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  • Opening the left door wide

    This essay is inspired by the recent article by Denis Godard titled: “The NPA in crisis: We have to explain because we have to start again.” His article is a review of the strategic orientation of the historically Trotskyist-origined tendencies that prioritize building independent class formations and which see electoral vehicles as expressions of anti-capitalist cum revolutionary socialist movements “from below” (that is, based in and directly responsive to grassroots and rank-and-file formations).

    There is no dispute here with this strategic orientation, on the contrary. But while Godard sees a need for recreating a “new strategy” for the left, its “newness” pertains mainly to the “sameness” between the old LCR [French Revolutionary Communist League] and the new NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party] (into which the LCR dissolved as its largest component). It is a critique in part of what Godard sees as the fixation on the electoral and on the programmatic differences that define the LCR or NPA vis a vis the rest of the left, and the failure to re-invent itself in response to the new (“novel”) conditions thrown up by the systemic crisis of capitalism and the resulting mass revolts with even more explosive conditions expected to come.

    He argues further that the organized left needs to move beyond the propagandistic terrain defined by these programmatic definitions – alluding to a propensity for a “top down” ready-made electoral program for the masses, rather than the active refounding of left organizations that would develop a political expression organically while attached and integral to the social movements. He contends that the NPA was too quick to prioritize the electoral, as if compelled to compete with the upstart Front de Gauche (FdG, or Left Front) in the impending 2012 presidential contest. He does not mention that failure to achieve the modest threshold of votes needed to ensure the state subsidy of approximately $1 million would cripple the party. So, why the rush after the election? And is base-building within the current capacity of the left? Despite the differences, there are some important parallels for us to consider.

    It is certainly true that the European left has a longer and steadier tradition, a historical strength, that is inconceivable in the US. The cultural and structural advantages accrued by even very modest electoral successes of parties like the NPA, FdG, (or, eg, Die Linke in Germany whose think tank, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, recently opened a branch in Manhattan), is indisputable. As for membership cadre, at the NPA’s current estimated membership of 3,000, the size of a comparable party in the US would be about 15,000 (more than 50 times the size of Solidarity). At its founding, before the split over support for the FdG candidate Melenchon, the numbers were triple those (9K in France = approx. 45K in US). The numbers for the French CP are even more challenging for us to conceive of here, unheard of  since at least 75 years ago, if then: 134K in France = approx. 650K in US. So, perhaps, it is not completely outlandish to call for base-building with the urgency Godard does, considering the relatively far greater capacity of the French left, despite, and one could say because of,  the decline in the NPA membership and its poll results (2002: far left 10.44% [LCR: 4.25%]; 2007: 7.07% [LCR: 4.08%]; 2012: NPA 1.15%/FdG 11.1%).

    Godard does not suggest that the revolutionary left’s traditional “values” – class independence and the co-development of a movement from below along with and as a prerequisite for its electoral expression, and to forge its own institutions to replace those of the existing capitalist system – is incorrect. Instead he argues that the existing NPA is stuck in the mud of programmatic divisions as a consequence of its electoral preoccupation. He defends the orientation of the NPA, as against an alliance or regroupment of some kind with the FdG, and calls urgently for re-booting the NPA, this time getting the strategy (action plan) right. His argument rests on what I believe are two errors of analysis: an exaggerated assessment of the depth and breadth of “mass revolts” and a mistaken conflation of the capitalist crisis as equivalent to a crisis of capitalist hegemony.

    These errors of analysis lead Godard to the flawed conclusion that the crisis of the NPA – and we can extrapolate that to say of the left generally in the advanced capitalist countries – is a crisis of the will of the left in a period of important new opportunities. I would argue that yearning for a “new strategy” in this period really still amounts to wishing for improved social conditions that could make a more advanced strategy viable, but that the reality confirms the prevailing orientation albeit within the limits of the shrunken capacity of the left and the constraints imposed by the ever-increasing dominance of the capitalist class. This is not to say that the left is doomed to marginalization, but neither is it reasonable to re-orient on the basis of a mistaken analysis of the movements and of the agency of the organized left to “lead” (drag us out of the mud, so to speak) as a matter of will. To be sure, a “re-boot” of some sort is in order, but on what basis is not so clear.

    Godard begins by casting aside the temptation to blame the failure of the NPA to lead the French left in recent national elections on “the period we’re in” or on the FdG which usurped part of the NPA’s “space”. Godard states: “The opposite is true: the inability of the NPA to show its usefulness in this period of crisis of the system and of mass revolts was the reason for its internal crisis.” He asserts that the “times we live in have seen no less than the start of a systemic crisis of capitalism, quantitatively the largest social revolt in France since 1968 (the movement for pensions), the Arab revolutions, the Indignados movement in Spain and Greece, the Occupy movement in the United States. How can you make such a period the reason for the failure of an anti-capitalist party?” But the reality is much more complex.

    Is the deep global financial and economic crisis, which most of the left believes to be true, really equivalent to a massive social crisis in play, or put another way, to a crisis of the hegemony of capital?

    In the first place, all of the “mass revolts” he cites are not equivalent. There is certainly more maturity and massiveness to the Arab Spring, although that comparison should be carefully qualified by local particularities of relationships of forces, degree of unanimity of the working class, not to mention the effectiveness or not of existing and sometimes evolving leftist forces. It is one thing to recognize the revolutionary potential in Egypt when a genuinely massive popular uprising combines with a hitherto critically repressed labor movement to shut down the economy and force the overthrow of the head of the regime (the “capo dei capi” as it were. Nevertheless, the “revolution” is obviously far from finished and beset by social divisions and political sectarianism.) It is quite another to compare it in the same thought with the overstated impact of the Occupy movement in the US, which despite its contribution to making visible an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and giving new voice to the grievances of the 99%, does not represent a transformational agency, nor even a convincing expression of the class. The class is too polarized and confused to be able to form an expression of mass discontent or to compel a movement for social change. Despite much worse conditions generally (cf. the US) for the working class in the Spanish state, the Indignados seem to be no further along. Even in France, for which Godard claims the largest social revolt since 1968, it is a dubious “success” that mobilized perhaps millions and for the first time since 1968 was unable to prevent austerity measures from implementation by the government. It is much more important at this point to eliminate the confusion that besets and discourages the class, essentially the present orientation for most of the revolutionary socialist left.

    The nearsightedness of a focus on the “mass revolts” as indicators also blinds us to what we are loath to recognize in our daily lives: the entrenched consolidation of capital and its functionaries. Each day we read in Labor Notes and elsewhere of the occasional victories both small and large, from Republic Windows and Doors to the Chicago Teachers. But as inspirational as these are, they are exceptional. The broad truth is well known and unavoidable: union representation at the lowest levels for generations and having lost any advantage it once had at the bargaining table (more and more often a result of lost leverage as much as treacherous union leaders); the division of wealth is at historic levels abetted by a corporate class able to plunder abroad and loot at home virtually at will; a political system in the lands of the “free” that stands for “free market” more than the producers of wealth, that disenfranchises and enslaves its subjects, able to set aside legal and ethical constraints with ease as the needs arise; raping the world’s resources both material and human at will. The impotence of the working class is never more apparent or certain than today, not just to the left but to the masses who would be in revolt.

    In the second place, Godard criticizes those within the NPA who blame their poor electoral showing on the FdG taking advantage of the NPA’s weakness, defined as the inability to build its base among the communities and institutions of the working class it aims to represent. This is not so clear. In fact, the LCR had been out-polling the PCF (Communist Party) in the last elections, despite the far greater saturation of PCF members in union and municipal government officialdom. The implication is that, in a period of growing revolts and social upheaval, the masses were ready but the NPA was not; presumably, therefore, the left jumped to the FdG in a fit of desperation. In other words, the left and the working class, having little confidence in the “same old” NPA, were enchanted by the prospects of the new FdG, presumably an illusory and temporary deviation. The flat performance of the FdG can be seen to substantiate the view that the left was vacillating between its own, but the unaffiliated not so much: the far left polled about the same as in previous presidential elections, but badly underperformed the far right National Front’s gain from 10.44% to 17.9%. Whether or not the left vote for the FdG was transitory, clearly “space was occupied” by the far right instead.

    While the particulars of the French electoral scene must be respected, the arguments Godard raises are relevant to the left in the US. Godard argues that the “new” NPA was really only superficially different from the “old” LCR from which it formed. The idea is that with the crisis of the Communist and Social Democratic parties after the fall of the eastern bloc, the revolutionary left would be able to “regroup” and broaden its appeal and enhance its effect. A similar trajectory was seen for the left in the US by Solidarity and some others. The disappointment according to Godard was that opening wider the programmatic door to estranged communists and social democrats was limited to and by its organizational definition, still leaving the left in place as “revolutionaries without a revolution.” The insinuation is that there was and is a revolution to be had, on the horizon, as it were, and that the left is – capacity aside – unwilling to accept the challenge.

    Godard explains: “In this analysis of the novelty of the period two elements remained marginal: the systemic crisis of capitalism and above all the return of mass struggles and of an anti-capitalist consciousness.” Again, Godard subordinates the hegemony of capital – which, in my view, is not in crisis – to the systemic crisis of capitalism, as if the crisis can “be solved through a succession of political crises and large-scale confrontations.” This suggests the possibility that theoretically a revolutionary transformation can be posed at least in substantial part by contesting for economic and political reforms compelled by such confrontations. From and through these confrontations, as the left has long maintained, “our class (broadly defined) may, on a mass scale, acquire levels of consciousness and organization making it suitable for a revolutionary transformation.” Perhaps feeling a twinge of doubt, Godard uses the example of how in Egypt those who early on dared to criticize the army were few and a year later are many more. He is remarkably silent, however, on the effects of the police state in Egypt and virtually everywhere else where capital rules, in constraining the effects of such confrontations. Even more, the crisis of confidence in the working class is arguably more severe as the traditional social institutions lose their potency, aggravated by workers’ fear of falling into the same plainly visible abyss as their less fortunate peers. And it is here, at the nexus of these demonstrable fears and demoralization of the working class with the invisibility of capitalist hegemony (the forest we don’t see for the trees), where the class war plays out.

    In Godard’s analysis, the crisis of capitalism provides the opportunity for the left that must find the will to take it on by way of fighting for reforms and ameliorations of the hardships of the class it would lead, at the same time that it fails to confront the impotence of the class and its fighters in the face of overwhelming state power. Not only is his view of the “novelty of the period” limited to the inherent crisis of capitalism at the exclusion of consideration for the most entrenched hegemony of capital perhaps ever seen, but his assessment of the capacity of the class to wage massive revolts is exaggerated. The hegemony of capital takes many and various forms, not simply the disenfranchisement of the working class or the unstoppable power of the state apparatus. It is also evident in the social divisions and sectarian factionalism within the working class itself. It is the always feared rise of the right that we see operating perpetually as a counter to the left in the electoral arena (eg, Le Pen/NF in France) and ever more freely in the streets as the effects of austerity embolden the right (eg, Golden Dawn in Greece). Not only do these right wing alternatives intimidate the left, they also capture substantial segments of the working class consciousness, further diminishing the potency and potential of the working class to defend, let alone assert itself.

    Whether or not the rise of the right and the hegemonic power of the capitalist states raises the stakes for the left, it should be clear that Godard’s argument that the left is missing an opportunity is an overstatement. So he says: “What makes a new party both necessary and possible is the conjunction of a period which can set in motion millions of people with the emergence of tens of thousands of activists within various fronts of the movement, who are their practical leaders on a day to day basis.” If his statement is true, it is also only half the truth. Re-booting the left to take advantage of a new opportunity without consideration for the overwhelming power of capital is a set up for a repeated failure. Even if the confidence of the class were awakened and organized into massive uprisings, the question of challenging state power is still grievously misunderstood, especially having the benefit of knowing the subsequent events in Egypt where the case has been offered that the uprising has been most advanced. (Another notable example of the constraints on social transformation is seen in Venezuela, which, with all its particularities, is a more or less open experiment for all to see.) And the challenge is not a static one: each confrontation, although of value experientially for the left, is also instructive to the state. Each “advance” by the working class is met with an equal or greater force from the state; and each innovation is understood and overcome. So, the novelty of Occupy is unseated at its source: the “place” that gave Occupiers their visibility and a common voice that the entire class could hear, was summarily emptied and its sense of autonomy disoriented by the state, able to apply concerted and decisive action that confirms its power and the continued impotency of the working class.

    This assessment, however, should not be construed as a litany of hopelessness. The argument is not with the fight back and the struggle in the face of overwhelming odds, nor with the imperative to build the movements based in the working class. It is with the notion put forward by Godard that we face a new period of social explosions that requires recreating organically new agencies of transformation (ie, working class institutions and the parties that express its ambitions), that insists on starting over – alone. The opportunities are not in doubt; whether or not the left responds well or inspires confidence in the class, the potential for struggle is as real as the human nature to be free. What is in doubt is whether the left will reverse its trajectory toward extinction. The call for new formations of struggle is permanently a truism without exceptional meaning. Is this another incantation of the need for the left to rise to the latest signs of revolutionary upsurge? Are we seeing another example of the exuberance of optimism that is the life blood of the revolutionary left? Or is this an excess we can attribute to a sectarian resistance to regroupment and a demonstration of irrelevance of the self-proclaimed vanguard of the class? Because there is no certainty that the increasingly desperate working class will stand by for long waiting for the bickering left to sort out its differences and win over the masses to its program. An ascendant right will have captured the imagination of the masses long before then.

    The subjective insularity of the extant left organizations, each beset by the fear that dilution of the program by which it has so far survived will hasten its demise, is recognized by Godard: “Any structure, any organization creates its own conservatism in ideas as well as in practice. This is what gives an organization the stability needed to hold out in difficult times and to withstand the pressures of the dominant ideology. But this conservatism, which always involves dangers, becomes a real obstacle when the situation changes…. The LCR only opened the doors to its house…. But it was the LCR’s house, the one the members of the LCR knew, and they knew how it worked. Others could only be guests. It turned out that that house was actually not suited to the tasks of the new period.” While Godard describes the expansion of the LCR into the somewhat broader NPA, he does not admit to shutting the door once again.

    He is willing to capture all of the likeminded on the far left, in order to re-try building the class vehicle that will fit the new times. At the same time he is unwilling to engage with the broader left which he writes off (too transitory or fanciful?). He is apparently unwilling to admit that others – like the FdG – also believe a revolutionary transformation is necessary, and might be willing to discuss new and creative ways to engage workers and oppressed as the conditions worsen. Godard complains that the electoral fixation of the NPA was defined by the programmatic differences among the far left, but is unwilling (with about 3,000 more party members) to engage with those others on the far left to rebuild new formations, to demonstrate a readiness to reshape and reinvigorate the left so that it might inspire the confidence of the even broader left he hopes to lead. He does not address the glaring contradiction that building a movement is not simply a matter of getting one’s soldiers lined up in the proper direction, but also of persuading those who are accustomed to taking what they can get from whoever has something to offer them. If the trajectory of the beleaguered class is tending to the right, then the organizations that struggle in their name will need to reach out to their right, not to their left, to engage with them.

    Godard’s argument that the times are propitious and demand a restart of the NPA project is in itself appropriate; but a misreading of the depth and breadth of the movements engenders an exuberance of the will of the revolutionary socialist left to build its influence among the ranks of increasingly desperate and discouraged workers and their beleaguered institutions. There is indeed a crisis, a crisis of the credibility of the left that can only be addressed by reconciliation. The experiments of organization and openness to the organic development of the left’s program applies not only to the NPA and left groups internally, but is fundamental to a renewal of the left influence for the entire class. The relatively short history of left regroupment has been hampered by the sectarian imperative of self-preservation: in a dwindling set of organizational players, the survivors remain convinced that the correctness of their program has ensured their survival, and must continue to do so. The sum of our experience so far may be that effective regroupment will only come about by necessity: only when faced with final extinction will the extant organized left be compelled to combine its forces, and perhaps it will then be too late.

    Godard is not unaware of the necessity for renewal: “The nature of the times makes the construction of an anti-capitalist force not just possible; it makes it more necessary than ever. Without the coordination of movement activists and the progressive development of an anti-capitalist strategy, victories become increasingly difficult to gain for specific struggles, as demonstrated by the movement on pensions, the anti-racist struggle or the anti-war movement.” Indeed, he admits the limits of what has been accomplished. Still, he miscalculates. The “mass revolts” and the “crisis of capitalism” cited by Godard have not propelled the left to self-preservation, only decline; the failure of the left to credibly cohere has only emboldened the far right. His reliance on the will of the left places the responsibility for renewal squarely within the house of the revolutionary left alone.

    The decline of the organized left, beset with internecine programmatic disputes, reveals both a reduced capacity to build a base and a loss of influence beyond its diminished numbers. Advocacy for class independence is not a bargaining chip the far left must give up when it regroups, nor is cohabitation in bourgeois governments a precondition. It may not be a matter of the will of the far left to forge a regrouped or rebooted left; it may come down to a matter of necessity with social conditions at a tipping point (cf. Syriza in Greece), of the basic survival of the broad left. What is certainly clear is that the left must be able to accomplish a regroupment in order to inspire confidence in the class. The class is mostly to our right, and being tugged even farther. It is where we will struggle for the hearts and minds of the builders of a just future. But we have little prospect of persuading the class if we can’t forge a united left. These are the immediate concurrent tasks for the far left everywhere that capital reigns, and is the strategy we must continue to employ. The renewal that Godard prescribes for the NPA  is not a new strategy. The regroupment that is Syriza, as contradictory and unfinished as it is, is not only an electoral formation, but aims to build a base and organize a movement at the same time. This is an advance that has paid off for the regroupment strategy with an astounding poll result to show for it as well. It shows a method for growth, experimental and with more questions than answers – but one which has inspired the broad left and is for now what stands in the way of the ascendant right.

    Warren Davis is a long-time labor and political activist living in the Philadelphia area, most recently active in the Occupy movement and the struggle against austerity. This article was originally written as part of a discussion by the National Committee of Solidarity: A Socialist, Feminist, Anti-Racist Organization.

