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Wrestling with Trotsky, Che, and Political Impatience

Daniel Bensaïd. An Impatient Life: A Memoir. Foreword by Tariq Ali. New York: Verso, 2013. Photos. Notes. 358pp. Hardback – $34.95.

Daniel Bensaïd, raised in his Algerian Jewish and French Communist family in Toulouse, was strongly affected as an adolescent by the revolutionary movements in Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam. At the university, he became swept up in and was soon a student leader of university strikes that set off the great upheaval of May 1968 leading to the strike by 11 million workers.

He would never live to see such times again in France, and seldom anywhere else in the world; he would spend his life, until he died in January of 2010, working and waiting for the revolution, thus: his Impatient Life. He became in his twenties a leader of the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) and of the Fourth International (FI) based in Brussels and led by the economist Ernest Mandel. The LCR, led by Alain Krivine, was the flagship of the Fourth International and Bensaïd become one of its luminaries.

Bensaïd’s memoir is in large part an account of his long years wrestling with the contradiction that stood at the heart of his politics, his party, and his International, the tension between the European Marxist tradition and the Third World revolutions of the post-World War II period. Michael Löwy, his French-Brazilian comrade, writing in 1973 described the Jeunesse Communiste Révoutionnaire (JCR) of Bensaïd’s student years (the predecessor of the LCR), as a “French Castro-Trotskyist” organization.[1] That contradictory phrase—that might better have been Che-Trotskyist—could also have described the young Bensaïd, and though he later recognized some of the problems that the tension between Trotskyism and Guevarism generated, he could never entirely shake his infatuation with Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Daniel Bensaid as a boy between his parents in the family’s bar.

Bensaïd, born March 25, 1946, grew up in a Communist family in a leftist neighborhood. His mother came from a French working class and went to work at 14 while his father was a Jew from Mascara, Algeria, who had been a boxer in his youth. His parents ran a bistro in Toulouse, the social center of the local Communists and “solidly red.” Bensaïd loved school and did well at it, and he loved his six-week each year in the Communist-affiliated CGT summer camp. Already as an eleven-year old he was aware of the Algerian conflict and by 1960 “open war” had broken out between rival student factions in his high school. His best friend Bernard gave him a copy of the Communist Manifesto, while his friend Annette loaned him political novels and poems. But it was the Paris police massacre in 1961 of at least 40 (and perhaps 200) pro-Algerian National Liberation Front protesters, part of a demonstration of 30,000, that led Bensaïd and his friends to establish a Jeunesse Communiste (Young Communist) group in their high school. Some of those in the group he soon learned were sympathetic to the Left Opposition in the party and soon Bensaïd had joined them—though he did not then think of himself as a Trotskyist. But it was not primarily Trotskyism that motivated the young radical:

In these years of the Sino-Soviet conflict, the Havana Declaration and Che Guevara’s speech in Algiers, Third Worldism had the wind in its sails. François Maspero published Frantz Fanon, with Sartre’s famous preface. We enthusiastically read Che’s Socialism and Man in Cuba, celebrating a socialist humanism, lyrical and generous, and light years away from the petrified speeches of the Kremlin apparatchiks.

Their not-very-clandestine opposition group within the Young Communists began by late 1965 to align itself intellectually with Trotskyism, reading Pierre Broué’s History of the Bolshevik Party and Ernest Mandel’s Treatise of Marxist Economics, but it was Che whom they held in their hearts. Within the JCR, Bensaïd writes, he “felt closest” to Jeanette Habel’s “more or less Guevarist views.” By 1966 Bensaïd and his fellow Guevarist Trotskyists had been expelled from the Communist Youth and, adding “Revolution” to their name, had founded the Jeune Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR – which later became the Ligue Communiste and then the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire).

In that same fall of 1966 he entered the Saint Cloud campus of the École Normale Supérieure, the great French public university, as a student of philosophy, surrounded by “people [who] were more passionate about Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Saussure, Freud, Braudel and Foucault,” than they were about Plato and Aristotle. But political discussion was everywhere and Bensaïd felt that as a member of the JCR he was in “a no man’s land” between the pro-Soviet Communists and the growing number of Maoists, “adorers of the Great-Helmsman-Red-Sun-In-Our-Hearts.” At Easter of 1967 he became part of the JCR’s national leadership as it became more closely identified with the Fourth International.

Menwhile at the university, Bensaïd signed up to study for a master’s degree under Henri Lefebvre, the sociologist and former Communist—theoretician of the “critique of everyday life”—who had become one of the most important critics of the French Communist Party. Politically Bensaïd and other JCR activists cooperated with the anarchist group of Jean-Pierre Duteuil and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. When May 1968 arrived, Bensaïd became one of the student leaders, riding the wave of student and worker protests that crested in the general strike and occupations that paralyzed France. But by June the Communist Party had helped to restore order in the workplace and de Gaulle’s conservative party had swept the elections. The revolutionary fervor of May subsided. Bensaïd and his JCR companions considered May 1968 to have been the “dress rehearsal” for a coming socialist revolution—an event that never materialized. The 68ers, became as he writes in his introduction, “revolutionaries without a revolution.” But they were not yet aware of that.

The social movement subsiding, the Ligue now turned to electoral politics, running its charismatic leader, 28-year old Alain Krivine for president in June 1969 in an attempt to give political expression to the upheaval of the year before. Krivine to their shock and great disappointment got only 1% of the vote. With revolution in France apparently off the agenda for the moment, what should the Trotskyists do? Bensaïd explains the tilt toward Latin America and Che:

Latin America was a kind of twin continent in our political imagination. Cuba had proclaimed itself the first liberated territory of the New World. Che had abandoned the exercise of power to devote himself to permanent revolution. No matter where death had surprised him…It was a remote and desolate Bolivian village. [Ellipses in the original.]

So, “In April 1969, the 9th World Congress of the Fourth International decided on a solidarity campaign with Bolivia” and “adopted an orientation of armed struggle in Latin America.” At the same time, with a strike wave in Italy and labor upheaval in England as well, “Ernest Mandel predicted imminent revolutionary eruption in Europe.” With revolution around the corner, the LCR also took up the problem of “development of our own military forces” and the plan for “subversive work in the army.” The group studied an old Comintern book on Armed Insurrection.

Henri Weber, Alain Krivine, Daniel Bensaid, and Charles Michaloux in 1971 at the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Paris Commune.

So began a decade or more of Fourth International infatuation with Latin American guerrilla revolution and dreams of armed struggle spreading even to Europe. To give us a sense of the time and mood of the Ligue, Bensaïd quotes a line often used by his comrade in the 1970s from Trotsky’s 1938 The Transitional Program, a line with Guevarist ring to it, “The crisis of humanity is summed up in the crisis of revolutionary leadership.” If only the working class had the right leadership, leaders like Che, they believed, there would be a revolution and it would succeed.

Bensaïd, in fact, became the Fourth International’s principal ambassador to the revolutionary organizations of Latin America from the 1970s up to the 2000s. When he went to Buenos Aires in October 1973, shortly after General Pinochet’s coup in Chile that overthrew the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, he noted that “Che’s portrait could be seen everywhere.” In Argentina, where, just a year, before a military dictatorship had been swept away by popular mobilization, there were frequent kidnappings and shoot-outs between leftist revolutionaries and the police. Argentine Trotskyists were divided between the group led by Juan Posadas who believed that Juan Perón’s popular nationalism was progressive and the group of Nahuel Moreno who believed Peronism was a kind of pre-fascism. The Fourth International had little authority with either. Bensaïd was shocked when he saw what Che-Trotsky politics meant in practice.

Our comrades were young and intrepid, full of confidence in the socialist future of humanity. Three years later, half of the people I met at these meetings had been arrested, tortured and murdered. It was clear we were on the wrong path.

This was true of all of the Trotskyist groups, including those loyal to the FI: “We were running headlong into an open grave.”

To his credit, Bensaïd drew the lessons of the experience in Argentina, what he called “the most painful in my life as a militant. “My initiatory visits to Argentina,” he wrote, “inoculated me against an abstract, a mythical view of armed struggle.” He came to see that “Weapons have their own logic” and that “A military apparatus generates its own needs.” He came to agree with Régis Debray, the French intellectual who had theorized Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba and Che Guevara’s call for the guerrilla foco in Revolution in the Revolution but who by 1974 in Critique des armes had rejected the “hasty Leninism” of the guerrillas in Latin America. Che’s revolutionary strategy had proven to be a disaster.

Yet, in the 1990s and even in the 2000s, Bensaïd still clung to romantic notions about Che Guevara. He could write in his memoir that the Trotskyists, who he believes understood Stalinism better than others, could, “without renouncing solidarity with Cuba in the face of imperialist threats and blockade,” criticize and condemn the “gloomy bureaucratic affair” of the kangaroo court trials and execution of Arnaldo Ochoa and Tony de la Guardia in 1989, while remaining “more faithful to the spirit of Guevara and the revolution than a complicit silence.” Even at the end of his life, Bensaïd remained under the spell of Che, Che who spent six years in the ruling elite and government of Cuba helping to lay the foundations of that bureaucratic system while inspiring Latin American young people to pursue a strategy that would not only fail to liberate the continent but contributed to a decade of extreme violence and the deaths of thousands of young radicals.

Bensaïd, while he recognized the terrible errors of militarism and violence on he part of the left in Latin America in the 1970s, failed throughout this book to come to grips with the central issue of Guevarism as revolutionary theory and strategy, what can be called “substitutionism,” that is, the attempt to substitute a small group of dedicated radical activists for the working class. The theory suggested that a small group’s will to power and their skill with weapons would make it possible for them to lead a revolution by providing an example to the people. Substitutionism also meant attempting to bring about a revolution at once, impatiently, without having invested time in organizing in the working class. Impatient youth’s slogan back then was: “We want a revolution and we want it now.” To create the revolutionary group that could by-pass the working class, many on the left in that era concluded, one needed a Leninist party that could overcome the “crisis of leadership.” It was there that martyred spirit of Che met the ghost of the assassinated Trotsky under the dry, severe, and academic gaze of Mandel.

The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and its comrades were, fortunately, able to overcome the legacy of Guevarist voluntarism and substitutionism of the 1970s and, through their work in labor unions and social movements, to remain a vital force on the French far left. By the 1980s they had begun to rethink their theory and to break with the post-war Trotskyist dogmatism as well as with the impatient Guevarism of the 1960 and 70s. Bensaïd helped this process along with a series of essays subsequently published in English under the title Strategies of Resistance: “Who Are the Trotskyists?” He redefined the Trotskyist tradition, recognizing that the Trotskyists included those individuals and groups, who had previously been considered apostates and heretics because they held the view that the Soviet Union was either state capitalist or bureaucratic collectivist, formed part of the Trotskyist current. Today’s Fourth International partly through Bensaïd’s effort has become a revolutionary socialist center which, while struggling in the Europe of crisis and austerity, has a growing influence in Asia, as well as member and observer organizations from various countries who hold a variety of views on theory and strategy.

What I have recounted and discussed here all comes from the first half, the exciting half, of an Impatient Life. The second half of Bensaïd’s memoir is a highly uneven mélange of historical narrations, essays, and meditations, some of them somewhat interesting, others not at all. In Chapter 12, “The Color Rouge,” he discusses in passing the Ligue’s “voluntarist proletarianization” at the end of the 1970s as members were encouraged to get jobs in industry, a development which “did not arouse unanimous enthusiasm witin the Ligue.” He also confesses that his book Revolution and Power, rejecting the feminist notion of the “personal is political” won him “a (deserved) thrashing from feminist comrades.” There is a chapter (number 13) on the media and journalism based on a book he had written years before, which I found not at all engaging. That is followed, however, by a fairly interesting chapter on the crisis of Marxism, but one that doesn’t address the problem of Che Guevara’s influence which had been his own principal problem. Chapter 15 takes us with him to Brazil and the Trotskyists role in the development of the Workers Party of Lula, while Chapter 16 is an essay about Trotsky and Chapter 18 a rumination about what it means to be Jewish, secular, and leftist. Chapter 20, titled “A Thousand (and One) Marxisms,” is a call for an open and non-doctrinaire Marxism, while Chapter 21 is an essay on Capital.

An Impatient Life is wonderfully illustrated with several pages of photographs of Bensaïd, his friends and comrades. American readers who are unfamiliar with modern European political history and French intellectual life may find this book with its scores of passing allusions to various thinkers and political leaders, organizations, and publications to be rather off-putting. Anyone who buys the book will regret that it doesn’t have a bibliography or an index.

[1] Michael Löwy, The Marxism of Che Guevara: Philosophy, economics, and revolutionary warfare (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), p. 115. The relevant phrase reads, “Jeannette Habel, leader of Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, a French Castro-Trotskyist organization suppressed in June 1968….” Thanks to my friend Sam Farber who called this phrase to my attention.

August 2, 2014
Supporting the Struggle Against Apartheid Then and Now

The discussion of a socialist strategy towards Palestine never recedes from global pertinence and urgency. The basic terms of the Palestinian tragedy established in 1948 remain a festering wound—unaddressed, malignant and oozing in blood and rot. With it the Israeli garrison state continues to descend, and rightfully so, into isolation and disrepute in the court of civilized opinion. But under the protective and ever indulgent umbrella of American imperialism, Israel nevertheless continues to defy international outrage without consequence in its relentless march to impose a grotesque and monstrous caricature of a one-state solution on the whole of Palestine.

The Palestinian plight has its origins in the 1948 partition and ensuing war, although this was a direct continuation of the Zionist-Arab conflict that had been brewing for decades. In that conflict, both sides practiced ethnic cleansing, with no Jews remaining in areas conquered by the Arabs and few Palestinian remaining in areas conquered by Israelis. But the UN partition plan called for the Israeli state to constitute 55 percent of Palestine, in which the Arab population would represent almost half of the population. In the run up to and during the war, the victorious Israeli state expanded its territories to 78 percent, and mostly emptied those regions of their Arab inhabitants. Three quarters of a million Palestinians, some from the original 55 percent allotted to the Jewish state, were driven out; over 450 Arab villages were uprooted and their dwellings leveled. New Jewish villages, kibbutzim or immigration camps were built on or near the former sites of these Arab villages. Urban dwellings were reoccupied by Jews, often holocaust survivors. Jewish refugees from Arab nations, subsequently cleansed in retaliation for the Palestinian catastrophe (Nakhba), were sent to jerry-rigged development towns.

Gaza and the West Bank, the sites of huge concentrations of Palestinian refugees, fell—with Israel’s approval—into the hands of Egypt and Trans-Jordan (now Jordan) respectively; the possibility of a Palestinian state all but extinguished. This all changed when, after the Six Day war in 1967, these territories were brought under the control of the Israelis, uniting all of historic Palestine and reviving the Palestinian national movement. The colonial project at the heart of Zionism, of settlement and expulsion, was also reignited and several hundred thousand additional Palestinians were again expelled to Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. The remnants were left to the mercy of an ever more brutalizing occupation. The armistice boundaries of the 1948 war (the green line) were effectively effaced and Israel emerged as a nation unique in its refusal to define its borders—symptomatic of an Israel further seeking to consolidate its character as an ethnic Jewish state, but on a vastly broader canvas.

Today the struggle for justice for Palestinians continues. Where are Palestine’s allies? What power can it leverage? International solidarity has yet to save lives, to redeem territories, to compensate and repatriate refugees, or to establish the right of Palestinians to national self-determination in defiance of Israeli intransigence. An internationalist Israeli left, never more than a tiny minority and unable to implant itself in the Hebrew working class, is besieged not only by state repression, but also by a now burgeoning fascist street presence. The protracted Arab Spring, momentarily checked by United States and Iranian intervention, has yet to mature as an agency that can brake and reverse the momentum of Israeli settlement and dispossession.

Conversely, Israel, as currently constituted, is functionally incapable of integrating itself into the Middle East. It cannot and will not accept peace proposals—whether by the Arab League, the Palestinian Authority, or Hamas—that require it to halt its colonization process in return for diplomatic recognition and a regional accord. These have been repeatedly offered to it by its neighbors and blithely ignored or scornfully dismissed. And although Israel is periodically called upon to mollify successive American administrations by going through the motions of negotiations with Abu Mazen, it formulistically does so while seizing every opportunity to further strangle the occupied territories. The Janus face of international civic responsibility is inseparably paired with the grim visage of sabotage and betrayal. The hapless Palestinians too are ritualistically called upon time and again to participate in this farce, hoping against experience that the outcome might yet, just this one time, improve. But the outcome is always the same. The Palestinians earnestly talk compromise while “facts” on the ground continue to be implanted. They can then either stay and loose street credibility or leave and feed Israel’s habitual public relations theme that it has is no partner with which to negotiate peace. The obdurate reality is that the cruel hoax of negotiations expresses itself in an endless succession of groundhog days for Palestinians, exceptional only in that they lose traction with each successive iteration.

It is clear, if only in retrospect, that Israel would only have made peace with its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, insofar as the framework for those agreements provided a protective bubble behind which its colonization project could safely proceed. These treaties would never have been signed had an end to hostilities been contingent on a binding resolution to the Palestinian problem. What is also tragically clear is that no satisfaction to the just demands of the Palestinians is likely to come about through negotiations within the currently existing dynamic of power alignments.

Yet one key fact remains. American imperialism does not require Israeli expansionism. An on-going Zionist project does. But given that Washington requires Israel as an asset to further its policies, it can also reliably be counted on to “stand with Israel” and subsidize Zionist adventures. This is, however, not a blank check relationship and Israel’s outrageous behavior portends a poisonous turn in a partnership yielding diminished dividends. Still, as long as the American treasury underwrites the colonial project in the occupied territories, it defers the fissures that would disrupt Israeli social cohesion were Israel otherwise called upon to directly finance its own expansion. It is this dynamic that cements the symbiotic relationship between Israel and the United States assuring that a colonizing Israel remains a Jewish national, that is Zionist, state. Were these cracks not paved over from without, all the class and ethnic tensions that are currently suppressed would bubble to the surface. Israel would revert to capitalist normality. Its no-longer subsidized rulers would predictably seek to offload the enormous cost of occupation on to its already beleaguered working class. The top-down nationalist alliance between Israeli capitalism and its exploited multi-ethnic underclasses could be shattered. The social isolation of Palestinian-Israelis might finally be breeched in the struggle for working class power.

The liquidation of the colonization project implicitly places the battle for a genuinely anti-imperialist two-state solution at its center. The dissociation of Israel from American imperialism is likewise the precondition for a truly Israeli state—ultimately a binational citizen state of Jews and Arabs—carrying out Israeli policies in Israel’s, rather than America’s, national interests. And those national interests would first and foremost find expression in the relaxation of tensions between Jews and Palestinians; a joint struggle for a just resolution to the broader Palestinian refugee problem in its entirety, including recognition of the right to repatriation/compensation; full national rights for Palestinian citizens, including the right to secession; and, in return, a full integration of Israel into the Middle East on an equal national footing.

For Israel, perhaps more than any other nation, war and the threat of war is indeed the health of the state. And its continuing project of colonization, dispossession, humiliation, lethal oppression, and ethnic cleansing assures itself that insurgency, both armed and peaceful, remains a constant menace. It also predisposes its citizenry—and international supporters, and blind well-wishers— to remain harnessed in perpetual mobilization against that resistance. Israel has its roots in colonial settlerism. As long as that project continues, Israel will reliably exist behind this iron wall—arrogant, messianic, and myopic; and its international supporters will be driven ever further to the right.

But Israel is not, the West Bank excepted, simply a cluster of colons. It is a fully elaborated capitalist society, whose class tensions are structurally contained through identifiable political and economic networks of domestic and international power. That is why those who make the analogy of Zionist settlerism with apartheid and draw upon strategies consistent with the South African anti-apartheid struggle are searching in the wrong direction. The conventional position of the anti-imperialist Arab and pro-Palestinian left, the socialist voices of the oppressed, has been that the Palestinians, like the Algerians, Zimbabweans, and South Africans have the right to statehood in all of Palestine; and to accede otherwise, that the Israeli oppressor has the right to a separate state, is an accommodation to settlerism as a living project and going concern. But it is not necessary to place the nationalism of the oppressed on the same level as the rights of the oppressor to recognize the existence of a distinct and class-differentiated Hebrew community with characteristics wholly commensurate with dozens of other national entities whose right to national self-determination has never been denied by socialists. Most of North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand, after all, have their roots in settler colonialism. Most also became “normal” capitalist states once the colonial-settler stage of development was brought to an end. And the conventional means by which this came to an end was through a one state solution in which the original inhabitants were marginalized, expelled or annihilated, precisely the paths that political intervention here and now is urgently called upon to short-circuit in Palestine.

Israel, no doubt, meets the legal definition of apartheid. That definition refers to ethnic, racial, or national exclusion with the purpose of “nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.” This definition can be consistent with a denial of collective rights as a national entity, without the denial of individual rights. Think of the history of the French community in Quebec. But it can also apply to discrimination against individuals by policies such as Jim Crow, absent national oppression (presuming of course that African Americans in the main never came to consciousness of themselves as a distinct nation.) Think too of the pervasive gender apartheid in traditional societies. Palestinians within Israel and the occupied territories, citizens and subjects, suffer from both forms of apartheid, so understood. That is, they are denied both individual and national equality on either side of the green line.

But socialists also seek to understand settler apartheid in its operational specificity through the interplay of class and nation. When socialists refer to Israeli apartheid they are generally seeking a parallel between South Africa and Israel It is a parallel that suggests that there is no distinct Hebrew nation aside from a narrow cultural layer and that this community has no distinct right to self-determination, any more than did South African Whites of British or Dutch extraction. There are of course many parallels. In some pointed ways, Israel’s repressive policies in the occupied territories are far more horrific. But the decisive difference resides in this. The White population of South Africa (or the French in Algeria, the British in Rhodesia) never experienced full social and class differentiation. The exploiters were of European background; the working classes were Third World people of color. The white community in South Africa lived off the labor of a black nation-class harnessed to capitalism and subordinated to white supremacy through apartheid. This form of settlerism generally ended with decolonization and the repatriation of colons to the metropole. That it did not resolve precisely in South Africa, as it did in Algeria, the former Rhodesia, Vietnam, and countless other recent decolonization struggles is the exception, not the rule. Settlerism in the “new world” in contrast rarely passed through this apartheid stage in its relations with aboriginal peoples. European implantation there was in the main not discriminatory and exploitative, but genocidal.

Zionist colonialism did not transplant Jews to Palestine to exploit the native peoples, but to acquire in isolation and through marginalization and ethnic cleansing, a new society with its own national culture. Jewish colonization quite consciously fostered its own Hebrew working class. It resembles neither South Africa nor French-dominated Vietnam and Algeria. And were Israel to be militarily overwhelmed there would be no mother country to take the colonists back. They would be a captured nation, not a cultural residue of empire.

Another, more integral argument against Hebrew, as opposed to Zionist, self-determination and nationhood is that the Israelis do indeed constitute a nation, but a nation that exists and is maintained by the exclusion and denial of another nation’s right to exist. This, perhaps, is the thinking of many who are uneasy with the South African parallel, but who nevertheless seek a one-state solution as the only means of rectifying one historical injustice, without creating another. That is, it aims to address the Palestinian national problem and eliminate the conditions of apartheid on both sides of the 1967 borders, without reversing the situation of oppressed and oppressor. It promises an equality of citizens in combination with an equal collective right to cultural development and expression within a unitary state.

Certainly national self-determination is not per se a supreme ideal. It is a democratic right. Socialists approach the advocacy of this right instrumentally, guided by whether its exercise advances or obstructs the class struggle. If the goal of working class unity can better be realized in a unitary state, socialists will advocate that the “right” to nationhood be subordinated to the needs of struggle. This might, for instance, be a consideration in a socialist orientation towards Scottish independence. Socialists cannot commit themselves to encourage each and every nation regardless of concrete circumstance the right to establish an independent state. We generally reserve such encouragement to where national oppression suppresses class struggle and binds the oppressed nation’s working class with its capitalists in democratic opposition. Here, self-determination is welcome as a precondition for interclass fragmentation. It secures a more favorable context for socialist fight back.

Neither, reciprocally, can socialists advocate in principle and at all times our preference for multi-national states over nation-states. Where such possibilities loom, the only general principle that must be upheld is that the surrender of the right to independent national existence be fully voluntary and not the result of coercion. For any joint framework based on compulsion reintroduces the very mechanism of national oppression that re-validates the call for self-determination as a democratic right and socialist imperative, even when led by reactionary alliances.

We as socialists are, in all circumstances, driven by the desire to accommodate national rights only to the degree necessary to dissipate the poisons of nationalism and raise to prominence the struggle between classes.

And here is the rub. While one-state advocates sincerely envision a non-coercive and peaceful multi-national framework, they cannot specify a present path by which both Palestinians and Israelis could agree to this outcome through free will and choice. Under the best of conditions unity must be preceded by an enormous amount of mutual cooperation and confidence building. And of these, there is simply precious little history in Palestine. There is no other path than that of a genuine two state experience from which such measures can be forged. A forced fusion of nations at Israel’s expense, unlikely in any event, would only throw the Israeli working class deeper into an alliance with reaction and perpetuate the conflict on a different, albeit non-Zionist, footing.

