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  • Understanding the attack on teacher tenure – Guest blog by Doug Mann

    Guest blog: This week I have a commentary by a reader. Doug Mann provides background about the issue of tenure for teachers in Minneapolis. His analysis, identifying how the Right has pushed this issue and why systemic racism has to be named in defending teachers’ rights to due process, applies in most respects to other urban school districts.  Doug is the Green Party candidate for Minneapolis School Board, citywide, and an education activist.

     

    The Vergara decision, if upheld on appeal, will strip away key union job

    protections for teachers, including tenure rights. Teachers will become at-will

    employees. "Job protection unionism" will become a crime for public school

    teachers.

     

          Minneapolis Public School superintendents, going at least as far back as

    Thandiwe Peebles, have been lobbying the legislature to take tenure and

    seniority rights away from teachers, and have gotten some concession on these

    issues from the teachers union in recent collective bargaining agreements.

     

          School board member Carla Bates was a founder and chief spokesperson for

    Put Kids First Minneapolis, and former School Board member Chris Stewart became

    a leader in that organization after leaving the Minneapolis School Board. The

    mission of Put Kids First Minneapolis is to strip away key union job

    protections for teachers, arguing that bad teachers who get tenure can't be

    fired.

     

          In my opinion, a lot of public support for eliminating teacher job

    protections from those who are poorly served by the public schools  represents

    misdirected anger about bad teaching in the public schools. The problem is too

    much job protection for "bad teachers," according to corporate school

    reformers. As I will outline in detail in the following paragraphs, teachers

    are being used as scapegoats for problems created by actions of the School

    Board and policy makers at the state and federal level. The Board has played a

    role in segregating students by race and income, and undermining the quality of

    education provided to most students of color and many poor whites. Rather than

    pitting parent and students against the teachers union by word and deed, I am

    appealing to the teachers union to take the side of parents and students who

    are poorly served by the school district, and demand changes in policy that can

    make a quality, public education available to all on an equal basis.

     

    The Separate but Equal doctrine resurrected in Minnesota

     

          The Minneapolis School Board passed a resolution in 1995, entitled

    "Closing the gap: Ensuring that all children can learn. The strategy proposed

    was to establish a system of "community schools" in which students within a

    defined area were guaranteed enrollment. The idea was to assign students closer

    to home, which would reduce the cost of transporting them to schools, and

    increase parent involvement. The Closing the Gap resolution promised to use

    money saved on bus transportation to upgrade the quality of education in high

    poverty schools, and to minimize the segregative effect of the Community School

    Plan: Two promises never kept. The Minneapolis City Council passed a resolution

    in support of the Community School Plan, and the State Board of Education

    (since dissolved by the legislature) granted the district a waiver from

    Desegregation Rules.

     

         In the fall of 1997, the school district began to promote part-time

    ability-grouping for reading and / or math, where students were assigned to

    separate classrooms for reading or math instruction according to ability at the

    beginning of first grade. Instruction for "high ability" students was based on

    a standard academic curriculum with varying degrees of enrichment. The

    curriculum for a majority of students was watered-down to varying degrees. The

    district did not formally evaluate the effects of its ability-grouping

    practices on students, as required under Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act of

    1964, according to the US commission on Civil Rights.  First hand observation

    of the effects of ability-grouping practices and reviews of student test score

    data broken down by race and poverty indicated that the district's ability

    grouping practices were harmful to the majority of students.

     

         The high concentration of inexperienced teachers in high poverty schools

    was brought to my attention after I joined the National Association for the

    Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in December 1997 and soon thereafter

    became a member of the Education Advocacy committee of the Minneapolis branch

    of the NAACP and a plaintiff in Xiong et al vs. Minnesota, a lawsuit merged

    with NAACP's education adequacy lawsuit against the state of Minnesota. In the

    spring of 2004, the district noted that about 25% of regular Ed teachers and

    about 33% of special Ed teachers had not completed their 3 year, post-hire

    probationary period. At that time the district sent lay off notices to all

    probationary teachers every spring. Under the Teacher Tenure Act for Cities of

    the First Class, a layoff notice to a probationary teacher is a notice of

    termination of employment. The district is free to replace any and all

    probationary teachers the next fall. Tenured Teachers in Cities of the First

    Class must be offered continuing employment before they can be replaced by

    newly hired teacher. All teachers covered by the Teacher Tenure Act that

    applies to the rest of the State of Minnesota have the same recall rights as

    Tenured Teachers in Minneapolis.

     

           The Minneapolis School District stopped firing all probationary

    teachers, and selectively rehiring and replacing them around 2010. However, the

    district invented a new class of layoffs: Performance Layoffs. A large

    proportion of teachers are "performance laid-off" before finishing their 3 year

    probationary period. These probationary teacher are heavily concentrated in

    high poverty schools. Since 2009, the district has also had a contract with

    Teach For America to supply provisionally licensed teachers with little formal

    teacher training to work in high poverty schools, including in licensure areas,

    such as early elementary education, where there is an abundant supply of

    regularly licensed teachers who are looking for a teaching job.

     

           The high concentration of inexperienced teachers in high poverty schools

    is certainly a consequence of firing and replacing a large proportion of

    teachers before they finish their 3 year probationary period. Other

    probationary teachers quit or bid out of high poverty schools at the first

    opportunity due to lack of job security and inadequate support, including a

    lack of support for high needs students in the classroom. Educational Support

    Paraprofessionals should be helping Special Ed students who are assigned to

    mainstream classrooms as well as being assigned to Special Ed resource rooms.

     

          In 2000, the Minneapolis School District was reprimanded by the Federal

    Department of Education for labeling 25% of all African-American students, and

    close to 40% of African American males as having Emotional Behavioral Disorders

    and enrolling them in Special Ed programs where they are not getting

    appropriate services. Things haven't changed much in this respect. Minneapolis

    enrolls a higher proportion of its students in Special Ed programs than any

    other school district in the United States of America.

     

         Beginning in the late 1990s, the Minneapolis School District successfully

    carried out a plan to retain nearly all teachers at 2 elementary schools:

    Elizabeth Hall and North Star. The strategic goal of the 2002 District

    Improvement Plan was to bring teacher turnover rates to low levels in all

    schools. However, the District Administration actively sabotaged the plan by

    firing all probationary teachers every year, and by starving high poverty

    schools of the resources that they should be getting. The district has been

    getting substantial funding from federal Title 1 and state compensatory funds

    because a large proportion of the student population is eligible for free and

    reduced-price lunches.

     

         At a School Board meeting in 2008, there was a discussion about a proposed

    covenant between the District and a coalition of African American parents,

    educators and other community members. The African American group asked for a

    non-binding promise by the district to establish two model schools for poor

    African American students. The only criterion for a model school identified by

    the African American group was a very low teacher turnover rate. Board member

    Lydia Lee stated that the district could not afford to increase teacher

    retention rates in high poverty schools, not even in just two schools, unless

    the district found new money for that purpose.  High teacher retention rates in

    low poverty schools is not a problem, so why isn't there money to increase

    teacher retention rates in high poverty schools?

     

          Maintaining a large pool of probationary teachers in the district makes

    no sense at all, except as a cost containment strategy. However, it is

    questionable that the district really saves very much, if any money by doing

    so. The increased cost of allowing most newly hired teachers to complete their

    probationary period and to become tenured teachers would be negligible over a

    period of 5 years, when you consider money saved on recruitment of new teachers

    and the extra training they need. Performance evaluations should be focused on

    providing constructive criticism that can help teachers improve their practice.

    There should be more support for classroom teachers in high poverty schools in

    order to reduce job stress and facilitate their professional development. The

    co-teaching model used at Lucy Laney school right now is an example of the type

    of support that regular classroom teachers should be offered to motivate them

    to stay in high poverty schools. Educational Support Paraprofessionals in the

    Special Ed department should be in regular Ed classrooms to provide support for

    mainstreamed special Ed students.

     

          The Minneapolis School District has a huge population of special Ed

    students not only because a large proportion of poor students experience toxic

    levels of stress outside of schools, but also because of toxic stress

    experienced inside of the schools. The District acknowledged that taking steps

    necessary to stabilize the teaching staff in high poverty schools makes a huge

    difference in outcomes for the students: Higher test scores, fewer student

    behavior problems, higher levels of parent satisfaction with the schools. But

    the District's leadership shows no inclination to bring teacher turnover rates

    to low levels in all schools.

     

         K-12 students in the Minneapolis Public Schools are being damaged by

    malfunctioning regular Ed programs, and then assigned to special Ed programs

    where they often do not get appropriate services so they can stay in

    mainstream, regular Ed classrooms. At best, the District gets reimbursement for

    40% of special Ed expenditures. Over-enrollment of students in Special Ed

    programs because of malfunctioning of regular Ed programs is an investment of

    resources to remediate a problem that could be solved by taking the steps

    necessary to shrink the pool of probationary teachers and to achieve low

    teacher turnover rates in all schools. Maintaining a large pool of probationary

    teachers should not be tolerated as a cost containment strategy, in part

    because it has a disparate effect on the majority of students of color and many

    poor whites.

     

  • Betrayals in Social Movements

    For the last two years, Dan La Botz has provided an annual roundup of social struggles in the US. These have been useful, especially insofar as we on the Left are often quick to forget explosive events like the protests against the George Zimmerman verdict, which erupted seemingly spontaneously during a period that we might remember as being otherwise quite docile.

    But every time we consider these actions, we also need to ask why they are so few, so fleeting and so often ineffectual. We also need to look back not only at the events that inspired us, but also the failures, especially those that need not have been. When we wonder why many working people are cynical about mass action leading to change, we need to provide an analysis as to why social struggles fail—not just because they are repressed by the police and by the Right, but because defeats are imposed on movements by their leaders. These betrayals occur on a regular basis, including many times over the past few months. They are all around us and as far as the eye can see.

    Sometimes these occur as the betrayal of a union’s members and their democratic rights, at other times these are betrayals of principles that an organization is supposed to be fighting for. Often they are carried out by professionals—media personalities, union bureaucrats or non-profit staffers—seeking out a compromise nobody wanted in defense of the legitimacy of their organization or career, or simply crushing the spirit of workers who expect something more, as so often happens in labor. Either way, we cannot only blame the Republicans, or even the Democrats, for the failures of social movements when our “leaders” so often betray the very people and issues that we are all supposed to be fighting for.

    This will be a partial list, not nearly as thorough as La Botz’s overviews. Hopefully, this can at least provide a warning about the limitations and even self-imposed defeats that our struggles face so that we can avoid them in the future.

    The US labor movement has been rife, for decades, with leaders whose deals with employers have discouraged and even obstructed working-class struggles. One of the worst recent cases comes from the Teamsters. In April, 2014, 94 percent of the members of Local 89 in Louisville, Kentucky, voted down a UPS contract, among other things in opposition to a requirement that workers wait unpaid for 30 minutes to an hour to take a shuttle to work. Teamster leaders James Hoffa and Ken Hall used a technicality in the Teamsters’ constitution to override this vote and impose the contract on the workers. “I feel let down,” one of the workers told the local media. “I thought we had a strong union, but by what they just did, I don’t know. . . . What good is a union if they’re not going to represent you?” A brewing rejection and fight against the contract was turned into a demoralizing rout.

    Undemocratic moves like this are not always carried out in such a brazen manner. Last year’s Boeing contract in Washington State saw members of the International Association of Machinists vote down a contract that would transfer their pensions to a 401k plan and increase their healthcare costs with minimal raises over eight years. “Because of the massive takeaways,” Local 751 President Thomas Wroblewski told his members, “the union is adamantly recommending members reject this offer.” After the members voted down the contract by 67 percent, Washington State found $8.5 billion in tax breaks for the company and International President Thomas Buffenbarger stepped in to carry this corporate sweetheart deal through the last mile. With Boeing threatening to move the assembly of the new 777X passenger jet to another state, the International demanded a re-vote and the intimidated membership agreed to the same deal they previously rejected. The collusion of a multinational corporation and the state in transferring billions of dollars of wealth from working-class people into the hands of the rich could hardly have been possible in this case without the assistance of the International leadership. Boeing workers got to keep their jobs—but the fight that they may have been prepared to have with their employer was swiftly shut down.

    Last year, SEIU organized a campaign against the greedy healthcare industry, holding rallies outside hospitals and collecting signatures for ballot initiatives that would limit costs and cap CEO pay. All of this, it seems now, was just a public relations ploy to bring the hospitals to the negotiating table. SEIU has since dropped these campaigns and is now working with the hospitals to funnel more Medicaid payments into their coffers, costs and CEO pay be damned. In return, the hospitals agreed to a “code of conduct” to help SEIU organize hospital workers into the union. Such codes of conduct and neutrality agreements are all the rage in labor-management cooperation circles, where collecting members’ dues is the goal toward which fighting the employers is actually an obstacle. Meanwhile the people who attended the hospital protests and collected ballot signatures might be forgiven for thinking they were being used by SEIU to cut a deal with the people they thought they were fighting.

    In late May, SEIU along with several pro-immigrant groups called on President Obama not to issue a moratorium on deportations but precisely the opposite, insisting he take no executive action to alter his deportation policy until House Republicans had time to work out a deal. “We believe the president should move cautiously and give the House leadership all of the space they may need to bring legislation to the floor for a vote.” That is, they demanded that Obama not unilaterally change his policy that has led to the deportation of 2 million immigrants so as not to antagonize the Right. How any progressive or liberal can continue to think that House Republicans will play nice so long as we bargain in good faith is a mystery. One might conclude that some lessons will never be learned by those who have a strategy of looking for a seat at the table above all else. In the end, it took merely two days for Obama to agree to their demand to maintain the status quo, just as 21 immigrants were being rounded up in Milwaukee. The results were harshly criticized by immigrant rights groups such as the Chicago-based Immigrant Youth Justice League. “Organizations that have provided political cover for the President’s political maneuver by asking him to delay relief,” they wrote, “have demonstrated their lack of commitment to immigrant communities and their willingness to use the suffering of these communities for their own gain.”

    On a local level, union leaders have been at war with other each other, falling over themselves to win the approval of political leaders to promote their own organizational legitimacy. This April in San Francisco, the Labor Council’s annual fundraising banquet was picketed by the Building and Construction Trades Council. The two groups disagree primarily over which Democratic Party politician to elect to the state assembly. If only they could use these tactics to fight for their members, like a group of rank-and-file construction workers did when picketing against the anti-union two-gate rule on May Day, only to be denounced by a union business manager, then labor might get somewhere.

    A similar case occurred last fall when Port of Oakland truckers, who are not legally allowed to form a union, went on strike to protest against repressive work rules. The President of ILWU Local 10 helped the police break the picket line and directed his own members to cross, complaining without a hint of irony that the truckers were “trying to use the port as an economic tool.”

    In a similar incident in May, locked-out Teamsters and Construction workers who had not agreed to work rules enforced by the Philadelphia Convention Center watched as Electricians, Laborers and Stagehands crossed their picket line.

    Selling indulgences

    Labor is rife with betrayals, dirty compromises and leaders pushing unpopular contracts down the throats of their members. But unions are not the only organizations whose leaders compromise their members and their principals on a regular basis. There are any number of non-profit progressive organizations which, along with organizing protests—or sometimes instead of doing so—dedicate their resources to helping the enemies of their cause justify themselves. Rather than resisting their opponents, they absolve their supposed enemies of their sins by cutting deals that promote the legitimacy of both parties.

    For several months, Oakland officials discussed establishing a Domain Awareness Center (DAC), which would be a central command post for all of the city’s surveillance initiatives. One of the groups opposed to this effort was the ACLU—until the City Council began considering a smaller DAC dedicated to the Port of Oakland, a pivotal location for labor protests in the Bay Area. At this point, the ACLU staff lawyer increased her lobbying of the Council—in support of the Port DAC. Not only did she encourage the new plan to go forward but she even sent the City Council language for a proposed resolution. In the end, after helping the City Council usher in the Port DAC, the ACLU was able to declare victory and the Council and the Mayor could save face by insisting they did everything in a responsible manner—even the ACLU said so. Of course, a small DAC may have been the real goal all along. If you are a pro-police Councilmember, how do you get a small DAC? Propose a big and scary one, of course, so liberal groups like the ACLU can declare “victory” by supporting a scaled back version. The ACLU could congratulate itself for its efforts, but many Oakland activists in this campaign were against police surveillance altogether and did not want any DAC, big or small. “I am just really disappointed,” one protester told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I guess I have higher expectations” than the ACLU. Of course, we now have a situation where the DAC can begin slowly expanding once the protests have died down, which Mayor Jean Quan told the Chronicle was her plan. “We’ll bring them back one at a time,” she said, referring to the pieces of the DAC that were temporarily abandoned.

    Fighting to scale back a reactionary initiative is one thing. Supporting the scaled back version, though, is a betrayal when the scaled back version does exactly the same thing just not as much. This sort of thing is a strategy for the ACLU. For example, they are currently working with the drone manufacturer Olaeris to help them sell drones in North Carolina. The two approached the legislature to propose the Preserving Privacy Act which would require warrants to be obtained before drones could be used for surveillance. Of course, this guarantees that drones will be used for surveillance, and with the declining fortunes of the Fourth Amendment we can be certain that this privacy policy will be stretched to the limit or even broken outright once drones are in the air. The ACLU should know that no law or policy can protect us from police abusing their powers. Furthermore, this law would allow the police to waive the need for a warrant if they felt that a crime was imminent. But they always think a crime is imminent—the point of restraining the surveillance state is that we do not trust the judgment of law enforcement or politicians because they have consistently proven themselves untrustworthy. A right-wing libertarian group in the area even referred to the bill as “The Preserving Privacy Act that Doesn’t” because of this and other loopholes. Sweetening the deal, Olaeris is discussing moving their operations to North Carolina and we should not be surprised if tax breaks are soon rolled out to encourage this. “Drones could mean thousands of jobs and billions pumped into the economy if the state becomes the industry leader,” according to WNCN News. So the politicians can boast about all the new jobs, Olaeris will be assured a contract, and the ACLU can brag about how they are guaranteeing our rights. Win-win-win. Except that once the police have this shiny new toy, they will certainly abuse it because that is what they always do. Warrant or not, people of color and political dissidents will soon be in the crosshairs of drones. But thanks to the ACLU, Olaeris and the police have a valuable fig-leaf without which they might not be able to expand drone use at all.

    While some betrayals require entire organizations, Al Sharpton is often able to manage several all by himself. Last August, he organized a March on Washington to commemorate the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic 1963 march. The march was billed less as a battle against racism and more as a parade in memory of times past. At the last minute, Sharpton announced that the speakers list would include Attorney General Eric Holder, the man who oversees the criminal justice system that warehouses nearly 1 million Black men in prison. In his speech, Holder credited the 1963 march for putting himself and President Obama in office, though he made no mention of the fact that more Black men are caught up in the legal system today than were enslaved in 1850. With politics like this coming from the stage, we can imagine why so many people are cynical about the possibility of social change.

    Not to be outdone by himself, Sharpton later held a tribute in Harlem to the late Nelson Mandela, inviting newly-elected New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and newly re-appointed NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, historically one of the most prominent advocates of the department’s racist stop-and-frisk policy. “There will be freedom and equality for all,” Bratton told the audience, “and my commitment to you is that your police force, in your city, will be respectful. It will practice what Mandela preached.”

    By far the most egregious example of a social justice organization betraying its principles and supporters, though, is the Los Angeles NAACP’s planned lifetime achievement award to Donald Sterling. This was to be Sterling’s second lifetime achievement award in only five years, such were his efforts in support of African-Americans. It turned out that Sterling had donated money to the LA NAACP, who offered these awards even though his racism was well documented before his recent tirade came to light. The LA NAACP eventually canceled Sterling’s award and the chapter president resigned in disgrace. The ceremony went on without these two, with awards given to the Mayor of Los Angeles as well as executives at Federal Express and Wal-Mart—and Al Sharpton.

    This pay-to-play effort may have been surprising on the outside, but it highlighted the role of opportunist organizations who fight for themselves first and their constituents later. The planned award to Sterling was no different from the Catholic Church’s old habit of selling indulgences, wiping out the sins of the sinful for a hefty fee. The sinner receives absolution and the priest gets not only the payout but a seat at the table with the rich and powerful—and the prestige of granting their absolution. The NAACP has even taken money from Occidental Petroleum and in return supported the resumption of nearby oil drilling. The Sterling affair was not a momentary gaffe but rather business as usual for institutional liberalism.

    The role of the Left

    This is only a partial list. No doubt, scouring the local newspapers of cities around the country would reveal dozens of union leaders and non-profits violating the trust of their members and supporters by cutting back-room deals. This problem will never go away so long as there is a capitalist system which provides a niche for organizations and individuals to make a career of claiming to represent the oppressed and exploited. Any future upsurge in working-class struggle will not dispense with these problems. On the contrary, every mass movement will always see the Sharptons and the Hoffas stepping in to take credit for any gains while redirecting everything into negotiations and symbolic actions, if not shutting it down entirely. If the Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements, the liberal social movement leaders are their undertakers.

    It is important that the Left not mimic these tactics by seeking out symbolic victories which we can use to promote ourselves. Instead it should be our role to prepare for the inevitable sellouts, remembering how militant struggles are cut down and compromised for the benefit of those who want to promote their careers and organizations instead of further strengthening the independent power of the movements.

    Of course, union workers cannot just organize around their leaders, who will play a role in every contract fight, but need to be prepared for the betrayal that lies ahead. Whenever there is a Hoffa or a Buffenbarger, there is often an opposition slate or even a group of rank-and-file truckers or construction workers taking their own direct actions without some highly paid figure taking credit for their sacrifices. These efforts are often small and may seem unimpressive, certainly to the mainstream media who are looking for a spectacle and a sound-bite from an important spokesperson. Yet these small, militant campaigns are far more radical than a mass march with no demands, which can be turned off like a spigot by those directing it from above. As for the large non-profits, we need to be prepared for them to get involved and take credit for cutting a deal, rather than expecting they will lead the way. They do not jump on board to radicalize a moderate struggle, rather they jump onto a radicalizing struggle in order to manage and moderate it for their own ends.

    It is always easier to enjoy a momentary upsurge than it is to organize against its eventual shutting down. But if we on the Left do not insist on a radical and principled agenda for the movements we are involved in and resist back-room deals by our self-appointed leaders, we should not be surprised when nobody else does either.

    The struggle of the radical Left is not merely just against the Republicans and the Democrats, but also against the undemocratic union officials and the career media stars who moderate struggles in order to present themselves as responsible negotiating partners. It is against the civil libertarians who in the end are perfectly willing to help the state erode our civil liberties rather than resist the attacks to the end. It is against the non-profits who put their own funding above the causes they claim to support. When the leaders of social movements have such different goals from the participants, we should not be surprised when the movements fail.

    None of the betrayals mentioned above could have been easily beaten back, but that must be our goal unless we are willing to accept more of the same. Ultimately, the true power of a social movement is not merely its size or its goals but whether it can be easily put back into a box of moderate protest that threatens nobody. It is precisely the ability of a movement to push the boundaries of acceptable forms of resistance and dissent that makes it radical. But in the future, when the inevitable betrayal comes and the movements successfully reject them, then—and only then—will we have a true mass radicalization which cannot be easily corralled and intimidated.

     

    Scott Jay is a writer and activist living in Oakland, CA. His writing has previously appeared in CounterPunch, The North Star, and The Outsider.

  • Explaining the defeat of tenure and teachers unions in Vergara

    Tenure and teacher unions suffered a defeat this week when a California court ruled in the Vergara case that the state's law giving teachers tenure violated California's constitution.  I've blogged about why the claims in Vergara were manufactured to pit students against teachers. But I think it's important for those of us who support to teachers unions to push on what needed to be done differently to defend tenure.  Yes, it was important to clarify that tenure does not prevent administrators from removing poor teachers, as did both California teachers unions. But once again the unions pulled their punches and were unwilling to make a public case that Vergara is part of a  project to de-professionalize teaching, to make teaching contract labor, so as to allow the global (capitalist) elite to control what our children learn and believe. To win we have to take the offensive. That means telling a radically different story from what's in the media about teacher union and teacher-bashing.

