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  • OUTRAGE, PROTEST, AND REBELLION OVER REFUSAL TO INDICT MICHAEL BROWN’S KILLER

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    Pain and anger at the police killing of Michael Brown became transformed into protests that swept across America just before Thanksgiving. Thousands of people in the town of Ferguson, Missouri, and tens of thousands in cities throughout the country reacted with indignation, anger and in Ferguson with violent protests after the grand jury failed to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

    The killing took place on August 9 when Wilson stopped Brown and a friend. A struggle broke out between Wilson and Brown in the course of which the officer shot and killed the African-American teenager. Wilson first fired his gun wounding Brown, who was unarmed, but then nevertheless continued to fire a total of 12 shots, six of which hit Brown, the last shot apparently killing him. Wilson claimed he feared Brown who was moving toward him, though some witnesses said that after being shot Brown had raised his hands as if to surrender. Wilson kept firing anyway and killed him. Contrary to all routine procedures, Officer Wilson was never arrested, was allowed to keep his gun for some time before it was turned in as evidence, and was permitted to speak with others about the events.

    African Americans and many others who were already angry about the many police killings of young Black and Latino men and women were outraged that Ferguson District Attorney Robert McCullough, refused to seek an indictment of the officer. McCullough, whose own father was a police officer killed by an African American, should have recused himself but failed to do so. McCullough pursued an extraordinary legal course in an attempt to protect Wilson from prosecution, first declining to seek an indictment and then using the grand jury as an opportunity to justify Wilson’s action. McCullough selectively examined witnesses to strengthen Wilson’s case that he killed Brown in self-defense. As opposed to a jury trial, the grand jury did not include a rigorous cross-examination of witnesses. Yet, while this was a virtually unprecedented legal strategy—sending a case to a grand jury without a recommendation to indict—still it  was characteristic of the way in which police departments and district attorneys protect officers involved in such homicides so that few are tried and fewer convicted of wrongdoing when they have shot and killed a Black man.

    With no recommendation from the district attorney, the grand jury brought no indictment against Wilson who walked free. The Michael Brown case is seen by many Americans as another in a long series of unjustified and unaccountable killings by police officers. And that, of course, represents the logical outcome of racial profiling, harassment, and routine police violence toward African American, Latino, immigrant and LGBT communities.

    Protests in Ferguson and Nationwide

    When the verdict was announced on the night of November 24, the crowds in Ferguson, made up mostly of African Americans and young white activists who had been expecting and preparing for just such an outcome, continued to peacefully protest as they have been doing for months. Others, however, in response to their own anger and indignation at this reminder that Black lives don't matter, and to the continued militarization and aggressiveness of a police presence (and to the use of language like "rules of engagement") as well as to the deployment of the National Guard as if it were a colonial occupation, went through the town’s business district breaking windows, setting fire to businesses and automobiles, shooting firearms, and looting stores.

    Much of the violence was carried out by youth who, no doubt, identified with the young Michael Brown. Some Ferguson residents and protestors attempted to stop the violence, but others expressed sympathy and support for the young people who were destroying the business district, feeling that it was the only way to force some reaction from the powers-that-be. The Ferguson police, who had earlier talked about their preparedness, were unable to stop the violence despite numerous arrests, while fire fighters left the scene after hearing gun shots.

    Protestors were furious not only at the authorities and the police, but also at the media that had so often portrayed Michael Brown and other African American men as beasts or demons and Black protestors as savages. The progressive media criticized the corporate coverage, while crowds in Ferguson chanted, “Fuck CNN.”

    Throughout the country’s major cities on Nov. 24 and 25—in New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Seattle, Oakland, and Los Angeles, among others—there were spontaneous as well as planned protests of hundreds and in some places of thousands. In New York City on Nov. 24, for example, a thousand protestors first gathered at Union Square and then marched several miles through Times Square on their way to 125th street in Harlem.

    When New York Police Commissioner William Bratton appeared at Times Square, protestors, outraged at a recent police killing of a Black youth in a New York housing project, threw red paint representing blood at the commissioner. Later, many of these saddened, indignant, and angry and youth realized their unity gave them power and together blocked several bridges. While Wilson, who shot Brown walks free, Diego Ibañez, the teacher and Occupy activist who threw the paint at the commissioner has been indicted on several criminal charges and if found guilty could face years in prison.

    The most militant and disruptive demonstrations outside of Ferguson took place in nearby St. Louis and in Oakland, California, where crowds blocked streets. Everywhere protestors told of their anger not only at the killing of Brown and the distortion of the justice system in the Wilson case,, but also spoke of the dehumanization many have experienced due to police harassment, stop-and-frisk, unjust detention, unfair trials, and many other aspects of the system of massive incarceration and social control that targets poor and working class communities of color. Some expressed their hope that the Michael Brown case and the reaction to it would represent a turning point.

    The Liberal Establishment Fails

    The liberal establishment had hoped to keep things in Ferguson under control by having figures like Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson exert their moral authority to keep protests peaceful and political aspirations within the political channels offered by the Democratic Party. Crowds in Ferguson booed them, demonstrating the degree to which figures like Sharpton and Jackson are out of touch with young poor and working class African Americans. The historic Black leadership is too integrated into mainstream politics, too separate from the lives of ordinary African Americans to be able to exert much influence. At the same time, it is clear that no new national African American political leadership has emerged which might have led protests into a new social movement.  

    Some young people, however, are radicalizing due to the events of the past few years and becoming leaders themselves, at times connecting with older organizations like the Organization for Black Struggle or with newer groups from other parts of the country such as the Dream Defenders, which formed after Trayvon Martin’s murder. Some of these young people are also building coalitions with other exploited and oppressed youth like the United We Dream immigrant activists or forming national organizations like Freedomside, which linked to veterans of Freedom Summer at this past summer's 50th commemoration event. Clearly if new national leadership develops it will come from these newly radicalized youth.

    The police killing of Michael Brown and grand jury’s refusal to indict the officer represent symptoms of the continuing pathology of American society’s racist and unrelenting  destruction of the lives of the young and poor. The criminal justice system, though, is only part of the larger system that grinds down communities of color. The capitalist economy's  inability to provide living wage jobs, and the government’s refusal to create, maintain, and expand affordable housing, to actually establish universal healthcare, and to build the infrastructure necessary to transition to a non-fossil fuel economy demonstrates that neoliberal capitalists and their politicians and bureaucrats—as well as the majority of the media who justify their actions—have chosen to ignore the economic, environmental, and social crisis of their decaying society in order to maximize and maintain the extreme inequality they have created. They, and their capitalist system, can no longer be considered rational or civilized.

    This system is far more violent and destructive than any protest against it. Capitalism, which was founded on slavery and blood, has now clearly regressed back into a race-based colonial “injustice system." Equally troubling is the failure so far of multiple generations of activists to converge and coalesce, out of the Occupy, abolitionist, queer, and environmental movements, into a social force capable of sustaining a new organizational vehicle, a socialist party for the 21st century that fights for hegemony and power. Yet there are signs that new resistance movements are emerging. They will be essential, because we still need a socialist revolution in order to transform this barbaric system.

  • Özlem Ilyas Tolunay – Socialist, Feminist, Freedom Fighter -1975-2014

    We at New Politics were saddened to learn and are very sorry to have to inform our readers that our good friend and writer Özlem Ilyas Tolunay, 39, died on Nov. 16 of a heart attack. We are heartsick that this young woman, a fighter for social justice in Turkey, wife and mother of a young child, is no longer with us. 

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    Özlem was a member of the Özgürlük ve Dayanışma Partisi (ÖDP) Freedom and Solidarity Party of Turkey and a translator and writer for its newspaper BirGün. Such work was also her profession. She was a committed socialist activist, a feminist, and a believer in the right of the Kurds to self-determination. While on a visit to Turkey, my wife Sherry and I had an opportunity to meet Özlem and her husband Ibrahim Tolunay, a Geography Teacher at Notre Dame de Sion French High School in Istanbul. We accompanied them to a demonstration of thousands organized by her party calling for greater democracy in Turkey where we were introduced to her comrades. We also spent some time with Özlem, Ibrahim, and their son Deniz, now four years old, and so we got to know them a little as a family.

    After we returned to the United States, I continued to be in touch with Özlem and invited her to write for New Politics. Though we came from different political traditions, we felt that we had much in common. Özlem wrote for both the New Politics journal and for our website, helping us to better understand developments in Turkey. Her article “Turkey, the Erdogan Government and the Left Today: An Interview with Oguzhan Müftüoğlu,” was published in our Summer 2013 issue of New Politics and her piece “Women in Erdoğan’s Turkey” appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of the journal. Just last month she wrote “Behind the Kobane Tragedy: The Kurdish Political Movement and Turkey” for our website. Translator and journalist, wife and mother, socialist and feminist, Özlem’s life was full of love for her family and friends, useful work in her society, and a deep commitment to socialism.

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    She was buried on Nov. 18, her coffin draped with her party’s red flag, and as a young friend of hers wrote to me, “surrounded by her women comrades, working class women, the poor, and the oppressed.” 

    We  at New Politics extend our deepest sympathy to her husband Ibrahim and other members of her family, to her friends, and to her comrades. Far away as we are, like you, we will miss her.

  • Sign-on Statement: End the Killing of Students Now: Peace, Justice, and Democracy for Mexico

    Dear Friend of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy,

                We are writing at this critical moment to invite you to sign the CPD statement "End the Killing of Students Now: Peace, Justice, and Democracy for Mexico." Thanks to all of you who have already signed — please invite your friends and social media contacts to sign as well. We plan to publicize the statement widely — to students, parents, and their allies in Mexico, to Mexican and Canadian government officials, President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry, key members of Congress, as well as to the media in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. 

                The statement is below, along with a list of initial signers. We very much hope you will add your name — a large number of signatures can make a real difference and will let people in Mexico know they are not alone. The statement is now being translated into Spanish and Farsi. We welcome volunteers to translate it into other languages.

                To add your name, see the emerging list of signers and their affiliations, and/or make a tax-deductible donation to publicize the statement, please go to our website.

                You don’t have to donate in order to sign, but please do give if you can, and as generously as you can.

    INITIAL SIGNERS INCLUDE Ervand Abrahamian, Alan Akrivos, Frango Akrivos, Michael Albert, Greg Albo, Bruce Allen, Kevin B. Anderson, Sedef Arat-Koç, Joe Auslander, Jack Bakunin, Rosalyn Baxandall, Domenic Bellissimo, Medea Benjamin, Karl Beveridge, Mel Bienenfeld, Jonah Birch, Paul Bocking, Eileen Boris, Jeremy Brecher, David Camfield, Roane Carey, Donna Cartwright, Noam Chomsky, Dennis Clagett, Tony Clarke, Joshua Cohen, Marjorie Cohn, Saulo Coln, Carol Condé, Margaret Crane, Hamid Dabashi, Gail Daneker, Ariel Dorfman, Dan Edson, Daniel Ellsberg, Samuel Farber, Thomas M. Fasy, MD, Dianne Feeley, John Feffer, Michael Ferber, Barry Finger, David Finkel, Bill Fletcher, Jr., David Friedman, Mike Friedman, Sam Friedman, Barbara Garson, Jack Gerson, Sam Gindin, Walter Goldfrank, Luin Goldring, Alfonso Gonzales, Jeff Goodwin, Jules Greenstein, Ricardo Grinspun, Arun Gupta, E. Haberkern, Thomas Harrison, Trevor Harrison, Howie Hawkins, Teresa Healy, Wayne Heimbach, Judith Adler Hellman, Judith Hempfling, Doug Henwood, Paula Hevia-Pacheco, Madelyn Hoffman, Nancy Holmstrom, Shima Houshyar, Ali Issa, Geoff Johnson, Brian Jones, Yasmine Kamel, Ramsey Kanaan, Temma Kaplan, Michael Karadjis, Jan Kavan, Robin D.G. Kelley, Kathy Kelly, Yusef Khalil, Alex Khasnabish, Mustafa Koç, Dan La Botz, Despina Lalaki, Joanne Landy, Doug Latimer, Marc Lavietes, MD, Sue Leonard, Nicholas Evangelos Levis, Traven Leyshon, Nelson Lichtenstein, Guy M. Liston, Martha Livingston, Michael Lowy, Laura Macdonald, Alejandra Marchevsky, Ravi Malhotra, Carmen Martínez Novo, Marie-Josee Massicotte, Gloria Mattera, Ian McMahan, Tim McCaskell, David McNally, David McReynolds, Teresa Meade, Deborah Meier, Marilyn Morehead, Manijeh Nasrabadi, Immanuel Ness, Piotr Niemczyk, David Oakford, Enrique Ochoa, Stephen Oren, Ph.D., António Simões do Paco, Costas Panayotakis, Leo Panitch, Christopher Phelps, Charlotte Phillips, MD, Justin Podur, Andrew Pollack, Danny Postel, Norma Rantisi, Joanne Rappaport, Judy Rebick, Mubbashir Rizvi, Katie Robbins Corey Robin, William Robinson, Leonard Rodberg, Richard Roman, Bruce Rosen, Fred Rosen, Ruth Rosen, Herman Rosenfeld, Robert Ross, Matthew Rothschild, Abraham Rotstein, Anthony Saidy, John Saul, Kshama Sawant, Jennifer Scarlott, Jay Schaffner, Chris Schenk, Peter Schwartz, Katherine Sciacchitano, Sadra Shahab, Azadeh Shahshahani, Stephen R. Shalom, Margaret Butz Shelleda, Metta Spencer, Stephen Steinberg, Lynn Stephen, Cheryl Stevenson, Jeanne Strole, Jack Stuart, Yifat Susskind, David Swanson, Richard Swift, Ernest Tate, Miguel Tinker Salas, Meredith Tax, Chris Toensing, Patricia Tomic, Marcel van der Linden, Laura Veit, Leandro Vergara-Camus, Daniel J. Walkowitz, Mel Watkins, Lois Weiner, Russ Weiss-Irwin, Naomi Weisstein, Don Wells, Phyllis Willett, Reginald Wilson, Ella Wind, Lawrence Wittner, Sherry Wolf, Kenton Worcester, Julia Wrigley, Yanna Yannakakis, Sina Z., Anna Zalik.

    Identifications of signers are available on the website, and we’ll be updating the signer list regularly.

    In peace and solidarity,
    Joanne         Tom
    Joanne Landy Thomas Harrison
    Co-Directors, Campaign for Peace and Democracy
    www.cpdweb.org/

    PLEASE NOTE OUR CORRECT ADDRESS (it was listed incorrectly for several hours last week):
    2808 Broadway, #12, New York, NY 10025

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    Women hold banners with portraits of the missing students during a protest in Mexico City on November 5, 2014 (AFP Photo/Yuri Cortez)

    Statement by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy
    November 13, 2014
     
    END THE KILLING OF STUDENTS NOW: PEACE, JUSTICE, AND DEMOCRACY FOR MEXICO
    http://www.cpdweb.org/stmts/1024/stmt.shtml

    We send our solidarity to the parents of the dead and missing students, to the millions of student protesters, and to the Mexican people!

    We condemn the murders and human rights violations by the Mexican government and the drug cartels. And we condemn the U.S. and Canadian governments for their support of the Mexican state!

                We feel pain, anger and outrage at the kidnapping, torture, and executions of rural students from the teachers college of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico on September 26, 2014, at the hands of police in collusion with groups linked to drug trafficking. This was a crime against humanity. The 43 missing and three of the six whose murders have been confirmed are young students, mostly children of poor rural families. For decades, especially for the past six years, the school where they were studying, the Rural Normal "Raúl Isidro Burgos," a school specializing in training teachers to serve the rural and indigenous poor, as well as rural teachers colleges as a whole, have been subjected to an intense political attack by the state and powerful business groups.

                These crimes against humanity, sadly, are the rule not the exception in Mexico. And they are often carried out or tolerated by different levels of the Mexican government and/or in collusion with the drug gangs. As the protesters in Mexico have repeatedly declared, Fue el Estado (It was the state). The federal government is responsible for the safety of people traveling on federal roads, as the students were doing. The federal army has a strong presence in Iguala, the site of the massacre, and was nearby at the time and aware of the attacks. It did nothing. The federal army itself carried out another mass execution of 22 young people in the same region, in the town of Tlatlaya, in the neighboring state of Mexico in June, 2014. The army and the federal government then attempted to cover up these executions in Tlatlaya, a cover-up that included harassing and threatening witnesses. The investigation that followed the September 2014 massacre of the students from the Ayotzinapa college has been deliberately incompetent and staged as an effort to deflect blame to the local level, to cool out protest without attempting to find the disappeared or to get to the roots of the crime.

                The depth of the Mexican crisis, the state and drug cartel violence, and the perception that the electoral route is closed because of widespread fraud, manipulation and corruption, means that Mexican popular movements have to work in the middle of a boiling cauldron of repression and violence. The United States is deeply involved in this cauldron through military agreements with the Mexican armed forces in carrying out this repression in Mexico under the cover of the drug war. And Canadian mining companies are also deeply involved as they seize and despoil the waters and lands of Mexican peasants and carry out brutal repression through private armies aided by various levels of the Mexican government against many Mexican communities. The giant oil corporations welcomed in by the privatization of Mexican oil will be protected from popular protests by the Mexican armed forces with the ongoing massive military assistance of the United States. U.S. and Canadian companies and their governments are involved in direct and indirect ways alongside the Mexican state in the repression of the Mexican people and the despoliation of their society.

                The drug war, a battle between rival drug gangs, generally linked to different groups of the local, state, and federal authorities, has provided a cover for the renewal of the dirty war of the 1970s, when the Mexican government carried out large numbers of assassinations and forced disappearances in an attempt to stop rising protests and guerrilla movements. State-executed assassinations and disappearances continued at a reduced level in the following decades but have sharply escalated since 2006 and even more so since Enrique Peña Nieto became president in 2012.

                The growing repression is only partially linked to the drug wars. It is intimately linked to attempts to eliminate resistance to the ongoing neoliberal offensive in Mexico, an offensive being promoted by business interests and the governments of Mexico, Canada and the United States. The harsh human consequences of the neoliberal offensive in Mexico — a sharp increase in poverty and inequality, the downgrading of the labor market, and the dispossession of large numbers of rural Mexicans from their lands — have been generating resistance, as have the depredations on communities being carried out by the drug gangs, the police, private security forces of mining companies, and the armed forces. For example, many community militias have been formed in the state of Guerrero and the neighboring state of Michoacán to defend their communities against these aggressions. But the state and national governments have arrested the leaders of the community militias and sought to disband them as they continue to tolerate the attacks by the drug gangs and by the local and state government.

                The recent changes to the Mexican Constitution promise to speed up the dispossession of rural communities as they allow for the privatization of oil and other natural resources and permit the government to remove local communities for the sake of resource development — communities that are already being dispossessed informally by gangs working for business interests, or by the despoiling of their land by mining development. As resistance has increased, so has repression.

                We express our solidarity with the bereaved but courageous parents of the dead and disappeared students of Ayotzinapa and with the millions of Mexican students and citizens demanding justice and a different Mexico, a Mexico of peace, democracy, social well-being and justice. We support their demand for an independent international inquiry not only into the events of Iguala and Tlatlaya but also into the thousands of disappearances, killings and human rights abuses that have been carried out under the umbrella of the drug war. We also call for an end to the role of the United States in facilitating these horrific abuses through the military aid provided in the Mérida Plan and military training, as well as the systematic human rights violations being carried out to protect Canadian and U.S. companies.

                We are heartened by the massive size and national scope of the protests. Thousands of protesters, including family members of the missing students, blocked the Acapulco, Guerrero international airport for three hours interrupting flights on November 10. 22 of the 81 municipalities of the state of Guerrero have been taken over by protesters. Nearly four million students staged a national strike on November 5 and the inter-university committee that organized this third national action within the last month continues to plan new protests. The scale of the protests has grown and the demands have become more radical. The righteous indignation of the Mexican people has not succumbed to fatalism or cynicism nor have they been fooled by the various maneuvers of the federal government attempting to demobilize the protests. The more the mobilizations grow and radicalize, the more likely are attempts to end them by force. We must raise awareness of the ongoing struggles and violations of human rights in Mexico. Their struggle is our struggle. We are all Ayotzinapa!

    To add your name now, go to the Campaign for Peace and Democracy website.
     
     

  • The Trials of Rasmea Odeh

    ImageRasmea Odeh, a 67-year-old Palestinian-American, associate director of the Arab American Action Network and organizer of the acclaimed Arab Women’s Committee in Chicago, was convicted in Detroit on November 10 of “unlawful procurement of naturalization” at the time she became a U.S. citizen in 2004.

    Her imprisonment immediately afterward has been the most shocking part of the case, as explained below.

    The verdict itself, announced after only two hours of jury deliberation, looked practically inevitable in the wake of Federal Judge Gershwin Drain’s pre-trial rulings that crippled her legal defense. The government relied on documents from Odeh’s naturalization application, as well as earlier ones from 1995 when she first applied at the U.S. consulate in Jordan for permanent legal residency in the United States.

    On those documents she did not disclose her 1969 arrest and conviction for a bombing in Israel, or the ten years she served in prison before her release in 1979 in an Israeli prisoner exchange with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.    

    That all may sound straightforward and incriminating enough, to an uninformed observer. Missing from the trial, however, were all the relevant circumstances and background, which the defense was forbidden to present.

    When Rasmea Odeh was arrested 45 years ago, in a mass roundup in the West Bank following the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket and subsequent bombings at the British Consulate, she was tortured for 25 days of her 45 days in detention – including violent sexual assaults – and finally “confessed” in the face of threats to torture her family. She retracted that confession but was sentenced nonetheless to two life terms by an Israeli military court, where rates of conviction exceeded 99%.

    Judge Drain, after stating in a pre-trial hearing that he found Odeh’s account of torture “credible,” later ruled evidence relating to the torture to be inadmissible. The government was allowed to say that she was convicted of the bombing charges (although enjoined from using the word “terrorism”).  Expert testimony from Dr. Mary Fabri, who has diagnosed Rasmea with post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from her torture, and was prepared to testify to its effects on her memory, was also excluded. In today’s political climate, it’s not hard to imagine how steeply the deck was stacked against the defense. 

    The defense team headed by attorney Michael Deutsch could essentially argue only two points. First, the questions as worded on the immigration and naturalization forms, on which Odeh stated in 1994 and 2004 that she had no arrest record, were far from clear. Second, with the aid of eloquent expert testimony from Professor Nadine Naber and Rasmea’s own account on the witness stand, the defense brought out the record of her astonishing successes among primarily Arab immigrant women in Chicago. (See an article by Professor Naber on Odeh’s work.)

    Odeh testified that she initially applied for U.S. residency in 1994 in order to assist her father, then living in Michigan along with her older brother. (Rasmea’s English was almost nonexistent at the time, and the immigration documents were largely filled out and mailed to her by the brother.) Rasmea explained that ten years later, after her father had died and her brother had also recently passed away, her plans to return to Jordan changed when she visited Chicago and encountered the conditions facing women and girls in the Arab immigrant community.

    These women, as both Rasmea and Professor Nader testified, face the realities of harsh “external” treatment from a sexist and racist U.S. society, but also “internal” oppression within a community where they are often forced to be virtually cloistered. Seeing these dreadful  conditions, Rasmea stated, she  determined to become a naturalized U.S. citizen and devote her life to community service and organizing.