Why do these distinctions matter? The immediate task is to mobilize worldwide support in defense of the Palestinians and to prevent the Zionist colonization project from proceeding to further rounds of mass murder and ethnic cleansing. But the long-term strategy is to drive a wedge between the Zionist ruling class and the Hebrew working class, to break the iron wall of chauvinist solidarity thereby unleashing conditions favorable to the creation of a mass, bi-national, Israeli left. The immediate task and the long-term strategy are in fact intimately linked and must condition the tactics that socialists act upon to bring about these ends.

The solidarity movement correctly understands that an imperialist brokered two-state solution is likely to be a sham solution, based on Bantustan autonomy and military domination, i.e., one giving “due consideration” to Israeli security. It has understandably focused its energies not on encouraging illusions, but in isolating Israel in the court of public opinion through the tactics of boycott, divestment, and sanctions, BDS. BDS is an eminently democratic call employed to some success, not only in the struggle against South African apartheid, but also, one might add, by the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. How telling that these past supporters and modern day co-thinkers and camp followers of the Student Struggle can reliably be counted upon to raise fierce objections, including the demand for repression and intimidation against BDS, now that the object of their affections is being duly targeted.

BDS demands an end to the occupation and colonization of Arab lands and the dismantling of the separation barrier, granting full civil rights and equality to the Arab minority in Israel and respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinians to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194. What BDS seeks is not inconsistent with a two state solution, although it is officially agnostic on the question. Still, the majority of Palestinian membership organizations and individuals who support BDS also stand on record in accord with a two-state solution.

But are BDS tactics against Israel actually commensurate with advancing the socialist cause? Isolating apartheid South African was a means of demonstrating to South African capital that the cost of doing business would require an overhaul in its structure of exploitation. It created a more propitious context for class struggle. Isolating Israeli capital would only have the desired results if apartheid served the same functional expedient. But this is where the distinctions between South African and Israeli apartheid crucially breaks down. Israeli capital does not rest on Palestinian exploitation, but on Palestinian exclusion. Zionist apartheid, as we have shown, is not a political superstructure of exploitation, but the modus of colonization. Israeli capitalism benefits economically from the occupation regime to the extent that it retains a captured market in the impoverished territories and makes use of state force to hijack land and water rights. It also, more importantly, benefits politically insofar as Zionism unifies classes in subordination to “nation building,” that is, to colonization and its perpetual need to defend that project. But Zionism and Israeli capitalism are separable social concerns. The harmonization of class conflict can persist only as long as the occupation regime is underwritten and subsidized from abroad. The relatively dovish character of the Israeli bourgeoisie is likewise attributable to a basic recognition that the Middle East as a whole constitutes its natural customers and Arab businesses its natural partners. The point is this: Israeli capitalism is not the principle obstacle to Palestinian national rights.

An effective embargo of Israeli capitalism, such as envisioned by BDS though by no means imminent, would ramify against the working class of Israel through mass layoffs. Sinking the Israeli economy would be experienced as a form of national oppression and would easily be exploited as a rallying cry for Zionist reaction to mobilize all classes around itself. The hundreds of thousands of guest workers who replaced Palestinians following the Oslo accords would be expelled, further thinning the Israeli working class and depleting its potential power. Class conflict would further self-suppress into the interstices of Israeli public life. It would be open season, as if it’s not already, on Palestinian and leftist scapegoating. Social and economic dependency on an imperialist lifeline would predictably strengthen, providing an even more eager and viral bulwark against the Arab democratic upsurge.

This is not a program for struggle. It is a program of despair that writes off the Israeli worker as a partner in the struggle against capitalist oppression and imperial domination. What needs to be confronted, isolated, and sanctioned instead, are the official agencies and representatives of Zionist domination and repression. What needs to be boycotted as illegitimate are goods and services produced in the occupied territories. What needs to be divested from are international businesses that partner with an Israeli state that continues to discriminate in the dispersal of public goods and resources and to oppress its occupied subjects.

Every means must be employed to shatter, not reinforce, the Zionist consensus.

Central to that end, however, is a unified demand to halt all state aid to Israel and a military embargo. They should be combined with the call for aid to be redirected to the Palestinians in the form of humanitarian relief and infrastructural support. Let Gaza and the West Bank rebuild their housing, their schools, their sewage and water treatment plants, and their hospitals. Let it create air and seaports for the export and import of its goods and services. Let it build an economy capable of lifting its citizenry out of poverty. Private aid and assistance to Israel should also not be exempt. We should demand that it be heavily taxed with those tax proceeds earmarked for Palestinian development. Let the Palestinians create the prerequisites of a functioning state.

Israel, after all, claims an inviolable right to defend itself against the consequences of its occupation. Let Israel, alone, pay for it.

July 29, 2014
Signs of Hope in Demonstrations of Solidarity with Gaza

Last Thursday was a national day of protests in solidarity with the people of Gaza, with demonstrations being held across the United States, with follow-up events in many places. There was also a Friday demonstration in New York City that I attended. This demo—like Thursday’s—was quite large, with perhaps 1,500 people. Friday’s had sizable numbers of Arab and Muslim protesters, while Thursday’s had groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, opposed to Israel's policies vis-a-vis Palestine, and of course at both there were many other folks of all ethnicities.

On Friday, there were Palestinian flags everywhere and one young man who was carried on a friend’s shoulders led the group in shouting, “Free, free, free Palestine.” Here are a couple of pictures from the Friday event, conveying some of the powerful ideas and sentiments expressed.

July 29, 2014
Obama Foreign Policy – A Brief Postscript
JULY 21, 2014 — Since the writing of my effort to analyze the Obama foreign policy (“Droning On, Fracking the Planet,” New Politics Summer 2014), a confluence of events – in various ways, all blowback from ravages of U.S policies past and present – combined to transform much of world politics in nasty and dangerous directions, with huge tolls in destruction and human misery. To review very briefly:
- In Iraq the vultures have come to roost, or more precisely to feed on the carcass of the society first crippled by Saddam Hussein’s grotesque rule and then destroyed by Bush’s invasion. Having acquiesced in prime minister al-Maliki’s sectarian and repressive practices until the place blew apart, the United States looked on helplessly as the too-brutal-for-al-Qaeda ”Islamic State in Iraq and al-Shams” (under whatever name it’s currently trading) took over a third of the country while the U.S.-trained Iraqi military disintegrated. It’s true that the Obama team inherited the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld tar pit, but they’re sure-enough stuck in it now. Left to its own infernal devices, the “Islamic State” itself should begin to crumble as the atrocious rule of ISIS impels its ex-Baathist partners to fight against it, but it’s always possible that this U.S. administration or the next one – by launching a bombing campaign, for example – might hold it together.
- In eastern Ukraine, Putin’s boys left to play without adult supervision have certainly produced a challenge to my repeated predictions that the crisis won’t rupture the ties of economic interdependence between Europe and Russia. The broken bodies in the debris field of the blown-up Malaysian airliner testify to the human costs of cynical geopolitical rivalries. At this writing, it’s unclear whether Putin will distance his regime from the separatist militias or, alternatively, exploit the crisis to “freeze” in place the attempt to fracture the country. What’s needed right now (exactly along the lines of the excellent articles on Ukraine in the current New Politics) are simultaneous, unconditional demands (i) on Russia, to leave Ukraine alone, and (ii) on the U.S. and NATO, to explicitly disavow the goal of bringing Ukraine into NATO membership and to retract the onerous neoliberal economic demands of the IMF and EU – thereby dramatically reversing the United States’ Clinton- and Bush-era triumphalism.
- On the southern U.S. border, the horrific harvest of child refugees has sprung up from decades of imperialism in Central America – Reagan’s counterrevolutionary wars and sponsored genocides of the 1980s, the insane “war on drugs” that ripped apart U.S. inner cities, the celebrated Clinton-era North American Free Trade Agreement, and more recently the Honduran coup quietly endorsed by the Obama administration that restored the rule of oligarchic “death-squad democracy” in that country. Broken societies have now produced gangs from which families face the choice for their kids to flee, or die. Unforgivably, the Obama administration – caught between a militant racist right wing backlash and its own cowardice – is creating machinery to deport most of these kids as quickly as possible, rather than respecting the rights of fair hearings and asylum they have under international and existing U.S. law.
- Beyond words is the Israeli assault in Gaza – of which whatever we may try to say today, the situation will be even worse tomorrow. It is pointless here to try to summarize the horrors of this massacre, the crackdown in the West Bank that preceded it, and the explosive growth of explicitly genocidal attitudes within the Israeli public – all of which will be undoubtedly explored in the New Politics blog and ensuing issues of the magazine. I will only state here that I certainly got it right about the political and moral collapse of this president and his administration on Palestine, to say nothing of the Congressional chimpanzees. (As I write this, it seems that the Senate has voted 100-0 to unconditionally support Israel’s slaughter as a defense against “unprovoked” rocket attacks and to demand the dismantling of the Palestinian unity government. This complicity in mass murder follows a similar House of Representatives resolution.) The question now is whether, as the rubble and the piles of bodies mount, Israel’s destruction of Palestine might change from a second-rate issue of little strategic importance to a serious liability for U.S. imperialism. At the present moment, with the Egyptian regime firmly allied with Israel and with many Arab regimes consumed with multiple crises, that doesn’t seem an immediate prospect – but we know from the Arab Spring that circumstances can dramatically change, and perhaps the rapid growth of global BDS may affect the climate in Europe.
In short, the damage wrought by the “necessities” of imperialism, and by the strategic choices of this administration and previous ones, has come into ominously sharper focus.
July 26, 2014
La Botz Got the Siegel Campaign All Wrong

Dan La Botz' article on the return of Left to electoral politics is generally insightful, and its survey of campaigns around the U.S. is a valuable contribution. However, the article's analysis of the Dan Siegel campaign for mayor of Oakland is off.

Siegel's economic program is not one "for capitalist investment that might have been developed by Democratic or Republican party candidates." It's not a socialist program, but no mayor is likely to bring about socialism in one city. Capitalist investment is indeed moving into Oakland, and the question is what form this will take. Will it displace Oakland's working class and force out even more of Oakland's African American residents? Or can Oakland's current residents organize and leverage capital's desire to invest in Oakland to extract concessions that can improve life here for the majority?

Silicon Valley capitalists, with no love lost for the cable monopolies, might indeed be fine with bond-financed municipal investment in a public broadband internet provider, although they'd probably prefer one of their own control the infrastructure, Google Fiber-style. Business interests are less likely to be happy paying taxes to help finance jobs for Oakland residents repairing streets, re-insulating buildings and installing solar panels, one of the Siegel planks La Botz mentions, or paying for after-school programs and universal pre-kindergarten education, planks La Botz leaves out.

Much less are capitalists interested in paying $15 per hour to each of Oakland's many service workers. La Botz implies Siegel's support for $12.25 is a retreat; in fact, while Siegel supports an independent union-backed ballot initiative that chose the lower number, he also still campaigns on a promise to submit legislation for $15 once in office.

The current phase of gentrification in Oakland is led by residential investment, with skyrocketing rents and property values. Tech workers are moving to Oakland as individuals much more rapidly than their jobs, creating a hot real estate market. More than 70% of Oakland residents rent, but California’s anti-tax Proposition 13 and Costa-Hawkins act limit Oakland's options in protecting tenants, banning any property tax increase as well as rent control for single-family homes or after vacancies. Within these constraints, Siegel supports an elected rent board, city-provided "free or low cost” legal counsel for tenants, and a large expansion of nonprofit affordable housing via construction or conversions–funded by an anti-speculation tax on real estate transfer and a doubling of Oakland's gross receipts tax on rental income. Together these would amount to a substantial transfer of wealth from landlords to renters and the public.

Oakland's current mayor, Jean Quan, bragged last year of her administration's accomplishments:

"We've grown our economy by supporting local businesses and reviving major development projects to create jobs. As we've grown the city's budget, I used that growth to hire police officers and we have begun to reduce crime… I cut budgets at City Hall… and reduced… pension costs… As a result, Oakland's overall economy is the strongest it’s been in years."

Quan is actually one of the more liberal candidates in the current race, but her "grow the economy, hire police" pairing is representative of the ruling class plan for Oakland.

Even though the city already allocates 40% of its discretionary budget to the police, every other major candidate supports expanding the force, which makes Siegel's stance that Oakland does not need any more cops a clear contrast. It’s true, as SocialistWorker.org has argued, that he could do better, and call for a downsizing of the city’s brutal and unaccountable force. Nevertheless, unfortunate outbreaks of "small business" rhetoric aside, Siegel's program is not that of Oakland's capitalists. And his choice to deregister as a Democrat prior to the race is primarily symbolic, given the election is nonpartisan, but still not without risk, and not to be discounted.

La Botz concludes rightly that what the Left needs is for “political campaigns [to] begin to interact with the social and labor movements in such a way as to inspire a virtuous circle.” Siegel has said similar things himself, and this vision of a movement-based campaign is what has drawn in many of his core supporters.

But there are countervailing pulls in the Siegel campaign. The consultants who built the slick website also have a fairly conventional understanding of how to win an election, and this sometimes comes through in the materials they produce. And Oakland's ranked-choice voting, which brought Mayor Quan to power on the back of second-place votes, gives candidates an incentive to play nice with each other, so as not to alienate rivals' supporters, whose second and third choices still matter.

Given the stark contrast between Siegel and Oakland’s Democratic establishment, voters who are persuaded by another candidate’s platform won’t be likely to select him second or third. Siegel’s left supporters believe that since he can’t be a consensus candidate, to have a shot, he’ll have to polarize the race around issues that mobilize people and try to win mostly with first-place votes. But not everyone in the Siegel campaign agrees with this logic, and the campaign’s future is unwritten.

The question, then, for this election, is not which Democratic candidate can pick up Siegel’s platform and “run with it all the way to the bank.” The question is whether Siegel’s radical ideas will get highlighted, and with luck capture the imagination of large numbers of people in Oakland and sweep an activist mayor into office, or whether, for reasons internal or external to the Siegel campaign, a real opportunity to transform Oakland politics will be missed.

David Judd is an Oakland resident and a member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which has endorsed the Dan Siegel campaign.

Drawing by Lisa Lyons.

July 24, 2014
New Politics Summer 2014 is Now Available

Dear New Politics Subscribers and Friends,

The exciting new issue of New Politics is now available in print and online! This issue focuses on the American Scene as well as offering articles on the Ukraine and other international topics and theoretical discussions. Click any of the links below to access the online essays and book reviews.

Print copies are available by subscription and in fine bookstores (i.e., those that carry socialist magazines). If you are not a subscriber, we urge you to become one.

Check the New Politics site regularly for much additional web-only content, both blogs by our regular contributors and other features.

The Editors

From the Editors

by Dan La Botz, Stephen R. Shalom, and Julia Wrigley

In this issue, we shift our focus toward domestic concerns, though we also look abroad with anxiety and trepidation.

The American Scene

The Working Class and Left Politics: Back on the American Radar
by Dan La Botz

The American political system, so highly polarized between conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats, has experienced in the last year some interesting changes on the left-hand margin of the national political scene.

Beyond Obamacare
Universalism and Health Care in the Twenty-first Century
by A. W. Gaffney

The Affordable Care Act commentariat — including those confidently awaiting the day when all its promises are vindicated, those rooting for its ignominious demise, and those of us in a separate camp — have been kept occupied in recent months. Between autumn's website drama and winter's enrollment saga, the news cycle has been full of stories of IT dysfunctions tackled, right-wing challenges thwarted, enrollment goals met, electoral prospects threatened, and individuals newly insured (or variously dissatisfied).

The Teachers' Trifecta
Democracy, Social Justice, Mobilization
by Lois Weiner

Across the United States, we are in the midst of a great struggle over the nation's education system. On one side is a bipartisan effort to privatize schools and undermine the promise of public education. Opposing that effort are large numbers of parents and teachers.

The Chicago Women's Liberation  Rock Band, 1970-1973
A Memoir and Reflection on Badass Boffo Revolutionary Feminist Music
by Naomi Weisstein

In Chicagoland, in 1970, almost every teenage girl listened to rock. They considered it their music — hormonal, quasi-outlaw, with screaming guitars and a heavy, driving beat. But it was sooo misogynist! This wasn't the Beatles' playful woman-affectionate songs.

Aquí estamos y no nos vamos — Adelina Nicholls on the Fight for Immigrant Rights
We're here and we're not going away
by Martha W. Rees

On February 7, 2014, I sat down with Adelina Nicholls, executive director of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) in Atlanta, to talk about the organization's history and achievements, as well as to reflect on the political role of Latino immigrants in the United States today.

Droning On, Fracking the Planet
Foreign Policy in the Obama Era
by David Finkel

The moral collapse of the Obama administration on so many fronts — Guantanamo, Palestine, drone warfare atrocities, mass electronic surveillance and brutal prosecution of whistleblowers, presidential-ordered assassinations, and so much more — has rightly drawn shock and outrage from the peace and global justice movements. Indeed, this presidency has been a civil and human rights travesty both domestically and globally. Alongside our horror, however, must be a clear material and political assessment of the underlying strategic purpose of this administration.

The Crisis in Ukraine

The crisis in Ukraine has raised grave problems for the people of that country, significant dangers for world peace, and many contending views on the left. Here we offer three articles that we think help us make sense of what's going on, by Joanne Landy, Kevin B. Anderson, and Sean Larson.

Ukraine Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Is There a Way Out?
by Joanne Landy

The governments of the United States and Russia are attempting to shape events in Ukraine in their own interests, not for the benefit of the Ukrainian people. Ukrainians have long suffered from domination by Moscow, under the Russian czars and later in the Soviet Union, most horrifically under Stalin. With the end of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, millions hoped for freedom and a new beginning.

Ukraine: Democratic Aspirations and Inter-imperialist Rivalry
by Kevin Anderson

Ukraine constitutes a test not only for democratic movements, or the unevenly matched imperialisms of the U.S./EU and Russia, but also for the global left. As with other "difficult" moments like the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, Iran 2009, or the Libyan uprising, our support for democracy and human rights has in some quarters come into conflict with the long held stance that neoliberal capitalism, led by the United States, is the main danger confronting humanity.

Contradictions of the Ruling Class in Ukraine
by Sean Larson

Ukrainian capitalism today is distinguished by the most fortified oligarchy of the post-Soviet states. Politics in Ukraine have been subject to volatile lurches over the last decade, driven by the direct involvement of masses of Ukrainians. Meanwhile, shaping the economic, political, and ideological aspects of society and daily life in Ukraine is a ubiquitous inter-imperialist competition between Russia on the one side and the United States and the European Union on the other.

On Returning To Where the Heart Is
by James Kilgore

[Ed. note: This essay by James Kilgore was the winner of the Daniel Singer Prize for 2013. Kilgore lived in South Africa from 1991-2002. During that time he was a fugitive from U.S. justice living under the pseudonym "John Pape." He worked as an educator and researcher for unions and social movements. In 2002 he was arrested on the streets of Cape Town, then extradited to the United States where he served six and a half years in prison. In July 2012 he returned to South Africa for the first time since his arrest. Here he presents his reflections on the journey.]

Argentina: The End of Kirchnerism?
by Niall Reddy

Scholars have sometimes noted that Argentinian history seems unusually punctuated by periods of booming prosperity followed by dramatic collapse.

China's Emergence as an Imperialist Power
by Michael Pröbsting

One of the most important issues in world politics today is China's rise as a great imperialist power. Most left-wing writers consider China either as a "socialist country," a "deformed workers' state," or as a "dependent capitalist country" exploited by Western monopolies.

Rosa Luxemburg: Economics for a New Socialist Project
by Ingo Schmidt

Right-wing militias killed Rosa Luxemburg and dumped her dead body into the Landwehr Canal after the Spartacus uprising in Berlin. Social democrats and communists finished off her intellectual and political legacy by putting her on their respective pedestals. She became a principal witness against Bolshevik organizing practices for the former and was praised as a co-founder of the German Communist Party and a revolutionary martyr by the latter.

Remembering Doug Ireland, Steve Kindred, and James D. Young
by Dan La Botz and Thomas Harrison

We note the passing of radical journalist and queer activist Doug Ireland, student and labor activist and a founder of Teamsters for a Democratic Union Steve Kindred, and Scottish labor historian Jimmy Young.

In Memoriam: Phil Evans, 1946-2014
by Kent Worcester

The gifted political cartoonist Phil Evans passed away earlier this year in the seaside town of Hastings, England. He was 68.

Reviews

Mapping the New Oligarchy
by Michael J. Thompson

Inequality is the theme of our time. It should perhaps be said that it has always been so. But after the surge of globalization since the 1990s, the decreasing fortunes of the middle class, and the more recent shock of the 2008 financial crisis, it has come more sharply into focus. It is within this context that Thomas Piketty has published Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a book that is exhaustively researched and brimming with empirical data and interpretation.

New Light on the KKK
by Martin Oppenheimer

Sit-ins at lunch counters by black students began in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. Blacks had traditionally not been served there or anywhere in the South at that time. Within a week the sit-ins spread to Durham and Winston-Salem. Eleven of the first sit-ins were within 100 miles of Greensboro. After many arrests, and assaults by white hoodlums, on July 25 all Greensboro stores targeted by the sit-ins agreed to serve blacks on an equal basis.

Sleeping Through the Pirate Raid
by Michael Hirsch

The mainstream media was never true to its pretension of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable — which was Gilded Age humorist Finley Peter Dunne's point — but there were exceptions, and exceptional practices. "Accountability reporting," or investigative reporting, is one of them.

When the Red States Really Were Red
by E. Haberkern

The labor- and third-party movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been studied and written about extensively by academics and writers on the left. Most readers of this journal are probably familiar with much of this material. This book, however, is of particular interest today for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the author concentrates on the South and emphasizes the biracial nature of the movement.

Renegades and Castaways
by Kent Worcester

For many years the dominant trend in scholarship on C.L.R. James has been to emphasize his cultural and literary writings. Arguably the most popular way to frame his legacy has been to situate him as a forerunner to cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and identity politics. But this culture-centered reading of James is at best incomplete.

July 20, 2014
Mexico's MORENA Party Obtains Legal Status–What Will Be the Impact?

Will MORENA, the National Regeneration Movement founded and led by former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, be able to change Mexican politics and what sort of change might that mean? We will soon have an idea. Founded in November 2012, MORENA is now a legitimate political party with the right to run candidates in elections.

MORENA received official recognition as a political party from the National Electoral Institute in early July. López Obrador and his followers, who had previously been members of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), now have the electoral vehicle they have desired and worked for as they prepare to enter the mid-term Mexican elections in 2015. The expectation is that MORENA will nominate López Obrador for president in the 2018 elections.

No Chiles, Please

López Obrador who lost the 2006 and 2012 elections—both of which he and many other believe were stolen—had previously run as the candidate of the PRD. Frustrated with that party’s in-fighting, corruption, and political compromises, he and his supporters left to found MORENA, first as a social movement and now as a political party. Since his defeat in the controversial and fraudulent 2006 election, López Obrador has traveled throughout Mexico virtually continuously, speaking to the issues, recruiting followers, and building up local and state organizations. That work came to fruition with the organization being granted political party status this month.

MORENA’s like the PRD from which it sprang, has a political program, that essentially accepts the existing neoliberal economic frame, though with a nationalist, progressive, and democratic flavor. One finds no reference to fundamental structural changes or to socialism in the program, but there are several references to the role of the private sector and to the elimination of monopolies in order to to increase competition.

There are no chiles here, nothing picante. MORENA is not socialist, is not radical, and is not a working class party. MORENA’S politics represent only another tepid version of the Mexican nationalist tradition. While its acronym, which means “the dark girl,” may suggest Mexico’s working class majority, this is not tortilla de maíz but rather pan blanco. Yet it is not impossible that this party could become a vehicle for modest social change. The party’s rural and urban working class base and discontented middle class members may engage in militant protests and push the party to take more far-reaching positions, though it is doubtful that it could ever become the kind of genuinely radical party needed to begin to transform Mexico.

The Size and Power of the Parties

MORENA was one of three would-be parties which passed muster, the other two being the Humanist Front (Frente Humanista or FH), a conservative party, and the Social Encounter Party (Encuentro Social – PES), based on the Evangelical churches, bringing the number of electoral parties in the country to ten. To become a party, according to the 1946 electoral law, the three pretenders had to demonstrate that they had a national presence, now defined as 220,000 supporters or more in a large proportion of the country’s states and municipalities. In order to maintain their party registration, each must win at least 3 percent of the vote in the 2015 elections.

Of the three parties seeking legal status, MORENA was by far the strongest. FH had 270,966 accredited members and 221 district assemblies and PES had 308,997 members and 236 district meeting, while MORENA had 496,729 members and held 30 (out of 32) state-wide assemblies.

Mexico’s political spectrum now looks like this: there are ten parties, six of which are conservative and four of which are on the left. The conservative parties are the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which is in power; the National Action Party (PAN) which held the presidency during the previous two terms; the Ecological Green Party (PVEM), a satellite of the PRI; the Nueva Alianza (NA) which is the party of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) and is also allied with the PRI; and the two new conservative parties FH and PES. On the left there are the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD); the Workers Party (PT) which came out of the Maoist movement; the Citizens Movement (MC – formerly Convergencia); and now MORENA.

