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  • The Problem with the German Workers Council Movement –A Response to Comack

    Martin Comack is absolutely correct to recognize that I wrote a Leninist critique of his book Wild Socialism about the revolutionary shop stewards or council movement that existed in Berlin at the time of World War I and on into the early 1920s. I don’t think, however, that he responds very well to the central point of my critique, deciding instead to accuse me “errors and misinterpretations” that are really fundamentally just different interpretations. The heart of my review was the argument that the council communist movement—as admirable as the revolutionary stewards were—proved to be utterly ineffectual at a key moment in German history that was decisive for Europe and the World. The council leaders were parochial, unable to see beyond Berlin; workerist, unable to see beyond their factories; and sectarian, unable to develop a strategy to challenge the labor union leaders and the Social Democrats in power. The council communists were outwitted by the Social Democrats at every step, usually because of their sectarianism, though occasionally because of their opportunism.  

    The several thousand German shop stewards and other workers in Berlin’s council movement failed to act decisively at key moments in the immediate post-war period, their leaders engaging in revolutionary rhetoric and gestures as the Social Democrats made an alliance with the German Army that crushed the left in early 1919. The councils failed at that moment to join with the Spartacist League which represented the first appearance of a revolutionary socialist tendency, and that was the first missed opportunity to begin to build a revolutionary party that might have changed German history.

    The Social Democrats then coöpted the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD)—including one shop steward leader—into their government and at the same time took over the workers council idea, eviscerating it of its radical content. The revolutionary shop stewards had no strategy for forming alliances with the Social Democrats rank-and-file and winning them to a revolutionary perspective. In the early 1920s, some Berlin stewards joined the Communist Party (KPD) and others the Communist International while more joined the independent German Communist Workers Party (KAPD), a larger version of all of the problems of the revolutionary shop stewards.

    The “wild socialism” of the KAPD could be characterized as a result of the failure to develop a united front strategy. The disastrous March Action of 1921 led by the Communist Party (KPD) affiliated with the Communist International also represented a caricature of a revolutionary party leading an offensive without having consulted and won the support of the their working class base. Comack and I agree that by the mid-1920s the German Communist Party and the International to which it belonged, were well on their way to becoming a disaster for the international workers’ movement, and would only become worse after Stalin took power in the Soviet Union. 

    Young radicals today are interested in the revolutionary shop stewards and in the council movement for all the right reasons. The revolutionary shop stewards showed that workers themselves could turn their factories into powerful and potentially revolutionary centers of organization. They rejected the Social Democrats parliamentary manoeuvers and the trade union bureaucracy, trusting instead on themselves. All of that is admirable and commendable. They failed, however, the key test of a revolutionary organization, the ability to strike when the iron is hot. They failed the test of 1919 just as, for completely different reasons, the Communist Party failed the test in 1921, when the iron had grown cool.

    One could not build among the workers in the factories of one large city—even a key, capital city—a revolutionary party capable of leading a nation in revolution, there had to be be a national organization, able to relate to all sectors of society, capable of challenging the politics of labor bureaucrats and social democratic reformists, and then the moment comes, able to act decisively. While embracing their idea that workers’ power ultimately resides in the workplace, we should reject the parochialism, workerism, and sectarianism of the shop stewards councils.

       

  • AFL-CIO Convention Days 3 and 4: Inspiring Resolutions & Internal Tensions

    [I blogged daily for The Indypendent from this week’s quadrennial AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles. This is my third blog. For my coverage from Days 1 and 2 of the convention, click here and here.] 

    LOS ANGELES–If you go by a strict reading of the resolutions passed at the AFL-CIO convention that concluded Wednesday, this is a solidly progressive organization ready to speak with brio for all working people and not just its millions of current members and retirees. Calls for a smooth transition to citizenship for new immigrants, an alternative to the politics of austerity, organizing and acting in solidarity globally, significantly improving Obamacare leading to health care for all, ending mass incarcerations, organizing the South, and supporting workers of all sexual preferences are great stands.

    So is building up the state and local labor federations as active community organizations, supporting higher education and ending student debt and—most of all—actively and uniformly cooperating with militant social movement organizations on their goals, too. These resolutions marked the just concluded Los Angeles convention. In key ways affiliated unions, especially in the public sector, are already on board in practice.

    Changing Times

    One more indication of the changing times: The AFL-CIO, a federation of 57 International unions with some 13 million members, no longer calls itself “the” labor movement” but a part of the labor movement,  along with the 89 percent of the labor force that is not organized in a union. Admitting that alone is refreshing.

    Still, it’s a bridge too far to write, as Tuesday’s Huffington Post did, that “Labor Reinvents Itself.” The AFL-CIO wants to re-invent itself, and it should, but too much of the convention had an air of rebranding if not magical thinking.  Almost all of the “resolved that” language in its resolutions were modest implementations in comparison to the strong “whereas” motivations. They also point more toward politicking and preserving the AFL-CIO’s vaunted access to the Obama administration than mass campaigning. The only scintilla of publicly-voiced dissatisfaction with the White House (though there was plenty of grousing in the halls) came from possibly inadvertent floor remarks by Lee Cutler, Secretary-Treasurer of New York State United Teachers’ (NYSUT), who in supporting a roundly backed condemnation of Honduran labor and human rights violations, told delegates that Honduran unions were forming their own party to contest upcoming elections. “That’s something I think we might want to consider here,” he said.

    The Obama Message

    And that was almost lost in the fawning that convention leaders bestowed from the podium on new Labor Secretary Thomas Perez. Once a Maryland-based labor union stalwart, Perez was now on Obama message, talking airily about  administration efforts at “growing the middle class,”  aiding “middle-class workers” and  “growing the economy from the middle class out,” rather than the top down (though sadly not from the bottom up). Throughout he conflated economic justice with social opportunity. He pledged his department would “play a key role as we confront the challenge of economic opportunity, secure a better bargain for the middle class, and build ladders of opportunity with sturdy rungs that all people can reach.” Here was the much-anticipated new Labor Secretary, the child of Dominican immigrants, mythologizing how more and lower steps on an economic ladder would deal with a jobs crisis, end the predations of an economic plutocracy and reverse the inherent lack of room at the top.

    If Labor buys this twaddle, then they should rename its Washington D.C. headquarters the 815 16th St. NW Shelter for Battered Unionists. As for fulfilling this week’s ambitious agenda for remaking the AFL-CIO as an organization that works hand-in-glove with existing social movements, here’s the problem: few outside organizations have come on board.  

    Despite press reports that the Sierra Club and the NAACP are already part of the effort, no such pact has been made. The only group of national note that can be point to—and it’s no small feat—is the National Organization for Women. The other eight announced organizations—including the Brooklyn-Queens based Make The Road NY and the Blue Green Alliance (a longstanding coalition of unions and environmentalists chaired by Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, and Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune) are an indication of what could be done. And those relationships are at present particular to the unions involved.    

    Labor & The Environment

    Internal strains also remain. These became apparent even in this largely orchestrated atmosphere of the convention. Referring to the resolution calling for close cooperation with those who at the same time oppose building the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline, Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) President Terry O’Sullivan groused to some labor journalists in classic old guard speak.

    “These groups have no equity with the work. I grew up believing that you didn’t get in each other's way… but [these groups] are taking food off our table. I won’t get in another union’s way,” he said as he cited as the example of Communication Workers efforts over the years to raise telephone rates on customers in order to fund member raises, something that hurt the public but was seen by the affected union as necessary. So, Sullivan implied, how is buddying up with tree huggers kosher?

    Getting the whole AFL-CIO to line up with groups sometimes hostile to union ends (as is clearly the case with the Keystone XL Pipeline and the Gateway Pacific Terminal in Washington State —projects anathema to environmentalists but seen as job generators for workers) have to be resolved and the unions have to buy into these new alliances. Incanting the right words, as many recognize, isn’t enough.

    So while it’s way too early to write off the new effort at inclusion as a self-delusion for hard times, let alone a parlor trick or vitamin-enriched repeat of the hopes of the early Sweeney era, it’s not yet time for hosannahs. When pressed, one senior Federation official admitted privately that the program “is a work in progress that won’t operate the same in every state or with every organization.”

    Reporter’s Notebook

    Sadly, the AFL-CIO’s newfound feistiness appears to stop at “shore’s edge” … During the convention, there was a cathedral-like silence over any discussion of the Obama administration’s then-anticipated Syria bombing plans. The labor federation also refused to take a position on the bloated military budget. A resolution from the Wisconsin AFL-CIO urging cuts in Pentagon spending was referred back to committee. Explaining the quietism on military spending, one senior staffer told me that the Federation didn’t want the Obama administration caught in “a pissing contest with the GOP over what to cut in the budget.”

    One of the most vexing internal issues facing the AFL-CIO is how to respond to provisions of the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) that could penalize unions with certain types of health insurance plans they have won for their members. Some, like LIUNA chief Terry O’Sullivan have suggested that unions should fight for Obamacare’s repeal if their concerns are not addressed. A floor discussion over the matter prompted a New York Times story headlined “Unions’ Misgivings on Health Law Burst Into View”… In the end no amendment was raised that would force a vote on the matter. But the fact that a floor discussion happened over key differences was unprecedented in modern times.

     

  • Response to Review of Wild Socialism

    I would like to comment on the Leninist critique of my book Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin, 1918-21 by Dan La Botz on your website. His review contains several errors and misinterpretations.

    La Botz contends that I did not explain why the Revolutionare Obleute, the workers councilists, refused to join the Spartacist League, predecessor to the German Communist party. But as my text makes clear, the RO was composed entirely of industrial workers, a purely proletarian organization. The Spartacists were a relatively small grouping of radical intellectuals and former Social Democratic activists, prone to incessant revolutionary pronouncements and demonstrations – inept “revolutionary gymnastics” according to the Obleute, which earned the workers' distrust, if not contempt.

    Further, there is no evidence to indicate, as La Botz maintains, that the revolutionary shop stewards joined the Communist Party (KPD) in 1920. A case might be made for their support of the Communist Workers Party (KAPD) at that period – the latter an anti-Leninist group that defined itself as “not a party in the traditional sense. It is no leadership party …. The concept of a party with a revolutionary character in the proletarian sense is nonsense ….The council system is the organization of the proletariat.” (WS pp. 70,71). At that time the KAPD with some 12,000 members in Berlin was larger than the local KPD itself.

    The reviewer doubts that the workers council movement exerted any influence over the Weimar government. In fact it was the seizure of workplaces and factories by the workers that so frightened the Social Democrats (SPD), the Weimar regime and the employers’ associations that they all came to an accord on the installation of SPD-controlled unions and pseudo-workers councils throughout German industry, the latter institutions even being acknowledged in the Weimar constitution – thus containing and channeling the radical upsurge (of course, all these measures would be annulled or reversed at the first opportunity).

    La Botz claims that the political positions and ideologies of the various groups were not fully explained in WS, despite the fact that the divisions and differences within German radicalism both before and after the fall of the Imperium are fully outlined for the reader.

    Lastly, La Botz makes the fabulous assertion that the occupation of factories and workshops by the workers of Berlin was in fact a "frantic and failed attempt to build a party." Say wha? Here we enter the realm of science fiction or perhaps the occult, evidently the Leninist imagination knows no bounds. The search for the revolutionary vanguard party, even in the most uncongenial and unlikely of places, is similar to that of the quest for the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth in the Middle Ages. Faith trumps Reason every time.

    I go along with La Botz in recommending The German Revolution, 1917-1923 by Pierre Broué, a work that I reviewed in the Winter 2007 issue of NP, and whose focus is on the origins and early development of the German Communist party. In his discussion of the latter, Broué notes that the KPD, the Leninist vanguard, by the mid-twenties was transformed into "nothing but an apparatus…intended to meet the needs of the foreign policy of the Soviet bureaucracy." And so far as social revolution was concerned, the KPD was fearful that such an event would "threaten to overturn the precarious status quo upon which its survival was predicated" (pp. 910-911). Recall what the German Communists advised the German working class in 1933—don't worry they said, Nach Hitler, uns.

  • Jean Anyon: Loss of a giant

                       

    With Jean Anyon’s death, the Left and education have lost a giant.

                            The undergraduates I teach come mostly from the kind of working class schools Jean’s early research described as channeling students into low-wage occupations. She documented a reality they had lived but not fully experienced, explaining why their schools expected so little creative or intellectual work from them and how this related to social class.  Jean’s research often prompted anger, and I had to caution students not to blame the messenger for the message. By the end of the course, they see how Jean's analysis contests claims being made "neoprogressive" (the term coined by Amanda Lashaw) challengers of neoliberalism: Schools sorted students by class (and race) before the current reforms, which have made inequality far worse.

                            What made Jean special was the totality of her life’s work: her commitment to teaching, teacher education, and her students; her seminal research poking holes in capitalist mythologies about schooling’s capacity to correct social inequalities that are embedded in economic and political power relations; her presence as an activist-scholar on every important political issue of the day, from the War in Iraq to reform in the faculty union at CUNY. Few radical academics manage one of these well. Jean accomplished all of them, simultaneously. Teacher education is the “cash cow” of universities and teacher ed faculty its workhorses. Nationally, teacher ed faculty salaries are lower and work loads higher than those of arts and sciences faculty. Conducting quality research is extraordinarily difficult when one cares about the quality of teachers one’s program produces, and yet Jean did just that while she was at Rutgers, Newark.

                            Jean’s life pushed back against the institutional hypocrisies that mar the careers of many academics, radical and not, teacher educators and not. She valued teaching, made time for her students and was a caring mentor – though the academy does not value teaching and advising. She used her training and impressive intelligence to expose social realities other researchers would not. She could always be relied upon to sign statements that would be on the side of social justice and peace – though unpopular with officials apprehensive about making political waves.

                            Last Spring I sent Jean a message after reading my undergraduates’ final exams. Almost all of them wrote that what they learned in her article on social class and the hidden curriculum of work had made an indelible impression on them. Next week my undergrads will read her work. Jean will again be opening their eyes though she’s not with us.

                            Thank you, Jean. I miss you already.

                             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.

                   

                          

  • The Brazilian Spring: Still Under Construction

    Brazil went to the streets in June this year with crowds never before seen in the history of the country. There were young workers and students who were demonstrating for the first time, but also sectors of the middle class and union members as well as social movement and left party activists who protested about a wide diversity of issues. The demands raised in the posters and the crowds’ slogans were varied: access to quality public services for the entire population; health care and quality education; good public transportation and a reduction of bus fares; decent housing for all; an end to corruption and police repression All this against the backdrop of the Confederations Cup–a caricature of the priorities of the Brazilian State—spending millions on an event for a small elite, while removing thousands of families from their homes—and doing so while so many in the country still need basic services and while structural inequality is the major feature of our society.

    The demonstrations of June with their size and intensity surprised everyone—including left organizations, political parties and social movements. The protests lasted about a month, with many confrontations and some violence, gradually becoming less frequent and cooling down, but never stopping.  

    On July 11, the unions, from government supporters to the leftwing, as well as some political parties seeking to regain their legitimacy, “put the working class in the street,” with united, national demonstrations.  Despite the positive assessment made by some organizations and the participation of social movements like the Movement of the Landless (MST), in most places the demonstration didn’t fulfill their goals. The July demonstrations didn’t attract the young workers who had gone to the streets in June. And they didn’t have a great impact on society in general, largely because by holding such traditional labor demonstration they kept away the groups that had been the protagonists in June. It was much more of the same old thing.

    Though the number of people on the streets has declined and the unions’ demonstrations haven’t been as successful as they might have been, the mobilizations continue across the country, and are increasingly more political. There have been occupations of public places and state legislatures—and there continue to be—in dozens of cities. We have also had demonstrations directly against the state and municipal governments, including occupations of the streets in front of the rulers’ houses, especially in Rio and São Paulo almost weekly.

    In Fortaleza an occupation of the main green park of the city to protest the construction of an overpass, together with the fight for more urban mobility and better public transportation, has already lasted nearly two months and has put into question the state and municipal governments. If the number of people in these occupations and demonstrations is lower than in June, the legacy of those struggles is very much alive. Occupations resist much more than before, even with few people, and they gain more support from the population; governments insist on using violence, but they are increasingly losing legitimacy in society, and instability is spreading in some major cities of the country.

    An interesting situation has developed among the sectors that remained mobilized, involving those who use Black Bloc tactics and give a dynamic character to the demonstrations through their direct actions. Some leftist parties seek to enter into polemics with the Black Bloc groups, while others seek to enter into dialogue and exchange of experiences with them, understanding the differences and the peculiarities of this sector in Brazil. The most active and most militant youth on the streets in June—from the Black Bloc groups to the party and social movement’s activists, to the anarchists and to the many who found out about the demonstration on Facebook and for whom this was their first experience of social protest—are today the protagonists of the current occupations and continuous demonstrations, sometimes with some of the unions.

    In São Paulo some of the protests in August were pulled off by the subway workers’ union, after the discovery of corruption in procurement by the subway management, an issue that connected directly with struggles for reducing the bus fares that erupted in June. In Rio after the large demonstrations in June, the main demand has been “Go Away Cabral,” calling for the ouster of the state governor and the repeal of several privatizations, as well as changes in construction plans for the World Cup.

    The disappearance of the bricklayer Amarildo Dias de Souza, seized by the police without explanation and probably one more poor black person murdered by the state arbitrarily, has also led to demonstrations in the city and across the country. The struggle against the extermination and the criminalization of the poor and black people in Brazil is also growing: “Where is Amarildo?” is a watchword throughout the country. In northeastern Brazil, the demonstrations are challenging the historical dominance of the oligarchs, for example in Maranhão, Pernambuco and in Ceará where there is a struggle over Cocó Park.

