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  • A Comment on the East Bay Mayoral Campaigns

    In the past few weeks, New Politics has published two valuable commentaries on the role of socialists and the Left in local electoral campaigns, first a broad overview by Dan La Botz and then a response by David Judd specifically on Dan Siegel’s campaign for Mayor of Oakland. Both of these contributions come from a starting point that I think is valuable for the Left—that even though the capitalist system cannot be reformed through elections, the Left still can use electoral campaigns to build the struggles of the working-class and the oppressed. If the media is going to shower candidates with attention, there might as well be one candidate with good politics. But there must be a caveat here. The key question, as La Botz writes, is this: “Can these political campaigns begin to interact with the social and labor movements in such a way as to inspire a virtuous circle of rising movements with militant strategies and more political challenges raising left political visions and programs?”

    I agree with this sentiment and would take it a step further—the purpose of Left electoral campaigns should not be to win an election, but first and foremost to build struggles from below.  Winning should never be the primary goal if you don’t think electoral victories themselves can change much. Some will join these efforts with the sole purpose of winning—fine, but we shouldn’t let them shape the politics of the campaign. Victory itself can also be a disaster, as a Left candidate with no social movements behind them will simply feel pressure to carry out the same austerity measures they are supposedly against. Suddenly, a small but growing movement can turn into its exact opposite once placed into power. This genuine danger is rarely discussed in these campaigns—after all, how dare you suggest our candidate might sell out!—though La Botz does a good job of pointing out how this dynamic played out in Jackson, Mississippi, for example.

    The role of Left campaigns should be to build struggles first and win election as a distant second, so distant that in most cases it is not even remotely a goal at all and there is no illusion that winning office can change much. If you really think that winning a seat is going to have a big impact, your social movement strategy can be vastly distorted, if there even is one. It is not “ultra-left” to take this view—it is simply a good social movement strategy. Putting winning first is a bad social movement strategy, as it will ultimately assume the movements should be subordinate to the campaign and not vice-versa. Campaigns with this strategy can even be quite harmful, no matter how many “opportunities” we see dangling before us.

    The discussion around Dan Siegel’s campaign for Mayor of Oakland is a useful starting point for considering this. La Botz is fairly critical of Siegel’s campaign, stating that his pro-investment rhetoric could come from any Democrat or Republican. Judd disagrees, pointing to many of Siegel’s platform issues, such as a $15/hour minimum wage and public broadband Internet. But he gets to the critical point when he says, “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.”

    I agree with the first point—although I think Siegel’s campaign has come up short—and disagree with the second. The point, to get back to La Botz’s quote, which Judd also quotes approvingly, is whether or not Siegel’s campaign can strengthen social movements and various acts of struggle and resistance to the status quo. I believe that it could, as do many activists I know and respect in Oakland who are involved in this campaign, including those that Judd and I worked with alongside Siegel and the family of Alan Blueford, an African-American teenager killed by the Oakland police.

    Unfortunately, so far, the campaign has retreated from radical politics and has missed important opportunities to strengthen social movement organizing and give voice to the oppressed.

    On August 4, 23-year-old Jacorey Calhoun was killed in East Oakland by an Alameda County Sheriff's deputy in circumstance strikingly similar to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. According to reports, the deputy stopped Calhoun, suspecting he was involved in a robbery, and when Calhoun ran he was shot in the head and killed even though he was unarmed. The Calhoun killing has been completely ignored by the entire political establishment in Oakland including every candidate for Mayor—including Dan Siegel. There are probably a number of reasons for this, among them the extensive work and planning in place by staffers and volunteers which cannot be easily unwound. The real problem is that shedding light on police violence and giving a voice to the people in East Oakland who deal with law enforcement as an occupying army every day should have been the entire point of the campaign in the first place. Apparently, it was not.

    Had Siegel not been running for Mayor, there is no doubt in my mind that he would have been an outspoken critic of this killing, as he has in the past. For example, during the Blueford campaign, Siegel wrote that the Oakland Police should be dissolved. He is the first person I ever heard use the phrase “police abolition,” congruent to how some discuss prison abolition. During the Blueford campaign, he regularly and publically said that the cop who killed Alan Blueford was “just doing his job,” pointing out that the job of the police is to terrorize the Black population. This was Siegel at his best. But now he argues that the Oakland Police can do a perfectly good job as currently constituted with a bit of reorganization that would put more police on the streets. The point here is not to insist that Siegel arbitrarily insert far-left rhetoric into the campaign. Perhaps the term “police abolition” is a bit abstract, but the idea that the cops are an “occupying army” would not be lost on anybody in East Oakland. The point is that the logic and realpolitik of electoral campaigning promotes a retreat from radical politics and resistance to austerity and oppression in order to appeal to moderate voters.

    It is hard not to believe that the campaign’s reluctance to do anything around Calhoun’s case is a result of this retreat. This should be a serious problem for the Left, again, not simply because Siegel has crossed some line with his political terminology. The problem is, rather than creating a platform for these issues, the campaign has convinced people who have tirelessly spent hours and hours of their lives fighting this sort of injustice that they should now prioritize doing other things like having house parties and putting up door-knob hangers about their candidate. Part of the problem is organizational, but part of it is almost certainly political—that it is based on the idea that Siegel speaking out about this now would hurt his chances to really do something about it as Mayor.

    Siegel could potentially transform the election by making Calhoun’s case a central issue. Just as every politician in Oakland was quiet about the murder of Alan Blueford due to their unwillingness to rock the OPD boat, Siegel could put this killing at their doorstep and force them to deal with it. It could create a small crisis for City Hall and for most of the candidates for mayor—one of whom is the current Mayor and two others are on the City Council. These three are the main contenders in the race. None of them will criticize OPD or the Sheriff's office as they want their support in the race. Putting Calhoun’s killing at the center of the campaign would be a controversial move that would probably alienate a lot of voters, not to mention some supporters deeply involved in the campaign who really just want Siegel to be a mainstream liberal who is a bit better than the current mayor.

    Judd hints at this, pointing out that there is disagreement about how to win in Oakland’s ranked-choice voting system, where voters can rank the candidates in order of preference. The second and third choices of voters come into play if no candidate wins a majority in the first round. Judd’s conclusion is fine—that some in the campaign incorrectly want him to appeal to a broad mass of “second place” and “third place” votes and therefore tame his radical politics. However, I disagree with Judd’s assertion that this is about appealing to voters who want to rank Siegel as their first choice. The math of ranked-choice voting is completely irrelevant. Ultimately, this is a political question about what sort of campaign this should be. Appealing to “first place” voters will likely lose the election and we should not argue otherwise, as there are currently fifteen candidates in the race and there is little likelihood that anybody will win in the first or even the second round. The real issue—the only issue—is the politics of the campaign, and whether these politics and strategies directly further the goals of social movements and weaken the status quo.