According to María Marván Laborde of Excelsior, based on federal electoral statistics, some 13 million Mexicans are affiliated with one or another of the political parties. The existing parties’ numbers are as follows: The PRI has 5,848,944 members; the PRD, 3,435,979; the PVEM, 947,346; the PT 892,756; MC, 795,281; NA, 639,174; and the PAN, 271,632.

How, one might wonder, has the PAN with so few members been able in the past to win the presidency and sometimes control about a third of the congress? The answer is that the PAN has relied heavily on its influence in the media. What is clear above all from these statistics is the enormous electoral capacity of the PRI which not only now plays a dominant role in the media but with its allies the PVEM and NA controls or influences about 7.5 million party members, that is about half of all party members.

Party members alone are not everything. López Obrador and his followers demonstrated in 2006 and again in 2012 that they are capable of organizing hundreds of thousands of people in massive demonstrations and sit-ins. Though, at the same time, it is not clear on the basis of past experience that López Obrador and his party have the ability to win a majority or even the necessary plurality of the vote.

Will MORENA be able to pull voters form the PRD and the PRI, as well as mobilizing new voters? The entrance of MORENA into the national elections in 2015 could lead to a reshaping and realignment of the political parties, and one can imagine a variety of possibilities, that will make the 2015 elections more interesting, though probably not more significant.

July 19, 2014
Troublesome Words

            Words have histories, and history affects meaning. And since the history of the English language is very much bound up with the history of the English Empire, many ordinary words have histories that are subtly, or even covertly, racist, imperialist, or otherwise troublesome. I recently received a letter from a colleague, taking me to task for using the word tribalism in an article. He wrote:

"In your essay you make a pejorative reference to tribalism, and I noticed a similar, uncritical repetition of Orwell's reference to linguistic barbarism in your essay on anarchism and language. These are highly orientalist and colonial tropes . . . repeatedly invoked throughout Western history and philosophy to justify extreme dispossession and violence."

He's right about tribalism, of course. And I really should have known better, though the fault here is one of carelessness rather than malice. I'm less sure about barbarism, for reasons that I'll explain shortly.

            The exchange got me to thinking, though, about troublesome words.

            By troublesome, I do not mean simply bad. Bad words are intended to offend or provoke, and they convey that intention as part of their meaning; they rely on it for their force. There are no innocent uses of fuck or cunt or nigger. Competent speakers can be presumed to know what they are doing when they use such terms, though whether it is right to use them must remain a separate question. And then there's the further puzzle of whether they can be reclaimed or normalized. If fuck ever starts to sound polite it will, for precisely that reason, become as quaint and as rare as zounds (which once blasphemously referred to "God's wounds"). And the question of whether queer is a term of empowerment or abuse is as much generational as political. But the point remains: Bad words may be used well, but to use them well one must realize that they are bad words.

            Troublesome words are not bad in the same sense; one might say instead that they are mischievous. They don't behave how we would like.

            Troublesome words are those words that have a racist or sexist origin, connotation, or implication — whether obvious or obscure — but which also capture some useful meaning, and for which we do not have ready alternatives.

            In addition to tribalism and barbarism, which have already been mentioned, I could add (just off the top of my head) — hysteria, cannibal, denigrate, philistine, and juggernaut.

            According to the Oxford English Dictionary: Hysteria began as a medical term describing a psychological condition thought to be caused by a disorder of the uterus, and "usually attended with emotional disturbances and enfeeblement or perversion of the moral and intellectual faculties." Cannibal was a variation on Carib, the people for whom the Caribbean is named. Denigrate means, literally, "to blacken." The Philistines were an ancient people who regularly came into conflict with the Israelites (most famously in the story of David and Goliath); since the nineteenth century the word has been used to refer to anti-intellectual opponents of high culture, though it can also mean, simply, an enemy. Juggernaut is a corruption of the Sanskrit Jagannātha ("lord of the world"), a title belonging to Krishna; the more familiar meaning derives from an annual festival in which his statue is pulled through the streets on an enormous conveyance, the wheels of which were reported (by Europeans) to crush the god's worshippers.

            In addition to the etymological and historical concerns, there are words that are troublesome for reasons of connotation, or because they are often used in some biased fashion. For example, I was once upbraided for using the word riot in a lecture, the objection being that riot is the way the authorities describe uprisings in order to discredit them. I responded by explaining that an uprising can be almost anything — a strike, a sit-in, the Zapatista's insurrection, a military mutiny, or Gandhi's march to the sea — whereas what I was talking about was, specifically, groups of people acting together in defiance of the law, attacking property and fighting with cops. Also, for what it's worth, I was pretty clearly on the side of the rioters.

            I have likewise been told that strident, perky, and obsessive are misogynist terms. All are harmless in themselves, but (it is argued) they are disproportionately and dismissively applied to women; and as a result, even when they're used to describe men, the implication is that they are insulting because they are feminizing. A similar complaint has recently become a campaign targeting the word bossy, the reason being that we call little girls bossy when we would call little boys leaders. Oddly, the campaign went public with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, a publication that is famously and purposely pro-boss. One class-conscious commenter has suggested that the problem isn't the word but the behavior: it isn't wrong that we object when girls (and women) are domineering, but that we don't object nearly often enough when men (and boys) are. He also pointed out that when we do object to bossy men, the words we use are considerably worse; we call them jerks and assholes. So in the interest of equality, perhaps we need to give men and boys less slack, but also be more willing to call women and girls assholes.

            Then again, a friend of mine once quipped: "As a queer man, I've never had any complaints about assholes." So maybe asshole, as a term of abuse, is homophobic.

            Writing is full of such quandaries, in part because English is littered with troublesome words. Probably we will never scrub our language clean of them, since they generally pass us by unnoticed and, when we do notice, we find it difficult to do without them. Such words are troublesome precisely because they sometimes are the words that we need. We struggle to find replacements — mania for hysteria, decry for denigrate — but we always seem to lose something in the bargain. The substitution is clumsy, imprecise, or hollow. Will factionalism do as a surrogate for tribalism? Usually, I suppose; but not always. And when the substitution falters, where no synonym is available, a writer faces a terrible choice: Say something more than one means, or say much less.

            The issue here is not merely that such words might give offense. It is not even, really, that the bias in the language reflects some real (if often latent) prejudice in the person who uses the language. The problem is that the words we use carry with them some conceptual framing, a way of dividing up and understanding the world. All words do that — it is how they create meaning — and words often do it at many levels simultaneously. That's not necessarily bad. It produce a kind of literary richness, ambiguity, irony, humor, or a subversive subtext. The thing that makes some words troublesome is that they carry along with them a conceptualization that we cannot endorse, and which may be contrary to our purposes in writing. The best word may also sometimes be the wrong word to use.

            As a practical matter, the first question to ask should be whether the word really does express one's meaning. Then, is it liable to be misunderstood? And finally, is it really likely to offend people? Implicit in each of these is the question of whether the troublesome meaning — the unintended implication — lays dormant, as an archaism, or whether it is an active feature of the word's functioning, part of the conceptual work that it does. After all, who today considers slave an insult to Slavs?

            I think barbarism passes this test, though tribalism fails. (And if we do away with barbarism, must we also avoid vandalism? What about goth?)

            But things are never quite so easy. Unfortunately, the question of whether a word may give offense or be misunderstood is always empirical; it has no obvious relationship to the separate question of whether it should offend or confuse. For instance: I've heard it argued that picnic is linguistically implicated in lynching, though in fact, it comes from the French, pique-nique, which originally meant something like a potluck. In contrast, and somewhat strangely, I have never heard anyone object to denigrate, though it shares the nig root with nigger. However, the etymologically innocent niggardly — meaning stingy, likely derived from an early Scandinavian word — always raises an eyebrow and sometimes erupts in controversy.

            Most famously, in 1999, David Howard was forced to resign from his position as aide to the mayor of Washington, D.C. because he used the word niggardly to describe the District's budget. The misunderstanding was predicable since, as the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg put it, "Phonetics always trumps etymology." It was also somewhat ironic: The point Howard was trying to make was that the city's (mostly black) residents were being scandalously starved of government services. Instead, he came across as a bigot and lost his job — which only produced a counter-controversy, leading to an apology from the mayor and a new job with his staff. Pretty much everybody ended up looking foolish, and public services in the nation's capital did not improve one bit.

            There is a lesson in that, for speakers and audiences alike. The words we use are important, but what we are trying to say is at least as important. Speakers and writers should do other utmost to select the words that convey their meaning; but readers and audiences should also listen for the intention and try to grasp the idea behind our always imperfect language. If both parties work at it, communication is just sometimes miraculously possible. But if we don't — if we pay too little attention, or too much — words don't just fail us, they betray us. The language we use and the way that we use it — the way we write and speak, the way we read and listen — can divide as well as connect, can obscure rather than illuminate, and can defeat our own efforts.

            Troublesome words are only a particularly clear example of a much deeper problem. Language, though rule-governed, is inherently unruly. At its best its anarchic nature produces outbursts of creativity — not just new manners of speech, but sometimes also new ideas and clearer ways of thinking. At its worst, it is something beyond meaningless; it can be actively destructive of meaning, preventing communication, and therefore also limiting thought.

            Words are tools; but, like knives or dynamite, they are dangerous tools. And we are, all of us — writers and readers — always somewhere in the process of learning how to use them.

Bibliography

Ban Bossy, accessed March 2014.

Berlatsky, Noah , "The Problem Isn't the Word 'Bossy' — It's Leaders Who Abuse Their Power," The Atlantic, March 14, 2014.

Nunberg, Geoffrey, "No Picnic," in The Way We Talk Now: Commentaries on Language and Culture from NPR's "Fresh Air" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001).

Oxford English Dictionary (Online), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, accessed March 2014).

Sandberg, Sheryl, and Anna Marie Chávez, "Sheryl Sandberg and Anna Marie Chávez on 'Bossy,' the Other B-Word," Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2014.

Williams, Kristian, Anarchism and the English Language (CrimethInc, 2013).

Williams, Kristian , "The Politics of Denunciation," Toward Freedom, February 20, 2014.

Woodlee, Yolanda , "D.C. Mayor Acted 'Hastily,' Will Rehire Aid," Washington Post, February 4, 1999.

Kristian Williams is the author of Hurt: Notes on Torture in a Modern Democracy and (with CrimethInc) Anarchism and the English Language/English and the Anarchist Language. He is presently at work on a book about Oscar Wilde and anarchism. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

July 17, 2014
An Open Letter to Israeli Academics

These are desperately bad times. The government of Israel, having provoked the firing of rockets by its rampage through the West Bank, is now using that response as the pretext for an aerial assault on Gaza which has already cost scores of lives. An atmosphere of hysteria is being deliberately provoked in Israel, and whole communities are being subject to collective punishment, a war crime. People are dying, and for what? To prevent a unity government of Fatah and Hamas?

We have been asked by our academic colleagues in Gaza – whose universities have been destroyed a number of times in the last six years, who are unable to teach or study, and who are also in growing need of food and medicines, like the rest of the almost two million Palestinians living in Gaza – to urge you to act urgently, to make your voice heard in Israel and abroad against what the Israeli government is inflicting on the Gaza population. More than 123 people have been killed already in Gaza by the IDF since the start of the Israeli operation on Monday, and the number will be bigger by the time you read this message. Most of these people are children, women and the elderly. There could be no credible claim made that these people were involved in any military activity whatsoever. The Gaza infrastructure, already in tatters, is now further undermined, and the population is in the worst situation it has ever been, and this is getting worse by the minute. These atrocities, committed by Israel will bring neither peace nor security to the region, and can only lead to further deterioration of the already dangerous situation in Palestine/Israel.

We invite you, as fellow academics and intellectuals, to join your voices in an open and resounding protest about these war crimes by the Israeli government – your government. We urge you to stand up and be counted, to answer the call of your Gazan colleagues and make your voice heard. We hope that you will be able and willing to come together and voice your total opposition to the war crimes committed in your name!

If you are an Israeli academic and agree with us on the urgent need to bring an immediate end to those atrocities, and to act to end the illegal occupation in Palestine, please sign the statement at the bottom of this letter by sending us a mail with your name, title and affiliation. (See instructions below.)

Signatories

Dr. (Baroness) Jenny Tonge, House of Lords, UK
Prof. Richard Falk, Princeton, USA
Prof. Haim Bresheeth, SOAS, UK
Prof. Moshé Machover, KCL, UK
Prof. Yosefa Loshitzky, SOAS, UK
Prof. Hagit Borer, QMU, UK
Prof. Nira Yuval-Davis, UEL, UK
Prof. Jonathan Rosenhead, LSE, UK
Prof. Ronit Lentin, TCD, Ireland
Prof. Nur Masalha, UK
Prof. Yigal Arens, USA
Prof. Terri Ginzburg, USA
Prof. Hamid Dabashi, USA
Prof. Stephen Deutsch, BU, UK
Prof. Robert Lang, USA
Dr. Dina Matar, SOAS, UK
Prof. Florence Martin, USA
Prof. Michael Chanan, UK
Prof. Susan Hayward, , Exeter, UK
Prof. Des Freeman, Goldsmiths, UK
Prof. Barbara Harrell-Bond, Oxford, UK
Dr. Julian Vigo, UK
Prof. Karma Nabulsi, UK
Dr. Carlos Prieto del Campo, Spain
Prof. Noha Melor, Kingston, UK
Prof. Ghazi-Walid Falah, Akron, USA
Prof. David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford, USA
Prof. Bill V. Mullen, Perdue, USA
Prof. Sherna Berger-Gluck,
Prof. Rosalyn Baxandall, CUNY, USA
Prof. Emmanuel Farjoun, HUJ, Israel
Dr. Staughton Lynd, independent scholar, USA
Prof. Sondra Hale, UCLA, USA

If you are an academic and wish to sign the letter above, write directly haimbresh@googlemail.com with the subject heading: "PLEASE ADD MY SIGNATURE"

Do the same if you are an Israeli academic and wish to sign the letter below:

Statement to be signed by Israeli academics:

The signatories to this statement, all academics at Israeli universities, wish it to be known that they utterly deplore the aggressive military strategy being deployed by the Israeli government. The slaughter of large numbers of wholly innocent people, is placing yet more barriers of blood in the way of the negotiated agreement which is the only alternative to the occupation and endless oppression of the Palestinian people. Israel must agree to an immediate cease-fire, and start negotiating in good faith for the end of the occupation and settlements, through a just peace agreement.

If you are an Israeli academic, working in Israel, who would like to sign the statement above, please email haim@haimbresheeth with your name, title and affiliation.

July 13, 2014
Fireworks in both US teachers unions

Both US teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), held their national conventions in July. For the first time in decades the conventions were marked by challenges to union leaders on educational policies, including union approval of the Common Core and union leader's unwillingness to take on the Obama administration and Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education. Debate has been fierce and though there have been important victories in pushing the unions to be more aggressive in their defense of social justice and public education, a new generation of activists is learning that those who hold power are not going to relinquish it without a fight. At the same time, during their speeches, NEA and AFT officials adopted the rhetoric of the challengers and even ceded on some policies. Debate is ferocious in online forums and lists, as well as social media. Activists realize that we are in a race against time, that teacher unions have to be transformed quickly if teaching is going to be more than contract labor controlled by powerful elites who direct what and how children learn.

The Summer 2014 issue of New Politics carries an article in which I analyze the state of teacher unionism, including many of the issues the conventions debated. So that my article may be of use while these topics are live ones, I've asked New Politics to fast-forward posting my article on our website. In the meantime, you can follow me on twitter and Facebook.

July 13, 2014
Social Inequalities, the World Cup, and Some Simple Solutions

The World Cup is the most widely viewed sporting event around the world. Millions of viewers will tune in Sunday to watch the broadcast of the upcoming final match and cheer on their favorite teams as they battle for the golden trophy. In the United States, the event has become a much anticipated and celebrated source of entertainment – an opportunity for people to show support for their country and an excuse to grab a drink and watch the game with friends at a local bar. While the cameras zoom in on the athletes and the excitement of sport fans, many Brazilians would rather the world focus on the persistent social inequalities in their country.

According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, the majority of Brazilians (six out of ten, to be exact) believe that the World Cup will do little to improve the social conditions of their country. This statistic is particularly shocking given that Brazil is considered one of the most soccer-obsessed countries in the world. Not only has Brazil won the World Cup five times, it has also produced world-renowned players such as Pele and Ronaldo.

Despite their love for soccer, Brazilians are enraged at their government’s decision to spend an estimated $14 billion to host the World Cup. Many people are concerned about the lavish spending on a sport event while turning a blind eye to the pressing social challenges in health, education, housing, infrastructure, and disproportionate poverty. It isn’t hard to understand the frustration that many of the people of Brazil must feel as they watch poor people being forced out of their favelas when the construction of the stadiums began. More recently, thousands of homeless people have held demonstrations to call attention to their poor living conditions and their right to housing. In Rio de Janeiro, demonstrators have clashed with police and armed forces, resulting in many injuries and some deaths. The justified demands of the demonstrators and the social movement in Brazil require a simple understanding of the social inequalities that adversely affect people’s everyday lives.

Income Inequality: Brazil has one of the top ten largest economies in the world, yet people living in Brazil experience one of the highest levels of inequality (ranked twelfth globally in social inequality). For instance, the richest 10% take about 80% of the total income, while the poorest 35% take a merely 1%. About 10% of the population lives on less than 2 U.S. dollars per-day. These numbers mean that a small number of people have an astronomical amount of income at their disposal, enough to live a million lifetimes, while a larger proportion of the population is living in dire conditions.

Health Inequalities: Health inequalities can be measured in many ways; however, life expectancy is considered the best indicator of health because it directly reflects the state of health during a person’s lifetime. The average life expectancy in Brazil is 73 years, but this average varies as much as 13 years between rich and poor neighborhoods. Consider the life expectancy at birth of two male Brazilian babies living in two different locations in Rio de Janeiro, one living in poverty and the other in wealth. Although these babies might live just a few miles away, the poor baby is likely to live 13 years less that the rich baby. In other words, the rich baby is likely to see and celebrate his 74th birthday while the poor baby is lucky if he makes it to see his 61st birthday. Similarly, a poor female baby will live to 72 years of age while a rich female baby will live up to 81 years. Indeed, such health inequalities reveal the lack of opportunity for the poor to live healthy, dignified lives.

Gender Inequality: Brazil lags behind many industrial countries in gender equality. According to the Gender Inequality Index developed by the United Nations, Brazil is ranked 85 out of 148 countries. In 2008, it was estimated that women’s wages were approximately 84% of men’s. More disturbing is that this gap increases at higher levels of education: among individuals with 12 or more years of schooling, women only earned 58% of the income of their male counterparts. This means that women and men with the same amount of education receive significantly different wages, suggesting extreme gender and structural inequality in the workplace.

Solutions: The Brazilian government has made notable attempts to combat poverty and social inequalities. According to the Word Bank, poverty has fallen from 21% in 2003 to 11% over the last decade. Many social initiatives such as Bolsa Familia have significantly reduced poverty, providing financial assistance and lifelines to students and families in need. But despite the economic improvements of the last decade, it remains to be seen if the World Cup investments will produce any social benefits to the Brazilian people. Some solutions, however, are relatively simple:

First, it is estimated that FIFA will rake in over $4 billion from the World Cup. Instead of pocketing the astronomical profits, FIFA could, and arguably should, return some of these profits to Brazil to assist with the expenses the country has incurred by hosting the World Cup. An alternative and potentially more valuable solution would be for FIFA to return some of its profits to social programs that would alleviate social inequalities.

Second, there need to be regulations put in place to ensure that FIFA’s actions are transparent and that the organization is accountable for how it handles its profits. Corruption has been a prominent issue throughout the history of FIFA. In 2011 Jack Warner, vice president of FIFA, resigned after being charged with multiple counts of corruption, including taking an estimated $500,000 in bribes in exchange for helping to Australia's unsuccessful bid as World Cup host in 2022. More recently, Joseph Blatter, the president of FIFA, has faced corruption allegations over the decision to make Qatar the World Cup host in 2022. Ironically, FIFA is classified as a non-profit organization, yet Joseph Blatter has an estimated net worth of $10 million and his salary remains a secret.

Third, the Brazilian government needs to democratize the operation and activities of the World Cup. For instance, the government could give indigenous people in the Amazon and other parts of Brazil more power to decide how their land is used without external threats from mining companies and international corporations. This includes the threat of continuing to build buildings and stadiums in their lands. Taking this action would be a first step toward creating a balance of power and equity in Brazil.

Social inequalities in Brazil are no illusion. They are very much real, and tackling the issue of inequality from the root of the problem through empowerment and social and economic reform is a longer-term solution that has the potential to improve the quality of life for the millions of people in Brazil. After all, besides golden trophies and profits, capitalizing on our human bonds and kinship manifested in social equality is an ideal worth pursuing.

Maynor G. Gonzalez, PhD, is a Public Health researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center and an activist in several community-based organizations in Rochester, NY.

July 11, 2014
Ricardo Flores Magón: Mexican Anarchists and American Socialists

Claudio Lomnitz. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón. New York: Zone Books, 2014. 594 pages. Notes. Index of Names. Photos. Hardback. $35.95.

If it were a house, Claudio Lomnitz’s The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón would be a rambling, decaying mansion with various jerrybuilt stories and wings, a ramshackle place filled with archives and artifacts, old political posters and antique typewriters, a building straddling the U.S.-Mexico border, a shared abode whose residents are an interesting and odd collection of characters, some of them lovely people, some noble, and others quite disagreeable, coming and going at all hours, sometimes reciting poetry. And don’t be surprised if, while you’re visiting, the place is raided by Furlong or Pinkerton agents, by the police or the Texas rangers who carry off some of the boarders to prison; some of whom will be gone for years at a time.

For this house—which over the years was moved from Mexico to the United States and then from one city to another—is the headquarters of a band of anarchist and socialist revolutionaries and their American friends and comrades most of whose time is spent in putting out the newspaper Regeneración, in organizing disastrously failed insurrections in Mexico, and in campaigns to get their correligionarios out of prison. Don’t be shocked if Ricardo Flores Magón, the leader of this outfit, gets angry with you, calls you a pederast and a pervert, a degenerate and a traitor, and publishes in his newspaper a call to have you executed. Don’t take it personally, you are hardly the first. Finally don’t be surprised if the author mistakes this house for a communist utopia, for he has been visiting it for a long time, knows everyone and their brother, and his deep immersion in their cause has on the one hand given him a remarkable familiarity with the place and its people, but on the other hand also sometimes clouded his judgment, as it clouded theirs. And I know how that happens, for it has happened to me too.[1]

The Return is a prosopography of a dozen or so Mexicans and Americans, the former mostly anarchists and the later mostly socialists, who at the beginning of the twentieth century were engaged in the common cause of defending and supporting the Mexican revolution and its revolutionaries in their attempt to overthrow the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Ricardo Flores Magón and the other Mexican Liberal Party leaders—anarchists and socialists–imprisoned by Díaz in 1903, fled the next year to the United States to continue their organizing and to publish their newspaper Regeneración first briefly in St. Louis and then for many years in Los Angeles. There the Mexicans and their American supporters worked together to expose and publicize conditions in Díaz’s Mexico, above all the existence of a system of debt peonage that was tantamount to slavery and a dictatorship that was every bit as bad that of Czarist Russia.

Ricardo Flores Magón stood at the center of the exiled Mexican anarchist group together with his brother Enrique, while John Kenneth Turner, author of Barbarous Mexico, his wife Ethel Duffy Turner, John Murray, and Elizabeth Darling Trowbridge were at the center of the American socialists. The Mexicans had founded and led the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM)—which despite its name was actually an anarchist organization—while the Americans were part of the Los Angeles chapter of the Socialist Party of America, the party of Eugene V. Debs. Also supporting the Mexicans, though from a distance, was Emma Goldman, publisher of Mother Earth, the most famous figure of American anarchism. The brothers Flores Magón and the American socialists worked together in relative harmony from 1904 until 1911, when the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, led by Francisco I. Madero, led to a break between socialists and anarchists both in the United States and in Mexico, after which the two political tendencies were generally opponents and even enemies. On both sides of the border the socialists broke with the anarchists and supported Madero’s revolution, while the anarchists urged their supporters to resist Madero as a capitalist and the enemy.

In his introduction Lomnitz writes that he wants in The Return to rescue Ricardo Flores Magón from two particular misinterpretations: first, that which sees the Magonistas and the PLM as only “precursors of the revolution,” a title and also an official organization created by the Mexican government; and, second, that which “brownwashes” the Magonistas and the PLM by seeing them as the origin of the Chicano movement, a point of view developed by Juan Gómez-Quiñones.[2] Lomnitz wants to shift the framework for telling this story, arguing that the history of the Mexican Revolution has usually been told as national or international history, “but analysis of the revolution as a transnational phenomenon has not yet made a deep mark”—though in fact there have been several earlier transnational histories.[3] Flores Magón, the PLM and its allies, Lomnnitz argues were not precursors, they were part and parcel of a transnational movement that formed an essential part of the Mexican Revolution.