    To reverse the failure of the July 11, another national demonstration was called by the unions for August 30, again with both pro-government and opposition unions, with the classical workers’ demands and in some places also with the participation of other social movements such as the MST. All of these demonstrations, from the more spontaneously to the more organized, have a greater legitimacy and support than before June. One of the biggest challenges of the left is to understand and deal with this new historical moment.

    Therefore, it’s necessary for every social fighter to understand June’s legacies. In terms of the concrete political victories, the government’s response so far has been: the reduction in bus fares in some cities, free-pass to buses in a very few others, an insufficient Federal program that will bring  foreign doctors to help solve the demands for health care within the country, and some very faint signs of political reform.. In some places, such as Rio de Janeiro some very important victories were, such as the decision not to demolish schools and museums to make way for the World Cup constructions.

    Overall, given the size of the demonstrations and the feeling in the country, what we have seen are very modest advances. On the other hand, if we see June and this moment as part of an open and ongoing process, then we recognize that some legacies are very important and that they offer good prospects for radical social change in Brazil. The first is that social demonstrations have become more legitimate and that improves things a great deal, even when we have a smaller number of people. We need to think now of more daring ways of fighting and of raising increasingly more advanced demands, even if there are only five hundred or a thousand people on the street in every city, and not always eighty, ninety or a hundred thousand as we had on the streets in June.

    Moreover, one of the main conclusions that must be drawn regarding this process up until now is that we have experienced an important encounter between different political and organizational cultures through the mass demonstrations. Young people who organized in new ways, often with associative forms of social networking, without a culture of meetings or the formation of commissions and without a culture of developing deeper formulations of a political agenda—but, at the same time, without any kind of bureaucratic tendency in the organization and with many radical actions—came together with political party activists educated in a more traditional leftist organizational culture. Many problems came from this encounter, but the continuation of the demonstrations and the process—in which both sectors have a lot to learn and a lot to contribute—could make possible new syntheses.

    The challenges for the socialist left are many. Perhaps the most important thing at this time is to be open to learn from the processes and for the political party activists to be capable of self-criticism. The anti-party feeling and the rejection of old forms of organization in Brazil are directly related to the trajectories of the Brazilian traditional left parties (the Workers Party as well as the Communist Party of Brazil) and also the capitulation of union federation such as the CUT and the CTB. At the same time, we cannot ignore the authoritarian practices and the tendency toward to bureaucratization of parties, unions, and movements that make up the revolutionary left, such as the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSOL). So we need to pay growing attention to bureaucratic trends and to engage in an increasingly stronger criticism of the bourgeois parliament and its representative system, even when we are involved in them. We can’t let elections or the parliament be our guide, but must rather take direction from the streets and direct mass movements and actions, letting them set the direction for our work in the bourgeois political system. For PSOL this is the greatest challenge to be faced in our Fourth National Congress to be held in November this year.

    To dispute the directions of this historical process we need to learn from it and to be conscious of our size. We aren’t capable of directing the process and we won’t be in the next period either, and we must have the humility to understand that, and realize that this is not necessarily so bad. On the other hand, we must increasingly be an important part of the process. For this we don’t need to cling to the classical forms (many party flags on the demonstrations, sound cars controlled by the unions, that is, the traditional forms of Brazilian worker’s class demonstrations). We need to come together to influence the content. The best way to influence these movements is to be inside them and respect their dynamics and their pace. We need to be part of horizontal discussions and to seek to politicize them while acting in concert with the whole of the movement, even when we believe their ways of working aren’t necessarily that functional for the struggle. The best way to improve and contribute to this process is to be—as socialist activists—an honest part of it. Our role should be to be daring in form and to deeply influence the content.

    At least some core issues, the results of the June Days, should be taken up and strengthened by the left through discussion in order to enrich and enhance these movements. We need to take up these demands: the demilitarization of the police; 10% of GDP to public education and 10 % of GDP to public health; free-pass for all domestic public transportation; democratization of the media; against all the sexist and homophobic projects being debated in parliament; as well as the classic working-class agendas in urban areas and in the countryside such as the reduction of the working day and land reform.

    The prospects of the process are positive. September 7, Brazilian Independence Day, was marked by protests across the country organized through Facebook as the “September Seventh Operation.” There were activists from different organizational traditions. The demonstrations included the “Shout of the Excluded,” raised by Theology of Liberation activists and supported by the MST, the housing movements, and others. Despite the differences between the two demonstrations, the agenda was similar in some locations. Though there was a great deal of repression, it was one more meeting on the streets helping to provide synthesis and advances throughout the process.

    In 2014, with the BRIC meeting in Brazil in March and the World Cup, surely the masses will go to the streets again, this time in a more organized and politicized way, and probably with increasingly common channels of synthesis and formulation among the left parties that are opened to learn from the process, as well as the unions and consolidated movements in the country and this new protagonist, youth, that took to the streets in June and somehow continues organizing actions.. The Brazilian Spring keeps developing, but it is still under construction, and its direction is in dispute. If the Brazilian left activists from parties and movements are open to dialogue and collective construction with working class youth who are organizing itself in different forms, then it is very likely that left will be able to influence and increasingly politicize the process, and then the results will then be closer and closer to creating the conditions for a radical and deep transition to another form of society.

  • Mexican Teachers’ Massive, Militant Strikes and Demonstrations Face an Intransigent Government

    Teachers, whose unprecedented strikes and massive, militant protests by tens of thousands have shaken Mexico over the past week, may be headed for what could be a violent confrontation with the government. As the teachers’ strikes and demonstrations led by the National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE), a rank-and-file caucus within the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), have become more extensive and militant, so too has the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto become more intransigent. Mexican history could be about to repeat itself, and it is a history replete with use of the police and the army to crush militant labor unions, peasant organizations, student protestors and other movements for democracy. Should Enrique Peña Nieto decide to use force to put down the teachers’ movement, it would come at great political cost, removing the veneer of democracy from what he has called the “new” Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Yet, given the country’s history, and his own personal record, violent repression of the teachers is not unthinkable.

    Mexico’s independent and democratic teachers’ movement has a forty-year history of massive demonstrations and sit-ins by tens of thousands, especially by the teachers of Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Mexico City, and more recently those in Michoacán. But we have never seen anything as militant as these current demonstrations nor as extensive, with teachers striking and protesting in virtually all of the country’s 31 states as well as in the Federal District. Teachers have occupied public buildings, blocked the Mexico City international airport for several hours, seized highway tool booths, and for several days 30,000 have sat-in at the Mexico City’s Plaza of the Constitution. They have also threatened to take over banks and businesses. All of these are the traditional tactics of the militant teachers, but never unleashed on such a scale and never finding such a response on a national scale.

    The protests have been driven by the Mexican Congress’s passage of an education reform law which, even though weakened, subjects teachers to evaluations. At the same time issues of wages, benefits and conditions are also involved in each state. The teachers’ protests, however, are not solely motivated by their concerns about their jobs and salaries. La CNTE also opposes to the government’s plan to open the Mexican Petroleum Company (PEMEX) to private investment and to pass new tax laws expected to benefit the rich and harm working people and the poor. As one longtime labor activist told me, the teachers’ strikes have been accompanied by an unparalleled radicalization of the population throughout the country. The left-led CNTE thus finds itself at the head of an inchoate national movement opposed to Peña Nieto’s political agenda. Leading the teachers’ movement has been Local 22, the Oaxaca Teachers Union, the historic leader of the teachers’ movement, which has mobilized tens of thousands of its striking members, 30,000 of whom currently occupy the zocálo or Plaza of the Constitution in Mexico City filled with their tents, lean-tos, and huts.

    La CNTE has now called for a “national civic work stoppage,” something like a general strike, for Wednesday, September 11. The teachers have won the support of 60 other labor unions, peasant organizations, and community groups that support them and might join them in such a shutdown. While such national civic work stoppages called in the past have had only very limited success—Mexico unlike almost all other Latin American nations has never had a general strike—it does represent an attempt to expand the movement and amplify its impact. The call for a national work stoppage also contributes to the growing sense of confrontation between the teachers and the government.

    The Government Intransigent

    Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) have issued statements making it clear that they are preparing to confront the teachers and deal with them. Peña Nieto has said that he will negotiate with the teachers, but that “There is no turning back, the education reform law will take effect.” Education Minister Emilio Chuayffet told the teachers that the government has only one interlocutor, and that is the Mexican Teachers Union, not its dissident opposition caucus la CNTE which, he said, represents only ten percent of all teachers. Most ominously, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, the Minister of the Interior who is in charge of the country’s internal security, told the press that tolerance has its limit and that if the teachers’ mobilizations affect the country’s citizens, the law will be invoked.

    At the same time, the Mexican press has begun to change its tone. An article in El Universal refers to “Mexican Teachers Provoking Chaos in Five States” while conservative political columnists suggest that la CNTE is linked to left-wing guerrilla groups and warn that it is taking the country to “A National APPO,” a reference to the teachers’ strike that became a civic uprising in the city of Oaxaca in 2006, with massive repression and death squads killing several teacher leaders. In late August thousands of teachers blocked TV Azteca and Televisa because, they said, those stations’ television reports were “lying” about the teachers’ protests and their demands. Still TV press reports take the side of the government and portray the teachers as unreasonable and violent. Some commentators on the left have begun to warn of the dangers of government’s coming violent repression of the movement.

    Up until now, Peña Nieto has been on an incredible role. He won election (some say a fraudulent election) and his party, the PRI, won a majority in both the Senate and the House. Even before he took office he created the Pact for Mexico, uniting all of the major parties around his political agenda of modernization. After his election (but before he took office) the Mexican Congress passed a labor law reform that he supported, and after he took office it passed his education reform. He also jailed the controversial, corrupt, and unpopular labor and political leader Elba Esther Gordillo, the head of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), on charges of embezzlement. Peña Neito and the PRI with the support of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and very likely some members of the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), now stand poised to pass its energy reform bill permitting private investment in petroleum. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, former presidential candidate and leader of the Movement of National Regeneration (MORENA), has been leading the movement against the privatization of petroleum, holding protest rallies of as many as 50,000 in Mexico City, many of those striking teachers. The teachers, who not only opposed the most recent education reform law but also generally oppose any role for the private sector in petroleum, stand squarely in the path of Peña Nieto’s parade—and he will not have them raining on it.

    The confrontation between the Peña Nieto government and la CNTE and the teachers could come on September 15, a date by which the government would like the zócalo cleared in preparation for Mexican Independence Day Celebrations on September 16. On that day the Mexican President stands on the balcony of the National Palace and gives the “shout of Hidalgo,” leader of the Mexican independence revolution in 1810: “Long Live Mexico!” Similarly in towns and cities throughout the country, governors and mayors give the shout from state capitols and city halls. The powers-that-be hope to sweep the movement away by that date, though they would have to clear the teachers out of the squares they now fill and the buildings they now occupy. A confrontation could come earlier if one side or the other takes more aggressive action.

    What Can Be Expected?

    Historically, whenever the Mexican government has felt threatened by a mass movement which might become a challenge to its political power, it has mobilized the police and the army to crush the movement. The 1959 railroad workers strike, perceived to by the government to be a Communist-led assault on the government, was suppressed by the Mexican Army, with thousands fired, the leaders jailed for years, and some killed and many injured in the repression of the movement. When students protested to demand democracy in 1968, taking advantage of the fact that Olympics were being held in Mexico, the government attacked their demonstration, killing hundreds. A similar suppression of the student movement took place in 1971. The Mexican Electrical Workers (STERM) and their Democratic Tendency (TD) attempted to carry out a general strike in 1976 that was also suppressed by the army with firings, arrests, and the break-up of the movement. More recently, on October 10, 2011, the Mexican government of President Felipe Calderón sent police and army to seize the Light and Power Company facilities, dissolving the company, and firing 44,000 workers, eliminating the independent and oppositional union from the workplace. Calderón’s government also brought false charges against Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, head of the Miners and Metal Workers Union, forcing him to see asylum in Canada.

    President Peña Nieto himself is known for having a heavy hand. As governor of the State of Mexico he was principally responsible for the police repression of a community movement in the town of Atenco in May of 2006. The Mexican Human Rights called the incident a “tragedy.” Over 200 people (ten of them children), said the commission, suffered cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, some 145 were arbitrarily arrested, 26 women were sexually assaulted, and give foreigners subject to such treatment were also illegally expelled from the country. As one activist said, “With him as president, anything is possible.”

    The Mexican teachers of la CNTE are well aware of this history. For years the Mexican Teachers Union was headed by Carlos Jongitud Barrios, leader of the Revolutionary Vanguard caucus associated with the PRI. Under his leadership of the union, dissident teachers in areas like Oaxaca and Chiapas faced not only firings and beatings, but sometimes assassination. The activists in those states, then as now, were principally indigenous, bilingual teachers, mostly women organizers at the base with elected leaders and spokesmen were usually men. The teachers fought for forty years to win the right to control their unions and to decide their own fate. Today the fight is against the education reform law, but also over the broader political agenda of Peña Nieto, and neither side seems prepared to back down. 

    Yet Peña Nieto would pay a very high political price, giving up his claim to represent a new and more democratic direction for Mexico. And any such massive national repression would have to have the approval of President Barack Obama and his administration, now preoccupied with its plans for a strike on Syria. What will happen in Mexico in the coming days? As one Mexican activist wrote to me, “The coin is in the air…”

    Dan La Botz is the editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php

  • We Oppose Both a U.S.-led Attack on Syria and the Brutal Regime of Bashar al–Assad

    Pressured by the British Parliament's historic rejection of military action against Syria and by the great opposition of most of the American people to getting involved in yet another bloody war in the Middle East, President Obama has been forced to take his plan to attack Syria to Congress. At the moment, Congress appears to be sharply divided over whether or not to support the President, with many still undecided, and it is therefore imperative to take advantage of widespread antiwar opinion to make the case now against U.S. military intervention in Syria.

    Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government is a cruel dictatorship that, like the vicious regimes of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Tunisia's Zine Ben Ali, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, and Bahrain's Hamad Al Khalifa, deserves to be overthrown by its people. But military assaults by the United States and its allies will do nothing to advance struggles for democratic change and social justice in Syria; in fact, they will most likely have the opposite result.

    Any military effect of missile strikes on Assad's forces will be outweighed by its political effect: strengthening Assad's "anti-imperialist" posture internationally and his nationalist credentials within Syria itself, which is where the essential battle is taking place. This is all the more likely if, as is virtually inevitable, an attack causes "collateral damage" — that is, the deaths of innocent Syrian civilians. Indeed, many Syrians who support the opposition because of their revulsion at Assad's brutality may have second thoughts if Obama and his partners carry out an attack on their country. Some elements of the opposition welcome a U.S. attack, but it is hard to believe that most ordinary Syrians do; it would be criminal to add to their suffering simply to enforce Obama's "red line."

    The claim that the Assad regime is guilty of the horrendous chemical weapons assault on Damascus suburbs cannot be simply dismissed as pro-war propaganda. The claim may very well be true, but even so we must insist that this cannot justify U.S. missiles. Obama seeks congressional approval for a "limited, targeted" attack on Syria not because he wants to prevent the use of chemical weapons by everyone, but in order to buttress U.S. "credibility" as a reactionary superpower in the Middle East and around the world; support for U.S. military intervention in Syria serves only to legitimize and reinforce that power.

    Moreover, when it comes to chemical weapons, the United States itself is far from having clean hands. CIA intelligence helped Saddam Hussein massacre Iranians with sarin nerve gas and mustard gas, and Washington made sure that Saddam faced no consequences for gassing Iranians or Kurds. In 2003 Congress imposed sanctions on Syria for having a chemical weapons stockpile, but gave a free pass to Egypt and Israel, both of which continue to this day to have chemical arsenals and, like Syria, have refused to accept the Chemical Weapons Convention. U.S. forces used depleted uranium in the Gulf and Iraq wars and in Fallujah attacked Iraqi civilians with white phosphorous, a hideous incendiary weapon that melts human flesh. And let us never forget the 20 million tons of chemicals, including extremely toxic Agent Orange, that were dumped on Vietnam from 1962 to 1971.

    Nor is the U.S. motivated by a love for democracy in the Middle East: witness, for example, Washington's support of Mubarak and Ben Ali which persisted until almost the last moment, its sponsorship of the Yemen "solution," under which the dictator Ali Saleh resigned in favor of his deputy Abd Hadi, leaving the core of the Saleh regime in place, and the continuing close ties to the brutal Egyptian military, even after the coup in July of this year. In Syria it is no secret that the United States fears not only Al-Qaeda and the other armed jihadist groups that are active in the Syrian opposition, but also the threat of people's power embodied in the courageous demonstrations of millions in the streets against the rule of Bashar al-Assad.

    It is also essential to remember that throughout the Middle East people have protested not only against dictatorship but also against terrible economic hardship and privation, which result from the harsh policies of governments that have acquiesced in the austerity programs of the International Monetary Fund and other enforcers of global neoliberalism — programs wholly supported by the United States. Washington's persistent promotion of these economic policies indicates what the true aims would be of any U.S. military intervention in the region.

    The issue is not whether or not Assad's government is guilty of chemical warfare. If Congress goes along with President Obama's request for a "limited, targeted" attack on Syria in order to buttress U.S. credibility as global and Middle East hegemon, there is good reason to believe that Assad will respond. What comes next? No-one can predict, but the dangers of horrific escalation are very real.

