Unemployment Rates for States: Opportunities abound in North Dakota, owing to the state's oil resources. North Dakota recently overtook Alaska as the 2nd leading state supplier of oil to the U.S.

Unemployment Rates for States Monthly Rankings - Seasonally Adjusted Apr. 2012p
Rank	State	Rate
1	NORTH DAKOTA	3.0
2	NEBRASKA	3.9
3	SOUTH DAKOTA	4.3
4	VERMONT	4.6
5	NEW HAMPSHIRE	5.0
5	OKLAHOMA	5.0
7	IOWA	5.1
8	WYOMING	5.3
9	MINNESOTA	5.6
9	VIRGINIA	5.6
11	UTAH	6.0
12	KANSAS	6.1
12	MONTANA	6.1
14	HAWAII	6.3
14	MASSACHUSETTS	6.3
16	MARYLAND	6.7
16	WEST VIRGINIA	6.7
16	WISCONSIN	6.7
19	DELAWARE	6.8
20	ALASKA	6.9
20	NEW MEXICO	6.9
20	TEXAS	6.9
23	LOUISIANA	7.1
24	ALABAMA	7.2
24	ARKANSAS	7.2
24	MAINE	7.2
27	MISSOURI	7.3
28	OHIO	7.4
28	PENNSYLVANIA	7.4
30	CONNECTICUT	7.7
30	IDAHO	7.7
32	TENNESSEE	7.8
33	COLORADO	7.9
33	INDIANA	7.9
35	WASHINGTON	8.1
36	ARIZONA	8.2
37	KENTUCKY	8.3
37	MICHIGAN	8.3
39	NEW YORK	8.5
39	OREGON	8.5
41	FLORIDA	8.7
41	ILLINOIS	8.7
41	MISSISSIPPI	8.7
44	SOUTH CAROLINA	8.8
45	GEORGIA	8.9
46	NEW JERSEY	9.1
47	NORTH CAROLINA	9.4
48	DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA	9.5
49	CALIFORNIA	10.9
50	RHODE ISLAND	11.2
51	NEVADA	11.7

Bringing It All Back Home: Occupied Chicago is America's New Normal

Bringing It All Back Home: Occupied Chicago is America's New Normal Written by Chris Floyd    Monday, 21 May 2012 16:12 Gary Younge and Bernard Harcourt have good pieces in the Guardian about the "new normal" of America's militarized society, as exemplified by armed occupation of Chicago by a staggering array of "security" forces. Younge notes the bitter irony of the word "security" in a city where the poor are being subjected to ever-increasing levels of violence both from private predators and public "protectors": The dissonance between the global pretensions of the summit this weekend and the local realities of Chicago could not be more striking. Nato claims its purpose is to secure peace through security; in much of Chicago neither exists. … The murder rate in Chicago in the first three months of this year increased by more than 50% compared with the same period last year, giving it almost twice the murder rate of New York. And the manner in which the city is policed gives many as great a reason to fear those charged with protecting them as the criminals. By the end of July last year police were shooting people at the rate of six a month and killing one person a fortnight. This violence, be it at the hands of the state or gangs, is both compounded and underpinned by racial and economic disadvantage. The poorer the neighbourhood the more violent, the wealthier the safer. This is no coincidence. Much like the Nato summit – and the G8 summit that preceded it – the system is set up not to spread wealth but to preserve and protect it, not to relieve chaos but to contain and punish it. Younge then gives us a few of the local fruits of this global system: Chicago illustrates how the developing world is everywhere, not least in the heart of the developed. The mortality rate for black infants in the city is on a par with the West Bank; black life expectancy in Illinois is just below Egypt and just above Uzbekistan. More than a quarter of Chicagoans have no health insurance, one in five black male Chicagoans are unemployed and one in three live in poverty. Latinos do not fare much better. Harcourt, meanwhile, focuses on the mechanics of the lockdown imposed on Chicago: As one commentator suggests, Chicagoans are experiencing the "New Military Urbanism in Nato-Occupied Chicago". The extensive nature of these security measures (as reported by the US secret service), road closures and pedestrian restrictions included dozens of road closures (at least 7.5 miles of closed roads, by my calculation) … Eight-foot tall, anti-scale security fencing went up all over that perimeter and downtown, including Grant Park; and the Chicago police – as well as myriad other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and the US secret service – were out in force on riot-geared horses, bikes, and patrols – batons at the ready. Philadelphia Police Department is sending over reinforcements to help out; Chicago has also asked for recruits from police departments in Milwaukee and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC. Meanwhile, F-16 warplanes "screamed through the skies as part of a pre-summit defense exercise" and helicopters hovered incessantly. …. Plus, the Chicago Police Department will be deploying its two, new, expensive long-range acoustic device (LRAD) sound cannons – which it bought at $20,000 a pop. These are the type of devices that were used by the Pittsburgh police to deliver high-pitched alarm tones during the G20 summit meeting there in 2009. Then, there is the "secret suburban Chicago" police control center where "officials from more than 40 different agencies sit side by side with a giant central screen before them," as reported by the Chicago Sun Times. From the multi-agency command center, all different types of federal, state and local law enforcement can "view live video feeds from security cameras that are already up and running throughout the city". Harcourt makes the telling point that Mayor Rahm Emanuel denied numerous protest permits and imposed other restrictions on the grounds that the expression of free speech by demonstrators would cause "inconveniences to traffic and ordinary businesses" -- this, after closing off more than seven square miles of the city's commercial area himself. He makes the even more telling point that these hyper-draconian measures will, in many cases, stay in place once the power-players have finished their meaningless jaw-flapping and returned to their well-wadded entrenchments at home: Third, and finally, all of this is, sadly, here to stay. Nato will come and go, but the new anti-protest laws, the new riot-gear, the two LRAD sound cannons, and all the normalization of this police state … that will be with us for a long time.

