In Defense of Venezuela, Part 2: Different Class, Different Interests

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Today we continue the second part of a two-part series on the ongoing protests in Venezuela. In part one, Nicholas Laursen wrote about the history of the Venezuelan constitution, the oligarchical parties that dominated the political landscape until 1999, and the Chávez administration’s dedication to a democratic process of constitutional revision. Now we move from history to a discussion of the current situation.

What drives the current opposition to Maduro? The answer is mostly economic—the current protests are related to a rise in crime and inflation, as well as shortages. However, at their core, these grievances are more the ails of the wealthy, propertied classes, and they highlight the economic tension and disparate interests between rich and poor Venezuelans. In order to understand these, however, we have to go back to economic history. Continue reading →

This is Class War: In Defense of Venezuela

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In considering the political firestorm in Venezuela, it may be best to start with a quantitative measure of populist will: elections. The government of Hugo Chávez—and the associated Bolivarian Revolution, more movement than literal revolution—came to be in 1999, following the elections of 1998 in which Chávez won a majority, 56%, of the national vote. In second place came the center-right candidate, Salas Römer, with 40% of the vote. Chávez’s margin of victory was particularly impressive given Venezuela’s abundance of political parties.

After less than a year of governance, the Chávez administration called a public referendum to approve the creation of a Constitutional Assembly, which would be charged with the task of drafting a new constitution to replace the outdated and outstanding one written 39 years prior by rural and business elites, and engineered to preserve their interests. The referendum passed with an unprecedented 88% of the vote. Continue reading →

Marxist Mixtape: “Omnipotent #WaveOfAction” with Eminem, Ice Cube and Korn

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The populist genre of the 1960s and 1970s was folk music. When Neil Young or Joan Baez took the military-industrial complex to task, they strummed and crooned about it; in a sense, their aching voices were the voice of the sixties, a peaceful, critical call-to-arms.

Does it make sense that, nowadays, it would be nü metal?

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Hemorrhage: An Ablution of Hope and Despair

“Hemorrhage: An Ablution of Hope and Despair”

In April 1937, Mussolini and Hitler’s air forces, in compact with Franco’s nationalists, began a bombing campaign against the Basque city of Guernica. The city had no military defenses and few soldiers; hundreds of civilians were killed or maimed in the assault. While the Basque civilians were horrified at the senseless aggression of the fascists, the rest of the world barely noticed. Rather, it took a generation of artists to take to their typewriters and paintbrushes to communicate the fascists’ war crimes to a callous world.

One of these artist happened to be the Spaniard Pablo Picasso, who was living and painting five hundred miles northeast, in Paris. His response was to paint “Guernica,” perhaps his most famous canvas, an abstract depiction of the agonizing death of Guernican civilians under the wrath of the bombers. So powerful and illustrative was the painting that it is rumored to have prompted a Nazi officer to arrive at Picasso’s doorstep in Paris and ask, “Did you paint this?” To which he responded, “No. You did.”

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Allen Ginsberg: “The Ballad of the Skeletons”

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Featuring Paul McCartney, Lenny Kaye and Philip Glass
Mercury Records
Music video directed by Gus Van Sant

In 1995, two years prior to his death, poet Allen Ginsberg published “Ballad of the Skeletons” in The Nation magazine. The poem, a scathing condemnation of Newt Gingrich’s America, received attention from other aging artists, including Philip Glass, Paul McCartney, Lenny Kaye and the considerably younger filmmaker Gus Van Sant. With rallying, Ginsberg was able to convince the four of them to work on producing a song and eventually even a music video to accompany. Continue reading →

Introducing: Marxist Mixtape

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PopFront is proud to introduce Marxist Mixtape, a regular series about music, culture and politics. The goal of Marxist Mixtape is to cover individual songs from any era or genre that could constitute a contemporary popular front; that is, music that contains some progressive or leftist content, even if it’s just a blip or a few lyrics.