  • “Where were you…” Thoughts on John F. Kennedy and his Memory

    Hanging from a chain on a roof, that’s where I was. It’s true, as every television and radio station has been telling us over the last several days; those of us my age do remember where we were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And, as I think back on it now, I am shocked at the cavalier nature of my response when I heard the news and I wonder at my lack of understanding of the significance of the event.

    I was hanging from a chain on a steep roof in Anaheim, California, the home of Walt Disney’s Disneyland amusement park. I was eighteen, between high school and college, and had taken a job at a factory where orange peels from the Sunkist juice plant were run by the ton through a great screw conveyor, dried, and turned into pectin. On that particular day though, my boss had told me to go up on the roof which I was to paint with aluminum paint, and, because the roof was so high and the pitch so steep, I was somehow strapped or tied to a chain anchored at the peak, and so I dangled against the corrugated metal. Sometime in the early afternoon a man came by and hollered up at me, “The president’s been killed,” and walked on.

    All alone on the roof for another few hours, until someone came by to tell me to knock it off and freed me from the chain to go home, I had no one to talk to, no one with whom to process this information. When the fellow had first shouted to me I had thought, “Who cares?” or maybe “So what?” In my mind Kennedy, a Catholic, a fabulously rich man, and a politician, represented all that I had been raised to despise. My Dutch, Calvinist paternal grandfather, an immigrant baker, a socialist, and the biggest intellectual influence on my young life, loathed the Catholic Church and the Pope, who, he said, took the pennies of the poor to build gold encrusted cathedrals and palaces for the prelates. Worse yet, the president’s father, Joseph Kennedy, was a plutocrat who had made his money in steel and booze and owned that great palace of capitalist commerce, the Merchandise Mart, in my original hometown of Chicago. I knew too that Kennedy was a Democrat, head of the party of the Solid South where white racism ruled. The party too of Chicago’s corrupt political boss Mayor Richard J. Daley, a man loathed by my family. No, Kennedy’s death did not move me.

    And as my Japanese pocket transistor radio kept reporting, Kennedy was not the first president to be assassinated. Lincoln, a hero for his leadership of the North in the struggle against the South and slavery, had been assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at the Ford Theater. Now that, I thought, was a real tragedy. McKinley, the Republican imperialist, had been assassinated by an anarchist, and, I thought, it would not have been so bad if others of his ilk—Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Calvin Coolidge—had also been eliminated from American history.

    I was living at the time in a home for senior citizens, on the second floor which, because it had no elevator, and so could not legally be rented to men and women in their sixties and seventies, like those who lived in little apartments on the first floor. I had been there too short a time to have formed any friendships with the old folks, so I just climbed the stairs and, exhausted from throwing hundred pound bags of pectin, passed out. No nightmares of Kennedy’s assassination disturbed my sleep.

    The next day I was back at the pectin factory in my usual post where I worked all alone at the bottom of the funnel where the tons of dried orange peels, carried by the conveyor from the juice plant, then dried by the great blower and reduced to flakes poured out of the funnel’s mouth to be captured in hundred pound canvas sacks that I sewed shut with the heavy hanging Singer machine before I piled the bags on pallets—five bags to a layer, four layers high—and then picked up the pallets with the forklift, drove them across the street, and stacked them three pallets high in the warehouse. All of this was done by me alone. Like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, I raced back from the warehouse to the funnel, from the funnel to the warehouse. Sewing bags, stacking bags, driving the forklift and stacking pallets. It was hell. Kennedy’s assassination the day before must have been somewhere in the back of my mind, maybe, I guess. Though that morning, failing to execute a turn correctly, I drove the forklift into a wall of pallets causing an avalanche in the warehouse that could have killed me. Throwing my hands up in exasperation, I walked to the office, quit, took my check, returned to the senior citizen home, packed up my few things, and went back to my mother’s home in Imperial Beach, California. I had failed at my first real job. I was still a kid with the right of return.

    My mother, a grocery clerk, a member of the Retail Clerks Union, and a Democratic voter, though a woman who did not generally hold politicians of any stripe in high very esteem, told me she felt sorry for Mrs. Kennedy. I found my friends, many of our friends, men and women in their forties and active in the local Democratic Party—a real rarity in San Diego County—still distraught, the women weeping and the men shaking their heads somberly though the assassination that had happened two or three days before. They were not just sorry for Mrs. Kennedy. The assassination of Kennedy had been a blow against their leader and their politics. While I liked them, I had never understood their political commitments and now couldn’t understand their distress and their grief.   

    Fifty years later, I am rather embarrassed and ashamed at my reaction. After all a man had been killed, his wife widowed, his children left fatherless. Today, a husband, a father, and a grandfather, I can better appreciate the personal tragedy that was involved. When during this past week I saw Jacqueline Kennedy and her children on television, images we have all seen dozens of times before, a tear came to my eye. My grandfather’s anti-Catholic prejudice, I now realize, kept me back then from realizing that the election of the Catholic Kennedy, much like the election of the African American Barack Obama, had represented an expansion of American religious toleration and of democracy, no matter what his politics. Thinking back on it, I am sure that those older friends of mine, few of whom are still living, were concerned because they didn’t know what to expect from Lyndon Johnson, and living in Southern California, in Goldwater country, they were worried about a right turn in the not too distant future. A callow kid, I hadn’t gotten any of that.  

    I am sure I didn’t grasp the gravity of the events of the time. The country’s leader had been shot and killed, a sign that something was profoundly wrong in the body politic that claimed to be a secure democracy. But, of course, we had known that before Kennedy was killed, known that something was rotten in Denmark. And it hadn’t begun with the assassination. Like my contemporaries, I had been watching the struggle of the African American civil rights movement on television every night, well aware that Kennedy was doing as little as possible on that issue for fear of losing the Solid South. I had been reading the radical Liberation magazine since I was fourteen years old, a gift from my absent father, so I was well aware of Kennedy’s role in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, an attempt to smother the revolution and prevent Cuba from gaining its independence. Just a year before, we had lived through the Cuban missile crisis, the most dangerous moment of the Cold War standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. I was well aware that Kennedy was a Cold War warrior, as deeply committed to the capitalist-Communist division of the world and the anti-Communist crusade as Truman and Eisenhower before him.

    Later after Kennedy’s death, there was the creation of the Camelot myth, Kennedy enshrinement in popular memory as the handsome young king surrounded by a court of Sinatra, Monroe, Bernstein, Mailer, and the rest, the liberal’s world of culture. None of that held any fascination for me, because after the assassination came Lyndon B. Johnson, the expansion of the war in Vietnam, the carpet bombing, the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese being killed, as well as tens of thousands of Americans. That, for me, remains the Kennedy legacy. 

  • What do "social movement teachers unions" look like?

    system-built-this-way One question I’m frequently asked is what “social movement teacher unionism” looks like and how to get there. The first place people are looking, and correctly so, is the Chicago Teachers Union, transformed by radical activists who learned from failed reform efforts and began to build the union at the school, rather than mostly concentrating their efforts at capturing the union apparatus as had been done previously.

    CORE’s success was based in part on Chicago’s unique circumstances that don’t exist elsewhere. They have much to teach teachers elsewhere and at the same time, their success can’t be reduced to a formula. We have much to learn (and share) from how this new movement is evolving elsewhere. For instance, activists in NYC and Newark NJ (whose organizing almost yielded them a majority of the union leadership positions in the most recent election) shared insights in this panel about their vision of a democratized union, one that works with parents and students, and how they are working towards it.  I’m still bowled over by the specifics they provide.

         In Los Angeles, I’m looking to the success of the “Union Power” slate because of its excellent program and work in mobilizing members. I encourage UTLA members to become active in its campaigns. What I think we’ve learned from the LA teachers union in the past years of reform efforts is that no matter how intelligent, conscientious or militant individual leaders are, their capacity doesn’t substitute for building a movement.  No leader can do it for us. Real change in our unions, in UTLA and the LA school system, depends on organizing at the school, member by member, building a union presence based on a set of principles and respectful alliances with parents and community. “Union power” isn’t about endorsements for an election but rather building a social movement that holds its leaders’ feet to the fire and at the same time shows up to support projects the union officers put forward.

         Elsewhere in the AFT, reform movements are percolating in Providence RI and Philly.  In both places, AFT members who understand that the union must attend to the historic injustices of a segregated school system and name racism as a systemic problem are seeing that they have to engage teachers about the lack of democracy in their union and its sclerotic operations. Things are hopping in the NEA as well, in North Carolina, Seattle, and Portland.  Next week I’ll offer some thoughts on how the AFT and NEA differ and what this means for organizing. 

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

  • Wealth and Power in the U.S Out of Whack

    Growing Income Disparities ‘Danger to System,’ says Former Clinton Labor Secretary
    (A mixed review of Robert Reich’s documentary ‘Inequality for All’)

    Robert Reich, the intellectual giant, stands 4 foot 11 inches tall, dripping wet. He jokes about it. He comfortably drives a Mini Cooper and once co-hosted a talk show with terrifically tall and terrifyingly conservative (except by Tea Party standards) ex-Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson (the show was called “The Long and the Short of It”). The author of 13 books, he served in the Ford, Carter and Clinton administrations—the later posting as secretary of labor from 1993 to 1996, a post he resigned from after losing one last intramural battle to Treasury secretary and Wall Street princeling Robert Rubin. Among his better senior hires: labor leaders Karen Nussbaum(SEIU Local 925) and Joyce Miller (Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers).  His presentations come with equal parts easy-to-assimilate detail and a self-deprecating, wry humor.

    The peppery Reich considers himself a center-left liberal, which may explain why he didn’t publicly rebuke Clinton’s ending of welfare as we know it.  “I have never been a member of the Communist Party,” he tells one television interviewer without prompting, but in his graying years he has become a leading critic of cascading income inequalty in the United States .

    His 2010 book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, and the recent documentary, “Inequality for All,” based on the book and his presentations to standing room-only lecture-hall classes at the University of California-Berkeley — whose number of graduate assistants alone could explain any rise in the Bay Area employment rate — are damning indictments of a corporate system that impoverishes tens of millions even as it sabotages its own capacity to grow the capitalist system. Anyone interested in understanding the hypertrophic gap separating the super rich from not just the poor but also middle-income households should see this film. Better still, read the book. The picture he draws of a widening class divide and a growing plutocratic threat to democracy is  perfect in detail. (Here’s one nibble: how many of us knew, for example, that the U.S. ranks 64th among nations on the inequality scale — only slightly better than several war-ridden West African nations. I did, and only because TV’s John Stewart showcased that fact, courtesy of Reich.) 

    That’s just one sobering fact among scores Reich reveals, as he asks “How much inequality can we have and still have capitalism?” That theme works in the film the way creepy music does in a monster flick. You know some rough beast is slouching toward center stage, and you know it by its works.

    But beware: Reich is no socialist. He says he loves capitalism, but thinks it can be fixed if only the rich understand that income inequality and the loss of buying power are bad for them, and that vast income and wealth disparities — translated as declining purchasing power — are themselves the cause of economic crises and the precursors to the social order’s demise. That’s a social order over which they rule.

     That frame is problematic. Leaving it in the realm of bad ideas and not seeing exploitation as an intrinsic and systemic necessity, one for which, as Marx said of the captains of industry, “Accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and the prophets,” is beyond sad. Urging the super rich to adopt a self-correcting methodology lies, from a socialist standpoint, somewhere between the naive and the delusional. And I mean that with respect. Reich at least sees the problem.

     His main point — correct as far as it goes and argued with his characteristic flair — is that so-called middle class Americans (that term, of course, is a horror) are responsible for 70 percent of U.S. spending, and that consumer buying is the engine driving the economy. So they, and not the captains of industry, the economic royalists and the Wall Street stock manipulators, are the real job creators of the real economy. But to fulfill that function they need more purchasing power, which means higher salaries that enable them to be active and aggressive consumers. It is they who gin up demand, allow industry to hire and pump up tax collections. Hoarding wealth, offshoring investments and giving the rich tax-rate treats is a threat to the system itself.

    It’s the incapacity of a middle class to consume enough that causes economic busts. It’s wages stagnating or declining even as the cost and number of necessities, including decent child care for working families, healthcare and housing  compound the sort of pricey life-style choices previous generations never had, that is  the problem. 

     For Reich, the essence of the New Deal was creating the conditions where the majority could spend more. It meant a jobs program to create demand to get the sluggish capitalist behemoth up to speed. That’s wisdom not only the Englishman John Maynard Keynes understood but also FDR’s Federal Reserve chief Marriner Eccles,  the Morman banker and businessman extraordinaire, who sold Roosevelt on the idea that, as Reich puts it, “excessive spending has nothing to do with the 1929 collapse.” It was, instead, the lack of spending by the many.

    It was, as Eccles saw it, “the vast accumulation of income in the hands of the wealthiest people in the nation,  which siphoned purchasing power away from the rest.” It’s also what led to the 2007 Great Recession, Reich says, as he demonstrates that the greatest disparities in wealth in US history were, and not by coincidence, in 1929 and 2007.

    Film maker Jacob Kornbluth even trots out a billionaire to acknowledge these home truths. Nick Hanauer, founder of Seattle-based venture capital company Second Avenue Partners, runs among his many holdings a  successful pillow company, though his real money came from his ground-floor investing in Amazon.com and the myriad tech companies he later sold off to Microsoft. Running against his own class’s grain, Hanauer supports public education, considers his low income-tax rate preposterous, and decries the self-congratulatory rubbish behind the label “job creator."

    "When somebody calls themselves a job creator, they aren't describing the economy, although that's what it sounds like. What they are really doing is making a claim on status, privilege and power," Hanauer tells Kornbluth in the film. He argues that “only the middle class and the poor are job creators. It’s their spending that makes it happen.” He even reinforces Reich’s argument that the wealthy alone can’t spend the economy into a permanent recovery. “Even the richest individual has no need to buy thousands of pillows,” Hanauer says.  

     So what’s wrong with this? What Reich doesn’t get, or can’t acknowledge, is that the idea that workers are worth their hire didn’t just come out of scripture or because Marriner Eccles persuaded FDR and Treasury Secretary Robert Morganthau to intervene in 1933 — and he and they doubtless did — but because a militant social movement was making demands that the social order needed contained if not also housebroken. Instead, Reich lectures and writes as though greed and inattention were the problems and not abiding class interest.

    That’s not to challenge Reich or Eccles or even Lord Keynes’ veracity, but to show that their ideas were listened to precisely because enough of the corporate class got it that they otherwise had no alternative but either turn toward liberalism or embrace fascism. (For them, socialism was never an option.)

    Even that understanding was scarcely universal; many, like Ford and the DuPonts, were ready to endorse fascism, some enthusiastically. As Kim Phillips-Fein shows in Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, key sections of American capital never bought into the kind of decent sharing commonly taught in kindergarten, nor were FDR’s Depression era policies successful in themselves in doing what Eccles hoped they would do. It was war spending and the U.S. coming out of World War 2 uncontested as an imperial power that allowed for the sort of booming economy that grew a middle class. The “social compact” that allowed income inequality to narrow, including The Treaty of Detroit, which briefly established high wages for auto workers and labor peace for the Industry, had little to do with an enlightened elite and everything to do with U.S. business having little competition abroad. That all ended in the 1970s.

    Reich is also frustratingly weak on just how to get capital’s overlords to become more like him. He wants unions to grow and workers’ wages to rise, fearing a “political polarization” that will threaten their ability to rule. But there’s no strategic implication coming out of his analysis for those most harmed by the great wealth and power divide. He doesn’t talk the language of class struggle but only of suffocated buying power, as though the income disparities were not the outcome of a rapidly proletarianizing nation.

    That may be too much to expect. Reich would never say, in the words of The International, that “The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers alone.” Still, it’s stunning that a former top federal administration official, now carrying the university title Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy has so little to say about which human agencies could turn even his good-natured policy recommendations into facts on the ground.

    [Note: If I haven’t dissuaded you from seeing “Inequality for All” — and it should be seen; its strength outweighs its weaknesses — it’s readily available.  Released for general viewing in late September and still in wide circulation, it will go on sale in  DVD and Blue-Ray format in January, as well as on VOD. Netflix will feature it later in the year. Go HERE for more information, including access to lesson plans and discussion guides.] 

    Michael Hirsch, a New Politics board member, is a New York-based political and labor writer. This piece originally appeared on the DSA blog. 

     

  • Should we “play nice” with the NEA and AFT?

    The teacher activist blogosphere has been buzzing about the perfidy of the AFT’s and NEA’s endorsements of teacher evaluation tied to students’ standardized test scores and a new national curriculum, the Common Core.  Both policies are key to the neoliberal dream of a national, privatized system of public education that will synchronize educational outcomes with an economic reality of growing joblessness and underemployment.  (I know these are strong claims and I refer readers who want further verification and explanation to my analyses in New Politics and book.)

                                        Peggy Robertson, a Colorado activist, writes in her FB post “I truly am trying – desperately – to figure out how to occupy my union…- it is hard – crazy hard. I am just now getting involved, but let's just say the first two encounters have left me speechless. I am doing the work of the unions yet I pay them every month to sell me out. The irony.”

                                        Mercedes Schneider says she’s been told to “play nice” with the two unions, explaining she’s “been wondering about ‘the unions’– the two major national teachers unions– the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA). I have been told that “the unions” are the major forces on the side of classroom teachers in this fight against the corporate takeover of American public education…I want that to be true– but I cannot ignore what I am seeing…I have been told not to question the unions– that my doing so could hinder their effectiveness in fighting ‘against reform.’”

                                        First to Peggy’s point.  Union reform work is unlike any other political activity we undertake because of the unique nature of unions as institutions. Unions need to represent all members, not just those who agree with an activist, progressive perspective.  Union reform work requires us to be active on different fronts, simultaneously.  We must talk with members and persuade them of our ideas, working  on collective actions.  That has to go on at the school but often we can find like-minded activists beyond our schools and should connect with them.  Networks develop in ways that are unpredictable and the first rule is “take it where you find it," as we're seeing in North Carolina – the topic of a future blog.

                                        At the same time, we have to take on the ideas and policies of union officials, who control the union apparatus, to try to keep the existing “leadership” from doing harm.  Meanwhile, we have to keep organizing on issues outside of the union structure, developing allies among parents and communities.  It often happens that our work with these allies leads us to teachers who won’t have anything to do with the unions, for reasons that are understandable but need to be challenged. 

