when the new issues come out before going on to more substantive matters.

So, when I looked at New York yesterday and noticed that it was virtually a special issue on the DSA/Jacobin phenomenon, it drove home to me the degree to which it is the perfect place for such articles. They were the latest installment of puff-pieces that began in the January 20, 2013 NY Times with “A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream”. 

Ever since I have been reading the NY Times on a daily basis, I have never seen anything but the most hostile and distorted reporting on socialism and Marxism but for obvious reasons, this “democratic socialism” stuff really goes over big with the publisher. The first two paragraphs of the Times article has a tone that never would have been used if the subject was Hugo Chavez or Che Guevara:

When Bhaskar Sunkara was growing up in Westchester County, he likes to say, he dreamed of being a professional basketball player.

But the height gods, among others, didn’t smile in his favor. So in 2009, during a medical leave from his sophomore year at George Washington University, Mr. Sunkara turned to Plan B: creating a magazine dedicated to bringing jargon-free neo-Marxist thinking to the masses.

Other trend-sniffing magazines followed suit with their articles about another “democratic socialist” superstar. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been profiled seven times in Vogue magazine, including an item about her multistep skin care routine. They quote her Instagram post: “I’m a science nerd and I truly enjoy the science of it, reading about compounds and studies. It’s like that.” She has also made it into Vanity Fair eleven times, including the cover photo shown above.

Let Bhaskar Sunkara and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bask in the limelight with their celebrity status. I’ll stick with socialists and radicals who are seen as notorious rather than celebrated. This includes Malcom X, Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky. When you are understood to be an enemy of the capitalist system, the gloves come off in the bourgeois press. These three, who had a big influence on me as a young radical, were notorious—so much so that they were killed for their efforts.

In a New York article titled “Okay, But What’s Wrong With Liberalism? A Chat With Jonathan Chait and Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara”, we get a “one-on-one” exchange moderated by Eric Levitz, a staff writer like the centrist Chait but closer to Sunkara politically. That doesn’t prevent Levitz from asking the question I’ve been asked a thousand times myself: “Didn’t the 20th century prove that socialism is even worse? After all, socialists are supposed to be radical (small-d) democrats — yet, in country after country, didn’t they transform into authoritarians upon their first taste of power?”

Sunkara answers this in a crafty manner. He acknowledges that Sweden was a capitalist country but “in the 1970s was the best society we’ve ever seen” and “governed by a socialist party that fought for democracy through the 1920s and ruled virtually uninterrupted for a half-century through democratic elections.” As for those shitty dictatorships like the USSR and Cuba, Sunkara leaves it like this: “We know the tragic legacy of the latter tradition.” 

What’s missing from this analysis is a recognition that there was a counter-revolution in the USSR. All of the major leaders of the October 1917 revolution were executed, assassinated or died in a Gulag. So what “latter tradition” is Sunkara talking about? The Communist Party that did everything in its power to prevent Spain from consummating a socialist revolution in 1938 or that used its control over the trade union movement in France to derail the May/June 1968 revolt? No, that legacy had little to do with socialism, even if Jacobin has repeatedly held up Italy’s Stalinist leader Togliatti as someone that today’s left can learn from.

Toward the end of this panel discussion, Sunkara acknowledges that in the long run the Swedish model will be unsustainable even if Bernie Sanders was elected and went about turning the USA into another Sweden. Why? “The history of social democracy is that capital will withhold investment if it doesn’t like the prevailing political mood or constraints on its freedom. In the modern, internationalized economy, this means that social democracy is harder to achieve than it was in the 20th century.”

So, what can we look forward to from the DSA/Jacobin left? Maybe thirty or forty years of election campaigns that will finally create a “democratic socialist” majority in both houses of Congress, a president like Sanders (maybe Ocasio-Cortez herself), and a Supreme Court filled with people like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, the DSA backed District Attorney who is against Mumia getting a new trial . Even if this long and arduous struggle is successful, it will have been a Sisyphean effort since the capitalists will do everything in their power to subvert it. Maybe the idea is to start building a revolutionary party opposed to the Republicans and Democrats alike, one that will challenge capital politically by running candidates that raise the consciousness of the masses by exposing the contradictions of the capitalist system, such as its inability to eradicate the racism that has been at its core for the past 300 years or so. Most importantly, this will be a party that fosters the growth of working class committees that have the power to defend themselves against counter-revolutionary violence. This is the way that socialist revolutions happen and the USA won’t be an exception.

Then there is “Pinkos Have More Fun Socialism is AOC’s calling card, Trump’s latest rhetorical bludgeon, and a new way to date in Brooklyn”, a piece that makes the DSA scene look positively happening:

It’s the Friday after Valentine’s Day. The radical publishing house Verso Books is throwing its annual Red Party, an anti-romance-themed banger. Like a lot of the best lefty parties, it takes place in Verso’s book-lined Jay Street loft, ten stories above cobblestoned Dumbo. The view of the East River is splendid, the DJ is good, and the beers cost three bucks.

Before long, you get the idea that this a subculture much more than a political movement. The people appear to be very young, very educated and very white. What is the chance that a striking Spectrum worker will feel at home where this is happening?

An hour into the party, Isser and Brostoff stage a version of The Dating Game — one bachelorette, four suitors — to promote Red Yenta. Friend-of-the-app Natasha Lennard, a columnist at the Intercept, yells for quiet. “There is a service — a communal service — that is better than a Tinder, or the last hurrahs of an OKCupid,” she announces. Who wants to slog through a few bad dates only “to find out that someone is a liberal?” Brostoff takes the mic. Pins and posters are available for purchase, she says, and donations are of course welcome. “That’s how we became capitalists,” she jokes. “And that’s what you call irony. Or dialectics.”

Funny to see Natasha Lennard in this setting. A decade ago, she was a high profile anarchist who would not have found much in common with “democratic socialists”. I guess this just reflects the counter-cultural, if not the political, ebb of anarchism. She felt at home at a party that was greeted by the NYC-DSA host: “Everybody looks fuckin’ sexy as hell. This is amazing to have everybody here looking beautiful in the same room, spreading the message of socialism. Give yourselves a round of applause.” I’m glad I wasn’t invited. My days of looking beautiful are long over, plus I get sleepy around 10pm.

