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  • Indiana Moral Mondays

    Moral Mondays has been established in Indiana. At a founding meeting in Indianapolis in mid-September, the organization adopted a “five-point agenda” similar to those of Moral Mondays movements in other states:

    • Secure pro-labor, anti-poverty policies that insure economic sustainability;
    • Provide well-funded, quality public education for all;
    • Stand up for the health of every Hoosier by promoting health care access and environmental justice across all the state’s communities;
    • Address the continuing inequalities in the criminal justice system and ensure equality under the law for every person, regardless of race, class, creed, documentation or sexual preference;
    • Protect and expand voting rights for people of color, women, immigrants, the elderly and students to safeguard fair democratic representation.

    On September 20, a rally was held at the State House at which the Rev. William Barber, head of the North Carolina NAACP and a leading spokesperson for the Moral Mondays movement, gave an impassioned speech to some 400 people. I was present myself at the rally, and also briefly interviewed Purdue professor, long-time activist, and Indiana Moral Mondays steering committee member Harry Targ on the politics and potential of the organization. 

    Rev. Barber opened the rally with a powerful speech in the oratorical style of the African American church, heavily emphasizing morality and the moral implications of the political issues involved, and how this moral concern drove the sense of correcting injustice and reinvigorating politics that fueled the Moral Mondays movement — a movement that has now appeared in 13 states following its origins as a protest against the legislative activities of the Republican-controlled North Carolina state legislature.  At the rally it was emphasized that Indiana was now the second state to have clearly established Moral Mondays as an organized force.  Whatever one might think as a secular socialist of the politics involved, Rev. Barber’s moving speech, like African American gospel music, was a real treat.  Masterful in its oratorical cadences, it drew in and swept away the audience with its eloquent passion and vivid imagery, drawing mightily on the tradition of the Black church.  Aesthetically, it was a tour de force.

    When I spoke with Targ, he emphasized the nature of Indiana Moral Mondays as articulated by Barber: an individual “state-oriented” political approach that would rely heavily on “fusion politics” to draw diverse constituencies into participation on the key “interconnected issues” of labor, education, healthcare, women’s reproductive rights, and gay and lesbian rights.  “The only way progressives can make a dent," noted Targ, "is if we can work together and look at the interconnectedness of all these issues.”  Moral Mondays would be strongly oriented at “pressing” the Indiana General Assembly, the state’s two-house legislature, and the Governor’s office — both presently dominated by Tea Party-leaning Republicans — on the issues, as well as undertaking education and voter registration and working also for alternative candidates for office. Nevertheless, Targ stressed, Indiana Moral Mondays “is not primarily or exclusively an electoral movement.”

    Conceding that little could be done by the upcoming 2014 elections, Targ underlined that Moral Mondays was looking toward a long-term strategy and presence, and perhaps would be more able to flex its muscle by the 2016 elections.  Education and “working class” economic issues such as inequality, poverty, low-paying jobs and persistently steady unemployment would be emphasized, and that pushing for the right of workers to form unions would be “just one part of a broader effort” to reach out to that 90+ percent of Indiana’s workforce that was non-union.  As part of “fusion politics,” outreach to white workers that educated them on the shared commonalities they faced with African American workers would be an important component of Moral Mondays’ work.  As Targ stated, “All workers are experiencing increased exploitation and immiseration.”  Indeed, outreach to the “white working class,” long an electoral base for the Republican Party in heavily Red-state Indiana, was stressed by several speakers at the September 20 rally.

    Much the same was articulated by Joseph Varga, Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at the main campus of Indiana University in Bloomington. Varga, a self-professed “labor activist and LBGT activist” who is also active in South Central Indiana Jobs with Justice, was enthusiastic about Moral Monday’s potential for “coalition building,” as he saw that “the only way we’re going to stop the reactionary movement in this country is through numbers.” Son of a Hungarian immigrant factory-worker father, Varga grew up with a blue-collar identity and saw that his fellow white worker cohorts would support social safety-net and populist measures out of self-interest, even as they “stayed away from labels of what we call liberalism and leftism in this country.”  Varga feels the United States is in a “state of emergency” for poor and working people, emphasizing that “working people and poor people have no representation whatsoever; they are getting destroyed.”  He added, “I don’t think workers vote against their self-interest if we have a Democratic Party that’s not doing a damn thing for them.”  He thinks “actions are going to speak louder than words,” and that workers will be attracted to, and join, a movement that is in “the places where goods and services are transported and being moved and clog that system up so badly that it cannot operate until our concerns are addressed.”  Civil disobedience was, of course, a hallmark of the North Carolina Moral Mondays, and was also mentioned by Rev. Barber in his speech here in Indianapolis.

    Admitting to feeling a “little bit skittish” with Moral Mondays because of the moralistic emphasis and active presence of churches and Christian religious believers (at the rally, e.g., I saw no discernable Jewish or Muslim presence, and certainly no overt atheist, agnostic, or secular humanist one), Joe Varga emphasized that the activities in Bloomington were strictly secular and, as for overt religious influence, the best course was to “just ignore it.”

    In an article he wrote, Harry Targ emphasized that Moral Mondays, in the 13 states in the South and Midwest where it has a presence, has "begun to build a new fusion movement that draws together workers, women, young and old, black, brown, and white people, documented and undocumented, environmentalists, people of faith and atheists, and the LBGT community based upon ‘moral’ and ‘constitutional’ agendas.”

    It certainly is true that at present Moral Mondays has galvanized a sizeable element of the radical imagination.  But can it succeed, especially here in Indiana, based so fervently as it is on moralism little backed up with concrete program? Or will it go the way of Occupy, which was similarly based on fervid moral indignation with little, or no, attempt to develop a program of concrete action, and thus became only a fond memory for many radicals, having left nothing discernable in its wake?  Probably the only realistic answer at this time is: Only time will tell, as Moral Mondays begins articulating its vision and building coalitions, drawing new people into it, and thus over time becoming more concrete and programmatic in its approach.  And perhaps the success of Moral Mondays movements will vary from place to place, which seems the most likely.  But despite the publicity and activity of the original in North Carolina, it seems to have had little deterrent effect on the Republican supermajority in control of that state's legislature.  Yet despite this, Moral Mondays there has certainly not closed up shop.  Indeed, far from it—to continue the marketing analogy, the franchise has only broadened and set foot in new locales.

    But in terms of Indiana, I’d have to say that Targ’s and Varga’s optimism is based on both of them living in bucolic college-town islands where left political activity is far more the norm than it is elsewhere in Indiana, and where the rest of the state is more a fetid swamp than it is a haven for such activity.  That is especially my jaundiced take on the potential of Indiana Moral Mondays here in Indianapolis where I live, where I’m afraid the prevalent overweening religious pietism and religiosity will turn Moral Mondays here into yet another clique of the “peaceable religious progressives” who will hostilely exclude anyone not of their religious persuasion.  Because I’ve seen too much of that happen before:  in the derailing of a promising, more broadly-based and secular peace movement here in the mid- to late-1980s, when key people instead turned it into an exclusively religious pacifist clique that focused solely on “symbolic protest” and did no mass outreach; and in the destruction of the Solidarity Books/Paper Matches youth collective here a decade-and-a-half ago, where a group of feisty anarchist youth tried to set up a truly viable non-sectarian left bookstore, and were driven out in frustration and disgust by the “respectable religious progressives” who were incensed over these youths’ revolutionary rhetoric.  Which has left Indianapolis, a major metropolitan area, completely bereft of any radical bookstore whatsoever.

    Also, statewide movements in Indiana have never been able to sustain themselves during my 34-year stay here.  The Indiana Green Party tried, but disbanded, and the only movements here that have been able to sustain themselves over a long run have been regional ones based preponderantly in certain major cities and urban areas:  Gary/Northwest Indiana, near Chicago; Lafayette/W. Lafayette, where Purdue University is; Bloomington, where Indiana University is; Mishawaka/South Bend, where Notre Dame is; and Indianapolis, leaving large swaths of the state without any active progressive or liberal, let alone any leftist or radical, presence whatsoever.  Except for the northern, more industrialized part of the state, the rest, preponderantly rural, is home to the Republican and Tea Parties, and these two have dominated Indiana politics easily now for many years. As for the Democratic Party, it’s more a vote-gathering machine which sees “moderates” and “conservatives” having the best electoral chances.

    Further, Indiana is staunchly socially and culturally conservative, even hidebound, and in this is more akin to the Old Confederacy than to the Midwest of which it is geographically part.  Indeed, Indiana, because of its cultural conservatism and lack of significant urbanity, even in its cities, is the great sleeper, the great stealth juggernaut, of Red-state politics that’s consistently overlooked by the national media.  (For an excellent journalistic portrait of this hidden aspect of the state, see Bryan K. Bullock's “The Ultra-Right-Wing State Nobody Mentions,” .) Perhaps Indiana Moral Mondays will succeed where others have failed in the past.  Perhaps.  For Indiana Moral Mondays appears to be off to an auspicious start—but I’m afraid it will take more than moralistic fervor to make it a consistent go.

     

    George Fish is an anti-authoritarian socialist writer living in Indianapolis, Indiana, whose work has appeared in several left publications. He has also published extensively on blues and other pop music, has published poetry, and does Lenny Bruce/George Carlin-style stand-up comedy. He may be reached at georgefish666@yahoo.com.

  • Ebola: Who are the Architects of Death and How Can We Combat Them?

    ImageAccording to the latest predictions of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), if the Ebola pandemic continues to progress at the current rhythm, it could affect 1.4 million people in Liberia and Sierra Leone between now and January 2015, leading to the deaths of 700,000 in a year, and thus making Ebola the third leading cause of death from infectious diseases in Africa, after AIDS and respiratory diseases. The two countries most seriously affected could suffer the loss of 10 percent of their populations in a year, if one takes into account the impact of such a catastrophe on food production and the overall health of the populations involved. Our understanding of the causes then is urgent in order to avoid the worst and to prevent similar tragedies in other regions of the global South.

    We should first note that this illness seems to have been controlled in Nigeria and in Senegal, and that it seems to have been slowed down in Guinea. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a similar epidemic began at the end of August also seems to have been brought under control, a country that has experience with this disease since 1976. How can we explain then the particular seriousness of the pandemic in Liberia, which has the majority of new cases since mid-August, followed in second place by Sierra Leone? The fact that Guinea has done better suggests that the epidemic began in the forested areas of the south, largely cut off from the northern economy based on bauxite mining, the world’s largest reserve. In fact the south looks toward Liberia and Sierra Leone, which offer it the closest seaports.

    To understand the gravity of the situation in Liberia, in Sierra Leone and in the south of Guinea, it’s necessary to look carefully at the particularities of this sub-region. I note here four characteristics that constitute an explosive cocktail.

    1. At the end of the 1980s, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the south of Guinea were at the center of armed conflicts for the control of natural resources.
    2. After the reestablishment of relative peace in the early 2000s, there was a surge of foreign investments, accompanied by land-grabbing and the expropriation of the small farmers who had been weakened by war.
    3. The increasingly rapid destruction of the forests endangered many animal species and pushed their microbial parasites to search for new hosts at the margins of their traditional ecosystem.
    4. The collapse of the state institutions that had been established when these countries became independent led to the transfer of their tasks to outside and local non-governmental organizations, private companies, and even to Western powers.

    It is the combination and interaction of these four characteristics that has made these countries an ideal terrain for the diffusion of the Ebola virus.

    Wars for the Control of Natural Resources

    The civil wars that bloodied Liberia and Sierra Leone starting at the end of the 1980s had largely been carried on by groups—whether those in power or those in rebellion—struggling over the control of natural resources, in particular diamonds (which because of these circumstances came to be called blood diamonds) as well as lumber, with the complicity of large multinational corporations. Those wars were the cause of the death of some 200,000 people, not to mention the thousands of wounded, mutilated, raped women, orphaned children, and those displaced and turned into refugees. The vast forests where Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea touch have been particularly ravaged by the battles in which the Guinean army confronted the Liberian forces, which were allied to the rebels of Sierra Leone.[1] In addition, this remote area where the capitals of the three countries are found has continued to be the scene of repeated violence, almost to this day, either in the district of Kolahun (Lofa County) in Liberia, or in that of Guéckédou, Guinea. It is in the latter that the Ebola epidemic broke out in December 2013.

    Liberia and Sierra Leone recovered from their civil wars and attained a relative stability, supported by the diplomats and the special forces of Great Britain and the United States, whose action has been continued by United Nations peace-keeping missions there, so that by 2005 in Liberia and 2005-07 in Sierra Leone there had been put in place a semblance of representative democracy and business-as-usual resumed. The international index of “economic freedom” (of the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal) showed a continual improvement in commercial freedom, in the monetary and tax systems and in investments in the two countries, and only the rights of workers and public services have worsened.

    No doubt about it: the international competition for the control and exploitation of natural resources has returned with a vengeance, dispensing with the mediation of costly armed bands, as part of the new scramble for Africa. During the last five years, from 2009 to 2013, according to the World Bank, the GDP of Liberia has grown on average by 11.1 percent per year, and Sierra Leone by 10 percent. Overall, Guinea remains behind, with a growth rate of 2.5 percent, though it is true that is has not suffered a destructive conflict in the whole country.

    Expropriation of Rural Communities

    In Liberia and Sierra Leone rural communities have been the first victims of the war and of the savage exploitation of natural resources by the belligerent parties; half of the inhabitants have been internally displaced, while at the same time there has been an influx of refugees from neighboring states, as hundreds of thousands of small farmers have been permanently uprooted. It is in this context of mining and land-grabbing that have developed on a large scale over the last several years, with the delighted encouragement of the authorities, obsessed with the neoliberal ideology if not actually corrupted—that in 2012, the tax abatements conceded to the six largest corporations represented 59 percent of the Sierra Leone budget.

    In Liberia, the grabbing up of arable land by international investors has exploded, notably by rubber and palm oil plantations and biofuels; and finally iron ore extraction has led to new concessions. This country now has the world record for foreign investment ratio to GDP. At the same time, 85 percent of its inhabitants live below the poverty line, and 80% of them are unemployed. Sierra Leone presents the same picture. In November 2011, the Swiss Addax Bioenergy Company of the billionaire Jean-Claude Gandur launched a great production unit aiming to develop 20,000 hectares of sugar cane, an ethanol refinery for export, and an electric power plant. Altogether, multinational corporations today control some 500,000 hectares of land in a single country. These investments deprive agriculture for food production of the land and water that it needs, which is why, echoing numerous popular protests, last June some 180 citizens signed the Freetown Declaration against land-grabbing.

    Destruction of Forest Ecosystems

    Forested areas of the three countries are subject to growing exploitation due to population pressure, aggravated by the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing armed conflict. Meanwhile, the timber industry is sold to international dealers that open up roads and employ armies of lumberjacks. Small scale mining and the intensive exploitation of flora and fauna accompany these developments, so that the people whose livelihoods depend on all these activities must rely increasingly on bush-meat, hunted on a large scale, which is sold in regional markets for food.

    Throughout this sub-region, commercial lumbering has caused an irreversible destruction of the forest: while wooded areas represent only 4 percent of the surface of Sierra Leone, their importance in Liberia and the south of Guinea is much greater, representing a larger part of their territory.

    This is what led to the accelerated destruction of wildlife, which despite the animals’ higher morbidity, has not prevented them from also being hunted and consumed by people. This is probably also the reason why the fruit bats, healthy carriers of the Ebola virus, move on, traveling ever greater distances in search of food. It is therefore possible that it is these fruit bats, which originally came from their home in Central Africa, that brought the strain of the Ebola virus causing the outbreak in West Africa. Moreover, they often colonize the fruit trees that grow on the edges of the forests near inhabited areas. (Washington Post, July 8, 2014).

    Privatization and the Out-Sourcing of Public Tasks

    In 1991, Sierra Leone was subjected to a brutal structural adjustment program, reducing public spending by 40%, a development that contributed to the outbreak of civil war. Therefore, the state has increased its contracts with foreign private companies to provide public services, to be paid by a share of the profits from diamonds: the country acquired private troops, private customs agencies, a private central bank, and private fisheries … encouraging a growing complicity between African war lords and large international companies. Liberia has followed the same path, which led to the virtual disappearance of its already minimal medical infrastructure. Today, there are 1.4 doctors and 27.4 nurses per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 2.2 and 16.6 for Sierra Leone (the OECD average is 320 and 890) (Vox, Oct. 2, 2014).

    With peace restored in the 2000s, similar processes have continued into the present. Now, it is “democratically elected” and internationally recognized officials who are selling off the natural resources of these countries to foreign investors. The latter are not required to accept national participation in these ventures, not even the smallest share; they are allowed to repatriate their profits; they are protected against any possible change in the law that would be unfavorable; they are exempt from taxes; and they have access to the workforce of the country at bargain prices. It must be said that the President of Liberia studied economics in the United States, and has worked for the World Bank, Citibank, and HSBC! There is still a “national” state, though it is primarily used for punishing people who dare to protest against those in power and their decisions. For instance, in dealing with Ebola, the authorities of the countries concerned have focused on military roadblocks, imposing quarantines to hundreds of thousands of people and stalking families who do not report their sick, to avoid their loved ones being taken away and isolated without getting any care,

    We find the same situation in the south of Guinea, where the poor Guéckédou District institutions have not been able to deal with the exponential growth of the population over the last 20 years, an explosion from less than 80,000 to approximately 350,000 people today. The infrastructure is so non-existent that when Doctors Without Borders (MSF) dispatched its first team in March 2014, they had to scramble to make a map of the city. In one day, from satellite images, 200 volunteers from around the world were asked to arrange some 100,000 homes in the metropolitan area on a plane that involved little more than two roads and the indication of some large areas inhabited. A feat that is nothing other than the mirror image of the total collapse of public services.