    So what's next?  The bipartisan gang pushing the Vergara case made tenure protections appear very strong.  But in recent years union strength has diminished so much at the school site that teachers are often too frightened or weak to defend their legal rights, including tenure.  The only way we are going to make schools safe for critical thinking and teachers' exercise of their professional judgment is to organize at the school site, bringing parents and students into the struggle.  NEA and AFT need to augment a legal fight to reverse Vergara and keep similar court cases from being won elsewhere with agitation about the real meaning of these reforms that pretend to be about putting "students first."  The capitalist elite that runs the World Bank – and our government – wants to control what kids learn so as to keep their power and profit.  Teachers and unions stand in the way of their goal.  It's as simple – and chilling – as that.

  • Trotskyist Teamsters of the 1930s—an Attempt to Draw the Lessons

    Review of: Bryan D. Palmer. Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strike of 1934. Historical Materialism Book Series. Chicago: Haymarket, 2013. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Photos. 308 pp.

    In 1934, a small group of dissident Communists, followers of Leon Trotsky, led Teamsters Local Union 574 through a series of strikes and emerged victorious, ending the employers’ open-shop regime and making Minneapolis a union town. It was one of three important strikes that year—the other two were in San Francisco and Toledo—that signaled the beginning of the great labor upheaval of the 1930s with its sit-down strikes, mass picketlines, and violent confrontation, leading to the organization under the aegis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) of industrial unions in auto, steel, rubber, and the electrical industry as well as in many other branches of the economy. Overall six million workers were organized by the CIO and the AFL in the 1930s, winning workers union protections, raising wages, improving working conditions, gaining respect from foremen and supervisors, and bringing workers a new sense of self-confidence and pride. Only the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-1960s rivals the 1930s strikes in significance in modern American history. How could a small group of radicals on the fringes of American society in one second-tier city in the Midwest have played such a crucial role in helping to detonate that momentous development in the American labor movement and society? That is the central question Bryan D. Palmer attempts to answer in his Revolutionary Teamsters.

    We already have several books on the 1934 Teamster strikes, but Palmer’s is distinguished by its focus on the role of the Trotskyist leadership, that is, on the role of revolutionary socialists in the labor movement.[1] Palmer, a Canadian labor historian and Marxist intellectual, describes and analyzes the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America (later the Socialist Workers Party) in the Minneapolis Teamsters, offering an assessment of the group’s strengths and weaknesses in both leading one of the most important labor struggles of the era and in dealing with the political parties in Minnesota at the time: Republican, Democrat, and Farmer Labor. His goal, he writes, is to help today’s leftists and militant labor unionists draw lessons that can contribute to forging a revolutionary leadership for such labor struggles in the present. Such a book then is obviously of great interest to the American and Canadian left today.

    As Palmer himself points out, today the words “revolutionary Teamsters” sound like an oxymoron. The Teamsters union, one of the largest in the United States (as well as in Canada and Puerto Rico), has a well-deserved reputation as a business union—that is, a union both run like a business and operating as a partner of business—with a long history of involvement by organized crime and continuing practices of authoritarianism and the suppression of rank-and-file democracy. In the 1970s Teamster union leaders supported President Nixon, in exchange for banning former President Jimmy Hoffa, Sr. from being involved in union politics and in the 1980s the Teamsters union backed Ronald Reagan—making it an anomaly in the labor movement. Under President Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., in 2008 the Teamsters joined the rest of the unions in backing Barack Obama as it did again in 2012. But it has never supported independent or left wing alternatives. These were hardly the politics of “revolutionary Teamsters. Yet, as Palmer reminds us, it was the Trotskyists, revolutionary socialists, who in 1933 and 1934 led coal drivers and then freight drivers to win union recognition in Minneapolis and then went on between 1934 and 1940 to organized tens of thousands of other truck drivers, warehouse workers, and other laborers throughout the old Northwest Territory—winning higher wages along the way—and laying the basis for the transformation of the Teamsters into an industrial union.

    Palmer’s book on the Teamsters grew out of research he carried out to write his biography of an American Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon and the origins of the American revolutionary left, 1890-1928, in the course of which he unearthed previously unexamined papers about the role of Cannon and the CLA/SWP in the 1934 Teamsters strikes. Revolutionary Teamsters begins with a brief account of the two other major strikes of 1934, the San Francisco longshoremens’ strike led by Harry Bridges and the Communist Party and the Toledo Autolite led by the Socialist Party. Palmer then writes a detailed and dense narrative of the Minneapolis strikes by coal yard workers and freight drivers that describes and analyzes all of the forces involved in them, from the Teamsters Union to the employers’ Citizens Alliance, from their opponents in the Communist Party and in Governor Floyd Olson and his Farmer-Labor Party. The book’s final sections deal briefly with the union’s regional expansion in the years from 1934 to 1940 and its suppression by the administration of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, eradicating the Trotskyist presence in the Teamsters in that era. Finally the book concludes by drawing some very general lessons for today’s activists and there is an appendix which provides a short account of the American Trotskyists at that time.

    Most of the Trotskyists in Minneapolis who organized and led Teamsters Local 574 had long histories in the labor movement and in the left. Vincent R. (Ray) Dunne and Carl Skoglund, for example, had been involved in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and in the Communist Party (known in the early 1920s as the Workers Party), and had subsequently joined the Trotskyist Communist League of America. Others like Farrell Dobbs were recruited to the CLA in the course of its Teamster organizing. The Trotskyists first organized a strike in the coal yards and then, having won union recognition and a contract there, found an ally in William S. (Bill) Brown, the president of the local union. Working with him, and despite opposition from Daniel Tobin, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, they launched a drive to organize the truck drivers and make Minneapolis a union town. Without going into all of the details here, suffice it to say that the Trotskyists in leading the freight strikes created a highly disciplined and effective organization that at times in its violent confrontation with the Citizens Alliance’s deputized thugs and the local police took on a quasi-military character, capable of mobilizing hundreds of workers in pitched street battles and in calling thousands to mass rallies. It was not, however, brute force and violence that won the battle, but rather strategic savvy in choosing the right issue, the right moment, and the right tactic.

    In passing, Palmer sketches rather one-dimensional portraits of the Trotskyist Teamster leaders, mentions briefly the Teamsters Women’s Auxiliary, but without really getting into the experience of women, and neglects the one opportunity to deal with racial issues which is provided by the several native American truck drivers (there being few African Americans or Latinos in Minneapolis at the time). The holy trinity of contemporary history and social sciences—race, gender, and class—does not have much sway in this book. Nor is there much more than a sketch of economic or social history. Palmer’s is an old school, leftist, labor history, an account of a strike movement, focusing on the union, the left, and party politics. Palmer wants to understand the degree to which a group of Trotskyists operating in the Teamsters union succeeded or failed in carrying out a revolutionary strategy.

    Palmer, however, describes the Trotskyist leadership’s functioning in Local 574 to only a limited degree; we know that the Trotskyist core cadres are making the decisions, but we don’t really learn how they operated. Did they make decisions first in their cell, fraction, or branch and then work to convince their allies like Brown and others? Or did they make those decisions together with the worker leaders and activists closest to them? Such things are difficult to reconstruct, even with the documents that Palmer has at his disposal, but they are crucial questions that tell us something about the Trotskyists' conception of the party, of leadership, of collaboration and of democracy. The author also describes the role of the CLA leadership — Cannon, Max Shachtman, and others –who traveled to Minneapolis to provide their skills as journalists, organizers, and especially as political advisors. Cannon in particular brought to bear his long experience as a labor organizer who could offer strategic and tactical advice. Still, one would like to know how party leaders interacted with local Trotskyists-Teamster leaders, relationships which don’t come off clearly in this account and may not be something that we can reconstruct. Perhaps only a personal diary, journal, or memoir could provide us with an account that would satisfy our curiosity.

    One of the most interesting things about the Trotskyist Teamster leadership is the degree to which they evaded and ignored both local and national Teamster organizational structures, roles, and rules and simply built a radical, fighting leadership at the core of the local trucking industry. While part of the International Brother of Teamsters, their rank-and-file organization maintained a remarkable degree of autonomy from the national and local union, until they had the power to take over and dominate the local union. When later they fell afoul of Teamster President Dan Tobin and their union lost its Teamster charter, they eventually joined the newly created Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), but then, when the opportunity presented itself, they later rejoined the Teamsters, merging with another local that had been created during their brief absence. It is clear that they had no organizational fetishes, but rather created or seized upon whatever organization proved useful to their strategic goal of organizing the Minneapolis and later the Northwest regional trucking industry. One is reminded of how—as described by Wyndam Mortimer in Organize: My Life as a Union Man (1971)—the Communists in the auto workers union worked in the company unions, the AFL Federal locals, and then in the UAW-CIO, seizing up any opportunity to build their rank-and-file group.

    Palmer praises the Trotskyist-Teamsters for their political principles and strategic wisdom, as well as for their obvious strength of character and courage in the face of slander and violence. Yet, he is not uncritical of this “steeled cohort” (p. 272) that he admires so much. He faults the Trotskyists for two things, one at the level of labor unionism and the other at the level of politics. At the level of union strategy Palmer argues that while the Trotskyists were initially far in advance of the conservative union officials in Minneapolis in 1933-34, by the mid- to late-1930s as they began organizing on the regional level, they found themselves dealing with a different sort of union leader. “…Trotskyists found themselves more and more aligned with progressive, but decidedly mainstream, labor-officials.” (p. 234) Palmer writes:

    Rather than utilizing ongoing struggles to build militant class-struggle caucuses in the distant locales where interested organizing campaigns were being launched, the Minneapolis trade union leaders tended, instead, to forge relationships with established IBT union-leaderships. This was the easiest path to follow, and it produced tangible short-term gains s. The result, however, was that a rank-and-file, infused with radical currents, steeled in struggle, and trusting of a revolutionary leadership, did not cohere as it had in Minneapolis in 1934. (p. 234)

    The upshot was that, “Each step in this seemingly benign direction solidified the labor-movement credentials of Trotskyist union-leaders like Dobbs, but moved them further away from their capacity to promote the revolutionary politics of Left Oppositionists [i.e., Trotskyists].” (p. 235) He goes on:

    It was not so much that what the Trotskyist advance-guard in the Minneapolis labor-movement did was wrong; rather it was what it did not do clearly enough that proved troubling. Channeling their energies into consolidating ‘united fronts’ from above with various trade-union leaders, and concentrating their activity on trade-union questions alone, Minneapolis Trotskyists lost an important part of the revolutionary momentum that could have cultivated radicalizing rank-and-file caucuses through which revolutionary politics would have been extended among insurgent workers. This alone could have saved and preserved the victory of 1934. But it was not to be. (p. 235)

    He concludes that:

    The more the Left Opposition within the IBT succeeded, then, the more it seemed to be boxed into making accommodations with forces that had, in any case, adapted to a more liberal, if often bureaucratized stand. Unable to shift political gears sufficiently deftly and utilize the all-too-often meagre resources to develop left-caucuses and mass support within the union locals that they were promoting and working with, the Minneapolis Trotskyists thus found it increasingly difficult to differentiate themselves from ‘progressive,’ but defiantly non-revolutionary, figures within established trade-union officialdoms. The localized base of the Minneapolis revolutionary teamster-leadership, as important as it had become, was unable to actually reach into the kind of broad regional and national development that would have been necessary for the Trotskyists among the teamsters to have been protected from the kind of attack that was entirely possible in the changed climate of Roosevelt’s third, wartime, term as President. (pp. 238-39)

    Palmer, it seems to me, more or less refutes his own criticism when he mentions the Trotskyist group’s “meager resources,” to which he might have added their small numbers and lack of broader influence in the union movement and society. The organization of caucuses in far-flung local unions throughout the upper Midwest and Great Plains states and then throughout the country would have required a much bigger organization in the union and a far larger political party, and with or without such union and party organizations it would have taken time—time during which the organized union base in Minneapolis might well have been destroyed. The Trotskyists would have faced not only the employers, but also ambitious adversaries such as West Coast Teamster leader Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa in Detroit. The Trotskyists, moreover, were hated by the bosses, loathed by the Communist Party, despised by the Teamster leadership, and persona non grata with the U.S. government. To say the least, they had few friends. These circumstances led the Trotskyist to ally with progressives or business unionists in order to accomplish the goal of creating regional pattern contracts and building an industrial union in the trucking industry. It is hard to believe, knowing the difficulties they would have faced, that they could have pursued another course, including the course that Palmer suggests, that might have made them more successful than they were.

    Secondly, Palmer criticizes the Trotskyist Teamsters for being insufficiently critical and wary of Floyd Olson and the Farmer-Labor Party. Palmer explains that:

    Trotskyists like Dunne, Skoglund, and Dobbs knew [that Olson could not be trusted], but they chose [initially], unlike the Communist Party, to focus their early approach to Governor Olson not on his shortcomings, but on placing strategic stress on the Farmer-Labor Party leader’s ostensible pro-union sympathies, which could be exploited to build labor-organization among the truckers.” (pp. 64-65).

    This is a position that Palmer agrees with. He disagrees, however, with the Trotskyists later for failing to adequately understand and criticize Olson, who would ultimately call in the National Guard to occupy Minneapolis, stop the Teamsters strike, and impose a settlement that included arbitration. Palmer writes, “Stronger stands could have been taken against Olson, his harnessed use of the National Guard, and his duplicitous role in the obvious ambiguities inherent in the settlement, including the nature of arbitration. There is definitely evidence that Dobbs and others seemed to rely, at times, rather naïvely on Olson’s assurances.” (p. 121). Palmer goes so far as to say that the Trotskyists cultivated illusions in Olson and the Farmer-Labor Party. (p. 236, fn. 11) He argues that the Trotskyists should have criticized the Farmer-Labor Party as a cross-class alliance, and an organization that was, moreover, politically related to the Roosevelt Democratic Party. They should, says Palmer, have advocated more clearly and consistently the organization of a “workers’ party.” (p. 226) Their failure to do so, he believes, meant that workers had no political alternative, which left the Trotskyists open to their ultimate political repression.

    There were throughout the 1930s local labor party efforts and the idea was raised more broadly within the CIO at various points.[2] Yet one has to wonder how successful such an attempt to found a labor or workers’ party would have been in Minneapolis, where a nominal labor party—the Farmer-Labor Party—already existed. Attempting to create such a workers party would have been extremely difficult, especially after 1936 when both the Socialists and Communists had gone over to Roosevelt and the Democrats. This is not to say that the effort might not have been worthwhile for propagandistic reasons, but that such a party could have been built in Minnesota or perhaps anywhere in the United States at that time seems dubious to me. Then too there's the question of whether the Trotskyists had the resources both to build caucuses in the unions and to build a workers’ party.

    I think Palmer’s view of the Trotskyists is open to criticism on another more general level. He argues that it was the presence of the Trotskyist revolutionaries which made possible the Teamster victory, where presumably others would have failed. (He actually writes that the Stalinist Communists would certainly have failed – p.262). Yet we know that Communists won a victory in San Francisco as the Socialists did in Toledo. Communists would just a few years later play a major part in organizing the United Auto Workers victory at General Motors, while both Communists and Socialists played central roles in organizing in the steel industry. One might draw the conclusion that workers’ attempts to build industrial unions were more likely to succeed if they had a far left leadership of almost any sort. Yet we also know that opportunistic business unionists in the Teamsters led the same sorts of fights in Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston and they also succeeded in organizing big cities and entire regions of the trucking industry. West Coast Teamster leader Dave Beck, for example, who had organized the Seattle area truck drivers in 1933 and 1934, succeeded between 1935 and 1937 in organizing Los Angeles, until then an open-shop stronghold dominated by the Merchants and Manufacturers Association.[3] Perhaps the key ingredient was a cohesive team of savvy strategists—whatever their politics—who were capable of mobilizing workers and were prepared to engage in the kind of violent confrontations required at that time.

    The Trotskyists did bring important elements to their organization of a strike that some others did not: their regular mass meetings and especially their daily strike newspaper. Most important was their political independence from both the Democrats and the Farmer-Labor Party. Still, the question was, perhaps, not so much whether or not workers could fight and win without revolutionary socialist leadership; they clearly did fight and win without it in many situations under various sorts of leaders. The real question is: What sort of union does one get in the end? Does one get a democratic, militant, and socially-conscious union capable of continuing the fight for a socialist society, or does one get a bureaucratic union subordinate to capitalism? Only in a few places—one thinks of the independent Union of All Workers created at Hormel’s meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota, in 1933—were genuinely independent, democratic, and militant unions created. That union lasted until the 1980s.[4] Such unions were few and far between.

    The American left, labor unions, and workers in the 1930s only partially succeeded in laying the basis for a more democratic, militant, and socialist union movement. They succeeded in creating the CIO, but lost in their attempt to create a labor party and to bring socialism to the United States. By the 1940s, the New Men of Power, as C. Wright Mills called them, were already heading up what had become simply larger bureaucratic business unions.[5]  In part this is because of the authoritarianism found on the left, for example the terrible role played by the Socialists in driving out the militants and building a bureaucratic machine in the steel industry.[6] Or consider the one-party state that socialist Walter Reuther established in the United Auto Workers, a ruling party so successful that it continues to run the union to this day. Where Communists became the leaders of local unions, they also built powerful political machines with little toleration for opponents. The Smith Act sedition trials of 1941 eliminated the Trotskyists from the labor movement—we will never know what a Trotskyist-led labor movement might have looked like—and other leftists, even where they built strong unions failed to maintain the labor movement’s political independence from the state. The leftist union leaders’ political decisions, especially the almost universal decision not only by the businesses unionists but also by the Communist and Socialist parties to support World War II, meant that unions, employers, and the government came together in kind of partnership that—together with the Cold War and McCarthyism—laid the basis for the dominance of business unionism in the post-war period.[7]

    Palmer’s book gives us one more take on the 1934 Teamsters strike in Minneapolis, but because of its all-too-dense narrative, its portraits of Teamster leaders that border on caricature, and its often reading like a political tract from another era, its audience will, I think, be limited to the small field of labor historians and to the (unfortunately) equally small number leftists. If a labor union activist or some young radical were to ask me what to read about the 1934 strike, I would still recommend Farrell Dobbs personal account in Teamster Rebellion, a memoir that reads like a radical’s strike manual and seems as relevant today as ever.

    [1] The books dealing with the 1934 Teamster strike are: Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion (New York: Pathfinder, 1972). Dobbs also has three other volumes dealing with his Teamster experience. Charles Rumford Walker’s American City: A Rank-and-File History (New York: Arno Reprint, 1971), originally published in 1937, remains an interesting economic and social history of Minneapolis at the time of the Teamster strikes. Philip A. Korth’s The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995) is a rather undigested combination of historical narrative and interesting oral histories. Elizabeth Faue’s Community of Suffering & Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), which also deals with the Teamster strikes, emphasizes women workers and communities, but she is less interested in labor union strategy and politics. Finally, Chapter 3 of Paul Jacobs, Is Curly Jewish: A Political Self-Portrait Illuminating Three Turbulent Decades of Social Revolt: 1935-1965 (New York: Atheneum, 1965) provides an interesting and amusing account of his several weeks as a Trotskyist youth organizer in Minneapolis during the period of the Teamster strikes.

    [2] See Eric Leif Davin, “The Very Last Hurrah? The Defeat of the Labor Paty Idea, 1934-36,” in Staughton Lynd, ed., “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp. 117-71.

    [3] Donald Garnel, The Rise of Teamster Power in the West (Berkeley: University of California, 1972), pp. 146-64.

    [4] Peter Rachleff, “Organizing ‘Wall to Wall,’ The Independent Union of all Workers, 1933-37,” in Lynd, ed., “We Are All Leaders”, pp. 51-71.

    [5] C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948).

    [6] Clinton S. Golden and Harold J. Ruttenberg, The Dynamics of Industrial Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publisher, 1942). The authors describe how they got rid of the troublemakers who had built the United Steel Workers of America as they constructed the union bureaucracy. Golden was a member and sometimes a leader of the Socialist Party.

    [7] The Communist Party officially supported the war, while the Socialist Party did not officially oppose it.

    Dan La Botz was a truck driver and Teamster activist in the 1970s and a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. He is the author Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (New York: Verso, 1990), of the “The Fight at UPS: The Teamsters Victory and the Future of the ‘New Labor Movement’,” (Detroit: Solidarity, 1997), and of the chapter “Tumultuous Teamsters” in Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Calvin Winslow, eds. Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s (New York: Verso, 2010). He is a member of Solidarity and a co-editor of New Politics.

     

     

  • Is 21st Century Fascism Advancing Undercover?

    The European Parliamentary Election of last May 25 was marked by a strong push from the Europhobic and racist right, which was  rife with currents of the extreme right. Its best showings were achieved by the United Kingdom Independence Party -UKIP (which received 27.5% of the British vote), by the Party of the People of Denmark (26.7%), by the National Front of France (24.9%), and by the Freedom Party of Austria (19.7), and one shouldn’t forget the recent advances of the Swedish Democrats (9.7%) and of Alternative for Germany (7%). Beppe Grillo, the leader of Italy's 5 Star Movement (which garnered 21.1% of the country's vote)  is also connected with some of these parties. With regard to the openly fascist parties on the European periphery, such as Jobbik in Hungary (14.7%) and Golden Dawn in Greece (9.4%) they represent a somewhat different case. One will note finally, that despite exaggerations spread by Russian propaganda and picked up by the western press, the two extreme right candidates in the Ukrainian presidential election together got just 2.3% of the vote.

    About the Anti-Immigrant Parties

    What are the common denominators of these rightwing parties? To begin with, they denounce immigration as the principle cause of the explosion of unemployment, of spending on social services, and of a “lack of safety.” They also oppose the free movement of people within the European Union (UE). This is why they unanimously applauded the success of the initiative introduced by the Swiss People’s Party (SVP – a hard nationalist rightwing party) “against mass immigration” in Switzerland last February 9. However, this does not mean that they are all completely against the EU. At the same time they reassert an unabashed imperialism with its modern day racist rhetoric that plays on Islamophobia in order to attack immigration from outside of Europe. The fascist elements don’t hesitate to develop an anti-Semitic language that is spread discretely or covertly. Today these groups represent a physical danger to immigrants and gender minorities, but also a threat to solidarity activists as was shown recently in the case of Clement Meric in France.

    These parties are all in favor of private property and free enterprise. They advocate the liberalization of the labor market and the reduction of tax burdens on corporations, and in particular on small- and medium-sized businesses. They assert that leaving the euro and building new customs barriers will revive the domestic economy. They propose demagogic measures for those with low income, but exclude raising the legal minimum wage, which they oppose, while asserting that they will defend and ensure the social well-being of citizens. They support industrial production without any concern for the environment. The National Front in France calls global warming into question while the United Kingdom Independence Party wants to banish the subject from British schools. They make repeated declarations in favor of the family and of housewives as well as supporting traditional education. They are partisans of the “moral order,” and they don’t hesitate to flatter homophobia. They defend harsher criminal sanctions and support the death penalty “for the most heinous crimes.”

    Combining the Historic Cultures of the Right

    They say they are against the system, whether the governments are conservative or social democratic.  “What holds these disparate elements of the UKIP together,” writes Richard Seymour in England, “is the socially paranoid ideology of the hard right [for which] the UE is a socialist plot concocted by Eurocrats who live at the expense of small business, encourage immigration, and the welfare state.” (Red Pepper, Sept. 2013). After the fall of the Berlin Wall, these parties went on a crusade against the EU which they liken to the USSR. They owe their success to their capacity to wed the historic cultures of the right: nationalist, militarist, colonialist, racist, sexist, homophobic, authoritarian, religious, conservative, libertarian, anti-socialist, etc.

    Today they appeal to a mass electorate coming from large sectors of the wage-earning and middle classes who are deserting both the social democratic and traditional rightwing parties. Indeed, they contribute to a radicalization on the right based on widespread anger over the dismantling of social services, a process in which the parties in power have been zealous participants. They individualize workers by reducing them to an electoral body of angry whites, but mostly they divide the world of work between foreigners and nationals, people of color and whites, the unemployed and those with jobs, retirees and those still working, etc. They shy away from any collective response. This can be a significant asset to the bourgeoisie, especially in a country like France, where the cure of an austerity program along the lines of the Maastricht Treaty’s Euro-convergence criteria looks extremely severe.