                                        The reasons the AFT and NEA have to be transformed is because of the power they exercise and the potential social movement unionism has.  No clearer evidence is needed of teacher unionism’s capacity than what we’ve seen in Chicago as a result of radical teachers persuading their colleagues of the need to “own” their union.  Though Chicago has a unique history, teachers are teachers. The skills and knowledge needed to reform a union aren’t found in the drinking water.  They have to be taught, learned and shared.  Some of what we must do to transform our unions is generic to union reform, as activists learn when they collaborate with reformers in other unions.  Some issues are particular to teaching and education and have to be thrashed out as we engage in struggle. 

                            We absolutely have to take on the NEA and AFT- as critical friends. To do so we should be clear that the “union” is not its elected officials.  Sometimes “the union” is not even a particular organizational form.  We may need new forms of organization, especially when unions lose the right to bargain collectively – as is happening with breathtaking rapidity.

                            “The union” is an organization of workers that defends a set of principles. To me and a rising generation of activists those principles are solidarity, democracy in the workplace, defense of quality public education for all kids, equality and justice in the workplace and in society.  Union officers are part of the problem but they have the power to betray these principles because they are allowed to do so by their members, who have adopted the passive role encouraged by the business union model that has dominated US labor for decades. 

                            Paulo Freire’s  advice in “ Pedagogy of the Oppressed” that “freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift”  and  "Not even the best-intentioned leadership can bestow independence as a gift” holds for pedagogy and in teacher union politics.  A good place to start to understand how to “occupy” the unions is to (re)read Freire – and go to the Labor Notes conference, this year in Chicago, April 4.  Yes, kick ass, don’t play “nice.”  Union reform is a contact sport. But remember to do it collectively.  We don’t need heroes or victims, we need victories.

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

  • Left Third Parties in 2013: The Wave Begins?

    The 2013 municipal election contained mixed results for left third party advocates.

    The two most high profile and exciting candidacies, those of Socialist Alternative's Kshama Sawant and Ty Moore, appear to have gone down to defeat. But the margins were small-a few percentage points- and both are young and have already committed to rematches in two years with a strong likelihood of success.

    Furthermore, even if these two candidates had won, they would have amounted to no more than two small points of light. Municipal office and the opportunities it presents for building power have yet to be recognized by the left whose anarchist tinged distaste for "electoralism" on the one side and abusive spouse relationship with the Democrats on the other have prevented any widespread recognition of this potential from emerging.

    Sawant and Moore have shown that such campaigns can be run cheaply, effectively and competitively most notably in the numerous cities where Democratic machines have dominated for generations. Their campaigns may have woken up many leftists to follow suit and it is not impossible that 2015 could see a wave of municipal candidacies on Moore and Sawant's Socialist Alternative line, from a reinvigorated Green party and other independent left formations, such as the Vermont Progressive Party.

    While leftists might not yet be fully aware of this potential, it seems certain that the Democrats, whose history of compromise and capitulation to big money-"pond scum" compared to the Republicans dog poo, as a recent Daily Show segment pegged them- are aware that they are ripe for the picking by the left.

    WFP, WTF?

    A good indication occurred in Syracuse where long time Green activist Howie Hawkins, whose previous campaign against an machine Democrat failed by 94 votes, this time went down by a slightly larger margin. The difference did not reflect a lack of support but rather as the Syracuse Post Standard reported, the presence of "the Working Families Party, which hired paid canvassers and coordinated an intensive get-out-the-vote effort on (Hawkins's opponent's) behalf during the past few weeks."

    This is only the most recent chapter in the long and increasingly sordid history of the WFP which during the last gubernatorial election, showed its true colors as a pawn of Democratic Party leadership by supporting the union busting "Governor 1%" Andrew Cuomo.

    Increasingly true to form, rather than aiding numerous Democrats against Republican competition, (for example, here) the WFP turned its fire against the left, supporting a bland, corporate centrist in Syracuse.  Their rationale for doing so was pithily summarized by one of the paid WFP out-of-town "organizers" who declared on social media that "A victory for Hawkins tomorrow would be worse for the progressive cause than any other victory for a Right Winger." 

    It was due to Hawkins strong challenge that the combination of crackpot logic and cynicism which is at the core of WFP much vaunted "strategy" has been finally revealed for all to see, provoking this petition which has attracted the support of noted left intellectuals such as Barbara Garson, Rick Wolff, Margaret Kimberly, Doug Henwood, Steve Early and 200 others.

    Rather than being coddled, the WFP should be widely repudiated, most notably by the Nation magazine, which has championed it, to the exclusion of other left parties, for years.

    The Left Wins when it Loses

    More positively, strong Third Party challenges, have shown, as did OWS a few years back, that they can force a shift in the political agenda, requiring Democrats to get on board or expose themselves as the servants of capital which their business model requires them to be. A case in point was Sawant's signature issue of a $15 an hour minimum wave quickly adopted by all leading Democratic candidates lest they show themselves as out of touch with the anti-corporate mood which formed the backdrop to this electoral cycle. 

    These are only two indications of how, as was reported by the Seattle NPR affiliate, the left wins even when it loses serious, well organized and viable campaigns.  

    Let's hope 2013 is a preview of many more to come.

     

  • Christie's coast to victory was not inevitable

    It was clear from the start that teachers had an uphill battle explaining why NJ Governor Christie’s educational policies, his vicious bashing of teachers, were harmful to kids and the state.  One of the most serious obstacles is that media are captive to neoliberal propagandists. Conveying a different message requires concentrated, savvy use of social media. But Chrisite enjoyed his “coast” to victory mainly because of the “pragmatism” of the two state-wide teachers unions, New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) and American Federation of Teachers New Jersey (AFTNJ), which have consistently chosen to compromise with Christie’s anti-union, pro-privatization, anti-public education policies rather than coming out fighting. As a result, they lost countless opportunities to educate parents and community about what’s at stake for them in the policies he (and the unions’ “friends” in the Democratic Party) have pushed successfully, like gutting tenure for teachers, increasing the number of charter schools, fighting the Abbott decision that insures equal funding for schools serving high proportions of poor children.  The unions have to change their message too, embedding teachers’ rights in a broad program to restore quality public education for all kids.  NJEA and AFTNJ are mired in rhetoric and positions that make them an easy target for the far-right foundations and non-profits that claim to put “students first” – by selling schools and children.

                            Still, even with the unions’ abysmal lack of vision, they might have held his feet to the fire during the campaign.  They could have organized speak-outs at Christie’s rallies and speeches, making him answer questions about his policies.  A bully with no patience for defending his policies, Christie would likely have exploded, as he did when a NJ teacher, Melissa Tomlinson, asked him why he describes schools as factories for failure.  The incident went viral, and as often happens, the social media attention spilled into mass media. The episode exposed the “ludicrous” image Christie has so carefully cultivated as a statesman and moderate.

                            Time now to face reality. No Democratic Party hopeful is going to save public education or teachers’ jobs. The unions need to shift gears, fast.  That means teachers need to “occupy” them, run for office, become active in their schools; reach out to parents and community to hear what they want and develop mutually respectful alliances.  As we’ve seen in Chicago, we can turn the tide we have to jettison the failed policies and mindset that have given our opponents their coast to victory.

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

  • Queering Socialism: An Interview with Alan Sears

    We’re at an interesting (and terrible) moment where we’re witnessing attacks on most every gain working people have made for at least the last half century. The curious exception to that has been the advance of marriage and civil rights for gay and lesbian couples in many U.S. states and core imperialist countries. But while we can celebrate the dismantling of many of the legal barriers to equality, we need to be mindful of the cost assimilation has had on "gay" communities, the movement’s relationship to other progressive causes, and lastly how it measures up to radical ideas of gender and sexual freedom.

    In order to start to think through these questions as socialists, we interviewed Alan Sears, a queer activist, author, and professor of sociology at Ryerson University in Toronto. Sears is the author of, among other works, "Queer in a Lean World" and “Queer Anti-Capitalism: What's Left of Lesbian and Gay Liberation?” and co-author with James Cairns of The Democratic Imagination. The interview, conducted in June 2013, addresses the history of the gay liberation movement, the split between mainstream gay rights and radical queers, the construction of gender and sexual identity in capitalism, and the relationship socialists have had with gender politics.

    Tessa Echeverria (TWE): I just wanted to start out by asking you if could define “gay” versus “queer” identity, and how those are seen as different things.

    Alan Sears: When I first came out in the 1970's the word “gay” was our word. It was the word that came out of the movement, as opposed to the word “homosexual” which was seen as a kind of medical category and a pathologizing one. Gay was a self-identity that was positive, self-proclaimed, and so on. At the time I first came out, at least some lesbians and lots of gay men pretended that the term was inclusive of women as well.

    Fairly quickly the fake inclusiveness of “gay” became an issue, and so not long after I came out people began to use the term "lesbian and gay" much more broadly to try and make it clear that gay wasn't inclusive and that it was primarily a male defined term; women tended to use the term lesbian. That was my first big move linguistically.

    The second one was in the late 1980's, which grew out of AIDS activism that was becoming more and more militant as AIDS continued. At first, the overtly militant response wasn't there, but as AIDS continued and the denial and the silence continued, essentially the silence or collaboration with the government of many of the mainstream gay and lesbian organizations, there was a new move that started around ACT-UP and AIDS Action Now in Canada, and then took a specifically sexuality-organizing turn with Queer Nation. For me personally, it was around the time of Queer Nation that I first heard the term “queer.”

    Queer was already defining itself against the idea that gay was becoming kind of normal—the mainstream gay organizations were becoming very, very mainstream. But it was also a way of recognizing that gays and lesbians were talking about only specific parts of the gender and sexuality non-conforming community. There were people, especially trans people for example, who played a key role at the Stonewall Riot and had been part of the movement from the beginning insofar as it was a movement. By the late '80s, there were much more gender-normative aspects of “gay” and “lesbian.” Even the gender non-conformity that was there in official identity often began to recreate new forms of masculinity rather than challenging them: gay men to some extent taught straight men how to shop, and began to redefine new forms of masculinity, but that didn't mean make it any less masculine. The term “queer” was both meant to be a protest against lesbian and gay because it was becoming so mainstream and to say that there are lots of people left out.

    I feel some conflict around the term, not because I don't understand where it comes from (and I still use it), but for me the conflict came when a few years ago I was at the a retreat for the Canadian Auto Workers Union (CAW) for their lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, two-spirited and queer members. I used the term “queer” quite a bit in my talk there, and it was an amazing gathering of everyday heroes who fought hard for the right to be themselves under shop floor conditions that were often not very amenable. But this woman came up to me afterwards and said, “It really pisses me off that you're using this term 'queer.' I have fought really hard to educate my union sisters and brothers that this is not acceptable language. This is a term of abuse. And here you are justifying it in our own retreat.”

    So even though it's a term that works in certain circles, it's one that I still have some unease with even though I understand why people have gone there. It doesn't necessary translate outside the circles of those who already know what it all means.

    TWE: I wanted to make sure we got a chance to talk about this because as a young person coming out, I came out as queer. It was right before going to university and a lot of people I knew adopted that language. But as you branch out and you try to organize and relate to communities that might not necessarily be at the university, or among young people, it is hard to have that conversation about queer versus gay as an identifier. I wouldn't really consider myself “gay,” but I think it's interesting how the movement has developed and inclusion or moderation of the gay movement spurred queer as an identity, and how far that's reaching people who aren't in the clique of queer activism and organizing.

    Sears: It's interesting hearing the generational thing, to hear you say you came out as queer, because even though I've been around it's not something I think about since you get used to your own circles and people who came out when you did and all that kind of stuff.

    The impulse towards inclusion is exactly the right one, but the question becomes how you do it at the level of language, which I think is something we're always coping with on the left because you use a term like “people of color” for example, which is supposedly inclusive in certain ways but then other people will say that it can sometimes hide who really needs to be there. I certainly think that's true about queer. It's my sense that movement inside a university-oriented context has developed a kind of specialized jargon, as lots of academic disciplines do, that works around some very important concepts but has almost no effectiveness outside those circles.

    TWE: I see that issue all the time where there's a lot of new queer theory coming out, but how do you relate that back to real world experiences and everyday lives in the U.S.? How do your take that language and make it be inclusive not just to people who have those different identities that fall under queer but also for allies and those who want to work together without making it sound like if you don't have our language you can't be my ally. It’s a fine line to walk.

    Sears: One of the things that will begin to change that, or solve the puzzle for us, will be when gender and sexual liberation becomes more of a movement again. When there's not a movement, one is less concerned with persuading anybody of anything, so your political terms can become more of a test of whether you have the prerequisites or not than they are terms to move and excite people. It becomes much more of an issue when you're actually trying to build a movement, and building alliances that really do matter.

    I firmly believe that we in Canada have more formal rights than in the United States, and these are explicitly lesbian and gay rights: marriage, workplace benefits, and that kind of stuff. A lot of that has to do with the way the union movement in Canada from the early 1980's on really took on lesbian and gay rights. That required a whole lot of alliance building and careful work, so that when the Canadian Union of Postal Workers went on strike in 1981, they fought for both full pay for maternity leave for women and non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the workplace. That wasn't because it was primarily a queer union. It was because people did the hard alliance work in what was a very radical union, to say, “If we're radical, we need to defend the rights of women, the rights of gays and lesbians, and so on.”

    Andrew Sernatinger (AS): That's a good transition because I was going to ask about some of your work where you've written about how gender and sexual identities develop and change in capitalism, and how that has a lot to do with how capitalist work is organized. I was hoping you could run this through because it's a very interesting idea and it's a meeting place of Marxist ideas and queer theory. It strikes me as being really different because there's a mantra that “gay has always existed throughout history,” and now we're arriving at a new place where it can finally just come out. But you're saying something a little more nuanced…

    Sears: The idea of the eternal, unchanging “gay” is partly a product of attempting to use human rights legislation—and that part of it makes sense. I think you have to use every tool you can to fight discrimination while building movements to overturn the system. But in doing that the claim became, “it's not a choice at all, we're born this way.” Somehow that should mean we have intrinsic rights, as though if there was any choice at all we'd be outside the realm of intrinsic rights and thus outside of court challenges and so on. But it's a really dubious political distinction: that it's only what you're born with that gives you rights as opposed to choices you make in your life.

    It is also a really bad anthropology and a very undynamic view of human sexuality. What we would now call “heterosexuality,” which is only a term that arose in the 1800's, has also changed over time. All kinds of arrangements existed over time, so the idea that at the heart of it was the essential heterosexual or essential homosexual that go unchanged, until finally we've earned the right to express our various sexualities in modern North America, seems to me to be pretty wrong-headed to begin with.

    The best works on this, which I first found through John D'Emelio and Barry Adam, basically asked, “What began to change?” since the term “homosexual” was only coined in the 1860's. Why didn't they need a word before? There were certainly same-sex practices. Huge varieties of human societies have had same-sex practices that have taken all kinds of forms. But the “homosexual,” which is kind of the “full-timer,” the dedicated, unvarying same-sex practitioner, only arose as a word in the 1860's, and that's not bashfulness, but it tells us that that full-timers really didn't exist very much up until then.

    What made that possible? There were lots of same-sex practices, but the idea that one has a primary orientation towards your own gender or towards another one became possible largely with the rise of capitalism and the separation of work and home life. The relationships in which you keep yourself alive, sustain new life, take care of your emotional needs, wash yourself, rest yourself—those relationships are different in capitalist society for most of us than our working relationship, where we earn the money to make the rest of that possible. Most of us go out to work and then come home. Once that happened, the relationships at home can take a whole bunch of different forms. There is a certain kind of space created for exploration that would not have been possible before.

    The basic capitalist structure created new kinds of possibilities. And a range of different people, including Foucault but also Marxists have looked at the rise of sexuality specifically in this context. Foucault looks much less at the capitalist character of it, but they look at that separation of work and home.

    Now, from the point of view of governments and state-policy makers, this was a bad thing. In England in the 1840's and 50's, there were all these “Condition of the Working Class” reports, where state officials went into so-called slums and were very worried with what they thought of as amorality among working people. So then you began to get, from the point of view of capitalist states, a whole new direction, which was to ban homosexuality and regulate sexuality and gender behavior through schools and so on. In the 1880's, you get male-homosexuality outlawed in Britain, and in Canada, which was following Britain. Not women's same-sex practices, or lesbianism; it wasn't outlawed basically because Parliament would not admit that women had enough of a sexuality to be sexual with each other. It wasn't a positive measure, but a total denial of women's sexual agency at all. The rise of capitalism created certain possibilities but also, from the point of view of the state, different kinds of constraints.

    AS: Thinking about it through the twentieth century and linking it back to today, it seems like one of the major markers that starts to distinguish the gay rights movement, and then the mark between gay and queer, is the Post-War Accord and the change of the family structure. Maybe you could run that through for us?

    Sears: What happens with the end of World War II and the development of new social systems is that you began to get the stabilization in new ways of particular family forms within layers of the working class — though the Post-War Accord didn't include everyone.

    That at first was incredibly gender-normative. There was a kind of gender panic after World War II, where large numbers of women had been involved in paid labor. After that there was a period of incredible repression. In Canada, that took the form of a purge of basically anyone who they identified as gay or lesbian from the civil service. The idea was that people who are homosexual are more likely to be black-mailed by the Russians, and thus in a Cold War era are a threat to national security. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the police force who did the major security work in Canada like the FBI does in the States, actually tried to invent a “fruit machine” that would identify gay civil servants so they could be fired.

    The first impact of the post-war period was an attempt to force a heterosexual normative family form, and to use the increased income, assistance, and social security that working people had won to try and create a very specific model of the family within sections of the working class: disproportionately among white folks. Then, beginning with the women's liberation movement, people began to refuse that—not that there wasn't resistance along the way, but in the 1960's women quite assertively mobilized around these things and began to demand a change in the way this post-war stabilization was affecting the family form. Feminism, the rise of the women's movement, and the beginning of the Black Power movement, began to create models and new ways of thinking so that gays actually began to identify what they were facing as a political oppression, which a very small number of political gays had done before that. Most communities' people just thought that this is the way it is. Then it became politicized by a movement that fought against the dominant normative form that developed after the war.