The most illuminating paragraph in this life-style article is this one:

Until very recently, it wasn’t that socialism was toxic in a red-scare way. It was irrelevant, in a dustbin-of-history way. But then came Bernie Sanders’s 2016 candidacy, then the membership boom of DSA, then the proliferation of socialist cultural products like Chapo, and then, finally, the spectacular rise of Ocasio-Cortez.

The politics of the socialism that they helped revive isn’t always clear. Stripped of its Soviet context and cynically repurposed by conservative partisans, the word had lost its meaning by the time it got hot again. For some DSA grandees, like NYC chapter co-chair Bianca Cunningham, socialism means a planned economy that replaces market capitalism. “It means we own the means of production. It means we get to run our workplaces and our own government,” she says. But that is unusual. For Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and most of their devotees, it’s closer to a robust version of New Deal liberalism — or, perhaps, Northern European social democracy.

No, the word has not lost its meaning, at least for people not taken in by Sunkara’s con-game. It is a system that will exist globally or else it will not exist at all. Furthermore, it will be characterized by the collective ownership of the means of production, scientific planning, and a reintegration of the city and the countryside in order to overcome the metabolic rife. It will not be launched from Verso offices in Brooklyn but in dingy meeting halls in working-class neighborhoods in Queens and their counterpart in other cities in the USA and the rest of the world. The people at its core will be garment workers, meat-cutters, bus drivers, and miners who have no idea who Slavoj Zizek or Vivek Chibber are. They will also be largely people of color, very few of whom who will have an advanced degree. Trying to find a way to reach such people was very much on the minds of people from my generation but ironically they can be reached now by a left that largely seems committed to living in a life-style cocoon.

Toward the end of the article, the author has a conversation with Michael Kinnucan, a Facebook essayist. Kinnucan provides a quasi-Marxist analysis of the explosive growth of the DSA:

Over beers in Crown Heights, we’re tracing the origins of the movement. The most straightforward explanation for the socialism boom is, fittingly, a material one: Saddled with student debt and thrust into a shit post-2008 economy, millennials were overeducated, downwardly mobile, and financially insecure. On top of everything, the internet was making them feel bad and the planet was melting. The precariat, they called themselves.

In between frequent cigarette breaks, Kinnucan sketched his version of this progression. Graduate from the University of Chicago in 2009; get bogged down in the post-crash economy; drift to Occupy Wall Street in 2011; get radicalized. “There was a Twitter hashtag and internet meme, #SIFUAB: Shit is fucked up and bullshit,” he recalled fondly. “There was a large element of collectivizing depression. The genre of meme where you write on a piece of paper and hold up the amount of student loans you have.”

This sounds about right but susceptible to the glass ceiling that has so often stopped left groups in their tracks. For “Leninist” groups like the SWP and the ISO, that glass ceiling was about two to three thousand. Such groups grew rapidly but were constrained by their insistence on a program that required ideological conformity that many leftists disdained as a kind of intellectual straight-jacket.

For the young, University of Chicago-educated, Verso Party attending, and Caucasian precariat, the glass ceiling is much higher. Who knows? The DSA might even become as large as SDS was in its heyday. Whether it will be able to attract the people who have the social and economic power to change society is doubtful at best. Maybe that doesn’t matter much since they are having lots of fun in the meantime.

Finally, we get to Levitz’s interview with Michael Kazin titled “What Does the Radical Left’s Future Look Like?” Kazin is the co-editor of Dissent, the social democratic journal that might be described as Jacobin stripped down to its pro-Democratic Party propaganda but without the Kautskyite frosting.

Kazin, who wrote a hatchet job on Howard Zinn in 2010, is a DSA fan, especially since it focuses on economic issues unlike the left of my youth that was in effect single-issue movements against the Vietnam War, for abortion rights, etc.

Kazin is not so nearly as coy as people like Sunkara and Eric Blanc when it comes to work in the Democratic Party that they regard as merely a tactic that will be discarded maybe in 2060 or so when the country is ready to vote for a third party demanding an end to the capitalist system:

If Bernie hadn’t run as a Democrat in 2016, most Americans would never have heard of him and he wouldn’t be in a position to mount the kind of campaign he’s going to run. I think the left cannot just be a movement outside the party structure, looking askance at the party and thinking that somehow it can win real reforms and transform American society without engaging with the party. You’ve got to be both radical and Democratic with a capital D.

Levitz next asks a question that really gets to the heart of what makes the DSA so different from the anarchist-dominated anti-globalization and Occupy movements that were not shy about their hostility to capitalism: “What do you think is responsible for this pragmatic turn away from the anarchist tendency that informed the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s or Occupy Wall Street and toward a greater concern with winning and exercising power within existing institutions?” So, for all the horse-shit about transcending Scandinavian social democracy and the need to establish true socialism in the far-off future, Levitz sees the DSA as a “pragmatic turn away from the anarchist tendency that informed the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s or Occupy Wall Street and toward a greater concern with winning and exercising power within existing institutions.” Put more succinctly, Levitz nails the DSA and the intellectuals who promote it in Jacobin as pragmatists working inside the Democratic Party.

Bingo.

2566. Book Review: The Intimacies of Four Continents

By John Holmwood, Theory, Culture and Society, November 4, 2015

Abstract: Lisa Lowe’s book addresses the colonial relationships that connect the continents of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. These relationships of appropriation and dispossession are integral to liberal thought and no matter how much it seeks to present itself as transcending these contexts, liberal thought is continually fractured by them. The book asks its readers to confront the formation of modern political subjectivity and its implication in the very disciplinary subjects through which we claim to know.

This is a challenging book, which should be read by all those interested in the history of capitalism and the formation of the social sciences. It is especially challenging to sociologists who have, for too long, worked with a standard account that serves to establish core concepts of contemporary sociology. According to this standard account, capitalist modernity is a key object of sociological inquiry which focuses on the rise in Europe of the nation state, political democracy and a civil society organised around market exchanges. The colonial conditions of modernity rarely get a look in.