Beware the gate keepers who suffer from AFFLUENZIA!!

AFFLUENZIA:  A made up "mental illness" first described by the blogger, Mark Raymond Ganzer.  This illness occurs and  manifests itself in the upper-middle income class, the top 20% of money makers.  The illness is characterized by the holding as cherished and unshakeable beliefs the following:

That poverty is contagious
That homelessness is contagious
That mental illness is contagious

As a result of those beliefs, those people suffering from AFFLUENZIA spend much of their time in the role of "gate-keeper," and while they may generously support those who advocate and work for people living in poverty (and frequently do), and while they may generously support those who advocate for and work for homeless people (and frequently do), and while they may generously support those who advocate for and work for people who have been labeled "mentally ill" (and frequently do), under no circumstances whatsoever would they EVER consider

Feeding a person (or persons) living in poverty a meal, served in the home of the AFFLUENZIAC, or


Putting up for a night, or a week, or a month a homeless person (or persons) in the home of the AFFLUENZIAC, or

Visiting a dear friend or relative who has been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital in the mental hospital.  The dear friend or relative, upon being released from the mental hospital is unlikely to ever receive an invitation to visit the AFFLUENZIAC's home.

In this manner, do the AFFLUENZIACS protect their home and family from the great trifecta of life's school of hard knocks:  poverty, homelessness, and mental illness.

AFFLUENZIACS also protect their established institutions (churches, schools, neighborhoods) from the presence of the impoverished (criminalizing those who have no money; labeling them vagrants; having the police tell the homeless to "hit the road") from the presence of the homeless (again, labeling them vagrants and leaving it to the police to pass along the message "hit the road, Jack, and don'tcha come back no mo, no mo, no mo, no mo), and to further protect these institutions from the presence of the mentally ill, again by calling the police, having an ambulance come to check out the vitals of the mentally ill one, shipping the mentally ill one to a medical hospital for evaluation, then involuntarily committing the mentally ill one to a mental hospital where, IF the mentally ill one is fortunate enough to also be impoverished and homeless, they are covered by the State of Illinois Medicaid plan, and thus the state can house and feed them for up to seven days (five "working days" plus a two-day weekend).