    Right now, many members of Congress have stated that they will support the President, or that they are "on the fence," despite the fact that their constituents overwhelmingly oppose an attack on Syria. Our leaders will respond, if at all, only to active protest. At the same time, we believe it is absolutely crucial for the antiwar movement to distinguish itself from those who make excuses for or even cheer on the murderous Assad regime. The only principled and effective basis for opposition to U.S. imperialism is consistent support for democracy and opposition to authoritarianism, torture and repression, whatever the source. We urge those who participate in demonstrations to carry signs that denounce both a U.S.-led attack against Syria and the bloody Assad regime.

    Because of Iraq and Afghanistan, because of the heroic revelations of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, there is an all-pervading and profoundly healthy skepticism toward U.S. foreign policy among Americans and throughout the world. Public opinion, here and abroad, is on our side. We must act now to stop Obama's catastrophic assault on Syria.

     

  • Back to school, with New Politics

                            Starting this week, I’ll be blogging at NP every Wednesday, expanding the range of topics on which I write to include issues of teaching and learning, as well as sticking with topics that seem more “political,” like  teachers unions, school reform, and labor.

                            This shift comes from my conclusion that we on the Left, especially those of us who are academics, need to articulate what’s wrong with the changes being made to schools with language that speaks to the deepest human needs and desires. While we can’t be afraid to speak truth to power- in fact, we have to be much more outspoken about the destruction of public education and the colonization of communities of color- we have to cast our arguments in more understandable language.

                            Teachers as a group have not traditionally been very political, though there’s always been an activist core. Generally people choose teaching as a career because they love working with kids or their subject matter. However, this year many teachers are feeling as if the ground has fallen underneath them because of the imposition of a national curriculum (Common Core) and new evaluation procedures linking teacher pay to student test scores.

                            In my blog I’ll discuss topics that are often not considered the domain of a Left general interest publication, in particular aspects of teaching, to prompt discussion about  ways teachers’ work differs from that of other public employees and what we should do about that as union members, education activists, parents, and socialists.  Look in the coming weeks for my letter to TFA recruits who are stunned at being in over their heads; liberal rapture with school reform in Union City, NJ; and analysis of what’s happening with US teachers unions (lots!).

                            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.

  • Selective Skepticism

    Skepticism is always warranted in the face of government claims, but some folks seem unable to apply the same level of skepticism to claims by Syria's dictator as they do to those of the U.S. government. This will not help us in waging a sustained effective campaign against U.S. military action against Syria; to rest our case on acceptance of Assad's claims weakens our argument. We need to explain why a U.S.-led war on Syria is not the solution, whether or not Assad is responsible for the horrific chemical weapons attack in the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus.

    There are still unanswered questions about the August 21 gas attacks in the Damascus suburbs, and it seems the UN inspectors won't shed much light on the question of who was responsible for the attack, since their mandate was only to confirm whether chemical weapons were used. The circumstantial evidence incriminating Syrian government forces seems quite strong, though whether the scale of the attack was intended or accidental and whether it was authorized by Assad himself is unknown.

    Several so-called anti-imperialist sources, however, have charged that rebel culpability for the attacks is proven by the hacked emails of a British defense contractor, Britam Defence, in which two officials of the company discuss a White House-approved plan for Qatar to provide the rebels with chemical weapons to use to try to implicate Assad.

    Unfortunately, those who bandy this story about don't bother to refer to the following report from the Guardian of June 26, 2013:

    "The Daily Mail has apologised and paid £110,000 in libel damages to a London defence firm it wrongly linked with an alleged chemical weapons plot in Syria.

    "Britam Defence Limited complained that an article on the Daily Mail's website Mail Online falsely accused two of its executives of conspiring in a 'nefarious and illegal plot' in the Middle Eastern state 'for enormous financial reward'.

    "The article quoted one email supposedly sent between two executives at the company which claimed to show that Britam had agreed to supply chemical weapons to Homs for use in an attack. However, the emails turned out to be forged.

    "…

    "Adam Tudor, a solicitor at law firm Carter-Ruck, said on behalf on [sic] Britam: 'The emails were not written or sent by the claimants (or by anyone at Britam Defence Limited or anyone associated with them), and the illegal hacking of Britam Defence's website remains the subject of a criminal investigation.

    "'The claimants had no involvement in any chemical weapons plot and would never contemplate becoming involved in the heinous activities which were the subject of the article.'

    "Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers agreed [sic] the six-figure libel settlement after accepting that the emails were fabricated and that the allegation of a chemical weapons plot was untrue.

    "Martin Wood, for Associated Newspapers, said in a statement before the judge, Mrs Justice Nicola Davies: 'My lady, on behalf of the defendant, I confirm that the defendant offers its sincere apologies to the claimants for the damage and distress caused by the publication of these false allegations, which had appeared on US websites.

    "'The defendant acknowledges that the emails in question were completely fabricated and that there is no question of any of the claimants being involved – or even considering becoming involved – in the heinous actions to which the article referred. The defendant is pleased to set the record straight.'"

    The Daily Mail removed its original story from its website, suggesting to some that covert operations were at work. But removing a story that one acknowledges was based on forged evidence is hardly mysterious.

    This is not the only example of anti-imperialist sources uncritically parroting pro-Assad misinformation. Among the stories now well debunked are ones claiming that residents of Ghouta admitted that the Saudis provided chemical weapons to rebels, that the opposition slaughtered 120 children in Tal Abyad, that Syrian rebels were arrested in Turkey with sarin gas, that the opposition was responsible for the massacre in Houla (claimed by a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, but solidly refuted by the UN's Commission of Inquiry and Der Spiegel).

    None of this is to support a U.S. military strike on Syria, even if Assad's responsibility for the August 21 chemical weapons attacks is proven conclusively. A U.S. assault would be disastrous on many levels: for the Syrian people, for the Syrian revolution, and for world peace. We must oppose U.S. military action in Syria, but not because we swallow pro-Assad propaganda.

  • Anti-Authoritarianism and the Syrian Revolution

    A new website by the TAHRIR International Collective Network is trying to connect anti-authoritarian struggles in Europe and Middle East.

    A fascinating post describes the work of Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz and his efforts to promote self-organization in the Syrian revolution, reflected in the Local Coordination Committees. Aziz had been living in the United States and returned to Syria when the revolution broke out. He wrote an important discussion paper on council organization that at the moment is only available in Arabic. Aziz was arrested by the mukhabarat (the Syrian intelligence service) in November 2012 and held in horrendous conditions; he died of heart complications in February 2013 just short of his 64th birthday.

    One tribute to him stated: “at a time when most anti-imperialists were wailing over the collapse of the Syrian state and the 'hijacking' of a revolution they never supported in the first place, Aziz and his comrades were tirelessly striving for unconditional freedom from all forms of despotism and state hegemony.”

  • Roundtable on the Syrian Crisis

    The Campaign for Peace and Democracy has posted an interesting symposium on Syria. It was mostly written before the August 21 chemical weapons attack and the resulting war threat from Washington. None of the symposium participants favors U.S. military action, but the symposium provides useful background on the Syrian uprising that helps us make sense of the current situation.

    Here I post the introduction to the symposium as well as the response by Thomas Harrison and Joanne Landy to the other contributions. All the essays linked below are worth reading.

     

    CAMPAIGN FOR PEACE AND DEMOCRACY
    ROUNDTABLE ON THE SYRIAN CRISIS

    In June 2013 the Campaign for Peace and Democracy's co-directors issued a personal statement on the Syrian revolution. At that time, we invited contributions to an on-line symposium, hoping to stimulate a vigorous debate over the issues raised by our statement. What follows are several pieces that in various ways oppose, support or supplement our position on Syria.

    The symposium contributions were written before a large-scale poison gas attack with many casualties in the rebel-controlled Ghouta suburbs of Damascus on August 21, 2013. Likewise, they were all written before Washington's deployment of military forces to the region and its virtual announcement that military action is forthcoming. Whether or not it is definitively proven that the chemical weapons attack was carried out by the Syrian government (which in our view is very likely the case), we – along with all of the symposium participants – strongly oppose military intervention by the United States and its allies, for reasons explained in our symposium response. It's clear that whatever military measures the Obama administration may now adopt in Syria stem from a concern to rescue U.S. "credibility" as a global hegemonic power, not a genuine concern to defend the victims of Assad's brutality, a concern of which it has given little previous indication in the case of Syria or anywhere else. On the contrary, Washington continues to support and supply weapons to repressive governments in Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the world.

    The first contribution, from Molly Nolan, characterizes the Syrian conflict as a civil war rather than a revolution, and argues against any of the forces, including secular democratic forces in the field, receiving arms. Instead, Nolan maintains that the only solution is negotiations between the Assad regime and its opponents, with no pressure for regime change from the Obama administration, and urges progressives not to take sides in the conflict.

    Michael Karadjis, on the other hand, maintains that the Syrian conflict remains, fundamentally, a democratic revolt against dictatorship. While acknowledging the reactionary Islamist threat, he points to strong democratic resistance at the grassroots and argues that the Islamists are not yet in control. However, while defending the right of Syrian revolutionaries to obtain arms, he believes that the ongoing militarization of the conflict favors both Assad and the Islamists; therefore he thinks a ceasefire would be in the best interest of the revolution, allowing a revival of the mass movement that initiated the revolt against the regime.

    David McReynolds highlights the ruinous history of U.S. "humanitarian intervention," citing the devastating wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Like Nolan, McReynolds regards the fighting in Syria as a civil war, with Assad retaining significant popular support – though he rejects the idea that Assad and his regime are "socialists under assault." McReynolds is against all military aid to the rebels and calls for the U.S. to work with Russia to bring the warring parties to a peace conference.

    Assaf Kfoury supports the Syrian revolution, but he thinks that any weapons from outside are more than likely to come with U.S. influence and interference attached, and that they will induce Russia, Iran and possibly China to increase the supply of weaponry to Assad. Kfoury, like Karadjis, looks to an internationally-supervised ceasefire and the coming Geneva-2 conference to bring at least a temporary respite to the violence.

    Michael Eisenscher sends us the statement of U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW), along with additional commentary, calling on Congress and the Administration to send humanitarian aid rather than arms to Syria and to promote a political solution. Eisenscher also includes a link to a petition that USLAW signed along with other peace groups that opposes military intervention and opposes arming the rebels or creating a no-fly zone. It calls on the U.S. to focus on increasing humanitarian assistance through the UN and building active multilateral diplomacy with all involved parties for an immediate ceasefire without preconditions, a full arms embargo, and negotiations to end Syria's civil war.

    Salameh Kaileh favors the revolutionaries receiving weapons where they can, and argues that all the outside powers, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have refused to arm the revolution in a way that would actually enable it to win. Instead, he says, they favor what they call a "political solution" that would consign Syria to Russia's sphere of influence.

    Finally, we publish an interview "Imperialism, Sectarianism and Syria's Revolution" with Joseph Daher, a member of the Syrian Revolutionary Left Current. Daher supports the Syrian revolution while arguing that reactionary forces like Jabhat al Nusra are being well-funded by some Gulf countries in order to transform the revolution into a sectarian war. Unlike many Western leftists, Daher insists that the Syrian conflict is not a proxy war and that Assad and the countries supporting him are not anti-imperialist. Instead he calls for solidarity with the revolutionary and democratic popular committees and organizations.

    The symposium concludes with a response from the CPD co-directors, "No to U.S. War on Syria! No to Assad! Yes to a Democratic Syrian Revolution!"

    RESPONSE FROM THOMAS HARRISON AND JOANNE LANDY (Aug. 27, 2013)
    No to U.S. War on Syria!
    No to Assad!
    Yes to a Democratic Syrian Revolution!

    We would like to thank all of the contributors to the CPD symposium for helping to enrich the discussion of how peace activists and leftists should respond to the unfolding events in Syria, and to the escalating threats of war on Syria by the United States and its allies.

    Our fundamental disagreement with David McReynolds, Molly Nolan and Michael Eisenscher is that we believe it is essential to take sides in Syria. The Assad regime is extraordinarily cruel and tyrannical, and while it does retain support among sectors of the Syrian population, it is hated by the millions of Syrians, most likely the great majority, who have suffered under its rule. Although the fight against Assad has been complicated, and to a significant extent compromised, by the role of sectarian jihadists, it is still predominantly a popular democratic revolution. (See, for example, Amnesty International’s Map of Non-Violent Activism in Syria.)

    We agree with Michael Karadjis when he says that “the situation on the side of the revolution is still fluid, there is still struggle, the reactionary forces by no means dominate.” Karadjis cites the reports of those on the ground who describe life in many areas of Syria controlled by the rebels, where authoritarian jihadists are not dominant, or where they are challenged by local people. He and others like Joseph Daher from the Syrian Revolutionary Left Current note that civic councils and local coordinating committees have sprung up in rebel-controlled areas — and when extremist political Islamists have tried to impose their doctrines on the population, they have often been resisted. Nonetheless, as we acknowledged in our initial statement, there is unquestionably a very real and growing threat of the Syrian revolution being hijacked by reactionary Islamists. Consequently we see an emerging three-cornered struggle with three contenders: supporters of the Assad regime, foreign and Syrian Islamists, and democratic forces resisting both.

    David McReynolds rightly describes the retrograde aims of the U.S. government in Syria, the Middle East, and throughout the world, and argues that the left “cannot count on an imperial power to act with democratic and humanitarian concerns.” Indeed, in our view, and in the view, it seems, of all of the contributors to the symposium, the sordid history of U.S. interventions in country after country stands as rejoinder to those who would hope that “this time” the United States military could play a positive role.

    In our original statement, we said: “Consistent with our strong opposition to any kind of military intervention in Syria by the U.S., or other foreign powers, we also oppose providing air cover or establishing no fly zones. We do believe, however, that the democratic opponents of the Assad dictatorship have the right to get guns where they can, while resisting all attempts by those who provide arms to acquire political and military influence in return.” We continue to defend this right, and we agree with Karadjis that merely receiving arms from foreign countries has never been the “final determinant” of a revolutionary movement’s politics. But we also recognize that since none of the governments in the region or in the West actually favor a mass popular democratic victory, they are extremely reluctant to offer the democratic opposition significant weaponry. Moreover, like Karadjis, we do not call on the United States to arm the rebels, because we are unwilling to take responsibility for the way that the U.S. government will inevitably use any offer of weapons to attempt to manipulate the struggle and buttress its ongoing reactionary role in the Middle East.

    We agree with Assaf Kfoury, Michael Karadjis, Salameh Kaileh and Joseph Daher that only the Syrian people can win their own freedom, and that the Syrian revolution has no real and reliable international support besides the revolutionary movements in the neighboring nations. This is why we remain extremely dubious about negotiations brokered by the big powers, such as the upcoming G-2 Conference. It may or may not be true, as Kfoury argues, that the current military imbalance is so overwhelmingly in favor of Assad that a brokered cease-fire is the only way to prevent further slaughter. But we should have no illusions. Russia and the U.S., if they can agree to use their "good offices" to resolve the Syrian conflict, will most likely seek a "Yemeni-type" solution — one which leaves the Assad regime intact, with or without Assad himself remaining in power.

    The recent events in Egypt underscore the tremendous hurdles facing democratic revolutionary movements in the Middle East, but they also demonstrate the ongoing vital grassroots resistance to neoliberal, authoritarian governments that is the embryo of an egalitarian and democratic alternative. As long as these forces remain alive, they deserve our support and solidarity. What they do not need is a destructive, cynical and self-serving military strike on Syria by the U.S. and its allies.

  • Flipping burgers and school reform

    Fast-food workers are striking today throughout the US. Tweets are flying with new hashtags announcing strike actions. While it’s unscientific, I grant, to judge anything just by twitter activity, I’m impressed by the reach of the strike, including the South (Durham, NC) and small depressed cities in the Northeast (my hometown, Wilmington, DE), as well as big cities in the West (like Denver). Chicago has lots going on, with considerable support by the Chicago Teachers Union.

     

                            This struggle is going to change kids’ lives. While what we do in our classrooms “counts” it isn’t the one “true path” out of poverty, as Arne Duncan says.  School reform Is not a substitute for creating good jobs.

     

                            Stop by a (ubiquitous) fast-food restaurant today and tell the workers you support their struggle for a living wage. If you’re a teacher, let them know that you think a living wage will do more for kids than the money being poured into testing, testing, testing and the reforms making teaching more like flipping burgers than touching kids’ lives.

  • A Comintern International Agent: The Talented and Reviled Pepper

    ImageReview: Thomas Sakmyster. A Communist Odyssey: The Life of József Pogány / John Pepper. Budapest-New York: Central European University Press. 2012. Photos. Bibliography. Index. 249 pp.

    During normal times in a capitalist society, skill and drive are harnessed by the corporations, the labor union bureaucracy, and the political parties, but when the crisis comes a revolutionary party must harness the most talented and most ambitious for its purposes. The idealistic and the opportunistic, the selfless and the self-aggrandizing, the ruthless and the kind, the brave and the cowardly among those most determined and striving souls must somehow be made use of for the higher purposes of the revolution and ultimately for of all of humanity. The revolutionary movement must bring out the best in them, for we are the only material we have.

    The great European revolutionary epoch of the post war period from the 1910s through the 1920s provides endless biographical material revealing all that is best and worst in the human material of revolution, the Russians having been the most studied, providing shelves of biographies of Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin, and Trotsky. Among other figures of the era from various countries we also have remarkable women like Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Alexandra Kollontai and men such as Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek, all of them with their strengths and weaknesses. If perhaps Victor Serge represents the most idealistic and heroic, then József Pogány, also known as John Pepper, embodies all that is the most opportunistic and morally reprehensible. Yet he too under the impulse of revolutionary forces and within the structures of what was for a while a revolutionary organization made his contributions.