    There's some opening up in the family form, but at the same time not breaking the bounds of capitalism that began to have huge influences on what ultimately got achieved by that movement. It's much more about coupledom than it is about liberation; about couples' rights rather than sexual liberation in any sort of way. The whole movement became so defined by purchasing and lifestyle and so on that capitalism has had its influences on this end as well.

    TWE: It's interesting where you ended that because I did want to talk about the commercialization of gay and lesbian identity. During Pride Month, part of me is excited as a queer person to celebrate that, but then I go to events and I see corporation after corporation and the message of “Buy Gay Things” as a way to prove your gay identity. Could you go into how capitalism changed to commodify gay identity while it's still silent on the rights? How can capitalism change to adapt while still exclude the vast majority of gay or queer people?

    Sears: In terms of a new low for Pride in Toronto, this year the Executive Director for Pride Toronto, which is one of the three biggest in North America, opened the Toronto Stock Exchange with all kinds of Pride signs, ringing the bell. It really was a sign of where things have come.

    I was at a couple of the early Pride Marches in Toronto, and it was scary. It's hard to imagine now what it was like to feel that there's a good chance that you're going to get attacked, people throw things, you are being exposed to a lot of contempt and there's very few of you. It felt pretty daunting at the time. Anything except for a mass march did at the time. So to see the change from these scary little gatherings to this festival with streets lined across the Toronto community is shocking. In a way there's excitement with that: I do think that even though queer bashing continues, and we have to be clear that the violence hasn't gone away and that people are still afraid, there are changes that are important that need to be celebrated.

    But the question needs to be asked at some point, why is it that we made gains at a time when in fact most movements seeking change were pushed backward? Affirmative action, abortion rights, and migrants were hugely under attack and being brutalized; unions are being attacked and workers are giving up all kinds of gains; general labor law is going backwards. Why is it that we've made advances? Some of it is because people fought, that does make a difference that people were defiant, and angry, and mobilized. But what we gained, and it's only in retrospect that you see it, is largely what was most compatible with capitalism.

    Of all the things we were fighting for, there was the idea of generally opening up gender and sexuality in real ways, so that people would have realms of play, both in the engineering sense and in the creative unalienated activity sense. Instead what happened was that we won the rights that were most compatible: coupledom, where marriage is becoming officially monogamous, certain workplace benefits (which make a huge difference and should be fought for), but also this idea that we mark ourselves by the consumption of very specific commodities. You see that in terms of clothing and hairstyles, going to certain places. That cuts out people with low-income; they can't be visibly queer. Often people of color are excluded because the character of that commercialization has whiteness built into it, often in fairly clear ways. It seems like we've won a lot, and then you realize that what we've won is the relatively easy stuff that fits with this system. In fact, it risks dividing ourselves much more and potentially limits what we can gain.

    TWE: Chelsea Manning (at the time referred to as Bradley) was going to be one of the honorary grand marshals at the Pride Parade in San Francisco this year; then they decided to cut Manning from the line-up. I thought that was interesting to show how nervous people are about the Pride Parade's receptions, and the unwillingness to engage with other controversial issues that connect with gay and queer issues, such as military resisters or antiwar movements—keeping those as separate things from “gay rights.”

    Sears: Earlier you referred to alliance building. You can build radical alliances for change with other people who are facing deep exclusion and oppression, or you can try to build alliances with essentially elements of the mainstream ruling order, with Democratic or Republican politicians, to try and become an insider. That's a different kind of alliance-building than the kind we were referring to before, but it's unfortunately what the main body of the movement has gone for, insofar as the term movement can even apply. That means you don't want to do anything that would offend corporate bosses, mayors, Democratic politicians, and so on. You end up pushing out anything that's controversial.

    To their credit, Toronto Pride hasn't pushed out Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) despite the fact that the City Council has threatened to defund Pride if QAIA, opposed to Israeli pink-washing, marches on Pride day. They've marched each time, and Pride has stuck with their right to march and City Hall has backed off. Occasionally some guts are still shown, but overall it's all about showing yourself off to those who you want to see you as allies, who are sadly the most powerful and that means massive compromise.

    TWE: Here in the States, there's been a lot of gearing up around marriage equality and getting laws passed state-by-state. I've been to a lot of meetings, like Occupy last year, where people were having a lot of discussions about marriage equality. The issue that always came up was healthcare, and I would go and talk about the need for healthcare for everyone (single-payer), so I really appreciate you pointing out that instead we're winning rights to coupledom. The issue I saw coming out of the AIDS movement was the fight for healthcare and not just for marriage.

    Sears: I agree completely. Personally, I believe we should always oppose legal discrimination; therefore I support marriage rights only because it ends the heterosexual monopoly. The other side of it is the cost of focusing explicitly on marriage rights. If it's only about workplace benefits for a limited portion of the population, there are a lot of queers, or just couples, who don't benefit from that because they're working in situations where they don't have benefits. That's true of a lot of the workforce now.

    Remember that we are not fighting for couple rights, but universal rights ultimately, rights that should apply to anybody. We're a little bit closer to that in Canada than in the United States because of single-payer health care. Part of what's remarkable in the differences between the two countries is that it was easier for unions in Canada to win same-sex workplace benefits for unmarried gay couple simply because the cost of healthcare in the U.S. means that employers hate adding to the family.

    The basic thing is that it's about healthcare, it's not about couples, but it's also about sexual freedom! That means different things to different people. That may mean couples, that may mean having sex with a lot of people; different people have different preferences and needs. If we are talking about sexual liberation, we're talking about the idea that as long as everyone is consenting, people should have the right to do those things. In general, there's shame that exists in this society about sexuality, where people can't even talk to their partners about what they want to do or what they don't want to do. Images of sexuality are everywhere, every billboard, every car ad, and yet in reality people are incredibly silenced about their sexualities, about what they want and need. There's some locker-room bravado that some men have, but that's not really sexuality, it's bragging about conquest.

    We've made some gains, but we haven't really achieved some of the most basic things around sexual openness, non-stigma, and choices.

    AS: One of the reasons we wanted to do this interview is that we wanted to push-back against some of the guiding wisdom in the socialist movement, which seems very hesitant about queer politics. Now people are against a lot of concepts that came through queer theory: the word queer, notions of privilege, and a lot of the more challenging concepts that are not as clearly delineated in Marxist theory. It seems like there is a kind of tension about sexuality with Marxists, but it's something I hope will change. Maybe you could comment on that, and what your experience has been in this area.

    Sears: I recently was reading a book by Sheila Rowbotham about “utopian socialists.” They were people in the 1800's who considered themselves socialists and had great aspirations for what a better world would be like. It's clear that many of them, especially women but also some men, were thinking about sexual politics as part of what we would now call the liberation struggle. Some of them were thinking explicitly around same-sex practices, but a lot of them were thinking about what real sexual freedom would mean.

    That strain of utopian socialism gradually got pushed out through the twentieth century by Marxism within the socialist movement. Even though there were some places where Marxism and sexual liberation found new meeting places, overall there was a lot of interpretation of Marxism in terms of economic categories: class, the workplace. You'll find a lot of Marxists to this day who talk obsessively about the power that workers have at the point of production, meaning in the workplace — it's true that is an important source of power and I'm not trying to deny the power of a general strike. But if our politics only focus on the workplace, it's a place where sexuality is largely excluded.

    At the very best, the better end of Marxism has tended to adopt and work out the best ideas liberals have about sexual freedom. Through the twentieth century, certainly in my period as a socialist and queer activist, my view looking back on the record of a socialist-queer movement was that it was largely picking up the best knowledge of the liberal-left of the existing movement and putting out a liberal political practice. I think one of the things that we've learned from the queer movement is that that's not good enough. There are all kinds of people who are left out of that. We need to be on the leading edge of those who are asking the tough questions about who's left out and why, and what do we do about that? How does “gay” work with patterns of racialization—it's not an accident that white folks tend to come out more, it actually has to do with the whole definition of who counts as gay or lesbian and how that works culturally, racially.

    Marxism, or socialism in its broad sense, provides tools for thinking about all this. If the separation of work and home is part of the way “gay” begins to exist as a category, what does it tell us about this category? There are all kinds of questions we can look into, like, “Why is the workplace so gender-normative?” “Why do particular kinds of workplaces run around a very explicit kind of masculinity?” It's not simply that “those guys are like that” — so what are the dynamics of the workplace that operate to create gendered behavior in certain ways and then police it?

    If we're talking about liberation, how do we begin to address that part of sexual freedom that is having a place to have sex? That means we should be deeply concerned about homelessness. We should also be concerned about young people who often have no space as they're becoming sexually active and end up having their sexuality in the cracks. As long as we, as socialists, don't think that our tools are exclusive, as long as we're engaging with queer theories, with anti-racist theories, with feminist theories, there's a lot we can do.

    This gets to what real freedom looks like. Marx's ideas about alienation and un-alienation, the idea that humans thrive by making our mark on the world, are tools that can be helpful in offering a vision of gender and sexual liberation that begins to ask questions about why the gender system persists, why sexuality occurs only in the cracks; what is it about work that is a rejection of hedonism, work as duty, the squeezing out of the joyful aspects of life. That means challenging the kind of socialism that's often there in organizations: “All work and no play makes socialism a dull boy.” A lot of the focus on the workplace and the economy, as if capitalism exists simply as a set of economic relations and not also as a set of cultural and interpersonal relations, that kind of socialism is heading towards a dead-end. Part of the revitalization, building the next-New Left, will be restoring the excitement: what would revolution really bring about?

    TWE: How do you see socialism and queer activism partnering up, and where can those be providing strengths for each other so that we can start to move forward?

    Sears: The more that I've thought about this, the more I've come to believe that the best socialist thinking in all areas is hybrid thinking. It's not purely “socialist,” but involves deep engagement with the theories, thoughts, and actions of those involved in struggles and how the world appears to them. “Queering” socialism offers opportunities, not only in the realm of gender and sexual liberation, but also in terms of approaches to work and all areas of life.

    In queer theory right now, there's a lot of talk about queers as transgressors: we act up against the dominant set of sexual relations, which is non-queer. But permanent transgression is kind of unsatisfying, and socialism can help us move from transgression to transformation. The goal is to change the whole set of relations to a new realm of freedom, and then we wouldn't even know what queer would look like anymore.

    Together, queers, socialists and anti-racists can begin to ask questions about how it is that the idea of “gay” is now being used globally as part of a western imperialist power strategy. How did that happen? What is it about “gay” that is exclusionary? How is it that all kinds of other same-sex practices in the world don't count, or are seen as a lesser-form, a not-yet-out form of sexuality, and a particular kind of self-proclaimed gay and lesbianness that has tended to occur among certain layers of disproportionately white folks in Europe and North America. Socialism provides some of the tools, but not all of them.

    What about this joyous, challenging, gutsy liberation movement, that when I first came into politics was just fun: dirty, nasty, celebratory, fun. How do we bring the ethos of that kind of movement into socialism? If we can do that, we'll have a way more potent set of tools, because it won't just be about the dull duty, and not about disapproving of everyone else and their crimes and political deviations, but talking about where we're heading and the incredible celebration of human potential: what we could be, the way we could be living, the stuff you see in every human being that gets crushed out of them. When you get together the queer, the socialist, the anti-racist, then you start to point to what it all could begin to look like.

     

    Andrew Sernatinger and Tessa Echeverria are socialists based in Madison, Wisconsin. This interview was recorded for their podcast, Black Sheep Radio.

  • Doug Ireland, 1946-2013

    Doug Ireland, radical journalist, blogger, passionate human rights and queer[1] activist, and relentless scourge of the LGBT establishment, died in his East Village home on Oct. 26. Doug had lived with chronic pain for many years, suffering from diabetes, kidney disease, sciatica and the debilitating effects of childhood polio. In recent years he was so ill that he was virtually confined to his apartment. Towards the end, even writing, his calling, had become extremely difficult.

    Once, Doug’s writing – in U.S. publications such as the Nation, the Village Voice, New York magazine as well as his blog Direland, and in France Libération and the news website Bakchich – was easy to find. But in recent years his voice was rarely heard outside of New York’s Gay City News, for which he continued to contribute reportage as international editor and political commentary until this year, and few younger radicals are likely to know about him. This is a pity, because Doug’s voice — his scathing polemical style, the vast breadth of his knowledge – was exceptional. Doug was a tireless champion of the oppressed of all kinds, but especially of those who are punished for loving members of their own sex, wherever they might be. For his uncompromising internationalism, his refusaI to allow cultural differences to stand as an excuse for denying LGBT people their human rights, I can think of no one on the left, apart from Peter Tatchell, who was quite like him. 

    Doug was always a man of the left, a libertarian socialist, who nevertheless had long-standing ties to progressives in the Democratic Party – going back to Allard Lowenstein, George McGovern and Bella Abzug, for whom he worked as a campaign manager. I have never shared Doug’s hope that these progressives might transform the Democrats (it’s usually the progressives that get transformed) or, more broadly, his commitment to lesser-evilism in response to the threat from the right – to me, an absolutely futile strategy for reversing this country’s rightward drift. But Doug was never an apologist for mainstream Democrats, including Obama, never pulled his punches in his attacks on their cynical amoralism. Ed Koch, he once wrote, was not a closet gay, but a “closet human being.”

    Doug had a special loathing for Clinton. One of his last published pieces was “Should We Forgive Bill Clinton?” in Gay City News (March 26, 2013), after the former President wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post against the Defense of Marriage Act that he had signed into law in 1996. Noting that the Post piece was timed to prepare for the kickoff of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign a week later, Doug wrote: “The truth is that an old and predatory libertine like Bill couldn’t have cared less if a guy or a gal wanted to marry a Volkswagen. He wasn’t a bigot himself — he just surfed on the bigotry of others like the opportunist he’s always been. And it is that opportunism that led him to write his op-ed piece against DOMA on behalf of his wife’s candidacy.”  Doug reminded his readers that “there is a long list of vicious actions by President Clinton and his administration for which he owes LGBT people an unadulterated apology.” One of the items on this list was the Clinton administration’s use of “aid and trade blackmail targeting Third World countries to stop them from buying or manufacturing cheaper, generic versions of the AIDS-fighting drugs needed to prolong life. . . . How many thousands died because Clinton, in his subservience to the greed of Big Pharma, engaged in this shameful arm-breaking? We’ll never know for sure — but their blood, too, is on Bill’s hands.”

    Doug was a friend of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD), an antiwar and human rights advocacy group committed broadly to a radical form of democracy from below, and to the socialist journal New Politics.[2] In 1988, at a time when CPD[3] was heavily involved in defending democratic dissidents in the Soviet bloc, Doug reported for the Campaign’s newsletter on the persecution of gays in Eastern Europe.  He wrote: "Of all the taboos in Eastern Europe, none has been more cruel or dehumanizing than the official attitude toward homosexuality. If one of the very first acts of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution was to abolish the laws making homosexuality a crime, . . . Stalinism recriminalized homosexuality, and the theory that 'fags are a product of capitalist decadence' has reigned malignantly in the Eastern bloc ever since, with anti-gay persecutions a favorite weapon of the political police throughout the bloc." 

    Doug’s understanding of Stalinism’s crimes, and beyond that of the whole history of the left’s troubled relationship to alternative sexualities, was brilliantly expounded in a piece he wrote for New Politics, “Socialism and Gay Liberation: Back to the Future” (Winter 2009).[4]  In it, he paid tribute to the courageous gay socialist pioneers, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde (yes, he was a socialist), and Magnus Hirschfeld. But he also described the vicious bigotry that was made official in the Stalin-era Communist movement and persisted long after Stalin’s death.

    The great turning point, of course, was the birth of the post-Stonewall radical gay liberation movement in the United States, a movement, in Doug’s words, that was “against the State, which made us criminals; against the medical and psychiatric professions, which declared us sick; and against the cultural heterotyranny which made us the target of disdain, ridicule, opprobrium, hate and violence.” Doug quoted the German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim: “It is not the homosexual who is perverse, but the society in which he lives.” Like Doug, Gay Liberation saw itself as an integral, but never a subordinate, part of all liberation struggles – feminist, antiwar, civil rights. 

    What a contrast with most of the narrowly parochial LGBT organizations of today, which support and shower gay dollars on any politician, of either party, who is “good on gay issues,” no matter how reactionary he/she is on anything else. Since the late 90s, the gay movement has become tamed and institutionalized, symbolized preeminently by the corporate-oriented Human Rights Campaign. Doug never ceased railing against the established LGBT leadership for its political conservatism and for turning the movement into just another interest group – but he was especially critical of its near-indifference to the persecution of LGBT people in other countries. Doug called for the aggressive defense of gays under attack in Uganda, Russia, and Iraq, where they were being murdered by Shia death squads after a death-to-gays fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Sistani – but to little avail.

    Doug’s reporting on the persecution of gays in Iran, including the public execution of men and boys, in Iran elicited criticism from several quarters, including the then-director of the LGBT Rights Program of Human Rights Watch.  Critics objected that he was improperly imputing a Western-style “gay identity” to same-sexers in Muslim countries, and some insinuated that he was providing political fodder for U.S. intervention against Iran. Undeterred, Doug continued to expose the homophobic criminality of Ahmadinejad and the Iranian theocrats. I don’t know if Doug would have seen it this way, but to me he was working in the great universalist tradition of the historic left, based on a single norm of human freedom and flourishing, a norm that justifies criticism of cultural traditions, wherever they might be, that support such practices as female subordination, racial and religious discrimination, and homophobia. As Paul Schindler, the editor of Gay City News put it in an editorial defending Doug’s reporting, “ Cultural sensitivity is of course an absolute requirement for effective human rights advocacy. But absolute cultural relativism is a recipe for inertia and defeat.”

    In his New Politics piece, Doug insisted on the need “to begin a serious and radical rethinking of homosexuality and gender identities so as to understand at a deeper level why the fear and loathing of same-sex love and gender variants are so deeply engrained in society and culture.”  Writing in 2009, he sensed “a hunger for a return to some of the earlier principles of sexual liberation for all with which our movement began, not just here but abroad.”  Doug is no longer with us, no longer able to make his own inestimable contribution to the revival of these principles. Let us hope, nevertheless, that they can be revived, for the sake of a truly liberated future. 