Within sociology, the standard approach has been challenged by Gurminder K Bhambra (2014) and her idea of connected sociologies. Lisa Lowe – professor of English and American studies at Tufts University – develops a similar argument for an expansive understanding of the global social and cultural conditions of what is typically regarded as European modernity. For many of us working in the social sciences, we might be moved to ask at the end of the book; why has our range of engagements with the history of modernity been so limited? And why are the humanities more open to the insights of postcolonial critique than the social sciences?

Lowe’s arguments are compelling, even if her data is unfamiliar. The focus of her book is, “the often obscure connections between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century” (2015: 1). Where do we learn of these phenomena in our histories of sociology? ‘Settler colonialism’, for example, is not one of our ‘forms’ of capitalist modernity, at least not in the standard sociological accounts, and not in what we teach our students. We may have learned to add to the writers deemed to be canonical, but we have yet to disrupt our conceptual canon.

Lowe makes a bold claim and a moral claim and I, for one, am persuaded by both aspects: “the social inequalities of our time are a legacy of these process through which ‘the human’ is ‘freed’ by liberal forms, while other subjects, practices, and geographies are placed at a distance from the ‘human’” (2015: 2). The dispossession of Native Americans through colonial enclosure, the movement of populations through enslavement and indenture – the figure of the ‘slave’ and the ‘coolie’ – are these not all implicated in the protection of our ‘hard-earned’ patrimony in the fences currently erected in the US and in Europe against migrants? We continue to promote our invention of freedom and deny it in the present, just as we denied it in the past. Importantly, we are implicated as liberal subjects – as citizens – but we are also implicated as purveyors of social scientific reason formed in the very concepts that are at issue.

The arguments of the book are more aligned to cultural studies than to studies of social structure, but we should not be insensible to their mutual implication. The chapters set out different ‘journeys’ and the narratives they describe illustrate and illuminate mutual entailments of freedom and subjugation, privilege and degradation, possession and expropriation – these entailments are the ‘intimacies’ of the title. They are geographically extensive and they bring social structures of colonial modernity in their wake.

Lowe sets out four key journeys: the life journey, or autobiography, of formerly enslaved African, Olaudah Equiano, published in London 1789 in the same year as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in Paris; Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and the journeys of colonial commodities that embroider the text and provide key settings, unobtrusive in the background but defining meanings; the journeys of the East India Company to China and Hong Kong establishing trades in opium and indentured labour; the journeys of enslaved Africans and their representation in historical narratives that elide the self-emancipations recorded by C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois.

There is much to enjoy in each of these chapters, especially, the dialectical interweaving of liberal conceptions and their negation, and the careful delineation of context and claim. Ultimately, however, the book is a dissection of liberalism and its fractured and fracturing presence in the modern world. It takes its place alongside, Chakrabarty’s (1989) Provincializing Europe, or Mehta’s (1999) Liberalism and Empire. More than anything, it also sends us back to C.L.R. James (1963 [1938]) and his Black Jacobins, not least because one of the inspirations was his remark that, “Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me” (cited by Lowe 2015: 73). For Lowe, it is Thackeray, rather than Marx, who registers the presence of colonial commodities and their circulation through Victorian households.

Yinko Shonibare’s ship in a bottle which was installed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2010-2012, confronted Nelson’s column celebrating his victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. Lowe chooses it as an illustration of her book and it is fitting. Shonibare’s ship confronts Britain’s colonial and Imperial past, but in looking to the past, it also brings that past into the present where it continues to live. This is precisely the point of Lowe’s book. Our political discourses and our disciplinary discourses are each formed by the past. The promise of freedom remains a promise precisely because it constructs ‘the human’ in a separation from ‘other humanities’ which remain always displaced in a promise that, for them, is unrealised.

References:

Bhambra, Gurminder K. (2014) Connected Sociologies, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1989) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

James, C.L.R. (1963) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage.

Mehta, Uday Singh (1999) Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

John Holmwood is Professor of Sociology in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham.

2564. Book Review: Liberalism: A Counter-History

By Chris Byron, Marx and Philosophy, January 31, 2013

Liberalism: A Counter-History is Domenico Losurdo’s trenchant analysis of the question what is Liberalism in its historical development and who may we consider to be a Liberal? Without very serious reflection few people would contest that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Alexis de Tocqueville, to name but a few, are both Liberals, and worthy of the designation. Losurdo however demonstrates that the classical Liberals we learned about in school are in fact separated by huge gulfs in their philosophical views and political practice. Moreover, what frequently unites them in practice is more their tolerance and often cheerful willingness in implementing certain forms of severe oppression (e.g., indigenous genocides, slavery, work labor camps). At the end of Losurdo’s masterful condemnation, the theory of Liberalism, which we have come to take for granted, and the founders who we assume with equal certainty to be embodying some particular philosophy, are left with only the most tenuous of connections to any set of pristine principles regarding the Liberty of man.

Losurdo opens his work admitting that even posing his question is somewhat ‘embarrassing’; the knee-jerk response is that Liberalism has always been the philosophic-politico tradition concerned with the Liberty of the individual. Yet the dawn of Liberalism on either side of the Atlantic, as best expressed by the writings of Locke, Grotius, Franklin, and Smith, were conjoined to, and involved in, ‘a process of systematic expropriation and practical genocide first of the Irish and then of the Indians’, not to mention the rapid rise of ‘black enslavement and the black slave trade’ (20).This simultaneous birth, which in itself is a politico-historical contradiction, also has deep seated philosophical contradictions. Whereas Grotius ‘affirmed’ slavery ‘without the least reticence’, Locke’s ‘legitimation of slavery’ is only perceptible between the lines of his written works (26-7). Both are historically considered Liberals, but the connection is now more tenuous than first appeared. And as Losurdo’s shrewd analysis shows, slavery was not an institution that unfortunately was grandfathered into the birth of Liberalism, instead slavery engendered its maximum development based upon the success of Liberal revolutions.

