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  • A Letter from Ukraine

    Dear Friends,

    As the uprising in Ukraine seems to be coming to a crisis after weeks of mass demonstrations and occupations, I would like to translate for you the following letter received last week from Julia Gusseva, the Russian translator of Victor Serge and co-organizer of the International Conference of Independent Labor Unions in Kiev last November. Julia, an activist since the ‘80s, is one of the founders of the Praxis Center in Moscow, and writes from an anarcho-syndicalist viewpoint.

    Richard Greeman

    Dear Richard,

    You ask what we think of the situation in Ukraine. In fact, the Ukrainian movement is a part of the wave of civil protests that has been unfurling for the last few years in every corner of the world (“Arab Spring,” Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, the movements in Greece, Turkey, Russia…). In Ukraine, the pretext was the refusal of the President to sign the agreement on association with the countries of the European Union. In this semi-authoritarian country, a large part of the population considered that association as a step toward democracy, rights, higher social standards, etc. The positive demands of the movement are democratic (return to the 2004 Constitution, new, free, honest elections, etc): the people are fighting for their full rights. The main thing is that the movement is self-organized (autonomous) everywhere around the country, with activists occupying the town halls, etc. The same labor unions who participated in our conference in Kiev last year have recently formed the all-Ukraine strike committee.

    As far as the “leading personalities” of the movement are concerned, we see the same thing as in Russia, Turkey, etc: politicians who are trying to put themselves at the head of the movement, but whom the great mass of protesters does not at all recognize as their leaders. Yes, there are various political currents in the movement, including Ukrainian nationalists (and also the Left, which is part of the “citizen sector” of the protesters), but the vast majority – as in Russia and elsewhere – are regular citizens, non-party political activists.

    Kiev has already seen police violence (before the current clashes – RG ) causing dozens of injuries and several deaths (at least four); this means the movement will not stop half way and fade out. Besides, the President is inclined to give in to popular pressure (there is no doubt that Putin would have acted differently in his place!)  So there is a good chance that the popular movement will triumph and, on the condition that the politicians don’t turn it to their own ends, will make Ukraine a freer and more democratic country than it is today.

    Je t’embrasse, Julia

    P.S.

    Asked about the publicity given to the presence among the demonstrators of right-wing and nationalist elements (both in the mainstream media and on the Left), Julia referred me to the following article, refuting what she called“Putinist/Stalinist insinuations about democratic revolutionary movement in Ukraine.”

  • ARGENTINE MOVEMENT DEMANDS EXONERATION OF CONVICTED OIL WORKERS

    Four Argentine oil workers were convicted last December 12 of having killed a policeman in the midst of a strike and a demonstration demanding the release of a jailed union member. The four—Ramón Cortez, José Rosale, Franco Padilla, and Hugo González—were sentenced to life in prison, while six other defendants were each sentenced to five years in prison on charges of coercion. Now a movement of human rights activists, labor unionists, university professors and students, cultural workers, political parties and elected officials from city and state government to congresspersons is demanding their release, arguing that they were “falsely convicted.”

    Daniel Ximénez of the Labor Studies Workshop (Taller de Estudios Laborales –TEL) in Buenos Aires, Argentina who is working in the movement to exonerate them calls their conviction a “tremendous injustice.”

    “They were sentenced to severe punishment for a crime they didn’t commit. And the most serious thing is that they were convicted in a case constructed by the prosecutors on the basis of torture, threats, and lies—without any evidence. They are being punished in order to intimidate the workers of our country,” said Ximénez.

    The case began in 2006 during a strike at Las Heras against a new income that would affect workers’ wages and against out-sourcing. During the weeks-long strike a union leader was arrested and his coworkers and family members went to the jail where he was being held to seek his release. The police then attacked those who had come to the jail and in the melee a police officer was shot and killed. Prosecutors subsequently brought indictments against a number of oil workers, ultimately convicting ten. There is much speculation about how the police officer might have been killed, though no other indictments have been made.

    Oswaldo Bayer, the famous journalist and screenplay writer, said of the case, “The people of Argentina are living through one of the greatest historic injustices, that of the oil worker comrades of Las Heras. This case is comparable to many of the crimes committed by the military dictatorships we lived through in past years.” Bayer compared the Argentine oil workers to the “martyrs of Chicago,” that is the seven workers convicted and four hanged in Chicago during the struggle for the eight-hour day in the 1880s. The Chicago workers were convicted of having set off a bomb in the Chicago Haymarket leading to a riot in 1886 in which seven policemen and four workers were killed, though no evidence linking them directly to the crime was ever presented.

    Speaking of the oil workers of La Heras, Ximénez said, “The prosecution was never able to present evidence against the accused, but they acknowledged that the police had used torture in the interrogations in an attempt to get the evidence they wanted. False witnesses were also forced to testify under threat, but they later complained to the judges that their testimony had been coerced and proclaimed the innocence of the accused. For these reasons the initial judgment was annulled, though it was later upheld upon appeal to the provincial government.”

    Hundreds of Argentines from federal legislators and top union officials to human rights activists and artists have signed a petition calling for the exoneration of the ten workers who have been jailed in the case. The movement is seeking international support. [See petition below.]

    PETITION

    EXONERATION FOR THE WORKERS OF LAS HERAS

    We, the undersigned, repudiate the unjust conviction handed down by the tribunal of Caleta Olivia on December 12, 2013 in the case of nine petroleum workers of Las Heras, Santa Cruz province (Argentina), of whom four were sentenced to life imprisonment—one of them being a minor at the time dealt with under a special legal system; one was condemned to five years in prison on a charge of violent coercion and being an accessory; and finally four were sentenced to five years in prison for coercion.

    The workers were condemned without any proof and with grave violations of human rights, for the murder of officer Sayago, which occurred in a town in that area in 2006 when they demonstrated to oppose a tax on earnings and for better working conditions.

    We the undersigned demand the exoneration of the workers, given that this conviction was fabricated out of falsehoods.

    During the course of the trial and the arguments, the defense attorneys for the petroleum workers, who were constantly threatened and sanctioned by the court, demonstrated the innocence of the workers, against whom no evidence had been brought. The only thing that was demonstrated was the torture, humiliation, and threats suffered by the oil workers at the hands of the provincial police during the three years that the workers were detained, an action more appropriate to a military dictatorship than to a democracy.

    We denounce the court that went forward with this trial and then convicted the defendants based on torture. Mr. Candia, one of the prosecutors, acknowledged this, saying that he didn’t consider a blow to the head and a couple of slaps to be torture. We are dealing here with a verdict fabricated in order to convict the workers, plagued with human rights violations, such as the brutal torture to which the victims were subjected during their detention, as well as the constant threats against their families.

    Human rights organizations, labor unions, social movements and political parties have denounced the trial and have taken their case to the National Secretary of Human Rights, asking the Secretary to carry out an investigation of the trial.

    These harsh verdicts represent one of the gravest attacks on workers who have come out to fight for their rights since 1983 at the end of the military dictatorship. The purpose of this verdict is to make an example of the workers so that workers will not confront the oil companies and the large employers. In this way, it sets a very grave precedent, namely that the courts uphold convictions based on testimony obtained through torture.

    The conviction of the workers did not lead to their immediate imprisonment, which cannot be carried out until the sentence is finalized; meanwhile, we will use this time to achieve real justice, which means the exoneration of our comrades. At the beginning of February, the case was appealed, and if that appeal is not successful, the case will be taken to the provincial Supreme Court in the city of Río Gallegos in the Province of Santa Cruz.

    Therefore we demand:

    Immediate and unconditional exoneration for the petroleum workers of Las Heras.

    Those who wish to sign this petition should send their name and organization to either the committee working for exoneration at absoluciontrabajadoreslasheras@gmail.com or to tel@tel.org.ar.

    Signatures:

    Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

    Osvaldo Bayer, writer and journalist

    Nora Cortiñas, Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Línea Fundadora

    Mirta Acuña de Baravalle, Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Línea Fundadora

    Elia Espen, Madres de Plaza de Mayo

    Graciela Rosenblum, Presidenta Liga Argentina por los Derechos del Hombre

    and many others…

    The complete list of endorsers can be found at: http://tel.org.ar/spip/spip.php?article261.

     

  • Steve Kindred: Irrepressible American Radical, 1944-2013

    Steve Kindred, an irrepressible American radical— student and antiwar activist, socialist, and labor organizer—died of cancer on December 9, 2013 in New York City at the age of 69.

    Kindred, a legendary figure among Teamster activists, had worked in various states as a freight driver, car hauler, and limousine driver; helped to establish several TDU chapters; led wildcat strikes; and counseled reformers who ran for office. Brilliant, courageous, eccentric, down-to-earth, generous, and kind, Kindred was remembered by family and friends at a memorial service held at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies of the City University of New York on February 8.

    Born on May 14, 1944 in Waverly, Iowa, Kindred was the son of Arthur Kindred, a Methodist minister, and Carol Hunt Kindred, who played music in the church; visited the congregation’s poor, sick, and elderly;, and raised three boys. Steve’s brother Mike told the 150 friends and family members who attended the memorial that Arthur Kindred’s support for the Civil Rights Movement and opposition to the U.S. war against Vietnam strongly influenced his sons. The family’s Methodist missionary visitors who had served in other countries around the world widened the children’s horizons. Hoboes knew the Kindred home as a place where they could get a warm meal. Their mother’s ministrations to the poor served as a model for the concern for others and kindness towards society’s less fortunate that came to form part of the core of Steve Kindred’s character.

    Educated in Iowa’s public schools, Steve went off in 1962 to study at the University of Chicago, where he soon moved into the activist circles opposing the Vietnam War. His grad student friend Bernard Tuchman became a mentor who discussed political ideas and social movement strategy with him. Kindred became involved in the fight against the University of Chicago’s complicity in the Vietnam War; the school was providing student lists and rankings to the Selective Service System. In the spring of 1966, Steve was among the students who occupied the university administration buildings as professors such as Jesse Lemisch and Staughton Lynd taught American history from the Bottom Up to the occupiers. As a result of his participation, Steve ended up being suspended from the university.

    Steve became active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Founded in 1960, SDS developed by the mid- to late-1960s into a national, mass organization through which passed thousands of members before its demise due to sectarian in-fighting at the 1969 convention. In 1966 Steve’s father convinced the board of the Methodist camp at Clear Lake, Iowa, to allow the SDS convention to be held on its grounds. Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Steve had become persona non grata with Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police department, and was constantly harassed by them.

    After the collapse of SDS, Steve and other members of the University of Chicago student movement joined the newly formed International Socialists (I.S.), an organization that Steve saw as embodying his belief that socialism had to be built from below by ordinary working people. Led intellectually by Hal Draper, the I.S. defined itself as democratic, revolutionary and internationalist. The I.S. came out of the Third Camp socialist tradition; that is, it opposed both capitalism, including European Social Democracy, and the bureaucratic Communism of the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba.

    Based initially in Berkeley and New York City, the group had decided by 1970 that its members would move to Midwestern industrial cities and seek jobs in industry. The I.S. believed that socialists working in industrial unions could help to build rank-and-file caucuses that would either force labor union officials to fight the employers or push them aside. Out of these caucuses the I.S. was convinced that it would be possible to recruit working-class activists to socialism and to begin to build a small revolutionary socialist party in the United States.

    Steve, who was then living in Los Angeles, worked with other I.S. members there to create a student worker alliance with its newspaper The Picketline. When in 1970 the Teamsters went on strike, Steve and other I.S. members recruited students to support the strike and won new friends among the Teamsters with whom they walked the picket lines. At that time, Steve met and worked with Curly Best, a Teamster who had founded the “500 at 50” club, fighting for $500 a month at 50 years of age for retiring Teamsters. 

    When in July 1971 a group of rank-and-file Teamsters met in Toledo to create the Teamster Union Rank and File (TURF), Best was chosen as one of its national leaders and Steve became his aide and editor of TURF’s newspaper. Steve had a gift for listening to workers, talking with them, and convincing them to become active in the rank-and-file movement.

    TURF did not survive very long, but by the mid-1970s, the International Socialists had several members active in forming rank-and-file groups in various Teamster locals. Steve played a key role in the mid-1970s, traveling throughout the Midwest and meeting with local Teamster activists, convincing them to join the national contract campaign Teamsters for a Decent Contract and later in 1976 Teamsters for a Democratic Union. During the late 1970s Steve worked in Detroit with Teamster activists on local union election campaigns and with car haulers and provided leaderships for a massive wildcat strike in Ohio.

    When in 1986 the International Socialists merged with two other organizations to form Solidarity: A Socialist, Feminist, Anti-Racist Organization, it was Kindred who made the motion to name the group Solidarity after the Polish workers movement Solidarność, which through mass union organization and strikes had challenged the Polish Communist government.

    After the mid-1980s Steve married Ellen Goldensohn and moved to Manhattan, becoming involved in support for Teamster warehousemen. Steve was active in the TDU-supported Ron Carey for Teamster President campaigns in 1991 and 1996 and for a time in the 1990s worked as a union official in a local that had been thrown into trusteeship because of previous union corruption. In 2009 Steve became involved in the support committee for the workers at the Stella D’Oro Biscuit Company in New York.

    Steve’s friends knew him as a voracious reader of books on history, politics, and science, as lover of art and nature, as a loving father to his son, Benjamin. Steve often stopped to talk with homeless men he met on the street, got to know their names, and became friendly with them, helped them out with a few dollars now and then, and sometimes took their clothes home to wash and fold them. He walked down the street picking up and compacting trash, got into conversations with everyone, rushed to help anyone who might need help on the street, including interrupting at least one robbery with his powerful and, if need be, frightening voice.

    Suffering throughout his life from depression, which he battled through with therapy and medications, he was at times deeply disturbed by issues public and private that could lead him to obsessive, uncontrollable and unstoppable monologues. Though oblivious at those moments to others, he remained at his core a remarkably kind, generous, and loving human being.

    From the time he joined the Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the 1960s, through SDS, the IS and TDU, Steve remained committed to the idea that society must be changed from the bottom up. He believed that every human being was an interesting and in their way an important person, treated all with dignity, could be counted on the side of the underdog. As his longtime friend Dave Finkel reminded those at the memorial service, Steve remained true to that compass, never fooled by the idea that there was a shortcut through support for some Communist country or work in the Democratic Party. Socialism would have to come from below, from the grassroots, from the rank and file, from the ordinary people whom Steve helped, trusted, loved, and respected.

    A version of this obituary appeared earlier in Jacobin.https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/images/cleardot.gif

     

     

  • Pitting students against teachers

    In California a legal battle is being fought that has political implications for teachers everywhere.  It’s being cast – incorrectly –  as a confrontation between teachers’ jobs and students’ rights.

                Appropriating the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, powerful elites who want to control what is taught and how, so as to privatize education and control what is taught and how, have established front groups, like “Students First” to advance their aims.  “Students First” has filed a case in California to eliminate tenure and professional protections teachers have when they are found to be ineffective.

                What those of us who want to protect public education have to say first – loudly and clearly – is that the kinds of statements made by teachers being put into testimony in the Vergara case are not ones we as a profession or a society can accept.  I don’t defend the right of a teacher to tell a student that she has no future. What I do defend is the right of a teacher accused of having made disrespectful, damaging remarks the same common sense protections that we give anyone accused of a crime, most importantly the need for evidence that the incident occurred as reported.  This protection is the only way to prevent witch hunts.  Frightened teachers produce frightened children. Tenure protects teachers and in so doing it protects children. Conditions in schools sabotage teachers’ best efforts to reach all kids. I explain this more fully in my book on urban teaching and can’t give the topic the attention it so deserves in a blog.  We should be clear that the anti-teachers union, anti-teacher changes “Students First” is pursuing in this lawsuit will do nothing to improve the conditions that lead to teachers acting in ways they ought not:

                “Urban schools are notorious for the poor quality of their professional development; more often than not inservice workshops are useless, even insulting. Teachers see that their ideas are not valued or respected, and in response many stop struggling to make themselves heard.  They have so often been ordered to use a new curriculum or method that they become skeptical about all change.”

                Teachers can fall into the trap of blaming students and parents for the school system’s and the society’s failures – just as teachers are now themselves being made scape goats for everything that schools and our government should do but don’t. To fight back against the pernicious attack on public education we have to be clear that students and parents are our most important allies. They are not responsible for the root causes of poor schooling, which are what we need to change.

                Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric. Vergara is using a real problem to advance aims that will destroy the promise of a quality education for the kids who most need it.  The case is not about improving schools but eliminating the chance for all kids to attend schools that will support and nurture them. 

    I invite reader responses at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. You can follow me on twitter and Facebook, as well as my blog every Wednesday here at New Politics.  

     

     

  • Learn–like Seeger Did—to Sing Another Tune

    Bhaskar Sunkara, editor and publisher of Jacobin, has written an article for Al Jazeera America that, while ostensibly a defense of the great American songwriter and folk singer Pete Seeger, is actually an apologia for the American Communist Party. Bhaskar, my colleague on the New Politics editorial board, is a sharp political analyst and Jacobin is a new and important voice on the American left, so his muddle on this issue needs to be addressed. American radicals have been decades freeing themselves from the Communist Party’s historic dominance of the left, and it would be a shame if today’s young activists were to turn back toward that fundamentally flawed and compromised tradition.

    The heart of Bhaskar's essay is found in these short paragraphs criticizing those who praised Seeger for his role as one of the best known artistic voices of American social protests from the 1960s until his death, despite his past Communist Party membership:

    Such attempts at balance miss the mark. It's not that Seeger did a lot of good despite his longtime ties to the Communist Party; he did a lot of good because he was a Communist.

    This point is not to apologize for the moral and social catastrophe that was state socialism in the 20th century, but rather to draw a distinction between the role of Communists when in power and when in opposition. A young worker in the Bronx passing out copies of the Daily Worker in 1938 shouldn't be conflated with the nomenklatura that oversaw labor camps an ocean away.

    As counterintuitive as it may sound, time after time American Communists such as Seeger were on the right side of history — and through their leadership, they encouraged others to join them there.

    Bhaskar’s assertion about American Communists being “on the right side of history” flies in the face of all we know about the Soviet Union, the Communist International, and the American Communist Party (CP). The Soviet Union represented not “state socialism” or socialism of any kind, but rather the coming to power of a bureaucratic ruling class that built a totalitarian state and society that oppressed and exploited its own working class—killing millions—while it also controlled and manipulated the Communist Parties in other countries that followed its line through all of the famous “twists and turns” of the period from the late 1920s through the 1950s.  