    The New Faces of Barbarism

    The Fascism and Nazism of the 1920s and 1930s was constructed by mass organizations that had served as a battering ram for the most combative sectors of capital, staving off the threat of revolution and then destroying workers’ organizations, eliminating democratic rights, and establishing a long term reduction in labor costs. We're obviously not there today, except perhaps in Greece where Golden Dawn explicitly refers to such a model. But in the rest of Europe, how does the current far right upsurge serve dominant class interests, given that the political and trade union left is in disarray? In fact, given the scope of social regression that they are planning, of which the south of Europe gives us a foretaste, it is probably more useful than one might have thought. It means in fact nothing less than depriving a numerically stronger than ever wage-earning class—the famous 99%—of its main social and democratic achievements in the 20th century, which it rightly considers to be elements of civilization, but that the famous 1% still find far too costly, despite the cutbacks imposed during the last 30 years.

    What were these achievements? First, the idea that wages should allow one to live "decently," that is to say, to cover a range of needs that go beyond the physiological minimum: a diversified diet, attractive clothing, consumer durables, leisure, culture, etc. Moreover, the belief that indirect wages or social insurance (for sickness, disability, unemployment, retirement, etc.) is vital for a large part of the population that does not have any means of production or income of its own, and cannot therefore be considered, even partially, to support itself or somehow subsist. Then too, there was confidence that there would be massive subsidization of public services (education, health, social housing, transport, etc.) supported as necessary by a progressive tax. Now all of this is challenged by "the dictatorship of the markets,” backed by increasingly opaque and authoritarian institutions, which has led some working people to take up the slogan of Spain’s indignados we must fight for "real democracy here and now."

    How to Build a United Front

    Even if today the great majority of the traditional organizations of the old labor movement accept de facto the extremely brutal austerity plans in the name of the “imperatives” of national industry’s need to remain competitive, the unions’ relative weakness doesn’t necessarily allow them to convince the workers that they should go like sheep to the slaughter without resisting. Workers remain deeply attached to the value of their labor power, the result of a long historical evolution marked by many battles, which capital cannot therefore reduce as dramatically and quickly as it would like. It is precisely because the nationalist-populist right justifies the imposition of a radically reduced standard of living for large sections of the popular classes—the undocumented migrants, people of color, young part-time workers, and women—reducing the value of their wages, that it contributes to undermining the historic achievements of the working class. In the same way, in lauding the housewife at a time when, for the great majority of the working class, two wages have become indispensable to the maintenance of a family, it justifies an increase in free domestic work, which permits a reduction in the costs of the reproduction of the labor force. Finally, in beginning to organize popular sectors with which the traditional parties have practically no more organic connections, the right lays the basis for a challenge in the streets to the labor unions, social movements, and the left.

    An acculturation process of this magnitude is inconceivable without a high degree of physical and mental violence, particularly against women, which would be the price to pay for such a decline in civilization. To drive forward, capital will need, in addition to control of the state, auxiliary forces within civil society. In this sense, it is not unfounded to speak of a new proto-fascist threat to the Europe of the 21st century, provided that one emphasizes that its forms could be quite different from those of the past. Nothing would be worse than to play again the musical scores of the past that failed in the 30s, so we must avoid two pitfalls. Firstly, that of a "republican front" with the “social democratic” or "center-right" supporters of social dismantling; and, secondly, that of the division of anti-neoliberal electoral slates which oppose these policies.

    Such a united front for the satisfaction of social needs, against capitalist austerity, and to oppose the national-populist right, must give pride of place to the fight against racism, fully integrating immigrants into its mobilizations, all of this within an internationalist perspective. To do this, we must denounce the actions taken by Frontex, the security service of Fortress Europe, as well as condemning the more restrictive immigration laws adopted by European states, often on the initiative or with the guarantee of social democratic parties. The struggle of migrants against their arbitrary detention and expulsion, but also against the humiliation and slave labor against which  they are often compelled to fight is our struggle. Such a convergence in action cannot be strengthened without clearly stating its trans-European dimension. Despite its limitations and its purely electoral dimension, one must recognize the achievement of an Italian party — The Other Europe with Tspiras — that defined itself in terms of its support for the Greek Syriza party and garnered 4% …Despite its limitations and its purely electoral dimension; one must recognize the significance of its showing in the European elections. The commitment of such forces to resist together on a common platform does not imply in any way denying the autonomy of each of them to democratically define its own objectives in the fight, its own repertoire of actions, and its own political orientations.

    Translation by Dan La Botz

  • The European Elections: Despite the Crisis, the Neoliberals Save the Day

    “Disaster,” “an earthquake,” “electroshock,” “a historic shock,” “a thunderclap,” “a stroke”: the results of the most recent European elections have caused a veritable media storm throughout Europe, beginning with France where the historic victory of the National Front of Marine Le Pen has left commentators with a real hangover.

    Amid the austerity, economic crisis and the loss of confidence not only in European institutions but above all in the political forces that drive them, the major trend of the vote on May 25— the far right’s vote spreading all over Europe –is not surprising. But looked at more closely, some of the important results call into question any one-sided interpretation. To begin with there is the landslide victory of Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party in Italy and the “relative strength” of the great coalition in Germany. Then too, strengthening the anti-capialist left, there were encouraging results of Podemos and the Plural Left in the Spanish State and even more of Syriza in Greece which are political expressions of the popular mass mobilization of the last few years. 

    One of the first things to be noted is the high rate of abstention mentioned by all the commentators, a fact that offers some consolation to those who apparently reason that at least the non-voters didn't vote for the nationalist, populist rightwing: about 57 % of European voters decided not to go to the polls to vote. France, with a 56.5 % abstention rate, is situated right in the European middle of this disaffection, of this distrust or perhaps “desperation” that affects a large part of the population of the 28 countries called to elect the Parliament in Brussels. Still, compared with the abstention rate in previous European elections—57 % in 2009 and 55 % in 2004—this year's is in fact normal. The abstention rate even declined in certain countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain, Finland, France, Sweden, Romania, Germany, Greece and Lithuania. In reality, the increase in non-voting was principally found in the east, in Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, as well as in some southern countries, Cypress, Italy, and Portugal, and in the North in Ireland and Denmark.

    If the elevated rates of abstention can be partly attributed to the rejection of the European Union by the popular classes, they tell us next to nothing about the evolution of the relation of political forces country by country over the five years that separate the last two elections. Abstention then is not an important measure for understanding the upheavals that preceded May 25. And also, as Manuel Kellner emphasizes, this view tends to lend support to the somewhat magical belief that abstention proves “the lack of legitimacy of the European institutions,” while it leads without a doubt to an underestimation of the real weight of European institutions and politics on the national realities and to a “lack of interest in what happens in other countries.”[1].

    Government Parties in Disarray?

    The second observation that strikes one is that some 43% of European citizens who went to the polls cast their votes against the parties that have been considered to be the representatives of European institutions and against the agents of the policies of austerity in their countries, as well as against a political class that they considered to be corrupt. The great traditional parties, in particular those that were in government, retreated everywhere. In France, the Socialist Party won a little less than 14% of the vote (compared to 16.5 % in 2009). It was rebuffed, confirming the earlier defeat in the municipal elections, and not only in competition with the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) of former president Nicolas Sarkozy that finds itself in the middle of a financial scandal, coming in second with 20.8% of the votes (against 27.8% in 2009), but especially compared to the National Front of Marine Le Pen, which won with nearly 25% (compared to 6.3 % in 2009).

    In the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party in power also suffered, falling from 27% in 2009 to 23.3% in competition with the nationalist, populist rightwing United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) which came in first with 27.5 percent of the votes as compared to only a little more than 16% in 2009. In the Spanish State, the European elections appeared to mark the end of the two-party system (the Popular Party or PP vs. The Socialist Workers Party or PSOE).[2] The PP dropped from 42.2% in 2009 to 26.1% in this election; while the PSOE went from 38.8% in 2009 to just 23.0%. Altogether, the two parties failed to win 50% of the votes cast. The tendency was the same in Poland where the Popular Party fell to 31.3% compared to 44.4% in 2009; in Sweden, where the Moderate Party received 13.6 percent (compared to 18.8 percent in 2009), and in Hungary where the center-right Fidesz Party fell from 56.4% to 51.5%.

    In general then, the parties in power, the Social Democratic and traditional conservative parties, were punished by an opposition vote against the “elites that impose austerity” and which have diligently applied the European Central Bank policies which bring in their wake subjugation, privatization, cut in public services, poverty, unemployment, the destruction of the social state, and the degradation of living and working conditions. Germany and Italy represent notable exceptions that challenge the oft repeated analysis of a vote against the European Union and a rejection of government parties.[3] In Germany, while the Christian Democratic Union / Christian Social Union coalition had been predicted to win with 40% of the vote, its vote actually declined from the 37.9 percent garnered in 2009 compared to 35.3 % in 2014,while the Social Democratic Party rose from 20.8 % in 2009 to 27.3 % in 2014. In Italy, the Democratic Party of Renzi collected 40 % of the votes cast compared to just 26 % in 2009, to which I will return…

    “The convergence of rightwing government and neoliberal government is clear in the eyes of millions of workers,” wrote François Sabado in the heat of the moment.[4] The left has long rejected such a conclusion in order to justify the casting of a “useful vote” or support for the “lesser evil ” or the need to present an “ alternative to the right ” and other such arguments ad nauseum. In 2013, the Spanish lefitst Miguel Romero mocked this in a little parable, writing, “Some years ago there was a quite successful film titled Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray plays a character trapped in the nightmare of an infinitely repeating day. Something similar has happened with the various groups of personalities who are addicted to presenting themselves as spokespersons with the goal of ‘a battle against the right’ designating Social Democracy as the protagonist of such a struggle. ”[5]

    This realization has been facilitated by an ever clearer neoliberal positioning of the European Social Democratic parties, which the “anti-austerity ” rhetoric of some of them (we think of Martin Schulz in Germany and of Matteo Renzi in Italy and even of François Hollande in France) has not been able to mask. European Social Democracy seems to be openly following the path of the Italian Democratic Party. Cutting the last of the “fictional” historic links that connected it to a rich tradition of popular struggles for social emancipation, it aims to become the party of a modernist bourgeoisie, such as that which exists in Italy, modeled on the U.S. Democratic Party. Should we be surprised that along the way it will lose some of its traditional electoral base which it obviously hopes to replace with the heterogeneous clientele of popular bourgeois parties?

    In certain countries, such as Portugal, the Socialist Parties can still hope, though less every day, to make some gains in the opposition. So, the Portuguese Socialist Party (PSP) has done noticeably better than the other European socialist parties (from 26.5% in 2009 to 31.4%).  In contrast, the decline of social democracy in other countries doesn’t seem to arouse much resistance on the left, even in France where it has failed, apparently irrevocably.

    The 2008 split which led to the establishment of the Party of the Left by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and to the creation as well before the European elections of a new organization called New Deal which also came largely out of the ranks of the Socialist Party—winning 2.9% of the vote—confirmed the rule that no left current can last for long within that party.

    Overall, the European environmental parties experienced a greater erosion of support than the Social Democrats, no doubt because of the strong perception that they now form part of the mainstream Euro-compatible parties (they went from 57 to 52 seats in the parliament). In France the Greens paid a high price for their participation, crucial participation, in the government of François Hollande, falling from 16,3% to 8.9%, one of the biggest tumbles in Europe.

    For its part, the traditional right also lost ground, with the European People’s Party falling from 35.7% of the seats in 2009 to 28.5% today. This retreat, not surprisingly, touched to varying degrees the conservative political organizations of several important countries, among them the Spanish State, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany. It should be noted that this also account for the policies of the grand coalition governments (traditional right, Social Democratic, various “center ” parties) tested for “ confronting the crisis ” and justifying austerity policies (in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, etc.) The right has to walk a tightrope between its own Euro-skeptic and nationalist forces while also responding to the growing and uninhibited influence of the extreme right which has the wind in its sails. Angela Merkel, the iron lady of the Troika, engages with the advocates of the European Union while at the same time hardening her tone in order to keep in touch with the growing Euro-skeptic fringe of the German right. Just before the election didn’t she emphasize that the European Union was not a “social welfare union”? [Suggesting that the EU was not a place where immigrants could go shopping for welfare benefits. – DL]

    The Irresistible Rise of the National-Populist Constellation

    These manoeuvers are the result of the hard national-populist right, ranging from Europhobic to proto-Fascist, which has today upset the European political situation. The election made manifest the growth of an “anti-system” vote and of a nationalist or regionalist retreat. Its cause is almost self-evident, taking into account the economic, political, and moral crisis which has affected the EU for the last several years. The high vote for catch-all parties, some of which, like Alternative for Germany (Afd), define themselves as “neither left nor right, ” and which profit from the economic and social discomfort of the popular is obviously a vote in opposition to the Troika’s policies, and this includes those in Germany who believe that the EU is too expensive and who reject parties that are “selling off  national independence , people who are angry at the lack of understanding of the impact of austerity politics put in place so zealously by governmental parties.

    The nationalist-populist vote expresses above all a rejection of immigration that is tinged with racism and which is aimed primarily but not only at people from non-European countries, but also expresses contempt toward the most indebted countries of the South of the Old Continent (the PIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain), supposedly lazy spendthrifts who are considered as the principal causes of the crisis. The UKIP puts itself forward today as the champion of the family with 27.5% of the vote (compared to 16.1% in 2009), becoming the leading political party of the country. It belongs to the Europe of Liberty and Democracy group which includes the Danish Peoples Party, another big winner in the election with 26.7% (compared to 14.8% in 2009), with Order and Justice in Lithuania (14.3% compared to 12.2 in 2009), with the Party of the True Finns (12.9% against 14% in 2009), together with Alternative for Germany (7%), and perhaps the Polish New Right, with around 7%.[6]

    The real spoilsport, however, was the National Front of Marine Le Pen which won nearly 25% of the vote (compared to just 6.3% in 2009) becoming the leading party in France. Though the British UKIP refuses for the moment to collaborate with it, in spite of evident smiliarities in their views on immigration, Le Pen’s FN plans to establish a new European parliamentary group with other related parties, some of which have also risen sharply, such as the Austrian Freedom Party (19.7% against 12.7% in 2009) and the Swedish Democrats (9.7% against 3.3% in 2009), though others are in decline, such as the Party for Dutch Freedom (13.2% against 17.0% in 2009), the Belgian Flemish nationalist party Vlaams Belang (4.1% against 9.9% in 2009), and probably the Italian Northern League (6.2% against 10.2% in 2009). Further to the right, we find the Nazi-Fascist Hungarian Movement for a Better Hungary or Jobbik Party (14.7%) and Greek Golden Dawn (9.4%), currently a pariah but with strong support from its base.

    At the periphery of this nebula Beppe Grillo’s 5 Star Movement (M5S) is the surprise guest, involved today in discussions with UKIP the possibility of its eventual affiliation to Europe of Freedom and Democracy. Grillo, who caused a veritable explosion in the 2013 elections, stumbled this time on the steps of the European Parliament. Confident of winning hands down, he ran under the banner, “Either them or Us.” But several factors worked against the M5S and its leader : a nationalist-populist campaign riddled with anti-Semitism, which led him to lose support on the left ; the excommunications of several members of the movement in the course of the last few months which reinforced the image of an authoritarian party headed by unchallengable leaders; the poor management in certain local governments…As I wrote in 2013 (New Politics, Winter 2014), M5S is characterized by Italian subversivism, that Gramsci described as “ a negative class position…that always turns to the right at the decisive moment.” It did not take long for Beppe Grillo to play his hand, although some part of the movement has dissociated itself from him.

    Yet, with or without M5S, the nationalist-populist constellation is ever more deeply rooted in the European soil. It does not appear in the guise of the fascism of yesteryear, although some of its activists and voters claim that legacy, even if it always issues from the fecund womb of the foul beast, as Brecht said in 1941. This is more or less the case of all of these formations. Their speeches are ultra -nationalist, racist, patriarchal, imperialist, anti-socialist, and based on the stigmatization of the poor and the “less productive,” and sexual minorities, as well as the domination of women. Thus, the leader of the New Polish Right, Janusz Korwin-Mikke recently stated that rape was normal, because women want it…. But it is also a "vote representing an attitude that comes from the gut.” Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP, summons up the picture “of the barfly who you buy a beer and then together denounce all politicians and ruminate against immigrants.”[7] These movements are principally attractive to members of the petty- and middle-bourgeoisie (doctors , teachers, small businesspeople), but also have a significant following among the popular classes (workers, public employees, and the unemployed). They may also, as in the case of the French National Front, attract young people.

    In most countries, these far right parties certainly nibble at the popular electoral base of conservative parties, but they also impinge on the social democratic vote, pushing the government parties to adopt their rhetoric or to follow suit, in particular when it comes to immigration restrictions and national security. Of course, there are a lot of other things to ask about these movements. Who are their sponsors? Where does funding to facilitate their rise come from? What links have been established between them? What kind of relationship do they have with clearly fascist or nationalist groups? Their progress is all the more worrisome given that they do not seem to lead to the social and political mobilization necessary to counter them. Some 8,000 young people did participate in a demonstration on May 29 against the victory of the National Front in the European elections, and that first impulse should be continued and extended.

    The Italian Exception?

    Matteo Renzi is the big winner in the latest European elections. As the international press likes to say, he is an “anomaly,” just one of many such “exceptions” that, seen from afar, seem to punctuate the history of contemporary Italy since the beginning of the twentieth century. The Democratic Party, which won 25.5% of the votes in the Lower House in February 2013, won 40% of the vote more than any other Italian party has won since 1958. The country that British Marxist Perry Anderson recently described as “the real weak link in the EU, at which it could theoretically break,” is thus distinguished by a vote that will perhaps help to stabilize it. Yet the Renzi government has a policy of austerity and social dismantling just as zealous as that of his predecessors.

    Several factors explain this success within the context of the weakness of the social resistance movements. Firstly, the young chairman Matteo Renzi, darling of the international and national press, has only headed the government for a few months. And he spared no efforts in speaking out against European austerity and German domination, he called for the revision of the EU treaties and he contested the idea that there had been a "recovery." So he was able to pose as the man who wanted change and right now, change which would improve the living conditions of all Italians (for example, by adding 80 euros to every worker’s pay check), while at the same time remaining the liege man of the bosses (Confindustria, the employers' association newspaper, devoted 12 pages to support his campaign in the European Parliament). Renzi is thus the prototype politician who "best combines demagoguery of charity with the destruction of what remains of the achievements of organized labor."[8]

    Finally, Matteo Renzi is presented as an alternative to the old Democratic Party, thus assuming no responsibility for the policies pursued hitherto by his predecessors. Criticism of the dinosaurs, by figures such as Massimo D'Alema, who has been accused of "destroying the left," were accompanied both the announcement of the return of the Italian Democratic Party to the Socialist International and the emergence of broad governmental agreements, even including Silvio Berlusconi. So Renzi was able to win "left" voters, recovering some votes that were garnered in 2013 by Grillo’s 5 Star Movement, but also to win “right” votes, given the collapse of the coalition of Berlusconi (People of Freedom – PdL), which alone collected more than 35% of the vote in 2009. Added to this is precisely the failure of M5S which in February 2013 had created a stir by becoming the largest party with 25% of the votes in the House and 23% in the Senate. In the recent election, however, it got only 21% of the vote.

    The Left that’s Coming…From the South

    The left, however, is not without hope, particularly in southern Europe where austerity policies have already brutally battered the region which is also where the most important social movements have taken place up until now. In Greece, Syriza won 26.6 % of the vote (compared to 4.7% in 2009), asserting itself as the leading political force in the country, even though the mass mobilizations are declining. In the Spanish State, Podemos, a new political force arising out of the indignados movement, won its 8% of the vote in its first ever election, becoming the third political power in Madrid, Asturias, and Aragon, and the fourth most powerful party in the country. A true "catalyst popular indignation," this slate represents an undeniable turning point for the radical left, not only in terms of its modes of organization (encouraging the active participation of its members ), but also in its chosen repertoires of action. To this victory must be added the showing of Izquierda Plural (a broadening of Izquierda Unida) growing from 3.7 % of the vote in 2009 to nearly 10 % today. Counting the left nationalist slates in the Catalan, Basque, and Galician regions (The Republican Left of Catalonia or ERC, and the People Decide made up of the Basque Bildu, the Galician Nationalist Bloc or BNG, and the European Spring) the anti-neoliberal left presence rose from 6.25% in 2009 to 26% today.

    In Italy the slate “The Other Europe with Tsipras” (a reference to Alex Tsipras, leader of Syriza) also created a surprise with 4% of the votes, even more striking because this organization had little media coverage. This group is a collection of movement activists, notably No Tav (the mobilization in the Suse Valley against the high-speed Turin-Lyon train), but also including intellectuals and journalists (Barbara Spinelli, Andrea Camilleri, and Marco Revelli) who are close to the daily Repubblica newspaper. Quite a hodgepodge for sure, but a sltate that locates the struggle on the European terrair and could open the way to a transnational expression of the anti-neoliberal left. In Portugal, however, the Left Bloc, that some accuse of having made concessions to the Socialist Party, and which has recently suffered from divisions and departures from the group on the left and the right, fell sharply–from 10.7% in 2009 to 4.6% today. The Communist Party, which is still seen as a mobilizing force in alliance with its environmentalist satellites, rose from 10.9% of the vote in 2009 to 12.7%.

    In the North, the situation appears more mixed. New political forces have arisen, such as the Swedish feminist and anti-racist organization, Feminist Initiative, which won 5.3% of the vote (compared to 2.2% in 2009). Founded in 2005, it is the "worst nightmare" of mainstream parties. In Ireland, Sinn Fein itself also increased from 11.2 % in 2009 to 17 % of the vote today. Added to this is the result of French-speaking Belgium Workers Party (PTB) – Open Left (GO), up from 1.1% in 2009 to 5.5 % today, which benefitted from the call of the Charleroi city FGTB (the main trade union confederation) to break with the policy of the Socialist Party. While Die Linke (The Left) party in Germany remained stable at 7%, the situation in France is undoubtedly the most calamitous, overdetermined by the disappearance of social movements together with the loss of the battle against the pension reform in 2010. Since then, social struggles have remained atomized and have literally disappeared from the radar screens.

    In the European elections in France, the Left Front won only 6.3% of the vote, much the same as it had at its founding in 2009, despite the attractiveness of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), which then collected 4.9 % of votes. I must say the Left Front may have suffered slightly from the presentation of the "New Deal," which came out of the Socialist Party calling for a program of Keynesian stimulus. But it probably suffered more from the decision of the Communist Party to put up a common slate with the Socialist Party in many municipalities just a few months before the European elections. As Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote on his blog on May 30: “Our Left Front has a large foot in the system, as shown by the sequence of the Municipal elections.  As a result, thanks to some geometrically varying arrangements and alliances, beyond their local legitimacy or not, have literally associated us with the spectacle of arsenic and old lace of the system. Therefore we made ourselves equivocal or, quite frankly, we ended up being suspect at a time when suspects are submitted to bad treatments! In just one election campaign, all our efforts to become politically autonomous have been destroyed for many people.”

    However, the Left Front, gasping for air as it dealt with the tempestuous struggle between the Communist Party and the Left Party of Mélenchon, apparently did not (or has not yet) benefited from the several waves of defectors from the NPA, who, with other forces, formed the Ensemble (Movement for a Left Alternative) last November, hoping to establish a third pole in the Left Front. As for the NPA, the situation is even more serious, since it won only 0.3% of the vote in 2014 (compared to 4.9% in 2009), a result which probably reflects the degree of confusion among a good many of its supporters since 2009. The overview is not complete without mentioning Workers Struggle (LO), which continues to go it alone with about 1% of the vote. The challenge therefore remains:  to build a united front of the entire anti-neoliberal left remains the key objective; within it, each political tendency should continue to discuss and organize democratically to defend its positions while respecting moments of common struggle to support and encourage social mobilization, but also to make clear the existence of a combative left at election time.