    There are two visions for this campaign, one that the Left could get behind and the other which should be rejected. It is not too late for Siegel to shift his campaign, but there is not much time left either.

    It is, however, too late for Mike Parker’s campaign to become Mayor of Richmond, California. La Botz documents many positives about Parker, a lifelong socialist and member of the Green Party and Solidarity. Richmond is a city just north of Berkeley, whose largest employer is the Chevron oil refinery, where a Green has held the Mayor’s office for the last eight years. At the last minute, however, Richmond City Council member and Democrat Tom Butt entered the race and Parker dropped out. The result is a mess that only further discredits the Green Party in one of its only strongholds, a city filled with Black and Latino residents who face not only deep racism and economic inequality but regular environmental pollution from Chevron.

    As Parker says, “My supporters and I determined that in this race the progressive vote would likely be split.” The thinking was that he should not “split the vote” between himself and Democrat Tom Butt, thereby allowing Democrat Nathaniel Bates, who is heavily backed by Chevron, to win. Yet the real spoiler, when the Mayor is currently a Green, is Butt. Imagine the day when the Democrats step aside so as not to spoil the opportunities of the Left! It simply will never happen, especially when the Left gives up so easily. If the goal was to build an alternative to the Democrats then this should have never happened. That, apparently, was not the goal. We cannot complain that working people are not attracted to a Left that cannot even fight for itself. They are right to be distrustful and skeptical of Leftists who cannot even carry through with their own stated plans. It would be a disservice to working-class people to try to convince them otherwise when the evidence before them is so clear.

    All too often, when Leftists gain some prominent role or position, they suddenly decry how they are handcuffed by their limited options and suddenly have to quietly go along with every austerity measure or sellout because there is nothing that can be done. The Left is handcuffed all right, by its own failed strategies. Usually, being “handcuffed” involves having an abundance of opportunities, but taking one of these opportunities and actually doing something useful with a momentary position of power would forestall better opportunities down the road. There is always a hypothetical future opportunity that handcuffs us now. Unfortunately, the future never arrives.

    There has been a vast disparity between the failure of the Left and the resistance of working-class people from below over the past week. Just as the candidates were quietly mulling their limited options, Black people in Ferguson have launched a rebellion against the police shooting them down in the streets and against the military occupation of their neighborhoods. None of the people rebelling in Ferguson are worried about sounding too radical or splitting the vote. On the contrary, the revolt is a consequence of the fact that the entire political establishment has failed them.

    The Left could learn something from this revolt and, at the very least, worry less about spoiling its future and more about the battles in front of us today.

     

    Scott Jay is a writer and activist living in Oakland, CA.

  • Is It Time To Be Outlaws Again?

    Only large-scale civil disobedience will make our leaders address economic injustice.

    In 1989, Bob Dylan recorded a song titled “Everything Is Broken”. That song seemed to go largely ignored, perhaps because it seemed to be only a pessimistic lament that offered no suggestions for how to go about fixing the “everything”.

    But as with many of his songs, it was prophetic. Lately, many Americans are  experiencing the feeling that everything is broken, but people in many other countries have had this feeling for a long time.

    While it is not useful or necessary here to document exactly when the US decline began, it can be generally and safely assumed that for a substantial part of our population, which Occupy called  “the 99%”, the most dramatic part of the decline began with the near total economic collapse of 2008.

    Although it was the banksters and their partners in crime known as hedge funds who created the crisis, it fell to the taxpayers to bail those banks out of their looming bankruptcy, thereby saving capitalism from itself.

    This bailout, while actually guaranteeing greater profits for the banks already large enough to swallow smaller institutions, also allowed the banks to metastasize like a rapidly growing cancer into previously unattained power, both economic and political. This growth, despite the claims of our elected officials at every level, did little to relieve the working class, the 99+%, from continuing economic and political decline.

    Let’s look at some of the facts about the current economy in the United States:

    ·         Income inequality   US now 4th worst in the world.

    ·         Productivity vs wages   Real wages up 5% since 1979, productivity up 75%

    ·         Poverty  About 16% (over 50 million) of US in poverty, worst since 1993

    ·         Status of children   One out of 6 on food stamps, 20% in poverty

    ·         Average CEO vs average worker   240 to 1 in 2012, 20 to 1 in 1965

    ·         Wealth controlled by 1%   Top 1% control 36%, top 10% control 75%

    ·         Jobs    7 million with multiple jobs, 2.6 million can only find part-time jobs

    ·         Home ownership    Almost 20% living with mortgage greater than value of home

    These figures above should be enough for anyone with even a shred of moral conscience (never mind political consciousness) to realize that we are, in truth, living in a nation that not only violates much of traditional capitalist doctrine, but the very core of our beings, our morality, our ethics, and our belief (present in almost all of us) that we bear some collective responsibility for each other’s well-being.

    Putting morality aside, a massive and continued decline of general living standards is not only unhealthy for YOUR family, but for our entire society, our larger family, and poses great and continuing danger for our children’s futures.

    And so the question looms before us of how to fix the damn thing. Is it by continuing to count on an electoral process that clearly is not only dominated, but almost completely controlled by the banksters? Should we, every 2 or 4 years, simply be electoral activists who try to persuade our neighbors and friends that “this time it will be different”? Can we honestly expect voters to believe that electing one corporate funded (and therefore owned) candidate over another will make a difference?

    Or shall we look back at our history and realize that, in fact, REAL change, the kind of change that threatens to topple the status quo, the change that makes ordinary people proud of ourselves, aware of our power, convinced that we CAN create a world that lives in peace, feeds the hungry, provides jobs for most if not all, and prevents those in power from continuing to rule our lives, THAT change only comes about by people taking action, by resisting, by making clear that we are willing to risk all to gain all and that we really have no other choice.

    Yes, some will continue to argue that in a democracy, we can make that change via the ballot box, but to believe that, one must totally ignore the fact that what we called  “democracy” has been hi-jacked by those with the money to finance not only the electoral campaigns, but the life styles of those legislators,with  promises of future board and lobbying jobs when they retire from office, and thereby effectively purchasing those officials.

    No real change, the kind of change that creates a humane culture and world, will come about by voting, although electoral politics, especially centered around radical 3rd party candidates, can sometimes work to aid that resistance.

    Instead — and again — we must revisit the lessons learned from various human rights struggles of the past.

    Unions, which  helped to abolish wage slavery and the inhumane working conditions suffered by so many, became recognized and legal by the actions of millions of workers across the US who defied existing laws, resulting in  many being jailed, beaten, or even murdered.

    Slavery was ended not by the rule and proclamations of one man, it took rebellion by both slaves and abolitionists that tore the nation apart before slavery (at least in name and by law) was abolished.