    [1] Doug embraced the term “queer,” as have most of the militant wing of the LGBT movement. Despite its usefulness as a more inclusive label than “gay,” and as a way of distinguishing us from the moderate, assimilationist wing of the movement, the term makes me uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s my age (actually close to Doug’s), but I find it hard to adopt a name that for most of my life was universally employed as a term of abuse and often associated with violence and humiliation.     

    [2] I’m one of two Co-Directors of CPD (Joanne Landy is the other), and both of us are also on the editorial board of New Politics.

    [3] Then called the Campaign for Peace and Democracy/East and West.

    [4] This article was part of a two-part symposium in New Politics (part 1, NP 45, Summer 2008; part 2, NP 46, Winter 2009) on gays and the left that Doug helped organize.

     

  • An Open Letter to the Climate Justice Movement

    [The following open letter to more than 60 environmental justice organizations is a revised version of a talk given at a conference on "The Political Economy of the Environment" held in Brooklyn, New York, on October 5, 2013, co-sponsored by the Union of Radical Political Economy and New Politics. It will appear in the Winter 2014 issue of New Politics as part of a special section on the environment, featuring articles from several different points of view. We are posting Robin Hahnel's contribution in advance of the publication of the print issue to coincide with his release of the letter. The forthcoming special section will include three articles based on a plenary session at the June 2013 Left Forum (Nancy Holmstrom, "The Left and the Environment," Jill Stein, "Economic and Ecological Transformation—There Is No Alternative," and Christian Parenti, "Shadow Socialism"), an article drawn from a talk at a different Left Forum panel, Brian Tokar's "The Myths of 'Green Capitalism,'" as well as additional pieces by Michael Löwy, "Ecosocialism: Putting On The Brakes Before Going Over The Cliff," Natassa Romanou, "Economic and Ecological Crisis in Greece: The global context and Syriza's solution," and Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, "In the Shadow of the Manhattan Project." We urge readers to follow the full discussion in our forthcoming Winter 2014 issue, either by subscribing to New Politics or online.]

                                                                                                                           November 4, 2013

    Dear fellow fighters in the Climate Justice Movement:

    I am a long-time advocate of both climate justice and fundamental system change. I am writing to you with whom I share these central political commitments because I believe you are making a serious strategic mistake by categorically rejecting international carbon trading.

    Recently your organization, together with over sixty other environmental justice organizations, sent a letter to the President of the AFL-CIO “imploring labor to join us in the fight against climate change,” explaining what labor must do differently if it expects to advance its cause. You obviously understand why we must sometimes reach out with advice to allies in struggle who we believe are making serious mistakes. That is the spirit in which I write you this letter.

    I urge your organization to join together with much larger environmental organizations which may not endorse “system change” and declare your support for the only international program with any chance of averting catastrophic climate change in an equitable way before it is too late: Serious mandatory caps on national emissions set according to differential responsibility and capability accompanied by international carbon trading. If climate justice organizations continue to categorically dismiss cap-and-trade policies and carbon markets as “false solutions,” I am afraid they will further alienate those joining our desperate fight to prevent climate change in the here and now.[1]

    Denouncing cap and trade and carbon markets as “false solutions” has become ubiquitous in the climate justice movement. It was featured in the Durban Declaration in 2004, the Copenhagen Klimaforum09 Declaration in 2009, and the Cochabamba Peoples’ Agreement on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Nature in 2010. Ill-informed denunciations of cap and trade and carbon markets are featured in numerous books and videos by prominent spokespersons for the movement.[2] Just last month Naomi Klein charged that “green groups may be more dangerous than climate change deniers” in an interview published in Salon Magazine, and Patrick Bond criticized President Correa of Ecuador and President Morales of Bolivia as “Pink Petro Keynesians” in an interview on the Real News Network.

    The sad reality is that the very policies climate justice organizations condemn are the only way in the relevant timeframe to force the advanced economies to bear the burden of necessary emission reductions; they are the only way in the relevant timeframe to secure significant transfers of income from more developed countries to less developed countries; and they are the only way to protect indigenous ways of life in jungle forests. Fortunately the climate justice movement need not change any other part of its message and program in order to correct this tragic mistake and become an important part of broader efforts to avoid climate change. Nuclear power is a false solution. Geo-engineering is a false solution. Natural gas is not a bridge transition fuel. Governments are doing nothing—playing Nero’s fiddle while greenhouse gas concentrations approach levels that will make climate change unavoidable. Public outrage is what is called for. Massive demonstrations and civil disobedience are desperately needed to overcome lethargy and catalyze needed political action. And yes, economic “system change”—replacing the capitalist global market system with some form of eco-socialism—is the only way to adequately protect the environment in the long-run. The climate justice movement has got all these important things right. Unfortunately, by insisting on rejecting carbon trading in any form, the radical wing of the environmental movement is undermining its credibility and treating as enemies those who should be allies.

    The Necessity of International Carbon Markets

    The conclusion that international carbon markets are necessary seems to me unavoidable. It follows from several incontrovertible facts.

    Fact 1: Political reality: While global capitalism must eventually be replaced by eco-socialism if we are to fully protect the environment, this is not going to happen in the next ten years because eco-socialism requires massive political support that cannot be won overnight. It is true that the forces fighting against the fossil fuel industry and its allies have suffered setbacks over the past five years. But the movement to replace capitalism with eco-socialism is weaker still. There is simply no realistic possibility that majoritarian support for global eco-socialism can be won in fewer than ten years.

    Fact 2: Scientific reality: Science tells us that we cannot afford to fail to reduce global emissions dramatically over the next decade. A business-as-usual emissions scenario over the next ten years will generate massive damage and run an unacceptable risk of triggering changes that are truly cataclysmic.

    Conclusion 1: Facts 1 and 2 together imply that we must reduce global emissions dramatically even while global capitalism persists. There is nothing wrong with calling for system change—which I do at every opportunity. But it is irresponsible to preach that system change alone can prevent catastrophic climate change because, regrettably, system change cannot occur soon enough. Something effective must be done now even while the global market system persists.

    Fact 3: The free rider dilemma: Voluntary commitments by national governments to reduce emissions will not work. Theory predicts it and history has proved it: Under voluntary reductions the UK, for example, would pay for 100% of its own emission reductions but enjoy less than 1% of the benefits from its reductions since the UK has less than 1% of the world’s population. On the other hand, under the Kyoto Protocol, which required all developed economies to reduce emissions, while the UK still pays for 100% of its own reductions it enjoys the benefits of a global reduction that is 20 times greater than its own reduction. At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 governments of advanced economies all promised to voluntarily reduce emissions significantly. But when governments reconvened in Kyoto five years later not a single one had reduced emissions. In short, without a treaty that sets mandatory reductions on national emissions through mutual agreement we will fail to prevent climate change.

    Fact 4: Environmental justice: Unless very different caps are set on national emissions for countries that bear different “responsibilities” for causing the problem and have different “capabilities” for solving the problem, poor developing nations will be treated unfairly.

    Fact 5: Cost differentials: Many of the cheapest ways to reduce carbon emissions are to be found in less developed countries.

    Conclusion 2: Facts 3 and 4 together imply that for an effective treaty to also be fair it must hold wealthy countries accountable for the bulk of global emissions reductions. Once this is done, fact 5 implies that international carbon trading dramatically reduces the overall global cost of preventing climate change while forcing the advanced economies to pay for those costs.

    Why? Because sources in wealthy countries with low caps and high reduction costs will find it in their interest to purchase emission reduction credits from sources in poor countries with high caps and low reduction costs. In other words, carbon trading locates reductions where they are cheapest, largely in poorer countries, but ensures that wealthy countries pay for them. Unlike Larry Summers’ infamous suggestion that it is “efficient” to deposit even more toxic wastes in countries where life expectancy is low, having wealthy countries pay for carbon reductions in poor countries has the additional benefit—since reducing carbon emissions also reduces other pollutants as well—of lowering citizens’ of poor countries exposure to toxic wastes.

    Why is it important to locate reductions where they are cheapest? If the global cap is low enough to be effective—that is, to reduce global emissions by at least 80% by 2050—and if different national caps are set fairly, then carbon trading can cut the overall cost of preventing climate change by as much as 50%. This is important for two reasons: It will reduce political resistance in wealthier countries to cutting emissions by enough to avoid disastrous climate change. And it will generate a large flow of payments from sources in wealthy countries to sources in poor countries. Payments for carbon credits from the global North to the global South under a fair and effective treaty would dwarf the size of any climate “reparation payments” Northern governments would ever agree to pay because carbon credits are based on self-interest rather than charity motivated by guilt.

    The recent break down in efforts to secure enough money from wealthy countries to pay Ecuador to ban oil exploration in Yasuni National Park is a perfect example of why the “guilt money” strategy will not work. Ecuador was willing to forego an estimated $22 billion in oil revenues in exchange for a $3.6 billion payment, but governments of wealthy countries could not even raise half that amount.

    Where Does the Climate Justice Movement Go Wrong?

    Spokespersons for the climate justice movement and I share basic values. So why do I think they've gotten the carbon trading issue so wrong?

    People in the climate justice movement do not like turning nature into a commodity.

    And rightly so! This is one reason I have long advocated replacing capitalism with eco-socialism. But there is one thing worse than making nature into a commodity, and that is to allow the most powerful and least socially responsible actors among us to appropriate and abuse nature at will precisely because it belongs to nobody and is there for the taking. And that is exactly what happens to nature in a global market economy. In such an economy the choice is whether to allow those emitting greenhouse gases to continue to do so free of charge, or to charge them for the privilege of doing so. In a market economy failure to charge people for using nature by emitting carbon into the upper atmosphere is tantamount to allowing them to appropriate mother nature as their own private commodity to abuse as they will, free of charge. Until capitalism is replaced by eco-socialism we are far better off putting a price on using nature than allowing the price to be zero by default.

    People in the climate justice movement are fearful that Wall Street will take advantage of and destroy the carbon market.

    Nobody has been more outspoken in criticism of the financial industry than I have. Nobody has preached louder than I have that free market finance is an accident waiting to happen. But Wall Street greed is not a reason to refrain from creating a carbon market.

    There are only two ways to prevent the financial industry from ripping off sizable chunks of economic output while creating conditions that give rise to financial crises. The best way is to replace private with public finance. The only other way to protect the rest of us from Wall Street excesses is to restructure the financial industry and subject it to regulations that are appropriate and competent.

    In either case—if we replace private with public finance, or if we subject private finance to effective regulation—we need not fear that carbon allowances will become part of the next toxic financial cocktail. Moreover, if we fail to reform finance in one of these two ways, it is almost certain there will be more financial cocktail crises, whether or not carbon allowances are one of its ingredients. In other words, we cannot prevent future financial crises by refusing to create certified carbon emission reduction credits. Future financial crises can only be prevented by successful financial reform.

    However, consider a worst-case scenario. Suppose Wall Street mixes carbon allowances into a terrible, toxic, financial potion, and suppose this new asset bubble does burst with a vengeance. In this case Wall Street would siphon off a big chunk of world product—first by trading in toxic assets that include carbon allowances as the bubble builds, and then by shifting the cost of the financial cleanup onto the rest of us when the bubble bursts. But this has nothing to do with the number of carbon permits in existence, and therefore nothing to do with how much carbon can be emitted. Moreover, such a financial crisis would not be the fault of the carbon market. This tragedy would be due entirely to the failure to either nationalize the financial sector or subject it to effective regulation. Denying Wall Street access to one new commodity, carbon allowances, will not prevent future crises if the financial industry remains free from effective regulation.

    Critics of cap and trade worry that sellers of emission reduction credits will be awarded more credits than they deserve, which will puncture a hole in the cap on global emissions and thereby undermine the effectiveness of the treaty—turning it into a “false solution.”

    Suppose a source sells credits for 100 metric tons of emissions reductions but in truth does not reduce emissions by a single ton. In other words, suppose a source is somehow certified to sell credits that are entirely “bogus.” This is the scenario many in the climate justice movement obsess over. The fact is this cannot reduce global reductions one iota provided the source selling the bogus credits is located in a country whose national emissions are capped. This fact is well known among progressive environmental economists who work on the issue of climate change. And since it is a source of great confusion in the climate justice movement I have explained why it is the case at length in articles published in the Review of Radical Political Economics and in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.[3] But to make a long story short, the cap on national emissions forces someone else inside the country from which a bogus credit is sold to make up the difference. This is certainly unfair and objectionable. But it does not undermine the effectiveness of the treaty with regard to reaching its global reduction target.

    It is perfectly possible to cap emissions in all countries in an equitable way—which should be the principle focus of climate justice organizations since the great danger is that even if we succeed in reducing global emissions sufficiently it will be done unfairly. It would mean, for example, setting a cap for a very poor country like the Republic of the Congo above its current emissions level while setting a cap for the US considerably below its current emissions. When emissions are not capped for some countries, as was the case under the Kyoto Protocol, corrupt practices can undercut global reductions. But once all countries are capped fairly, even if bogus credits are sold global reductions cannot be undermined.

    A Five Point Program to Unite Us All

    In the next few years when I am marching in the streets and engaging in civil disobedience I will be chanting: “Leave the Oil in the Soil! Leave the Coal in the Hole! Leave the Tar Sand in the Land! Leave the Fracking Shale Gas under the Grass!” But unlike some in the climate justice movement I will not confuse good slogans and chants with a political program to prevent climate change. A program is a set of policies that will achieve these results even while capitalism persists, such as the one outlined below. It is a program that climate justice activists who believe in system change, and climate reformers who may not, should be able to agree on.

    1. Let Science Set the Global Emission Cap

    Insist that scientists who study the climate—not economists—are the experts best suited to advise us about how much reduction in global net emissions is necessary. Climate scientists have proved to be the best negotiators for an aggressive response to the danger of climate change. The power of their testimony has now moved reductions of 80 percent, or more, by 2050, or sooner, smack into the middle of the bargaining table, and fixed discussion on the necessity of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at 350 parts per million, or less.

    2. Caps for All Countries

    Under Kyoto, trading bogus carbon credits could only puncture holes in the global emissions cap when projects in less developed countries (so-called non-Annex-1 countries) where national emissions were not capped sold bogus emission reduction credits to governments or sources in more developed countries (Annex-1 countries) with national emission caps. The obvious solution to this problem is to cap emissions in all countries—that is, eliminate the distinction between Annex-1 and non-Annex-1 countries in the Kyoto framework altogether.

    3. Equitable Caps: Greenhouse Development Rights Framework

    One excellent proposal for determining equitable caps for developed and developing countries alike is the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework.[4] The authors have created a practical formula using readily available data to assign differential caps to all countries on a continuum that considers only a country’s residents who have enjoyed economic development, combining those residents’ “responsibility” and “capacity.” Climate justice advocates should be waving copies of the GDRF pamphlet—like others once waved Mao’s Little Red Book—when demonstrating in the streets at international climate conferences.

    4. Cap Net Emissions

    It is extremely important to eliminate perverse incentives to destroy existing forests and provide positive incentives for forest conservation. Even if we do not take other environmental benefits from forest conservation into account, destroying existing forests is very counterproductive simply from the perspective of net carbon emissions. The international treaty should cap national net emissions rather than emissions. In which case, governments would have an incentive to discourage activities that increase net emissions, like deforestation, even when followed by replanting. The international treaty need not dictate to governments how they go about this.

    While not as exciting as denouncing global capitalism and calling for system change, most in the climate justice movement find nothing concrete to object to in these first four proposals. It is only the last proposal that has proved controversial: once these four improvements in the Kyoto framework are made, countries and sources should be allowed to trade certified emission reduction credits if they wish.

    5. International Carbon Markets with a New Sheriff

    As already explained, when national net emissions are capped equitably carbon trading (a) lowers the global costs of preventing climate change considerably, thereby reducing political opposition to an effective treaty in wealthy countries, and (b) generates a large flow of payments from the global North to the global South. Moreover, once net emissions are capped in all countries the international treaty organization has nothing at stake with regard to the legitimacy of carbon trading because planned global reductions would be secure even if bogus credits were traded. Furthermore, the governments of all countries would have a powerful incentive to prevent private parties within their borders from selling bogus credits in the international carbon market. If country governments whose net emissions are capped fail to prevent bogus sales, either those governments or their citizens would suffer the adverse consequences of having to cover the shortfall by reducing net emissions or buying more credits than they would have had to otherwise. So not only can the treaty safely permit carbon trading, it can relieve itself of the burden of certifying emission reductions for sale and leave that to national governments.

    No doubt governments of poor counties will appreciate all the assistance they can get from the professional staff of an agency of the international climate treaty with expertise in establishing baselines to measure “additionality” and detect “leakage” when certifying credits for sale. But it is national governments that should be put in charge of final approval for projects within their own borders seeking to sell credits in international carbon markets. Any government which simply chose not to certify emission reduction credits for sale, would of course be free to do so.

    All too many critiques of carbon trading stem in part from confusion about what is easy and what is difficult to measure. It is relatively easy to measure national annual net emissions and count up certified emission reduction credits bought and sold by sources within countries. And this is all that is necessary for the treaty organization to determine if signatories have met, or failed to meet, their treaty obligations. It is far more difficult to measure how much any project reduces net emissions compared to what would have happened otherwise. This means it is sometimes difficult to know how many credits to certify for sale in the international carbon market. The above proposal guarantees that mistakes in certification do not undermine the effectiveness of the treaty, and shifts the difficult task of certification from the treaty organization to national governments since mistakes merely create inequities among their own citizens.

    I urge the climate justice movement to rethink its dismissal of cap and trade and carbon markets. These policies are, of course, not ultimate solutions. But they offer us a margin of hope to forestall cataclysmic climate change.

    In Solidarity,

    Robin Hahnel
    Professor Emeritus, Department of Economics
    American University, Washington DC
    robinhahnel@comcast.net


    [1] I have devoted much of my forty year professional career to writing about the negative consequences of markets and how we can, and should replace them with a system of participatory planning that is efficient, fair, and environmentally sustainable. I began criticizing markets in Unorthodox Marxism published in 1979. My latest book on this subject is Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation published in 2005. More recently I published “The Case Against Markets” in the Journal of Economic Issues in 2007, and “Against the Market Economy: Advice to Venezuelan Friends” in Monthly Review in 2008. I have also taught environmental economics for decades and published widely on the subject of international climate policy, including Green Economics: Confronting the Ecological Crisis, published in 2011.