    AFRICOM is not the Salvation Army

    The role played by MSF on this terrain is emblematic of the abnegation of responsibility by the United Nations organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO). With an annual budget of $400 million, eighty percent of which comes from private donors, this corps of 35,000 volunteers has without a doubt been the principal actor in the struggle against the epidemic in West Africa since the spring of 2014. Overwhelmed by the breadth of the problem MSF has not hesitated to use its good will to call for massive civilian and military aid. With the exception of Cuba, which has announced that it will send 400 doctors and nurses and already has half of them on the ground, it is essentially the countries most engaged in the new partition of Africa that have responded to this appeal. China has converted a hospital in Freetown that it had previously constructed into a health care center and has sent the necessary medical personnel. The old colonial powers have made small gestures: France announced the establishment of a treatment center and a laboratory in Guinea, while the United Kingdom promised field hospitals in four urban zones of Sierra Leone.

    Obama struck a blow in deciding to send 3,000 troops to the countries most affected and by helping with the distribution of aid, together with the government of Senegal, with the local NGOs, but all by promising to establish 17 medical centers of 100 beds each. The headquarters of the operation is based in Monrovia, Liberia, under the orders of a U.S. AFRICOM general. After its intervention in Nigeria against Boko Haram, the U.S. Army has another occasion to polish its image on the continent, after having failed, despite its attempt to work with 49 African States, to establish AFRCIOM’s command center on the continent. A little more than a month earlier, the U.S. president had brought together 51 delegations from African countries for an unprecedented economic summit in Washington. “Strip away all the modern PR and prettified palaver and it’s an ugly scramble for oil, minerals, and markets for U.S. goods” noted the editor of Foreign Policy in Focus.

    If the devil had wanted to create an advertisement to sell capitalism to humanity, he would have presented the Swiss and their mountains…of chocolate, though while buying it, humanity would have received Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ebola as well. Indeed, the current epidemic is a condensation of the deadly consequences of a world order which feeds on the huge growth of inequalities: the exploitation without limits of men and of natural resources; the destruction of the environment; a double digit growth (for how long?) in profit to foreign investors and a handful of local potentates; states in the service of multinationals, which know nothing other than repression to deal with the discontent caused by their resort to privatization, supplemented by charitable NGOs, and in the case of a sharp crisis, by foreign armies aiming to make the situation permanent. Conspiracy theorists imagine that Ebola is the brainchild of a perverse scientist paid for by the imperialists’ military research funds, but fail to see that the real architects of death are the little circles of people who profit from the existing world order, and that they can only be dethroned by the action of a mass movement of people in struggle.

    In order to get out of this barbaric situation, we have to denounce the mystifications of those who unceasingly praise the “take-off” of Africa, portraying the multinationals as development agencies, that pass off the MSF as the WHO, and suggest that AFRICOM is the Salvation Army. At the same time, our solidarity should go to all of those African social movements that combat the pillage of their natural resources, the expropriation of their peasants, the super-exploitation of their workers, the ruin of their public services, and the repression of their democratic rights.leave

     

    Translation by Dan La Botz.

    Jean Batou is a professor of Contemporary International History at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is the author of numerous publications on the history of the globalization and social movements.This article appeared in Spanish at Viento Sur.

     


    [1] Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) attacked from the south of Guinea to get Charles Taylor out of power in Monrovia, with the support of the U.S., in 2003.

     

  • What They's Talking about on the Streets in Hong Kong

    After Sunday night, when many people feared that there might be a crackdown on the protests after following several pleas for protesters to leave the sites and the government’s warning that civil servants must be able to return to work the next day, this week the protests have nevertheless continued. While the numbers taking part have fallen – unlike last week, this week is a regular working week – many of the protesters still remain very determined. Talks between the Students’ Federation and the government which had been scheduled for Friday were canceled by the government. Meanwhile pro-Beijing groups have continued to try to disrupt the protesters, although not on the same scale as last Friday.

    Last night I was in Mong Kok and joined one of many of the discussion groups that have been taking place at the protest sites. Participants in this discussion were concerned with the movement’s goals and how best to achieve them in light of the current situation. The discussion is worth commenting on as the majority of participants were ordinary working people of different generations, (instead of students) as well as a few local activists, who had initiated the discussion. Previously working class and lower middle class people in Hong Kong have tended to be more politically apathetic and this is only something that has begun to change recently, beginning first amongst the young people. What started as a small group discussion, last night, quickly drew in a bigger crowd of participants with those passing by also stopping to give their views.

    When I first arrived, the issue of which protest sites should be maintained was being discussed. It was commented that while the site in Causeway Bay, was significantly shrinking and may be difficult to maintain, there were many people keen to keep the site in Mong Kok. One person commented on how the Mong Kok protest was like a following river, and that even if there were those who wanted to call for a retreat to Admiralty, it would have little impact as people would keep coming back here anyway. One participant then raised the issue of what sort of impact would this have on the small businesses and the self-employed in Mong Kok, while a passerby stopped to criticize the traffic disruption caused by the protests.

    Someone then asked whether it was really possible to sustain the protests for 30 or 60 days and this soon led on to the more important question of how long the movement should go on for and when should the protests end. On this question there was a lot of debate about what should be achieved before the protesters withdraw. One man commented on how while it was necessary to be tactically flexible in negotiations, principles should never be sacrificed. He believed that while our goal is universal suffrage, we also want regime change and do not just want another CY Leung as Chief Executive.

    Another participant expressed his opinion that the movement reminds him of the HKTV protests, where thousands of people came out, and then it just died down. He believes that this only encouraged the government to be more offensive and was therefore concerned that if the protesters retreat now, without winning again concessions, the government will only attack more ferociously next time.

    Several argued that we should only leave the streets when we get real universal suffrage, while others disagreed and argued that this was a war to be won in stages. It was argued that it was important to assess whether the movement is expanding or not and that it didn’t mean giving up if we were not occupying this or that street. Despite the different views, however, there seemed to be agreement that regardless of whatever happens it is important not to give up principles and to remember the goal of universal suffrage and civic nominations.

    In the discussion, some also turned their attention to how far the students could represent them. One man commented that while the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) and Scholarism did not represent us, it is still important to give support to them now as they are a medium between us and the government. He thought that it was important that the HKFS should come out to brief people during the negotiations. Someone also commented that the HKFS does not have the power to tell protesters what to do in the streets, while another also warned that if the students did enter into negotiations depending on the results there would be the danger that they would lose credibility among the people. The question of whether it would be possible to give the students some type of mandate was also raised, although nobody seemed sure exactly how it would be possible to do this.

    On the issue of the negotiations, someone commented that they are just symbolic and it might be the best result if they break down. Others were concerned that they would just be manipulated by the government. One participant commented that they felt pessimistic that the government was not making any concessions, while HKFS seemed to be. Another person expressed the view that we are just at the beginning of the movement and do not actually want a result right now.

    Criticism of the pan-democrats was also a topic of discussion. One woman commented on how the Legislative Council does not have the mandate of the people, including the pan-democrat councilors and then went on to criticize how when the protesters were attacked with teargas, some of the pan-democrats did nothing and just folded their arms. “Why should we re-elect them?” she asked. Another participant observed how the pan-democrats never consult the ordinary people. Meanwhile one person was critical of how some pan-democrats have said that it is alright if we lose the movement now as the seed of democracy has already been sown. He went on to argue that you only have to look at China after the crackdown 25 years ago to see that an entirely different seed has been sown. He also said that after so many people have sacrificed so much it is not alright for the pan-democrats to simply tell them to go home.

    The discussion session concluded with a well-received speech by a long time political activist who commented on the challenges made to the protesters by pro-Beijing groups when they say that everything that Hong Kong people enjoy comes from China. His response to this challenge was that actually our rice does not come from the Communist Party but from the peasants, while consumer goods are produced by the workers. Even the natural water is only polluted by the Communist Party. He also commented on concerns about the divisions in society, and said that while any division between people who were born in Hong Kong and people who have migrated here is entirely unnecessary, the split between the crony tycoons and the ordinary people is a necessary division and that the more this grows the better until it grows to such an extent that the people will take over.

     

  • Karen Lewis and the Long Arm of Lesser Evilism

    The article by Scott Jay that follows was published on our website several days before the public learned that Karen Lewis was suffering from brain cancer. We are sorry to hear of her illness and offer our sympathy to her and to her family and friends. We leave the article on our website as a matter of public record and because the political issues that it raises remain important, even though she has now decided not to run for mayor. We wish Ms.Lewis a rapid and full recovery. – Editors

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    As the president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the leader of the Chicago teachers’ strike of 2012, Karen Lewis has become one of the most popular opponents of the city’s Democratic Party machine. However, it currently appears likely that she will run for mayor of Chicago as a Democrat.

    Accepting the lesser of two evils, usually in the form of supporting the Democratic Party, has led many social movements to their own graveyard. Accepting the logic of supporting candidates who preach against our interests has led many movements to soften their voices, limit their demands, and even disappear rather than embarrass their candidate. However, many on the Left who have been quite clear about this have not always been so clear that lesser evilism does not stop at the voting booth. The issue is not only whether we can build a resistance to the blatantly neoliberal Democrats like Obama but also whether we can stop our own allies from accepting the lesser evil and keep themselves from being pulled in along with them.

    The problem is not one of ideological purity. On the contrary, we can be as pure as we want about never voting Democrat, but if we uncritically promote allies who are dragging others down this road, we are hardly building an alternative to lesser evilism. It is one thing to compromise our demands downward in order to build a larger coalition to fight for them, it is another thing entirely to advocate for things that we oppose. Austerity is often carried out by our “friends,” which weakens our ability to resist these measures because nobody wants to embarrass their friends. After all, the thinking goes, if we fight concessions carried out by our allies–who are generally less evil than the opposition–we will only help bring the reactionaries back into power.

    This thinking is suicidal for the labor movement but it is all too common. The Democratic Party has long been the primary tool of liberalism to facilitate lesser evilism. However, the long arm of lesser evilism reaches far beyond the immediate scope of those who endorse Democrats and often touches their allies and their allies’ allies as well.

    Fighting the Democrats or Supporting Them?

    The impending mayoral campaign of Karen Lewis is a minefield littered with many aspects of this very issue. It would be ridiculous to describe Lewis as “evil.” Rather, she is highly popular precisely because of her role in leading the teachers’ strike. Since then, Lewis and her union have been among the most visible forces of opposition to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s neoliberal agenda. She is an extremely appealing figure who would be a great champion for labor and its allies. As a candidate, she could carry the banner of a fighting labor movement into the race and provide a voice for working people and people of color that would not otherwise be heard in this election. There are few candidates with the potential and ability to galvanize class politics the way she could

    Unfortunately, Lewis has taken a right-turn in recent months as described in a sharply critical article by Lee Sustar and Brian Bean in Jacobin. While in the past Lewis has spoken eloquently about the effects of racism, she has suddenly begun pushing pro-police rhetoric, commenting on the “tired, demoralized” Chicago police force and calling for more cops to be hired. Additionally, “Lewis spoke approvingly of an agreement between Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and Emanuel to bring in forty state troopers to help Chicago police officers.” This in a city in which police tortured false confessions out of over 100 Black men, sending many to prison and even Death Row.

    Even worse, Lewis has sunk to pandering to racial resentment among middle class ethnic white voters. When Emanuel announced a plan that would give hiring preference in the police and fire departments to graduates of Chicago Public Schools–the schools that her members teach is–she shot back. “Lewis claimed,” Sustar and Bean write, “that this mild affirmative action proposal smacked of religious discrimination–and even racial bias against whites–because many white cops and firefighters send their kids to private Catholic schools.” This is dreadful stuff coming from somebody as promising as Lewis, as Sustar and Bean document quite well.

    What they are less clear about is the fact that—even though the mayoral race is non-partisan–she is campaigning as a Democrat and has been doing so for some time. Rather than just continuing to hope that she will run as a left-wing independent, we need to deal with the far more likely scenario–that she will continue on her current course, which has already been harmful to the labor movement.

    Lewis recently pushed CTU to endorse Governor Pat Quinn for re-election, stating that he “believes in public schools and I know he will fight to make sure every child has a great education.” This is the same Quinn that signed SB 7, a law  that attacked teachers’ seniority and their right to strike. The bill was also endorsed by Lewis. “We’re going to encourage every CTU member to turn out for Governor Quinn in November,” she said in a press release. If the Left is going to build an alternative to lesser evilism, it must oppose this–not just Quinn, but Lewis’s efforts to push labor into his arms.

    Before moving toward her own candidacy, Lewis showed her enthusiasm for Democratic Party Alderman Bob Fioretti, the other major candidate in the mayoral race. She even helped Fioretti with fundraising, suggesting the likelihood that she will throw her support behind him if she is not able to proceed. The Chicago Sun-Times has suggested that an alliance with Fioretti could be a powerful tactic to bring down Emanuel, though Lewis hardly needs their advice on this. She is also encouraging her supporters to donate money to her exploratory committee via ActBlue, a fundraising platform for Democrats. Her fundraising page describes her as a “Progressive Democrat.”

    The Chicago Mayor’s race may technically be non-partisan, but we cannot seriously expect to find solace in the gray area of electoral technicalities. Lewis has embraced the strategy of working within the confines of the Democratic Party some time ago and the fact that she has done so in a far more appealing manner than others does not make it better. In fact, it makes it worse. She will be far more effective at bringing her supporters to the right than anybody else in the labor movement or in Chicago politics. Whether or not this is her actual goal is irrelevant when compared to the consequences of her actions.

    Many will see Lewis’s campaign as an opportunity–though an opportunity for what exactly is not clear. The Chicago teachers’ strike and Lewis’s leadership of it opened an opportunity to build a fighting opposition to the Democratic Party. That opportunity is rapidly being closed by Lewis herself. This poses a number of real problems for the labor movement. Lewis is being pressured by Emanuel’s supporters to step down from the CTU leadership in order to show that she has no conflict of interest as she would be negotiating a raise for her members while defending the taxpayers’ interests. This is, of course, business-speak for not being too generous to the working-class. Whether or not she complies, we can expect this rightward pressure on her campaign to continue and potentially affect the CTU as well.

    The American Federation of Teachers has promised $1 million for Lewis if she runs and has suggested they would launch a Super PAC to help her campaign. For a candidate without Emanuel’s big-money backers, $1 million is a substantial sum and one not likely to be kept available if her fiery rhetoric turns too militant or her campaign takes on a fight with anti-labor Democrats like Quinn.

    Furthermore, Lewis recently gave an interview to the editorial board of Crain’s Chicago Business and suggested her willingness to compromise on the ongoing pension negotiations, which the pro-capital paper described as “an uncharacteristic peace gesture.” Will she accept a worse deal for her members in order to ease the concerns of Chicago taxpayer groups, or even just to get the issue off the table? Will anybody oppose her on this?

    The pressure on Lewis and her allies in CORE will be enormous as such a compromise would probably make for good mainstream electoral politics. However, it would make for horrible class politics. We do not know whether the negotiations will go in this direction or if they will simply continue sputtering endlessly without an agreement. But if Lewis goes down this road, the Left in CORE and CTU cannot support this, regardless of whether she runs as a Democrat or a socialist or an insurrectionary anarchist. This would not be class struggle unionism or social justice unionism but good old fashion Democratic Party machine politics. If Lewis can compromise on this issue without a fight then she can compromise on far more. A labor Left that cannot be clear about this is hardly a labor Left at all.

    Providing an opposing voice to this direction will be highly unpopular in some quarters but that is precisely why it is so important. The Democrats succeed in co-opting the most popular figures in social movements so as to make their party more appealing to liberals. This is exactly why Lewis’s direction is so damaging for the labor movement–hardly anybody will want to oppose her, even when she is cutting deals and throwing around rhetoric that labor militants cannot possibly support. The fact that Lewis is such a strong figure and is probably totally well-meaning does not change the consequences of her actions one bit.

    The Left is uniquely positioned in the CTU both in the rank-and-file and in the elected leadership and some of them may find this interesting or even awkward. Yet, this position is presumably exactly what they always wanted when they got involved in union politics in the first place. We all know well the many stories of union leaders who sell out their members for any number of reasons. The value of having the Left active and even elected in unions is to resist these efforts, not to abide by them or even defend. If the Left cannot lay out a clear strategy to oppose Lewis’s current trajectory–in a clear and comradely way, but clearly opposed to her political strategy–it will find itself in the graveyard of social movement regardless of whether they endorse her as a Democrat or not. A labor Left that does not have a clear sense of purpose and strategy around these issues will find that it has no sense of purpose at all, other than to wait for a better leader or a better Left to come along and do it for them.

    A similar challenge is facing the campaign of Jorge Mújica, an openly socialist candidate for Chicago alderman running in a largely Latino neighborhood against a Clinton Democrat, as Dan La Botz described recently. By many accounts, this campaign provides a great place for the Left to unite in a non-sectarian platform that can project its politics to working-class people. That is still true, but the Karen Lewis campaign poses a whole new challenge. Back in August, Mújica expressed his enthusiasm for Lewis entering the race. And why shouldn’t he have? But as the weeks have gone by it is less clear that socialists can endorse her, and the potential problems this could cause in the campaign are real.

    There will likely be many in the campaign, not to mention the electorate, who will want Lewis to run even as a Democrat. Nobody will want to disagree with the enthusiasm of people who want to support the most popular labor figure in Chicago, and possibly the country, but downplaying this problem is a concession to the suicidal politics of lesser evilism. Quietly accepting the direction in which Lewis is taking her supporters, while doing nothing to challenge her from the Left so as not to alienate important allies, cannot be an option. If the goal is to build an alternative to the politics of lesser-evilism, then the campaign must have clarity around this, otherwise it is just the Left holding hands and patting themselves on the back and feeling good about being socialists. This stark description should in no way be taken to be a prediction of what exactly this campaign will do or a judgment on its many hard-working supporters. This is simply a statement of a very difficult problem which the Left has stumbled over many times in the past and that, hopefully, the Mújica campaign can overcome.

