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  • Yes, We Can

    Continental CrucibleWe hoped that our book, Continental Crucible, would open up a discussion of the future of the North American Left and labor movement, a discussion that is urgent in the face of the relentless capitalist offensive of the last forty years. Dan La Botz’s generous, thoughtful, and critical review of our book, Continental Crucible, advances that discussion in important ways and we hope that others will join in the discussion. We argue that workers’ struggles, while remaining grounded locally, need to simultaneously expand their geographical terrains to match those of capital, that these struggles must move beyond sectionalism and economism towards class-wide, anti-racist, feminist, inclusive, internationalist and transformational goals and that unions themselves have to be transformed into participatory, democratic, and class-political organizations. These are daunting but unavoidable challenges that face the Left and the working class. We also argue that transformed unions—and certainly not unions as they presently exist—are essential for any effective challenge to the power of Capital.

    The absence of a significant revolutionary left in all three NAFTA countries creates a major obstacle to this necessary transformation of unions. But that is the unfortunate and difficult reality. The transformation of existing unions and the rebuilding of a revolutionary, non-sectarian left will have to proceed simultaneously if either is to be successful. But there is no other way to effectively challenge the rule of capital and its determination to level downward the working conditions, standards of living, and environmental conditions in all three countries, a determination consciously cultivated by the leading political organizations of the capitalist class in all three countries, as we discuss in Chapters 1-4.

    The mass protest movements that have erupted world-wide have, in general, lacked a consciously organized working class core with the ability to give the movement organizational solidity and political direction. The absence of this working class core speaks to the failure of the revolutionary left as well as the cooptation, corruption and sectional economism of much of the union movement. The labor movement has responded with ineffective, rearguard actions while the capitalist class has been transforming the system.

    The mass anti-neoliberal protest movements (the Quebec students, the Occupy movement in the US, the anti-media duopoly/electoral fraud youth movement in Mexico), can at best slow down the neoliberal offensive at certain points or win victories, albeit important, (tuition raise reversal in Quebec) that leave intact the power of capital to renew its offensive when these movements have ebbed in energy and organization. Only a solidly institutionalized movement based on the working class and with a left transformatory perspective can give solidity and durability to these movements of students, the middle sectors, and workers.

    We think that there’s basic agreement on these points. Our differences reside both in Dan’s pessimism and in some of his specific reading of our views. Where Dan seems to see relative hopelessness at this moment, we see possibilities, possibilities that face great obstacles, but possibilities nevertheless. There is a murmur of discontent in important sectors of all three countries that occasionally erupts in significant struggles. There have been important episodes of resistance, impressive but fragmented– the Oaxaca uprising of 2006, the resistance of miners in Mexico against great odds, the Madison insurgency, the Quebec student movement. Indeed, these encouraging episodes float in a sea of continuing defeats.  There are many good reasons for pessimism. But it’s crucial to cultivate the seeds of resistance—as Dan does in his practice—even in a historical moment of great defeats Popular discontent, even if not expressed in actions, is being  kept alive by the relentlessness of the capitalist offensive and the deliberate slamming shut of the doors of reform. There is a real potential for the emergence of radical, class-based struggles against the capitalist offensive but the path will not be easy. It will require the development of a non-sectarian radical left with a class struggle orientation.

    Before summing up our arguments, we’d like to explore three areas in which Dan presents critiques of our perspective on the current situation.  Dan argues that we “tend at times to exaggerate the existing level of struggle, to misunderstand the complexity of the situation of Mexican workers in the U.S., and to overestimate the likelihood of revolutionary developments in Mexico in the near future.” We’ll comment on these critiques one by one.

    1.  “Exaggerate existing level of struggle”

    The level of labor resistance to the capitalist offensive is at a nadir. The forty year assault by Capital and the short-sighted responses of labor have brought the union movement to an incredibly weak position. Our statement in the introduction that the clash between the capitalist offensive and the “forces of resistance” was heating up was a bit exaggerated—or premature, we hope.

    But, nevertheless, we are more optimistic than Dan about the potential for resistance. The most important reason for optimism is the very success of the capitalist offensive. In the last forty years, both in periods of economic expansion and economic crisis, the capitalist class has been successful in creating more inequality, more human suffering, more poverty, more environmental destruction alongside a consumerist ideology of higher living standards. The capitalist offensive will continue and workers will respond individually and collectively. The heterogeneity within the working class means that there will be a variety of responses that will vary in different moments and different contexts. Despair and feelings of personal failure will mingle with anger and rebelliousness not only in the class but in the minds of individual workers. The rebelliousness for some could turn into reactionary radicalization or class-conscious left radicalization. There is danger and opportunity.

    This “American (and Mexican and Canadian) Dream”—which has been a sustaining factor in capitalist domination as well as providing important underpinning for narrow, economistic unionism, is in process of destruction by the very success of the capitalist offensive. The despair that people feel will make them open to new alternatives. In the case of the U.S. and, to a lesser degree Canada, it could make sections of the working class open to right-wing, racist, anti-immigrant demagoguery. This alternative is very unlikely for the Mexican working class because of its different ethno-racial make-up and history of racial victimization in both Mexico and the U.S. as well as the very different character of Mexican popular culture.  But for Canada and the U.S., the absence of both a working-class oriented Left and class struggle unionism leaves the door open for a reactionary radicalization of the working class. But the despair felt by workers in all three countries only creates a potential for left radicalization of the working class. It requires ideological-political leadership to win over workers’ to the notions that their suffering is the result of capitalism and not of this or that political party or immigrants, definitions widely offered by sections of the media. The potential of left radicalization of the working class needs to be politically nurtured by the interconnected rebuilding of the Left with a working class orientation and the transformation of the labor movement in ways that we discuss and on which we all are in agreement.

    We are also more optimistic than Dan because of the surprising—and generally unexpected—insurgencies of recent years, insurgencies that have both been inspiring and at the same time, have contained severe limitations. We are in a period both of great working class defeats and massive popular insurgencies. These insurgencies nevertheless represent a re-entry throughout the world of the masses as political actors. They have (re)established a model of mass direct action as a model of struggle, a model that is crucial not only for the struggle against authoritarian institutions but also has pointed to a necessary alternative to the compromised politics of much of the electoral left. The Arab Spring, the Quebec student movement against tuition increases,  the 2012 Mexican movement against electoral fraud and the media, the Madison occupation, the Greek and other European fightbacks against the collective punishment of austerity, the Turkish uprising, and most recently the Brazilian mass insurgency. These insurgencies show the potential for the emergence of mass and unexpected resistance to neoliberalism, though these issues have been intertwined with or submerged within broader, more diverse, and sometime ambiguous demands. These insurgencies have inspired each other. While the cases of insurgency are very heterogeneous, we can suggest that the challenge is the same as mentioned above—the development of a Left with a class struggle and revolutionary perspective within these broad and diverse movements.

    The internal diversity of these movements has been both a strength in mobilizing vast and heterogeneous social sectors and a limitation in consolidating these movements or achieving social transformation. These movements, in general, have lacked leadership that could create cohesion and clear direction, a leadership with a mass of rank and file leaders within the movement. A radical working class movement could provide that leadership and the solidity of organizational structure within these diverse movements. But unions and the working class more broadly have lacked this seasoned base and transformational vision to play that role. Its absence has left many of these mobilizations subject to ideological cooptation and/or simply withering away. This argument, of course, would need qualification and greater specificity given the variety of cases.

    The labor movements in Canada, Mexico and the U.S., with their lack of transformational vision, their present politics, and their existing organization are not able to play this role. The limitations of the labor movement in Mexico have important differences with the limitations of unions in the U.S. but even the best unions in all three countries have limitations that derive from bureaucratization, sectionalism, and economism as well as from the intrinsic tensions of unions within capitalism, The necessity of bargaining within the system, even when your goal is to transform the system, creates dilemmas and tensions whose progressive resolution requires an overall vision of strategy and politics. But the economistic sectionalism which was successful for some sectors of the working class in the post WWII “golden age” of capitalism has proven totally inadequate to even defend those segments of the working class in this new period, let along the rest of the working class. In fact, this narrow form of economistic unionism has facilitated the playing off of sections of the working class against each other.

    We discuss these issues at length in Chapter 8 of our book in the sections, “The Limits of Presently Existing Unionism,” “The Limits of Presently Existing Solidarity,” and “Transforming Unionism, Transforming Solidarity, Transforming Society.” We argue that the working class is the necessary central backbone to any transformational struggle in all three NAFTA countries, all of which have a vast, if very heterogeneous, working class majority. We argue that unions cannot play a leading role in transformational struggles without transforming themselves. These limits of unions and the necessity of their transformation are a key part of our discussion, as Dan notes. This is why we agree with Dan’s pessimism about presently existing unionism and specifically about US-Canadian international unions as they now exist. But we maintain a cautious optimism that the relentless assault of capital and the models and embers of resistance provide a potential that could lead to a new workers’ movement. We argue that the larger unions in the U.S. and Canada have the organizational and financial wherewithal to play a key role in the development of a new workers’ movement in all of North America—though as currently constituted, they lack the politics and the will. An upsurge of   rank and file militancy is necessary to challenge these old structures and politics.

    1. “Misunderstand the complexity of Mexican workers in the US”

    Dan argues that our characterization of the protests of Latino immigrants lacks complexity and that we’re wrong to view them as having a radical character. He qualifies this critique by saying “if what we mean by radical is a challenge to the established economic, social and political order. Immigrants…were demanding…the right to participate in American society, not a fundamental change in American society.”  We would argue that, while the demands did not have an explicitly radical character, they nevertheless had—and have—a tacitly radical character. There are different potentials in the non-revolutionary demands of the immigrant movement. Reformist demands have radical and radicalizing potential if the system cannot grant them or, if their granting has the potential, to radicalize the struggle. The radical and radicalizing potential of demands lies not simply in the demand but in the context in which it is made. Just as with trade union struggles that can only achieve limited successes within capitalism, they have the potential to radicalize the working class movement in their course of struggle.

    There is great heterogeneity in the Latino community and some immigrants do achieve relative success, as Dan points out. However, the proportion of the immigrant community that is able to be successful has been sharply diminished by the structural changes to the economy brought about by the corporate offensive as compared to earlier generations of immigrants. The whole downward harmonization of the labor market has sharply decreased possibilities of mobility for immigrants as well as hopes for a better future for their children. And, yes, there is improvement in absolute poverty levels for many immigrants but that improvement comes at a very high human cost. While health and safety conditions for all workers have deteriorated, the greatest deterioration has been for those on the bottom end of the labor market where immigrants are concentrated. And the very act of migration is an act fueled by hope for a better life in the U.S. as well as desperation about possibilities at home. These raised expectations smack up against the reality of the neoliberal offensive. Raised expectations, disappointing realities, super-exploitative conditions, all create a potential for radicalization.

    The immigrant rights’ movement was a very broad movement and, as in all very broad movements, there is, of course, a struggle for hegemony in the movement between liberal, reformist forces, socially conservative forces, and left radical forces just as is the case with the broad insurgent movements mentioned above and the labor movement more broadly. And, as in those cases, the weakness of the Left is the Achilles heel of the struggle.

    1. “Overestimate the likelihood of revolutionary developments in Mexico in the near future”

    Mexico is not in a pre-revolutionary situation; it is in a deep organic crisis, a catastrophic equilibrium and an implosion and/or explosion of the regime is quite likely in the near future. In fact, it can be argued that an implosion is well underway and that an explosion may well be brewing under the surface, an explosion that may only emerge in fragmented ways and therefore be subject to containment, cooptation and defeat but also may spread. That implosion and/or explosion could lead to a variety of outcomes including a more brutal and more authoritarian regime and/or an intensified and more brutal internal war.

    We are more optimistic than Dan about the potential for a workers’ insurgency in Mexico in the coming period. There are numerous obstacles and problems but the continuing and now speeded-up neoliberal transformation of the economy as well as the continuing repression and denial of workers’ rights have closed off reformist solutions that, along with repression, have previously worked so well in 20th century Mexico. Contrary to the systematically promoted myth of an economic renaissance in Mexico, the economy continues in semi-stagnation with deteriorating standards of living for most of the population (Cypher 2013). The terrible and worsening reality for most of the Mexican population does not guarantee a workers’ insurgency but increases the potential for one.

    The weakness of the union movement as well as of the revolutionary left in Mexico does not preclude popular uprisings but makes their success more problematic. Again, the challenge is how to simultaneously rebuild a revolutionary left with a working class orientation and a workers’ movement, of which unions would be a key component. We also believe that radical traditions of popular insurgency and class struggle are still alive in important sectors of the working class in spite of their manipulation and abuse by the regime and the union officialdom. A renewed workers’ movement in Mexico will unavoidably clash with the very structure of the political regime as  the whole strategy of the regime is low wages and intensified worker exploitation based on repressive labor control. Workers, with rare exceptions, can only make significant and durable gains in organization, wages, and conditions by transforming the regime.

    A workers’ insurgency in Mexico, if at all successful, would immediately be attacked by both the Canadian and U.S. regimes. The imperial interventions as well as the insurgency itself would have popular reverberations among the vast Latino population of the U.S. An insurgent workers’ movement, even if contained or defeated, could have a big and radicalizing influence on the Mexican working class in the US, especially in the context of the continuing repression of unions and wage cutting in the US.

    We believe that a workers’ insurgency in Mexico could be the spark for a new wave of North American class struggle. But there is no guarantee that there will be a big wave of workers’ insurgency in Mexico or that it will have a wider continental impact. But there is a significant potential for a popular explosion in Mexico along the lines of ones that have recently occurred in other parts of the world. The example of Oaxaca 2006 though limited by its local character and tolerated by the national regime for tactical reasons for a period, shows how quickly the combination of militancy around trade union demands by the teachers’ of Oaxaca combined with repression by the regime to produce a genuine popular uprising that controlled Oaxaca City for five months (Roman and Velasco).

           Conclusion

    There are reasons to despair about the prospects for the workers’ movement and the Left in North America at the present moment. But there are also strong reasons for a cautious optimism. Both the obstacles in the way of a revival of the labor movement and the Left as well as the pressing necessity of such a revival—and transformation—are powerful. The challenges are enormous but not impossible. The labor movements of North America and the North American Left can be and must be revived and transformed. Yes, we can.

     

           References

    James M. Cypher, “Mexico: Prosperous, Competitive, Undergoing an Economic Renaissance?” in NACLA Report on the Americas, Summer 2013.

    Richard Roman and Edur Velasco, “Mexico’s Oaxaca Commune,” in Socialist Register 2008 (edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys).

     

  • Mexican President Proposes Opening State Oil Company To Private And Foreign Investment; U.S. Corporations Line Up To Return

    Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) have proposed constitutional changes and legislation that would for the first time since 1938 allow foreign companies to explore for and produce oil in Mexico. While this is not the full-scale privatization of the oil industry desired by conservative business interests in Mexico and by U.S. and other foreign oil companies, it is a big step toward opening up the industry in a country where the government’s ownership of the oil has been virtually sacrosanct. Even with these dramatic changes, the state-owned Mexican Petroleum Company (PEMEX) will, at least in theory, remain the dominant force in the Mexican oil industry. The oil industry proposal is also linked to opening up the electric power industry, and legislation on that will also be forthcoming from the president.

    The president, the PRI, and other parties argue that permitting private and foreign investment is necessary in order to fund the  industry’s modernization.  At the same time, Exxon, Chevron, and Royal Dutch Shell have expressed their interest in participating in the Mexican oil business. For some this will be a return to the oil fields that they once controlled 65 years ago, before Mexico nationalized the industry. One could say that the greatest achievement of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1940 is being reversed as profits from the country’s most precious resource will again flow into the coffers of U.S. corporations.

    A Clever Strategy

    Peña Nieto has cleverly positioned his party and his proposal, which calls for sharing profits with foreign companies,  midway between the conservative National Action Party (PAN), which has called for privatizing the company through the sale of shares or the granting of concessions, and the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which rejects any measures that would open the company to large-scale private and foreign investment. Andrés Manuel López Obrador who was the PRD’s second -place presidential candidate against Peña Nieto in 2012 and has since gone on to form his own political organization, the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA) also strongly opposes Peña Nieto’s proposal. Peña Nieto’s plan, which will radically transform the Mexican oil industry if it passes, thus appears to be the more moderate of the two alternatives now put before the Mexican Congress.  

    The president can expect to win enough support not only from his own PRI, but also from the PAN, and probably also from enough PRD legislators to pass the constitutional amendments and new laws that are needed to make his proposal a reality. The Green Ecologist Party (PVEM), which despite its name is a satellite of the PRI and not an authentic Green party, will also support the measure. The leftist Workers Party (PT) of Maoist origin and the middle-class Citizens Movement (MC), which together have only a few votes in Congress, are intransigent opponents who have called the idea of opening up the industry to private, foreign investors “treason.”

    Continuing the Neoliberal Trend

    The proposal of Peña Nieto continues the neoliberal policies initiated by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-94) who carried out the privatization of hundreds of the approximately 1,000 state-owned companies that existed when he came to office. Salinas sold off to private and foreign investors, among many other enterprises, the Mexican National Railroads to Southern Pacific and Kansas City railroads—and the Mexican Telephone Company (TELMEX) to a consortium comprising  Mexican magnate Carlos Slim, France Télécom, and Southwestern Bell Telephone. After Salinas, the drive to continued privatization stalled, largely because of the tremendous national sentiment in favor of retaining the country’s oil in the government’s hands and the existence of an organized movement against privatization.

    Why is Peña Nieto now in a position to procede with privatization where other PRI and PAN presidents have failed? First, Peña Nieto, as we have argued before, is on a roll. Even before becoming president, he succeeded in getting the major opposition parties to join his own in the “Pact for Mexico,” a political compact based principally on a series of political and economic reforms which he then moved ahead to pass. Since being elected president he has succeeded in passing a Labor Law Reform bill, an Education Reform bill, and then a highly contested Telecommunications Reform Bill. He jailed on charges of embezzlement the controversial labor and political leader Elba Esther Gordillo, the head of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE). He has also proposed to give pensions to all Mexican workers over 65 years of age, though that has yet to become a bill. These reforms and proposed reforms have been popular with large sections of the Mexican elite and middle class as well as with much of public at large, giving his administration tremendous momentum at this time.

