Against the Current No. 4-5, September-December 1986

"... Her writings go far beyond mere dissent, disagreement with, or criticism of the United States or its policies . . .

"Your pending application for adjustment of status is hereby DENIED."

--Decision on Application for Status as Permanent Resident,
Immigration and Naturalization Service, (INS) El Paso, Texas October 2, 1985

WITH THESE WORDS, a representative of the State [the INS regional director in El Paso, Texas] ended his seven­page decision and my 17-month wait....

The Gloves

for Rhoda Waller

Yes we did "march around somewhere" and yes it was cold,
we shared our gloves because we had a pair between us
and a New York City cop also shared his big gloves
with me--strange,
he was there to keep our order
and he could do that and I could take that back then.
We were marching for the Santa Maria, Rhoda,
a Portuguese ship whose crew had mutinied.
they demanded asylum in Goulart's Brazil
and we marched in support...

THIS INTERVIEW BEGINS with Daniel Singer's opening remarks at a talk he gave at the New York Marist School in 1986.

REVOLUTIONS, ROSA LUXEMBURG wrote somewhere, are the only kind of war in which, really, ultimate victory can only be achieved through a series of defeats. The implication is that defeats need not necessarily be in vain, provided that we learn something from them....

THE VICTORIES of the Greek socialist movement in 1981 and 1985 represented a major breakthrough in several senses: they brought significant new social forces into effective political activity; they gave nationalist and socialist ideology a new legitimacy; they led to the further dismantling of the police-state apparatus that had undergirded the electoral system....

THE DEFEAT of the revolution following the declaration of the state of siege in Poland did not lead to the destruction of the social movement, a first in the Soviet bloc. Solidarnosc, in 1980-81, not only led a revolution of greater mass participation and longer duration than any other in the Eastern bloc, but now, following the December 1981 coup, it has generated a prolonged social resistance.

The Stalinist bureaucracy's system of rule is totalitarian by its nature; it is based (1) on the holding of the working class as well as the entire civil society in a state of forced atomization; and (2) on the uprooting of all elements of workers' and citizens' democracy within society....

Poland Under Black Light
By Janusz Anderman
Translated by Nina Taylor and Andrew Short
Readers International, 1985, $12.50.

THE SIBERIAN COLD held Krakow in its grip the winter l lived then. It was mid­February. I'd been in the city about six months, and I thought. I'd grown accustomed to the hardships that were typical of life in this poor, po!itically­ravaged land....

Rendez-Nous Nos Usines!
by Zbigniew M. Kowalewski
Translated (from Polish into French) by Jacqueline Allio
Editions La Breche, Paris 1985.

ZBIGNIEW M. KOWALEWSKI documents the direct working-class character of the revolutionary movement that Solidarnosc was ... and continues to be. His account of the struggle that developed in Poland between August 1980 and December 1981, between Solidarnosc and the "totalitarian bureaucracy," raises with great immediacy a host of political questions (only a few of which can be dealt with here) which I believe the revolutionary movement will find worthwhile to debate....

THERE ARE TWO main theories concerning Leninism. Most Western academics view the Leninist party as a self­seeking group which took advantage of a power vacuum to seize power and establish a dictatorial system which benefits only the small ruling stratum, the party hierarchy.(1) Alvin Gouldner, in a radical version, sees Marxism as representing the false consciousness of workers and the real consciousness of intellectuals.(2) In both variants an elitist ideology and structure pre-figures the future totalitarian society....