    [2] For example: Brian Tokar, Toward Climate Justice (2010), Patrick Bond, Politics of Climate Justice (2012), and the video The Story of Cap and Trade by Annie Leonard.

    [3] “Left Clouds Over Climate Change Policy,” Review of Radical Political Economics (44, 2), June 2012; “Desperately Seeking Left Unity on Climate Change Policy,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (23, 4), December 2012; and “Response to Patrick Bond on Climate Policy,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (24, 2), June 2013.

    [4] Paul Baer, Tom Athanasiou and Sivan Kartha, The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World: The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework (Berlin: Heinrich Boll Foundation, 2007).

     

     

  • Capitalism Gone Wild

    Review of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013

    This American life is a mess, argues George Packer in The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. It’s a nation fraying, with core institutions from government and finance to housing, jobs and education dysfunctional or “unwound.”

    Packer, as befits a New Yorker staff writer, is a sharp stylist with a keen eye. While he does pay homage to the American ideal of self-reinvention and upward mobility that existed imperfectly at best in the past, he focuses his seemingly infinite capacity for listening on bringing to life the stark inequalities of a society that is experiencing contrasts in wealth and poverty not seen since the late 19th century. It’s one in which billionaires and the homeless multiply while the proportion of middle-income families shrinks and where six of Sam Walton’s heirs have as much accumulated wealth as the United States’ bottom 30 percent.

    His vision of an anomic, atomized America unfolds like a well-produced slideshow. Highlights include an insider’s view of K Street swinishness, its manufacturing of “grasstop” coalitions and how lobbyists on Capitol Hill not only grease politician’s palms but write legislation in the interest of no one but their own clients.

    There’s also great reporting on the epidemic of robo-signing, mortgage and security fraud, bank failure, securities fraud and bankruptcy. His pointing to the collapse of federal regulations on bankers and traders that allowed for the Wall Street feeding frenzy is on target and a good introduction to the 2007-2008 collapse and its devastating consequences nationwide.

    Taken singly, many of the chapters are brilliant, as is his coverage of the 2012 GOP convention and the ghost subdivisions and foreclosure wipeouts in Tampa, Florida. There’s Youngstown, Ohio’s shedding of 50,000 jobs (with a population of 150,000) and the vacating of 40 percent of its housing parcels in just 10 years. There’s also devastating takedowns of the gremlin-like Newt Gingrich, the preposterous Oprah Winfrey and the weaselly Robert Rubin matched with fitting portraits of new Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and writer Raymond Carver, named “the chronicler of blue-collar despair.”

    A reviewer in The Guardian described his feelings after reading the more than 400 page tome as having “The sense of loneliness — of isolated souls, failed by their institutions, pummeled by the forces of big money — seems to seep under your skin, and to stay there.”

    My reaction was that, too; it’s a tough read when bad things happen to good people. Or when good things happen to the undeserving rich. Yet the pieces, exquisitely and intelligently drawn, don’t make for a whole picture. Not only is there no unified theory — it is, after all, journalism — there is no uniform explanation for the crises beyond hubris, the sclerosis of government and politicians unconscious when not themselves abetting crimes. We get a cataloging of malignity, venality, chaos and stupidity, as well as a growing list of victims. Like the libertarian masters of the universe in his tale, we have to do the theorizing for ourselves.

    That’s problematic because as accurate as the depictions are, they’re static. His villains may know how to network, but his victims for the most part are loners, with little social interaction outside of their immediate family. It’s as though he takes seriously the paradigm of the right — that society is a fiction — though he clearly despises the right’s politics. And if America is unwinding, when was modern life ever a coherent whole? When was it ever “wound”?

    Unfortunately, Packard’s roster of villains is circumscribed. As responsible as they were for instigating the Great Recession, Wall Street and the securities industry were not the business centers solely at fault for the lead-up to the collapse. An outsized military budget, imperial wars, the decline of unions as counterweights to corporate excesses and the flight of manufacturing overseas played their parts, too.

    At bottom, despite the thick description in Packer’s work, there’s no sense of working people as actors, only as creatures acted upon. This may be true enough for the people profiled, at least initially, but weren’t there other people in other areas who acted as their own social agents? His subjects are real enough, but they’re presented without enough historical context to understand what options they had, if any, for a fight-back.

    Here Packer could have taken the extra step of looking at the present crisis less as a failure of government to rein in the thieves — which it is — and more as capitalism unfolding in a global economy, as a process that creates not simply winners and losers but evolving social classes, learning from their mistakes and successes and — in the case of working people — rediscovering cultures of resistance.

    In Youngstown, Tammy Thomas, a black worker at the then- prominent Packard Electric and single mother of three, goes to a union meeting. She finds it pointless — two white guys arguing, she tells Packer, and her description is doubtlessly right. But why was the meeting pointless? And was it always thus? Did this local union have a history of militancy? Of accommodation?

    Thomas for one goes on to be a first-rate organizer, but that’s due to the influence of an outside organization. Similarly the good guy in foreclosure-ravaged Tampa is a feisty local lawyer, not an affected homeowner. Were there no instances of community institutions that resisted the leveling of their world?

    Packer rightly cites local critics calling the funding for exurban Tampa’s heady property-flipping a Ponzi scheme, and one with the active collusion of county commissioners, “but everything kept growing and no one paid attention,” he writes, end quote. Why no attention?

    And why, when almost all of his white characters are either moneyed Rand Paul-style libertarian ideologues or conservative Christians, does he give them such ample room to expound? Couldn’t Packer have found even one semi-employed Marxist in one of the troubled locations to balance the picture? If Packer was stuck, he could have called me.

    Packer exhibits both the strengths and weaknesses of mainstream newsgathering. Even when he refuses to sing hosannas to the rich and the ubercomfortable, instead acting as an informed and aggressive skeptic who tells oppressed people’s stories so well, he never quite pulls the trigger. Nor does he seem to know he can.

    Capitalism is about much more than conscious thievery, guilty individuals, enabling politicians and victims; it’s a system that depends on exploitation and class division. It may require exploiters to tell outsized moral tales about themselves, whether as members of yesterday’s Calvinist elect or today’s libertarians, but it’s first a system of production, and an unstable one made up of real people in a real and conflict-ridden context. Why people do or do not make common cause and fight back — and what they fight for — are as much part of the story as are the hideous conditions they endure. That’s the part Packer doesn’t tell, and I wish he had.

     

    This article first appeared in The Indypendent, Oct. 30, 2013, Issue #191.

  • Mediocrity in teacher education?

                            Bill Keller’s op/ed piece in the NY Times about the mediocrity in teacher education deserved a political rebuttal that responses in the “letters” section didn’t provide. My letter, rejected, slipped in my doctoral work at Harvard and my book on urban teaching, which in the past has allowed my radical critique to pass as credible.

     

          During my doctoral work in teacher education at Harvard in 1990, I took a seminar in which we studied policies right-wing think tanks advocated for teacher preparation and certification. Almost all of those policies have since become law, with bipartisan support. Now Bill Keller advocates for yet another change that the far-right has thirsted after for decades, destroying university-based teacher education by raising entrance requirements so that only college students from families with high socio-economic status can become teachers. This policy parallels the aim of Teach for America – another program we studied just as it was hatched. Teacher ed's crime in the eyes of these opponents is preparing prospective teachers to care about the whole child and understand the       role of schools in a democracy. I plead guilty as charged. (Lois Weiner is the author of "Urban Teaching: The Essentials")

     

                                 Keller’s article is part of a well-orchestrated  campaign to eliminate teacher education at state universities, what were once normal schools, then state teachers colleges, as this presentation by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) explains. NCTQ, like so many “non-profits” and foundations funded by far-right donors, now drives teacher education policy in the federal government and at the state level.  

     

                                 Don’t we want teachers who are well-educated themselves? Absolutely. That’s my life’s work, as well as doing what I can as a teacher educator to make sure that teachers are “dream keepers” not “gate keepers” for children who have not been given equal educational opportunity.  But as Ken Zeichner explains that’s not what the changes to teacher education are doing, especially with shoddy “fast-track” programs to plop newbies into schools to work with kids with the most needs..  How many people who are well-educated will remain in school systems that serve kids who don’t do well on standardized tests when teacher pay and evaluations are pegged to students’ test scores? How many people with other career options will work in a job with no professional supports, no job security, with low pay, where the supervisor hires and fires at will?  Not many.

     

                                 So what will happen if/when we cut off the pipeline of teachers to a trickle? Politicians will likely do what they always have when there is a teacher shortage: waive requirements to put warm bodies in classrooms.  There will likely be plenty of people in this “jobless recovery” who will want work.  It’s an outcome the World Bank points to as a model, noting approvingly that this is what occurred in Benin when teachers had the audacity to ask the government to consider a pay raise and were fired wholesale.

     

                                 In every neoliberal reform I can think of, to understand what the impact (intended or not) will be, use one of these semantic devices: invert the meaning or add “for a select few.”  Thus, the goal of “raising teacher quality” by restricting admission to teacher education program to only those who have the highest SAT scores will have the effect of “putting minimally qualified teachers into most schools” or “raising teacher quality for a select few.” So don’t be surprised that the debt ceiling legislation included a provision to allow “alternate route” teachers to bypass all the regulations for university-based programs. 

                                 I am heartened that more activists have been persuaded by my argument that this is not a conspiracy because conspiracies are, by definition, secret.  This is a global project with quite public documentation and exegesis.  The evidence is in front of us. The problem is that many liberals don’t want to face that we are in an ideological battle with enemies who aim to destroy public education and democracy. The only way to “engage” (to quote a teacher union official with whom I often tweet) with our enemies, and this includes the Democrats as well as the Republicans, is to defeat them using all our strength and savvy.

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

  • Socialism and Sports

    The two great loves of my father’s life were the Green Bay Packers and golf.  Every fall Sunday we worshipped at the altar of the Green and Gold.  My brother and I learned, at an early age, that we could only talk during commercials and half time.  Our Sunday routines created my love of armchair sports.  Today, in addition to following pro football, I watch college basketball and football, pro basketball, baseball and tennis.  Too often feminists and leftists dismiss the importance of sports in society and only focus on the machismo culture encouraged by professional/college athletics.  Although that culture is real to an alarming extent, I dare say it is also an elitist attitude that is not conducive to mass organizing and needs to be re-considered.

    Team sports are not just about competition and rarely about individuals but also about how talented individuals can band together and succeed.  Players and coaches recognize this — the favorite saying is “There is no I in team.”  Despite the use of hockey as an example of individual prowess, it is very much a team sport.  The six players on the ice work as a unit to score goals.  Each position has a specific assignment.  If one player plays alone, the team loses. Professional hockey is a violent sport because the owners encourage fighting as a way to sell tickets.  Fighting is rare at lower levels.

    My expertise lies more with football and basketball.  Both require players to cooperate.  Granted, there are stars on the teams but the stars succeed by meshing with other teammates.  Aaron Rodgers, considered by some the best quarterback in the league, is only as good as the offensive line that protects him for a sufficient amount of time so he can throw razor-sharp passes and score touchdowns.  In basketball, teams who play as a unit are more successful than teams who play as individuals.  The San Antonio Spurs have won four NBA championships over the past 10 years because the whole is better than the individuals.  The New York Knicks fail because Carmelo Anthony, the star, won’t share the ball.

    The life lessons that children learn through participation in team sports are to respect others, cooperate with and support each other, and to let bygones be bygones.  Young girls can get embroiled in petty arguments that may lead to bullying and certainly lead to a rigid social hierarchy where girls on the bottom feel real pain.  However, through participation in organized sports, there is less social hierarchy and less bullying.

    Those who did not grow up in a sports environment miss the community bonds which are created.  Go to any sports bar and you find complete strangers high five and hug each other after great plays.  People who attend the same bar to watch games come to know each other and find themselves talking about more than just the sport that brought them together.  Certainly, it is an opportunity to begin a discussion of working class politics because we have established our bona fides through our mutual support of THE TEAM.  Involvement in the sports culture is an organizing tool.

    Furthermore, professional sports are a microcosm of the struggle for economic justice.   On the corporate side are the team owners[1]; billionaires every one, many too stupid to recognize that they know nothing about the game they own (football:  Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys, Dan Snyder of the Washington (enter racist team name here); basketball:  Donald Sterling of the LA Clippers; Jimmy Dolan of the New York Knicks).  Then there are the owners who believe their team ownership is a sure way to maximize personal profits (David Glass, (former CEO of Walmart), of the Kansas City Royals whose claim to fame is dooming his team to be the worst in the league for the past 18 years after reducing team payroll by 50 percent when he took over). 

    And then there are the owners who believe they can feed at the public trough and get their stadiums built with tax money even though they can afford to build themselves, such as Clayton Bennett of the Oklahoma City Thunder, formerly the Seattle Supersonics.  This captain of industry, along with National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern, moved the team when they failed in their attempt to blackmail the citizens of Seattle into using tax dollars to build a new stadium; and Zygi Wilf, owner of the Minnesota Vikings, and Commissioner Rodger Goodell threatened to move the team to another locale if local state legislators did not approve using tax money to build Wilf a new stadium.  Citizens in the Twin Cities (where the team is located) had turned down two referendums on paying for the stadium in the past.  These owners[2] have little regard for the communities that support their teams, not unlike corporations or hedge funds that buy businesses, milk the profits dry and then close up shop, leaving unemployment and a reduced tax base in their wake.

    While players are paid well compared to a work-a-day guy or gal, their pay scale does not compare to the owners’ profits.  More importantly, their high salaries are achieved through collective bargaining.  The Major League Players Association[3] is the strongest professional sports union in the country.  Originally led by Marvin Miller, a former economist and negotiator for the United Steel Workers, the union raised salaries, negotiated an arbitration clause (which took the disposition of grievances away from the Commissioner (an employee of team owners) and gave it to a neutral third party.  Miller also negotiated the first free agency clause in major league sports.  An enormous victory for the players — no longer did the owners control where they worked. 

    The National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) has been the weakest, historically.  There were several unsuccessful strike efforts during the 1980’s, and the last one led to the first use of scabs.  Under the reign of Gene Upshaw, a former Oakland Raider, there was “labor peace.”  Complaints that the peace came at the expense of the players swirled.  In 2011, the league announced that if an agreement wasn’t reached by March 1, the league would lock out the players.[4]  The players were prepared and, ultimately, won. 

    First, the leadership of the NFLPA took a page out of Marvin Miller’s playbook and ensured that the best players were team delegates and alternates.  This included Drew Brees, star quarterback of the New Orleans Saints, as the most outspoken union supporter.  Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers  was an alternate delegate.  Another successful union tactic was a focus on health and safety issues instead of money.  The NFLPA made a compelling argument about the dangerousness of the sport, the short tenure of players, and the lack of retiree health benefits.  For the first time, the union spoke up for retiree rights.  A brilliant community-based strategy raised awareness.  In the settlement, the players succeeded in preventing the league from instituting an 18 game schedule — two more than the current schedule — a top management priority.  An 18-game schedule is a horrible idea for players as it exposes them to even more possible career ending injuries.

    All is not sugar and light with professional sports unions.  The National Basketball Players Association (NBAPA), also faced with a lockout, signed an agreement that gave the owners over $5 billion in give-backs.  Unlike the football players, the union focused on money.  There was no community outreach, nor were the best players in leadership roles.  This epic failure can be attributed to the incompetence of the NBAPA executive director.

    Like it or not, sports are front and center in American life for both women and men.  Given our fascination, we must recognize the potential fandom represents in educating and organizing folks to join us in advocating for social democracy.  The world of organized sports is a microcosm of corporations vs. workers and community.  This meme can also be exploited to our benefit.  We must take advantage of the opportunity! [5]

    Notes

    [1] The only community-owned team is the Green Bay Packers.  In the mid 1950’s the team offered stock in the team to raise funds.  The stocks were limited to one per person and could not be re-sold.  The money raised financed the team and improvements to the stadium.  There have been more stock sales under the same rules.  That and the NFL league money-sharing rules allow the Packers to stay in a small town market and remain a successful franchise.  Community-owned teams were banned in the early 1960’s, much to the regret of the rest of fandom.

    [2] For a more detailed account, see Dave Ziren’s:  Bad Sports, How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love.

    [3] Baseball players

    [4] A lockout is management’s version of a strike.  The good thing (if there is anything good about it) is that the employer cannot permanently replace the players.

    [5] To keep up on the latest in sports, read Dave Ziren’s column in The Nation, or subscribe to receive regular email updates. Email: edgeofsports@gmail.com.

     

    Lee Levin worked for unions for 20 years, including eight years as executive director of the Coalition of Labor Union Women. Currently, she is a full-time mom and volunteer coordinator for national DSA. This article originally appeared on the DSA blog.

     

  • Connecting the dots: The "new mindset" we confront

           One of the most deceptive aspects of neoliberal reforms in education is that destructive policies often contain one element that is seductive for progressives who care about inequality in schools. When the Dems and Republicans rewrote federal aid to K-12 schools in No Child Left Behind (NCLB) many liberal researchers were dazzled by the legislation’s requirement that schools and states report data on student achievement broken down (disaggregated) by race. This was no small change, as I learned when I analyzed student achievement in New York City for a study of school reforms being touted as a cure for underachievement.  The political price we paid for this data has been imposition of a punishing regime of standardized testing, which has provided the rationale for massive school closings and privatization of education. What we should have learned from NCLB is to connect the dots, to look at the entire picture, understanding that the rhetoric obscures the aims, and any real benefit is tangential to the project’s purpose.

           When I talk to audiences about the neoliberal project, I use the 1999 quote from “The book of knowledge,” a Merrill Lynch report that calls for a “new mindset” that sees schools as “retail outlets,” parents and students as “customers,” and school boards as “customer service departments.”  It is this “new mindset” that we must defeat. When we look at the evidence, when we connect the dots, especially the global picture, what’s apparent is that we face a project that aims to create a new, global system of education that will synchronize education with capitalism’s economic demands.  In every case the language and result of the policy contradict its effects.