    Bhaskar suggests a divorce between the (bad) Communist Party in power in the Soviet Union and the (good) Communist Party in opposition in the United States. But these parties were joined together organizationally and ideologically and pursued the same goal, which was the perpetuation of the Soviet Union’s social system and, where possible, its extension to other societies. The national Communist parties not only praised and promoted the Soviet Union and its ruling Communist Party, but also modeled themselves after it, creating authoritarian organizations dominated by loyal Stalinist leaderships.

    Bhaskar knows, of course, that by the late 1920s Joseph Stalin had succeeded in taking control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the government of the Soviet Union, as well of the Communist International that laid down the line for Communist Parties around the world. He seems not to understand, however, that the American CP's leadership, cadres, and many in its rank and file were not political innocents. Stalin and his agents had to approve the Communist Party leadership in the United States, and those who failed to carry out instructions from Moscow were soon removed from office. Perhaps his readers are unaware that party leaders and key cadres of the American CP of the 1930s were sent to the International Lenin School in Moscow where they were trained in “Marxism-Leninism,” a dogmatic perversion of Marxism that argued for the Stalinist-style top-down political party, for the one-party rule of the Communist bureaucracy, and for the party’s control of labor unions and other mass movements.

    In 1936 the American Communist Party urged its members and fellow-travelers to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to go to Spain, and to join in the defense of the Spanish Republic; but the Brigade also supported attacks on Spanish anarchists and on the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), including the kidnapping and assassinations of the leaders of those other left organizations—such as Andrés Nin—that were also fighting fascism. Some of those Communists returned to become local leaders of Communist Party chapters or labor unions.

    When World War II broke out, the Soviet Union—and therefore Communist Parties around the world—at first aligned themselves with Hitler’s Nazi Germany, leading many Communists to quit the party. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Communists suddenly became supporters of the Allies, joining with Britain, France, and later the United States—the world's three great capitalist and imperialist powers—in the struggle against the Axis. Following the Soviet line, the American CP for the duration of the war opposed the fight for African American liberation, and worked to prevent labor union strikes and to squelch anything that might have disrupted the war effort. When the U.S. government invoked the Smith Act to imprison the Trotskyist leadership of the Minneapolis Teamsters Union, the Communists applauded the government (though later the Smith Act would be used against the Communists themselves from 1949-1958). During the war, the Communists also supported the internment of the Japanese and expelled Japanese members from their own party.

    While still running its own candidates, the Communist Party—with the exception of the Henry Wallace Progressive Party campaign of 1948—moved most of its political work into the Democratic Party. The Democrats were at the time the party of the Jim Crow Solid South and the corrupt big city political machines; and the Communists failed to extricate themselves from the Democrats where they have remained for over 65 years.  

    All of these, however, are details compared to the greatest problem, which was the fact that the Communist Party dictatorship in the Soviet Union became identified in the public mind with socialism, first through the efforts of the Communists and then through the propaganda of the anti-Communists. This did immeasurable harm to the socialist cause. Since the 1920s all of those interested in creating a democratic socialist society have had to struggle to disentangle Marxism from Stalinism, to separate the struggle for socialism from the construction of a Communist dictatorship. We may only now be freeing ourselves from the CP albatross.

    Without a doubt, many American radicals who wanted to fight racism, organize labor unions, establish a mass working class party, and fight for socialism were attracted to the Communist Party. The Communist Party, however, also shaped those radicals who joined the party, convincing them to accept its top-down organization, pressuring them to toe the party line, and over time shaping a membership that in too many cases gave up its critical faculties. Party patriotism—much like national patriotism—created a membership that by and large rejected any criticism of the Soviet Union, the Communist International, or the American CP. For too many Communists their attitude was “My party right or wrong.” Communist rank-and-filers often adopted a kind of imagined “toughness,” a callousness about human life and suffering, summed up in their old adage that you “can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” Communists were all too often willing to look the other way, turning a blind eye to things they knew were happening in the USSR because one could not cast any doubt on the “workers homeland.”

    It is, of course, true that many rank-and-file Party members, perhaps including Pete Seeger, sincerely believed that they were fighting for something like democratic socialism—although their conception of socialism had to have been corrupted by the need to apologize for Soviet reality, both to others and in their own minds. It is also true that many CPers were barely socialists at all, even subjectively, but saw themselves rather as militant trade unionists or fighters for racial equality. But the point is that whatever rank-and-filers thought they were doing, their activity served the needs of the Party as long as they stayed in it. They had no ability to control the policy of the Party or its top leadership, which was selected by the Soviet bureaucracy and which in turn selected the leaders at lower levels of the organization. For Communist leaders, loyalty to Stalin and the Soviet Union was absolute; as soon as that loyalty wavered, they either left the Party or were expelled.

    While for years Pete Seeger had been a loyal Stalinist Communist and an exponent of those politics, to his credit by the early 1950s he like so many other Communists a bit later—after the Hungarian Revolution and the Khrushchev report on Stalin’s crimes against humanity to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party—had broken to a great extent with the Soviet Union and the American CP, even if often retaining a somewhat nostalgic and romanticized view of the Communist past.

    Unfortunately Bhaskar doesn’t follow the example of the Seeger he admires. Ignoring the extensive literature on the American Communist Party and its relationship to the Soviet Union, which makes clear its subordination to the bureaucratic Communist model, Bhaskar attempts not the rehabilitation of Seeger, but the refurbishing of the Communist Party and its Popular Front period. If we are going to look back at the Communist Party in order to learn from it—and there is much to learn from that experience—we have to do so critically. If we admire Seeger, as I do, and the thousands of other rank-and-file Communists who fought racism and built labor unions, we have to consider how their accomplishments and the prospects for the socialist cause in the United States were undermined by the fact that they were led by such a fundamentally reactionary political party. Just think of how much better off the left would be today had those activists been democratic radicals and socialists.

    If Bhaskar and Jacobin are going to be a voice of the American left, they should—as Seeger did—learn to sing another tune.

     

  • Preschool and snow days

                Is the push for preschool something we should celebrate?  Yes and no. As the NY Times notes, universal preschool is “having its moment, as a favored cause for politicians and interest groups who ordinarily have trouble agreeing on the time of day.”  When a Republican governor (Snyder) who has turned its largest city, populated by minority citizens, into a colony ruled by the (white) legislature, states that preschool is “a human need and an economic need” we should be taking note. Unfortunately, unions are not. Nor are folks in education who should know better.  We can be sure that powerful elites who want schools to serve their interests aim to have the economic function of schooling trump the human.

                Deborah Meier’s blog suggests what we should be asking – and demanding – in this push to send kids to (pre)school at age 5.  She cites work of a Cambridge University researcher, published in an Australian newspaper, who argues that “Five is just too young to start formal learning,” this specialist in cognitive development of young children argues.  Children should, instead, be “engaged in informal play-based learning.”       Kindergarten “has now become or becoming first grade,” Deborah points out, noting that “pre-K could maybe be our last chance to build-in the kind of playfulness that all schools should later honor.”  From what I hear from teachers, the situation in schools is worse than our having “lost kindergarten” to academics. We’ve lost kindergarten to test preparation, with children being taught how to use bubble sheets, answer multiple choice questions.

                We have to note that preschool serves different purposes for different children. My daughter attended preschool partly because as a working mom, I needed childcare. I also wanted her to be prepared socially for school (and life), learn how to get along with other children who came from families quite different from ours, become accustomed to relating to adults in authority other than her parents. Many children are first exposed to books and reading in preschool. That wasn’t necessary for my daughter, but I respect how important this is for many children.  Quality early childhood education supports children to develop socially, emotionally, and cognitively.  And that’s what we need for all kids.

                Both AFT and NEA have embraced the drive for universal preschool. Neither has (to my knowledge – prove me wrong here, please) rejected the rhetoric that preschool should serve economic interests.  Given the unions’ endorsements of the Common Core and teacher evaluations linked to test scores, it’s not surprising that the unions have accepted the economic rationale for preschool. We should be organizing now to insist that preschool develop children’s full human potential, rather than being vocational training.

                One last note, on snow days. Parents work and rely on schools to take care of their children. This is especially true in school systems serving parents who work in low-wage jobs that provide no personal days. When parents miss work, they don’t earn money and may even jeopardize their employment.  At the same time, when schools are kept open during dicey weather conditions, teachers often have to risk their safety to get to their jobs only to face classes that have only a small proportion of kids in attendance. Teachers feel like they are “babysitting.”

                The solution to this requires acknowledging that schooling is more than giving kids knowledge.  Parents rely on us to care for their children and there is nothing demeaning about that. We are shaping the next generation, socially, emotionally, politically, intellectually.  What’s demeaning is that schools are not organized to support teachers in doing that complex work.  In my opinion, we should have emergency plans so that schools provide safe, engaging environments for kids when the weather makes students’ and teachers’ travel to school dangerous but communities are otherwise functioning and parents will be expected to be at work.

    .I invite reader responses at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. You can follow me on twitter and Facebook, as well as my blog every Wednesday here at New Politics. 

  • VICTOR SERGE: CONSCIENCE OF THE REVOLUTION

    ImageSusan Weissman. Victor Serge: A Political Biography. New York: Verso, 2013. Notes. Biographical glossary. Bibliography. Index. 452 pages.

    From its opening pages Susan Weissman’s Victor Serge: A Political Biography thrusts us into the life of this remarkable revolutionary and writer as he plunges into the Russian Revolution with all of its contradictions. Weissman has written a wonderful intellectual and, above all, political life of Serge that focuses on his experience in the Bolshevik Party and then in the Left Opposition, explaining how he attempted to understand and express through his journalism, essays, histories, memoir, novels and poems the meaning of it all as the workers’ revolution first faltered and was then transformed into the Stalinist regime. Weissman’s Victor Serge takes up virtually all of the major incidents, issues, and personalities of the revolution during the 1920s and 1930s, giving particular attention to Serge’s coincidences and differences with Leon Trotsky.

    Originally published by Verso in 2002 as Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope, this new paperback edition with a new title, a new preface, and 50 pages of supplemental material in the form of a biographical glossary, only became available this past June. Weissman has produced a book where scholarship based both on the archives and on the social history of the revolution joins with her passion for the subject matter and with Serge’s and her own socialist politics to produce a remarkably stimulating book. For anyone interested in the history the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Party, and the Soviet Union, and in their significance for the questions of the past and future of the socialist movement, this book is a must read. Through it we enter into Serge’s central political preoccupations, the concerns of an anarchist turned Bolshevik: What is the relationship between a revolutionary workers’ movement and the party and leaders at the head of it? How do adverse economic and political developments shape both the movement and the party? What is the responsibility of the individual revolutionary in the defense of the revolution both from its external enemies and from its own internal dynamics tending toward authoritarianism? How can we in a process as powerful and violent as a revolution preserve its foundations in the solidarity of the underdogs as well as its humanist ideals and goals?    

    Serge’s life experience embodies and exemplifies that of the European revolutionary socialist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The son of exiled Russian revolutionary parents who had been involved with the Narodnik or Peoples’ Will Party, Serge was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich in Brussels in 1890. As a teenager, he joined the Socialist Young Guard in Belgium, but in search of a more radical politics and lifestyle became an anarchist and editor of the weekly Anarchie published in Paris. In 1913, though he himself was not involved in crime or violence, because of his anarchist convictions and refusal to desert his comrades, he was convicted in the famous trial of the anarchist Bonnot gang and sentenced to five years in a French prison. Released in 1917, he was expelled from France and joined the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Barcelona where he participated in preparations for the uprising that took place there later that year. Back in France, he was arrested and held for more than a year in a French concentration camp as a suspected Bolshevik. At the end of World War I he was traded by the French government for a French officer held in Russia, and so in late 1918 arrived in his parents’ homeland.

    In Soviet Russia Serge joined the Bolshevik or Communist Party, worked for the Soviet government, and fought in the civil war. With his knowledge of several European languages and extraordinary writing skills, he went to work for the Communist International or Comintern as a political analyst, writer and journalist serving in Berlin and Vienna. When he returned to Russia in 1925 he joined Trotsky in the Left Opposition but, after Stalin’s victory in the fight over party leadership, Serge was expelled from the Communist Party in 1928. During the Stalinist terror that expanded and became more intense between 1928 and 1936, Serge was arrested and jailed twice, once held in solitary confinement for 85 days in the Lubyanka Prison and eventually sent to the Orenburg gulag near Kazakhstan where he lived with his son Vlady. Finally freed from the Orenburg concentration camp by campaigns organized by European writers, artists, and intellectuals, he returned to France in 1936. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Serge and Vlady narrowly escaped and after many difficulties eventually reached Mexico where he lived and worked until his death in 1947. Throughout all of these years Serge remained remarkably productive, writing several novels, histories, and many essays dedicated to understanding and analyzing the progress and regress of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary movement more generally.

    Weissman follows the adventure of Serge’s life and the evolution of his thinking particularly after he became involved in the Bolshevik Party and then in the Left Opposition that opposed the rise and consolidation of Joseph Stalin’s bureaucratic counter-revolution in the Soviet Union. While Leon Trotsky was the leader of the Opposition, Serge was no mere follower, developing his own critique of the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet State. Throughout the 1920s and well into the 1930s, Serge was the principal translator of Trotsky’s workers into French and for many Western Europeans who were sympathetic to the Opposition, he was, after Trotsky himself, the best known writer and analyst of developments in the Communist movement. During those years Stalin crushed the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union, while the Soviet GPU, the secret police, infiltrated the Opposition and pursued and assassinated Opposition leaders in Europe. Trotsky, giving up on the idea of changing the direction of the Communist International and the Communist Parties, brought together his small groups of followers and launched the Fourth International in 1938. By then the positions of Trotsky and Serge had so diverged that it was impossible for them to collaborate. Trotsky’s criticized Serge scathingly in public and even more viciously in the inner circles of the opposition.

    Serge differed with Trotsky on a whole series of issues going back to the early days of the revolution, differences that in the context of the Spanish Civil War and the founding of the Fourth International took on greater significance. One of those debates dealt with the old issues of the Kronstadt Rebellion of February 1921. Trotsky, as a leader of the Bolshevik Party shared responsibility for the violent suppression of the rebellion, though he had had no personal hand in it. Both Trotsky and Serge agreed that the rebellion had had to be stopped and suppressed because it opened the door to counter-revolution in Russia. But, while Serge saw the Kronstadt rebels’ program as representing the “beginning of a fresh, liberating revolution for popular democracy,” Trotsky argued that “the Kronstadt uprising was nothing but an armed reaction of the petty bourgeoisie against the hardships of social revolution and the severity of the proletarian dictatorship.” [Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, translated by Peter Sedgwick (London: Writers and Readers, 1984) and Trotsky, “Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt.”]

    The differences on Kronstadt paralleled their differences over the role of the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government. Serge, as Weissman shows, saw the beginning of the degeneration and the slide toward totalitarianism in the establishment of the Cheka and the death penalty as early as 1921. Trotsky disagreed on the role of the Cheka in that period and would date the degeneration of the party several years later, nor would he share Serge’s libertarian critique of the Bolshevik-Soviet government.

    The Trotsky-Serge disputes over Kronstadt and the Cheka were driven by their differences in the late 1930s over the Spanish Civil War and the establishment of the Fourth International. As the Spanish civil war and potential revolution unfolded, Serge supported the Workers Party of Marxist Unification, the POUM, a fusion of left and right Communists, while Trotsky criticized it for a variety of reasons but most importantly for joining the Popular Front government in Catalonia. Serge was also much more sympathetic than Trotsky to Catalonia’s mostly anarchist labor movement, which also ultimately joined the Popular Front.  

    Those differences over Spain were in turn related to the question of Trotsky’s call for the establishment of a Fourth International. Serge believed that a new International could only be created by real revolutionary working class parties in a few important countries—and there were none. Trotsky was determined that his Left Opposition groups, most of them mere handfuls of young intellectuals, could issue the call for and go on to construct a Fourth International as a new party of world revolution. Trotsky, with his usual will and fervor fought fiercely for the creation of the Fourth International organized around his programmatic ideas. As many of his former collaborators, including his own son Leon Sedov, noted, throughout these years Trotsky became more rigid, dogmatic, intolerant and authoritarian toward both his friends and his critics in the anti-Stalinist left, making a genuine discussion of the issues among those in the revolutionary left and particularly in the Trotskyist circles more difficult.

    My own view on these debates, I must confess, sometimes coincides with Trotsky but at other times leans toward Serge. Trotsky’s logic is often completely convincing, though Serge’s ethical stand is often more compelling to me. While understanding Trotsky’s belief that the workers’ movement needed a new revolutionary leadership as an alternative to Social Democracy and Stalinism, Serge was certainly right that one could not create a new Fourth International out of the tiny, inexperienced, and generally isolated Trotskyist groups in Western Europe and the United States. The Fourth International never became a real international of working class parties and soon split into rival factions most made up of small revolutionary currents in various countries. On the question of the POUM in Spain, while I agree in general with Trotsky’s critique of the Popular Front and I recognize the POUM’s participation in the Catalan Popular Front—it’s leader Andrés Nin became Minister of Justice—compromised its position as an independent force, yet it is also the case that the small party attempted in the labor and social movements to maintain a critical and independent posture vis-à-vis the government of Lluís Companys while taking advantage of the opportunity to expand its presence and recruit. This was a strategy that ultimately failed, as Trotsky predicted, though it is not at all clear that the POUM’s independence from the government would have been any more successful given the balance of forces.

    On the question of the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky and Serge—though they existed in the same Opposition—tended in their responses to the critical situation in Soviet Russia in the 1920s to differ in their approaches, Trotsky generally focusing on influencing the party leadership (a least until 1929), while Serge wished to find a way somehow to not only reestablish democracy within the party, but also in working class, and the broader society. Serge was willing in 1923-24 to consider the possibility of a coalition government in Russia—though one wonders who could possibly have formed such a coalition—something Trotsky could never have accepted. Finally, Trotsky and Serge differed on the nature of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s; the former calling it a “degenerated workers’ state” while the latter described it was “bureaucratic totalitarianism with collectivist leanings.” Yet, both thought it was necessary to carry out a new revolution in Soviet Russia to bring workers back to power. Even today, many decades later, the debates between Trotsky and Serge, the issues they raised, seem difficult to resolve, and so it is perhaps best just to say that we place ourselves in that tradition of revolutionary, democratic, and international socialism that they both exemplified.