    The results by all accounts have been amazing. The large contingent of supporters who came to Detroit for the week of the trial included not only political activists from Chicago and Minneapolis, but also a substantial group of the immigrant women whose lives Rasmea has helped transform, and who clearly cherish her.

    That’s why the events immediately following the verdict have struck observers as particularly horrific. Judge Drain convened a brief “detention hearing” and two hours later emerged from his chambers to revoke Rasmea’s bond and to order her held until her sentencing, scheduled for mid-March 2015. She was then promptly handcuffed and shipped to the county jail in Port Huron, Michigan, some 400 miles from her Chicago community.

    This action throws some light on a question that defense attorney Deutsch could raise only in passing during his closing argument: Why the prosecution of Rasmea Odeh now? It came out in the course of the government’s case that Odeh’s immigration papers and arrest record had been under investigation for more than three years. Why the expenditure of such time and resources on a woman now 67 years old, undoubtedly an outspoken Palestinian activist but clearly no “threat” to anyone?

    As journalist Charlotte Silver reported in the online Electronic Intifada: “Odeh’s conviction carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison, as well as fines. Prosecutors indicated in court that they are likely to seek a prison term of no less than 21 months.”

    Imprisonment will also be followed by deportation proceedings (when Odeh would be close to 70 years old). Silver continued:

    “In granting the prosecution’s request to detain her immediately, Drain… invoked her attempt to escape from an Israeli prison in 1975 as proof that she poses a flight risk. The judge also asserted that Odeh ‘has no real ties to anyone in Chicago’ that would prevent her from fleeing the country before sentencing, a pointed dismissal of the dozens of friends and supporters who had travelled from Chicago to Detroit to attend pretrial hearings for over a year, and who were present every day during Odeh’s trial.”

    That the judge would say she has “no real ties” in Chicago, and the exclusion of evidence of torture that he originally deemed “credible,” itself lends credibility to the suggestion that Odeh’s case from the beginning has been a politically selective prosecution with some high-level string-pulling. An Israeli group called Shurat HaDin, linked to the Mossad spy agency, boasts that it obtained the 45-year-old documents that wound up in the hands of the U.S. Department of Justice.

    The case also appears to be linked to federal government attempts to haul activists from Chicago and Minneapolis before grand juries, which so far the activists have been able to successfully defy. 

    The immediate effort is to get Rasmea Odeh’s bond restored during her appeal. Dr. Fabri, the clinical psychologist and torture expert, warns that Odeh’s imprisonment now may trigger her PTSD. In addition, according to Hatem Abudayyeh of the Rasmea Defense Committee, Odeh is being held without her blood pressure medication in a prison that is miserably cold. 

    A motion has been filed to secure Rasmea’s release. According to Abudayyeh:

    “The government is required to respond to this motion by November 19, and after that, the judge could rule quickly. As we await that ruling, we need to keep up the pressure. Two hundred individual and organizational letters have already been submitted by supporters to Judge Drain, urging him to release Rasmea now, but there is still time to collect more. Use the sample letter here and send yours to justice4rasmea@uspcn.org right away.

    “[A] second motion asks the judge to set aside the jury’s November 10 verdict and either acquit her or schedule a new trial. It argues that there was not sufficient evidence presented at trial to prove her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and describes how Rasmea was denied her ‘right to present a complete defense.’ This motion puts on record the many injustices that led to the guilty verdict.

    “Some of you have already sent letters to Rasmea. She has called her Chicago colleagues from jail twice and written letters to them, and received a few visitors as well. Her spirits are high and she is looking forward to the next step in the fight for justice in her case. We encourage you to continue to send these letters to her. (Please remember that prison authorities will read all of these letters before Rasmea gets them.) Rasmieh Odeh #144979, St. Clair County Jail, 1170 Michigan. Port Huron, MI. 48060.”

    Rasmea Odeh’s life has been one of many trials, in Palestine, in exile and in America. At age 67, she deserves better treatment than this biased and selective prosecution. To follow the progress of this struggle, you can get updates at the U.S. Palestinian Community Network website, www.uspcn.org.    

     

    David Finkel is an editor of Against the Current and an active member of Jewish Voice for Peace in Detroit.

  • How Labor Can Save Itself

    ImageReview of The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers’ Movement,
    By Stanley Aronowitz, Verso, 2014.

    In 1955, when the country’s two contending labor federations merged to form the AFL-CIO, the combined organization represented more than one in three American workers. Unions then were strong enough, employers cautious enough and the economy juiced enough to create a working class that for the first time in history was for the most part not poor. Today the number of union members in the civilian labor force alone is just a hair above one in nine. The numbers are worse for private sector workers, where just one in 14 are unionized — this in a period when pay is frozen, real wages fall and an explosion of young people work at part-time or contingent jobs, when they work at all.

    The reasons for the collapse of the “House of Labor” are many: the failure of the postwar drive to organize the South, the purges at the onset of the Cold War of radicals who were often labor’s best organizers, insular union leaders who emphasized contract unionism, allowing employers free rein to run their own enterprises with no voice from workers. Union leaders even traded away the right to strike for more or less steady work. Then there’s the sheer power of U.S. capital, at home and unchained.

    Even in their debilitated state, unions remain by far the largest and most deep-pocketed institutions on the left and, in theory, have the potential to be the anchors of a broad-based, multiracial progressive movement. Yet, organizing the unemployed and making alliances with community groups and radicals are sadly rare. Even the support Occupy received from labor — which in New York City was a lot — was episodic. And the outstanding things Occupy did, including intervening in home foreclosures, are not yet on any union’s agenda.

    None of this is new to people who follow labor closely. What’s new is the way it is understood by Stanley Aronowitz, former factory worker, union organizer with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers unions, prolific author and sociology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. His latest book, The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers' Movement is a slim, compelling and highly readable treatment. It builds on work Aronowitz has done over the past four decades since the publication of his seminal work, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. This latest not only harks back to the labor movement’s glory days in the 1930s and charts the present hard times for working people, but also looks at a problematic future where he says mass unemployment will be the rule and union resistance extinct unless labor rediscovers its historic mission of fighting not just for its own static or shrinking memberships but for engaging every worker and every worker’s family in the fight.

    ‘Collective Begging’

    Aronowitz targets collective bargaining itself as the rock in the shoe. Contracts have their good points: they lock in wages and benefits, codify work rules and prescribe a transparent and agreed-upon due-process system for handling grievances, discipline and firings. In return, workers give up their birthright: the right to strike and challenge the employer’s arbitrary right to manage.

    In the postwar boom years such a strategy bought labor peace. With the flight of manufacturing jobs, first to the South, then to Mexico and overseas in search of a workforce that would work for almost nothing, good jobs at home shriveled and unions workers were forced to make major concessions on wages, benefits, working conditions and even job security. Collective bargaining today, Aronowitz says, “is now mostly a kind of collective begging.”

    For the author, the era of labor-management cooperation initiated by the New Deal and welcomed by unions has come to an end. At this point business isn’t even looking for lapdogs, let alone labor allies. It’s a brave new world where business-driven automation across many sectors of the economy is gaining speed and destroying more U.S. jobs at home than are outsourced overseas. Worst of all, the unions’ dependency on management circumscribes revolt. Labor-led struggles, such as they are, are either defensive efforts in support of Social Security and Medicare or parochial battles to preserve defined benefit pensions for government workers while private sector employees must rely on 401K plans that are contingent on a booming investment market that regularly goes through bust cycles.

    Act Boldly

    Aronowitz’s advice: encourage direct action in the workplace (such as the walkouts that galvanized the fast-food workers movement), don’t leave the fightback at protracted grievance handling and fight for a guaranteed basic income — even a $15 minimum wage is below the poverty level. He wants working people to intervene in the process of technological change by demanding control over its introduction and design, as well as a say in how the product or service is made. (The first step: recognizing that they currently have no choice in these matters.) He wants unions to stop thinking of workers as purely wage earners or their clients, but as partners in job and community struggles, among them “raise[ing] hell about the virtually closed-down state of mass transit.”

    More. Aronowitz wants the movement to “take seriously the question of workplace democracy,” to stop investing in polluting industries and take seriously that the war measures taken by the last two presidents are as much about spiking war production, with its fading hope of creating large numbers of new jobs, as with actual ongoing imperial ambitions.

    To its credit, the book reads like the words of a secular prophet, but without the hectoring or sanctimony. Where Aronowitz misses the target, and he doesn’t miss it much, is in not quantifying the trends to some of his more scarifying predictions. He first floated the idea of job shrinkage as the wave of the future in his co-authored 1995 book The Jobless Future, and the present book holds that the jobless wave morphed into a tsunami of lost work and blown opportunities for labor. He uses the specter of mass unemployment throughout, a problem that for him outstrips even the creation of a precariat, but he relies on anecdotal evidence for that, when a look at the last 20 years of Bureau of Labor Statistics data would better demonstrate actual job loss trends. Absent that, Aronowitz’s book is a wonder.

     

    Michael Hirsch is on the editorial board of New Politics. This article first appeared in The Indypendent, Issue #201, Oct. 27, 2014.

     

     

     

     

  • Kobanê, Turkey, and the Syrian Struggle

    An extended interview with Joseph Daher, a member of the Revolutionary Left Current in Syria, living in Switzerland, will be published in the forthcoming Winter 2015 issue of New Politics. Here we just post the questions dealing with Kobanê and Turkey. Daher is the writer and editor of Syria Freedom Forever, a blog dedicated to the struggle of the Syrian people in their uprising to overthrow the Assad authoritarian regime and to build a democratic, secular, socialist, anti-imperialist, and pro-resistance Syria. A Ph.D. student in Development, he works as an assistant at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He was interviewed in Geneva on October 22, 2014, by New Politics board member Riad Azar, with some email updates.

    New Politics. Regarding the recent events in Kobanê, you have reported on a statement by the YPG General Command (the acronym for the People's Protection Units, the currently recognized army of Syrian Kurdistan), and their fight against Islamic State (IS). The report details their determination to see the fight for Kobanê as the struggle for a free and democratic Syria. How do you read events in Kobanê and the struggle against IS, especially since the United States has not only been directly involved in airstrikes against IS, but has been sending supplies to Kurdish fighters?

    Joseph Daher. Let me begin by saying, as a question of principle, that we as the revolutionary left current in Syria support the self-determination of the Kurdish people, not only in Syria but also in Iraq, Turkey, and Iran as well, where they have been oppressed for decades. Further, in Syria we should not forget that the Assad regime developed a policy of colonization of northern and northeastern Syria, where the Kurds are very much present. We strongly condemn this. At the same time, we say also that we would like the Kurdish popular forces to become an ally with us, with the democratic and progressive forces of Syria, to build, and to struggle for democratic, socialist, and secular Syria. We are happy to note that the statement of the YPG Armed Forces goes in this direction.

    The latest events in Kobanê show once more that even though a U.S.-led coalition has recently strengthened its bombardments on IS forces, the intervention is still insufficient in many ways in protecting the Kurdish forces. The sending of arms is propaganda and solely to avoid a complete massacre of the Kurds. I think from the standpoint of the imperialist and sub-imperialist states, the issue of Rojava — which is the Kurdish autonomous region — is a problem and a challenge. These states only favor an autonomous region for Kurdish political forces that are submissive to imperialism, like Barzani in Iraq. Turkey does not want to see a challenge to the status quo that began with the 2013 peace process between the PKK and Turkey. If the PKK had bases in Syria, or ties with a sister organization — which is the YPG — it could challenge the status quo with Turkey. This is an important framework to think about when we speak about the U.S.-led intervention. Only now is the intervention taking a more direct form with some assistance given directly to the Kurdish forces by the United States. But it is very, very light. We will see what will happen. Of course, when Washington really wants to support an ally, like Israel — which is a surrogate of imperialism in the region — it really does work effectively.

    We should put Kobanê into a framework of the U.S.-led coalition, and also remind ourselves that the Rojava administration is a direct consequence of the Syrian revolutionary process. There is no way Kurdish autonomy could have existed without that process. Kurdish autonomy would never be given by the Assad regime, which is chauvinist and Arab nationalist. The Assad regime has been oppressing Kurdish national rights for forty years. It was the Syrian popular uprising that pushed the regime to withdraw from regions where the Kurds are a majority. And some very good things are happening in these areas, although we should not fetishize them; there are also problems. As a principle we support the self-determination of the people of an oppressed nation, but we can also criticize the political leadership. Just as we support the self-determination of the Palestinian people, but we should criticize very much the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. This does not stop us from supporting the self-determination of both peoples.

    What is happening in the Kurdish autonomous region is far from perfect. There is repression of Kurdish activists and forced conscription — people who refuse are imprisoned. Institutions that criticized the PKK were closed. The PYD — the Democratic Union Party, a Syrian Kurdish political party established in 2003 — like its mother organization the PKK, is not democratic in its internal functioning. We must remember for example the protest movements in late June 2013 in some cities of Rojava, such as Amouda and Derabissyat, against the repression by the PYD of Kurdish revolutionary activists.

    But at the same time you have some very positive aspects when it comes to the protection of religious minorities, strengthening women's rights, and secularism. In comparison with the popular councils that were established from below in the liberated areas of Syria by the revolutionaries, which are real example of self-administration, in the case of Rojava it is more a dynamic from above, led and controlled by the PYD. So again, these are the different aspects that you can say about this intervention in Kobanê and how I see it.

    But I also understand that the fall of Kobanê will not only be a big loss for Kurds, but for the Syrian revolution as a whole. Any kind of progress towards greater Kurdish self-determination is linked to the deepening of the Syrian revolutionary process. If that revolutionary process is defeated, you can be sure that the Assad regime and Turkey will do everything in their power to undermine any kind of Kurdish autonomy.     

    NP. The latest news speaks to Turkey's conflicting interests, on the one hand bombarding the PKK, while on the other also allowing Iraqi Kurds to cross the Syrian border to fight ISIS. How do you read Turkey's actions?

    JD. Turkey's actions are definitely linked to the peace process with the PKK that has been ongoing since 2013, and its will to control the PKK's process and Kurdish autonomy in southern Turkey. We are very far from peace, and we can see that curfews have been implemented for the first time since 1992 in the southern and eastern regions of Turkey that are majority Kurdish. Approximately 30-35 Kurdish protestors have been killed and a thousand arrested, so repression is still very much present. There is a fear in Turkey that the PKK might get strengthened by Kurdish autonomy in areas of Rojava.

    The Turks refused the passage of Kurdish PKK fighters to go to Kobanê, just as they wanted to kick out people that were affiliated with the Syrian PKK, and put them back in Syria. The Turkish government has also declared that the PKK are terrorists similar to IS, while saying that it did not understand why Kobanê was such a strategic city for the USA, a way to criticize the very small assistance given by the Americans to the PYD.

    So the solution was, in my view, to allow the passage of a symbolic number of 200 Iraqi peshmerga that are linked to Barzani, who is a Turkish ally. We should not forget that the biggest investor in northern Iraq and Kurdish Iraq is the Turks, and Barzani has been an ally of imperialism for decades. To let the Iraqi peshmerga pass was a way to deal with the Kobanê issue, because they do not want it to fall completely. The Turks wouldn't like to have IS on their border. But at the same time, today the Turkish government said that it was a bad idea for the Americans to send weapons through airdrops to the Kurdish forces in Kobanê. So we can see the double game. Certainly Turkey is not a friend of Kurdish self-determination and Kurdish popular forces. Exactly the opposite, they are an enemy and Turkey sees any kind of strengthening of Kurdish popular forces and Kurdish autonomy as a threat to its own political interests.

    NP. What would you like to see happen in Turkey?

    JD. I would like to see an uprising against the Turkish government and the Turkish army, both of which represent the different interests of the multiple factions of the bourgeoisie in Turkey. They both use forms of sectarianism and national chauvinism against religious and ethnic minorities, with the objective of dividing the popular classes. So I can only support my comrades and the left in Turkey to build a large and independent, democratic, social justice oriented organization, opposed to sectarianism and nationalism. The Turkish left must build a strong front, allied with the Kurdish minorities, to challenge the kind of bourgeois interests represented by the AKP and the army.

     

  • Midterm Elections, Direct Democracy, and Legitimacy

    If any group of United States citizens can claim a mandate in the midterm elections than it must be the millions of eligible voters who abstained from voting. It is a common excuse when discussing U.S. midterm elections to argue that voters do not participate in the numbers that accompany elections in a presidential election year. However, blaming the low 2014 election turn-out on a historical trend is incomplete and deceptive. There was new and identifiable voting trends in the 2014 midterm elections. According to The Center for American Progress, boycotting midterm elections is much more a function of disillusionment than the absence of a “wow” factor that the Presidential elections produce, “… because voting is an expression of hope, a belief that a citizen’s input into the system will yield social dividends. Or viewing it from another perspective, politicians rarely offer disillusioned citizens reasons for optimism. Lacking hope, those voters do not show up at the polls because they believe nothing politicians say or do makes life better for them.” The old and tired argument that ties the election directly to the President’s popularity polls or that of various candidates is simply not good political science.  

    In the last two presidential election cycles around 130 million citizens of voting age turned out. That was an electoral achievement as the poor, minorities, independents and the left-wing political base of the Democrats turned out in the confident hope that their vote was essential and worthy. In the last midterm elections four years ago 91 million voters cast ballots which was 42% of eligible voters—a historically high number. Yet, the 2014 midterms saw only 36% of eligible voters at the polls. This is a significant outlier considering the relative numbers of eligible voters who refused to participate and stay home. Only 83 million voters cast ballots. As a result, the Republicans won the senate and increased their advantage in the house in an election year that saw the lowest turn-out since 1942 when the US was in the middle of World War II. This is clearly not a mandate for the Republicans and hardly a significant rejection for the Democrats. It is merely a triumph for the two-party or duopoly system which managed another theft of the election while over 60% of eligible voters refrained from voting.  Election boycotts and voter disillusionment was a palpable element to the elections. Sixty percent of eligible US citizens indirectly voted for “none of the above” or rather were inordinately disillusioned and voted for systemic change instead of rubber stamping the usual suspects. Hardly a triumph for US style democracy and never a vote of confidence for a government that cannot even now claim legitimacy. Election boycotts are a tradition in so-called third-world countries where frequently the results are pre-determined by fascist regimes and rigged elections of one candidate or one party preferred by the elite class often with the interference of the US. Does this sound familiar? This is exactly what the recent elections in the US mirror.

    Also, we cannot forget the efforts of the neo-cons to prevent willing voters the chance to cast a ballot by creating impediments to voting by implementing barriers much like we saw in the 1960’s. According to Danielle C. Belton of The Root, “…the reason so many of the working poor don’t vote is that certain politicians have made sure it’s as inconvenient as possible for them.” Indeed, this election cycle saw several barriers to voting, including long waits, strict ID laws, and the potential for increased use of provisional ballots among minorities. Belton concludes that if voting were easier and more egalitarian, politicians would “suddenly have more citizens to answer to—citizens who want different things and can’t be ignored.”

    Any way one looks at the 2014 midterm elections, the results are pathetic and a result of unprecedented spending by the rich, corporate influence, and most likely many eligible voters’ rejection of the system itself. Hence, the lowest turnout since 1942 hints at an illegitimate government. The legitimacy of any government comes from electoral participation in the form of individual engagement, significant majorities, the creation and maintenance of survival strategies, and a set of clear and acceptable ideas in the form of platform that the electorate can identify and accept. The candidate or party must set forth a strategy that can be approved or rejected. This is exactly what didn’t happen. The most significant question championed by the mass media for the mid-term elections was approval or disapproval of the Obama presidency. This is simply not true according to exit polls but a successful ploy by the Republicans and some Democrats. It was more an approval or disapproval of the whole governmental system and its ability to provide a strong state within a strong society. (See Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-SocietyRelations and state capabilities in the Third World 1988).

    Leaving the debacle of the 2014 midterms aside, the most promising results of the elections was a trend towards a more direct democratic society. “This tired argument, that direct democracy is tantamount to “mob rule,” is nothing more than archaic bourgeois propaganda. The arguments which, after little support if any at all is provided, conclude that “those who own the country ought to govern it,” as John Jay opined, or that the system should “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” rabble masses, to quote James Madison, the main framer of the United States constitution, are clearly exploitive, authoritarian and vulgar apologetics for elite, highly concentrated centers of power and wealth, whereby said centers of wealth and power are protected over and against the “rabble masses,” who are “too stupid to govern.”

    Direct Democracy is gaining traction as referendums and initiatives are forming what Jefferson and the Greeks before him called “pure democracy”. This is a significant development across the U.S. as communities; individual states and municipalities bypass the local legislatures and vote on such social questions as medicinal marijuana, gay and lesbian rights, minimum wages, and taxation levels. As the Denver Green Party reports, “One interesting twist we saw nationwide was the approval of progressive policy positions from ballot initiatives, including four blood-red states passing minimum-wage hikes at more than 50% approval at least (Alaska, Arkansas, South Dakota and Nebraska). While Massachusetts voted in a Republican governor, they also approved mandatory paid sick leave. Similarly, Amendment 67 (“personhood”) was soundly rejected by Colorado voters at 65% to 35%, which had to include Republican voters as well in order to reach that vote total.  It would appear that Republican voters are not quite the social conservative, anti-women people that the Udall campaign painted them to be. This would also explain why Bob Beauprez was basically non-committal about any social issue, saying that his personal views went one way but that he would respect the law.” Although, it is discouraging that some legislatures, recognizing usurpation of their powers, quickly voted to require super-majorities to pass these referendums. Florida’s legislature is one example. The majority of voters approved the legalization of medicinal marijuana with a 58% approval vote but the initiative failed due to the required super-majority (60%) laid on it by the legislature. More of this legislative behavior can be expected as support for direct democracy grows across the nation.

    As I mentioned above, the legitimacy of a political body whether it be the entirety of a national government, individual state or a local board of commissioners is dependent on various factors. The midterm elections certainly brought this discussion to the forefront. The historically low level of voter engagement whether it be registered voters or non-registered voters (both eligible voters) was a particularly grievous hit to the perceived legitimacy of the entire body politic. The end round use of direct democracy as a mechanism to establish political policy certainly hints at the dissatisfaction of voters and their inability to cause political change through representative government.

    The use of the Republican and Democratic parties of the popularity of the president as a rallying cry while never supplying a coherent platform for voters to approve or disapprove shows the disdain politicians have for voter intelligence. The voters were never given a chance to choose based on policy differences among the two parties. This is significant in that the two-party system has melded into a uniparty. Policy differences are slight and obfuscated for purposes of elections based on personality cults and attack advertisements. Corporate money and influence through lobbyists gives the elite class the ability to write their own policy which becomes law through the weak government.

    This leads us to the ability of the government to address the needs of the governed through recognizable survival strategies. According to the weak state, strong society theory of Migdal, the US government is unable to perform its task under the constitution. Clearly, the midterm elections showed us that the various governmental bodies are unable to respond to the electorate and the country as a whole. The governed are beginning to use direct democracy to address policy themselves while the Congress and state legislatures are well behind the progressive choice of its constituency.

    The time for a more direct, socialist democracy is here. It is clearly evident that representative democracy in a world of corporate bullying and unlimited moneyed interests is unable to provide for the welfare of its citizens and provide even a semblance of policy choice. As evident through the nation-wide use of initiatives and referendums, perhaps the political divisions in U.S. society are not as strong as we are lead to believe. Many suggest that voting on policy through the internet, where many more voters can express their choice, is the future of democracy.