    Second, the left opposition to privatization has suffered a series of defeats. The principal party with a nationalist economic program, the PRD, has seen its candidates Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and López Obrador go down to repeated defeats in national elections several times (though two of those defeats, one for Cárdenas in 1988 and one for López Obrador in 2006, may have been the result of fraud). The nationalist economic program has been rejected overwhelmingly by the voters.

    At the same time, the anti-privatization movement has suffered a defeat. The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) that headed up the National Front against Privatization was virtually destroyed by former President Felipe Calderón of the PAN when he used police and army troops to occupy the Mexican Electrical Company facilities, liquidated the company and fired 44,000 workers in 2009. With the SME preoccupied with fighting for the jobs of the 16,000 members who did not accept their severance, the front has been dormant. Calderón also persecuted Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, head of the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union (SNTMMRM), forcing him into exile in Canada while working with Grupo Mexico mine company to destroy the important union local at the Cananea Copper mine, thus keeping that union too preoccupied with defending itself and making it less likely to take up the privatization issue.

    Back to the Future

    Mexican oil was once in private hands, the very hands that today desire to return. Oil was first discovered and developed in Mexico in the period between 1900 and 1910. The two biggest figures in the industry at the time were the American Edward L. Doheny owner of the Huasteca and Mexican oil companies, and by the Englishman Weetman Pearson, Lord Cowdray, who created the Mexican Eagle Petroelum Company. Doheny sold his interest to the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and Lord Cowdray sold his to Royal Dutch Shell.

    So, by the 1920s Mexican oil was in the hands principally of those two and a number of other foreign oil companies. Mexican communities in the Faja de Oro, the Gold Belt along the Gulf Coast, feel aggrieved by the foreign companies because of the environmental damage they caused, while workers experienced intense exploitation and low wages, as well as segregation that kept them from moving into skilled or management positions. The country as a whole resented the fact that so many of Mexico’s natural mineral and petroleum resources as well as its industries and agricultural exports were in the hands of foreign capital, mostly American, English and French.

    The Nationalization of the Oil Industry

    The Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1940 was fought principally over the demand of the peasants for land taken from them over time by the great haciendas, but it was also a nationalist revolution against foreign ownership of the country’s resources and industries. In 1917, the Constitutionalist forces led by Venustiano Carranza called a convention at which the Constitution was rewritten. Article 27 of the new Constitution of 1917 stated that the nation owned the natural resources and held the power to expropriate them, though it required indemnification of the former private owners. President Plutarco Elías Calles ordered the foreign companies to register their properties and limited their concessions to 50 years, but under constant threat of invasion by the United States throughout the 1920s, Mexican leaders hesitated to act on their legal right  to nationalize until 1938.

    President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), taking advantage of the European War, finally acted to nationalize the oil industry on March 18, 1938, paying the foreign corporations on the basis of the low estimates of value they had earlier presented to justify their low tax payments. While Soviet Russia had earlier nationalized the Baku oilfields in 1918, Mexico’s was the first major Latin American nationalization of oil, followed later by Argentina in 1949, Brazil in 1953, and Venezuela in 1976. (Argentina had actually fisrt nationalized its oil fields and created a state oil company in the period of 1918-1922, but at that time its oil industry was not very significant.) )  

    The Power of PEMEX

    Mexico’s nationalized oil fields, pipelines, port facilities, and refineries were combined into the Mexican Petroleum Company (PEMEX) which came to be the largest and most important sector of the country’s economy for several decades. Only since the 1980s have manufacturing, tourism, and out-of-country workers’ remittances come to represent as large a proportion of the economy. PEMEX is today the world’s seventh largest oil concern. Some 70 percent of PEMEX profits are turned over to the Mexican government to meet its budget, making up one-third of the government’s entire revenues. Critics of Peña Nieto’s plan for private and foreign participation in the industry argue that if the government taxed the wealthy and the corporations appropriately it would not have to rely upon PEMEX; and that by taking the company’s revenues for government operating expenses, it has kept PEMEX from modernizing.

    PEMEX incomes and expenses have always been surrounded by mystery because the highly corrupt corporation has been such a source of embezzlement by politicians, government officials, labor union leaders, and organized crime. PEMEX collects dues for the corrupt and authoritarian Mexican Petroleum Workers Union (STPRM), lets contracts to the union, and makes other payments. Many union officials are involved as individuals in business deals with the company or its officials. Union officials sell union jobs to workers who also become beholden to the officials who hired them.

    The most famous recent case of PEMEX and STPRM corruption was Pemexgate, when the PRI illegally ordered the STPRM to support the presidential campaign of Francisco Labastida in 2000. Those accused were not found guilty of the most serious charges, though some were found guilty of electoral fraud; the PRI was fined US$90 million for its role. Company and union officials also work with criminal organizations that siphon petroleum out of the pipelines. How many hundreds of millions of dollars flow out of the oil fields and into the pockets of parasites all along the line may never be known, but the sums must be astronomical.

    Peña Nieto’s constitutional and legislative changes opening up Mexico’s oil industry to private and foreign investors will not solve the economic problems of the majority of Mexicans, but it will create an opportunity for a lot of business people in Mexico and in America of make money. As we wrote at the opening of this article, in a sense, the Mexican Revolution’s most historic achievement is being undone. The oil may still formally belong to all of Mexico, but its wealth will accumulate in a few hands there and in the U.S.

  • Statement from the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists on the Massacre in Cairo

    The bloody dissolution of the sit-ins in Al-Nahda Square and Raba'a al-Adawiyya is nothing but a massacre—prepared in advance. It aims to liquidate the Muslim Brotherhood. But, it is also part of a plan to liquidate the Egyptian Revolution and restore the military-police state of the Mubarak regime.

    The Revolutionary Socialists did not defend the regime of Mohamed Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood for a single day. We were always in the front ranks of the opposition to that criminal, failed regime which betrayed the goals of the Egyptian Revolution. It even protected the pillars of the Mubarak regime and its security apparatus, armed forces and corrupt businessmen. We strongly participated in the revolutionary wave of 30 June.

    Neither did we defend for a single day the sit-ins by the Brotherhood and their attempts to return Mursi to power.

    But we have to put the events of today in their context, which is the use of the military to smash up workers' strikes. We also see the appointment of new provincial governors—largely drawn from the ranks of the remnants of the old regime, the police and military generals. Then there are the policies of General Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi's government. It has adopted a road-map clearly hostile to the goals and demands of the Egyptian revolution, which are freedom, dignity and social justice.

    This is the context for the brutal massacre which the army and police are committing. It is a bloody dress rehearsal for the liquidation of the Egyptian Revolution. It aims to break the revolutionary will of all Egyptians who are claiming their rights, whether workers, poor, or revolutionary youth, by creating a state of terror.

    However, the reaction by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists in attacking Christians and their churches, is a sectarian crime which only serves the forces of counter-revolution. The filthy attempt to create a civil war, in which Egyptian Christians will fall victims to the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood, is one in which Mubarak's state and Al-Sisi are complicit, who have never for a single day defended the Copts and their churches.

    We stand firmly against Al-Sisi's massacres, and against his ugly attempt to abort the Egyptian Revolution. For today's massacre is the first step in the road towards counter-revolution. We stand with the same firmness against all assaults on Egypt's Christians and against the sectarian campaign which only serves the interests of Al-Sisi and his bloody project.

    Many who described themselves as liberals and leftists have betrayed the Egyptian Revolution, led by those who took part in Al-Sisi's government. They have sold the blood of the martyrs to whitewash the military and the counter-revolution. These people have blood on their hands.

    We, the Revolutionary Socialists, will never deviate for an instant from the path of the Egyptian Revolution. We will never compromise on the rights of the revolutionary martyrs and their pure blood: those who fell confronting Mubarak, those who fell confronting the Military Council, those who fell confronting Mursi's regime, and those who fall now confronting Al-Sisi and his dogs.

    Down with military rule!
    No the return of the old regime!
    No to the return of the Brotherhood!
    All power and wealth to the people

    The Revolutionary Socialists
    14 August 2013

    revsoc.me/statement/ysqt-hkm-lskr-ysqt-lsysy-qyd-lthwr-lmdd

     

  • A (Tiny) Treatise on Human Nature

    In the left-academic circles in which I travel, the March release of Vivek Chibber’s book-length critique of Subaltern Studies caused quite a stir. Chibber debated one of his antagonists, Partha Chatterjee, at a plenary session of the Historical Materialism conference in May, a confrontation which provided endless fodder for debates on FB and within the Left blogosphere. For two examples, see Kafila.org’s coverage (make sure to read the comments section), and the debate between Chris Taylor and Paul Heideman.

    There’s no doubt that, at times, some of this can be discouragingly parochial — intelligible only, perhaps, to people who’ve spent far too long with the relevant texts. This is exacerbated by some academics’ habit of speaking in tongues. As Derrida was reported to have confessed, sometimes the ruling maxim is that you don’t understand something unless you can’t be understood while explaining it.

    Nonetheless, Chibber’s long interview in the most recent issue of Jacobin showed that there are real issues at stake, here. The debate has the virtue of demanding clarity from Marxists about Marxism’s fundamentals: what we argue about human nature and thus the premises on which we rest our theory of history, how we make sense of the heterogenous development of capitalism around the world, how we understand divisions within the working-class, and much, much more.

    Below, I’ve posted an excerpt from my own review of Chibber’s work—the full piece is available at the Pakistani webzine, Viewpoint. The review covers many of the mentioned issues in some detail, but I’d like to note a few things about the argument about human nature, a dispute which took center-stage in the HM debate between Chibber and Chatterjee.

    Chibber, as I write in the review, argues that Marxism’s theory of historical change makes little sense unless one presumes an unchanging, ‘transhistorical’ core to human constitutions (i.e., a human nature). Marxists hold that the particular ways in which agents are arrayed with productive resources (peasants with usufruct rights to land versus proletarians with nothing to lose but their chains, say) shape the laws of motion of the social formation they comprise (feudalism versus capitalism). But this can only be true if these agents behave in predictable ways, across space and time. In short: without claims about invariant human drives, our theory of history flounders.

    If left at this, though, one might not think the issue merits the hubbub it has inspired. Why should your non-academic take any interest, if all that’s at stake is the internal consistency of this or that tweed-clad academic’s account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism?

    But there’s more to this debate than meets the eye. At stake in this tussle are also, I think, intrinsically political questions of how one makes sense of socialization (i.e., the process by which individuals come to accept certain norms, and reject others). Arguments like Chibber’s, which attributes to humans a ubiquitous interest in securing the satisfaction of our basic needs, suggests that, in effect, socialization can’t go ‘all the way down.’ Norms incompatible with the struggle for one's daily bread will be resisted and re-shaped. This is, to make it explicit, the kernel of the Marxist defense of materialism. Life shapes consciousness, and not consciousness life.

    One moment during the question and answer session at the HM plenary attests to the significance of this point. Chatterjee made an off-hand remark about the recent spate of farmer suicides in India. Suggesting that comparable levels of indebtedness in ‘Western history’ have inspired revolt, he concluded that the absence of such resistance in India must have something to do with the content of peasant culture.

    Those familiar with his work will notice that his argument here draws on larger claims about peasant consciousness in Indian history–that, pithily put, socialisation meets with no limits. There, he argues that it's only in cultures that celebrate individuals that one finds agents committed to the defense of their individual interests. In those places not (yet) steeped in the values of the self-regarding bourgeois, agents are composed of different stuff altogether. They are liable to put communities, elders, and/or the spiritual before themselves.

    Now, in other contexts, related arguments meet with the ire of progressives. In debates about Chatterjee's claim, I referred to the parallels with rants attributing suicide bombing to Palestinian culture, so consider a different case: Bill O'Reily's bilious harangues about Black culture. His tired, predictable thesis–that black culture encourages violence, discourages endeavour, fractures families, etc.–is, of course, an attempt to dress the political economy of white supremacy in the blind, happy tropes of Horatio Alger groupthink. But when we, as progressives, recoil, we summon certain convictions about human behaviour about which we may or may not be aware.

    The counter-arguments take two forms: those that deny the premise, and those that explain it away. First, norms glorifying violence aren’t at all unique to African American communities, and are anyway far more frowned upon than embraced; and norms discouraging enterprise don’t really exist. These are lullabies the wealthy feed themselves about the poor and the disenfranchised in every society, at all times.

    But on the assumption that less-exaggerated differences do exist, the argument from culture obviously inverts cause and effect. As Stephen Steinberg writes in a must-read review of the return to academic fashion of ‘culture of poverty’ arguments, critics do not always “deny that the culture of poor people is often markedly at variance with the cultural norms… in more privileged sectors of society. How could it be otherwise? The key point of contention [is] whether, under conditions of prolonged poverty, those cultural adaptations ‘assume a life of their own.’” Children don’t bear these norms as hand-me-downs from their parents, Steinberg insists, but because “'the son goes out and independently experiences the same failures, in the same areas, and for much the same reasons as his father.’”

    And critically, the argument continues with a counterfactual. Were available jobs remunerative and plentiful, the reigning culture would be readily cast aside—something progressives can argue precisely because we model modal behaviour on the assumption that people, everywhere, are animated by a more or less stable set of needs, a drive which trumps whatever cultural rationalizations their milieu might produce.

    Note, also, that arguments like Chatterjee’s don’t really have the intellectual resources to make sense of social change. As many an undergrad in my intro sociology classes has observed, this problem bedevils all theories that see agents as nothing more than the repository of the norms they inherit or the structures they inhabit: how do agents transform a world that makes them entirely in its image? How could quiescence ever become resistance?

    Well, if we agree that people aren’t ever disabused of these drives to safeguard their livelihoods and their autonomy, norms are understood to go only so deep. On this model, quiescence in the face of obvious injustice is better understood as an index of the implausibility of resistance, rather than the swallowing whole of ruling norms. Revolt is precluded by the fact that the opposition is too strong, and/or our side too weak. And thus movements emerge not when norms change, but when the broader environment weakens one’s enemies and strengthens one’s allies. So, the Civil Rights movement arose not because young men and women opted, one day, to no longer accept the rationalizations of the Southern power structure (after all, if that’s the argument, what changed?), but because the transformation of the cotton economy led to the migration of masses of black people to Southern and Northern cities, in turn endowing them with the organizational resources to fight back. Which they promptly and heroically did.

    There is, of course, always much more to say. Socialization is certainly more complicated than the simple reproduction of ruling-class ideas. But caveats aside, this is the primary dividend of this postulate about an invariant human nature: it anchors the materalist theory of history and historical change.

    This disagreement about human nature extends, also, to the normative justification of our political project. We are, of course, outraged by institutions that deny to individuals the right to live free and full lives. But why? Obviously because something essential and common to all humanity, we think, is being stifled in a world in which not everyone has enough to eat, and in which the vast majority lack meaningful autonomy over their lives. Yet if, as Chatterjee would have it, Sanjay is constituted entirely by the injunctions of his elders, it would be difficult to protest, say, their decision to flog him for absconding with the love of his life. He has to care about his individual interests for us to be incensed by their non-satisfaction.

    In the HM debate, Chatterjee responded to this point with some jibes about the larger, contractarian tradition of political philosophy with which he associated it. His argument was unclear, but the implication was straightforwardly mistaken: that because these premises are shared by people on the other side of the barricades, we are obligated to reject them. Arguments about individuals, invariant constitutions, and the priority of individual interests can of course sanction visions we reject, but this is a battle over the additional postulates that elaborate the content of justice. I challenge anyone to develop a way of thinking about what’s just that doesn’t take the interests of individuals (and thus, assumptions about the transhistorical existence of these interests) as its starting-point. Toss the bath water, sure, but you can’t do without the baby.

    There’s more to say about this, too, but I’ll save it for a future post. A relevant portion of my review of Chibber’s book is posted below.

    …Recall the second of Subaltern Studies' arguments about the bourgeois revolutions. What these were understood to have transformed, in Europe, was not just property arrangements and the political order, but agents' world-view. Because the bourgeoisie abandoned its tasks in India, the individualism that is the hallmark of bourgeois ideology never seeped into Indian culture. Put differently, bourgeois heroism in the West explained why Westerners are individuals before they're anything else; bourgeois timidity in India explained why brown people are community-oriented, first and foremost. On the terms of their argument, showing the bourgeoisie were never heroic invites confusion.

    This is where Chibber's book is at its most important. Against the thesis that Western subalterns are made of different stuff, Chibber argues that human beings are, at their core, not that different across contexts. The winds of history and culture may change many things, but human constitutions do not. His defense of this argument sets the stage for what, in my opinion, is the most deliberate, careful explication of the key tenets of historical materialism that I have read.

    This argument is that humans, everywhere, take an interest in defending their well-being and their dignity. Chibber offers three reasons to believe this (though he doesn't say this explicitly). First, it's an entirely reasonable assertion about (gasp) human nature. Second, it seem inductively true–everywhere we look, people seem to act accordingly, when they're able. In one of the most gratifying parts of the book, Chibber shows that the evidence Partha Chatterjee advances to prove Indian peasants' non-bourgeois socialization actually illustrates the tenacity of individual interest. And third, it can be derived from another postulate about humans in society: namely, that individuals have to secure a basket of necessities if they're to survive, one day to the next. So, while it's undoubtedly true that individuals can assimilate all sorts of norms and injunctions, to the extent that this socialization interferes with the task of surviving to fight another day, it will have to be resisted. If it isn’t, the agent who bears these norms (and thus these norms themselves) won’t live on. All cultures have to accommodate themselves to this constraint.

    In the debates that have followed this book's release, I've been struck by how much this argument seems to have bothered Chibber's antagonists. I can only interpret the anxiety as an index of the left's confusion. That claims about human behavior across time and space can trigger mass palpitation in a tradition that brought us 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle' is a sad sign. A Marxist without transhistorical commitments is a bit like the Pope in a world without God–feel free to go through the motions, but forgive the rest of us if we can't take you very seriously.