We have had many biographies of Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Liberal Party, as well as several books that have described their transnational political collaboration, but Lomnitz’s The Return, a collective biography based on new archival research on both sides of the border as well as on previously unknown or untapped sources, and written as a cultural history of this milieu and period, represents the fullest and richest account so far.[4] Lomnitz, the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, brings to his study of this group his anthropological sensitivity to the complexity of cultures and a deep interest in and fascination with language and literature. While the historical narrative is clear enough, the author is also given to leaving the main highway and taking us on to side roads and occasionally footpaths, especially if he hears someone over the hill reciting a poem. The Return’s solid foundation in the historical record allows Lomnitz to explain previously misunderstood issues; and when he doesn’t have evidence, he boldly risks intelligent psychological speculation about desires, motives, and intentions, many of which are compelling, though not all of them are convincing.

While I love rambling through this big old house with Lomnitz, I can’t always share in his explanations and sometimes find them farfetched. For example, he spends a couple of small sections of the book called “Families of the Cause” (pp. 214-220) and “Edendale” (pp. 441-443) describing the family relations of the PLM leaders and some of their American allies. He argues that their families were “novel households,” partially reflecting the earlier bohemian lifestyle of their youth, “compounds” involving more than one family, which he says he is “tempted to christen the ‘Liberal Joint Family System’….” He writes:

Communism, in short, had a real social base. It was not ‘utopian,’ because it was built on real circumstances and on everyday solutions to everyday problems by groups of workerswho had pooled resources, shared rooms, supported one another and composite new families that could, under certain conditions, morph into veritable colonies. Communism was an ideal, certainly, but it also existed, right there, as real lived experience. (p. 220)

A passage like this—which makes us think of contemporary discussions that developed around the Occupy Wall Street movement under the name of “prefiguration”—strikes me as making a theoretical mountain out of an everyday molehill. Many working class people, and perhaps more commonly among Latin Americans, form families made up not only of parents and children, but also grandparents and grandchildren, aunts and uncles, an often “fictive kin” who are incorporated as well. Poverty is the mother of invention of these families where then and now people share mortgages or rent, clothing and food, as well as incomes and bills in order to survive. While as Ethel Duffy Turner wrote, “There was a remarkable camaraderie in those days,” there was also as Lomnitz himself observes, grinding poverty: people lived close, too close, didn’t have enough money, enough space, or enough to eat. To call this, “Communism…right there…as lived experience” is not only not convincing; it seems downright silly.

But Lomnitz then goes on to draw from that inference this fantastic conclusion:

This, in the end, was why many workers felt robbed when the state appropriated these forms, in Russia, for example. The soviets had been betrayed. The state was not a union of soviets, but an armature that had been raised above them and that exploited even their name, only to turn around and call the small-c communists “utopians”

But I am getting ahead of myself.

But Lomnitz is not getting ahead of himself—for he never returned to these issues later in the book. He jumped from his observations about the need of Mexican and American radicals to share housing, to the deduction that that was a kind of prefiguration of the communism they desired, and from there to the conclusion that the Russian Revolution had somehow destroyed all of that. It’s hard to take such a passage seriously, especially as there is no sustained discussion of the differences between anarchists and socialists and hardly another mention of the Russian Revolution until the very end of the book and there only in passing. The anarchist movement’s relationship to the Russian Revolution is an important and complicated one that if it is going to be raised deserves more serious comment than this. One also sees in this passage what is a large amorphous problem with this book, namely that because of the author’s immersion in this milieu and identification with its protagonists, it is often hard to separate what the Magonistas are doing and writing from what Lomnitz thinks about it.

A Rich Book–Poor in Politics

Lomnitz is clearly at some level in love with Ricardo Flores Magón and company; one sees this in his practice of calling all of the Mexican anarchists and American socialists that he likes by their first names, while others, following standard practice, are called by their last names. Yet Lomnitz has to be credited with seeing the Magonistas as they really were. Lomnitz makes it clear that they were incompetent revolutionaries whose failure to create a clandestine organization meant that their mail was read by the U.S. and Mexican governments, leading to the failure of their insurrections in 1906 and 1908 and to the execution of many their comrades. He also agrees with other historians that the PLM-Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) invasion of Baja California in 1911 was not only a military failure but an even worse political fiasco.[5] Lomnitz doesn’t hesitate to point out that when differences with his comrades arose, Flores Magón lashed out viciously, calling his former friends and comrades not only “traitors” but also “lesbians” or “pederasts” and “perverts.” He also describes how Flores Magón sent out orders that a former comrade who had left the group be shot and mentions other published calls to execute former PLM leaders. And he doesn’t hesitate to mention Flores Magón’s glorification of violence motivated by hatred and a desire for revenge. Yet, while he recounts these faults, we find no systematic political critique of them, so that one comes away feeling that Lomnitz still romanticizes and loves the Magónistas despite these political and moral faults.

The one political problem that Lomnitz fails to deal with is the Magonistas' opposition to the Chinese, a serious problem for a group that took pride in its proletarian internationalism. The Magonistas’ reformist program of 1906 stated, “The prohibition of Chinese immigration is, above all a measure of protection to workers of other nationalities, principally the Mexicans. The Chinese, disposed in general to work for the lowest wage, submissive, petty in his aspirations, is a great obstacle to the prosperity of other workers. His competition is fatal and it must be avoided in Mexico. In general, Chinese immigration doesn’t produce the least benefit to Mexico.”[6] This was a view shared by the American Federation of Labor and other unions in the United States, a virulent racist sentiment that in the U.S. led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and in Mexico during the revolution to the massacre of the Chinese by Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s troops.

What is most disturbing about Lomnitz’s The Return is that it never systematically discusses the Magonistas' political views or how they came to them. One can read a few hundred pages of this book before the word “anarchist” receives any discussion, though the Magonistas were anarchists.. What is missing from this book is what was at the core of Cockcroft’s Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1913: that is, a clear intellectual and political description of the Magonistas as Bakuninist anarchists. If one understands their Bakuninism, one then understands the Magonistas’ dual revolutionary strategy of one the one hand behaving as a vanguard organizing repeated revolutionary insurrections and on the other hand acting as an ideological center to guide the rising of what they view as the ignorant and inchoate masses. If one knows they are Bakuninists, one also understands the PLM's conspiratorial character, its authoritarian leadership, its insurrectionism, and its lack of a working class strategy. Lomnitz writes that merely discussing the ideological differences between anarchists and socialists doesn’t explain the developments that took place in the relations among the Mexican and American radicals, and perhaps not, but the reader surely needs that basic information and understanding, even it is supplemented by other material regarding the milieu and the cultures in which it existed.

When Lomnitz does occasionally venture into political analysis, for example in a short section titled “Revolutionary Theory” (pp. 329-335) he ends up giving us another short historiographical essay (such as we had in the introduction) and then a few paragraphs that suggest that the Magonistas failed “…either because they had insufficient local ties or because leaders who did have ties were often compelled to subordinate their ideals to the practical desires and requirements of local factions and so became vulnerable to accusations of treason from Ricardo, back in Los Angeles” (p. 335). While there may be some truth in this, one would hardly call this a discussion of “revolutionary theory.” There is no discussion of social classes, political organizations, revolutionary strategy, or plans for governance. This book, rich in so many things, is poor in politics.

If this book were a body of water, it would be a Mississippi, a great meandering river, twisting and turning through the land, at flood carrying everything with it, depositing all the soil and debris, the flotsam and jetsam of a season into the Gulf of Mexico. And if we travel with Lomnitz on his raft down that river, we get a tremendous ride, see many sights, meet a good number of interesting people along the way, but never get up on a hill, never have an overview that allows us to understand what it all means. We can see why he loves the river, but not how the river shapes history.

[1] I have been working for about twenty years on a history of the Mexican Revolution and its influence on the American left between about 1900 and 1930 and have also been intrigued, absorbed, and sometimes bewitched by the Flores Magón group and their American allies.

[2] Juan Gómez Quiñones, Sembradores: Ricardo Flores Magón y el Partido Liberal Mexicano: A Eulogy and Critique (1971).

[3] Transnational studies of this period include: W. Dirk Ratt, Los Revoltosos: Mexican Rebels in the United States, 1903-1923 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981); Javier Parés, La Revolución sin frontera (Mexico: UNAM, 1990); Colin M. MacLachlan, Anarchism and the Mexican Revolution: The Political Trials of Ricardo Flores Magón in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism an the Plan of San Diego, 1904-1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).

[4] The best known individual and collective biographies are: Diego Abad de Santillán, Ricardo Flores Magón (Mexico, D.F.: Grupo Cultural “Ricardo Flores Magón,” 1925); Ethel Duffy Turner, Ricardo Flores Magón y el Partido Liberal Mexicano (Morelia, Michoacán: Editorial Erandi del Gobierno del Estado, 1960); James D. Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1913 (Austin: University of Texas, 1971). Transnational studies are: W. Dirk Ratt, Los Revoltosos: Mexican Rebels in the United States, 1903-1923 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981); Linda B. Hall and Don M. Coerver, Revolution on the Border: The United States and Mexico, 1910-1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988); Javier Parés, La Revolución sin frontera (Mexico: UNAM, 1990); Colin M. MacLachlan, Anarchism and the Mexican Revolution: The Political Trials of Ricardo Flores Magón in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904-1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).

[5] Lowell Blaisdell, The Desert Revolution: Baja California, 1911 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962); Lawrence Douglas Taylor, La campaña magonista de 1911 en Baja California (Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1992) and La gran aventura en Mésico (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1993), two vols.

[6] Fernando Zertuche Muñoz, Ricardo Flores Magón: El sueño alternativo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), p. 85.

July 7, 2014
Monsters and a Critique of Everyday Neoliberalism:

[This is part two of an interview with scholar-activist David McNally on the current economic crisis. The first part focused on the crisis itself, its causes, the way in which working life has been reorganized, the perspective of ruling elites in managing the crisis and pursuing austerity policies, and how this should help inform our stance as movement activists.

This second part will concentrate on McNally’s book, Monsters of the Market, asking why the monstrous has captured popular culture. This will lead us into a critique of everyday life under neoliberal capitalism, discussing how the experience of waged labor has created an affinity for monster stories, particularly zombies, vampires, and Frankenstein’s monster. The second part ends with McNally’s thoughts on building a renewed socialism-from-below.—AS]

Tessa Echeverria: It’s of course important to understand how capitalism works and how the current crisis came to be in order to use that information to mobilize our social movements in a forward trajectory and not just see it as crazy people instituting this plan that’s not good for the economy. I was hoping we could transition into talking about Monsters of the Market. In the introduction, you talk about how people say capitalism is a monstrous system and that’s what we’re up against, but we need to recognize the real monstrosities that capitalism has brought about and the way it forces us to live under the system every day. I was wondering if you could go into why you wrote the book—tell us why you thought this was an important book and what was your process?

David McNally: It’s interesting because we’ve been starting, I think appropriately, from the economic side of the equation in terms of the most basic thing that people talk about in their lives: paying the bills, paying the rent, paying the mortgage, can they find a few more hours of work and so on. But there’s a danger in that, and I say that as somebody who writes a lot in the area of political economy. There’s a danger that we don’t pay attention to so many other dimensions of experience in a capitalist society. Here I think the image of monsters and monstrosity is really important.

There is something very unsettling about what goes on in modern society. We’ve created a society in which the mass of humankind is dispossessed of land and any other means of making a living except to go out onto the market and sell your capacity to work to an employer. That experience is one that I don’t think we reflect on much, and I think it’s a problem. It has become so normalized. We treat it as such a natural fact of life that we often forget that you can’t sell your ability to work, your creative energy, your talents and so on, without physically turning yourself over as well.

On one level we all know this: whether you punch a time clock at a factory or you log on to a computer as soon as you get to work to indicate that you’re present the fact is that there is a rigid, orchestrated routine for most of us governing hours of work: when we get breaks, what kind of communication we can and cannot have with our coworkers, with management, never mind with our loved ones and so on. Literally we surrender control over our body and our wills for a significant part of our waking lives.

Of course we always try to steal a little bit of that back: sneak off and email someone or send a text message, or whatever. But the truth is that most of our time we are doing something that we don’t think of as living. We think that our lives begin when we leave work. That’s why we get all those expressions, like referring to work as “dead time,” for instance.

What a remarkable expression to think of a part of our lives as if we are living dead! And of course the living dead is the classic image of the zombie. My own view is that one of the things that’s happened under neoliberalism, that the power of employers over workers has become so significantly greater as a result of the defeat of unions, the reorganization of work on shop floors and the basic restructuring of labor that’s gone on, that we are in fact more dominated than ever before. We are generally more sped up and stressed in our work than ever before.

The idea of being a living dead, and very often feeling “zombie-fied,” as we leave work and all we’re good for is opening up a beer, having a bite to eat and watching some mind-deadening stuff on our laptops or what have you, all of that I think is part of the social-cultural reality of what it feels like day after day when we’re working. Your life energies are stolen from you. They’re taken; they’re appropriated by somebody else who treats you simply as a means to an end, which is the profitability of their firm in whatever good or service it is that they’re producing.

I think that within our culture there is a very deep hostility, but worse often after a very deep depression, about that reality. Part of what’s happening with the proliferation of zombie images in our culture is self-recognition in the zombie. There’s recognition that a lot of the times we shuffle around like the slow moving creatures: awkward, kind of ugly, not looking very uplifting. In some ways the zombie captures a part of our lives that we don’t like to talk about. One of the things that I was trying to do in Monsters of the Market was to really reflect on the ways in which our popular culture is saturated with these images.

Having said that I think that too often in the Hollywood and the North American genre of the zombie we’ve lost what was once at the heart of it, literally, when the zombie image originated in Haiti. We’ve lost the image of the zombie laborer. That’s what the Haitian image was about, living dead laborers for others. For a whole variety of historical reasons, Hollywood has fallen in love and the mass media in North America has fallen in love with the zombie consumer. You see it even in the idea of zombies as flesh eaters. That’s very new imagery, which probably goes back to George E. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which was one of the most powerful critical uses of the zombie as flesh eater. Interestingly, Romero didn’t think they were zombies! They only got called that later. That idea that something monstrous where our life energy is captured and we are turned into something less than fully human is I think part of the story.

The other side of it, and the one that is very interesting, and one I think some of the best treatments of zombies sometimes get at, is the idea that the zombies might wake up. This is a central part of the Haitian story of the zombie, and the Haitian image is sometimes picked up in sub-Saharan Africa as well. Zombies can awaken.

Zombies most of the time lack memory, they lack identity and subjectivity, but under certain conditions they awake. This is the image of the zombie rebellion. The carnival of the living dead, who all of a sudden maraud through the streets, scaring polite society and showing them in some ways that those who’ve been downtrodden, those who’ve been zombie-fied and monsterized by this system actually have a monstrous power. Once they get it together, they can use that power in carnivals of revolt, insurrection, and rebellion. There’s one really nice film from the 1990s by Wes Craven called The People Under the Stairs that really gets that image of the zombie revolt.

There’s also a story of zombies coming up against big business, the bankers. The real zombies are those in life who have no purpose in life except to exploit others for ever swelling amounts of money in bank accounts somewhere. The zombie image can therefore be turned around or inverted to one in which we are criticizing zombie capitalism as a system on life support by governments, pumping trillions of dollars into keeping a certain kind of necropheliac capitalism going and sucking our life energies to do it. The Monsters of the Market is how we all experience being zombie-fied in some ways when we become workers in a capitalist society and live at least part of our lives as the living dead. There are these other sides, the potentially radical usages of the zombie images where zombies awaken, recognize who they are, they come to a capacity for action in their society against those who are a different kind of zombie, another living dead.

Andrew Sernatinger: Everyone I’ve talked to that’s seen or heard about this book has already been fascinated by it, and I think that’s a remarkable success. Here we just had this fantastic conversation about Global Slump, which I think is probably one of the best books about the crisis that I’ve read, but for a lot of people looking at that sort of political economy is intimidating. But then here you have something that seems almost fun and subversive in this way that everybody can relate to. Everyone has a story or something they want to talk about with the mythology of zombies and vampires and things like that. It’s a brilliant delivery on that.

It’s really interesting that you talk about the different ways that the zombie myth has been deployed because we’re so used to thinking of the zombie as something you don’t want to be or that you try to escape from. You’re right that there is this kind of small current about the zombie that becomes awakened and transcends being a zombie. You brought up a Wes Craven movie, but even George Romero in Land of the Dead has that same zombie rebellion sequence. People have a discomfort about it, but then you can only take the zombie idea so far before it has to have a resolution. The rebellion motif is one of the places people have taken it to.

To some extent, the fascination with the zombie myth has changed with the arrival of this crisis and slump. The perception isn’t about alienation as much as it is about survival, it seems. Here you are against a wave of people and you’re competing for your spot. Literally, the alternative is death. That seems to be something that’s really gripped the popular imagination.

DM: Yes. I basically wrote the book before the explosion of what I would call the “Zombie Apocalypse” idiom that you’re describing there and I think it’s very powerful and I’ll come back to that in a moment.

On your first point, I think that one of the things that we need to be very careful about on the left is that we are able to talk about the quality of every day experience. Sometimes as huge as issues like employment, wages and so on are, the danger is that those of us on the socialist left may seem to project the idea that all we want is a society with full employment and better pay. Of course I want full employment and better pay, but that can be appropriated to the mythology of perfect full employment capitalism. We wouldn’t be addressing alienated labor, the degradation of work, the fabric of our daily lives, and the exhaustion of people by mundane, boring, incredibly dreary and tedious labor processes without any diversity or creativity to them.

One of the nice things about coming into this discussions about monsters and zombies and vampires is its one of the ways in which we do get to talk about what daily life experience is like being at work or searching for work in our society. It forces us to think if we really want to imagine a better society then full employment and better wages aren’t enough! We’ve got to be talking about the very qualitative features of everyday life, the fabric of social existence, the question of human creativity, of dis-alienating labor, of finding entirely different rhythms of work and life.

Those are the kinds of discussions—particularly in a period where we’ve been retreating all the time—that we’re not even having in a serious way in left circles. And yet in my experience if you really want to get across to people the idea of a socialist alternative to how our society operates, one of the things that is most attractive and captivating is the idea that we’re talking about changing the very rhythms, the sensuous fabric of everyday life and creativity. That’s one of the things that I’ve enjoyed about some of the conversations that the book has opened up.

I think you’re entirely right on your point about the zombie apocalypse. The zombie was there as this incredibly adaptable image that when the crisis hit there was the idea that we could in fact be moving into a stage of capitalism where—forget all these stories about technological progress, which are the old fantasies of ever expanding capitalism—we could be in a meat grinder of a system! It could just chew things up as it rots; as cities rot; as disease spreads; as hordes of homeless people simply move about the land looking for a place to live.

All of those are just extrapolations of some of the trends of this crisis. The zombie image was highly resonant with that perception. It can also then get married to a certain kind of deeply conservative survivalism. I would suggest that a lot of that is going on in the very popular series The Walking Dead. If you go through the roles played by actors of color in that series it seems to me that you see a certain kind of white survivalism that runs through.

It’s important therefore to think about how we discuss and analyze why these kinds of images have such powers of attraction: there is something that people really do identify with in the collapse of civilization image, there is a sense that the growth phase of capitalism seems to have disappeared. That’s important to connect with. But at the same time, if collective responses designed to remake the world in radically new ways just don’t seem to be out there then the survivalist mode can kick in. Here I think that Frederick Jameson’s pithy little comment tells us an enormous amount: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” I think that’s what we’re seeing in these zombie apocalypse stories and scenarios: civilization is collapsing, but all kinds of capitalist modes of survival in the most elemental and brutal sense start to fill the void; you just beat your competitors into the ground. It’s a scenario in which collective solutions to remaking the world tend to disappear. That’s why I think the zombie rebellion idiom becomes really important in a political and historical moment like this. That’s a subversive side.

There are these little events, the “Zombie Marches,” that you get in a number of cities, that I think are really interesting because zombie marches increasingly have all these financial and capitalist symbolism about them. At the last zombie march in Toronto, I would say half of the zombie marchers had dollar bills pasted all over them and that sort of thing. That way of turning the imagery and talking about capitalism as the living dead system, the idea of zombies who are actually breaking through it, is something that is very difficult to sustain right now but has really huge creative possibilities. I find people responding to some of the better zombie rebellion type images really interesting in that regard.

AS: One of the things that we like about this discussion about why people are taken with zombies is because it is in a way difficult to grasp everything that’s been happening. But I think you made the point in Monsters that the popular imagination can explain things in capitalism sometimes only through the fantastical. When things like crises happen, sometimes only the monstrous can really describe it. And that is something that Marx gets to also.

The zombie wasn’t really around when Marx was writing Capital, but Capital is full of all kinds of allusions to vampires and monsters, how there’s a life-force sucking energy in capitalism. On the one hand I think that it’s really interesting that you have to engage with this mythology and that it seems like even Marx was very aware of deploying popular mythology or creating a literary element to his analysis of capitalism. Also the vampire is the counterpart to the zombie in nearly the opposite way.

DM: There’s no question about it. One of the things I really enjoyed about working on the book was exploring and recuperating what Marx was doing with those monster images. People often talk about Marx’s political economy writings as so difficult and intimidating, and of course Capital is a big fat book and the opening chapters are just full of new concepts, dizzyingly so.

One of the things that we sometimes forget is that Marx was struggling to find a language with which he could express what was going on in capitalism. The existing theoretical languages (philosophy, political economy) that he had really weren’t fully serviceable. He tried to use them to the extent that he could, but once he gets to the chapters on the working day and what it feels like to be in a factory, or his chapter on machinery and what that is like, Marx has got the whole Charlie Chaplin Modern Times-thing right there! The worker becomes a cog in the machinery; the machinery drives the worker.

But how does he express it? Chaplin can do it in a filmic way, with these incredibly powerful visual images, but Marx has to generate the imagery through the word. I find it just fascinating the way that he returns over and over to the vampire as an image: the vampire who will not let go until every bit of blood has been sucked dry from the worker. He also returns to the image of giants. He’s got the factory and machinery as Cyclops at one point. Production is just so overwhelming in the massiveness of the operation that the worker is reduced to mere insignificance in relationship to it.

I really find it interesting the way in which he’s struggling to bring together all these narrative strategies: yes he’s using some philosophy; he’s using some political economy; but Shakespeare is in there! Faust is in there! Vampires are in there! When he hits the limits of some of the existing theoretical discourse of his day, he goes for the only thing that he can imagine can convey what he’s trying to describe, which is a whole series of literary images. I think we need to appreciate that aspect of Marx.

In all the ways we think about rebuilding a radical left culture today, we need to put a much greater emphasis on the literary and the cultural as ways of communicating or expressing what it is we’re trying to say in our society. There’s a danger that we become kind of monotonal: we get a certain left discourse that was honed in a particular historical period and we imagine that that discourse and its vocabulary has magical effects because once upon a time the masses mobilized behind those images and that rhetoric. Well, if they’re still effective and there are ways that they still speak to people, that’s fine. But we need to be honest about the cultural transformations that go on in our society and I think it’s important to find the resources within popular culture, in film and literature and so on, that allow us to communicate these sorts of things. That’s why I loved your example from Romero’s Land of the Dead, where there are fascinating scenes where zombies are learning to use weapons! It’s not true that they can’t learn, that they’re uneducable. There’s a learning process happening. There is the de-zombification happening, or what I was calling the “zombie awakening.” I find it’s really interesting the kind of discussions you can get into about our society by using those kinds of cultural reference points as well as the political economy that we absolutely need, as well as the historical understanding. That’s what I mean by not being monotonal: we can draw upon a lot of different languages, visual and imagistic systems to communicate what is going on in our society and how it could be different.

TE: I wanted to go into vampires a little more. We’ve talked about how zombies have changed in their cultural significance and how they’ve fit into a various stories as capitalism has changed. Talking about vampires the same way, vampires of old were Dracula or Nosferatu; they were terrifying, evil creatures that destroyed every life force around them. Nowadays vampires are majestic and something to aspire to be, instead of something to fear. I was wondering if you could go into this development a bit.

DM: If we go back to Bram Stoker’s original Dracula story, it’s an aristocratic image to begin with. It’s deeply parasitic and frightening: these vampires do you damage! What we’ve got today is this fascinating romanticization of the vampire. One of my hunches is that, of course, in all kinds of ways the vampire image has lots of different sexual overtones expressed in different cultural artifacts. It particularly speaks to young people discovering their sexuality, and that’s part of what’s there.

But I find the analyses that only get that far to be a little superficial. I say that because it seems to me that part of the resurgence of the romanticized vampire actually is a kind of anti-alienation theme. It’s speaking to a society in which people feel incredibly atomized, incredibly dissociated from each other; the sense that social connection is at an all-time low. Communities and their resources have been so eroded in the neoliberal era.

