As a European (Swedish) socialist it is very reassuring to see that there are Americans that believe in economic justice and do not see themselves as living a superior way of (capitalist) life while also being the sole protectors of democracy in the world.

In Sweden, with the picture we get of the US it is easy to believe all Americans support death-penalty, flat-tax, 'family-values' the US as world-police and Newt Gingrich. It's not a pretty picture. Almost all we see of US working-class is like in "Cops" (they are criminals) or in "Ricki Lake" (they are stupid and will do anything to be on TV) or similar.

Nice site you have set up. [This was written before the first issue and refers to the material appearing as [more] on the right of our home screen.-ed.]

As I have never had the opportunity to talk to an American socialist before I have a few things I'd like to ask you: Isn't it hard to share your views in the US? Do you agree that because of the extreme right-wing conformity in the US many American socialists tend to become hateful, dogmatic and avoid self-criticism? (because they are isolated and have to fight all the time)(this is just an impression I have)

In Sweden, the Left is spear-headed by middle-class intellectuals, not by the working class; why are there so few left-wing American intellectuals? How can the extreme Christian right-wing groups have so much influence, still in our time (in Sweden Gingrich would just be laughed at, militant pro-life doesn't exist)?

Many symbols of socialism (or words) have with most people a generally 'bad-feel' to them. 'Communism' being the best example (especially in the US I guess), people associate it with mass-murder, starvation, inefficiency... . Do you agree that if the left got rid of all references to these symbols and these words (communism etc.) but did not change the actual polices that this might make people less afraid of sympathizing with the ideas? (I do)

How do feel about the possibly emergent European federation (the European Union, which some want to make a federation-state like the US (I don't, it will become more like the US is today but bigger and European))?

If you are interested in more outrageous facts about the world today, feel free to check out http://www.obsession.se/wolf/facts/facts.html where I compile information--bits that are not mentioned as much as they are important.

Best wishes.

Ulf (Stockholm graphic designer)

Dear Ulf,

You asked how difficult it is for socialists and radicals to get a hearing in the USA. The answer?--not very difficult, if you try. It is my experience that it is a hell of a lot easier for socialists to get a hearing, in 1998, than it was in 1958.

There was a difficult period, 1990 - 1995, when things were hard; people were a really impressed by the "death of socialism" boasting after the "fall of the wall" and depressed by a series of defeated strikes. For the last three years, we have experienced the beginning of change--things are moving forward again

I have to disagree with your notion of trying to hide socialist politics under a non-socialist label. This is not only dishonest, but self-defeating. In a very real sense, this course would reinforce our rulers' anti-socialist ideological offensive. From personal experience, I have seen that the organizations (the U.S. Communist party and the social democrats) who have tried this course have not made any gains.

Let's think about Newt Gingrich & resurgent ultra-right, who looked so big a few years ago. Well, the Newt is now the most-hated individual figure in American politics. His party "comrades" are trying to disassociate themselves from him and his ideology. The Newt himself, is trying to disassociate himself from what he was preaching just four years ago,

I think that the Newt, and many political observers, mistook a short-term electoral shift (produced by good staff work & bribery ) for a shift in mass attitudes, for a shift in real political attitudes.

The hard right, the potential Fascists, are quite a bit weaker than they were even twenty five years ago. It has been quite while, the 70s, since we have seen mass Fascist gangs rioting in the streets. The defeat of legal racism, in the 1960s really pushed back the right-wing, changing politics in America in a fundamental way.

Of course rightist currents are working to build a mass following, most successfully with anti-immigrant agitation. I think you have very similar trends in Sweden, where neo-Fascists and skinheads push an anti immigrant politic. Don't they riot around the statue of some king or other, attack Middle Eastern immigrants, gay people, socialists?

You raised a question about the role of intellectuals in the US & Swedish socialist politics... The main unique feature of US politics is that the working class, unlike in any European country, does not yet have a party of its own. In the USA, there is no mass party, calling itself socialist, communist or labor, that speaks for the workers. In the USA, the working class, women, Afro-Americans, farmers, gay people--the oppressed--look to the two capitalist political parties, the Republicans & Democrats, for political leadership.

It seems to me, that "leftist" intellectuals, in the absence of a mass working class party, tend to adapt themselves to capitalist politics and try to find posts in the trade union apparatus, or perhaps join the Democratic Party, which has an undeserved reputation as "liberal".

About the "dogmatism" you speak of: I don't know, we would have to get specific. In the USA, I support the Socialist Workers party; in Ireland, I support Sinn Fein & the IRA. These are real parties, with politics you may or may not agree with. I think it's best to discuss actual politics rather than abstract terms like"dogmaticism", "sectarianism", etc....