    The Dead End of “Future Opportunities”

    There is a clear opportunity now to have out a debate in the organized labor movement about the role of the Democrats. The fact that one of the US labor movement’s greatest champions is embracing the second party of American capitalism should not be seen as an awkward problem that we hope will go away. On the contrary, it is an historic opportunity–even if a very difficult one–to build an organized, political grouping within labor that understand the anti-union role of the Democrats. There are many radicals in CORE including in the leadership who are now uniquely situated to carry out a political campaign around this issue, but avoiding the debate in the hopes of not alienating valuable allies will mean that it simply never happens, or it happens when it is too late and nobody is paying attention.

    There are so many opportunities for the Left, but often these are misunderstood. There is always some future opportunity that the Left does not want to lose sight of and therefore difficult problems now are avoided in order to carry out a much more powerful struggle in the future. But those struggles rarely come, because the real fight is usually the one just before us, the awkward fight with our compromising allies that just may break up the alliance we have worked so hard to build. On the other hand, the fight in front of us today just might build the clarity and organization that labor actually needs to carry out those bigger battles.

    Karen Lewis’s campaign poses problems not just for her supporters but for the allies of her supporters; her supporters may allow her to go down this road so as not to alienate the allies who follow her. But every challenging problem provides the small kernel of a solution. The Left today that can resist the pull of the Democratic Party, even coming from a figure as admirable as Karen Lewis, will be hardened for even greater challenges down the road.

    Scott Jay is a writer and activist living in Oakland, CA, where he has been active in the Occupy movement, the fight against police brutality and solidarity with port workers.

  • A Challenge to Occupiers and Unionists

    ImageWhere have all the occupiers gone? We have scattered, enmeshed in an economic system we loathe, faced with the dismal realities of the prolonged "Great Recession" and a jobless recovery that only benefits the ruling class. With our future prospects bleak and our hopes for creating a more just economy diffused, we are left with only our collective will, experience, and values. As the reality of poverty and downward mobility looms large in our lives, we are faced with  a choice: to live our values or to give up and submit to economic oppression.  For these concepts of economic democracy and freedom of speech to truly flourish, it is necessary to take the occupation to where it most directly impacts our lives… It's time to take occupation to the workplace!

    We are still the 99%! We are still the workers and the poor, the young and old. We have control of our economic future, if only we choose to grasp it! I believe that it's time to suggest a time- honored, revolutionary idea anew. We need to come together as workers, as a class, to withhold our labor and our consent. Collectively demanding what we have rightfully earned; the capital our labor produces. This means nothing less than giving birth to a new Labor movement, one that seeks to organize against the elites, with all workers in all industries. As capital is now global, so too must we be global. There is no other way to be effective. The fulfillment of our mission is to build a profoundly democratic, collective labor movement organized around the interests of our class, putting the economic needs of the many over the irresponsible and greedy desires of the few.

    Camping in parks and in front of buildings was never enough. It was simply a prelude, a hint of something greater. What it did was give us a collective identity and moral foundation as the 99%. The time has come to move beyond fruitless exercises. If we are to truly live up to the values of the occupy movement, we need to occupy where it counts. The place we are most directly being exploited and used as tools of the capitalist system, the workplace.  We need nothing short of a "One Big Union" of the 99% acting collectively for our class interests. This is the only way that we can ever hope to achieve our great ambition of economic democracy.

    We face a choice as a people. We can either passively go through the motions and be satisfied with the lame and innocuous outlets our culture provides, or we can actually demand a real say in our lives. Through the generations we collectively created the massive wealth and infrastructure on which capitalism depends. Our hard work created it all, in a very literal sense. We are autoworkers, truck drivers, landscapers, farmers, longshoremen, tradesman, fast food workers, nurses, teachers, firefighters. Our labor creates all wealth! Our collective consent is what the economy depends on. Without us, the elites are nothing. They only seek to leach off of the surplus we create. Why should they alone decide what to do with the products of our labor?  Ultimately we will be cast off, once we are no longer needed for their profits. If we don't restructure the economy to work for us, we will only face a non- stop decline in our standard of living. The 1% needs us, but we have no need for them. Their existence is parasitic.

    It's time we examined what has worked in the past and make it relevant today. What social movement was prosperous when the wealth of our society was most equitably distributed? It was the Labor Movement! Look throughout history and you will find that the only time the capitalists have ever ceded anything to us is where we have collectively forced them to. The greater density and power unions had, the better we did as a class. The opposite is also true, as unions have declined our share of the wealth has also declined.

    Let me be clear. When I say “union” I'm not talking about adding another layer of bureaucracy. I'm talking about an organic workers movement that will enable a democratically controlled economy. I'm talking about organizing for justice at work, through direct action. I'm talking about active community unemployment councils. I'm talking about wrenching the money and power out of the hands of the rich through a new organized, class conscious movement.

    The time is gone to be naïve. The rich are class conscious and act in their own interests. It's time we wise up and do the same. The more atomized we become, the more we lose. We need to organize into creative and democratic worker organizations with the explicit purpose of spreading the knowledge of solidarity and collective direct action to all working people. We can no longer afford to think of only ourselves. The self-made man is a myth, invented to prop up an unjust and immoral system.

    In the end we are just another replaceable part for the corporations. Our economic system sees us only as disposable tools for producing capital. Why else would the department that fires and hires us so commonly be called "human resources"? It's time we become more than a commodity. We are the 99%, the vast majority, the working class. If we could only realize our common economic interests and forget about our trivial differences, we would be unstoppable! We are capable of changing the entire economic and cultural system for our collective benefit. We are the most powerful social class on the planet. It's time we start acting like it.

    *Sean Crawford is a fourth generation Union member, raised by women who were part of the Women's Emergency Brigade during the UAW's formation in the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37. Sean currently works at General Motors Lake Orion Assembly as a nightshift UAW committee person and team leader.

  • A Sleeping Giant Stirs: Mexico's October Risings

    Largely downplayed in the U.S. media, ground-shaking events are rattling Mexico. On one key front, Mexican Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong announced October 3 the Pena Nieto administration’s acceptance of many of the demands issued by striking students of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN). IPN Director Yoloxichitl Bustamante, whose ouster had been demanded by the students, handed in her resignation.

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    Osorio Chong’s words were delivered to thousands of students from an improvised stage outside Interior Ministry headquarters in Mexico City. In addition to Bustamante’s departure, the senior Pena Nieto cabinet official pledged greater resources for the IPN, the cancellation of administrative and academic changes opposed by the students, the prohibition of lifetime pensions for IPN directors, the replacement of a much-criticized campus police force, and no retaliations against the strikers.

    Osorio Chong shared the students’ concerns that IPN policies were turning a professional education into an assembly-line diploma mill and reducing “the excellence of schools of higher education.” Education Secretary Emilio Chuayfett was noticeably absent for Osorio Chong’s presentation, which was held at the conclusion of a Friday afternoon march through the Mexican capital that attracted in  upwards of 20,000 students.

    Distrustful of the government, the students are reacting cautiously to the Pena Nieto administration’s response to their 10-point petition, insisting among other things that Yolo Bustamante be held accountable for alleged transgressions before leaving her job. Student activists said that acceptance of the government’s response will be democratically debated and resolved at upcoming meetings of the 44 schools that form the IPN.

    “In each school we are going to organize (university) assemblies to analyze the proposal that the Interior Ministry delivered,” said activist Ivan Garcia. “This was a gain but not victory.”

    Under the slogan “We are All the Polytechnic,” the IPN students’ strike has drawn enthusiastic support from students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and other public and private universities, as well as unions and popular organizations.  Additionally, the students support the embattled and repressed students of the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college in Guerrero state.

    Erupting on the eve of the anniversary of the October 2, 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, when hundreds of students were slaughtered by Mexican security forces, the new  student movement is drawing comparisons with an earlier landmark event in the nation’s political history.

    “The giant has awoken,” wrote journalist and political analyst Jenaro Villamil. “(IPN students) aren’t the same young people with the same demands as during the era of (President) Diaz Ordaz or even #YoSoy132 of 2012, but they share the same impetus for criticism of the federal government and attempts at media censorship or distortion, especially by Televisa.”

    Villamil continued: “Many of the young people under 20 years of age that are marching today are the grandchildren of the 68 Movement, and they interact with equal efficiency on social media networks and cyberspace as did the youth of #YoSoy132.”

    Villamil’s mention of #YoSoy132 refers to the mass youth movement that arose against the commercial media’s promotion of Enrique Pena Nieto’s successful run for the presidency in 2012.

    Inspired by their students, members of IPN’s faculty are now beginning to organize and advocate changes like democratizing the naming of directors and publicly disclosing the management of financial resources.

    “We need transparency in the income and expenses of our schools,” said IPN Professor Gerardo Angeles. “This continues being a secret and we also don’t know how (staff) are contracted.”

    Founded in the 1930s during the administration of President Lazaro Cardenas as an institution to prepare professionals for the operation of Mexico’s newly-expropriated oil industry, the IPN has undergone significant changes in recent decades, according to Erika Celestino, professor of economics at the 170,000-plus student school.

    Driving student and faculty discontent are watered-down classes and diplomas; the imposition of “precarious” working conditions on instructors; the whittling away of student rights; and steps toward privatization, she said.

    “There is a conflict in the IPN’s projects going back 15 years,” Celestino said. “On the one hand is the nationalist foundation; on the other, there is the neo-liberal restructuring.”

    The IPN struggle was high on the agenda of this year’s October 2 anniversary commemoration in Mexico City, where an estimated 25,000 students, union activists, members of popular organization and veterans of the 1968 movement  rallied not only to honor the martyrs of ’68 but to call to attention to contemporary struggles.

    Representatives of Sonora’s indigenous Yaquis, who are embroiled in a water conflict with their state government, demanded freedom for imprisoned leaders Mario Luna, Fernando Jimenez and Tomas Rojo.

    Residents of San Salvador Atenco, clutching machetes in their left hands and corn cobs in their right ones,  reiterated opposition to renewed government intentions of building an airport on their land outside Mexico City.

    A special homage was paid to Raul Alvarez Garin, a prominent leader of the ‘68 Committee that has kept alive the October 2 commemoration. The IPN representative on the 1968 student strike committee, Alvarez passed away only days before the event on September 26- ironically just as the 2014 IPN student strike was getting off the ground and on the very day another massacre of students was unfolding elsewhere in Mexico.

    “You see it. You feel it. Raul is present!” thousands chanted.

    Besides the Mexican capital, October 2 demonstrations- both large and small- were reported in at least 15 states. The events ranged from a demonstration of 5,000 in Morelia, Michoacan, and a 12,000-strong rally in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the state capital of southern Chiapas state, to much smaller protests in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez on the U.S.-Mexico border.

    More than 50 members of the Teachers Resistance Movement occupied a toll booth on the Tijuana-Tecate highway, allowing motorists to pass free of charge as they remembered October 2, denounced the repression against the Ayotzinapa students and protested the national education reform passed in 2012.

    In Ciudad Juarez, about 50 students from the Alta Vista High School marched to the giant flag near Chamizal Park. “October 2 is not forgotten,” the students chanted.  “If they do not allow us to dream, we won’t let them sleep!”

    The students were following in the footsteps of a previous generation. Alta Vista was one of the schools that formed the old, city-wide Student Struggle Committee which emerged after the Tlatelolco Massacre and conducted various protests in the border city between 1968 and 1970.

    The October 2 commemorations were especially intense in the state of Guerrero, where memories of an old government massacre merged with revulsion and anger over a new one.

    For the first time in 10 years, students and their allies commemorated October 2  in the streets of Tlapa, where between 1,200- 2,000 people paraded  in the streets. Other protests were reported in Zihuatanejo, Atoyac, Tecpan de Galeana, Acapulco, Ometepec, Chilapa, Iguala, and Huamuxtitlan.

    In Mexico City, Guerrero and across the nation, the protests reverberated with a word that is now part of the October 2 vocabulary: Ayotzinapa.

    Demonstrators called for the safe return of 43 missing students- all of them young men- from the Raul Isidro Burgos Teachers College of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, who disappeared after they were attacked by September 26 by municipal policemen and civilian gunmen in the city of Iguala while they were collecting money to pay for a trip to Mexico City for the October 2 protests.

    Six people were killed and 25 wounded in an attack now blamed on the Iguala municipal government working in conjunction with the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.  On October 2, in the Guerrero state capital of

    Chilpancingo, about 20,000 people marched and then blockaded for six hours the Highway of the Sun connecting Mexico City with the tourist port of Acapulco.

    Besides the return of the missing students, the protesters demanded punishment for the intellectual and material authors of the September 26 massacre; the sacking of Guerrero Gov. Angel Aguirre; and the arrests of Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca Velasquez and Felipe Flores Velazquez, the city’s public safety chief.

    Both Abarca and Flores are fugitives, and it is suspected they could have been tipped off that Mexican soldiers and police were looking for them before they vanished from sight last week.

    According to Guerrero State Attorney General Inaky Blanco, more than 30 policemen and others have been arrested in connection with the Iguala killings and disappearances. More arrests will be forthcoming, he said. On this score, witnesses reported seeing some of the missing students detained and put into municipal police vehicles.  In a swift action, the federal attorney general’s office took charge of the investigation into the attack on the students.

    Guerrero activists and residents charged that government officials had ignored complaints for more than a year that Iguala was a virtual fiefdom under a reign of terror. They cited numerous murders, extortions, arbitrary detentions, tortures, police beatings, and forced disappearances of both activists and the everyday citizens allegedly committed by Mayor Abarca and his henchmen.

    “The events of Iguala might not have happened if the Mexican state had duly investigated the previous violent events in the region,” wrote Abel Barrera, director of Guerrero’s Tlachinollan Human Rights Center.

    “The disappearance and execution of the Popular Unity activists (2013), the penitentiary massacre, the armed incursions in Carrizalillo: all this was tolerated and remained submerged in the only state of law that really exists in Guerrero: the state of impunity.”

    At an October 3 forum in Acapulco sponsored by the municipal government, the director of a National Autonomous University of Mexico cultural institute dedicated to the legacies of October 1968 called the Iguala slaughter a “state crime.” Esmeralda Reynoso Camacho assessed the differences that might exist between 1968 and now.

    “Not much has changed,” Reynoso said. “Deaths, disappearances and repression continue, as the power elite does not understand that it has to listen to the people, that it’s not just about voting for (politicians) but also to see what can be done. As long as the power elite does not realize this, violence and social uprisings are latent.”

    Reynoso’s words were echoed separately by acclaimed writer Elena Poniatowska, author of a celebrated chronicle of the Tlatelolco Massacre, during an October 4 ceremony at the Autonomous University of Guerrero where she was awarded an honorary doctorate.

    “(Iguala) is a human tragedy and a disgrace in a country that presumes to be a democracy like ours,” Poniatowska said. “And besides, it is a tremendous blow to the regime…”

    The Iguala events have captured international attention. The United Nations condemned the violence, urging an effective response from the Mexican government, while the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ordered protective measures for the Ayotzinapa students. In England and Argentina, demonstrations were held in solidarity with the students.

    In Mexico, students of all the country’s rural teacher training colleges have declared a strike until the Ayotzinapa students are returned. Relatives of the missing young men plan a national demonstration for Wednesday, October 8, which is expected to be accompanied by a nationwide work stoppage in schools and other protests organized by the National Coordinator of Education Workers. On Sunday, October 5, about 700 students and parents conducted another blockade of the Highway of the Sun in Guerrero.

    Nearly 2,000 Mexican soldiers, police and Guerrero state employees scoured the vicinity of Iguala for the disappeared students.  Authorities said they will check the identities of 28 burned bodies uncovered from a mass grave found in the area on October 4, to see if any of them matched the missing students.

    Reportedly tipped off by some of the individuals detained for the Iguala violence, the clandestine burial ground was located in the same zone where 30 bodies were discovered last April and May. Local residents called the site, which offers a panoramic view of Iguala, a “narco-cemetery.”

    One young girl remarked, “On many nights, stinking trucks pass by here. Really, they stink.”

    If the bodies are confirmed as belonging to the Ayotzinapa students, the September 26 massacre could prove to be the worst such incident in the long and bloody political history of Guerrero. Previous massacres include Chilpancingo (1960), Iguala (1962),  Atoyac (1967), Acapulco (1967),  Aguas Blancas (1995), and El Charco (1998). In the both the 1960s and 1990s, the slaughter of unarmed civilians precipitated guerrilla uprisings.

    Meanwhile, about 500 friends and family members of 23-year-old Ayotzinapa student Julio Cesar Chavez Ramirez Nava, murdered in Iguala on September 26, paid their last respects in Tixtla.

    Friends recalled how the young man suspended his studies for some years in order to work as a construction laborer so he could support his family. Ramirez’s activities as a member of a local soccer club and as a musician in the Ayotzinapa school band were likewise remembered.

    “Your place in the band will never be erased,” said the band leader about his murdered companion. “You will always be remembered by us.”

    Sources:  Milenio.com, October 4 and 5, 2014. Articles by Ignacio Alzaga, Liliana Padilla, Marco Campillo, Roberto Agustin Esteban, Pedro Dominguez, and EFE. El Universal, October 4 and 5, 2014. Articles by Adriadna Garcia, Natalia Gomez, Eduardo Hernandez, Vania Pigeonutt, and editorial staff.

    La Jornada, October 2, 3, 4 and 5, 2014. Articles by Elena Poniatowska, Sergio Ocampo, Alfredo Valadez, Ernesto Martinez, Rubicela Morelos, Hector Briseno, Abel Barrera, Arturo Sanchez Jimenez, Gustavo Castillo, Fabiola Martinez, Arturo Cano, and Emir Olivares.

    La Jornada (Guerrero edition), October 3, 4 and 5, 2014. Articles by Margena De La O, Citlal Giles Sanchez, Salvador Cisneros Silva, Rodolfo Valadez, Roberto Ramirez Bravo, and editorial staff.