    Pogány/Pepper—who like other Communists of the era used several other pseudonyms as well—remained something of a mystery until now. Before this book, Hungarian historians knew of József Pogány who had been a major figures in the Hungarian Revolution and the Americans knew John Pepper who had played a key role in the American Communist Party, but now we have the full picture of this fascinating figure in a highly engaging and illuminating biography. My former colleague at the University of Cincinnati, now Professor Emeritus, Thomas Sakmyster, a scholar in the area of international relations, Communism, and Hungary, making use of Hungarian, Russian and American sources from the archives of the Communist International to the records of the FBI, as well as the memoirs of Pepper’s wife and many other papers, has produced the first comprehensive biography of Pogány.

    And a great story it is. A Social Democratic and then a Communist leader in the Hungarian Revolution of 1918-19, Comintern agent in the German Communist March Action of 1921, and a central leader of the American Communist Party in the 1920s, arrogant and opportunistic, Pogány stirred up controversy wherever he went. The words most commonly used to describe him, writes Sakmyster, were “loathed,” “detested” and “reviled.” Yet he also won the favor of top Communist leaders such as Zinoviev and Bukharin, charmed and captivated audiences of soldiers, workers, and leftists, had a tremendous career as a writer, and, despite his philandering, never lost the love of his wife Irén. What makes such a man? How does a person so difficult also remain so influential? Why was he tolerated for long? And what eventually brought him down?

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    Pepper was born in 1886 as József Schwartz, the son of a middle class Jewish family. Jews in Hungary faced less discrimination than in other European countries, and József was able to attend the prestigious Barcsay Gimnázium and then go on in 1904 to the University of Budapest.  At the age of 17 he changed his name to Pogány, a name with a Hungarian ring to it, though it means “pagan or heathen” and may have been his way of breaking with Judaism and all organized religion. At the university he studied Hungarian and German language and literature at a time when Hungarian literature had become a call progressive change. He, his friend Ernő Czóbel and his sister Irén Czóbel, became involved with a group of radical students, began reading Népszava (The People’s Voice), and subsequently secretly joined the Social Democratic Party of Hungary, secretly because the government forbid students joining political parties. As part of his studies Pógany spent six months in Berlin and six months in Paris, attending some classes but spending more time with the labor movement and the socialist parties before returning to finish his dissertation on the Hungarian poet János Arany, graduating summa cum laude. Having earned his doctorate, Pógany married Irén Czóbel in 1909.

    After finishing his studies, Pógany wrote for Munka Szemle (Labor Review) and Szocializmus (Socialism) and the newspaper Friss Újság (Fresh News) as well as the most influential Hungarian magazine of the day Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century). He wrote from a Marxist perspective on literature, history, current events, contemporary social problems, particularly the lives and conditions of working people. With his friend Czóbel he joined the Demokrácia Lodge of the Masons, putting him in touch with other progressive intellectuals. In 1912 he was proud to become a writer for the socialist paper Népszava, the dream of every young radical. He soon became an editor writing on political issues and especially on foreign affairs. During the period from 1912 to 1914 he was a sharp critic of the Austrian Hungarian Empire. One of his articles attacking the Austrian Hungarian imperialism led to a trial—where he was also accused of lèse majesté—and sentenced to six months and jail The outbreak of World War I saved him from serving any time.

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    Jozsef Pogany became a writer for Népszava,

    the Hungarian socialist newspaper.

    Though Pogány had written editorials strongly criticizing Austria Hungary for its imperialistic policies in the spring and early summer of 1914, when the war broke out he aligned himself with the Social Democratic Party leadership, supporting the war and a truce in the class struggle for the duration. Drafted, he served in combat alongside the German forces against the Russians, suffering a serious chest wound. Once well enough to work again, he became a correspondent for Hungarian, German and Swiss commercial and socialist newspapers, some of his articles being published as pamphlets during the war. He cultivated relationships with the military officers and he opportunistically self-censored his own pieces, going so far as to celebrate Austrian Hungarian military campaigns and victories over Russia. On the other hand, Pogány focused much of his writing on the ordinary infantry soldiers who endured the brunt of the battles, sympathizing not only with Austrian-Hungarian and German soldiers, but also the Russian and Italian enemy soldiers. 

    During early 1918 Pogány followed closely the events in Russia where workers and soldiers had created soviets (councils), and the Bolsheviks had taken power under the leadership of a virtually unknown figure named Lenin. By January of 1918 workers in Budapest were engaging in large scale demonstrations and some workers and leftwing socialists called for revolution, but Pogány warned that without support from the peasantry and the other nationalities and, in particular, without support from the soldiers a revolution would be doomed.

    By October 1918 the Habsburg Empire was collapsing, strikes were spreading, street demonstrations a daily occurrence. Dual power developed, with the Habsburg monarchy being challenged by a National Council made up of the renegade Count Mihály Károlyi, the Radical Party, and the Social Democratic Party. Pogány opposed the SPD participation in the coalition government but he had little chance of influencing its decisions. Following his “political instincts,” Pogány began to agitate among the rank-and-file soldiers. “In fiery speeches, sometimes seven or eight a day, he urged the soldiers to repudiate the hated Austro-Hungarian army, which he denounced as a tool of the capitalists and imperialists.”

    After the king appointed Károlyi prime minister, he in turn appointed Pogány the commissioner to the Soldiers’ Council upon which the National Council government depended. At the same time, Pogány continued his agitation among the soldiers, telling them to refuse to be disarmed and to maintain their discipline in the face of provocation. The soldiers, seeing they had a champion in Pogány, elected him president of the Soldiers’ Council. As both commissioner and president Pogány called for the election of officers and purge of counter-revolutionaries. When on more than one occasion the National Council government attempted to limit and reduce his power, Pogány responded by mobilizing the soldiers in street demonstration and marched on the Buda castle and succeeded in bringing down two minister of defense. His resolute actions won him the support of the left wing of the SDP and made him a significant political figure.

    The situation became more complicated in November of 1918 when Béla Kun arrived in Hungary coming from Russia with former prisoners of war who had been converted to Communism. While this new Communist Party was small it was also quite active. Its cadres agitated at factories and in street demonstrations, distributing their newspaper Vórős Úsjág (Red News), and winning support from both the left and from the poor. The CP’s presence also “exacerbated differences among the factions of the SPD,” now divided between those who supported the Károlyi government and those who were increasingly critical of it.

    Some SPD leaders such as Győrgy Lukács, a leading leftwing intellectual, quit and joined the Communist Party. Communists and SPD dissidents were now holding secret meetings. Pogány initially resisted Communist overtures, but by March 1919 he had become an advocate of an alliance between the SDP and the Communists in Hungary and on an international scale between Hungary and Russia. With other leftwing SPD members he voted for merger with the Communists. Having helped to negotiate the merger of the parties, he raced to the Soldiers’ Council to put forth and pass a resolution calling for a government of the newly merged Socialist Party and for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The new party took power.

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    Béla Kun, leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic

    The Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted only 133 days with Béla Kun as head of state and Pogány serving both as Commissar for War and as a member of the five-man executive committee of the Revolutionary Governing Council. Forced to resign as Commissar for War, he was later appointed a minor military commander and finally made Minister of Education. Pogany was a strong advocate of an alliance with the peasants. He argued that the government should give up its attempt to collectivize agriculture and instead distribute land directly to the peasants. His position might have made a difference, but it was too late. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was disintegrating. When the Western powers presented the Clemenceau Note to the Hungarian Soviet Republic demanding that it cede the territory that its Red Army had recently conquered, Kun recognized that the government would have to acquiesce. The Hungarian Communist revolution had been defeated. On August 1, 1919 the Revolutionary Governing Council turned over power to the moderate Social Democrats who had sat out the revolution. Kun and other Communist leaders left Budapest by train for Austria eventually reaching Vienna.

    By August 1920, Kun and Pogány had arrived in Moscow to put themselves at the service of the Communist International (the Comintern). While still in Vienna Pogány had written a book on the counterrevolutionary government in Hungary titled The White Terror that, translated into German and Russian, enhanced his reputation among Communists in those countries. In Moscow he met the Russian revolutionary leader Grigory Zinoviev, worked as an assistant to the German Communist Karl Radek, was sent to Vienna to participate in a Comintern conference on the Balkan countries, and then dispatched to the Southern Front in the Crimea where the Red Army defeated General Wrangel’s forces. Back in Moscow where Trotsky and Lenin were debating Zinoviev on the need for a “breathing space” in the ongoing post-war revolutions, Kun and Pogány sided with the latter. Pogány was the most ardent advocate of continuing the revolutionary drive.

    When in February of 1921 the Comintern decided to send a delegation to Germany, it included Kun and Pogány. Ordered by Radek not to “let slip a decisive moment,” Kun and Pogány pushed for a revolutionary rising and found themselves in conflict with Klara Zetkin and Paul Levi who urged caution. On March 23, at the urging of Pogány and others, the action went forward despite a last minute attempt by the German Communist Party to call it off in Hamburg and Central Germany. The March Action, unsupported by the majority of German workers, led to thousands of casualties and to mass resignations from the Communist Party. When Kun and Pogány returned to Moscow, they were criticized and privately reprimanded by Lenin and Trotsky for their adventurism. Nevertheless, they continued to be advocates of the revolutionary offensive. During this period, Trotsky and Pogány developed a mutual contempt that only grew deeper over time.

    With not only Trotsky but also Radek tiring of his irascible behavior and knowing that he had to find a new project, Pogány offered to go to the United States as a representative of the Comintern, though his exact role remained unclear throughout his American stay. The American Communist Party of 1922—known at the time as the Workers Party—was small, only about 6,000 members, many of them immigrants organized in foreign language federations of Italians, Poles, Finns and so on. Pogány soon reorganized the Hungarian Federation and refurbished its newspaper Új Előre (New Forward) which he was soon proud to call the leading leftwing Hungarian newspaper in the world.

    At the same time, since he was seen as the Comintern representative, Pogány was soon a major figure in the Workers Party, speaking in German which was understood by many Communist leaders and members. They called him the “Hungarian Columbus” for he had discovered America. Within a year he had taught himself English well enough to deliver speeches, to debate and to write articles and pamphlets. Now, using the name John Pepper, he was able in English to express himself with the usual sarcasm and vitriol for which he was so well known and so disliked. He put forward positions that were central to the transformation of the Workers Party over the next several years, arguing that American Communists had to learn to speak English, to create an aboveground political party, to work to organize a broad labor party, and to become advocates of the rights of Negros.

    Pepper was everywhere. He helped to create the Daily Worker and to make it into a genuine socialist labor newspaper for which he wrote frequently, as he did for the party monthly The Liberator.  He wrote a pamphlet For a Labor Party that argued in popular language for the creation of a working peoples’ party in America. He became a member of the Central Executive Committee and secretary of the Political Commission, as well as a member of the Secretariat, three powerful positions. Not surprisingly he was soon referred to as the “Czar and commissar” of the party. There was hardly an aspect of the Workers Party upon which he did not have an impact, and generally for the good.

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    Yet Pepper can also be held responsible in large part for the greatest debacle of the American Communist movement’s early years, its role in wrecking the attempt to create a labor party in the early 1920s. At the time, the Chicago labor movement was led by militant unionists Edward Nockles and John Fitzpatrick. They had led organizing drives among packinghouse and steelworkers in Chicago and William Z. Foster, a leader of the Communist Party, had worked with them. They had created a Chicago Labor Party in 1918 and then an Illinois Labor Party in 1919, part of the broader Farmer Labor Party movement, and were now attempting to create a national labor party. The Communists wanted to participate and Fitzpatrick was willing to let them, but told them up front, “Let’s get the record straight—we are willing to go along, but we think you communists should occupy a back seat in this affair.”

    Pepper saw the organization of a labor party as a major breakthrough and wanted the Communists to be in the front seat, if possible in the driver’s seat. He soon overcame the caution of the Communist leadership and persuaded them to take an aggressive role. He used every trick he had learned in the European and American socialist movements to artificially increase the Communist Representation to the founding convention held in July 1923 in Chicago, so that when it began, out of 550 delegates, about 190 were Communists who with their effective floor leadership and discipline were able to play a leading role. Communists made up a majority of the new party’s executive committee and controlled the party journal. Furious, Fitzpatrick withdrew as did most of the labor unions that had been involved. As a St. Louis labor newspaper later wrote, “Workers’ Party Captures Itself and Adopts a New Name.”

    During his first stay in America, Pepper had become embroiled in heated faction fights. He was aligned with Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone against a faction that included William Z. Foster and James P. Cannon among others. The conflict in the American Communist Party was like other issues at the time to be settled in Moscow, so after two years in the United States, Pepper—once again Pogány—returned to the Soviet Russian capital in time for the Comintern’s Fifth World Congress. Through Zinoviev’s good offices, Pógany was appointed to the Political Commission and presented its theses on the economic crisis as well as speaking on revolution in China and criticizing the British Communist Party’s position on the Labor Party. The Congress adopted Zinoviev’s “Bolshevization” program and Pogány was sent to Sweden to implement it there in August of 1924. Back in Moscow, Pogány became director of the Comintern Information Bureau and a member of its Negro Commission.

    Pogány was at the height of his influence at the Comintern in 1926. He spoke before the Comintern executive on international labor. He wrote for the newspaper Pravda and journal Imprecorr. He served on the American Commission and became secretary of the British Secretariat and in that role wrote the pamphlet The General Strike and the General Betrayal. He worked closely with Zinoviev on the campaign against Trotsky, but when Zinoviev fell from favor, he transferred his allegiance to Bukharin and Stalin. Privately he commented, “Just now I’ve discovered that…I’ve been kissing the wrong ass!”

    Yearning to become a Comintern agent in China where he saw a revolutionary future, he worked to become an Asian expert, becoming a member of the Japanese Secretariat and of a commission on China, but his plans backfired when he was sent to Korea, referred to as the “graveyard” of Comintern agents. Afraid of traveling in disguise to Korea, he went instead to Tokyo, Kobe and Yokohama as well as Shanghai, and though he met with Korean Communists in those cities, he never carried out his assignment to meet with Korean Communists in Korea. Returning to Moscow he filed a false report claiming he had visited and met with Koreans in Seoul, a report that later came to haunt him.

    Fearing that his prevarication would be uncovered, he was anxious to flee Moscow and once again asked to go to the United States. Permission was granted in February and by mid-March 1928 he was back in New York where he quickly made himself the expert on the American Negro Question, becoming chair of the Negro Commission and in that capacity setting up the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC). He rejected the idea of self-determination for the black population, believing that African Americans wanted “equal rights for all nationalities and races.” He argued that the Communists should “fight for the Negroes as an oppressed race.” Pepper also became an advocate of the theory of “American exceptionalism,” that is, the notion that the theories and policies being applied by the Comintern in Europe did not necessarily apply to the United States. Little did he realize that his positions on the Negro question and American exceptionalism would be his undoing.

    At the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern held in Moscow in July and August of 1928 Pogány found himself under attack from Stalin and his group for his theory of American exceptionalism, but many others piled on as well. He quickly shifted his position on the Negro Question, rejecting the slogan of equal rights for self-determination and saved himself from abuse there. He returned to the United States and actually ended up drafting the party pamphlet American Negro Problems which remained an important CPSU publication for several years and continued to be consulted for decades after. But, though he seemed to be once again back in the swings of things, the game was up.

    In January 1929 he was ordered to return to Moscow and forbidden to attend the Workers Party convention but decided to say in the United States. He told the American Communists that he was going to Moscow, but hid in an apartment in New York in order to continue directing the Lovestone faction. At the same time, he became embroiled in love affairs with two of his secretaries, one of whom had a jealous boyfriend. When Pogány finally returned to Moscow he told the Comintern leadership that fearing the U.S. authorities were on his trail he had gone to Mexico, but then decided not to take the ship from there and returned to the U.S, which was why he had been delayed. Meanwhile the true story of his hiding out in New York and his love affairs had come to light. The executive committee of the American Communist Party expelled him, but later rescinded the expulsion, arguing that that should be left to the Comintern.

    When he arrived in Moscow in April, he was excoriated by Stalin and his group for his theories of American exceptionalism and his position on the Negro Question. Expelled from the Comintern in the summer of 1929, he was put to work in the Soviet bureaucracy until his reinstatement in the Comintern in May of 1932. Once again he spoke, wrote and translated furiously and made a name for himself, while on important matters he echoed the opinions of Stalin and vilified Trotsky and Bukharin. But he had no real future. He had not only offended Stalin, but too many others as well. Finally in July of 1936 his time came. The secret police arrested him and he was imprisoned as were his wife and daughters. On February 8, 1938, Pepper was tried, convicted, and shot. After Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 Pogány was posthumously rehabilitated.

    Pogány’s political life was marked by a series of major disasters: the Hungarian Revolution, the March Action, and the Labor Party fiasco in the United States. Yet at the same time, his fundamental program for the Workers Party—Americanization, building an aboveground party, creating a broad labor party, and fighting for Negro rights and equality—represented the necessary steps to create real left party in the United States. The revolutionary forces of the period and the Communist Parties, however, proved unable to harness Pogány. He was one of the ambitious ones whose egotism makes them unable to work collectively and to contribute to the common cause. Ultimately as Sakmyster writes, the combination of Pogány’s vanity and arrogance and the transformation of the Communist Party into Stalin’s dictatorship came together in such a way as to destroy him. We should remember that the revolutionary movement that produced Pogány/Pepper also produced Victor Serge and many other noble and idealistic men and women for whom the building of a democratic socialism was more important than either their own personal careers or the demands of Stalin’s bureaucracy. In any case, we have to go forward, for we are the only material we have to work with.