    Women’s suffrage was not gained by sitting home and trying to elect sympathetic representatives, but by women taking the streets, demanding support from their partners and openly rebelling both in word and deed.

    Civil rights, with all due credit to King, Malcom X, and others, were hardly won by electing “fair-minded” officials. Rather, industry and society, as a whole, was brought to its knees by open rebellion, deliberate violation of existing laws,  and the beatings, deaths, and arrests of thousands of committed persons joined together in a power which ultimately became greater than the power of the state.

    The same has been true in one degree or another of every other struggle for human rights, including but not limited to the movement for Gay Rights and the Vietnam anti-war movement that finally ended an unpopular war so decimating to both nations.

    During all of those struggles, people began to realize that voting, marching, writing letters, petitioning, and teach-ins were just not enough. People realized that to make government move, we had to move it ourselves, that no one could or would do it for us, that there were no “saviors” except ourselves.

    As Dr. King pointed out, unjust laws, that is, laws that fail to uphold human dignity, need to be broken.

    As our history shows, oppression spawns, every time, the determination by citizens to act in violation of the law. We must deliberately and consciously resist the power of the state, to become aware again of our power when we organize for revolution.

    And, sad to say, that is where we are today. We are without other recourse because we are without democracy. We are without law and reason, because the law is designed to protect the interests of those in power, and those in power are without reason.

    Our world, the world our children are inheriting is in danger as never before. The danger is not only from the massive accumulation of wealth by a handful of people who now have more power than many nations of the world, but also what they do with that power. These people care about nothing other than continuing to gain and gather power by any means necessary. They are without ethics, without morals, without any compulsion other than continued accumulation.

    It’s what they do with their accumulated power and wealth that makes them so different, so criminal, so undeserving and unworthy of respect. It’s the trading of stocks, the hoarding of  “commodity futures” to drive up prices, the deliberate excessive profit taking, the funding of wars from which they profit, the plundering of the earth’s resources that brings them profit and our planet closer to environmental destruction that make them different from you and me. We are not like them, and we must glory in that.

    And so, we are left with little choice, at this point in our history, but to use the power we have, legally and illegally, to combat this continued destruction of our world.

    They are not about to create any more jobs than they absolutely need to make a profit. They are not about to cease convincing our officials to push for more fossil fuel extraction even though the results are already proving disastrous. They are not about to support greater taxation on their already bloated profits, even though they are now taxed at a lower level than at anytime in recent history. They are, to put it simply, not about to stop.

    It is up to us to stop them, to create the conditions in which we can once again, be neighbors, be friends, be supportive of each other, be the society in which we do not cast aside those born into a poorer economic background, to stand up, collectively and say that we will do whatever is necessary to end this disaster.

    Along with legal activity we must be willing to break the law, stand and be arrested, stuff the jails when possible, be proud of “going to jail for justice”, understand once again that we, those who created this wealth, have a right to feed our families, to work, to not worry about losing our homes, to see our children educated to their maximum potential, and, simply….to live without fear.

    In 1976, a country western singer named James Talley, recorded a song titled “Are They Gonna Make Us Outlaws Again”. Like Dylan’s song quoted at the start of this article, it was prophetic and the last verse reads:

    Now there’s always been a bottom

                And there’s always been a top

                And someone took the orders

                And someone called the shots

                And someone took the beatin’, Lord

                And someone got the prize

                Well, that may be the way it’s been

                But that don’t mean it’s right.

     James Talley was correct. It’s NOT right, and we have a moral and ethical responsibility to do something about it. So do it.

    Mel Packer is retired from health care after earlier life occupations as a Teamster truckdriver and activity with TDU. He has a life history of involvement in social justice struggles, mostly in PIttsburgh, PA. He can be contacted by email at melpacker@aol.com. This article originally appeared in Vox Populi.

  • Israel and Imperialism

    I would like to thank Bennett for his kind and appreciative comments on my artcile and use the opportunity presented by his letter to answer some essential points of contention.

    Bennett correctly notes that I defend a two-state solution. A two-state transition might be a more accurate summary. But what he omits is equally critical. The Israel that I advocate — the Israel that can breakdown the island – ghetto walls that separate it from the Arab world — cannot be based on its present Jewish chauvinist structures. It requires a revolutionary struggle to de-Zionize Israel and replace the existing foundations with one that balances and democratizes the relationship between the Jewish and Palestinian communities that constitute it. It requires, in other words, repudiating the colonial project of Zionism and re-building Israel on an equal, bi-national footing. These are the preconditions for resolving the larger Palestinian issue and bisymmetrically allying Israel with the broader democratic aspirations in the Arab world.

    But the larger difference I have with Bennett is that he recognizes only two out of three central aspects of the Zionist state – the ongoing colonial settler aspect and the creation of a new national community that arose from it, later to acquire an independent existence. What he fails to appreciate, what he in fact vehemently denies, is the imperialist-agent aspect of the Israeli state.  Payments for services rendered to American imperialism underwrite and sustain Israel’s ongoing colonizing project. And it is this partnership, and the revenues that flow from it as military aid and tax-exempt charitable contributions, that keep a lid on Israeli social conflicts by allowing Israeli capitalism to confer special material privileges to Jewish workers. And this closes the loop.  For these subsidies create a mass reciprocal social base within Israel that identifies with the aims and interests of the US.  As long as this nexus is not disrupted, there is little prospect that internal social conflicts will acquire an anti-Zionist let alone a revolutionary character. Imperialist aid is the glue that causes the Zionist structure to adhere.

    Is it “flying off the rails” to describe Israel as a bulwark against the Arab democratic upsurge?

    Israel has always assumed a watchdog role as defender of American and British interests, not only in the Middle East but in Africa and Central America as well. I will refrain from reiterating the broader litany of charges against Israel in this regard and confine my remarks to the Middle East. Every challenge there to American regional interests — whether from radical nationalists of the Nasserite or Baathist stripe, Shi’ite and Iranian empowerment or mass democratic upheavals — are an equal call to concern and action for Israel. All feed a well-justified fear for the health of the status quo that benefits elite American interests. The fear of Arab democracy compounds these concerns not only in its own right, but also for fear that it creates a wedge for jihadist populism.

    Israel has permitted the US to stockpile arms, fuel, munitions and other supplies on its soil to be accessed whenever America needs them in the region. Israel is a port of call for troops, ships, aircraft and intelligence services. It is a testing ground for missile defense systems and counter-insurgency weapons and tactics. Representative Steve Rothman has even argued that “without the American partnership with the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), the Unites States might need to have 100,000 or more additional troops stationed permanently in that part of the world to make up for the protection of US interests and vital intelligence provided by Israel to the United States.”(The Hill, June 3, 2008).