    El Sur, October 2, 3, 4 and 5, 2014. Articles by Zacarias Cervantes, Lourdes Chavez, Brenda Escobar, Aurora Harrison, Jacob Morales Antonio, Carmen Gonzalez Benicio, Alejandro Guerrero, Rosabla Ramirez Garcia, and Oscar Ricardo Munoz,  El Diario de Juarez, October 2 and 5, 2014.  Articles by Martin Coronado, Juan de Dios Olivas and Reforma.

    Frontera.info, October 3, 2014. Article by Laura Duran.  Proceso/Apro, September 30, 2014; October 2, 3, 4 and 5, 2014. Articles by Jenaro Villamil, Rosalia Vergara, Juan Carlos Cruz, Mathieu Tourlierre, Gloria Leticia Diaz, Ezequiel Flores Contreras, and editorial staff.

    Reprinted with Permisstion of FNS – 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

  • Betty Reid Mandell, at 89; longtime advocate for the poor

    Long after retiring as a professor of social work at Bridgewater State, Betty Reid Mandell kept putting her teachings into practice in her 80s by lending assistance to the homeless who were seeking help from the state Department of Transitional Assistance.

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    When she stopped by to volunteer, she recalled in an essay, the homeless section of Boston’s welfare offices reminded her of the front line in an endless conflict.

    “The Homeless Unit feels like a war zone where refugees have been displaced from their homes,” she wrote for the winter 2001 issue of the journal New Politics, which she co-edited until a year ago. “I feel like a war reporter as I tell their stories. There is a war going on against the poor, and most fiercely against people of color.”

    Handing out survival tips she had penned to point people in the direction of food and housing assistance, Ms. Mandell would explain that as poor as they were, the homeless still had rights. “The security guard called her the fairy godmother of the welfare office,” said her daughter Christine of West Roxbury. “People would be surprised when she walked up and said, ‘Would you like my help?’ ”

    A lifelong advocate for the dispossessed, Ms. Mandell combined an upbeat demeanor with a fierce presence on the page, where she picked apart laws and government policies that she believed hurt the poor residents they ostensibly were designed to help. She died Friday in Faulkner Hospital of complications from a blood clot. Ms. Mandell was 89 and lived in West Roxbury.

    “She believed in helping people, and that was her whole life,” said her husband, Marvin Mandell, a retired Curry College English professor. “She was a wonderful person. She was passionate about everything: about causes, about life itself.”

    In the mid-1980s, Ms. Mandell was among the founders of Survivors Inc. and the journal Survival News, which provided a forum for low-income women. In Survival News she also published Survival Tips, a guide that offered phone numbers, websites, and very specific advice on how to apply for everything from food stamps to fuel assistance and therapeutic shoes for diabetics. The most basic necessities were often in short supply for those trying to survive with no homes, no money, and few job prospects in a difficult economy.

    “Government officials tell us how many people are living at or below the poverty line, but they don’t tell us how low the poverty line is,” Ms. Mandell wrote for New Politics in February 2012. “A more appropriate name would be the ‘near starvation line.’ ”

    Though Ms. Mandell was ardent in her advocacy, “I never knew her to be angry,” said her daughter Charlotte Mandell Kelly of Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. “She always was more concerned about other people than she was about herself. She was the most generous person I ever knew, and also the most caring and loving.”

    The youngest of four children, Betty Reid was born in 1924 in Roggen, Colo., a small ranching and agriculture community northeast of Denver. Her parents had been homesteaders, and as a teenager, she exhibited a prize-winning steer at a national livestock contest.

    “She was a good horsewoman, but she really wanted to come east and go to college,” her husband said. “She wasn’t that fond of the farm.”

    After graduating from Colorado State University with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, she went to Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where she received a master’s in religious education.

    “She mostly lost her religion at Union seminary,” her husband said. Although she embraced the Christian message, “she thought it was being betrayed all over the world by organized religion.”

    After receiving a master’s in social work from Columbia University in 1952, she worked at the Hudson Guild settlement house in New York City. Through friends, she met Marvin Mandell, a committed socialist.

    “There was never any doubt in my mind that she was perfect for me,” he said. “She embodied everything I always believed in. She was passionate about social justice and helping the poor.”

    They became a couple and married in the 1950s. She taught at the University of Iowa while he completed a doctorate, and she was a social worker later while he taught in Connecticut.

    At the end of the 1960s, the couple moved with their daughters to Boston, where both found college teaching jobs. Ms. Mandell taught at Boston State College until 1981, when she switched to what was then Bridgewater State College. She retired from Bridgewater in 1994.

    Ms. Mandell wrote numerous essays and articles for New Politics, other publications, and her blog, and she wrote and edited books including “An Introduction to Human Services: Policy and Practice” and “The Crisis of Caregiving: Social Welfare Policy in the United States.”

    “Betty has been one of the more visible social activists on the Bridgewater State College campus,” said a December 1994 profile in Bridgewater Review, a college publication. “Over the years she has organized a number of workshops, public hearings, and demonstrations in support of those on welfare.”

    Arrested on occasion at demonstrations, she once found herself face to face with one of her former Bridgewater State students: the police officer who led her away. “He actually apologized and said, ‘I’m so sorry I have to arrest you,’ ” her daughter Charlotte recalled.

    Ms. Mandell “was amazingly tireless,” Charlotte said. “She never seemed to get tired of helping people.”

    A service will be announced for Ms. Mandell, who in addition to her husband and two daughters leaves a sister, Shirley Stanosheck of Longmont, Colo.

    With her husband, Ms. Mandell spent alternate summers at their cottage on Cuttyhunk Island and a chalet they rented in St. Jean d’Aulps, in the Alps region of eastern France near the Swiss border. There and in Boston, her presence was welcomed by all she encountered.

    “I really feel everything I’ve learned about kindness and patience and being good to other people I learned from her,” said Christine, who added that the meals she shared with her mother at home and in restaurants were always “filled with laughter and happiness.”

    “My sister and I are both Buddhists, and she said she believes that Betty was a real bodhisattva, that she was somebody who was put on earth to give people happiness, and I feel that way too,” Christine added. “One time we were out at a restaurant laughing together and the waitress came up and said, ‘I just wanted to remark on what a wonderful relationship you two have. I wish I had that relationship with my mother.’ ”

    Bryan Marquard can be reached at bmarquard@globe.com.

    This article originally appeared in the Boston Globe.

  • Hong Kong – Statement from Four Organizations Calling for a Tactical Retreat and a Report

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    Today [October 3] Hong Kong’s rule of law and basic human rights were totally violated. In Mong Kok, Causeway Bay and Tsim Tsa Tsui fascist thugs and gangs to different extents attacked the peaceful occupiers, resulting in hundreds of injuries. We condemn this most severely. A variety of circumstantial evidence points to the conclusion that Beijing is the biggest suspect behind these thugs and gangs.

    Sadly our government not only made no effort to protect the Hong Kong people but instead let them violently attack the peaceful occupiers. These thugs and gangsters were clearly well prepared in advance, and this being the case, the government must have known. They knew but did not effectively do anything to arrest the attackers and protect the citizens, and were in fact relying on these gangs services to fight against the pro-democracy movement. This situation only makes the actions of the occupy movement even more legitimate and urgent; only with the realization of democracy can the rule of law be guaranteed.

    In this situation of government connivance in such a brutal attack, in order to avoid greater losses and to minimize the impact on innocent people, we call on the occupiers to evacuate the other areas and to focus on Admiralty. At the same time, the Admiralty occupied area should not be expanded but existing positions should be held. This space more than a week ago had already began to become a space genuinely belonging to the people. But we must also understand that the fight against despotism requires long term struggle. Apart from trying to win victories by expanding, the movement also needs to pay attention to retaining its strength and in particularly should avoid providing the CY Leung regime with an excuse to implement martial law and for a comprehensive crackdown.

    This umbrella democratic movement’s development has been so magnificent. The participants have shown such amazing civic solidarity. The Hong Kong people have shown both their eagerness to make their own decisions and that they have the ability to do this. We do not want the elite class to decide everything! We want democracy and autonomy! We want genuine universal suffrage!

    Regardless of the final outcome of the movement, the emergence of the movement itself is already a great achievement because it represents the awakening of democracy in Hong Kong. This guarantees that democracy will triumph.

    Bring the thugs to justice! C.Y. Leung Step down! Implement genuine universal suffrage, genuine democracy! Civic nominations!

    The National People’s Congress (NPC) should withdraw its decision on reform!

    Long live democracy! Long live the people!

    October 3, 2014

    Neighborhood and Workers Service Centre

    Link of Social Democrats

    Globalization Monitor

    Pioneer

    A Report from Hong Kong by Ruixue Bai

    After the attacks of yesterday and further threats by anti-Occupy groups to attack the protesters, large numbers have still turned out today undeterred. One pro-Beijing group, Caring Hong Kong Power, had earlier put out a call to its members to again go to Mong Kok. The message says that the use of violence against the protesters is necessary and that if necessary the PLA should be mobilized. 

    Despite yesterday, however, protesters are still continuing to occupy the streets in Mong Kok and Causeway Bay. Furthermore tens of thousands were once again in Admiralty this evening, where a rally “Citizens Stand Against Violence/Peaceful Resistance” had been called. At the rally there were speeches from protesters who were attacked yesterday, as well as other students, lawyers, teachers, performers and Occupy Central leaders. Some performers also sang songs.

    Meanwhile this evening the Hong Kong Students Federation have also issue another statement saying that it would meet to discuss with the government, provided the government meet two conditions: Firstly that the government promise to investigate the enforcement of the law over the last few days concerning the thugs (who attacked the protest), and secondly that they will only meet with the Chief Secretary Carrie Lam, and not Chief Executive CY Leung who has only continued to ignore public opinion and use the police to violently suppress the peaceful demonstrators.

    I was only able to attend part of the rally, but below is a summary of some of what was said when we were there:

    One lawyer, who was attacked yesterday in Mong Kok, said that when peaceful protesters are attacked by pepper spray or when a mob attack protesters it is an insult to the rule of law. He also reported how a friend was pushed to the ground in a supermarket for wearing a yellow ribbon. He said that he has never seen anything like this before in Hong Kong and that he was previously proud of Hong Kong for having the rule of law and giving high priority to civic values. 

    Another lawyer spoke of how on learning of yesterday’s attack, lawyers lit 800 candles and held a vigil to symbolize how the light of democracy could not be blown away by any violence. He said that lawyers will continue to defend the students who are attacked and arrested and called on everyone to come out and defend the students. 

    Meanwhile a third lawyer appealed to the international media and described what we are seeing tonight as “the purest form of courage that you will ever see on this planet.” He said that the presence of the media was extremely important in keeping the Chinese government from harming the students.

    Academic Wong Wai-gwok read out a statement signed by a group of academics, condemning yesterday’s attack. We want to tell the police that they shouldn’t just fold their arms and we demand that the government respond to the citizens’ aspirations for democracy. Only this can solve the crisis.

    Chua Hoi-wai, the head of the Hong Kong Council of Social Services, said that he was moved by all the people who were there sharing their experiences. Yesterday when he watched TV he was distressed about what he saw happening in Mong Kok. He thinks that we should condemn the violence. However he then went on to appeal to the Hong Kong Federation of Students to review their decision not to talk to the government anymore. He said that leading a social movement is not easy as not everybody has the same idea, however he appealed to the protesters to follow the decisions and advice of Occupy Central, HKFS and Scholarism  even if they decide it is time to call off the action.

    A film director commented on how while there are lots of people in the performance arts who support the students but there are also those who are against their actions. He reported on how he had heard someone remark that it would be easy to get rid of the occupiers. All that would be required is to ask the communications companies to cut off their connections. He has also heard another actor express how he thought it would be good if the protesters were adversely affected by the weather, while another had complained about the occupation having a negative effect on the economy. He reported how he had felt very emotional when he heard this as they are his friends. However he then reported on a forth actress who had said that even if it seems useless to fight for democracy, we should still do this anyway.

    A teacher, who said that she hasn’t taught any classes recently as her students are boycotting classes, spoke about the two Hong Kongs that she has seen in the last few days; the beautiful Hong Kong, where everything is clean and tidy, there are poems written on protesters’ banners, posters written in different languages, where educated people are sitting here and technically breaking the law by blocking the road, and the very ugly Hong Kong witnessed yesterday in the attacks.

    One speaker spoke of how the road to democracy is very long and winding, but that the number of those who are awakening are huge and growing. “Now with so many people coming out we fear no more. I think the awakened citizens, young and old, should hold our hands together and confront the government.”

    Another speaker, who said that he had been at Admiralty since the early morning after hearing that the protesters might be attacked again, made the comment that in 1989 Zhao Ziyang had come out to meet the students but how today none of the high officials have ever greeted the students.

    Amongst several singers who had come to perform songs at the rally, one commented on how they wanted to pay tribute to the young people who are not afraid to sacrifice their future careers to fight for the people. Despite foreseeing bigger difficulties in the future they appealed for the protesters not to be afraid. “Now there is lots of discussion about whether we should retreat or not. But in the long run there are still many tasks for us to do together. The silent majority, including my family do not understand. I want to abandon all the language used by the mainstream media, academia and politicians and instead use human language. It is simple. The present package is evil. If we use simple language then everybody can understand more easily.”

       

  • Hong-Kong – Chinese Government Sends in its Mafia

    ImageThe following is a report from an on-the-ground source in Hong Kong. – Editors

    The government is mobilizing its mafia extensively. Since noon, the government has started mobilizing gangsters to provoke the public. It is hard to imagine that the government is lining up with the mafia but it now happens during the CY Leung’s administration. This is something expected and no need to be shocked about it.

    Looking at the current situation, the government hopes to shift Occupy Central with Love and Peace into a massive riot and make the Hong Kong public angry with the protesters.

    At the same time, they also have agents in the crowd planning to create serious casualties, hoping that the public opinion will change and justify the government’s action to disperse the public.

    It is the Communist Party’s classic tactic to use one group of people against another group. Before this, they kept assigning people like Robert Chow to start a battle to shift public opinion. Now they have mobilized the gangsters and started violent fights. This tactic will cause no end of trouble, but this also means C.Y. Leung has no other tactics to play with.

    The most urgent thing to do now is to continue to adhere to our principles. Protect our bases. Be persistent. Win public support. Tell them how the government is lining up with the gangsters. All these actions will not only make C.Y. Leung’s plan fail, but will also lead to backlash to his actions. The gangsters were paid to do their dirty work, but they cannot beat the persistence of hundreds of thousands of people. Stay until midnight so that we can start planning ahead and avoid another round of attacks.

    We have been asked: Why are you so sure that they are from the mafia? Come and have a look and you will know. Here is the list of tactics they used to provoke people:

    First, a gangster (possibly a woman) starts shouting to get attention.

    Then another gangster, depending on the reaction at the scene, he may pretend to be an opponent or a supporter.

    The public starts taking photos and among them there is always a video camera.

    The gangsters continuously provoke the protesters and may last for up to two or three hours. The gangsters wait until the movement’s marshals come and ask the public to calm down – then they start harassing the marshal.

    The gangsters do their very best to provoke a conflict – including pushing fences, pulling tents, attacking protesters.

    They do the same thing on the other side of the occupied zone – use the same tactic.

    Photos can be found here.

    Strong Condemnation of Violence towards the Occupy Movement;

    Support of Hong Kong Citizens Fighting for Universal Suffrage

    Left 21 – 4th October, 2014 – a Statement from the Movement

    Boycotts of classes by university and secondary school students initiated by the Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholars begun on September 22 in the fight for genuine universal suffrage escalated to the full-blown Occupy Movement on the evening of September 26. Attempts by the government and police to evict protestors with violence on September 28 just triggered another wave of ever-expanding autonomous occupation across the territory.

    On the evening of October 2, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government eventually responded to the Occupy Movement and the open letter of Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) by sending the Chief Secretary of Administration Carrie Lam to meet with HKFS. It is the first concession of the SAR government since the Occupy Movement started, and it is largely because of the anger of Hong Kong citizens against the earlier violent eviction by the police. In the meantime, Hong Kong citizens began occupying areas in the vicinity of Chief Executive Office, which is the political center of the SAR government. Authorities who wished to suppress the movement with violence have obviously been dragged into a prolonged battle by the people. Although we do not have high expectation on the negotiation with the government, such progress shows that our effort in the past 11 days have definitely not in vain.

    Nevertheless, the SAR government is far from sincere to negotiate with the people. Today the peaceful Occupy Movement has been severely threatened by hooligans with destruction to the occupied areas and physical violence against participants, while the SAR government and the police turned a blind eye to the chaos. This is unacceptable and has to be strongly condemned. After the violent clashes in the occupied areas, HKFS has announced the suspension of talks with the government. Authorities managed to suppress the people with the legitimate power of the police and with huge amounts of money, but what we possess is merely flesh and solidarity. We need more people coming out to support the Occupy Movement, to urge the government to bring the suppression to an end, and to enforce universal suffrage.

    We hereby urge the SAR and central government to:

    1. Stop any kind of suppression to the Occupy Movement, which includes illegitimate force by the police and driving other social groups to disturb the occupying crowd with violence.

    2. Hold Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying responsible for the violent eviction and force him to resign

    3. Withdraw the National People’s Congress (NPC) resolution on political reform

    4. Implement genuine universal suffrage with civil nomination and abolish functional constituencies of the Legislative Council.

    5. Repeal all political prosecutions

    We also call upon our fellow Hong Kong citizens to:

    1. Continue participating in the Occupy Movement and pressuring the government with civil disobedience in order to fight for genuine universal suffrage

    2. Convince as many people in your community as possible to join the democratic movement, so as to strength public pressure for universal suffrage and the resignation of Leung Chun-ying.

    Photos can be found here. 

    *Au Loong Yu is a Hong Kong activist. He is currently editor of China Labor Net and also has a column in Inmedia.

  • Occupy Central–What’s Next for the Hong-Kong Democracy Movement? A Brief Observation on the Current Movement

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    (An earlier version was translated by Bai Ruixue, but since then the Chinese version had been revised and partially translated by the author.)

