this picture of Lenin to decorate the listing of their first posted "session" Lenin: His Works' Pertinence Here and Now, as will be expressed in the words and thoughts of of Richard D. Wolff, Chris L Hedges, Laura Flanders, Tim Schermerhorn The last one, Tim Schermerhorn is the only one I hadn't ever heard of, Wolff being what counts as a ubiquitous presence in the obscurity of current Marxism in the English speaking world, a Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Visiting Professor at the New School University in New York City who scribbles books and apparently has a TV show about economics which I'd never heard of before and which I doubt gets much viewing. Hedges and Flanders are, I would guess if I had to, what might pass as better known, getting marginal airtime on the big cabloid networks, Hedges being the somewhat admirable and honored former war reporter but who, I'm convinced, is rather shell shocked and who mostly, these days, is a discouraging prophet of doom. In other words, these three I knew of because they're of the professional scribbling-chattering class of the kind who really have marginal skin in the actual world of laboring People but who have endless ideas about what should happen to them. The class that it is unsurprising to find are still holding the torch for Lenin and the coming of the Communist regime in Russia and, as Lenin and his successors violently imposed it, the Soviet Union. That is when about the only place in the world where a government is holding the torch for Lenin may be such places as North Korea. What Lenin was, was the first in a series of mob bosses who racked up one of the highest body counts of any modern country, outdone, perhaps, by China under the Communists, and Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, the Mongol hoard in medieval times perhaps outdoing them and the European colonial efforts in the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia.
What's odd about the group is the one which is not like the others, Tim Schermerhorn, of whom his Left Forum bio says:
Tim Schermerhorn is a retired train operator and member of TWU Local 100. A rank and file organizer, Tim was a founding member of the Hell on Wheels newsletter and the New Directions Caucus. He now works with Democracy at Work New York and is on the board of Labor Notes.
If there is anything that Lenin was not it was the working Person's friend, a friend of independent unions - he and Trotsky et al crushed the start of those in Russia and the Soviet Union and its occupied European and Asian satellites and, ironically, for all time, anything of socialism that was coherently consistent with democracy. While I have my differences with Noam Chomsky, this passage from this article is quite a good description of what Lenin and Trotsky did to unions and working people.
A historian sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, E.H. Carr, writes that “the spontaneous inclination of the workers to organize factory committees and to intervene in the management of the factories was inevitably encouraged by a revolution which led the workers to believe that the productive machinery of the country belonged to them and could be operated by them at their own discretion and to their own advantage” (my emphasis). For the workers, as one anarchist delegate said, “The Factory committees were cells of the future… They, not the State, should now administer.”
But the State priests knew better, and moved at once to destroy the factory committees and to reduce the Soviets to organs of their rule. On November 3, Lenin announced in a “Draft Decree on Workers’ Control” that delegates elected to exercise such control were to be “answerable to the State for the maintenance of the strictest order and discipline and for the protection of property.” As the year ended, Lenin noted that “we passed from workers’ control to the creation of the Supreme Council of National Economy,” which was to “replace, absorb and supersede the machinery of workers’ control” (Carr). “The very idea of socialism is embodied in the concept of workers’ control,” one Menshevik trade unionist lamented; the Bolshevik leadership expressed the same lament in action, by demolishing the very idea of socialism.
Soon Lenin was to decree that the leadership must assume “dictatorial powers” over the workers, who must accept “unquestioning submission to a single will” and “in the interests of socialism,” must “unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process.” As Lenin and Trotsky proceeded with the militarization of labour, the transformation of the society into a labour army submitted to their single will, Lenin explained that subordination of the worker to “individual authority” is “the system which more than any other assures the best utilization of human resources” — or as Robert McNamara expressed the same idea, “vital decision-making… must remain at the top… the real threat to democracy comes not from overmanagement, but from undermanagement”; “if it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential,” and management is nothing other than the rule of reason, which keeps us free. At the same time, ‘factionalism’ — i.e., any modicum of free expression and organization — was destroyed “in the interests of socialism,” as the term was redefined for their purposes by Lenin and Trotsky, who proceeded to create the basic proto-fascist structures converted by Stalin into one of the horrors of the modern age.
You might want to compare Chomsky's piece with this load of hagiographic crap from the "Trade Union Educational League," in 1924.*
But this is a piece about the absurd waste of time and counterproductive heap of bull shit that the Left Forum is and has been. Considering the political character of the regime that Lenin imposed on the lands he lorded over, preparing the way for Stalin's more developed terror state, it is putridly disgusting that the next item in the list of "sessions" at the 2019 Left Forum is Election Integrity: Publicly Verified Elections and Informed Public Are Key to De-Corrupting Our Democracy! For any bunch of play-lefties to be holding up Lenin and "His Works' Pertinence Here and Now" to have the gall to then go on to lecture Americans about democratic elections is disgustingly hypocritical. If there is one thing that Lenin was entirely against, it was democracy, especially what might have been understood, even then, as democratic socialism. Something which makes me wonder if another clearly Commie sponsored session later in the conference Trotskyist Youth in the Fight for Socialist Revolution vs. "Sanders Socialism" has more to do with the idiocy represented in the likes of the "Trade Union Educational League" and its history of typical commie infighting, especially with anyone who has any possibility of winning a single Senate seat, something which Sanders actually, though rather idiosyncratically managed and which is nothing like anything any member of the sponsoring organizations," Internationalist Group, Revolutionary Internationalist Youth" have done or will ever do. I wouldn't be surprised if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn't slammed in that session by the, I'll bet, less than two dozen members of those groups. I am confident in predicting no one not in those groups will attend the session.
I didn't feel like pouring through the entire contents of the Left Forum's 2019 sessions to see what unintended rather bitter comedy will, no doubt abound there. I will say that in 2019, after a hundred and two years of seeing Communism, especially Leninism in action, anyone who holds a torch for it is the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier, a neo-Nazi. And I say that having had some respect for at least Chris Hedges from that group, back before I came to conclude he was shell shocked. Any "left" that holds up anything like a candle for Soviet Communism is a self-discrediting heap of shit that we on a left that might make things better need, absolutely need to throw on the garbage heap of history or we have no one to blame for the century worth of discrediting of the real left continuing into a second one, but ourselves. These people are not our comrades, they are not our friends, they are not any burden we can get to do anything but drag us down and defeat us. The struggle against fascism, against corporate gangsterism can't afford to coddle or tolerate their presence. We've got to get shut of them in all of their delusion and scribbling-babbling class idiocy.
I didn't poke around to see what the Putin fixture of the Green Party, Jill Stein was doing that got her in the rogues gallery of photos of participants that moved across the Left Forum 2019 site. If Lenin was a fitting symbol for the history of counter-productive, hypocritical and thuggish lies of the play-left, there is no more fitting symbol and symptom of it in contemporary terms than Jill Stein, so infamously the table mate of Putin and Michael Flynn at the celebratory dinner for the Putin crime regime propaganda outlet RT after she helped deliver the election to Putin's guy, Trump. Any "left" that has anything to do with her is a left that is probably taking money from the same people who funded that effort.
* Poking around in the baroque complex that is the history of Communist-"socialist" and other lefty organizations in the United States, the risings and falling and infighting and ideological posturing and opposing AND THE TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE DISASTER THEY WERE FOR ACCOMPLISHING ANYTHING EXCEPT HAMPERING AND DISCREDITING THE ACTUAL LEFT, can lead to you reading something like the program of the Left Forum in this almost new century with different eyes. It can also make you rather allergic to the academic and journalistic "left" and the cult members of various commie and other "parties" and "groups" of maybe scores or dozens of members who organize and staff these "sessions".
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