The idea of isolated, self-sufficiency and everything that’s really unsettling and disquieting about that is also running through that image. At the most powerful level, the vampire is an image of incredible closeness. Literally bodies become interconnected in the most intimate ways, and I think that’s picked up again in the mobilization of vampire tropes as love stories, stories of closeness, passion, and belonging; the idea of being infinitely desired and inseparable from others. Sure, we can see various gendered tropes at work there that we’d want to be aware of and critical towards, but just as I was saying before we need to see what it is about the zombie apocalypse image that really is speaking to people’s fears, so I think we need to see the romantic vampire as speaking to the really frightening sense of aloneness that is so pervasive in our society. We need to understand that the desire for an escape from other isolation is something that good politics and social movements of the left ought to be able to speak to.

There’s a cultural barometer, a kind of reading of the social temperature of our times that we need to do there. All of this is speaking to the huge amount of experience of everyday life. Very often, saying in public something like, “My profound sense of aloneness is really frightening and it scares me”—that’s not something that people do very readily! Those films or novels that capture this particular construction of the vampire I think give people permission to recognize those feelings and then have a fantasy-based projection of a world where they would be desired, where they would belong, they would have togetherness and communion with others. Seeing that side of it, I find it to be really significant.

AS: One of the things I like about these discussions is that there is no singular “correct” answer when you’re analyzing culture. There’s a lot of room for thinking about all of the different things at work here and trying to pin down what people are really concerned about.

Part of the reason why we brought this up is because we have these conversations from time to time where, for example, there are progressive institutions and all of their social funding has dried up. Now they’re talking about the need for patrons, essentially, where some wealthy donor will hold up their progressive ideal. I almost see that in the new vampire: the vampire is the image of power, and if someone needs to be lifted out of their situation they can get this vampire-patron, who’s a “good vampire” that helps them out. To me, it doesn’t have to take away from what you were saying before, I think it speaks to a sense that the way to get out of working class life is that you’re lifted out externally.

DM: I think you’re absolutely right. It connects back to something that is the flipside of the aristocrat image. The aristocrat is a dangerous individual in the Bram Stoker story, but on the other hand the aristocrat is not capitalist. Aristocrats operate according to a different social and cultural code, and one of the characteristics of that code—and I think you’ve nailed it in that description—is noblesse oblige. You have patrons, people upon who you confer some of your wealth and beneficence. I think the fantasy for that, as you say the idea of someone who will rescue us from the fears, the dreariness of a life of wage labor is also probably part of that story in wages that deserve to be thought more about. So yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.

TE: I just love the story of Frankenstein and you mention it in Monsters of the Market. I was hoping you could go into the significance of that quintessential monster story. We talked earlier about how with wage labor, you’re selling your body and giving up so much of yourself—talk about how that plays out in the story of Frankenstein.

DM: It’s such a wonderful story and it’s a shame that people often know the story largely through later adaptations through film and elsewhere and in some ways don’t get to appreciate what an interesting novel Mary Shelley wrote. In the early nineteenth century, Shelley created that whole resonant set of images of the creature and of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and all the interactions that the two have with each other.

The context is really interesting. Among other things, Mary Shelley is the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the writer of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the original modern feminist texts of the late eighteenth century. At the time of the French Revolution and its slogan of the rights of man, she wrote on the question of the rights of women. Then Shelley marries the great radical left poet, Percy Shelley. In conversation with others, Mary Shelley is exposed regularly to discussions around the so-called “Luddite Riots” in Britain in the period 1813-1820.

These rioters, machine wreckers, were basically poor workers across the small industrial towns of Britain who, when they were going to be displaced by various pieces of machinery for spinning and weaving, would show up at night under cover of darkness and burn down the mills or smash the machines. They were being hugely persecuted: they were being arrested and hanged and so on for their crimes against property. The circle of friends that Mary Shelley ran in was opposed to this treatment of poorer people who were trying to preserve their livelihoods.

What she does is incredibly interesting. She has her isolated scientist, Victor Frankenstein, decide he wants to create a living creature. How does he do it? He raids graveyards. He goes and gets pieces of human body parts and he melds them together with animal body parts. This was a constant theme for the working class in London at the time, because corpses were regularly raided from graveyards. Really only the corpses of the poor because the rich were buying these heavy lead vaults that couldn’t be blasted open. The bodies of the poor were just being stolen from graveyards and sold for medical or anatomical experiments. This spoke to a working class fear that even in death your body could be chopped up and turned into a bunch of saleable commodities. Bad enough in life that you’d have to sell your body to survive, but then to have it chopped up in death was the ultimate indignity.

Mary Shelley is picking up on that to begin with. But also, she’s imaging the proletariat, imaging the working class, in this notion of grabbing different bits and pieces of random, disparate individuals and cobbling them altogether. Well, that’s what happens when you go to the factory! That’s what happens when you go to the mill or the mine. Bunches of people who have had no previous human contact with one another all of a sudden are thrown together as one creature, one entity: the workforce. She’s imaging all of that and depicting all of it in the construction of this creature, the working class, by this one individual, Dr. Frankenstein.

I find all of that just incredibly powerful in the way in which it’s depicting both anxiety about grave robbing that workers have—their bodily integrity was regularly being assaulted, and here was the worst possible imaginable result that they even get you as you lay in your grave—and also this idea of being thrown together and becoming one monstrous mass, an enormous creature capable of feats beyond what any one individual could do. Of course, that’s what we are like when we’re all assembled together in a workplace: we can do things that no one of us could do on our own, in terms of the amount of Big Macs we can produce or the amount of automobiles we can produce.

Contrary to the way in which Hollywood later turns the creature into a slow shuffling zombie without the capacity to speak, particularly in the Boris Karloff movies, that’s not there in Shelley. What’s so fascinating is that once the creature rebels and heads out on his own, he moves through the world quickly, but more than that: he learns to read! There is this amazing set of scenes where the creature sits outside the cottage of a poor family, one of whose young men has married what I can only describe as an Arab feminist. This is a literate, Arab woman and she reads to him the most radical, revolutionary tract of the day by a guy named Volney called The Ruins. It’s about how humanity began in Africa, and it’s still considered by Africanists to be one of the greatest anti-racist texts ever written. So you’ve got an anti-racist theme, a feminist theme, and a working class theme all running through this novel. This is how the creature learns to speak. He learns by hearing an Arab feminist read the greatest revolutionary tract perhaps of the late 1790s or early 1800s.

Then of course, we know that it has to culminate in a great conflict between the inventor and the creature, the monster that the inventor has created. We get an ending that leaves everything hanging: we don’t really know where things lie. We know that Victor Frankenstein has died and the monster has disappeared. The creature has won a victory, it wanted Frankenstein’s death for the murders he committed, but at the same time it’s unclear whether the creature has killed himself or if he will live to rise another day.

This to me is one of the most powerful literary imaginings of how capitalism brings into being a monstrous creature that could be its own undoing. What I really am attracted to is that this is not a zombie. The creature learns to read and what it craves throughout the whole story is communion and association; it wants a partner. Victor Frankenstein’s crime is that the creature wanted a partner. Frankenstein started to create it, and then he killed the female companion he was making for the creature out of the fear that a new race of creatures would be bred. Well, if that isn’t the capitalist class’s great fear of the multiplying masses of the proletariat, of the working classes, I don’t know what is.

There’s so much happening here. This is in my mind the original monster story about capitalism, but also the one that leaves open the idea that this monstrous creature of the working class might just be capable of educating itself; might just be capable of putting an end to this insane, alienating society; it might just be capable of starting something different. But that’s left as a question mark. We’re dangling and there are no easy answers. In some ways of course that is very attractive to me, because if the left ought to have learned anything in the nearly 200 years since Mary Shelley wrote that text, it’s that there are no easy answers. Nevertheless, there are huge and explosive tensions in this society that she just captures so wonderfully.

AS: That’s a good place to finish with a conversation about the left. You’re talking about, in the literary sense, an antagonism within capitalism but at the same time an uncertainty about capitalism being overcome. We wanted to talk to you a little bit about your thoughts on the left right now, because as far as I’m aware you’ve written a couple of essays but it’s something you haven’t commented very much on recently. Maybe you want to start by telling us a little bit about your history on the left?

DM: I was in university in the United States and I focused quite a lot on anti-racist and anti-war activism, particularly with the Committee to Free Angela Davis. When I later returned to Toronto for family reasons, there was a kind of radical leftwing that had just emerged in the social democratic party in Canada, the New Democrats. That left wing split off from the New Democratic Party and tried to launch a new kind of radical left party, and I joined it in my teens because it was the one place I could see a left group that actually had really significant working class membership: nurses, steelworkers, teachers, autoworkers and so on. That particular group, known ironically as The Waffle, self-destructed in the mid-1970s and a handful of us had gotten attracted to the “Socialism From Below” politics of the International Socialist groupings at the time. We found that much of what they were trying to do, particularly the rank-and-file labor organizing but also a rank-and-file organizing that was very open in terms of the feminist and anti-racist dimensions of that work; we found that very attractive.

I became a founding member of what became the International Socialist group here in Canada. I put a lot of years into trying to do activism in that guise. For a whole variety of reasons, that International Socialist current began, I think, to politically degenerate in the later 1970s: it became increasingly bureaucratic, increasingly fundamentalist in the sense of “we have the truth” and we don’t need to ask any questions, and increasingly intolerant to feminism and anti-racism. This eventually, in the early 1990s, drove a bunch of us out and into the political wilderness. We then were involved in creating the New Socialist Group.

That organization continues today, and what really distinguishes it is that it begins from the premise that first we have lived through a period of the decomposition of the radical left of a previous era. That historic left in virtually all of its forms is effectively over: the social democratic, the Communist Parties, but also the far left versions. That history is basically done, not in the sense that we don’t need to learn from it, but in the sense that I don’t believe those organizations can be the basis for the next new left. Therefore, we need to be thinking about a longer-term process of recomposing the left. That is going to mean a process of socialist renewal in which the socialism that we develop is completely transformed by and shot through with the lessons of theory and practice from the queer movements, the socialist feminists, the most important strands of anti-racist and anti-colonial politics (in Canada of course this means of indigenous liberation politics), and also of eco-socialism.

Yes, there are very important inheritances from the past. As you can tell, Marx remains central to me for how I think about the world in which we live, but it’s got to be a renewed, extended, developed socialism for the twenty-first century that is going to have a lot of new and unique characteristics that I think are informed by radical participatory democracy, more so than any left we have seen up until now. That’s a big challenge to think about recomposing and renewing the left in those terms and breaking from all the vanguardism of little grouplets that think they are the center of a next left composition. They’re not. If they’re healthy, even semi-healthy, they’ll have a role to play but it’s going to be something very different.

Of course, it all presupposes a return of large-scale social movements: movements that can produce tens of thousands and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. As we get that, just like the last new left, people are going to look for different kinds of socialist traditions and approaches that can allow them not to have to reinvent the wheel. So the work of small circles and collectives of activists today who are trying to think about what resources can we help preserve and develop for a new left will be really very important. That was true of the last new left, for good and for ill. Having a sense of what ailed the last left, and in particular the small group party-building projects, is important. They can produce fanatical energy, but they all hit a wall because that model has inherent limits. It doesn’t matter if the group grew to a few thousand, as some of them got in France or Britain, because none of them proved capable of moving beyond that and most of them have disintegrated in one way or another since then.

That’s a very daunting process, but it’s nevertheless something that is our responsibility today. Those like me, and I think of myself as a 1970s radical, I think we have a responsibility to try to preserve and develop a kind of living tradition which has some roots in what we think has been best about past lefts but also a very high allergy to those sectarianized tendencies that did great damage to the last left. Yes, we need organization, that’s absolutely true, but the organizational forms will be different, they will (I hope) be more open, democratic, participatory and thoroughly feminist, pro-queer, and anti-racist in ways in which our spaces weren’t in the last left. It’s a big task, but the truth of the matter is we’re talking about what small groups, circles, collectives, networks and so on can do now just by way of trying to provide some resources for the next left. Those resources will get inherited, edited, deleted, transformed, and re-worked and so on by real social forces and real social movements.

But it is important that democratic, from-below socialist politics be out there and be available, because one of the problems is that neoliberalism also destroys historical memory. The sense that we have certain continuities that are precious to us and that go back to the great past struggles that people have waged, these are a part of our history, they’re a part of our heritage and we need to make them part of our memory, but in that open-ended way that we know we’re reworking the left and not trying to mimic and repeat as if that could be something good. That’s where I see the kind of task that I’m involved with, with New Socialist in Toronto, but also just staying in touch with all the currents and people I can. We need one another, we need dialog, and we need ways of exchanging experiences and reflecting together. If history has taught us anything, of course mass struggles will emerge again but we can never predict how. When they do, we could have kept resources that will be absolutely precious to the next left.

Andrew Sernatinger and Tessa Echeverria are socialists based out of Madison, Wisconsin. They produce the podcast Black Sheep, available at www.blacksheeppod.org, where the audio of this interview was first aired.

David McNally is a scholar-activist based in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance and Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism.

July 4, 2014
Global Slump & the New Normal

[It’s been nearly seven years since the onset of the global economic crisis that began in 2007. In order to get an understanding of the crisis—of its origins, depth, and trajectory, we spoke with David McNally, activist, political economist, and author of Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (2010) and more recently Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2012). For readability’s sake, we have broken this interview into two parts. This first part focuses on the crisis itself, its causes, the way in which working life has been reorganized, the perspective of ruling elites in managing the crisis and pursuing austerity policies, and how this should help inform our stance as movement activists.

Part two will concentrate on Monsters of the Market, asking why the monstrous has captured popular culture. This will lead us into a critique of everyday life under neoliberal capitalism, discussing how the experience of waged labor has created an affinity for monster stories, particularly zombies, vampires, and Frankenstein’s Monster. The second part ends with McNally’s thoughts on building a renewed socialism-from-below.—AS]

Tessa Echeverria: Let’s start by talking about the history of the crisis that we’re in now, neoliberalism and how capitalist states responded to the meltdown that began around 2007. Could you give us a quick rundown of how the crisis came to be and how that relates to the recent history of capitalism?

David McNally: I see this as the fourth great slump in the history of global capitalism. The last quarter century or so of the nineteenth century was the first slump, the original “Great Depression” where the term was first used. It began in 1893 and ran for about 25 years. Then, of course, for most of us raised on 20^th century history, there was the Depression of the 1930s, which was actually the second of the great slumps. That was followed by the slump in which I came into political activism, the crisis of the 1970s running more or less from 1971 to 1982. And then neoliberalism and the way it reorganized and restructured work, corporate power and so on, managed to engineer another wave of capitalist expansion, which really was exhausted by about 2007 when we entered the fourth of these great slumps. We’re in year seven or so of this slump, with, I would argue, no end in sight.

That’s just to get us situated historically. Now of course, every great slump has its unique historical features. They show all kinds of different characteristics having to do with the ways in which capitalism has evolved and in our case particularly how it has globalized, much more so than in any time in its history. There is also the specific role of the financial sector, and the very esoteric financial kinds of transactions that have been a feature of the neoliberal era of the last thirty years or so.

You put those two features together, globalization and financialization, and it allows us to make sense of why it was that a crisis that began in the U.S. real estate sector, probably in 2006/early 2007, then became a full-fledged financial crisis. That has to do with all of these mortgage-based securities that financial institutions were trading back and forth and selling to investors and speculators globally. It explains why the crisis so quickly globalized, because banks in Spain and banks in Scotland and so on were all holding these mortgage-based assets. I say all of that to give us a wider historical perspective: this is the fourth of these great slumps and they tend to last anywhere from slightly over a decade, as the one of the 1970s and early 1980s did, up to a quarter of a century, twenty-five years or so, as the first one in the nineteenth century. But also to point out that each of these has unique features.

That doesn’t mean that there are not some basic consistencies at work. I would argue that consistently in any economy geared for competition between private owners for sales and for profit you are going to get manic waves of investment where capitalists all try and purchase the latest state of the art technologies that they think will give them an edge in producing the same good or service more quickly. And so computers were used for all of these “just-in-time” production and delivery systems and the like. As long as capitalists are doing that and also trying to corner their markets, at some point they inevitably build more state-of-the-art steel mills and auto factories, build more shopping malls and apartment blocks, build more housing and aircraft than anybody out there can profitably use in a capitalist society. Those crises, which I think can be correctly described as overinvestment and over-accumulation crises, then take some time to get resolved.

The irony is that the way in which the world central banks responsible to governments intervened to try and stop the financial crisis is I believe stretching out the whole crisis that we’re looking at. When banks the world over started to collapse, central bankers, usually at the direction of governments, did what they did not do in the 1930s: in the 1930s they were so taken with their free market ideology that they thought they had to let the banks go down and let the market mechanism automatically correct itself. What they discovered was they had no idea where the bottom was! 1930 was worse than 1929, 1931 was worse again, all the way to 1933 at which point some governments, particularly the United States, began to try to counter the effects of the crisis by using government spending and banking policies.

But they learned that that huge collapse from 1929 to 1933 was catastrophic, both economically for capitalism but also socially and politically. This time, governments intervened massively. They did it basically by saying to the banks, “Give us all the toxic assets that you own, give us all the junk, the mortgage-backed securities that are worth nothing; the collateralized debt obligations that are worth ten cents on the dollar of what you paid. You give us that stuff, and we will give you back central bank money, the best stuff out there for investing, buying, and selling; the best paper that can be used for any financial interaction. We’ll give you dollar bills for junk.”

They threw the first few trillion into the system and that didn’t solve the crisis. They threw some trillions more, and by my reckoning at least $28 or $29 trillion dollars got thrown into the banking system and a little bit into fiscal stimulus programs of the Bush-Obama variety in the United States. Now to give you an idea of what that means, because I suspect you, like me, have never seen $28 or $29 trillion, that’s more than the value of all the goods and services that the U.S. economy produces in two years. In other words, the equivalent of taking more than two times the U.S. gross domestic product and giving it to the banks. Big surprise: that stopped the banking crisis!

As a result, that part of the crisis is over. Literally, there was no limit: they would just keep bailing out until the banks were stabilized. The problem is that they not only massively injected money into the banks, but they also effectively made the rate of borrowing money free! They made interest rates effectively zero for banks and prime corporate borrowers. What that has meant ironically is that the businesses that would otherwise have collapsed were either bailed out, think General Motors or Chrysler (which were directly bailed out by governments in the United States and Canada), or they were tacitly bailed out by being able to go to the bank and borrow with nearly zero interest attached. Essentially that free money has kept all sorts of businesses afloat.

I say it’s ironic because in order for capitalism to get back on its feet it needs to get rid of all the excess capital or excess businesses that are out there; all the over-accumulated, over-invested state of affairs. They do that by corporate bankruptcies.

In the 1970s and 1980s in the United States that is what happened: all kinds of steel corporations went out of business for instance. But we haven’t seen that because money has been effectively free. So we’re in the fourth great slump in the history of world capitalism, a massive intervention by central banks stopped a banking crisis, but by making money effectively free they’ve also blocked capitalism’s own perverse mechanism for getting back on its feet. You bankrupt the least efficient, least productive, least profitable companies, and you let the most efficient, most productive and most profitable take over their markets so that they can now start to expand and invest again.

You have a bailed out capitalism where the banks aren’t collapsing, but where there’s effectively something close to zero new investment by businesses. There’s this long, high unemployment, very low growth rates and so on. Capitalism needs a wave of bankruptcies to really get back to vigorous growth, but central bankers are worried that in an environment of high unemployment it would have politically damaging effects to see a lot of businesses go under. And maybe some of those companies, if they go under and can’t pay back their loans, will start yet another banking crisis. That’s why I’ve been saying since early on in the crisis that I expect this to be one of those longer kinds of crises, easily ten years, perhaps significantly longer than that.

TE: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how this is more of a global slump than a short-term or localized “crisis.”

DM: Let me start with the first part of that on how global this crisis has been, because of course early on the claim was, “It’s just a U.S. crisis.” And when Europe was tanking within a matter of months, they said, “It’s just a crisis in the Global North, the South is vigorous. China, Brazil, and India are going to keep the whole system ticking over.” And of course in the last while, it’s been clear that there are big problems in those parts of the Global South as well.

This doesn’t detract from the fact that there are uneven rhythms to a global crisis—a crisis does in fact have to start somewhere. But if it were only a local crisis, then you would expect just an individual economy, or a couple of regionally connected economies, to go through a crisis. We’ve had crises like that: in 1997 there was the so-called “East Asian Crisis,” which didn’t go global. It stayed within one region of the global system.

But this was different because a long wave of neoliberal economic expansion from about 1982 to 2007 was winding down due to over-accumulation. In that context, the whole system is vulnerable. Really, everybody is on the edge because it’s just not productive to keep investing when you’ve got already a global capacity to produce 200 million tons of steel more than anybody needs, and that’s where the world is at the moment.

Once the crisis hit in the United States, it wasn’t long before it was a European crisis. Of course we now know that for a lot of interesting reasons Southern Europe was particularly vulnerable: Greece, Portugal, and Spain really stand out in that regard; Italy becomes part of that story. But not just Southern Europe, contrary to some claims: Ireland has been hit very hard and all the indications are that France is going to continue to just limp along. Those Southern European countries have unemployment rates around 50 percent for youth and about 25 percent of the workforce as a whole. That’s Great-Depression-style unemployment rates that most of Europe is experiencing right now.

Right at the start of the crisis, China introduced a much bigger stimulus program than did the combined stimulus programs of Bush and Obama in the United States. China massively invested in airports, highways, bridges, hydroelectric stations, and so on as a stimulus response to the crisis, particularly in 2008 and 2009. They were really worried about losing their export markets. That did help stabilize the system for a period of time. Therefore the stories that China, India, and Brazil would be the new growth centers were plausible.

Today, Brazil has been really sliding down for two years and all of a sudden when you read the business pages you see this incredible worry about China. They’re now talking about all the bad loans that the Chinese put out as part of their stimulus programs five years ago accumulating to a point where they don’t know if the central government can contain that crisis. The Chinese growth rate has already dropped by about a third, or 40 percent.

But it’s happened unevenly and on a stretched out timeframe, so it’s easy for people to lose the interconnections across this process and understand the way in which it is one large global slump, which I’ve referred to on some occasions as a mutating slump. It may begin in one specific sector, say real estate, and then move into the banking system, and then when the banking system is able to contain it, it moves into an unemployment crisis. Its epicenter may move geographically: if the U.S. banks are bailed out, then the pressure may fall on the European banks; if China does a massive stimulus, they may postpone the day of reckoning, and so on.

What we’re really seeing is that while the temporal rhythm is stretched out over many years, each time the crisis in one sector or one region sneaks back into other sectors and other regions. China’s turning down will now be very bad for all of those economies which export a lot to China, particularly for the huge building boom they’ve been in. All of those economies can expect to see a slowdown, which will be blamed on China’s slowdown rather than recognizing that China’s slowdown is just part of this wider pattern of a mutating slump that is changing form all the time as its center moves. It’s as if you have an illness that moves from one part of the body to another: it’s still the same organic illness at work, but it’s manifesting in different parts of the ailing organism. That’s really what we’re seeing and the organism in question here is the global economy. Different parts of it become the centers of pain or centers of distress in what is really one integrated global process.

TE: Following that, a lot of people over the past few years have talked about austerity versus neoliberalism, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the distinctions between those forces and how that plays out in this slump?

DM: I do think that this is the key to understanding why profits look so robust in the United States. The picture for corporate profits seems to defy the description I’ve given you. The understanding of austerity allows us to grasp some of the key political dimensions of this ongoing crisis.

Starting with the picture for business, when they recognized that it was not going to be possible to bail out the banks with just a few trillion dollars, the amount of debt governments around the world were going to take on was massive. Very early on, central bankers sent the message to governments that they would have to make somebody pay for the amount of debt governments were taking on to bail out the banks. The obvious candidate was the working class and poor people as a whole, who would in the first instance feel the effects of really dramatic cuts to social spending: education, healthcare, pensions, social assistance, and the like.

There the campaign has been orchestrated. We had the dubious distinction in Toronto in 2010 of having the G8 and the G20 meetings, the group of the eight largest and twenty largest global economies. They send their finance ministers, prime ministers, presidents, and so on to gather and strategize together. Prior to those meetings in 2010, there had been a phrase kicked around in the business press: “A decade of austerity.” That was the rhetoric. It was going to take a decade to turn around the results of the massive government spending to bail out the banks.

Then all of a sudden, in and around the G8 and G20 meetings in the early summer of 2010, the phrase “Age of austerity” appeared; the “decade” had been shelved. What they realized was that the scale of their intervention had been so massive, $28-$29 trillion, that there was no way they were going to pay it down and restore the kind of budgets they wanted within ten years.

But I think there was more to it than that. It was the scale of the debt, but also they recognized the political opportunity: they realized that if movements of mass austerity resistance were not going to topple governments, and that was an open question at first—it certainly looked like a possibility in the days of the Arab Spring, when governments fell in Tunisia and in Egypt—that if by and large they were not going to be swept aside by mass social protest, then they thought, “We can actually use this.” They could use the crisis long term to roll back the kind of gains that have been historically acquired going back to the 1940s or 1930s by labor and social movements.