    The U.S. government has lost its legitimacy and hence its ability to govern at all. In the face of weak and corrupt political representation we must revolt by working to set aside ineffectual representative democracy. Continuing the trend towards community initiatives and referendums is a strategy that can remedy a weak government. These initiatives are a hint of a more socialist, inclusive governmental system that can provide systemic change. Wherever direct democracy takes root in the United States, perhaps we have a chance of taking back what representative democracy has stolen—that most cherished right of political speech.

  • Global Capitalism and Pathogenic Environments: Is palm oil monoculture responsible for the ongoing Ebola outbreak?

    The Ebola pandemic, which has already caused the death of more than 5000 people in West Africa, could kill more than 90,000 people, just in the Liberian county of Montserrado, between now and 15 December, if measures taken in the affected regions are not massively increased over the next few days.[i]

    Certainly, nothing suggests that the measures taken so far will have a significant impact on the epidemic. In any case, is it really possible to put an end to a health crisis such as this without addressing its social and environmental causes?  We must adopt a broader approach and learn the essential lessons from this catastrophe, in particular from an ecosocialist point of view. 

    I will start by summarizing five arguments, presented in more detail in previous articles published on the New Politics website (September 6, and October 11, 2014).

    1.       The transmission of the virus from animals to humans (spillover) is related to qualitative changes in the regional environment resulting from deforestation, exploitation of natural resources (minerals, wood etc), land grabbing and from the rise of agricultural monoculture for export, phenomena all of which have been aggravated in the context of global warming.

    2.       The increased exposure of village communities to this new pathogenic agent results from accumulation by dispossession which increasingly dominate peripheral capitalism, and is characterized by accelerating privatization of the commons (enclosure), war over the control of raw materials, and the uprooting and forced migration of populations.

    3.       The failure to control the pandemic results from the collapse of health systems and of public services in general in the countries concerned which is a direct result of the imposition of brutal structural adjustment programs at the expense of the basic social responsibilities of states.

    4.       The neocolonial alliance between powerful foreign investors and local bourgeoisies is designed to guarantee their exclusive control of rents. Associated with this is authoritarianism and repression of popular resistance, which has given rise to profound suspicion among the population of local leaders and foreign actors. This is the political context today that undermines all attempts to control the epidemic.

    5.       The pursuit of profit that dominates the pharmaceutical industry paralyses research on poor countries’ health problems to the extent that they do not represent a threat of a global pandemic or a risk of bioterrorism. This is why there is no vaccine against, nor effective treatment for, Ebola, nearly 40 years after its first appearance in central Africa.

    Scientific studies published over the last weeks, in particular in the area of biology, epidemiology and human ecology, have refined our understanding of the links between the development of intensive agriculture for export under the pressure of global market forces, in particular after the financial crisis of 2007-2008, and the rise of the Ebola pandemic. As a general point, these studies suggest that financial circuits of capital open the way for the emergence of extremely dangerous pathogenic agents, particularly in countries of the periphery, which suffer the immediate social effects of the current process of accumulation by dispossession. We will consider here some of the major consequences of these trends.

    Ecosystems and epidemics

    We know that the Ebola virus has been present in West Africa for several years, firstly, because antibodies against several of its variants were found in blood samples taken in Sierra Leone 5 years ago; more recently, because the first analyses of the genome of the strain that has been active for over 10 months, allowed its appearance in the region to be dated to the middle of the year 2000.[ii] Given this scenario, why would occasional infections with this pathogen, not diagnosed as such until the end of December 2014, suddenly produce an epidemic? Because, according to a recent study, “changes in policy or socioeconomic structure, including the economics driving plantation farming, can ‘desterilize’ a natural or human ecosystem in which a pathogen has been largely held in check at a low-level equilibrium value, or simply had not previously evolved”[iii].

    Traditional, smallholder agriculture, to the contrary, because of its diversity in time, space and type, presents numerous physical and functional obstacles (that statisticians call « stochastic noises ») to the exponential multiplication of many pathogens. For each ecosystem, researchers are trying to identify, the kinds of socioeconomic changes that facilitate the evolution and propagation of pathogenic agents. For example, it seems that the commercialization of fruit tree culture and the effects of government policies leading to the dispossession of rural communities, have encouraged increased density of humans and animals around export cultures, as well as the multiplication of contacts among and between species. This increased concentration of the virus in a confined space encouraged its spread in line with the “Allee effect” (which establishes a direct relationship between density and growth of a population).

    This model suggests the possibility that under certain conditions the “friction” of an ecosystem, which impedes the circulation of pathogens, can suddenly be reduced. With this new “fluidity”, emergency interventions are no longer able to contain spread of the virus and ensure its spontaneous regression. From then on, the struggle against the pandemic cannot be managed without structural measures aimed at restoring “viscosity” of the system.[iv] The control of a pandemic implies the capacity to intervene in the ongoing transformations in agriculture, forestry and mining production that are taking place under the pressure of the global market.  Such a policy requires conscious action on the part of the affected populations to resist the forces of the international market from a social and ecological perspective.

    “Tracking disease emergence along circuits of capital”

    The bio-ecologist Robert G. Wallace (University of California, Irvine), among others, promotes the concept of “Structural One Health”. These researchers advocate the development of “a new science tracking disease emergence along circuits of capital”.[v] For example, if Ebola has been confined to the wild over these years, the end of this latency period and the uncontrollable epidemic that it has provoked, could be due to significant changes in the ecosystems of West Africa, relating to changes in production methods of palm oil. The first foyer of contagion, in a village close to Guéckédou, is indeed situated in a densely forested zone containing a mosaic of villages and plantations all of the same type. We know that the oil palm attracts large, fruit-eating bats, which are the favorite hosts of the virus. These bats can then transmit the virus to humans through urine, excrement or saliva, which means that the consumption of bush meat is not necessarily implicated. The neighboring region of Kailahun, (County of Lofa) Liberia, has similar characteristics, made worse still by massive increases in land grabbing [vi]

    Of course, the oil palm tree has been exploited in its natural form and cultivated for hundreds of years in West Africa. However, under international demand, its fallow cycles have progressively decreased, from 20 years in the 1930s, to less than 10 years in the year 2000, resulting in increased plantation density. In Guinea, the cultivation of these trees has expanded recently: 37,000 acres will allow the production of 84,000 tons of palm oil by 2015.[vii] And although the traditional smallholder sector continues to dominate this activity, the Guinean Oil Palm and Rubber company (SOGUIPAH), which is state owned, has served as the transmission belt for foreign markets; through the introduction of a higher yield hybrid variety, the seeds of which can only be obtained through the company,[viii] land requisition and eviction of tenants, multiplication of farming contracts, rationalized production lines, and police interventions to repress popular resistance.

    “Development aid” has encouraged these trends with the European Bank of Investment recently funding a quadrupling of the refining capacity of SOGUIPAH. From now on, under threat of imprisonment, small producers are not allowed to extract oil using traditional methods. These developments result in the privatization of the commons; increasing obstacles to the free exploitation of natural palm oil trees or the development of small scale private slash-and-burn agriculture. So while there are, as yet, no large multinational operations in Guinea, as there are in Liberia or Sierra Leone,  “oil palm there represents a classic case of creeping consolidation, enclosure, commoditization, and capitalization curtailing artisanal production. So while no private companies presently plants oil palm in Guinea, by a relational geography the effects of the global market upon the local agro-ecology appear to be felt already”. [ix]

    The violence of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is merely the reflection – in terms of health – of the violence that drives the destruction of ecosystems (deforestation), the dispossession of rural communities (privatization), the extreme degradation of working conditions in export sectors (super-exploitation), but also the dismantling of the last remnants of social protection that were set up by states (structural adjustment plans). It is an indication of the price that global capitalism will force people to pay, in particular the poorest and most vulnerable, for the ever increasing commodification of their economies and the increasing environmental damage that it generates. One more reason to fight capitalism in the name of an eco-socialist project, which cannot be regarded as a “luxury” for the North but as an urgent necessity for the whole world.  

    [i] Fishman, D. et Tuite, A.R., “Ebola: No Time to Waste », The Lancet, October 24, 2014.

    [ii] Schoepp, R. J. et al., “Undiagnosed Acute Viral Febrile Illnesses, Sierra Leone”, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 20, 2014, p. 1176-1182; Gire, S. K. et al., “Genomic Surveillance Elucidates Ebola Virus Origin and Transmission During the 2014 Outbreak”, Science, 345, September 12, 2014, p. 1369-1372.

    [iii] Wallace, R. G. et al., “Did Ebola Emerge in West Africa by a Policy-Driven Phase Change in Agroecology?”, Environment and Planning, 46, 2014 (released on-line on October 20, 2014).

    [iv] Osterholm, M. T., “What We Need to Fight Ebola”, Washington Post, August 1st, 2014.

    [v] Wallace, R. G. et al., “The Dawn of Structural One Health: A New Science Tracking Disease Emergence Along Circuits of Capital”, Social Science and Medicine, 2014 (available on-line).

    [vi] Fouladbash, L., Agroforestry and Shifting Cultivation in Liberia: Livelihood Impact, Carbon Tradeoffs, and Socio-political Obstacles, PhD Thesis, Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, 2014.

    [vii] Carrere, R., Oil Palm in Africa: Past, Present and Future Scenarios, World Rainforest Movement, Montevideo, 2010.

    [viii] In case of breach of contract, the use of seeds from the first generation of trees results in a 40% decrease in yield  (Delarue, J. and Cochet, H., “Systemic Impact Evaluation: A Methodology for Complex Agricultural Development Projects. The Case of a Contract farming Project in Guinea”, European Journal of Development Research, 25, 2013, p. 778-796).

    [ix] Wallace et al., «Did Ebola Emerge… », art. cit.

     

  • Brazil’s Party of Socialism and Freedom, PSOL: Another Way of Doing Politics

    Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT) won Brazil’s presidential election on October 26, meaning that when her term ends her party will have held the nation’s top office for a remarkable sixteen years, longer than any party in Brazilian history. Rousseff began as part of an armed revolutionary guerrilla organization during the dictatorship from 1964-1985, then helped found the Democratic Workers Party (PDT), and only joined the PT in 2001. The PT of the 1980s and 1990s represented the political expression of militant labor and social movements tending toward socialism, yet today the PT is the establishment. And now others are attempting to build a new revolutionary movement to its left.

    Tremendous opposition to Brazil’s PT establishment has come from both left and right, as seen in the June 2013 demonstrations that swept the country. And in the October 2014 elections, both the left and especially the right grew as a result. The more conservative Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) succeeded in harvesting much of the discontent that expressed itself in the tremendous demonstrations of June 2013, other rightwing parties have also grown and a number of far right candidates have been elected. Thus we see a polarization of Brazilian society with gains for both the far right and the far left.

    On the left, the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL) proved most successful, especially in Rio de Janeiro where it emerged as a real electoral force to the left of the PT. There are also at least two other important far left parties, the United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU) and the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), though they are both less significant electoral forces, the former having received 188,473 votes and the latter 66,615 votes in the recent national election. The PSTU is a more important force in the labor unions, while PSOL has deeper roots in other social movements. There have been proposals for electoral fronts of all three parties in the past, but in 2010 and 2014 PSOL was not an attractive electoral ally because it was too weak, so PSTU ran its own candidates. With PSOL’s strength in this election, a left electoral front is more likely, as has already happened in some states.

    This article is a companion to another that analyzes the Brazilian elections which will appear in the January issue of New Politics. We look here at PSOL through the experiences of some of its leaders and activists.

    The Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL), a leftwing breakaway from the Workers Party (PT) that has governed Brazil since 2003, did quite well in the October 2014 election, especially in the State of Rio de Janeiro. The PSOL increased its Congressional representatives nationally from 2 to 3 and state representatives from 3 to 5. The PT’s candidate for governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Tarciscio Motta, won almost 10 percent of all votes cast. Running for Congress, Chico Alencar was victorious with nearly 200,000 votes as was Marcelo Freixo who received almost 350,000. Luciana Genro, PSOL’s presidential candidate won 1,745,470 votes, compared to the party’s candidate in 2010 who won 1,144,216. The election results make PSOL the most electorally significant party of the par left. Even more important, however, PSOL used the elections to organize and win new activists to its project.

    PSOL represents a different way of doing politics on the far left in Brail. Unlike most other organizations on the far left, PSOL does not see itself as a party in the Leninist mold, but is rather a pluralistic organization that contains several different political tendencies with different histories. While PSOL has its own clear organization and political program, its members strongly identify with the labor and social movements and feel a strong loyalty to them. It is this melding with the movements that allowed PSOL to have greater success in the spontaneous upheavals of June 2013 and to make a strong showing in the October 2014 elections. While in Brazil in August, we had an opportunity to talk with PSOL leaders activists in the enormous metropolis of São Paulo, in the magnificently beautiful city of Rio de Janeiro, and in the historic capital of African Brazil, Salvador. Their biographies help to illustrate the pluralistic, multi-tendency character of PSOL.

    João Machado – The Trotskyists in PSOL

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    To better understand PSOL, we asked several of PSOL’s leaders and activists to talk with us about their personal histories, their work in the party and in the movement. We start with João Machado of São Paulo, who for decades has been in the leadership of the Trotskyist, Fourth International tendency in Brazil, because he and his comrades were so influential in both the PT and then in the creation of PSOL. Machado, one of the central leaders of Insurgência, a tendency within PSOL, was born in 1951 in the state of Minas Gerais. He first became politically active in 1965 at the age of 14 during the period of the military dictatorship as part of Catholic youth group led by priest who organized political discussions. When he was 18 in 1969 Machado had entered the university where he became a Marxist and got involved with a group of people who formed the group Democracia Socialista.

    “We had the idea that we in Democracia Socialista could fight for the leadership of the PT until the early 1990s,” says Machado. “The PT was moving to the left throughout that period.” Then Lula and the PT began to turn in a more conservative direction. “Lula’s government never broke with the bourgeoisie. They wanted to get along with the bourgeoisie while introducing some improvements in the social situation. For example, Lula’s Finance Minister, Antonio Palocci, adopted neoliberal programs, while the government also increased social programs.”

    Machado explains how the DS could in the 1990s have had such hopes of possibility winning leadership in the PT and transforming it into a revolutionary party. “We had an alliance between Articulação Esquerda [Lula’s tendency] and the DS which gave us a majority in the leadership of the PT. Lula wanted to base the party on a broader multi-class coalition and he was in favor of more conservative programs. He was very shrewd would have others present his ideas and when he lost, it didn’t hurt him. During that period Lula often lost votes. We on the left were often able to defeat him up until the early 2000s.” But by 2003 when it was clear that Lula had moved to the right, the situation could no longer be maintained. DS militants and others on the left criticized and voted against Lula and his allies, and were eventually expelled to found PSOL.

    Why, we asked Machado, has the Brazilian capitalist class now become so hostile to Lula, Rousseff and the Workers Party even though they adopted the pro-capitalist neoliberal model? “Under Lula and under Dilma there was an attempt to increase the power of the state in its dealings with big capital, and it was this that led the bourgeoisie to decide to stop collaborating with the PT. They have never felt that the PT was theirs. Now they feel that they could have a president and political party which directly represented their interests.”

    Returning to PSOL, Machado says, “We are aware that back in the 1980s the Workers Party was founded by grassroots movement, rank-and-file movements of workers, of people on the left, and of Christian groups, both Catholic and Protestant—while PSOL was formed in the early 2000s by an expelled senator and expelled deputies. That is, it began with a parliamentary orientation and with positions which were not as far left as those of PT at the time of its founding. PSOL faced a greater parliamentary temptation. Its virtue is PSOL has not been consolidated, it can improve.”

    Machado is optimistic about PSOL’s future. “We believe that the left opposition is well positioned to be able to dispute power with the PT. We have better politics on environmentalism, and we are anti-bureaucratic, opposed to the bureaucracy not only of the PT and other parties, but also to the bureaucracy of the labor unions.”

    Leo Lince – From the Communist Party to PSOL

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    Others came to the PSOL by other paths. Leo Lince, a leading figure in PSOL’s large Rio da Janeiro organization, is a close advisor to Chico Alencar, a PSOL Congressman. Lince told us, “I was born in Goiás, Brazil in 1947. I became a student activist in the university in Goiás, joining the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB) in 1964—the year the military took power—and  was involved in clandestine activity during the period of the military dictatorship. The PCB was a small, illegal party, a party that didn’t have even one congressman. I was arrested in 1968 at the age of 21 and spent one year in prison. I then went into exile and from 1970 to 1972 lived in the Soviet Union. In Moscow I studied at the university but also attended a Communist training school. When I returned to Brazil there were only two legal political powers in the country: the military and the Party of the Democratic Movement of Brazil (PMBD) that had been established by the dictatorship in 1966. While still a Communist, I became active in the PMBD as a way of doing politics.

    “I became part of a group within the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB), a group of about 200 Communists who left the PCB and entered the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) in 1989. The group was led by Leandru Konder, a noted intellectual, and Carlos Nelson Coutinho, a longtime PCB leader. That same group, which formed a tendency within the Workers Party (PT), later left to join in the foundation of the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL) in 2004, participating in gathering the 500,000 petition signatures needed to create an official, electoral party. I became part of the national leadership of the PSOL.”

    Asked why he and his comrades left the PT, Lince explains, “In 2002 the Lula government began to move away from the PT’s positions, for example on the question of social security. When they spoke out on this issue, a number of PT leaders and activists—such as Luciana Genro, who was the party’s presidential candidate in October 2014,—were expelled. There were waves of expulsions. We left and formed the PSOL in 2004. Within PSOL there are groups that have come out of the armed organizations, the Trotskyists, various Marxist-Leninists, Luxemburgists, and the believers in the Theology of Liberation.” Lince does not belong to any of the PSOL’s internal tendencies; he is an independent.

    Brazil today, says Lince, is in a transition period that requires a different way of doing politics. “Hannah Arendt once said, ‘We are between “no more” and “not yet”.’ We are in a time of movement, of dislocation, not just a time of change, but a change of time. The events of 2013 were an expression of this transition period.”

    “We saw in the protests of 2013” says Lince, “a complete rejection of parties, though interestingly not of PSOL, and in particular not a rejection of Chico Alencar . One of the reasons for this was that PSOL didn’t try to put itself forward as the leader of the movement, with huge banners with its name on them, but rather entered modestly as part of the movement. In the book that Chico has just written—A Rua, A Naçao, e o Sonho: uma reflexão as novas geraçoes (The Street, the Nation, and the Dream: A Reflection of the New Generatins)—there is a programmatic section. He takes the terms for this section directly from the signs carried by protestors in June 2013.”

    From the Morenistas to PSOL – Ana Carvalhaes

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    Ana Carvalhaes was born in São Paulo and became active at the age of 17 during the last years of the military dictatorship. She became a journalist working for several important Brazilian newspapers while also earning a master’s degree in political economy. She joined the organization of the followers of the Argentine Trotskyist Nahuel Moreno, the group today called the United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU), and worked with them for many years. Through her journalism and her political work she spent five years living in the mining region of Bolivia (in Oruro and Llallagua), a year in Peru, and six months living in Argentina, and as a result of her journalistic and political work speaks not only Portuguese, but also Spanish and English fluently. A group from the Morenista Trotskyists of which she was formerly a member broke away from the main body in 2002 and became some of the founders of PSOL.

    We asked Carvalhaes about the relationship between Insurgência and PSOL. “Insurgência is the result of a merger between several different groups and is affiliated with the Fourth International. We are nearly 700 strong in Rio de Janeiro and play an important role in the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL). We have a representative in the city government. We also have influence in northeastern Brazil, in the city of Fortaleza where we also have a representative in government there, João Alfredo.”

    When asked about PSOL’s internal life, Carvalhaes explained, “We have in PSOL three tendencies. The first is on the right is called Popular Socialist Action (APS) and they are Stalinists. They are at the moment the leaders of the coalition that dominates the party as a result of a 51/49 vote at our last convention. The second is on the left and includes Insurgência. The third is MES, the Movement of the Socialist Left which is also affiliated with the FI as an observer. Our presidential candidate in 2014, Luciana Genro, comes from that tendency which is strong in the South.”

    What does Carvalhaes think about being a member of a pluralistic, multi-tendency party like PSOL? “With all its problems,” says Carvalhaes, “PSOL is richer than any centralized or vertical party. Reaching any decision or taking any action is difficult. We have to negotiate constantly with all the other groups. But this is a far more interesting and richer process.”

    We asked Carvalhaes how she saw the enormous social explosion of the June Days of 2013. “The movement,” said Carvalhaes, “was the result of discontent as a result of economic conditions. The government of Lula and of Dilma, that PT government, had succeeded in improving conditions a little, a very little. But now the people said, ‘We want more.’ We have jobs and we have wages, but we don’t want to pay the high bus fare. One of the slogans of the movement was, ‘It’s not about the 20 cents.’ But it was about the 20 cents. People said FIFA (the World Cup) needs us, but we have needs too, we need health care and education.

    “We should be clear that the PT has not overcome the national scandal of inequality. Brazil has a long history going back to the Portuguese conquest of violence, oppression, and inequality, and those issues continue. And inequality is racial as well. We can say that Brazil has a history of ‘negotiated oppression’ that arose from the Portuguese conquers dealings with the women that they took to bed with them. We have a history of oppression that is based on class, race, and gender violence.

    “So we had this social explosion against everything: against the government, the politicians, the labor unions, against all parties, against us. But, interestingly when Chico Alencar or Marcelo Freixo went to the demonstrations, they were embraced. People loved them because they were known and they were there.

    “People who are not on the left think that it was a just a youth movement, but it was also a workers movement. At the end of June, a lot of middle class people pulled out of the movement and only the working class was left.

    “It’s important to understand that in addition to the broad movement in June there were also several strikes. The primary teachers went on strike for months. It was a strike against the mayor of Rio that involved about 10,000 teachers. All of the left groups became involved in it. It was the first such strike in thirty years. There were many demonstrations of thousands of teachers and their supporters and there was solidarity from teachers all over the country. The strike resulted in a draw, but there had been a very large movement.

    “Then there was the strike of the garis, that is, the garbage collectors. That strike took place in February during Carnival and the garbage was piled high in the streets, and the wealthy were surprised that the general population supported the strikers.

    “This was followed in May be a strike in the subway system that moves three million people each day. When you shut down the subway, you shut down Rio. The movement was severely repressed with 70 workers being fired and fines against the union.”

    Anarchists represented a significant current during the June Days. We asked Carvalhaes how Insurgência and PSOL related to the anarchists. “We defend the anarchists who have been criminalized by the government. There are 23 anarchists who were arrested and put on trial. We believe it is wrong to criminalize them and we participate in the movement in their defense. But, we don’t agree with their way of behaving. They go to a movement meeting, but they don’t feel any sense of responsibility to the collective. They leave and do whatever they want.”

    In June 2013 there were eight million people in the streets—today Brazil is quiet. What, we asked Carvalhaes, happened to that movement? “The movement in general retreated,” she told us. “A part of the movement went to the ultra-left, to the anarchists and the black bloc. A small part went to the socialist left, to groups like the Unified Socialist Workers Party (PTSU) and to Insurgência. The June events and the rise in the class struggle are what made it possible for the various groups to come together to form Insurgência. At one point we had a youth camp (Rua campamento) with over 700 young people.”