A general theme is consistent throughout Losurdo’s book. Each chapter takes a historical moment (e.g., French Revolution, Glorious Revolution, San Domingo Revolution), and points out the contradiction between several elements: philosophy, political practices, and important thinkers of the time. Liberalism as a philosophy and political practice are then juxtaposed to the ideas of certain Liberal thinkers, leading to the usual conclusion that what is common to all is often some support of oppression and not personal Liberty. Isaiah Berlin, as Losurdo points out, gave us the strong dichotomy between Positive and Negative Liberty. No one would doubt that slaves and victims of genocide are not exercising Positive Liberty. Strangely though, even advocates of Negative Liberty are often themselves not capable of exercising it due to their own tyrannical legislation. For instance, a common theme in the Liberal tradition was tantamount to eugenic breeding, that is, Liberal’s thought that breeding with the oppressed was to mix the superior with the inferior race. As Benjamin Franklin said to a doctor ‘Half the Lives you save are not worth saving, as being useless; and almost the other Half ought not to be sav’d, as being mischievous’, he goes on to condemn the doctor for declaring war on the ‘Plan of Providence’ (115). As a result of such horrifying views, members of the higher classes that may desire to marry or educate those seen as ‘useless’ and ‘mischievous’ were denied their Negative Liberty by their class’s own standards. This attitude led to a snowballing effect of how a slave or servant could be treated legally, even when the owner of said slave desired to treat his ‘property’ differently than the law commanded (e.g., slave owners who were disbarred from teaching their slaves to read). If the slave is property, by the Liberal standard, then this is most assuredly an infringement upon Negative Liberty.

Reverse oppression carries over into other areas besides Negative Liberty. For instance, Losurdo presents in alarming detail the degree to which ‘white slavery’ was rampant in Liberal societies. During the process of colonization, stricter penal codes and forced labor camps grew in tandem. But the penal code, initially intended to force labor upon the colonized, began to reverberate back upon whites. Forced labor and indentured servitude, of both slaves and now whites, became staples of the economy of colonizing nations; both in conquering, and conquered, states. In an eerily Orwellian spin, Liberal’s tried to say that indentured servitude did not so much deny Liberty, as embody it. Since agreed upon contracts are a staple of Liberal society, and servant and master enter into a contractual relation, the servant is exercising Liberty, according to Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès: “in the way most opportune to him”. Moreover, the servant is “receiving more than what he gives up” (82). As with Negative Liberty, Liberals have jettisoned Positive Liberty amongst the white race too.

Liberals might be inclined to disregard Losurdo’s work as bombastic and hyperbolic, but they would be exercising poor judgment to do so. Although a few references are to the works of Marx and other critics of Liberalism, the primary sources of Losurdo’s works are historical documents, the writings of Liberals, and scholarly texts on Liberal history. This is not revisionist history, but history told from the point of view of those who are making it. Almost each page of Losurdo’s work contains at least half a dozen footnotes from either contemporary scholarly research or the works of Liberals from the period he is analyzing. Of course this has its downside too. The footnotes can be rather jarring when you are trying to determine if the just cited sentence came from an actual Liberal or a recent historian, and at times they can make you wonder how much of Losurdo’s work is unique, and not just repetition. Nonetheless, the constant reminder of the sheer number of sources Losurdo has used to drive home his thesis is constant testament to the labor embodied in Losurdo’s writing.

But hia thesis itself remains somewhat confusing. Losurdo is essentially posing a philosophical question: what is Liberalism and who can we say belongs to its ranks? But the answer he gives in each chapter is less a philosophical one than an intricate empirical analysis of historical facts. The book sits atop a fence between philosophy and history, without being enough of one (philosophy) and too much of the other (history). After all Losurdo is an accomplished scholar on Hegel and Marx, not to mention an accomplished philosopher, but primarily this book reads as history, with a pinch of unanswered philosophical questioning peppered throughout. Perhaps that is Losurdo’s point, the fluidity of the Liberal philosophy, and its representatives, leads to the impossibility of a solid conclusion regarding the primary question of his research. But that too is a rather philosophical position that requires more elaboration than Losurdo has given us.

Without detracting too much from Losurdo’s accomplishment, another criticism needs to be considered. The structure of the book is often erratic and confusing. A chapter might begin with a question e.g., who was a Liberal in the French Revolution, and end with a summary of Christian Radicalism during American Industrialization. The connection between the introduction, and the conclusion, is often tenuous. To name one more example, during the middle of a discussion regarding the French Revolution, an unexpected detour is taken into Bolivar’s campaigns throughout Latin America. The reader will thus learn copious amounts of history, but at the end of many chapters will be left wondering how to tie it all together. And in this regard, the condemnation of Liberalism can seem a little helter-skelter.

Nonetheless, Losurdo’s historical account is as horrifying as it is vigorous. Radicals and Socialists have long known that the birth pangs of Liberalism have been bloody, authoritarian and hypocritical. He has offered compelling research to attest to our suspicions and he leaves no room for serious rebuttal. If one still wants to declare themselves a Liberal after reading this, they have a serious hurdle to face: their own philosophies genesis. As Losurdo has demonstrated, Liberalism is not Liberty for the individual in the positive or negative sense; it began, and continues to be, a fluid ideological defense for those in power to justify their positions of power.

2456. To Defeat Hitler Vote for Hindenburg! – “Lesser Evil” Voting Then and Now

By Stanley Heller, Economic Uprising, July 2, 2016

Hillary and William Clinton at Trump's wedding

In 1932 in Germany there were four national elections including two for the powerful position of president. The two leading candidates for president of Germany were Adolf Hitler and Paul von Hindenburg. Today when we hear the word Hindenburg we think of the zeppelin with that name that burned in New Jersey in 1937, but Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg was a very famous man for decades in Germany.  During “the Great War”, which we now call World War I, he was Chief of the General Staff of the German army. In the last years of the war he was in effect military dictator of Germany.  The German revolution ousted the Kaiser from power, but the leaders of the SPD (the very big German socialist party which supported the war) allied with counterrevolutionary forces and after massacres of the revolutionary Left made Germany into a capitalist republic.  Hindenburg, who should have been in disgrace for his failed war leadership, came through the period with his reputation unscathed.