    Monday 29th September 2014/Occupy Central Day 3 – Occupy central continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

    I. The Situation

    The general public has come out to support the students, and with their own bodies have resisted the tear gas to defeat the offensive of the regime of Leung Chun-ying, better known as C.Y. Leung, the Chief Executive of the Executive Council of Hong-Kong, sparking a new generation of people’s democracy activists. This movement has the following characteristics:

                    1. The students and the public have shown that they have the ability to think for themselves, to take bottom-up direct action, without relying on the leaders. It is within a context where the movement displays deep distrust of not only the Pan-Democracy parties, but also of the Trio of three leading liberal academics and clergymen who suggested the occupation a year earlier. Even the Hong-Kong Federation of Students, which was for a while the vanguard of the movement, saw its proposal to withdraw on September 28 in view of escalation of crackdown was rejected by the masses.

                    2. The students and young people, whose actions have led to the upsurge in the movement, are now the driving force of the movement, rather than the middle-aged and middle-class Pan-Democracy supporters whom the Trio relied on as their constituency for their occupation plan, a fact which reflects the deep distrust towards young people and working people toward the Trio.

                    3. The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) has called for a workers’ strike and there are some responses; in addition to this there is strong sympathy for the movement among working people. And the occupation of main streets also makes possible a slowdown in workplaces, which in turn allows lots of discussion among colleagues.

                   4. A desire for social equality has also become part of the movement. In his speech to the student boycott on September 22, student leader Alex Chow already mentioned the issue of economic inequality. A few days ago twenty-five trade unions and civil society groups also issued a joint statement not only demanding genuine universal suffrage but also regulations on working hours and a universal pension. The occupation of the last two days has also given the general public the chance to discuss their opinions, and amongst these one frequently hears discussions of the extreme inequality.

    Because of this strong movement from below the C.Y. Leung government has now been forced to stop its offensive, permitting space for the movement to grow even larger. The issue now is how to take advantage of the situation fully and to seek the biggest victory. It means that we have to overcome the movement’s weaknesses:

                   1. The old democracy movement’s former leaders are no longer able to lead, however the new leaderships of the new democracy movement is still in formation. This is a danger. Although spontaneity has been a great factor in advancing the movement, now–with all the sabotage taking place and a crackdown quite possible sometime in the future by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Leung government–the movement will soon require more organising and leaderships, and I use plural here deliberately.

                   2. Although the students’ organization is comparatively better, the general public lacks the organization and networks to support each other. This is especially so for the strike call. Although there were some early responses to the strike call, a broad strike wave has yet to happen. The HKCTU is not yet strong enough to fully implement the strike call, let alone to organize the solidarity alliance now in preparation. Strengthening movement will require great effort and also new initiatives

    II. Aims and slogans

                  1. The Leung Chun-ying regime must surrender Civic Plaza and Tamar Garden to the people and to withdraw all police from there, so that these two places can be a focal point for the movement. If the government does not promise this then the movement should certainly not withdraw from the streets, and, if they do promise, then the decision to withdraw or stay on will depend on the circumstances and the wishes of the people.

                  2. The Leung Chun-ying regime and its officials must apologise.

                  3. The Leung Chun-ying regime must step down.

                  4. The National People’s Congress (NPC) resolution must be withdrawn; genuine universal suffrage and civic nominations must be implemented.

                  5. Regulations on working hours, a universal pension and collective bargaining rights must be implemented.

                  6. We must win regime change and the self-determination over political reform.

    3. The Way Forward

                  1. Working people need more encouragement to strike. One way is to encourage each company or unit to organise and set up a small group for solidarity with the movement and to establish a strike committee. Only with this foundation, is it possible to discuss the issue seriously.

    Slogan: Students and workers unite together to achieve regime change. For self-determination over political reform!

                  2. Adhere to nonviolence.

                  3. Proposing self-determination over political reform is appropriate. However if anyone proposes Hong Kong independence then we (the democratic left/progressives) can respond that we cannot agree to this, although we respect the right to express this opinion.  Also it is an issue worthy of discussion later, but not for now,  or it may be harmful to the movement.

    Updated on the early morning of 30th September

    Last night when I went to the scene, I found that the movement had again expanded in scale and it was very moving. However this also increases the risk of direct intervention by the CCP–although this does not necessarily mean dispatching the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) from the outset. Nevertheless it is necessary to avoid provocations and excesses. In the case of escalation of the crackdown from tear gas to shooting–or even worse the mobilization of the PLA–there is no way we can fight that, given the present level of organisation.Therefore we should retreat from the streets when this moment comes, but keep the strike going – no one can force working people to work normally even with guns. In addition to this we will need a deepening of the non-cooperative movement in all areas. 

    *Au Loong Yu is a Hong Kong activist. He is currently editor of China Labor Net and also has a column in Inmedia.

     

     

     

  • Dilma or Marina—Or Luciana?

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    A little more than year ago, Brazil was paralyzed by the enormous popular protests of the June Days of 2013 as, according to a highly regarded poling agency IBOPE, some 8.5 million people joined demonstrations in 400 cities and 22 state capitals, first against high transportation costs and then against just about everything else that had to do with government policies. IBOPE found that 72 percent of the population approved of the demonstraitons and that 89 percent had no faith in the political parties.

    The protests were followed by a wave of strikes–transit workers, teachers, street cleaners– involving 3.5 million workers according the United Brazilian Workers (CUT) federation, a labor upheaval such as had not been seen in the country for decades. The protesters were first violently repressed by the government, but then when it became apparent that they had the public’s sympathy, the government quickly made some minor concessions, offered promises of reform, and then studiously turned its back on the discontented and ignored the issues. Now Brazil is about to go to the polls in an election that pits two of the country’s best known women leaders, once both leaders of the governing Workers Party (PT) against each other in an election that will take place in just a few days. What candidate and party today represents the Brazilian democratic left and radical social movements?  

    Emir Sader, one of the leading Marxist intellectuals of Brazil, best known to English readers for his articles over many years in New Left Review, has just published on the eve of the Brazilian elections scheduled to take place on October 5, an article entitled “Dilma or Marina?” in which he argues for a vote for incumbent president Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT) rather than for her challenger Marina Silva, the former Minister of the Environment who resigned her cabinet position in an earlier PT administration and is now candidate of the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB). There is also a third major candidate in the race, the more conservative Aécio Neves of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), and altogether there are eleven presidential candidates. Perhaps most important for the future of the social movements and the left, there is Luciana Genro, the presidential candidate of the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL). If none of the candidates receives more than 50 percent of the vote on October 5, then there will be a run-off election between the two highest vote-getters on October 26.[1]

    Sader states that Dilma would, as she has in her first four years in office, continue the policies of President Ignacio “Lula” da Silva, offering an “alternative to neoliberalism,” while Marina would turn the clock back to the old neoliberal model. While there is no doubt that first Ignacio da Silva, better known as Lula, and then his successor Dilma had the good fortune to preside over expanding economy (until the 2008 crisis) and that beginning in 2003 they put forward social policies that reduced poverty dramatically, it is also true that the PT’s alliance with the bankers and corporations led to greatly increased social inequality. If Marina, once a leader of the environmental movement beside Chico Mendes and now an idiosyncratic conservative, has become the savior of neoliberalism, then one should be clear that Dilma represents what has been called social liberalism, that is, a commitment to neoliberal policies whose impact is softened by social programs for the poor. A victory for either Dilma or Marina will lead to a consolidation of power of Brazil’s capitalist class through a government based on Brazil’s notoriously corrupt political system, an arrangement in which the PT is deeply implicated as was made clear in the 2005 mensalao political-payoff scandal.

    André Singer suggested in his book The Meanings of Lulismo, Lula’s second election in 2006 represented something like U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second election victory in 1936 election, that is, the establishment of a hegemonic bloc that laid the basis for a New Deal that established a new and durable social pact. Lula’s poverty programs, most important Bolsa Família, not only reduced poverty between 2003 and 2009 from 22 to 7 percent, they also won him the votes of poor people from throughout the country and especially from the Northeast. At the same time, stronger affirmative action programs improved the situations and raised the expectations of the country’s large Afro-Brazilian population. While Lula had originally been carried to power by the labor unions, the far left, and the Christian base communities informed by the Theology of Liberation, once in office, Lula renegotiated his party’s relationship to society, forming on an economic development alliance with financiers, construction companies, and agribusiness, while his social programs won him the votes of largely politically passive poorer people of the country. That same voting bloc carried Dilma to the presidency in 2010.

    A vote for Dilma then is a vote for the hegemonic bloc and the social pact of the PT—though in today’s world there is no guarantee that the conditions that made possible Brazil’s economic expansion in the 2000s and paid for the expanded social programs will continue into the late 2010s and 2020s. In fact, it is highly unlikely that the economic expansion of the PT’s best years in power can be repeated. Brazil grew under Lula and Dilma through its exports—meat, aluminum and agricultural products such as soya—and through the expansion of heavy civil construction and ship building, though it actually experienced a significant decline in manufacturing.  Brazil’s deep and complicated insertion into international capitalism, especially its economic ties to China and the United States, make it vulnerable to both their influence and to the vicissitudes of the larger international capitalist system. Brazil cannot compete with China in industrial production and its petroleum and agricultural commodities make it dependent on market fluctuations.   

    What’s At Stake in Brazil?

    In another article titled “What’s At Stake in Brazil” Sader writes, “What's at stake in Brazil in these elections is whether the country will continue as a major partner of Latin America and the Global South or if it will return to being a U.S. satellite.” Yet this both distorts and exaggerates Brazil’s role. Though Sader sees Brazil as a kind big brother to other Latin American nations, for years Marxists in Brazil such as Ruy Mauro Marini have argued that in addition to the United States, there exist regional, sub-imperial power, such as Brazil, that while operating within the context of U.S. domination of the hemisphere also itself dominates other nations, a point of view most recently advance by Raúl Zibechi in The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy. Sader believes that BRICS—the economic alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—holds the hope of creating an alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), establishing a bi-polar international economy that would seriously weaken U.S. power.

    Yet all of the BRICS’ economies which were thriving a few years ago, have, with the exception of China, gone into decline, with falling growth rates usually related to falling commodity prices. The fanfare surrounding the opening of the BRICS New Development Bank a few months ago does not change the reality that New York, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo remain the financial centers of world capitalism. As several Marxist critics have argued, rather than being an alternative to the existing imperialist system, the New Development Bank seems more likely simply to become a sub-imperialist center. Lula’s himself recognizes this for while in 2009 he blamed “the blue-eyed bankers” for the economic crisis was in New York, in February 2014 begging them to come invest in Brazil.

    What’s Really at Stake?

    With conservative candidate Aécio Neves having fallen behind in the polls and unlikely to make the runoff election, what’s really at stake in this election is whether or not Brazilian capitalism will be consolidated on a neoliberal or social liberal basis, either of which would work to smother the discontented and rebellious social forces of the June Days who represent the future for progressive social change in Brazil. What’s really at stake is the future of that amorphous, rebellious, movement and all the possibilities it suggested.

    The candidate whose party puts itself forward as a vehicle for the hopes of those millions of Brazilians who want a more democratic society that works to meet the needs of its majorities for transportation, education, and health care as well a more livable society is Luciana Genro of Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL). Luciana Genro is a twenty-three year old political activist and former Congressional Representative (deputada) who in 2003, together with other Workers Party leaders was expelled from the party because she criticized and refused to support its neoliberal policies. Those expelled leaders representing the far left wing of the PT—but made up of people from a variety of political tendencies—regrouped and organized the Party of Socialism and Freedom in 2004 and running Helena Heloísa for president in 2006.

    While the movement activists of the June Days were generally hostile to all political parties left, right, and center, PSOL succeeded in establishing a rapport with the mostly young, low-wage, working class activists. Now Luciana and PSOL are trying to see if they can provide a voice and an organizing center for Brazil’s discontents in order to build a mass movement. Luciana has little hope of winning in the first round, but her party’s goal goes beyond the election to the construction of a new left in Brazil. Dilma and Marina are not the only alternatives. And for the movement they are not alternatives at all. Luciana, PSOL, and the veterans of the June Days represent the future.

    [1] I have broken with our usual style here and followed the Brazilian practice of referring to all of the candidates by their first names.

     

  • Ukraine: Resisting nationalist polarization and Russian invasion

    Nina Potarskaya is one of the leading Ukrainian leftist feminists, founder of the feminist squadron at Maidan, and member of the Left Opposition, which helped organize three successive conferences of left forces in Kiev, in November 2013, March 2014, and September 2014. The most recent conference decided to build a new democratic Left party, which is the first electoral effort of its kind in Ukraine. She was interviewed in Geneva by Jean Batou, with the help of Kirill Buketov, for solidaritéS.

    Potarskaya outlines certain basic democratic principles of the new party: the need for a popular membership, transparent funding, and participatory internal democracy—all of which says a lot about their wish to break with Ukraine’s traditional party politics. When I asked what the founders of the new party meant when they declared themselves a party of the left, Potarskaya replied that the party will challenge social, economic, and gender inequalities, and the members are now in the process of drawing up a program with specific demands along those lines. For reasons outlined in the interview, the party has not taken a position on the national question and the war.—Jean Batou.

    Q. Could you explain the social and political dynamics of the Maidan process, which led to the overthrow of the Yanukovych regime in February 2014, and could you try to contrast it with the course of events in Eastern Ukraine?

    Nina Potarskaya: First, I’d like to recall the nature of the social protests in Ukraine before and after Maidan. Opinion polls show that during the last four years, the principal reasons for people’s discontent, whether in Western or in Eastern Ukraine, had to do with economical frustrations. Therefore, in the last period, the social and economic deterioration triggered growing popular protests. This anger exploded after the non-ratification of the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement, which led to the first Maidan demonstrations, towards the end of November 2013. And every two or three weeks that followed, the evolution of the political situation provoked an escalation, as a growing number of people were taking over the streets, especially after special police forces began to beat and even kill demonstrators.

    The situation was different in the East, because Russian-speaking people, who are predominantly listening to Russian media, populate the Eastern part of Ukraine, and their information about Maidan had nothing to say about the actual reasons for these protests. They heard about an uprising led by neo-Nazis, which had to be stopped by all means. Of course, the far right played an important role at Maidan, but it was wrong to say that it was a right-wingers’ movement. So the Russian media explained to the people of the East that there was a serious danger for them, and they were provoked to the streets, because they thought they had to act to stop fascists.

    I was one of the founders and organizers of the women’s squadron at Maidan—because the demonstrators were divided into different squadrons. This group consisted of twenty or so very active women with a much broader influence. One of the actions of this women’s squadron was to send a delegation to Kharkov, because there was an anti-Maidan movement growing there, in order to meet with women at a square occupied by anti-Maidan demonstrators. The first reactions of those women were very negative, and we were even physically assaulted. But when we managed to start a dialogue, after 15 or 20 minutes, we found a common language because we realized that the social concerns of our movements were absolutely similar. It was the media that was misinterpreting the nature of our movement, manipulating the population, and creating a serious split between the Eastern and the Western parts of the country.

    Q. How can you measure the respective role of Russian troops and Eastern Ukrainian activists in the growth of the separatist movement, which led to the formation of two self-proclaimed “People’s Republics” in Donestk and Lugansk, in April-May 2014?

    NP: As people in Donbas were starting to act against what they saw as a potential fascist threat, many Eastern Ukrainians came to believe that—just as the Russians had been able to take over Crimea without bloodshed—the same scenario would be repeated in the East. At the beginning, because many Eastern Ukrainians hated both Viktor Yanukovych and his rival Petro Poroshenko, the prospect of a separate state was certainly popular, even if it is very difficult to say to what extent. But, since the situation is changing very rapidly, the public opinion is very volatile. When the Ukrainian army retook control of Kramatorsk in the Northern part of Donestsk in May, we had the opportunity to talk to the people of this town, and they told us that they hated all military uniforms, whatever they may be.

    Anyway, as they realized that their situation was not that of Crimea, Eastern Ukrainians were hearing a lot of rumors that the official use or teaching of the Russian language was going to be outlawed, and that they had to act themselves to defend their rights. At the end of April 2014, elements of the Russian military began to infiltrate Eastern Ukraine, disguised as members of civilian self-defense units, and took over government buildings, immediately supplanting local anti-Maidan activists, who were already occupying these buildings. Russians are easy to recognize because they speak with a distinct accent and use some distinct words and sentences. When they entered Slavyansk, urging people to leave the streets, they employed a typical Russian term, never used in Ukraine, in naming the signs that separate roads from pedestrian areas. But when anti-Maidan activists realized that they were not going to be allowed to occupy the buildings again, they took to the streets, using pro-Russian rhetoric and pro-Russian flags, probably influenced by Russian agitators.

    Even if such demonstrations have been limited in size, it doesn’t mean that they were not supported by a large fraction of the population. People from Lugansk recently told us that taking to the streets was a very uncommon way to protest in Eastern Ukraine. Therefore, you cannot infer from their limited size, that these demonstrations were not supported by a large part of the population. In any case, there is no accurate way to measure the share of the people that supported the two self-proclaimed “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk (April-May 2014). Concerning violence against civilians, it’s also difficult to determine the responsibilities of both camps, since each side, depending on its nationalist inclination, accuses the other one. There is no independent source of information, and according to local people, both sides have behaved badly.

    Q. How does Ukrainian national feeling interact with the social demands of the people? Do workers stop mobilizing themselves in defense of their interests?

    NP: The question is how to push the social issue ahead of the others. But of course, in a situation of war, people stop thinking too much about social issues. In August, everywhere, we observed growing patriotic mobilizations driven by increasing nationalist feelings. There are growing anti-Russian and anti-separatist actions in the West, but the social and political reasons for which people took to the streets last year—for example, to fight against corruption—are less and less at the forefront.

    There are two types of trade unions in Ukraine. The Federation of Trade Unions is rooted in the old Soviet culture and simply supports what the government says; it has only played a very limited role, to say the least, in reforming the labor legislation of the country. But there are also independent unions, which have been formed during the perestroika; they are much more active, especially at the local level, and some of them are extremely powerful. However, the leader of these independent unions is a very strong politician; he supports the Ukrainian government, even though he tries to avoid any kind of provocative speech. There are conflicting political positions among this confederation, but nothing like a neutral position against the war.