    Asked about the state of social movements today, Carvalhaes told us, “The LGBT movement is the largest and the most important social movement in Brazil and it is really impressive. The environmental movement and the women’s movement are both quite small. Though it’s interesting that the young women who were involved the June movement are, we might say, unconscious feminists. For example, they don’t allow men to take advantage of them, and if a man does something in appropriate, they push back.”

    From the Brazilian Socialist Party to PSOL – Claudio Serricchio

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    Claudio Serricchio, who works for the national oil company Petrobras and is also an environmental activist. He was a member of the Partido Socialista Brasileira (PSB), then led by Eduardo Campos, before becoming involved in PSOL. We asked him about the Workers Party environmental policies. “When Lula first became president, he appointed a wonderful group of socialist environmentalists, but within a year the group was paralyzed because of the power of economic interests,” said Serricchio.

    “The Lula government dealt with the problems of drought on northeast region, imposing a very expensive and questionable watershed transference project from the San Francisco River. There were many investigations and billions were spent, but they did not deal with the issues. The Lula government permitted the introduction of transgenic soy beans and corn for the agro-export business. We see the use of pesticides and insecticides on an enormous scale. Lula permitted the expansion of the nuclear program and the planning of construction of five new nuclear plants and that was only stopped because of Fukushima. The PT has gone backwards on environmental issues,” he said.

    Serricchio gave expression to the frustration felt by so many in Brazil. “As we saw in the demonstrations of 2013, one of the fundamental slogans was ‘Não nos representam.’ The legislators don’t represent us. We are at a complete impasse. They pass laws only for themselves. They don’t pass laws to advance social welfare, health, or education. The big agricultural and pharmaceutical interests are against measures to improve the environmental health of society. We see no solutions at present. People talk about new majorities, but at the moment the people see no way to advance their interests through politics.

    We also have the problem of environmental groups that get money from corporations, so that they are more concerned with the money they get from the corporation than they are with the environment. Today it is interesting that the public prosecutors and the environmental courts are more powerful than the environmental movement.

    Guilherme Moreira da Silva – A Young, Afro-Brazilian Oil Worker Leader

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    Guilherme Moreira da Silva at the age of 31 is the leader of a local oil workers union, part of the national petroleum works union (SINDEPETRO), in Salvador, Bahia. His father worked at the airport and his mother was a homemaker. He was born in Fortaleza where he went to school and met his wife Lidianny in high school. Later Guilherme went to college and studied mechanical engineering and then got a job for the state oil company (Petrobras).

    Moreira’s union represents eighty technical workers in the State of Bahia where they work in the construction of refineries in the petro-chemical industry.

    Moreira told us, “The Brazilian labor movement is very fragmented. It is divided into several centrais (labor federations) and many of these federations have a negative impact on the workers. The most important federation is the Sole Confederation of Workers (CUT) which is affiliated with the Workers Party (PT), but it has become very bureaucratized. Then there is the Confederation of Brazilian Workers (CTB) which is affiliated with the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). The different groups on the left are involved in these federations, especially the more leftwing federations, and in their affiliated unions.

    “First, there is CONLUTAS in which the Unified Socialist Worker Party (PSTU) affiliated with the Morenista international (LIT) is involved as is the Left Socialist Movement (MES), a faction of the PSOL. Second, there is the Intersindical which has about 40 affiliated unions in which the Insurgência faction of PSOL is involved. Third, there is the Corriente National de Trabahlo or CONAT.” While there have been attempts over the last five years to merge the leftwing federations, but they have failed. Still Moreira believes it’s important to promote unity in the labor left. “In my own Petrobras union, the left—PSOL, PSTU and the CUT left—put up a common chapa or slate. We believe that we can only develop mutual trust and confidence when those on the labor left work together.”

    Asked about the state of class struggle in Brazil, Moreira told us, “The level of class struggle was very low until last June 2013, then the level of struggle increased but it has been very uneven. The older industrial groups—metal workers and bank workers, for example—have found it harder to mobilize. They have been slow to act. Transportation workers, teachers and others have been more active, fighting both against their employers and their union leaders who have failed to take up their issues.

    “In my union and in others, the government’s tactic has been to draw the workers into negotiations, offering them a small raise together with a one-time-only bonus, in our case a bonus of BR$5,000. The bank workers were offered something similar, though as a profit-sharing scheme, a small percentage of the bank’s profits. Union members are reluctant to be drawn into fights because they have no confidence in their leaders.”

    Moreira is also involved in Brazil’s Movimento Negro, the Black Movement, which is strong in the state of Bahia where he lives. “Bahia is the state with the greatest black population and Salvador the city with the greatest percentage of black population,” Moreira told us. “I work in the Institute Búzios which brings together the black movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement. We identity with the Salvador Revolt [also known as the Malê Revolt or Great Revolt] of 1835 that was an expression of the influence of the French Revolution on the African descent population of Bahia.

    “Color has an impact. Brazil has an ideology of ‘racial democracy,’ though in practice such a democracy doesn’t exist. For example, in many of the ‘shoppings’ they do not employ black or brown workers, so we have protests to demand that they hire brown and black workers. The PT government has a Ministry for Racial Equality and they have appointed a very famous and well known black person to head that, but the ministry does not have a very large budget or strong administration. We mostly see photo-ops not action.

    “There are racial quotas in the schools and in competition for public employment. When those quotas first went into effect about ten years ago, suddenly many more people said that they were black.

    “The areas where the black movement is strongest are Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, and Sao Paulo. There was a black movement in the 1960s and 1970s that created the Movimento Negro Unificado, the Unified Black Movement, and, while that still exists, it is not as strong as it once was. Five years ago there was a National Congress of the Black Movement that brought together many organizations including religious organizations that practice the condomblé religion and black women’s groups. Unfortunately the administration succeeded in dividing that group, winning some to work with the government.

     “The Moviment Negro is an organization for formação política, that is, political education and training. We educate about history and current issues of the black movement. We are currently planning to participate in the Second International March against the Genocide of Black People. Our movement has been influenced by the Black Panthers in the United States and by other experiences in other countries.

    “The Movimento Negro is made up of diverse groups. Most are not socialists and some believe that one can abolish racism without abolishing capitalism. We socialist believe that we must abolish capitalism in order to abolish racism.”

    PSOL, as we noted, represents a new way of doing politics in Brazil, one based on political pluralism. We might end by remembering Ana Carvalhaes’ words: “With all its problems, PSOL is richer than any centralized or vertical party. Reaching any decision or taking any action is difficult. We have to negotiate constantly with all the other groups. But this is a far more interesting and richer process.” The question is whether this richer and more interesting process can also be more effective.

     

  • Obama’s Failure Leads to Crushing Conservative Victory; Some Signs of Hope on the Left

    The failure of President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party to lead a fight for many of the major social issues on which he had campaigned—jobs and wages, African Americans’ civil rights, immigration, labor union power, and the environment—led to a sweeping victory for the Republican Party and a crushing defeat for the Democrats in the midterm election. The historically low voter turnout of 36.6 percent compared to 40.9 percent in the 2010 midterm, the lowest turnout since 1942, provides a measure of the American people’s sense of alienation from the political process, politicians, and major parties. The Democrats lost turnout from many of those groups who had carried Obama to the presidency six years ago. Young people, Latino, African Americans, women, union members, and independents voted in far lower numbers than Democrats had hoped and needed. The Republicans now take control of the Senate—55 Republicans to 45 Democrats—and increase their dominant position in the House where there will now be 243 Republican representatives compared to the Democrats’ 178. The Republicans will control 31 governor’s mansions, while the Democrats have only 17. The Democrats have not been such a political minority since the Civil War.

    While some leftists had argued that working for Obama and the Democrats would place socialists on the side of the people and that a revived liberalism that would allow us take advantage of a friendly and supportive administration in the shadow of which we could advance social and labor movements, the result after six years has been just the opposite. Obama proved to be the president of high finance and big business, while in foreign policy he has been an inept imperialist whose attempt to control developments in the Middle East have led to disaster for the peoples of the region. Obama saved the banks in 2008, but his temporary and weak stimulus plan failed to adequately revive the economy and to provide jobs to the millions of unemployed, discouraged workers, and those working one or more part-time jobs at low wages. His single major achievement, Obamacare, a plan written by insurance corporations, health companies, and the pharmaceutical industry, while it brought coverage to many, left millions without insurance and failed to have an impact on rising rates and medical costs. Failing at so many things, Obama’s administration did succeed in advancing the privatization of public education through charter schools, also weakening the teachers’ unions.

    The Obama administration, far from encouraging social struggle in any form, worked with local Democrats to crush the Occupy Wall Street movement and contributed to the demobilization of African Americans and the defeat of Latinos’ efforts to reform immigration—while more immigrants were deported than under any other president. The idea that the Democrats serve in any way to advance the left should be abandoned by all, but we know that some will cling to this idea even after this experience. The Democrats’ turn to the right over the last several years and their failure to speak to the issues of the working class majority of our population left them with no program of interest to American voters, and they have reaped the result. If the African American population has remained strongly supportive of Obama, it is not only because he is the first black president, but also because the Republican political alternative seems so hostile and dangerous to the black population, threatening its economic wellbeing and its voting rights. Yet, as some African Americans acknowledge, the president has done little to improve the lives of the country’s black communities.

    The Republican win, a victory for a more conservative Republican Party than existed even a few years ago, may have been, as many commentators suggest, more the result of frustration with the entire political system than an endorsement of the party’s ideology and programs. There was no groundswell for the Republicans and rightwing policies, but rather tremendous disappointment and discontent with Obama. The election results, nevertheless, will increase for the time being the power of economic and social conservatives, continues to move the entire spectrum to the right, and enhance and legitimate rightwing politicians and their attitudes—racist, sexist, pro-business and anti-labor—in the media, in politics, and in society at large. With this election we can only expect more white racism, police brutality and impunity, criminalization of youth, voter suppression laws, moves to shutdown abortion clinics, and so on—all the reactionary feelings and behaviors encouraged by the right and so often aimed at society’s underdogs.

    Republicans Sweeping Victory

    The Republican victory is sweeping if not surprising. In the South, which has been largely Republican territory since the 1970s, the Republicans overwhelmed the Democrats in the Senate races. The arch-conservative Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky won 56% of the vote to Democrat Alisson Lundergan Grimes 41%, making it possible for him to become Senate majority leader. Republicans took North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia as well. But more surprisingly Republicans also won Iowa, where Obama had his first victory back in 2008 and Arkansas, the home state of Bill and Hilary Clinton, and in Colorado where Democrat Mark Udall had campaigned on his support for women’s reproductive rights.

    Most depressing of all the election results may be the victory of Republican Governor Scott Walker over Democratic challenger Mary Burke by a vote of 53.3% to 46.6%. First elected in 2010, Walker supported legislation in 2011 that effectively dismantled Wisconsin’s public employee unions. Faced with a largely union-organized recall in June of 2012, Walker defeated his Democratic Party opponent then (for a second time) and has now won his third gubernatorial election in four years. Walker’s victory demonstrates that the AFL-CIO’s reliance on a traditional electoral strategy in Wisconsin, adopted after union leaders shut down the strikes and massive protests in the state capital of Madison in 2011, was a tremendous mistake. An electoral strategy unconnected to the building of mass movements will have little effect in stopping the right and advancing the left in this period. Also successful in the Midwest governor’s races were Republicans John Kasick of Ohio, Rick Snyder of Michigan who introduced “right-to-work” anti-union legislation and undemocratic emergency managers there, and venture capitalist Bruce Rauner of Illinois. The Republicans clean sweep of the governor’s mansions in the industrial Midwest, where once cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland formed the backbone of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, is a devastating judgment on the labor unions’strategy and the Democrats’ political commitments.

    Where the Democrats won, there was little for progressives to rejoice in. In the East, conservative Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo easily won reelection in New York, while in New Jersey, the slick, pro-Israel, “happy to reach across the aisle” Democrat Cory Booker was victorious.  In New Hampshire the liberal former governor and incumbent Senator Jeanne Shaheen was reelected. Surprisingly in a close election the Democrats lost the Massachusetts governorship, with Republican Charlie Baker, a health insurance executive, defeating Democrat state attorney general Martha Coakley.

    The Republican victory—and some Democratic Party victories as well—were largely paid for by corporate and conservative PACs and “dark money”, used to purchase often misleading advertising attack ads. Since the Citizens United case of 2010, the role of money in politics has increased, become more obscure, and more nefarious. Altogether some $3.7 billion was spent on the 2014 mid-term campaigns. The brothers Charles D. and David H. Koch were among the biggest spenders at $77 million on advertising and twice that amount on grassroots organizing. American Crossroads, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and many other smaller business and conservative groups spent tens of millions on advertising and organizing aimed not only at beating the Democrats, but also at defeating pro-labor, pro-women, and pro-environmental agendas. The wealthy conservatives and the corporations who contributed to representatives can expect their well spent money to lead to delivery of the XL Keystone pipeline and other legislation they have paid for.

    Obama has made little or no headway on the progressive elements of  his legislative agenda in six years and now any hope that he had of advancing these initiatives is virtually dead. If Obama were a courageous advocate of even his own by no means progressive agenda, he would use his veto power combined with his executive power to advance his own agenda—as he has said he will. But his first six years suggest that he will seek “shared government,” compromise, more-give-than-take, surrender, and ultimately only encourage ever more conservative developments. Both parties now looking at 2016 are likely to move toward the center—which is a center now located further to the right—in an attempt to win and animate the electorate.

    The results pose serious problems for U.S. imperial global management. Various national leaders—from Putin to Erdogan and from Netanyahu to Kim Jong Un—felt free over the last year to flout the nominal “leader of the Free World” so that Obama has lost all authority on the international stage. The Republican Congress will only complicate his attempt to win the cooperation of Russia to conclude a nuclear agreement with Iran, which if it fails could lead to a much more dangerous world situation. Israel’s stranglehold on the U.S. Congress will continue to cripple Obama’s Middle East policy, while the Republicans, neocons, and Hillary Clinton will push for a hard line against Palestine and more aggressive military intervention in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine, a disastrous course. Conservatives who wish to destroy whatever remains of Obama’s authority might even be tempted to put that priority above their conception of the national interest.

    Some Hope on the Left

    Within the larger context of the Republican surge and the Democratic defeat the far right seemed to retreat while the left made some small gains. The Tea Party, which seemed to dominate all political discussion back in 2010, diminished considerably in significance, as a more disciplined Republicans moved to defeat wildcard challengers. At the same time, of course, Tea Party candidates have become ensconced in the Republican Party and the party as a whole has moved in the direction of the Tea Party’s more conservative policies, though downplaying some social issues, such as abortion, in order to win.

    Over the last couple of years, labor and left candidates have reappeared on the national radar, most spectacularly with the Seattle City Council victory of Kshama Sawant in 2013. The leading left challenger nationally in this election, Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for governor of New York—who had been polling as high as 9 percent—in the end received 166,822 votes or 4.78% of the total votes cast. This is a remarkable gain over the 60,000 votes he received in 2010, votes won in part, no doubt, because Working Families Party members, angry at their leadership for backing Cuomo, cast votes for Hawkins in protest. Hawkins received endorsements from a few local Democratic Party clubs and from several local teachers unions, demonstrating that he and his party have the ability to attract from the Democrats’ left wing. In Ohio, according to unofficial tallies, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Anita Rios of Toledo won 99,402 votes, or 3.3 percent of the vote, meaning the party will keep its ballot line status.

    In Richmond, California, the anti-Chevron petroleum company candidates swept to victory with longtime politician Tom Butt defeating Nate Bates in the mayoral race, while all three Richmond Progressive Alliance council candidates won their seats. In Richmond Mike Parker, a longtime labor union activist and self-identified socialist, had dropped out of the mayor’s race, stepping aside for Democrat Butt in order to preserve the unity of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, which has for years worked to defend Richmond from Chevron whose refinery dominates the local economy.

    In a remarkable showing in the Milwaukee Sheriff’s election, former bus driver, union officer, and independent socialist Angela Walker, a first time candidate, came in second with 67,346 votes behind the victor David A. Clarke with 261,489 —  that is, Walker won 20 percent of the vote her first time out. Walker’s was not the typical sheriff candidate with the usual call for more police; quite the contrary. She argued, “I firmly believe that poverty is violence, and that the gun violence and crime we see on our streets is the outcome of poverty. If we want to honestly address crime in Milwaukee, we need to look at the limitations placed on people in the most affected areas here. We absolutely need living-wage jobs, and safe transit to get people to and from their jobs. We need progressive mental health treatment and drug and alcohol treatment that is dignified and available to anyone who needs it. We need to stop incarcerating people for drug possession, and look at addiction not as a criminal offense, but a matter of public health. People need safe and decent housing.”

    The Presidential Election of 2016

    While the Republicans have done well in the mid-term elections this by no means assures them of success in the presidential and congressional elections of 2016. Hillary Clinton will in all likelihood be the Democratic Party presidential candidate, while the Republicans may find it difficult to unite around a candidate. The liabilities of the leading contenders are many: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s “bridgegate” scandal and bullying behavior make him unattractive to many. Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s anti-abortion, pro-gun, and other far right positions may make him too conservative for most American voters. Libertarian Rand Paul could not win the confidence of the Republican elite. The nomination could go to former two-term Florida governor Jeb Bush, though he would have to live down the legacy of his brother George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency.

    Though they are well positioned now, it is altogether possible that by 2016 the tide which turned so powerfully against the Democrats may turn again, this time against the Republicans. Hillary Clinton will not have Obama’s 2008 advantage of being a fresh face and an unknown; her ties to the New York economic elites, to the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and her hawkish attitudes are well known. Therefore, if Clinton is to win the 2016 elections, she will have to revive the electorate, particularly women, African Americans, Latinos, and working people with the same sorts of false promises that carried Obama to the presidency. Clinton and the Democrats will have an increasingly hard time convincing most Americans that they are on their side and represent their best interests.

    Democratic progressives and liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York will be absolutely necessary to help the fundamentally conservative Hillary Clinton win the presidential election. Their job will be to defend the party’s left flank from raids by the Green Party and socialist candidates in an election where every vote may count. The Democrats may also need to find another figure like Rev. Jesse Jackson who in the 1988 election rounded up discontented African Americans, Latinos, and working class white voters who were straying from the flock and brought them back to the party—with the usual results.

    The Elections, the Unions, and the Movements

    The AFL-CIO and the major African American, Latino, women’s, and LGBT organizations remain committed, as always, to supporting the Democratic Party, believing that they can have more influence with Democrats than Republicans. Most American working people don’t share that confidence as revealed by the high level of non-voting and votes cast for Republican candidates. The left’s task remains to build independent workers’ and social movements that can also exert an independent political influence. The continuing economic malaise and the likelihood of recurring economic crises combined with the continuing attack on social programs provides the basis for building such movements with the goal of supporting campaigns such as those of Sawant and Hawkins as the way to a larger and more powerful political alternative independent of the two pro-corporate mainstream parties.

     

  • The No State Solution: Institutionalizing Libertarian Socialism in Kurdistan

    In what many outside of the territory are referring to as the Rojava Revolution, a major shift in political philosophy and political programmatics has taken place in Kurdistan. Yet, this shift is not limited to the region of Rojava, or what many call Syrian or Western Kurdistan – a region where the Democratic Union Party (PYD) has taken an active part in this change. In “Turkish,” or rather Northern Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has been the foremost leader. In Eastern Kurdistan (lying within Iranian borders) the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK) has taken to the change in ideological orientation as well. It is an expanding movement towards what is internally being described as a “democratic, ecological, gender-liberated society” – a collection of ideas, institutions, and practices that compose the political, economic and social outlook of Democratic Autonomy and Democratic Confederalism.

    As stated in Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan – a book written by a group from TATORT Kurdistan (a human rights advocacy organization based in Germany; “TATORT” translates to “crime scene”) who ventured from Germany into Kurdistan for their research – the paradigmatic shift to Democratic Autonomy and Democratic Confederalism has meant renouncing the establishment of “a socialist nation-state and instead” seeking the creation of “a society where people can live together without instrumentalism, patriarchy, or racism – an 'ethical and political society' with a base-democratic, self-managing institutional structure” (TATORT Kurdistan, Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan, Porsgrunn, New Compass Press, 2013, 20). In short, "democracy without a state".

    Contrary to what many might believe, the ideological shift did not take place in the last few months or even the last year. Rather, approximately a decade ago it forthrightly appeared when Abdullah Öcalan, long-time leader of the once Marxist-Leninist PKK, issued The Declaration of Democratic Confederalism. In it Öcalan disavowed the nation-state, deeming it an organizational entity that serves as an obstacle to self-determination instead of as an expression of it. Öcalan states, “Within Kurdistan democratic confederalism will establish village, towns and city assemblies and their delegates will be entrusted with the real decision-making.” For Öcalan this means “democratic confederalism of Kurdistan is not a state system, but a democratic system of the people without a state.”

    This system of Democratic Autonomy and Democratic Confederalism is composed of overlapping networks of workers’ self-managed enterprises, entities of communal self-governance, as well as federations and associations of groups operation according to principles of self-organization. Most, these assemblages function according to direct participatory democracy as well as with close-to-home delegate structures that are accorded through a council system.

    The year 2005 wasn't only a period of theoretical or ideological shifts. It also marked the beginning of the construction of councils. In urban settings, this took place on concentric levels of the neighborhood, district and city. In 2008 and 2009 these councils were reorganized so as to include the input and power of various "civil society organizations, women's and environmental associations, political parties, and occupation groups like those of journalists and lawyers" (TATORT Kurdistan, Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan, Porsgrunn, New Compass Press, 2013, 26).

    Yet, before venturing any further it is important to look discuss the ideological roots of Democratic Confederalism.

    Theoretical Roots of Democratic Confederalism

     Much has been said about the influence of the American eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin's influence on Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned since his arrest in 1999. In fact, through his lawyers, Öcalan contacted Bookchin. Unfortunately, Bookchin was too sick to enter into serious dialogue with Öcalan, but, Bookchin did send his wishes that the Kurds would be able to successfully move towards a free society. Yet, Bookchin's influence on the wider Democratic Confederalist movement can't be overlooked.

    Bookchin is unheard of to many outside-–and even inside-–anarchist circles. Yet, the scale of his political involvement and writing was immense. As Janet Biehl denotes in her article “Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy,” upon Bookchin’s death in 2006 the PKK went as far to call Bookchin “one of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century.”

     Bookchin upheld what he called Social Ecology. Bookchin's view, as stated in his book Remaking Society, was that "the basic problems which pit society against nature emerge from within social development itself" (Bookchin, Remaking Society, Black Rose Books, 1998, 32) and that placing society and nature into an oppositional binary was both descriptively erroneous and prescriptively destructive. More elaborately and succinctly put, “the domination of human by human preceded the notion of dominating nature. Indeed, human domination of human gave rise to the very idea of dominating nature.”

     With Social Ecology Bookchin sought to broaden the scope, nuance, and depth in the ways we look at systems of oppression and the ways in which they are intertwined with and often serve as a production of social hierarchy. Bookchin looked both at the roots of hierarchy and its various mutually supporting manifestations and institutionalizations, as well as at the conditions for its abolition and the founding of institutions based on non-hierarchical relations.