    Pertinent to the immediate context is the well-publicized convergence of interests in regional stability between Israeli ruling circles and the Arab regimes, in particular those targeted by revolution in the wake of the Arab Spring. The Egyptian coup had no greater ally than Israel, who lobbied relentlessly on its behalf with Washington. And Israel had no better regional allies than Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia during its current war on Gaza. Those regimes now threatened, with the exception of Syria, are all long-term American regional assets.  And a declawed Syria, freed of its chemical weapons, is valued as a reliable enforcer of Israel’s northern borders.

    The NY Times (July 30, 2014) reported with some insight, that

    “(t)he dynamic has inverted all expectation of the Arab Spring uprisings. As recently as 18 months ago, most analysts in Israel, Washington and the Palestinian territories expected the popular uprisings to make the Arab governments more responsive to their citizens, and therefore more sympathetic to the Palestinians and more hostile to Israel.”

    But instead of becoming more isolated, Tel Aviv has emerged as the “unexpected beneficiary” of a resurgent conservative order.

    This de facto Israeli-Jordanian-Saudi Arabian-Egyptian- Emirates alliance is the Maginot Line of American imperialism. And it is this line that would have to be broken when the revolutionary Arab Spring reorganizes.

    Those who seek a de-Zionized Israel and its integration into the region have a vital stake in the success of a revived mass revolutionary Arab breakthrough. A victory for Arab democracy would change the regional balance of power by decisively transferring control of the regions resources to the Arab masses. In so doing it would render Israel’s watchdog role – and its further usefulness to an American imperialism in retreat — obsolete.

    How long thereafter until Israeli society mutinied at the prospects of directly shouldering the dead weight of Zionism’s colonization projects in the Occupied Territories? And with that chapter closed, Israeli capitalism, no longer able to sustain the caste privileges of Jewish workers from without, would revert to normality.

    Zionism would then be on the road to anachronistic irrelevancy as, incidentally, it was before the Six Day War revived it.

  • Coal Miners Are Mad…and Scared. And They Have a Right to Be

    In 1968, the Mannington Mine in Farmington WV owned by Consol Coal, caught fire, blew up, and 78 miners were buried, many likely alive.

    Image

    In 1972, a Consol mine in Blacksville, WV, caught fire and 9 miners were buried (again, likely alive) when Consol sealed the mine off to stop the fire and save the coal.

    I remember those well, having been involved in labor struggles as a working Teamster truck-driver back then with friends in the coal fields.

    In the very early ‘70s, a militant movement of rank and file union coal miners called the Miners for Democracy was born, threw out corrupt leaders, and rebuilt a union that was militant, demanded safe working conditions, and knew who the enemy was, and still is — the owners of those coal companies like Consol.

    I knew and worked with some of them. I even worked in the mid ‘70s to try and persuade some folks to revive the MFD as it had now dissolved and some of the militancy and class-consciousness was fading.

    But at its founding, the MFD knew what it was about, knew that the coal companies were evil, and knew miners had to stick up for each other as workers…or die.

    Yesterday, I stood on a sidewalk outside of this building holding a sign calling for reduced carbon emissions while a thousand or so miners and famil members marched by supporting those same companies that have brutalized and exploited the communities of Appalachia for decades.

    What happened to make union coal miners support the companies that buried some ancestors alive, gave most of the survivors black lung and then tried to deny them benefits, and laid them off by the tens of thousands as the companies opened non-union mines and began ruining the “almost heaven” hills and valleys of WV with mountain to removal which employs few, if any, union miners.

    Why are union miners falling for the company line that there’s a “war on coal” when the coal and gas companies are really making a war on ALL of us, on our planet, on our children’s futures and certainly on those very miners who are marching on behalf of the coal companies?

    BECAUSE THEY’RE SCARED TO DEATH OF THE FUTURE.

    Last year, I traveled thru some of the same mining communities where friends lived and worked in the early 70’s, towns like War and Welch that were once friendly, solid, working class towns, places you’d be proud to live. When I was there last year, I couldn’t even find a pizza shop open on a Sunday and most businesses were boarded up.

    MINERS ARE SCARED!

    I saw poverty on that trip in those hidden Appalachian valleys that I’d not seen since the Kennedy-Johnson era and the War on Poverty days.

    MINERS AND THEIR FAMILIES HAVE A RIGHT TO BE SCARED.

    Why? Not because there’s a “war on coal”, but because those very same coal companies that fund their protests, pulled out of their communities once the easy-to-get coal was gone and went to mountain-top removal or tar-sands oil or fracking and left those miners and their families out in the cold, jobless, and desperate for easy answers.

    I saw anger on the faces of those marching coal miners yesterday, but I smelled fear on every one of them, fear of further social and economic devastation, of hungry children with lousy schools and no way out, of old houses without money to keep them up, of the addictions people turn to when they’re desperate for relief from the social pain of unemployment that just keeps coming every time your kid looks in your empty pockets for lunch money.

    Those angry and fearful miners aren’t stupid, they’re as smart as anyone else, but they’re desperate. They know what’s coming, about climate change, of looming environmental disasters already too late to avoid…but they still need to feed their kids.

    Those miners and their families have fueled this nation with their labor and their lives for countless decades. They, like everyone else displaced in this Wall Street “recovery” but working class disaster, need jobs, good jobs with dignity, union protection, and living wages. Jobs that leave us with some sense of pride at the end of the shift, knowing we somehow contributed to the common good, and that ain’t gonna come from the coal companies, not now, not ever. They’ve used those miners and their families up and now they’re sitting them out, while using them one last time for their own interests.

    And so I come to the proposed regulations, weak as they are, and certainly to be weaker once Congress gets done working for the coal companies. But they are still urgently needed and strengthened if we are to even begin getting off our self-destructive path paved by the fossil fuel industry.

    But while we debate those rules, we must also create good jobs for those who will be, correctly, displaced from the mines.

    Does anyone dare to tell me that a working miner would not rather have a good, clean, union job building solar panels or wind turbines? Or that a human being would choose black lung over a clean environment that allows comfortable retirement, a job where the roof doesn’t fall and kill you, a job where you might wind up being buried alive to save the coal?

    If you dare to answer “yes” to those questions, I’ll refer you to a good psychiatrist for a sanity check.

    In closing, I urge the EA to do the SANE thing by rewriting your proposed carbon reduction regulations to not only increase the rate at which the reductions are achieved, but to demand that Congress provide the funds to put those who lose coal jobs back to work in fully funded renewable energy jobs and save the communities that have been destroyed by the coal companies.

    Government cannot serve two masters. It either works for us, the working people, or for the fossil fuel companies. I know which side I’m on. How about you?

    *Mel Packer is retired from health care after earlier life occupations as a Teamster truckdriver and activity with TDU. He has a life history of involvement in social justice struggles, mostly in PIttsburgh, PA. He can be contacted by email at: melpacker@aol.com.