    Some have perhaps confused Chibber’s argument with the flagship postulate of neoclassical economics–that humans, everywhere and always, are utility-maximizers. But whatever we think of that argument (and I agree it's a stretch, though it's hardly the most unconscionable thing they’ve ever said), it is not Chibber's. To argue that individuals seek to maintain a basic level of well-being and defend it against attacks is a much weaker wager.

    Nonetheless, what follows from this claim about human nature is actually quite profound. For if it's the case that individuals everywhere can be expected to behave in ways broadly consonant with a defense of their well-being, important aspects of their behaviour become explicable. Not everything, let me stress–historical materialism doesn’t explain the sex appeal of skinny jeans. But the Marxist argument is that it explains much of what strikes us as politically and morally relevant, as revolutionaries: the pace of productivity improvements, the distribution of resources, the allocation of capacities with which to fight that distribution, the broad patterns of political contestation, the sorts of ideas that will circulate and thrive (more on this soon), etc. An excellent example of this approach is Robert Brenner's work on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, to which Chibber's debt is clear. Distinct social relations yield distinct 'rules of reproduction' for individuals, Brenner argues, which aggregate to explain distinct developmental trajectories.

    This, then, is Marxism: an approach which is unabashed in its use of universalizing categories, which grounds this universalism in transhistorical expectations about individual agents, and which does it all for a good reason. It might well be possible that others have mounted as explicit and watertight a defense of its orienting propositions as Chibber has, in this book. My only claim is that, in several years of amateur Marxism and four years of graduate school, I have yet to come across them…

  • A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

    Book Review of Stuart Easterling. The Mexican Revolution: A Short History, 1910-1920. Chicago: Haymarket, 2012. Ilustrations. Chronology. Index. Notes. 167 pp.

    The Mexican Revolution—dated variously from 1910 to 1920 or from 1906 – 1940—was an enormous, long, and complicated series of events encompassing conflicts between a dictator and those who wanted democracy, between landlords and peasants and between factory owners and workers, as well as involving shifting alliances between rival revolutionary bands. We have all heard some of the names of the most famous revolutionary leaders—Francisco Madero, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza, and Álvaro Obregón—though the forces they represented and the programs they fought for may have eluded us. While beginning in northern Mexico, the revolution eventually spread throughout the country as armies of tens of thousands clashed, leaving one million dead while another million migrated to the United States. The great upheaval swept away the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and los científicos, the small coterie of hacienda owners, industrialists and professionals who surrounded him, together with the crony capitalism that they had created. Out of the revolution rose a new elite of revolutionary generals who through their populist program and reforms won the support of peasants and workers and succeeded in creating a more broadly based and remarkably stable capitalist state.  

    Though the most violent stage of the revolution ended in 1920, militant agrarian reform movements, workers strikes, and political protests continued into the 1930s. Finally, during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40), the revolutionary government fulfilled the revolution’s goals: the hacienda virtually disappeared as ten million acres of land were distributed to peasants, labor unions were recognized, and the foreign owned petroleum industry was nationalized. Yet at the same time Cárdenas incorporated into the ruling revolutionary party the army, the peasants' leagues, workers' and public employees' unions, and the organizations of the self-employed, creating a corporate party that evolved into the authoritarian and corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico until 2000 and, after a 12 year hiatus, rules Mexico today.

    Stuart Easterling does a very fine job of telling this complicated story in an extremely economical way in The Mexican Revolution: A Short History, 1910-1920, fleshing it out with a few anecdotes that give us a feel for life at the time, some thumbnail sketches of revolutionary leaders, and most important an explanation of the social forces that they represented. (1) (This is not an easy task as I know from my own attempts.) The historic photographs and woodcuts complement the text nicely. With its large type and generous leading, the book is an easy read.

    As the writing shows and the endnotes confirm the author has a command of the extensive literature of the Mexican Revolution, yet the book is written in a popular style; it is a kind of “people’s history” of the Mexican Revolution, without academic or political jargon. It is the kind of book one could use in a college survey course in Latin American History or in a study group for young activists interested in knowing about this tremendously important revolution that took place in North America only a century ago. It is a good introduction to the subject for the general reader.

    Since it is a popular book, Easterling addresses himself to really popular misconceptions about Mexican history and history in general, such as what might be called “the Great Man theory.” He points out that some historians try to explain the Mexican revolution in terms of the striking characters and personalities of leaders: the naïveté of Madero, the integrity of Zapata, or the volatility of Villa. Less important than their personalities, argues Easterling, was their relationship to the social groups of which they were a part: Madero’s connection to the landowners and businessmen who had been excluded from the dictator's inner circle, Zapata’s rootedness in the peasantry of the State of Morelos, and Villa’s experience among the bandits, ranchers, and workers of the North.

    The Mexican Revolution has raised many fascinating questions. Easterling only spends much time on one: Why didn’t the campesinos take power? Following Adolfo Gilly (more about him below), he argues that the peasants and ranchers could not overcome their parochialism and develop a national strategy. Another important question, that Easterling does not discuss, is: What was the nature of the group that actually seized power?  Manuel Aguilar Mora argued in his El Bonapartismo Mexicano (1982) that, when peasants, workers and the capitalist class proved incapable of taking power, a Bonapartist figure, first Álvaro Obregón and then his successor Plutarco Elías Calles, took power, balancing above all of the classes.

    Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had developed this analysis earlier to explain the coming to power of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in France and also used it to analyze Otto von Bismarck’s Germany. While Mexico had a capitalist economy, Aguilar Mora suggested, it did not have a capitalist ruling class. Nora Hamilton looked at this idea of the relative autonomy of the state from social classes in her book The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico also published in 1982. For political activists in Mexico, one’s attitude toward the Mexican state was all important. The Mexican Communist Party (PCM), later the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM), and Lombardo Toledano’s Popular Socialist Party (PPS) suggested that the Mexican state should be supported and pushed to fulfill its revolutionary potential, while the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party argued that the state should be opposed and overthrown. Perhaps, by simply writing a narrative, Easterling missed a chance to raise some important theories about the nature of revolutions. 

    Nor does Easterly have anything to say about the historiography of the Mexican Revolution, which is a fascinating one which even novice might like to know something about, at least in broad outlines. Frank Tannenbaum, a former member of the Industrial Workers of the World who became a historian, first argued to the American public that Mexico had had a genuine social and political revolution in his book Peace by Revolution: An Interpretation of Mexico (1933). It was he suggested a progressive revolution that had expanded democracy and created a more just society. Reissued as a paperback in 1966, Tannenbaum’s book was the standard text and the common dog-eared textbook into the 1970s.

    Then in the conservative 1980s regional studies began to dissolve the Mexican Revolution into a series of local events while, particularly in European studies, post-modern attacks on the very idea revolution—bourgeois or socialist—and the rejection of narratives of social progress, tended to undermine the whole enterprise. Many young academics came to reject economic and social explanations or the idea of revolution altogether. Revolutions? Some said, there never were any. Other said, oh, yes, there were, but they’d all gone bad, inevitably. This was reflected in studies of the Mexican Revolution in Eduardo Ramón Ruiz argued in The Great Rebellion (1980) that Mexico’s upheaval should not be called a revolution, since the overthrow of a capitalist dictatorship had led to its replacement by….a capitalist dictatorship. A year later Friedrich Katz broke new ground, however, by placing the Mexican Revolution in the context of the machinations of the great imperial powers in The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (1981).

    Allen Knight weighed in on the debate over the revolution with his exhaustive, two volume The Mexican Revolution (1986), synthesizing the enormous academic literature into a powerful argument that reaffirmed Tannenbaum’s claim that indeed, there had been a a political and social revolution in Mexico. At the same time, two other scholars expanded our understanding of the Mexican Revolution by placing it in a longer timeframe and in a broader international context. John Tutino’s From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940  (1986) suggested that the roots of the Mexican Revolution had to be found in the two-hundred year long struggle of Mexican peasants for the land taken from them by the Spanish conquers and colonizers. A year later, John Mason Hart’s Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (1987) undertook to compare the unfolding of the Mexican Revolution with the experiences of revolutions in Iran, China and Russia.

    The trends changed once again in the 1990s from this focus on social classes, revolutionary processes, and the state with what has been called post-modern cultural turn in Mexican Revolution studies, as exemplified in the collection of essays titled Everyday forms of state formation: revolution and the negotiation of rule in modern Mexico (1995) edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent.

    One of the peculiarities of American academic scholarship is that it tended to ignore Mexican writing on the Mexican Revolution. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Adolfo Gilly, the Argentine born revolutionary sat in his cell in the Lecumberri Prison, jailed for his role in the 1968 political protests. While in prison he wrote La Revolución interrumpida, Mexico, 1910-1920: una guerra campesina por la tierra y el poder (1971), a Marxist analysis of the Mexican Revolution that had an enormous impact on the subject in Mexico. What made the book so fascinating at the time was its footnotes citing the texts by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that were used to elucidate Mexico’ revolutionary experience. Octavio Paz, the most famous Mexican writer, essayist and poet of the time stopped the presses on a forthcoming book in order to include a chapter review Gilly’s book. Not until 2005 was Gilly’s important history published in English under the title The Mexican Revolution by the New Press; in 2006 New Press reissued it as part of it Peoples History Series.

    Easterling has written a fine introductory book, though we will still turn to Gilly for its explicitly Marxist interpretation and to Knight for the encyclopedic account. For those who after reading Easterling might want to take a somewhat deeper plunge in this pool, I would recommend Michael J. Gonzáles’s The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940 (2002), also an introduction, though at 307 pages about twice as long as Easterling’s.

    —–

    1. Easterling’s history first appeared in three successive issues of the International Socialist Review, number 74, 75 and 76.

  • Wild Socialism

    Wild SocialismBook Review of Martin Comack. Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin, 1918-1921. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. 97pp. Paperback or e-book: $24.99

                Martin Comack—who proudly lists on his book his checkered career as soldier, merchant seaman, civil servant, and university lecturer—tells us that it was his encounters with the German anarchist Augustin Souchy and with the German anti-Bolshevik Communist Paul Mattick in the 1970s that first led him to take an interest in independent workers councils as an alternative to both Social Democracy and Communism. With a renewed interest in what could be called “left communism” since the eruption of a series of mass protests from the Indignados  in Spain to Occupy Wall Street to Gezi Park in Turkey, this book is timely. Especially after Occupy Oakland helped to shut down the Port of Oakland, people have been asking about the relationship between union officials and rank-and-file workers and between the organized and the unorganized. Many young people have been attracted to anarchist, syndicalist, and left communist theories, experiences, and organizations. This book will certainly interest them.   

                In his short but tightly packed Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin, 1918-1921, Comack presents a sympathetic but hardly uncritical account of the radical German workers’ movement of those years. Comack’s narrative history—a mere 76 pages of actual text organized in 12 little chapters—is located within the broader context of Germany industrialization and the rise of the Social Democratic Party and its trade unions. It focuses on the development during the First World War of a particularly radical group of workers based in heavy industry in Berlin and their evolution through a series of events and organizations. At the center is the Revolutionary Shop Stewards (Revolutionäre Obleute or RO) led by Richard Müller, a lathe operator, which grew from 50 or 80 in the metal industry in 1916 to several thousand in a variety of industries by 1918. The RO proved capable of organizing mass political strikes of hundreds of thousands under the conditions of a virtual military dictatorship in Germany during the war.

                Comack argues that the RO could be considered the core of the German working class, but they were not the only leftists. The Social Democratic Party and its Free Trade Unions, which had in 1914 supported the war and entered into a partnership with the Imperial government, maintained a grip on the majority of workers. The Independent Socialists were a coalition of several radical socialist tendencies and worked closely at times with the RO. The Spartacist League (which later became the Communist Party of Germany or KPD) led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht led wave after wave of street actions which were disdained by the RO as exhausting the working class in useless struggles. All of these groups attempted to provide leadership to the German Revolution of 1918 which broke out at the beginning of November after naval mutinies in the fleet’s bases in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven spread through the country.

                As the German Empire collapsed, throughout the country workers and soldiers formed councils that took over factories and temporarily ran municipal governments. The German workers councils (Arbeiterräte), unlike the Russian soviets, generally did not see themselves as an alternative to parliamentary government, but rather generally conceived of themselves as supplementing bourgeois democracy. The RO, which for a moment stood at the center of the workers council movement in Berlin, contemplated a coup to take power—but failed to act. While the RO hesitated, Friedrich Ebert, head of the Social Democratic Party, under pressure from massive strikes and demonstrations, proclaimed a republic. The RO, still seeing revolution as a possibility, then occupied the Reichstag, the German legislature and elected a Council of People’s Commissars as a provisional government, but they took no decisive action to actually seize power.

                The very next day Ebert changed the name of his cabinet to the Council of People’s Representatives and incorporated into it three Independent Socialists, one of whom was a shop steward and a member of the RO. The cooptation of the more moderate Independent Socialists was one part of his strategy, a deal with the military was the other. While the RO and the rest of the far left continued to make vague revolutionary gestures, Ebert made a pact with General Wilhelm Groener who offered to support the new republic if he could have a free hand to crush Bolshevism and the councils. Ebert agreed and the die was cast.

                The German capitalists and the Social Democratic trade unions also had their plans. The General Commission of the trade unions and the German Employers Association met and on November 15 adopted a social pact (Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft or ZAG) that not only legally recognized the unions and outlawed company unions but also created works committees under the supervision of the unions in all workplaces of more than 50 employees. Unlike the workers councils, some of which saw themselves as not only taking over the factories but also as the basis for an alternative government and society, the works committees confined themselves to workplace problems and economic issues. The Ebert government, in a clever move to compete with the workers councils, arranged elections to these works committees by all white collar and blue collar employees. At the same time the unions grew rapidly. Unions which had had 1,500,000 members in 1914 had 7,300,000 by 1919—as the workers councils withered.

                    By December 1918, Ebert and the Social Democratic government had succeeded in winning the support of the financiers and industrialists, the army, the enormous government bureaucracy, most of the working class and the general population. When the First German Congress of Workers and Soldiers councils met in Berlin, a quarter of a million workers demonstrated outside calling for all power to the councils, while inside the Social Democrats held a majority that blocked radical resolutions. The Spartacist Week that opened on January 5 with the dismissal of Emil Eichorn of the Independent Socialists from his post as police chief saw protests by the RO, the Independent Socialists, and the Spartacists. Karl Liebknecht joined a Revolutionary Committee made up of the Independent Socialists and the RO that called for the overthrow of Ebert and said it was taking over the government—but failed to seize any government buildings and didn’t attempt to seize power. The next day the Spartacists issued a call for a council republic, but Müller and other RO council leaders withdrew from the Revolutionary Committee.

                Ebert had appointed Gustav Noske to be Minister of Defense, who hired and deployed Freikorp units, rightwing mercenaries, to suppress the radicals and the councils, leading to the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg and the summary execution of a number of others on January 15. A few days later, on January 19, the Social Democratic Party won 38 percent of the vote for parliament, much larger than any of the other socialist groups—the Spartacists had boycotted the election—though the center and right parties won a majority. The Weimar Constitution adopted in August 1919 included an Article 165 on the councils, intended to encourage worker participation in industry, though workers were to increase production, not infringe on management’s power.

                While Comack does not explain this, Müller and the RO refused to join in the initial formation of the Spartacist League, which became the German Communist Party (KPD), because it refused to participate in elections or in the Social Democratic Trade Unions. Müller and the RO saw that as a sectarian policy. At the same time, the RO stood apart from the attempt to build a revolutionary party. Only later in October 1920 did many of the revolutionary shop stewards join the KPD, though by then the immediate post-war revolutionary moment had passed.

                Comack writes: “The last months of 1918 and the early weeks of January 1919 had seen the high tide of political power for the workers council organizations of Berlin. They would never again regain such direct influence over government policy.” One wants to ask: What influence over government policy? The RO had at least twice called for revolution and failed to organize to seize power. The Ebert government had outflanked them in the workers councils themselves, in the establishment of the rival works committees, and in the elections to parliament. Most important Ebert and Noske controlled not only the army—not all of which could be relied upon—but also the rightwing Freikorp units and had used them to suppress strikes, councils and left parties. In the new Weimar government parliament the Social Democrats also defeated the councils’ calls for the socialization of industry, arguing that the country could not socialize industry while it was surrounded by hostile capitalist powers and while the nation’s economic situation was so dire.

                The Social Democrats and especially their labor unions, as the workers council activists realized, had become the principal bulwark against socialist revolution. Why did German workers generally reject the left socialists and in particularly the workers council advocates? Comack suggests several reasons. First, most workers remained loyal to the Social Democrats and their unions, the historic organizations of the labor movements. Second, workers were “indifferent or confused” by the proliferation of left groups and programs. Third, most workers—with the exception of those in Berlin—saw the workers councils as useful adjuncts to trade unionism, not as autonomous organizations and certainly not as an alternative form of government. Based on Comack’s description one could say that working class consciousness was highly uneven throughout Germany, with only pockets of revolutionary workers organizations in a sea of mostly reform-minded workers. The workers councils, however, based in heavy industry in Berlin, were not capable of overcoming this problem.

                Defeated by 1919, the council advocates retreated from the political sphere to the economic, rooting themselves in the factories; their slogan: “Make every factory a fortress.” They also took up education and produced a theory: workers councils represented the road to socialism. The workers councils began to produce a  newspaper Die Arbeiter-Rat (The Workers Council) and other literature on the idea of council communism, much of it written by the socialist journalist Ernst Daumig. Müller, the outstanding leader of the RO became editor of the Metall-Arbeiter-Zeitung (the Metal Worker Times) newspaper with the goal of creating first an economic and then a political system based on workers councils, though he lasted in that position only six months.

                Still the struggle continued. The Kapp Putsch of 1920, an attempt by the Prussian civil servant Wolfgang Kapp to seize power and overthrow the Social Democratic government led to the mobilization of all of the country’s left parties and labor unions—from the Socialist to the Catholic unions—in the organization of a general strike. The independent workers councils revived briefly, but remained a minority movement and increasingly isolated.