    Like many anarchists, Bookchin saw the State as the highest manifestation of hierarchical organization. Why the opposition to the State? In Bookchin's own words from his book Remaking Society:

    Minimally, the State is a professional system of social coercion – not merely a system of social administration as it is still naively regarded by the public and by many political theorists. The word 'professional' should be emphasized as much as the word 'coercion.' Coercion exists in nature, in personal relationships, in stateless, non-hierarchical communities. If coercion alone were used to define a State, we would despairingly have to reduce it to a natural phenomenon –which it surely is not. It is only when coercion is institutionalized into a professional, systematic, and organized form of social control – that is, when people are plucked out of their everyday lives in a community and expected not only to 'administer' it but to do so with the backing of a monopoly of violence – that we can speak properly of the State (Bookchin, Remaking Society, Black Rose Books, 1998, 66).

    In terms of identity, such coercion is utilized by the State for the purposes of molding a given manifold of cultures and ethnicities into what Joost Jongerden and Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya refer to in their article “Democratic Confederalism as a Kurdish Spring: The PKK and the Quest for Radical Democracy,” from the book The Kurdish Spring, as the attempt to craft “a single identity population” (Mohammed M.A. Ahmed and Michael Gunter, The Kurdish Spring, Costa Mesa, Mazda Publishers, 2013, 170.). More often than not, such ventures are violent ones. The Turkish State has been no exception to this.

    Turkey does not allow the Turkish language to be spoken or taught within State-run institutions, including public schools, and raids are frequently carried out on an array of municipalities and civil society organizations. The treatment of Abdullah Demirbas is exemplary of Turkey's treatment of the entire Kurdish population. He was elected in 2004 as mayor of Sûr, a district in Amed. One of his promises was to conduct affairs in Kurdish, however, according to TATORT Kurdistan “three years later the Council of State removed him for using Kurdish, Assyrian, and English in providing municipal services.” He was reelected in March 2009 by an even wider margin, but in May he was arrested again for supposed ties to the Union of Kurdistan Communities (KCK) as well as for “language crimes.’” For this he was sentenced to two years in prison.

    While there are differences between Bookchin and the Kurdish people whom Bookchin has influenced, what has been most strongly imparted from the former to the latter are goals of building “dual power” and implementing a system of governance that is composed of varying forms of stateless, equalitarian, assembly-democracy.

    With a strategy of building dual power one finds the goal of building, according to Janet Biehl in her aforementioned article, “a counterpower…against the nation state.” This means building a parallel societal structure. Or rather, building a set of and network of alternative and counter institutions that are decidedly different from, and run in contradiction and opposition to, the dominant system. In this case, the nation-state and capitalism. This notion is not original to Bookchin, as one can find its explicit articulation in Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and even earlier in the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Öcalan himself embraces this outlook of building dual power with his exhortation that “‘regional associations of municipal administration’ are needed, so these local organizations and institutions would form a network” and as such a “non-statist political administration.”

    Building a Solidarity Network

    As a Democratic Society Congress (DTK) member denotes it is "not just about autonomy – it's about democratic autonomy." As such, this has meant organizing institutions outside of the State that are based and operation according to self-organization and self-management. The knitting together of a solidarity network is, in part, a macro-political production of a relationship between such institutions. These institutions are being built in numerous, and concentric, local levels.

    In their article “Jongerden and Akkaya quote a chair of a neighborhood council in one of the poorer areas of the city of Amed asserting, “Our aim is to face the problems in our lives, in our neighborhood, and solve them by ourselves without being dependent on or in need of the state” (Mohammed M.A. Ahmed and Michael Gunter, The Kurdish Spring, Costa Mesa, Mazda Publishers, 2013, 183-184.). This best expresses the meaning of Kurdish communities seeking to establish Democratic Autonomy. As such, Jongerden and Akkaya define Democratic Autonomy as the “practices in which people produce and reproduce the necessary and desire conditions for living through direct engagement and collaboration with one another" (Mohammed M.A. Ahmed and Michael Gunter, The Kurdish Spring, Costa Mesa, Mazda Publishers, 2013, 171.).

    Yet, it is the combination of Democratic Autonomy and Democratic Confederalism that constitutes "for or going beyond those of the nation state" (Mohammed M.A. Ahmed and Michael Gunter, The Kurdish Spring, Costa Mesa, Mazda Publishers, 2013,  178.). This manifests “as a network model of localized small-scale self-organization and self-administration.” With the Democratic Society Congress (DTK) such a network is given institutional shape and form. In 2005 the DTK was founded, with the intention of bringing together a diversity of groups.

    The DTK contains a gender quota: the continuation of its operations contingent on meeting the requirement of at least 40% of attendees and positions being filled by women. The organizational structure of the DTK largely consists of the General Assembly, which meets at least twice per year, and the Standing Committee. The General Assembly holds at least 1,000 delegates, 60% of which come from the grassroots level, and 40% of which are elected officials such as representatives or mayors. The General Assembly elects a Standing Committee of 101 people. There is also a Coordinating Council, which consists of 15 people, and works in the areas of ideology, social affairs and politics. On all levels though, committees are frequently organized based on these three areas. The DTK itself holds numerous committees and commissions, which range from areas of ecology, women, youth, economy, diplomacy, culture and a whole of others.

    The building of such a model is closely aligned to Bookchin's conception of confederalism which he defines as “a network of administrative councils whose members are elected from popular face-to-face democratic alliances, in the various villages, towns and even neighborhoods of large cities” (Mohammed M.A. Ahmed and Michael Gunter, The Kurdish Spring, Costa Mesa, Mazda Publishers, 2013,177.). Such administrative councils do not make policy, but rather are “strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible to the assemblies that choose them for the purpose of coordinating and administering the policies formulated by the assemblies themselves.” Administrative councils are just that: they administrate and do not constitute a system of representation which accords high levels of decision-making and policy-making power to representatives.

    Thus, as Jongerden and Akkaya remark, "Democratic Confederalism can be characterized as a bottom-up system of self-government" (Mohammed M.A. Ahmed and Michael Gunter, The Kurdish Spring, Costa Mesa, Mazda Publishers, 2013,172.).

    The City of Amed – North Kurdistan

    Amed, one of the largest cities in region and by official estimates containing over 1.5 million residents, is part of the DTK. Similar to other cities in Kurdistan, Amed is composed of councils and assemblies on all levels. This includes street councils, neighborhood councils, 13 district councils, and a city council. The city council is comprised of 500 people, containing the mayor, elected officials, delegates from women's and youth organizations, NGOs political parties, and others.

    The city council is organized along five different areas: social, political, ideological, economic and ecological. Within these five areas committees are formed, which all hold the aforementioned 40% gender quota as well. The political area holds a Coordinating Committee, which includes women's councils (there are strictly women's councils, which are self-organized, and mixed gender councils) youth councils, political parties, and others. The economic area concentrates on forming cooperatives. The social area concentrates on things such as education and health.

    For juridical matters, committees handle conflicts and disputes. Their goal is to engage in conflict resolution so that the disputing parties can come to a consensus. This applies to issues ranging across a whole range of potential conflicts. In other areas of North Kurdistan, such as Gewer, legal committees do not purely hold lawyers, but also contain feminist and political activists.

    The Town of Heseke – Western Kurdistan

    Heseke in Rojava holds a similar institutional layout to Amed. Like Amed and the DTK carries a 40% gender quota. It contains a city council, however, it is comprised of 101 people, as well as five representatives each from five other organizations including the PYD, and the Revolutionary Youth. There is also a coordinating council, which is made up of 21 people. Heseke holds 16 district councils.

    District councils hold anywhere from 15-30 people, which meet every two months. Anywhere from 10-30 communes comprise a given district, with 20 communes approximating to 1,000 people. This means that there is often 1 delegate for every 100 people in a district, which is far more direct than many other institutional structures across the world. It should be kept in mind though that what is most frequent is the convening of peoples' assemblies, a phenomenon that also spans across Kurdistan and serves as the base for Democratic Autonomy; many areas in Kurdistan have weekly peoples’ assemblies.

    In Heseke “communes have commissions that address all social questions, everything from the organization of defense to justice to infrastructure to youth to the economy and the construction of individual cooperatives.” The commissions for ecology concern things such as sanitation and specific ecological problems. There are also “committees for women's economy to help women develop economic independence” (TATORT Kurdistan, Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan, Porsgrunn, New Compass Press, 2013.)

    This structure also sends delegates to the general council of Rojava. Similar to many other areas in Kurdistan, resolutions and decisions are preferred to be made by consensus instead of simple majoritarian vote.

    Embrace of Heterogeneity

    In the Charter of Social Contract, a constitution formed by cantons in Rojava, begins its document with an embrace of pluralism:

    We the people's of the democratic self-determination areas; Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians (Assyrian Chaldeans, Arameans), Turkmen, Armenians and Chechens, by our free will, announce this to ensure justice, freedom, democracy, and the rights of women and children in accordance with the principles of ecological balance, freedom of religions and beliefs and equality without discrimination on the basis of race, religion, creed, doctrine or gender, to achieve the political and moral fabric of a democratic society in order to function with mutual understanding and coexistence with diversity and respect for the principle of self-determination and self-defense of the peoples.

    This alone in the preface to the Charter contradicts the often oversimplified depictions of theMiddle East by Western media. According to the translation of Zaher Baher of the Kurdistan Anarchist Forum (KAF) from his eyewitness account titled “The Experiment of west Kurdistan (Syrian Kurdistan) has Proved that People Can Make Changes” (Zaher Baher, “The experiment of West Kurdistan…, Libcom, August 26, 2014, www.libcom.org/news/experiment-west-kurdistan-syrian-kurdistan-has-proved-people-can-make-changes-zaher-baher-2), The Charter goes onto state in its first page that “the areas of self-management democracy do not accept the concepts of state nationalism, military or religion or of centralized management and central rule but are open to forms compatible with the tradition of democracy and pluralism, to be open to all social groups and cultural identities and Athenian democracy and national expression through their organization”

    Yet, if one is to truly talk about an embrace of heterogeneity, this must involve the nonhuman just as much as it involves the human. This means going beyond the multilingualism and cultural diversity that many in Northern and Western Kurdistan have embraced – even institutionally – to looking at the ways in which the question of ecology is being tackled.

    Ecology

    For Aysel Dogan, an ecology activist and president of the Alevi Academy for Belief and Culture in Dersim, “the best way to create and ecological system is to build cooperatives” (TATORT Kurdistan, Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan, Porsgrunn, New Compass Press, 2013, 165.). Other eco-minded activities include the development of seed banks, protesting the simple notion of nuclear power plan development, and the disallowing the entrance of mining companies.

    All of these are seen as a means to foster an ecologically geared social consciousness. Much of this also includes education, and as such is ecological schooling is part of the explosion of academies and other learning institutions that inhabit the region. The increase in academy and cooperative development has interlocked with other emancipatory efforts as well.

    Education

    A number of academies have opened across Kurdistan. This includes the founding of the Mesopotamian Social Sciences Academy in late August in Qamislo in the Cizîrê canton of Rojava, which operates according to “an alternative education model.” According to Rojava Report, in Cizîrê alone 670 schools with 3,000 teachers are offering Kurdish language courses to 49,000 students (Rojava Report, August 31, 2014, http://rojavareport.wordpress.com/2014/08/31/first-new-university-to-open-in-rojava/).

    Language, cultural and historical academies oriented towards preserving and building identity aren't limited to Rojava. They have taken off in North Kurdistan as well. As of July 2012 there are "thirteen of them, with various foci, including nine general academies, two women's academies and two religious academies, one for Alevis and one for Islamic beliefs." TATORT Kurdistan reports Kurdish youth public school students staging week-long strikes in response to the constraints placed on their language within those spaces and other assimilation policies.

    Commenting on a number of schools run outside of the auspices of the Turkish State a representative of the Amed General Political Academy states, “These schools want to work out the essence of Islam and connect to the oppositional Islamic movements, which reject rulers and an Islamic state but nonetheless are connected to Islam.” (TATORT Kurdistan, Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan, Porsgrunn, New Compass Press, 2013.)

    As indicated by the Amed General Political Academy, much of the politicized Kurdish population carries an anti-capitalist, anti-State outlook, including and especially at the grassroots level. TATORT Kurdistan reports in the academy's three-month course, “All participants reflect on what they have learned and formulate a critique of state and ruling class.” These political academies also teach things outside of class analysis, such as histories of women and the development of patriarchy, of which a critique of the latter is raised as well.

    Also, in Amed lies a center that offers courses to women ranging from technical and practical skills, to those teaching the Kurdish language and literacy, as well courses in law and women’s rights. Other centers offer health and sexuality courses. There are also seminars offered on Democratic Autonomy.

    Empowerment of Women

    In multiple ways women are empowering themselves in Kurdistan, and as a result serving as the main thrust of the movement. In a few ways this has already been indicated, such as through the gender quota that is institutionalized on nearly all levels of society, and through learning sites and academies. Another great example of the latter is the Amed Women's Academy.

    TATORT Kurdistan quotes leaders of this academy, “the liberation of women, and of gender, is as significant as the liberation of men in society.” They work on projects, such as transcription of oral histories and engaging in "female writing of history." They offer courses through a participatory discussion-based model.

    Many from these academies and the Free Democratic Women's Movement (DOKH) also engage women by simply striving to empower many to step outside of their home. Some women within this movement take on a particularly radical perspective towards the State consigning to having a role in producing a hierarchical logic within the family unit.

    Along with women's councils, academies and centers, there are women's cooperatives wherein the goal is to “help women create their own relations of production, where they can work and participate,” as TATORT Kurdistan quotes those involved in women’s cooperative development. Through women's cooperative development the altering of gender relations takes place on a number of levels: women's relation to the workplace (previously have very little of such, if at all), in relation to their husbands and male relatives (breaking culturally embedded taboos and gender roles), and in relation to the whole of society (inserting evermore in and through the program of Democratic Autonomy). Through these cooperatives many women have become economically independent, have engaged in individual capacity development as well, and through both are breaking female internalizations of patriarchy.

    As Baher of the KAF specifically reports for the latter region, throughout Northern and Western Kurdistan there is “a system called Joint Leaders and Organizers” meaning “the head of any office, administration, or military section must include women.” Such organizational layouts are manifest in a number of the councils and committees mentioned throughout this article.

    In addition, to this the women have their own armed forces. “Thus, within People's Protection Units (YPG), there has been the formation of Women's Protection Units (YPJ). The YPJ, a 7,000 strong military group have been on the frontlines against ISIS. As might be expected, the emergence of the YPJ has significantly punctured many conceptions of preordained gender roles, particularly ones that have filtered into notions and systems of male domination.

    Empowerment of Youth, and Workers' Self-Management

    With Democratic Autonomy, youth councils, both under-18 and over-18, have emerged. Like the other councils, the youth councils have say and power in the carrying out of initiatives and projects, e.g., in the building and modifying of recreational sites and spaces. Besides this though, some of the most radical perspectives have, with clear articulation and vision, come from the Kurdish youth.

    To TATORT Kurdistan one Kurdish youth, between 16 to 26, remarked, “We don't consider ourselves nationalists. We're socialist internationalists.” There was also the statement by the same Kurdish youth that:

    At the moment we're moving into a new phase of the revolution through the construction of communes, collectives and cooperatives. Popular self-organization of the economy has the goal of laying the groundwork for comprehensive change in prevailing social relations… the movement is building village, youth and women's cooperatives… The different levels of self-management let us enter into the process of organizing more easily.

    There are varying results with the federating of cooperatives and communes. According to a member of a women's cooperative in Baglar, anarchists in twenty-two communes in Gewer have gone as far as to abolish money as a means of exchange.

    The Fight Against ISIS

    The largely lackluster support given by the United States government to the Kurdish line of defense against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) should come as no surprise, especially when considering the close ties between the United States and Turkey. Given Turkey's extensive history of repressing the over 20 million Kurds that reside within its borders, and given that presently the Kurds are on the frontlines fighting against ISIS, the deficient response by Turkey to ISIS should not be a shock.

    From 2009 to July 2012 over 8,000 people were arrested “for alleged membership in the Union of Kurdistan Societies, KCK, under the Anti-Terror Law” (TATORT Kurdistan, Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan, Porsgrunn, New Compass Press, 2013.) More recent reports, as noted by TATORT Kurdistan, have asserted that as many as 10,000 people have been arrested in anti-KCK operations. The incarceration of Kurds is at such scales that one finds examples of thirty-five people thrust together in a single cell , with people being forced to sleep atop one another. The overcrowding of prisons has come to the point that Turkish built F-type cells, originally intended for solitary confinement, often hold four people at a given time.

    Turkey's policy to expand its hydropower base through the building of dams has doubly served as a means to destroy Kurdish culture. As Aysel Dogan, the head of the Alevi Academy for Belief and Culture, states, “Since the holy places are endangered by the dams, the state sent [a] so-called scientist here who's supposed to provide expert opinion. He says that there are only stones here and no indication that it is a holy place. But these stones are sacred for us.”

    Yet, many in the mainstream trumpet their shock at Turkey's and the Obama administration’s hitherto low level response to ISIS. On September 22, the BBC reported that Turkey closed a number of border crossings upon of tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees. This is consistent with Turkey's existing relationship with the Kurds, and so is the U.S. government’s caution in carrying out a policy of bolstering Kurdish defense. Only of late has the U.S. government supplied arms to Kurdish forces in Kobane. Recent reports from Workers Solidarity Movement even show the Kurds gaining on ISIS. Yet, one wonders how far the U.S. government is willing to go in supporting Kurdish forces that carry strong anti-state, anti-capitalist tendencies.

    Simultaneous to all of this, Turkey allowed the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga passage to Kobane in Rojava to take part in the fight against ISIS. At first this may appear to be a strong policy reversal on the part of Turkey, but amongst the four regions of Kurdistan it has by-far held the best relationship with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq, or what is otherwise known as South Kurdistan. The KRG, led by Massoud Barzani, has historically been in violent tension with the PKK, with Turkey naturally welcoming episodes of violence between the two camps. The KRG has also indicated a level of distrust and disavowal of the activities in Rojava, particularly with the PYD, which holds a cordial relationship with the PKK.

    Conclusions

    To any libertarian socialist the developments in Kurdistan over the last decade are strongly encouraging. Many of the Kurdish people assert that Democratic Confederalism can be positioned as a body with transnational capacity potential. Many within Kurdistan, including Öcalan himself, find Democratic Confederalism to be a means to bringing peace and emancipation in the Middle East. Proponents of Democratic Confederalism, as indicated by their apparent openness to cultural diversity, do not simply consider this a solution for the Kurdish population, but for the multiplicity of the groups and ethnicities that constitute the wider region. Öcalan has gone as far as to assert that dual power must be built on a global scale, and that with such, a transnational body competing with the United Nations must be formed.

    Not only does Democratic Autonomy and Democratic Confederalism constitute an ideological and institutional push away from the State and capitalism, but it is a system that is keen on increasingly moving away from representative political structures to those of autonomous and performative practices. Yet, if the institutions and practices that constitute Democratic Autonomy and Democratic Conferederalism are to deepen inwardly and scale outwardly then a critique of all hierarchical social frameworks must be maintained, and the concretization of an anti-hierarchical and non-hierarchical societal outlook and vision must continue to be applied and actualized.

    *Alexander Kolokotronis is a BA/MA philosophy student at Queens College, City University of New York. He is the founder of Student Organization for Democratic Alternatives, a Worker Cooperative Development Assistant at Make the Road NY, and the Student Coordinator for NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives.This piece originally appeared in the GC Advocate of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

  • A love supreme: What's inspiring teachers' resistance to the destruction of public schools

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    Teachers are standing up to the intimidation, abuse really, heaped on them by politicians of both parties and the billionaires who have bought them. To understand where the passion of resistance comes from and is sustained, especially in city schools, and especially in schools educating poor kids of color, listen to this podcast of African-American male educators in Philadelphia, including two members of the Caucus of Working Educators, who explain their passion and resistance, their "love supreme." There is a great deal of resistance one does not learn about in corporate or even liberal media.  But it's there and we need to support it. 

    You can follow me on twitter  Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

  • Brazilian 2014 Elections: Plus ça change…

    Once again the Workers’ Party (PT) found itself in the difficult position of having to defend its government’s sorry record on issues such as the economy, corruption and energy policies, all while fending off  right-wing opposition candidates. Fortunately for the PT and its incumbent president and presidential candidate Dilma Rousseff, their adversaries at the national level  never  managed to assemble a political program that differentiated itself from the PT’s. 

    During the first electoral round, both Marina Silva of the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) and Aécio Neves of the Social Democratic Party of Brazil (PSDB) vacillated between two contradictory positions. While their right-wing policies aimed at reducing government and giving the central bank more autonomy in order to attract important economic interests, the parties also played up to the more populous working classes with offers of better public services. Economic shock therapy, however, is not something your average Brazilian would agree to or be interested in. So while the PSDB also promised to uphold the PT’s successful social programs, it offered nothing new in terms of reducing poverty, criminality or inequality.

    Initially Dilma was fortunate to run against the mediocre candidacy of Aécio, who demonstrated a lack of charisma despite favorable media coverage and a major political machine behind him. Then everything changed with the death of the PSB’s Eduardo and his replacement by Marina Silva. This was not her first presidential run but followed her 2010 Green Party sprint, where she placed third with 19 percent of the popular vote.[i]  For many Brazilians, she seemed a decent alternative to the two principal parties, which were widely viewed as incrusted in the state, fraught with corruption, and incapable of representing average Brazilians.

    Marina’s main strategy lay not in pushing her political program (on which  she flip-flopped several times) or her party (which remains divided about her candidacy and support to the PSDB), but in playing the anti-establishment card and attacking her main competitors’ credibility. She often repeated on the campaign trail that she represents the interests of the millions of protesters who took to the streets every evening for almost a month in June 2013.

    Due to her lackluster performance and her lack of an innovative political program, Marina was eliminated from the second round and ended up receiving about the same percentage of votes (20%) as in 2010. It was the PSDB political machine and very favourable press that managed to get Aécio into the runoff election. This was also the PT’s lowest score in the first round since 2002, demonstrating the erosion of popularity in recent years that have included lower levels of economic growth, media-inspired corruption scandals and massive public protests. Although Marina and the executive of the PSB officially and publically endorsed Aécio, others in the PSB especially in North and Northeastern states (Amapa, Bahia, Paraíba) where they are allied with the PT decided to publicly support Dilma.

    It is important to note that the PT did not do as well in Congress in these elections, losing 18 deputies and two senators. In general, there was a swing to the right in both the upper and low chambers of Congress. The PT won in only three important states, Minas Gerais, Bahia and Ceara and lost in states such as Rio Grande do Sul and Mato Grosso do Sul. While the right managed to keep it hold on important states such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Paraná, Pernambuco, and Para, many have also commented on the conservative nature of the new Congress, given the election of a number of openly homophobic candidates and ex-police and military officers.

    Polling before the runoff elections predicted an Aécio victory of 45 percent, with Dilma following with 43 percent, a gain of only 1.5 % from the first run. This shaped the media’s prediction that Dilma would actually lose votes—itself a reflection of media bias. Such bias is obvious in what makes the front pages: corruption scandals in the PT government are above the fold, while such equally newsworthy crimes as Aécio’s government scandals in the state of Minas, his DUI arrest and his public assault on his girlfriend are barely reported. Although it is not surprising that the elite and upper middle classes voted for Aécio, what these polling surveys attempted to demonstrate was that important segments of the lower middle class were abandoning the PT for the PSDB. This did happen in richer states in the South and Southeast of Brazil, though the poorer states in the Northeast (and in Aécio's home state of Minas Gerais) voted for Dilma.