    These remarks were delivered as a comment at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Public hearing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on August 1, 2014 about proposed new regulations. This statement was first published in Vox Populi.

     

     

      

     

      

     

     

  • Kshama Sawant on Gaza Solidarity: End the Brutal Violence and Killings

    [Because Kshama Sawant is at the moment the leading elected socialist official in the United States her opinions carry a weight far more important than those of many other socialist groups and activists. We print below Sawant's recent statement on Israel's attacks on Gaza made in the Seattle City Council and reprinted on the Socialist Alternative website. – Eds]

    Transcript of statement by Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant:

    “This Saturday I attended the weekly peaceful protest in Seattle against the violence being inflicted by the Israeli state on the people of Gaza.

    It was really gratifying to see a strong and defiant spirit at the protest at Westlake, and the solidarity from progressive people in Seattle, regardless of ethnicity and national origin. I was especially struck by the energy of young political activists, something that should be encouraged and fostered in the interest of social justice.

    This horrific war purportedly began as a response to the death of three Israelis. Since then, according to Al Jazeera news sources, at least 1,830 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 9,406 others injured. Sixty-three Israeli soldiers have also died, along with two Israeli civilians and a Thai worker.

    Israel yesterday attacked a United Nations school sheltering some 3,000 displaced people in Rafah, in southern Gaza, The Seattle Times reported on this today on the front page (PDF), which killed 10 people. The U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the attack as both “a moral outrage and a criminal act.”

    Rocket attacks by Hamas against Israelis also must be condemned. When they hurt anyone, they hurt innocent civilians and give an excuse for Israel’s ruling class to further unleash their war machine.

    In this current war, the Israeli “Iron Dome” system has intercepted almost all rockets with an identified potential to hit civilians. It is not by accident that only one of the three civilians in Israel who lost their lives was killed by a rocket, and that he was a Bedouin from the south of Israel who, like tens of thousands of Bedouins in the south, was denied any right of protection due to the racist policies of the Israeli state.

    All killing of innocent people, women and children especially, should be condemned. And the last month of killings of Palestinians in Gaza is not only stomach-turning, it is only one in a long and documented series of war crimes stretching over decades. This has been happening with the tacit or overt complicity of US imperialism and I think we as elected officials have to have a statement describing the role that the U.S. Congress and Senate have played.

    The New York Times has reported that nearly 60,000 people have lost their homes in Gaza, and the number of people taking shelter in schools is nearly five times as many as in 2009. The cost to Gaza’s already fragile economy will be significant: the 2009 conflict caused losses estimated at $4 billion — almost three times the size of Gaza’s annual gross domestic product. That gives us a sense of the scale of the damage.

    It is the responsibility of elected officials everywhere to openly speak out to stop the humanitarian catastrophe, and to condemn it in the strongest possible terms.

    Next Saturday, there will be the weekly protest from noon to 2:00 PM protest at Westlake. On Thursday at 7:30 PM at Seattle Central Community College, a pots and pans noise brigade against the violence in Gaza. I invite everyone to join us there.”

     

    Councilmember Tom Rasmussen: “May I say something?”

    Councilmember Sawant: “Yes, please.”

    Councilmember Tom Rasmussen: “I want to say that you do not reflect my views. These are your personal views. And I respect that. I personally abhor the war, and the violence that is occurring in Gaza and in that area in general, but I believe that it is wrong to condemn one party alone. And so you may use your podium as you wish, but I do not share your views in terms of condemning one party alone. But I do share your view in terms of abhorring the war and the violence that’s occurring.”

    Councilmember Sawant: “Thank you for expressing your views, Councilmember Rasmussen, I really appreciate it. Just for the record, I would like to remind everyone that in my statement I condemned both sides, and I don’t condone violence of any kind. That is my opinion. Again, I think it is necessary for us to acknowledge the complete lack of proportion between the violence that Hamas is capable of, and the violence that has been inflicted by the Israeli state on Palestine. That’s my view. We all should express our views and I really appreciate you engaging in the discussion.”

  • Response to Barry Finger on Israel-Palestine

    I wish to commend Barry Finger for his analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict dating back to the establishment of 1947 UN Partition Plan. (Finger makes a minor error in calling it the “1948 partition.”)

    It is rare for someone on the left to admit that “both sides” in the war that followed “practiced ethnic cleansing.”   He correctly notes that the UN Partition Plan was unjust in that it allotted the Jewish state 55% of Palestine, but the problem was not that “the Arab population would represent almost half of the population,” but that the Arabs, who outnumbered Jews by 2:1, were allotted only 45% of the land for their state.  This was a legitimate issue, but rather than propose a more equitable division of the land, or to join the minority of Zionists who were proposing a bi-national state, the Arab side rejected partition or bi-nationalism in principle, refusing to recognize the right of Jews in Palestine to establish any political entity.

    Furthermore, had the Arabs the foresight to accept the partition plan despite its unfair division of the land, the fact that the Arab population left inside the Jewish state was so high would have given it extraordinary political leverage.  Instead, by launching a war against the Jewish population, the Arabs gave the Zionist forces the opportunity they were looking for to expel most of the Arab population.

    It is also rare for leftists to admit that the Arab nations “subsequently cleansed [their Jewish population] in retaliation for the Palestinian catastrophe.” Not only was this a gross human rights violation, but it was incredibly stupid from the Arab nationalist perspective because it generated millions of new immigrants to Israel, who have remained on the right wing of Israeli political spectrum to this day.

    Finger also argues that “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…”  This is not exactly the case.  Given the current and past state of the Middle East—characterized by dictatorships, monarchies, Islamic insurgencies etc., who have often used anti-Jewish rhetoric — it is not exactly a welcoming place.  Nevertheless Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and came awfully close to a final agreement with the Palestinian Authority in 1999-2000.  Its current enemy, Hamas, has failed to make a peace proposal that includes recognition of the state of Israel.  Finally, unless and until the Palestinians give up the “right of return” there will be no peace agreement with any Israeli government, left or right.   For the Palestinians to insist on both an independent Palestinian state on territory occupied by Israel since June 1967 and the right of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel in its pre-1967 borders is absurd.               

    Finger’s argument challenging the typical leftist claim that Israel is another South Africa is right on point.   Israeli Jews are a nation.  Many of its Jewish citizens are refugees from one of the worst genocides in human history.  They may look like white Europeans, but white Europeans almost exterminated them. . Based on this experience, they are not going to give up political sovereignty in the short or medium term.  Further a large minority of its population are not white Europeans in any sense, but immigrants or descendants of Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, where they experienced varying degrees of discrimination, culminating in ethnic cleansing.