AFFLUENZIACS are so totally unprepared to deal with such life events as:

(a)  the loss of a job
(b)  the acquisition of a terminal disease
(c)  the loss of health insurance
(d)  the loss of their home
(e)  the emergence of a mentally ill family member
(f)  a marital infidelity
(g) the loss of accumulated savings which had been entrusted to "a guy" who for years
     had returned to them a very consistent 10% (during which time "the market" remained
     stagnant) because he had a secret formula!

That in the event of two or more such examples occurring shortly after one another, that they freak out, become clingy, whiny, titty babies, and frequently do themselves (and the rest of us) a favor by committing suicide.

Thanks, Lord, for small favors.

Driven by Truman’s 1948 arms scare, NATO lumbered into being in 1949, ratifying dominance of US arms procurement for the alliance, internal custodial sentry duty against any slide to the left by one or other of the European allies, establishment of West Germany as an independent state and US control of the nuclear forces deemed necessary to counter non-existent Soviet conventional superiority.

WEEKEND EDITION MAY 25-27, 2012

CounterPunch Diary

It’s Back to 1980, With the JCS Auctioning Off the Presidency From the Pentagon Battlements

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Let me whisk you to 1980 on one of Obama’s miracle drones.

In the right-center we had incumbent President Jimmy Carter, derided as a man of peace, el wimpo.

True his top foreign policy man was an unreconstructed Polish cold war warrior burning to bringing the  Soviet Union to its knees. True, the two  had launched the largest covert operation in the CIA’s history — $3.5 billion – against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

True he was financing Argentinian torturers to impart their skills to the Nicaraguan contras.

True, his out-year military budgets actually outstripped those of his opponent.

On the far right was Ronald Reagan, his candidacy crowning almost a decade’s worth of propaganda for the New Cold War from outfits such as Paul Nitze’s Committee on the Present Danger. Nitze used to go on speaking tours with a rack of missiles. On one side were America’s trim little ICBMs, on the other, their mighty, albeit technically somewhat backward Soviet  counterparts.

The Reaganites derided all treaties as traps, depicting Uncle Sam as, in military terms, down to his underwear, with a peashooter in his holster. Every Pentagon wish received a cordial welcome.

Here we are today. On our center-right , Obama, derided as a man of peace, el wimpo, though his relations with the Pentagon have been intimate, and he himself ductile to their demands.

True, he’s been waging war on… how many fronts? Five, six, with probably more on a covert, semi-privatized basis.  True, he has given the finger to all positive developments in Latin America, presided over a bloody coup in Central America.

True, he has been Israel’s serf, and has thumped the drum against China and Russia.

True, his secretary of state has been a fountain of bellicose bullyswaggering.

And on the far right here’s Romney. The Pentagon auctioneers await the next bid. Up goes Romney’s paddle.

Make your pitch, shout down the Joint Chiefs. Romney reads them extracts from his latest speech, delivered in response to Obama’s in Chicago at the NATO summit.

“Last year, President Obama signed into law a budget scheme that threatens to saddle the U.S. military with nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. President Obama’s own defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has called cuts of this magnitude ‘devastating’ to our national security. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has plainly said that such a reduction means ‘we would not any longer be a global power.’..

“We have a military inventory composed of weapons designed 40 to 50 years ago. The average age of our tanker aircraft is 47 years, of strategic bombers 34 years. Our Air Force, which had 82 fighter squadrons at the end of the Cold War, has been reduced to 39 today. The U.S. Navy, at 285 ships, is at levels not seen since 1916. Should our air, naval and ground forces continue to age and shrink, it will place the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies at risk.

“An alliance not undergirded by military strength and U.S. leadership may soon become an alliance in name only.

“In 2009, the Obama administration stunned two NATO allies — Poland and the Czech Republic — with a surprise withdrawal from an agreement to station missile defense sites on their territories, an agreement they signed in the face of Russian threats. Two of our most valuable partners were treated shabbily, the cause of missile defense was set back, and the Russians achieved a prime security objective without having to make meaningful concessions in return. And President Obama recently promised Russian leaders even more ‘flexibility’ on missile defense if they give him ‘space’ before his ‘last election.’