    The good news for Brazilians is that, Dilma and the PT, warts and all, managed once again to win the presidential elections. In this, we can observe a pattern that dates to the 2002 elections where the PT finds itself lagging in the surveys in the weeks leading up to the elections when markets and mainstream media do everything legal and illegal to influence the popular vote. Then the PT manages to get into the runoffs at a disadvantage, yet pulls ahead in the polling race in the last few meters thanks to its network of activists working not only on the Internet but in the streets convincing a majority that despite corruption and continuity in old politics, the PT is the best bet for the poorer sectors of the population and for the country in general. This also reflects the right's incapacity to develop an alternative project that appeals to large sectors of the population  and to come up with a charismatic and “clean” leader.

    Other interesting observations: Dilma’s victory was the tightest PT win since Lula confronted Collar in the 1989 elections. This narrow winning margin reflects the rising influence of the PSDB and the erosion of the PT's political influence with its allies and with the general public. The PT also becomes the party to hold power federally for the longest period of time in Brazilian democratic history.

    Economically, this election was important because it saved Brazil from a return to purist neoliberal macro-economic policies that would have rapidly erased any progress made on the socio-economic front. Symbolically, it means an ideological polarization will continue for the next few years less over actual policies and more over representation.

    What’s also clear is that the Brazilian elite and its middle-class wannabes have declared an open class war not only against the PT but against the majority of working classes not-as-white or European Brazilians that voted for Dilma. What we can look for in the upcoming months and years is a radicalization of this position attacking not only the PT but those who elected them into power. This is not new. Brazil's rich, white and European-inspired elite have always attempted to position themselves as the “real” Brazil.

    With the election of Lula and the PT to the federal government in the 2000s, this changed politically, economically, and symbolically It is not that the working and middle classes are worse off under the PT, but that they are better off and in position to challenge upper class privilege and their national identity. Given that context, we should not underestimate the force of what the PT represents symbolically to the elite, upper middle, and middle classes.

    The PT has four more years not only to consolidate its gains but to revamp its platform. Dilma has promised an important political reform claimed by its civil society allies. Unfortunately, because of its weak showing in Congress and the Senate and the reaction of the “market,” it will have to depend on sleazy right wing parties as part of its governing coalition. Unless it develops a better political strategy, Dilma’s administration will have to cut deals if it wants to get anything worth having through the legislature. To assure governability, it will also have to cozy up to the private sector so as to not deepen the economic instability that capital and the market know so well how to create when it serves their interests.

    The left that actively supported the PT during these elections will also have to re-evaluate its strategy and relation to the governing party in order to figure out how to better influence this government and help them confront their elected right-wing enemies in government and in society. This will not be an easy task, and I hope that the relationship that the left in civil society has forged with the PT in government will not be simply be a back to the usual rapport that has developed in the past 12 years where social movements allow the PT to control the political agenda concerning important macro-economic issues. Some serious reflection will be necessary in order to think about how to keep the PT out of the clutches of its rightwing political allies and their political gains, and instead wage a real challenge to the the rightwing establishment.  

    *Charmain Levy is a professor of international development studies at the University du Québec en Outaouais since 2005. She is a specialist of Brazil has been following Brazilian elections since 1994. She is also a member of the Leftist Quebec political party Quebec Solidaire and has been a candidate for provincial deputy three times in the county of Pontiac.

    [i] Marina Silva can be best described as a political leech who latches onto small or weak political parties in hopes of running for the presidency. In 2009 she tried to negotiate a deal with the leftist party PSOL and when that fell through, she approached the Green Party.

     

  • Critique of Piketty on Capital and Inequality

    THE ISSUE OF growing inequalities of in­come and wealth in the advanced capitalist world over the past four decades has been the subject of both social scientific research and political struggle. On the one hand, there is an extensive literature that amply documents the growth of inequality globally since the mid-1970s. While ideologues of neo-liberalism have attempted to dismiss this evidence or diminish its importance,(1) there is a consensus among social scientists that inequality has been on the rise.(2)

    Image

    On the other hand, the widening gap between the super-rich and the rest of us fueled the Occupy movement in the fall of 2011. Occupy targeted the “1%” and its growing income, wealth and political influence in the name of the “99%,” putting inequality at the center of U.S. politics for a brief period of time.

    Image

    Fundamentally, it was the political and ideological impact of Occupy that created the conditions for the reception of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It is quite exceptional for a lengthy, academic study by a trained economist — complete with graphs, data tables and various formulae — to become a major cultural sensation.

    Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been the subject of miles of column inches in newspapers and magazines and extensive discussion on the internet, television and radio.(3) As we are writing this review, the book is beginning its fourth month on the New York Times non-fiction best seller list, competing with the latest screeds from various Fox News commentators and Hillary Clinton’s self-congratulatory memoir of her years as U.S. imperialism’s chief diplomat.(4)

    Leftist commentary on Piketty’s book generally makes two points.(5) First, Piketty provides valuable statistical ammunition for activists and organizers in the labor and social movements on the extent of wealth inequality in several major capitalist societies since the late 18th century. Second, Piketty is far from an anti-capitalist radical.

    While the son of revolutionary militants in France,(6) he is a member of the (at best) left-center Socialist Party. Piketty rejects Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production and believes that changes in taxation on wealth could alleviate inequality while preserving the ‘efficiencies of the market economy.’(7)

    There is no question that Piketty is not a Marxist. He conceives of capital as a stock of assets used to produce income rather than as a relation between classes; focuses on the distribution of profits, rent and wages rather than social production; and rejects Marx’s fundamental insight that the same underlying forces that make capitalism incredibly dynamic inevitably lead to periodic crises.

    Still, with few exceptions(8) most left commentary on Piketty has not gone beyond distinguishing his investigation of capital from that of Marx. Put another way, they have not demonstrated how Piketty’s non-Marxist conceptual framework cannot explain the patterns of inequality he documents.

    The Normality of Inequality

    The greatest strength of Piketty’s book is, without doubt, his empirical data.

    Building upon earlier research that he and a team of French economists have been engaged in for over a decade, Piketty’s World Top Income Database (WTID) draws on tax records and other government data to provide detailed documentation of the distribution of wealth and income in France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and the United States (with less thorough data for Argentina, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, China and India) for the past two and one-half centuries.

    While Piketty engages in flights of fancy concerning inequality before the late 18th century, his data clearly demonstrate that growing wealth and income inequality is a normal feature of capitalism. Contrary to the claims of Simon Kuznets and other mainstream economists writing during the height of the Cold War, declining inequality was the exception — the product of the massive destruction of capital during the Great Depression and the two world wars.

    Inequalities of income and wealth steadily increased from the late 1700s through the 1930s, declining slightly during the “thirty glorious years” after World War II, and again increasing steadily since the mid-1970s.

    Piketty begins with two “fundamental laws of capitalism.” The first is expressed in the formula:

    a = r x β

    Here a is the share of national income from capital, r is the rate of return on capital and β is the ratio of capital to total national income. As Piketty recognizes, this is essentially a descriptive, accounting formula — the percentage of national income from capital is equal to the ratio of capital to national income multiplied by the rate of return on capital. His second “fundamental law of capitalism” is equally descriptive:

    β = s / g

    Put another way, β — the ratio of capital in national income — is the savings rate s divided by the rate of growth of output per capital g, or wealth “saved” divided by the rate of growth of total production of goods and services.

    Piketty uses these two “laws” to illustrate how a rising ratio of capital to total national income before and after the “thirty glorious years” led to a growth of national income from capital and growing inequalities of income and wealth. Conversely, the temporary reduction of the capital/output ratio in the mid-20th century radically reduced the share of national income derived from capital and led to a slight reduction of economic inequality.

    The problems come with what Piketty calls the “central contradiction of capitalism.”

    r > g

    For Piketty, the rate of return on capital almost always exceeds the rate of growth of per capita output, producing greater inequality. While technological innovation can raise the rate of return on capital and the growth of capital can reduce the rate of return, Piketty claims that the rate of return was generally stable both before and after the post-war era of declining inequality.

    By contrast, the rate of growth of output is determined primarily by population growth, except for brief periods when the destruction of existing capital produces growth that exceeds demographic increase. Given slowly growing populations in most of the developed capitalist world in the past two centuries and a relatively stable rate of return on capital, growing inequality was the unavoidable consequence of capitalism.

    The exceptional period of 1945-1975, when inequality declined, was the product of the massive destruction of capital and the exceedingly high growth rates of that era.

    Piketty’s attempt to explain wealth and income inequality, however, is either simply descriptive or theoretically and factually inconsistent.

    On the one hand, it is almost axiomatic in both conventional and Marxist economists that the rate of return on capital shapes the rate of growth of output by determining investment. Put another way, the rate of return and rate of growth are not independent of one another — the higher the rate of return, the more likely capital will be invested and total output increased, and vice-versa.

    On the other hand, Piketty’s claim for a steady rate of return that is consistently higher than the rate of growth is unsupported by any data. For an economist who insists on the need to test all claims against data, this is a rather surprising omission.

    Various Marxist economists(9) have argued that Piketty’s rate of return does not correspond to Marx’s rate of profit — total profits divided by productive capital and total wages — but to the mass of profit, total profits produced annually. There are significant data, in particular by other Marxist economists, that demonstrate that the mass of profit has not been stable, but has fluctuated along with the rate of profit and rate of accumulation/investment.(10)

    While Piketty’s description of the persistent growth of economic inequality under capitalism is unassailable, his explanation of these patterns is inadequate.

    Marx’s Account

    The inadequacy of Piketty’s explanation is rooted in his acceptance of neo-classical economic categories, viewing capital as a mass of wealth rather than a social relation, and wages, rents and profit as determined by the “marginal productivity” of labor, land and capital, rather than by conditions of production, accumulation and exploitation.

    Marx’s account of capitalism provides a much superior account of the growth of economic inequality.(11) The fundamental tendency for inequality to increase under capitalism is built into the exploitative structure of the capital-labor relation.

    Effectively separated from means of production and consumption, the mass of wage workers are forced to sell their ability to work (labor-power) to those who own productive capital.

    Capitalists consume labor-power by compelling workers to labor in excess of the time needed to reproduce the value of their wages. This unpaid surplus-labor — surplus-value — is the source of profits under capitalism, creating the structural inequality in incomes between capitalists and labor.

    As competition among capitalists produces the concentration and centralization of capital, increasing mechanization, and a reserve army of unemployed (and underemployed) workers, the capitalist class becomes numerically smaller while appropriating even larger portions of total social product (Piketty’s capital as share of total output).

    The necessary tendencies towards periodic crises of profitability, rooted in increasing capitalization of production, lead to even greater inequalities as capital becomes centralized into even fewer hands through waves of bankruptcies of inefficient firms; and labor’s share of total output is reduced through wage cuts, speedup and the like.

    How would Marxist theory explain the exceptional period of declining inequality in the three decades after the Second World War? The slight decline in inequality and the general growth in working-class living standards in this period was the product of two historically specific factors.

    As Piketty acknowledges, the depression of 1929-1932 was the deepest and most devastating crisis in the history of capitalism. Across the capitalist world, massive bankruptcies destroyed the least efficient firms and produced a sharp increase in the rate of profit in the 1930s. The destruction of much of the productive capacity of Germany, Japan and Italy during the war sustained this rise of profitability through the late 1940s, producing a period of unprecedented growth through the mid-1960s.

    While the long postwar boom provided the possibility for a decline in inequality through rising working-class income, a unique set of political conditions made them necessary. Even more important than the global rivalry between the capitalist and bureaucratic (so-called “communist”) world, the militancy of the working classes in most industrialized countries in the 1930s and 1940s — including near-revolutionary mass strike waves in France and Italy after the war — compelled capitalists and capitalist states to institutionalize collective bargaining with unions, raise real wages, and expand social welfare.

    The combination of rising profitability and working-class militancy produced the temporary and exceptional decline in inequality after World War II. The subsequent decline of working-class militancy and self-organization, the result of the defeats of bureaucratic unionism and traditional social-democracy in the 1970s and 1980s, allowed inequality to continue to grow even during the neoliberal boom of 1982-2008.(12)

    In sum, the dynamics of capitalist accumulation necessarily produce growing inequality, and only massive disruption — mass strikes and the like — by working people have momentarily tempered these tendencies.

    Thanks to Solidarity and Against the Current for allowing us to reprint this article.

    Notes

    1.  For the latest attempts to dismiss the overwhelming data on inequality, see Chris Giles, “Piketty Findings Undercut by Errors,” Financial Times, May 23, 2014 and Neil Irwin, “Obama’s Top Economist Has Problems with Piketty’s Book,” New York Times Website, May 7, 2014 [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/upshot/obamas-top-economist-has-some-problems-with-pikettys-book.html?emc=eta1].
      back to text
    2.  For a synthesis of the research on inequality in the United States, see Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (New York: Sage Publishers, 2014).
      back to text
    3.  For a sample of the commentary on Piketty, see Jeff Madrick, “Piketty Review Roundup,” The Century Foundation Blog, July 1, 2014 [http://tcf.org/blog/detail/piketty-review-roundup-capital-in-the-21st-century].
      back to text
    4.  The New York Times Book Review, July 6, 2014, 22.
      back to text
    5.  See, for example, David Harvey, “Afterthoughts on Piketty’s Capital,” Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey, May 2014 [http://davidharvey.org/2014/05/afterthoughts-pikettys-capital/]; “Taking on ‘Capital’ Without Marx: What Thomas Piketty Misses in His Critique of Capitalism,” In These Times, May 20, 2014 [http://inthesetimes.com/article/16722/taking_on_capital_without_marx]; and Toni Gilpin, “Them that’s Got Are Them That Gets: Piketty’s Lessons for Activists,” Labor Notes, July 3, 2014. [http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2014/07/them-thats-got-are-them-gets-pikettys-lessons-activists]
      back to text
    6.  His parents were members of the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvriere (Workers’ Struggle) organization. See “Thomas Piketty,” Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty]

      back to text

    7. See “Dynamics of Inequality: Interview with Thomas Piketty,” New Left Review, II/85 (January-February 2014).

    1.  Three exceptions, from which I have borrowed freely, are Michael Roberts, “David Harvey, Piketty, and the Central Contradiction of Capitalism,” Michael Roberts’ Blog, May 19, 2014 [http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/david-harvey-piketty-and-the-central-contradiction-of-capitalism/]; Barry Finger, “Coasting on Borrowed Time: Making Sense of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century,” New Socialist (Canada) Webzine, June 15, 2014 [http://newsocialist.org/755-coasting-on-borrowed-time-making-sense-of-piketty-s-capital-in-the-21st-century]; and Benjamin Kunkel, “Paupers and Richlings,” London Review of Books, 36, 13 (July 3, 2014). [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n13/benjamin-kunkel/paupers-and-richlings]
      back to text
    2.  See note 8.
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    3.  See the work of Anwar Shaikh, in particular (with E. Ahmet Tonak) Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Income Accounts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and “The First Great Depression of the 21st Century,” Socialist Register 2011: The Crisis This Time (London: Merlin Press, 2010).
      back to text
    4.  This is drawn from Marx, Capital, Volume I (Ham­monds­worth, England: Penguin Press, 1976) and Volume III (Hammondsworth, England: Penguin Press, 1981).
      back to text
    5.  Kim Moody, “Contextualizing Organized Labour in Expansion and Crisis: The Case of the US,” Historical Materialism 20.1 (2012), 3-30.
      back to text

    September/October 2014, ATC 172

     

  • Rosa Luxemburg for Today

    ImageBOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY:
    Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy
    Edited by Jason Schulman
    Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 214 pp.

    The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg: 
Volume I: Economic Writings 1
    Edited by Peter Hudis
    Verso, 2013, 596 pp.

    Red Rosa
    Conceived and illustrated by Kate Evans 
and edited by Paul Buhle
    Forthcoming, Verso, 2015

    Rosa Luxemburg, a heroic and principled figure of the left, died in 1919 at the hands of the right-wing German Social Democratic Party (SPD) leadership’s militarist Freikorps (Volunteer Corps) allies. When they murdered her and her comrade Karl Leibknecht and threw their bodies into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, they made Luxemburg a martyr for the socialist workers’ movement. A Polish-German secular Jew, a Marxist political economist and theorist, Luxemburg was a prominent leader of the left wing of the SPD, founder of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, and, later, of the Spartacus League and the German Communist Party.

    Luxemburg lived and wrote during the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution and was witness to historical conditions ripe for actively rethinking socialist theory and practice. The episodic resurrection of Luxemburg’s political thought continues to inflame the political imagination of socialists committed to belief in the democratic possibilities of mass resistance and faith in the long-run capacity of the working class to rebel against capitalism, as demonstrated in her theory of spontaneity. Today, the protests in Tahrir Square, of the indignados in Spain, of Turkish activists in Gezi Park, the piqueteros in Argentina, the SYRIZA Party in Greece, Occupy Wall Street, and many other forms of popular resistance indicate that Luxemburg could appeal to yet another generation. She, too, grappled with what socialist parties and activists should and could do in relation to such protests.

    Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy, edited by Democratic Left advisory board member Jason Schulman, underscores Luxemburg’s major contributions to socialism during the years of the Second (Socialist) International and her relevance for contemporary socialist thought. The original impetus behind this project came from Stephen Eric Bronner’s essay “Red Dreams and the New Millennium: Notes on the Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg,” published in the socialist journal New Politics in 2001. Bronner’s article sparked a debate among New Politics writers over the proper interpretation of Luxemburg’s ideas for current socialist politics in light of new historic conditions. 

    Schulman brings together the New Politics debate with new essays on Luxemburg that offer reflections on political events that have transpired since 2001, including popular resistance to austerity measures both here and abroad. Among the new contributors are DSA activists (and DL writers) Amber Frost, Chris Maisano, and Michael Hirsch. The inter-generational approach of this collection reads as if one were listening to the debate in real time. Almost a hundred years after her death, Luxemburg still courts controversy.

    Below, I highlight a few points from the DSA contingent because they demonstrate Luxemburg’s steadfast commitments to radical democracy and internationalism. The only potential weakness of the book is the lack of attention to Luxemburg’s contributions regarding the conditions of women, of which more later.

    The primary contention in the original debate among Bronner, Alan Johnson, and David Camfield is over the “meaning of socialism under modern conditions.” Bronner argues, “Whatever else the term [socialism] might imply, it must initially be understood as a practice intent upon mitigating the whip of the market through the state and abolishing the exercise of arbitrary power by the state.” Bronner points to Luxemburg’s recognition of the necessity of translating economic reform into political demands, including the ultimate goal of revolution. In this regard, she is famous for her debates with Eduard Bernstein against his argument for “evolutionary socialism,” or the idea that socialism will gradually evolve out of economic reform. Today, the call for democratic socialism, Bronner argues, is “predicated on little more than an ethical commitment.” In general, Johnson and Camfield argue with Bronner over points of interpretation of Luxemburg as well as current political-economic conditions.

    Frost, a self-proclaimed activist and non-academic, argues that the participants in this debate are “indulging in Freud’s ‘narcissism of minor differences,’ and subsequently side-stepping more productive debate.” She criticizes other contributors for their “lack of faith in the resilience of Marxism in the face of detractors and assaults,” and takes Michael Thompson, especially, to task for his expressed doubts about the political effectiveness of workers’ councils. In the spirit of Luxemburg’s undying commitment to democracy for the masses, in contrast to Lenin’s supposed notion of the revolutionary vanguard party implanting revolutionary consciousness into the proletariat, Frost defends the democratic potential of workers’ councils by considering ways that the model might be improved and developed as an indispensable organizational form of political education.

    In “Where Do We Go from Here? Rosa Luxemburg and the Crisis of Democratic Capitalism,” Maisano frames his essay around the tension between capitalism and democracy. Echoing Luxemburg’s international commitment, Maisano’s analysis of popular movements extends beyond the United States in his discussion of the political context in Greece, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Maisano argues that the appeal of popular movements rests in their democratic nature and offers an explanation as to why “these movements have tended to reject parties, representation, and the state in toto”:

    “People today have very little control over anything that happens in their lives. They feel like playthings of powerful forces that are not subject to even a modicum of democratic accountability or control. This is what accounts for the relentless focus of movements like Occupy on process and consensus.” 

    Maisano summarizes the debates in the book as revolving around two conflicting approaches, with Bronner and Michael Thompson arguing for an approach that appreciates the potentially liberatory qualities of the republican state and gradualist programs of radical reform, and Alan Johnson, David Camfield, Paul Le Blanc, and Barry Finger defending a revolutionary councilist tradition that seeks to overthrow the republican state and replace it with a network of direct organs of popular control.

    In siding with Bronner and Thompson, Maisano underscores that Luxemburg’s legacy includes both direct action and “the need for political representation, leadership, and discipline.” This nuanced approach allows Maisano to argue that democracy is both “direct and representative,” horizontal and vertical. This same argument goes for our understanding of the state, “one that allows for a significant amount of space for popular participation in policy making and administration” as well as of a political party involving “a broad formation that allows for radicals of different persuasions to come together in a pluralistic and egalitarian institutional space.”

    Speaking from decades of experience on the left, Hirsch, in “Contra Bronner on Luxemburg and Working-Class Revolution,” argues that Luxemburg’s strengths lay in viewing history as an interactive process, not a dislocated series of events. She understood, long before Edward Thompson, that social classes were relationships and not categories or things. Luxemburg, with her long view that working people had to be prepared—not just persuaded or anxious—to rule, is an enigma for those conditioned to think revolutions are made by clusters of dedicated operatives, rather than as an expression of a class in formation evolving in experience, consciousness, collective action, and social conditions. 

    In response to Bronner’s argument that socialism is today only an ethical commitment, Hirsch argues, “From the standpoint of class struggle, socialism is not an ethical ideal or a consumer choice; it’s a necessity for survival as a culture and as a species.” 

    Unfortunately, the collection fails to mention Luxemburg’s contributions regarding the condition of women, namely their formal political exclusion despite their intense informal political involvement. Bronner is on record saying, “There is no use artificially trying to turn [Luxemburg] into a forerunner of feminist theory or practice.” Although it is true that Luxemburg never privileged an identity-based politics, surely she was an advocate of what would later become known as socialist feminism. After all, she agreed with Charles Fourier’s assessment that “In any society, the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.”

    Schulman has brought together a collection that should be read widely and used in study groups. In addition, I recommend The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg: Volume I: Economic Writings 1, edited by Peter Hudis and recently released by Verso. This is the first in an ambitious series of Luxemburg’s writings. It contains not only works that have never appeared in English, but also a new translation of her doctoral thesis and ten previously undiscovered manuscripts.

    Next year, Verso will publish a graphic biographical novel, Red Rosa, written by Kate Evans and edited by Paul Buhle. Evans generously shared a few advance images, shown here. Evans’s book was made possible by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of Berlin, which, thanks to the funding given to German political parties based on electoral returns, has now opened an office in New York. The NYC office has become a central location for funding, research, and support for the promotion of democratic socialism in the United States, keeping the legacy of Luxemburg and her thought alive.

     

    Nichole Shippen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, NY. She is the author of Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan). This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 issue of the Democratic Left magazine, and online on the DSA website.