    Yet Finger insists on using the term “apartheid” to describe Israel, based on a very broad definition that applies to lesser forms of discrimination.  Apartheid’s worst features were strict limits on the residence and movement of Black South Africans through “pass laws” and the denial of Black citizenship including the right to vote.  Palestinian citizens of Israel experience housing segregation but are free to move throughout the country. They have the right to vote, have formed political parties and participate in the political process. The term “apartheid” is better suited to describe the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

    To those leftists who call for a single state encompassing Israel and the occupied territory, where Jews and Arabs will somehow live as equals, Finger has the appropriate response.  “…They cannot specify a present path by which both Palestinians and Israelis could agree to this outcome through free will or choice.” 

    Finger brilliantly exposes a fundamental flaw in the demand for boycott, divestment and sanctions aka BDS.  “Israeli capitalism is not the principle obstacle to Palestinian national rights.”  A successful BDS movement will not cause solidarity among the oppressors to crack as it did in the case of South Africa, but strengthen the authoritarian and fascist tendencies in Israeli society.

    Finger’s alternative proposal is to demand an end to all US aid to Israel—and I would add diplomatic support. These proposals should have more appeal with Americans sick of foreign interventions and has the potential of forcing Israel to abandon its habitual reliance on military force when it realizes that it will not be bailed out by the US.      

    However, Finger flies off the rails by describing Israel as a “viral bulwark against the Arab democratic upsurge.”  Has Israel undermined the struggles for greater democracy in the Arab world?  Where?  In Egypt where the military is back in power?  In Syria, which is in the throes of a bloody civil war between the Assad dictatorship and Islamic fanatics?  In Iraq, where radical Sunnis are on the offensive against a corrupt Shia-dominated regime?  For that matter, I do not understand Finger’s claim that the Arab Spring has been “momentarily checked by United States and Iranian intervention.”

    It seems that the Arab Spring has turned into an Arab winter without any help from Israel, the United States or Iran.  Iran has aided Syria against the rebels, but neither side in that conflict promotes democracy.  Iran has exerted some influence in Iraq, but it has not been successful judging from the military success of the radical Sunni Islamists.  I do not see why Finger singles out Iran when Saudi Arabia has done far more to promote authoritarian rule in the Middle East.

    In sum, despite these disagreements, I believe Barry Finger had done a great service in articulating a cogent defense of the two state solution.  It is indeed only the viable basis to any just, peaceful and democratic solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, precisely because it recognizes the national and human rights of both peoples.

    This is something that the “Free Palestine” crowd has had trouble understanding.  Nothing rankles more than so-called international socialists in the US and Europe wearing Arab keffiyehs. 

  • Bacevich on the Betrayal of U.S. Soldiers

    ImageReview of Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.  New York, Metropolitan Books, 2013.  238 pages.  Endnotes.  Hardcover $26.  Paperback $16.  Kindle $11.04

    Although Andrew Bacevich had already published by 2003 two major critiques of what he was comfortable referring to as “The American Empire,” it was in 2008 that he managed to distinguish himself still further.  While supporting Barack Obama for president as a lesser evil to John McCain, whose expansionist polices he regarded as hopeless from his own, self-proclaimed conservative point of view, he took exception to Obama’s claim that the U.S. armed forces were too small.  As Bacevich saw it, the problem was that the foreign policy was too large.  Nothing has happened since to change his mind and Bacevich has emerged as one of the most vehement opponents of neoconservative, globalist foreign policies, whether put forward by Republicans or Democrats alike.  While Madeleine Albright, the Clintons, and many others have identified the U.S. as the one “indispensible nation,” Bacevich has in effect cried out, stop this world, I want to get off.

    Bacevich has regularly identified himself as a conservative, a Republican and even a believer in original sin as well as having had a long career in the military, having fought in Vietnam and the First Gulf War and retired at the rank of colonel (and having lost his son in the war in Iraq).  Not the usual story of someone to be put in a place of honor among the readers of New Politics.  But don’t let any of his personal details put you off, go and read the books and catch him on TV and YouTube.

    A major issue for Bacevich is the elimination of the draft, which he calls “Dick’s Trick.”  [A]lthough Nixon had run for the presidency, vowing to end the Vietnam War, eliminating the draft permitted him instead to prolong it.”  Furthermore, Bacevich argues that it caused the antiwar movement to lose steam and ultimately to induce public apathy toward war, creating in his view a form of “civic decay.”  “The conversion of military service from collective obligation to personal preference [became] irrevocable.”  Although there have been calls for a broadly constructed “national service,” from which the military would be drawn, sometimes even from liberals, this part of Bacevich’s inclination is sure to stimulate a great deal of debate.

    Since the end of the Cold War there has not been the “peace dividend” that some had hoped for, but instead the advocates of the extension of American power have been “searching for dragons to slay.”  Iraq became the poster child for the new category of “rogue states.”  Where formerly the byword was containment, viewed as a negative aim, it was now to be replaced by a positive aim, “to promote democracy, regionally stability, and economic prosperity,” as one of the acolytes of the projection of American power promised.  Consequently the slogan to “support our troops” becomes dominant and the public is discouraged from asking what purpose the troops might actually be serving and encouraged to remain passive.

    After the conclusion of the Cold War the ideological foundation for globalism was momentarily absent but it came roaring back after 9/11 with the focus on terrorism, Islamism, or some variation thereof. America “is still out there doing God’s work.”  Despite the denials that the U.S. is functionally an empire, Bacevich sees “global leadership” as an attempt to emulate such efforts as those in past years of Rome or Great Britain, merely hiding behind the cover of being Albrght’s indispensible nation or Hillary Clinton’s already announced desire to restore the U.S. to its proper leadership role in the world.

    Bacevich seizes upon General George Marshall as the kind of leader to bring the country back to limiting its military to what is sufficient to protect itself and “its most important interests.”  But there’s the rub, because it’s not that hard to transform this into the quest for “national security” which is already built into the name of its leading practitioner, the NSA.  Thus the enshrinement of preventive war or a “kill list” that allows the president to order the long distance assassination of purported enemies of the U.S., even including its own citizens.  The net result of all of this is that: “A people once profoundly suspicious of militarism tacitly embrace military power as a central element of national identity.”  He argues that both neoliberals and neoconservatives are “committed to maintaining world-dominant military capabilities.” 

    Bacevich quotes historian Charles Beard in 1939 that “America is not to be Rome or Britain,” and comments that this has a quaint sound to it.  “Global leadership” is exactly what the power advocates aspire to and what the notion of American exceptionalism has brought us to.  “Support our troops” as a dominant slogan helps maintain a level of public passivity that can most likely bring us to rack and ruin.  In his series of related books Bacevich has issued a clarion call for the American people to get involved and reject the dominant strain of foreign policy before it is too late.  It is important that there are conservatives speaking out along with the left.

     

    Jack Stuart is retired from teaching at Cal State Long Beach and lives in Minneapolis.