Governments beginning in the so-called western, industrialized countries in the late 1930s made concessions to working class and social movements around unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, socialized medicine (the United States being an important exception), public education, and, critically, higher education spending—all of that could be rolled back. You could privatize sections of it; you could move towards user-pay, so that even at public universities students pay more and more of the actual cost of attendance; you could starve the publicly-funded school system so that those of the middle class and above flee towards charter schools and private schools; you could undermine the so-called safety net in such a way that you could also systematically drive down living standards.

That has unfortunately worked. The majority of people in most of the Global North are poorer today than when the crisis broke in 2008. Their standards of living have declined and profits have soared. This is one of those cases where a really basic correlation works: wages down, profits up. That is largely what has driven the profit recovery.

Here we have the paradox that corporations have been significantly restored to health thanks to austerity, but they’re not investing. The amount of cash that corporations are sitting on in the United States is around $2 trillion and in Europe it’s around €2 trillion. These are historic highs! They’re raking it in again, but because of the over-accumulation I described earlier there’s not a lot of incentive to invest.

We have a capitalism that is profitable with high unemployment. It’s a unique combination of capitalist austerity that is working in terms of profits but it is not restoring economic growth to any degree that would really resolve the jobless crisis.

Unfortunately, the power elite has discovered that they can enforce austerity to a level I think many of them did not imagine pre-crisis. I don’t think they thought they could put the boot in this hard without mass social upheaval. They’re just going to keep testing limits. So what if class sizes in Detroit will be sixty? So what if Latvia has fired one third of all of its teachers? So what if pensions have been chopped by 70 percent in Greece? This is profitable for business! This is great neoliberal austerity for governments.

As long as they expect that they can keep doing it I think they will. As a result we get the phenomenon that commentators are talking about all the time where we have some of the most extreme degrees of social inequality coexisting with an essentially stagnant global capitalism with high unemployment rates. That is the new normal. I think it will stay the new normal until there is a shift in the balance of social forces by way of the kind of upsurge of mass working class and social protest that we saw, say, in the United States in the second half of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Andrew Sernatinger: Could you talk about why having this understanding of the global political economy isn’t just something that’s abstract and “out there,” but is really important for people in terms of movement work and organizing?

DM: I think this sort of analysis has a lot of value in terms of how progressive/left movements orient themselves and begin to think strategically in the long-term. Unfortunately, one of the things we learned during the neoliberal era from the early 1980s on, where gains won by feminist, civil rights, antiracist, labor, queer, antiwar movements, and so on were rolled back, is a kind of politics of defensiveness. I have so many buttons and t-shirts that begin with the word “stop”. “Stop these cutbacks!” “Stop these attacks!”

That mode is of course important. We need to try and resist all the attacks we can, stop cuts, and so on. But the danger for left/progressive movements is that we get into a purely reactive mode where we’re simply engaged in damage limitation. We’re not having the discussions, doing the strategic thinking, and raising the organizational or political questions that follow about where are we in world history? Do we need to think in terms of the way the rulers are thinking? They’re thinking of “decades” and “ages”—that’s their rhetoric. If we want to do more than damage limitation and we want to recover a politics of social transformation, to get back to a genuinely radical, transformative, liberatory political and social agenda, then I do think we need to situate ourselves.

The other thing I think we need to do is actually challenge the idea that austerity is simply being done by a bunch of crazy right-wingers, and what they’re doing is bad for quote “the economy” because it suppresses consumer demand by making us poorer. As though all we have to do is persuade those in power and corporate leaders that what they’re doing isn’t good for themselves. That’s the classic Keynesian argument, all we need to do is restore effective demand and everyone will benefit.

The problem with that perspective is that austerity is working for business and pro-business governments. Their interest isn’t something called “the economy.” Their interest is the corporate bottom-line and austerity is working for that. It’s true: austerity isn’t producing jobs. But that requires us to reckon with the fact that the purpose of a capitalist economy is not to create employment. That’s not why businesses invest. It’s not why bankers give loans. They don’t do it to create jobs. They do it to help borrowers and investors maximize their profits.

The outgrowth of the view that austerity is some deluded, deranged right-wing agenda is that if only we could get good Democrats in office in the United States, or good New Democrats in office in Canada, then somehow all these attacks would go away. I’m sorry. I just don’t believe it. I think that the analysis that I’ve been describing says to us that this is in capital’s interest. This is in the interest of corporate power and of the bankers in our society and they’re going to persist with it.

If you want to stop it, you can’t simply try to do this educational work saying it’s bad for the economy. You actually have to raise the question that radical working class and social movements of the 1930s did, which is how do we shift the balance of social forces in our society? How do we build a counter-power from below that is actually capable of winning victories against the agenda and begins to build an actual social force that is capable of articulating and shaping an alternative? Believe me, I don’t think that can be done over night. But I do think that this is the kind of strategic understanding that follows from the analysis that I’m making. As you say, it’s not just an academic analysis.

When I talk in these terms, I don’t think I’m being just hopelessly abstractly utopian. If we look at the 1930s in the United States, what we see is that really the first half of the Great Depression was just a carnival for capital, it was austerity on steroids. They hammered labor into the ground. It took really significant grassroots organizing among different lines, particularly the great tactic of the sit-down strike where rather than going out you occupy the place of work. That was a transformative moment in the history of the left, when a radically different strategic and political conception of how you do labor organizing and activism began to sink in. Once the first few victories were won it became infectious. As a result, it always remains possible to push that kind of direction forward.

Having said that, it can’t happen unless you soberly ask yourself where are we in history, what is the nature of this economy, why everywhere are governments that can get away with austerity doing it, and what does that mean strategically for developing a ten year and twenty year vision for radical politics and organizing.

AS: The reason I ask this question in part is because a few years ago Richard Seymour posed a question, saying, “Why are we not able to explain this crisis?” Part of the problem with popularizing a movement was that austerity had become very naturalized, and the crisis was seen as something that just happened to people, not something that was systematic or designed. Asking that question, I was hoping to get to how we create a common sense based off of what you’re describing?

DM: I think that is a key part of it, because you’re right of course that the neoliberal offensive was not just an offensive against labor and social movements. It was those things, but it was also an ideological and cultural transformation. It created a primacy for the market in our own minds and it created a kind of fatalism about the economy. It’s the idea that the economy is like a weather system and it has these patterns entirely outside of our control. When it starts to rain, you simply go for your umbrella. These economic policies have deep-rooted dynamics in the nature of the capitalist system but the way in which they’re translated into social and political policy is not nature-given. There’s nothing meteorological about it. It overwhelmingly has to do with balances of social forces and what our rulers can or cannot get away with.

There’s no question that what you say is correct: there is a key task of popular education. Having said that, I also think that there is out there a deep and abiding cynicism about Wall Street, banks, and corporate power. We saw that not only reflected in the Occupy movement, whose message I think really did have a popular resonance that surprised many commentators, but also I think we’re even seeing it increasingly in popular culture at the moment. Even in mainstream film and television!

The irony is that it’s not as simple as there being a deep ideological conviction about the market and about market-based ideas and solutions, but I think there is a historic collapse of any sense of alternatives, which I suspect is what you were getting and as was Richard Seymour. There is that sense out there that we have got this historical moment where the sense that this direction could be reversed is at an incredible low point. The cumulative effect of social retreat and social defeat over the last thirty years has really pulverized the radical imagination and the sense of possibility that was so different when I came into the left in the 1970s. That left had a sense that it had won major battles around civil rights; was winning major battles around gender rights; it could feel that it was having an effect on public opinion over the war in Vietnam. Taking the streets, occupying state legislative buildings, occupying workplaces and striking, occupying schools that are going to close—the sense that that can actually win is intoxicating, but feeling that it makes no difference, that it doesn’t matter what you do, is massively deflating.

We need to figure out ways of rebuilding the radical imagination practically, by way of identifying those small victories that are tangible and can build a new sense of self-confidence. That’s part of the story for the great shift that happened in the United States in the second half of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Andrew Sernatinger and Tessa Echeverria are socialists based in Madison, Wisconsin. They host the podcast Black Sheep at www.blacksheeppod.org

David McNally is a scholar-activist based in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of numerous books including Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance and Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism.

June 29, 2014
No Iraq War Replay!

Adopted by U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW) Steering Committee, June 25, 2014

A majority of working people opposed the Iraq War and participated in the eight year struggle to end it. We felt great relief when the last troops departed Iraq in 2011.

U.S. Labor Against the War opposes any U.S. military intervention in Iraq, whether that be with weapons, drones, missiles, bombs or troops, including Special Forces “advisors”. At the same time, we abhor the sectarian violence that is wracking the country, and are appalled at the humanitarian crisis that deepens by the day in Iraq.

Can sectarian divisions in Iraq be overcome? One need look no further than the Iraqi labor movement, which has operated since the demise of the Hussein regime on the basis of non-sectarian solidarity and mutual respect. Unions in Iraq welcome all workers as members without regard to their religious, ethnic and cultural identity or national origin. When unions and other civil society organizations are allowed to operate free of government interference and repression, the wounds of sectarian division can begin to heal.

USLAW agrees with Falah Alwan, president of the Federation of Iraqi Workers and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI), who recently said:

“The working class in Iraq is the common force that exists across the county, from the north of Kurdistan to the furthest points south. It is this force whose very existence and survival depends on the eradication of discrimination and the unification of the Iraqi people. This is the only force that can end fragmentation and division.

“We reject US intervention and … also stand firmly against the brazen meddling of Iran.

“We stand against the intervention of Gulf regimes and their funding of armed groups, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

“We reject Nouri al-Maliki's sectarian and reactionary policies.

“We also reject armed terrorist gangs and militias' control of Mosul and other cities. We agree with and support the demands of people in these cities against discrimination and sectarianism.

“Finally, we reject the interference of the religious institution and its call for indiscriminate warfare.”*

USLAW recommits itself to defend and act in solidarity with the Iraqi working class and labor movement in its quest for a non-sectarian, tolerant, egalitarian, democratic and prosperous Iraq that is at peace with its neighbors and at peace with itself.

There can be no military resolution to the conflict in Iraq and intervention of the U.S. will only add to the suffering while prolonging the hostilities. The conflict will end when Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and Christians negotiate a durable just power-sharing arrangement that promotes mutual respect and tolerance rather than sectarian division and enmity. There is no role for the U.S. in those negotiations. U.S. involvement should be limited to providing generous humanitarian aid and reparations for the destruction wrought by U.S. military operations.

The roots of the present crisis in Iraq can be traced to the U.S. occupation. While the neocons dominated the U.S. foreign policy establishment, an overwhelming bipartisan Congressional majority voted to authorize the Iraq War. The neocons now seek to deflect responsibility for the consequences of their policies by pointing to “age old religious sectarian schisms,” but there had been no violent conflict between Shiites and Sunnis until the U.S. occupied Iraq. George Bush sent Paul Bremer to Iraq to set up the occupation authority. He pursued a ‘divide and rule’ policy that pitted Shia against Sunni against Kurds to create and exploit social, economic, tribal, cultural and religious differences. The present crisis is the bitter fruit of that near-decade long military intervention. The crisis in Iraq has a “made in America” stamp all over it.

The very same figures who took us into the Iraq War are today calling for U.S. military intervention again in light of growing sectarian violence that threatens to plunge Iraq into civil war. They blame militant jihadists and depict the unfolding conflict as a “takeover” by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) bent on establishing a caliphate in which their extreme interpretation of Sharia law will prevail across what are now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. But ISIS’s military success has been possible only because it enjoys the support of disaffected Sunnis, former members of the Ba’ath Party and others who have been marginalized and ruthlessly repressed by the autocratic corrupt U.S.-installed al Maliki regime.

U.S. missiles, bombs, drones and Special Forces ‘advisors’ will do nothing to resolve the conflict in Iraq but will rekindle Iraqi hatred of the U.S. and entangle the U.S. once again in the internal affairs of Iraq. It will put American troops in harm’s way and inevitably lead to more U.S. casualties. Three hundred U.S. advisors can not accomplish what 165,000 U.S. troops could not.

We call on USLAW affiliates, the American labor movement and its social allies to demand NO U.S. military intervention in Iraq. Build America, don’t destroy Iraq. Create jobs here not refugees and casualties there. Respect Iraqi sovereignty and the right of Iraqi people to self-determination.

* http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/06/16-3

Web: USLaborAgainstWar.org   FB: labor.against.war

Twitter: @USLAWLeader  Email: info@uslaboragainstwar.org

Download as a one-page PDF file: http://bit.ly/NoIraqReplay-1page

Download as a two-page media release:  http://bit.ly/NoIraqWarReplay-media Organizations and USLAW supporters are encouraged to circulate this widely, adopt it as statement or a resolution and distribute it to local media. Please send copies of resolutions and any media coverage you receive. Because Friday and the weekend are not days on which we are likely to get media attention, the media version will be released Monday morning.

In solidarity,

National Co-Convenors: National Coordinator:

Kathy Black   Michael Eisenscher

Bob Muehlenkamp
Brooks Sunkett

Nancy Wohlforth
Michael Zweig

June 29, 2014
Zapatistas: The Costs of Autonomy

Book Review

Bernard Duterme et al. Zapatisme: la rébellion qui dure. Alternatives du Sud. Paris: Centre Tricontinental and Éditions Syllepse, 2014. Chronology. Notes. Index. 205pp.

All of those who are interested in social movements, especially indigenous movements, in Latin America and in particular in the Zapastista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) will want to read this important collection of essays published in French by experts and analysts from several countries: Zapatisme: la rebellion qui dure (Zapatismo: the Rebellion that Lasts). (Those who do not read French can, using the authors’ names given below, find English or Spanish language versions of some of the essays in this collection on line at various sites.) This book is part of the excellent Alternatives du Sud (Alternatives of the South) series which publishes four titles each year dealing with issues and movements in the Global South. Other recent books (also all in French) are titled: Narco-traffic: The “Drug War” in Question; The State of Resistances in the South: Peasant Movements; Social Welfare in the South: The Challenges of a New Impetus; and, Mining Industries: Extraction at any Price?

Zapatisme is a reflection on the Zapatista movement on the twentieth anniversary of the Chiapas Rebellion which it led in 1994. The occasion for writing several of these essays was the authors’ participation in one of the Escuelita zapatista (Zapatistas Little School) sessions held in August and December 2013 and in January 2014. In those escuelitas rank-and-file Zapatistas explained to those in attendance, many of whom were illustrious foreign intellectuals, the Zapatista movement’s new perspectives. The authors of these accounts of the schools and the movement are people who place themselves on the side of the indigenous people in their struggle for social justice and wish to encourage others to do so as well. These essays, based not only on the authors’ expertise but also on their observations of the movement, provide us not only with an update but also with a reflection on its past experience and its current status, and, therefore, allow us to form an opinion about its likely future.

I find this a tremendously informative book, though, in general, I am in fundamental disagreement with the authors’ outlook. The editor, Bernard Duterme, and the authors—Gilberto López y Rivas, Neil Harvey, Alejandra Aquino Moreschi, Raúl Zibechi, Jérôme Baschet, Sylvia Marcos, Gustavo Esteva, Alicia Castellanos Guerrero, and Fernando Matamoros Ponce—tend to find in the Zapatista experience an admirable struggle for social justice and in some cases suggest it may represent some sort of model for other movements in other contexts. They largely ignore the important question of whether or not it represents a model for revolutionary leadership and action, which was the EZLN’s starting point when it was founded in 1983. I recently published my more critical assessment of the Zapatista movement and can only say that information gleaned from this book only strengthens my doubts about the EZLN, its usefulness as a model for other movements, and especially its autonomist strategy. The most romantic accounts in this collection, however, also lead me to question the methods of some of the authors, who it seems to me, make bold assertions without any actual evidence to support their claims.

As often happens with a collection of this sort, there is almost inevitably a good deal of repetition as the authors recount the basic history of the Zapatista movement: the early origins of the group, the Chiapas Rebellion of 1994, the Mexican government’s initial military response, the early negotiations under Bishop Samuel Ruiz’s mediation, the San Andrés Accords of 1996, the Zapatistas 5,000 envoys who went throughout the country to demand respect for that treaty in 1999, the Zapatista speakers to the Mexican Congress in 2000, the “Other Campaign” during the election period of 2006 when Sub-Comandante Marcos and others toured the country to speak against capitalism, and most recently the Zapatistas’ Little Schools. The book was published just before Sub-Comandante Marcos announced what was either merely a name change or his stepping down from leadership of the group.

Several of the essays also recount the authors’ experience with the Escuelita: staying in the homes of the Mayan peasants and attending the school taught by indigenous teachers using a modest set of texts produced for the occasion. The authors who participated listened to the teachers’ explanation of how the Zapatistas are working to create autonomous communities and a broader autonomous society, that is, one that does not depend on the Mexican state and the political parties which have always treated the indigenous people poorly and have held them in contempt. Their autonomous communities also appear as an egalitarian and democratic alternative to capitalism. Some of the authors, rather than providing much analysis, spend most of their time simply sharing or expatiating on the teachers’ views and asserting their support and admiration for this project.

The most interesting essays, however, are those that deal with the difficulties and challenges that the Zapatistas have encountered and the ways they have responded to them. The mythic idea held by some in the first days of the rebellion that the indigenous people were united in their opposition to the Mexican government and capitalism was, of course, never true. Many indigenous people had other stronger identifications: to their tribal group, to Catholicism or Evangelical Christianity, to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), or simply to the status quo, which, however bad, was “the devil they knew.” The Mexican PRI government in power at the time, as it deployed the army or mobilized party loyalists to harass the Zapatistas, played upon such divisions and worked to accentuate them. Indigenous communities became even more divided. To escape government attack, the Zapatistas fled to the mountain forests and established temporary villages there, even more poverty-stricken than their original homes. Some of the essays take up these problematic situations.

One fascinating chapter by Alejandra Aquino Moreschi, “The Trajectory of a Zapatista Militant: From Engagement to Disengagement,” traces the experience of Pedro and his wife Ana, explaining how they became involved in the movement and why they eventually left it. Pedro, who came from the village of Agua María, was born in 1971, married at about the age of 16, becoming an adult member of his community, and joined the movement at the age of 19. Four years later he participated in the Chiapas Rebellion and subsequently became a Zapatista militant, continually taking on greater responsibilities. When the Mexican Army invaded Zapatista territory in 1995, he and his wife and the rest of their community fled to the mountains to create a clandestine village, Agua Maria-in-Exile, living there for six years. Finally when in 2000 they returned to Agua Maria, they found that it had been totally destroyed. Meanwhile, new issues had developed: many Chiapanecos were migrating to the United States to work, and coming back with stories of greater opportunity en el norte. The political parties and government agents were offering resources to Zapatistas who would leave their organization, while at the same time there was the implicit threat of hostile neighbors. The long exhausting years of struggle, the destruction of their homes, and the growing divisions in the Zapatista community as people began to leave the movement, left them demoralized, and Pedro and Ana also quit. Still, they would not participate in any government program, as some former Zapatistas did, refusing, for example, government offers of materials to improve their housing. A chapter such as that one gives the reader enormous insights into the whole trajectory of the movement’s experience, into the admirable character of the Zapatista militants and the difficulties they faced, including what seemed to some the hardest challenge of all, deciding to leave the movement which had provided their political and personal identity for years.

The Central Question: What is Autonomy?

The central issue that this book presents to the reader is the Zapatista strategy of building autonomous communities. What is meant by “autonomy”? Several of the chapters describe how the Zapatistas answer this question. They define autonomy as the creation of villages and ideally regions that are entirely separate from the government. They refuse to join or work for any political party, arguing that the parties are all corrupt, and they will have nothing to do with government social welfare or development programs, not wanting to become politically beholden. One has to say that their view of the political institutions is certainly correct and their fear of political manipulation well founded. So they have decided that they will not send their children to the government schools, arguing that the mestizo teachers who live in urban areas and drive automobiles to the school look down on the indigenous communities and their students. They will not go to the government hospitals and health clinics, except in extreme cases, arguing that the doctors there do not treat them well or provide them decent care. They refuse government material aid for the improvement of their homes and villages, arguing that if they take it they are expected to work for the ruling political party. Unlike the historic parties of the left, they do not fight through social movements, coalitions, and political parties to take control of these institutions and force them to serve them fairly. They reject dependency on government institutions for the alternative of community self-sufficiency.

Alternatively, then, the Zapatistas build their own homes and villages, run their own schools, and maintain their own health program. Several of the authors suggest that this is a good policy because it empowers the indigenous people, and especially women, allowing them to create their own institutions and run them democratically. Yet, in general, the authors refuse to ask what this choice means for the indigenous people in these communities. Raúl Zibechi, for example, describes the health system, explaining how each group of eight families chooses a team of three health workers who have been trained by the community, usually mostly women: a woman who prepares cures from medicinal plants, an indigenous “osteopath,” and what is described as a “wise woman.” Zibechi suggests that because women are generally the health workers, by taking on this responsibility they develop as stronger and more equal members of the community. That may be. But one would like to know, does this do anything for community health? Do autonomous community health workers keep their communities healthy? Are they able to prevent illness? Can they cure disease? Are they improving community health overall? Where is the epidemiology? How do Zapatista autonomous communities compare with non-autonomous communities in areas of inoculations, prevalence of contagious disease, chronic disease, infant mortality, and longevity? It does not even occur to Zibechi to ask these questions, much less to answer them.

He similarly describes the education system whose teachers, similarly trained by the community, have been chosen to teach the children. The facilities, he admits, are pathetic, yet how much better this is, he writes, than the government schools with their mestizo teachers who drive to work from town. We know that these are communities with high levels of illiteracy, with low levels of educational achievement—sixth grade is a common level—and with few trained professionals. Yet Zibechi never asks, how well educated are these teachers? He never tells us how far the students get in school, though he does mention the lack of high schools. He never tells us if the students learn to read, write, do math and algebra, or learn something of chemistry and physics. But, of course, it may not be important, because as other writers in this collection mention, they are principally living in communities engaging in subsistence agriculture. With the education they are receiving, they may never have any alternative. Surely self-reliance and self-respect are important achievements, but any reasonable assessment has to look at the impact on health and education outcomes as well. Zibechi, in my view, does a disservice both to the Zapatistas and to those who want to better understand what is happening in the Zapatista communities by providing no hard information on the issues he take up.

What about autonomy for women? Sylvia Marcos’ essay “The Zapatistas’ Revolutionary Women’s Law Twenty Years Later” is somewhat useful. The laws, first published in 1994, gave women the rights to full equality in the society and to the fulfillment of their basic needs. Marcos actually took key passages of the law and went among women in Zapatista communities to ask them how the law was being fulfilled and found that women had varying opinions about how well their society was living up to these laws. While Marcos’ survey is useful, one would still like to have some actual facts here. One of the historic problems of women in Chiapas and in Central America (and, of course, other societies as well), is that men get drunk and then beat up their wives. One would like to know to what degree the women’s laws have ameliorated these practices of domestic abuse. Or to take another example, the law says women have the right to determine how many children they will have, but do they have access to birth control information, to diaphragms and contraceptive jelly, inter-uterine devices or pills? And what about the right to abortion should birth control fail? And what about prenatal care if a woman decides to have a child? The team of village health workers clearly would not be able to provide any of these things, though the government health clinics can and do. One would have liked Marcos to ask these questions or present data from other researchers on these matters.

Reading these essays, one sees that the price of self-sufficiency is clearly very high, yet the value of the Zapatistas’ autonomy is not clear. The initial Chiapas Rebellion and the Zapatistas on-going struggles forced the country to recognize the poverty and oppression of the indigenous Mayan people and led the government to build more roads, to improve housing, to build hospitals and medical clinics, and more schools in Chiapas. There is also a large and powerful social movement, the dissidents of the teachers union, led by the National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE) of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), which is especially strong in the state of Chiapas fighting for the right of teachers and communities to control the schools. Yet the Zapatistas do not join the fight to make these potentially valuable, though flawed, social institutions respond to the people, including the indigenous people. One has to wonder whether or not their autonomist strategy represents the best path forward for the indigenous people. And equally important, is it a strategy for social change for Mexico?

Two other things in particular disturbed me about the Zapatista model as discussed in this book. First is the fact that only one of the authors, Jérôme Baschet in his essay “The Construction of Autonomy: The Lessons of the Zapatista Little School,” touches on the role of the Zapatista military command (CCRI) and its influence in the civilian communities. He quotes one of one of the members of the Council of Good Government as saying, “They are the ones who guide us.” The guerrillas, as Baschet acknowledges, have enormous prestige. Yet he has little more to say about the question. One wonders: Who is really in charge here? The guerrillas or the community leaders? Which is subordinate to the other? The question of the role of these armed men is one that is ignored by virtually all of the other contributors to the book.

