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	Workers Vanguard No. 1008	14 September 2012

A Radical Liberal Worth Arguing With

Remembering Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn—a muckraking columnist and editor who delighted in skewering the establishment press—died from cancer on July 21 at the age of 71. Of Scottish descent and raised in County Cork, Ireland, Cockburn came to the U.S. in 1972 and began to write for the Press Clips column of the Village Voice the following year. Educated at Oxford, Cockburn shared the bourgeoisie’s social world but not its worldview. Time and again, his distaste for imperialist propaganda, sharp eye for hypocrisy and contrarian streak led him to ruffle the feathers of mainstream liberalism (and its reformist “socialist” apologists). It was especially for that capacity that we appreciated his writings, despite the gulf between his radical liberalism and our revolutionary Marxism.

In his search for dissenting perspectives and buried truths, Cockburn at times drew from our newspaper. Dennis Perrin, whose columns were printed in Cockburn’s CounterPunch publication, describes picking up Alex’s mail and finding among letters and bills “Workers Vanguard, the American Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and yes The New Republic.” In the wake of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, in which five leftist anti-racist activists and union organizers were gunned down by the Ku Klux Klan, the Spartacist League initiated its first labor/black mobilization against Klan/Nazi terror. The action brought out some 500 people, mainly black auto workers, in downtown Detroit. Cockburn wrote in his Press Clips column:

“Courage would demand issuance of a call for anti-fascist demonstrations in every major city—like the one sponsored by the Spartacists in Detroit. But our liberals are too busy with Teddy [Kennedy].... Action against native fascism is left in the hands of the Trotskyists and other sectarians, who at least can understand the meaning of murder when they see it.”

He followed the maxim of his father, the noted journalist Claud Cockburn: “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.” He also performed filial duty in describing his father as “the greatest radical journalist of his age,” even though that journalism included hack service for the Stalinists as they crushed insurgent workers during the 1930s Spanish Revolution. While Alexander Cockburn enjoyed a certain status as an in-house critic to the liberal left, the leash only had so much slack before he would get pulled back with an abrupt snap. This became especially evident during the 1980s, as U.S. imperialism ramped up Cold War II against the Soviet Union.

He got into hot water in 1982 during the civil war in El Salvador, where Soviet- and Cuban-backed leftist insurgents fought a U.S.-backed death squad regime. We raised the call for military victory to the leftist insurgents and declared: “Defense of Cuba and the USSR Begins in El Salvador!” Cockburn also called for the insurgents’ victory in his Voice columns. The problem for him was that the bulk of the left was mobilizing behind the bourgeois-liberal demand for a “political solution”—i.e., a “peace” on the imperialists’ terms—complete with (failed) attempts to exclude our contingents from protests. To appease the anti-Spartacist cabal, Cockburn, even while describing our call for military victory as “unimpeachable,” sought to distance himself by calling us “assholes” with “more than a whiff of Marxism-Leninism-Bonkerism.” But as we wrote: “You can’t be both for battlefield victory to win war and for the popular front that wants a negotiated solution to stop it.”

In 1984, a witchhunt was launched against Cockburn for receiving $10,000 from the Institute of Arab Studies to write a book about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. For this sin against Zionism—an offense that would dog him throughout his career—he was suspended from the Voice without pay. We wrote, defending him, that we would miss him in the pages of the Voice “not only because we find his columns interesting, venomously bright; not only because he is a political enemy worth aiming polemics at. We think it’s just fine when we lay bare his political core: hiding his conciliation behind his snotty wit. But only we should be allowed to cream Cockburn, not this bunch of liberal imperialists” (WV No. 346, 20 January 1984). As it turned out, Cockburn landed on his feet, retaining a column in the Wall Street Journal and later writing for the Nation. In a 1986 Nation column Cockburn thanked Workers Vanguard for publishing a map of the U.S. showing the severity of sodomy laws in each state (see WV No. 408, 18 July 1986), writing “I didn’t know the Sparts were into that kind of thing.”

As the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy approached its ultimate crisis, leading to the destruction of the Soviet workers state in 1991-92, Cockburn began lurching to the right. His positions, always idiosyncratic, became more erratic. In 1990, he supported imperialist sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a lesser evil to war, a stance also adopted by the International Socialist Organization, among others. Cockburn eventually became a staunch critic of the sanctions, which in the space of a decade killed at least a million and a half Iraqis. In his later search for allies in the fight against U.S. intervention, Cockburn turned to the right-wing libertarians, including the Ron Paul crowd. Ever quirky, to the end he refused to give credence to the overwhelming evidence of global warming.

Nevertheless, from the pages of the CounterPunch newsletter, which he co-edited, along with its later Web site and book imprint, he continued to launch salvos against the inanities, absurdities and mendacities of the capitalist spin machine. While the Democratic establishment was in the midst of grooming Obama to be head overseer on the capitalist plantation, Cockburn called it straight: “You can actually see him trimming to the wind, the way you see a conjuror of moderate skill shove the rabbit back up his sleeve. Above all he is concerned with the task of reassuring the masters of the Democratic Party, and beyond that, the politico-corporate establishment, that he is safe” (“Obama’s Game,” CounterPunch, 24 April 2006).

In his better moments, Cockburn took on not only the Democratic establishment but also its fake-socialist water boys. In 2009, he exposed Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action as the moving force in canceling an antiwar picket against Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Recalling a similar incident in 1988, Cockburn described Mackler as “longer of tooth, but no closer to socialism.”

Just weeks before his death, Cockburn recounted how the reformist left liquidated into the petty-bourgeois, populist Occupy Wall Street, writing that self-proclaimed “Leninists threw aside their Marxist primers on party organisation and drained the full anarchist cocktail.” He wrote, “If ever I saw a dead movement, it is surely Occupy,” and called on “those veteran radicals” who had proclaimed “a religious conversion to Occupyism, to give a proper account of themselves” (“Biggest Financial Scandal in Britain’s History, Yet Not a Single Occupy Sign; What Happened?” CounterPunch, 6 July 2012). Always a radical liberal, Cockburn never lost hope that such hopeless types would recant in the face of his polemic.

When Cockburn was on the ropes at the Village Voice in 1984, we offered him a spot writing columns for WV. We noted, “Since our wage scale will hardly keep you in cologne, if you come to work for us you can take Arab money so long as you tell us about it.... (In fact, if you work for us you will need Arab money.)” We also observed: “If a man is to be judged partly by the enemies he makes, it must be said that Cockburn has many of the right ones.” We will surely miss Alexander Cockburn, always quotable and often right.