     

  • Michael Walzer's Defense of Israel's Crimes

    ImageThere is so much wrong with Michael Walzer’s brief essay on the New Republic website, supporting Israel in its latest onslaught, while criticizing “a little uneasily” some of the excessive civilian deaths, that it is hard to know where to begin.

    Walzer says he suspects Hamas “is awful and deserves all its trouble,” but he is no fan of Netanyahu’s.

    “One might well want to say, a plague on both their houses! But now they are at war, and choices have to be made.

    “We should choose Israel—because Israel is a democracy where it is possible to imagine the political defeat of the rightwing nationalists who are now in charge; it is possible to imagine a government that would work toward Palestinian statehood—Israel has had governments of that sort in the past, under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Olmert….”

    First of all, it is the height of hypocrisy for Israel to complain about Hamas's lack of democracy. When Hamas won the democratic Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, the United States and Israel backed a failed coup attempt by Fatah to overturn the election results by force.

    More generally, in most anti-colonial struggles it has often been the case that the colonial power was the more internally democratic society. Does that lead us to support France (with its Rights of Man) against the Algerians or the Vietnamese who were seeking independence? The British of the Magna Carta against India or Kenya? The democratic Belgians as they oppressed the Congolese? The Germans, with their universal male suffrage, as they committed genocide against the Herero people in Southwest Africa? The most perfect internal institutions in the world don’t justify external conquest and massacre. No matter how egalitarian its kibbutzim, or gay-friendly its policies (though both of these are exaggerated), a state has no right to occupy others. And those who are occupied are pursuing a just cause as they struggle to end their occupation.

    In any event, Walzer’s characterizations of both Israel and Hamas are seriously flawed. Rabin, famous for ordering the breaking of Palestinian bones during the first intifada, never supported a Palestinian state. In his last Knesset speech before his assassination, he made clear that what he wanted to see was a Palestinian “entity which is less than a state,” with Israel’s security borders located in the Jordan Valley, with a united Jerusalem including the huge settlement blocs Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev under Israeli sovereignty, and the inclusion of additional settlement blocs, including those yet to be built. And Olmert, who waged criminal wars against Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008-09, though going further than Rabin in his negotiations with the Palestinians, always insisted on Israel keeping the major settlement blocs, which would mean dissecting the West Bank into essentially non-contiguous cantons, cut off from East Jerusalem, and thus leaving them with no real state at all.

    Regarding Hamas, Walzer says: “Like the present Israeli government (or, better, its leading members), Hamas doesn't believe in a Palestinian state alongside Israel.” “Hamas has never deviated from its absolute opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.” But in fact Hamas’s willingness to accept a two-state arrangement has been clear for some time. In Khalid Meshaal’s recent interview with Charlie Rose he repeated what Hamas officials have stated many times before: that they needed to have a state “emerge on the borders of 1967,” something that “all the Palestinians factions have agreed upon.” “The occupation and the siege are the problem. We have to stop the occupation. We have to stop the siege and then we can have security and peace in the region.” “If Gaza lives without occupation, without aggression, without blockade, without closing of the crossings, without starvation, then we — then this will be fine. And this applies actually to the West Bank as well, because Gaza and the West Bank are two parts of the Palestinian abode. And we are one nation. We want to live without occupation in the West Bank and in Gaza.” And these were not just words. As Meshaal noted, Hamas had joined a unity government committed to a state on the borders of ’67.

    Walzer’s failure to acknowledge that the Palestinian struggle to end the almost 50-year occupation is a just cause, and that the blockade of Gaza is an illegal collective punishment leads him to write that “There has to be a just, or justifiable, way of responding to indiscriminate rocket attacks.” But there’s an extremely just way of responding: namely, end the occupation and end the blockade. Indeed, ending the blockade alone – though short of justice, which demands the end of the occupation as well – could have stopped the rocket fire. The 2008 lull could have been extended if Israel had lifted the blockade (as it ought to have done on moral grounds in any case). The 2012 ceasefire ended with an Israeli commitment to ease the blockade, which it didn’t do, and so there were periodic rocket launches (though Hamas itself fired no rockets until the Israeli rampage against Hamas on the West Bank in June 2014). In the current crisis Hamas has made clear that there would be no rocket fire if the blockade were ended.

    A state engaging in an illegal occupation has no right of self-defense; it has an obligation to withdraw. A state enforcing an illegal blockade likewise has no right of self-defense, only an obligation to end its blockade. But Walzer ignores all this, wondering only how Hamas can be attacked without killing quite so many civilians.

    One can argue about what the moral responsibility of individual soldiers is for killing enemy soldiers as part of an unjust war, but there is no debate among just war theorists that the leaders of a state act unjustly when they order the killing of soldiers or civilians in the pursuit of an unjust cause. So every Egyptian soldier killed in, say, the Israeli-UK-French attack on Egypt in 1956, was a crime. In the same way, since the current Israeli assault is part of an effort to maintain an unjust occupation and unjust blockade, every Palestinian death — whether armed militant or noncombatant infant — is a war crime.

    However, even if we go along with Walzer and disregard the broader rights and wrongs of the occupation and the blockade, his argument is morally unsustainable. He argues that while Israel should not be bombing the homes of Hamas members, the "primary responsibility" for civilian deaths in Gaza falls on Hamas because they are fighting from homes and schools and crowded streets.

    Walzer's reference to schools is a little grotesque. The Israeli government has pointed to the discovery of rockets in some school buildings, but those rockets were found stored (not being launched) from abandoned schools. As UN officials noted, schools that the UN relief agency UNRWA was forced to abandon were sometimes occupied by either Palestinian militants or Israeli troops. UNRWA deplored this, but it could not control the schools in which it was not physically present in the building. But when it was present, it could assure that the building was "free of weapons" and that no one with arms was allowed in the school. The Israeli attacks that have elicited outrage were not those aimed at the abandoned buildings, but at schools converted by UNRWA into shelters for refugees — some of the 475,000 desperate Gazans who had fled their homes on instructions from the IDF — and whose exact location and humanitarian status was communicated to Israeli forces many times.

    Before considering the human shielding issue, note the deaths Israel has caused that don't raise the human shielding issue at all. First, there are the deaths in homes which Walzer agrees are war crimes — though he never uses the term. Then there are attacks on civilian members of Hamas; as Human Rights Watch has noted, "Israel has wrongly claimed as a matter of policy that civilian members of Hamas or other political groups who do not have a military role are 'terrorists' and therefore valid military targets." They are no more legitimate military targets than are the civilian members of Likud or the other parties in Israel's ruling coalition. Then there are the deaths due to the use of artillery and other indiscriminate weapons in urban areas. As Amnesty International reported:

    "It is inevitable that the repeated use of artillery in densely populated civilian neighbourhoods will lead to the unlawful killing and injury of civilians and destruction and damage to civilian buildings, regardless of the intended target. Israeli forces have used such reckless tactics before, including in Operation 'Cast Lead' in 2008/9, when some 1,400 Palestinians were killed, the majority of them civilians." 