     

  • The Scottish Independence Referendum: A Socialist Perspective

    ImageOn September 18, 2014, the Scottish people had the opportunity to withdraw from the United Kingdom and become an independent country. The unity of Scotland and England has existed since 1707, so the vote could have broken with three hundred years of history. After a long and bitter campaign, the proposal to leave the UK was defeated by a margin of 55% to 45%. The vote had a profound impact on all of Great Britain and its impact is still being felt.

    Virtually the entire Left supported the campaign for Scottish independence. Toward the end, it seemed possible that the "yes" vote would carry. In the aftermath of defeat, many of those on the Left feel cheated, believing that those opposed to independence violated democratic norms. For a socialist who is not a Scottish nationalist, the independence vote raised a series of difficult issues deserving a close examination.

    Scotland already has its own parliament. Located in Edinburgh, and called Holyrood after a nearby palace, it has limited power to levy taxes. Holyrood receives most of its funds from the general budget of the UK, as determined by the British Parliament. Polls have consistently shown that public opinion is divided on independence but that two-thirds of those living in Scotland support "devolution max." This would result in the Scottish parliament gaining control over its budget in terms of taxes and expenditures, while determining virtually every matter of domestic policy. Only issues related to the military, foreign policy, and the monarchy would be left in the purview of the UK parliament.

    Devo max is so popular in Scotland because of the differences in the political landscape as compared to England. (Wales is somewhere between England and Scotland.) The two parties in the coalition that currently governs the UK are insignificant factors in Scottish politics. Indeed, the Conservatives, or Tories, are despised by the great majority of Scots. There are only two major parties in Scotland, the Labour Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP). The SNP considers itself to be a social democratic party, although it receives generous funding from several powerful Scottish capitalists. The SNP controls the Scottish parliament, and it was its threat to hold a non-binding referendum that forced the coalition government in London to agree to hold a binding referendum.

    Most of the Scottish Left advocated a yes vote, arguing that this would mean that Scotland would never be ruled by the Tories and that the SNP could be pressured into implementing progressive reforms. One of the problems with this argument is that the SNP demonstrated during the course of the independence campaign that it had no interest in establishing a truly independent Scotland. The SNP insisted that Scotland would retain its allegiance to the British monarchy. Furthermore, Scotland would retain the pound sterling as its currency, which means that its monetary policy would continue to be determined by the Bank of England. This promise led to the one of the most heated controversies during the campaign, as the leaders of the mainstream British political parties insisted that an independent Scotland could not retain the sterling, and Alex Salmond, the SNP leader and first minister at Holyrood, retorted that an agreement for a common currency could be hammered out after the vote. The SNP also pledged that Scotland would remain within NATO and the European Union, even though it would have had to agree to stringent conditions before being accepted as a new member.

    The UK is a member of NATO, and indeed a trusted ally of the United States. It also maintains a semblance of a nuclear deterrent. A new generation of nuclear subs, armed with Trident missiles carrying nuclear warheads, is about to be built at enormous cost. The only naval base currently capable of hosting nuclear submarines in the UK is at Faslane, a few miles from Glasgow, Scotland's largest city.

    Polls show that most Scots would like to rid Faslane of nuclear weapons. One of the few promises made by the SNP during the independence campaign was a pledge to remove the nuclear subs from Faslane. Yet Salmond also rammed through a resolution at a recent SNP national conference reversing the party's previous policy and committing it to support for NATO.

    The two policies are directly contradictory. As long as Scotland is part of NATO, either as an independent country or as a region within the UK, U.S. planes and ships armed with nuclear weapons will continue to use Scottish military bases. (This is also true of non-nuclear weapons. Scottish bases will be used as forward posts in the escalating war within Iraq and Syria.) Furthermore, it is highly probable that an independent Scotland would not be permitted to enter NATO unless it agreed to permit the UK to use Faslane as a base for subs carrying Trident missiles for a lengthy transition period until another base in England could be constructed.

    In reality, the SNP offered little to persuade voters that an independent Scotland would be significantly different than the status quo. Nevertheless, during the last weeks of the campaign, as the polls showed the result in doubt, there was a noticeable buzz in the air. Illusory or not, many Scots thought the referendum could lead to a significant change. Voter registration soared and signs and buttons on both sides proliferated. Tables were set up by both camps and people were debating the issue in workplaces and pubs. This was the most positive aspect of the independence campaign. Scotland has been hard hit by globalization as factories and shipyards closed and long-term unemployment soared. There was a pervasive sense of despair and hopelessness that undercut any effort to mobilize for positive changes. The independence campaign began to change this, providing the Left with further opportunities to be heard.

    Still, the Scottish Left played a small role during the campaign. The Radical Independence Campaign (RIC) created a broad umbrella for progressives to urge a "yes" vote while not being totally subsumed by the SNP, but it failed to advance an alternative vision of an independent Scotland. The RIC produced a sticker urging people to vote for independence in order to "sack the Tories," hardly a radical analysis. Green Party leaders were prominent figures within the RIC and the RIC seems to be acting as a funnel to move activists into the Greens. For socialists, this is a dead end.

    In spite of the uninspiring perspective presented by the SNP, and the lack of a radical alternative, the referendum campaign did energize Scottish politics. Even among those voting "no," there was a growing feeling that the UK government had ignored Scotland for too long, and that Scots needed more power to determine their own affairs. In the last weeks of the campaign, the leaders of all three mainstream UK parties, Tories, Labour, and Liberal Democrats, publicly pledged that the Scottish parliament would be granted "extensive" additional powers on domestic issues. These pledges have proven to be problematic in the aftermath of the campaign.

    Yet these last-minute concessions were not perceived as sufficient to guarantee the defeat of the referendum. Thus, there was an orchestrated campaign of fear in the last stages of the campaign, with banks and financial institutions threatening to leave an independent Scotland, as the tabloids screamed these threats in front-page headlines. Furthermore, the Westminster government claimed that public sector workers might lose their accumulated pensions if Scotland became independent. In all likelihood, the corporate threats were bluffs. After all, the SNP was eager to portray itself as pro-business and even promised to cut the corporate profits tax. Nevertheless, corporations are generally risk averse and there was also the concern that an independent Scotland might, in the future, be more likely to accede to public demands for better social services funded by taxes on the rich and the corporations. Most corporate executives opposed independence, and were willing to threaten dire consequences without actually intending to act on these threats.

    The SNP was furious at the fear campaign, which did sway some voters. In general, those with the most to lose were the most susceptible to threats. The "yes" vote polled the highest percentages in the poorest districts. Conservative politicians have been targeting social service benefits for austerity cutbacks and the "yes" campaign argument that an independent Scotland would be free from Tory rule resonated in these areas. In middle-class neighborhoods, and where public sector workers with pensions resided, the referendum was defeated by a substantial margin. (In Glasgow, a post-industrial working class city, a narrow majority voted for independence. In Edinburgh, considerably more affluent and the home of the Scottish financial sector, the referendum was defeated by a sizable margin.)

    After the vote, many leftists denounced the results, arguing that the corporate threats had violated democratic norms. This is a dubious argument for socialists to make. The last days of the campaign brought to the surface the reality of all elections in a capitalist society. Those candidates supported by the wealthy few always have an enormous, unfair advantage in the form of friendly media, sophisticated advertising, and a large staff of highly paid experts. When all this is not enough, there is always the threat to stop investment and curtail employment.

    Rather than complain that the other side is using unfair tactics, we should be pointing out that this kind of crude manipulation of the electoral process will only end when capitalism is abolished and a new and very different society is created.

    Furthermore, although the threats were bluffs this time, in the future, when the socialist movement becomes stronger, the threats will be real. Only when the working class has developed confidence in its ability to maintain the economy without relying on capitalist corporations will it be possible to move toward a just society.

    The aftermath of the referendum has already brought surprises. Alex Salmond has resigned as leader of the SNP and first minister in the Scottish government, taking responsibility for the defeat of the referendum. His deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, is likely to succeed him. Even before the referendum vote, some of those on the Left were insisting that she was more progressive than Salmond and more willing to challenge the established order. Illusions in liberal politicians die hard.

    The mainstream parties in the UK are being pushed to fulfill the pledges made during the campaign to introduce legislation further devolving authority to the Scottish parliament. It seems likely that these concessions will be limited in scope, but the momentum toward devolution max appears to be irresistible. It is also very possible that another independence referendum will be scheduled a few years from now. The question is whether those advocating independence will be more ready to articulate a program of substantive change, not just nebulous nationalist rhetoric.

    Within the Scottish political scene, the referendum campaign has greatly strengthened the SNP while giving a further push to the continuing decline of the Labour Party. The Greens and the RIC hope to nudge the SNP slightly leftward, while avoiding any direct challenge to SNP policies. There are plans for a joint slate of candidates for the next election to the Scottish parliament that would involve the Greens and others on the broad Left based on agreement on a minimum program.

    The radical Left is small but it can still be influential. Socialists can work within single-issue campaigns to advance a more radical program while consistently pointing to the failures of the SNP and the other mainstream parties. At the same time, there is an urgent need for a socialist organization that can develop a socialist vision through its writings and forums. It may also be possible to put forward candidates independent of the joint slate that stand on an explicitly socialist program and emphasize the necessity of a total break with all of the mainstream parties, including the SNP.

    These are stirring times for Scotland, with plenty of pitfalls but also genuine opportunities.

     

    Eric Chester is an author and activist who has lived for the last five years in Glasgow, Scotland, where he is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Republican Communist Network. His latest book is The Wobblies in Their Heyday (Praeger).

     

  • Protests Sweep Mexico over Police Attack on Students

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    [October 24, 2014] Public outrage over the police murders of six people and forced disappearances of 43 students from the Atoytzinapa rural teachers’ college in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero continued to snowball this week.

    Parts of the Mexican Republic were virtually paralyzed by a 48-hour protest convened October 22-23 by student, labor, farmer, and social organizations.  Significantly, actions ranging from the shut-down of university campuses and the takeover of government offices to the blockade of highways and international border crossings extended from the traditionally “politicized” zones of Mexico City and southern Mexico to many nooks and crannies of the country.

    The Mexican press reported actions in at least 18 of the nation’s 32 states, including usually less politically active entities like Colima and Nuevo Leon.

    On the evening of October 22, and for the third time this month, hundreds of people temporarily blockaded the Bridge of the Americas between Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas.
    In a march that wound from Borunda Park to the border crossing, protesters shouted out the names of the 43 disappeared students and plastered pictures of the missing young men at the local headquarters of the federal attorney general’s office.

    “To seek a better education is not a crime” and “There are not enough bullets to kill us all” were among the messages spotted on signs. Young people formed the vanguard of the protest, with participating students from the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, Autonomous University of Chihuahua, Technological Institute of Ciudad Juarez and the Ricardo Flores Magon Rural Teachers College of Saucillo, Chihuahua, a sister institution of the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa.  The women students from the Saucillo school have been at the forefront of advancing the cause of the Guerrero students in Ciudad Juarez and other parts of Chihuahua state.

    Among numerous actions, an estimated 15,000 people demonstrated in Guadalajara, Jalisco, while 40,000 students joined in shutting down institutions of higher learning in the neighboring state of Zacatecas. For the first time in its 180-year history, students shuttered the University of Guanajuato Law School in protest. Meanwhile, in the southern border state of Chiapas, indigenous Zapatista communities lit candles for the Ayotzinapa students.

    In Mexico City, tens of thousands of students from public and private universities made up huge sections of a march through the capital city. “No violence, no violence,” chanted students from the University of Chapingo.

    “We’re witnessing the largest march of recent years, perhaps since the university movement of 1968,” wrote political analyst and Proceso columnist Jenaro Villamil. “It’s one without party affiliation, without electoral slogans and with a great indignation that is visible on faces, on banners, on placards, in spray paintings, and with slogans that channel the anger in the direction of (President) Enrique Pena Nieto.”

    Interviewed prior to the march, an activist involved in the massive student strike for institutional democracy and accountability, public education and professional integrity still underway at Mexico City’s National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), voiced the heart-felt burst of solidarity with the Ayotzinapa students that is sweeping Mexican university campuses.

    “The rural teachers’ colleges and the IPN are sisters. What is happening to the (Ayotzinapa students) hits us in the guts; it’s family from the other side. We are linked. We were born as institutions for small farmers and workers. We share the same father, (President) Lazaro Cardenas,” said a female student identified as Magali.  “One cannot think of these as isolated events. There are connections between the student teachers and the struggle of the Polytechnic…”

    In Guerrero the movement got a jump-start on the rest of the country as teachers, students and the citizenry in general began occupying nearly two dozen city halls in different regions of the state early in the week.  In Tixtla, thousands of people supported by armed members of the indigenous-led community police effectively took over the small city located near Ayotzinapa. By week’s end, protesters led by the Guerrero State Coordinator of Education Workers and Popular Guerrero Movement occupied Acapulco’s city hall for an “indefinite” time.

    On October 22, between 10,000 and 20,000 people demonstrated in Iguala, the scene of the September 26 crime, garnering enthusiastic support from the residents. A small group of young people broke away from the crowd and set Iguala’s city hall ablaze.

    Across Guerrero protesters demanded the safe return of the Ayotzinapa 43, punishment for the authors of killings and disappearances, medical attention for victims wounded in the September 26-27 attacks, and the ouster and trial of Guerrero Governor Angel Aguirre, whom protesters hold responsible for the violent circumstances prevailing in their state, now considered as the most violent place in the country.

    As the week drew to a close, the protesters got part of their wish: Governor Aguirre announced he was requesting a leave of absence from office, in a move just short of outright resignation.

    “In this tragic scenario, I reject that the public debate should center on whether I remain as the governor in charge,” Aguirre said late Thursday, October 23. “The priority should be on continuing with the search for the missing young people.”

    Internationally, members of Mexico’s vast diaspora and supporters staged demonstrations for justice in London, Paris, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Madrid, Barcelona, Florence, Bogota, La Paz, Los Angeles, and other cities in at least 15 countries. On October 24, activists in Santa Cruz, California, plan a vigil for Ayotzinapa.

    But nearly a month after last month’s violence, it is still not confirmed if the dozens of charred corpses subsequently discovered in multiple, so-called “narco-graves” on the outskirts of Iguala belong to the missing Ayotzinapa students.

    Pushed by Federal Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam and other government officials, several versions exist (disputed in part by Atoytzinapa attorney Vidulfo Rosales Sierra) of why the students, who were in Iguala collecting monetary donations from the public in order to be able to attend the annual commemoration of October 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City, were so viciously targeted by municipal police and Guerreros Unidos cartel gunmen in the first place.

    Implicated as the authors of the violence, now-fugitive Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa, who has been identified as the sister of founding members of Guerreros Unidos, were reportedly incensed at the Ayotzinapa students’ presence in Iguala while a ceremony and dance attended by the couple was in progress on September 26.

    Consequently, either Abarca or his wife- or both- ordered that a harsh lesson be given to the young people.

    A related explanation for the mass abduction that climaxed the police shootings of the students and passing members of the public is that corrupt city officials and Guerreros Unidos made a monstrous misjudgment in confusing the students with “Los Rojos,” a rival organized crime group.

    So far, more than 50 people have been detained in connection with the violence, including Iguala policemen and alleged Guerreros Unidos members, according to Attorney General Murillo. In comments about this week’s political upheaval, President Pena Nieto reiterated his government’s commitment to locating the missing students and applying justice.

    “The President of the Republic makes the sentiment of indignation his own…,” Pena Nieto said.

    While the Iguala atrocities are far from unique in Mexico, the September 26-27 violence has perhaps no better exposed in one fell swoop the collusion of government and organized crime, the criminal infiltration and corruption of political parties, the cold hand of official repression, and the incapability or disinterest of the state in guaranteeing the security of its civilians.

    A central message of protesters this week: Iguala was a crime against humanity committed by the state. Analysts and commentators of all stripes weighed in on the turmoil.

    “Preceded by the scandal around the (June 30) firing squad execution of 22 people by the army in the Mexico state village of Tlatlaya, the case of the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students turned on its head the government of Enrique Pena Nieto, which was acting triumphant because of its structural reforms- especially the energy one- and that were displayed abroad as a modern and vanguard government,” wrote Proceso’s Jose Gil Olmos.

    “Nonetheless, Pena Nieto’s government is completely overwhelmed by a social, political and economic crisis…”

    Columnist Jorge Ramos, the star broadcaster of the Spanish-language television network Univision that is beamed into millions of U.S. households, was no less poignant in a column this past week.

    “The dead of Mexico can no longer be hidden. The massacres of Tlatlaya and Iguala show the worst of the country: the army massacring civilians and the police murdering students. This is Barbarous Mexico. And the government of President Enrique Pena Nieto is almost deaf, paralyzed and overwhelmed, as if the fault was not its own,” Ramos wrote.

    “Mexico smells rotten; it smells of the old PRI (President Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party). Students the country over, with marches and protests, no longer swallow the old (government) tale that we will search and punish. The lines are drawn: the government, its army and police are not with the students, with the victims of violence, or their families. Mexico was broken in Iguala…”

    Ironically, the outcomes of the massacre in Iguala, the very place where Mexico’s independence from Spain was formalized in 1821, could well lead to a new day for the nation-or its demise. As one Ciudad Juarez activist remarked to FNS, the great challenge of the youth and popular uprising of October 2014 will be to maintain the grassroots momentum while organizing and articulating the movement in a way so genuine, lasting changes result.

    Sources.  Arrobajuarez, October 23, 2014. Lapolaka.com, October 23, 2014, Nortedigital.mex, October 23, 2014. Article by Miguel Vargas. Milenio.com, October 23, 2014. El Semanario de Nuevo Mexico, October 23, 2014.  Article by Jorge Ramos. El Sur, October 22, 23 and 24, 2014. Articles by Brenda Escobar, Lourdes Chavez, Jacob Morales Antonio, Karina Contreras, editorial staff, and the Reforma news agency.

    La Jornada, October 23 and 24, 2014. Articles by Sergio Ocampo, Rubicela Morelos, correspondents and editorial staff. La Jornada (Guerrero edition), October 21, 2014. Article by Margena de la O and Salvador Cisneros Silva. Proceso/Apro, October 12, 15, 22, 23, 24, 2014. Articles by Marcela Turati, Santiago Igartua,  Jenaro Villamil, Jose Gil Olmos, Patricia Mayorga, Arturo Rodriguez Garcia, and editorial staff.

    Reprinted from: Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news, Center for Latin American and Border Studies, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico. For a free electronic subscription: email:fnsnews@nmsu.edu

  • Shock, Horror, Anger at Killing of 5, Disappearance of 43 in Mexico; Protests, Marches, Strikes, Gov't Buildings Burned

    Throughout Mexico there is continued shock, horror, indignation, and anger at the police killing of 5 and wounding of 17 other students, and above all at the disappearance of 43 students on the night of September 26 and the early morning of September 27. For almost a month now protests peaceful and violent involving tens of thousands have rippled across Mexico, as students, teachers, and other citizens demand that the missing students be returned alive, though some evidence suggests they may already be dead. While tens of thousands of Mexicans have died in the drug wars since 2006—as many as 60,000, and perhaps another 20,000 have gone missing—there is particular horror and revulsion at the murder and disappearance of these young people from humble backgrounds, children of peasants, who were students at the Ayotzinapa rural teachers college.

    The controversy over the disappearance of the students has taken place just as the Mexican government’s National Human Rights Commission issued a report on October 21 stating that Mexican soldiers had executed at least 12 and probably 15 people of the 22 people who were killed in June in the town of Tlatlaya in the State of Mexico. Two of those killed were minors; several had been tortured. Raul Plascencia, president of the Commission called it, “one of the worst incidents of human rights abuses ever committed.” So far no military officer or soldier has been indicted for the murders.

    The Guerrero students’ killings and disappearances have become a full-blown political crisis for the Mexican government, but above all for Guerrero Governor Ángel Heladio Aguirre Rivero of the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). While President Enrique Peña Nieto and opposition leaders such as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas have called the return of the missing students the country’s most important issue, to many it seems as if there is no response. Guerrero Governor Aguirre Rivero remains in office, no police officers or others have been indicted, and the identities of dozens of bodies found in mass graves in the area have yet to be identified. Government agencies and police have produced conflicting and confusing reports that give the impression that they are intentionally misleading and covering up evidence. There is widespread cynicism about the failure of the government and the political parties, the lack of transparency at all levels, the complicity of the authorities with organized crime, and the impunity of the police. 

    On October 22, Mexico’s Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam told the media that Iguala’s mayor José Luis Abarca Velázquez and his wife María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, the head of the municipal police had ordered the attack on the students. But the full story behind the attacks and the role of all of those involved has yet to be clarified. 

    The Police Shooting of the Students

    The events began in the month of September when students had engaged in political protests, claiming that students of urban campuses were being preferred over rural graduates. According to Carlos Pérez, a student eye-witness who survived the massacre, on September 26 a group of students had gone to the city of Iguala to raise money for the studies and when they were done had seized three buses to take them back to the school. Student commandeering of buses had been going on for some time in Iguala and the students had an understanding with the bus companies that drivers would not be harmed and buses would not be damaged. As they were driving out of the city, they passed the spot where María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, the wife of the mayor of Iguala and president of the agency for the Integral Development of the Family was giving her report.

    To their surprise, the police gave chase and then succeeded in blocking and stopping the buses. When the students stepped off the bus, asking to be allowed to leave, the police “response was to open fire against us immediately,” said Pérez. Some of the wounded shouted at the police that they were from Ayotzinapa, hoping that by identifying themselves as students the police would stop. Ambulances began to arrive to take away the wounded, as students began to use their cell phones to call for support from other organizations or friends. But then a group of men dressed as civilians arrived and began to fire at the students, causing more casualties. One of  the wounded was union leader Alfredo Ramírez García. the Sole Union of Workers of the Bachelors College.

    Earlier Complaints Against the Mayor

    Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states, has a long history of conflict and violence involving criminal gangs, the police, and radical insurgent groups. As in many regions of rural Mexico, political power is often in the hands of local leaders who reach a modus vivendi with the political and economic power-that-be and with drug dealers and even guerrilla groups. The mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca Velázquez, who appears to be the figure at the center of the killings, is just such a person.

    Abarca had a reputation for repression long before the recent events. Arturo Hernández Cordona had, a founder and leader of the Emiliano Zapata Peasant Union (UCEZ) and member of the PRD, had appealed to authorities for protection from Abarca who he believed plan to kill him and other leaders of the union. On May 30, Hernández Cordona and his comrades Féxli Rafael Bandera Román, Ángel Román Ramírez, Héctor Arroyo Delgado, Efráin Amantes Luna, Gregoria Dante Cervantes, Nicolás Mendoza Villa and Jimmy Castrejon were kidnapped and three of their bodies were found executed in the town of Tepecoacuilco. The others managed to escape. Mendoza Villa who was an eyewitness to their murder said that it was mayor Abarca who had personally fired a pistol into the face of Hernández Cordona. Autopsy revealed that the man had been tortured. More than twenty others had also faced violence from the mayor according to reports to the National Network of Civilian Organizations of Human Rights for All.

    The recent shooting is not the first attack on students in a commandeered public bus. On November 15, 2012, a gang of armed men attacked a bus carrying three students, the bus driver and his wife. The students were returning from Atoyac where they had taken a group to participate in a protest march regarding the students who had been assassinated on the Highway of the Son in December 2011. When they reached Tierra Colorada, a black Ram  SUV with darkened windows opened fire, forcing the driver to stop. The men threatened to burn the students alive for commandeering the buses of the Estrella Blanca Company, though after threatening them they were let go.