Longstory short.  The SPD steadily weakens. Hindenburg is elected President of Germany in 1925. The Great Depression hits Germany like a hammer and the Nazis go from getting 3% of the vote in 1928 to 18% in 1930.  Their goons are running the streets. The German communists (KPD) follow the orders of Soviet ruler Joe Stalin to totally go it alone.  They claim that the SPD were just another kind of fascist, “social fascists”  For its part the SPD refuses to work with the communists.  In 1932 Hindenberg runs for reelection, the KPD runs its own candidate and the SPD supports Hindenburg as the “lesser of two evils”.

Most people will agree that Hitler was the ultimate evil, so Hindenburg was certainly “lesser”, but the SPD strategy did not work as planned. Hindenburg won the April 1932 run-off presidential with a solid 53% of the vote. “Mission accomplished” or so the SPD thought. Hindenburg stayed in office and he continued to choose the Chancellors and cabinet. However, the string of men he picked totally failed to rescue the German economy. Then Hindenburg made a fateful decision.  In January 1933 he appointed Adolph Hitler as chancellor in a deal that gave the Nazis only 3 of the 11 cabinet positions.  This was thought all that would be needed to keep Hitler under control.  Brilliant plan. Hindenburg was putty in Hitler’s hands.  Within two months Hitler had bullied Hindenburg to sign an “Enabling” Act” which gave the Nazi leader dictatorial powers.

So what has this got to do with today?  Well, we have a candidate running for president who a lot of people have compared to Hitler.  And we have as his opponent a woman who

stands for the status quo, a millionaire who does the bidding of Wall Street, a bloody war “hawk” with notches on her belt from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Libya, a blind supporter of Israeli war crimes in Palestine and elsewhere. Yet people are running to herto defeat Trump, to save them from “Hitler”. (See Halle/Chomsky defense of lesser evil voting )

Now obviously, obviously things are a lot different in the U.S. now compared to  Germany in the ‘30’s. Joblessness though a lot higher than the “unemployment rate” is not as massive as in the ‘30’s.  The U.S. hasn’t felt the shock of a terrible defeat in war and a loss of territory. Though Trump has been embraced by enthusiastic neo-Nazis their gangs are not (yet) running riot.

On the other hand there are two threats we live under that were unheard of in the 1930’s. One is nuclear war. We were told with communism gone there would be an “end of history” and the danger of nuclear war would be gone, but any chance for nuclear disarmament in the 1990’s was completely thrown away by Bill Clinton.   At present the U.S. government still has hundreds of nuclear weapons on hair trigger, meaning they could launch in minutes.  Russia probably still has the same.  With NATO expanding and Putin conquering, the two nuclear powers are eyeball to eyeball again.

The other threat is out of control global warming.  Climate scientist Robert Howarth (who was on the short list in 2011 for Time magazine’s person of the year) says we’re on a path to go over the crucial 1.5 degree centigrade increase in just 13 years.  Carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. have leveled off in recent years, but methane emissions from fracking have undone all the good and the total global warming gases are increasing at record levels. This is a path to catastrophe, a catastrophe from which there may not be a recovery.  Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees world temperature increase the permafrost releases massive amounts of methane and we go into a feedback loop of another big jump in temperatures.  One of many results is that large areas of the world become either under water or uninhabitable.  If you think we have refugee problems now, wait until there’s tens or scores of millions of climate refugees.

Hillary Clinton will absolutely not save the world from either menace.  She raised no objection to Obama’s trillion dollar nuclear modernization program or his (or was it her) drive to stick NATO right in the face of Putin.  Clinton supported the Keystone XL pipeline as Secretary of State and only changed her mind under relentless pressure from Bernie Sanders.  She calls for an 80% cut in carbon emissions by 2050.  That sounds like a big deal, but it’s a totally inadequate measure to stop the warming that’s coming, a death sentence for coastal cities and genocide for Africa.  Let me emphasize this climate menace is on the way. The balance of nuclear terror may hold for more decades, but the things that balance global gases, like the world’s oceans can no longer do the job.

So who should we vote for in the U.S. presidential election?

Before we answer that question there are others to deal with first.    What is the minimum we need for continued human civilization (as opposed to a global war of all against all as livable land areas dwindle) and what would create the force, the movement, the organization necessary to win the minimum changes?

For climate I see no way to avoid intolerable climate change unless there is a government takeover of the energy, heating and transportation industries and a “Manhattan Project” crash program for 100% renewable energy by 2030.  The bloated armaments industry which lives on wars and the need for ever more nuclear “modernization” should be nationalized, too.  Its industries need to be converted to peace time use and its workers hired in “green” jobs. This has to planned at the highest level and worker run at the day to day level.  We need a new system, a social democracy that is able to maintain a sustainable ecology, in short “ecosocialism”.

Now the Democrats and Republicans are both staunch defenders of (somewhat different versions of) capitalism and nothing in the short run is going to change that. Unfortunately if we have 13 years to fix the climate all we have is the short run.  The recent farce at the Democratic platform committee where every proposed method of weaning away from fossil fuel was rejected should disabuse those who think the Democrats can be a vehicle for the necessary drastic changes need in the next decade.

The largest Left party is the Green Party which gets a miniscule vote in national elections and gets denounced for taking away votes that naturally belong to the “lesser evil”.  It’s hampered by a voting system totally stacked against third parties.  (As a result no party other than the Democrats and Republicans has won a single presidential electoral vote in almost 50 years.)  It sees its role as running in elections, period.  It rarely takes part in creating social movement or anti-war actions.

That’s not enough.  There needs to be something else, something that will run in elections, but that will also organize massive disruption to undo the power structure and build a new ecosocialist society. It has to be an ever rising tide of democracy and environmentalism.  We must do what is necessary to build the build that movement, that force and we can’t be intimidated by the fear of being taunted as the “spoiler” in elections.  We have to say in advance that if our actions result in a more repressive, more racist and environmental Know Nothing party taking over for a while, so be it.   We’ll have to grit our teeth and deal with it.  There’s no time for glacial progress. Human society is at stake.