                In the early 1920s, a variety of anarcho-syndicalist, council communist, and left communist groups sprang up in Germany. Rudolf Rocker and Augustin Souchy returned from exile to found a syndicalist labor federation that “embraced the idea of workers councils.” Another independent, leftist labor federation involved members of the German Communist Party (KPD). The anti-parliamentary German Communist Workers Party (KAPD) also became a small force at this time with about 40,000 members. Many of those in these organizations saw the workers councils not simply as a means or locus of struggle but as the organizations through which workers could take power, as the basis for socialism. Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Communist Party, polemicized against these left communists, arguing that their abstention from elections and refusal to join the Social Democratic labor unions made them irrelevant to the real struggle for power. After the Communist Party’s March Action in 1921, a failed attempt at a mass workers’ uprising, the initial revolutionary period in post-war Germany had passed. The council movement subsided, reduced to just a few thousand.

                Comack admires the workers councils in Germany and in other parts of Europe in that era for their horizontal and decentralized organization based on the solidarity of the workplace or the neighborhood, a form of organization that he implicitly counterposes to the centralized party form of organization, whether of the Social Democratic or Communist model. His own account, however, suggests that the council movement never became very significant outside of Berlin, and that during the period from 1918 to the early 1920s, its attractiveness actually declined. Most significant, Comack’s account suggests that the council form of organization proved incapable of acting decisively when the opportunity presented itself and its parochialism proved an obstacle to building a revolutionary party.

                The German councils did not become, as the Russian soviets had been, the parliament of the labor movement where all Russian working class organizations were represented both in 1905 in Petrograd and initially in all of the urban centers of Russia in the period from 1917 to the early 1920s. The German revolutionary shop stewards and the workers councils seemed to function as just one more organization on the splintered revolutionary left. On the basis of Comack’s book, the German councils appear to be a model not to be embraced, but to be eschewed. Had the shop stewards or later the councils become organically linked to a national revolutionary communist movement, whether Luxemburg’s and Liebknecht’s Spartacist League or the later German Communist Party, German history might have developed differently. As it was, the RO stood apart, and the left remained divided in the early 1920s.

                One could argue another and perhaps more important point here. Comack has provided convincing evidence that a revolutionary left existed within the Social Democratic Party before World War I. The failure of that left to leave the Social Democratic Party and create a revolutionary party before the outbreak of the war meant that German workers would face the task of attempting to create a revolutionary party in the midst of a revolutionary situation, an extremely difficult, if not impossible task. One could argue that what the Social Democrats derided as “Wild Socialism” was this frantic and failed attempt to build a party in the midst of the crisis. Comack, who is not interested in such a revolutionary party or who rejects the idea of a revolutionary party, favoring the workers councils as an alternative, is not interested in this problem and does not discuss it.

                A final word or two. If the virtue of this book is that it is short and dense, the weakness is that it does not take enough time to explain the political positions of the various groups and the differences between them. Those who want a much more complete story will want to read Pierre Broué’s The German Revolution, 1917-1923 published by Haymarket.

  • Getting personal: An open letter to TFA recruits in Chicago

    Dear New TFA recruits in Chicago,

    Can we talk about your teaching plans, as if you came to my office, as do lots of students and college grads thinking about becoming a teacher?

    First off, I’ll explain that I understand why you might want to take that TFA job you’ve been offered in a Chicago school this coming year. You think you have something to offer and you want a stab at testing yourself. You don’t know if you want to stay in teaching (I didn’t either, incidentally) and TFA offers a way for you to explore this option and do some good, you think. On the other hand, there’s so much contradictory information, vociferous debate. What should you do?

    I’ve been involved in this urban teaching thing for quite a while. I first learned about Teach for America (TFA) in a doctoral seminar at Harvard Ed School, in 1988. The instructor worked at Brookings and Wendy Kopp’s honor’s project had just started wowing powerful policy folks. I was on leave from my teaching job in the New York City schools, and my doctoral work was on urban teacher preparation. The instructor pressed me for my reaction to Kopp’s project.

    TFA was ill conceived, I said, because city teaching is tougher than any other kind and requires the best prepared teachers who will stay in hard-to-staff schools, helping to stabilize them. I spoke from experience at that point. I had taught for 7 years in three different suburban school districts before becoming a NYC teacher, but my first term in NYC school was a shocker. I knew what new teachers faced, that they would get the hardest teaching slots in the schools with the most challenges. And I had seen first-hand how kids’ lives were destroyed when teachers bolted in the first months of the term – as did those without adequate preparation.

    Now, 20-some years later, after a career as a researcher and teacher educator who specializes in urban schools, I hold the same opinion of TFA.  Except now we have solid research that the teacher shortage TFA aimed to correct didn’t exist – and doesn’t now, if what you consider a shortage is an inadequate number of people educated to be teachers. The problem was – and is – teacher retention and turnover (except maybe in math and science on the high school level).  It should be no surprise that schools that have high turnover and are hard to staff have rotten working conditions. Of course, this fact creates an unpleasant choice for people who want to find solutions to unequal educational opportunity that ignore deep inequality in our society. We’d have to greatly improve conditions in the most challenging city schools to retain teachers: more funding for smaller classes; more parent and student involvement; better professional development; supervisors who know good teaching and how to relate respectfully with teachers.

    I totally get the reasons people can’t always go through university-based programs, and I've even advised two graduating seniors to apply to TFA.  They were Hispanic women who lived in the communities where they wanted to teach. They supported their families and couldn’t afford to take off a semester to student teach. I knew from research they would likely hold their own in a traumatic first year (count on that first year being a doozy, no matter how well prepared you are) and subsequently be a valuable resource to the  school and the community. But here’s the catch: TFA rejected them because it aims to put young, high-status (mostly white, mostly female) college grads into classrooms teaching other people’s children.

    I know some TFA alums who managed to use TFA. They became wonderful teachers – and union activists.  Real leaders! But following their path, using TFA for your own purposes and ignoring what the organization does, is not an option for you now in Chicago.  When Wendy Kopp did her thesis project, the neoliberal project was just getting started in this country. As powerful business interests who want to make education their vehicle for controlling what kids learn have ripped apart school systems, TFA has morphed into their partner. Nowhere is this clearer than in Chicago, with  TFA partnering with CPS to retaliate against Chicago teachers and parents for their resistance to “reforms” imposed by the business elite that runs the schools. The first retaliation was school closings. The second was layoffs. The third is hiring TFA recruits to replace experienced teachers who have lost their jobs.

    If you permit TFA to place you in Chicago for this coming school year you are allowing CPS and TFA to exploit you in a very old strategy used to break unions, replacing older workers with new ones.  In my book of advice to new urban teachers, I ask that people consider carefully how their colleagues will regard them if they are seen as being used by the administration.  My prediction here is that if you take this job with TFA, you will be seen – forever – as having taken a job that was not rightfully yours. That’s hard to forgive and never forgotten, especially when teachers are being punished for fighting so bravely to improve conditions in the CPS.

    TFA in Los Angeles says it won’t take jobs away from LAUSD’s experienced teachers. Frankly this is a shell game, with TFA and its billionaire funders supporting creation of schools that take kids from LAUSD so as to shrink enrollments in the publicly-controlled system. But let’s take TFA LA at its word: Experienced teachers have priority. This stance, which articulates a return to TFA’s original mission of staffing schools with shortages, puts you in a strong position to say “I won’t take a job away from an experienced teacher. I won’t teach in CPS until all the teachers who have been laid off are rehired.”

    Please don’t let TFA use you in this evil project.  It doesn’t matter if TFA leaders and supporters don’t realize it’s evil. Sometimes, good intentions don’t count. All that matters is whether you show up – on the right side, and in Chicago this is the side resisting TFA’s grab for political power at the expense of Chicago’s children and parents.

    Questions? Please contact me privately.

    Professor Lois Weiner

    Readers can follow my thoughts on teaching, schools, and education on twitter , Facebook, and here on New Politics.

  • White Racial Delusion

    “There is not a Black America and a White America….there’s a United States of America.” So proclaimed Barack Obama, to wild applause, at the launching of his national and global celebrity in his instantly lauded 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Address. 

    Polls taken in the wake of the jury verdict that exonerated George Zimmerman for stalking and killing Trayvon Martin do not jibe well with that nationalist and color-blind claim. Fully 87 percent of black Americans questioned in an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that Zimmerman’s murder was “unjustified.” This opinion is shared by just one third of white Americans. A third of the whites polled said the killing was “justified” and another third were “unsure” – this despite the fact that the armed Zimmerman rejected a police dispatcher’s order that he stop following Trayvon and leave the matter (young Martin walking around with candy, that is) to public authorities. ABC reports further that:

    “By a vast 86-9 percent, African-Americans…disapprove of the verdict acquitting George Zimmerman….while whites approve by 51-31 percent. Blacks, by 81-13 percent, favor federal civil rights charges against Zimmerman; whites are opposed, 59-27 percent….More broadly, 86 percent of African-Americans say blacks and other minorities do not receive equal treatment as whites in the criminal justice system. Again, far fewer whites, 41 percent, share that view – a division that has prevailed, to varying degrees, in ABC/Post polls dating back 20 years.” [1]

    The refusal of 59 percent of whites to admit the widely documented fact of anti-black bias in the criminal justice system is consistent with the findings of a Tuft’s Harvard survey two years ago. That survey found that for the first time a majority of whites preposterously believed that “whites have replaced blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America” [2]. 

    The notion that whites are more discriminated against than blacks in the U.S. today finds no evidence in the nation’s social and economic outcomes. Fully 28 percent of African Americans, and 37 percent of black children, are officially poor, compared to 10 percent of whites and 13 percent of white children.[2A] Thirteen percent of blacks are officially unemployed, compared to 7 percent of whites. “As of 2010,” the New York Times reported last April, “white families, on average, earned about $2 for every $1 that black and Hispanic families earned, a ratio that has remained roughly constant for the last 30 years.” But blacks have suffered a far bigger fall in income since 2007 than any other racial group and their net worth (disproportionately concentrated in housing) has fallen to its lowest level in decades. A recent Urban Institute study shows that the wealth gap between blacks and whites, “already dismal” before the onset of the Great Recession, has widened in the wake of the latest economic downturn. As Times reporter Anne Lowery observes:

    “when it comes to wealth — as measured by assets, like cash savings, homes and retirement accounts, minus debts, like mortgages and credit card balances — white families have far outpaced black and Hispanic ones. Before the recession, non-Hispanic white families, on average, were about four times as wealthy as nonwhite families, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis of Federal Reserve data. By 2010, whites were about six times as wealthy. …The dollar value of that gap has grown, as well. By the most recent data, the average white family had about $632,000 in wealth, versus $98,000 for black families and $110,000 for Hispanic families.”[3]

    To make matters worse, black Americans make up 40 percent of the nation’s globally unmatched prison population of 2.3 million, even though they comprise less than 12 percent of the U.S. A minority within a nation that makes up just 5 percent of the world’s population, Black Americans make up 11 percent of all people behind bars on Earth. [4] A shocking 1 in 3 adult black males carry the crippling lifelong stigma of a felony record, a critical barrier to employment, housing, and much more.[5]

    Whites’ new majority notion that they are more discriminated against than blacks is also unsupported by carefully controlled studies of racial bias in hiring, lending, home-selling and renting, and service provision. Perhaps nobody has done more to demonstrate the persistence of anti-black racial prejudice than Princeton sociologist Devah Pager. As she explains on her faculty Web site, she “investigate[s] discrimination in low wage labor markets by hiring young men – who differ only by race, ethnicity, or criminal background – to pose as job applicants, presenting identical qualifications to employers for real entry level jobs.” Her work “shows substantial evidence of hiring discrimination, with black men receiving call-backs or job offers at only half the rate of equally qualified whites. In fact, a young black man with a clean record does no better in his search for low wage work than a white man with a felony conviction.” [6]

    Pager’s research demonstrates that black men pay a much higher job search price than do white men for possessing a felony record.  More remarkable, however, is her finding that whites with criminal records do as well as blacks without such records in the search for employment – a stunning outcome that has been demonstrated across different experiments in different U.S. locales.[7]

    Where do so many whites get the kind of racial attitudes and beliefs that lead them to approve a thuggish and armed white watch captain’s vicious stalking and killing of an unarmed black teenager and to think – against all evidence – that Caucasians have replaced blacks as the leading victims of racial discrimination in the U.S.? While a full explanation would have to go back to the origins of North American racial oppression in the rise of black chattel slavery during the 17th century, part of the contemporary explanation comes from a deadly interaction that has developed over many decades between racial segregation on one hand and the picture of black America many whites get from mass media on the other hand. Persistent strong residential and social separation means that most whites have little direct or proximate contact with the mostly working and lower class black population and community. The large number of black Americans who struggle to get by with hard work in a terrible job market (particularly bad for black Americans) and under an unjust plutocracy are largely invisible to white America. The white population’s main source of “information” on black Americans comes from the mass media, where two predominant black images prevail: (a) dangerous and threatening lower-class and ghetto-dwelling black criminals (mostly male) and gang-bangers; (b) highly successful blacks who have “made it to the top,” even to the White House. The first category (a) are a regular staple on the local evening news and the local newspapers, their alleged hideous crimes and violence routinely reported without the slightest hint of any historical or socioeconomic context on the savage paucity of economic opportunity in the highly segregated, poverty-concentrating communities to which they are consigned. The second category (b) deceptively suggests the abundant presence of black faces in high places, feeding the inaccurate white sense that black Americans (still the poorest racial group in the U.S. except for the miserably oppressed and forgotten Native Americans) have somehow outpaced the white majority on the whole. And since the dominant white culture since slavery has long painted the black population with the terrible brushes of laziness, brutishness, irresponsibility, the only way that many whites can or will understand this alleged black rise is in terms of “reverse racism” – purported endemic anti-white discrimination. 

    It doesn’t help that considerable white majorities have long drastically over-estimated the percentage of the U.S. population that is black and minority – something that only feeds whites’ fears that they are being flooded out of opportunities by hordes of blacks, Latino/as, and Asians. Or, of course, that a vast arch-reactionary right wing propaganda machine – proto-fascistic FOX News and the Teapublican talk radio empire being the most obvious representatives – is in place to regularly stoke white racial fears with fantastic claims that a liberal and even “leftist” government is using affirmative action and other terrible schemes to achieve supposedly undue racial reparations and that the current conservative and ostensibly black president is a radical Marxist Black Nationalist. 

    The fact that a black family sits in the White House holds no small symbolic importance in undermining many white Americans’ willingness to acknowledge that white racism still poses any serious barriers to black advancement and equality. It is the last nail in the coffin of that lost willingness for millions of whites is my sense.   

    Also reducing the likelihood that whites are going to question and shed their racial delusions is the in fact terrible economic prospects faced by many millions of Caucasian Americans, especially but not exclusively working class whites, in the current American New Gilded Age. A recent exclusive Associated Press story based on some innovative research by Washington University sociologist Mark Rank reports that 79 percent – 4 out of every 5 – of U.S. adults now “struggle with joblessness, near-poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.” The number includes 76 percent of whites who are now “engulfed” by “economic insecurity” by the time they turn 60, with economic insecurity defined as 1 year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid (e.g. food stamps) or income below 150 percent of the poverty level. As the AP reports, citing liberal Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson on the risks of growing “white alienation”:

    “Nationwide, the count of America’s [officially] poor [as measured by the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level – P.S.] remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population. Whites poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white (emphasis added)…More than 19 millions fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation’s destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.”[8]

    No wonder working class whites are gloomy about the future. According to the latest biannual General Social Survey at the University of Chicago’s NORC, just 45 percent of white Americans believe their family has a good chance of enhancing their economic status “based on the way things are in America today.” Just 49 percent of “working class whites” (defined as whites without college degrees) think their children will do better than them. By contrast, even though the economic plight of minorities is considerable worse, two-thirds (67 percent) of nonwhite working class Americans believe their children will be better off. 

    “It’s time,” Wilson tells the Associated Press, “that America comes to understand that many of the nation’s biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position.” [9]

    But it doesn’t seem very likely that the nation’s dominant ideological institutions are going to advance an honest discussion of class inequality – and class oppression – in America. Those institutions are themselves owned and controlled by the same very disproportionately white “1 percent” (the real economic elite is much smaller) that has been pulling the political and policy levers for decades to distribute wealth and power ever upward, to the point now where the 400 richest Americans possess as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the nation [10] and U.S. is more comparable to Latin America and Africa than it is to Western Europe and much of Asia when it comes to inequality. The reigning cultural and ideological authorities prefer to keep the nation stuck in endless partisan battles and debates pitched around race, gender, sexual orientation, guns, religion and other “values” and identity-based “wedge” issue and divides – anything to keep the real economic ruling class and power elite in the shadows. As the prolific left author and commentator Chris Hedges recently noted on The Real News Network, “both sides of the political spectrum are manipulated by the same forces. If you're some right-wing Christian zealot in Georgia, then it's homosexuals and abortion and all these, you know, wedge issues that are used to whip you up emotionally. If you are a liberal in Manhattan, it's–you know, they'll all be teaching creationism in your schools or whatever…Yet in fact it's just a game, because whether it's Bush or whether it's Obama, Goldman Sachs wins always. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs.” [11]

    The real pressure for a class-based understanding of American inequality will have to come from outside the system and the bottom up. Such understanding will have to challenge the elite’s longstanding game – as old as British Colonial North America and the early Republic [12] – of racial divide and rule. That challenge cannot be effective if it comes from a position of delusion and ignorance, white or otherwise, about the depth and degree of racial inequality and the rooting of that inequality in persistent white-supremacism and the ubiquitous demonization and shaming of black Americans and other minorities. White Americans need to shed their racial delusions and fears not in order to subordinate working class consciousness and activism to a strictly racial paradigm but in order to more effectively reach out to nonwhite fellow majority working class Americans in common struggle against the 1 percent, also known as the capitalist ruling class. 

     

    Selected Endnotes 

    1. Gary Langer, “Vast Racial Gap on Trayvon Martin Case Marks a Challenging Conversation,” ABC News.

    2. “Whites Believe They Are Victims of Racism More Often Than Blacks: In Zero Sum Game, ‘Reverse Racism’ Seen as Bigger Problem than Anti-Black Racism,” Tuft’s University Web site (May 23, 2011).

    2A. Frederick C. Harris, “The Price of a Black President,” New York Times, October 27, 2012.