“At this moment of both opportunities and perils — an Iranian regime with nuclear ambitions, an unpredictable North Korea, a revanchist Russia, a China spending furiously on its own military, to name but a few of the major challenges looming before us — the NATO alliance must retain the capacity to act.”

So the bidding war will go, and who would wager that the Pentagon chiefs won’t deem Romney the safer bet?

Ironically, the Law of the Sea is once again up for ratification by the US, a lonely hold-out, though the Treaty has been part of international law for many years. One of the big guns in the first Reagan campaign was this same law. Starting in the mid 1970s William Safire wrote scores of columns against the law then under negotiation, and was still at it in 1994: A specimen from the late 1970s:

“Seven years ago, in a foreign blunder of the Nixon administration, we agreed to a Law of the Sea Conference… The State Department wanted to show the Third World that we wanted them to get rich at little cost to us. The sop that we were planning to give the Third World’s  Cerberus was a division of the minerals of the ocean bottom. Potato-like lumps called ‘nodules’ litter the ocean bed, containing manganese, copper, cobalt. Plenty of nodules for everybody.  The deal we offered was to take half the natural common and turn it into a Third World cartel, leaving only the other half to the entrepreneurs that Locke called ‘all mankind.’”

Only half! You can imagine the sport Reagan  had with that on the campaign rail.

Now the Obama administration is trying to push ratification through again. Fat chance. They already put the vote off till after the election.

The cold war never went away. Romney howls for “anti”-missile encirclement of Russia from Georgia, Poland and the Czech Republic. Jackson-Vanik, passed in 1974, which denies Russia most favored nation status (given the Chinese some time ago) on human rights grounds is still on the books for Russia and has to be over-ridden on a case-by-case waiver process. As with Law of the Sea the Republican ultra-ultras in the Senate are implacably opposed.

A final note on NATO. There were gale-force gusts of bombast in Chicago about the NATO Alliance’s historic role as freedom’s buckler, starting with the defense of Europe, thus perpetuating nearly 70 years of years of humbug. There was never the slightest chance of the Soviet Union and its auxiliaries in the Warsaw Pact rolling west in the prospective onslaught luridly evoked  by Winston Churchill in a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March, 1949. Churchill raised the specter of the “Mongol hordes” that had menaced Europe 700 years before, only heading home when the Great Khan died. “They never returned,” rumbled the old faker, “until now.”

Having borne almost the entire burden of crushing Hitler’s armies on the Eastern front and having suffered appalling casualties in so doing, the Soviet Union was in no condition to invade western Europe. This didn’t impede mad Western scenarios of the sort that threat-inflators routinely issued down the decades until the very moment the Soviet Union collapsed.

Driven by Truman’s 1948 arms scare, NATO lumbered into being in 1949, ratifying dominance of US arms procurement for the alliance, internal custodial sentry duty against any slide to the left by one or other of the European allies, establishment of West Germany as an independent state and US control of the nuclear forces deemed necessary to counter non-existent Soviet conventional superiority.

Year upon year nothing dented the endless flow of “threat assessments” powering new weapons systems, “theater nuclear” and “counterforce” doctrines that kept the arms factories running at full tilt and spawned a vast subculture of think-tanks, expert panels and lobbyshops.

Then, suddenly, it was all over. NATO’s formal purpose evaporated. The Soviet Union collapsed. Without delay NATO burgeoned into exactly what its left detractors had always said its essential function had been from the very start, a US-dominated political and military alliance aimed at encircling Russia and acting as enforcer for larger US imperial strategy. NATO’s onslaughts on the former Yugoslavia duly followed.

NATO doesn’t need a new mission. It needs to disappear into the trashcan of history along with the cold war that engendered it.

Tumbril Time!

A  tumbril (n.)   a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Domenic Maltempi requests “stand idly by” be brought to revolutionary justice. It’s true that the phrase is often to be found in speeches that also say “all options are on the table.” (Summarily guillotined a while ago.) Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville made a fine speech pouring ridicule on the absurdity, nay the counter-revolutionary import of the phrase. So off goes stand idly by to the Place de La Revolution. 