Pieces are short (2-6 paragraphs) and include a link to the song, usually on Youtube. For every 10 songs reviewed, we will create a Youtube playlist—an online mixtape that you can jam to from any computer, tablet or device with an internet connection.

Mayor Lee’s Civic Priorities

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In an editorial entitled “SF needs to make the Main Library safer,” the San Francisco Examiner lauded Mayor Ed Lee’s effort to “institute stronger consequences for breaking the rules” at the main branch of the San Francisco public library. “Give Mayor Ed Lee credit,” wrote the editorial staff. “[Lee] is right in making a big push to rid the Main Library of what he called [the] ‘small number of people who create disturbances and commit crimes, tarnishing the experience for everyone else.’”

“People who commit crimes” is a rhetorical construction designed to obfuscate. If the Examiner were being truthful, they might have rephrased this sentence to something like: “people—many them poor, and many of whom have untreated mental illness, and have no where else to go—whose desperation leads them to commit crimes.” The truth is that poverty in San Francisco’s civic center is nothing new—nor is the civic tendency to criminalize them.

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“The East”: Hollywood’s take on “The Left”

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The East (2013) Directed by Zal Batmangli
Scott Free Productions/Fox Searchlight Pictures

Fictional depictions of radicalism usually take one of two tacks. First, there’s the absurdist bent, as seen in The Monkey-Wrench Gang and Fight Club. In these tales, radicalism exists within a bubble, its practitioners iconoclastic and mad and their activities largely harmless. Even acts of extreme violence—the bombings of financial skyscrapers in Fight Club, for instance—play out as thrilling, brilliant acts, rife with revolutionary symbolism.

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Popular Front

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The term Popular Front refers to a coalition of activists and artists. In the labor era, the Popular Front in the United States included artists, writers and filmmakers as diverse as Pete Seeger, Jack London, Woody Guthrie, George Bernard Shaw, Frida Kahlo and Charlie Chaplin. The cultural and social influence of the Popular Front was immense and led to the New Deal, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and the rise of labor parties that created well-paid middle-class jobs out of working-class manufacturing work.

Part of PopFront’s mission concerns the merging of journalism, activism, culture and politics to build a contemporary Popular Front; as such, we are proud to offer a curated guide to activism and political events in the west coast. Currently we are working on curating a list of events and groups in Northern California; later we hope to expand to SoCal, Portland and Seattle.

Please click on either “Groups” to read about political parties, organizations and causes with regular meetings; click “Events” to read about upcoming events and marches with political significance.

Democratic Socialists of America – Bay Area chapters

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DSA’s logo.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) root their vision of socialism in the concept of democracy; specifically, extending democratic control to the economic sphere. In their words: “We are activists committed to democracy as not simply one of our political values but our means of restructuring society. Our vision is of a society in which people have a real voice in the choices and relationships that affect the entirety of our lives. We call this vision democratic socialism — a vision of a more free, democratic and humane society.” Important theorists for DSA include Marx and Antonio Gramsci, the 20th-century Italian political theorist who originated ideas about cultural hegemony. Young Democratic Socialists (YDS) is the student and youth branch of DSA.

The DSA considers itself a socialist-feminist organization and involves itself in a plethora struggles that adhere to its social vision. These include advocating for LGBTQ rights, civil liberties, environmental justice, anti-imperialism and anti-racist struggles. As DSA is not a political party but rather a political organization, its members are often also members of other various parties—Greens, Peace & Freedom and even the Democratic Party. DSA has a strong presence within the intellectual left in the United States; Professor Cornel West is an honorary chair, and other notable members include Michael Walzer, Frances Fox Piven, Michael Harrington and Barbara Ehrenreich.

Northern California has multiple chapters.

East Bay DSA
Meets bi-weekly, often at the Niebyl-Proctor Library.

San Francisco DSA
See link above.

UC Davis Young Democratic Socialists