           Proponents of this project use the rhetoric of making schools more equal to increase inequality in outcomes.  The public sector is subject to staggering regulation and starved of resources while private programs (funded by right-wing “vulture” philanthropy) are freed from the most minimal oversight.  The project cites lofty goals of improving teacher quality to deskill and deprofessionalize teaching,  pushing Teach for America, a program that puts minimally prepared novices into the schools that require the best-trained faculty.  Slogans about holding all students to “world class” standards to push adoption of a national curriculum (Common Core)  mask the effects this will have.  Without massively increased funding, not even a well-tested curriculum (which Common Core is not) would fail.  Developed by a private consortium supported by the Gates Foundation, without parent, teacher, or citizen participation, the Common Core will be a disaster used to justify further privatization.  Poor test scores based on this uniform new curriculum will be the excuse to fire thousands of teachers and push tens of thousands of young people of color out of schools, into a jobless future or prison and convict labor.

           Connecting the dots clarifies that we have to defeat this project.  It’s a tsunami created by wealthy elites that aim to destroy public education and with it the ideals of public education that support a democracy.

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

  • Wasting money on educating the masses and "fear of elitism"

    When I speak to teachers and education activists about my research, I am often told that the vast, well-organized project I describe could not exist without our knowing about it and that what I am describing sounds like a conspiracy.  No, it’s not a conspiracy because conspiracies are, by definition, secret. And as evidence of the global nature of policies becomes more apparent, more activists are learning about the aims and actual effects of "free market" reforms, available for decades in prospectuses from transnational corporations developing new products and reports from the World Bank. 

                      Now a breathtakingly frank report from an adviser to the Minister of Education in the UK lays out the thinking behind the global project and the UK’s educational policies: Education should not be wasted on the masses, who are genetically inferior, he writes, and to say otherwise capitulates to a foolish “fear of elitism.” Cummings’ rhetoric about improving the quality of schooling and his blistering attack on the mediocrity of education is intended to justify introducing gross inequality into the UK’s educational system.

                       For wealthy, powerful elites who control business, media, and government, public expenditures on educating workers beyond the skill level needed for low paying jobs is wasted.  Since most jobs being created require no more than an 8th grade education only a handful of people need to acquire the sophisticated thinking and skills to manage and control the world’s productive resources. Minimally educated workers need only minimally educated teachers. Oversight of lowered expectations for educational outcomes can be achieved through exclusive use of standardized testing. Therefore, a well-educated (and well-paid) teaching force is a waste of scarce public money.

                      What’s behind release of Cumming’s straightforward description of the ideological premises of the project to make schooling more unequal? My hunch is that the successful joint job actions of England’s two largest teachers unions has forced the government’s hand. Public opinion is shifting to a more critical view of neoliberal educational policy and much of the negative publicity has focused on the inefficiencies and corruption of Gove’s policies. To contest the view that he is inept, Gove is clarifying the real aims of his policies to show that he is getting the job done: basing educational policy on pseudo-Darwinian theories to destroy the promise of quality education for all children.  Cummings’ report exposes this rationale and explains the tools being used:  eliminating the national pay scale for teachers so that communities pay what they can for teachers; introducing “free schools” so as to further disempower local communities through control of the school authorities.

                      England’s teachers go on strike October 17. (Half the country conducted a one-day work stoppage on Oct. 1; the other half goes out tomorrow.) The first action had significant support from US teachers, from which strikers took heart.  (Being on strike can be lonely and frightening, even when you know what you are doing is righteous.) I’m supporting England’s teachers with messages on social media, tweeting with the hashtag #teachrroar. You can follow this strike and other actions of teachers and students around the world at www.teachersolidarity.com

             Defending England’s teachers is a vital step to creating the international solidarity we need to turn back this global project.  Their project is global and so must be our resistance.

             PS – Tomorrow, October 17 I’m speaking in Providence RI and Friday, October 18 at University of Mass. Dartmouth about the role of transformed teachers unions in struggles to save public education.  If you’re in the vicinity, please join us.

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

     

  • What can retired teachers do to help?

    Welcome news: The strike last week of England’s two largest unions was highly successful, gaining strong favorable publicity on social media and rallies. (Mea culpa: I was corrected by a Scottish comrade about my use of “UK” – Scotland has an independent government and educational system. Wales didn’t strike because its government nudged a bit on contract issues). Many teacher activists in the US now have  personal contact with UK activists, and the President of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis, made a trip to the UK, presumably to share information and insights.  Last August the current President of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) joined a new network of US teacher union activists meeting in Chicago. We’re seeing creation of a new network of activists internationally, supported by work a former NUT President, Mary Compton, does through her updated website.  (If you want to know what’s happening globally with teachers, her site is a must-read.  You can follow her on twitter too.)

                            What’s the role in this growing new social movement of teacher activists asks Cam Kilgour, a Toronto District School Board teacher who describes himself as “retired and wanting to do anything I can to support our schools here and around the planet” ? I include myself in this category, since I began my highschool teaching and union activism in the early 1970s, leaving to become a college professor fifteen years later.  

                            I think those of us who are no longer working members of preK-12 teachers unions have a great deal to contribute.  We have time and energy for union-related activity that teachers who are working full-time do not. We understand what it means to have a strong union presence in a school, how the union can support teachers’ professional autonomy and their right to teach free from the fear that characterizes so many schools today. Our historical memory is immensely valuable, and we need to share understandings and information about what has been successful with a new generation of activists. 

                            At the same time, our experience was, for the most part, not in unions that were social movements. The culture and organization of teachers unions since shortly after their rebirth in the 1960s were seriously flawed by “business unionism” which defined “the union” as staff and elected officials.  The unions in which we participated were not what we need today.  I think we need to acknowledge that and to let this new generation of teachers forge a different model. In union elections that allow retirees to vote, we can organize other retirees to support candidates who want unions that are not afraid to fight for what’s needed and right (rather than what officials cast as “practical”).  We can organize to educate retirees about the fact that their financial security and the well-being of their grandchildren depends on this movement’s growth and success, its challenge to the model of unionism that has weakened the profession and allowed our opponents to win public support for its disastrous policies of privatization.

                            The role of retirees is to support this new movement, help mentor and develop leaders, not be the leadership ourselves.  We are outsiders now who should be counted on for help, intellectual and organizational. There’s more than enough work to be done!

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

  • Another International Labour Movement is Necessary

    [New Politics readers will be interested in the following article by Dan Gallin, who advocates social justice unionism, international solidarity and the need for workers' movements that actually move. Dan Gallin is the former general secretary of the Geneva, Switzerland-based International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF), a "union of unions" comprising 388 trade unions in 124 countries, including its eight major U.S affiliates. His standing and experience should help spark the widest discussion. Gallin delivered these remarks to the Global Labour Institute – Athens Network, June 18-19, 2013.]

     

    Comrades,

    I want to open a discussion on our crisis, the crisis of the labour movement, because I believe that the multiple crises we are facing in society are ultimately the result of the failures of our movement, and that we cannot effectively deal with those economic, social and political crises unless we overcome our own crisis first.

    I also believe that resolving our crisis is our most direct responsibility, that it depends on us alone and that it is a task we must immediately address because time is short.

    There was a time when the term "labour movement" had a precise meaning: it meant the movement of the working class with a political and an industrial wing: the party and the union, which, together with an array of auxiliary and flanking organizations, had a common aim: the emancipation of labour and the establishment of a socialist society. That, at any rate, was the dominant concept up to the second decade of the 20th century.

    The present situation could not be more different. The historical alliance of the trade union movement with a mass party representing the working class has broken down. This did not happen suddenly, it was a long process, over several decades, with many lost battles, for reasons too long to go into here.

    I want to focus on the outcome of this process, our present crisis, which has several basic elements.

    The first is the crisis of social-democracy in Western Europe and elsewhere (India, Japan). The social-democratic labour movement emerged from World War II superficially strong, actually greatly weakened by its losses under fascism and in the war, and far more dependent on State support than it had been before the war. The socialist transformation of society was no longer on the agenda.

    In the context of post-war capitalist reconstruction in Europe and Japan, and the division of the world into two power blocs led by the US and the USSR, many nominally social-democratic and labour parties abandoned their identity as class parties of labour, claimed to represent wider popular interests and adopted policies detrimental to the working class, dictated by their historical enemies.

    Today, there are very few countries in Europe where relations between the trade union movement and its former historical allies are not fraught with difficulties. In effect, the trade unions have lost their political allies.

    The second element is the loss of our periphery. The historical labour movement had created a powerful network of auxiliary organizations, covering most aspects of social life: culture, education, social protection, human rights, equality, a workers' press, even military self-defence. These were meant to be the building blocs of an alternative society.

    Much of this was lost in the post-war period, where unions retreated to what they believed to be their core business: collective bargaining, leaving society to the State. Because the State, by its nature, cannot substitute itself to society, other social movements have occupied the space left vacant by the labour movement. In that sense, these social movements are the illegitimate children of the labour movement. We need to recognize them as our own.

    The third element is the hugely destructive impact of Stalinism. Russia had three or four years of revolution, followed by seventy years of counter-revolution. The countries of Eastern and Central Europe occupied by Russia at the end of World War II had forty years of Stalinism. Hundreds of thousands socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, dissident communists perished in the "purges" and in the labour camps of that regime, or were assassinated elsewhere in the world, our best people. Together with them the memory of what had been the labour movement in one fifth of the world was obliterated.

    Worse yet: Stalinism corrupted and discredited the very concept of socialism, not least with the help of the conservative propaganda. Both sides colluded in this operation, the Soviet side, with its self-described "socialist countries", seeking to legitimise its system as an embodiment of historical socialism, and the conservative side, totally agreeing that the so-called "socialist countries" were indeed socialist, rather than the opposite of everything socialism had ever stood for, seeking to discredit the concept of socialism by equating it with Soviet reality.

    When that regime finally collapsed under its own weight, without any workers anywhere rising in its defence, on the contrary, it left a bureaucratic ruling class recycled as a new capitalist class, as corrupt and lawless as it had ever been, and it also left a weak and disoriented labour movement, trying to find its bearings with difficulty, against enormous odds.

    Before I leave this survey of the wreckage of the political movements that claimed to represent labour, I should also recall that there have always been dissidents, independent socialists, revolutionary syndicalists, who resisted. There were not many of us, but we fought and lived to fight another day, and that day is today.

    I believe that we know what we now have to do. The issues are at the same time ideological, political and organizational.

    Firstly: today's labour movement is essentially the trade union movement, that is what we have and that has to be our starting point. We have lost to a large extent our traditional political allies, but the trade union movement needs a political dimension. Everything we do is political.

    We therefore must recover the politics which are naturally ours, taking as the sole point of departure the interests of our members, which are also the general interests of society.

    Socialism remains our goal but, instructed by experience, we know that the meaning of socialism must be radical democracy: real power, democratically exercised, by real people, at every level, not by any substitutes, no vanguard parties, no so-called "progressive" authoritarians. We welcome all reliable political allies, but we cannot delegate the fight for the emancipation of labour to anyone else.

    As a socialist, I would not want my party to control any trade unions. As socialists, our role should be to support the independent organizations of the working class, controlled by their members.

    As socialists, we must also break with all forms of sectarianism. Those of us who are Marxists will remember what the Manifesto said: "The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interest separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which they shape and mould the proletarian movement."

    Too much damage has already been done by those who place the interests of their party or their sect above the interests of the movement. They need to be left to their own isolation.

    As a trade union movement, we must break with the ideology of "social partnership", which has long since been abandoned by our ruling classes. We have no "social partners", what we have is social counterparts, and that is not the same thing. Rather than lamenting the demise of "social partnership" and "social dialogue", we need to rebuild power relationships in our favour wherever possible by all means available to us.

    Secondly, we need to respond to the changes in the nature of work and to reconstruct the identity of our class, the working class. In today's world, a majority of workers are in unstable, precarious, informal forms of employment, and unemployed for much of their working lives. Many are immigrants. All of them are part of our class.

    Unions must develop effective structures to organize these workers. We must move beyond a narrow definition of the interests of our members and move towards class responses in new organisational forms and renewed organisations, reflecting the long-term general interest of our members and of society.

    This is also an ideological and political task because it requires an inclusive approach to what we believe the working class to be and to the unions as a social movement.

    Thirdly, and in the same order of ideas: we need to remain aware that women represent a huge proportion of the as yet unorganised working class, with enormous reserves of energy and courage, much of it still untapped and dormant. Despite some progress, the trade union movement remains heavily male dominated. Without a proactive policy of integrating women workers all the way to the top leadership level we deprive ourselves of an essential resource and are left fighting with one hand tied to our back.

    Fourthly, there is an issue of structure. Greece, a small country like my own, has some 150 trade unions, between GSEE and ADEDY. That is far too many. Far too many general secretaries. As long as this structure dominates, it will be impossible to create a movement supported by its members alone, without State subsidies collected through taxes. What, today, is to stop the State from shutting you down, like they shut down your television, or your public hospitals?

    Yours will remain a fragile and vulnerable movement unless it becomes the means through which the workers collectively rise and exercise their power. Power is not demonstrated by the ability to call 24-hour strikes. Power is demonstrated when the capitalists lose control over the State.

    Comrades:

    The European labour movement is today the target of an onslaught not experienced since the 1930s. This is not a passing phase. There will not be a return to what was considered normal social relations in the thirty years after the war. The project of contemporary capitalism is the destruction of the labour movement, in Europe, in North America and eventually everywhere else. Their project is the reorganisation of world society without organised labour. What they want is a society of slaves.

    Greece has become the crucible of this process. Your ruling class is preparing for war. The Golden Dawn nazis are the shock troops of capitalism. You have an army that has a history of military coups whenever democracy inconvenienced your ruling class.

    But you have also tremendous opportunities because everything is in flux, there is nothing to lose and everything is possible. Gramsci described the crisis of his time as: the old is dying and the new cannot be born. Our duty in our crisis is to be the midwives of the new: to make sure that the new can be born. There is nothing to stop you from rebuilding your movement to be the most powerful force in your country, as it potentially always has been and as it easily could become.

    Do not look to the European trade union movement for inspiration or examples. They have nothing to teach you except how to retreat. Rely on your experience and your imagination and don't be afraid of radical solutions. In our situation, radical solutions are the realistic solutions. Is a general union for all workers imaginable in Greece? Could the GSEE and ADEDY become a single union, One Big Union?

    Comrades:

    We would welcome the creation of a Greek Global Labour Institute as a partner of our GLI International Network. We have created a free space for discussion and action, and this free space is expanding. We are inviting you to join. You will be joining an invisible International. We have no heavy structures, we do not seek bureaucratic hegemony. We are a network of autonomous and self-determined trade union activists working together, and working with others, with a common purpose: help rebuilding the international movement that the workers of the world need and deserve.

    We recognise in you, our comrades in Syriza, the democratic and revolutionary approach which we believe to be the one our movement most needs at this time. We are here today to demonstrate our solidarity and we will stay together until every battle is won.

  • German Lessons

    Passionately watching last week’s election returns* at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s office in New York, without ever having been to Germany or learned more than a half-dozen German words, was an unusual experience. It was easy enough to orient my sympathies — as an American socialist they stood with the Left Party.

    My initial disappointment said a lot about how much further developed the struggle for a socialist alternative is in even the core of Europe than in the United States. 8.6 percent was less than the strong showing from four years ago, not quite the 9 or 10 percent that the more optimistic among us had been hoping for, and still leagues away from running the country. But it did show, once again, that the party had a stable base of support and indicated the possibility of a broadly progressive majority in even affluent and triumphant Germany.

    It’s also an electoral result more astounding than any the North American left has pulled off in a century.

    The legacies of state socialism, the rise of xenophobic parties of the Right, and the pressures of globalization plague the European left, but being an American socialist is an even lonelier, more difficult errand. Our center-left is dominated by the Democratic Party, a social liberal formation with little structural tie to the working class. It’s in a sense the final result that Third Way reformers in the British Labour Party or the German SPD seek to achieve.

    The language of class barely comes out in American election cycles and when it does, it’s diluted in a narrow identity category, meant to categorize a shrinking minority of white workers clinging to factory jobs in the Rustbelt, rather than an ever growing and diverse pool of “precarians”, as they have come to be called — from nannies to day laborers to fast food workers — united by common exploitation. When the Left is bold enough to run a Third Party candidate, like Ralph Nader’s bids a decade ago, they’re on a weak left-populist platform and the “socialist” label remains taboo.

    Many blame this development on America’s first-past-the-post voting system. But more broadly, it must be recognized that the U.S. has more of a “no-party” system than a “two-party” one. The growth of highly organized, mass membership political parties was a development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, starting first in Germany. It was a conscious advance by workers. That the Democratic and Republican Parties retain a looser political structure than their counterparts elsewhere finds reflection in their relatively inchoate, and at times self-contradictory, politics. They are only parties in the broadest sense. Open to all, they have no ideological requirements for membership. Anyone can register as either a Democrat or a Republican and no one can be expelled, making them little more than coalitions of social forces within which various groups contest for influence.

    By comparison, even a system like the German one (despite the 5% threshold required to enter parliament) seems infinitely more coherent and democratic. The American Left, even if it were to resurrect beyond expectations, would find little platform in Congress comparable to the bully pulpit the German Left has established in the Bundestag.

    But looking abroad, either in envy or awe, has for too long been the sustenance of American socialists. Our task is simple: to organize and expand our small minority, to establish a visible and openly radical opposition. In the heart of empire, even triumphs this modest can have wide ramifications, allowing our allies abroad more space to advance their programs. There is a parallel to the vital role the German Left can play aiding social movements in Greece and elsewhere in the European periphery.

    And lest these dreams seem too distant, there are some signs of hope. A Pew Research poll from 2011 shows that more Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 have a favorable opinion of socialism than of capitalism. We don’t know exactly what they mean by “socialism,” but at least it reflects a discontent with what’s on offer in the political mainstream.

    Demographics, needless to say, won’t by themselves save the American Left. It’ll take political action, and as one of my country’s great socialists, A. Philip Randolph, was fond of reminding his audiences, “At the banquet table of nature there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything; and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.”

    DIE LINKE is the type of organization that can win advances for the working class — and without eliding the difficulties that it too faces, that’s reason enough to occasionally sneak a peek abroad for lessons, and, dare I say, a little inspiration.