Roger Collins
(SeeingRed correspondent)

Yes, most people in the world--especially Europe--take the U.S. to be unspeakably reactionary: a violent land where state-run executions and troglodyte politicians are cheered by a trailer-home public.

May I say that it's not a coincidence that this view--Yanks as hopelessly violent, uncivilized savages--actually originated from the British monarchy at the time of the American Revolution. Of course--what other kind of people would dare revolt against the King, God's representative on Earth, and his exquisitely cultured Empire?

Of course since that time the U.S. has transmorgified from the most revolutionary country in the world to the most reactionary.

But the propagnadistic presentation of Americans as reactionaries still has the same source as it did in 1776: counter-revolution.

After all, the U.S. working class is the largest and most powerful section of the world proletariat. What could be more important for the powers-that-be than to convince the rest of the world that there will never be help forthcoming from those quarters?

Surely it's impossible to be a socialist or have any hope for fundamental change in the world if the U.S. proletariat as hopelessly backward.

No question that this--and everything else I'm going to say--only makes sense if you start with the understanding that the world is divided into haves and have-nots, and so too are its countries. (The comic strip called "B.C." once defined "foreign aid" as "when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country." That one-panel strip perhaps conveys what I'm talking about better than all MY words.)

Ultimately, of course, it comes down to understanding the world as we know it--and its future--as a result of the struggle between classes, fundamentally between the capitalists and the proletariat, yet at the same time between the imperialists and the common people.

It's that division that's needs to be grasped: there is no "United States"--there's the U.S. bourgeoisie and the U.S. section of the world proletariat.

Now, what is the state of that divided land?

Well, truth is that the working class IS one of the most backward sections of the working class in the world. Most emblematically, it has failed to establish its own political party--not even a corrupt, reformist one. The United States is in fact the only imperialist nation where there is no working class political party. It also has the lowest percentage of unionization........

The source of that of course is the super-profits the U.S. ruling class reaped from its pre-eminent semi-colonial Empire which were used to buy off big chunks of the U.S. working class.

But that's not the whole story either, for it STILL took a vicious semi-fascistic witch-hunt ("McCarthyism") and later wholesale assasinations of Black radicals (MLK, Malcolm, Black Panthers etc) to cow the population into accepting the payoffs.

Then there's the matter of the U.S.'s internal semi-colony: the Black population which until nearly 1970 had less legal rights than a household pet. A population which today--despite certain great advances--sees its children attend schools so vile that you wouldn't kennel your dog there.

All this helps hold the U.S. working class as a whole back politically.

On the other hand, structurally it looks pretty good. Fact is that the U.S. proletariat is the most international and the most female of any in the world. It's the world's largest, and the world's most powerful (measured by amount of wealth it produces/could control). It is also the only working class outside of Cuba that is armed: the U.S. government has never, since popular rebellion amended the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, been able to reserve weapons only to itself.

Remember that it was the American people (led by its youth) that brought about the defeat of "their own" country in an imperialist war--a feat that only the Russians can claim to have accomplished.

Remember as well that in the 1930's the U.S. working class exploded and achieved in less than five years--industrial (not craft) unionization of basic industry--what it took the Europeans 150 years to accomplish, even if they did it earlier.

So ultimately, the popular international vision of U.S. portion of the world working class as hopelessly backward is just another version of the self-loathing that the oppressors impose upon the oppressed.

But American workers are not "them"--they're us, they're you! And if we are hopeless than so are you.

The main thing is that we all are worthless dirt to the ruler-- andthat's how they want us to think of ourselves.

Cowed by our supposed impotence, we search for tiny ways to ameliorate our lot--maybe if we did more polling, maybe if we hired some good lawyers and PR folk, maybe if we dropped words like revolution and socialism--and kept miles between us a people like Marx or Lenin or Castro...........maybe as eunuchs we could kinda slide our way into a better world, gradually.........

But, Ulf, I believe that the evil bastards that rule our world will never by brought down except by the sheer force of numberless oppressed--only an oppressed that is conscious and behaves intelligently to be sure. That force will be crippled as long as we see ourselves--that's ALL of ourselves, from Moslem fighters to the African National Congress to Joe Six-pack Americans to even the clean-handed intellectuals and office workers--as flawed and inadequate.

Much better to see each other as brothers and sisters morally and democratically far more qualified to exercise power than the tiny greed-driven class which rules us all today.

Is our side flawed, do we have limitations? Absolutely. But for the oppressed and exploited the tendency is a reverse of what Jesus talked about: for us, we see the log in our own eye and just a mote in our enemy's.

Steve Eckardt
(SeeingRed magazine)