    3. Anne Lowery, “Wealth Gap Among Races Has Widened Since Recession,” New York Times, April 28, 2013; Harris, “The Price.” Many experts,” Lowery noted, “consider the wealth gap to be more pernicious than the income gap, as it perpetuates from generation to generation and has a powerful effect on economic security and mobility. Young black people are much less likely than young white people to receive a large sum from their parents or other relatives to pay for college, start a business or make a down payment on a home, for instance. That, in turn, makes their wealth-building prospects shakier as they move into adulthood.”

    4. NAACP, Criminal Justice Fact Sheet.

    5. Paul Street, The Vicious Circle: Race, Prisons, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago: Chicago Urban League, October 2002); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York” New Press, 2010).

    6. www.princeton.edu/sociology/faculty/pager/

    7. Paul von Zielbauer, “Race a Factor in Job Offers for Ex-Convicts,” New York Times, June 17, 2005; Devah Pager, MARKED: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2007); Devah Pager, Bruce Western, and Bart Bonikowski, "Discrimination in a Low Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment," American Sociological Review, vol. 74 (Oct. 2099):777-799; Devah Pager, and Lincoln Quillian, “Walking the Talk: What Employers Say Versus What They Do,” American Sociological Review, vol. 70, no. 3 (2005):355-380;  Devah Pager, 2005, “Double Jeopardy: Race, Crime, and Getting a Job,” Wisconsin Law Review , 2005 (2):617-660; Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology , vol. 108, no. 5 (2003):937-975; Devah Pager and Eric Grodsky,  “The Structure of Disadvantage: Individual and Occupational Determinants of the Black-White Wage Gap,” American Sociological Review, vol. 66, no. 4 (2001):542-567;  Devah Pager and Lincoln Quillian, “Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 107, no. 3 (2001): 717-767.

    8. Hope Yen, “Exclusive: 4 of 5 in U.S. Face Near-Poverty, No Work,” Associated Press, July 28, 2013, 1:59 PM EDT.

    9. Yen, “Exclusive: 4 in 5.”

    10. “400 Americans Have More Wealth Than Half of All Americans Combined,” March 2011, Journal-Sentinel PolitiFact Wisconsin.

    11. Chris Hedges, “America is a Tinderbox,” July 24, 2013.

    12. A classic text is Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975).

     

    Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of many books including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman&Littlefield, 2007), Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, 2008), and They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, forthcoming January 2014). He is also a contributing essayist in Francis Goldin et al., eds. Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (New York: HarperCollins, forthcoming in October 2013)

    This article was reprinted from ZNet, Aug. 1, 2013.

  • Liberals, ideology, and Teach for America (TFA)

    Liberals have taken way too long to understand that the bipartisan educational agenda, which started with the so-called “excellence” reforms in the 1990’s, has done harm. The good news is there’s liberal push-back now on TFA (Teach for America), which is replacing experienced teachers laid off in Chicago with new recruits who have several weeks of training.  Bruce Dixon argues this makes TFA “scabs.”

    What too many liberals still don’t get it is that this is an ideological struggle. The two sides are clear in this petition Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda has written, demanding that Tim Wise, a White progressive who writes and speaks about racism and White privilege, step away from his involvement with TFA. Wise’s explanation for working with TFA  perfectly illustrates liberals’ confusion.

     

    Wise is perplexed about why he shouldn’t work for TFA.  TFA is not “fundamentally more unjust” than “other institutions where I try and bring antiracist messages.” Why should anyone want Wise to “refuse to attempt to educate folks” in TFA?

     

    Here’s why: TFA was, from its inception, rooted in the idea that teaching doesn’t require much skill or experience.  TFA was predicated on the assumption that we don’t need teachers who make teaching a career. A revolving door of hard-working people who become exhausted after a few years is fine. They can be replaced by others. TFA presumed that if we could just change teachers, we would solve educational inequality.

     

    These ideological assumptions underlie what is known throughout the world (except here in the U.S.) as the neoliberal project. (Analysis about “disaster capitalism” also fits.) These ed policies have been imposed on Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a quid pro quo for development aid. TFA’s unique contribution has been to recruit the “best and brightest” who will alter the social class composition of teaching while simultaneously allowing teaching to become contract labor (a reform the World Bank says is essential). 

     

    Liberals want to believe that to judge whether a policy (or candidate) is worthy of our support we look at intentions. What they should know by now is that we have to look at evidence and ideology. What are the principles underlying the reforms? How do they correspond with what we believe and want?  On both counts, TFA is clearly the foe of poor children of color, despite its propaganda and self-conception, and has been from its start.

     

    Should we be challenging TFA recruits to leave their new employer? I’ll weigh in on this in another blog, shortly, here on New Politics. In the meantime, you can follow me on twitter and Facebook.

     

  • As the 1 Percent Leaves the 99 Percent in the Dust, Bush’s Chief Economist is Smiling

         Perhaps you shouldn’t be surprised that the chief economist during George W. Bush’s presidency seems happy that economic inequality in our country is at its most extreme since the Great Depression.

         After all, the Bush administration delivered huge tax breaks to the wealthy, the very people described by the former president as his political base.

         N. Gregory Mankiw, chair of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005, advisor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and now chair and professor of economics at Harvard University, created a stir with his pre-publication release of a new paper entitled, “In Defense of the One Percent.”

         Author of the college textbook Principles of Economics, Mankiw stands behind conservative political and economic policies whose success has come at a high social cost.
    In his essay, Mankiw lays out his moral and technical justification for meritocracy and inequality. In so doing, he also exposes the ideology behind the agenda of our country’s conservative ruling elite.

         Mankiw begins with a tale about a utopian society in which everyone is equal. The egalitarian structure breaks down when an entrepreneur sells a $100 product that everyone wants. The entrepreneur, likened to Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg and J.K. Rowling, becomes vastly richer than everyone else.

         “In my view, this thought experiment captures, in an extreme and stylized way, what has happened to US society over the past several decades,” writes Mankiw, suggesting that our sharp inequality is simply a reflection of how our economy works and that we can do little about it without rupturing the rules of the game.

    Inequality and Public Policy

         While he acknowledges that economics has limited explanatory power, Mankiw goes on to use the “dismal science” and anecdotal observations to justify the deep class division that exists in the United States, which has the most extreme inequality amongst the world’s developed countries. His paper leaves the impression that inequality results from a natural process when in fact the full story is much more complicated—and ugly. No, our inequality reflects political, economic and social power.

         For several decades, a ruling elite has governed the country with public policies—often the products of conservative think tanks–favoring corporations and their owners and managers. These policies include tax breaks for businesses and the rich, deregulation, weakening unions, privatization and attacking government, which from the New Deal until the 1970s served as our society’s great equalizer. But government—which plays a major role in the distribution of wealth and income through its economic and social policies and taxation—is notably absent from Mankiw’s utopian society.

    Elitism and Meritocracy

         The title of Mankiw’s paper—“In Defense of the One Percent”—is unabashedly provocative. It is unsettling because inequality goes against our sense of fairness. Even many conservative Americans—blue-collar Tea Partyers come to mind–are uncomfortable with inequality.

         But Mankiw believes the rich deserve their “just deserts.” He’s unapologetic about a miniscule percentage of our population pocketing a disproportionate share of the wealth.

         “My own reading of the evidence is that most of the very wealthy get that way by making substantial economic contributions, not by gaming the system or taking advantage of some market failure or the political process,” Mankiw writes. No, he argues, “…the most natural explanation of high CEO pay is that the value of a good CEO is extraordinarily high.”

         But the “just deserts” argument doesn’t account for how government tax policies partly explain our growing inequality.

         Between 1979 and 2007, about 30 percent of the increase in the rise in inequality resulted from regressive budget and tax policies, according to an Economic Policy Institute report, “Rising Income Inequality and the Role of Shifting Market-Income Distribution, Tax Burdens, and Tax Rates,” released in June. “The rising share of investment income—heavily concentrated at the top of the income distribution—at the expense of labor income explains much of the rise in income inequality in recent decades. Roughly one-third of the rise in the total share of income accruing to the top 1 percent of households, which more than doubled from 9.6 percent in 1979 to 20 percent in 2007, is attributable to the shift from labor income to capital income.”

         But from Mankiw’s “just deserts” standpoint, the wealthy are accumulating what they deserve. Moreover, inequality isn’t harming our society. “If the growing incomes of the rich are to be a focus of public policy, it must be because income inequality is a problem in and of itself,” he writes. We haven’t reached the breaking point yet, according to Mankiw.

    Too Much

         But, really, how much is too much?

         The Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, in a report in May on the impact of Walmart’s low-wage business model on the economy and taxpayers, said that, “The most recent decade proved to be a ‘lost decade’ for most working families—the average family’s income is lower today than at any point in the last ten years. Income inequality is more extreme today than at any point since before the Great Depression, with the top 1 percent of income earners receiving 93 percent of income gains in the recovery. In the third quarter of 2012, corporate profits reached $1.75 trillion, their greatest share of GDP in history. During that same quarter, workers’ wages fell to their lowest share of GDP on record.”

         The same report notes how much the Walton family—heirs to the founder of the retail empire—has enriched itself by paying domestic employees low wages and importing products from China. From 2007 to 2010, the wealth of six heirs of the Walton family increased from $73.3 billion to $89.5 billion, while the median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent. These six heirs own as much wealth as the 48.8 million families at the bottom of the country’s wealth distribution (41.5 percent of all American families combined), the report says.

         High inequality reflects how the economy isn’t functioning for the poor and middle class. Class polarization in the United States increasing resembles that of Latin America. Symptoms of our broken, unequal and unfair economy:

    • 46 million people, or 15 percent of the country’s population, lived below the official poverty line in 2011, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics;
    • the working poor—comprised 10.4 million people, or 7.2 percent of the work force in 2011;
    • the median financial net worth of all U.S. households, excluding homes and cars, is $10,890, according to Edward N. Wolff, an economics professor at New York University;
    • 46.2 million people lacked health insurance coverage in 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; and
    • the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of African-American households and 18 times that of Latino households, according to the Pew Research Center.

    You would think a country with 56 million impoverished and working poor people, half its adult population with only $10,000 in savings for retirement and nearly 50 million people without health insurance would be in trouble and cry out for the strengthening of its safety net. Apparently not for Mankiw.

         Since inequality isn’t a problem for Mankiw, it’s only logical that he claims that the wealthy pay enough in taxes and there’s little need for the government to redistribute income and wealth. He says, “the average person in the top 1 percent pays more than a quarter of income in federal taxes, and about a third if state and local taxes are included. Why isn’t that enough to compensate for the value of government infrastructure?”

         But our tax system is hardly progressive, especially compared to Europe. Economist Joseph Stiglitz says, “What should shock and outrage is that the top 1 percent has grown extremely rich, the tax rates they pay have markedly decreased. Our tax system is much less progressive than it was for much of the 20th century. The top marginal income tax rate peaked at 94 percent during World War II and remained at 70 percent through the 1960s and 1970s; it is now 39.6 percent. Tax fairness has gotten much worse in the 30 years since the Reagan ‘revolution’ of the 1980s.

    Corruption and Capitalism

         In justifying high executive pay, Mankiw ignores the corrupting influence of the U.S. corporate compensation model.

         “Today, a top executive who pumps up his company’s stock price by faking high profits can walk away with vast wealth even if the company later collapses, and the small chance he faces of going to jail isn’t an effective deterrent,” economist Paul Krugman wrote in a 2006 Rolling Stone magazine article, “The Great Wealth Transfer,” in which he analyzed how the Bush tax cuts were worsening inequality in the United States. Krugman noted that statistical evidence show that “unequal societies tend to be corrupt societies.” After the experience of the dot.com and housing bubbles is there any doubt that corruption is a problem in Corporate America?

         While Mankiw argues that the 1 percent deserve their wealth because of their contributions to our economy, he also attributes their success to their natural superiority.

         He writes, “…parents and children share genes, a fact that would lead to intergenerational persistence in income even in a world of equal opportunities. IQ, for example, has been widely studied, and it has a large degree of heritability. Smart parents are more likely to have smart children, and their greater intelligence will be reflected, on average, in higher incomes. Of course, IQ is only one dimension of talent, but it is easy to believe that other dimensions, such as self-control, ability to focus, and interpersonal skills, have a degree of genetic heritability as well.”

    Unequal Opportunity

         Mankiw rejects the argument that unequal opportunity is a major factor accounting for income inequality. That conveniently allows him to dismiss class-based factors that prevent upward mobility. And it allows him to dismiss the important role government plays in helping individuals and businesses prosper (and, by inference, to discount the need to pay sufficient taxes to maintain an interventionist government).

         Instead, Mankiw relies on anecdotal evidence to conclude that the 1 percent and the 99 percent have equal employment and educational opportunities.

         “My view here is shaped by personal experience,” Mankiw writes. “I was raised in a middle-class family; neither of my parents were college graduates. My own children are being raised by parents with both more money and more education. Yet I do not see my children as having significantly better opportunities than I had at their age.”

         Mankiw’s elitism, of course, plays down or ignores social factors that influence upward mobility. Acknowledging that class background plays an important role in your educational and career success would suggest that inequality is a societal problem. As the author of a manifesto for the 1 percent, Mankiw obviously can’t do that. Once you admit inequality is a problem, you should—God forgive—look to government to adopt public policies to address it.

         But it is absurd to suggest that equal opportunity exists in the United States.

         Children in our budget-strapped public schools are at a disadvantage when they compete with privileged children whose upbringing includes private schooling—from kindergarten through high school—in the rat race for college. Today, skyrocketing tuition effectively blocks more and more poor and middle class students from being able to enter the country’s top colleges and universities. When they do make it, they become prisoners of debt after graduation.

         Inequality is worsening within professions. Being a lawyer nowadays no longer guarantees you a huge salary unless you graduate from the best law schools. Blue-collar workers no longer can count on the solid middle-class salaries and workplace benefits they once could obtain before the country’s manufacturing industry was destroyed and union representation dropped to a mere 7 percent in the private sector.

    Technology and Inequality

         While discounting the roadblocks to upward mobility, Mankiw goes on to argue that technological change has contributed to inequality as highly-paid CEOs of high-tech companies have been rightly compensated for their contributions to the economy. He writes, “…it seems that changes in technology have allowed a small number of highly educated and exceptionally talented individuals to command superstar incomes in ways that were not possible a generation ago.”

         So, Mankiw apparently is OK with Larry Ellison of Oracle—the highest-paid CEO in 2012—raking in $96.2 million in 2012, an increase of 24 percent from his 2011 salary of $77.6 million. Ellison’s salary, however, improved more than his company did. In 2012, Oracle’s income grew by 17 percent, but its stock price decreased 22 percent. More than $90 million of Ellison’s 2012 compensation was in stock options.

         But with technology, we enter a complicated terrain that mainstream economics, with its focus on a productive economic actor, cannot fully explain. Mankiw only mentions CEO salaries while failing to discuss technology’s role in exacerbating inequality by destroying well-paying jobs and contributing to globalization, which has put downward pressure on wages at home while helping corporations find cheaper labor abroad. The smashing of unions and government trade policies that hurt domestic manufacturing (factors ignored by Mankiw in his paper) have fueled this process. The decline in unions mirrors the worsening of inequality. So does the decline in the federal minimum wage.

    Ideological Indoctrination

         At Harvard University, students have taken Mankiw over his neo-classical economics perspective and view on inequality. Dozens of students walked out of his Economics 10 class in 2011 in solidarity with students who face barriers to education across the country. The demonstration took place as the Occupy movement protested rising inequality and the growing concentration of power in the United States.

         “We believe that Professor N. Gregory Mankiw, a former economic advisor to President Bush, played a key role in creating the policies which have exacerbated economic inequality and led to financial instability and collapse,” students Gabriel H. Bayard and Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash wrote in an article titled “Tune In, Walk Out” in the university’s newspaper, The Crimson. “We argue that it is unfair that he teaches this foundational course, which greatly impacts the attitudes of Harvard students, every year.”

         Unfortunately, Mankiw has also greatly impacted the minds of our country’s elite.

     

    Gregory N. Heires is a New York City-based labor writer.

    This was posted on www.thenewcrossroads.com on July 15, 2013.

     

     

     

     

  • JUSTICE FOR TRAVVON PROTESTS + MARCH ON WASHINGTON = A CHANCE

    The coincidence of the “Justice for Trayvon” protests all over the country and the 50th anniversary of the March of Washington for Jobs and Freedom presents the African American people and all of those concerned with social justice a real opportunity to revive the black freedom and equality movement in the United States. Hundreds of marches and demonstrations have taken place in cities and towns throughout the nation in the last few weeks in a call not only for justice for Travyon Martin but also for an end to racial profiling and to “stand your ground” laws. Those involved in these demonstrations have been mostly African Americans, though Latinos—who face similar issues—were numerous in California and white allies were present in small numbers everywhere. Young African American men and women as well as teenagers showed up in large numbers, easily identifying with Trayvon’s all too common tragic experience.

    Rev. Al Sharpton, with a keen sense of opportunity and with a national organization, the National Action Network, called for demonstrations on Saturday, July 20, and tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—responded in cities across the nation. President Barack Obama’s response to the growing discontent in the African American community — holding a press conference and discussing his own experiences as a black man with white racism — has contributed to a sense that the issue is before us and something must be done.  Though strangely, at the same time, Obama considers appointing New York Police Chief Ray Kelly, responsible for the city’s racist stop-and-frisk policy, to be head of Homeland Security. 

    The Underlying Problem: the Economy

    Underlying these demonstrations about Trayvon Martin, racial profiling and what so many perceive as the “criminal injustice system,” is a deeper desire to end racism—economic, social, and political—in America once and for all. Economic inequality stands at the center of the country’s racial problems: the gap between African Americans and other Americans continues to grow. While the United States has its first black president, African Americans have not been so badly off in comparative economic terms for decades. The economic crisis of 2008 may have ended for banks and businesses and for a layer of more prosperous mostly white Americans, but it has not ended for millions of black Americans. While the monthly national unemployment rate remained constant at 7.6 percent, for African Americans it increased to 13.7 percent from 13.5, almost twice that of other Americans.