    The assassination of Trotsky by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in August 1940 ended the debate between the two men, though Serge, who had also found refuge in Mexico, would go on analyzing the political situation and the possibilities of the left until his death in November 1947. He died leaving a legacy of important socialist histories, memoirs, and wonderful novels. Those interested in Serge’s final years will find interesting the “Mexican Notebooks: 1940-47” published in New Left Review 82 (July/August) 2013.  We read there what may have been Serge’s last appreciation of Bolshevism. He writes:

    5 December 1941. Boshevism as a tremendous human achievement. The course of some sixty years had created a numerous revolutionary intelligentsia, constituting a unique achievement up till now in the modern world. Its general characteristics: a capacity for conviction, a unity of thought, action and life; personality, not individualism; social awareness, energy, capacity for sacrifice and hunger for victory.

    Serge himself can be placed within this tradition, while at the same time its critic and its conscience.

  • Defending teachers, protecting US kids: What's needed

         It’s hard to overstate how frightened US teachers are in many schools and districts.  We know from research that many teachers in schools now chose this career because they love kids and/or their subject matter.  Some of activists in social justice causes but many have never taken an interest in what they’ve viewed as “politics,” remote from their work.  These teachers aren’t prepared for the ferocity of the attack they’ve experienced, and teachers unions have been so weakened, legally and politically, that teachers feel quite vulnerable. When national unions call for collaboration with management, as AFT has done, the union signals that they are not going to fight.  (Incidentally, this stance is echoed in collaborations of the international confederation of teachers unions, the Education International, with multinational corporations.)

    Image

         The problem is not limited to the AFT by any means. Echoing the national organization, NEA staff working for the state affiliates often tell members and local officers that teachers are too demoralized and frightened to defend their rights. I’ve heard from many teachers who’ve responded to my challenge to work with and in their unions that the NEA staff from the state assigned to their local (how NEA organizes staffing) send a message that teachers are powerless. (In contrast, I hear from NEA staff that they try to empower members but are hamstrung by state and national attitudes.) Members realize “the union” is not going to protect them and retreat from engagement. Their mantra becomes “Do what you’re told. Keep a low profile. Definitely don’t make waves.”

         One result of this dynamic is that some heroic teachers have stood up for their rights and kids and have been left in the lurch. While we have to defend people who are victimized, we need a strategy to avoid victimization of individuals.  Unless teachers organize at the school site as well as in the local, state, and national, conditions are going to worsen. We need to work with parents, yes. But parents need teachers – and teachers unions – to provide organization and support.  We can win when we mobilize with parent and student support and make our struggle public, as did Seattle teachers when they boycotted their state’s standardized test. (Incidentally, leaders of that effort have formed a reform caucus in their NEA affiliate.  It has a mighty good-looking platform and slate.)

         Fear is often more intense in elementary schools, for reasons too many and complex to explain in this blog.  I learned from organizing as a classroom teacher in California that when elementary school teachers “get it,” they are solid and tenacious.  So how do we help teachers who are fearful to “get it”?  We need to talk to people, one on one.  We need to engage in struggles that will yield achievements and avoid victimization. Sometimes when we’re too afraid to defend ourselves, we are moved by our  obligation to protect someone in our care. I think we can support teachers who’ve all their lives wanted to be teachers because they love kids (female elementary school teachers mostly) to become more engaged in struggle is to reinforce our obligation to protect kids. When we don’t, we violate our professional ethics. If we have evidence that a parent or guardian abuses a child, our legal obligation is to report this to protective services.  But what do we do when it’s the authorities themselves that are abusing children – or looking the other way?

         Wayne State faculty member Thomas Pedroni, a distinguished scholar of urban education,  has been helping Detroit teachers in exposing the terrible things done to kids in the EAA (Educational Achievement Authority), the Broad-funded and Republican Governor Snyder-imposed district in Detroit.  In one blog, teachers describe the unspeakable conditions they and students now face in EAA schools. Pedroni (no slouch in the bravery department) has pressed the media to cover the myriad problems in the EAA and writes himself when newspapers and media duck their responsibility to expose wrong-doing and harm to kids.

         What we are seeing in Detroit and in Newark NJ, with the suspensions – partially rescinded – of school principals who spoke out against massive school closings is a reign of terror, not of error.  The individuals planning and carrying out policies that are hurting kids aim to destroy mass public education. While they say otherwise, the effects of their policies are quite clear.  (Sometimes intentions don’t count. Think about all those defenses of slavery and colonialism.) They are destroying teaching as a profession, eradicating public control over education, turning schools into factories that produce workers for the global economy or holding pens that prepare them to be convict labor. 

         This is scary stuff, not what teachers bargained for when they decided to teach. But if you look at teachers’ resistance globally, you’ll see they can rise to the challenge. Teaching, especially in urban schools, is not for the faint of heart or spirit. That’s why teacher unionism has emerged first in cities.   If Cami Anderson (Newark NJ’s state-appointed Supt.) and John Covington (Detroit’s state-appointed Supt.) think they can continue to abuse teachers and students without facing concerted resistance, they’re wrong.  No one should underestimate city teachers. Working under the conditions one faces in most city schools gives many teachers a resilience that’s equal to or surpasses what we find in workers in any sector. The question is whether they can do what’s needed fast enough.

         Some of what’s new: Minneapolis teachers have formed a promising alliance with parents and started a social justice caucus in their AFT local. Struggles in Portland, Seattle, and North Carolina indicate that the NEA leadership is facing the kind of insurgency the AFT national is trying to pacify.  There’s ferment within the teachers unions you don’t see reported in the media.  Stay tuned!

         I invite reader responses at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. You can follow me on twitter and Facebook, as well as my blog every Wednesday here at New Politics.

    (photo by Katrina Ohstrom)

  • How A Famous 90-Year-Old Doctor Survived Hospitalization, But You Probably Won’t

    ImageEnclosed in and insulated by their own structures of thought, many doctors are quite blind to the role of privilege, including their own, in getting or not getting medical care and in determining the quality of that care. If they acknowledge some flaw (or even ignorance or barbarity) in individual health care, they see it as non-systemic, simply a matter of a bad apple in an otherwise benign barrel. They may maintain this obtuseness even when they themselves become patients. Here is a stunning example: an account by Dr. Arnold Relman of his own recent hospitalization: “On Breaking One’s Neck,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 2014. Dr. Relman  is a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School, and did admirable work as Editor-in-Chief of a leading American journal, The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which I have read for many years in an attempt to keep up with developments in medicine as well as for important material on the state of the medical profession and of health care in the United States. The episode described by Relman  in NYRB involves another equally important and admirable figure, Dr. Marcia Angell, who is also a former Editor-in-Chief of NEJM. Angell teaches at Harvard Medical School, and is a critical writer in various areas, including medical ethics, conflicts of interest, and the conduct of the pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Angell is Relman’s wife, and she “stayed long hours” with him during most of his hospitalization.

    Relman  writes of his survival and what he describes as his “astonishing recovery” after a life-threatening June 27, 2013 neck injury,  which produced, among other things, massive hemorrhaging, on top of pre-existing atrial fibrillation, aortic stenosis and polymyalgia rheumatica, a severe disorder affecting muscles and joints. In Relman’s description, he received excellent care at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. Accompanied by his son (who is either a doctor or a lawyer), he went to the emergency room, identified himself, and “within a few minutes, it seemed, my cubicle filled with physicians, nurses, and other members of the staff.” Relman makes no other comment on this sudden gathering of a small crowd, nor of the crowding of prominent visitors during his subsequent stay in the intensive care unit.  He seems uncomprehending of the significance of the fact that the person in the cubicle was the former editor of one of America’s oldest and most prominent medical journal (nor of the possibility that he had taught some of the doctors who staff MGH). Of the “initial measures” that were taken at MGH, Relman concludes that they “undoubtedly saved my life.” Relman is also silent about the significance of the presence of the equally prominent Marcia Angell (who rushed back from out of town to join him). Just imagine the rapidity with which word must have circulated in Mass General about Relman and Angell’s presence in the hospital:  visiting royalty! Only a zealot for formal (as opposed to actual) democracy would assume that all are equal at MGH and that “professional courtesy,” standing and reputation make no difference and thus Relman would be treated just like any other patient.

    Relman is 90. After the emergency room, he was taken to the surgical intensive care unit. There, he writes, “my wife and our children all gathered very late that first night  — three physicians and three lawyers, a company that in other hospitals might have bothered the hospital staff. But not here.”  Relman des not ask why this crowding was accepted in the MGH ICU, nor does he even speculate on the relevance to his care of the hospital’s  acceptance of the presence of this heavy medical/legal crowd. (There have been studies that see correlation between the quality of patient care and number of visitors, albeit without attention to the prominence of the visitors.)

    The treatment that Relmna got was by any definition heroic, and should be seen in the context of the contemporary notion that heroic measures are unwise, particularly for a 90 year-old patient. At one point in the ICU, Relman’s heart stopped. “I would certainly have died then had it not been for the medical team.” After two minutes of CPR and stimulants, Relman’s heartbeat resumed. But then it stopped again. He was again given CPR, and within a minute,  his heartbeat resumed. Again it failed, and again, after another minute of CPR, it resumed. “The resuscitation saved my life.” It’s hard to believe that this much energy is expended on 90-year olds with such grave multiple diagnoses who are not Arnold Relman. And apparently he wisely had not drafted a health care  proxy which, if it follows the boilerplate phrasing available to all on the internet,  authorizes doctors to cease resuscitation efforts if they deem the patient  “incurable… with no reasonable expectation of recovery” – which certainly fits Relman’s later characterization of his recovery as “astonishing.” In another violation of standard healthcare proxies, he was put on a ventilator, apparently without the by now familiar ominous warnings that he might thus fall irretrievably into a persistent vegetative state. While healthcare proxies are presented as a way of carrying out the patent’s  preferences as considered in advance, such proxies only become operative in  extremely coercive situations with life itself in the balance: doctors may be in a hurry to get elsewhere; their judgment may be subjective and inaccurate, and patients’ families (if they are present) may be cowed by the doctor’s expertise and the deference with which doctors are viewed. In a thousand informal ways, the message is conveyed to the sick old.   These days we are propagandized through all media about the need to provide health care proxies, one of whose effects is to free doctors from suit for discontinuing life support – a discontinuation increasingly urged for the sick old whose duty to the nation in this age of cost/benefit driven medicine it is to get out of the way and die. But, contrary to this dominant ethos, ”Physicians [at MGH],”  Relman  comments, “simply refused to let me die (try as hard as I might.”)  Are others beneficiaries of the kind of care that Relman received, or are they in some sense manipulated into giving up the struggle before it is absolutely necessary?

    After his stay at Mass General, Relman was moved by ambulance to a private room at Cambridge’s Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, which is affiliated with his health care insurance. Here, by his account,  he received mixed to poor care in a noisy environment that interfered with sleep (Anyone who has experienced modern hospitalization –-  including in our best institutions –- may find that the blaring noise of endless amplified announcements  constitutes a significant health problem – an unexamined iatrogenic effect.) After many criticisms, Relman inexplicably concludes that his care at Spaulding was “superb.” Then he moved with Angell to an apartment that they rented near Mass General.  A  physical therapist made frequent visits to the apartment while an extended stair lift was installed at home in Relman’s  condo. Relman offers no suggestion as to why he received such different care in the two hospitals. It seems reasonable to assume that he and Angell were better known at Mass General than at Spaulding, which is not as classy a place. (Another scholar speculates that while Relman was well known at Mass General, at Spaulding he would be seen as “just another old sick guy.”)     

    *****

    Relman’s account of his hospitalizations misses the haloing effect of his professional visibility and prominence. In describing and analyzing  his experience, Relman functions as a participant observer, but one of the first rules of social science is that observers must take into account the impact of their presence on the realities that they observe. Relman’s omission eliminates from his analysis what may be the most important factor in determining the kind of care that he received – his standing and reputation (not to mention his easy access to publication on health care issues). And since he generalizes from his own experience, this omission seriously weakens his more general evaluation of health care in America.

    “What,”  asks Relman, “did this experience teach me about the current state of medical care in America?” “Quite  a lot,” he answers,  offering  among his various sensible points that  “costs are the central problem of the medical care system.” How sad to have come through all that and to have somehow missed the importance of privilege in medical care. Relman knows that he almost died a couple of times, and that the quality of his care was astonishingly good (at least at MGH).  But what of the other patients? Speaking of his experience in the ICU he acknowledges the support that he had, particularly “the comforting presence of family and loved ones.” He sees that some of his fellow patients did not have the support that he had, and then concludes with optimistic speculation, “I can only hope that  they received extra attention from their nurses. “ Relman offers no basis for this other than hope. Overall,  the extra attention that Relman received  saved his life.

    When doctors hear about, or experience, the horrors of contemporary medical care, they tend to miss the systemic quality and explain it with the medical equivalent of, "there's a bad apple in every barrel" — an argument whose absurdity they may see when applied to police beatings of black youth, but whose absurdity they miss when applying it to medical care. In his implied argument – he received good care at Mass General because it is a top-notch place – he misses an important systemic consideration related to the place of hierarchy in the culture of the medical profession.  As a (non-physician0 member of Physicians for a National Health Program, I am ardently for single-payer (“Medicare for All”), ) but I don’t think this will change the culture of the medical profession, and, when finally enacted, single-payer will still leave untouched significant inequalities which can make the difference between life and death.

    In many arguments that I have had over years within the left, I have always responded to the condemnation of “privilege” by noting that what is called privilege should not be taken away. Instead,  everybody should be brought up to the level of the “privileged.”(Cf the question of tenure in academe.) I’m glad that Relman survived and received good care. He is a valuable human being, and it would be enough for him to be just a human being . But we will never get such care for all if we fail to face head on the problem of privileged access and  different care for the privileged   – these are  aspects of the central problem of inequality in our society. Meantime, I’m going to ask Marcia Angell and Arnold Relman to accompany me when I’m next hospitalized – just for good luck. May all of us be so accompanied.

    Jesse Lemisch can be reached at Jesse.Lemisch@verizon.net

  • Carmen Fariña and New York City's schools: What to expect?

    Does appointment of Carmen Fariña signal a dramatic shift in policy for New York City public schools? Writing in the Indypendent, NYC teacher and union activist Brian Jones suggests, correctly I think, the situation is more complicated than supporters of Bill de Blasio want to believe.* On the one hand, Fariña is indeed different from her predecessors in the past decade. She is a career educator, one who knows that schools should not be run like prisons or assembly lines. She believes that parent and teacher voices should be heard. That’s a significant change.

             On the other hand, we have no reason to believe that she wants oversight over schooling to be democratized, for parents, teachers, and students to have major control over what is taught and how. As Sol Stern accurately describes in his piece for the right-wing Manhattan Institute, she bought into the early Bloomberg reforms. As a principal and District Superintendent she shared the world view of the Board of Education, which I’d summarize as “We at the top know better than you at the bottom but tell us what you think so we can at least pretend to consider it.” This way of viewing schooling complements the “business model” of teacher unionism embraced by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which represents all of NYC’s teachers, secretaries, and support professionals.

             It’s going to take a mobilized social movement of teachers, parents, and community to reverse policies that threaten the existence of a democratically-controlled, publicly funded system of public education. Joe Williams, speaking for Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), comments to the Washington Monthly: “The Bloomberg haters are going to have to settle for a change in style rather than major changes in substance.” Williams, the political operative, understands and trusts that de Blasio, despite his progressive patina, is a Democratic Party loyalist. DFER sets policy for the Democrats. De Blasio is not going to challenge what is now DP orthodoxy, neither is Fariña, nor will the UFT – unless, that is, we force them to do so.

             Though it’s hard to see the union’s potential, one of the key levers we have is the UFT, which for all its (many and severe) problems is potentially “owned” by its members. Democratizing the UFT is key to bringing democracy to the schools. While making economic demands on de Blasio about the new contract are essential to make sure we have a professional teaching force, they should be embedded in a broad program to create quality schools for NYC kids, one that talks about increased school funding, ending school closings, more parent and student voice, innovative evaluation procedures that are supportive and not tied to standardized test scores.

             Progressive politicians who do the work of DFER but in a kinder, gentler fashion than did Bloomberg (or Rahm Emanuel) are no more our friends than is Joe Williams. Carmen Fariña will be only as good as our movement is successful in democratizing the UFT and using it to create space for shared ownership of schools, as well as replacing the current regime of drudgery with joy and deep learning for all kids.

    * My research on District 2 which Brian cites describes the collaboration of the UFT and NYC administration officials to advance policies on curriculum and instruction viewed as progressive. The research investigates how effects of the reforms, promoted by prominent researchers, might have been related to the District’s unusual demographics, more complex than rich/poor, white/black white/Hispanic dichotomies. Conservative opponents of the reforms, which included Sol Stern and Diane Ravitch, wrote widely criticizing them. Progressives were reluctant to do so.

    I invite reader responses at drweinerlo@gmail.com. Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. You can follow me on twitter and Facebook, as well as my blog every Wednesday here at New Politics.

  • Teachers union leaders need union democracy

                Teacher activists have been buzzing in the blogosphere about AFT President Randi Weingarten’s shift, endorsing a moratorium on linking teacher evaluation to students’ scores on standardized tests and on the new national curriculum, Common Core. “Too little, too late” say some, while others express gratitude for the change.  I think the more important issue is that the president of a teachers union doesn’t have the right to make a decision on major national policy without being directed by union members. Both issues were significant enough in their impact on teachers’ careers and professional lives, as well as kids’ futures, for debate to be held in every local, votes taken, and union officials directed (not asked, directed) to do what members voted.

                No union leader, no matter how smart, wise, or dedicated can substitute for the intelligence, wisdom, and courage of a membership that is mobilized and exercises collective control of its union. That control occurs through members at every level of the union supporting and directing those who have more organizational authority.  The Chicago Teachers Union and Karen  Lewis, CTU President, model this ideal.  She understands and acts on the premise that union power resides with the members. Members "get it" too and hold her feet to the fire.   In contrast, in the national AFT and NEA, union officials have no direct tether to the membership. 

               Weingarten’s stance on the moratorium is, I predict, a temporary shift, a result of indirect pressure the union leadership has experienced from the first wave of unsatisfactory evaluations.  AFT members are being educated that the union has to "play nice," that is, give up even more.  This strategy is evident in the amazing collection of articles in the Winter 2013 issue of its magazine, the “American Educator” touting labor-management collaboration. Nothing in the magazine explains that collaboration requires that both parties have a “live and let live” attitude and that the neoliberal project is based on destroying the unions, especially teachers unions.  We won’t make that go away by showing that we want to work with politicians who do the bidding of powerful elites who are explicit they want to marketize education and turn teaching into contract labor. When you collaborate with people who want to destroy everything you stand for, you’re assisting in your own destruction. 