The second issue of concern is what seems to be the Zapatista organization’s almost total control of the lives of its members as described by several of the essayists. Anthropologists have frequently noted the almost totalitarian character of traditional societies guided by hundreds of unwritten but absolutely determinant laws of behavior. And all cultures, including our own American consumerist society, have their myriad unwritten laws of comportment that guide people in their everyday interactions with others of different genders, classes, and ethnicities. As described by the authors of this volume, Zapatista militants were expected to undertake all sorts of responsibilities in their personal, village, and broader community lives as activist, leaders, or participants in the military organization. Their lives were full of their responsibilities to the Zapatista organization. Perhaps this is simply the collective consciousness and labor they value as opposed to our capitalist society’s individualism. Still, the descriptions, scattered throughout the book, reminded me of the life of various religious and political sects with their constant meetings and activities that separate their members from the rest of society and immerse them in a world of their own.

The authors of this book are good people who place themselves on the side of the indigenous, the exploited and oppressed, but it is disappointing that most of them in doing so, hesitated to ask themselves and their Zapatista hosts more penetrating questions. So we have a book that is informative in its own way, almost in spite of itself, on might say, but useful as long as we the readers ask the hard questions.

June 29, 2014
Red Father Seen Through the Eyes of His Daughter

Tova Beck-Friedman. “Red Father” A 55-minute documentary film. DVD’s can be purchased at: http://tbfstudio.com/red_father.html

Tova Beck-Friedman, producer of several films, has created a fascinating documentary about, Bernard Ades, a Communist Party cadre, that leaves the viewer admiring both the filmmaker and Ades' loving daughter Janet Ades. Janet, a central figure in the film, is a critical observer of her father and his friends and from young adulthood an independent person capable of pursuing her own course, even when that meant conflict with her father.

The film—a photomontage of short readings from FBI reports, historic footage, old newsreels, excerpts from TV news shows, newspaper clippings and family photos, as well as interviews with Janet Ades, with Bernard Ades’ contemporaries, all accompanied by appropriate music—has a strong narrative line that carries the viewer through Ades’ political career and finally brings us in the end to the conflict between father and daughter. I should give a spoiler alert here. Fearing that many may not be able to see this film because it is not being widely shown, this review provides a summary of its content, though it cannot capture the immediacy of the photos and historic film footage that give this documentary its vitality.

Bernard Ades, Attorney for Uell Lee

Bernard Ades, a Jewish lawyer from Baltimore, was one of those men and women who formed the cadres of the Communist Party in the period from the late 1920s to the 1960s. Particularly in East Coast cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, but above all in New York, a large number of them were Jews, immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Their own experience of discrimination in Russia and then in the United States, as well as the exploitation that many experienced in the American workplace, led many into the labor unions and into the Socialist or Communist Party. Bernard, whose father was born in Russia in 1880 and who himself was born in 1903, was one of these.

In Defense of African American Civil Rights

His father was the proprietor of the first Jewish-owned bank in Baltimore, and his wealthy family, which had always expected him to become a lawyer, sent him to Law School of the University of Maryland and then to Johns Hopkins to study economics. Following the Crash of 1929 and the coming of the Great Depression, Ades like a good many others at the time, joined the Communist Party attracted to its ideal of economic and social equality. As an attorney, he began to work for the Communists’ International Labor Defense as part of the party’s anti-lynching campaign. He spent much of his time in the African American community encouraging black people to resist segregation and to join the Communist Party. He took on legal cases of African Americans who had been accused of serious crimes and who in some cases faced the possibility of execution.

Early in his career, in 1933 and 34, Ades represented Uell Lee, better known as Orphan Jones, an indigent African American accused of killing a white family of four near the town of Berlin in the Eastern Shore of Maryland where Jim Crow was still in effect at the time. Beck-Friedman has Joseph E. Moore, a former state’s attorney for Worcester County, Maryland and author of Murder on Maryland's Eastern Shore : Race, Politics and the Case of Orphan Jones help to tell the story.

A Communist Party rally for justice for Uell Lee

Lee had worked for the family as a handyman and had been let go, but because he felt he hadn’t been paid fairly, he got into an argument with the family. A few days later the four bodies were found. Lee was arrested and given a court-appointed attorney. The local white community wanted a fast trial, a conviction, and capital punishment, but Ades fought for a change of venue out of hate-filled Worcester County. A local official called Ades a “busybody Communist Jewish lawyer,” thugs beat him up, and there were attempts to lynch both Lee and Ades, who was saved when a judge hid him in the jail. The Lee case also appears to have led to lynchings in other Maryland counties, apparently because of anger that Lee had not been immediately tried, convicted, and hanged. Ades nevertheless stuck with the case and succeeded in having the venue moved out of the County, succeeded in getting an integrated jury of white and African American jurors, and won widespread publicity and the support of the African American community. He won the precedent requiring that African Americans be chosen for jury panels, an historic victory in Maryland. In the end Lee was hanged and charges were brought against Ades for conduct unbecoming a lawyer.

Ades was ordered to show cause in Federal Court why he should not be debarred. He was successfully defended by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP. Following the Uell Lee case, Ades ran as the Communist Party candidate for governor of Maryland in 1934 and received 7,000 votes, at the same time giving up his legal career.

To the Spanish Civil War

In 1937 Ades went to Spain to fight fascism as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades but ended up serving as an officer in the Spanish Republican Army. The Brigades were a front for the Communist Party, or, as Janet Ades says, “Soviet Policy was…a Popular Front that didn’t proclaim it was Communist, but pretended it was populated by all kinds of Americans of any political persuasion—but the truth was it was the Communist Party. Communists were, to say the least, unpopular in the United States, were considered anathema by many, and they [the Communist Party] perceived the word ‘Communist’ as the kiss of death among the American people, and they therefore hid it, even though it was true.”

In Spain Bernard Ades was a Communist cadre, “one of the Communist elite,” says his daughter. He was both a political commissar and a military officer, rising to company commander, in the Spanish Army. Janet Ades adds, “As Commissar Bernard was responsible for political correctness in his company.” The Soviet Union and Spanish Communists and their allies in the International Brigades defended the Spanish Republic against what they saw as the menace of revolution by anarchists and what they characterized as the “Trotskyites” of the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). Though Janet Ades doesn’t go there, as Spanish anarchists and the POUM have argued since the 1930s, and as has been confirmed since the opening of the Communist International archives in Russia, such Communist cadres worked with the Spanish Communist Party and the Soviet GPU to assassinate anarchists, POUMists, and other leftists.[i]

When he returned from the Spanish Civil War, Bernard Ades got a job with the United States Housing Authority in Washington, D.C., but Congressman Thomas D’Alessandro succeeded in driving him out of that job. The family moved to the Sholem Alechem Houses in the Bronx which had been built by the Yiddishists. Janet Ades says it was, “Safe, secure, and 99 percent Jewish; the lingua franca was Yiddish.” Most of the residents, she says, were Socialists or Communists, and, as a neighbor says, “They were at each others throats’ from the beginning.”

The rise of Nazism led to a growing threat of war in the late 1930s. While the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 led many Communists to leave the party, Ades thought it was a stroke of genius, winning the Soviet Union time to prepare to deal with the inevitable attack by the Nazis. With the outbreak of World War II, the family followed the fate of the Soviet Union in the war, putting pins in a map to show the progress of the USSR in taking territory in Eastern Europe. During the war the family contributed clothing to Russian War Relief. After the war, her parents and other Communists, says Janet Ades, never talked about the Jewish Holocaust. They never even talked about their Jewish family members killed in the Holocaust, says Ades. All they talked about was how many people Russia lost.

The Cold War and McCarthyism

Throughout his adult life Ades had been followed by the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover personally ordered him to be spied upon after he returned from Spain. By 1948 the Cold War had broken out and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and other politicians heading up Congressional investigating committees were demanding that Communists be ferreted out of their government jobs. The media and private parties also got into the act, denouncing Communists not only in government, but also those working in the private sector. Walter Winchell of the New York Daily Mirror and the Washington Post, used his very popular radio show to denounce “dirty Communists,” including one day Bernard Ades of Maryland. The result was that Ades, who had been working as a public accountant, lost all of his clients. Finding it very difficult to make a living and support his family, Ades told his daughter that he actually considered moving to Israel. Eventually he found foreign companies from Scandinavia that were willing to hire him to represent them.

Bernard Ades continued throughout these years to be active with the party, always loyal to the Soviet Union and an apologist for Stalin. By the time she was an adolescent, Janet Ades understood that her family mostly socialized with other Communists and only trusted other Communists. Among Bernard Ades’ party responsibilities was being in contact with representatives of the Soviet Union. The FBI and the Internal Revenue Service went after Ades in 1958, charging him with tax fraud, when they discovered that he had briefly put $50,000 belonging to the party in his own bank account. But he succeeded in proving that the money was not his and had only been parked in his account for a day or two. He gloried in having beaten the FBI.

While her father was a pillar of the Communist Party, Janet Ades found herself on the outs after her Communist boyfriend who had been to a Communist World Youth Festival in Hungary in 1956 asked questions about why there were so many troops in the streets. “His attitude was noted and an inquiry came back to the United States about him. He was now persona non grata.” Her continued friendship with the young man put Janet Ades “in very poor graces” with the party. Her friends, all members of the party youth group, shunned her. Her father quit discussing political matters with her, “so much so that I wondered if he loved me.” She was called in for a discussion with party leaders and was dropped from the Communists’ teenage club while her father arranged for her to be sent to a political rehabilitation group.

The study group brought in the “current Soviet nonsense,” as she says, the “cockamamie theory” that American democracy was not a democracy, but rather a repressive system of social control, something called “social fascism.” But she said nothing and shortly thereafter, no longer a pariah in her community, was invited to join the Communist Party. She didn't want to because the party because it was “dogmatic” and she “didn’t want to be under its discipline.” “I was afraid of them,” she says. She found the situation “impossible.” She refused to join the party, but neither did she decline. Her father, appalled, refused to speak to her about politics for several years.

Janet Addes ends by stating: “I loved my father and I admired him enormously. He had courage, he was brave. And he was savvy, but his loyalty to the party was not consonant with his savviness. So that seems to me a shame. I also have great sympathies for the ideals he had and that the party had, of equality and of social responsibility for one another. I think we are responsible for one another, or should be. But those ideals were poisoned by the way the Soviet Union behaved and by the way the Communist Parties internationally bowed and scraped to the Soviet party. They poisoned the well. And that too was very sad, and it also defeated his ideals, those of them that were noble.”

Ades, as far as we can tell from his daughter’s words, never had second thoughts about his commitment to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. He died in New York on May 27, 1986 and was buried in the Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery.

This well-done documentary will be of particular interest to those who want to better understand the history of the Communist Party of the United States and international Communism, as well as to those interested in American Jewry. As a teacher of college courses in American History, I would certainly use it in my upper division classes. The film which is being independently distributed will be shown in the fall at the University of Minnesota Law School and to the Minnesota Association of Black Lawyers and in the week of November 10 at Baruch College of Performing Arts.

[i] See Harvey Klehr, John Early Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), Chapter 4, “The Secret Apparatus Branches Out,” pp. 119- 187.

June 24, 2014
Inequality Kills

Book Review

Göran Therborn. The Killing Fields of Inequality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013. Hardback: $40.00 Paperback: $19.95 Kindle: $9.99

Inequality is unnatural. By nature, humans are equal. Genetically, as Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference among people.[i] Inequality is a social construct. And, according to University of Cambridge sociologist Göran Therborn in The Killing Fields of Inequality, [ii] it is best defined as a denial of human dignity, a denial of everybody’s human potential to develop. Moreover, its consequences are dire: humiliation, ill health, subjection, exclusion from knowledge, anxiety, poverty, powerlessness, lack of self-confidence and exclusion from life-chances as well as the resources to act and participate in the world. Inequality always means excluding some people from something, ultimately life itself. Death comes earlier to the poor; inequality kills.

After Auschwitz and apartheid, there’s at least general recognition, however immaterial and nominal, that humans are equal. But what, asks Therborn, is meant by equality, and what equality is desirable? Therborn’s definition is “equality of capability to function fully as a human being,” which must entail “survival, health …, freedom and knowledge (education) to choose one’s life-path, and resources to pursue it.” [iii] Such a capability approach to equality allows Therborn a basis for analyzing struggles against inequalities, “which should be seen as multidimensional barriers to equal human capabilities of functioning in the world.” In this sense, inequalities are violations of human rights.

Forms of Inequality

What are the forms of inequality preventing people from living a life worthy of human dignity? Therborn notes three broad interacting dimensions. First, human beings are organisms, minds and bodies, susceptible to pain, suffering and death, who can therefore suffer from vital inequality, “socially constructed unequal life-chances,” which can be assessed through the study of mortality rates, life expectancy and health expectancy. Second, humans are persons, with selves, living their lives within social contexts. Existential inequality is the “unequal allocation of personhood, i.e. of autonomy, dignity, degrees of freedom, and of rights to respect and self-development.” Third, humans are actors, capable of acting towards aims, but their goals can be thwarted by resource inequality (or, simply, economic inequality), providing agents with unequal resources to act. Resources can most easily be tracked by following the money trail, but one’s first resource is normally one’s parents, their wealth, their knowledge and their support.

Uneven Playing Field

What are the mechanisms which produce and reproduce such inequalities? Therborn notes that liberals make much of the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, favoring the former, while opposing the latter. Though this was a radical idea two hundred years ago, such a dichotomy between the two is “a sociologically untenable ideological construction” because what liberals call “achievement” is in fact dependent on the systemic rules of the game. And the playing field is skewed at birth. Therborn analyzes four mechanisms designed to keep it that way. The first he calls “distantiation,” that is, what liberals call “achievement” is blind to everything but the so-called achieving individual, telling us nothing about her relations to, and dependence on, others, “about the social script defining ‘achievement’,” or about the contexts of rewards and opportunities.

This is what is meant by distantiation. A moves ahead of, or distances herself from, B because of A’s better preconditions, such as more affluent parents, private education, constant ego-stroking and the like. And the distance between A and B, given the institutions through which both must maneuver, is only likely to grow over time, because the system not only defines “winning,” it is geared to producing winners and losers, as well as the distance of rewards and opportunities between them. But there are contextual variables other than systemic arrangements, which further put paid to liberal individualist ideology that success is the singular achievement of the successful individual. “Human beings emerge as adult actors with different health and vigor produced by their childhood.” Actors are bound to differ in self-confidence facing risks and uncertainties, given differential access to information and parental support. “In this way, through actor formation, social distances – of school achievement, job careers, social standing – tend to be reproduced over generations.”

A second mechanism producing inequalities is plain, old-fashioned exploitation, which is “the worst form of inequality.” A derives her advantages over B because of the valuables that B provides her with. Slavery and serfdom were classical examples. Capitalist exploitation, though less obvious, is based on an asymmetrical appropriation of the fruits of human labor, and is in this sense exploitative as well, an assessment which, Therborn claims, “will be rather non-controversial among egalitarians.” Two other mechanisms producing inequality are exclusion, barring the advance or access of others to social goods, a set of hindrances including discriminations of various kinds such as “glass ceilings,” and “hierarchization,” institutionalized rankings of social actors through formal organizations which open the door to the included, while shutting out the excluded, which may also take less institutional, more cultural forms through value systems and aesthetics of “taste” and “style.”

Today’s Unequal World: Vital Inequality

In measuring the three forms of inequality, Therborn employs two metrics, inter-national and intra-national. The three types of inequality are unequally distributed throughout the world, but, while vital inequality between nations (inter-national) has generally been declining, within nations (intra-national), after dropping in the ‘50s and ‘60s, it has once again begun to climb, resulting in “a stability of class inequality of life and health.” Therborn cites two chief causes of the resurgence of such life-and-death class inequality: first, growing economic insecurity and polarization, along with lack of respect on the job and control of one’s life and work situation; second, what is generally misnamed “lifestyle.” As Therborn notes, the latter should be better termed “life-options,” not so much a choice of style as a perspective on options. People who have little control of their basic life situation – finding or maintaining a job, paying the bills – may be less prone to control the health of their bodies, to notice and to follow expert advice on alcohol, tobacco, exercise and diet than those who have a sense of controlling their lives. And, at the heart of vital inequality is a negative asymmetry of information; whereas in existential and resource inequality it is usually the disadvantaged themselves who are best informed, the opposite is true when it comes to diet and health.

Premature adult mortality and socially unequal risks for it are driven mainly by cardiovascular diseases. The major causes of heart and blood vessel diseases are known even to lay people: smoking, animal fats, cholesterol, obesity, lack of exercise. But the most vulnerable know the least what food and medical treatment – what “lifestyle” – are best for them. Moreover, the asymmetry of information, in part a result of increasingly unequal systems of education, one private, the other public, runs even deeper to the psychosomatic effects of social stress, of social hierarchies, and lack of control of one’s work and life-situation. And to make matters even worse, limitations of lay knowledge are compounded by constraints of choice – “not a choice between a good healthy job and a bad risky job, but between a bad job and no job at all.” Furthermore, some of the means to cope with such stress – perhaps granting momentary relief or oblivion – have dire long-term consequences on the body, e.g. alcohol, fats, sweets, nicotine, narcotic drugs. Therborn’s meticulously researched book is peppered with data, backed by copious studies, including many by various committees of the United Nations. For instance, to illustrate growing vital inequality in wealthy states, he looks at life expectancy among adults in London. The results are startling. “If you travel east on the underground Jubilee line [in London, moving from upper middle-class to working-class neighborhoods], life expectancy of the residents is decreasing by half a year at every stop.”

Existential Inequality

Unlike vital and resource inequality, existential equality, though far from complete, is largely a success story. The defeat of racist fascism in World War II, culminating in the 1948 UN Charter on Human Rights, gave impetus to the struggle for human rights. But it was not until the 1960s, after the South African Sharpeville massacre and the development of the American civil rights movement, that momentum quickened in the struggle against racism. And, as Therborn puts it, “without social strength, without sustained social struggle, there can be no existential equalization.” The ‘60s witnessed the expansion of the struggle for recognition and respect into gender, sexual and settler-indigenous relations, eventually encompassing the disabled as well. In contrast to income and vital inequality, existential equality, in the aforementioned forms, appears to be gathering force in the early twenty-first century. But the picture becomes clouded with the emergence of a new form of such inequality, intertwined with vital and resource inequality, viz. the “marginalized” or “underclass” excluded from the labor market. In the UK, they’re known as “chavs,” while the American conservative, Charles Murray in his 2012 bestseller, Coming Apart, heaps existential scorn upon a new “lower class” of “the unmarried, lazy, dishonest and godless.”

Resource or Economic Inequality

Resource or economic inequality, in stark contrast to existential inequality, has soared over the last thirty-five years. Though world polarization among countries has not stopped, inter-national inequality declined somewhat with post-World War II decolonization. But within nations economic inequality has risen significantly since 1980. Brought on by deindustrialization, the weakening of labor and trade-union strength, financialization of capitalism, deregulation, and a relative decline in social spending, the world has been brought back to pre-WWII, gilded-age levels of inequality.

Therborn surveys three theories on the causes of the steep rise in economic (or, as he calls it, “resource”) inequality: globalization, technology and politics, and, though the three are interconnected, he settles on the neoliberal politics of the 1% (a percentage made famous by the Occupy movement but which might be extended to 5 or 10% with no alteration in the basic oligarchical point) as the principal factor. The political movement was driven at the top by the expansion and concentration of capital and at the bottom by policies to keep the poor down and “softened up to accept anything.” The methods – and there are many – include “high involvement management” (which some workers less euphemistically labeled “management by stress”), precarious part-time employment, off-shoring or foreign direct investment (FDI) in the endless search for cheaper, more exploitable labor, freeing of financial and currency markets, and, most significantly, strike-breaking and union-busting.

Class warfare from above has succeeded in diminishing the resources, concentration and cohesion of labor and ensuring that the top 1% of income earners in the United States, one of the most unequal of nations, more than doubled their appropriation of national disposable income from 1979 to 2007, while the bottom 80% lost, and in fact the lowest 40% of full-time workers have seen their paychecks decline each year from 1980 through 2005. Particularly noteworthy in the United States is the limited equality of opportunity, so vaunted by liberals. The rags-to-riches myth is just that … a myth. High intra-generational inequality is connected to high inter-generational inequality. Inequality of opportunity is positively correlated with inequality of outcome.

How is it possible for existential equality to make progress amidst growing levels of economic inequality? Therborn notes that a crucial difference between the two is that the latter is usually a zero-sum game while the former is usually not. As a privileged beneficiary of existential inequality you can bask in the deference forced upon your subordinates, satisfied that the “unworthies” are kept in their place, while economic inequality means unequal command over resources, with which you can buy whatever you want. Though existential inequality can be used to maintain and enhance economic inequality, existential equalization need not change the advantageous life chances of economic inequality. Existential inequality has been decoupled from resource inequality because powerful elites have found the issue “a gift of costless egalitarianism.” A Black Lesbian single mother or an Inuit seal hunter can be granted a crack at their life-dreams without challenging inequality of resources one whit. Moreover, “existential income discrimination does not make much sense to financial capital.”

Economic Inequality=Political Inequality

Hand-in-hand with economic inequality, the movement toward political equality has been stopped or reversed due to deunionization, “monetary electioneering” and what Therborn calls the “social dissolution of popular classes.” What others call an oligarchy, ‘dollarocracy” or kleptocracy, Therborn labels a “dictat-ship,” not quite synonymous with dictatorship, but close. What he means is that a political Diktat does not require a dictatorship for economic elites to exert their political will. In a dictat-ship, like the United States, there may be competitive elections and a diversity of media; you may vote as you wish and say what you like but with no effect. “Virtually all U.S. senators, and most representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 per cent when they arrive, are kept in office by the top 1 per cent, and know that if they serve the top 1 per cent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 per cent when they leave office.”[iv]

In a study conducted by Princeton University political scientist, Martin Gilens, it was found that neither Democratic nor Republican senators responded positively to any opinion from the lowest earning third of the population and were only moderately responsive to the middle third. When income groups diverge in their preferences, the poorer half of the population has no chance of winning. Only the most affluent 30% stand any chance and the top 10% trumps everyone.[v] Like existential equality, allowing the populous to cast a vote every now and again need be no threat whatsoever to unequal distribution of resources.

Possible Futures: Historical Egalitarianism

Inequalities are social constructions, and that which is constructed can be deconstructed through struggle. The French Revolution and American War of Independence of the late eighteenth century, the Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the twentieth century, while certainly falling short of an egalitarian utopia, have left us legacies of equalization. The two world wars and the labor upsurge of the Depression also spawned game-changing regimes. Therborn maintains that, in addition to such violent revolution, profound economic crisis and industrial war, far-reaching peaceful social reform has been possible, and this, he insists, “is obviously the experience most relevant to the current world.”

He cites two examples of what he calls peaceful reform movements, the first major, the second, minor. The first was the major advances in vital, existential and economic (resource) equality of the “golden era” of capitalism from 1945 to about 1980. “1968” was part of this larger movement, which was also a global phenomenon, spawning the end of institutionalized racism, the women’s movement, as well as the economic independence and growth of China and South Asia.

The second, minor, example adduced by Therborn, is the Latin American one, which, since 2002, has been bucking the global tide of inequality. The economic context of both periods of substantial peaceful equalization was economic growth coupled with more or less full employment, while the political context in both cases was the discrediting of right-wing liberalism (laissez-faire capitalism), which was associated with mass unemployment in the Depression and Latin American economic dislocation in the ‘80s and ‘90s, on the one hand, and the disappearance of right-wing authoritarianism, fascism in the first major episode and military juntas in the second minor one, on the other. But Therborn holds that, while the political precondition is a necessity for a future reform movement, the economic one is not. And, since in the wake of the Great Recession we’ve not yet cleared the field of right-wing liberalism (on the contrary, we’re witnessing the “strange non-death of neoliberalism”), the task of any egalitarian reform movement must be an ideological battle for the hearts and minds of the 99%.

Battlefields of Future (In)Equality

The three forms of inequality are interconnected, but it is economic inequality which is the principal culprit because of its devastating social, political, as well as psychological and medical effects. The egalitarian focus, Therborn maintains, must be on the multidimensional violations of, and socially constructed hindrances to, the capabilities of humans to flourish and develop. Therborn claims that the three institutions of contemporary inequality are family, capitalism and nation. The family is the conveyor belt of inequality. With the necessity of higher education in the rich countries people of the same education tend to marry each other (class homogamy: like marrying like), resulting in a widening gap in parenting. Therborn proposes that a guideline in redressing familial class divides would be a new emphasis on the rights of children to a good enabling childhood, which would mean massive investment in public education, pre-school child care, and “restrictions on ‘freedom of choice’ of exclusivist schools.”

Capitalism is the key generator of contemporary inequality, because it divides people into property-owners, property-less workers and, increasingly, the unemployed – “distancing people, excluding or subordinating many, and exploiting the labor of others, as well as our common environment. Its inherent ripping asunder of the social fabric is currently gaining a new dimension, the drive towards a social ‘precariat’ in permanently insecure and marginal employment.” But Therborn, who once upon a time advocated democratic socialism, now believes capitalism is “going to stay, for the foreseeable future.” The best egalitarians can strive for in the current conjuncture is reform to restrain the “animal spirits” of the owners of the earth’s resources. This can be done by demanding two kinds of rights, rights of labor and rights of citizens. Rights of labor would include the right to decent work, decent pay, decent treatment and safe working conditions, but most importantly it would mean the right to labor – “the right to a job, to a non-precarious livelihood.” Rights of citizens would mean the rolling back of “dictat-ships” and the forging of real popular democracy in order for citizens to stand a fair chance of regulating capitalism. Citizens’ rights would mean economic and social regulation through popular self-determination, individual social rights to life-course development, “from childhood possibilities to pensions and old-age care….”