And Jerry Fresia seeks to introduce a whole new theme in this series:

Might it be possible to nominate images, surely a means of communication as powerful as words at times, to be  carried off to the guillotine via the tumbril? If so I nominate the arm raised, closed fist image that adorns endless posters and T-shirts. About 40 years ago, back when I was a bit more virile myself, I too proposed that our new group use as its newsletter image, the in-your-face closed fist; what better way to announce to the world that we were brimming with a resolute no-screwing-around militancy. Now the same image makes me want to puke, if for no other reason than it is the absolute bane of creativity, the dreaded formula. While we are at it, why don’t we toss in the other mindless image of revolutionary zealotry, the face of Che Guevara. Any revolutionary organization worth its salt ought to come up with something both provocative and fresh. Militancy is needed. Che Guevara remains a hero. But please, can we move on when it comes to the images we use to present ourselves to the world?

Tempting, but I think not. We should value the strong images we have  — the fist, Che, Robespierre, and use them imaginatively.  Here, words are our business.

Our Latest Newsletter

Did Mitt Romney dodge the draft with his father’s help? Sure he did, even while he was demonstrating at Stanford  in favor of the war. H. Bruce Franklin, who was teaching at Stanford at the time, lays out the unsavory saga. 

Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures, President Obama’s obsessive enthusiasm for them. A sample of Andrew’s must –read story:

Rosa Luxemburg: The Future Everywhere Belongs to Revolution! by Dr Lenore J Daniels, PhD

Rosa Luxemburg: The Future Everywhere Belongs to Revolution! Represent Our Resistance By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD BC Editorial Board