 On June 20 Juan Gonzalez, the great journalist, former Young Lords leader and current co-anchor on Democracy Now!  spoke at the Bernie Sanders’ “Peoples Summit” .  He told the thousands attending, “Don’t make the mistakes of 1968 that elected Nixon.”  What were those mistakes according to Gonzalez? People came to Chicago to “confront” the Democrats who were about to nominate Hubert Humphrey.  Also SDS told people not to vote.   Gonzales claimed “there would have been a positive change, if Nixon had not been elected.”  The lesson, though Gonzalez didn’t say it outright is “vote for Hillary”.

Actually, what Gonzalez proposed would have been suicide for the movement. Hubert Humphrey was Lyndon Johnson’s lickspittle and junior partner in war crimes against Vietnam.   A Humphrey victory could well have led to eight more years of genocide for the people of Vietnam. Instead Chicago in ’68 was a milestone of direct action.  Neither the Chicago police riot nor the prosecution of protest leaders on bogus charges dampened spirits .   The Yippie and Left protests of ‘68  led to many more direct actions and the eventual radicalization of part of the U.S. military.  Thousands of U.S. soldiers would no longer fight for the empire.  They refused to be cannon fodder.  That scared the bejeezus out of the power structure and that’s what ended the war.

 Two more recent movements come to mind, the 2006 immigrant “boycott”  and what’s going on in France today.  On May 1, 2006 millions of Latinos “boycotted” work , maybe five million undocumented and documented workers went on a one day strike.  They came out into the street to protest an anti-immigrant law that was making its way through Congress.  The law was never passed.   Fast forward ten years and the neoliberal Socialist Party of France proposes a labor law to reduce labor rights.  For a month tens of thousands have come into the streets night after night to demand its defeat.

So what do we do here in the U.S. this election year?  As far as the election I’d counsel voting for Jill Stein of the Green Party for president.    I don’t have illusions that the Green Party will win the presidency. Nor do I think a “Green New Deal” is at all an adequate way to dealing with capitalism and I don’t like Stein’s blindness about Russia’s horrific role in Syria .  However, the Green Party will actually be on the ballot in 30 or 40 states.  A vote for the Green Party will be noticed and it’s the best vehicle we have to send out a certain message.

The message the vote will deliver to the public is that we’re uncompromising, yes “uncompromising”.  We’re not dogmatic about some belief or program, but we’re uncompromising about the need to preserve human civilization and to avoid a massive die off of human and animal life.  We realize that politics as usual is a death sentence and we won’t participate in our own executions. We intend to promote an ecosocialist tide and turn it into an unstoppable deluge.

Our main work is not electoral. During and after the election we continue our base work, organizing in the neighborhoods, workplaces and in the streets, coming out to the July 24 anti-fracking march, standing with immigrants, denouncing great power aggression and  indifference to the plight of Syrians, condemning the Saudi-U.S. war on Yemen.  We need to organize the millions of angry people that came out for Bernie and who are now being told to dive into the Democratic Party graveyard.

The Left in the ‘30’s had a slogan “socialism or barbarism”.  It needs to be updated for a world that faces even greater perils.  “Ecosocialism or the abyss”.

2455. Learning from History: Who’s going to be the lesser-evil in 1968?

By Hal Draper, Independent Socialist, January 1967

Hal Draper (1914-1990)

In 1968, when the presidential sweepstakes come up again, liberals all over the country are likely to face the California Syndrome. At the risk of sounding like a Californian, I’m referring to the political pattern that was acted out in the recent Brown-Reagan [1] contest in that state – whose denizens have this in common with New Yorkers, that they tend to think that whatever is happening in their state is What’s Happening. Sometimes it is.

In ’68 the problem is going to be: vote for Lyndon Johnson [2] again or not. Among all those schizophrenic people you know whose heart is in the famous Right Place – viz. a little left of center – ulcers are going to ulcerate, psychiatrists’ couches will get political, and navels will be contemplated with a glassy stare. Johnson or Nixon? Johnson or Romney [3]? Johnson or Reagan [4]? Johnson or anybody? As a matter of fact, even before this point is reached, there bids fair to be a similar pattern inside the Democratic Party machine itself: Johnson or Kennedy-Fullbright, [5] or its equivalent.

Now radicals have been wont to approach this classic problem with two handy labels, which in fact are fine as far as they go. One is called the Tweedledum-Tweedledee pattern, and the other is called the Lesser Evil pattern. Neither of these necessarily quite describes What’s Happening. To see why, let’s take a quick look at both of them in terms of 1968.

1 The ’68 race could be a Tweedledum-Tweedledee affair, and it may be. For example, Johnson versus Governor Romney. One can defy even Max Lerner [6] to insert even a razor-thin sentence between the politics respectively represented by these two millionaires. In fact, there is bound to be a sector of liberal sentiment which would indeed see the Lesser Evil in Romney, since there is as yet no evidence that Romney is quite as rascally a liar as the present Leader of the Free World. But roughly speaking, these two are politically indistinguishable: this is the defining characteristic of the Tweedledum-Tweedledee pattern. (The sociological label for this invented by the professorial witch-doctors is Consensus Politics.)

2 In contrast, the Lesser Evil pattern means that there is a significant political difference between the two candidates, but –To explain the “but,” let’s take – for reasons that will appear – not a current example, but the classic example.

The day after Reagan’s election as governor of California, a liberal pro-Brown acquaintance met me with haggard face and fevered brow, muttering “Didn’t they ever hear of Hitler? Didn’t they ever hear of Hitler?” Did he mean Reagan was Hitler? “Well,” he said darkly, “look how Hitler got started ...” A light struck me about what was going on in his head. “Look,” I said, “you’ve heard of Hitler, so tell me this: how did Hitler become chancellor of Germany?”

My pro-Brown enthusiast was taken aback: “Why, he won some election or other – wasn’t it – with terror and a Reichstag fire and something like that.” – “That was after he had already become chancellor. How did he become chancellor of Germany?”

Don’t go away to look it up. In the 1932 presidential election the Nazis ran Hitler, and the main bourgeois parties ran Von Hindenburg, the Junker general who represented the right wing of the Weimar republic but not fascism. The Social-Democrats, leading a mass workers’ movement, had no doubt about what was practical, realist, hard-headed politics and what was “utopian fantasy”: so they supported Hindenburg as the obvious Lesser Evil. They rejected with scorn the revolutionary proposal to run their own independent candidate against both reactionary alternatives – a line, incidentally that could also break off the rank-and-file followers of the Communist Party, which was then pursuing the criminal policy of “After Hitler we come” and “Social-fascists are the main enemy.”