    While joblessness is the immediate problem, the deeper issue is that African Americans have been seeing their assets—bank accounts, pensions, homeownership, automobiles—decline in comparison to those of whites. A study a year ago by the Pew Research Center based on 2009 data found that, “The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households….From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households. As a result of these declines [in homeownership and housing values], the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth (assets minus debts) in 2009; the typical Hispanic household had $6,325 in wealth; and the typical white household had $113,149.”

    The Obama administration has not simply neglected the African American population; it has actively pursued policies which are inimical to it. President Obama negotiated NAFTA-like trade deals that lead to a loss of job security and lower wages. He froze federal workers’ wages. He and his Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan have worked to weaken the teachers unions and promoted charter schools, policies that affect the employment and wages of black teachers, and harm African American communities, and students. Obama’s bailout of the auto industry at the beginning of his first term saved the corporations, but several auto plants were closed, thousands of jobs lost, and workers’ wages, conditions and benefits were sacrificed. As corporate taxes have been cut and jobs lost and workers’ wages lowered, the tax base has been eroded, which in turn becomes an excuse for cutting services and laying off public employees, many of whom are black. The bankruptcy of the auto industry capital, Detroit—a bankruptcy that is principally an attempt to eliminate the city’s obligation to pay pensions to about 6,000 retired workers—in a city that is 83 percent African American and 7 percent Latino, symbolizes the state of black America in the era of Obama.

    African Americans may be marching now principally because of Trayvon Martin and may also march in August 2013 to commemorate Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s great “I Have a Dream” speech and all that it implied—but they will also be marching because the American economic system is failing them and the American political system and its first black president has not stood up for them. Even as African Americans for completely understandable reasons remain loyal to President Obama, still proud of the accomplishment of election the first black president, they increasingly find intolerable the economic crisis and the continuing racism of American society and begin—if not to criticize the Obama administration—to demand an improvement in the economic and social situation, that is, to demand once again as they did fifty years ago “Jobs and Freedom.” We may be seeing—we hope we are seeing—the beginning of a longer march not simply to Washington and the reflecting pond, but of a march through America from sea to sea.

    Lessons of the Past

    African Americans facing today a deteriorating economic situation and continuing racial discrimination will have to create their own leadership to take them forward. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s—the greatest labor movement in U.S. history since the 1930s—was largely a movement in the South of poor farmers, agricultural laborers, domestic servants, and service and industrial workers (such as sanitation workers and steel workers), as well as of high school students and some college students. Yet, while it was a movement of working people, driven by anger and indignation at their super-exploitation as black workers and at their oppression under the Jim Crow system and white violence, in few places did black working people control the movement.

    The movement thrust up from below new organizations—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—and pushed forward new leaders, many of them local activists in churches and labor unions, many of them the women of the black communities. Women and men with radical backgrounds, like the modest Ella Baker, played a significant role. The African American poor of the South and the ghetto dwellers of the North pushed forward mostly male leaders of whom the most famous is Martin Luther King, Jr. almost all of them from the black middle class. Yet at the same time this middle class movement was pushed to take up the economic and social demands of its working class base.

    While it was a movement against Jim Crow and lynch laws and for civil rights, the civil rights movement was also from the beginning a fight for jobs and higher wages as well and it was economic necessity as much as a demand for social equality that drove it. African Americans made significant strides in the late 1960s and 1970s, winning greater access to corporate jobs and other employment, though mostly in the lower echelons. Yet, the hope for a genuinely more just society for all was not achieved, and the frustration of the movement in the 1960s and 1970s led to the emergence of the more radical Black Power movement, largely destroyed by repression before turning in a nationalist and ultimately pro-black business direction courted by Richard Nixon who embraced the term “black power” and created the Office of Minority Business Enterprise.

    A Movement under Middle and Upper Class Leadership

    Everywhere, the leadership of the African American civil rights movement was grasped by the historic black business and professional class and by a newly emerging group of corporate black leaders created by the movement’s very success. The black upper- and middle-class professionals tended to have their own understanding of the movement and its goals, which were not necessarily those of the black working class majority. They used the movement to advance their interests in politics, government, and business. Since the end of the 1970s the leadership of the African American community has been in the hands of its traditional and moderate civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the SCLC, of black ministers such as Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton, though in every city African American corporate executives, labor union officials, and Democratic Party politicians have played a somewhat less visible but usually more decisive role.

    The “participatory democracy” proposed by Ella Baker and SNCC was obscured by a narrowly construed, financially corrupt, and morally bankrupt electoral democracy dominated by party political machines, political action committees, and advertising and the media. The African American organizations—like the AFL-CIO labor unions and like the National Organization for Women—counted upon the Democratic Party as their shield if not their sword. It failed them. The Democrats, dependent on funding from the world of high finance and big business had no desire to and could not go after the banks foreclosing on black people or the corporations busting unions.   

    A New Opportunity

    The mass movement for Justice for Trayvon, the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, and the economic crisis facing the black community represent an opportunity for the reconstruction of a civil rights movement. Once again it will principally be youth and working class African Americans and white allies—and today their Latino allies as well—who will propel the movement forward. What is missing in the equation at present is an independent black workers’ movement that could give the movement both the truly representative character and the power that it would need to change our economy, society and government. While black workers make up a disproportionate share of service and industrial workers and of union members, they have yet to wrest the unions from leaders committed to partnership with the employers and dependence on the Democratic Party. To change that situation it black workers will have to join with their white, Latino and other immigrant coworkers to build a broad rank-and-file movement that can turn the unions from compromise followed by retreat to conflict followed by advance. We are not yet there.

    When we do get there, when we have that combination of African American working class power, a broad social alliance with Latino and white workers, and an independent political movement, the goal will be to wrest power form the banks and corporations and to create a democratic and egalitarian society. A working class movement in America, of which African Americans will form a leading component, will put back on the American agenda the demand for jobs for all, for a living wage, for free public education from K to Ph.D., and for an end to corporate health care and instead free universal health care. Implicit in every modern struggle for justice is the struggle against the corporations and against capitalism and for the alternative whose historic name is socialism. It is not surprising that A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, James Farmer and other African American socialists were among the organizers of the great March on Washington in 1963.

    We are not there yet, but we may be on the cusp of a new African American movement with the possibility of reviving the labor movement and through independent political action challenging the vicious two-party system which holds us all prisoners. We will be marching for Trayvon in our hometowns, we will be marching in Washington in August, and we will be either activists or allies of the new African American movement on which the fate of democracy and social justice in America will once again rely to carry us forward.

  • Working People for Peace: The Real Story of Popular Opposition to the U.S. Adventure in Vietnam

    [The following review of mine appears as Hardhats for Peace in the July 18 issue of The Indypendent, which calls itself with considerable justification "A Free Paper for Free People." An expanded version surveying a number of recent (and quite good) critiques of U.S. misadventures in East Asia from the Philippines to today, will appear in the forthcoming New Politics.]

     

         A lot of books get published. Some are worth reading. Occasionally one comes along that is so complete, so thoughtful and so well-argued that not only does it move the discussion, it closes it. In Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, City University of New York sociologist and labor educator Penny Lewis does that to a reigning myth — that the mass movement against the United States’ war in Southeast Asia comprised mainly spoiled college kids, and that the true, authentic blue-collar Americans backed the war with brio. That’s a slick line to propagate. Not only does an image like that of construction workers attacking protesters (as famously occurred on Wall Street in May 1970) justify foreign interventions and military spending, it stigmatizes dissenters as illegitimate and alien to the body politic. That grossly distorts real working class sentiment or the class composition of protesters, all to divide critics themselves.

         Slick as it was, the line was not true, says Lewis, whose work in this remarkably readable and textured analysis shows us the past isn’t so much remembered as “reconstructed,” in schools, by the media and elsewhere. Even contemporary polls by Gallup showed that the greater one’s education, the more likely one was to support the Vietnam War. That is the reverse of the urban myth that blue-collar families were the war's key defenders and that a privileged and ungrateful elite — what neoconservatives would soon name a “new class” — was responsible for defeat in the field. It’s an old trope, that wars are lost not through military blunders, or because they were undertaken for the worst possible reasons, or because the domestic effects from an indefensible and bankrupting military adventure estrange growing numbers of people, but because of a “stab in the back” by a willful and disloyal minority.

         In fact, as Lewis demonstrates, the U.S. drive to stabilize what quickly became  a series of milirary dictatorships in South Vietnam was defeated through the resistance of the Vietnamese and the disintegration of a near-mutinous U.S. army in the field. As for the antiwar movement at home, Lewis calculates that some tens of millions of Americans took part at its height, with the majority of Americans opposing the war. If the movement began on elite campuses and with the help of traditional pacifist and left organizations, Lewis demonstrates how it quickly grew to encompass communities of color, including civil rights organizations aghast at the domestic cost of the war, parents with a real expectation of losing sons in a pointless slaughter, mid-level trade union officials and rank-and-file union members bucking their war-abetting union leaders, and returning troops — typically with no more than a high-school diploma or GED — very publicly discarding their medals in antiwar mobilizations while helping build the GI coffeehouse efforts. And with the draft swelling resisters’ ranks, the now grounded multi-class movement changed a bipartisan consensus among Washington policy-makers that “rolling back communism” and “defending freedom” were both fair statements of war aims, let alone real possibilities. Communism would within a generation be rolled back, but by the tenacity of a then ascending global capital, not by the U.S. military.

         Meanwhile, the antiwar movement never transcended its own limitations. Once the body bags stopped flowing home and the draft ended in 1973, the movement — built on the broadest possible agreement on just one issue (Bring the Troops Home Now!) and never really incorporating the latent critique of imperialism, let alone opposition to capitalism — could not grow into an a radical force capable of challenging the U.S. class system itself. It did spark radicalism among erstwhile liberals (like me) and a real effort to organize working people as anti-capitalists at home, where those of us who began purely as war critics and activists grew into radicals of one stripe or another in unions, community organizations and academia. If anything, the meme propagated by some leftists that workers were big backers of imperialism backfired with many of the most dedicated campus antiwar activists, setting the stage for much of the working class organizing that former student radicals did during the 1970s. In myriad industrial cities we found — surprise! — young workers not that different from us, just having different life chances.

         Lewis does much more than just debunk a pernicious myth with her multifaceted and complete analysis. Her effort to complete an exhaustively detailed portrait of a huge movement — one that never received the sort of scholarly attention given to other key upsurges of the 1960s, including the Civil Rights movement — is commendably aimed at confounding what she calls “a faulty memory frame” while forging a true “countermemory.” Thanks to scholars like Lewis, history isn’t always written by the winners.

     

    Michael Hirsch is a member of the New Politics editorial board.

     

  • The Double Standard in Europe's Austerity Discourse

         The International Monetary Fund acknowledged making an egregious error in its evaluation of the Greek bailout it helped create after its ambitious push for harsh austerity last month. Their failed analysis highlights the dangers of austerity measures imposed on Greek citizens. According to the IMF report:

    "Market confidence was not restored, the banking system lost 30 percent of its deposits, and the economy encountered a much deeper-than-expected recession with exceptionally high unemployment. Public debt remained too high and eventually had to be restructured, with collateral damage for bank balance sheets that were also weakened by the recession. Competitiveness improved somewhat on the back of falling wages, but structural reforms stalled and productivity gains proved elusive."

         The evaluation additionally predicted that unemployment would reach 15 percent when it actually climbed to 25 percent. IMF analysts claimed that they simply underestimated the consequences that unemployment would play on Greece's recovery.

         This isn't the first time that the IMF has conceded the dangers of austerity. In 2012, the fund's research acknowledged that austerity packages applied throughout Europe were counterproductive and suggested "that fiscal cutbacks had larger-than-expected negative short-term multiplier effects on output." They expected only a loss of growth worth 50 cents for every Euro cut, but the lost growth exceeded three times that value.

         In a more recent report, Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde advocated more growth-based policies.

    "Over the past year, substantial actions at both the national and euro-wide levels have been taken to combat the crisis. But despite this progress, the economic recovery remains elusive, unemployment is rising, and uncertainty is high. While substantial collective action has been taken to tackle the crisis in the euro area, further policy steps are needed to support growth and increase employment."

         Though the IMF recognizes the devastating consequences that austerity poses to suffering countries, spending cuts and debt-reduction will likely remain a pillar of Europe's finance orthodoxy as public officials continue to advance the "fiscal responsibility" discourse. In an attempt to attract international investors, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras recently promoted his country as a "success story," downplaying Greece's record unemployment. He assured lenders that the $325 billion in bailout packages that imposed harsh austerity measures on Greek citizens restored the country's "credibility in Europe." He further promised higher rewards for future investments by endorsing Greece as a profitable vacation spot.

         On another front, Angela Merkel's likely reelection to a third term as German Chancellor will bring a renewed mandate to push for austerity in Europe's GIPSI states – Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland. Her popular support is rooted in an electorate that is tired of German taxes financing bail-outs for EU members largely painted as profligate and reckless. Merkel's prospective victory will frustrate Lagarde's recent push for growth-based policies as the IMF cannot act unilaterally and requires German involvement. Lagarde had primarily focused her attention on raising funds for European bailouts, but she has recently emphasized growth.

         When asked about whether Greece will be writing down more debt in the future, she spoke highly of Samaras saying, "I don't see it, thanks to the very reform-oriented Samaras government." Last year, almost a third of Greece's overall debt was forgiven in a write-down of over a hundred billion euros held by private investors. She ended with an assurance that "debt-sustainability will continue to be ensured."

         The triumph of Europe's austerity discourse advances the narrative that profligate government spending caused the crisis. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle recently stated, "We are convinced that if we give up on budget consolidation in Europe and return to the old approach of more and more debt, then we would cement mass-unemployment over a period of many years" (italics added). Even Merkel recently implied that suffering states spent beyond their means when she snidely commented, "I call it balancing the budget. Everyone else is using this term austerity. That makes it sound like something truly evil."

         This kind of language reveals how the current narrative paints deficit spending as the cause of the financial crisis. In reality, the sovereign debt crisis is a product of the banking crisis, and debts ballooned only after states had spent a large percentage of their GDPs rescuing the financial sector. Up to that point, the public expenditures of those suffering the most were well within in the average of the Eurozone. To confirm this, I collected data from the European Commission's Eurostat and averaged the total general government expenditures as a percent of GDP from Eurozone members in 2008. Spending of the GIPSIs averaged 45.75, which is well within the Eurozone's overall average of 45.05, demonstrating that countries suffering the most did not spend beyond their means.

         In fact, the GIPSI debt burden followed a downward trend throughout the decade leading up to the collapse. Using IMF data, I averaged GIPSI debt relative to GDP from 1997 to 2010. The average of the GIPSI states' debt relative to GDP was 77 percent in 1997, which slowly slid down to 63.5 percent in 2007. Austerity actually magnifies the debt burden as spending cuts slow growth while doing nothing to alleviate the debt. Debt became a problem only after the establishment of the austerity orthodoxy, as debt to GDP ratios shot up to 91.4 percent in 2010.

         The apocryphal narrative of profligate state spending distracts us from the class politics inherent in Europe's austerity project. The promise to return Europe to "stability" and "fiscal responsibility" as well as transform it into a "credible investment" masks how spending cuts target those who rely most on social programs. The ambitious push to shrink government services shows Europe's double standard in its austerity project after states dissipated large amounts of their GDPs rescuing the financial sector. In this regard, austerity serves as a form of redistribution, transferring money and privilege from the bottom to the top.

         Simultaneously, unemployment continues to plague the GIPSI economies. Using data from the World Bank, I looked at the unemployment rate of the GIPSI states over time. The average unemployment rate for the GIPSIs was 7 percent in 2008 but it jumped to 19 percent at the beginning of 2013. Meanwhile, the Tax Justice Network reveals that the wealthiest investors in the world continue to make more money while hoarding up to $30 trillion in secret tax havens abroad.

         There is nothing "stable" or "responsible" about that.

     

    Ben Luongo is currently a doctoral student in the University of South Florida's Department of Government and International Affairs. He has taught international relations at St. Petersburg College in Clearwater, Florida. He has also coordinated several campaigns with groups like the Human Rights Campaign and Save the Children.

  • Heartbreak and class warfare, Chicago-style

    I’d be heart-broken by the layoffs announced by the Chicago Public Schools, (CPS) even if my pal Xian Barrett (in the photo, talking teaching with me at the DC Save Our Schools demo last April) weren’t one of the folks given a pink slip.

    By pinning the blame for the layoffs on “the lack of pension reform” Mayor Rahm Emanuel is trying to force the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) to choose between layoffs and cuts to pensions. Meanwhile, the CTU with parent and community allies has brought the district to court to reverse the school closings, tenaciously contested last Spring.

    Layoffs are devastating – as are school closings. Can the CTU win this? Or as a reader of my most recent NP seems to suggest, is schooling just too enmeshed in the muck of capitalist social relations for even a good union to counter?

    No one has a crystal ball – not me, not readers, and not our enemies. No one knows what the outcome of this struggle will be. This is class warfare, and in wars both sides have wins and losses. The CTU’s strike and its success in building solid, mutually respectful alliances with parents, students, community, and other unions go in the “win” column. So far the weight of those successes has not been sufficient to keep Emanuel and the political elite of Chicago whom he represents from countering successfully with the school closings and layoffs.

    What to do now?  I think the union needs to adopt two strategies simultaneously. First is turning up the heat “from below.” CTU knows how to organize and staff are likely cooking up a campaign as  I write.  Maybe a series of rolling strikes? That’s what the two biggest teachers unions in the UK are doing now to push back on the government’s attacks on teachers and public education. (Catch that band playing! Love those hats!) The Bad Ass Teachers Association has a campaign to phone Emanuel's office and demand he call off the layoffs. Nice work, BATS!

    The other part of the strategy is “from above.” This means putting pressure on AFT President Randi Weingarten, who has considerable access to the White House, to use her clout, now.  After letting the White House know her intention, Weingarten could have a coffee date with Rahm and explain why he can’t tell teachers to choose between pensions and layoffs – not, that is, if he wants a single penny from the AFT for Democrats (who don’t deserve a cent to start, but that’s another blog…) No campaign workers, no phone banks. And a campaign in the AFL-CIO to follow suit.