                One might think the union would focus on collaborating with parents, students, and community. But nope, what we need today, according to these articles, is collaboration with “management.”  But who precisely is “management” now?  Management is principals trained by the Broad Academy to demand the power to fire teachers at will, with no legal or contractual protections.  Management is mayors like Rahm Emanuel who control city school systems and try to break the unions.  The Camden NJ school superintendent, who was never a school principal and barely taught, is management for Camden teachers. 

                I  have a hunch that if AFT and NEA officers organized informed debate and votes in their locals, they’d learn that many members don’t think there’s much to be gained by trying to collaborate with management these days.  Maybe I’d be proven wrong. This is an empirical question. So let’s ask members, including  music and gym teachers who’ve received unsatisfactory evaluations because students’ math or language arts scores on standardized tests haven’t risen enough to satisfy benchmarks.  Let's ask Chicago teachers who battled to stop Emanuel from closing schools for budget reasons only to see charter schools springing up to replace them.  Let’s ask teachers what they want their unions to do about testing, student and teacher careers tied to exams about which teachers, students, parents, community have no say.  I'll live with whatever members decide, after we've had the vigorous debate we need,

                How about real debate in publications that our dues make possible?  We can have an exchange in the  “American Educator” about labor-management collaboration. That would be a start to the kind of collaboration we need – members talking, making decisions with other members about what our unions should say about the future of our profession and public education. 

    I invite reader responses at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. You can follow me on twitter and Facebook, as well as my blog every Wednesday here at New Politics.

  • Twenty Years Since the Chiapas Rebellion: The Zapatistas, Their Politics, and Their Impact

    The Chiapas Rebellion led by the Zapatistas took place twenty years ago this month. What was the importance of the rebellion and of the Zapatistas? What was the impact at the time? And what has been its political legacy? What is the role of the Zapatistas in Mexico today?

    Twenty years ago, on the morning of January 1, 1994, the Chiapas Rebellion began in Mexico’s southernmost state led by a then unknown group, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and its mysterious spokesman subcomandante Marcos. Some 3,000 poorly armed, mostly Mayan guerrilla soldiers marched out of the jungles and seized a half dozen towns and briefly took the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. The EZLN had chosen January 1 because on that day in that year the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an international treaty between Canada, Mexico, and the United States, took effect. The EZLN rebels called for the cancellation of NAFTA, the overthrow of the government of Mexican government, and the convocation of a constituent assembly to write a new Mexican constitution. Some of the guerrilla troops told reporters they were fighting for socialism.

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    The Chiapas Rebellion had an enormous impact at the time, not only in Mexico but around the world. The EZLN had led the first leftist, armed rebellion since the fall of Communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union just a few years before, suggesting that contrary to claims about the death of the left and the “end of history,” a new left had arisen in the Lacandón Jungle of Chiapas. The rebellion also signaled that all was not well in Mexico, where outgoing president Carlos Salinas had been claiming that by joining the GATT, forerunner of the World Trade Organization, in 1980 and by joining NAFTA, and through his privatization of hundreds of state companies, Mexico was leaving the Third World and entering the First World of modern capitalism. The Chiapas Rebellion and the EZLN Manifestos pulled back the veil revealing to the world Mexico’s world of rural poverty and especially the poverty oppression of the indigenous people.

    President Ernesto Zedillo, who had taken office only a month before, responded immediately by sending the Mexican army and air force to suppress the rebellion. Throughout Mexico tens of thousands of people responded by going to the zócalos, the public squares, to protest, demanding that Zedillo stop the military attack on mostly Mayan rebels. Within twelve days Zedillo halted the attack and the EZLN agreed to a truce, the beginning of what has been a twenty-year standoff in Chiapas.

    When several months later the Zapatistas held a consulta, a kind of survey or referendum, asking what role they should place in Mexican society, hundreds of thousands responded, the majority voting that the EZLN should lay down its arms and participate in Mexican social and political life. The initial protests against Zedillo’s use of the army and the results of the consulta suggest that the Mexican people rejected armed violence on all sides. In the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, one million had died and one million had emigrated in a nation with a total population then of 13 million. The memory of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence seemed to live on in the public consciousness and apparently few wanted to repeat that experience.

    Armed revolution in Mexico it seemed was not on the agenda. The Zapatistas declined to lay down their arms, but on the other hand, for the last twenty years, neither have they used them. The EZLN's continuing struggle took other forms.

    Who Were the Zapatistas?

    The Zapatistas were founded in November of 1983 by a group of leftist activists in northern Mexico. The Mexican left had inherited a long tradition of armed rebellion, one could say going back to the conquest, though certainly the Mexican Revolution’s nationalist legacy was most significant. In addition there was the impact of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s foco theory (which has been popularized by the French intellectual Régis Debray) and which had had such disastrous consequences throughout Latin America.

    Throughout Mexico in the 1970s and into the 1980s one could find small rural and urban guerrilla groups, some calling themselves Marxist-Leninist and usually combining a left wing version of Mexican nationalism with Cuban foco theory ideas or sometimes with Maoist ideas of a prolonged people’s war. Hundreds of such young men and women were disappeared and murdered during Mexico’s secret war in the 1970s. The Zapatistas had their origins in that political milieu. Initially called the National Liberation Forces, a name that became popular on the left in various counties after the Algerian Revolution, the group later, after moving to Chiapas, added the word "Zapatista" to their name after Emiliano Zapata, the leader of the revolutionary peasant movement during the Mexican Revolution.

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    Later in the 1980s the group decided to move its operations to Chiapas in southern Mexico, a state with a very large indigenous population made up of several different Mayan groups. As in the rest of Mexico at the time, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) controlled government at all levels and controlled the labor and peasant unions and various indigenous organizations. There was, however, a developing social alternative. Since 1959 the Bishop of Chiapas had been Samuel Ruíz, who had participated in Vatican II (1962-1965) and in the Latin American Bishops’ Medellín Conference (1968) and who was completely involved and identified with the Theology of Liberation, the idea that the Church should be on the side of the poor.

    Under Ruíz’s direction the Catholic Church in Chiapas took an interest not only in the salvation of the souls of the indigenous, but also in improving their material conditions and their social and political treatment. The Church’s catechists became not only carriers of the Gospel but also organizers of the indigenous people’s incipient social movements. It was in this milieu that the Zapatistas now inserted themselves, and with Ruíz’s tacit support, often worked closely with the catechists and other indigenous leaders. Ruíz said that while he shared the Zapatistas’ goals he did not support their strategy of armed rebellion, yet at the same time he did not prevent the EZLN from organizing. So during almost a decade the Zapatistas established their organization in Chiapas, recruited Mayan and mestizo activists to their organization, and laid their plans for an armed uprising.

    What Did the Zapatistas Believe?

    What did the Zapatistas have in mind when they revolted on January 1, 1994? The Zapatistas apparently believed that if they ignited a spark in southern Mexico it would unleash a wildfire across the entire country. Whether or not they were familiar with the concept or the term, this is very like the nineteenth century anarchist notion of the “propaganda of the deed” and also bears a resemblance to the foco idea of the dedicated revolutionaries in the sierra who will ignite a revolution in the plains. The idea is that the people, exploited and oppressed, are simply waiting for a heroic example of revolutionary struggle to show them the way, and that then they will rise up and overthrow capitalism. The Mexican people, as was demonstrated in the early months of 1994, were not prepared to follow the Zapatistas or to rise up, and while millions sympathized with the poverty and indignities suffered by the indigenous, they rejected the idea of armed struggle. Mexico was no different than any other country where social change tends to come not from heroic actions of a few but from years of organization, education and propaganda, and many concerted smaller actions at the base of society before people are prepared for revolutionary change.

    In August of 1994 the Zapatistas called a convention in their jungle redoubt to which they invited some 2,000 Mexican intellectuals, writers and artists, academics, and social movement activists, as well as a few official delegates from the United States of whom I was one. Once in San Cristóbal we traveled to the convention on public buses donated by the state government and attended the ceremony where the stage was lit by stadium lights which must also have been provided by the state and the Federal Electricity Commission. Marcos spoke before an enormous Mexican flag, perhaps 40 by 20 feet, as the Zapatista soldiers (some wearing boots but most in huaraches and a few barefoot) marched before the platform, most carrying wooden rifles, not real firearms. The huge flag and Marco’s rhetoric suggested that the EZLN were radical nationalists and advocates of indigenous rights; while there was a call for a constituent assembly to write a new constitution, there was no talk of socialism. Really, this was not a convention, just a few speeches until the event ended in a tropical downpour of Biblical proportions that put out the lights and swept away our tents. The EZLN’s politics were still in evolution.

    The Zapatistas failure in launching a revolution and the Mexican army’s siege of the zone in which they operated forced them to retreat and fall back on the indigenous and other poor people in the canyons where they had their base. The Zapatistas now did more openly what they had been doing clandestinely for years, organizing their indigenous and mestizo supporters into communities that constituted a kind of liberated zone—though interspersed with other indigenous and mestizo communities that did not support them and surrounded by the army which sometimes harassed them.

    ImageThroughout the 1990s and 2000s the Zapatistas organized remarkable protests by indigenous women who came out in their traje, their indigenous dress, and literally pushed the armed soldiers out of their villages. The EZLN called indigenous meeting in Chiapas and inspired the convocation of national indigenous meetings that led to the creation of the National Indigenous Congress. After months of negotiation, on Feb. 16, 1996, the Zapatistas and the government of President Ernesto Zedillo signed the San Andrés Accords, a treaty granting autonomy, recognition, and rights to the Mayan people in Chiapas. The Mexican Congress, however, didn’t adopt the accords, and the Zedillo government soon violated them. The Zapatistas announced they wouldn’t therefore hold any further negotiations, withdrawing again into the canyons.

    The Zapatistas and their supporters claimed that they had created new democratic forms of organization in the villages in which women had an equal role. Marcos and other EZLN spokespersons argued that they were reconstituting society from the bottom up a village at a time. Eschewing the state institutions controlled by the PRI, the Zapatistas created their own schools and local governments—though they had few if any economic resources—as an alternative to government institutions. Marcos and the Zapatistas began to develop a new rhetoric and to proclaim a new ideology summed up in the phrase “mandar obedeciendo,” to lead by following. This suggested that the people were deciding and the leaders merely expressing their views and carrying out their desires. Here it was suggested was the socialism from below that many of us believed in and had been working for.

    In the late '90s lawyer and sociologist John Holloway popularized and elaborated on the Zapatistas’ ideas, and his book Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico became a best seller on the left. He suggested that, in part under the influence of indigenous ideas, the EZLN had rejected the old Marxist paradigm of the proletariat struggling for state power, putting on the agenda a new theory and practice of revolution that seemed to have more in common with anarchism: anyone from any social class could begin to make the revolution by asserting their dignity and forming a liberated community where they were. The Zapatistas seemed to be building such a communitarian alternative to capitalism in the remote communities in Chiapas.

    Yet it was very hard for outsiders to see and to understand exactly what was really taking place in villages in the canyons of Chiapas where a group of armed men were working among the native people. The continued existence of the EZLN as an armed guerrilla group alongside and among indigenous people led one to ask: How democratic was the movement? How were decisions really made? Who were the real leaders? The Zapatistas and their supporters offered answers that had to be taken on largely on faith given—at least for most of us—the impossibility of entering physically, intellectually, and psychologically into the world of indigenous politics in Chiapas.

    The Zapatistas, as interpreted by Holloway and others, had an enormous impact on the new Global Justice Movement that began in the 1990s and culminated at the Battle of Seattle, the joint environmental-labor protests against the WTO in 1999. Everywhere young people wore the balaclavas and red bandanas of the Zapatistas over their faces, often identifying themselves with anarchism. Every major city and many colleges in the United States had Zapatista support groups. Mexican American youth of the Southwest were particularly inspired by the Zapatistas. The combination of the romance of masked men and women, of armed struggle, and of the utopian idea of an immediate march to an egalitarian future held sway throughout the decade, inspiring many young people to become activists. Then it was all suddenly extinguished along with the Global Justice Movement by the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, and by the War on Iraq, leading to a sudden rightward shift, new levels of government surveillance and repression, and an instantaneous upsurge in American patriotism. Other armed fighters now held the public attention.

    The Zapatistas and the Movement

    In Mexico during the first couple of years after the rebellion the Zapatistas had enormous moral authority. Much of Mexican society admired the Zapatistas for their courage and for speaking out with and for the indigenous. Many were charmed by subcomandante Marcos’ sardonic wit and great creativity both as a speaker and a writer. Mexican youth from the wealthy neighborhoods of Mexico City to the poorest neighborhoods of the border towns adopted a new Zapatista swagger as they painted radical graffiti on the walls. The Zapatistas attempted to capitalize on their moral authority by projecting themselves as a force in the broader Mexican society.

    ImageLiving in Mexico in those years, I attended in Mexico City and in Tijuana meetings of the Zapatista Front for National Liberation (FZLN) which held a founding of the national organization in 1997. The Zapatistas, however, seemed to have no interest in a real front, that is, in a coalition of various left organizations and movements. EZLN leaders found difficult the give and take of coalition building in a country where there were scores of social movements, labor unions, and left political parties. The EZLN’s insistence on dominating the supposed front that they had created meant that it never grew or became popular and never had an impact in Mexican society at large.

    The EZLN also attempted at about the same time, with the aid of leftists in the labor movement, to organize a Zapatista workers’ organization. The labor union activists I knew and with whom I spoke told me that the Zapatistas opposed participation in the existing labor unions, not only because they believed they were bureaucratic, but also in part because the unions held elections and the EZLN didn’t believe in elections and voting. With an unwillingness to deal with the unions and their existing structures and with longstanding rank-and-file labor organizations, the Zapatista labor organization was stillborn. The Zapatistas’ attempt to turn themselves into a political force in Mexican society failed utterly, and they withdrew again to the canyons of Chiapas.

    The Zapatistas were more successful in Chiapas and in some other areas in organizing their autonomous municipalities which they called Caracoles y Juntas de Buen Gobierno. While almost all of these communities were in Chiapas, the Zapatistas did inspire some in other states and in the Plan Realidad Tijuana of 2003 proposed to unite the archipelago of liberated communities in Mexico into one emerging free nation within the nation. Though the plan never proved successful nationally, the Zapatistas did continue to organize their own autonomous communities in Chiapas.

    The EZLN and the National Elections

    When the 2000 elections approached, the EZLN announced that it would not support either of the two rightwing parties—the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party—nor would they support the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Cárdenas, who had been a presidential candidate in 1988 and 1994, remained enormously popular on the left. Many hoped that the Zapatistas would support him, though organizations of the revolutionary left were divided over the issue of whether to support Cárdenas or back some independent socialist candidate. The EZLN, however, rejected elections in general and Marcos excoriated Mexico’s political parties of all stripes as compromised and corrupt.

    Yet the election proved not to be irrelevant to the Zapatistas. When Vicente Fox of the PAN won the election by a large plurality and became president, ending the PRI’s more than seven decade hold on government, the Zapatistas decided to take advantage of what was apparently a new political opening. The Zapatistas traveled to Mexico City and its representatives, in an historic act, actually spoke to the Mexican Congress, asking that it fulfill the principles embodied in the San Andrés Accords. While Fox showed some sympathy with the EZLN, nothing new was forthcoming from the Mexican Congress.

    "The Other Campaign"

    In 2006 when the next presidential elections took place, Marcos and EZLN adopted a different approach. Once again, most of the Mexican left hoped that the EZLN would support the left candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the PRD, who was speaking out strongly against NAFTA, neoliberalism, and the corruption of the PRI and PAN. The EZLN, still rejecting both elections and the existing parties, had other plans. Marcos announced the organization of la Otra Campaña (the Other Campaign). Unlike other political parties, the EZLN would not put forward its own candidates and would not support the candidates of other parties, but would instead organize a campaign that would travel around the country speaking out against the Mexican government and against capitalism.

    The EZLN’s Other Campaign was joined by several other left groups, from the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) to the followers of Albanian Enver Hoxa in the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist (CPML). The Campaign took place during a period of a number of dramatic social conflicts, most important the civil unrest in Sal Salvador Atenco in the State of Mexico. When police suppressed flower sellers and other street vendors, the Peoples Front for the Defense of the Land called upon the EZLN for support. Marcos and EZLN showed up bringing thousands of supporters. During the Other Campaign, Marcos and other speakers held moderately successful meetings and rallies around the country, sometimes speaking to thousands against the evils of capitalism. Everywhere they went, the CPML’s giant portraits of Stalin hung in the background, casting doubt in some minds about the meaning of it all.

    Meanwhile the PRD’s left candidate López Obrador harangued crowds of up to a million, mostly working class and poor people, with his populist rhetoric. When it became clear that President Fox and the ruling PAN party were violating election law and preparing an enormous fraud, which in fact took place on election day in July, there arose an enormous protest movement in defense of a fair election and citizens’ right to have their votes counted. Tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands in Mexico City joined the protests blocking the boulevards and occupying public plazas.

    Several of the revolutionary left groups involved in the Other Campaign went off to join the election protests as a matter of principle; even if they hadn’t liked the parties and candidates offered up in the election they felt the citizens had the right to vote and have their vote counted. Marcos and the EZLN, opposed on principle to elections, refused to participate in the defense-of-the-vote protests. So they withdrew and retired to Chiapas. The Zapatistas sectarian attitude toward that movement did enormous damage to their reputation among those in the broad left and those on the far left. They lost much of the moral authority that had clung to them since the 1994 uprising.

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    Questions Posed for the Left and for the EZLN

    During the last twenty years, the Zapatistas have had a huge impact on Mexican society and on the left both in Mexico and internationally. When the left seemed moribund, they revived it. Where the indigenous had been downtrodden, they were inspired to rise up. Their example enthused radicals throughout the Americas and in Europe and at their international meetings in the Chiapas jungle one could find leftists from dozens of countries exchanging experiences and perspectives. In retrospect, it is surprising that no organized international tendency, no “new international” came out of it. Despite all of the vicissitudes of their twenty-year long career, the Zapatistas remain both a local social movement in Chiapas and the standard bearers of a certain radical politics in Mexico associated with local organizing, support for the indigenous, and political abstentionism.