Now this same H. Paasche has recently been arrested - as it seems, the arrest was caused by a leaflet in which he is said to have appealed to the women workers in the munitions branch of industry to hold a mass strike!...The fact is that he is undergoing investigation. Isn’t it wonderful that suddenly one can still discover human beings, real men, {and women], and in circles where they are least to be expected? Letter to Clara Zetkin, [Breslau,] November 24, 1917, (The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg ) What a charade! Congress does not vote for his policies! Barrack Obama to the American people: It’s Urgent! Call, write, email, tweet the U.S. Congress! You’re your congressional representative to support Obama’s policies! News is hardly distinguishable from the cultural production heard on NPR or from the commercial advertising on television or from the art work on display at a local gallery; in other words, it, too is generated by corporate “artists” blurring the lines between fiction and myth. Consequently, the omission of this government’s move toward totalitarianism is not news! So you might have missed this: Obama’s signing into law the Federal Restriction Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act in March, 2012 - and, no, it is not about improving the landscape of federal buildings. It is, however, about keeping those well-kept lawns clean of taxpayers, specifically, protesting taxpayers! See you are being urged to call, write, email, tweet your Congressional representatives from your home, if your home is not in foreclosure or if you have a home at all. Get active! Protest! Yes, protest - but from home - stay off the streets or anywhere the haloed local, state, or federal represents might be speaking and, most important, stay clear away from wherever the Haloed One on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue might make an appearance, unless you are one of the “selected” citizens chosen to represent - the powerful, increasing centralized authority of the State. Think of the well-choreographed parades and ceremonies in North Korea! Do not leave your home and assemble with other Americans in protest on the lawns of a government building or anywhere Obama or those Congressional represents might be speaking if you are not pleased with the way your government fails to represent you and your interests or the way in which the Empire spends billions on wars and kills with the weapons you pay for, if you have employment here in the U.S. You will be arrested if you dissent and make your voice heard by showing up to protest in front of a public building. The right to assemble and “peacefully” protest along with fellow citizens is now a felony! Sounds like the policies of a totalitarian state in the making? You cannot protest where government officials are nearby! This new law grants the secret Service with the right to arrest you and those assembling to protest. Simply standing with a bullhorn, holding up a sign, promoting a contentious message or even being on the grounds of a Secret Service secured event will now make it possible for the government to detain, arrest and charge those involved in these “disruptions” (even if you just happen to be passing through) with a felonious criminal act. (Brasscheck TV) The President, those Congressional Democrat and Republican represents who signed the bill into law do not have to see protesters. If protected by the Secret Service, you do not have to see them either! Protesters can be arrested on the spot for your convenience. Just call, write, email and tweet the haloed ones from your home, please! The President does not want to see you on a street near him! That is good government. Government by and for the people! Human rights violation? Yes, again because the law ultimately favors the 1%, the corporate rulers who, in turn, need to keep their representatives, the president and the congressional folks, safe from you, the protester! As we all know, corporations are persons! Their rights cannot be violated! You rights can be violated! Remember Shays’ Rebellion in the summer of 1786. Resentment in the westernMassachusetts sent citizens in the streets to protest “against the legislature inBoston.” “Illegal conventions began to assemble…to organize opposition to the legislature,” historian Howard Zinn writes, Plough Jogger spoke: he was greatly abused. He did more than his share in the war. But now all the “great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it” (A People's History of the United States). Daniel Shays’ “seven hundred” organized “armed farmers,” veterans of the Revolution, marched to Springfield where, despite their permit to parade, confrontations between the farmers and militia ensued. Ultimately Shays’ Rebellion was quelled after several protesters were arrested and some executed (People’s History). In France, Thomas Jefferson may have thought a “little rebellion now and then” was “good thing;” others in the government did not see it that way. Alexander Hamilton, specifically citing Shays’ Rebellion, (in the The Federalist Papers ), offered his thoughts about repressing “domestic faction and insurrection”: “The tempestuous situation from which Massachusetts has scarcely emerged evinces that dangers of this kind are not merely speculative” (People’s History). The people fought the “great” because wealthy guys put the great Jackboots to work! For those who fought on the side of justice, the lesson of Shays’ Rebellion exposed the contradictions inherent in the newly formed government. “Democracy” exists for the ruling class and their representatives in government, but for the majority of citizens, they are subject to militarized violence and government executions. “Anti-democratic” forces must be crushed - for our security. Formed through a revolution, the U.S. government is now the world’s leading imperialist state and its main business, at which it is best, is the forging of democratically-applied measures to restrict, hinder, interrupt and otherwise interfere with the development of human potential for the benefit of corporate moguls for whom corporations only exist. Their representatives in the U.S. government seem happy to oblige them - “democratically.” As a united front of Republican and of Democrats, Congress, in service to the corporate-imperialist state, keeps one eye on their gods, the corporate rulers, and the other on the majority, restricting and regulating the temperament and movement of this group - always seeing to it that the 1% are well