    Looking for the Missing Students

    To return to the recent events, following the September 26-27 shootings in Iguala, the students went looking for their friends in jails and hospitals, finding some being treated for their wounds, but unable to locate 43 of their colleagues. The police and civilians began a search and on October 4 found human remains in a common grave containing an undetermined number of cadavers. By October 9 four other graves containing human remains had been found, and by October 16 the number of such clandestine graves sites had risen to 17. The Mexican Attorney General, Jesús Murillo Kram, announced on October 15 that experts from his office had determined that none of the 28 bodies found in the first 5 of 14 graves being examined were the Ayotzinapa students.

    Murillo Kram also announced that 46 people had been arrested in conjunction with the investigation of the shooting and disappearance of the students: 22 police officers from Iguala, 14 police officers from the town of Cocula, and ten civilians who were gangsters, members of the Guerreros Unidos gang. Warrants for the arrest of Mayor José Luis Abarca and police chife Felipe Flores Velázquez had also been issued. There was also an investigation into María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, the wife of Abarca for her alleged role in the disappearance of the students.

    While Murillo Kram had ruled out the possibility that the common graves that had been discovered contained the remains of the students, Raúl Plascencia Villa Nueva, president of the Mexican government’s National Commission of Human Rights, suggested on October 22 that indeed the secret graves might contain the students’ remains. The exhumation and examination of the human remains found in the many mass graves in the area continues under the direction of local police.

    Alejandro Solalinde, a Catholic priest and human rights activists, told the media on October 18 that sources in the community had told him that government agents had been responsible for the students’ kidnapping and that several of them who were wounded had been burned alive. They were taken off in police vans, not carried away by criminals. He also said that the Ayotzinapa students were a “stone in the shoe” of the government because they refused to accept the neoliberal model of education that it was promoting.

    The Political Controversy

    The Mexican government and particularly the governor of Guerrero, Aguirre Rivero, have been excoriated by human rights groups, by the church, and by international organizations as calls for the removal of the governor have been ignored. The Senators of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the party of President Peña Nieto, and of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), have argued that Aguirre Rivero should be removed from office and some have suggested that the State of Guerrero should be put in trusteeship of the federal government. The leaders of the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) voted to reject the call for the removal of the government and both the PRD and the PRI denied that the state was “ungovernable,” the legal requirement for a trusteeship. The continued presence of Aguirre Rivero in the governor’s palace, however, clearly represents a threat to the PRD’s continued claim on representing Mexico’s working people and the poor. The Catholic Bishops of Guerrero called upon the government authorities to make a great effort to clean up the state’s institutions.

    The Organization of American States (OAS) has demanded that the Mexican government clarify these events which in the words of President José Miguel Insulza “sadden all America” (meaning all of the nations of North and South America). Legislators from 33 Latin American countries have called upon the Mexican government to end the impunity and punish those responsible for the events in Iguala. A group of academics and intellectuals from 60 countries and 500 universities and research centers from around the world have called for the immediate resignation of Governor Aguirre Rivero and his Attorney General Iñaki Blanco Cabrera and all the police and military who were involved in the crime.

    Waves of Protest

    Students and teachers have understandably led the protests against the events in Iguala. The State Coordinating Committee of the Education Workers (Ceteg) in Guerrero, other teachers, students, and family members burned the Government Palace in Chilpancingo, the state capital, the headquarters of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) also in Chilpancingo, and the Iguala town hall. Marches, principally by students, occurred in 25 states. Students called for 48-hour strikes at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), both in Mexico City. The two universities together have hundreds of thousands of students and many thousands participated in the protests. There have also been strikes in 40 other universities throughout the country.

    In Guerrero, the National Coordinating Committee of the Mexican Teachers Union (la CNTE), the students of 17 rural teachers colleges throughout the country, and the Peasant Organization of the Southern Sierra (OCSS), among other groups, plan to seize the 81 city governments throughout the state as well as highway tool gates until the 43 students are presented alive. Ceteg and peasant organizations have already seized several town halls.

    This article was updated on October 23.

    *This article could not have been written without the daily reporting of La Jornada on which I have relied. 

     

  • Response to Jay and Sustar & Bean

    The following article by Adolph Reed, Jr. responds to an article that appeared on the New Politics website a week ago. Sadly, since then we have learned that Karen Lewis has been afflicted with brain cancer. We offer our sympathy to her, her family, and her friends and wish for her rapid and full recovery. While she has withdrawn and will not be a candidate in the mayoral race, we believe that the issues raised in this article remain important.

    I recently read two quite similar calls for concern about Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis’s possible campaign for mayor: Scott Jay’s “Karen Lewis and the Long Arm of Lesser Evilism” in New Politics—http://newpol.orgkaren-lewis-and-long-arm-lesser-evilismand Lee Sustar and Brian Bean’s “Don’t Back Down” in Jacobin—https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/dont-back-down/. I admit that I was a little surprised to see that this flavor of the left has already lobbed its charges of selling out before she’s even declared her candidacy. 

    The New Politics piece is just simple-minded and wrong-headed all the way through, pro forma stuff that Jay could have phoned in from and about anywhere. No one except maybe he and his political buddies ever imagined that she’d run as anything other than a Dem in the first place. And why should she in a race that’s officially nonpartisan anyway? The only effect would be to increase the degree of difficulty in what would already be a steep uphill fight. (I was especially taken with Jay’s declaration that he’s not demanding ideological purity, which he follows by raising the bar of ideological purity in arguing that it’s not enough that we avoid the sin of voting Democratic but that we need to take care that our actions not only don’t lead anyone else to vote Dem but that they don’t lead anyone to lead anyone else to do so. This brings to mind my fourth grade Catechism teacher.) He criticizes Lewis for supporting Illinois Senate Bill 7, “that attacked teachers’ seniority and their right to strike,” which certainly would be an odd move for the CTU president. In fact, she contingently supported the version of SB7 that passed over the worse one that had been proposed. He also attacks her for supporting Pat Quinn’s re-election as governor, a move that Jay understands, consistent with his brand of sectarian fantasy, to expose her as a stooge for the Democrats. Of course she supports Quinn over kazillionaire privatizer (and Friend of Rahm) Bruce Rauner. Much as I dislike Quinn’s earlier moves on public pensions, etc (and I think Lewis’s argument is at least plausible that he gambled on backing a proposal that was so extreme the state legislature wouldn’t accept it, which is in fact what happened), I sent him some money because Rauner promises to privatize as much of state government as possible and destroy public education. That’s also why the CTU endorsed him, not some shadowy “pressure to stay within the Democratic Party fold,” as Sustar and Bean contend.

    There’s a flavor of Trotskyist that brings to mind a line from a truly horrible late 1970s Paul Schrader film, Hardcore, in which the stereotypical young hooker with a heart of gold who is helping upper Midwestern Calvinist George C. Scott find his daughter who was spirited into the sex industry on a Disneyland trip, remarks to him that their views about sex are fundamentally similar. When he looks at her like she’s nuts, she explains that he cared so little about it that he didn’t do it at all and she cared so little about it that she’d do it with anyone. The parallel in this domain is with Dems and their antagonists of that sort on the left. Both tend, as a matter of hallowed principle, to overvalue the significance of electoral action and to reduce electoral engagement to a matter of supporting Dems or not; they just take different sides on the question. But voting for a Dem or not is not the end all and be all of politics; whether or not to do so is fundamentally a tactical or strategic question, not a matter of principle. It is high principle for those leftist types because they operate within a mythology—not unlike mental illness—according to which, if we could just get the people to stop voting for Dems, they’ll come to see the necessity for socialism, or the crazier-still version, that the masses already are pleading for socialism, but the elite gatekeepers in the labor movement, etc., keep duping them into supporting Dems. Sustar and Bean are no better than Jay in this regard. Like Jay, they imagine that a mass movement is already out there waiting to be called together, if only Lewis would demonstrate her independence from the Dems and adopt the proper laundry list of lefty proposals. For them that means:

    from raising the minimum wage, to a tax on financial transactions, to higher taxes on the wealthy. The fight against racism will have to be front and center. She will have to highlight underfunding in schools, residential discrimination, and the lack of genuine economic development—not gentrification—in black and brown neighborhoods. Such a campaign would also have to confront the reality of police brutality, from Ferguson to Chicago. Immigrant rights should be a major focus, too, in a city in which a growing Latino population faces a dramatic rise in deportations, as well as racism and poverty.

    All those sound good as talking points (and Sustar and Bean note that Rahm supports increasing the minimum wage), but they generally lack content. What, after all, are the warrants of “the fight against racism” and what does it mean to make it “front and center”? How can we tell what counts as “genuine economic development—not gentrification”? What can the mayor of Chicago do about police brutality in suburban Maywood or Evergreen Park, much less in metropolitan St. Louis?

    Both these pieces betray a really naïve or underdeveloped understanding of electoral action, its costs and benefits, the unavoidable messiness of engaging in it. And, by the way, the same messiness applies to all efforts to build and maintain broad alliances, all of which require finding ways to navigate locating points of agreement and looking the other way at least temporarily at potentially serious differences and contradictions. Jay’s essay is puerile in this regard, but the Jacobin essay isn’t much better; both fall to the level of facile exposé—Lewis calls for more cops on the streets even though the FOP fundraised for Darren Wilson and the CPD has a history of racist brutality!!—and they fail to understand that you can’t build a movement around an election campaign, which requires an approach to organizing built on thin and broad, diffuse even, appeals because the standard of success is tied to % of the vote received. And the logic of electoral campaigns is inexorable; it brings to mind an old college friend’s quip about acid: once you buy the ticket, you have to take the ride.

    And as for the “Lewis’s turn to the right” line, and the need for “the fight against racism [whatever that is concretely] to be front and center,” it’s important to keep in mind the really existing black politics in Chicago, which presents a much more complicated field of action than either essay takes into account. There’s a venerable history of black (and nonblack) aldermen and other politicos pledging to back the insurgents and then putting their troops out on election day to turn out for the machine. For the preachers that sort of duplicity is in their basic job description, and then you have the “community leaders,” who’re likely to be on the administration’s teat either directly or via the nonprofit industrial complex. Then there are whatever remains of the South Side nationalists and Jesse Jackson’s operation to which those “activists” are loosely linked. That element has its own history of cash and carry politics, and its minions have habitually found a way to denounce or quietly reject the insurgent candidates for some arcane political incorrectness and cut deals with the machine or in state politics with the GOP in exchange for working to demobilize around the edges. South Side “activists” did that when liberal Dem Dawn Clark Netsch ran against GOP incumbent Jim Edgar for governor in ’95. They determined that they were affronted that she hadn’t supported Harold Washington in the Dem primary in 1983 (though she did in the general election and again all the way in 1987). So they got some Edgar money. They also worked tirelessly to preempt the emergence of a serious progressive contender against the Lesser Daley during his reign by insisting that only a black challenger could embody the legacy of the Harold Washington coalition.

    And another thing that lefties don’t understand, especially to the extent that they harbor essentialist fantasies about “the black [or Latino] community,” is that it’s such institutional nodes that actually mobilize voters and turn them out. That’s also why a Lewis campaign would need support of whatever unions and other organizations with political capacity it could get. Sustar and Bean’s belief that the positions a Lewis campaign adopts would by themselves turn out voters, working class or otherwise, against an entrenched political apparatus is wishful thinking, and a particular species of wishful thinking at that, an electoral version of the Myth of the Spark that will condense the spontaneous mass demand for socialism. Yes, there are tradeoffs that have to be made; that would be true even for a serious protest candidacy. Such tradeoffs have to be made carefully and judiciously through collective processes, but they have to be made. I don’t see a hint of recognition of that fact anywhere in either of these articles. To that extent they’re not much more than political posturing and dilettantism. They don’t engage at all with the specificities of Chicago politics—electoral or otherwise—and offer only cookie cutter proposals transcribed from those laundry lists so routinely cobbled together by the activistist left and parsed endlessly on the internet and in Brooklyn coffee houses.

    Finally, the problem in Chicago isn’t the need for a break from the Dems; it’s the need to build a broad alliance against neoliberal policy and, it is to be hoped, beyond that. A Karen Lewis mayoral race could be a significant step in building such an alliance; if it is to be, it’ll be a tough struggle that will require broad appeals and wide and deep mobilization. At the same time, I doubt that there are many people more acutely aware than I of the dangers—including the potential contradictions of success—that can come from winning a mayoralty. Some people think that, taking those dangers into account, Lewis might be more effective politically by remaining outside City Hall and agitating to broaden a base within the labor movement and among other constituent groups. That’s ultimately a practical question and one to which there may be no clearly correct answer; nontrivial tradeoffs accompany each course. (However, Lewis’s sudden health complications may be serious enough to render debate about her possible mayoral campaign moot.) That’s the problem with real politics; it’s messy, laden with contingencies and uncertain outcomes and, of course, odd bedfellows. It’s ironic that the political element that is now prepared to denounce Lewis for capitulationism was also among the loudest voices urging her to run in the first place. I see now that what they had in mind, as these critiques make clear, is the sort of purist and pointless suicide mission that is the hallmark of their ideological tendency.

    This article originally appeared at NonSite.org   http://nonsite.org/editorial/response-to-jay-and-sustar-bean

     

     

  • Behind the Kobane Tragedy: The Kurdish Political Movement and Turkey

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    The whole world is just watching the forthcoming massacre in Kobane. US-led air strikes seem to be made only for show. When ISIS approached the oil-rich Erbil,  the Kurdish Regional Government’s capital, the U.S.-led coalition forces immediately took action against ISIS. However they didn’t do the same for Kobane.

    John Kerry said  that “The situation in Kobani is a ‘tragedy’ but saving it from ISIS is not part of our ‘strategy’”. Everybody knows that long-term strategy of the US is to establish U.S backed governments on the Erbil – Lazkiye line and dominate the distribution of oil in the Kurdish region controlled by Barzani to the world economy. So, the US uses ISIS to decrease the Shiah effect on this line. For example, Prime Minister of Iraq – Nuri el Maliki who was thought to strengthen Shiah influence in the country and help Esad protect his position in Syria, resigned this summer after the U.S. threated him by not intervening against ISIS should they attack Baghdad. In the middle of this unrest in Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) seized the control of Kerkük, which accounts for 40 percent of Iraq’s oil production.

    Kobane, is one of the three cantons that declared democratic autonomy in Syrian Kurdistan and that has been under siege by the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) since September 16. The other two cantons are Efrin and Cezire. Kobane is between Efrin and Cezire and is located at the heart of Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan). These cantons are self-governed by the local assemblies, which are composed of the representatives of ethnic and religious group on the basis of secular pluralism, gender equality, and democratic autonomy. In Kobane, the political theses of Abdulla Öcalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), regarding governance and living together in solidarity with other peoples have been put into practice. Besides, Party of Democratic Union (PYD) holding the political and military control in Rojava, is the Syrian branch of PKK which has been fighting for the basic right of Turkey’s Kurds for 30 years. Just because of this brand new life project, Kurds, without any heavy weaponry, are trying to defend Kobane against IS,  which captured tanks and advanced weaponry from Mosul.

    It is no longer a secret that Turkey has been providing military equipment and training to ISIS for quite some time. In addition, Turkish soldiers and police using plastic bullets and tear gas attacked Kurds flooding to the border in order to get some news from the other side  and provide help to the Syrian Kurds. Even some of those only slightly wounded bled out after after Turkey chose to keep them waiting at the border. On the other hand, while ISIS was crossing the border during a live broadcast by a pro-Kurdish TV channel IMC, Turkish tanks and soldiers were just watching them. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), with the help of Kobane siege, has attempted to demolish the Rojava model and aims to shape the peace process and solution to the Kurdish issue with a reactionary and sectarian form.

    With the support of AKP and the ultra-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP), the Turkish parliament   voted to  authorize  its government to send military forces to Iraq and Syria to combat the terrorist organizations. However the name of ISIS is not explicitly mentioned in the bill, which makes one think that the bill has some other intentions related with Syria and Assad’s regime. A no-fly buffer zone in northern Syria, which was laid down by Turkish President Erdoğan as a condition for joining the international coalition, also aims to prevent Assad’s air forces from intervening and bombing ISIS positions. The main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), comprehending the symbolic importance of Kobane as a secular project very well, joined People’s Democratic Party (HDP) in voting “no” to the war measure, despite the pressure of the nationalist wing in the party which perceives PKK and PYD as an explicit threat to Turkey’s integrity.

    On October 4, PYD leader Salih Müslim visited Turkey and met with both the MIT (National Intelligence Organization of Turkey) and Foreign Ministry officials. He demanded two things: First, permission for the People’s Protection Units (YPG, the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers Party) fighters in Afrin and Cezire to cross the Turkish border in order to join the resistance in Kobane. Second, allowing the transportation of heavy weaponry coming from North Iraq through Habur Border Gate into Kobane through Mürşitpınar Border Gate. Since ISIS surrounded Kobane from east, west and south, Mürşitpınar Border Gate is the only connection YPG has with the outside world. Casualties and civilians enter Turkey from this gate. Turkey, in exchange for meeting these requirements, demanded unacceptable compromises from Müslim: back down from the cantons and democratic autonomy, stop the collaboration with Assad regime and accept the security zone. AKP, for a long time, has been trying to tame the Rojava Kurds who refuse to come together with the reactionary forces against the regime under the name of a so-called “opposition forces”. However, Rojava once again chose to resist instead of giving up without a fight and Müslim left Ankara.[i]

    After this meeting HDP called on its supporters to mount mass protests all over Turkey and demonstrations showing support for Kobane resistance began. During the demonstrations in the Kurdish cities and the ghettos of Western cities, the clashing parties were not only the Kurds and security forces as in the ‘90s, which were the peak years of the civil war; but also the supporters of MHP, AKP and Hüda-Par, the party of Kurdish Hizbollah. This latter group, which had laid down its arms a few years ago and whose leaders were released from the prison by AKP, were in the streets. Islamo-fascists backing up ISIS started to attack the Kurdish and socialist students in the main universities of western Turkey. The government declared curfew in six cities, including Diyarbakır, and the tanks and infantry forces roamed the streets of Diyarbakır, thought to be the unofficial capital of Turkey’s Kurdistan. After a few days, there were 38 dead, 351 wounded and 58 detainees.

    The Turkish government, in order to put an end to all these protests, assigned MIT officials to talk with Öcalan, who is imprisoned in Imralı and has been conducting peace negotiations with the state for several  years.  Öcalan’s views were conveyed to HDP. After the statement ( below ) made by HDP on October 10, the protests all over the country decreased significantly and the tension eased: “We want to eliminate these internal and external threats to our peoples together with the government… Despite all the tension and pain, we expect the government to continue its positive steps (such as facilitating the passage of wounded people and humanitarian aid across the border), taking into consideration the contribution of Mr. Öcalan, preventing the attacks by provocateurs on civilians, and acting in a responsible way by issuing messages that will defuse tension.”

    The co-presidents of HDP added that they hoped the leaders of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), an organization founded by PKK to put into practice Öcalan's ideology of Democratic Confederalism,  would also repeat their call to demonstrators to refrain from violence, investigate armed actions, and take measures to reduce tension.

    Nearly 40% of Kobane has been taken by ISIS at the moment. The fall of Kobane to ISIS would surely result in a massacre of the town’s civilians. At the same time, a possible future of solidarity of peoples on the basis of secular pluralism and democratic autonomy in the Middle East will be shattered.

    All these goings on related to Kobane, have a special significance for Turkey. Ocalan and Turkish state officials have been carrying out peace talks for several years after a 30-year civil war that took some 40,000 lives. If Kobane falls, it is likely that PKK will put an end to the truce and resume the armed struggle, which will mean thousands of more casualties in a new civil war. If Kobane falls, the violence will escalate in the Kurdish cities of Turkey and the extensions of ISIS in Turkey and the fascists will collaboration on lynching Kurds, Alewites, and socialists in Turkey. That police and Islamo-fascists together have been attacking socialist students in the universities for the last few days is a sign of this.

    The Kurdish political movement is not monolithic. There are moderate Islamists, leftist and nationalists in it and this reality has a significant effect on their policies. The Kobane resistance has brought both the Kurdish national freedom movement and Turkey as a whole at a new and strategic political crossroads. ISIS, maybe for the very first time in Kurdish history, might have been the means of understanding what a big threat political Islam is for most of the Kurdish people. As a consequence, progressive views may gain strength within the Kurdish political movement. “Religious brotherhood” and the “Islamic umbrella,” concepts frequently pronounced by Öcalan during the peace process. may be able to be questioned more loudly. The resistance of the Kurdish people against ISIS and political Islam, may reinforce the possibility of changing the republican masses’ view of Kurdish reality and establishing a dialogue between the Kurds and the secular republicans on the basis of secular or even leftist values. The CHP’s “No” vote to the bill in the parliament is a contribution to this potential outcome.. A significant part of the secular, democratic, and leftist sectors of Turkey know by heart that the only way to get rid of their own Islamo-fascist trouble is a united front comprising socialists and the secular, democratic and leftist wing of CHP and HDP.

    [i] http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/kurds-are-no-more-mercenaries-pyd-leader-.aspx?pageID=238&nid=72880&NewsCatID=352

     

  • License to kill?

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    Although it took some time for US media to cover the story, it now clear: Mutilated bodies of teacher education students were found in a mass grave in Mexico.  In response, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) issued a press statement by the union president, Randi Weingarten, calling for the “perpetrators of this atrocity” to be brought to justice.  The National Education Association has been mum. Shame on the NEA and its President, Lily Eskelsin Garcia for their public silence. It is especially unforgivable given AFT and NEA’s domination of the Education International, the international confederation of teachers unions.

                AFT’s press release was welcome and needed as rebuke to the Mexican authorities (and the US government’s support of them) responsible for these murders. Still the AFT response falls far short of what we need because the atrocity was committed in the context of a new World Bank report about education in Latin America that makes teachers unions a target.  For governments ready and eager to rule with an iron hand, the report provides a license to kill.

                The report argues that poverty in Latin America has to be solved by developing “human capital,” accomplished through the same measures used now in US cities that are all but domestic colonies, like New Orleans and Detroit: excessive testing that determines what is taught and how; replacing experienced teachers who come from the communities they serve with a revolving door of recruits from “alternate route” programs; eliminating legal protections for teachers, so as to give administrators complete control over staff.  The report suggests a hunting season – on teachers unions – when it notes “The deepest challenge… is not fiscal or technical, but political, because teachers unions in every country in Latin America are large and politically active stakeholders” (p. 3). The World Bank report urges stakeholders to break the power of the unions.

                As Mary Compton observes in her invaluable website and resource about the global project to privatize education at any and all costs, the EI should end its collaboration with the institutions directing this project. The AFT and NEA are the majority organizations in the EI and hence control policy. They claim it is practical to be working hand-in-glove with people who are whipping up anti-teacher union sentiment and likely violence against activists.  My question for the EI: At what point does it become impractical to collaborate?  Their answer seems to be “When they’ve destroyed us.” 

                We need to reject collaboration with these architects of our destruction. One way to start is for the EI to publish a report and organize a campaign on the attacks on the reform movement of the Mexican teachers union that is similar to the one on Colombia’s violence against teachers union activists in that country.  If we do not mobilize international pressure, the Mexico massacre may be the first of other violent attacks on teachers in Latin America fighting for public education and democracy.