    The Zapatistas’ experience raises important questions for the left. There is no doubt that in a capitalist system and its liberal democratic state, as it is called, in which political parties operate, elections function primarily to both buttress the system and to regularly place representatives of capitalism in power. It is also true, however, that elections by parties which are genuinely independent provide an opportunity for the left to propagandize for its ideas and to use elected positions to contribute to the organization of social movements.

    The Zapatistas are right that the Party of the Democratic Revolution and its candidates Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and López Obrador were representatives of social democratic and populist variants of capitalist politics. The PRI, the PAN, and the PRD have all proven to be quite corrupt, it is true. But what if the Zapatistas had used the enormous moral authority that they had in the first years after the rebellion to help to organize—not to insist on controlling—a national social movement and a genuinely independent national political party? How much greater could their impact have been during these last two decades in which, partly under the impact of the NAFTA treaty that they opposed, the power of Mexican capital has grown so much greater and the forces of working people become so much weaker?

    To me, the Zapatistas remain opaque and their politics mysterious. I wonder: Does there still exist at the core of the EZLN a hardened cadre who hold to the classical guerrilla politics of the 1970s and 1980s—or did the Zapatistas under the influence of the indigenous and their own experiences really become some sort of anarchists? What is the real nature and significance of the Caracoles y Juntas de Buen Gobierno? Can the Zapatistas ever overcome their sectarianism and project themselves as an ideological and organizing force in Mexican society—or will they continue to cut themselves from other sections of the far left?

    After twenty years the Zapatistas have not gone away, remaining a challenge to both the government and to the established political parties and the parties of the revolutionary left. The new and deeper integration of Mexico into the U.S. and global economies which has been achieved by the passage of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s structural reforms will raise new challenges and very likely produce new movements. We will see in this new period whether or not the EZLN’s experiences and ideas prove relevant to a new generation of radicals.

     

    Dan La Botz is a member of Solidarity in New York City, and an editor of New Politics. This article first appeared on the Solidarity website.

  • Closing Bridges While Building Bipartisan Bridges for Corporate-Backed 'Reform'

    ImageIt remains to be seen whether NJ Governor Chris Christie will be able to avoid having his political career crash and burn.

    Politically-motivated lane closures on approaches to the George Washington Bridge were no playful pranks. Massive traffic jams, incredible disruption to the lives of Fort Lee residents, and delays of emergency vehicles — these are serious matters. Students had difficulty getting to school, but that was OK with a Christie pal who had been appointed by him to the Port Authority who happily noted that these were the "children of Buono voters" (referring to Barbara Buono, Christie's Democratic opponent in the November 2013 gubernatorial election). The traffic tie-ups may even have contributed to the death of a woman whose ambulance was slowed getting to the hospital, but perhaps she was also a Buono voter.

    Will Christie be able to avoid responsibility for this criminal behavior? Maybe he didn't know what was being done by his deputy chief of staff, his transition chairperson, his re-election campaign manager whom he had nominated (since withdrawn) to be head of the state GOP, and the high school friend and political confidante whom Christie had appointed along with a political crony to the Port Authority board — though this strains credulity. But it is hard to imagine that anyone watching Christie's months of repeated denials and his stonewalling refusal to look into the matter would absolve him of the charge of covering up a crime.

    Christie claims that he had more important things to do than worry about some lane closures. And indeed he has spent most of his time pursuing policies that have had a much more devastating impact on the people of New Jersey. He vetoed a tax on millionaires multiple times, cut property tax rebates for the middle class, and reduced the earned income tax credit that benefited the poor. He vetoed a minimum wage hike (though voters later passed it in a referendum). He illegally abolished the Council on Affordable Housing. He several times vetoed funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides health care for poor women. He vetoed same sex marriage (though the courts later legalized it). He removed New Jersey from the 10-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. He opposed the Dream Act until the month before the election, then supported it; but then after the election he agreed to sign it only if the legislature made undocumented residents ineligible for financial aid. He vetoed multiple gun control bills, including one that was a version of what he had himself proposed. He cut school funding, in violation of rulings of the State Supreme Court, and responded to criticisms by trying to pack the Court with his cronies and destroy the teachers unions.

    In short, Christie has caused immense human suffering.

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    The bridge lane closing, though, does raise an interesting question. Why would a Republican governor go to extraordinary lengths to punish a Democratic mayor for not supporting him? Don't Democrats generally not support Republicans? But this is New Jersey, where corrupt party bosses are a major force in the Democratic Party. For these bosses — especially George Norcross, the major power broker in south Jersey and Essex County executive Joseph DiVincenzo — all that matters is their self-interest, political and financial.

    The political bosses fund their efforts by directing state contracts to their moneyed supporters. Christie, the so-called corruption-buster, has been all too happy to work with them. The Governor aggressively went after state officials who were getting public employee pensions and a state salary at the same time, but he gave a pass to DiVincenzo, one of the biggest double-dippers of all, who has also been charged with the largest misuse of campaign funds in state history. Norcross was known to be a bully well before the bully Christie came on the scene ("I will fucking destroy you," he snarled at the co-president of the State Senate back in 2002). One of the owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, Norcross is a political king-maker (an FBI tape-recording overheard him saying “In the end, the McGreeveys, the Corzines," — Democratic governors — "they're all going to be with me. Not because they like me, but because they have no choice”). Christie and the bosses joined forces in order to pass legislation reducing the pensions of public workers, even of those who had already retired. ("I will protect your pensions. Nothing about your pension is going to change when I am governor," Christie had pledged in 2009.)

    DiVincenzo, the country executive in the most Democratic county in the state, openly endorsed Christie for governor. Dozens of other Democratic politicians — many of them ethically challenged — also endorsed Christie. One reason was that the Democratic candidate was Barbara Buono, a liberal who was not part of the machine. Buono's positions on the major issues were in line with that of the state's Democratic voters (raise the minimum wage, same-sex marriage, tax millionaires, fund public education), and she even selected a union official from the Communications Workers of America, Milly Silva, as her running mate. But Democratic politicians deserted her in droves, and many others sat on their hands. So when the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee refused to join the collaborators, the Christie administration decided to punish him.

    Buono was trounced in the election. But, it was not just the desertion by the Democratic machine that did her in. Obama made clear he wouldn't come to New Jersey to campaign for her, even when he was campaigning nearby. One blogger put it well:

    "I think it's a very good thing that Barack Obama is not using his political capital to support Barbara Buono for Governor of New Jersey. I mean, if he did then the Republicans in Congress would get mad and might not vote to support Obamacare or other things Democrats find important.

    "But since he's refusing to help a progressive woman in a campaign against a conservative, anti-choice Republican now Obama will be able to get anything through the House he wants.

    "Really, it's political genius."

    All the major newspapers in the state — The Star Ledger, Philadelphia Inquirer, Asbury Park Press, Bergen Record, Herald News, and Press of Atlantic City — endorsed Christie. And they did so even though their editorial positions were often closer to Buono's than Christie's on most issues, aside from public workers. "Christie’s great failing has been that he has done little to help New Jersey’s poor," said the Press of Atlantic City. But the programs Buono "proposes make it sound as if we are still back in the free-spending days before the recession. She has yet to learn the tough lesson that New Jersey can no longer afford to fund every worthwhile program." She "is too bound to the public-worker unions to be expected to take the difficult steps necessary to fix" the state's fiscal problems. "We would rather have someone fighting not to increase taxes than a governor willing to capitulate to the demands of special-interest groups," declared the Herald News. The Bergen Record commented that "Buono has spent years advocating for many social causes dear to The Record. But a governor needs more than personal convictions; he or she must be able to achieve results." (No matter that those results were for reactionary policies.)

    But it was the Star Ledger that went furthest in exposing Christie's record while endorsing him:

    "The property tax burden has grown sharply on his watch. He is hostile to low-income families, raising their tax burden and sabotaging efforts to build affordable housing. He’s been a catastrophe on the environment…. "

    "The governor’s claim to have fixed the state’s budget is fraudulent…."

    "… he threatened the independence of judges at all levels…."

    "The public gives him top marks for his handling of [hurricane] Sandy, but the record is mixed….Why did the federal government have to strong-arm the state to include more relief for renters and Spanish-speakers than Christie had proposed? And why should anyone believe taxpayers got the best price on refuse removal when the governor awarded a no-bid contract through a political friend?"

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    The Ledger acknowledged

    "Buono has long been a sturdy voice for progressive causes. She was a key player in establishing paid family leave, protections against bullying and revamping the school aid formula.

    "As governor, she would allow gay couples to marry, raise the minimum wage and stop the baseless attacks on the courts. She would raise taxes on incomes greater than $1 million, and restore at least some of the property tax rebates that Christie cut. She would also restore funding for Planned Parenthood, and sign strong gun legislation. On each of those issues, we are with her."

    So what was the problem? Her support for public unions and her education policy, specifically her opposition to the "education reform" agenda of privatization and removing public accountability from schools. The Ledger was quick to point out that

    "Understand that President Obama endorses the reforms Christie has pushed. This is not a right-wing conspiracy; it is a bipartisan movement…"

    And they're absolutely right. It is bipartisan. Obama and Christie and New Jersey's new senator, Democrat Cory Booker (who did endorse Buono) are all part of a movement, heavily backed by billionaires like Eli Broad and Mark Zuckerberg, to undermine public education. In New Jersey cities such as Newark and Camden and suburbs such as Montclair and Highland Park, a battle is raging between the corporate "reformers" and grassroots movements trying to resist their onslaught. These cities and suburbs all vote heavily Democratic, but their school systems are being run by people connected to the Christie administration.

    New Jersey's current Democratic Party, dominated as it is by corrupt bosses and corporate interests, cannot adequately challenge the rightwing program or the bipartisan corporate-driven education agenda. Christie may be toast, but it will take a real grassroots upsurge to offer a genuine alternative to his policies.

     

  • Homer and War

    ImageThe following is a response to an article trying to enlist the poet Homer on the side of hawks by the Boston Globe’s resident neocon right winger Jeff Jacoby. This letter was not published.

     

    Dear Editor:
         Once again Jeff Jacoby flaunts his ignorance, this time on Greek poet Homer (“The Radical Dream of Peace on Earth,” Globe, 12-25-13).

         Failing to grasp Homer’s irony, Jacoby cites Hektor’s militaristic advice to his child—this just moments before Hektor goes to his ignominious death.

         Of course The Iliad portrays men in mortal combat as they endure conflicts of courage and cowardice, of patriotism and family devotion, of friendship and betrayal. But how does it portray them? At the height of his aristeia (string of victories), Achilleus, Homer tells us, “was straining to win glory, his invincible hands spattered with bloody filth.” (Book 20) Achilleus, every Greek knew, had chosen a short glorious life over a long infamous one. And this battlefield glory was spattered with bloody filth—hardly a glorification of war. 

         No, The Iliad does not glorify macho militarism—and I write as a WW2 veteran (88th Infantry Div., Italy). It shows us men caught in a war without meaning; again and again they try to end it, but they cannot—mostly because of their own irrationality. In her brilliant essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,” Simone Weil, writing in 1940-41, the darkest days of World War II, shows that in The Iliad force turns humans into things, that it destroys everyone, that all the victors become victims:

            “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it
            is to its victims: the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth
            is, nobody really possesses it…. In this poem there is not a single man
            who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to force.”

         In my view, The Iliad ranks among the most powerful anti-war masterpieces, but due to poor teaching and/or careless reading, it has come to represent the opposite.

    Marvin Mandell

     

  • MEXICAN CONGRESS PASSES ENERGY REFORM: HISTORIC DEFEAT FOR THE LEFT

    The Mexican Congress passed President Enrique Peña Nieto’s energy reform bill in December, allowsing private and foreign investment in the energy sector, despite widespread public opposition and massive protests by opponents. Peña Nieto and his supporters argued that the energy reform would allow more effective development of the country’s petroleum resources, leading to economic growth and more jobs.

    Opponents have argued that the new law turns over the oil industry to foreign capitalists. Ricardo Monreal of the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) said, “This isn't the reform of the century, it’s the robbery of the millennium.”

    The passage of the new energy law, which required amending the Mexican Constitution, represents a historic victory for the country’s conservatives over the left and over the nationalist legacy and institutions of the Mexican Revolution. The new law will allow foreign oil company involvement in Mexican oil production at every stage of the process, ending the country’s monopoly of the petroleum industry.

    The energy reform passed through Congress on a fast track with overwhelming votes in both the Senate and the House. The Mexican Senate voted in favor of the measure by a vote of 95 to 28 on Dec.11, while the lower house passed the bill by a vote of 353 to 134 on Dec. 12. Within just four days, the 17 of 31 states needed to approve the amendments to the Constitution had been found and, on Dec. 21, Peña Nieto signed the bill into law in the historic National Palace. “We Mexicans have decided to overcome myths and taboos and take a great step into the future by way of democratic institutions,” said Peña Nieto. “Mexico has pronounced itself in favor of change and transformation.”

    Proponents and Opponents

    Voting in favor of the law were the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its satellites the Ecological Green Party of Mexico (PVEM) and the New Alliance Party (PANAL) of the teachers union, as well as the conservative National Action Party (PAN). Opposing the energy reform were the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the Workers Party (PT). The measure was also opposed by the Movement of National Regeneration (MORENA), a political organization in the process of becoming a party, which has no representatives in the Congress.

    Opposition to the bill was organized by historic leaders of the Mexican left such as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the PRD and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leader of MORENA. López Obrador, however, suffered a heart attack on Dec. 3, effectively removing him from the culmination of the struggle in December. Joining the left parties in opposing the bill were the independent labor unions such as the Mexican Electrical Workers (SME) and the Coordinating Committee of the Mexican Teachers Union (la CNTE), a large opposition caucus.

    The opposition held large marches and huge rallies throughout December and, as the date for the votes neared, opponents surrounded the Mexican Senate. At one point representative Antonio García Conejo stripped off his clothing except for his undershorts to symbolize the stripping of Mexico’s natural resources and its dignity.

    The actual vote had the atmosphere of a brawl as legislators pushed, shoved, and hollered at each other. As PRI legislators shouted “Mexico! Mexico!” and the PRD legislators shouted “Traitors! Traitors!”, PRD congresswoman Karen Quiroga punched the nose of her female colleague Landy Berzunza Novelo of the PRI, sending the latter to the infirmary. Just before the vote in the lower house, PRD and PT representatives locked the doors to the congressional hall in an attempt to prevent a vote, but legislators simply moved to another room and voted there.

    What Is Changed by the Law

    The new law overturns one of the greatest achievements of the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910 and ended in 1940, the country’s takeover of the foreign oil industry. The Mexican Constitution of 1917 in its Article 27 gave the nation control of all land and water and of the subsoil, that is, of the minerals and petroleum. On the basis of that article, in March of 1938, President Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated (with compensation) and nationalized the foreign oil companies in Mexico, principally the U.S. Standard Oil Company and the British Royal Dutch Shell, as well as several others.

    The nationalized companies were unified as the Mexican Petroleum Company (PEMEX) with representation on the board by the Mexican Petroleum Workers Union (STPRM). PEMEX was the largest employer in Mexico throughout most of the twentieth century and represented one of the largest sources of the country’s GDP as well as providing most of the revenue for the Mexican government. PEMEX’s top officials came, until the PRI’s defeat in 2000, from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which also controlled the notoriously authoritarian and corrupt oil workers' union. The wealth produced by PEMEX provided the funds that built Mexico’s national highways, hospitals, and schools during the oil boom of the 1970s, but it also provided the slush funds that oiled the PRI’s political machine.

    Private and foreign companies were for decades forbidden from involvement in exploration, drilling or refining, though over the years they became involved in peripheral aspects of the industry. Proponents of the law argued that by forbidding foreign involvement Mexico was failing to develop deep water off-shore oil reserves as well as potentially rich shale deposits. They claimed that only an influx of foreign capital and technology would be able to take advantage of the existing natural resources. Foreign oil companies, particularly the Americans who have been involved peripherally in the past, were anxious to see the energy reform pass, though the European oil companies have also expressed great interest.

    What the New Law Permits

    The new energy law will effectively grant concessions to foreign oil companies, though that term is not used because of its association with the earlier period of private domination of the industry in Mexico. While Mexico’s oil reserve will remain the property of the nation, companies will be given contracts or licenses to drill for oil; these will be for services or on a profit-sharing or production-sharing basis. That is, companies will share both risks and profits, receiving a percentage of the crude oil produced.

    PEMEX now becomes a for-profit company that will have to compete with private domestic and foreign oil companies. The new law also removes the Mexican Petroleum Workers Union from the board of directors of PEMEX.

    Under the new law the Mexican electricity sector is also open to private investment. All Mexican energy generation and distribution is now in the hands of the Federal Electrical Commission (CFE), a national company created over several decades by the absorption of smaller private and public electrical companies.

    American companies most interested in exploring and drilling for oil in Mexico are Chevron, Exxon, and Shell. These are in fact the successors to Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell, the very companies expropriated and nationalized in 1938. So history is reversed.

    Massive Layoffs to Be Expected

    Senator Rabindranath Salazar of the PRD, as well as other opposition legislators, predict that both PEMEX and the CFE will lay off tens of thousands of workers. Salazar believes the layoff of PEMEX workers alone will come to some 100,000. PEMEX workers have long had stable employment paying some of the highest wages in Mexico, but those days may now be over.

    Similar things have happened in the recent past. When Mexico privatized the railroads in the 1990s over 100,000 railroad workers lost their jobs.

    Salazar told the Mexico City daily La Jornada that the energy reform law says that workers’ rights will be protected, but that apparently refers to the right to severance pay.

    Political Implications

    The passage of the energy reform represents a stunning achievement for Enrique Peña Nieto who has finally managed carry out a reform advocated for years by leaders in both the PRI and the PAN. The president’s success in carrying out the labor and education reforms earlier this year and now the energy reform show him to be the country’s most successful president since Carlos Salinas (1988-1994), breaking through all opposition to pass neoliberal reforms that eluded his predecessors.

    Interestingly, the transformation of the oil industry also represents a blow to what was historically one of the principal bases of the PRI. PEMEX was the flagship of the country’s nationalized industries and the oil workers of the STPRM, the vanguard of the working class of an earlier era. The PRI’s power had been based in large measure from the 1930s to 2000 on its control of the nationalized industries and on the unions that represented workers in those industries.

    The energy reform would have been political suicide a few decades ago, but the PRI has become a modern party whose power is based upon its use of the mass media more than on its labor, peasant, and community organizations, not to say that those are totally irrelevant. The energy reform thus not only transforms the economy but also ends a period of political history by demolishing the institutions on which the PRI's one-party state of the 1940 to 2000 period was based.