So the Lesser Evil, Hindenburg, won; and Hitler was defeated. Whereupon President Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the chancellorship, and the Nazis started taking over.

The classic case was that the people voted for the Lesser Evil and got both.

Now 1966 America is not 1932 Germany, to be sure, but the difference speaks the other way. Germany’s back was up against the wall; there was an insoluble social crisis; it had to go to revolution or fascism; the stakes were extreme. This is exactly why 1932 is the classic case of the Lesser Evil, because even when the stakes were this high, even then voting for the Lesser Evil meant historic disaster. Today, when the stakes are not so high, the Lesser Evil policy makes even less sense.

In 1964, you know all the people who convinced themselves that Lyndon Johnson was the lesser evil as against Goldwater [7], who was going to do Horrible Things in Vietnam, like defoliating the jungles. Many of them have since realized that the spiked boot was on the other foot; and they lacerate themselves with the thought that the man they voted for “actually carried out Goldwater’s policy.” [8] (In point of fact, this is unfair to Goldwater: he never advocated the steep escalation of the war that Johnson put through; and more to the point, he would probably have been incapable of putting it through with as little opposition as the man who could simultaneously hypnotize the liberals with “Great Society” rhetoric.)

So who was really the Lesser Evil in 1964? The point is that it is the question which is a disaster, not the answer. In setups where the choice is between one capitalist politician and another, the defeat comes in accepting the limitation to this choice.

New development

For the moment, so much for the Lesser Evil pattern. But there is an interesting difference between the classic case (Hitler and Hindenburg in 1932) and the Johnson-Goldwater case. There really was a significant political difference between Hitler and Hindenburg; the general himself would never have fascized Germany. If he called the Nazi to the chancellorship, it was because he believed that the imposition of government responsibility was the way to domesticate the wild-talking Nazis, that the burden of actually having to run the country would turn the “irresponsible” extremists into tame politicians like all the others, in the pattern usually seen (as with the Hubert Humphreys [9]). But Hindenburg himself was not a Hitler and he really was a Lesser Evil. What the classic case teaches is not that the Lesser Evil is the same as the Greater Evil – this is just as nonsensical as the liberals argue it to be but rather this: that you can’t fight the victory of the rightmost forces by sacrificing your own independent strength to support elements just the next step away from them.

This latter pattern is what has been going on in this country for the last two decades. Every time the liberal labor left has made noises about its dissatisfaction with what Washington was trickling through, all the Democrats had to do was bring out the bogy of the Republican right.

The lib-labs would then swoon, crying “The fascists are coming!” and vote for the Lesser Evil. In these last two decades, the Democrats have learned well that they have the lib-lab vote in their back pocket, and that therefore the forces to be appeased are those forces to the right. The lib-labs were kept happy enough if Hubert Humphrey showed up at a banquet to make his liberal speeches; or, before that, by the Kennedy myth which bemused them even while the first leader on this planet poised his finger over the nuclear-war button and said “Or else!” With the lib-lab votes in a pocket, politics in this country had to move steadily right-right-right-until even a Lyndon Johnson could look like a Lesser Evil. This is essentially why – even when there really is a Lesser Evil – making the Lesser Evil choice undercuts any possibility of really fighting the Right.

But now notice this: when the Lesser Evil named Johnson was elected in 1964, he did not call in the Greater Evil to power, as did Hindenburg. He did not merely act in so flabby a manner that the Right wing alternative was thereby strengthened – another classic pattern. These patterns would have been old stuff, the historic Lesser Evil pattern in full form.

What was bewildering about Johnson was that the Lesser Evil turned out to be the Greater Evil, if not worse. Was it then the Tweedledum-Tweedledee pattern, after all? Am I merely then saying that the apparent difference between Johnson and Goldwater (even within the framework of capitalist politics) was just an illusion? Is the conclusion merely that all capitalist politicians have to be the same, that therefore the case against voting for the Lesser Evil is that there is no Lesser Evil?

I don’t think that’s the answer; I think there is a third pattern around, which is neither Tweedledee-Tweedledum nor the classic Lesser Evil choice. If the Johnson-Goldwater contest was one example, then an even better one was provided by the recent Brown-Reagan race. For Pat Brown really is a liberal, whatever you may think of Johnson; and thereby hangs the tale.

Because this genuine liberal, Pat Brown, acted for eight years as governor of California in no important respect differently from what a conservative Republican would have done. The operative word is acted. He sold out the water program to the big landholding companies as his two Republican predecessors never dared to do. He fought tooth and nail for the bracero system [10] as no Republican governor of an agricultural state dared to do.

It was he (not Clark Kerr [11]) who in 1964 unleashed an army of police against the Berkeley students. After the Watts uprising, it was he who named John J. McCone’s commission to whitewash the whole business, and who then supported the right wing’s anti-riot law to intimidate the ghetto. It was Brown who gave the liberal Democratic CDC the final decapitation when he personally mobilized all his strength to oust Si Casady as CDC head. [12] If half of this had been done by a Reagan, the lib-labs would be yelling “Fascism” all over the place. (As they will during the next four years, no doubt.)

And I repeat that I don’t think this took place simply because Pat Brown was a Tweedledee reflecting image of Reagan. Here is a somewhat different interpretation:

A profound change has taken place in this country since the days of the New Deal – has taken place in the nature of capitalist politics, and therefore in the two historic wings of capitalist politics, liberalism and conservatism. In the 1930’s there was a genuine difference in the programs put before capitalism by its liberal and conservative wings. The New Deal liberals proposed to save capitalism, at a time of deep-going crisis and despair, by statification – that is, by increasing state intervention into the control of the economy from above. It is notorious that some of the most powerful sectors of the very class that was being saved hated Roosevelt like poison. (This added to the illusions of the “Roosevelt revolution” at the time, of course.) Roosevelt himself always insisted that a turn toward state-capitalist intervention was necessary to save capitalism itself; and he was right. In fact, the New Deal conquered not only the Democratic but the Republican Party. When Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal were succeeded by Eisenhower’s regime, the free-enterprise-spouting Republican continued and even, intensified exactly the same social course that Roosevelt had begun. (This is the reality behind the Birchite charge that Eisenhower is a “card-carrying Communist”!)