    Q. What was the result of the recent Kiev conference? Is there a possibility to build a united democratic Left party in Ukraine today? What are the forces that could cooperate in this regard? What could the program be of such a party? What makes this a left party? Is not the national issue dividing its ranks?

    NP: We now have the opportunity to bring together independent trades unions, NGOs, and progressive political forces, all together under the umbrella of a left democratic party. That was the purpose of our last meeting in Kiev. This conference decided to create an organizing committee, which started to work on a founding document. We wanted to do that in a transparent and democratic manner, but of course, a democratic process takes time. We discussed our common commitment to doing politics in a different way, which we can sum up in a few simple points. First, we want to exclude from our membership the people who earn more than a certain amount of money. Second, the party finances must be an “open book,” where all transactions are publicly reported: everything that we receive or spend must be transparent to everybody. Third, the decisions should be taken by open forums, involving as many rank-and-file members as possible; it is not up to the leadership to take decisions, but we should develop internet processes allowing all the members of the party to be involved. In a way, we opted for a mixture of the organizational principles of the European pirate parties [supporting civil rights, freedom of information, and direct democracy] and the social-democratic parties.

    We didn’t separate the pro- from the anti-Maidan forces. There were very different positions represented, but we decided to focus only on fighting social, economic and gender inequalities. Our common reference to the left means that we put social and economic rights at the forefront. We didn’t raise the national question. This was the first opportunity for us to speak to each other in recent years. So people were of course interested to deal with a lot of different things, but we didn’t deal with the national question this time. We mainly addressed the organizational principles through which some kind of unity could be built. What we, as organizer of the conference, tried to do was to create an atmosphere in which a common declaration could be made on the topic of the war. But in order to keep the unity of the group, the language of such declaration had to be very diplomatic and soft, and finally there was no declaration, but only a draft….

    Q. What are the procedural problems to be solved in building a new political party in Ukraine today?

    NP: Building a new political party is a very difficult technical process, with a lot of practical obstacles: most of Ukraine’s existing parties were created at least ten years ago, when the legislation was much more favorable, and now it is almost impossible to form a new one. A well-known lawyer from Kharkov, who had been a member of the socialist party, but was expelled from it, succeeded (along with some other Kharkov socialists) in building his own political organization. He is a well-off politician, but has no backing from any of the oligarchs. He succeeded in having this new organization registered, and in being elected to the Parliament, with some members of his party obtaining seats in municipal councils. But step-by-step, his organization declined and disappeared, leaving him with nothing more than a registration without members. So he is offering us his registered organization as a vehicle to build a new left party that could adopt a new name.

    Q. You are a member of the Left Opposition. Can you tell us something more about your organization and the role it played in the preparation of the Kiev conferences?

    NP: The Left opposition initiated these conferences. Our influence is, however, low, since our membership is in the range of a few dozens, with a more limited number of active people, not only in Kiev, but also in Cherkassy (in the center of the country). Of course, we mobilize a broader bunch of sympathizers, who take part in our actions, in our debates, and spread our publications. The left opposition is made up of two sets of people: the first, which created the organization, came from the Trotskyist tradition. The other part is not interested in choosing between the different Trotskyist affiliations; it considers itself as anti-capitalist, socialist, anti-Stalinist, and anti-authoritarian, that’s all. For me and for many other people, it is enough; and for many young people or new activists who join us, what we are fighting for or against is much more important than our historical background. In some sense, we are twin brothers of the Russian socialist movement (RSM).

    Q. Does everybody agree on the electoral perspective of this democratic Left party under construction?

    NP: No, we are still debating this. Our possible involvement in the forthcoming elections was a kind of spontaneous decision, which was just taken because of the opportunity to do so. But some people wonder whether we should be part of a parliamentary group. So, we decided to participate in the electoral process without aiming at getting elected. Instead, we’d like to use this campaign as an instrument for mobilizing and organizing people around us. Of course, some friendly political websites criticize our decision to enter the electoral process.

    Q. What social force can resist today’s nationalist polarization? At the beginning, you mentioned women. Could the attempt of Maidan women to bridge the gap with anti-Maidan demonstrators in Kharkov have a possible follow-up?

    NP: It is difficult for the left to build an anti-war initiative, because very different opinions coexist in our ranks. And each time you discuss the possibility of an independent campaign, you have to oppose two dominant options: following the Russian or the Ukrainian propaganda. The nationalist responses dominate public discussions. The building of an independent feminist voice is made difficult by the very limited resources of feminist organizations. Social and political demands cannot be heard without adopting a more general stance on human rights. It was already the same during the Maidan events, when the left-wing groups couldn’t easily participate as such in the political discussions, and it was possible only for women to get into Maidan and start debating the issues of nationalism, sexism, and discrimination. Even if the far right is traditionalist, and think that women should stay in the kitchen and have no voice in a political process, it could not exclude us from the debate. During two weeks of truce, the so-called “two weeks of silence” in the Maidan process, when the fighting stopped, we were able to launch very important debates around social issues, and to attract the attention of the media. We became very well known—one hundred people participated in our meetings, our comments on Facebook were spread everywhere, and the far right had to take account of us.

     

  • Climate Convergence Moves Us Forward, but Challenges Us to Create a Strategy

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    The Climate Convergence with its more than one hundred workshops, its large plenary sessions, and its miles-long mass march of more than 300,000 people, the largest climate protest in American history, represents a turning point for the environmental movement. The gigantic and passionate parade of indigenous people, ethnic groups of all sorts from everywhere in the country, students by the tens of thousands, neighborhood organizations by the dozen, several major national labor unions, and every conceivable sort of ecological cause tramping through New York City carrying huge banners and giant puppets, striding and dancing to the tunes of 29 marching bands, put the issue of the environment and climate change on the national agenda as never before. The national climate movement has arrived—now what will it do?

    The Convergence march was as broad politically as it was long. In the march were U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, former Vice-President Al Gore, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York State legislators and several New York City council members, their presence signifying that climate change had gone main stream. At the same time, bringing up the rear were those of us in the anti-capitalist contingent of a few thousand socialists, anarchists, and others who know capitalism is the cause of the problem and believe in a democratic socialist society, even if we don’t know or agree about what to put in its place. And who can blame us, for it’s not clear how we get from here to the new democratic, egalitarian, socially just and environmentally sound society that we know we need. Most folks were marching in the middle somewhere, not trusting the corporations, dubious about government, wanting to get rid of fossil fuels but without a clear political vision of where we’re going. That is perhaps the biggest thing missing from the movement right now, a unifying strategy for the majority if not a strategy for all.

    A remarkable humanitarian and internationalist spirit pervaded the march. I saw the flags of many nations carried by individuals or small groups from as far away as Australia. There were immigrants to America from all over the world who retain their connection with the pre-capitalist traditions of their homeland, like those carrying the banner reading “Pachamama,” the earth mother worshipped in Peru since ancient times. There were signs reading “One Planet,” “One Future,” and “We Are All in this Together.” People marched to save their local park, river, or lake, but they also marched to “Save the Planet,” as many signs said, and to save us all.

    Such universalist idealism was moving even if it tended to obscure for the moment the fact that though “we are all in this together” even those marching are not all on the same side. The profound division of capitalist society into those who have capital and those who have only their labor, between those who rule and those who are ruled over remains even in the era of climate change. Ban Ki-moon, President Obama, Al Gore, the U.S. Congress, other governments around the world, and the corporate executives may fear climate change, but they do not want the world of climate justice for all that we want. The reality is that what will be done to save all of us will have to be done by most of us against those whose few of us whose commitment to their money, their power, and their capitalist economic system stands in our way. So what strategy do we put forward?

    How do we move those who are anti-corporate to becoming anti-capitalist? And how do we move the anti-capitalists to become socialists? In America with its dominant conservative ideology and political system, with its culture of acquisitive individualism, and its historic antipathy towards socialism going back to the red scares of the 1920s and the 1950s this has always been the problem, figuring out how to get people to move from a posture advocating liberal reform to a position calling for radical transformation of the system. The only way is to educate ourselves collectively as a movement through actions at all levels that confront the power and over time reveal, through discussion, debate, and struggle the superiority of democracy and make obvious the right of the majority of people to control their own fate not only politically, but economically and in terms of climate. 

    The strategic elements of movements around the world that in the past won limited reforms and in some other countries won significant social change for some extended period of time have been three:

     First, a conscious mass movement, inspired by its vision of greater justice, that mobilizes to confront the powers-that-be: the corporations, the military, the political parties, and the government, a movement which is not afraid to use its economic and social power to profoundly disrupt the system through demonstrations, strikes, and civil disobedience.

    Second, the construction out of that movement of an independent political force, outside of the existing capitalist parties, a political power that fights in the electoral and legislative arena to change the laws so that they represent not the wealthy and the corporations, but the people.

    Third, a revolutionary theory, strategy, and organization that arising out of the social and political movement is prepared with the support of the majority to take power and reorganize society along new lines based on the needs of all, not the needs of the few. In American history, we should note, we have seldom gotten beyond the first stage, and around the world today, the struggle at all levels is uneven.

    We have no choice but to try. We have everything to lose, above all our planet earth, and we have a world to win.

  • After you win the union election, what next?

     

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    What happens after a social movement/social justice reform caucus wins the union leadership? As we see more victories, we need to consider what changes and why. I was delighted to open a panel that began the convention of CORE, the now-leadership caucus of the Chicago Teachers Union. I think CORE faces some new challenges, which I briefly describe in my remarks.

     I’m a teacher educator who was a high school teacher and teacher union activist for 15 years in California and NY. I now coordinate a MA for experienced teachers and research urban education and teachers unions. Some of you may know of me through my book, “The future of our schools.” But what’s most germane to my being here today is that I’m a really big fan of CORE. If you had a fan club, I’d run for president. But before I talk anymore, I’d like those of you who worked in a school today to wave your hand and shout out. I want to thank YOU for coming here, after what was a hard week. Urban teaching is a job and a half. Union work is a job on top of that. Caucus work gets piled on top.  You’re great for being here.

    AN INSTITUTIONAL CONSCIENCE

                I want to suggest why your work in and for CORE is critical, and propose challenges for CORE that I see based on my research and discussions with teachers unions in the US and elsewhere in the world. As a  caucus vies for leadership of a union, the decisions it makes about its principles and its operation shape the kind of union it creates, the kind of leadership it offers, when it wins elections. The caucus is the new union in embryo. However after that victory, the caucus purpose and importance shift. The caucus remains the voice of a rank and file union leadership but also becomes the institutional conscience of the union apparatus, of the leadership and staff. 

                This new role is essential because unions experience pressure to mirror the culture of the employer. It’s a fact of life. No union is immune from these influences. The pressures occur because the union is necessarily locked in battle with management, and even a fighting relationship is a relationship. This relationship explains why we find corrupt, gangster unions in industries that are gangster-ridden.  It also explains the pressures on urban teacher unions to become bureaucratic and hierarchical. The union adapts to the employer (school system) culture and assumptions even as it resists them.             No matter how principled, courageous, and strong we are as leaders, we and the organization are subject to conservatizing pressures. Democracy is inefficient; solidarity is difficult to develop; mobilizations take a great deal of time and energy. And leaders are charged with producing results. That’s why they are elected.

                In a caucus like CORE that is pledged to union democracy and grew by defending that ideal, caucus members meet as equals. The highest officers have no more power or authority than does a regular union member. Officers and staff bring one perspective and essential knowledge that comes with leadership.  Caucus members, however, bring another perspective and knowledge set: the texture of work and union life in the school.  The job of the caucus is to defend the ideals on which its candidates won office. This is the sense in which it serves as the conscience of the union leadership and staff they hire.

                These conditions of equality and the understanding that a union is strongest when members feel that they control the union – and not vice versa- mitigate against the pressures towards hierarchy that unions inevitably experience. In schools, caucus members model this determination and confidence that members are the union. Internally in the caucus, members defend the caucus ideals as they think they should be enacted.

    EXTENDING DEMOCRACY, INTERNALLY AND EXTERNALLY

                I think the challenge for CORE now is to take the democratic norms and procedures you have made part of union life in two directions: to the schools and to politics. That means organizing members to combat the bullying of administrators in ways that are creative and self-confident.  It also means standing up to the bullying of politicians who think the schools and communities are theirs to run as they wish.  All over the world teachers and their unions have been shut out of the political process. In the US we see this in the way the Democrats answer Republican rivals and exclude our demands from the political process.  The CTU and CORE need to push even harder to create space for teacher, parent, and student voices to be heard and respected in schools. At the same time, you now need to create space in the public sphere, in politics and in the media, for your vision of a different kind of society and school system.

                As I see it, CORE’s challenge is to develop a deeper, stronger union presence in the schools, reinforce and extend your connections with community and unions who will struggle, and to take your struggle to the political arena to give people a real alternative to the parties and politicians controlled by wealthy elites. As it meant in confronting the former CTU apparatus and CPS, this process requires a clear commitment to reject politics as usual, including the idea that politicians, no matter how smart or courageous, can replace the actions of our movement.  Expecting politicians acting as individuals to take on the government sets them – and us- up for disappointment and betrayal. The people we elect we be only as strong and principled as they know they must be to have our support.

                This is a tall order, but so was transforming the CTU – which you’ve done – and taking on Rahm Emanuel successfully – which you’ve done. CORE has inspired struggles all over this country and the world.  I think you’ve just begun.

    Si se puede!

    Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. And you can follow me on twitter  Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

  • Capitalism and Work Today: A World Survey

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    Corinne Goria, editor. Invisible Hands: Voices from the Global Economy. San Francisco: Voice of Witness, 2014. 388 pages. Map.

    Corrine Goria, the San Diego-based lawyer and writers, together with a large team of other editors, researchers, transcribers, translators, and all the usual assistants who make possible the production of a book (and it is nice to see them all recognized on the verso of the title page) has produced an engaging and useful volume that is a kind of survey of work today in the capitalist world.

    Invisible Hands: Voices from the Global Economy is a collection of interviews with sixteen workers and activists from eleven countries—the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Nigeria, Zambia, Uzbekistan, India, Bangladesh, China, South Korea, and Papua New Guinea—who talk in the most straight-forward and down-to-earth way about their lives and work. The book is organized by industrial sectors—garment manufacture, agriculture, resource extraction (mining and petroleum), and electronics—though because some of those interviewed had other work experiences, we also learn about other industries and occupations.

    When I received the review copy of this book from the publisher, I was planning a course on Global Labor that I am now teaching in the Urban Studies Department at Queens College. After looking the book over, I decided to adopt it for my class. Over the last three weeks the ethnically-diverse, evening class of mostly non-traditional students (from their late twenties to late forties) has read it and found it engaging, disturbing, and sometimes shocking. Workers tell us about their work for textile companies in Mexico or Bangladesh, for mining companies in Zambia or the United States, on plantations in India or North Carolina, or in the electronics factories owned by Foxconn or Samsung in China and Korea. To give a few examples:

    ·         Ana Juárez a garment worker, and Martín Barrios, a labor organizer, tell their story of labor organizing experience in Puebla, Mexico.

    ·         Neftali Cuello, a high school student and tobacco field worker in North Carolina describes her life and work amidst the toxic plants.

    ·         Clive Porabou of the island of Bougainville in the autonomous region of Papua New Guinea discusses the struggle of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army against the Rio Tinto mining company.

    ·         Li Wen, a former factory worker in China, tells us how he lost his hand in an industrial accident and what happened to him afterwards as he dealt with the company and the government.

    The personal stories and the students’ reactions to them have provided an excellent basis for our class discussions and an easy way to introduce students to the world of work around the globe today. Since the book provides no theoretical framework and makes no attempt at analysis it allows the students to enter into an open ended discussion, one in which my students frequently compared their own life and work experience with that of the testimonials they were reading. With its stimulating interviews, short chapters, illustrations, large type and leading, and highly readable prose, it is not only an engaging book but an easy read. Anyone interested in work, especially industrial work in the developing world, would find this book a useful introduction.

    Still, while generally happy with this book, both as a reader and as a college instructor, I think it has some weaknesses. Though some of the testimonials come from workers who were organizers or activists in struggle, many are from others who describe themselves principally as victims. While I too am moved by their truly sad stories of the deaths of coworkers, the beatings and firings, the injuries, often maiming, and illnesses, I felt that some of the stories became mawkish. I preferred the organizers’ and activists’ stories, but even they often did little more than mention the ideologies that motivated them, the strategies they employed, or the tactics they adopted. The interviewers might have pressed harder, asked more probing questions. And more of the stories might have discussed worker struggles—choosing, for example, a worker activist involved in one of the thousands of strikes taking place in China today.

    The editors’ introductions to the workers’ stories are sparse, providing just enough information to be able to read the interviews for oneself—which from a pedagogical point of view is good. Nothing is forced on the reader. On the other hand, the editors fail to raise questions for the reader (or student) about what’s happening in the world of work. Some of these stories deal with the relationship between struggles for national self-determination and fights and for rights at work, as in the case of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. Others show how the lack of political democracy and civil rights also has an impact on workers’ lives, as in Uzbekistan. Many of these personal narratives raise the question about the relationship between the multinational corporations and the national states in which they operate. We see in several chapters worker organized not only by labor unions but also by NGOs, the Catholic Church, a national liberation movement or a political party. Had the editors called these issues to the reader’s attention and perhaps asked some questions about those issues the book would have been even more effective. For example, are NGOs, usually staffed by middle class people and funded by foundations, really the best vehicle for worker organizing? Or perhaps such a leading question would undermine the book’s open-ended character.