     

  • A Black, Working Class March on Washington: But We're Still Waiting for the Beginning of a New Movement

    The Fiftieth Anniversary March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 24 was a mostly African American working class event of tens of thousands. They came to celebrate the struggles and victories of a half century ago and to put on the agenda for today the issues of racial profiling and stand-your-ground laws, the country’s unemployment rate and growing economic inequality, and new restrictions on voting rights. Some of those on the dais before the magnificent Lincoln Monument, like Representative John Lewis, had spoken there in 1963, while others like Newark Mayor and New Jersey Senate candidate Cory Booker were, as he said, not even born then. Where fifty years ago the civil rights leaders had come to implore the Democratic Party politicians, at this march the Democratic Party politicians came to try to mobilize politically—and immobilize socially—their ever more discontented if still incredibly loyal base.

     

    March on Washington, 1963

    March on Washington, 1963

    The presence on the platform of key figures of the Obama administration, such as Eric Holder, and of the leading Democrat in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, gave the event a quasi-official character in stark contrast to the 1963 march that maintained its distance from the administration by having no political or governmental speakers. While many in the crowd of the 50th anniversary march have good reasons for feeling frustration and anger about government policies and the state of the country, the tone of the event was one of pride in black struggles of the past and pleasure in being present with tens of thousands of others like ourselves who believe in a more democratic, just and decent society. The rally and march, however, did not create the impression that a new movement was being launched (as I had hoped it might; audio), though it did at least show that the unions and civil rights organizations still exist and can still march to the capital to petition for jobs and justice.

    UAW Marchers

    The words one saw most often and the most common image was Trayvon Martin, the young man’s whose death has made him the symbol of racial profiling and persecution, killed for no good reason, his killer set free by a system that simply cannot respond with justice to the murder of a young black man. Trayvon was everywhere, on caps and t-shirts, on placards and banners. Many of those present had no doubt participated in protests of the verdict of not guilty in the trial of Martin’s killer George Zimmerman or in protests against stop-and-frisk policies in New York, but those activists did not set the tone for the 50th anniversary march.

    Trayvon Martin

    While there were clusters of militants here and there, the crowd had been brought to Washington by the labor unions and the African American civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Action Network (NAN) who place their hopes in the Democratic Party to solve their problems. Not surprisingly given the makeup of the crowd, there were no signs and banners criticizing President Barack Obama or  his policies. On the contrary, the crowd cheered loud and long for Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party’s House minority leader, herself a veteran of the 1963 march.  The union members who were there clearly took pride in following in the footsteps of those who came before, but one had little sense that they had come to open new paths to the Promised Land.

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    I have seldom been in a mass political demonstration of hundreds of thousands where one felt such fellowship and good will. This was more a picnic in the park than a protest against the powers. If there was no militancy in the rally and the march, there was a great sense of pride and common purpose: these were people who want the country to be better, are willing to work to make it so, and are prepared themselves to shoulder their portion of the burden, and more. Yet, in a certain sense, that was the problem. While people spoke out against racial injustice, there was no sense of a rejection of either the corporations or the government and its policies.. With the exception of small numbers of radicals and socialists, the march saw itself as influencing the system—not challenging it.

    The left was present, of course. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had endorsed it, and at the rally one saw banners of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party and a spirited march of a few hundred against the new Jim Crow led by the International Socialist Organization. While the ANSWER Coalition and the ISO had printed thousands of placards that one saw scattered throughout the crowd, those who carried them did so because they supported the slogan “Dr. King’s Legacy: Jobs not War” or “End Mass Incarceration and the New Jim Crow,” not because they supported socialism. We on the left were a drop in the bucket of the sea of black working people who continue to place their hopes on making the system work, rather than on the hope of creating a new system.

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    Yet all the problems remain, not only the injustice of the justice system, but also the continuing economic problems of high unemployment and growing inequality as well as the attack on voting rights. Health care remains an issue, for Obama Care (never really what we needed) has not yet come and will not come to many states; the public schools and teachers remain under attack; the immigration issue remains unresolved; and everywhere American working people face the government’s austerity program, cutting public services and public employees. The military interventions continue and threaten to expand and the national security state continues to grow, eavesdropping on millions. The Democrats on the dais stand on the wrong side of almost all of these issues, their only real concern to protect voting rights because the Republican attack on their voters endangers their political positions.  

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    This massive March for Jobs and Justice fifty years later was a missed opportunity  to launch the movement we so badly need. Yet we can count on the irrationality of the economic system, the unfairness of the political system, and the continuing desire for justice on the part of all of those walked in Washington to give us one more chance. Let it be soon, for every day that passes there is another Trayvon somewhere, another foreclosure, another unemployed worker, another homeless family on the street. Let it be soon, and when it comes, let it be powerful and “Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”

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    (All 2013 photos by Dan La Botz.)

  • Egypt: The Revolution at the Crossroads

    As I write, a horrible tragedy is unfolding in Egypt. The old order has reasserted itself with a vengeance. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that Egypt will ever again be what it was before 2011.

    Many aspects of the situation remain murky. First, there is the question of how many of Morsi’s supporters have been slaughtered. The New York Times accepts the figure of 1,000, with 4,000 wounded (this includes a relatively small number of police and army, as well as anti-Muslim Brotherhood civilians) in the initial attack on the protest camps and during the four or five days afterwards. We may never know the true casualty figures, but there is good reason to believe that they are much higher than this. Certainly the number of deaths will continue to rise if Egypt descends into civil war, which seems to be happening.

    Then there is the question of Washington’s role. According to reporting in the Times, American and European diplomats tried to broker a deal between the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) and the Brotherhood in order to prevent the massacre, but the military “brushed them off.” At the same time, Israel, the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates lobbied the U.S. not to pressure the Egyptian generals. Though the American ambassador in Cairo was considered to have friendly relations with Morsi, Obama made no public comments on the coup for several days, even after the army committed its first large-scale killings. Secretary of State Kerry actually praised the military for “restoring democracy.” Obama condemned the butchery of August 14, but his administration bears some of the responsibility for it by having given de facto support to the July 3 coup and thus signaling to the SCAF that they might escalate the violence with impunity. Moreover, in the aftermath of August 14 it was instantly made clear that Egypt’s $1.5 billion, mostly in military aid, would not be in jeopardy no matter what the army did – although under pressure (from Republicans, mostly) Obama is now hinting at some reductions in subventions to Egypt.

    It is a scandal that the fight to cut off U.S. aid to this murderous regime is being led by elements on the right, like Robert Kagan, even though most of them, such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham, call only for its temporary “suspension.” Earlier, on July 31, a Senate attempt to block military aid, led by Rand Paul, was defeated 86-13, after intense lobbying by AIPAC, with every Democrat voting against. Even now, among Democrats there seems to be almost no interest in a cutoff. Some have used the pathetic excuse that Egypt would always be able to get military aid from Russia, Israel or the Saudis instead (true), and “we” would thereby lose our “leverage” with Cairo. Others are simply following the AIPAC line. But for most, as usual, it comes down to a reluctance to trouble their friend in the White House.

    The argument about “leverage” is largely specious because U.S. aid does offer Egypt access to some very sophisticated weaponry and maintenance contracts for its existing arsenal. The United States and Egypt have long been highly integrated at the military and diplomatic levels, and if Obama were to act in a principled way it might very well have a sobering effect on the SCAF. In fact it seems possible that if Washington had forthrightly denounced the July 3 coup and threatened to cut off aid immediately, the massacres of August 14 might have been avoided.

    In any case, it is certain that none of this was considered by the Obama administration and will not be in the future unless there is a determined campaign by the peace, human rights and social justice movements. American progressives should demand the termination of aid, not only because it is immoral to supply mass murderers with weapons, but because cutting off aid to the generals would offer comfort and solidarity to the Egyptian victims of the army’s repression and encourage those in the Arab and Muslim world who yearn for real democracy.

    When Mubarak fell, it was generally assumed in the West that Egypt’s masses were so deeply attached to Islamic conservatism that the Muslim Brotherhood would win power by a sweeping majority. That condescending view quickly proved unfounded. Morsi and the Salafist candidate together won only 42 percent in the first round of the presidential election, and Morsi himself garnered only 51 percent in the second round – a victory, but hardly a landslide, much less a popular mandate to gather all power to himself and the Muslim Brotherhood, and to impose a sharia state. But that is what Morsi proceeded to do, albeit gradually.

    Juan Cole has called Morsi’s presidency “a slow motion coup.” In light of the current, much more repressive military regime, it is easy to forget the sectarian and anti-democratic thrust of Morsi’s policies. The president quickly began to act as though he was above the law. He pushed through a new constitution, based on sharia principles, that was endorsed by a referendum in which only 30 percent of Egyptians participated; effectively a mass boycott. The new constitution made “the principles of Islamic law (sharia) the main source of legislation,” as did the old constitution, but it added language that more specifically defined sharia in terms of "evidence, rules, jurisprudence and sources" accepted by Sunni Islam – suggesting that sharia-mandated punishments for theft, adultery, and blasphemy might soon be imposed. Indeed, Coptic teachers were charged with blasphemy under the constitution. All of this was far from a Taliban-style system, of course, and far less than Salafists demanded. But it was ominous, and millions of Egyptians clearly believed that worse was to come if Morsi remained in office.

    Above all, Morsi was flagrantly attempting to create a one-party state, asserting the right to rule by decree, attempting to pack the courts with pro-Brotherhood judges and accusing all his critics of being part of a foreign conspiracy. Morsi’s political style took on a very ugly, authoritarian and paranoid cast. Anti-Copt rhetoric, which had always been a staple of Brotherhood discourse, was strident. The police turned a blind eye to Brotherhood vigilantes who attacked Christians and Shias. Islamist gangs assaulted leftist demonstrations and imposed the jizya on Coptic communities – the tax on non-Muslims levied in the past by Islamic rulers, including the Ottomans. Morsi clamped down hard on freedom of expression, closing several newspapers and prosecuting bloggers.

    Popular revulsion at these trends, including from millions who had voted for Morsi, contributed to the explosion last June. But the thing that turned most Egyptians against his rule was terrible economic hardship. Morsi unhesitatingly did the bidding of the IMF. The result was a massive increase in Egypt’s already catastrophic unemployment, scarcity of food and fuel and rising prices for staples. Of course, continuing austerity and the whole neoliberal project were exactly what the Egyptian ruling class expected Morsi to impose. In return for their support or acceptance, however, he was also expected to end the revolution. Egypt’s elite, including the military brass, hoped the Muslim Brotherhood’s efficient machine could co-opt and neutralize the disaffected masses, but it did not, and this is what prompted the elite to abandon him.

    The revolt, or Tamarod, of June 30 was complex. The Tamarod organization itself was an extremely loose alliance of youth from the Social Democratic Party, the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, Mohamed ElBaradei’s Constitution Party, and the Revolutionary Socialists (RS). None of these groups, except the RS, are actually socialist or even very left; Hazem Al-Beblawi, for example, a founder of the Social Democrats, is the current prime minister. But behind the Tamarod were millions of Egyptians who wanted Morsi’s ouster and prompt new elections. Some 22 million signed the Tamarod petition calling on Morsi to step down, and an estimated 17 million demonstrated in Cairo on June 30 in what may have been the largest mass demonstration in history. These figures represent around one fourth of the country’s population, or about half of all Egyptian adults; a comparable number in the United States would be 78 million – more than voted for Romney or Obama. (Some have questioned these numbers, but no one, as far as I know, disputes that they were enormous and far larger even than the turnout in January 25, 2011.) In a democracy, no president is entitled to stay in office in the face of this kind of opposition. The Egyptian people, like citizens everywhere, have a moral right to recall governments that have lost their confidence, a right that for Americans is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Morsi should have stepped down – but then there should have been new elections as quickly as possible. This is what many, probably most, Egyptians expected, but it was not what the army planned when it stepped in to “carry out the will of the people.” Nor, it seems, was this what most of the Tamarod’s leaders had in mind.

    Adam Shatz, writing in the London Review of Books, cited a friend with “contacts in the [Egyptian] security establishment” who claims that the coup of July 3 was coordinated with Tamarod, which provided it with populist cover. In view of the fact that Tamarod’s leaders have vociferously supported Gen. Al-Sisi and are calling for vigilante attacks on the Muslim Brotherhood, there is good reason to suspect a degree of cooperation between them and the Egyptian army. Moreover, it was no secret that the movement as a whole always included supporters of the old regime and the army, who wanted to crush the Brotherhood at any cost. The bewildering aspect of all this, however, is how quickly and easily the democratic elements in Tamarod, especially the Revolutionary Socialists, were sidelined by the authoritarians.

    Nevertheless, the mass outrage of the movement that culminated on June 30 was real and sprang from deep, legitimate grievances. Those millions of demonstrators were not mere pawns of the SCAF and the activists of Tamarod. Among them were workers who had seen their strikes broken and their unions throttled by the Morsi regime, women who knew that their rights were threatened, Egyptians who were disgusted by the government’s encouragement of sectarianism and hatred for religious minorities, and the poor and underemployed demanding what the revolution had promised: bread, freedom and social justice. It was a tragedy of epic proportions that there was no leadership that could offer a consistently democratic perspective to the mass movement, one that clearly distinguished between a demand for Morsi’s ouster and a military takeover.

    What now? The SCAF is conducting a reign of terror, and their targets will be labor and human rights activists as well as Islamists. The military’s ferocious attack on Egyptians’ freedom already makes Morsi’s authoritarianism pale in comparison. We who are outside Egypt should do everything we can to make this a pariah regime. It is imperative for the Egyptian left to defend the victims of the military’s savage repression, especially those Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters protesting the coup. At the same time, there should be concerted efforts to protect Egypt’s ten-million strong Coptic community against the ongoing pogroms carried out by Brotherhood and Salafist gangs. Al-Sisi’s government clearly intends to ban the Brotherhood, and when and if it permits new elections these will be fatally compromised as long as the imprisonment of opposition leaders and restrictions on political freedoms continue. Morsi, the Brotherhood leaders, and all political prisoners should be released, the state of emergency lifted, and free elections held as quickly as possible.

    Egypt has gone backward. The revolution has suffered a terrible defeat, and the old regime has arrogantly taken back nearly everything it had lost in 2011. The crowning insult is the possibly imminent release of Mubarak himself. What cannot be restored however, is the crippling passivity of the masses before 2011. Egyptians have seen the power of great numbers in the streets – their power. They know that it was Egypt, after Tunisia, that unleashed the magnificent Arab spring. Under the generals, Egypt is now entering a very dark time. Leaderless, disoriented, millions of Egyptians are right now under the terrible illusion that the army has “saved” them and will take care of them. They will learn, and quickly. It is impossible to believe that the darkness will last for more than a short time. We have not heard the last of the Egyptian Revolution.

     

    Thomas Harrison is on the editorial board of New Politics and co-director of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.

  • Letter to Supporters

    The following statement from the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists makes a powerful case for socialism from below in the context of the Egyptian coup, the massacres carried out by the military and their horrific impact on the nation's democratic upsurge. Like others, the Revolutionary Socialists is evolving its point of view, challenged as it is with understanding first the election of a repressive right-wing Muslim government on the heels of a healthy mass movement, and then the shocks from a bloody military coup. We think it important to share their statement on the situation and, along with the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and others, we are republishing it as a contribution to the general discussion.

    Down with military rule …
    no to the return of the old regime …
    no to the return of the Brotherhood

    Terrible massacres and violent repression, a huge escalation in attacks on Egyptian Christians and churches, the consolidation of the repressive military state continues apace. These are the momentous political developments we have experienced during the last few weeks.

    They pose enormous challenges to the revolution, but they also contain opportunities to prepare for the coming waves of the revolution, which the Revolutionary Socialists can use effectively to build the movement, provided that we develop tactics capable of dealing with changing circumstances.

    Revolution or military coup?

    After millions took to the streets to topple Mohamed Morsi and Al-Sisi made his declaration removing him from the presidency, there has been widespread debate about how to characterise these events. Was this a revolution of the masses, or a military coup aimed at removing the president in order to establish a military dictatorship? The answer to the question “revolution or coup?” lies in its importance to the development of a strategy for the months, and perhaps the years to come of the Egyptian revolution.

    Whoever dismisses the intervention of the gigantic mass movement which launched the new wave of the Egyptian revolution is fleeing from dealing with its inherent contradictions, and thus from both the new challenges in front of the Egyptian revolution, and the opportunities that the future holds. Unsurprisingly, the revolutionaries who dismiss the value of the intervention of the masses – or at least consider the masses to be simply the object of a counter-revolutionary game – are suffering today from deep frustration as a result of what they call the retreat or end of the Egyptian revolution, and their denial of the available opportunities.

    Nor are they alone in dismissing the direct intervention of the masses in Morsi’s downfall, and the downfall of the legitimacy of the ballot box with him. Almost all the forces intervening in the political situation today, including the international forces, dismiss the role of the masses.

    The exception here is the military establishment, which was burnt by the fire of the mass movement previously, and thus was unable to ignore or overlook it. Rather, the prospects and development of the mass movement are the principal factor determining its policies and interventions. The military establishment represents the mainstay of the ruling class, the regime and the state. It is the spearhead of the counter-revolution which imposes itself on the mass movement as a fait accompli, even while it sows panic about the possibility of the development of the mass movement and strives by every possible means to either contain it within a specific framework which does not threaten its class interests, or by direct repression as happened in the past.

    The army certainly wants to contain the gigantic mass movement demanding Morsi’s downfall within the limits it sets and the steps it calculates. It wants to prevent the movement from escaping from the framework of Morsi’s downfall to become a deeper challenge to the regime in its entirety. The primary goal of the military was return of the millions who filled and controlled the streets to their homes in the shortest time possible, and to stop the movement at the limit of overthrowing the head of the regime and getting rid of him. This goal was compatible with the aspirations of the military after Morsi’s failure to abort the revolution in face of the confusion which had gripped the ruling class in the face of the revolution throughout his year in office.