    What if Weingarten doesn’t respond to private pressure? Doesn't want to use her political capital to save the jobs of Chicago teachers? Then we should go public with the demand. Petitions, phone calls, to the AFT national office. Union officials are only as smart and powerful as their members help them to be. Union officers get lots of heat from the media and the politically powerful to be reasonable, that is, make concessions. It’s the job of members to push the other direction, hold our officers’ feet to the fire.  By making demands on Weingarten to defend Xian and the other 2000 CPS employees told they've been laid off, we’ll be helping Randi Weingarten to do her job.  And by organizing at the schools, with parents, students, and community, the CTU is helping Rahm to be a better Mayor. And boy, does he need help. Until we throw him out.

     

  • Class Struggle from the Couch

    On Sept. 17, Grand Theft Auto V, the latest installment in the wildly popular video game franchise, will be released for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, perhaps as one of the final major games for the current console generation.

         Older readers may not be aware, but video games have developed quite a bit since the Pac-Man booths of yore. Games increasingly include sophisticated plots, top-of-the-line voice acting, and graphics that could be mistaken on first glance for live-action film. I have little doubt their quality will increase exponentially in years to come and they will represent one of the most important media of the 21st century. Back in 2011, The Economist reported the video-gaming industry was already three-fifths the size of the movie industry. For that reason alone, games deserve serious critical attention.

         I'd like to take the opportunity of GTA V’s release to examine, as one might books or movies, how its publisher, Rockstar, has dealt with political themes. Specifically, as a fellow traveler myself, I'd like to look at the publisher's portrayal of socialism and class struggle. I'll do this through the lens of Rockstar’s earlier games, Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noir.

         Red Dead Redemption is a 2010 action and adventure game inspired by the spaghetti westerns of filmmakers such as Sergio Leone. Now, you should know, I'm not a die-hard gamer. I haven't played everything out there, or even close. During the opening character-creation sequence of Skyrim, a game which hardcore reviewers were in ecstasies over, I got bored and gave up. But I LOVED Red Dead Redemption. And yes, the caps lock is necessary. It boasts a beautifully rendered world, solid character development and a well-written story. So if you've never picked up a controller or haven't in a while, give RDR a chance.

         Part of the game is set in the Mexican Revolution. It's my understanding that some of the characters are based on real-life figures but I'll leave discussion of the release's historical accuracy to those with more knowledge of the subject. I am, sadly, just another dumb gringo.

         RDR's central protagonist is a bounty hunter named John Marston. Asked whether he is a socialist, he explains, "I'm many things, most of them bad. But a man of political principles? No." Marston fights on both sides of the conflict before throwing in his lot with the rebels, seemingly more out of personal loyalty than ideological conviction.

         Rockstar portrays the Mexican dictatorship as brutally corrupt, though eventually paints the rebel leadership as little better. Similarly, the publisher seems sympathetic to the revolutionary rank-and-file, while also suggesting they are naive. Luisa Fortuna, a selfless peasant fighter, is perhaps the game's most uniformly likable character. She speaks passionately of the struggle without Rockstar imposing a noticeable sense of irony. At the same time, however, she is in love with a local guerrilla leader, who admits to Marston he would never marry a peasant and is revealed to be something of a political tyrant-in-waiting. His insincere commitment to Fortuna and the rebel cause is perhaps explained by his upper-class origins.

         In the end, Rockstar sides with the rebels, but quite unenthusiastically. Whether this is an appropriate position, given how the revolution turned out, is a question I'll leave for those with more knowledge of Mexico's history. But the publisher seems to go further, cynically suggesting government can never be representative of the people's interests, no matter the circumstances, no matter how much the masses struggle. This, of course, leaves no room for progressive change.

         L.A. Noir, also published by Rockstar, is a 2011 pulpy period piece set in the 1940s. Unfortunately, it's not fractionally as fun as RDR. There's very little overarching story or character development to propel you forward, and the cases you work through could probably be played in any sequence, as you might watch the TV show Law & Order, without missing much.

         One investigation could be interpreted as an implicit criticism of Red Scare hysteria. The central protagonist, a police officer, investigates a series of suspicious fires he believes to be connected. The game leads you to charge a low-level gas company employee found in possession of anarchist pamphlets, specifically Peter Kropotkin's Law and Authority. And if I'm following the game's twists and turns correctly, the employee is actually innocent.

         Another investigation, however, introduces us to a communist character who, while also falsely charged, is the most unflattering representation of a leftist in either L.A. Noir and RDR. The guy's insufferably snotty and just in case you didn't pick this up from what he says, he's wearing an ascot. I mean, an ascot? But it doesn't stop there. He looks down on working class people and beats women, just in case you didn't get that he is a monstrous hypocrite too.

         Of course, we live in a conservative country where, according to Gallup, only 36 percent of the population has a positive view of socialism, however it may be defined. So it makes sense that a major game publisher would present an ambiguous-to-negative view of economic democracy and those who work for it. Have readers out there played any other games, by Rockstar or other publishers, that deal with issues of class struggle?

     

    Jon Hochschartner is a contributing writer for The North Star, a non-sectarian socialist website.

     

  • Zimmerman Verdict: Still Impunity in the U.S. for the Killing of Black Men and Boys

         The acquittal of George Zimmerman on charges of manslaughter and murder in the Trayvon Martin case on July 13 represents another incident in the long history of impunity for those who in the name of the law and order kill African American men and boys. Zimmerman, an armed, neighborhood watch leader in Sanford, Florida, followed Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old and legally a child, through his neighborhood—despite the fact that after calling the police Zimmerman had been informed that they did not want him to follow the individual that he had identified as “a real suspicious guy.” When Zimmerman overtook Martin, there was an altercation that left the armed vigilante alive and the black teenager dead. Zimmerman’s attorneys argued that he should be acquitted of the charges of manslaughter and murder because he had acted in self-defense after being attacked by Martin.

         The long and complicated trial before a jury of six women, one a woman of color, presented conflicting testimony about who was on top once the two were fighting on the ground and who it was that called for help, the mother of the killer and the mother of the victim both identifying their son’s voice as that calling for help. The jury decided that it had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman had not acted in self-defense. Yet, while the specifics of this case may be complex and the decision of the jury consonant with Florida law, the injustice of that decision is all too apparent to African Americans and their allies who know that it is only another example of impunity for those who either as real police officers or would-be police officers kill black men and boys. Let us put the facts simply: an armed vigilante with no legal or police authority followed a black child through the neighborhood and killed him. Yet the killer walks free. Whites in the South and in other regions of the country were free to kill African Americans with little likelihood of punishment under slavery, during the Jim Crow era, and apparently can still do so in what some have called the “post-racial” age. At best one can say the justice system unfortunately failed, though many, especially black Americans will feel that it worked, as it has worked for decades.

         Demonstrations protesting the Trayvon Martin decision began on the West Coast, in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles, the same night as the jury reached its decision. There have also been demonstrations in Washington, D.C. and Tallahassee. Other demonstrations are planned for Sunday, July 14 in cities throughout the country. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is calling upon the U.S. Justice Department to act in the case. They are circulating this:

    “We're calling on the U.S. Justice Department to open a civil rights case against George Zimmerman and have launched a petition to Attorney General Eric Holder. The petition says:

    "The Department of Justice has closely monitored the State of Florida's prosecution of the case against George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin murder since it began. Today, with the acquittal of George Zimmerman, it is time for the Department of Justice to act. 

    "The most fundamental of civil rights—the right to life—was violated the night George Zimmerman stalked and then took the life of Trayvon Martin. We ask that the Department of Justice file civil rights charges against Mr. Zimmerman for this egregious violation. 

    "Please address the travesties of the tragic death of Trayvon Martin by acting today. Thank you."

    Click here to add your name to this petition, and then pass it along to your friends.

         The struggle for racial justice in the United States continues, now over the killing of Trayvon Martin, where the killer walks free. Perhaps this most notorious of recent cases will provide the occasion for the reconstruction of an African American civil rights movement that can demand not only justice from the courts, but economic and social justice from the society at large.

     

  • A reply to Herman Benson: The Chicago Teachers Union is a different kind of labor union

    The exchange between Herman Benson and Dan La Botz highlights one, if not the primary, issue that has to be resolved if we are to turn back the tidal wave of anti-union and anti-democratic policies that have transformed the nation’s social and political landscape.  I think both Herman and Dan would agree that we need a revived labor movement. But what will drive the revival? And what form should it take?

    Herman’s definition of revival seems to consist of more “oomph” from the AFL-CIO leadership and more attention to union democracy.  Both are sorely needed. The question is whether these are adequate to restore, let alone push forward, the political and economic policies we so desperately need.  In education, the answer is a clear “no” and the example of the Chicago Teachers Union supports Dan’s argument.

     

    Yes, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) conducted a militant strike. But it was not a traditional strike by any means, if we take as a definition of tradition what has existed in US unions for four decades.  What we see in Chicago has been more  like the kind of organizing done by the CIO, fusing a progressive social program to union demands. CORE, the insurgent caucus that leads the CTU and was re-elected last month in a landslide (with over 60% of the members voting) has shifted the political terrain of education politics by embedding union demands in a vision for public education. Yes, the strike was a contract dispute, but these courageous, wise activists found a way to win over the vast majority of teachers to use the contract fight to fight for much more. Theirs was a fight for public education – as is their current struggle against the unnecessary, racist school closings that other cities are facing.  CTU has taken on the power establishment of Chicago and the White House.  They organize along side parents and community activists, as partners. In doing so, the CTU has shown teachers and organized labor the kind of unions – and unionism – we need.  Now.

     

    The victory of “right to work” legislation in Michigan shows how very tenuous U.S. labor’s hold is on the right to bargain collectively. Is it even a movement? Herman has been so right for so long about union democracy. Still, his analysis reflects the problems liberals have had in understanding that neoliberalism has destroyed the landscape in which unions have functioned.  (In an upcoming article in “The Jacobin,” I’ll be discussing liberalism’s failure to “get” what’s ailing education and the unions in more detail.)

     

    (Note: You can now follow me on twitter @drloisweiner.)

  • Real Unions and Unreal Unions

    This discussion has shifted ground. It started with what I proposed, but now we’re discussing Dan La Botz’s views on the AFL-CIO. I wrote about the need to democratize unions. Dan wants to turn existing unions into “real unions.”

    Rich Trumka solicited comments from friends of the labor movement on how the AFL-CIO might best prepare for the future. I replied by suggesting that if unions were thoroughly democratized, millions of members who were now indifferent to their unions or disenchanted could be imbued with the conviction that their unions truly belonged to them and not to the salaried officialdom.

    And so, the labor movement, which now depends upon an active cadre of thousands to bring its message to the nation, could recruit from its own ranks an army of millions of missionaries who would speak up for unions and labor’s cause to their relatives, their friends, co-workers — at home, in social gatherings, in their churches and clubs, at work. And so, in time, the mood of the nation could be affected and the labor movement restored to a powerful social and political force. In this, I do believe. I offered no new program, no alternate leadership, no cure for AIDS, no cure for the many social and economic ills of the nation or of the labor movement.

    Knowing something about Dan and, as an interested reader of what he writes, I am sure he agrees with what I proposed. But he says not a word about the essence of what I wrote. I don’t know if he even noticed it. He is too troubled by the few nice things I said about the AFL-CIO.

    He sees a fatal contradiction between criticizing the AFL-CIO leadership and then noting that the federation has been moving in the right direction. But why? Joe Rauh used to say: “We don’t want to tear down labor’s flag, we only want to wash out the stains.” The reality is that the labor movement has been moving, slowly, in the right direction precisely because of the criticism, the dissident activity of union democrats and reformers. In 2005, the book Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers added the subtitle, “How insurgents transformed the labor movement.” It was too optimistic. While the decades of insurgent activity did not “transform” the labor movement, it certainly did move it in the right direction; and there is evidence all over the place. I don’t think that Dan would agree with those who claim that all that reform activity was fruitless.

    Dan insists that “we need a completely different labor movement if we are to have real unions.” Does he really believe that? The unions and the labor movement we have today may not meet our standards, but they are real enough for us to support against attack and to applaud efforts to recruit and retain members. In the same declamatory spirit, he writes of the “70-year degeneration of the labor movement.”

    At the risk of alienating Dan and/or his co-thinkers, I admit I see it differently; I don’t think that the more extreme the language you devise in analyzing unions, the more it demonstrates your consistent militancy and hones your effectiveness. I see the labor movement as weaker, relatively smaller, and on the defensive, but it is not in a state of “degeneration.”

    In some respects, we have a better labor movement. The entry of nurses, teachers, communication workers, and public employees has made a difference. The labor movement is more sensitive to the concerns of minorities and immigrants. Organized crime, while still a problem, has been pushed back, notably in the Teamsters union. The combined effort of reformers and government has made internal democracy more secure. Increasingly, unions recognize the need to work with community activists.

    I will agree that in this time of troubles, when unions have been put on the defensive, the dominant labor union officialdom has not displayed the kind of strong leadership we need. Even within the limits of what can be done, they have failed. And that lack has been only partially offset by independent militants, reformers, and insurgents; I am familiar with their battles because I have been working with them for the last fifty years. But at the further risk of disappointing Dan, I must add: The root cause of labor’s setbacks lies not in the derelictions of its top leadership, but in the major national and international political and economic trends of our era:

    The demise of the New Deal coalition and the persisting strength of conservatism which can count upon the support of half the nation and the Supreme Court; the decline of manufacturing in the United States; the change in the nature of our work force; low wage competition from so-called developing countries. The success of anti-union forces in pitting people in private industry against public employees.

    I realize that some may be leery of citing these facts for fear of minimizing the shortcomings of our established labor leadership. Not at all. We must face the reality to assess the validity of our own program and not get swept away by our own rhetoric.

    What are the essential qualities of that “completely different labor movement” and those “real unions”? Dan explains that “they will have to build a movement prepared to engage in job actions and wildcat strikes that violate the contract, meaning that they risk their jobs and court action that will penalize their unions economically, and they will have to engage in civil disobedience and be prepared to go to jail.” More broadly, he adds that they “will have to transform their pro-capitalist ideology, restructure their bureaucratic organizations, and once again inspire militant class struggle unionism.”

    Of course, at critical moments unions have to be ready to take that kind of militant action when need be and when it can be effective. From time to time, some of our most conservative unions have been good at it. But can that be the crux of a union program today? Is that the centerpiece of any program reformers and militants should advance in their unions today? In this, I admit, Dan is in good company. At the 1995 convention, when John Sweeney was pushing his successful insurgent campaign for AFLCIO presidency he told the delegates they had to be ready to “Block bridges’ in labor’s battles. He was greeted with wild applause from the delegates, most of whom were paid AFLCIO officers and staff. Everyone likes to dream of going into glorious battle. But almost no one, not even Sweeney, did much about it, not because they were sellouts, but because back in their unions, it didn’t seem the answer.

    In reply to Sweeney, Tom Donahue said “We have to build bridges.” It is true that in the past decades, there have been decisive moments that cried out for militant civil disobedience in labor battles. In a few instances today, mostly minor, they have been successful. But the dominant call, the most consistent appeal, coming from labor reformers has been for unions to build bridges: to minorities, immigrants, women’s groups, churches, community organizations.

    When Dan comes down to earth and assesses real unions in real battles, he ignores his own exacting standards. For example: he cites two models of his kind of real unionism: Miners for Democracy and the strike led by the Chicago Teachers union.

    The Miners for Democracy was a remarkable and admirable insurgent reform caucus. It ousted the murderous leadership of the United Mine Workers. It rallied support, financial and legal, from liberals and civil libertarians. With the volunteer help of a team of pro-labor attorneys, it wielded its own rights under federal law, and it expanded union democracy law to the advantage of all unionists in all unions. It inspired movements for democracy in other unions. Teamsters for a Democratic Union modeled its very name on theirs.

    But there was no bashing of capitalism, no civil disobedience, few of the standards for “real unionism,” no breaking the law. Quite the contrary, they made effective use of the law. In tendency, the miners and their leaders leaned conservatively. Its attorneys were standard Democratic leftish liberals. The man who inspired the movement at the cost of his life, Jock Yablonski, was a mainstream union leader right out of the old UMW incumbent leadership who finally realized that miners needed union democracy.

    The Chicago teachers gave a great lift to union morale. At a time when teachers and their unions face unremitting attack from governments, moneyed capitalists, and conservatives and criticism even from liberal politicians, the union demonstrated that it is possible, under strong leadership, to gain public support and win a strike. An insurgent caucus convinced the membership to replace an inactive leadership with one more militant. Yes, the CTU is obviously a real union. But like the Miners for Democracy it hardly meets Dan’s criteria. This was no wildcat strike, no break with capitalist ideology, no massive civil disobedience. The new officers led teachers in an effective, classical union strike, solid and disciplined.

    The point is this: The models selected by Dan to illustrate ‘real unionism” do not meet his own standards. There must something seriously wrong with those standards.

    I can’t throw off the nagging notion that I’m making too much of this discussion. I realize that what Dan writes here is not a guide to action, but the kind of evangelical rhetoric that many radicals welcome, inspiring them to persist in the unending battle for social justice. I hate to interfere with that process and do so only reluctantly just to clear the air.

    In my submission to Trumka, I listed nine practical steps unions can take to democratize. I’d be interested in the reactions from leaders and members of unions, both real and unreal. Is it possible to get to that discussion?

    =======================================================

    PS: Just for the record: Trumka was never a leader of the Miners for Democracy. At the time, he was an aspiring young lawyer who, among others, was helping Joe Rauh and Chip Yablonski provide legal support for the dissident miners. Praiseworthy, but no leader.

     

  • Egypt: Not the next stage of the revolution

    [from Weekly Worker 969, July 4 2013]

    The July 3 army coup that overthrew president Mohamed Mursi will do nothing to end Egypt’s “state of tension and division” – as claimed by general Abdul Fatah Khalil al Sisi in his TV address. The commander of Egypt’s armed forces said that Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood had “failed to meet the demands of the Egyptian people” and therefore the army had made good its pledge of two days earlier to step in. He announced the suspension of the Egyptian constitution pending new parliamentary and presidential elections, although he did not indicate any timescale.