feed, clothed, housed, and well guarded. The gods keep both eyes on the Market. When it is a criminal act to support your own 99% opposition to government policies that favor the corporate rulers? Then, more than your First Amendment rights are at stake! “The scandal for socialism will be definitive if once again peace is dictated by cannon - American cannon this time - rather than by the action of the proletariat” (Letter to Adolf Geck, Breslau, September 14, 1918, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg). In her activism and in her written works, Rosa Luxemburg advanced a narrative of liberation for all and from any bourgeois model of organization. Only the workers themselves can free themselves from capitalism and imperialism. “Leaders” do not free a people. Only the continual struggle of the people (that “tempestuous situation”) offers the remedy to rid us of this corporate government. Luxemburg witnessed the capitulation of the leaders in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) - opportunistic leaders, she called them, who revised Marxism to advance to powerful, controlling positions, and, who, as opportunists, betrayed the struggle of the poor and working class. As a thinker, Rosa Luxemburg was greatly feared by the leadership in Germany. When Luxemburg turned her attention to the Russia revolution and its leaders, she was consistent in her criticism because she was consistent in her convictions. No compromise! The struggle is for and by the people! The government is for and by the people! A government that decrees that the people have no right to protest injustice is not a government for and by the people! A government that even permits injustice to flourish is not a peoples’ democratic government! Written while Luxemburg was serving a prison term for her opposition to World War I, the essay, “The Russian Revolution,” never published in her lifetime, [1] is her plea for the creation of a “revolutionary democracy after the seizure of power” (The Rosa Luxemburg Reader). It is critical of the Bolshevik leadership for their establishment of a Central Committee resulting in a vanguard of leaders after what she describes as the “mightiest event of the world war,” - the peoples’ revolution (“The Russian Revolution”). “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorshipof the proletariat” (Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875) - not a dictatorship of the vanguard. Against a Karl Kautsky counter-revolution in the rear of the peoples’ struggle in Russia, Luxemburg writes, one that influences the Mensheviks’ “utopian and fundamentally reactionary character” and its determination to cling to “a coalition with the bourgeois liberals,” Lenin’s party is the “only one in Russia which grasped the true interest of the revolution in that first period.” His party, she continues, “really carried on a socialist policy” (“The Russian Revolution”). It is this which makes clear, too, why it was that the Bolsheviks, though they were at the beginning of the revolution a persecuted, slandered and hunted minority attacked on all sides, arrived within the shortest time to the head of the revolution and were able to bring under their banner all the genuine masses of the people: the urban proletariat, the army, the peasants, as well as the revolutionary elements of democracy, the left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. During the internal scrabble between fractions, she continues, the Russian revolution continues on, advancing at a rapid, “stormy and resolute tempo,” breaking down “all barriers with an iron hand,” and placing its “goals ever farther ahead.” Luxemburg reiterates: “The party of Lenin was the only one which grasped the mandate and duty of a truly revolutionary party and which, by the slogan - ‘All power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry’ - insured the continued development of the revolution.” And, in turn, the Bolsheviks won the first goal: the majority of the protesters “became a ‘majority’” of the citizenry. The Bolsheviks, she explains, offered a “far-reaching revolutionary program” - “a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purposes of realizing socialism.” Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary far-slightness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and the other comrades have given in good measure. Luxemburg continues: “Their October uprising was not only the actual salivation of the Russian Revolution, it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism.” However---there is a bottom line with Rosa Luxemburg! The struggle is a permanent struggle - in this Luxemburg agreed with Trotsky. With Marx, she concurs: revolutionaries continue their “education” as they continue the struggle. But the struggle cannot be manipulated by “leaders.” It is not the task of the “leaders” to “‘anticipate the process of revolutionary development’” and seize power “‘as an enlightened and conspiratorial minority,’” writes Alex Callinicos, paraphrasing Marx (The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx). What I am in favor of, in general, is that things should proceed slowly and thoroughly rather than hastily and superficially. It is an entire process of political schooling that must be gone through by the masses of our people, and that requires time. In such times of transition, patience is the duty of a political person and a leader, even if it is not a pleasant duty. And you too must practice this patience, but as calmly and cheerfully as possible…I know, dearest, all the things that disturb your peace, but I also know that you are above all a person with a strong sense of responsibility who gets consumed with worry at the thought of not being able to lend a hand when the labor seems so urgently necessary. It is precisely this false notion of yours that I would like to clear away… [It is] my strongest inner conviction…not to want to do too much; a few, calm, well-aimed steps - that’s what is now necessary but also completely sufficient (from a letter to Clara Zetkin, [Sudende,] March 9, 1916, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg) “Leaders” do not undermine a revolution! But here are the leaders displaying, writes Luxemburg, a “quite cool contempt” for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage - “the whole apparatus of the basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken together, constitutes the ‘right to self-determination’ inside Russia” - but they hold the “right to self-determination of nations.” Inside