    For after Morsi’s rise to power last year, with the blessing of the US, the military establishment, and a large section of the business elite, he failed to achieve the objectives of the ruling class in aborting the Egyptian revolution. Morsi was initially a better option for the majority of the ruling class, as he adopted the neo-liberal project and aligned himself with the interests of business. He had no qualms about alliance with the US and was careful not to disturb the Zionist state, in addition to being the first elected president after the revolution. Most importantly, he had a base in the largest mass organisation in Egypt, an organisation which works on the ground with hundreds of thousands of members, sympathisers and supporters. They would be able to absorb the anger of the people and convince the masses of the neo-liberal project and the cruel plans for austerity which accompany it, sparing the ruling class the danger of a mass uprising during its attempts to deal with the economic crisis – or at least to mitigate its effects – at their expense.

    Instead, the economic crisis and the failure of Morsi to implement the demands of the revolution (or more accurately his explicit challenge to these demands and objectives) led to a decline in his popularity and the popularity of his organisation to the extent that the ruling class and its institutions could no longer rely on them in the face of the masses.

    When it became clear that popular anger had risen enough to overthrow Morsi, it became necessary for the most powerful and cohesive institution in the ruling class – the military – to intervene quickly to contain the anger of the masses and implement their demand. It was necessary to get out of a losing bet on the head of the regime and to rearrange and unify the ruling class around new leaders who would appear as heroes, carrying out the people’s demands and uniting with the people in “one rank”.

    The army was really caught between two fires. The first was the fire of the mass movement, and the possibility of it breaking through its limits in the event of Morsi continuing in power. The second was the fire of the Brotherhood and the Islamists in the streets, and with the opening of complex fronts in Sinai to a greater extent and some areas of Upper Egypt to a lesser extent, in the event of Morsi’s overthrow. Not to mention the differences which would develop with the US administration and the threat of what they call “the democratic path”.

    The Army chose to avoid the fire of the mass movement, despite the consequences. It decided to knock out Morsi, while absorbing the masses and stopping the development of their movement, and face the fire from the Brotherhood which was less threatening than that of the masses. As for the US administration, and the EU to a lesser extent, they have long-term strategic relations with the Egyptian military establishment which are capable of absorbing any tensions caused by the overthrow of Morsi. Thus the military panicked about the possibility about the development of the mass movement and its escape from its leash. The other option was fraught with danger, for if the army did not overthrow Morsi, and the movement developed in a more radical and deeper direction, the confidence of wide sections of the masses in the army – a confidence which was born out of the absence of any other alternative which could deal decisively with Morsi – would be shaken. This was a factor which could push the movement off its tracks.

    In order to complete the work of containing the mass movement, the military appointed an interim president and a new government as a civilian face. The aim was to preserve firstly all its powers and privileges and its interventionist role in violent repression when necessary. Secondly, it aimed to complete the project of counter-revolution at both a political and economic level. This did not mean a retreat of the military from power, but rather the opposite. For in spite of the military’s retreat behind the civilian cloak of the new government, it still manages everything just as it did during the year and a half of the Military Council under the leadership of [Field-Marshal] Tantawi and [General] Anan.

    So we have witnessed the mass wave of protest on 30 June and the few days which followed, and seen the military riding on the revolution after 3 July in order to cut the road to the development of the mass movement. The mass movement could have developed greater and more radical dimensions, in particular with the beginning of partial strikes in the Public Transport Authority, the railways, in Mahalla, and among the civil servants at the Cabinet Offices and many others. We are also seeing the return of the ruling class with its military symbols and old leaders in full force, after the expulsion of the Brotherhood from the state, in order for the military to lead the ruling class and the forces of counter-revolution to achieve what Morsi failed to do. That is, to abort the revolution and a hugely confident mass movement, which was however full of contradictions in consciousness and organisation. Inevitably, we have to deal with the movement including its contradictions and exploit the possibilities inherent in it to prepare for the stronger waves of the Egyptian revolution to come.

    From this angle, 11 February does not exactly resemble 3 July 2013, and is in fact completely unlike it in many aspects. In the first case, the ruling class was forced to get rid of the head of state and open the door to greater confusion among its own ranks. The state was in a condition of much greater weakness than it appears today, after the collapse of the Interior Ministry and the extreme hostility to Mubarak’s cronies. In the second case, however, the ruling class got rid of the head of the regime in order to unite its own ranks, shuffle the cards in its hand, and mend the cracks in order to prepare for attacks on all revolutionary movements. But this does not mean that the political and economic crisis of the ruling class has ended.

    In the face of Morsi’s overthrow, the Brotherhood and their Islamist allies sought to escalate their mobilisation on the ground with sit-ins and marches in order to restore the “legitimacy” overthrown by the masses along with their failed project hostile to the goals of the revolution. In the process they have committed heinous crimes which cannot be forgiven in many areas and provinces, as well as their sectarian rhetoric and their incitement against Christians, by pouring their anger out on them and attacking churches. As Revolutionary Socialists we must stand firmly against this aggression and any attack on the Christians of Egypt: this is a matter of principle for us.

    We are well aware that for the Brotherhood this is a battle for survival and they will not easily surrender. In parallel to the Brotherhood’s attacks and crimes they themselves are facing violent repression at the hands of the military and the Interior Ministry, beginning with the massacre at the Republican Guards HQ, and ending with the barbaric breaking up of the protest camps in al-Nahda Square and Raba’a al-Adwiyya, not to mention the killing of three of their women members in Mansoura, and so on.

    The crimes of the Brotherhood have led most factions of the left to take an extremely opportunistic stance and to ally themselves with the military and support the repressive state, even repeating the same lies of the bourgeois and feloul media, and completely abandoning any revolutionary or class position. This perspective is built on a catastrophic analysis which considers the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies to be the greatest danger to the Egyptian Revolution, while in reality, if the Brotherhood poses a danger to a certain extent, the institutions of the state which monopolize the means of violence represent a far greater danger to the revolution. This is manifested in the return of the repressive state in all its brutality, in the dictatorial Constitutional Declaration, in the appointments of provincial governors from military and police generals and the old regime and the attack on the Suez Steel strikers and so on.

    In addition to the opportunistic and treacherous position of so-called liberals and leftists in support of the military (led by those who participated in Al-Sisi’s government), there are many who see the battle between the Brotherhood and the new/old regime as a battle which means nothing to the revolution and the revolution has no stake in its outcome. From this perspective, revolutionaries must take a neutral position, as if the two parties to the conflict are of equal strength and represent the same danger to the revolution. These views are extremely short-sighted. They do not see the real meaning of the current regime’s actions, and the grin on the military's face in the face of the Islamists as they crush the sit-ins at Raba’a al-Adawiyya and al-Nahda. These massacres are a dress rehearsal for crushing the Egyptian Revolution, and will be repeated tomorrow against any genuine opposition force which appears on the scene, particularly the labour movement. This is what we saw a glimpse of in the attack on the Suez Steel strike. The massacres against the Islamists are only the first steps along the road map towards counter-revolution, and we must expose this in sharp and principled attacks on them.

    Today we are exposed to a great deal of attacks on our position for condemning the violence of the institutions of repression against the Islamists, and for our attacks on Al-Sisi as the leader of the counter-revolution. But this will not lead us to dilute our position by creating a kind of “balance” in our attacks on the military and the Islamists as if there was equality between them in terms of the danger they represent to the revolution. We are in the process of a comprehensive and sweeping counter-revolution and the crushing of the Muslim Brotherhood’s sit-ins and protests is only the first step. We will not waver in our firm position against the military and its fierce repression. “Balance” between the two sides would only reflect hesitancy and indecision instead of taking clear and bold position against the repressive state. We cannot be silent about the military’s massacres which have killed dozens of Islamists and we cannot support the state in crushing their sit-ins. Nor can we stop recalling the military’s crimes, and warning about the Interior Ministry and demanding the prosecution of their criminals at every opportunity. Likewise we must warn of the return of Mubarak’s state and its repressive institutions in full force, and direct our attacks against it.

    Nor must we be driven behind the attempts of the supporters of the old regime and their thugs to harass the Islamists and kill them in the streets. There is a vast difference between the self-defence of the masses –even if by violent means – in the face of attacks by the Brotherhood as we saw in Manial and Bayn al-Sayarat and Giza a few weeks ago, and the violence of the institutions of repression and the thugs of the old regime against the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter is not violence defending demonstrators and the revolution, but rather an attempt to stabilise things in the hands of the new regime without opposition from any quarter. The army, police and old regime elements did not intervene, not even once, during the last few weeks, to protect local people or protesters in any of the clashes. It is in this context that Tamarod “Rebel” movement and the left which is stuck to the military’s boots, is calling for popular committees to protect the state and the institutions of repression and to help them crush the Islamists. These are fascist calls and we cannot accept them or repeat them.

    We must confront the lies the media which give political cover to pinning all the crimes of the military and the old regime on the Muslim Brotherhood. We must challenge the obnoxious narrative which seeks to erase the revolution of 25 January and replace it with the 30 June revolution, in which “all classes” participated, which was not about “burning police stations” and “attacking institutions”. This narrative presents the January Revolution as a pure conspiracy by the Brotherhood, which required a revolution against them and not a revolution against the ruling class and its state and repressive institutions. In addition, we hear hateful racist rhetoric against the Palestinians and the Syrians.

    The state is mobilising almost all political forces and (formerly) revolutionary forces behind it, and large sections of the masses, in order to confront the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist alliance around them. In what they call the “war on terror”, they are whipping up a disgusting nationalistic atmosphere, claiming that “there is no sound louder than the sound of battle” in order to suppress and garble the demands of the revolution.

    As for the talk of “exclusion” [from the political process] and “reconciliation”, the Revolutionary Socialists cannot build their position on this issue in isolation from the moods of the masses and their orientations– in spite of their strong internal contradictions. These masses will not accept reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. As one of the statements of our movement stated, “beating the drum for reconciliation suggests equality between murderer and victim, which is completely unacceptable, without bringing the killers of the martyrs, all the martyrs, and the instigators of violence, to a fair trial”. If the masses, under the influence of the media and bourgeois propaganda, want to exclude the Brotherhood, while ignoring the old regime elements and the military, we must also attack the return of the old regime supporters and the return of Mubarak’s state under Al-Sisi’s flag. All of them are enemies of the Egyptian Revolution and its future prospects, and Al-Sisi is much more dangerous than [Muslim Brotherhood leader] Muhammed al-Beltagi by any measure.

    In these circumstances, we must directly and boldly and clearly and without any hesitation raise the slogan “Down with military rule… no to the return of the feloul … no to the return of the Muslim Brotherhood”.

    Are we afraid of isolation?

    There is no doubt that the tactics of Revolutionary Socialism depend fundamentally on determining the level of development of the consciousness of the masses and of the working class at their heart and their vanguard on the one hand, while assessing the possibilities and opportunities for the development and deepening of the mass movement during the course of the revolution, on the other.

    The mass movement today suffers from great contradictions within it, and faces great challenges, and perhaps the greatest of these is the apparent reconciliation between a section of the masses with the institutions of the state, and particularly the military and the Interior Ministry – the head and heart of the counter revolution. Yet despite the massive frustration which affects large sections of revolutionaries who fought against the Military Council during a year and a half of the revolution, and who continued their struggle against Morsi’s regime, there is no other way to carry out a living role within a mass movement, except to deal with it as it is and to understand its contradictions without either overlooking or exaggerating its current potential.

    The alliance of the old regime elements and liberal media, with the security services, military and Interior Ministry has succeeded to a large extent in swaying the masses by projecting a false image of the neutrality of the military and the Interior Ministry who they portray as being aligned with the people against Morsi, the Brotherhood and their Islamist allies, in an attempt to also erase the crimes of the state in murder and torture from the memory of the masses. Many political forces, most notably the opportunistic National Salvation Front, the Tamarod campaign, and the Popular Current, have played the most opportunistic and dirty roles in burnishing this image through calls for “unity in the ranks”. They praise the national role of the army and the state institutions in meeting the demands of the people to finish with the Brotherhood regime, which they considered to be the biggest and only danger to the Egyptian revolution. However, this perspective only represents a thin crust around the consciousness of the masses. True, it is a solid crust, and almost all parties are working to harden it further, but underneath lies a genuine consciousness of the demands of the revolution and its goals of bread, freedom and social justice.

    We cannot lose sight of the fact that, in the midst of these contradictions in consciousness, large sections of the masses have great self-confidence, despite all the distractions and the fog of the “war on terror”. The masses have genuinely imposed their will and overthrown two presidents and four governments since the beginning of the revolution. This confidence which lies under the crust of contradictory consciousness, is what prompted the masses to rise up against Morsi in the first place, and it is this which allows some to prepare gradually to complete the struggle against the new government, as its economic and political policies opposed to the demands of the masses becomes progressively clear. This is despite the partial hope among some sectors of the masses that the government will meet the demands of the revolution.

    At this stage we have to find every way possible to reach the genuine core of the poor and working masses’ consciousness, in whose fundamental interests it is to continue the revolution and implement its demands. We must continue to emphasize the giant capabilities that the masses exhibited in the wave of 30 June and the previous waves of the revolution by spreading the genuine demands of the Egyptian revolution, and mobilising for them in every province and every workplace. But this cannot and should not push us to hide or delay some of our policies and principles in order to enjoy the temporary, close support of the masses behind our rhetoric and our slogans.

    On the contrary, concealing some of our slogans or our policies in order to achieve short-term political goals will only lead to opportunism. This is not the way that the Revolutionary Socialists work, and we have completely avoided opportunism as we have built our organisational project in the midst of the masses and for the victory of the Egyptian revolution. For example, we cannot slacken in our attacks on the lies presented by the media of the old regime and the bourgeois liberals, or stop our attacks on the rehearsals for counter-revolution which the military and the Interior Ministry are carrying out today. We cannot stop recalling the criminal history of the Military Council and Mubarak’s cronies, and demanding that they be put on trial side-by-side with the Brotherhood’s leaders who have excelled during the last few weeks in incitement to violence and killing, and the unleashing of disgusting sectarianism. We cannot, in any event, slacken in directing political attacks against the old regime elements and the opportunists in Beblawi’s government, the clear liberal tendencies of this government, and the consolidation of the repressive state by the appointment of new provincial governors. We cannot relent in our attacks on the huge powers and privileges which the military enjoys according to the constitution, and its control of around 25 percent of the Egyptian economy, and on the continuation of the humiliating Camp David agreement and so on. We have to deal with these things in a strictly principled manner.

    Belittling the return of Mubarak’s state and the military repression is extremely dangerous. The state of Mubarak, which – it is true –did not disappear from the scene since the beginning of the revolution, returns today with its full powers, free of internal crises, and with the support of wide sections of the masses. It is this situation which forces us to go onto the attack, immediately against this state, and its symbols, which will not wait long before launching attacks on all who call for the demands of the revolution.

    Our principled position may result in our temporary isolation in the midst of the masses. Our message will not generally find a wide reception in the masses, despite all the efforts we will expend in work and activity in the workplaces, the university campuses and the local neighbourhoods. This isolation had already begun in reality before 30 June, as a result of our principled position against the military, the old regime and the Brotherhood. But we must not allow ourselves to give into any degree of frustration, for as long as contradictions continue in the consciousness and capacity of the masses to organise themselves, the mass movement will remain a vehicle which can be affected by many intersecting factors, which force it to proceed along winding roads and not constantly along a straight and rising path. The real content of the repressive regime now in power will be revealed before the eyes of the masses who will gradually begin the struggle against it.

    This does not mean complete isolation and separation from the masses, as there are tens of thousands of revolutionary youths who fought fiercely against military rule in the waves of the Egyptian revolution, and who completed the struggle against Morsi’s regime. Their memories are still rooted in revolutionary principles, they have fewer contradictions in their consciousness, and they are not betting on the institutions of the state, particularly not on the military, the backbone of the counter-revolution. These will find the principled position of the Revolutionary Socialists attractive, in the light of the wholesale drift of the political forces to the side of the military and the new government it has appointed. From this angle, the situation is better than it was after February 11 2011, when for months, only the Revolutionary Socialists and few individual activists would speak out against the Military Council.

    In the weeks and months to come, we have the opportunity to attract and win some of these revolutionaries to strengthen our ranks, in order to play a more vibrant and stable role in the coming waves of the revolution. But at the same time we also want to integrate workers and the poor who made the revolution and participated in the last wave of 30 June for the goals of the revolution which were never realised. Here it is of the utmost importance to revive the project of the Revolutionary Front with principled parties which do not drift into the arms of the state and the new government, neither are they allied with the Islamists against the state and which adopt a programme of the demands of the revolution and its goals.

  • Dream Sequences: Marching on Washington, Fifty Years On

    It is the age of Barack, the age of Trayvon; a time for imagining post-racial transcendence, a time for recognizing obdurate injustice. As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington this month, as new generations surround the reflecting pool, we will ask whether we yet judge each other by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin.

    The answer, of course, will be no, and also yes. The reality of race today is nebulous, flecked with shadings, neither a utopia of little black boys and girls walking hand in hand with little white boys and girls nor merely a slew of racial slurs. History’s etchings on our psychology ensure that between awareness and callowness, solidarity and enmity, comprehension and smallness, lie infinite gradations.

    Were it not but a phantom of memory, the euphoria of election night 2008 might have caused a smug national self-satisfaction in commemorating the March on Washington. Instead, disquietude is felt after the Florida jury’s acquittal of George Zimmerman, the Supreme Court’s striking down of key Voting Rights Act provisions, and Detroit’s bankruptcy. Martin Luther King’s dream holds lasting power not for its eloquence alone but because the American present is still so separate and still so unequal.