    If you conduct labor education for your union, work in the peace and social justice office of your church, or teach in a high school or college classroom—or if you’re just someone interested in reading a sweeping survey of work in the world today—this book is a good place to start. Though as the teacher you will have to ask many questions of your students that the editors have not raised. You and your students will need to read as well something about the history of the labor movement, about economics, about world politics, about the land-grab in developing countries, about the tremendous resistance movement in China today, and, no doubt, other issues as well. Of course Marx would be useful, essential. But with this book as your starting point you will have been plunged into the world of today’s working class: precariously employed, under-paid, working  10 or 12 hours a day six to seven days a week, but still dreaming of a better life, full of hope, speaking out for justice, and in many cases struggling for power in the workplace.

  • Climate Convergence Opens with a Prayer and a Call to Action

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    The Climate Convergence—an opening session on Friday, a hundred meetings on Saturday, a huge march and Occupy the U.N. Climate Summit on Sunday, and other actions on Monday such as #FloodWallStreet (Stop Capitalism. End the Climate Crisis.)—began in New York City on Friday night with an indigenous prayer, speeches from climate activists, and a powerful call to action to save the planet. Organizers have worked to make this a turning-point event.

    The Climate Convergence has come to New York to challenge, protest, and attempt to change the climate policies of the corporations, national governments, and the United Nations which is holding its Climate Summit this week in New York. 

    For Sunday’s march, some 500 buses are bringing protestors from around the country, demonstrators will line up on 26 city blocks, and there will be 29 marching bands. Some 2,000 other climate events are taking place simultaneously in 160 countries. Organizers predict that 100,000 will march in New York on Sunday, September 21 in the biggest climate action in American history.

    While the opening sessions speakers came from a range of movements, experiences, and perspectives and presented no one point of view, theory, or analysis, what came through loud and clear was the need to change our planet’s course, because if unbridled capitalism, corporations, and consumerism continue to dominate our discourse, ideology, and practice we are headed for a disaster that could destroy the planet and the human race. We provide here some excerpts from the opening session talks to give our readers a feel for the movement.

    Tom Goldtooth of the Dakota people in Minnesota and a spokesperson f the Indigenous Environmental Network opened the meeting by reminding the gathering that the indigenous movement “has never been idle” in its work, a reference to the Idle No More movement. He in turn called upon Josephine Mandamin (Anishinaabekwe), an Ojibway woman also known as Grandmother Water Walker who is noted for her work to protect the Great Lakes and other waterways, to offer a prayer.

    First speaking in her native language and then in English Mandamin said, “The creator gave us the duty to take care of our mother the earth the way we would take care of our own mother or grandmother.. She called women the “water carriers” and told the climate activists, “We are women are the water carriers, the life carriers. The little droplet of water is what unites us all.” She told the group, “We have come here to speak to the powers-that-be, to the corporations about the climate issues and to ask, ‘What are you going to do about it.’ And I ask you too, ‘What are you going to do?’”    

    Jill Stein, the physician and former Green Party presidential candidate who chaired the opening session told the crowd of some 500 that, “We are at a critical, transformative moment.” Call for involvement in both direct action and electoral politics, she told the group, “The fundamental purpose of our coming together here is to leverage our work.”

    “This is the first time in my experience,” said Stein, “that so many people from so many different movements have come together to put people, the planet, and peace over profits. We cannot fix the planet while the neoliberal capitalist system goes on.”

    Anne Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project has worked since 2007 to challenge the United Nations’ climate policies. Tracing UN policies since 2004 in Argentina, she argued that “the United Nations’ climate program had become completely market dominated.” Her protests over the last half dozen years at climate summits in Bali, Durban, Doha led her to be permanently banned from the UN Climate summits. She told the climate activists that “The United Nations does what its corporate masters tell them to do.”  

    Felipe Cornell, the Afro-Peruvian, Harlem bred, hip-hop legend better known as Immortal Technique gave a powerful speech about the need for environmental change before reading one of his moving poems. A powerful stage presence, Cornell told the audience, “We have to redefine what has been redefined for us—our humanity. We have been told that the earth belongs to us, rather than that we belong to the earth.”

    “I find these things transcending racial lines, because we are one human race,” said Cornell. “Before race, class, and gender, we are all human beings who have to be caught in a non-sustainable system. We may divide ourselves by race, but we are united class.”

    Erica Violet Lee of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan who is active in the Idle No More movement talked about the indigenous peoples’ conditions and struggles. “Our people live in poverty and without adequate health care, with inferior education, over-represented in the prisons, suffering economic hardship and facing racism everywhere,” she said. “We are Idle No More, but that is just a new name for the indigenous resistance movement that has gone on so long. We get up in the morning and we say, ‘We are still here, despite centuries of efforts to destroy us. We are still here.”

    “Violence on the land is directly related to violence against indigenous people and against indigenous women,” said Lee. Lee read a moving poem dedicated to the Palestinian women of Gaza.

    Nastaran Mohit, a New York city labor organizer and Occupy activist, talked as a socialists who had only recently come to the environmental movement, driven by the experience of Occupy Sandy in response to the devastation of super storm Sandy. “It was Occupy Sandy that turned me into an environmental activist,” said Mohit. “Occupy Sandy was Occupy Wall Street’s first opportunity to connect with low-income communities.” Mohit challenged the audience to work with such economically marginal groups.

    Finally, the featured guest of honor, Oscar Olivera, a leader of the Coordinating Committee en Defense of Water and Life, and one of the three principal leaders of the Cochabamba Water Wars, talked about how the largely indigenous and working people of Bolivia “had fought and won against Bechtel, the World Bank, the Bolivian government, and the military.” Olivera emphasized the need to be able to explain complex ideas to society’s underdogs. He also emphasized the need for new forms of organization. “We organized horizontally,” he said, “without leaders, without presidents, without political bosses, without parties, and without the employers. The people made the decisions.” Finally, said Olivera, one has to set the educated and organized forces in motion, one has to mobilize. 

  • Greening the Union Label

    From teachers to transit workers, civil servants to electricians, the People’s Climate March will have more organized-labor participation than any environmentalist effort in U.S. history.

    More than 50 unions, including some of the city’s biggest, are among the organizations sponsoring the march. The Service Employees International Union, the nation’s second largest, has endorsed it, and its two main New York locals, the health care workers of Local 1199 and the building service workers of Local 32BJ, are heavily involved. Also on board are District Council 37, the city’s largest public employee union; Transport Workers Union Local 100; Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; the Communications Workers of America, who represent city employees as well as telephone and cable-TV workers; and the city, state and Connecticut affiliates of the American Federation of Teachers.

    The sponsors also include labor-based groups such as the Left Labor Project and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and “worker centers” that seek to organize low-wage and undocumented workers. Trade Unions for Energy Democracy is bringing union leaders from more than 10 countries, including the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, Korea, Canada and South Africa.

    “Labor is marching because climate change affects all of us,” says Local 32BJ President Hector Figueroa. “We live in the communities that get destroyed by storms like Sandy. We work in the buildings that get flooded. We get hit by health epidemics like asthma that are rampant in our communities, and we care about the world that we will leave for our children and grandchildren.” 

    “Labor has come to the conclusion that it is a workers’ issue, some of us faster than others,” says Estela Vazquez, a Local 1199 vice president.

    Sandy’s Impact

    Superstorm Sandy galvanized sentiment about climate change among many union members here. “We saw the impact on our places of work,” says Vazquez. Members were working at NYU Langone Medical Center when it had to be evacuated and at nursing homes in the Rockaways. As health workers, they also worry that global warming will abet the spread of diseases like malaria.

    The storm flooded DC 37’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, destroying the building’s electrical system. Members stayed on the job at a water treatment plant in Staten Island when flooding cut it off from land, says Jon Forster, a city scientist and union vice president. “There is a sense that this is urgent.”

    Whether that sense translates into turnout, however, depends on unions reaching their members, says Sean Sweeney, co-coordinator of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy. He’s been particularly impressed by the efforts of 32BJ, 1199, the New York State Nurses Association, Electricians Local 3 and the Amalgamated Transit Union, which has two small locals representing bus drivers in Staten Island and Queens.

    DC 37 has published two articles about the march in its newspaper, which goes out to 170,000 readers, and handed out thousands of flyers to members and the general public, says communications director Zita Allen. Local 1199 is reaching out to members through social media and has translated materials into Spanish, Russian and Chinese. Local 32BJ has been phone-banking its members and holding meetings and handing out Spanish-language flyers in Washington Heights. Its 2,000 “green supers” — who have completed a course in making buildings more energy-efficient — “really lead the way in talking to other members about the environment,” says Lenore Friedlaender, who is in charge of member engagement.

    “It’s not just a PR thing. There really is a lot of momentum inside labor for this march,” she adds.

    Political shift 

    Such a labor-environmentalist alliance has been a long time coming. The “teamsters and turtles” coalition from the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests dissipated quickly. The BlueGreen Alliance, founded in 2006, brought together the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club, but did not influence the Obama administration to push for a “Green New Deal.” Environmentalists are often stereotyped as an upper-middle-class white movement that cares more about wilderness than jobs.

    “We are a one-trick pony. We only care about one thing, and that’s jobs,” a building trades union’s political director told LaborPress last fall. “We don’t care about your guns, if dudes can marry dudes, medical marijuana. It’s not our issue.”

    In that, there are genuine conflicts. To environmentalists, the Keystone XL tar-sands oil pipeline means “game over” for the climate. To the Laborers International Union of North America, it means 42,000 jobs. For building trades workers, the criticism that these would only be short-term is meaningless. Almost all construction jobs are short-term. Laborers President Terry O’Sullivan has harshly criticized AFL-CIO leader Rich Trumka’s initiatives to unite with environmental groups.

    “Green jobs” — alternative energy, retrofitting buildings and public transportation — could be the key to cracking that conundrum. Pete Sikora, a Communications Workers official running for the state Assembly in Brooklyn, believes New York could reduce both income inequality and carbon-dioxide emissions simply by requiring mandatory energy-efficiency upgrades for buildings. 

    This, he says, would create “tens of thousands of good, sustainable, mostly union jobs” and pay for itself in energy savings within five years.

    Creating a greener New York would include constructing bulkheads, a better drainage system and transportation hubs, says DC 37’s Forster. We should build solar and wind energy facilities instead of a terminal in Long Island Sound for exporting fracking-extracted natural gas, he adds. “One is a green job, the other isn’t.”

    “What is the sense in creating short-term jobs when the impact on the planet is negative for all of us?” Local 1199’s Vazquez asks. “We cannot continue mindless consumption.”

    But if cars and coal are bad for the environment, how can we change that without condemning miners and autoworkers to Walmart or unemployment? “Labor needs to be weighing in on policy,” says Forster. “If decisions are made, jobs have to be taken into account.”

    “I value the work opportunity construction of renewable energy projects will offer building trade workers, and the resulting reduction of the city’s carbon footprint,” Electricians Local 3 head Chris Erikson said at a July press conference for the march. But, he added, “we must weigh the effect on jobs for U.S. citizens and be prudent in the implementation of regulations.”

    The environmental movement has also realized that climate change and pollution often hit people of color and the world’s poor hardest, says Vazquez. This rally, she adds, “gives all progressive forces an opportunity to build a new coalition.”

    Climate change will never be stopped as long as the market dominates political decisions, Sweeney says, so Trade Unions for Energy Democracy advocates public ownership of energy production. World energy production could be “completely decarbonized” by 2030, he contends, but it would take an effort on the scale of World War II, such as installing 60,000 3-megawatt wind turbines every year.

    “What’s technically possible is different from what’s politically possible,” he says. “We need a really militant climate movement, and labor has to be at the center of it.”

     

    This article is reprinted with the permission of The Indypendent, a New York City-based newspaper, where it first appeared.

  • The Tragedy of Being Michael Brown

    ImageMichael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, was shot dead by police in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9. Two of the more problematic reactions to the tragedy of Michael Brown’s death rest upon a shared association between the value of the “raced” victim’s life, or lack thereof, and his supposed “success” or “failure.” These reactions, which I call the “no-angel” and the “degree” approaches, although different, both stem from the dominant worldview of today’s capitalist societies which judge people’s life worth on the basis of their success or failure, of being good or bad people.

    The No-Angel Approach

    One mainstream media’s reaction to the recent tragedy was “Michael Brown was no angel,” implying that, at least in some instances, he could be perceived as a bad person, a failure, or a criminal.[1] The mainstream media’s no-angel approach was also employed in the case of Trayvon Martin and many others. The mainstream media’s “no-angel” approach often rests on an unofficial archive of the victim’s transgressions of legal and cultural norms. The archive draws on an investigation of friends, family members, victim’s photos, etc., and is employed in an informal media-based court that implicitly justifies the verdict of police brutality. In fact, the media and their audiences only learn about the “raced” victims of police brutality after their lives have already been lost, subsequent to which their lives are reduced to a series of selected events and idiosyncrasies. The excavation of the victim’s failures (or deviations from social norms) replaces the actual vivid scene of murder and doesn’t let “the sooty details of the scene [rise], thrusting themselves between the world and [audiences],” as Richard Wright wrote in his poem “Between the World and Me.” The implicit interpretation of the no-angel approach is that the raced victim must be an angel in order for his life to be worthy. Hence, the victim’s life counts as no life, or less deserving of grief, due to snapshots deemed to demonstrate the individual’s failures.

    From the perspective of this record-keeping mindset not only is the idea of a “second chance” given to “wrongdoers” nullified, but also the murder of a raced victim is justified through archival snapshots of the victim’s life. There is a common belief that the U.S. is in its post race and racism era; consequently, police brutality, in this colorblind worldview, is blamed on the victim being a “bad” person who had deviated from the law, dominant social values, or simply failing to be successful. The basis for police impunity and right-less-ness of the raced victims is their criminality, given that the mainstream media associates the police killing with the raced victims’ former transgression of law or dominant social values. Hence, the language of criminality, instead of race, is used for relegating the life of the raced victim to unworthy of protection and his social status as non-citizen. As Michelle Alexander states in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, “In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt.… Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.…Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination … are suddenly legal.…One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system.”[2]

    The police violence in the no-angel approach was excused on the grounds of the victim’s former transgressions of the law—or of sociocultural norms—in order to claim that the victim was a danger to the police at the scene, or against society in the future. Hence the police, together with sections of the mainstream media, exploit society’s fear of the “dangerous” raced other, already criminalized through racialization, to suggest that if the victims had remained alive they could have killed the police officer (even if the victim was unarmed), and would subject society to harm in the future. The wrong or right of the killing of the raced person becomes dependent on the social status and criminal history of the victim, as opposed to the evidence and story revealed at the scene. The worthiness of a raced person’s life is equated with being perceived as successful. Even if the mourners, by citing the victim’s educational credentials, prove that the victim had been successful, this success is often challenged by the mainstream media based on the victim’s wearing a hoodie, doing rap, making gestures, or body size. In order to deny the existence of race and racial injustice in the U.S., the no-angel approach constructs an image of the raced victims to blame police brutality on the victims themselves. 

    The Degree Approach

    There is another approach that portrays Brown’s life as valuable, and his death as being worthy of mourning, by noting his completion of high school, his prospects of earning a college degree, and his being an overall good and successful person with the potential for playing a constructive social role in the future.[3] While the no-angel approach reduces victims to a number of criminal biographical events that are transformed into the whole reality of the psychohistory and the interior meaning of the lost lives, the degree approach challenges the mainstream media’s demonization of raced victims. However, the strategy of highlighting raced people’s educational credentials in order to challenge police harassment or to dismantle society’s racist imagination of the dangerous raced person does not fully address the race-based injustice against “unsuccessful” raced victims or those who happen to have a recorded history of criminality. As Lanre Akinsiku states in his recent Gawker article, “At best, I was reducing my humanity—my right to not get shot by a police officer—to a giveaway received during freshman orientation. At worst, I was just delaying what is now starting to feel inevitable.”

    As Judith Halberstam says in The Queer Art of Failure, success in a capitalist society “equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation.”[4] Hence, one’s life is a failure if one avoids conforming to the disciplinary power of success and propriety, and refuses to submit to regulations that would lead to a predictable adult life.

    The interrelatedness of the two approaches

    The degree approach inadvertently differentiates lives and assigns values to them, similar to the no angel approach, as it does not challenge the ungrievability of the “unsuccessful” raced victims. In effect, the emphasis on victim’s successes (the degree approach) implies that the depth of tragedy of the victim’s loss of life is measured by the individual’s accomplishments. This logically implies the conclusion that if the loss of a life does not spur grief, and a life has not been worthy of protection, then the victim lacks success and must have had social failures. Consequently an investigation of failures follows in order to make sense of the victim’s life not being recognized as a true life whose loss is worthy of mourning (the no-angel approach). The no-angel investigation of failures takes place instead of examining the sociopolitical conditions that led to the victim’s life not being considered as life and worthy of protection and the violence against it as violence. On the other hand, the degree approach draws attention to the victim’s successes in order to counteract the mainstream media’s demonization of the victim and to claim that the victim’s life (full of hopes for success in the future) was worthy of protection against destruction and death, instead of questioning the equation made between life worth and success and the mainstream media’s approach of blaming police brutality on the raced victims’ recorded history and position in society.

    The ungrievable deaths and the ideology of success

    The raced community is collectively criminalized and is perceived as homogenous in terms of lifestyle and social status. “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me,”[5] Frantz Fanon tells us about the pre-determined meaning imposed on each raced person in a society that suffers from racial prejudices. It is in such conditions that some of the raced people try to lessen their race-based criminalization. But how about those members who do not have college or high school graduation photos, or who might have a recorded history of criminality? As Judith Butler states, “Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?”[6] The degree approach does not challenge the dehumanization of those without a degree, for it implies, in Akinsiku’s words, that “yes, some of us deserve to be shot in the street, but this ID proves that I’m not one of them.”