    Continuing Opposition

    The opposition has promised to continue the fight. Jesús Zambrano of the PRD announced that his party would leave the Pact for Mexico, the alliance between all three major parties formed at the time Peña Nieto became president, punishing the PRI and PAN for their treachery. It is doubtful that this will matter much to them now.

    The opposition has also called for a national plebiscite, though it is not clear that the Constitution permits such referenda.

    Finally, opponents say that they will bring legal cases to challenge the law in the courts. There seems little likelihood that the energy reform will be overturned either by a plebiscite or by litigation. When the oil industry acts, there are few forces today capable of stopping it. Beaten down during the administration of former President Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s independent unions were in no position to stop the Peña Nieto steamroller and could not conceivably force it back.

  • A recipe for building social movement teachers unions – and fig cake too

    Image

                There’s no strict recipe we can follow to build social movement teachers unions though the process will require some indispensable ingredients, robust democracy for one.  Another element is creating relationships among people who inhabit very different social spheres.  While the principles on which we organize are key,  so are the ways we struggle together, creating friendships.

                In my experience, helping to build the AFT local in Hayward California in the early 1970s, sharing food is an important part of community and movement-building. We have to reach people through social media, for sure, but let’s not underestimate the value of face-to-face meetings and the draw of really good refreshments.

                Building the movement we need is arduous.  It should also be joyous. To push both along in 2014, I’m contributing a recipe for fig cake I cut out of Sunset magazine in my California years.  Most people don’t know this, but I am a credentialed, experienced teacher of home economics. In my first teaching job I taught cooking and “apartment living” to high school boys. 

                For the fig cake you can substitute dried figs for fresh.  I use Kalamata figs from Greece and these days think about the heroism of Greece’s teachers, who are leaders in the movement against austerity.  Just soak the dried figs longer, about 25 minutes.  I also use dried ginger instead of cinnamon because I find cinnamon too prosaic – but that’s just my bias.  I also use  1/3 cup of whole wheat flour for 1/3 cup of the white flour. Don’t use all whole wheat or the cake will be too heavy. Vegans can use an egg substitute, probably not banana or tofu. The cake needs the egg for loft.  To be fancy, bake the cake in a well-greased and floured bundt pan but start checking to see if it’s done after 1 hour.

                The cake is fragrant and a bit chewy, perfect for eating after a long day of teaching and organizing. Or maybe serving at a house party to raise money for your favorite union reform caucus?

                Happy 2014!

    I invite reader responses at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. You can follow me on twitter and Facebook, as well as my blog every Wednesday here at New Politics.  Except next week – I’m taking a break from my blog to work on a critical look at where we stand now in pushing back against the neoliberal project.

  • HOW I LEARNED ABOUT NAFTA – A PERSONAL ESSAY

    During the early 1990s I became involved in the national debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) then in the final stages of negotiation between Canada, Mexico and the United States. Twenty years later, it’s clear that NAFTA, the creation of a North American common market of sorts, was a watershed event, but I have to admit I had not really been paying much attention to it until I got a phone call in November 1990. On the basis of a book I had written on Mexican unions, The Crisis of Mexican Labor (1988), Pharis Harvey of the International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund (ILRERF) contacted me to ask me if I wanted to go to Mexico on a job for him. I hung up thinking it was a crank call, but he called back and asked if I would be willing to go to Mexico to undertake a study of the state of workers’ rights there in order to help inform the Congressional debate on NAFTA.

    I was warned that this would have to be a low budget operation, that it would have to begin immediately, and that the investigation and report would have to be produced quickly. Enticed by the idea of returning to Mexico where I had worked as a reporter a few years before, I took a quarter-long break form the Ph.D. program I was enrolled in the History Department at the University of Cincinnati and, with the blessings of my pregnant wife Sherry, headed for Mexico where I conducted research from December of 1990 through February of 1991.

    In the 1990s Mexican President Carlos Salinas, Canadian Premier Brian Mulroney, and U.S. presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were arguing that NAFTA would be a boon to all three nations. International investment would bring improvements to all, commerce would expand, business would boom, and while some workers might be adversely affected by increasing competition, there would be new and better-paying jobs in industries exporting their products abroad. Conservative, independent presidential candidate Ross Perrot, however, said he heard a “giant sucking sound,” the sound of American jobs being sucked away to Mexico. Many U.S. workers were waiting for the ground to open up beneath their feet.

    American workers, Clinton told the U.S. labor movement, should not be afraid of competition with lower-paid Mexican workers, because even as American workers found new and better paying jobs, Mexican workers’ fortunes would also be improving. Mexican workers would find new jobs at higher wages in their home country, making them less competitive while immigration to the U.S. would also decline. On signing the agreement Clinton predicted “more growth, more equality, better preservation of the environment, and a greater possibility of world peace.” The labor and environmental side agreements, Clinton said, also made the trade treaty “a force for social progress as well as economic growth.” Well, I was going to look into one aspect of all of this. I was going to find out what chance Mexican workers would have to exert their rights once NAFTA went into effect.

    When I arrived in Mexico, I contacted my friend Ricardo Pascoe, who was then a Congressman of the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT), and asked for his advice. He said I should meet two of his friends and took me over to their house and introduced me. They were Arturo Alcalde, one of the country’s preeminent labor lawyers and a leader of the National Association of Democratic Attorneys (ANAD), and his wife Berta Lujan, a leader of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), an independent labor federation. Arturo, handing me several typed pages, suggested that I get in touch with the list of ANAD attorneys at their offices in various states and cities in Mexico. He also went to his office and brought me an arm load of books on Mexican labor law, telling me to return them when I was done. Berta gave me contacts in the FAT and said she would let people know I was coming. With that, I was on my way.

    Taking buses and riding the trains—there was still passenger service then in Mexico—I traveled to a number of cities and towns throughout the country visiting the labor attorneys’ offices. I remember that when I arrived in Chihuahua it was snowing, an eventuality for which I was unprepared having come north from warm Central Mexico. Every door I knocked on opened to an attorney willing to help, leading me to the waiting room where workers’ of all descriptions were happy to tell me the myriad ways in which their rights had been violated. They had been fired for attempting to organize a union, for trying to make their unions more democratic, for fighting for a better contract, for speaking out on the job. Some had not only been fired, they had also been threatened and beaten. The FAT leaders I met with, like Manuel Urrutia, explained the structure of various industries and the nature of their unions, from mining to fishing. One of the names on my list was a Catholic worker priest, Father Pantoja, who served a working class parish in the steel town of Monclova. He introduced me to steelworkers there who were dealing with the crisis of plant shutdowns.

    Though farmers and peasants had been among the hardest hit by Carlos Salinas’s neoliberal transformation of Mexico, I felt that given the time available and my areas of expertise it would be impossible for me to look into the conditions of rural workers. Still their situation was at the forefront of the NAFTA discussions in Mexico and the United States. In order to join NAFTA, Mexico had passed Constitutional amendments and laws that changed the nature of the ejido, the state land held in perpetuity by indigenous and rural communities.

    Historically the land while held collectively, was worked individually. Members of the ejidos could not sell or lease the land because it belonged to the community, not to the individual who farmed it. Farmers had long found it difficult to make a living on the land because of the lack of state support for loans, marketing, irrigation, and fertilizers. The amendments and laws passed by the Mexican Legislature at the urging of Salinas permitted farmers to sell their land, and they began doing so at once. Later, after NAFTA took effect, tens of thousands of farmers sold their land or simply abandoned it and went to find work in the industrial cities of Mexico or in the United States.

    Traveling around Mexico I found in many small cities and pueblos newly poured concrete slabs with at each end a basketball backboard. The basketball courts had been built by President Salinas’s PRONASOL community social welfare program. The backboard hoops had no baskets, the original nets having soon deteriorated. The courts stood empty. The families that lived in the pueblos couldn’t afford to buy basketballs, so one didn’t hear the characteristic bang-and-ping of the ball bouncing on the court. In any case, Mexicans, depending on what state you were in, played soccer or baseball; no one played basketball. The vacant courts, monuments to bureaucratic planning, stood as symbols of the emptiness of the Salinas era which had not only stripped Mexico of many of its small farmers and rural communities, but also in the process had laid waste to much its traditional culture.

    When I returned to Mexico City, now staying in Ricardo’s house, I continued to interview union leaders and dissident activists as well as rank-and-file workers from major unions, small independent unions, and opposition caucuses. I interviewed Fidel Velasquez, the powerful leader of the official unions, and met with Ford workers from the Cuautitlán plant who had seen one of their fellow workers murdered in the plant during the suppression of a rank-and-file movement. Two women activists I met, Elaine Burns and Mary McGinn introduced me to leaders and activists at the intersection of feminism and independent unionism. PRT members whom I knew introduced me to workers active in caucuses in the telephone and electrical workers unions.

    Arturo and Berta told me about a service called Prodata that clipped all the Mexican newspapers. The staff provided me with a chronological collection of clips from the major papers on the country’s principal labor unions and conflicts. (You have to remember this was before the era of the internet.) The ten or so bound volumes that Prodata produced for me provided me with the basic narrative of the series of atrocities committed against both official and independent unions during the presidency of Carlos Salinas.

    During the late 1980s and early 1990s Salinas had sent the police with bazookas to blow the doors off the oil workers’ union and to arrest their leaders on trumped up charges. He also sent the army to occupy the town of Cananea, birthplace of Mexican unionism, in order to prevent the union and the miners from protesting when the mine was declared bankrupt and sold to new owners. The government crushed several independent union struggles. Everywhere workers raised their heads, they were bludgeoned into submission, and yet they continued to fight for their rights.

    I returned to Cincinnati just in time for the birth of our son Reed on Feb. 16. I then spent a few weeks writing my preliminary report documenting the lack of workers’ rights in Mexico. The preliminary report was circulated to the U.S. Congress in an attempt to provide some education on the deplorable situation of Mexican workers. During the next few months I banged out the complete report, kindly edited by Matt Witt of the American Labor Education Center, which was published jointly by ILRERF and South End Press of Boston in 1992 as Mask of Democracy: Labor Suppression in Mexico Today.

    At the request of Pharis Harvey, former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall wrote the introduction to the book. Marshall argued that U.S. trade policy should be used to pressure other countries to protect workers’ rights. I saw my book in part as an exercise in international labor solidarity, explaining to Americans how Mexican workers suffered under a political system that denied them their basic workers’ rights.

    To my surprise the Cincinnati AFL-CIO labor council invited me to speak to a labor meeting about NAFTA. I spoke in the Laborers’ union hall to the assembled union officials and workers and told them about conditions in Mexico, but I found that many of those in the audience, and at other labor events I attended in that period, looked down on Mexican workers as racial inferiors and unfair competitors. Union officials and workers were so concerned about the threat to their own wages, benefits, and conditions posed by NAFTA, that they had little interest in the conditions of Mexican workers, and it had not yet dawned on them that it might take unions on both sides of the border to stand together against their governments and the corporations which had foisted the trade agreement upon them.

    While the Mask of Democracy was published almost 22 years ago, I believe that it is still useful to those interested in the recent history of the Mexican labor movement. Ironically on this twentieth anniversary of NAFTA, Mexican workers still cannot exercise their basic rights, and the recently passed Labor Reform weakens some of their rights even more. Marshall’s hope that U.S. trade policy might be used to strength workers’ rights abroad never came to pass, and on the contrary U.S. trade policy has resulted in the weakening of workers’ rights everywhere including here at home in the United  States.

    On January 1, 1994, the day that NAFTA was to go into effect, a small guerilla group called the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) led an uprising of mostly Mayan peoples, seizing two towns and the city of San Cristobal de las Casas. Subcomandante Marcos of the EZLN and his followers called for the overthrow of the nefarious Salinas government and for a constituent assembly to write a new constitution, while some of the rebels said they were fighting for socialism.

    The EZLN hoped through their propaganda of the deed to ignite a revolution in Mexico, but their hopes faded as they were attacked and surrounded by the Mexican Army. Tens of thousands throughout Mexico went to their town and city plazas and called upon President Zedillo to stop the army’s attack, expressing sympathy with the Indians’ long experience of racist oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation, but the citizenry also called on the Zapatistas to lay down their arms. The Mexican Revolution in its violent phase from 1910 to 1920 had taken one million lives and led a million Mexicans to emigrate from their homeland to the United States and few of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren willing to repeat that experience.

    Perhaps in part because of Mask of Democracy as well as some pamphlets I had quickly written about the Chiapas rebellion, the Zapatistas invited me to their convention in the jungle in August of 1994. This was shortly before the 1994 election that pitted Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) against Ernesto Zedillo of the PRI. So after the EZLN convention I stayed on to learn more about the PRD, observe the election, have a firsthand encounter with the civil society movement, and interview activists in the women’s movement, as well as to take a look at the struggles of the maquiladora workers on the northern border. That experience led to another book, Democracy in Mexico: Peasant Rebellion and Political Reform also published by South End Press in 1995.

    By 1994 I had become immersed in thinking and writing about Mexico. That year I sought and received a Fulbright as well as another fellowship that allowed me to spend 1994-1997 living in Mexico and doing research on my dissertation about the slackers, American war resisters who became involved in the organization of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Communist Party of Mexico, and the creation of feminist organizations during the era of the Mexican Revolution and World War I. My two years in Mexico from 1995 to 1997, while Sherry worked at the Environmental Center of the Pan-American Health Organization in Toluca, allowed me to learn more about the FAT and about RMALC, the Mexican Network on the Free Trade Agreement.

    I attended the RMALC meetings pretty regularly, giving me an opportunity to see how Mexican labor unionists, environmentalists, feminists, and others were assessing the impact of NAFTA on their society. I also participated in a Labor Notes conference on cross-border organizing held in Ciudad Juárez and it was there that I met Robin Alexander of the United Electrical Workers (UE), which had a strategic organizing agreement with the FAT. Robin invited me to produce a kind of newsletter about the Mexican labor movement written in English for labor unionists and others who wanted to engage in solidarity with Mexican workers. Thus began Mexican Labor News and Analysis which she and I have been producing now for 17 years.

    Life in Mexico from 1994 to 1997 was difficult. The promises of NAFTA were not fulfilled. Ernesto Zedillo’s term had begun with the collapse of the Mexican peso and a national recession that saw high unemployment and a surge in poverty. Crime increased dramatically, not the extreme violence of the drug cartels of the 2000s, but serious crime: break-ins, armed robberies, automobile hi-jacking. I remember a gathering at the home of one of my wife’s colleagues, a well-to-do family, where about fifteen of us sat around talking about the issue of crime. Everyone present had had experienced some incident and several had been robbed at gunpoint. Working class people experienced crime of that sort in their neighborhoods too. When I went to the FAT office for the RMALC meetings in a working class barrio, I was warned to be careful and sometimes walked to the Metro or to my car by a couple of union members.

    The Chiapas Rebellion that had occurred in 1994 continued to have a tremendous impact on the Mexican people and on others around the world throughout the decade of the 1990s. It was sometimes described as the first electronic or internet rebellion because its organizers had used the internet to inform people around the world about their movement and its goals. As a result it had quickly attracted wide support from people in the United States and in Europe. The EZLN transformed itself within a year or two of the uprising from a typical guerrilla organization striving to seize state power into an indigenous organization that called upon its members to “lead by obeying” and seemed to offer a new model of revolution

    John Holloway in his book Zapatista: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (1998) offered something very like an anarchist interpretation of Chiapas Rebellion and the EZLN. He pointed out that the Zapatistas did not talk about taking state power, but about creating a new kind of democratically run society. The Zapatista leaders I met at meetings of the Zapatista Front in Mexico City and in Tijuana in the 1990s, however, were controlling and sectarian. The EZLN wanted to create a new labor movement, but because they didn’t believe in union structure or in elections, they wouldn’t let their followers participate in labor unions. That doomed their experiment to failure. Some believed the Zapatistas had become anarchists, but I had the impression that at their core they remained the classical leftist guerrilla group they had been back in the 1980s.

    Holloway’s interpretation, however, had a powerful impact. It was seized upon by activists of the new Global Justice Movement that had appeared in the late 1990s and exploded in the Battle of Seattle in 1999 where steelworkers, teamsters and longshoremen joined environmentalists in shutting down the city through civil disobedience in an attempt to stop the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting. Activists who had successfully stopped the Multilateral Agreement on Investment—a kind of global NAFTA—feared that the WTO would be taking further steps to support the global neoliberalism and the corporations. Many also strongly opposed the admission of China to the WTO.

    I was working at Global Exchange at the time which was deeply involved in organizing the Seattle protests. I and my crew, however, worked on organizing the Globalifóbicos: Cry of the Excluded Ones, a binational conference of a few hundred activists from Mexico and the United States held in Tijuana in October of 2000 to discuss strategies for resisting the globalization movement. The term globalifóbicos or “global-phobics” had been coined by Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo as a way of ridiculing and dismissing the critics of corporate neoliberal globalization. We adopted the term as a badge of honor, while we also embraced the “cry of the excluded ones,” the slogan of the Theology of Liberation movement which criticized global capitalism for its exclusion of the poor.

    The Battle of Seattle and the Global Justice Movement seemed to auger the beginning of a new era of mass struggles such as we had seen around the world in the 1960s and early 1970s. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists on the Twin Towers in New York and the U.S. Pentagon, however, resulted in a sudden change in government policies and in the national mood. A new Secretary of Homeland Security was created and an entire new police force established overnight to examine airline travelers and to watch railroad yards, bridges and water supplies. At the same time a wave of super-patriotism spread over the nation as the country went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while left movements just as suddenly seemed to disappear, victims of the new nationalist fervor. It would take a decade before we once again recovered with the initiation of the Occupy Wall Street movement of September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park.

    Today, twenty years later, the forces of global capitalism have grown stronger while the strength of organized labor has weakened. Yet social movements continue to arise from Spain’s indignados, to those who fought for democracy in the Arab Spring, to the Occupy Wall Street movement that swept the United States. History teaches us that no economic, social, or political system lasts forever, that rebellions from below continue to bubble up like unstoppable geysers, and that the recurring crises create revolutionaries who learn from their defeats—and one day win. No advance is permanent, but neither is any setback. NAFTA is twenty—the struggle continues.  

    Dan La Botz is a Co-Editor of New Politics and the editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis.

  • 'Operation Enduring America'

    "As we reassure our partners that our relationships and engagement in Afghanistan will continue after the military transition in 2014, we should underscore that we have long-term strategic interests in the broader region… As the United States enters a new phase of engagement in Afghanistan, we must lay the foundation for a long-term strategy that sustains our security gains and protects U.S. interests…" —US Senator John Kerry, Chair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, December, 2011.