Russia, limitations on civil liberties, outsideRussia, bordering nations have the “right to self-determination.” Luxemburg continues: Since socialism opposes “every form of oppression, including also that of one nation by another,” what is the point of this slogan but “hallow, petty-bourgeois phraseology and humbug” (“The Russian Revolution”). Consequently, bordering nations sought the protection of German imperialism against “the Russian Revolution.” What class resided over these nations, Luxemburg asks, and she answers: the bourgeois classes who “preferred the violent rule of Germany to national freedom.” People divided into nations are best for the capitalist class. Nations also justify military forces and, of course, imperialist aspirations. Luxemburg charges that Lenin’s position with regard to the separation of nations brought the “greatest confusion” into “socialist ranks and…actually destroyed the position of the proletariat in the boarder countries.” To be sure, in all these cases, it was really not the “people” who engaged in these reactionary policies, but only the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois class, who - in sharpest opposition to their own proletarian masses - perverted the “national right of self-determination” into an instrument of their counter-revolutionary class policies. Luxemburg also charges Lenin’s construction of the Central Committee, complete with its language of rigidly and discipline, rules and regulations for the continuation of “the revolution” - of stifling of the peoples free participation of spontaneous or organized protests. Indeed, the stifling of the very freedoms the people fought to gain. [2] And did we consider, she writes, “the destruction of the most important democratic guarantees of a healthy public life and of the political activity of the laboring masses: freedom of the press, the rights of association and assembly, which have been outlawed for all opponents of the Soviet regime.” Why are the “soviets” the “only true representation” offered to the laboring masses? Luxemburg asks. Look to the suits, the gentlemen leaders. Lenin, continues Luxemburg, declares that the bourgeois state is “an instrument of oppression of the working class; the socialist state, of the bourgeoisie.” But this is too simple. Why would the bourgeois rule have any need of political training and education? For the proletarian dictatorship, on the other hand, “political training and education” is the “life element, the very air without which it is not able to exist.” Trotsky, she continues, gives praise to the “laboring masses” for accumulating, “in short time,” a considerable amount of political experience while advancing “quickly from one state to another of their development.” But the leadership has “blocked up the fountain of political experience and the source of this rising development by their suppression of public life!” Whose narrative is this? The giant steps taken by the Bolsheviks necessitated “intensive” political training not Lenin and Trotsky’s “ready-made” formula for the socialist transformation, Luxemburg exclaims. Was the Bolsheviks’ revolution for the elites to pursue power at the expense of those who fought in the revolution? Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party - however numerous they may be - is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Luxemburg continues: The socialist system of society is “an historic produce,” born out of its own experiences, “born in the course of its realization.” Its development is living history, Luxemburg exclaims. It is of an “organic nature.” It always “has a fine habit,” she writes, of producing along with any real social need “the means to its satisfaction along with the task simultaneously the solution.” Socialism cannot be decreed from above! “The whole mass of the people must take part in it. Otherwise, socialism,” Luxemburg argues, “will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.” Do not think that Lenin does not know that socialism demands “a complete spiritual transformation of the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule.” Overseers in the factories, “draconic penalties,” ruled by terror are “but palliatives.” And rule by terror demoralizes! When the rights of the people are “eliminated,” asks Luxemburg, “what really remains?” Luxemburg concludes: “The basic error of the Lenin-Trotsky theory is that they, too, just like Kautsky, oppose dictatorship to democracy.” That is, they oppose thedictatorship of the proletariat and prefer the democracy of the bourgeois society. The favored “dictatorship” for Lenin and Trotsky is modeled on the “dictatorship of the bourgeois.” Once again, only the chosen few shall rule! The 1% - not the 99%! The dictatorship of a class, not a party, Luxemburg writes, is but “a clique,” not a majority and not for the majority since it is the “clique” of leaders who determine if, when, and where citizens may assemble to meet or protest grievance with the government. Otherwise, the majority is no more than spectators, alienated from the activities of the so-called peoples’ government. In the Lenin-Trotsky narrative, democracy is eliminated! No Shays’ Rebellion here! Luxemburg: To be sure, every democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. She adds: That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people. The question is not one of tactics employed by the protesters, Luxemburg explains, “but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such.” The battle between capital and labor “could not be solved inRussia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism.’” “I embrace you a thousand times, your R.” BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels. [1] “The Russian Revolution” was published by Luxemburg’s lawyer, Paul Levi, after his expulsion from the SPD in 1922. See The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, editors Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson, 2004. [2] Lenin: “The parties affiliated to the Communist International must be built up on the principle of democratic centralism. In the present epoch of acute civil war of the Communist party will be able to perform its duty only if it is organized in the most centralized manner, only if iron discipline bordering on military discipline prevails in it, and if its party center is a powerful organ of authority, enjoying wide powers and the general confidence of the members of the Party… (“Organization,” (Lenin Reader, editor, Stephan T. Possony, Henry Renery Co., 1966).