    The ideology of success in a capitalist society blames failure on individuals, as opposed to socio-political structures, and assigns success to being a good person who makes the right decisions and has the right attitude.[7] The emphasis on the educational credentials of a victim, to illustrate them as a successful member of society with the potential of moving higher up the social strata, challenges the equation between being raced and being a predetermined failure and a threat to the socio-political order and its standards. Failure in this instance is defined as not submitting to the dominant and hegemonic norms or cultural standards of society. The degree approach employs symbols of success intending to challenge the image the media would typically construct of blackness equated with failure when a raced victim is subjected to police brutality. However, the strategy unfortunately reinforces capitalist notions of success and life worth. Members of society who are underprivileged in terms of their social class and status and are perceived as failures, are posited as not worthy, given the linkage made between life worth and one’s ability to comply with social norms and standards. The death of a promiscuous raced person (that is, an individual who does not follow normative sociosexual standards), or one who lacks a standard education or a good paying job, and thus is unlikely to accumulate wealth, is perceived as less noteworthy, or tragic, than the deaths of successful members of society. That is the reason that Fox News asked the Vatterott Educational Centers to confirm whether Michael Brown was enrolled at college, suggesting that if he was not enrolled, it would explain away the heartbreaking injustice imposed on him.

    In 2000, when another unarmed African-American man, Patrick Dorismond, was killed by police, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried to undermine the case against the police by discrediting Dorismond as “no altar boy.’’ It turned out that in fact, Dorismond had been an altar boy at Holy Cross Church in Brooklyn, which had also been Giuliani’s church. How about if Patrick Dorismond was really “no altar boy”? The point is that making a precondition of the victim being an altar boy or college-bound for condemning police shooting makes the death of “no altar boys” and “no angels” ungrievable and their lives as unworthy.

    I agree with Jasmine Banks when she says in her essay, “Black Kids Don’t Have to Be College-Bound for Their Deaths to Be Tragic,” “I wouldn’t have cared if Mike, Trayvon and John all sagged their pants down to their ankles and if the only images of them depicted them smoking pot and throwing gang signs. I wouldn’t have cared if they’d been high school dropouts who fought and tagged walls. Their lives would have been every bit as valuable, and their losses every bit as infuriating and sad.”

    If your socioeconomic success is dependent on someone else’s failure, then using proof of your success to claim that you are not dangerous and are worthy of life is an implicit confession of complicity in the system of exploitation. As bell hooks states, “Those of us black people who have the opportunity to further our economic status willingly surrender our rage….As individual black people increase their class power, live in comfort…[we] come to see both the society and white people differently. We experience the world as infinitely less hostile to blackness than it actually is.”[8] As a result, one’s privileged social class status leads the society to see one as more assimilated into the dominant norms and values and consequently having less class rage and being less dangerous. A raced person is assumed to be bad and sinful unless proven otherwise through a display of success and submission to standards of propriety.

    “Identification with the suffering itself”

    We need to form ideas to challenge the demonization of failure, rather than trying to show raced people’s compatibility with bourgeois respectability, in order to defend their right to live without being subjected to police brutality. We need to question the intersection of race and class that forms the dangerous raced other for the society against whom police forces have impunity. It is the value of life and humanity of the underclass raced person that must be defended in order for us to confront race-based injustices. We need to create a space of counter hegemony against the capitalist ideology of success. The position we assume to oppose race-based injustice must be where the most rage and discrimination are felt. As hooks states, “Today degrees and intensities of black rage seem to be overdetermined by the politics of location—by class privilege.”[9]

    The protagonist in Richard Wright’s poem “Between the World and Me” comes across the bones and ashes that remain after a lynching. He does not know anything about the victim’s social history except for the suffering and the violence imposed on him. Nevertheless that lack of knowledge doesn’t lead him to deny the loss as a true loss or the life as a true and real life. He excavates the history, stands in the woods as a witness to the trauma of lynching, and mourns while transforming from a sympathetic observer to one who feels on his own body the degradation and violence imposed on the victim. The protagonist moves from “my mind was frozen within cold pity for the life that was gone” to “the dry bones … melting themselves into my bones/ The grey ashes formed flesh … entering into my flesh/ … now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in yellow surprise at the sun….” It is through the vicarious experience of violence and injustice along with the victim, “[developing] a point of identification with suffering itself”[10], that the victim’s educational credentials and transgression of social norms become irrelevant.

    Our assumptions about angelic versus bad victims need to be reassessed so that we observe the “differential allocation of grievability” reproduced in the obituaries we write for the tragic losses. It is through such a lens that a better message than the victim’s success-based ones seems to be: Police impunity and brutality must end not only against those victims considered as successful and good, but also against those victims who are high school dropouts working a minimum waged job, or have a recorded history of criminality, or whose styles of body posing, or singing, or clothing are not compatible with dominant aesthetic standards, and cannot have a facade of bourgeois respectability.

     

    Notes

    [1] New York Times: “Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel […]. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.”

    [2] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2011), 2.

    [3] Here is an example: CNN Wire:  “A Missouri community is angry and distraught after a Ferguson police officer killed a college-bound teen, Michael Brown, who a friend and witnesses said was unarmed and had his hands in the air.”

    [4] Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.

    [5] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 134.

    [6] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2003), xiv.  

    [7] Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 3.

    [8] bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1995), 14.

    [9] Ibid., 13.

    [10] Butler, Precarious Life, 30.

     

    Mina Khanlarzadeh is a Ph.D. candidate in humanities at Columbia University.

    Thanks to Joanne Landy and Farbod Honarpisheh for their insightful comments.

  • Defying Apocalypse

     

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    Image by Ricardo Levins Morales
     

    Today it often feels as though we are hopelessly mired in apocalyptic thinking, both in our social movements and in popular culture. From Hollywood blockbusters to art house dystopias, and from hip-hop lyrics to “serious” literature, images of irreversible climate chaos, interminable warfare, and total societal collapse seem increasingly inescapable. Apocalyptic visions appear equally-pervasive in current radical discourse, from Derrick Jensen’s popular “end of civilization” treatises from the US west coast to the more contemplative but perhaps equally despairing works of Paul Kingsnorth and the rest of the UK Dark Mountain group.
     
    For some, such outlooks are simply the logical conclusion of even a cursory examination of current climate science. If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels within the next few years – a prospect that seems unimaginable in the current political context – we could face global warming of 4-6 degrees C by the end of this century, resulting in the collapse of the relatively stable patterns of weather and climate that have helped sustain human life on earth for thousands, and likely tens of thousands of years. Absent any semblance of a meaningful global agreement to curtail climate pollution, how can we possibly fend off utter catastrophe?
     
    For some youthful radicals, the prospect of a civilizational collapse is invigorating: the more dire a future we face, the greater the urgency of revolutionary action and the more inviting the challenge. But for most people, facing the unthinkable is merely a path to despair and disengagement. If apocalypse is inevitable, why bother with activism at all? More people will prefer to just dig in, refocusing their energies toward the private sphere and the pleasures (or struggles) of everyday life. One recent study suggests that broad scientific literacy only correlates strongly with climate awareness in relatively progressive-minded circles; for most people, it appears far more important to fit in with the inclinations of one’s own social group than to embrace any particular understanding of the truth.
     
    A recent book, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, by four North American activist-scholars, describes in some detail how apocalyptic thinking has historically been a dead-end for the left, a chronic enabler for the right, and an outlook that radical movements embrace at their peril. “The politics of fear,” they argue, “play to the strengths of the right, not the left,” and best serve those interests that are “against equality and for war, hierarchy and state violence.”
     
    In contrast, as social movement historian Richard Flacks has shown, people will willingly disrupt the patterns of their daily lives to engage in the project of “making history” once they have a tangible sense that a better way is possible. This, for Flacks, is among the historic roles of democratic popular movements: to further the idea “that people are capable of and ought to be making their own history, that the making of history ought to be integrated with everyday life, that [prevailing] social arrangements … can and must be replaced by frameworks that permit routine access and participation by all in the decisions that affect their lives.”
     
    We now know that events over the next few years and the decades that follow will determine whether the destabilization of the climate will be disruptive and difficult, or catastrophic and extreme.  We know the world has both the technical and financial means to end the world’s dependence on fossil fuels and transform our energy systems. We also know it’s possible to enjoy a significantly higher quality of life at much lower levels of personal consumption than we are daily being sold on. This is largely because we now live under an inherently wasteful economic system that eschews any limits to its expansion and growth, a capitalist system that produces in opulent excess, even as a couple of billion people lack the means to satisfy their most basic human needs.
     
    A large portion of the system’s productive capacity mainly serves conspicuous consumption and advertising, or warfare and militarism. In the US, 40 percent of the food that is produced goes to waste every year. In this period of widespread economic stagnation, the expansion of US infrastructure to extract and distribute fossil fuels is expanding at its fastest pace since the economic boom years of the 1950s. This even as scientists affirm that at least three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves need to remain in the ground to avoid utter climate chaos. At current oil prices, technologies for tapping “unconventional” sources of oil and gas, such as hydro-fracking, horizontal drilling, deepwater drilling, and oil extraction from tar sands—once seen as hypothetically possible but economically prohibitive—have become central to the fossil fuel industry’s plans for the future. Fortunately, communities around the world that are faced with the most immediate consequences of “extreme energy” extraction are organizing, helping spark a wider, reinvigorated global opposition.
     
    The future of humanity, and indeed much of life on earth, now depends on the flourishing of those communities of resistance. From people facing threats from fracking or new oil and gas pipelines, to indigenous and other land-based peoples engaged in long term struggles against accelerated resource extraction – as well as urban communities that are highly vulnerable to temperature extremes and other environmental health threats – the call for climate justice is a potentially unifying message. In other settings, people are reclaiming the potential for localizing food systems and creating community-owned energy alternatives. With proposed top-down solutions faltering – from climate diplomacy to corporate-owned solar and wind farms – the long-standing historical promise of a movement of movements may be our best hope for redeeming the future.
     
    In the 1970s and early eighties a very decentralized grassroots antinuclear movement in Europe and the US prevented the construction of hundreds more nuclear power plants, often embracing a prefigurative politics of community-based direct action rooted in an internal praxis of direct democracy. Many groups called not only for an end to nuclear power, but also offered a vision of a new social order, rooted in solar-powered communities poised to reclaim their political future as well as their energy future. Efforts to redesign buildings and public spaces, and to “green” entire cities, were among that movement’s important offshoots, as was the emergence of Green politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Some activists drew inspiration from the writings of Murray Bookchin and other social ecologists who explored the social and political roots of environmental problems and offered reconstructive visions of a fundamentally transformed society rooted in popular power and confederated direct democracies.
     
    Clearly today there is no single blueprint for social transformation, but rather a renewed culture of resistance and a search for new dynamic processes of social and ecological renewal. Peace studies scholar Randall Amster correctly states that our utopian projects “are properly viewed as ongoing experiments and not finished products.” In the early 1960s (well before the wide acceptance of non-sexist language), the future studies pioneer Frederick Polak wrote that “… if Western man [sic] now stops thinking and dreaming the materials of new images of the future and attempts to shut himself up in the present, out of longing for security and for fear of the future, his civilization will come to an end. He has no choice but to dream or to die, condemning the whole of Western society to die with him.” This is equally true across boundaries of gender and social status, and is no longer limited to the West. While some may still cheer on the proverbial ‘end of civilization,’ a livable future for everyone depends on a far more challenging, but also far more hopeful project of ecological and social renewal.
     
    The coming week’s events in New York City raise the hope of taking that project to a whole new level.  See:
     
    peoplesclimatemarch.org
     
    convergeforclimate.org
     
    beyondthemarch.org.
     
    This piece was written on the occasion of the forthcoming “Apocalypse Now?” issue of the Occupied Times of London, as well as the People’s Climate March in New York City and events before and after, and also the publication of the newly revised and expanded edition of my book, Toward Climate Justice. 
     
    A newly revised and expanded edition of Brian Tokar’s Toward Climate Justice, has just been issued by the New Compass Press (new-compass.net/publications/toward-climate-justice-2nd-edition). He is the director of the Institute for Social Ecology (social-ecology.org) and a lecturer in environmental studies at the University of Vermont

  • A snapshot you won't see in the media

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    I’ve written about a new wave of reform in teachers unions  that’s still under the radar of the corporate media and much of the Left press.  It’s hard for these caucuses to get media attention, which is understandable when the outlets are owned by Rupert Murdoch or the like. They have no interest in publicizing teachers’ efforts to replace the tired, unsuccessful business unionism that dominates with a vibrant, democratic social movement.  The mainstream Left media’s confusion about education reform is another story, one I explain elsewhere.  One effect of the media ignoring these growing grassroots efforts is that activists can feel isolated.

             To illustrate what’s happening in many, many places, I’m posting a flyer being distributed in Philadelphia high school. In forming a caucus based on principles of social justice, committed to union democracy and a militant fight for the teaching profession and public education along with parent, student, and community allies, activists create the nucleus of a different kind of union.  They prepare themselves to be a different kind of leadership of a different kind of union. This kind of organizing is typical of what CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators) did – and does – in Chicago. It’s a model that has inspired teachers and labor activists around the world.  This process has to take on the union apparatus but it’s rooted in each school where teachers build trust and develop networks. This flyer gives us a snapshot of the process happening in Central High School and in Philadelphia. 

             Union officials are responding to this new movement by adopting a more militant tone in their speeches and taking positions on social justice concerns that were previously taboo.  These shifts show the new movement is having a significant impact on the unions, and we should welcome them – while realizing that a mobilized membership and a democratic union are the essentials we need to build the unions we must have, pronto. 

  • Chicago Teachers Union President Launches Campaign for Mayor

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    The likely candidacy of the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, which led one of the most important strikes in recent years in the USA, against the incumbent Democrat Rahm Emanuel, formerly the chief-of-staff of the White House and a champion of the privatization of the school system, is a major political event.

    Karen Lewis, the President of the Chicago Teachers Union, while she has not formally announced her candidacy, has clearly launched her campaign to oust the current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel, who formerly served as President Barack Obama’s Chief-of-Staff, has won the reputation of “Mayor 1%” for his pro-corporate programs. In September 2012 Lewis lead the CTU’s 30,000 members out on strike against Emanuel’s educational reform policies that had detrimentally affected teachers, parents, and students. It was an inspiring strike that brought her union a partial victory but failed to stop a number of public school closings.

    Now Lewis is back again to challenge Emanuel in the political arena. The candidacy of a union leader such as Lewis in a big city election is a novelty in contemporary American politics. Will she be able to trounce him? And if so, what will it mean for the labor left that she leads and for Chicago’s working class?

    The still unofficial campaign is up and running. The Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates, a body of hundreds, has endorsed her.  She has an exploratory committee that has recruited volunteers who are now out collecting the 12,500 signatures she will need to get on the ballot. She has personally contributed a $40,000 “loan” to her own campaign. The American Federation of Teachers has promised one million dollars for her campaign if she runs. She has scheduled a meeting with African American businessmen and has begun a series of meetings throughout the city with teachers, police officers, firefighters and public school parents.

    For 22 years, Karen Lewis was a high school teacher who taught chemistry in the Chicago Public School. An African American woman who converted to Judaism, she has been an outspoken critic of Emanuel’s policies. She blames Emanuel for closing libraries, police stations, mental health clinics and schools. “If you take the institutions out of the neighborhood, what are you left with? This has got to stop, and it will not stop if we continue to have the same kind of top down autocratic leadership that does not listen to the people,” says Lewis. “We are in an unsustainable death spiral if we continue this notion of subtraction.”

    The mayoral race is a non-partisan election, so Karen Lewis will not be a candidate of any political party. She will, however, be attempting to win the support of the so-called “lake front liberals” or “progressive Democrats,” a middle class constituency largely organized in the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO). She will also be attempting to win the support of Chicago’s African American economic elite, historically the most important black business group in the country. Though black business has seen some decline, African Americans in Chicago own some 50,000 businesses. As the corporations have consolidated their hold over American politics, both middle class liberals and black businesspeople have found their options narrowing. Can a teacher union president and her working class constituency provide leadership to such groups—or will they lose their character in such a coalition?  

    Lewis’ chances, at least at this stage, look good. An August 14 poll by the conservative Chicago Tribune found that if the election were held on that date, Lewis would defeat Emanuel by 43 to 39 percent with 14 percent undecided. Emanuel who had a 59 percent approval rating among white voters is now down to 44 percent with the same group, while 60 percent of black voters disapprove of his performance. As an African American, Lewis can expect to capitalize on that discontent among black voters. She will be a black woman candidate and no doubt the black women’s candidate, a tremendous organizing force in African American communities. Many working class voters of all ethnicities will see this as a chance to knock down the arrogant Rahm a peg or two.

    What Is the Balance of Forces?

    While the CTU’s inspiring 2012 strike brought a partial victory to teachers and inspired other teacher groups throughout the country, it also revealed that virtually no other major union in the city was prepared to follow its example and stand up and fight back against the powers-that-be. By and large, Chicago’s labor unions remain completely tied to the Democratic Party, and it is unlikely that many will break away to support Lewis. Still, even if, as seems very likely, the union leaders stay the course with Emanuel, some and perhaps many of their members could be expected to vote for Lewis.

    Chicago’s major African American and Latino organizations, most of them nominally non-partisan not-for-profits, have also been pillars of the Democratic Party establishment. Similarly with women’s and LGBT organizations. All of these groups have historically feared that organizing or voting against the Democratic Party would lead to political and financial punishment. Lewis and her supporters will be challenged to find the methods and program that can break these groups from the machine. While it is unlikely she can move the leaders, will she be able to win away the base of these organizations?

    What about the neighborhoods? The CTU created an Independent Political Organization that subsequently formed an alliance with a number of Chicago community groups and created United Working Families as an organization to campaign around neighborhood issue. United Working Families hired a Democratic Party operative, Kristen Crowell who had organized voter campaigns in neighboring Wisconsin. Crowell now plays a central role in shaping Lewis’ political message. Will Lewis’s campaign become simply a liberal or progressive Democrat affair, or will she propose a program, a strategy for struggle for the Chicago working class organized around workers’ needs for education, health care, more equitable taxes, $15 an hour and full employment? Time will tell—but our own organizing efforts could make the difference.

    *This article was originally published in the Swiss Solidarités Journal solidaritéS.