    "…A fuller reflection on the last eleven years should include the perverse twist about how in its almost single-minded effort to promote state-building, political tolerance and good governance in Afghanistan, just next door the West [sic] has left a trail of repression, graft and unfulfilled commitments to Central Asia’s fledgling civil society." —Central Asia analyst Alexander Cooley, "Afghanistan’s Other Regional Casualty"

    Despite the projected 2014 "drawdown" of most of its troops from Afghanistan, the US is not about to exit strategically vital and resource-rich Central Asia.

    The Afghan war and occupation created whole new sets of unparalleled opportunities and possibilities for increased US influence across the "post-Soviet space" often referred to as "the Stans". Propelled by the war-driven expediencies of "Operation Enduring Freedom," broader strategic ambitions, and a heavy dose of imperial hubris and arrogance, Washington sought and bought support from the repressive and corrupt regimes in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. 

    In turn, it gained varying degrees of previously unimagined regional access, not about to be relinquished. It also in the process planted seeds of future instability in a region already simmering with potential conflicts.

    The Strategic Tinderbox

    With the Caspian Sea to the west, the vast Central Asia steppes to the north and mountains to the east and south, the region half the size of the lower forty-eight United States sits at the strategic pivot where Russia, China, South Asia and Iran come together. That alone informs US "national interest". 

    The area’s former Soviet republics had their independence thrust upon them with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The old system’s disintegration set loose massive dislocations as state subsidies for industry, health care, education and social protections collapsed or disappeared entirely while socialized property was looted and privatized.

    In the process, the region increasingly became a tinderbox mix of endemically corrupt authoritarian states lorded over by a "new class" of ex-Soviet officials and ascendant entrepreneur, those best positioned to grab control of formerly state-run enterprises, assets and the levers of power. 

    Each of the fledgling states started out on a different footing, with varying levels of development and resources. Sprawling Kazakhstan, suddenly the ninth largest country in the world, with its inestimable wealth in oil, uranium and other strategic minerals, immediately dwarfed its southerly neighbors Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, currently two of the poorest orphans of the ex-Soviet space. Turkmenistan, with vast stores of natural gas, rapidly became a closed society while Uzbekistan, with the largest population and military in the region, would look to rival Kazakhstan as the dominant regional power.

    The diverse area is characterized by often disputed porous borders, peoples divided by those boundaries, inter-state rivalries, and percolating conflicts over water rights and other resources. Ascendant nationalisms, ethnic antagonisms, and an ongoing revival of long-suppressed Muslim identities also contribute to simmering social and political tensions. 

    At times flaring into open conflict, those tensions have been exacerbated by increasingly vast economic disparities between rich and poor glaringly visible in the contrasts between the region’s major cities with their post-Soviet nouveau riche and the continuing impoverishment of the countryside. 

    Expanding economic and social chasms have been compounded by endemic "misgovernance"—oligarchic rule through patronage systems rife with corruption, nepotism and the "criminalization of the state" involving the symbiotic role of organized crime syndicates in politics; in the case of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, the morphing of "crime bosses" into "political bosses" now seated in parliaments and heading key ministries and agencies.

    In impoverished Tajikistan, for instance, half the population lives on less than two dollars a day while remittances sent home by nearly half of the country’s male work force laboring in Russia provide the country’s largest source of GDP. But the capital, Dushanbe is "awash with cash, construction and flashy cars," the visible results of a huge "shadow economy" largely rooted in the massive drug traffic passing through the country from Afghanistan to Russia.

    According to a 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report, some 90 metric tons of Afghan heroin and 30 to 40 more tons of raw opium passed across the region in 2009-10. Netting an estimated $1.4 billion profit that year alone and involving the paid-for complicity of state actors at all levels, the heroin traffic courses its way through every country in the region. Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan have been classified as "narco-states" where the state representative from top to bottom are implicated in the trade, corrupted by it.

    The ‘Stans also have their share of radicalized Islamist insurgent groups, most notably the now regionally dispersed Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), often accused of being responsible for the drug trade by the region’s corrupt regimes, complicit themselves. Attributed by some to be the result of decades of war and occupation in Afghanistan and a broader transnational Islamic revival, the various insurgencies, limited in scope, have been propelled more so by indigenous inequities and state intolerance and repression.

    Adding to the tinder box mix, the specter of succession crises and resultant instability currently looms over the region. Party chiefs of their respective republics at the close of the Soviet era and in power since, neither Kazakhstan’s "Leader of the Nation" Nursultan Nazarbayev, nor the brutal "Hero of Uzbekistan," President Islam Karimov, now both in their mid-seventies, have shown any sign of relinquishing supreme authority. 

    Their neighboring autocrat, Emomalii Rahmon, said to run Tajikistan’s "near-failed" state for his own and his family’s profit since he consolidated power following a mid-’90s civil war, is not about to step down, as well. Nor is Turkmenistan’s increasingly authoritarian Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, successor to the country’s initial post-Soviet dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, who died suddenly in 2006.

    Human Rights Abuses

    To one degree or another, all the region’s states have long been cited for their widespread human rights abuses and ceaseless repression of dissent and political opposition. Arguing that economic development must come before openness, transparency and "good governance," elites across the region have come to view democracy as a gateway to instability.

    The 2013 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on Kazakhstan noted that its human rights record had "seriously deteriorated" in 2012. Freedom House, Transparency International, Reporters Without Borders, Amnesty International, and others including the US State Department have long chronicled the Nazarbayev regime as a serial abuser of basic rights and freedoms. 

    Its 2013 HRW report described Uzbekistan as a country with an "atrocious" human rights record; a nation where horrific torture remains "endemic" and freedom of expression is severely limited. The survey noted an intensified crackdown on civil society activists, political opponents, and journalists, and persecution of religious groups not registered with the state. 

    The Karimov regime, of late an increasingly close US ally, has consistently banned all opposition political parties, severely restricted freedom of expression, forced international human rights monitors and NGOs out of the country, and takes as many as two million children out of school to work, along with their families, as forced labor during the annual cotton harvest. Thousands of dissidents have been jailed and many hundreds have been killed, some of them literally boiled alive.

    Significantly, this year’s HRW Uzbekistan appraisal pointed out that, "Despite the government’s persistent refusal to address concerns about its abysmal human rights record, the United States and European Union continued to advance closer relations with Tashkent in 2012, seeking cooperation with the war in Afghanistan."

    HRW described Turkmenistan as one of the most repressive and closed countries in the world. While pointing to "some small, positive steps on human rights in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan," it noted that their poor records had not really improved despite government pledges to tackle the problem of torture and other abuses. Described as "near failed states" honeycombed with corruption, both have provided the prime transit routes for those massive amounts of Afghan heroin and opium headed northward. 

    While not speaking directly to the broader regional impacts of "Operation Enduring Freedom," HRW’s Europe and Central Asia director, Hugh Williamson noted how, "…the EU and the US have largely muted their public concern over the appalling rights records of all Central Asian governments at exactly the time when victims of government repression needed them to speak out on human rights."

    Importantly, the point has not so much been the fact that the US and its allies have been barely audible regarding the abuse of human and political rights. More so, by rewarding those assisting with the Afghan war and occupation, the US has certainly had a direct hand in aiding, abetting and furthering the region-wide corruption, nepotism, ongoing repression and assaults on basic rights. 

    The Strategic Goal

    While the cooperation of the ‘Stans became crucial for the prosecution of the war to the south, US attention on the region has never solely or simply been about Afghanistan.

    Underway before September 11th, the US is now enmeshed in a new "Great Game" in Central Asian remotely evocative of the 19th century one that pitted imperial Russia and Great Britain against each other for control of the "Eurasian core". Its main competitors include Russia, vying to maintain influence in its historic underbelly, and an ascendant China, already the dominant "outside" economic developer and investor in the region.

    Both Russia and China have maintained varying but extending economic, military, and political ties to the region.

    With their own distinctive stakes in the game, the Stans have joined in as well. Each has worked to maximize its own "bargaining power" by playing off the interests of the major contenders.

    Writing in 1998, at a time when the US was still the world’s unchallenged superpower and well before the "War on Terror", imperial strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski could speak of the vital importance of Eurasia as "the globe’s central arena," an area "of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and to America’s historical legacy." 

    The former National Security Advisor argued that the US must strategically focus on the region "to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s primacy." The most immediate task, he asserted, was "to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role…" (Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, 1998.)

    With the Afghan war in full swing four years later, in February 2002 then-Secretary of State Colin Powell could tell the House International Relations Committee that the United States "will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind that we could not have dreamed of before." Since then, statements regarding the importance of the region, either from State Department officials or from think tank specialists and policy makers have remained on message. 

    In December, 2009, George Krol, at the time a State Department hand on South and Central Asian Affairs and presently the US ambassador to Uzbekistan, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) that the Obama administration did not view the region as "a forgotten backwater" peripheral to national concerns, but as one "at the fulcrum of key U.S. security, economic, and political interests."

    A December 2011 staff report for the SFRC, chaired at the time by the current Secretary of State John Kerry, articulated a clear set of US regional priorities. The report on "Central Asia and the Transition in Afghanistan" pointedly stated that the ‘Stans would continue to play a critical role, post-2014, in the US strategy for the far wider area extending westward across the Caspian and Caucuses, eastward to China and to Pakistan and India in the southeast. 

    In his remarks marking the release of that report, Kerry noted that, "Central Asia matters"; that its countries were critical not only to the outcome in Afghanistan but to regional stability: 

    "As we reassure our partners that our relationships and engagement in Afghanistan will continue after the military transition in 2014, we should underscore that we have long-term strategic interests in the broader region… As the United States enters a new phase of engagement in Afghanistan, we must lay the foundation for a long-term strategy that sustains our security gains and protects U.S. interests…" 

    Addressing post-2014 security concerns and "fear" of "abandonment" articulated by the area’s regimes, the staff report also asserted that, "Washington should repeatedly stress that its engagement is not ending" and that the US "will protect [its] long-term interests in the region." 

    Underlining those US strategic interests, the report referenced Russia’s historic connections to Central Asia, past and present, and its recurring "encirclement" concerns with a US presence in its "backyard." It pointed out how China also was "leery" of US bases and an extended presence on its borders. 

    The report noted, in passing, how the United States in its efforts to build region-wide political support and cooperation for the Afghan war, had been "forced to rely on highly corrupt, authoritarian governments in countries whose populations are suspicious of [our] intentions." It did not go into what that has meant for the present or the implications for enduring US operations.

    Eurasian Atlanticism

    In specific regard to Central Asia, a November, 2010 report from the Atlantic Council (ACUS) laid out US concerns and strategic interest in the region. The highly influential think tank for the "Atlantic community" (i.e., the US and its major European allies) at the time was chaired by Chuck Hagel, the future Secretary of Defense. Hagel also headed the Council’s "Eurasian Task Force" that issued the paper. (He concurrently was a member of the board of directors of Chevron Corp., at the time Kazakhstan’s largest direct foreign investor.) 

    Released in advance of a December, 2010 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit in Astana, Kazakhstan (hosted, incidentally, by that country’s autocrat, Nursultan Nazarbayev), the ACUS paper called for President Obama to take advantage of the upcoming conference "to plant the flag of the United States in Central Asia."

    The report began by stating that, "an arc of potential disorder and instability looms over Central Asia." Nevertheless viewing the region as one "important to U.S. national security interests" where the "transatlantic community [sic], the Far East and South Asia come together…," it called for a "new approach" that "should feature sustained engagement to promote an attractive long-term vision."

    Interestingly, the ACUS study candidly pointed out that the "military/Afghanistan component" of US engagement in Central Asia had "overwhelmed other parts of the American agenda." In the view of the ACUS authors, "the nonmilitary aspects of US engagement in the region [had] languished—or at least were seen to diminish in local eyes." 

    That, ACUS suggested, had enabled a climate where demands for improvements in democratic and human rights had come to be seen as "politically threatening and humiliating" by those very same oligarchs assisting the "war on terror" campaign further to the south.

    Along similar lines, a preliminary draft of Obama’s National Security Strategy 2013, while noting the "new international environment in the aftermath of the "Arab Spring," prioritized the need to protect "critical global strategic interests". It noted that "supporting greater human rights and democracy, while an ultimate aim, nonetheless must be balanced with how our [sic] actions may lead to uncertainty." 

    While some regional observers have suggested that Obama’s 2011 "Asia/Pacific pivot"—a shift in the geopolitical center of gravity away from the Atlantic towards the Pacific and ascendant China—will reduce the strategic importance of Central Asia, others have argued that the concern with China has given the region added importance as a "western flank" in the military "repositioning" aimed at containing the rising power.

    Antebellum

    The initial US footholds in Central Asia came soon after the Soviet Union’s collapse as Washington moved immediately to recognize the newly independent states. As the State Department opened consulates and embassies across the region long closed to US interests, international financial institutions such as the US-centered World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and subsequently the Asian Development Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development followed suit. 

    With their sights primarily set on the potential returns from largely untapped natural resources unevenly dispersed among the ‘Stans, US-based multinationals and direct foreign investors simultaneously clamored for access wherever they could—especially in oil- and mineral-rich Kazakhstan, and initially in phenomenally gas-rich but largely closed-off Turkmenistan. 

    Under purview of the State Department, various small scale "security assistance" programs coordinated through military attaches at the various embassies were initiated throughout the decade, as well.

    By 1995-’96, for example, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Uzbek soldiers were participating in military maneuvers in Louisiana and North Carolina under the auspices of an expanding NATO’s "Partners for Peace" (PfP) program. Other PfP maneuvers under US supervision took place in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in 1997. Targeting hypothetical "dissident elements," that exercise in "force integration" and "interoperability" involved Kazakh, Uzbek and Kyrgyz paratroops trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina as well as some 500 soldiers from the US 82nd Airborne Division.

    Enduring Freedom’s Footprints

    The overall US presence, especially on the military end, deepened exponentially after September 11. With the coming of the Afghan invasion that October, the US sought and literally bought varying degrees of logistical support for "Operation Enduring Freedom" from the region’s dictatorships.

    The Pentagon quickly secured regional overflight rights or refueling agreements from all the ‘Stans and "transit center" air bases for Afghanistan-bound troops and weaponry such as the one inaugurated in October 2001 at Karshi-Kanabad (a.k.a., K2 or "Camp Stronghold Freedom" by its US occupants) near Uzbekistan’s Afghan border. 

    Central Asia specialist Alexander Cooley reported that in addition to paying $15 million for use of K2 as a tacit quid pro quo, the Bush administration in 2002 provided $120 million in military hardware and surveillance equipment to the Uzbek army, $55 million in credits from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and $82 million to the country’s security services. 

    In March of that year, Bush and supreme leader Karimov signed a broader strategic cooperation agreement calling for a partnership in the "war on terrorism" and deepened ties between U.S. and Uzbek military and security agencies. 

    Importantly, as part of the K2 deal, Washington turned a blind eye to the steady increase in political jailings that those very same security services were carrying out in the name of "counter-terrorism". The Bush administration, as part of its practice of "extraordinary rendition," meanwhile ordered dozens of terrorist suspects shipped to Uzbekistan with the full knowledge that Karimov’s police state routinely employed unimaginable torture.

    An additional regional "air transit hub" at Manas outside Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, acquired major logistical importance in 2005, after Karimov evicted the US from K2 following mild criticism from Washington in the aftermath of the May massacre of upwards of 800 protesters at Andijan.

    Manas soon became the "premier air mobility hub" for Afghan operations—the main entry and exit point for coalition troops. (In 2011 alone, some 580,000 troops went to and from Afghanistan via the base.)

    Initial rent for use of the Kyrgyz airfield started out at $2 million plus and additional $17,000 for each flight landing and taking off from the base in 2001. The rent went up to $17.4 million in 2005 following the closure of K2. Bizhkek then upped the rent $63 million in 2009. 

    The latter deal, negotiated between the US and the kleptocratic Kurmanbek Bakiyev regime also included an additional $117 million "aid package" to the government with $36 million earmarked for airport improvements, $21 million for ostensible "drug interdiction" and counter terrorism efforts, and $20 million for "economic development." 

    Much of that made its way into Bakiyev family overseas accounts. (As the head of several firms subcontracted to provide Russian-sourced jet fuel for the US military aircraft at the base in the mid-2000s, Bakiyev’s son, Maxim, a.k.a. "the Prince," siphoned off unknown sums from the $2-3 billion doled out by the Pentagon for the vital fuel.)

    "Securitization"

    Accelerating after September 11th, a high percentage of US military assistance came under the rubric of "security cooperation." It went most notably to the training and equipping of domestic special forces units and national police, but also included direct materiel transfers, "military-to-military" joint exercises, and funds for "retooling"—the replacement of Soviet-era equipment and systems upgrades.

    In pursuit of such assistance, and playing into US strategic ambitions and the massive logistical demands of twelve years of war and occupation, the region’s regimes developed their own particular "War on Terror" gambits. 

    Chief among them has been an over-exaggerated threat of an Islamist insurgent "spillover" from Afghanistan. That "specter" of Islamist insurgency and "extremism" has been used both as an effective hook for procuring US aid, primarily military assistance, and as a way of justifying the relentless repression of political opponents, critical journalists and human rights activists.

    In turn, those on the US side promoting the continuation of "partnering relationships" with the region’s regimes have reiterated such claims, highly disputed, to thwart public scrutiny and Congressional strictures on the flow of military assistance to Karimov’s Uzbekistan, Rahmon’s Tajikistan and elsewhere.

    As a result, US assistance and training earmarked for "counterterrorism" and "security" has been used to bolster existing regimes against internal opposition and criticism from those promoting democracy and civil society, regularly classified as "terrorists" or "extremists" bent on "regime change".

    As regional "war on terror" cooperation increased, the State Department sought and received "national security" waivers from Congressionally-imposed restrictions on military funding and assistance to serial human rights violators such as the Uzbek, Tajik and Kazakh regimes. The Bush administration and Congress also acted to speed up the fulfillment processes for funding and military transfers. 

    The Obama administration followed suit. As the New York Times phrased it in mid-2009 in regard to Kyrgyzstan, "…the Obama administration has emphasized pragmatic concerns over human rights in dealings with autocratic leaders in Central Asia." In January, 2012, the White House sought and received a waiver from a Congressional ban prohibiting military assistance to Uzbekistan, in place since 2004 due to the Karimov regime’s horrific human rights record. (Islam Karimov, it should be recalled, acquired an infamous reputation just prior for boiling political dissidents alive.)