    The European election results are clearly more mixed than they appeared in the first accounts written in the heat of the moment. Although the growing number of nationalist-populist, rightwing groups attest to the depth of the current crisis, the "Eurocrats" limit the damage. Bourgeois and social democratic parties have in effect kept their hands on the control levers, especially in countries that historically formed the core of the EU (Germany, Italy, and Benelux). Even in France, where the Socialist Party is undergoing a profound crisis of political legitimacy, the government Hollande Valls continues its journey. Germany of course but also Italy, deemed the weak link of neoliberal Europe, offer the EU an unexpected reprieve. This situation does not facilitate the task of the radical left, caught between the rising brown tide of the right and austerity parties in power, it does not seem to be able to capitalize on popular discontent, except in Greece and in the State Spanish, thanks no doubt to the mass struggles of the latter period.

    May 31, 2014

    Translation by Dan La Botz

    [1] Manuel Kellner, “ European Elections in Germany : Right-wing Success, Stagnation of the Left ”, 26 mai 2014, www.europe-solidaire.org.

    [2] Jaime Pastor, “ Elections européennes dans l’Etat espagnol : déclin du bipartisme, ascension de Podemos et renforcement du souverainisme en Catalogne ”, 26 mai 2014, www.vientosur.info.

    [3] Cinzia Arruzza, “The European Conundrum ”, Jacobin. A magazine of culture and polemic, Mai 2014, www.jacobinmag.com.

    [4] François Sabado, “ Les élections européennes : une Europe à la dérive et un tremblement de terre en France ”, 27 mai 2014, www.europe-solidaire.org.

    [5] Miguel Romero, “ La política de la marmota ”, Viento Sur Web, 9 nov. 2013.

    [6] Selon le porte-parole de la Nouvelle droite, Tomasz Sommer, son chef de file inclinerait pour la constitution d’un nouveau groupe libertarien, centré sur l’Europe centrale et orientale.

    [7] Dave Kellaway, “ European elections in Britain : Farage shakes it all about-The United Kingdom Independence Party keep through ”, Socialist Resistance, 26 mai 2014, http://socialistresistance.org.

    [8] Cf. Andrea Martini, “ Europee 2014. Lo scontro elettorale dei piccoli titani ”, 23 mai 2014, http://anticapitalista.org.

     

  • What Is the “Middle Class”? Who Are the 99%?

    What is the “Middle Class”?

                The working class got scarcely a mention in the 2012 election campaign. Instead, it was the great American middle class that got the headlines. As historian Steven Hahn pointed out at the time, “The campaigns of both parties showed an obsessive concern for the fate of the ‘middle class,’ an artificially homogenized category mostly coded white…” while ignoring poverty.  “Middle Class” is a problematic concept that I will explore below.

                Meanwhile, however, the conversation was already changing. In 2012 Elizabeth Warren, an F.D.R.-style liberal, won the Senate seat from Massachusetts. Within a year she had become “the Hot Ticket on the Far Left,” according to The New York Times, apparently because she had the audacity, in a 2011 speech, to declare that the rich didn’t get there on their own; rather, they were helped along by an infrastructure (roads, police, fire departments, vocational training, etc.) that the government paid for. There was no such thing as a “self-made man” (or woman), she insisted. Then in 2013 Bill de Blasio was elected Mayor of New York City. He campaigned on Michael Harrington’s “two nations” thesis: one rich, the other not.  Harrington’s book had been an important spark to the beginnings of what was to be President Johnson’s “war on poverty” in the mid-1960s.

                By New Year’s Day 2014 the Times claimed that “the national debate over inequality and social justice has reached a fever pitch.” President Obama had also been talking about the growing divide between rich and poor. Was this class warfare? Not to worry. Mr. Obama quickly shifted the focus: In his State of the Union address in January, 2014 inequality of opportunity rather than inequality of outcome had become the problem. Neither Obama nor Warren has anything against making lots of money. We just need to tweak taxes a bit in order to be fairer. And how are we to overcome inequality of opportunity? Out of the mountainous issue of “the two nations” comes the mouse of a solution: pre-K education, the heart of de Blasio’s reform program for New York City.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

                However, it is critical to note that wealth “come(s) from financial and employment practices that cause widespread joblessness and the very poverty that is being attacked” (Peter Marcuse, letter to The Nation, March 3, 2014). The program of “expanding opportunity” to enter the “middle class” via education and related reforms without altering the exploitative and oppressive rules that are basic to the creation and maintenance of wealth is illusory.

                The idea that most Americans, aside from those at the very top and the poor at the bottom, are “middle class” is deeply rooted in U.S. culture. It has been promoted over many decades by the media and by much of the U.S. social scientific community, which has steadfastly rejected class conflict analysis for most of its history. The result is to make the working class disappear, as Michael Zweig aptly put it.  If there is a working class different from a middle class and an upper or capitalist class, then we must examine what makes it different. This might suggest that there are conflicting economic interests between these classes, something that is outside the permitted framework of public discussion.

                Surveys over the years have tried to demonstrate that most Americans think of themselves as middle class, not working class, as if thinking makes it so. This goes back at least to 1940, when Fortune magazine did a poll asking people to choose between upper, middle, and lower class and, no surprise, the majority of respondents chose middle class. In 1949 Richard Centers, at Princeton, thought this was a bit fishy and did the survey again, adding the category of working class. 51% identified as working class. Since that time, in every survey that included a “working class” choice, those choosing neither “lower” nor “upper” have split in half, with around 45-50% identifying as working class and about the same as “middle class.”

                In August, 2012 the Pew Research Center released a report, “The Lost Decade of the Middle Class.” Among other quite useful data, Pew included a survey asking basically the same Fortune question: which class would you say you belong to, upper, upper middle, middle, lower-middle, or lower class?  49% chose middle, 32% chose lower-middle or lower, and 17% said they were upper or upper-middle. The 49% ranged in income from less than $30,000 to over $100,000, with an average for all of $70,000. From these figures it is reasonable to assume that much of this “middle-class” is part of the working class.

                The confusion that is being sown here is the distinction between middle class, and middle stratum or layer. The middle class, as those working in a Marxian framework insist, consists of people defined by several kinds of relationships to the capitalist economic system different from other people, whose relationships are qualitatively unlike theirs. In short they differ in their source of income from others’ sources of income. Middle stratum is often defined in income terms, or by lifestyle (culture, housing, education, consumer and leisure time activities, etc.). Clearly if we divide the population of income earners into 20% segments, and consider the bottom fifth poor, and the top fifth rich, the remaining 60% who are in the middle constitute a majority. Some of this middle is middle class, but much of it is not. The fact that some of this grouping have a certain level of education or own a house does not make them middle class despite every effort by the cultural and political apparatus to make them think so, and despite the fact that many of them have accepted this definition.

                Most social scientists, who generally lean liberal, are in the business of promoting this same confusion of class with stratum. Their studies often consider many kinds of workers (generally most white collar workers) as middle class because their work may have more prestige, or involves more formal education. For them the concept of exploitation as a tool with which one sector of the labor force can be distinguished from another is absent because that is considered a moral, hence scientifically useless, expression. Even Zweig’s overall very useful book defines class “in large part based on the power and authority people have at work…For all their differences, working class people share a common place in production, where they have little control over the pace or content of their work, and aren’t anybody’s boss.” So for him, professionals, because they have “considerable authority and flexibility in their jobs, whether they are self-employed or work in a corporate department” are middle class.

                For most Marxian sociologists that is wrong: the self-employed (including many professionals) are part of the old middle class, the petty-bourgeoisie. Those who toil for others in a corporate setting are workers, regardless of their authority over their immediate work. The fruits of their work are expropriated by another class. They are exploited, an economic concept, not a moral one. For some other Marxian sociologists, administrators, supervisors, and mid-level bureaucrats who are wage earners constitute a “new middle class” because their function is to support exploitative relations even as they are also themselves exploited. Where to draw the line between new middle class and working class has been a problem for some time.

                The present economic crisis has clearly hit large numbers of households in the middle income strata hard, but the poor even harder. Incomes and wealth (especially as reflected in housing values), have deteriorated for the middle. In fact the so-called middle class has shrunk,  the famous “declining middle thesis.” What does this mean, and where did they go? The Pew authors define the middle-income “tier” (that’s acceptable, it’s a layer, a stratum, not a class) as all adults whose annual household income is from 2/3 of the median household income to twice the median: that is, from $39,418 to $118,255 in 2011. This number constitutes 51% of all households. In 1971, using figures appropriate for that date, it was 61%.  Where did they go? The upper tier increased to 20% of households from 14%, and the lower rose to 29% from 25%. However, in Pew’s three-tier system, only the upper-income tier gained in its share of household income. These folks collected 46% of all income, up from 29% in 1971. The middle tier collected 45%, down from 62%, and the bottom tier got 9%, down from 10% forty years ago. The fact is the income share of the middle 60% of wage earners has been steadily declining since 1965. (Note that tiers are much larger than quintiles.)

                However, this misses a lot. We must also look not only at shares of income, but also at changes in real, actual dollar income. When the U.S. Census looks at quintiles (20% segments) of household income, it turns out that the income of the bottom 40% (two quintiles) was the virtually the same in 2010 as it was in 1970, adjusted for inflation. So this stagnation began well before the Great Recession of 2008. But quintiles do not lose, or gain, in the same proportion: the lower the quintile, the larger the proportion of loss, and the higher you are, the larger proportion of gain. Thus since 1990, the bottom fifth lost 8% of its income, the second fifth lost 6%, while the top fifth gained 20%. What about wealth, which is always more unequally distributed than income? For the top 10% of individual owners (of wealth), their share went up from 67.2% in 1989 to 74.5% in 2010, and that’s after the crash of 2008. Meanwhile the bottom 50% of households went down from 3% of all wealth to 1.1%.

                The mystification that so many people are “middle class” whereas they are simply in some statistical middle has unfortunately been all too successful, and contributes to the relative lack of class consciousness of U.S. workers, although obviously it is not the only factor. Many workers do in fact consider themselves middle class and see themselves as separate from other elements of the working class including the unemployed and the poor.

                The real middle class, as most Marxian sociologists see it, consists of small-scale farmers, small business people (mom and pop operations with a limited number of employees), and self-employed professionals. Franchisees are in a contradictory position: on the one hand, they have purchased a business for about $30,000 up to millions depending on the industry, and in that sense are part of the middle class. On the other hand, their conditions of work, including everything from the percentage of their gross revenue to the specifications of their product (the shape of a hamburger, the print on the advertising, the architecture of their outlets) are determined by the corporate franchiser. What is left after expenses (without considering the purchase price) is the “profit,” or salary, as it is sometimes actually termed in the franchise business. This suggests that franchisees constitute a kind of “secret proletariat.” (The average annual net profit of a franchise is about $66,000, varying with industry, which is a low wage considering the hours worked by many franchisees.) Of course his or her workers are even more exploited, and because the “owner” determines the wage and work assignments she/he is at the same time an exploiter. Aside from sometimes using the term “salary” most franchisees do not grasp that one of their legs is in the working class and the other, given their high bankruptcy rate, is on a banana peel.

                Once we pose the question of how different parts of these strata relate to actual social and economic relations within capitalism, we may be able to get a better grasp of their likely political agendas.

    Who Are the 99%?

    The 99% concept similarly breaks down when we look at the realities of the U.S. class structure. Within the 99% there are deep differences due to divergent, and sometimes conflicting, class interests.

                The famous 1% captures a vastly disproportionate part of the nation’s wealth and income and this disproportion likely grows by the day. The data have been well-known over the years, long before the Occupy Wall Street movement spread the word. “As of 2012, the richest 1% of families, all with incomes above $394,000, receive more than one-fifth of the income of the nation.” (Alex Green reports that the top 1% of households — which includes individuals, hence numerically larger than people in families — begin at $521,000.) As for wealth, the top 1% of individual owners of wealth, averaging about $6.8 million in assets in 2010, commanded 34.5% of all wealth then. Meanwhile the bottom 50% aggregated a big 1.1%, as was noted earlier.

                But the capitalist class consists of a far larger group than the 1%. Consider the next 9%, with an average wealth of $2.37 million. Are they part of the 99%? What about the next 10% (about 12 million households), whose net worth begins at $952,000 and goes up from there? True, a million bucks doesn’t buy what it used to, but considering that much of their wealth, and for those who are retirees their current income, is derived from owning shares of corporations or related financial “instruments” (derivatives, and other complex forms of gambling) aren’t most of them if not directly capitalists, linked to capital rather than labor? (It’s also true that many union pension funds, as well as other progressive institutions, are invested with Wall Street, which may play a role in their lack of revolutionary zeal.) So the 99% has now shrunk to only 80% of individuals who don’t own significant property, that is, aren’t dependent on the survival of capitalism. (To be sure, we know from history that quite a few of the top 20% have social consciences and can be recruited to progressive causes.)

                There’s another factor that supports this lower percentage: the number of people directly owning and operating medium to large businesses. Some are doubtless among the 1%, but many more are not. In 2010 there were about 17,000 businesses with 500 or more employees. 500 is the government’s cutoff, below which it’s “small business.” (Other countries use a much lower cutoff, which is more logical). This is the core of the producing, retailing, and service economy, with nearly 57 million workers. There were another 82,000 firms with 100 to 499 employees. It’s not clear how many of the under 500 group are part of the 1%, but surely many are somewhat below that. Their interests place them into an antagonistic position vis-à-vis the majority of the working (and unemployed) population. These owners, plus those with 20-99 employees, are what we can consider the better-off segment of the old middle class, or petty bourgeoisie (U.S. Census, 2010, Statistics of U.S. Business).

                What are the political interests of those who rank in the top 20% in income and/or wealth but are below the 1%? Or, overlapping with them, the owners of firms with less than 500 workers? And even below that cutoff, the 22.5 million businesses with no employees? They exploit only themselves, and perhaps family members. Many are immigrants, who are overrepresented in these ranks. What are their interests?

                It would be simplistic to suggest that this large mass of the real middle class constitutes a single political bloc that is either pro status quo or part of the 99% that Occupy Wall Street imagines can be brought together in a progressive and vaguely anti-capitalist coalition. However, my argument is that large segments are unlikely to be potential allies in an anti-corporate struggle—logically enough because they are part of the corporate structure, albeit at the smaller-scale level.[1]  How do we know this?

                One way to get at this question is to study specific political organizations and the distribution of occupations among their members. There are many studies of right-wing groups ranging from the KKK to Christian Identity to the Tea Party.[2] If Tea Partiers are disproportionally middle class, as is true for Christian Identity, maybe their political views can be extrapolated to a like-situated larger group. However, the middle class respondents are not “broken out” of the entire group for analysis, so we have no way of knowing whether, or how, they are different from the entire membership.

                We do know that a New York Times/CBS poll of April 2010 shows that in their rather small sample of 881 Tea Partiers 65% see themselves as upper middle or middle class, while 31% see themselves as working or lower class. It could even be that this latter group is more reactionary than the folks in the middle; we don’t know. Without further data, it is hard to argue that the Tea Party, or any organization in which the majority is middle income and/or middle class can show us the political face of the entire, or even most, of the petty bourgeoisie.

                Fortunately we do have further data, courtesy of the small business “community” itself. The National Small Business Association, which conducts surveys, looked at 650 small business respondents in October, 2011.  This report provides details about the makeup of the 650: 70% had less than 20 employees, 25% had from 20-99. Most were in professional services (23%) followed by manufacturing (19%), construction (11%), and retail (8%). From 2008 to 2011 those identifying as Republicans increased from 48% to 54%, while Democrats went down from 33% to 16%, an astonishing drop, which is not explained. Possibly Obamacare had something to do with it. 82% see themselves as conservative or strong conservative on fiscal issues, and 72% see themselves the same way on foreign affairs and national security, whatever “conservative” might mean in this context. Only 11% are moderate or strong liberals. When asked what the federal government should do to help “your business,” the overwhelming sentiments of the Republican majority ran to “reduce and reform taxes,” “reduce and reform regulations,” and, more pointedly, “get out of the way,” the meaning of which would seem obvious.

                In August, 2012 the business magazine Entrepreneur provided the results of a survey done by Manta.com. Manta is an online small business service that collects business data. It did a series of surveys of its approximately 2000 “members” who had registered their business profiles prior to the 2012 election. In May, it reported that only 4% of respondents opted for Ron Paul, the libertarian closest to the Tea Party. Three weeks prior to the election, Romney was down 14% from August, with 48% support, against Obama’s 38%. (Romney apparently lost some support when he picked Rep. Paul Ryan, an extreme right-winger, as his running mate). This group also saw Obama as more in touch with the average American than Romney (after Romney said 47% of the American people would never vote for him because they don’t pay income taxes). However, they did see the Republican Party as the bigger supporter of small business (54% to the Democrats’ 19%, with 14% saying neither). Their biggest concerns were, in order, healthcare (probably because small business is worried about Obamacare’s possible negative economic effect on them), tax policy (likely because they don’t like paying taxes to support “unproductive” people, whether big banks, or the poor), and government regulation (too much, too complicated). They were also concerned about unemployment, but very little interested in foreign policy, or social issues such as gay marriage.

    What are we to conclude from all this?

    1. We learn little by looking at right-wing extremist groups, where the petty-bourgeoisie is overrepresented. From surveys of larger business populations we can gather some pretty good indications, but even so these are limited given that many business people are left out—in particular the surveys do not tell us about minority and immigrant business political sentiment. Nor do the surveys distinguish between men and women entrepreneurs.
    2. It is pretty clear that small business leans conservative and Republican, although the individual business person’s views are not unalterable. The level of support for given candidates does go up and down.
    3. Most small entrepreneurs favor laissez-faire economics, distrust the federal government and most state governments, in particular their regulatory arms. They feel overwhelmed by paperwork. They do not like taxes, which they see as an unfair burden. Since labor unions also infringe on their decisions, and threaten their competitive positions, it is logical to assume that most are hostile to unions, although that issue was not included in these surveys.

                Where does that leave us with respect to the 99% and Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots? While it is not so easy to find a consensus on the entirety of OWS’s program, we can try to compare the sentiments of the small business community to one widely-disseminated document, the OWS Declaration accepted by the New York City General Assembly on Sept. 29, 2011.

                There are 23 points in the Declaration, all of which are essentially indictments of corporations and their economic power, which, the preamble states, “run our governments.” However, it does not say which corporations; presumably, only the very big ones, but many small business people reading this might conclude that OWS is anti-business. Beyond that, lots of the points can hardly be disputed even by Republican entrepreneurs. What rank-and-file Republican can object to protesting illegal foreclosures, bailouts, exorbitant executive bonuses, discrimination in the workplace (surely no small business person does that!), poisoning the food supply, infringements of freedom of the press, coverups of oil spills, etc. But wait: there’s the one objecting to stripping “employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.” To the extent that these rights infringe on employers’ freedoms, they are not what most bosses would freely agree to: note the widespread resistance to current drives to increase the minimum wage. And, while OWS questions the need to create weapons (of mass destruction) in order to maintain our security, most of the bourgeoisie, large or small, does not.

                A pragmatic businessperson might ask, but what do they advocate positively? Unions, apparently, and regulation: of the food supply, product safety, hiring practices to avoid discrimination; and health insurance. The small business community is largely hostile to regulation in general and Obamacare in particular. Furthermore, OWS tries to get its points across by violating the sacred principle of private property by—occupying it, which is against the law. It is not difficult to conclude that the Republican majority, and even some of the Democrats of the small business community are not in sympathy with OWS, which claims to represent the 99% including that community. Their economic interests trump appeals to the greater good. Their class consciousness, their material self-interests, logically enough support conservative, and for a segment that resents redistributive policies (meaning to the “undeserving” and in their view, minority, poor), reactionary, policies. The surveys we have at hand unfortunately do not go further in exploring the politics of race. Finally, this middle class does not want to hear about equality of outcomes. You get what you work for. Creating  equality of opportunity by improving educational opportunity is probably okay with them. 

                As we try to reverse decades of declining class consciousness (especially among white workers), we need to make the working class visible again. We also need to expose the way wealth is created and made to grow, and how that process leads to unemployment and poverty. We need to call that process by its name: capitalism. What things are called does matter because it affects the way people think of themselves and others, which in turn affects their behavior. We should therefore insist on calling classes by their right names. The “middle class” mythology has the effect of papering over the realities of class and class conflict and maintaining illusions.

     

    Martin Oppenheimer is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Rutgers University. He has been a friend to New Politics since its earliest days.

     


    [1] In the National Small Business Association survey discussed below, 87% of responding businesses were either S-Corporations (40%), Corporations (29%), or Limited Liability Corporations (18%). S-Corps and LLC’s are usually smaller entities.

    [2] See, for example, David Cunningham, Klansville, U.S.A. Oxford U. Press, 2103; James Aho, The Politics of Righteousness, U. Washington Press, 1990; Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio, Crashing the Tea Party, Paradigm, 2011.

     

  • Reimagining and remaking union solidarity

    The National Union of Teachers (NUT) hosted a conference on global education “reform” May 24, bringing together NUT activists with union leaders and scholars from the global south and north. My blog this week adapts my presentation, which along with papers from others (all quite informative) will be published on the Research Collaborative of www.teachersolidarity.com

             Global elites are altering teachers work in ways that go well beyond the scope of traditional contract negotiations. Standardized testing, privatization of the education sector, including teacher and school evaluation, creation of private schools paid for by public money, whether called “free schools,” “academies” or “charter schools,”  are undermining the profession and children’s education.  However, a new generation of teachers is being politicized and radicalized very rapidly. Just as we see a global footprint of neoliberalism’s global project in education (with important national differences), so we can now detect a footprint of resistance. One reason international work is so vital is that it enables us to borrow and adapt ideas, just as our opponents do.  We need not and should not wait for successful strategies to emerge spontaneously in our own communities or countries.  One element in the emerging footprint is new kinds of alliances with parents and community, taking traditional coalition work to a different terrain.  This is territory that can make unions uncomfortable because they must share power in ways that are often unfamiliar and difficult to manage with legal strictures of collective bargaining.

             But these new types of alliances are supporting teacher activists where they feel too isolated and weak to speak and act as union members. Teachers are forming organizations with parents and students based on clearly articulated, shared principles that include social justice issues as well as concerns that teachers unions traditionally address.  These alliances, in turn, generate new tactics and strategies. we can learn from what has occurred in Mexico, described in the paper by Hugo Aboites.

    "So, coupled with the demonstrations and marches teachers in several states organized “congresses” as they were called, which reunited hundreds of parents, in one occasion; large numbers of students in another; also communities and parents. From all this, new proposals for education started to emerge. This led to a re-appreciation of many projects organized by teachers and communities founded years before. In one of these projects, pre-hispanic languages were rescued as well as the culture they belonged to..Teachers and communities also organized projects of production and services to benefit students and the whole community. In some states, full-fledged alternative schools were created, and all the schools of the state rejected standardized testing."            

             We have until now been on the defensive.  To shift to the offensive requires putting forward a new narrative of what we want from and in schools and new kinds of activism, moving beyond contract unionism and the strategies associated with it, including the strike.  Though the strike has long been and can still be a powerful weapon, it too is limited in its effect when the employer is willing to weather the loss – which is now the case in much of the world. Alternative tactics are emerging: parents occupying schools to resist school closings in Chicago and Newark; teachers boycotting standardized tests in individual schools, school systems, and countries.  However, we see resistance shifting to the offense in Mexico: teachers occupying schools with parents, making schools sites of human emancipation.  Teachers, together with one another, joined by parents and community, taking back their schools from the powerful elites who aim to eliminate democratic control of education are succeeding in doing so.  What has occurred in Mexico suggests an additional strategy, one that can be added to the “rolling strikes” that have been used successfully.  Why not have “rolling occupations”? Instead of walking out, invite parents and community to join the school staff to make the school liberated territory, for a day emancipating teachers and students from the drudgery and control of a curriculum powerful elites dictate is necessary to make them compete for jobs.

              Very often international work is the provenance of a small sector of union activists or officials. While this is understandable, it is also dangerous because commitments to international work are often seen by members as siphoning off resources better spent at home.  One role for researchers is to help unions and teachers explore the impacts of international policy on their own work. In the end space for meaningful international work depends on the union developing a presence in the school site, having members who understand that they are the union [i] and that “union issues” for teachers must address power struggles about who decides what we teach and how.  The context of struggle over one’s own work, with work being broadly defined beyond contract and economic concerns, supports’ members’ understanding the need to receive – and provide – solidarity, starting in their own school, extending to their nations and globally.