     

    *Editorial Note: On September 22, Germany elected a new Bundestag. Angela Merkel’s CDU scored a major victory, receiving – together with its Bavarian “sister party” CSU – 41.5% of the votes. The Social Democratic Party got 25.7%, widening the gap to the CDU/CSU. Surprisingly, DIE LINKE (The Left) came in third, with 8.6% of the votes and 64 elected representatives. While the Greens scored 8.4%, the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) – part of Merkel’s governing coalition – lost 10% and fell below the 5 percent threshold, meaning the party will not have any representatives in the new Bundestag. The newly founded right-wing populist Alternative for Germany came in just below 5% as well.

     

    Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin, a senior editor at In These Times, and a board member of New Politics. This article was originally posted on Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Oct. 5, 2013.

  • Jobs vs. the Environment

    Is there a fundamental conflict between a healthy environment and a healthy economy?

    There has been a lot of concern lately about damage that we humans are inflicting on our small, beautiful Planet Earth.  Waste CO2 from our way of life has been dissolving in the oceans, increasing the acidity of the water and making it very hard to, among other problems, raise Willipa Bay Oysters. Apparently, the delicious baby oysters can’t make an adequate shell for themselves in the acidic seawater. And so I’m left to wonder if I will live to see the end of a special part of the Pacific Northwest that my family and I love.

    Carbon Dioxide in the upper atmosphere acts like glass in a greenhouse. It allows sunlight to come in, but doesn’t let as much heat escape back out to space, so the earth warms up. That’s why it’s referred to as a greenhouse gas. Since the 19th century, when the industrial revolution really got going, the CO2 content of our atmosphere has climbed by about a third. There has been a corresponding increase in average world-wide surface temperatures, which has melted a lot of ice that scientists say would be much better if left frozen. Apparently, there is a danger, if the increase in CO2 continues, that the enormous glacier covering Greenland could disintegrate. That catastrophic ice melt would result in a rise in sea level of 20 feet or more, which would swamp many of the world’s major cities, like New York and Miami. According to the Smithsonian Institution, “Since we have been keeping weather records, nineteen of the twenty hottest years ever have happened since 1980.”

    Besides rising sea levels, there’s a lot to worry about from increasing levels of CO2. The increased temperatures will lead to horrific draughts and decreased harvests where millions, and perhaps billions, will starve to death. Tropical diseases will move beyond the equator, causing people to catch malaria, maybe as far north as San Francisco. Ironically, dilution of seawater from ice melt will probably disrupt the Gulf stream enough to result in horribly cold and long winters for a while in Europe, possibly a mini-ice age as far south as Northern Italy.

    All in all, it would be in the best interests of humankind if we were to come up with a plan to actually decrease atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Many climate scientists agree that a level of 350 parts per million (ppm) is the maximum safe level. We’re at a little over 380 ppm right now, which is the highest it’s been in the last 10,000 years. Bill McKibben, the founder and leader of the environmental group 350.org, thinks we can get the CO2 down to 350, but it’s going to take some real effort. We need to stop using coal to produce power, and we need to quit refining the filthy oil from Canadian Tar Sands. We need to vastly increase public transit and insulate our buildings, and then we need to help people in other parts of the world, especially China and India, do likewise. Quite a tall order, but worth it, if you consider the grim alternative.

    McKibben doesn’t just talk a good game. He acts on what he believes. Under Bill’s leadership, 350.org has staged a series of national demonstrations against something called the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if built, will vastly increase the amount of dirty, CO2-rich tar sand oil being refined and burned. The February 2013 rally against the pipeline drew 40,000 people to our national mall in Washington DC. I hope these gatherings continue, because I think that public gatherings like these are the best way to begin to shift public sentiment in favor of producing less CO2. Abraham Lincoln once said, and I completely agree with him, that “public sentiment means everything” in these matters. Go Bill!

    But let’s take a look at the movement to fight climate change from another angle. Since the consequences of allowing atmospheric CO2 to continue to climb are so dire, why isn’t the movement bigger? Why not 400,000? Heck, why not 4 million at the national mall to rally against the destruction of our beautiful climate?

    I happened to catch the Melissa Harris Perry show on MSNBC the day after the big demo. Perry seemed delighted with the accomplishment of 350.org from the day before. While she was in complete agreement with the goal of reducing CO2 to a safe level, she was compelled to offer a warning to McKibben and his group. Perry reported on a recent national Fox News poll taken to determine how much opposition there was to going ahead with the Keystone XL pipeline. The results should serve as a warning to the 40,000 who rallied in DC. According to the poll, opposition to Keystone XL among Americans hovers around 25%, and support for building the pipeline is at about 70%. Now, we all know how polls can be skewed by the questions asked, but still! As a matter of fact, Fox managed to tie the question of building the pipeline to holding U.S. gasoline prices down. It might have been a little different, if the poll just asked for a straightforward yes or no on the pipeline.

    But why are we losing so badly in the battle for the hearts and minds of the American People? Why can’t we get 400,000 at the mall? Don’t people realize what’s at stake here?

    As a matter of fact, I don’t think most people want to realize what is really happening, and therein lays the dilemma of Jobs versus the Environment.

    Here in the Pacific Northwest, there is an issue of comparable magnitude to Keystone. Peabody Coal wants to build a coal export terminal in Bellingham, Washington, something that would vastly expand the amount of coal being exported from the American Mountain West to China. As I understand it, we’re talking 9 trains a day, each 1.5 miles long and loaded to the gills with CO2-rich anthracite, to be burned in China, with a lot of the pollution coming back here to the West Coast of the United States.

    As one might expect, a considerable amount of opposition has emerged to these “death trains.” The Sierra Club has led a good fight against the coal shipments, including organizing thousands to attend federal hearings in Seattle on whether the new terminals should be built. To its great credit, my union, the UFCW, was on the side of the angels at the Seattle hearing, where they handed out, free of charge, hundreds of lovely red “No Coal Trains” t-shirts.  We’ll see, later this year, if President Obama was listening or not.

    What interested me greatly was the counter campaign that was waged in favor of building the terminal and running the trains. Apparently, a number of unions (not mine!) joined with Peabody Coal to try to convince the public that coal trains are a good idea. Their main argument was, you probably guessed it, JOBS! The TV and print campaign that the pro-coal forces put on was incredibly slick. Every TV ad that I saw featured working class folks like you and me, calling for the terminal to be built and promising 20,000 new jobs if their side prevailed. Who can say “no” to 20,000 jobs in this economy? Probably not unemployed construction workers in Bellingham, WA!

    Jim Cramer, the host of the CNBC show “Mad Money,” was recently on “Meet the Press” as a member of the morning’s “powerhouse” panel. At one point in the discussion around lingering unemployment, Cramer weighed in forcefully to say that President Obama should approve the Keystone pipeline immediately. Cramer informed viewers that oil pipelines have been the largest generators of jobs in the U.S. for the last 3 years, and construction of Keystone would mean 60,000 jobs this year!

    How can this “Jobs versus the Environment” conundrum be solved? In a capitalist jobs market, where it’s not possible to turn to the government for help, a decent job means everything. A life of dignity and respect, a healthy family, a nice place to live, all are possible with a good job. Without a living wage job, you join the growing ranks of life’s losers. This is why working people often shy away from the environmental movement. Just about anything that affords everyday people a better shot at a good job makes them say, “Let’s do it!” Doing things to protect the earth may be the right thing to do, but that always seems to mean fewer jobs.

    And remember; vague talk about “green jobs,” to come at some undetermined point in the future, pales in comparison to 60,000 high-pay jobs this year, if we build Keystone.

    So what can we do about it? To answer this question we need to go back into our history a little. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s final state of the union address called for a right to a job for every American. This talk is often referred to as his “Second Bill of Rights” speech. It contains a call for the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation. After 12 years as the American President, he had come to the conclusion that the U.S. government should guarantee a job to all who are able and willing to work. If private industry can hire everybody, fine. If not, the federal government should step in as a back up. And if Roosevelt thought we could have Jobs for All in 1944, I say we can have Jobs for All today.

    With a decent job no longer a worry, working people will be free to join us in the environmental movement, and help us stop global warming. Without a government job guarantee, everyday people will remain under the threat of job loss, and every time they hear about a new super storm or drought or rise in sea level, they’ll say, “I wish I could help, but I need to work, you know?”

    Jobs for All will mean creation of government programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA.) The WPA offered millions of jobs to the unemployed in America at the height of the Great Depression. And these jobs were, for the most part, green jobs, created long before the need to protect the environment was understood like it is today. Jobs in a new WPA would probably be almost entirely green. Replanting forests, insulating homes and buildings, taking care of national parks, daycares, libraries, live theater groups, etc, etc, etc.

    There are many differences between the idea of “Jobs for All” and calls for just “jobs” or “green jobs.” When we don’t say “for all,” working people wonder if they will be included. If everyday people don’t trust a government jobs program to include them, they will not join a movement to pressure Congress for the program. If we want to have a mass movement in support of our calls for more jobs, we have to say “for all” or “everybody.” This is why current proposals for more jobs don’t get too far.

    Another concept of considerable importance to the environmental movement is something referred to as “Just Transition.” This idea usually refers to the provision in a union contract to provide equivalent jobs to workers who are laid off as the result of closing down a business like a dirty coal burning power plant. If just transition can be worked out, it seems like a fine idea to me. But we should keep in mind that the whole working class, including the unemployed, needs to be covered by just transition. That would be Living Wage Jobs for All.

    So, when we achieve “Jobs for All,” we will have ended forever the problem of “jobs versus the environment.” Then we can welcome working people into the environmental movement. One thing I’d like to see is placing a tax on burning fossil fuels, a carbon tax. James Hansen makes a proposal for such a tax in his book, Storms of Our Grandchildren. An intriguing part of Hansen’s idea is that he would have all the money collected from the tax refunded, in equal shares, to everybody in America. Gas would cost a lot more for cars, as would heating of buildings, but people could use the money they receive for transit and insulation. Everybody could relax because of the government guarantee of a decent job, and the CO2 in the atmosphere would start to go down, instead of up. Global warming would slow way down. It would be very cool!

     

    Brian King is a retired respiratory therapist who’s been working with 350.org on global warming and with DSA on “Jobs for All.”

  • COIN of the Realm: Sprawling Police State Brings the Wars Home

    Review of Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency, ed. by Kristian Williams, William Munger and Lara Messersmith-Glavin (AK Press, 2013); and Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America, by Matt Apuzzo & Adam Goldman (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2013).

    Anyone who spent 10 minutes at an Occupy encampment knows that the police response was intense, invasive, unconstitutional and bordered on the deadly. In New York, Oakland, Boston and in hundreds of other locales nationwide, the police were not there to serve and protect nonviolent protesters, let alone the general public. To quote Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s infamous words during a week-long police riot against anti-war protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, his cops were there “not to create disorder but to preserve disorder.” Who can improve on Daley? Life During Wartime tries. I think it fails, though the trying is well worth the effort.

    A ponderous book that’s impossible to read in one sitting, or even 10, it’s filled with much-needed information on counterinsurgency efforts at home and abroad. It chronicles mainstream institutions such as the media that serve to legitimize the existing social order and cool out, co-opt or crush dissent. It examines everything from state violence to an Orwellian manipulation of language. It also speaks to the capacity of social movements to act smarter in response. The breadth of its examples and the understanding of its 15 contributors of the depth of manipulation alone makes the book necessary reading. That’s where it succeeds.

    Where it fails is in its broader thesis, which asserts that every element of the social order is implicated not only in reproducing conformity and compliance and in legitimating its own power but in naming counterinsurgency (or, COIN) as its principal method of social control.

    Co-editor Kristian Williams writes that Prussian military theorist Carl von Clauswitz’s famous maxim, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” can usefully be reversed to read that politics is war — in the present case counterinsurgency — by other means. At the end of this book counterinsurgency is not only treated as political but the preferred and dominant form of class maintenance in the United States.

    That's a correction to the standard Disney-like understanding of bourgeois democracy, where all would be right with the democratic system if only more citizen activists and excluded groups engaged in electoral politics. But everyday social controls don't constitute counterinsurgency and dissident work or community cultures absent organization don't in themselves constitute resistance. Using “counterinsurgency” as a circus tent covering every aspect of class rule explains little about the actual nature of the state, the multiple choices an elite has in tactics, the sometimes feral differences elites have among themselves or the numerous ways oppressed groups can fight back.

    Using counterinsurgency as the definition of class politics flattens the possibilities not only for a ruling class but for its subalterns, too. Still, given how much material the authors marshal, reading this book is worth the slog. Even if the contributors don’t present a seamlessly persuasive master plan, it’s better to know what’s lurking in the dark.

    A book that succeeds, if only because its is so much more theoretically circumscribed, is Enemies Within. There’s no master narrative offered by the authors, both Associated Press reporters. And while this book could use one, it manages to tell the necessary story about just how stupidly and thuggishly the New York Police Department operated in its mission creep to ferret out potential terrorists in the years following 9/11.

    The villains are clear: Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence David Cohen. If there are any “good guys” in this story (and in any other context they would not be mine), they are the FBI agents and state police officers who did not surveil whole communities, including New York’s some 700,000 Muslims (a process Cohen called “zone defense”).

    The FBI's relative restraint did not rub off on the cowboys at the NYPD who routinely treated constitutionally protected speech, whether publicly expressed, written or in casual conversation as a precursor to terrorism.

    Despite its aggressive surveillance and a soaring counter terrorism budget, the NYPD failed to net a single legitimate terrorism suspect in the post-9/11 decade. And when the single most dangerous terrorist plot to take shape in that time did crop up, New York's Finest were caught unawares.

    This conspiracy — hatched by one Najibullah Zazi, a young Queens resident of Afghani descent who sought to bomb subways in New York in 2009 — is at the center of Enemies Within and gives the book its mystery novel quality.

    Zazi received explosives training in Pakistan from al-Qaeda and later recruited a pair of former high school friends from Flushing to join him in carrying out his intended “martyrdom operation.” Zazi's plans were uncovered by the FBI, which had put him under surveillance. The NYPD's contribution was to come charging into the case at the last minute and unwittingly give away the investigation to an informant at Zazi's mosque in Queens, who they grilled and who in turn alerted Zazi that he was being watched. Zazi fled New York and was subsequently nabbed by the Feds.

    In the authors’ retelling of this tale, the NYPD emerges as a mendacious band of Keystone Cops. To this day, Bloomberg and Kelly continue to insist that the NYPD remain free of any external oversight lest New York become “a more dangerous place to live.” Meanwhile, the Intelligence Division operates with 600 officers on a $60 million budget, and Muslim residents, even those once favorably disposed to helping the police, are — as one rights attorney said — living in fear. For them, New York is less safe, thanks to the NYPD.

    While Enemies Within makes clear that the NYPD has and is continuing to pursue its own private “war on terror,” the book’s narrow scope leaves out what movement activists and civil libertarians already know from experience: the New York police force is not only monitoring Muslim communities but proactively harassing a wide array of left-wing activists in the city, too. If neither book offers a synthetic explanation of the complex relationship between police or military practices and the needs of the capitalist state and the corporate class, their capacity for telling useful stories that contribute to developing that synthesis is invaluable.

    [This review first appeared in The Indypendent, Sept. 27, 2013.]

  • You Want MORE?

    Fewer than two weeks before the US House of Representatives brought on the government shutdown, it voted (9/19/13) by a slim margin to cut $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, over the next 10 years. Now, $4 billion a year may not seem like much, given the enormous figures our "leaders" play with, but it will mean that a great many families as well as individuals will not have enough to eat.

    Remember in the public TV film of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, when Oliver's stomach is calling out for a little supplement to the skimpy bowl of gruel he was given? Oliver asks, "May I have more, sir?" The very well fed overlord of the kitchen indignantly says, "You want MORE?" How dare a child want adequate nutrition!!!

    For some strange reason, mothers and fathers want their little children to have enough caloric intake, of the right sorts of things, for their brains to develop adequately (and their muscles and their growth hormones). Without that happening, we're going to have millions of kids who won't be able to stay focused in class, who won't be able to think properly or quickly, whose growth will be stunted and whose muscles remain pretty slack.

    In the meantime, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, along with the rest of the one percent, will have billions of dollars from which to feed their own children. Why, they could fly themselves and their kids to Shanghai if they suddenly develop a craving for dim sum!! Then they could fly them right back to the edges of Wall Street for a New York-style bagel, with some cream cheese and lox. The following day, Dimon and Blankfein and their oh-so-fortunate ilk could fly them to Barcelona for some paella or Tel Aviv for some falafel and hummus! 

    There's something very wrong with this picture. Adjusting the volume or the focus won't help. It's the stark contrast between that picture and our founding ideals that's the problem. If "all men are created equal" and "equal justice under law" are realities, and not just oh-so-pretty words, how come one kid can't focus or think fast and another develops a tummy ache from too many pot stickers? How come a young Black man who steals an I-Phone to afford some decent food goes to jail and Dimon or Blankfein, who stole billions of dollars from old people's 401(k)s by their reckless CDO and derivatives gambling fly their families to the Pearl River Delta?

    It's because those who are on top of the societal pyramid care very little if at all for the rest of us who are at its base.

    What's the solution?

    We've got to get enough of us together, from the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, La Raza, the NAACP, NOW, AARP, GLAAD and the hundreds of millions of us who live in the same communities as each other, to gather our figurative pitchforks and our torches, and walk vigorously, with songs of freedom and equality bursting forth from our lungs and larynxes, to the gated neighborhoods of our "betters." Maybe we could liberate a drone and an APC or Humvee or two or three and burst our way into those walled communities.

    What follows will be a reckoning. The walls will come tumbling down, the coffers reluctantly opened and many millions of kids will eat well for maybe the first time in their lives. We'll have upended the pyramid. Those on the bottom will now be on top, and our society's values and practices will radically change. There might be freedom, justice and equal opportunity for all for really the first time in our country's history. The daughters and sons of former slaves will sit down at the table of personhood and plenty with the daughters and sons of former slaveholders.

    There is not "just" chattel slavery. There is economic slavery. It must end and a genuinely new era begin. If we want more, we can have more. There is plenty. It just needs to be apportioned far better than it's been.

     

    Greg King is a labor activist and long-time City of Boston worker. He has been actively engaged in politics since the Vietnam war era.