    Fueling the region’s endemic corruption, unknown sums of military assistance came to be channeled through often unaccountable "opaque" Pentagon funding streams outside Congressional and public purview as US "security priorities" increasingly trumped human rights concerns.

    A 2010 Open Society study on aid to regional militaries and police between 1999 and 2009 showed that the Department of Defense (DOD) established so many new military and police assistance programs during the decade that it outdistanced the Department of State (DOS) as the traditional funding source of U.S. military assistance. 

    Significantly, the study pointed out that DOD gained "unusual autonomy" in distributing its assistance—that a succession of leading generals at US Central Command (CENTCOM) had charge of unknown hundreds of millions of dollars of what they, the commanders, referred to as "walking around money" dispensed "almost at their discretion" for training and equipment.

    The report’s author, Lora Lumpe pointed out that, "Nobody really knows how much military aid the U.S. government is giving the Central Asian states" and that actual amounts of total assistance dispersed through CENTCOM remained classified.

    The Pentagon also developed a parallel system of "security cooperation." While the State Department continued to maintain some authority over funding to the region’s regular armed forces with their largely conscript base, CENTCOM moved to training and equipping "special forces," comprised of national police and intelligence unit successors of the Soviet-era KGB. 

    Such special units came to have "dual use"—for "counter-terrorism," however defined by regimes brooking no opposition, and for "Praetorian Guard" units protecting the likes of Kyrgyzstan’s former kleptocrat, Kurmanbek Bakiyev and Tajikistan’s Emomali Rahmon. (In the case of Bakiyev, the personal security unit commanded by his brother, elements of which received US training, proved inadequate as he was ousted by a popular uprising in April, 2010.)

    In addition, US-provided equipment has also been used by the regional oligarchs to suppress demonstrations and strikes. In December, 2011 in Kazakhstan, for example, state security forces deployed US-provided Humvees as they attacked and gunned down striking oil workers, killing at least 15, in the Caspian region company town of Zhanaozen.

    Writing in 2012 of the Afghan war’s "other regional casualty," Central Asia analyst Alexander Cooley aptly framed the issue of US "security" assistance":

    "A fuller reflection on the last eleven years should include the perverse twist about how in its almost single-minded effort to promote state-building, political tolerance and good governance in Afghanistan, just next door the West [sic] has left a trail of repression, graft and unfulfilled commitments to Central Asia’s fledgling civil society."

     The Northern Distribution Network.

    US assistance to the ‘Stans fell off in 2003 as the Bush administration turned its "War "as the new Obama administration fixed its sights on the "right war" in Afghanistan and the Pentagon revved up its "Afghan surge." 

    That escalation heightened and accentuated the importance of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), primarily a matrix of overland truck and rail routes shuttling "non-lethal" materiel and provisions southward to the occupation army. 

    Initial NDN routes came about as insurgent attacks on truck caravans coming from Pakistan stepped up in mid-2008. They came to follow various lengthy paths, such as the one extending from the Baltic port at Riga, Latvia, through Russia (a "frenemy, after all, in regard to the "war on terror"), and down through Kazakhstan and Karimov’s Uzbekistan to Afghanistan. Another would pass from the Georgian Black Sea port of Poti by ferry and rail to Baku, Azerbaijan, across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan and southward. Also originating in the Baltic, an additional route came to enter Afghanistan via Tajikistan. 

    The Network took on increased importance in 2011 when over-the-road convoys from Karachi came under increasing attacks by Pakistani militants in retaliation for mounting US drone strikes. Then, in November of that year, Islamabad closed the supply route entirely in protest over air strikes on its territory that killed 24 of its soldiers. 

    With the Pakistani route shut down through July, 2012, the ‘Stans soon came to handle all overland shipments. Uzbekistan—the "front line state" with the best railroads in the region (in large part initially constructed by the Soviets during their 1980s Afghan War) and a US-facilitated rail link running from the "Hairaton Gate" border crossing at Termez to Mazar-e-Sharif in north central Afghanistan—came to handle upwards of 90 percent of the cargo traversing the Network. 

    The NDN clearly came at a highly inflated price. The first routes in 2008-2009 immediately more than doubled what it had cost to transport supplies through Pakistan. By 2012, the cost increased another two and a half times.

    In February 2012, the DoD estimated that it cost $17,500 per shipping container to transit the network. At an average of 750 containers per week, that amounted to a weekly outlay of $13.125 million, $682.5 million per year. By mid-2013, over a hundred thousand cargo containers had passed through the complex. On top of that, the DoD paid each regime undisclosed flat sum "transit fees" for "use of the infrastructure." 

    To assure the uninterrupted NDN flow, the US Central Command stepped up its dispersal of unaccountable "walk around money" and additional cash through numerous DoD agencies and programs. A good part of that went to commercial carriers and private construction companies with insider connections to the ruling oligarchs. Related contracts regularly received "national security" waivers from congressionally mandated "Buy American" stipulations requiring the Pentagon to purchase goods and services from US firms.

    Pentagon funds also ended up going to venal regime middle men and local lesser officials extorting regular bribes from truckers along the routes—"the cost of doing business" in order to assure the movement of vital fuel and other materiel to its occupation army.

    Money and materiel aside, regimes along the route have exacted other benefits. In exchange for their cooperation and access, the State Department under Hillary Clinton, then-Senator John Kerry and other Congressional leaders continued to mute, if not totally silence their criticism in regard to the repressive practices, abysmal human rights records and rife corruption across the region. 

    For example, when the Defense Budget Authorization Act passed by Congress in December, 2011 removed restrictions on military funding to Uzbekistan in place since 2004, Clinton asserted that there had been "progress" on human rights and political freedoms. Central Asia analyst Jonathan Kucera at the time tactfully noted that her claim was "not a realistic assessment of the situation." 

    Offering a similar claim of improvements, the 2011 Kerry Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on Central Asia contended that Uzbekistan would require "a careful balancing of priorities, given its central role in supporting the Northern Distribution Network…." 

    The report noted "significant human rights concerns, including torture in pre-trial detention facilities, imprisonment of human rights defenders, forced child labor in the cotton fields, and government restrictions on religious freedom…." It nevertheless maintained that it was "in the United States’ interest to engage with such admittedly authoritarian countries on the full range of bi-lateral priorities, including security, good governance, human rights, trade, and investment." "Security" remained the top priority.

    The NDN’s US planners initially expressed hopes that the web of military transport routes would encourage regional economic growth by stimulating broader regional trade. Asking if ordinary Central Asian citizens were benefitting from the Network trade, a critical 2012 study found that,

    "…the NDN is not performing in practice as was expected in theory. There is little evidence to suggest that the NDN is increasing regional cooperation, and in some cases, it may be causing rises in border fees. Indirectly, the NDN also appears to be stimulating corruption in Central Asia. It has done little to improve the efficiency of regional trade, and its revenues flow overwhelmingly to opaque state coffers rather than to ordinary citizens."

    In addition, it appears that US-promoted highway and rail improvements along the NDN have facilitated the northward flow of Afghan heroin and opium to Russia and beyond.

    Citing an October 2012 report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Central Asia journalist Joshua Kucera has reported on how the vital CENTCOM-brokered rail line running between southern Uzbekistan to Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan has become a transport route for northward bound opium and heroin.

    The 2010 UN investigation pointed out that most of the drug seizures made on Uzbekistan’s rail network (a minuscule percentage of the amounts shipped) arrived via Tajikistan. A detailed 2009 report on the drug traffic flowing across the US-built $37 million, Army Corps of Engineers designed "Friendship Bridge" crossing the Panj River between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, chronicled the complicity of corrupt Rahmon regime officials in the trade.

    As Kucera put it, "It stands to reason that making transportation easier would make illicit trafficking easier—especially in countries where border officials are notoriously corrupt. Why go through the trouble to cart the drugs by pack animal through remote, unguarded border areas when you can bribe the border officials on a much faster a highway or railroad?" 

    Regardless, with 2014 fast approaching, the Pentagon is looking to remove thousands of vehicles and other equipment of every description brought in over the course of the twelve-year Afghan occupation. Attuned to increasing such "reverse transit" demands and the fact that the NDN cash bonanza will be coming to an end, the various regimes have recently jacked up transit fees and other costs paid out by the Pentagon cash cow. 

    Karimov’s Uzbekistan, a prime beneficiary of NDN/DoD open spigots, has already increased transit fees for rail shipments to and from Afghanistan by 150 percent. Karimov’s people have also been engaged in discussions regarding the amounts and types of war materiel—vehicles and helicopters, night vision goggles, etc.—to be left behind as yet another form of compensation.

    The NDN has laid the foundation for what Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pronounced in July, 2011 as a "New Silk Road Initiative (NSRI)—the construction of a trans-regional east-west matrix of roads, railways, electric grids, pipelines and assorted commercial ventures intended to economically integrate greater Central Asia—the five ‘Stans, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. As part of the NSRI, the State Department has proposed the resumption of the TAPI pipeline project —the construction of a natural gas line running from Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan to India —long delayed by Afghan instability.

    NSRI proponents have argued that it will bring longer term stability to Afghanistan the broader region. Planners have also viewed the network, with its east-west and southerly transport corridors and pipelines, as a way to wean the largely landlocked ‘Stans away from their long-standing dependency on Russia-routed trade and further integrate the region to "the West." The project has also been viewed as a counter to Chinese economic influence, already well advanced, across the region. 

    After Afghanistan?

    The success of the NSRI is far from assured. And while the exact course and direction for US involvement in Central Asia is unclear, most observers assume that the region, post-2014, will garner far less US attention once the Afghanistan drawdown concludes. 

    Revenues from the NDN and basing agreements have not been unsubstantial, especially in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, but war effort US largesse is expected to decline dramatically. In tandem with all the preexisting social tensions and national rivalries already in play, the impending decline of "war on terror" economy cash flows will likely assist in increasing instability across the region.

    Inter-state rivalries and tensions are likely to increase as the construction of hydroelectric dams in resource poor Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan threaten the water supply need for Uzbekistan’s cotton cash crop. (Uzbekistan has already threatened war if Tajikistan proceeds with its Rogun Dam.) 

    Succession struggles are anticipated with the passing from the scene of Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev, Karimov in Uzbekistan, and Rahmon in Tajikistan while a wave of democratization or at best, "good governance" is unlikely. 

    If prior patterns hold, with their contempt for "good governance" and distrust for democracy, whatever cliques in remaining in power will more than likely resort to the same modalities of repression against all dissent. Internal disputes along class, ethnic and religious lines will likely intensify and overshadow any threat of some "spillover" from Afghanistan, even if the Taliban was take control in Kabul once again.

    Defense Department strategists in the meantime have developed longer, post-2014 designs for future "military-to-military" relations across the region. 

    Pentagon planners have consistently cited the US "transit center" at Manas, as a model "lily pad"— a "reduced footprint," regionally-oriented base, part of an updated "forward basing" strategy and newly restructured "global defense posture." With its lease not renewed by the current Bishkek regime, the base is scheduled to close down in mid-2014. 

    That conceivably could change since the Pentagon payments for access to the airfield currently are the second largest formal contributor to the country’s GDP. Regardless, discussions of opening other regional logistical air hubs either in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or as far away as Rumania have been ongoing. 

    As part of its developing "forward partnering" strategy—a combination of continued but scaled-back US "forward force projection" and increased "inter-operability" with allied "regional stabilizers"— the Pentagon throughout the course of the Afghan war has also continued to hold major joint maneuvers with regional forces, NATO allies and US troops, most notably the annual Operation Steppe Eagle held in Kazakhstan on nine occasions through 2013. Such maneuvers are not about to end.

    * * * * * *

    The twelve year war and occupation in Afghanistan has clearly taken a particular toll on the broader Central Asia region. In its "throw money at it" haste to obtain and insure continuing logistical support for its military effort in landlocked Afghanistan, the US has pumped billions of dollars, much of it largely unaccounted for, into countries where corruption and bribery have long been considered part of "business as usual".

    In what has amounted to a spree of bribery and unprecedented grand scale graft, unknown amounts of Pentagon "walk around money" and other US assistance has gone to the region’s authoritarian regimes as compensation for their cooperation. The results have been manifold as injections of war chest cash and credits have also gone to line the pockets of ruling oligarchs, their well-connected cronies, and other "rent takers." 

    Unevenly distributed and largely siphoned upwards and abroad, the vast amounts of military and other forms of aid have assisted in widening preexisting social and economic chasms, the key sources of insecurity and resentment. Much of the funding, doled out for "security assistance," in turn has gone to bolster repression rather than democratization.

    Enabling the corruption and ongoing human rights abuses endemic to the region, US operations have actually benefitted the few at the expense of the many and thereby made all but guaranteed future instability and increased the likelihood of blowbacks yet to come after Afghanistan.

     

    Alan Ruff is a historian, activist, radio host, and writer. This article appears in the January 2014 issue of Z Magazine.

  • Write on behalf of Iranian teachers facing death

             In much of the global south, teachers are leaders of their communities.  In Iran, two teachers are in mortal danger because they have defended their community’s religious freedom.  Amnesty International has sent an alert for urgent action to defend them. I’ve sent an email message, reproduced below. Please do the same – before January 20.

             Teachers have as part of their professional obligations a responsibility to serve their communities.  As a professor of education and teacher-educator,  I write on behalf of two Iranian teachers, Hadi Rashedi and Hashem Sha’bani Amouri, who were sentenced to death on 7 July 2012 in connection with their cultural activities on behalf of Iran’s Ahwazi Arab minority. They were reported to have been pressured to make videotaped “confessions” and are believed to have been tortured or otherwise ill-treated when they refused.

             The Iranian people have the right to determine their future and for this reason I have consistently opposed use by the US and other nations of force and sanctions against the Iranian people. I urge you to support the same rights for others and reveal the whereabouts of Hadi Rashedi and Hashem Sha’bani Amouri and revoke the order to execute them and the other three men Mohammad Ali Amouri, Sayed Jaber Alboshoka, and Sayed Mokhtar Alboshoka, convicted with them.

             All the men deserve retrials in proceedings in line with international fair trial standards and without recourse to the death penalty. They should be protected from torture and allegations of torture should be investigated.  They should be given medical treatment and are allowed immediate and regular contact with their lawyers and families.

    PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 20 JANUARY 2014 TO:

    1. Leader of the Islamic Republic

    Ayatollah Sayed ‘Ali Khamenei

    Twitter: @khamenei_ir

    Email: info_leader@leader.ir

    Salutation: Your Excellency

     

    2. Head of the Judiciary

    Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani

    Email: info@dadiran.ir

    (Subject line: FAO Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani)Salutation: Your Excellency

     

    3. Copy

    President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

    Hassan Rouhani

    Email: media@rouhani.ir

    Twitter: @HassanRouhani (English) and @Rouhani_ir (Persian)

  • Marta Russell, 61, Writer about Disability Issues

    Marta Russell died a few days ago in Los Angeles days short of her sixty-second birthday. A journalist and commentator about issues affecting disabled people as well as a film industry worker for many years, Russell was best known for her landmark and pioneering book, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the end of the Social Contract (Common Courage Press). Here she set out a compelling critique of how capitalism marginalizes and oppresses disabled workers. Reading it as a young disability rights advocate, I found Marta's book a breath of fresh air, combining passionate advocacy with an understanding of political economy and an account of how disabled people are systematically oppressed by capitalism.
     
    Marta was particularly unique in focusing on an anti-capitalist critique of disablement policy in the United States where postmodern analysis of the disabled body has predominated. With Jean Stewart, she wrote a remarkably biting piece about prisons and disablement for Monthly Review. She was also not shy about criticizing misguided strategies by disability rights movements that she felt were too moderate or co-opted. Disabled since birth, Marta leaves behind a daughter, Georgia Scheele, her partner, Steve Weiss, and countless disabled people she radicalized around the world. Advocates of socialism from below would do well to revisit her work on this too often ignored topic.
     
    Ravi Malhotra is a member of the Human Rights Committee of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities and co-authored an article with Marta Russell in Socialist Register in 2001.  
     

     

  • Duking it out with Weingarten on Common Core

                ImageOne of the most confusing aspects of the last decade’s education reforms is that a reform that will do great harm often contains an element that’s useful, even progressive.  The reforms are crafted to seduce liberals with this combination of a carrot and grand rhetoric about the intention of increasing educational opportunity.  Testing was sold to liberals as a way to hold schools accountable.  Now a national curriculum, the Common Core, is being peddled as essential to give all students the rigorous education (they love that word “rigorous”) they need to compete in a global economy in the 21st century.

                We should have learned by now that we can't be seduced by the carrots or the rhetoric.  Yet, here goes Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, doing exactly that.  Weingarten is being battered on social media for allying with the Business Roundtable to urge acceptance of the Common Core, which is opposed by activist teachers and parents on the Left as well as by elements of the far-right, in particular the Heritage Foundation.

                The Washington Post article practically chortled about Weingarten's jump into bed with the union's foes: “The head of the country’s second-largest teachers union and a business leader who tried to weaken unions as a onetime governor of Michigan have made a joint plea to the nation’s governors to stand by the controversial Common Core academic standards.”  

                Weingarten has endorsed the Common Core in her capacity as union president, speaking on behalf  ofAFT members without this issue having been given the vigorous debate and vote it needs. She has no right to do that and should be called on it.  In allying the union with the forces who aim to destroy public education and teachers unions, she is strengthening them and weakening us.  She is betraying the union’s democratic ideals – and no, the poll the AFT has commissioned cannot substitute for debate and votes, at the local level. Support for the Common Core is disorienting activists, teachers and parents alike, many of whom who are still not totally convinced the union is a trustworthy ally.

                At the same time, we need to acknowledge that union honchos/honchas can get away with this kind of behavior because members allow it.  We have to acknowledge that many union members, though angry, are frightened and passive. They’re waiting for “the union” to protect them. If every member of the AFT Executive Council told Weingarten they would resign unless she pulled back on the Common Core and repudiated linking teacher evaluations to students’ standardized test scores, she would retract her positions.  But AFT Executive Committee members, who are presidents of key locals, don’t do that.  They too are frightened and are used to being told what’s possible for the union to do.

                The AFT and NEA will be as democratic and militant in defense of public education, the profession of teaching, and our students as we make it.  By all means,  duel with Weingarten on twitter for her perfidy. But don’t let this replace organizing in the schools, talking with colleagues about what we can do, together, to make our unions live up to their responsibility.