    Conservatives during King’s lifetime reviled him. They now embrace the dream, reducing its meaning to simple race blindness. If racism is a bygone irrelevancy brought up only by liberal scolds, then political correctness is all that divides us and inequality is a result of irresponsibility, as shown in teen pregnancy data or statistics that blacks are far more often killed by other blacks than whites. Slavery and segregation are over: stop blaming others.

    In this manner an outward commitment to color blindness sustains the pathologizing of black America, an outlook patently shaped by the very history it denies. The slave system deprived black Americans of compensation, property, literacy, and citizenship while unleashing ferocity upon any hint of independence. In the white mind, fear of black violence commingled with moralism, engendering a psyche that fancied itself the chivalric defender of civilization against animality.

    It is an old story, and in moments like Trayvon Martin’s murder we doubt the white republic has left us. We all know, however, that our present is not monochrome. A black First Family resides in the White House, and our own families and friendships are criss-crossed in black, white, yellow, brown, and red. More and more, Americans identify as multiracial when census takers knock at their door.

    We are in the midst of a third great American system of race and class, the successor to chattel slavery and formal Jim Crow. Unlike its predecessors, the current system—which operates so subtly that it gives only the barest appearance of being a system—maintains diversity as an ideal even as it continues to produce injustice in the aggregate. Understanding it requires that we overlay our narratives of race upon our narratives of capitalism, taking them as one despite their partitioning into the separate academic disciplines of cultural studies and economics.

    Between the 1960s and 1970s, a new regime of capitalist accumulation came about. Not by accident did this neoliberal form of capitalism coincide with the rights revolution. Just as a global free trade regime required the dismantling of colonialism, so the logic of deregulation found an elective affinity with the end of formal segregation. While freedom songs were being sung in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Southern Christian Leadership Conference, libertarianism was being generated in the Mont Pelerin Society and Chicago School.

    Since white supremacy’s pervasiveness owed much to its immense profitability, the idea that a free market would best serve race blindness required conservative ideologues to improvise a dreamscape. In Capitalism and Freedom, published one year before King’s 1963 speech, Milton Friedman argued that the invisible hand cared only for the content of one’s character. “An impersonal market,” he stated, would best protect black Americans “from being discriminated against in their economic activities for reasons that are irrelevant to their productivity.”

    To sustain this reverie, wide swathes of history had to be bracketed off as mere “residual discrimination,” the detritus of the past of slavery and segregation, when market individualism was not yet in full sway. While others argued that economic exploitation explained the persistence of slavery and segregation, the neoliberals glimpsed utopia in a pure capitalism.

    So it is that the black freedom movement and its crowning achievements, the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and advent of a black elected officialdom, coincided with the consolidation of an elite consensus that removed constraints on corporate activity, cut tax rates on the wealthiest and social spending for the most needy, and instituted more flexible world trade regimes.

    The result for black America, plain by the 1980s, was a flight of capital from urban centers in search of cheaper labor, the rout of labor unionism, the devastation of black working-class prospects, a decline of urban tax bases, and the centrifugal deterioration of social life. Black neighborhoods in deindustrialized cities became prime territory for the drug trade, which doubled as an escape from despair and a lucrative growth field for black youth without occupational alternatives.

    Far from an “impersonal” market, studies find call-back rates for job interviews consistently lower for applicants with stereotypically “black” names. In every significant metric—income, wealth, employment, education, housing, poverty, debt, longevity, incarceration—black Americans fare much worse than whites. The carceral state has ballooned, with supermax facilities substituting for leg irons. From 200,000 in prison or jail in 1970, the ranks of the confined have swelled to well over two million, most of them black and Latino men under 40.

    The black freedom movement coincided with its neoliberal claimant, but they were always distinguished by a major difference of emphasis. Black leaders never imagined liberation to be genuinely possible without economic equality. Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, the now-forgotten socialist architects of the March on Washington, demanded “jobs” as well as “freedom.” In Malcolm X’s more militant cadence, “You can’t have capitalism without racism.”

    A redistributive outlook underlay King’s late-life criticism of the Pentagon as the world’s greatest purveyor of violence; his call for putting social needs first in the national budget; his organizing of a Poor People’s Campaign that prefigured Occupy by planning mass encampment on the Washington mall; and his support for striking sanitation workers in Memphis at the time of his 1968 assassination.

    In 1964, King wrote,

    "The Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life. What will it profit him to be able to send his children to an integrated school if the family income is insufficient to buy them school clothes? What will he gain by being permitted to move to an integrated neighbourhood if he cannot afford to do so because he is unemployed or has a low-paying job with no future?"

    If King’s “I Have a Dream” speech emphasized law and attitude, his broader career indicates that his unfinished agenda is more structural, economic, and social. Race is sunk in ’hood and ’burb, in property values and school district boundaries, in wage differentials and portfolios, and in credit ratings and loan rates.

    Race is still perceptual, as when a hoodie functions as synecdoche for threat and makes walking while black a capital crime. And the law remains crucial, as the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act demonstrates. We should oppose “stand your ground” laws that pervert self-defense doctrine, justifying lethal force by subjective fear rather than demonstrated responsibility for a life-threatening altercation; demand an end to long mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug offenses; and oppose constrictive voter I.D. laws.

    When freedom is confused with equality and diversity confused with justice, however, conservatives can assume that racism is in the past because of a Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, a Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice in the cabinet, or a black as McDonald’s CEO. The same confusion of diversity for justice allows liberals enamored of progress in symbolic representation to ignore how Obama’s team and policies favor Wall Street, blaming his shortcomings wholly on Republican nullifiers.

    There is still a color to money. Black homeowners were most fleeced by subprime mortgages, and black unemployment is double the national rate. Blacks are far more likely than whites to have a negative net worth. Blacks, along with Latinos, fall disproportionately among the working poor. A diversity ethic correlates with globalized capitalism, wary of offending any market segment, but it has primarily opened a narrow set of opportunities at the top, creating a black 1 percent ensconced in boardrooms and country clubs that encounters the underclass rarely, if at all.

    While supersession of neoliberalism is not on the agenda any time soon, better apprehension of its race and class terrain might spur fresh thinking about how to parry inequality. At least it should help to rule out two kinds of one-sidedness endemic on the left. The first reduces race to economics and emphasizes class solutions exclusively, like those who speak of “the trouble with diversity” or see only fragmentation in identity politics. The obverse embraces black leadership as progressive regardless of whether its programs serve corporate interests. Both are limited by partiality given a system with coordinates of class and race.

    Our politics must combine race with class, just as reality does. We might begin by brainstorming inventive race-class demands. A Robin Hood tax on all financial transactions, for example, might be used not only to reduce financial speculation but to make possible zero-interest loans for building health clinics, food co-ops, and the like in black-majority areas (or barrios or Indian reservations). Stringent fines on polluters might be allocated to funds for creating green spaces and self-managed organic farms in current urban wastelands. Banks and corporations whose profits derived from slavery might be pushed to atone by giving grants to shore up underfunded municipal pension plans for public workers, since cities and public sector workforces have higher concentrations of people of color and their pension plans support urban economies.

    We face a social system, not merely a set of attitudes. Redress will not come from good will alone, but from an erosion of the material foundations of bigotry. We need a contemporary theory and practice—not abolitionist, not “civil rights,” but suited to our day. Equality and justice are freedom’s prerequisites. To rescue the dream from descent into nightmare requires nothing less than social reconstruction.

     

    Christopher Phelps teaches American Studies at the University of Nottingham. This article first appeared on the website of Dissent. Thanks to Chris Phelps and Dissent for permission to repost.

     

  • Giroux on the War on the Young

    Review of Henry A. Giroux, America's Education Deficit and the War on Youth, Monthly Review Press, 2013.

    Henry Giroux is a key figure in the critical pedagogy movement, editor of the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies with his wife Susan Searls Giroux, and a prolific writer, speaker and public intellectual.  His on-going column for Truthout – from which most of the contents of this book are pulled together with some enhancements – has proved essential reading for educators and students during the latest financial crisis.  Giroux has argued tirelessly and passionately that with the rise of market fundamentalism and the ensuing economic and financial meltdown youth are facing a crisis unlike that of any other generation. 

    There is an awful lot to contemplate here but all is relevant and compelling, making this an excellent introduction to the author's general project [1] and an especially fine choice for a study group.  From the opening sentence, Giroux positions his argument to a broad audience, appealing to those who would side with “democracy” against the “corporate- and state-sponsored assaults.”  “As a right-wing juggernaut attempts relentlessly to destroy the social state, worker protections, unions, and civil liberties, it is easy to forget that a much less visible attack is being waged on young people, and especially on public schools and the possibility of critical forms of teaching.” (130) 

    For the most part these are purposeful occasional pieces that piggy-back off the latest tragedy in order to repeat a set of prepared diagrams that remain a little short on immediate prescriptions.  Perhaps as a mark of respect for the Occupy movement's resistance to demands (see chapters 7 and 8), the 'programmatic' content is largely reserved for the ninth chapter. Titled 'Neoliberalism's War against Teachers in Dark Times: Rethinking the Sandy Hook Elementary School Killings,' here Giroux excels in precise cultural critique, also exemplified by Chapter 3's focus on U.S. popular culture and military-like values, where the argument that a general acceptance of violence pervades everything that children learn well into adulthood proves most compelling.  While strong on the subject of violence, one wants to hear more substantial ruminations about the context of fear that has made academic repression expand under the Obama regime. [2] Giroux's target remains those social relations that promote material and symbolic violence and the message is clear that any education system decided by the capitalist process cannot address basic human needs or foster broad-based prosperity.

    While among the better essays to read 'around' the topic, Chapter 4's analysis media representations of the tragic death of Trayvon Martin does not perhaps go far enough in honing in on the case at hand or tying its points back to the main thread of the collection.  This said, it does perform a fine structural analysis of the US’s national stereotypical obsession with nihilism as being endemic to black youth culture.  Chapter 5 pans back out in order to explore the “suicidal state” where “the government works systematically to disenfranchise its own youth, thus attacking the very elements of a society that allow it to reproduce itself,” (24) though a more thorough analysis of the role women necessarily play in this process is absent in the short overview. [3]

    The lack of more in-depth analysis and reflection on concepts reveals the limitations of the 'op. ed.' style used for the purpose of these pieces original publication. [4] Chapter 7 exposes some of the 'disappearing acts' of corporate-funded, anti-public intellectuals who erect walls around knowledge, while simultaneously rendering invisible disadvantaged populations who are deserving of compassion and social protections.  But more could be said, in terms of 'ideological critique', about how these gated intellectuals, often abetted by the dominant media, use privilege and ideological narrowness to divorce themselves from understanding the systemic elements that contribute to social and economic injustice. 

    Despite an annoying non-European habit of associating “authoritarianism,” “fascism” and “proto-fascism” with anything that thwarts democracy (this, despite his own repeated warnings to avoid such a crude binary logic), Giroux generally produces a hopeful tone that nonetheless respects Noam Chomsky's repeated warnings of creeping American fascist gloom.  The result is a level of righteous discourse that on some occasions is pitched just short of exaggeration, able to match adversaries in the 'fire and ire' department. [5] 

    There are moments where his otherwise finely-honed passionate rhetoric spills over into the kind of apocalyptic anger familiar to readers of his fellow Truthout columnist, Chris Hedges, with whom he shares a hint of cultural reductionism with the slightly-snobbish, certainly bourgeois idea of America as “a culture of [largely civic] illiteracy” and a corresponding lack of appreciation for how consumers of popular culture and mass media are able to disagree with and subvert the message-as-massage.  Still, you can't argue with the book's opening salvo: “it appears that the nation has entered a new and more ruthless historical era, marked by a growing disinvestment in the social state, public institutions, and civic morality.” (9) 

    Acutely aware that the failure and fraudulence of Obama-led liberalism has opened a door for the like of the loony fringe Republicans and Randroids, Giroux saves one of his scathing critiques for the libertarian-Right's “theocratic economic fundamentalist ideology” that “destroys any viable notion of civic virtue in which the social contract and common good provide the basis for creating meaningful social bonds and instilling in citizens a sense of social and civic responsibility.  The idea of public service is viewed with disdain just as the work of individuals, social groups, and institutions that benefit the citizenry at large are held in contempt.” (12)  The ideas of science and language, as vehicles for truth, are also viewed with disdain, leaving us with a President well-versed in double-speak who claims he wants to reduce the deficit but instead spends billions on the defence industry and wars abroad.

    In conclusion, Giroux has written one of those explosive little books that might spur you to buying multiple copies in order to leave on the bus or on the coffee table in the office or teachers' lounge.  His description of an as-yet uneducated America provides one of the most passionate and convincing cases to deepen and develop the anti-capitalist preconditions for a politically engaged and engaging democracy.  “Pedagogy in this sense becomes central to any substantive notion of politics and must be viewed as a crucial element of organized resistance and collective struggles.” (18) 

    Notes

    1. The reader will find the same themes treated in more detail in Giroux's other collections: Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (2008), Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (2009) and Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (2011).  Giroux's choice of titles are as subtle as a sledgehammer and the repetitious content of these books serves to highlight how little has changed following the victory of Wall Street's hopes for its candidate.  “[T]he same people who gave us the economic recession of 2008, lost billions in corrupt trading practices, and sold fraudulent mortgages to millions of homeowners have ironically become sources of wisdom and insight regarding how young people should be educated.” (161)

    2. Giroux takes up Obama’s educational failures in Henry A. Giroux (2010), Politics After Hope: Obama and the Politics of Youth, Race, and Democracy. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

    3. Giroux emphasises notions of masculinity in crisis that are produced through gruesome revelling in gun culture, constant bombardments of hyper-competitive sports, US commitments to military aggression and massive Pentagon spending, and blood filled spectacles of militarism. He is conspicuously short on advice for parents and barely scratches the surface of the fundamental role that universal child-care and young women's education will have to play in any coming democratic society.

    4. One wants to know why Giroux sees some concepts, such as 'common sense' (by which he means Gramsci's “forma mentis”) and 'the market' as irredeemable, while others like 'common deliberation' or 'the public sphere' are unconditionally worth saving and not subject to critical examination (e.g. we must ask Who can speak in this public sphere?  How will it be different from the old liberal-bourgeois public sphere?).  To be fair, he does elaborate on this privileging of terms in previous works but readers new to his oeuvre may feel disorientation by the self-assured, slightly testy manner in which he wields his overworked keywords.  (It's high time we had a Giroux Glossary compiled and posted online.)  We must also commend his urgent and necessary efforts to call the subaltern elements’ attention to the tensions and possibilities within popular – 'mainstream' – common sense, and to the social implications and the political ramifications that these possibilities can bring.  Paine and Gramsci united at last!

    5.  He writes with the indirect voice of experience, having spent considerable time on U.S. campus environments where he witnessed first-hand some of the situations resulting from the general culture he describes.  Both Giroux and his one-time close colleague at Miami University, Oxford-Ohio, Peter McLaren, have been subject to harassment and intimidation, both on- and off-campus, from those willing to represent them as posing a threat to national security.  Giroux currently holds the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Ontario.

     

    Dick Dunbar is an unemployed educator in the U.S. of A.  This review is dedicated to his step-children, who are their own writing of radical hope.

  • How (not) to push back on the power elite's destruction of public education

         A former PR apparatchik in the US Dept. of Education (DOE) in Obama’s first term, Paul Cunningham, has penned a snarky attack on Diane Ravitch, the best known liberal opponent of the bipartisan “reforms” of public education that are destroying it.

    Beyond revealing that the DOE “monitors criticism” Cunningham’s “rant” is fairly dull. However, what’s worth noting is that he tries to cast Ravitch as someone who doesn’t care about inequality in schools because she says that not all kids should have to attend college. 

         Ravitch’s point is one I made in an article outlining a program for progressive education reform, but I argue we have to make sure that as a society we maintain options for people to enroll in free, quality public higher education when they mature and/or want it. Many years ago, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) created such a proposal, modeled on Medicare. (AFT dropped the program, fast.) We also have to create good-paying jobs that allow kids who aren’t interested in academics to support themselves and their families.

         One trope of the White progressive pushback has been that there was no crisis in education until the most recent wave of corporate school reform. That argument won’t cut it with parents and community who couldn’t find a local school they trusted, whose kids were told by counselors that they weren’t college material.  While teachers cannot be held responsible for the structural inequality in schools, well-documented by a generation of sociologists and anthropologists, we must start our critique by acknowledging that many public schools did not serve poor kids of color well. Inequality has been exploited by powerful elites who aim to marketize public education, eliminate democratic oversight, turn teaching into contract labor, and destroy teachers unions (perhaps allowing them to remain as dues-collectors but without any clout.) To defeat them we must be forthright that there was no “golden age” to which we can return. Unequal schools are imbedded in an unequal society, and we have to face that uncomfortable (for liberals) reality.

         We are finally starting to see democratic stirrings within the teachers unions, inspired by events in Chicago. Reformers gathered in early August in Chicago to strategize about transforming the unions. The President of the National Union of Teachers in the UK, which this autumn will hold a joint national strike with the second largest UK teachers union, spoke to the group. Together these unions represent the vast majority of UK teachers. We’re finally seeing formation of a new global network of teacher union activists. Bravo! (I’ll discuss this in my Labor Day article in The Jacobin.)

         Another promising development is Barbara Madeloni’s campaign for President of the Mass. Teachers Association, the state affiliate of the National Education Association. She is using the campaign to spark formation of a caucus of members to create a social movement union. They have a great program. I’ve made my check to the campaign (payable to The Committee to Elect Barbara Madeloni) and mailed it to The Committee to Elect Barbara Madeloni, 43 Munroe Street, Northampton, MA 01060. I hope you do the same.