The nation, forged in the American and French revolutions, proclaimed the equality, however qualified, of its citizens. But in the era of globalization and transnational corporations, “national cohesion and equality have been dumped for national attractiveness to foreign capital….” Egalitarians must demand a new concept of the nation as a human collective living together in a common civility, “not only tolerating its members letting their capabilities flourish, but collectively committed to supporting and promoting those capabilities in their vital, existential and resource aspects.” And this collective must include immigrants.

Resources of Hope—Egalitarian Forces Today

While economic and political contexts are of course important, social struggle is essential. And Therborn finds four broad groups who, he believes, will continue the modern egalitarian movement. First, and historically the most significant, is the labor movement, which, though now in retreat except for China and Latin America, was the backbone of economic and political egalitarianism in the recent past, and will be indispensable to the more socioeconomically heterogeneous movement of the twenty-first century. Second will be the urban poor, precarious workers, middle-class employees and peasants in what used to be called the third world and in the rich centers of capitalism “the new servant class” in the service sector. Third, the immigrant sub-proletariat and fourth a substantial part of the professional middle class, both of the latter in the Euro-American zone. Identity movements might also be counted upon to join in the egalitarian struggle.

Few would argue with Therborn’s claim that the central actor in the struggle for modern egalitarianism was the working class or his contention that indeed “the twentieth century was the century of the working class ….” But he goes on to note that, while labor was the principal force in the battle for democratic and social rights, it was never in a position to carry out its full transformative program; moreover, he insists that in the twenty-first century, while the working class will remain essential, “the chances of equality will hinge primarily not on the strength of the labor movements …, but on the … middle classes.” Therborn acknowledges that this “class” is amorphous and can only be defined as “the non-rich and the non-poor” and that it lacks social cohesion, but he insists that there are promising signs that it may ally with the other three groups in its “anger at the oligarchy,” as evidenced particularly in the 2011 Occupy Movement. Moreover, Therborn is optimistic that a global egalitarian movement may develop:

Though the principal cause of internal, rich-country inequality has been the weakening of labor, it is not unrelated to “globalization,” which has extended the power of Euro-American economic elites. The world has been pried open to rapacious forces in the South as well as in the North, boosting Southern national income, from which crumbs have fallen to the poor. But this also creates new possibilities for the struggle for our future. A class dynamic of intra-national polarization is operating both North and South, which may connect social movements across the equator. A new pathway for such connections is now running through consumer-cum-trade-union concerns in the North with exploitative, outsourced suppliers from the South, bringing pressure most directly on the big Northern retailers, like the biggest and most vicious, Walmart, and designer brands like Apple or Nike.

The Killing Fields of Inequality is not only useful in its delineation of the forms of contemporary inequality but in its comprehensive compendium of evidentiary data. Moreover, Therborn’s attempt to discern the new twenty-first century agency of egalitarianism is original and helpful. Yet Therborn appears both too optimistic and too pessimistic. Too optimistic in his belief that capitalism can be reformed in a manner egalitarians advocate. True, during the so-called golden era of 1945 – 1980 very significant restraints were placed on capital in the interests of the collective welfare. But this was an anomaly, made possible by unprecedented rates of growth, during which the whole pie – profits, social spending, wages and productivity – was able to expand. When the slice of the pie going to the corporations failed to satisfy the economic elites, the neoliberal counterrevolution, commencing in the late ‘70s and gathering force through the last three decades, was launched, ratcheting up inequality to what has actually been more the norm of the historical capitalist system. Reforms will only be conceded when they do not jeopardize the profits of the 1% whom Therborn calls “resource owners.” Too pessimistic in its assessment of the ability of the working class and the potential allies Therborn notes to enact more far-reaching systemic transformation. Nevertheless, Therborn has carried off a tour de force on the most pressing issue of our time—the killing field of mounting global inequality.

Therborn ends his comprehensive survey with a poignant question for his readers: “The battle is about to start. Nobody knows how it will end. Which side will you be on?”

*Bob Turansky lives in Cincinnati where for 35 years he has taught European History and Political Theory. He is a member of Solidarity: A Socialist, Feminist, Anti-Racist Organization.

[i] Stephen Jay Gould. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

[ii] Göran Therborn. The Killing Fields of Inequality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013.

[iii] Therborn employs the definition of well-known moral philosopher Amartya Sen. The Idea of Justice.

[iv] Joseph E. Stiglitz. “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May, 2011.

[v] Martin Gilens. Affluence and Influence. New York: Princeton U. Press, 2012.

June 23, 2014
Spot-On After All These Years: Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

We don’t think of philanthropists as ragged: louche, maybe even a tad shabby, as with
trust-fund hipsters or Palo Alto billionaires, but never ragged. In writing his early-twentieth-century British classic, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell (the pen name of Robert Noonan) wanted to drive home his point. The biggest benefactors of the rich are workers. His is a portrait of hard-pressed working people and their counterintuitive respect and political and economic support for their rulers.

Tressell’s figures, drawn from his own experiences as a house painter and sign
writer, not only accept the social order and its extremes as natural and inevitable,
but think that only slackers complain about the pitiless hard work and early
deaths. A hundred years after publication, the central message of the book rings true.

It was an instant success in 1914 and remains the pre-eminent novel of the British
working-class left. The full manuscript was first published in the United States in 1962 and was reissued in the United Kingdom with new material in 2010. Largely autobiographical—the subtitle reads, “Being the Story of Twelve Months in Hell, told by
one of the damned, and written down, by Robert Tressell”—it’s a curious and successful amalgam of art and socialist propaganda. The descriptions of working-class life, including everyday interactions and the physical conditions of workers’ homes, show an eye for detail that rivals Henry James and the best ethnographies.

The book centers on a group of house painters, skilled workers who are underpaid, poorly educated, and always in debt—for necessities, not luxuries. Beaten down as they are, they still vote for their bosses’ two parties— in their day the Tories and Liberals (the newly emerging Labour Party was still a minor player). These fictional but very representative working people are under the thumb of papers such as the Daily Obscurer and the Weekly Chloroform; attend the Church of the Whited Sepulchre; work for bosses
named Sweater, Makehaste, and Slogg; elect a town council comprising “The Forty Thieves”; and have daughters who work as parlor maids for the likes of the harridan Mrs. Starvum and rentiers like Lady Slumrent. The most boss-friendly toadies are named Crass and Slime.

Frank Owen, the book’s protagonist, works as a house painter and, as a socialist, tries with little success to get the others to see that they are playing a mug’s game (hence the name of the fictional town, Mugsborough). His fellows regard him “as a bit of a crank; for it was felt there must be something wrong about a man who took no interest in [horse and dog] racing or football and was always talking a lot of rot about religion and politics.”

Some of that “rot” was Owen’s view of capitalism as “one big Swindle,” where the “unnatural order” may claim affinity with Christian communal values but only rewards those who act like feral lone wolves, because the logic of the system demands selfishness.

“We must be selfish or we shall be hungry and ragged and finally die in the gutter,” Owen notes. “The more selfish we are, the better we will be. In the ‘Battle of Life,’ only the selfish and cunning are able to survive; all others are beaten down and trampled under foot.”

During one lunch break, Owen is coaxed into revisiting what his mates think is the outrageous claim that lack of money is not the cause of poverty, and his response—without using the words “exchange value” or “surplus value” or citing Karl
Marx—shoots down the idea that socialism is about sharing or about putting more money into circulation but is instead about “discovering the reason why there is not enough produced for everyone to enjoy abundance.” So, poverty is not the lack of money: “it
consists [instead] in a shortage of the necessaries of life—or rather, of the benefits of civilization.”

Too much propaganda and too little art? Tressell gets the balance right, I think. He writes in his introduction that his work “is not a treatise or an essay, but a novel,” and that his aim was “to write a readable story full of human interest and based on the happenings
of everyday life, the subject of Socialism being treated incidentally.” Also repeatedly and essentially, but applied with an exacting brush, not a trowel. 

Michael Hirsch is a labor journalist, political writer, and member of the New Politics editorial board. This review appeared originally in Democratic Left, Summer 2014

June 23, 2014
When I Was Against Gun Control…And Why I Changed My Mind

Like many of my generation, I was active in the left. From the mid to late 1960s to the late 1970s, I was affiliated with Trotskyist organizations. We considered ourselves revolutionaries and foresaw the day when the working class would rise up against capitalist oppression, overthrow the government, and establish a proletarian dictatorship. There was no doubt in our minds that this could not be accomplished without violence. When the revolutionary situation was ripe, we would need weapons. Therefore, we were opposed on principle to any laws that would interfere with our ability to acquire them. Others on the left shared this perspective. After all, it was fully consistent with the teachings of Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Che, Fanon, etc. Didn't "political power grow out of the barrel of a gun"?

During those years of radicalism at home and revolution abroad, we were thrilled when we saw that poster of Malcolm X with his rifle and the photo of the female Viet Cong soldier with a baby on her back and a rifle in her hand. When Malcolm said “by any means necessary” we did not bother to ask for clarification and when he was murdered by the Nation of Islam, we insisted that the police and the FBI were responsible. As for the Viet Cong woman, no one questioned whether she was endangering the welfare of a minor.

Thankfully, the left did not practice what it preached, realizing that the time was not right for violent revolution here in the USA. The Weathermen were the exception to the rule. They planted a few bombs and participated in the Brinks robbery. But there was one organization at that time that really did pick up the gun—the Black Panther Party, established in Oakland, California in 1966—in response to incidents of police brutality. They openly brandished rifles at the California State House and their newspaper featured drawings of brave Black men and women toting military style weapons. The Panthers were wildly popular with the left.

I vividly recall participating in demonstrations in support of the Black Panthers where we chanted "The Revolution Has Come, Off the Pig, Time to Pick up the Gun, Off the Pig…" over and over again. To "off a pig" was to shoot a policeman dead. No doubt about it. Although the Panthers technically advocated killing policemen only in self-defense, they glorified the use of guns in the "revolutionary struggle" and turned to violence to resolve internal disputes. In 1968, under Governor Ronald Reagan, California reacted to the tactics of the Black Panther Party by enacting a strong gun control law against openly carrying weapons in public. The National Rifle Association (NRA) supported it.

Nowadays, it is those on the right and the far right who have picked up the gun, insisting that their "right to bear arms" is guaranteed by the Second Amendment. Some who hold this belief have joined armed militias, so named because of the Second Amendment's reference to a "well-regulated" militia. This Amendment exists because when the Bill of Rights was drafted and adopted in 1791, the US did not have a standing army. Its citizens were expected to join their state militias in times of crisis. Of course, slaves and Indians were denied the right to bear arms. In fact one of the purposes of the Second Amendment was to enable white people to keep them in line.

The gun advocates deem unlimited gun ownership necessary to defend their freedom. Against whom? Presumably, the federal government — as in Waco, Texas, Ruby Ridge, Idaho and the recent standoff in Nevada outside Cliven Bundy's ranch. The most extreme elements believe they need guns to defend themselves against armed forces in "black helicopters" representing the United Nations or some international conspiracy, prepared to swoop down and throw them in prison camps. These are paranoid delusions.

It is probably more common, however, for gun advocates to assert that widespread gun ownership is a matter of self-defense against criminals. Declining rates of violent crime appear to have no effect on their fervor. Further, the most common causes of gun violence in American homes are suicide, domestic homicides, and accidents. In fact, there are very few cases of guns used in legitimate self defense. The ratio is 22:1.

The scenario of a criminal breaking into somebody's home with the intention of harming the occupants is exceedingly rare. In a typical "mugging," the criminal's purpose in brandishing his weapon is to force the victim to give up his valuables. More likely scenarios for gun violence are a depressed person killing himself or a fight between drunks in a bar that escalates into a shooting, because guns are easily accessible.

Mass shootings, including work place shootings, admittedly, make up a small percentage of gun violence. But they do make the headlines. Every time there is a mass shooting, the NRA and other gun advocates argue that if only the victims or the bystanders were armed, the "bad guy" could have been stopped dead in his tracks by "a good guy." This assumes that (1) the potential victim will have time to pull his weapon and shoot the bad guy first; (2) the armed bystander can readily tell the difference between the "bad guy" and his potential victim(s); (3) innocent people are not shot in the crossfire; and (4) there are no safer ways to escape the shooter, such as running, ducking, hiding etc.

For good reason, law enforcement officials are rigorously trained in the proper use of firearms, yet still make plenty of mistakes. Can your average Jane or Joe with a gun be trusted to gun down a shooter without getting herself or others killed? It is far more likely that your average person with a gun will misread the situation and fire recklessly or maliciously. Once the bullets start flying, others may join in, not knowing who to shoot. Reach for your wallet or cell phone and you might get shot in "self-defense." In the real world it's vigilante aggressors like George Zimmerman who get to make life and death decisions. Not John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or Clint Eastwood.

Statistically, gun use is most prevalent in African American or other poor minority neighborhoods where the perpetrators and the victims are typically people of the same race or ethnicity. These neighborhoods are also the site of most unjustified police shootings. Yet, this segment of the population supports gun control because they know that more guns breed more violence. Rather, the base of the gun rights movement is white men who live in suburban or rural areas with few people of color. Why?

In my opinion, it is a way for white men to assert their manhood in a time of insecurity. White men who fear they are no longer the heads of their household — who are threatened by the assertiveness of gays, who believe that immigrants are taking their jobs, and that their tax dollars are going to support what they see as “lazy Blacks” — express their rage by toting a gun. The "open carry" movement is the purest expression of this disorder — white men carrying weapons into retail stores and fast food restaurants, etc. — just to show how macho they are. The bank may have taken away their home, but no one better try to take away their gun. By their way of thinking, not even hospitals and schools should be off limits.

To be fair, many gun owners and advocates of gun rights are not as fanatical. They are solid members of the middle class who are content to keep their guns at home, but are under the influence of an ideology that emphasizes individual responsibility including personal responsibility for their own and their family’s safety. However, I believe there is an undercurrent of fear in their minds, fear of dark skinned “criminals” invading their homes or rampaging in the streets. It is no accident that the pro-gun movement is nearly all white.

I want to be careful here. The perpetrators of mass shootings are not only right wing nut cases. They have often been troubled youth (Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in Columbine, Colorado, James Holmes in Aurora, Colorado, Adam Lanza in Newtown, Connecticut), including a Korean college student (Virginia Tech). In Maryland, it was two Black men who appear to have been partially motivated by Islamic fanaticism (John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo.) But they all purchased guns and ammo effortlessly due to lax laws crafted by politicians beholden to the NRA.

Most gun control advocates do not propose taking away anyone’s guns. They have nothing against people keeping guns at home under lock and key, or using them for hunting or target practice. What they do advocate are bans on assault weapons, limits on the size of ammo clips, limits on the number of weapons that can be purchased at one time, mandatory background checks for guns sold on-line or at gun shows, and other restrictions that are already in place in many states, as well as opposition to "stand your ground" and “open carry” laws.

For example, in my home state of New Jersey, where many people legally own guns, residents must apply for a permit from the state police in order to purchase a handgun and may not carry one in public unless they can demonstrate an "urgent necessity for self-protection, as evidenced by specific threats or previous attacks which demonstrate a special danger to the applicant's life that cannot be avoided by means other than by issuance of a permit to carry a handgun." As a result, very few people are allowed to carry. As a matter of public safety, it sounds reasonable to me.

In their crusade for expanded and unrestricted gun ownership, the NRA and their allies have a perverse message for Jews. Nazi Germany banned guns. Jews desperately needed guns to defend themselves. Therefore, Jews should favor gun rights in the United States. This argument has been rejected by nearly all Jewish organizations.

Indeed, there did come a point where Jews needed guns to fight the Nazis — in the ghettos, the camps, and as partisans in the forests. But the United States is a long way from becoming Nazi Germany and the use of guns by the Black Panthers in the late 60s and 70s, when they were, in fact, the target of police violence, did them no good. Harking back to earlier periods in American history, the German anarchists trained with rifles in 1886, but that did not save them from mass arrests and four executions after someone threw a bomb that killed seven policemen in Chicago's Haymarket Square. Sacco and Vanzetti belonged to an anarchist group that engaged in bombings. Vanzetti was carrying a gun when he was arrested. This made it easier, not harder, for the State of Massachusetts to execute them in 1927 for a crime they did not commit.

The US government has engaged in mass repression in the past. The most notorious case affecting the left was the Palmer raids in January 1920 in which 10,000 immigrant radicals were arrested. Armed resistance would have been futile. There have also been numerous strikes in American history in which police or state or federal troops shot down strikers. Mineworkers, in particular, were known to arm themselves. Yet violent strikes were typically unsuccessful.

Coming full circle, what attitude should we on the left have toward gun control? Is there any truth to the far right's claims that we are living under government tyranny and must arm ourselves to protect our freedoms? How much do we trust our police and military and if they turn their guns on us, then what? Do we "pick up the gun"? Would it help if we did, considering the overwhelming firepower available to the authorities?

I think the essential difference between our attitude and theirs is that in our quest for a more just and cooperative society, we have come to either embrace non-violence as a sacred principle or to conceive of violence as the absolute last resort. The far right, on the other hand, sees the right to carry and use guns as its birthright in a dog-eat-dog society where it is every man for himself. For now and the foreseeable future, our weapons of choice must be the ballot, our checkbooks, pens, computers, picket signs, and our bodies. Or to put it another way, we take our stand on the First Amendment, not the long obsolete Second.

I know that Trotsky called for the formation of "workers' militias" in the Transitional Program of the Fourth International, but that was in 1938 and times have changed.

Bennett Muraskin is a union representative for state college/university faculty, librarians and professional staff in NJ.

June 22, 2014
Angela Walker, “Free Range Socialist,” Runs for Sheriff in Milwaukee

Angela Walker, an independent socialist, is running for the office of Sheriff in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this coming November. Her campaign is part of a small trend of independent labor, Green Party, and socialist campaigns around the country that are discussed in a survey article by Dan La Botz in the forthcoming Summer issue of New Politics. Here La Botz interviews Walker to learn why she is running and what she hopes to accomplish.

New Politics – Angela, thanks for talking with me about your campaign. Tell me a little about your background.

Angela Walker – I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on January 19, 1974. I grew up primarily on the North Side in what’s identified as the inner-city of Milwaukee. I lived on the South Side for a little bit, but mainly on the North Side with my mom. My mom was a school bus driver for a few years, she had some data entry training, and she went from job to job,. My brother and I are a year apart, and my sister was born when I was 15, when my mom re-married.

I went to a bunch of different schools. First, I went to elementary school at the Elm Creative Arts School and then to Roosevelt Middle School of the Arts. Somehow I ended up at Bay View High School which completely threw me off the arts track. I don’t know why I did that.

NP – Did you go on to college?

AW – Yes, I went to the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, studying history: American History, World History. I would have liked to specialize in African American and women’s history, but I didn’t continue. I dropped out in my last year because I could make more money as a bus driver than I could as a teacher. Plus I loved it. I drove for Greyhound for two years as a matter of fact.

It was quite an Odyssey. I drove for two years for Greyhound and moved to North Carolina and got married, and then I moved back to Florida and then to Milwaukee. I got back here March 1 of 2009. My husband I and separated. We’re in the process of divorcing as we speak.

NP – How did you get involved in politics?

AW – I got hired by the Milwaukee Country Transit System in November of 2009 and I was made legislative director of the union that represented the transit workers in 2011. I wasn’t looking for that position. I wasn’t in line for it. I was asked to do it.

There was so much unrest here in Wisconsin at the time because of what Governor Scott Walker did in stripping unions of their bargaining power. I began to go to the protests by myself because I believed in it. I had made some leaflets with information about the Koch brothers and what the Governor was doing and handed them out. So I had become known in my union for my activities.

It just so happened that about that time the legislative director was stepping down. My local union president asked me if I wanted the job. I said to myself ‘Hey, if my union president asks me, I’m going to do the job.’

NP – What was it like being legislative director?

AW – My predecessor didn’t train me, so it was basically: We’ve thrown you in the water, now swim. My thing is social justice, so I wanted to know, what kind of candidates are we endorsing? Where do they stand with the community? Is their approach holistic or is it single issue and that’s all they’re concerned about?

NP – What do you think you gained from your experience as legislative director?

AW – I met a lot of absolutely amazing people. I was part of the Occupy movement, so I brought that into the work I did for the union. The ATU nationally supported the Occupy movement. I met a lot of people that I’m still friends with.

NP – And what did you think of the legislators you met?

AW – Legislators….hmmmm….(laughing) a mixed bag. You have some people who are genuinely committed to reform and some who are getting a pay check.

NP – How long did you work in that position?

AW – For two years. I stepped down from that position in October of last year.

NP – How did you decide to run for Sheriff? And why are you running for that office?

AW – A very good friend of mine, a socialist like me, suggested the idea.

Our current sheriff, David A. Clarke, Jr. is an interesting character. He’s a very colorful character. He was just reprimanded by the District Attorney’s Office here for his lack of cooperation. He had made a statement about the D.A. being “soft on crime” and the D.A. fired back. Clarke engages in a lot of fear-mongering. He panders to a gun-loving, lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key base. It’s a particular concern to me, because Milwaukee County and City are still some of the most segregated in the country. We are greatly affected by mass incarceration issues. His messaging is not in line with what’s happening in the county.

I am running for sheriff because Milwaukee County is dealing with segregation and violence in the inner city, and these issues have deep roots that have only been glanced at in passing. I think that the only way we will finally move Milwaukee in the direction it needs to go is to be truthful about the role that capitalism and white privilege have played in making the inner city a permanent underclass.

Mass incarceration is a huge problem in Milwaukee. I am sure that you know that Wisconsin leads the country in incarcerating Black and Latin@ folks. Those folks come from Milwaukee County. Many of the prisons they end up in are out-of-state, for-profit institutions. Those institutions are not profitable unless they are full, so we've seen crimes that up until recently were misdemeanors become felonies. And I am sure you know that once someone is labeled a felon, it is much harder for them to find work, housing, and access to educational resources. So they re-offend, and the cycle starts all over again, with prisoners being used for cheap labor in positions that used to be held by union members. It's a dehumanizing situation. I want this system of commodifying human beings called out and ended.

I support the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, with the same restrictions as alcohol, because nonviolent offenders make up a disproportionate percentage of this prison population. If legalization and decriminalization happen, these folks will have to be released. The prison system here in Wisconsin is capitalism at its finest, profiting off of the misery and marginalization of people who deserve much better. I think that my campaign will give me the platform to address this.

NP – If you were elected Sheriff, how would you conduct things differently?

AW – The way I look at the office of Sheriff is that there is a need for greater cooperation between that office and the county board, the police department; those relationships are extremely damaged under Clarke. I would want to repair that damage and work cooperatively with these agencies.

For me, criminal justice is an oxymoron. If you want justice, the first thing we have to be addressing is poverty, which is a major problem in Milwaukee, and understanding how poverty and the lack of a living wage keep people in the prison industrial system. The people who are being incarcerated are being incarcerated for profit.

Also with the passage of Act 10 which took away state employees’ collective bargaining rights you have prisoners doing work previously done by public employees and being paid little or nothing, so it’s very profitable.

I am supportive of the Living Wage Ordinance passed a few months ago by the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors, which would require all contractors with the County to offer a minimum wage of $11.61 to those they employed. I realize that this does not go nearly far enough, but I support it as a measure that opens the door to the fight for a real living wage for all workers here. I believe that living wage work and the reinstatement of workers' collective bargaining rights will help to curb the violence in Milwaukee, the root cause of which is poverty.

Living wage and ending mass incarceration make up my platform, and I think that those issues will resonate with a lot of folks here. We'll be able to address a lot of other issues that stem from these, and build on the good work socialists did in this city decades ago.

NP – What's been the response to your campaign?

AW – I won’t be on the ballot until November 4. Clark is running against an opponent in the Democratic Primary. His opponent is Lt. Chris Moews, a lieutenant in the Milwaukee Police Department. I’ve talked to him on any number of occasions and he’s a good person. The media is concentrating on them.

NP – Are you a member of some socialist organization or an independent socialist?

AW – I identify myself as a free-range socialist. I’m very timid when it comes to joining organizations. I tend to do what I want. I know what I believe. I know what things make sense to me.

To me being a socialist means that we value things that are for the public good: having the proper income distribution, making sure that people aren’t doing without when others have more than they need.

I like the idea of workers owning where they work. I think it’s fair. I think people are more productive and get more job satisfaction when they own where they work. I was a transit worker and what I would have liked was to have a cooperative system where the workers and riders would have made decisions about how the system is run, and that is not currently the case.

I’m just a person and one of the things I hope for coming out of this race is that people will feel empowered, that they will say, “I’m not rich and I don’t have a thousand degrees behind my name, but I believe that I can help and I won’t be afraid to try.”

June 18, 2014