    And then there are the cases examined by Human Rights Watch where investigation revealed no military target at all. “Israel’s rhetoric is all about precision attacks but attacks with no military target and many civilian deaths can hardly be considered precise,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Recent documented cases in Gaza sadly fit Israel’s long record of unlawful airstrikes with high civilian casualties.”

    These deaths probably account for the bulk of the civilians killed. What then of those civilian deaths that did involve human shielding. Investigations in previous Israeli assaults have found IDF claims of human shielding to be vastly overstated (Human Rights Watch in Lebanon, 2006; Amnesty International, Gaza, 2008-09), as have investigations of the current conflict by respected journalists (Sengupta, Bowen). Human Rights Watch noted that an Israeli military spokesperson reportedly told a journalist regarding an IDF strike on a hospital, “We’ve seen a lot of launches of rockets that came from exactly near the hospital, 100 meters near.” HRW commented: "Given the precision weapons available to the Israeli military, a target 100 meters from the hospital provides no justification to hit the hospital."

    But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there are many cases of human shielding by Hamas in Gaza. (And let us put aside the fact that Israel puts its defense ministry in downtown Tel Aviv or that runways at Ben Gurion International Airport are shared by the military and civilian traffic, etc.) What follows from that?

    International humanitarian law is quite clear:

    "…the attacking party is not relieved from its obligation to take into account the risk to civilians, including the duty to avoid causing disproportionate harm to civilians, simply because it considers the defending party responsible for having located legitimate military targets within or near populated areas. That is, the presence of a Hamas commander or military facility in a populated area would not justify attacking the area without regard to the threatened civilian population."

    Consider an example. If a felon fled into an apartment building, would anyone think it justified for the police to level the building, using the argument that any resulting deaths to innocents are the responsibility of the felon? Would we applaud the police who did this as "the most moral" police force in the world?

    Moreover, "even if military forces misuse a medical facility to store weapons or shelter able-bodied combatants, international law specifies that the attacking force must issue a warning that sets a reasonable time limit and can attack only after such a warning has remained unheeded." But what about cases where it's not just storing or sheltering but actually firing rockets at Israeli civilian areas?

    To answer this, we need to briefly discuss just war theory. Walzer explains that according to just war theory and international humanitarian law it is impermissible to intentionally target civilians, but it is permissible to kill civilians if you are aiming at a legitimate military target and if the harm caused is not disproportionate to the value of the military target. Pacifists may cringe, but there is a moral logic to this position that I think most nonpacifists would accept. Consider these examples. If you were under attack from a Nazi blitzkrieg and you realized that the only way to stop it was to call in airstrikes on the invading tanks, but that the airstrikes might kill some civilians, you might regretfully order the airstrike. The moral benefit of the strike — saving your country from a murderous Nazi conquest — would outweigh the unfortunate cost of some civilian lives. On the other hand, if an enemy soldier were hiding in a filled-to-capacity football stadium, calling in an airstrike — which would kill the soldier plus thousands of noncombatants — would clearly be disproportionate.

    Walzer notes that he "along with many others" has "argued for another rule: that the attacking forces must make positive efforts, including asking their own soldiers to take risks, in order to minimize the risks they impose on enemy civilians." This is a good rule, but it is a rule that is in addition to proportionality. But when Walzer summarizes his conclusion, he omits proportionality entirely. He says, if some risk "is taken, then I think that the major responsibility for civilian deaths falls on the insurgents." That's it. No further reference to proportionality.

    But notice what happens when we consider proportionality, even a proportionality that elides the fact that in an unjust war no military target in Gaza has moral benefit. If Hamas were about to take some military action that would cause major civilian loss of life in Israel, then proportionality might say that in order to prevent Hamas from taking that action Israel would be justified in acting in such a way that posed some risk to Palestinian civilians. But if all that Hamas were threatening to do was take an action that represented a tiny danger to Israeli civilians, then proportionality would rule out Israel's acting in a way that posed serious risk to Palestinian civilians. The latter hypothetical is the actual situation prevailing in Gaza. Hamas has fired thousands of rockets and yet has only killed three civilians. Whether the explanation is Iron Dome, Israel's civil defense measures, or the inaccuracy and low payload of Gazan missiles, the fact is that the chances of an Israeli civilian getting killed by one of these rockets is very small. The three civilian deaths almost prove the point. One was a civilian who intermixed himself with troops on the border (human shielding?). A second was a Bedouin, who is prohibited by Israeli law from building a bomb shelter and who, the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled, need not be provided with a bomb shelter by the state. And the third was a foreign worker who didn't go into the bomb shelter when the alarm went off. (Note incidentally, that all three Israeli civilians killed were males of military age [see here, here, and here]. Israeli apologists have argued that the civilian death toll in Gaza is being overstated because many of the alleged civilians are in fact males of military age. But women, children, and the elderly are not the only civilians. If one were permitted to target not just soldiers but all males of military age, then almost two million Israeli males would be fair game.)

    So how many Palestinian civilians is it permissible to unintentionally kill in an effort to stop rocket fire that kills one civilian for every thousand rockets fired? Surely the proportionality principle would dictate that Israel's behavior in Gaza, even if every dead civilian could be attributed to a case of human shielding, is illegal, unjust, and criminal.

    A war that could be avoided by ending an illegal occupation and an illegal blockade cannot be a just war. And a war that so blatantly violates the principle of proportionality cannot be a just war. It is sad that one of the world's leading expositors of just war theory can't get this right.

     

    Stephen R. Shalom is one of the editors of New Politics.

  • Wrestling with Trotsky, Che, and Political Impatience

    Wrestling with Trotsky, Che, and Political Impatience

    Image

    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 Bensaïd enfant au comptoir du bar familial

                         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.

    Daniel Bensaïd à l

    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.

     

  • 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.

     

  • Signs of Hope in Demonstrations of Solidarity with Gaza

    ImageLast 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.

     

     

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  • 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.

  • 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?

    Image

    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.

  • New Politics Summer 2014 is Now Available

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    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

    ImageThe 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

    ImageAcross 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

    ImageIn 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

    ImageThe 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

    Image[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

    ImageScholars 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

    ImageOne 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

    ImageThe 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

    ImageInequality 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.

     

  • 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. 

  • 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.

     

  • 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.

     

  • 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.

  • 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.

     

  • Ricardo Flores Magón: Mexican Anarchists and American Socialists

    ImageClaudio 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.

     

  • Monsters and a Critique of Everyday Neoliberalism:

    Image[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.