             Reimagining and remaking education, development of a vision constituent members of unions share, is essential for forging authentic relations of solidarity among unions globally. It is this vision rather than a particular set of organizational relations that should define our work.  All who support the vision and principles deserve support.  A redefined solidarity means that we in London send a message of support to the British Columbia Teachers Federation (BCTF), which takes on strike action this week. We call on the EI to do the same.  Is the BCTF a member of the EI? No.  Does this matter? No.  BCTF members are defending teachers’ rights to give all children the education they deserve by having a workable class size and composition.  Their struggle is the same teachers throughout the world have to wage and institutional memberships and national borders ought not influence relations of solidarity.

             Another way we might operationalize the principles I have described would be to draft a statement on control of curriculum and standardized testing, pointing out how international testing, PISA in particular, degrades education and is based on the faulty assumption that globally workers have to compete for jobs in a race to the bottom, in a process that often destroys the environment.  We might circulate this statement for support among researchers, unions and advocacy organizations. Affiliates of the EI might then present it as a motion, directing the EI to end its collaboration on testing and  involvement with the international agencies (and corporations) that design and administer the tests. 

             The agenda I have outlined is admittedly ambitious but so are the aims of our opponents.  They aim to destroy our profession because we educate the next generation. We are a threat to their control over social, political, and economic relations. We cannot win by following the old rules or looking backward to what has been lost. Key to our success is international work among unions, defined as our mutual and collective reimagining and remaking of education to develop the full potential of all children.

     

    My blog will resume in July.  You can still reach me with comments  at  drweinerlo@gmail.com.  And I’ll be posting (those less frequently) on twitter , Facebook.


    [i] Stephanie Ross, "Varieties of Social Unionism: Towards a Framework for Comparison," Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society 11, no. 16-34 (Autumn 2007).

     

     

  • SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS STEPS DOWN – WHAT'S NEXT FOR THE EZLN?

    Subcomandante Marcos, the famous voice of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN),announced in the early hours of Sunday, May 26 that he ending his role as the group's spokesperson and military commander. Or as he put it, Subcomandante Marcos, a “harlequin” and a “hologram” created by the EZLN, has now ceased to exist.

    Subcomandante Marcos in Chiapas, 1994

    Subcomandante Marcos in Chiapas, 1994

    Making his first public statement in five years, Marcos denied claims that he was either in ill health, had died, or had been displaced or purged by the EZLN. From now on, he said, he would be known as “insurgent subcomandante Galeano,” taking his new name from José Luis Solis López, better known as “Galeano,” a Zapatista militant assassinated by a paramilitary group on May 2 in the autonomous Zapatista town of La Realidad.

    In stepping down, Marcos pointed to demographic changes in the thirty-year old organization as new younger, indigenous leaders stepped forward replacing an older largely mestizo leadership, several of whom came out of the student and guerrilla struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. With Marcos apparently giving up leadership of the group, what will happen to the Zapatistas? What new political vision and strategy will the EZLN put forward in his absence? And what will be the role of the new subcomandante Galeano?

    Who is Marcos?

    Marcos, whose real name is Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, was born on June 19, 1957 in Tampico, Tamaulipas. His father and mother were both school teachers; his family was middle class and comfortably well off. He graduated from a Jesuit High School in Tampico, studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, and later pursued graduate studies at the elite Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM). At UAM he studied and taught in the Sciences and Art for Design Department, offering his students a reading list that included Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Mao Tse-tung. While there are stories that Guillén has studied at the Sorbonne, been involved in the Sandinistas revolution in Nicaragua or been a labor organizer among Mexico City bus drivers, none of these has been confirmed and all seem implausible.

    Sometime in the early 1980s, Guillén joined a guerrilla organization that later became the EZLN. The National Liberation Front(FLN) had been established in 1969 under the leadership of the brothers Cesar Germán and Fernando Muñoz Yáñez as a Marxist-Leninist organization. Like other such groups of the era its inspiration came from Mao, Fidel Castro, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Its goal was the creation of a small revolutionary organization that might lead a revolution such as those that had been carried out in Cuba and in Nicaragua.

    The group, which originally operated in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon in northern Mexico, suffered a police attack in 1974 that virtually destroyed the organization. It was then that Fernando Muñoz Yanez took the survivors to Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state. The FLN was active in Chiapas from 1974 to 1983 and it was during that period that Guillén joined the organization, which in November 1983, merging with indigenous militants, transformed itself into the EZLN. One of the persistent and unanswered questions remains: what was the relationship between the Marxist-Leninist cadres and their indigenous allies?

    The Chiapas Rebellion

    Chiapas, with a large indigenous Mayan population, is one of Mexico's poorest states despite rich natural resources. The Catholic Bishop Samuel Ruiz García, whose views were informed by liberation theology, sent catechists to teach both the Gospel and to call for social change among the indigenous communities and the mestizo immigrants from other regions of Mexico. It was in this poor, somewhat politicized indigenous population that the EZLN built its organization with tacit support from many of the Catholic catechists.

    In 1993, Guillén/Marcos carried out a political coup within the EZLN. Marcos fought and won a power struggle within the group and, inspired by his hero Che Guevara, created a more centralized and disciplined organization, and planned to launch an armed rebellion.1On January 1, 1994, Subcomandante Marcos led the Chiapas Rebellion in which hundreds of indigenous and mestizo troops seized several small towns and briefly occupied the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas. Those events, communicated through the internet to the rest of Mexico and the world, brought Subcomandante to international recognition as the masked face and the sophisticated voice of the Zapatistas.

    I recently wrote an overview of the twenty years of Zapatista history since the Chiapas Rebellion, so I will not repeat that analysis here. Throughout the last twenty years, as the Zapatistas established their autonomous communities, engaged in attempts to build a national indigenous movement, and carried out political propaganda against capitalism through their "Other Campaign,” it was Subcomandante Marcos who acted as the group's spokesperson. Since the Zapatistas' political decision-making processes are not transparent, one presumes that Marcos played a central role in shaping the EZLN's autarkic and sectarian strategy that rejected not only Mexico's corrupt political system and parties, but also coalitions and alliances with others on the Mexican left.


    Zapatistas observe the 20th anniversary of the 1994 rebellion in January 2014.

    What Next for the EZLN?

    With or without Marcos, the EZLN will continue to face threats from landlords, government enterprises, political parties, and the state itself. The government could see this moment of transition as an opportunity to eliminate the Zapatistas as a factor in the affairs of Chiapas and Mexico. Historically, since the Revolution of 1910 to 1920, the Mexican government has dealt with such movements through a combination of violence and co-optation, killing off the leaders and offering reforms and relative economic security to the followers. Certainly, the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto is capable of just such a strategy. The Zapatistas must be on guard and we must be prepared to offer our solidarity. [The National Committee of Solidarity recently endorsed this statement and has encouraged members of our organization to participate in solidarity events in the US.]

    The best defense for the Zapatistas would be a political offensive, projecting the movement as they did in the mid-1990s to Mexico's indigenous population, civil society, and, above all, to its working class, offering a program of democratic socialism such as they have failed to put forward clearly in the past. The question is, will a new Zapatista leadership be able to develop a new left politics based on a non-sectarian relationship to the left and the social movements in Mexico? And will the EZLN be able to work with others on the left to develop a genuine, independent, and radical political party? Mexico and the world wait to know if the Zapatistas can once again inspire hope of a revolutionary transformation.

    1 See Nick Henck,Subcomandante Marcos: The Man and the Mask(Durham: Duke University, 2007), pp. 183-190, and also my review of Henck.

    Dan La Botz is an editor of New Politics and a member of Solidarity in New York City. He is the author of several books on Mexico. 

    This article was first published on the Solidarity website.

     

  • Hats off to Philly's Caucus of Working Educators (CWE)

      ImageThis brief story about the Philly TAG (Teacher Activist Group) conference suggests what was special about the occasion but it misses what was the most salient political feature of the conclave.  Philly teachers who are committed to social justice have formed a caucus in their union, an AFT local.  The group has aptly named itself Caucus of Working Educators to signal the disconnect between long-time union officers and staffers and working teachers. 

    I met with several activists in the group after my speech at the conference. They are smart and courageous.  They are committed to rebuilding the union in the schools, transforming the idea of what a teachers union should do to protect kids and public education.  They realize that the neoliberal project derives much of its persuasiveness from its exploitation of inequalities that unions have not combatted with the vigor we should expect.  They are committed to building mutually respectful alliances with parents, students, and communities that go beyond the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" agreement that characterizes business unionism (at its most socially sensitive).

    CWE, like the union reform groups formed in many other cities and states, is the embryo of a new kind of teacher unionism. CWE and the other reform caucuses are  under the radar of the mass media, as was CORE's activity in the Chicago Teachers Union – until CORE's victory and transformation of the union led to the strike that forced the media to pay attention.

    Just remember you read it first here, on New Politics!

  • Steve Kindred (1944-2013) and University of Chicago Students for a Democratic Society

    Steve Kindred, my friend, brilliant Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leader, organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, activist in the struggle to keep the Stella d’Oro plant in the Bronx open, campaigner against a lockout of workers by Sotheby’s auction house—all this, and a thousand other causes. Steve is, for lack of a better word, “gone,” in a New York hospital, suffering from abdominal cancer, which has spread. Having been close to Steve and having admired and loved him now for 50 years, I am very sad. Other people’s deaths have reminded me of my own mortality. This one focuses me on what we have all lost with Steve gone, and what new movements might learn from him.[1]

    Two clichés about Steve and me come to mind. First, his death violates the laws of nature that say that teachers should die before their students. This applies: I was Steve’s teacher at the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s. The other cliché, that teachers often learn from students, also applies: Steve was my student, and contributed to an electric classroom atmosphere which took me from class to typewriter to write “Jack Tar in the Streets” and “The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up.” I had grown up left, but Steve was my instructor (along with Chris Hobson) in the first larger struggle that I experienced in the 1960s in which we had to anguish over programs, directions, and strategies—more complicated than just offering my body for arrest in the civil rights and anti-war protests that I had participated in but that were planned and led by others.

    In the early 1960s, the University of Chicago (U of C) was trying to remodel itself as less Jewish, more sports-oriented, and less left. Director of Admissions Charles O’Connell interviewed and rejected a long-haired applicant: O’Connell’s report described the candidate as “fingering his long tresses.” The student described himself as the son of a victim of McCarthyism: “you can see what kind of a family he comes from,” said O’Connell. “We have enough kids here who cause trouble … Better let him go to Reed or Berkeley.” My students sat in on the 50-yard line, perceptively understanding what the return of football—President Robert Maynard Hutchins had dropped football in 1939—would do to the place. I had warned students of the horrors of becoming like Yale. In my first ecstasies at finally coming “home” to the U of C after 10 years at Yale, I taught while dancing barefoot around the Cobb Hall seminar tables. As for the Jews: the typical undergraduate was exemplified in the invented character of “Aristotle Schwartz.” To cure this condition, the U of C instituted a euphemistically named “Small Town Talent Search”—perhaps a local version of the Ivies’ prior quest for “geographical diversity,” that is, in translation, fewer New York Jews. Steve Kindred seemed to fit: the son of a Methodist minister in Iowa and at the time in so many ways a seeming ur-goy. U of C had not understood its capacity, under the control of an alliance of Hutchinsonians and Straussians, to make radicals out of sons of ministers. (Perhaps Steve, with a passionate and principled father, was already on his way there.) With the draft and the Vietnam war, U of C SDS looked for an approach that would address these issues in ways that meshed with the highly intellectual undergraduate culture. In this quest, Steve was a central thinker. Chicago had never compiled class ranks; now Selective Service wanted them to do so, and to hand over to the Feds what amounted to a kind of a death list. U of C SDS brought out the many ways in which this was a corruption of the educational process, at odds with the College’s often repeated shibboleth, “the life of the mind.” (Wittily, Chris Hobson gave SDS’s campus newsletter that name.) Certainly, I found SDS’s argument compelling: why should I, as faculty, decide who will live and who will die? As in so much of Steve’s politics, this focus addressed a passionate belief in learning held by U of C students, and connected that belief to the war as well as to the life of the university. This minority strain within the New Left gives us a vantage point from which to re-examine the larger Movement and to ponder what might have been had this kind of course been followed. A different SDS was possible, and U of C offers a concrete example of an alternative.

    For several days in the spring of 1966 we occupied the Administration Building: During the sit-in, Staughton Lynd and I taught “history from the bottom up”; Naomi Weisstein and Heather Tobis Booth taught Women’s Liberation. It was a memorable and ecstatic time, with volunteer elevator operators crying out, “Second floor—sleeping, Third floor—studying.” The entire sit-in debated strategies and directions in long meetings of the hundreds present, brilliantly chaired by Jackie Goldberg (just out of Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement, and later a state legislator in California). Noted professors came to the building to tell us that we reminded them of Nazi storm troopers. (Hannah Arendt had earlier responded to my public question in Mandel Hall, saying to a large undergraduate audience that she would not state a position on the war.) Responding to such attacks, I said, in words that turned out to be prophetic, that I would feel myself more honorably treated were I employed by the people in the sit-in rather than by the administration whose building we were occupying. This moment of unexpected faculty solidarity with students, after a parade of accusations, produced a scene that I will always remember: I worried lest the standing ovation might disrupt the sit-in.

    The time came when it looked as if Mayor Daley’s brutal Chicago police would arrest and evict us if we stayed in the building longer. Steve, Chris, and the others wanted to stay in. But we were losing our constituency. Left faculty members came before us with the “you’ve made your point, now go home” speech. A revered dean wept crocodile tears, expressing his love of students. Always seeking to lead their constituency in more radical directions, but also always seeking to stay with them, we came to the difficult decision to leave. We had been outvoted, and we obeyed. Today the building is called Edward H. Levi Hall. It was Provost Levi, later Nixon’s Attorney General, who had told our little faculty group that he could not resist the government’s demands for class ranks because of what he saw to be the “unlovely” consequences of having, perhaps, to receive a subpoena—as if nobody had ever challenged a subpoena.

    I write all this from memory, having run up against a stone wall in seeking to get the U of C library to establish an archive on student protest parallel to the Berkeley Bancroft Library Free Speech Movement (FSM) Archives. FSM and U of C SDS had much in common. They avoided the parochialisms of a narrow and depoliticized student power, while also avoiding the other end of the spectrum: the Third-World vanguardism—and the attendant implied unworthiness of mere student rights—which was to contribute so much to the death of the student movement. U of C, and its present College Dean (an ethically challenged historian and adversary of protest), want to erase all positive memory of that time. Students were so badly treated—40 or 50 were thrown out in 1969, many on the basis not of their actions but rather on the basis of political beliefs. (After the protests of that year, the disciplinary committee asked such general and self-incriminating questions as, “What is your conception of the university?”) U of C’s memories of mistreatment of students are so strong that the Alumni Office refers to the classes of 1964—74 as the “lost classes.” No wonder. The outside world knows the place as the home of rotten and barbaric economic theories (consider the barbarities of the Milton Friedman- influenced Chilean “Chicago Boys”); I know it as a place where the Straussians who ruled the introductory required social sciences courses—“Sosh I” and “Sosh II”—applied their retrograde views to the snippets of US history that the remnants of Hutchins presented in such weighty but lightweight compendia as The People Shall Judge. When I was fired, before the customary second term renewal as assistant professor, it came about through a coalition of the Straussians, who despised me for having sought to teach history and historical context, and the History Department, ruled by the hideous right-winger Daniel Boorstin, and by chair William Hardy McNeill, who contributed to the political neutrality of the place by running an on-campus military intelligence unit. “Your convictions,” McNeill told me when he fired me, “interfered with your scholarship.”

    (Chris Hobson recalls that at one point, Steve—near to graduation and not wanting to risk expulsion—formed with others a “Chickenshit Liberation Brigade,” which would undertake a university office occupation through the standard three warnings and then “throw themselves on their faces and back out of the office chanting, ‘Grovel, grovel, who are we to challenge power?’”)

    For a time, Naomi and I lived in close quarters with Steve, Chris, Jonathan Kaplan, Ron Tabor, and the others resident or hanging out next door to our 5331 South Dorchester apartment. What a time it was! This was the closest that Naomi and I were to come to communal living until her illness brought nurses into the house 24/7 in the 1980s and since. After Chicago, when we lived in a Buffalo suburb, Steve would appear without notice (this was before cell phones) in seemingly block-long trucks that he was driving across the country. He would signal his presence with what sounded like a tugboat horn, resonating through lawns and hedges, even startling the squirrels away from their birdfeed feasts. From an enormous treasury of memories from 1966, another one stands out. In the spring, I handed over my car to Steve for protest preparations and distribution of literature. It was a Saab, which made a distinctive noise—a kind of high-pitched whine. (And it was the first stick-shift that fellow anti-rank activist Miles Mogulescu had ever driven.) While these things were going on in the streets and quadrangle outside, I presented to a History Department seminar in the Faculty Club the paper that I had just presented at the Organization of American Historians (“Jack Tar in the Streets”); it was on its way to being published as a pioneering positive study of the mob in Revolutionary America amidst a history profession that was at that time generally hostile to people in the streets. Boorstin responded, “Jess, those are nice sea stories, but why do you have to talk about class?” At that moment, outside, Steve drove past in my Saab. Hearing the Saab from the streets and Boorstin from inside at the same time, I had no doubt about which side I was on.

    What explains Steve’s radicalism? Was he his father’s son, a Methodist preacher of the next generation, perhaps a lay preacher? (Hutchins had also been a preacher’s son.) But Steve was also deeply a rationalist, and the combination contributed to the making of a distinctive SDS chapter. Steve’s rationalism contributed to the strength of his analyses, but also sometimes led him into culs de sac. In thinking about Steve, I often come back to E.L. Doctorow’s depiction of a Julius Rosenberg-like character in his Book of Daniel. It’s 1949, and a dangerous mob of American Legionnaires are attacking the New York leftists who have come up to Peekskill to hear Paul Robeson sing at a rally. In Doctorow’s telling, as the bus driver tries to drive out through the rock-throwing Legionnaires, Julius asks him to open the door so that he can reason with them. Julius leans out the open door and waves to the Legionnaires. They break his arm. So it was in some ways with Steve. In 2009, Steve worked with the Stella d’Oro Solidarity Committee (“International Troublemakers & Boat-Wreckers Union”) trying to save the jobs of workers at the Bronx Stella d’Oro Biscuit Company plant. As part of his campaign, he tried—on his own and without authorization from anybody—to convince Goldman Sachs to keep the plant open: Steve has done his research, has his numbers, and intends to show them how they can make a profit by keeping the plant open. He can’t get through by phone, so he goes down to Wall Street to persuade them. But he can’t get past the receptionist. The cops are called and seize him; he sits in their squad car, trying to figure out what went wrong. (I get this from Steve’s own hilarious but poignant account to me, delivered with his customary joyful verbosity.)

    Steve often quoted his father’s penultimate words: “We were euchred.” Steve made the error of trying to repeat the 1966 sit-in in 1967, this time as a “study-in,” again in the Administration Building. Naomi, Heather, and others argued against it. (Steve tended not to listen to women in those days, though he grew much better on this front later on.) But Steve bulled ahead. It turned out to be a catastrophic failure. The Administration of that moral sewer sent the teachers of Sosh I and II to take down the names of those protesters who they recognized from their classes. So much for the life of the mind. Deeply and passionately principled, and fully understanding the implications of such a betrayal of teacher—student relations, Steve cried out, again and again, “You hacks, you hacks!” In my head I hear his voice and see his face.

    I think, in the end, Steve and the rest of us were euchred by a medical profession that often deserves contempt and not the deference that they are usually given. Steve spent six weeks in intensive care at a classy New York hospital. Like his father before him, Steve was euchred by medical misdiagnosis and failure to treat. Despite the heroic and resourceful efforts of his wife, Ellen Goldensohn—to whom the doctors remained largely deaf—they found no cause for his condition, missed the significance of the pain’s location, and came up with neither diagnosis nor intervention. When Ellen had him moved to another hospital in the last days, they did the same tests and came up with the grim diagnosis in two days. Too late: precious time had been lost. Steve, and the rest of us, were euchred by hacks. But let us continue to work, as did Steve, intelligently, passionately, and albeit comically, for a better world. And, along the way, let’s rename Edward H. Levi Hall Steve Kindred Hall.

    Note

    1. I wrote most of this on December 5, 2013 at a point when Steve Kindred was gone but not yet dead. He died on December 9, at the age of 69. Since then, I have combined my original with revisions and additions based on conversations and email feedback, mainly from Christopher Z. Hobson and Naomi Weisstein, and from various friends from University of Chicago days in the sixties, including Heather Booth, Rusti Eisenberg, Howie Machtinger, Miles Mogulescu, Bernie Tuchman, and Eric Shtob; also Micah Landau and Joanne Landy. None of these people are responsible for my interpretations.

    Bibliography: Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel: A Novel. Random House: New York, 1971.

    From: THE SIXTIES: A JOURNAL OF HISTORY, POLITICS AND CULTURE, May 2014

    Jesse Lemisch: Jesse.lemisch@verizon.net.

  • New faces and base-building

               Image In studying urban teacher preparation (the hat I wear professionally when I’m not thinking about teacher unionism), I examine how school practices and organization influence teachers and students.  To understand what goes on inside classrooms we have to look at the welter of powerful influences within schools and outside their walls.  Blaming “teacher quality” for unequal academic achievement is an ideological assumption with little evidence.

                This same broader view explains why union officers are only as good as the movement that supports them.  No matter how talented, smart, or radical an individual activist is, s/he must depend on the wisdom and courage of the movement s/he represents.  Officers need to be directed and supported by members. For that to happen, the union needs democratic norms and policies.  Another way officers are supported and nudged is through a caucus.  NEA has semi-official committees that are called caucuses, and this has caused some confusion for teachers who are new to labor union activity.  A union caucus is really an internal political party.  It is independent of the union apparatus and receives no funding or help from the union.  There is no time on the regularly scheduled agenda of the union for caucuses to meet.  Within the caucus, union officers have no special power.  They are equals.   While their position within the union gives them insights and information other union members may not have, it should be understood that their role as officers has removed them from the day-to-day concerns and perspective of members. 

                If a caucus is primarily an electoral vehicle for a few talented people, it cannot serve the function it should. Moreover, using a caucus primarily to elect individuals miseducates members about what’s needed – an entirely different kind of union, one that draws its strength from member activity in their schools.  Because the unions are so decrepit, sometimes what is conceived of as an educational campaign morphs into a real contest and the reformers win.  But more often, activists are seduced by the illusion that if only they could replace the existing officers, the union would be substantially different.
                Without their realizing it, activists who think this way have adopted the strategy the Communist Party used in its union work, a strategy imitated by unions like  SEIU:  mobilization of members on specific campaigns and advocacy of social justice –  without building the union on the shop floor, that is, strengthening union democracy and having members direct the union. This situation gives elected officials power to speak on behalf of the workers (often for the leadership's own political purposes) without empowering them.

                New faces at the top are limited in what they can accomplish on their own.  Newly elected officers often face the problem of long-time staff who have their own ideas about how to organize. Officers can push for democratic practices but their position on the top inhibits  their ability to make change from below.  Both factors weaken the officers’ capacity to mobilize members and build the union in the schools.

                Our enemies are quite aware of teachers’ fears and the unions’ political weakness with the public.  Officers need a strong base in the schools. If/when teachers don’t have the legal right to bargain collectively or if their union can no longer defend them, they have to depend on one another in ways that are immediate and personal. We cannot alter power relations in the schools without (re)building the union on entirely different premises, starting with the idea that “the union” is not the person who is the president or the officers and staff.  Of course leadership counts – as does teacher quality.  But as with teacher quality, the quality of union officers depends on their being supported and being absolutely committed to leading members who will direct them. The education of union officers begins with their being members of reform caucuses committed to union democracy, building the union’s presence in the school, as well as fighting for social justice and mobilizing members in specific struggles.

                Coming soon: The National Union of Teachers (NUT) which represents teachers in the UK and Wales, is hosting a research conference May 24-25 at its London headquarters about how to build international solidarity of teachers unions. Susan Robertson, a brilliant scholar, will start off the event. The event is path-breaking.  Try to join us.