In the three and a half decades since 1932, and before, during and after a second world war which intensified the process, the capitalist system itself has been going through a deep-going process of bureaucratic statification. The underlying drives are beyond the scope of this article; the fact itself is plain to see. The liberals who sparked this transformation were often imbued with the illusion that they were undermining the going system; any child can now see that they knew not what they did. The conservatives who denounced all the steps in this transformation, and who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new stage, were also imbued with the very same illusion. But even Eisenhower – who has never been accused of being an egghead, and who, before he was nominated for the presidency, made exactly the same sort of free-enterprise-hurrah speeches as Reagan was paid to make for General Electric – even he was forced to act, in the highest office, no differently from a New Deal Democrat. Because that is the only way the system can now operate.

Fruits of lesser evilism

Under the pressure of bureaucratic-statified capitalism, liberalism and conservatism converge. That does not mean they are identical, or are becoming identical. They merely increasingly tend to act in the same way in essential respects, where fundamental needs of the system are concerned. And just as the conservatives are forced to conserve and expand the statified elements of the system, so the liberals are forced to make use of the repressive measures which the conservatives advocate: because the maintenance of the system demands it. [13] Just as when Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley [14] and then invoked it against striking workers. What is more, because the liberal politicians can point a warning finger towards the right and because the lib-labs will respond to it, they are even more successful than the conservatives in carrying out those measures which the conservatives advocate. It is not necessary to claim that even that pitiful man, Hubert Humphrey, is merely a hypocrite. No, I fully believe, myself, that he is as sincere a liberal as the next lib-lab specimen. It is liberalism which requires the examination, not Humphrey’s morals. Nor was that even more pathetic man, Adlai Stevenson, simply a rascal when he found himself lying like a trooper at the UN in the sight and knowledge of the whole world. [15]

So besides Tweedledee-Tweedledums and besides the Lesser Evils who really are different in policy from the Greater Evils, we increasingly are getting this third type of case: the Lesser Evils who, as executors of the system, find themselves acting at every important juncture exactly like the Greater Evils, and sometimes worse. They are the product of the increasing convergence of liberalism and conservatism under conditions of bureaucratic capitalism. There never was an era when the policy of the Lesser Evil made less sense than now.

That’s the thing to remember for 1968, as a starter.

Notes

1. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown (Democrat): California state attorney general, 1951-59; Governor of California, 1959-67

2. Lyndon B. Johnson: the Texas Democratic vice-president was sworn in as president in 1963 after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He went on to win election to a full term in a landslide against GOP candidate Barry Goldwater in the presidential race in 1964. At the time of the writing of this article, Johnson was planning to run as president; but he later announced he would not seek another term as president after the January, 1968 Tet Offensive exposed the U.S.’s inability to win the war in Vietnam and his poll figures dropped precipitously.

3. George W. Romney: Served three consecutive terms as governor of Michigan, from 1962 to 1968. Chairman of American Motors Corp. from 1954-1962, and a contender for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination.

4. At this time, Ronald Reagan was the Republican governor of California. He later (1980) was elected president and served two terms. His presidency personified the new drift to the right in U.S. politics – a ruling class backlash against the political and social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. He was famous, like the current president, for making inane statements such as: “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.”

5. This refers to a hypothetical 1968 presidential ticket of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Sen. J. William Fulbright. Kennedy served as attorney general in brother John F. Kennedy’s brief presidential administration, and then became a senator in 1964. He was assassinated on June 5, 1968. Fulbright of Arkansas (who once employed Bill Clinton as an intern) was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright was an early Vietnam hawk who became a leading establishment opponent of the war.

6. A well-known liberal newspaper columnist of the day.

7. Barry Goldwater was the Republican presidential nominee who ran against Johnson in 1964. He advocated using nuclear weapons to defoliate Vietnam.

8. Johnson ran for president in 1964 promising to de-escalate the war in Vietnam. When he won the election, he did the opposite, sending hundreds of thousands more troops.

9. Hubert Humphrey: elected as vice president with President Johnson on the Democratic ticket in 1964, and he was his party’s unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1968.

10. The bracero program: a post Second World War government-sponsored plan aimed at importing low-paid Mexican labor to the U.S. Mexicans under this program were allowed to come and work in the U.S., but were required to return to Mexico when their work term expired.

11. President of the University of California system during the Berkeley students’ famous Free-Speech fights in 1964.

12. Original note by author: The reader is referred to the October 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine for a brilliant (and detailed) exposition of all this, including an analysis of how it all could be done by a man who really is a liberal. Ramparts does this in terms of concrete facts; in this article I am generalizing.

13. It is worth noting that although the trend toward statification that Draper describes began to shift by the late 1970s toward “globalization,” i.e. more neo-liberal capitalist policies, the same political pattern was apparent. Not only Republicans Reagan and Bush, but also Democrat Clinton, carried out the neo-liberal policies. Therefore Draper’s point that liberalism and conservatism tend to converge around the particular historic interests of the ruling class still applies.

14. Taft-Hartley: 1947 labor bill that curtailed the rights of unions. Among other things, it empowered the government to obtain an 80-day injunction against any strike that it deemed a peril to national security. The act outlawed sympathy strikes or boycotts (boycott against an already organized company doing business with another company that a union is trying to organize), denied legal protection to workers on wildcat strikes, and outlawed the closed shop.

15. Adlai Stevenson: US diplomat & Democratic politician; governor of Illinois 1949-1953; Democratic presidential candidate 1952, 1956; US ambassador to UN 1961-1965. Famous for making a presentation to the UN in 1962 revealing the presence of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. Stevenson’s presentation denied important facts. For example, the U.S. had recently launched an armed CIA invasion of Cuba – landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Stevenson denied U.S. involvement. Stevenson also left out of his presentation the fact that the U.S. had placed nuclear missiles in Turkey pointed at the Soviet Union.