         You can follow me on teaching, schools, and education on twitter , Facebook, as well as my blog at New Politics. Look for that new piece in The Jacobin, on Labor Day.

     

  • Fighting the Landlords from Stuy-Town to Detroit

    Books reviewed:

    Charles V. Bagli, Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made (Dutton, 2013).

    Laura Gottesdiener, A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home (Zuccotti Park Press, 2013).

    In October 2006, the New York City-based real estate firm Tishman Speyer won the right to pay $5.4 billion for the sprawling Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village complex on Manhattan’s East Side, where more than 11,000 apartments — then mostly rent-stabilized — housed more than 25,000 residents. Add $240 million in acquisition costs and $650 million in reserve funds for contingencies and the total $6.3 billion cost for the iconic near-waterfront property was the biggest residential fish ever landed. The price alone made it a trophy, and the bidding war that took place for the property offers a prime example of the Grand Casino temper that pervaded the real estate industry on the eve of the Great Recession.

    The sale also illuminates the risks to existing tenants of a threatened conversion of affordable housing to market rates. On top of that, it underscores the dangerous absence of a sane national housing policy in a context where homelessness is rife and even middle-income renting tenants — the schoolteachers, nurses, police, firefighters, young families and the elderly who traditionally populated the complex — are at risk.

    Within 18 months of the purchase, the complex’s value had plummeted by half and Tishman Speyer was paying more on mortgage repayment that it was receiving from rents. After eating through its reserve funds by January 2010, Tishman Speyer defaulted on the mortgage, making it the largest commercial mortgage default in U.S. history. It avoided bankruptcy by handing the complex to its creditors, and in the process, lost nothing.

    Bagli Other People's MoneyAs New York Times reporter Charles V. Bagli writes in Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made, it was what the trade calls OPM, or other’s people’s money, that was lost, mostly in investments from pension funds that were then bundled and sold as mortgage-linked securities. With many mortgages shaky, these securities made for a toxic stew, and that practice nationwide fed the housing collapse and the onset of the Great Recession in late 2007. Bagli’s book is key not only in charting the decline of middle-income housing in New York City, but also for laying bare how shabbily the real estate game is played and how socially irresponsible the players are.

    The deal, as Bagli shows in detail in this example of the still-fresh utility of long-form journalism, could only have worked through another trade slogan: “aggressive management.” That would mean evicting rent-subsidized tenants, who were ostensibly subletting illegally but were in many cases the legitimate renters, and turning the property into market-rate housing. Building towers on the green spaces, themselves among the complex’s signatures, was another part of the plan.

    But among the impediments to the grand scheme was a strong tenants association. Add to that the dubiousness of marketing the complex — which lacks doormen, and for the Stuyvesant Town component, two-bathroom apartments — as luxury rentals. It also presupposed no interruption in the then-booming housing market.

    As Bagli writes, “Wall Street lenders were willing to lend 70, 80, even 90 percent of the property’s value, making a bet that the real estate boom would continue. The change in approach on underwriting fueled a surge in prices. Why not? The mortgages quickly dropped off their balance sheets, after being combined with other loans into a security and sold to other investors. On the first day a new landlord took over [the complex] the rental income wouldn’t even cover the debt service. But buyers, lenders and investors imagined that revenues would increase quickly in an ever-rising market.”

    When in October 2009, the state Court of Appeals ruled in a lawsuit initiated by the tenants that MetLife, the seller of the complex, and its new owners were double-dipping by charging market-rate rents for thousands of apartments while taking special tax breaks from a city housing program meant to keep rents affordable, Tishman Speyer walked away from the properties.

    With the complex under new management and efforts by the tenants association to buy the property underway, the tenants are secure for the moment. However, the underlying problem of debt outstripping rental income remains.

    While Bagli mostly focuses on the big players in the housing market, Laura Gottesdiener writes in A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home about the grassroots side of it. Focusing on the epidemic of homelessness caused by the ruin of formerly stable low-income communities through foreclosures, evictions, gentrification and the leveling of public housing, she pays specific attention to four families in Sanford, N.C., Chattanooga, Tenn., Detroit, Mich. and Chicago, Ill. The latter is the scene of a burgeoning anti-eviction movement.

    Gottesdiener, Dream ForeclosedWhile her case studies may seem different from Bagli’s, the context is the same. Gottesdiener’s is a wrenchingly effective and brilliantly informed tone poem — one only awaiting orchestration — about the consequences of the housing crisis on the poor, the psychic harm done to people without a home and the power that comes from fighting back. Where Bagli shows the systematic stupidity of those involved in the mammoth New York deal, Gottesdiener demonstrates the deceitfulness of the mortgage industry, its predatory lending practices and racial steering not only of property but of mortgage rates at a time when all levels of government are moving away from supporting — if not sabotaging — public housing.

    Like Bagli’s, Gottesdiener’s book is thoroughly researched, including extensive interviews and use of material from the invaluable Center for Responsible Lending. Unlike Bagli, she focuses on the families themselves and how they transformed from being powerless objects of a fraudulent system into active agents and even leaders in a series of fightbacks.

    With all of their rich detail, neither book is obviously prescriptive. While Bagli portrays the tenants' leaders and local officials — especially Councilmember Dan Garodnick, a lifelong Stuyvesant-Town Peter Cooper resident — as bullheadedly determined to give the tenants voice in any management decision, he leaves much of it at the level of voicing legitimate tenant dissatisfaction, including the well-founded suspicion that any improvements in the property would come at their expense. His recounting of the failed attempt to make a tenant-backed counteroffer and the ongoing push of activists to effect legislation and enforcement of strong rent-regulation laws is rich in detail. Yet it’s hard to find strategic lessons in his work, at least when the case is made so well that the impetus for the sale was in retrospect a kind of hubristic madness abetted by a feral political economy. In the best of circumstances, the sale’s success was a long shot, which Bagli masterfully shows.

    Gottesdiener, whose writing is informed by her commitments as an Occupy activist (the book is one of a handful of small works by the start-up Occupy-inspired Zuccotti Park Press) emphasizes “land reclamation” and direct action as the outcome of the work of those she profiles so well. She is better at imagining a just future in the corrupted present than in framing the mechanics of building those bridges to the future. These aren’t necessarily weaknesses in books by authors who cover their topics so well. Both lay excellent groundwork for readers and are plainly key texts for anyone looking to understand why housing in the United States is in crisis today and will likely continue absent mass upsurges for housing justice. It’s the strategic getting there that’s the tricky part.

     

    New Politics magazine's Michael Hirsch is a longtime labor and political writer and a resident of New York's Stuyvesant Town for more than two decades. The above first appeared in The Indypendent, #189, August 17, 2013.

     

  • Marot's October Revolution

    Review of John Eric Marot. The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History. Chicago: Haymarket, 2013.  References. Index. 274 pages. $28.00.

    Since the October Revolution of 1917, a great deal of writing about socialism has revolved around questions about the nature of that experience, some of the most important of which are: What was Lenin’s conception of the Bolshevik party and of the workers’ role in it and of their role in the making of the revolution? Was October 1917 a genuine workers’ revolution or a Boshevik coup? How did Stalin rise to power? and Why did Trotsky fail to stop him?

    The nine essays by John Eric Marot collected in his book The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History, now available for the first time in paperback, may be said to attempt to answer these questions. A Marxist historian of the Russian Revolution, Marot’s “interventions” as he calls them, tackle the issues by debating other historians who have addressed them and, in Marot’s view, failed to answer them. The first two essays that discuss Trotsky’s theory of the peasantry and Tony Cliff’s views of Trotsky—making up about 100 pages—will be most accessible to those general readers who come to the book as leftists; the other essays, were written for specialists in the field, and, though they are not without interest and importance for leftists, they will be hard going for some readers. Still, anyone who takes the time to read this book will learn a great deal about the historiography of the Russian Revolution and about the ideas and politics of its major figures.

    Rather than proceeding through the chapters in sequence, let me take up in order the questions I raised above, which have to be answered by moving almost backwards through the book, from the end to the front. Marot’s essays are detailed, precise, carefully argued, and based on the original sources in Russian and on the work of historians, most of whose writing is available in translation in English. My summaries of Marot’s essays here simply tries to capture the gist of his positions and present it clearly, recognizing that I fail to do justice the author’s carefully crafted arguments.

    First, Lenin. Marot (in Chapters six, seven, eight and nine) deals with Lenin principally in a series of essays about the Russian revolutionary leader’s differences of opinion with Alexander Bogdanov, another Bolshevik, the leader for a few years of a group called Vypered (Forward). Marot argues against other historians who he believes mistakenly have written that Lenin’s and Bogdanov’s differences arose either over the question of participating in elections to the Duma, the Russian parliament, or that they fell out over differences principally about philosophy. Conceding that there is reason for confusion about the former and some truth to the latter argument, Marot, however, argues that the two revolutionary’s differences were principally over politics, over the question of how workers come to be socialists fit to make a revolution.

    Bogdanov believed that workers were victims of the dominance of bourgeois culture that undermined their understanding and ability to act. To change that, Bogdanov believed, they would have to be educated in proletarian universities by socialist intellectuals. That is, for Bogdanov, socialist education and propaganda were all important and preceded action. Lenin on the other hand, after the Revolution of 1905, came to believe that through their own experience of the class struggle workers could arrive at a socialist consciousness. Socialist education and propaganda could help to clarify and solidify their evolving consciousness, but could not create it. What this debate makes clear is that for Lenin, workers should not operate under the tutelage of intellectuals, but rather could learn through their own experience and therefore become the agents of both the party and of the soviets that formed the basis for the revolution.

    I should note, since it forms such an important part of the Stalinist and capitalist characterization of Lenin, that Marot, following Alexander Rabinowitch, rejects the idea that Lenin created an authoritarian, undemocratic and conspiratorial party. In fact, he considers this question to have been resolved. As Marot writes in a footnote, “Thanks largely to Rabinowitch’s scrupulous scholarship, the open and deliberative character of the Bolshevik party in 1917, so controversial when Rabinowitch first broadcast it, is now widely accepted; convention, perhaps.” The Bolshevik Party (originally a tendency within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party)  had controversies and tendencies, debates and disputes, and Lenin sometimes lost those, though he often won them. First among equals, Lenin was not a dictator in the often tumultuous Bolshevik Party.

    Marot does not deal in this section with what happened to the party after Lenin, but I would argue that while Lenin may have had an authoritarian streak, that flaw did not determine the character of the Bolshevik Party. The idea of the monolithic Bolshevik Party was the creation of Zinoviev’s “bolshevization” campaign launched at the Fifth Comintern Congress in July 1924, half a year after Lenin’s death. Stalin’s counter-revolution from roughly 1927-1937—with its purges of old Bolsheviks, its cohering of a new ruling elite, and its “Lenin levy” filling the party with new recruits—transformed that bolshevized workers’ party into the party of the new bureaucratic ruling class. Stalin’s Communist Party was an altogether different organization than Lenin’s in terms of its class character, its ideals, its organization, and its program.

    Second, on the question, October 1917: revolution or coup? (Marot takes this up in Chapters 4 and 5). The Cold War political historians of Russia, argued in the 1950s and 1960s, and John Keep argues today, that Lenin and the Bolshevik Party had manipulated the working class, carrying out a coup and then convincing or forcing the workers to accept it. Marot contends that the Russian social historians who began to write in the 1980s (such as Dianne Koenker, William Rosenberg, David Mandel, and Ronald Grigor Suny) have demonstrated beyond a doubt that the Russian workers had been fully involved in the labor and social movements and the upheavals that created the soviet and then made the revolution. He criticizes them, however, for creating a kind of teleological explanation, that is, for arguing that their lived conditions of exploitation and political oppression and their factory life experience led them to turn to Bolshevism almost automatically.

    Marot argues that the social historians have to take a page from the political historians, showing how workers made a choice for revolution. That, he contends, can only be done by showing how at various points of the process workers chose between rival political organizations and their programs. The October Revolution of 1917 was not a coup, but a genuine revolution, the end process of a series of political choices by workers that led them to choose Bolshevik leadership.

    On the third question of how Stalin came to power (taken up in Chapter 1), Marot makes an original argument, based on the methodology he learned, as he explains, from his teacher, Robert Brenner. His argument is based on the debate that took place over the nature of the post-revolutionary Russian peasantry.

    After Lenin died in 1924 several of the Bolshevik Party’s leaders—in a series of shifting relationships—contended for leadership, among them Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Trotsky. One can argue that Stalin won principally because the other failed to unite against him. And why was that? In particular, why couldn’t the two most likely leaders, Trotsky and Bukharin, unite?

    Marot’s answer is that the roots of the problem lay in Trotsky’s misunderstanding of the nature of the peasantry. (This is not the old Stalinist argument that Trotsky “underestimated” the peasantry.) Trotsky believed and feared that the peasantry was a proto-capitalist class, waiting only for encouragement from government policies to lead a full-scale resurgence of capitalism in Russia. But no, says Marot—following Brenner—peasants such as those in Russia tended to create a self-sufficient and non-commercial peasant economy and society, inimical to capitalism (as it was to socialism).

    So, because Trotsky failed to recognize this and believed the peasantry was proto-capitalist, he was extremely hostile to Bukharin whom he perceived as the representative of that proto-capitalist peasant class. Consequently, Trotsky disdained the idea of an alliance with Bukharin, the alliance that could potentially have blocked Stalin from coming to power. Unwilling to enter into that alliance, it was impossible for Trotsky to mobilize workers and peasants against  Stalin's dictatorship and his counter-revolution.

    Finally, why was Trotsky unable to lead a fight to unseat Stalin and remove him from power? (This is taken up in Chapter 2.) Here Marot debates Tony Cliff, founder and principal intellectual leader for many years of International Socialism (later the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain) and author of a four volume biography of Trotsky. Marot begins by expressing his admiration for Cliff’s attempt to carry out a sustained critique of Trotsky’s “substitutionist” politics (that is, substituting the Communist Party for the workers), a critique says Marot that is absent from the work of Isaac Deutscher, Ernest Mandel, Pierre Broué, or Max Shachtman.

    Marot agrees with Cliff that Trotsky had failed to recognize soon enough that the Russian Communist Party and the Third International were, in Cliff’s words, “dead for the purposes of revolution.” He also agrees with what Cliff describes as the central contradiction of Trotsky’s thinking in this period: “On the one hand the party was strangled by the bureaucracy, but on the other Trotsky was unwilling to call on social forces outside the party to combat bureaucracy.”

    Marot believes, however, that Cliff doesn’t take his analysis far enough. The real problem, says Marot, is that Trotsky failed to realize that the bureaucracy was “a social force with its own interests.” Trotsky thought that Stalin and his followers represented a vacillating center caught between those in the party fighting socialism on the one hand and those who consciously or unconsciously were supporting capitalism on the other.

    For Trotsky, socialism in Russia was embodied in nationalized property and its development. So when Stalin called for a state program of industrialization and for the collectivization of agriculture, Trotsky and his followers supported him; and when peasants and workers resisted those projects Trotsky refused to back them. Similarly, when Bukharin supported the continuation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) that had allowed restricted markets and small business, Trotsky opposed him as representing the tendency to capitalist restoration. Trotsky’s misunderstanding of the nature of Stalin’s politics tended ironically to drive him and his followers to offer it cover and support, while driving them away from other Communists with whom they might have resisted Stalin.

    These problems were compounded by Trotsky’s belief in “unitary, single-party rule.” He refused, for example, to support the early oppositions, such as the Workers’ Group that arose in 1923, and when they were persecuted, declined to speak out on their behalf. Marot summarizes: “First, the Left Opposition could not organize a struggle against the bureaucracy, since it did not see the bureaucracy as a ruling class in its own right. Second, it could not organize against Stalin’s program, since his program was to industrialize. Third, it could not organize on the issue of the Communist Party’s monopoly of political power, since Trotskyists still acknowledged it to be the vanguard of the working class….In light of the foregoing, the Left Opposition put itself in a very poor position to organize workers’ resistance to Stalin.” It was these positions, says Marot, that explain why so many Trotskyists including many of the most prominent ones—such as Preobrazhensky and Christian Rakovsky—went over to Stalin.

    Some Communists, such as V. Smirnov and T. Sapronov, leaders of the Democratic Centralists (Decists), had concluded that the Communist Party was not reformable because it represented the interests of a new ruling class. They called upon workers to resist Stalin’s policies and some lower level Trotskyists supported them, though the Trotskyist leadership condemned them and urged the Left Opposition not to call for political strikes against a “workers’ government.” Trotskyist opposed an emerging working class opposition to Stalin because that suggested the creation of a new and separate workers’ political party, an idea anathema to Trotsky and his followers at the time.

    I have to confess that before reading this book I had already come to conclusions similar to those of John Marot on all of the major issues he takes up. So this book did not so much provide me with new ideas and arguments as confirm me in my existing views. On only one point do I differ with Marot, and that is not an essential one. In dealing with the arguments between Lenin and Bogdanov, Marot enters into long discussions of Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The book is a response to the relatively new post-Newtonian physics which had introduced to the world notions such as “relativity” and generally shaken up earlier epistemological theories. Lenin responds to Ernst Mach and the Neo-Kantians with a defense of materialism that Marot defends as bending the stick in opposition to a resurgent idealism, but which I think—with its passive “photographic” theory of consciousness—is simply crude, unsophisticated, and utterly uninteresting and unconvincing. But that is a small point and not one essential to Marot’s arguments in general.

    In essence, this book is a defense of what is best in the Marxist tradition and in Lenin, and a powerful refutation of what is worst in Trotsky. I will keep it in my library.