                In June and July I’ll be blogging less frequently to catch up on research and revise “Urban Teaching: The Essentials,” with help from Herm Jerome, a NYC teacher and union activist who serves on the Board of Directors of Teachers Unite.   You can still reach me with comments  at  drweinerlo@gmail.com.  And I’ll be posting (those less frequently) on twitter , Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

  • Ghana's Invisible Working Class

    Ghana, known for its stability and economic prosperity in the last 50 years, is praised as a model African state. Despite their rise to a middle income country, Ghana is struggling to deal with the rise of Kayayo’s, a destitute working class who go unacknowledged by policy makers. This is the story of an American living in a Kayayo town.

    During his Presidential address on May 1st (still known in Ghana as International Workers Day) President John Mahama began his speech by welcoming the Vice President, the Speaker of Parliament, the Chief Justice and seven other dignitaries before acknowledging the “dedicated and selfless worker of Ghana.” It seems odd that on a day of commemoration for workers, the workers themselves only received a footnote at the end of a drawn out introduction. President Mahama went on to praise the occasion and its importance worldwide, quoting the historical roots of May 1st as the one day each year dedicated to discuss the role of the Proletariat in the marketplace. His praise for the common man was short lived. Only a few sentences later he would apologize for not reaching consensus on an improved minimum wage and address allegations of widespread corruption within the system. All this while simultaneously praising his party for nurturing the ego of Ghana’s working class. Mahama’s speech was everything you would expect from a high profile politician; the use of both praise and apology for the workings of his administration which effectively reduced his message to neutral. This should be expected from any good politician but what was actually contemptible of Mahama's workers day speech was the complete lack of acknowledgment for Ghana's emerging working class: the Kayayo.

    Kayayo (pronounced Kaa-yay-oh), which literally translates to “people who carry heavy loads,” are Ghana's emerging working class. They emigrate from Ghana's rural northern districts to the bustling southern cities looking for employment. Often fitted with high school degrees in Integrated Science, Economics, or General Arts, these young Ghanaians struggle to find any steady employment in their fields. They soon realize their only qualification is their labor power. They are transformed from degree holders to head porters, weaving in and out of busy streets carrying basins on their head full of goods to sell. Everything from loaves of bread to imitation Gucci glasses are sold for a minimal profit. As the African sun sets, Kayayo’s slowly retreat to their living quarters which are notorious for their impoverished housing units. As an American living in Ghana, I am one of the few outsiders to have a firsthand experience of the Kayayo lifestyle.

    My first experience in a Kayayo town occurred when I briefly left my host village in rural north Ghana to meet some expatriate friends in Kumasi, a busy city in southern Ghana. We stayed at a guest house in a secluded area of town, known to locals as “where the white people stay.” After two days of checking Facebook, responding to emails and enjoying hot showers I was ready to return to my mud hut in northern Ghana. My bus was set to leave at 5:00 the next morning. Fearful of walking alone during the early morning hours I decided to call my friend Gabriel, a young man whom I knew from my village in the north. He left the village last year to become a head porter in Kumasi. He offered me a place to stay the night before my departure. I happily accepted. That evening, before leaving the guest house, I said goodbye to my friends, packed my laptop and made sure my bedding was thrown into the dirty laundry basket. Nothing irritates traveler’s more than dirty bed sheets.

    From the busy road side I hailed a taxi and for a small fee was dropped off at a small bus station in Kumasi market town. I exited the cab and was approached by several vendors who pressured me to buy their items. “Parlez-vous Français?” That's my market trick; pretend to only speak French so that vendors will stop bothering you. Ghana, unlike all of its neighboring states, is a not a Francophone country. I continued to the bus station where Gabriel was waiting for me. He immediately hugged me with the same warmth of a close relative who has just stepped off the plane from a long vacation.

    He assured me his house was not far and we began to walk. He wasn't lying. No more than 20 steps behind the bus station was a square structure no larger than a hotel elevator and filled with travel bags and pop culture posters and straw mats. One light bulb inside the small structure provided just enough light to navigate my steps over two people sleeping on the floor and the random assortment of plastic bowls and spoons that littered the ground. Gabriel pointed to a Real Madrid poster on the wall and directly below this was a straw mat to sleep on. I set my bag over the straw mat. Gabriel served me dinner: rice and beans with freshly grounded peppers. We returned to the room to meet his friends were awake and eager to meet me. They assured me that they would keep me safe until the morning. They mentioned that everything in their house was also mine. They’re not spouting idioms, either. While they spoke one man reached over and handed me the last orange that was laying in his corner of the room. Ghanaian hospitality is a constant reminder that this whole country is my second home.

    Before setting off to sleep I was handed a large bucket of water for bathing. I didn’t walk far before Gabriel abruptly stopped me. He removed his flip flops and told me to wear them so I wouldn’t ruin my new American sandals. I opened the door to an empty stall and realized the space was already polluted by a large puddle of stale urine and occupied by three chickens that refused to be chased away. I picked up a small stone and tossed it right above the chickens. The hard clank of the stone and small splash of liquid convinced them to leave. I entered and began my bath, scooping ladels of water over my head. A few minutes later my bucket was empty yet I somehow felt dirtier than when it had been full.

    I dried off, changed clothes, and layed down on my small straw mat with my head against the wall. Next to me was Gabriel, already asleep. Beside him were three of his brothers, sleeping back to back. On the other side of the room lay six other people sleeping back to back with their heads toward the opposite wall and their feet facing me. The two opposite rows of people sleeping back to back created a small walk way banked with dusty feet from a long day of Kayayo work. Throughout the night I was woken up by the sounds of buses starting which rattled the metal ceiling. Crying babies with angry mothers constantly walked by the window. Smoke from burning trash corrupted each breath I took. Daylight was just a few hours away, or so I told myself as I tried to ignore the constant distractions and fall sleep on my straw mat. Early daylight approached unexpectedly and somehow, I slept through my alarm. I scrambled around the room gathering my bag and ran outside to where my bus was loading people. The driver honked the horn impatiently; he was ready to leave. I gave a warm thank you to Gabriel, and hugged him. He assured me we would meet again when he returned home for his sister’s graduation in the coming months. Gabriel waited until the bus left before he turned around to get ready for another day of Kayayo work.

    The phrase used to describe the impoverished living conditions of Kayayo’s is routinely included under an umbrella phrase “the problems of urbanization.” These problems include, at the very least, exposure to crammed living spaces, unclean or lack of necessary resources and exposure to disease carrying insects. It’s a largely academic term that strips away the human experience of Kayayo life. This exact lack of humanism is supposed to be compensated for each year on May Day. Yet the struggle of the Kayayo in Ghana was absent in President Mahama’s May Day speech. This signifies not only willful ignorance by the nation’s top officials but a larger strategy of dismissing a reality of Ghana’s fragile consumer based economy: that it has only benefited a small segment of wealthy citizens while the average Ghanaian is fighting to find a dignified role in the workplace.

    You might be asking yourself an elementary question at this point: why should President Mahama (or anybody else) care about life of the Kayayo? They provide a cheap source of employment in a society that historically doesn’t equate time with labor. It’s an ideal scenario for any business owner. And after all, a necessary ideology of free markets is the ideal of individualism. Why then, you might ask, should you care about the plight of the Kayayo if they don't affect you personally? Around 40 BC the Roman poet Horatius Flaccus advised us well about why we should care. Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator: Change only the name and this story is also about you.

  • Arundhati’s Demands

    Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Haymarket, April 2014, $15 paperback.

    When you think of ghost stories, you may recall Henry James, Hamlet, or Banquo. Maybe you smell a camp fire, the story going around, the threat of the flame as you extend your arm and that impaled marshmallow over the heat. Or maybe you sense those dying embers, the cool of night taking its grip.

    In Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the ghosts play the role of illuminating something that the world judges to be supposedly good i.e. solid work ethic, but is later evinced by those chain-wielding spirits to be hellish, poisonous, and punitive.

    What chains do Marley’s ghost rattle and bear? The chains of those he’d sacrifice if he would choose Scrooge’s path, the people he’d step on, enslave, chain, if he emulated this old paragon of success. Here, Scrooge is the boss and Marley the worker. It is hard to avoid this Marxist reading of one of English’s most classic texts.

    In fact, Marx, uses the language of the paranormal to describe capitalism, which he said, “conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the power of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.”

    At their core, ghost stories imply the dead will not go away.

    Arundhati Roy’s new book her fourth critical non-fiction book in as many years, is also her most dire. For Roy, capitalism is dead, but in its wake, we are left ill and robbed of our sleep.

    The author of the 1997 Booker Prize winner writes like (and lives like) an explorer, a woman working in the field, mosquitoes, jungle mud, and guerillas at her every step. Her daring is contagious. Now, in this new take on contemporary India, her voice is most confident and hyper-aware.

    In May 2014, India votes in its presidential election. The front-runner Nurendra Modi has been accused by Salman Rushdie and others of allowing a pogrom against Muslims that killed thousands while serving as Minister of Gujarat. For these crimes, the U.S. State Department revoked his visa. The context of Roy’s book seamlessly bridges the political and economic.

    “In India the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-International Monetary Fund ‘reforms’ middle class—the market—live side by side with the spirits of the netherworld, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains, and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us.”

    How fresh it is to hear such a bold and rugged report on conditions in Indian war zones from which authorities say, “no news must come.”

    Nowhere has capitalism’s rise been faster than India, especially in the Punjab region, where farmers now call the train line, because of the pesticides which they ingest to commit suicide, the Cancer Express.

    Speaking of the at least 2,700 unmarked graves in Kashmir, Roy sarcastically accuses the government. “It is insensitive of the unmarked graves to embarrass the government of India just when India’s record is due for review before the UN Human Rights Council.”

    For Americans, Roy’s demographic may seem distant, but the story of India mirrors the growing wealth disparity and its brutal effects in the United States. In America, four hundred people own the same wealth as half the country.

    Roy adds, “In a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-forth of the GDP.”

    What this looks like: private land taken from private citizens and given to private corporations for things such as car manufacturing or even Formula 1 racing.

    This looks like the land of the most expensive dwelling ever built, “Antilla” home to Mukesh Ambani whose twenty-seven story house is so bright that neighboring towns lament, There is no more night.

    India, Roy warns, is now the chain-bearing ghost of its colonial years. Like a climber’s rope, dense, taut, and reliable, Roy’s prophetic prose leads us to daring heights.

    For the rebels, the innocent and the accused, due process does not exist.

    “Most of those involved, prisoners as well as witnesses, cannot read or write. One day, in Dantewada too the dead will begin to speak. And it will not just be dead humans, it will be dead land, dead rivers, dead mountains, and dead creatures in dead forests that will insist on a hearing.”

    Poor farmers, over 400,000 of whom have been imprisoned or relocated, now “await the declaration of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which will give the army legal impunity the right to kill ‘on suspicion.’”

    In many villages, especially in Kashmir, there are more soldiers than civilians. Roy describes one female who was arrested in 2011 and tortured in police custody, a schoolteacher named Soni Sori. “Stones were pushed up her vagina to get her to ‘confess’ that she was a Maoist courier. The stones were removed from her body at a hospital in Calcutta, where, after a public outcry, she was sent for a medical check up.”

    Later that year, the superintendent of police who conducted her interrogation was awarded the President’s Police Medal for Gallantry. Sori remains in jail. This is one many examples of such tragedy and torture from the book.

    While Roy repeats some of the revolutionary narrative from her 2011 book Walking with the Comrades, her new work remains fresh and biting.

    Roy is a restless academic in fatigues. She’s a very human writer, down-to-earth, as though she’s sharing a story with us around a campfire. Maybe, it’s a story we think we’ve heard before, but it’s nighttime, we’re cold, and with revolution stirring in Kashmir, the most highly militarized place in the world, we can’t go to sleep.

    Her demands are radical: an end to cross-ownership in business, the end of privatization of all public services, new universal rights declarations for shelter, education and health care, and finally, the prohibition of inheritance.

    Roy knows you don’t want to wait until you’re dead to spot injustice. Then, it’s too late.

  • MEXICO'S PARTY OF THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION AT 25: DISAPPOINTMENT & DISILLUSION

    The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which was founded in 1989 as the hope of the left, celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary on May 5 amidst expressions of disappointment and disillusion. The hope that the PRD would become a left political party capable of winning the presidency and a majority in the legislature and changing the face of Mexico has not been fulfilled. The principal founder of the party and repeat presidential candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, speaking on the occasion of the party’s twenty-fifth anniversary, said that the Party of the Democratic Revolution is “far from that which we proposed to construct” back in 1989. And its other most important former leader, also a repeat presidential contender, and the party’s biggest vote-getter, Andés Manuel López Obrador, has left the PRD gone off to found a rival left party, the Movement of National Regeneration (MORENA).

    While there is no question that the PRD will continue to play a role in Mexican politics, there is considerable doubt about its leftist character and its value to the country’s working people. The Mexican government, the corporate media, and the two major parties—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN)—have done everything possible to deny the PRD the possibility of winning a presidential election or becoming the majority in congress. At the same time internal factionalism, bribery scandals, alleged involvement with the drug cartels, and the suggestion from others on the far left that the Mexican political system and all of its parties are corrupt and undeserving of support, have over the years discredited the party in the eyes of many Mexicans. The PRD’s problems, some would argue, spring from its birth when elements of the PRI joined with Communists and other leftists to create a party focused on elections.

    The Origins and Growth of the PRD

    In the mid-1980s a new group of “technocrats” trained at universities in the United States took power in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), advocating neoliberal economic reforms such as privatization of state-owned industries, open markets, and increased foreign investment, as well as cuts in state social welfare spending and a reduction of the power of the labor unions. In reaction to the PRI’s sudden rightward turn, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the son of Mexico’s most famous and beloved modern president, Lázaro Cárdenas, broke with that leadership and established the Democratic Current within the PRI. Then in 1988, Cárdenas left the PRI, formed the National Democratic Front (FDN), attracting support from many on the far left, and ran for president, but lost to his technocratic opponent Carlos Salinas de Gortari, in what most observers believe was a stolen election.

    Following his defeat, C. Cárdenas and his allies Porfirio Muñoz Ledo and Ifigenia Martínez, left the PRI to found the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). This break from the PRI immediately attracted Mexico’s two major leftist organizations that had already worked with Cárdenas in the FDN: the Mexican Workers Party (PMT) of Herberto Castillo and José Álvarez Icaza and the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM—Mexico’s pro-Soviet Communist Party—led by Arnold Martinez and Gilberto Rincón Gallardo. It also attracted other smaller parties, some of them much further to the left coming from nationalist, Castroite, Maoist, and Trotskyist traditions. The PRD, originally made up of longtime PRI politicians founded itself involved with leftists whose work had been among peasants and workers or which, in some cases, had been armed guerrilla groups. While the PRD became somewhat more left with the ingress of the old left parties, the historic left itself virtually disappeared from the Mexican scene.

    The PRD took as its symbol the “Sol Azteca,” a yellow, rising sun promising a bright future for the country’s working people. Party leaders pledged to create a party whose leaders would be honest, transparent and responsive to the membership. The PRD’s ideology from the time of its founding until today has been leftist and nationalist, nominally in the tradition of General Lázaro Cárdenas who as president in the 1930s nationalized the foreign oil companies, recognized the industrial labor unions, and distributed millions of acres to poor peasants and indigenous communities. L. Cárdenas also reorganized the state-party by incorporating the labor unions and peasant leagues into it as its constituent organizations, creating the modern Mexican corporativist state-party. His successors affiliated the PRI to the Socialist International, the organization of the European socialist and social democratic parties.

    The General’s son Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas represented the living embodiment of that left, national tradition, though acting within the context of the neoliberal agenda being imposed by the United States, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, the son’s pronouncements and practice became center-left. López Obrador followed a similar trajectory, left rhetoric giving way to more conservative practice. For example as mayor of Mexico City, he hired U.S. Republican Rudy Giuliani to help him develop a “zero tolerance policy.” The PRD never pretended to be either a working class or a socialist party; it was a self-conceived people’s party fighting for reform. The PRD’s program was only mildly social democratic, its rhetoric populist in the Mexican political tradition, and its practice increasingly compromised by both political bargains and corruption.

    The PRD’s Political Record

    During the 1990s the PRD succeeded in electing several congressmen and then senators as well, winning its greatest number of representatives in both houses in 2006. Since 1997 when Cuauhtémoc won the post, the PRD has won every election for mayor of Mexico City. The party, strongest in central and southern Mexico, also succeeded in winning the governor’s mansion in several states in those regions, tough it also once won the governorship of Baja California Sur. The PRD ran Cárdenas as its candidate for president in 1994 and 2000 and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2006 and 2012. Like the 1988 election, the 2006 election was also believed to have been stolen.

    While achieving enough political success to make it Mexico’s second or third political party—after the PRI and the conservative National Action Party (PAN)—the PRD also began to degenerate into just another Mexican political party. The PRD’s internal life became riven by factionalism, the factions generally based on alliances among the various, former left parties that had helped to found the party. If one names only the most important factions, there have been more than half a dozen: the New Left, the National Democratic Left, the National Democratic Alternative, the New Sun Forum, the Political Action Group, the Worthy Fatherland, and the Progressive Movement. In particular the National Democratic Left faction fought for years to wrestle control from of the party from Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and for the political offices and perquisites that come with such control.

    Most damaging to the PRD’s reputation were the video-scandals of 2004 in which businessman Carlos Ahumada was videotaped passing money along to various politicians of the PRI, the Mexican Green Ecological Party (PVEM), the PAN, and the PRD. René Bejarano, López Obrador’s personal secretary, was videotaped accepting US$1.45 million. The whole scheme of bribes and tapes seemed to have been arranged in an attempt to discredit López Obrador. Then in 2009 Jesús César Godoy Toscano, a PRD congressman in Michoacán, was accused of having ties with The Family, the drug cartel that controlled the state’s narcotics business. He fled and after losing his legislative immunity remains a fugitive from justice. The PRD’s internal factionalism, the video-scandals, and the presence of a drug dealer in its ranks, seemed to prove that on its fifteenth anniversary it was simply another Mexican party based upon political fear and favors.

    While the PRD claimed to be the genuine expression of the Mexican left, it was challenged after by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), the small group of revolutionaries who had led a peasant rebellion in the southernmost state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994. The Zaptistas, who also placed themselves in the left nationalist tradition, consistently rejected the existing Mexican government and its political parties, including the Party of the Democratic Revolution. The EZLN spokesman Subcomandante Marcos spoke scathingly the PRD and its candidates Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and López Obrador, arguing that they were simply another expression of Mexico’s corrupt political system. For the last twenty years the EZLN has rejected any cooperation with the PRD or any participation in electoral politics. Though most other far left groups have critically or uncritically supported the PRD’s campaigns one way or another.

    The PRD Challenged

    Over the last 25 years the PRD has suffered numerous defections, including of some of its most important leaders: founder Porfirio Muñoz Ledo left in 2000, former Mexico City Mayor Rosario Robles in 2004, and Leonel Cota, former governor of Baja California Sur in 2012. The most important renegade, however, is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the party’s top vote-getter in the presidential election of 2006 when he won 35.3 percent of the vote. He in 2012 he received 31.6 percent. He argues that he was the real victor in both “fraudulent” elections. In 2012 López Obrador left the PRD and founded the Movement of National Regeneration pledging to make it the political party of the left. He has already announced that he will be its candidate for president in 2018.

    At the PRD’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, Cárdenas criticized the PRD from wandering from its radical, founding ideas. “The discourse about having to create ‘a modern left that distances itself from radicalism’ only serves the interests of the sell-out regime,” he said. “Principles are not just a fashion.”

    Commenting on the chasm between the party’s founding principles and its current situation, Cárdenas asked rhetorically, “Responsible? On the one hand, the hostility of the state and the so-called real powers that have fought against the PRD’s project of national sovereignty and democracy, and on the other, all of us who founded and make up this organization are all also responsible.”

  • Spring Mix

    The salad days.  Too cold or hot or wet for much of anything this time of year, and rereading E. P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, or David Harvey can get tiresome.  Here’s a few tracks for the indoor season, good for stealing time at work, when jammed into a reduced-service bus, or just sitting around building a 15now chapter. 

    Like movies and literature and art, pop music is an immediate reflection of the tensions and promise of the social movements of the day, a historical record of the creativity and emotion of community, a guide to the ideas centering social forces then and now.  From Ellington to Common, it reinforces the waged-labor nature of musicianship and entertainment, placing performers at the fulcrum of the daily humdrum of leisure work, subjects of market forces, sometimes at the memorable apex of crises and societal change, always on our stereos and bluetooths as motivators or enunciators of political practice.  Crucially, the art of pop music is collective, its creation, performance, and consumption are experienced socially and passionately, a sharp and exhilarating harmony against which destructive individualism is defenseless, an aural transit system we ride elbow to elbow, where we get on and especially off together.

    Surprise: strikers, dreamers, indignados, occupiers have their own rhythm, their own dance. Time to collectivize the earbuds – join the mixtape struggle by posting to the comment section.

    El Général – Rais Iebled (Head of State)

    The underground hip-hop cut that panicked the Tunisian regime in 2010.  El Général was jailed.  A change in season soon followed.

    Queen Latifah – U.N.I.T.Y.

    Who you callin’ a bitch?

    Heaven 17 – (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang

    Watch out for those hard right turns.

    Cab Calloway Orchestra – Doing the Reactionary

    All the best dictators do it, millionaires keep stepping to it.

    Ken Boothe – Is It Because I’m Black

    Syl Johnson’s blue-smooth lament turned inside out.  The Trojan Record’s house band is the prototype stepping razor, Boothe is spitting mad.

    Charlie Parker – Ko Ko

    The class tensions that were World War II America produced social movements electric with promise, urgency, resolve, creativity.  Here they all are, in three astonishing breathless minutes.

    Neko Case – Prison Girls

    Most of the time, incarceration is not an exercise in political economy or race studies.

    Flaco Jimenez – Mujer Casada

    If all accordion players were this incendiary, we would have won long ago.

    Magic Sam – All of Your Love

    No self-respecting Chicagoan goes without a copy of West Side Soul, a definitive slice of mid-century community. 

    Archie Shepp – Blues For Brother George Jackson

    The books-on-tape version of how far audacity can take us.

    Sonny Boy Williamson – Help Me

    To be alone is to be powerless.

    Curtis Mayfield – Ghetto Child (demo version of Little Child Runnin' Wild)

    Minus the top-40 cushioning, Little Child as a real kid right here in the kitchen.

    Rahsaan Roland Kirk – Walk On By

    Burt Bacharach’s polite ditty hammered into an exploding stomp, appropriate for the next CTU march.

    Buddy Guy – $100 Bill

    The irony of this classic is forever lost to the one-percenters. Never mind. The horns swagger, Guy grins: Asked my baby for an automobile, she flipped me keys to a Coupe de Ville.

    James Brown – Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag

    Released in June ’65 and riveted to the top of the R&B charts during the Watts revolt, the first hit exercise in funk is an unsung anthem of the civil rights era.

    Larry Young – If

    Recorded just after Watts, a vortex that even remade the 12-bar blues.

    JBs – Blessed Blackness

    Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.  

    Artie Shaw Orchestra – Nightmare

    Shaw’s signature tune was so slow and gloomy his record label made him change to something snappier.  It was a massive hit anyway, written in 1936 and finally recorded towards the end of the second downturn in ‘38, giving wordless expression to how Great the Depression really was.

    Staple Singers – Uncloudy Day

    Liberation theology never sounded this good.

    Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet – Golden Gate Gospel Train

    Spoke too soon.

    Common featuring Cee Lo – A Song for Assata

     “I’ll be honest with you. I know a whole lot more about what freedom isn’t, than about what it is.”

    Joe Williams – Every Night

    A velvet for the Great Recession survivors, working overtime to support families/partners/spouses.

    Mavis Staples – 99 and 1/2 (Just Won’t Do)

    Way more than a reminder. “It’s not 99% versus 1%,” Vijay Prashad said at Occupy Boston, “this is 100% wrong.”

    Duke Ellington Orchestra – Stompy Jones (1934)

    Prohibition jammed politics, art, booze, work, gender, race, sex, lit, ethnicity, recreational drugs, and music into a tiny noisy smoky illegal bar.  Sounded like this.