    Not insignificantly, however, following general Sisi’s address, both pope Tawadros II, the head of the Coptic church, and leading liberal oppositionist Mohammed El Baradei made short speeches about the new road map they had agreed with the army. Later it was reported that Mursi and his close allies had been detained at an unknown location. There are warrants out for the arrest of 300 other Muslim Brotherhood members. Meanwhile Mursi supporters took to the streets protesting against the army takeover.

    Showing the contradictory nature of the anti-Mursi movement, there were huge cheers in Tahrir Square greeting the announcement of the coup. The demonstrations that had taken place in Cairo and other major Egyptian cities had been amongst the largest since December 2011 and the fall of the Mubarak regime. Women, men, secular and religious, many from the working class, had joined forces with the urban poor, as well as sections of the middle classes, to call for Mursi’s resignation. Even outside the presidential offices, used in recent weeks as a rallying point for Muslim Brotherhood supporters, anti-Mursi demonstrators had outnumbered those of the Brotherhood and the MB offices were stormed.

    Anyone on the left tempted to hail the tamarod (rebellion) as the next stage of the revolution surely faces bitter disappointment – the army is not a progressive force and no ally of the working class and poor. But the call for the resignation of Mursi was just about the only unifying demand of the millions on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and Luxor, so it was hardly surprising that news of the army coup was greeted so enthusiastically. Although the economy, high prices and mass unemployment were key factors driving forward the protests, not all demonstrators were for a genuinely secular democracy – they included some of the softer critics of the Mubarak era, who were among those calling for army intervention. A minority were young activists and workers around the April 6 movement, who put forward radical economic demands, as well as former Muslim Brotherhood supporters disenchanted by a year of failed promises.

    Some Tahrir Square protestors carried placards with anti-US slogans, mainly prompted by a speech by US ambassador Anne Patterson, who had said: “Egypt needs stability to get its economic house in order, and more violence on the streets will do little more than add new names to the lists of martyrs.” Her remarks were interpreted as in effect support for the Muslim Brotherhood and she was widely condemned by its opponents.

    Hopes

    In December 2011, when I was in Egypt, large sections of the crowd in Tahrir Square – even those who were not supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood – had great hopes for the future: Mubarak’s trial was just starting, and there were promises of jobs, economic prosperity and social justice. So what has happened in the last 18 months?

    The reality is that, for all the lofty phrases about defending the poor and seeking social justice, political Islam – be it in Egypt, Turkey or Iran – is failing dramatically, mainly because it cannot provide answers in the face of the global crisis of capital. Out of power it was easy for Islamist populists in the Middle East and north Africa to blame the westernised upper classes for poverty, the gap between rich and poor, and so on. But in power Mursi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad followed exactly the same economic policies as their predecessors, both on a national and international level.

    The demonstrations in Cairo and Istanbul and the abysmal failure of conservative Islamists in the recent presidential elections in Iran are all reactions to the same phenomenon: Islamist populists in power become corrupt capitalists, presiding over increasing inequality, unemployment and spiralling prices. In other words, economic devastation for the majority and huge fortunes for their cronies and allies.

    Islamist economics was heralded as a “third way” that was “neither capitalist nor socialist”. The truth is that Islam, like all other religions, defends private property and has little to say about exploitation and surplus value. Islamic forms of taxation, khums and zakat, are supposed to result in egalitarian societies. In reality, these are voluntary taxes and their calculation is very much at the discretion of the rich themselves – very few, if any, Muslim capitalists pay the stipulated rate (one fifth of annual income). Abolition of interest is also supposed to help the poor, but it is simply replaced by ‘set charges’ in Islamic banks and financial institutions. In this, as in so many other aspects of Islamic economics, the difference with western capitalism is more in terminology than content.

    As with followers of other religions, the only promises made by Islamists that are not immediately broken relate to the afterlife: the poor will be compensated for exploitation on earth, for they will end up in heaven. Mohammed said: “To those who reject our signs and arrogantly turn away from them, the doors of heaven will not be opened; nor will they enter paradise until the camel passes through the eye of a needle” (Soureh 7:40). These phrases will have a familiar ring to Christians: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god” (Matthew 19:24).

    Depression

    What we are witnessing in Cairo, as in Istanbul and Tehran, is indeed disillusionment with the false promises of political Islam and the collapse of its mass appeal. In reporting these events, bourgeois commentators keep talking of ‘middle class rebellion’, but in reality we are talking of the protests of the new working class, white-collar workers and the newly proletarianised middle classes. As the gap between the rich and the poor increases, clerks, teachers, engineers, doctors and many others are facing lower wages, unemployment or underemployment, inflation and increasing difficulty in making ends meet. No wonder so many took to the streets of Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran. Many are indeed the former supporters of Islamists duped by their promises of social justice. The global periphery is bearing the brunt of the economic depression, as companies move out of what are considered ‘risk areas’ in search of ever cheaper, less organised labour – and Islam in power is now widely regarded as part of the problem rather than the solution.

    In Egypt, unemployment – one of the major sources of dissatisfaction in 2011-12 – is worse today. There is little new investment. Government jobs, considered to be safer and better paid than those in the private sector, are few and far between. Many, including women who have lost their public-sector jobs in the last 18 months, blame the Muslim Brotherhood for sacking them to provide work for its own members and supporters. The official rate of unemployment was 13.2% in the last quarter of 2012, but the real figure is much higher and youth unemployment is far worse. Eight out of 10 unemployed Egyptians are under the age of 30.

    In other words, Egypt is facing an economic depression. In 2011 alone, direct foreign investment dropped by $325million, according to the Egyptian Central Bank, and the trade balance deficit reached $16.8 billion in 2012, compared to $15.6 billion the year before.1 The Egyptian currency is losing its value, making an already troubled economic situation worse, and Central Bank intervention – spending dollar reserves to maintain the currency above a certain value to enable the country to pay for the import of essential goods – has had little effect. Egyptians face an inflationary spiral. Food staples, such as rice and potatoes, are now too expensive for the majority of the population.

    The Tamarod (Rebel) petition, apparently signed by 22 million Egyptians, sums up the situation:

    •   Security has not been restored since the 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak.
    •   The poor have “no place” in society.
    •   The government has had to “beg” the International Monetary Fund for a $4.8 billion loan to help shore up public finances.
    •   There has been “no justice” for people killed by security forces during the uprising and at anti-government protests since then.
    •   “No dignity is left” for Egyptians or their country.
    •   The economy has “collapsed”, with growth poor and inflation high.
    •   Egypt is “following in the footsteps” of the US.2

    Tourism, which has played a significant role in the Egyptian economy, providing employment for three million people and 20% of the state’s foreign currency, is in a terrible state. This sector was already in trouble before the fall of Mubarak, partly because of the international economic crisis, but national income from it fell again in both 2011 and 2012. Tourism, once the source of income for many Egyptian families, has shed many workers, who now have to rely on relatives and friends for handouts to survive.

    In January 2012, after my short visit to Egypt, I wrote: “The Muslim Brotherhood stood on a clear enough slogan: ‘Islam is the solution’.” The MB distributed meat (a rare commodity in Egypt) in the poorer districts of Cairo. Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf countries provided funding for the Brotherhood’s election campaigns; however, bribing sections of the population could only be a short-term solution to the catastrophic economic problems facing the country.

    The response to poverty by the MB’s Freedom and Justice Party was a typical Islamic one: charity from the rich, in the form of donations distributed by the mosque to alleviate poverty; meanwhile, multimillionaire allies of the FJP like Khairat Al-Shater became economic strategists – one way of making sure that the liberal market economy of the ancien régime survived! The FJP’s long-term plan for a ‘mixed economy’ were summarised in its ‘renaissance project’, involving investment in health and education. However, most of the new investment funds have ended up in the pockets of major capitalists close to Mursi.

    The FJP, like all other Islamist groups, claimed that income from zakat taxation would make a big difference. In reality there was no noticeable change compared to the Mubarak era. The same was true of Ahmadinejad’s election promises in 2005 and 2009. He was going to put Iran’s oil money “on the table of every citizen”. As it was, he ended up making the rich richer and the poor much poorer. The bribes given in the form of cash incentives to sections of hard-line Islamic supporters ran out once sanctions took effect and the government faced serious economic difficulties. Ahmadinejad’s cash might have helped when he needed demonstrators in 2009. However, his failure to maintain this level of bribing, as well as leaks by former allies about multi-million-dollar corruption amongst the inner circle of the presidential offices, left him and the conservatives isolated by 2011.

    Cronyism

    In Turkey, the AKP also came to power promising social justice, yet it presided over a period of privatisation, following the diktat of the International Monetary Fund. However, new business associations supported by the AKP, as well as an array of Islamic charitable organisations, allowed the party to consolidate its hold on the country’s economy through patronage and cronyism. AKP leaders embarked on major construction programmes that included a new airport for Istanbul and a canal to provide oil tankers with an alternative route to the Bosporus. The plans for a new shopping mall in Taksim Square in Istanbul were the latest in a long list of projects filling the pockets of AKP cronies.

    However, by 2012 the miracle was over. The Turkish economy was in trouble, as the growth rate fell to 2% (from 9%) and the country’s foreign debt doubled, while at the same time its foreign currency deficit rose. In two years the ratio of debt to disposable income in Turkish households rose from 35% to 45%”.3 Last month’s protests and demonstrations also reflected the frustration at high rates of unemployment.

    At a time of world economic recession, it is no surprise that capitalism’s destructive characteristics are fuelling protests throughout the world. The fact that millions have shown their anger towards Islamic rule in Egypt, as in Turkey and Iran, is positive. However, in the absence of an organised working class, at a time when the left is weak, there was always the danger that, for all the courage and determination of the demonstrators, it would be the right that would benefit. There was always the risk of a military coup.

     

    Yassamine Mather is an Iranian socialist in exile in Britain. Her political activities on the Iranian left started in 1980s Tehran and later in Kurdistan. In exile, she has been on the editorial board of the monthly journal Jahan and a member of the coordinating committee of Workers Left Unity Iran. She is also a member of the Centre for Socialist Theory and Movements (Glasgow University) and the deputy editor of the journal Critique. Since 2007 she has been active in Hands Off the People of Iran (HOPI).

  • Randi Weingarten – my union president, not my bff

    Diane Ravitch has been a powerful voice for US teachers against the Billionaire Boys Club, who have carried out a program of social engineering that has devastated our schools.  Ravitch is a friend of public education, a friend of the social movement trying to push back these terrible "deforms." This distinction is one Ravitch misses when she defends her personal pal, Randi Weingarten, who is coming under intense pressure for  supporting the Common Core,  a national curriculum that is generating resistance on the left– and the right.  Weingarten should state clearly that adopting this curriculum cedes the power decide what our kids learn to a self-appointed elite. The process has been thoroughly undemocratic and a teachers union that wants respect for teachers has to say that. Weingarten is my union president, not my bff.  We need leadership and integrity from her, not  attendance at our birthday parties. And when she's wrong, as she is on this national curriculum, we have to call her out.

    You can now follow me on twitter @drloisweiner.

  • Rejoinder to Bratsis

    In his review of Remaking Scarcity Peter Bratsis raises a number of important issues regarding the relationship between scarcity and economic democracy but does not always offer an accurate account of how the book specifies that relationship. In particular, he claims that my understanding of scarcity follows liberalism’s postulate of a fixed human nature, while also attributing to me the view that “the virtue of economic democracy is that it is more efficient than market mechanisms.” Neither claim does justice to my argument.

                Regarding the first claim, my discussion of scarcity and the configurations of scarcity that social systems, including capitalism, generate offers an explicit critique of the kind of liberal conceptions of a fixed human nature that Bratsis rightly objects to. To be sure, the way I define scarcity is the same as neoclassical economics, namely as any situation in which people’s material desires are greater than what the given economic system, at the given level of technological development, makes it possible to satisfy. This means that there is both a demand side to scarcity (people’s material desires) and a supply side (the resources available for the satisfaction of people’s desires as well as the distribution of these resources between different social groups). Remaking Scarcity offers an analysis of how both the demand and the supply side of scarcity are shaped by the structural logics of socio-economic systems, with special emphasis on how this takes place under capitalism. My discussion of the demand-side of scarcity explicitly addresses Bratsis’ first concern, since I offer a critique of neoclassical accounts which understand human desires as exogenous to the economic system while also dismissing critiques of consumerist society a la Marcuse and Lefebvre as paternalistic attempts to tell people “what they ‘really’ want” (RS, p. 38 and chapters 2 and 4 more generally).

                By contrast to such accounts, I argue that people’s material desires have been profoundly shaped by the use, in the last century, of a significant portion of the economic surplus to build a consumerist culture, which fails to satisfy, which undercuts people’s well-being and which also contributes to the deepening ecological crisis all around us. Since these flaws are, as I show, directly related to capitalism’s undemocratic and profit-driven nature, I argue for a democratization of the economic system.

                Unlike what Bratsis claims, therefore, my argument for economic democracy is not primarily an efficiency argument. If Remaking Scarcity makes the case for economic democracy, it is because it “identifies economic democracy as the condition for a use of scarce resources that is consistent with ecological sustainability, the elimination of unnecessary human suffering, and a richer life for all human beings on this planet” (RS 149). Efficiency, in other words, is not an end-in-itself but only desirable insofar as it facilitates the more complete pursuit of these much more fundamental goals. In fact, to be more precise, efficiency always refers to an underlying goal, since it presupposes as full an attainment of this goal as it is possible given the existing (often material) constraints. Since my book is, in part, a critique of neoclassical economics, it argues against the notion that capitalist markets efficiently serve the wants and needs of consumers. Instead, I argue that the only goal that capitalism can be said to serve efficiently is the pursuit of profit and that this efficient pursuit contradicts, rather than coinciding with, the goals of human well-being and ecological sustainability.

                My acknowledgment of the social construction of human needs is as present in my critique of Sahlins’ discussion of hunters and gatherers as it is in my discussion of capitalism. As I argue in the book, Sahlins inadvertently shows that the way of life of hunters and gatherers both makes it necessary for people to move and makes it impossible for some of the members of hunting and gathering communities to keep up with their group’s movement. As Sahlins himself admits, hunters and gatherers often recount with sadness the infants and old people who were left behind to perish because they could not transport themselves. This admission is also an admission that hunting and gathering societies did create needs they could not meet. In other words, the fact that human needs and desires were constructed differently in hunting and gathering societies than they are under capitalism did not, as Sahlins implies, mean that hunters and gatherers were impervious to the pressures of material scarcity.

                Bratsis also takes issue with my discussion of the literature on how capitalist consumerism undercuts rather than furthering human happiness. Suggesting that “happiness [is] also the goal of liberalism,” he questions whether “happiness [is] a revolutionary or, even, democratic goal.” In my view, the fact that an ideal is claimed by liberalism should not automatically lead to its rejection. After all, liberals would also include democracy in their goals, but this fact rightly does not lead Bratsis to reject democracy as a desirable goal. It is not always the goals that liberalism embraces that are problematic. What is often problematic is liberalism’s refusal to see that the goals it proclaims (human happiness, democracy, and so on) are at odds with the capitalist system it invariably supports. It is this refusal that makes liberalism a capitalist ideology, just as it is Remaking Scarcity’s critique of this refusal that makes the book a critique of the ideological role that liberalism plays within capitalist society.

                At the same time, Bratsis is right to point out that human beings will not abandon “the possessive individualism of liberalism [s]imply by transforming the power relations within the workplace[.]” This is why Remaking Scarcity neither equates economic democracy with democratic workplaces nor conceptualizes it as an economic blueprint. Instead, economic democracy is defined as the normative principle that all human beings should have an equal say over the operation and priorities of the economic system on which their subsistence depends. Far from being economistic, this definition is political through and through. It requires, moreover, the democratization not only of workplaces but also of all other economic sites, including households and the institutions of government.

                Just as he contrasts happiness to democracy, Bratsis sets another stark dichotomy when he asks, “How can we produce the type of people who value autonomy over comfort and commodious living?” Personally, I don’t think that either of these dichotomies is accurate or politically advisable. After all, such dichotomies can be interpreted as conceding that capitalism stands for happiness and comfort whereas anti-capitalists prefer democracy and autonomy. Instead, Remaking Scarcity argues that immense human suffering and unhappiness is the norm for capitalism, not just in the global South but increasingly even in the global North. It also suggests that, given the link between these sad realities and capitalism’s undemocratic nature, human happiness and economic security necessitate the pursuit of economic democracy.

                Beyond that, I also argue that the achievement of human happiness and economic security does not presuppose the complete elimination of scarcity. My claim is not that it is impossible to ever remove scarcity but that scarcity is not, in itself, a problem. People’s material desires can increase not just because of consumerism but also because of an enrichment of human needs (hence my reference, cited by Bratsis, to the possibility that, by increasing people’s awareness of the natural beauty and cultural richness of distant lands, a post-capitalist society might actually increase people’s desire for airplane travel beyond what is ecologically sustainable). In this sense, my claim that scarcity need not ever be abolished does not, as Bratsis suggests, stem from a belief in a fixed and insatiable human nature but from an understanding that an economically democratic post-capitalist society could enrich human needs and possibly lead to the proliferation of material desires that run against the limits set by technology and ecological sustainability alike. Were this to happen, people in such a society might not have every single material desire satisfied but they would all still have equal access to the resources needed to ensure a way of life much more fulfilling and consistent with the ecological integrity of the planet than the way of life afforded to the vast majority of the world’s population today.

                At the same time, it is true that, being more focused on the question of scarcity and the configurations of scarcity that capitalism generates, Remaking Scarcity does not explore in detail the kind of human being that an economically democratic society would presuppose. For example, Bratsis rightly points out that the spread of democratically run enterprises may not automatically guarantee that all workers will value the ability to participate in the economic decisions that affect their lives. There is much discussion in the literature on how a market capitalist environment may adversely affect the operation of worker-run enterprises. Bratsis’ reference to his experience with some of the workers in Argentina’s worker-run enterprises is a reminder that even the workers in such enterprises are not always immune to the effects that capitalism’s consumer culture has on all of us. In other words, Bratsis is right to suggest that there is much work to be done on the kind of human subjectivity required both by economic democracy and by the struggle to make economic democracy a reality. I look forward to probing this question further in the future and invite Bratsis and others to do so as well.