    Bob Marley and The Wailers – Get Up Stand Up/No More Trouble/War (Live)

    The 23-minute argument against Marley as just a multikulti Carnival Criuse t-shirt.

    Gang of Four – Natural’s Not In It

    Impossible to even leave the house without a tune about the colonization of desire.

    Augustus Pablo – King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown

    Ignore the nonsense about how musically influential these two and a half minutes were, in 1975 and since.  Pablo and Tubby instead welcome the post-‘73 apocalypse with equal force, structural erudition, and plenty of space to readjust to a planet of slums.

    Mulatu Astatke – Fire In The Zoo

    There’s always one somewhere.

    Air – King Porter Stomp

    Air’s startling, surging reboot of the King Oliver/Jelly Roll Morton 1924 ragtime exercise is more than a commemoration of the emancipatory practice of improvised music.

    The Golden Palominos – Ride

    In bed or in court, everybody gets off.

    Antibalas – Indictment

    Now that I think about it.

    Mac Roach Quintet with Abbey Lincoln – Love For Sale

    Cole Porter kicked hard in the head.  Lincoln is as much as responsible for propelling the second wave into a tsunami as anyone.

    Joe Bataan – Aftershower Funk

    Here’s hoping that the class traitors at the Chicago Board of Trade who dumped McDonald’s job applications on the LaSalle Street Occupiers never get laid.

    Jazz Passengers – Ring The Bell (featuring Bob Dorough)

    Buy low, sell high.

    Gil Scott Heron – Winter In America

    For the day when this song is no longer relevant.

    La Excelencia – Salsa Dura

    Ditch the earbuds, get a crowd over to the apartment, vent about everything in particular, and turn it up.

    Eric Schuster teaches history in Chicago. 

  • Teacher Appreciation Week: How to #thankateacher

                This is “Teacher Appreciation Week.”  Should we mark the occasion? How? Why?

                 Teaching is still “women’s work” – 85% of K-12 teachers are female. Teaching is taxing work that requires skill and knowledge, the ability to think quickly on one’s feet and be caring. Managing learning for a room of 30 (or more) people is the pre-eminent form of  multi-tasking. Yet, teaching’s difficulty and value are inadequately recognized by the society – as is parenting.  Few schools give teachers the resources and support they need to do their jobs well, one of which is the opportunity to work with colleagues, students and parents as partners, learning from and with them.  Because of the linkage between standardized testing and teachers’ evaluations,  teachers' professional judgment has been circumscribed, teaching's nurturing functions undercut; frightened themselves, local school officials increasingly demand subservience from teachers.  A climate of fear exists in many schools.

                It’s the job of teachers unions to educate parents and citizens about the supports needed for high-quality teaching and learning to occur, to fight for conditions that allow teachers to do their jobs well.  Because union contracts narrow the scope of bargaining, the union has to push self-consciously against those restraints.  Part of this struggle is insisting on a salary that is commensurate with the skill, knowledge, and difficult of the work, a professional wage.  Teachers can’t do their best when they don’t earn enough to support themselves and their families. They also can’t serve kids well when they are fearful of poor evaluations and losing their jobs if they speak honestly about what’s happening in their schools and classrooms. 

                We face an enormous challenge. The superbly orchestrated propaganda campaign against teachers and teachers unions, in support of a privatized school system run by moguls and billionaires through the politicians they have persuaded or bought, has configured teachers and teachers unions as blocking improvements in education for kids who most need high-quality schools and teachers.  However, the reforms being pushed by both parties use the rhetoric of putting “students first” to destroy public ownership of schools and limit opportunity. 

                How should we deal with the daunting task of changing the public perception of teachers and our work?  We see how to do it with the success of the Chicago Teachers Union, about which much has been written.  In contrast, we see how not to do it with the proposed UFT contract, which continues the failed policies of “business unionism.”  A bureaucratic process of developing contract proposals has been accompanied by little or no member involvement in pushing for real improvement in working conditions. This has, unsurprisingly, yielded a poor contract.

                The UFT’s leadership clique publicized the proposed contract as a victory – before members were given the contract language. All union members had was a description of “contract highlights,” released to the press as well. The ensuing publicity, endorsements by national media and a prominent liberal friend of the AFT leadership, was intended to make teachers feel that rejecting this contract is a futile gesture.  That is, the media, politicians, and UFT officers strive to minimize space for union members to decide for themselves whether the contract makes their work better and improves schools. 

                The question New York City teachers should ask themselves in deciding how to vote on this contract proposal is “Will this contract improve education for NYC kids?”  The answer, for me, is a decisive “No.”  It contains a few elements that are especially pernicious.

                1. The contract includes a career ladder,  “merit pay” without the label. If it weren’t designed to serve as "merit pay," we would allow teachers to do these jobs at their same pay. The new positions being created will likely help teachers to help kids so we should demand that more of these positions be created – at the same pay. The career ladder will pit teachers against one another for the pay increase, reinforce the erroneous idea that we can improve teaching by rewarding the "well-deserving" individuals,  and weaken solidarity in the school.

                2. The changes in the “redesigned” school day don’t touch the kind of transformation of working conditions teachers and students desperately need.  Those have to be made by empowered school leadership teams, about which this contract is silent.

                3.  As schools are closed and replaced by charters, more and more teachers will be put into the pool of displaced teachers. Teachers’ lack of protections in this process weakens the union and increases teachers’ fears. Every teacher is in danger of being placed in this pool but the displacements affect older teachers and teachers of color disproportionately. This new contract weakens the position of displaced teachers and in doing so harms the union and kids.

                4. Pay: The press hammers on this issue because they know that half of New Yorkers live at or below the poverty level. The union’s focus on pay reinforces the public perception that the union and teachers are totally self-interested.  Yes teachers deserve a professional wage and the union must fight for that, embedded in a vision for a very different kind of schooling that can win parents and community to our side. 

               Are NYC teachers ready to hear this message?  Teachers’ work now consists of more than what we do in our classrooms.  Our job is to speak truth about what NYC kids need and deserve and demand that our unions organize us with our allies to win those conditions.        

                NEA is publicizing National Teachers Week by having supporters use social media to #thankateacher. AFT and the AFL-CIO have joined this campaign.  On the other hand, President Obama has marked the occasion by proclaiming this “National Charter Schools Week.”  We’re not going to defeat the policies Obama is pushing with the kind of contract the UFT has negotiated.  I suggest we #thankateacher by urging NYC teachers to reject the proposed contract they’ve been told to ratify.

    Other notes: Under the radar of the media (most of the “progressive” media included):  The Philly school system, facing more draconian cuts in funding, now has a reform caucus in its teachers union. At last weekend’s Education for Liberation Conference I saw the great energy that comes from teachers working with students, parents, community groups to take back the schools.  Very powerful and exciting! I’m delighted to add Philly’s Caucus of Working Educators to the list of groups working towards building teachers union with a social justice vision, commitment to democracy, and mobilization, all starting in the school site… Join us at the Trinational Coalition to Defend Public Education this weekend in Chicago.  I’ll be in a workshop on standardized testing.

    You can follow me on twitter and Facebook, as well as my blog every Wednesday here at New Politics.  Or write me at drweinerlo@gmail.com. 

  • Teachers unions need critical friends

                Union Power’s sweep of the election for union officers in United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) signals a seismic shift in power relations in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). UTLA’s Union Power now joins reformers from CORE (Caucus of rank and file educators) in the Chicago Teachers Union in demanding a break from the “business union” model that has dominated teachers unions for decades.  Three state-wide reform caucuses have formed in National Education Association (NEA) affiliates, Massachusetts, Colorado, North Carolina.  As I explain in my forthcoming article (Summer, New Politics), these and other developments reflect how teachers are overcoming deep fears and feelings of isolation to build a different kind of union.  It’s happening off the radar of the mass media and most of the liberal press, which is entranced by the rhetoric of neoliberal educational policies that are aimed to destroy teaching as a profession, democratic control of schools, and turn education into another profit center for corporations.  An important exception is The Jacobin’s informed coverage of education and its collaboration with teacher unionists working to transform their unions.

                Union officials in both the AFT and NEA realize public education and the union are in deep trouble. At the same time, they seem incapable of the objective scrutiny needed to reverse course. Josh Eidelson’s Salon.com interview with AFT’s president, Randi Weingarten, exemplifies this phenomenon. Almost every opinion Weingarten expresses changes a disastrous union policy without a hint that there’s been a shift.  Because there’s been no debate in the union and no self-criticism, the new policies are adaptations rather than needed reversals.  Chris Christie?  He’s a villain now but just months ago Weingarten was chortling with him on “Morning Joe” about their collaboration on merit pay and the contract AFT pushed on Newark teachers, a contract that has weakened the union in fighting  the destructive school closings in the works now, which she opposes.  Common Core, the new national curriculum funded mostly by Bill Gates, is in trouble now, due to agitation from both the Right and Left – but without help from either NEA or AFT, which still support it in principle though disagree with implementation. Michelle Rhee, whom Weingarten now criticizes harshly? Rhee was a reigning celebrity, pushed by neoliberal Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), at the Democratic National Convention that nominated Obama for his first term.  NEA and AFT jumped on the Obama bandwagon though he was always explicit about his involvement with DFER and affection for Rhee, merit pay, and charters.

                AFT and NEA have pushed one disastrous accommodation after another, arguing with activists who feel the pain of these policies that the union needs a seat at the table. In contrast, Union Power and CORE understand that the meal being served is not one we can or should eat.  It’s poison and it’s harming kids, killing public education.  Privately and in social media union officers express anger at the “divisiveness” of criticism. However divisions are already present, demonstrated by the emergence of successful challenges of union reformers in the second and third largest teacher union locals in the US.  We need a contest of ideas, not personalities, debate and decisions made by members about policies that are altering their livelihoods and children’s lives. That process should be aided by friends who offer support, encouragement and critique.

                I invite reader comments, sent to me at  drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. And you can follow my thoughts on teaching, schools, and education on twitter , Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

                Saturday May 3 I’ll be speaking at PhillyTAG’s Education for Liberation conference. It will have super workshops on social justice teaching and education activism. Join us!

  • Rosa Luxemburg—a revolutionary for our time, or a liberal?

    ImageReview of Jason Schulman (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg — Her Life and Legacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 214 pp.

                In 2001, New Politics published a short article on Rosa Luxemburg by Stephen Bronner. The article sure hit a nerve. Over the next years, a whole series of criticisms were published to which Bronner responded twice in these pages. Jason Schulman collected these articles, added a short introduction and an interview with Bronner, and published them under the title Rosa Luxemburg—Her Life and Legacy. The subtitle of the book is slightly misleading as it contains little about Luxemburg’s life and the term legacy is too neutral to capture the intensity with which contributors fought over their respective understandings of Luxemburg’s theoretical and political work. Playing on Bronner’s 1981 monograph Rosa Luxemburg—A Revolutionary for Our Time[1], it might have been more apt to ask whether that’s still what she is or whether she became an inspiration for liberals in the meantime. Bronner contends that socialism and barbarism are no longer alternatives since efforts to build the former only advanced the latter and the industrial proletariat as the agent of change is on the wane. At the same time, though, Luxemburg’s revolutionary goal of attaining a liberal republican state has been achieved since Soviet power was dismantled by the liberal revolution in Eastern Europe. What socialists should do now is defend the reforms that have been won within the realm of the liberal state and extend their activities to reforming international institutions, as transnational corporations are progressively undermining nation-state sovereignty.

    Image            Bronner claims that he criticizes Luxemburg in much the same way she had criticized Marx. What emerged from this for Bronner was the rejection of Luxemburg’s claim that capitalist crises make social reform impossible and that socialist revolution, paving the way for workers' power exerted through workers’ councils, would be the only way of avoiding the barbaric degeneration of capitalist societies. What remains of Luxemburg is the fighter for the democratic republic, minority rights, and liberal, not proletarian, internationalism.

                This interpretation might have been much to the liking of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin, for whom Bronner’s article was originally written. The Luxemburg Foundation, a think-tank affiliated with the Party of Democratic Socialism, now Die Linke, was eager to leave behind the communist past out of which it had developed. At the same time, it was trying to carve out its political space in post-unification Germany. A Luxemburg that had nothing more to do with overcoming private property but still provided a critical edge vis-à-vis actually existing capitalism was precisely what was needed for this purpose. But it certainly wasn’t what many people around New Politics, used to defending the traditions of revolutionary socialism in the belly of the beast, wanted to hear. Not surprisingly, they responded in kind. As a then editorial board member and continuing sponsor of the journal, Bronner probably knew what he was getting himself into.

                None of Bronner’s critics misses the opportunity to point to the continuities of capitalist exploitation and the support it receives from nation-states and international institutions. More specifically, Alan Johnson draws attention to the fact that today’s working classes make up a larger share of the world population than they did during Luxemburg’s lifetime. Hence, the notion of a waning of the industrial proletariat is misleading. David Camfield charges Bronner with joining the post-Marxist camp whose ranks of disappointed radicals swelled continuously while the neoliberal variant of capitalism came to be seen more and more as the social order without alternative. Paul LeBlanc argues that Bronner’s support for international institutions includes imperialist interventions and Barry Finger turns Bronner’s claim that revolutionary socialism is outdated around by saying that the conditions under which embedded liberalism could flourish are gone. All of this may, or may not be true, but doesn’t take away from the fact that revolutionary workers movement don’t exist anywhere today. Therefore it is easy for Bronner to expose his critics’ defense of revolutionary socialism as a kind of ethical commitment, different from his own in content but as detached from current realities as were the scientific convictions about the inevitable victory of socialism over capitalism that were, allegedly, so characteristic of Luxemburg and most of her contemporaries.

                Considering the complete marginalization of revolutionary socialists in today’s social movements it should be an easy task for Bronner to answer his critics. Yet, there is a tone of self-assurance and impatience in his responses that suggests that he isn’t as convinced of his case as he pretends to be. In restating his case for the liberal republic and reformed international institutions he even takes refuge in empirically unsupported and theoretically inconsistent arguments. For example, he charges Luxemburg with splitting the social democratic left and thus allowing the right wing around Ebert to gain the upper hand within the social democratic party. Of course, one might direct the same charge against Bernstein during the revisionism debate or Kautsky during the mass strike debate. Be this as it may. What is difficult to understand, though, is how he squares his concern with a left united for democracy and republicanism with his endorsement of the Weimar-period SPD as defenders of these very principles. To this end, he invokes the apologetic argument that Weimar was a republic without republicans. Yet, looking at folks like Tucholsky, von Ossietzky and their Weltbühne-collaborators it seems more accurate to say that there was a small band of republicans desperately looking for a republic.[2] Michael Hirsch in his concluding chapter discusses Bronner’s skewed interpretation of Weimar. By the way, in his 1991 book Moments of Decision[3] Bronner also pointed to the continuities between imperial Germany and Weimar. While he changed his views on the Weimar Republic, the commitment to liberal democracy and international institutions that he presented to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation can already be found in this book. In fact, its German translation, published in 1999, might have been the reason why the Luxemburg Foundation invited Bronner to the talk that caused so much controversy in New Politics.

                Entwined with the discussion of the virtues and insufficiencies of the liberal republic is the question of whether councils can represent an alternative institutional framework or not. Councils, argue Bronner and Michael Thompson, represent only the special interests of industrial workers. Historically, councils only played a role in countries lacking liberal institutions; today there is no interest in them whatsoever. All one could possibly say to defend this line of argument is that those who wanted to replace the bourgeois republic by a councils republic focused very much on industrial workers. This is true, for example, for Richard Müller and Emil Däumig but also for Anton Pannekoek. Despite their commitment to the councils republic, the former sided politically with the Independent Social Democrats[4] while the latter joined the anarcho-syndicalist Communist Workers Party.[5] Neither of them went with Luxemburg and the Spartacists. Bronner rightly points out that Luxemburg was torn between councils and the republic but wrongly says that she had to choose one or the other. With support for the councils too weak to erect an alternative power structure in 1918/19 such a decision would inevitably subject the newly formed republic to the old alliance between the Junkers, smokestack barons, and generals whose internal quarrels had been a major factor leading Imperial Germany to war.[6]

                Luxemburg thought councils might serve as a countervailing power to the forces of reaction, and thus make Weimar a more democratic republic and leave the door for socialist revolution open. The tragedy of the German revolution is that this line of thinking was only understood and supported by marginal circles such as that around the Weltbühne, while the labor movement from anarcho-syndicalists to Ebert-Noske-style social democrats made their respective choices for insurrection and councils or counterrevolution approved by the Weimar Republic. Dual power of the liberal republic and councils might also have allowed the latter to extend beyond industrial workers and soldiers to workers in other sectors, most importantly agriculture, and consumers. Such ideas were discussed theoretically after the counterrevolution had already shut down the possibility of their realization. Karl Korsch made important contributions to this debate, the first of which was published in March 1919 when the revolution was just coming to an end.[7] Although he frequently appears in Schulman’s book, this aspect of his work is ignored or flat-handedly dismissed. As far as later developments are concerned it is worth mentioning that councils were established on numerous occasions and in countries with rather different political systems.[8] It is simply not true that workers never established councils in liberal democracies; the point is that they did so in situations in which they felt not appropriately represented by unions and the political system. This history of self-organization has plenty of experiences to offer from which today’s social movements can learn when seeking alternatives to liberal democracy’s surrender to the dictates of international capital as Chris Maisano argues in his chapter of the book. Bronner confirms his skeptical views about the potential of workers councils in an interview that reviews the preceding debate at the end of the book. What is more interesting about this interview, though, are the connections Bronner makes between Luxemburg in her day and today’s social movements from the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Syriza. In this respect he stresses the role of experiences activists are making in collective struggles for the formation of progressive movements.

                One argument that transcends the councils versus republic debate, which figures so prominently in most chapters of the book, comes from Amber Frost. Her starting point is a rebuttal of Thompson’s unambiguous defense of liberal democracy as the only institutional form capable of protecting the rights of minorities for which he cites gay marriage as an example. Frost picks this up to show how easily radical politics, such as feminist and queer activists struggles against the legal institution of marriage, are sidelined by the endorsement of apparently progressive issues. Her warnings against states permeating every aspect of life are more than welcome in a time where neoliberal ideology heralds the withering away of the state in the thin air of global markets. Yet, bringing feminism into this book about Luxemburg, she could have gone further. It is true that Luxemburg had little to no interest in what was called in her day the women’s question, but her economic theory of the colonization of non-capitalist milieus offers analytical tools to understand the transformation of domestic labor and female labor market participation from post-war prosperity until today. Sadly, many feminists engaged in the domestic labor debate recognized the affinity between their own efforts and Luxemburg’s theorizing but decided not to draw on the latter although it might have made their arguments stronger.[9]

                Frost shares the silence on Luxemburg’s economic theory with her co-authors. Bronner sees it as an outdated teleology that might have had currency in the past but certainly has none today. Moreover, he explicitly claims the primacy of what he calls the political moment over economics. Thompson, who agrees with Bronner on the question of republic versus councils, posits the necessity for critical political economy for radical politics of any kind but doesn’t give any hints as to how he understands the relations between economics and politics. Johnson and Camfield, standing on the other side of the republic versus council argument, distance themselves from what they see as a mistaken theory of breakdown. Maisano takes the Great Recession as his starting point but quickly departs into the realm of pure politics. This neglect of economics grossly misrepresents Luxemburg’s work. This is not only true for her explicitly economic works, notably The Accumulation of Capital and The Introduction to Political Economy, but also for her political works that reckon the role of economics. For example, she hints at the limits to social reform due to the recurrence of economic crises in Social Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike and in The Junius Pamphlet she reconstructs the outbreak of World War I from the pursuit of imperialist politics, driven by the quest for market expansion, great power status, and attempts to deflect from domestic class conflict.

                Bronner suggests that Luxemburg’s adherence to a teleological worldview—her belief in the final victory of socialism—is plainly wrong, and  can’t be substantiated. Sure did she believe in it; one might even claim that her activism was driven by ethical beliefs that Bronner presents as an alternative to teleological beliefs. Nobody would engage in any kind of politics if s/he didn’t think s/he could succeed. Yet, this doesn’t mean that the optimism of the will can’t or shouldn’t be complemented by the pessimism of the intellect. Chances to reach one’s goals are surely greater if one recognizes the economic conditions under which one pursues them instead of ignoring them.

                If all Luxemburg had to offer in this respect was the assurance that capitalism would collapse and thereby fire the starting shot for class struggle or even lead to the automatic rise of socialism, then her economic theory would be as teleological as Bronner claims it is. But it isn’t.[10] Like her contemporaries she used the word "breakdown" all too often and the term invites teleological understandings indeed. To avoid them it might be good to poke fun at it like Joan Robinson did with Marx’s use of the morally charged term "exploitation." Yet, Robinson didn’t do this to dismiss Marx’s economics but to reinvent them during her own lifetime. Sure enough, what came out of this was the conversion of Marx into a proto-Keynesian[11] and Luxemburg received the same treatment.[12] Even if one doesn’t agree with Robinson’s interpretation of Marx and Luxemburg one might find more interesting ideas in it than in mere restatements of Marx’s and Luxemburg’s original work. Bronner is right, these works need to be read and interpreted for everyone’s own time and this will inevitably lead to revisions. In today’s world where everyone talks about economics, 99% fearful and 1% hopeful, socialists have every reason to re-read the classics of critical political economy, reinterpret them against the background of today’s empirical realities and draw their conclusions for radical politics. This is not the same as suggesting to derive politics from economics. The purpose of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy was to highlight human agency behind the mystifications of commodity production and exchange. Luxemburg’s economic works continued this tradition by stressing the role of class struggles and international conflicts in capitalist development. They can certainly contribute to the way that activists interpret their everyday experiences with capitalist realities, share them with workers and other subordinated social groups and thus help to remake the working classes that were so successfully unmade by neoliberal restructuring.[13] We shall see, whether there’ll be a revolution. What is certain, though, is that Luxemburg is a socialist for our times and this sure means seeking ways to overcome capitalism.

     

    Ingo Schmidt teaches Labour Studies at Athabasca University in Canada. His most recent books are Social Democracy After the Cold War (co-edited and co-authored with Bryan Evans) and Rosa Luxemburg's 'Akkumulation des Kapitals'. He also writes economics columns for Sozialistische Zeitung, a monthly paper in Germany.


    [1] Stephen Eric Bronner, Rosa Luxemburg—A Revolutionary for Our Times (London: Pluto Press, 1981).

    [2] Ursula Madrasch-Groschopp, Die Weltbühne—Portrait einer Zeitschrift (Berlin, Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1985).

    [3] Stephen Eric Bronner, Moments of Decision—Political History and the Crisis of Radicalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

    [4] Ralf Hoffrogge, Richard Müller—Der Mann hinter der Novemberrevolution (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2008).

    [5] Hans Manfred Bock, Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus von 1918 bis 1933 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993).

    [6] Heiner Karuscheit, Deutschland 1914—Vom Klassenkompromiss zum Krieg (Hamburg: VSA Verlag, 2013).

    [7] Karl Korsch, Schriften zur Sozialisierung (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969).

    [8] Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzelini, Ours to Master and to Own—Workers Control From the Commune to the Present (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011).

    [9] Frieder Otto Wolf, “The Missed Rendezvous of Critical Marxism and Ecological Feminism,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, vol. 18, no. 2 (2007), 109-125.

    [10] Ingo Schmidt, “Geschichte und Sozialismus,” in Ingo Schmidt (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg’s Akkumulation des Kapitals (Hamburg: VSA Verlag, 2013), 138-165.

    [11] Joan Robinson, An Essay on Marxian Economics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1967).

    [12] Joan Robinson, “Introduction,” in Rosa Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), xxi-xxxvii.

    [13] Ingo Schmidt, “From Unmaking to Remaking—Neoliberalism and European Working Class Experiences,” in Andreas Bieler (ed.), Labour and Transnational Action in Times of Crisis (forthcoming).

     

  • Teachers, teachers unions and the “Common Core”: This is a test

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    1. More rigorous academic standards required by the new national curriculum, Common Core Curriculum Standards (CCSS) and its high-tech national test PARCC controlled by Pearson will alter employment for US students by making them “college and career ready.”

    2. The Common Core Curriculum Standards are a “state-led” initiative.

    3. Elected officials of both teachers unions endorsed CCSS and PARCC at the direction of members, after informed debate.

    Answers:

    1. False

                As this 3 minute video explains, Common Core proponents argue it levels the playing field for jobs. It implies but does not say that we need the Common Core because of historic inequality in education linked to race.  If students are “college and career ready” they will find well-paying jobs, or as the US Department of Education phrased its goal in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Act, ”The goal for America’s educational system is clear… Every student should have meaningful opportunities to choose from upon graduation from high school."   Schooling is “the one true path out of poverty” (Arne Duncan).

              This assumption obviates the state’s role in ending poverty through economic policy, for example by outlawing poverty-level wages, currently maintained by a minimum wage that sustains a class of working poor, and by creating well-paying jobs that support a sustainable economy.  The diminishing number of well-paid jobs sentences the vast majority of working people to a lifetime of economic insecurity. Yet labor, what remains of it, including teachers unions, has failed to take on the underlying rationale for the Common Core, which pushes vocational training into kindergarten.  PARCC, the profitable (for Pearson) test that ties student achievement and teacher evaluation to the new standards is losing support, mostly because of Right wing opposition to the federal government’s usurpation of what is held in the Constitution to be the right of the state, controlling education.

             Schooling is not and cannot be the “one true path out of poverty” for the vast majority of children because our economy consigns millions to unemployment and work that pays poverty wages. Yet it is also the case that public education in the US has historically reproduced social inequality.  Teachers unions and progressives ought to answer the “one true path out of poverty” claim by demanding 1. the government create high-paying jobs that support a sustainable economy AND 2. address  factors we know from empirical scholarship contribute to unequal outcomes in schooling, such as segregation, organizational practices within schools such as tracking, disciplinary practices, and because of taken-for-granted assumptions about students’ “ability.

    2. False

                Mercedes Schneider, a researcher who teaches school in New Orleans, documents in a blog how CCSS was developed, tracing its funding to Bill Gates.

    “It is important to those promoting CCSS that the public believes the idea that CCSS is "state-led." The CCSS website reports as much and names two organizations as "coordinating" the "state-led" CCSS: The National Governors Association (NGA), and the Council for Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). Interestingly, the CCSS website makes no mention of CCSS "architect" David Coleman… Nevertheless, if one reviews this 2009 NGA news release on those principally involved in CCSS development, one views a listing of 29 individuals associated with Student Achievement Partners, ACT, College Board, and Achieve. In truth, only 2 out of 29 members are not affiliated with an education company.

    CCSS as "state-led" is fiction. “

    3. False

                AFT and NEA officers have recently called for a moratorium in implementing CCSS and PARCC, reversing their initial support. Both unions accepted funding from Gates to implement CCSS.        Typical of those who hold power that is seldom checked, national officials have not explained their about-face as being correction of an error on their part.  The problem is not just implementation of the curriculum and the test, as the unions now charge but rather of the premises.  Mercedes Schneider nails the problem with AFT and NEA’s call for delaying implementation.

                If your information about education and CCSS has come from the NY Times, AFT and NEA publications and social media, or even progressive magazines, like Mother Jones, it’s likely you didn’t understand why so many teachers and parents are angry about CCSS and PARCC.  While Right-wing opposition has garnered a great deal of attention, there’s been almost no discussion of the dangers of CCSS, the way it pushes down academics to kindergarten (forget about play); the way it identifies a “core” that excludes civics (examination of the duties of citizens in a democracy) in social studies; the way it marginalizes the experience of literature and the arts; the way it undercuts teachers’ ability to give students choices in what and how they learn.

                I see many calls on social media for the AFT and NEA national officers to reverse themselves and reject CCSS and PARCC.  In response the unions point to polls that support their position.  But polls should not decide an issue on which teachers’ jobs, students’ lives, and control of our society’s future depend.  We need vigorous, informed debate throughout the union – not just state and national conventions.  In the locals!! The debate should be followed by a referendum: “Should our union endorse and help implement the CCSS as tested by PARCC?”

                In my presentation at the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at UC Santa Barbara April 25 I’ll explain why progressives have to argue for jobs as well as acknowledging the historic inequalities in education that our opponents exploit for their own ends.  My remarks will published in a bit if you miss the conference.

    Readers can contact me at drweinerlo@gmail.com and follow me on twitter and Facebook. I blog every Wednesday here at New Politics.

  • OUR HOUSE OF CARDS: POPULAR CULTURE IN THE OBAMA ERA

    Americans’ profound cynicism about Washington finds full expression in the wildly popular House of Cards, the Netflix series created by Beau Willimon and based on a novel by Michael Dobbs in which Francis J. “Frank” Underwood (Kevin Spacey), will stop at nothing—including murder—to achieve his political ambitions. Underwood, the fictional Democrat from South Carolina who works to extend the retirement age needed to qualify for social security, attacks public education and the teachers unions, and provokes a high stakes trade war with China to punish a political rival, is engaged behind the scenes in threats, bribery, extortion, kidnapping, and more than one murder to maintain his grip on power, eventually becoming U.S. president. From time to time, like a character in a Shakespearean drama, Underwood turns to speak to the audience, expressing his contempt for the politicians, lobbyists, businessmen, political challengers, and all the toadies and timeservers by whom he is surrounded. It is a contempt for the world of Washington that one suspects the viewers share.

    We find the same world in ABC’s Scandal, based in part on the life of George H.W. Bush’s press aide Judy Smith, where the protagonist Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), , runs a crisis management firm that handles problems for many, including the Republican President Fitzgerald Thomas Grant III of Santa Barbara, former governor of California. Olivia Pope the fixer, and the president’s sometime mistress, is the vehicle for exploring Washington, a place of lies, intrigue, deception, kidnapping, torture, and murder, a good deal of it committed by whacked-out former special forces agents. The president himself, we learn, had a personal hand in Operation Remington, a black op carried out a generation ago that revolved around the downing of Flight 522 to London and the death of hundreds of passengers. The commander-in-chief has been involved in the kind of cloak-and-dagger plots and skullduggery that accompanied the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that in fact forms part of all foreign policy, diplomacy and statesmanship from time immemorial.

    We have come a long way from Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing (1999-2006) whose President Josiah Bartlett (Martin Sheen), though involved in political wheeling and dealing and occasionally touched by scandal, violence, and the violence of the War on Terror at home and abroad, appeared to be a basically good and decent man (albeit with the narrow political vision of American politicians) struggling to deal with immensely complicated situations. President Bartlett after all struggled to save Social Security. Even at the time, of course, Americans joked that Bartlett was the good president we wished we might have had as opposed to the Bush-Cheney presidency we were actually suffering through. 

    House of Cards and Scandal show us Washington as we suspect it is: crooked beyond redemption. The newspapers and TV and radio show it to us daily, and, if you read between the lines and watch carefully, it is not so different: a place of lies and deception, though most of the kidnapping and murder that we’re aware of takes place through the execution of black ops and drone attacks carried out in other countries. Here at home our political leaders merely destroy social programs, attack public employee unions, and promote policies that may also we know lead to hunger, illness physical and mental, and eventually death, but in the slow, suffering way of ordinary people that is not nearly as entertaining as House of Cards. The homeless mother and her children face enough drama in their lives, but it is far from amusing and seldom occupies prime time.

    One can gauge Americans’ skepticism about our political system in other more quantitative ways than their TV viewing. Since the 1960s less than 60 percent of the voting age population participates in elections, while President Obama was the first president since FDR and Eisenhower to be elected twice by more than 50 percent of the voters. Most of our elected officials hold power on the basis of having won the votes of little more than 25 percent of the electorate. Then too, we have the approval ratings. At present (March 2014) only 40 percent of Americans approve of the job that President Barack Obama is doing—he has several times recently been down as low as 38 percent, while Congress’s approval rating is at 13 percent, the lowest in American history. The thing is, House of Cards and Scandal are a lot more suspenseful and exciting than watching the Republicans shut down Congress or following the technical, economic, social, and political failure of Obamacare. The TV shows are fun, confirming us as they do in our anger and disdain for evil politicians, but life is less fun for most of us under the real politicians who run the country. 

    The Barack Obama era will go down in American history as one of the least liberal and most conservative periods in American history. Unlike any other period since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century or perhaps the Roaring Twenties, capitalists have prospered enormously while workers have suffered tremendously and income inequality has grown exponentially. A 2013 OECD study showed that the United States had the highest income inequality in the developed world (only less developed Chile, Mexico and Turkey were more unequal), while another group of economists found that income inequality has grown faster in the United States than in any other developed nation, with the top 1% having doubled their income from 10 to 20 percent of the national total since 1970. The Pew Research Center study published in December 2013 demonstrated that income inequality in the United States was now the highest since 1928.

    We all know they’re getting richer, while the rest of us are falling behind. The woman or man on the street will tell you this. Or you could go to the movies. Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street would make it clear that, for some in the era of Bush and Obama, the Great Recession—even with government investigations and some new regulations—represented no obstacle to making money, even if occasionally they are caught with their hand in the till. Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) having lost a job in high finance finds another in penny-stocks and makes a fortune allowing him to live the high life—high on cocaine, call-girls, extravagant parties, and conspicuous consumption. Belfort, is a fictional representation of the real Belfort, is a man without conscience or remorse who, after doing a little time in prison for welching on a deal with the FBI, goes off to run sales seminars in New Zealand. Prison after all is really for poor, mostly dark complexioned people, while rich white crooks seldom see the inside of the slammer, and if they do are soon out and back at it, bilking the rest of us.

    Scorsese’s film makes an interesting contrast with Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, a similar story in many respects, except that in that earlier film the avarice of Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) stands in stark contrast to the working class and labor union values of his father Carl Fox (Martin Sheen), president of a Machinists Union at Bluestar Airlines. In that earlier fictional representation of Wall Street and its crooked deals, torn between corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) and his father, Bud come down on the side of his dad, even though it means he goes to prison. In the most recent Wall Street film, there are no moral fathers, there are no unions, and there seems to be no alternative to ruthless capitalism.

    The Wolf of Wall Street presents a tale that Americans believe and that we are gratified and entertained to see on the big screen, the tale of the corrupt guys at the top, lavishly spending the money that working men and women have lost. At least in the films we see the truth that the system is unjust—even if the emphasis is on the corruption and not on the inherent injustice of capitalism itself. And then too—and least for some of us—there is our identification with the characters, the vicarious thrill of being, at least in our imaginations, rich, powerful, stoned and sexually titillated for about 120 minutes, before we return to searching for a job, brooding about our inadequate pensions, or figuring out how to ever buy a house when prices are so high. It was great to get a way for an hour or two into the world of the rich bastards who never have to worry about these things.

    Under Obama’s watch the banks, insurance companies, and corporations, which had been on the verge of collapse, were buoyed up by massive infusions of taxpayer money, returned to profitability, and the neoliberal economic arrangements that they desire and require were continued with little significant alteration. Of course it is true that Obama can’t be blamed for all of the economic inequality. The current trends toward inequities in the American economy and society began in the late 1970s under presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and accelerated under presidents George W.H. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But Obama’s administration took no measure to put its foot on the brake, in fact, after helping to get the capitalist car back on the highway after the near crack-up in 2008 to 2010, the government stepped on the gas again, fundamentally continuing the same economic policies. We are on the road again, Obama in the driver’s seat and watch out for that sharp turn coming up ahead.

    The historical argument that Democratic Party administrations always act to ameliorate the misery of the poor and to attenuate the exploitation of workers, as they purportedly did under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s, proved wrong in the first decades of the twenty-first century under Obama. Before his election, Obama had supported Bush’s bank bailout, the Trouble Assets Relief Program (TARP) that nominally provided $700 billion in loans to rescue U.S. and foreign banks and insurance companies, though actually closer to $450 billion. Obama’s own American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provided a nominal $787 billion in stimulus to the U.S. economy, later revised up to $831 billion, in a variety of job and benefit programs. Liberal critics like Paul Krugman argued, and continue to argue, that the stimulus of that size was too small to cope with $2.1 trillion in lost production. The Great Recession that began in 2007 officially ended in June 2009, though even a year late economists were still in doubt about that claim. In 2013 the Economic Policy Institute produced a briefing paper asserting that “growth since mid-2009 has been too sluggish to move the economy out of its depressed state and restore it to full health.” Meanwhile the banks, if not making as much money as they would want, (When would they ever?) are doing pretty well. Let’s go back to the movies.

    Happiness is the Smell of a New Car

    Mad Men, Mathew Weiner’s award-winning AMC cable series about Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the brilliant, deeply conflicted and fundamentally unhappy advertising agency executive, is set in the Madison Avenue world of the 1960s. Draper—whose very identity is a lie, having stolen a dead man’s during a Korea War battle—is the perfect symbol of an industry which, if not actually based on lies (which it so often is), is certainly based on the idea that we can change our identities or at least our images—to become healthier, happier, more relaxed, but at the same time more alert, and above all more attractive, and sexier people—through buying the products they advertise.

    Why has Mad Men so captivated the American public? Perhaps it is because through it we are able to return to the Affluent Society, as John Galbraith’s 1958 book characterized the era of post-war prosperity in America. Draper’s company deals with all of the products of that so profitable and prosperous time from the Chevy to Lucky Strike cigarettes, from the Hilton Hotels to the airlines, for advertising, after all, is merely the enticing and more beautiful reflection of the commodity. Draper’s copywriters and artists turn the most banal objects of everyday life into the fetishes we crave. If there is a tendency to the reification—the thingification—of our lives, it is the Madison Avenue ad men who, if they did not exactly cause it, made it so natural and attractive. They make us feel okay about consuming. As Draper says, “Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay.”

    Mad Men makes us long for a past where people naively and obliviously live lives—lives of two-pack-a-day cigarette smoking, three martini lunches, not-so-casual infidelity, big cars that burn leaded gas, suburban sprawl covering farmland and wetlands, the Vietnam War, and politics as usual—which, as we know, lead to personal and social disaster, and lead to today.

    Ah, what a simpler world it was: racist and anti-Semitic, patriarchal and homophobic; a world where wealthy white men, as the song says, had the world (and the women) on a string. Yet as the series proceeds we witness the emergence of the beat counter-culture of the Village, the first steps toward workplace racial integration in the North, the rise of women struggling for their liberation various ways, not all of them dignified and only some of them successful. Through Mad Men we vicariously partake of the wealth and luxury but also hope, optimism, and progressive change of the 1960s.

    How could this not be attractive in our own era of the unfair society build upon enormous economic inequalities, economic crisis, and the false promises of hope and change? Mad Men has apparently led to an increase in the sale of suits and a resurgence of 1960s décor furniture. Still, hopeful at that may be, it will not lift us out of the recession, which we are told (contrary to our own experience and observation) we have already left behind.

    They Got Us All Fucked Up

    If one’s only encounter with America were its films, one might think that the country had in the last couple of Obama years made tremendous steps forward in dealing with its long history of racism and was well on the way to confronting and solving the problem. Three major films—Lincoln (2012), Django Unchained (2012), and 12 Years a Slave (2013)—have explored the history of African American slavery and the political response with a seriousness seldom seen before in film history. 12 Years a Slave based on the memoir of Solomon Northup as adapted for the screen by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen (no, not the action film actor), portrayed the kidnapping of the free carpenter and musician Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who is sold into slavery in the South in the 1840s and suffers all of the violence and brutality, as well as the humiliations and indignities of the that horrifying system. We have never before had such a graphic and honest Hollywood film about the African American experience of slavery.

    Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti western, shows the reaction to that system as incarnated in the black avenging angel Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave who is freed from a group of slave traders by the German abolitionist Dr. Schultz (Christoph Walz), no doubt, one of those famous European revolutionary refugees, the Forty-Eighter immigrants, many of whom were revolutionary democrats and socialists. With blazing guns of glory and righteousness Django and Schultz not only kill the arrogant and sadistic plantation owner (Leonard DiCaprio) but also destroy the big house, and symbolically shatter the plantation. Django is Spartacus and Toussaint L’Ouverture, Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner all rolled into one; he is John Brown and the the slave revolutionaries John Brown hoped to meet at Harper’s Ferry; he is the Civil War that’s coming and a dramatic representation of those nearly 200,000 black soldiers who fought in it for their own liberation. Django is the new and hopeful future of black power and black freedom as he goes riding off into the sunset with the black woman he has freed beside him as the big house explodes behind them, slavery obliterated, overthrown and undone, free at last. Not since Glory, the 1989 film by Edward Zwick, have we had such a portrayal of African American dignity, courage, and heroism.

    The Civil War nearly over, Steve Spielberg’s Lincoln shows the president (Daniel Day Lewis) as he works to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that will grant freedom to the former slaves before the states of the Confederacy return to the union. Fearing that the returning Southern states would attempt to restore slavery, Lincoln is determined to get the votes to pass the amendment by hook or by crook, handing out federal jobs to Democrats to get their votes, and slavery is ended in law as it was in fact through the war. While African Americans stand at the center of the other two films, in Lincoln black people are virtually absent, ignoring their contribution to the abolition movement and the key role they played in the war. Lincoln could only have accomplished what he did because of Django and his brothers in the Union Army who struck fear in the hearts of southern planters and helped to turn the tide of war.

    Yet, despite the sense one might get from these films of a new understanding and reconciliation with our past and the historic debt owed to African Americans, under America’s first black president, the country’s black people are no better off and are in fact worse off in many respects than they have been since the Civil Rights Movement’s victories of the 1960s.

    As talk show host Tavis Smiley told Sean Hannity of Fox News in October of 2013 when asked if blacks were better off after five years under Obama, “The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over black people would have lost ground in every single leading economic indicating category. On that regard the President ought to be held responsible.” Under Obama, African Americans have higher unemployment, more poverty, and continued high rates of incarceration. The overall unemployment rate for whites fell by February 2014 to 6.7 percent, but for African Americans it remained at 12 percent—and both of those should be doubled to get something closer to the real unemployment rate that includes discouraged workers and those who are underemployed. The black poverty rate continued to be much higher than that of whites, while African American men were six times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. One in three black men would go to prison during their lifetimes. By March 2014, two million Americans had run out of unemployment insurance.

    The Democrats continue to hold on to their electoral base among African Americans, Latinos, women, and a minority of the white male working class simply because they are the not-very-lesser evil. As Bruce A. Dixon of Black Agenda Report wrote at the time, “To keep the Democratic party's brand alive as standard bearer for the oppressed and unemployed, elected Democrats and their enablers desperately need to blame this on those immoral, evil Republicans, who are also the reason the minimum wage hasn't risen, Medicaid expansion hasn't happened, workers can't organize unions without being blocked by bosses, and food stamps have been cut to unheard of levels.”

    Yet it is not the poverty and injustice that African Americans have continued to face under Obama that is the worst legacy of this regime. As Dixon writes, “After eight years of Barack Obama, black leadership and black America will have decisively lost and forgotten the habit, the inclination, even the example of standing against unjust and abusive power, and our former reputation around the world as a people of struggle. The height of the black Freedom Movement [lasted] only about eight or ten years, but it left an example of what it was to stand for justice and righteousness against bad laws and bad governance that inspired us and the rest of the world. Black youth who will reach maturity in the middle of this decade have no examples of struggle to look up to, only accommodations to power and excuses for inaction and ineffectiveness on every front.”

    Too many African Americans, the economic situation deteriorating, continue to live in the inner city ghettos, a world of low-paid workers and their families, of unemployment, poverty, and for too many of drugs, and crime. As rap artist K.R.I.T. sang a few years ago in his song “They Got Us All”: Break my back for nothing (for nothing)/Lock me up for struggling/Only god can judge me, now/They got us all fucked up.

    The Deporter-in-Chief

    While there is great debate about the deportation figures, hundreds of thousands of immigrants continue to be deported by the Obama administration, leading immigration rights activists to call him the “Deporter-in-Chief.” They argue that he has now deported more undocumented immigrants than Bush, with a total now approach two million. A similar number of families, they say, have suffered the loss of loved ones returned to Mexico, Central or South America. Wherever you live, if you turn your radio dial to the Mexican station with the música ranchera and you will hear tragic songs about how deportation is affecting Latino communities. “El Deportado,” the song by the popular Los Terrible del Norte sings in Spanish the story of the deported man whose wife and American children remain behind in the United States. His child asks him, “When are you coming back?” He explains that they won’t let him cross the border, but his English speaking child hardly understand him. “It’s terrible the way I feel and makes me want to cry.” Now they have only their mother. Some twelve million immigrants, most of them from Latin America and the largest percentage of those from Mexico, continue to live a world where a broken tail light or simply driving while brown can lead to arrest and then to a Kafkaesque chain of events, as they are taken from one prison to another—usually far from family and friends—have a quick hearing followed by rapid deportation, leaving behind their families with their economic and social problems, to say nothing of the trail of broken hearts.

    With mid-term elections approaching and the presidential election not so far away, Obama issued an executive order in January 2014 halting deportation for many young immigrants brought to the United States when they were infants or small children. Then in March he ordered a review of deportation policies, another gesture to the immigrant and Latino communities. But Latinos are now so alienated from the president, that according to voter registration workers, they simply may not vote, feeling “frozen in frustration,” according to Lisa Duran, executive director of Rights for All People.

    The Apocalyptic Horizon

    When the Obama years opened we talked of a looming environmental crisis in which the president showed little or no interest, at least not as judged by his environmental legislation. The crisis is looming no longer. Already greenhouse gases and climate change have led to melting ice caps and rising tides, and it is not the one you hear about that lifts all ships. The New York Times summed up in a headline the U.N. Panel on Climate Change report of spring 2014: “The Worst is Yet to Come.” The future according to the report: wild weather, the ecological transformation of entire regions of the world, droughts, food and water shortages, and violent conflicts over these resources. Who will suffer most? The developing world’s poor—but no one on the planet will be safe now that our climate and our entire environmental are changing so rapidly. The “Summary for Policymakers” puts it this way: “People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally, or otherwise marginalized are especially vulnerable to climate change and also to some adaptation and mitigation responses (medium evidence, high agreement). This heightened vulnerability is rarely due to a single cause. Rather, it is the product of intersecting social processes that result in inequalities in socioeconomic status and income, as well as in exposure. Such social processes include, for example, discrimination on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age, and (dis)ability.”

    Environmental issues were projected on the big screen in the biggest way as the administration began. James Cameron’s 3-D Avatar (2009)—a film said to have taken twenty years to make, so not exactly a response to short term social and political issues—presented a stark contrast between earthlings who had destroyed their planet’s resources and therefore preyed upon another’s, and the Na’vi of Pandora who lived in harmony with nature and the spirit that animated it. When the U.S. Marines attacked the planet to seize its precious mineral obtanium, in scenes reminiscent of the American Indian wars of the nineteenth century and the carpet bombing of Vietnam, one of the American agents, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who had been living as an avatar among the Na’vi, joins the native beings who, assisted by the fauna of their globe, heroically defeat American intergalactic imperialism and return to living in peace and concord with nature. While our own early environment continues to deteriorate, perhaps now beyond control, we leave the theater gratified that on some distant planet or moon, the Na’vi have saved their ecosystems, their society, and their sovereignty.

    If Avatar dealt—albeit in a Disneyish way—with environmental crisis and its relationship to racism and imperialism, one could say that Elysium projected on the big screen all of the domestic questions of environmental justice, health care, and economic and social inequality. Though set in 2154 it was all about the 2010s. Poor earthlings like Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) live and work in the teeming slums of our contaminated planet, while the rich reside on Elysium, an enormous space station (that looks rather like a Cancún resort) in luxury and, as the trailer explains, with “no war, no poverty, no sickness.” Those on Elysium are citizens, those on earth are all “illegals.” What divides them most is that the rich on Elysium have health care that really works, curing all their ills including cancer, while the poor on earth have none at all. Skipping most of the plot, suffice it to say that Da Costa, a factory worker and an incarnation of the proletariat, is transformed by gang-banger computer nerds into a one-man revolutionary army who takes over the computer and extends citizenship and health care to all earthlings. He is the white (or is he Latino?) working class Django bringing if not socialism at least genuine social democracy to our descendants a century and a half from now. 

    So far such rebellion seems more likely on the screen than in the streets.