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  • Political Economy of the Environment


    A Conference of the Union for Radical Political Economics

    Co-sponsored by New Politics

    St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY, October 5, 2013

    Call for Workshop Presentations

    If you would like to make a workshop presentation related to the theme of this conference, please send an email to the URPE National Office.

     
    We are living in a period of increasing environmental crisis and growing inequalities within and between the countries of the world.  The obstacles to sustainable development and the equitable distribution of the products of our labor lie in the ways in which our political economic system operates.  The necessary technology is already available, and the resources required to end the use of fossil fuels, for example, exist. But multinational corporations, and the governments they control, base their decisions on the maximization of profits, not on the well-being of the world’s people.  Understanding and challenging capitalism is therefore essential for the building of local, national and international environmental movements.

    The goal of this conference is both to clarify areas of agreement among progressive environmental activists and to promote friendly discussion of disagreements.  Thus we would like the plenaries and workshops of the conference to address questions such as the following:

    • What would a sustainable and just future look like?
    • What short-run reforms, if any, can enable us to survive the climate crisis until fundamental change can be achieved?
    • Would sustainable development necessitate a reduction in living standards?
    • What have been the main successes of environmental movements and how were they achieved?
    • How do we promote environmental justice, making sure that environmental movements in the US address the specific concerns of African American and Latino/o communities?
    • Is there a conflict between the environmental movement and the labor movement?
    • How are people in the US and other countries responding to the challenge of fracking?
    • How do we assess the Kyoto Protocol?  Why did the Copenhagen summit fail?
    • How should we address hazardous waste disposal — locally, nationally,  and internationally?
    • What are the relative merits of carbon taxes and tradable carbon-emission permits as ways of reducing worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases?
    • What are “green taxes” and how could the imposition of taxes on pollutants be made “revenue neutral” or used to make a tax system more progressive?
    • Does environmental regulation result in the loss of jobs, the creation of jobs, or is this the wrong question to ask?
    • How does the changing balance of international power, such as the rise of the BRICS, affect the prospects for reducing environmental damage?

    For updates on the conference program visit: www.urpe.org.

  • Men Without a Country: Snowden and Trotsky

         I have been following the story of Edward J. Snowden, so far the most famous man of the twenty-first century without a country, who at the moment bides his time in an international way station in Moscow waiting for some country to offer him a visa and asylum. A whistle blower who revealed that the U.S. government was conducting massive surveillance of both Americans and foreigners, the government indicted him under the Espionage Act of 1917, a relic of World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s suppression of the American Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World. As Snowden himself explained, he has been stripped of his passport and his citizenship without having been convicted of any crime. Thinking both of Snowden’s situation and his alleged crime, I couldn’t help think of another such case, the most famous man without a country of the twentieth century. While the comparison between Snowden and Leon Trotsky is in many ways unlikely or even preposterous, I think there are more parallels than one would expect.

         In 1936 Trotsky found himself in a situation very similar to Snowden’s. Trotsky, of course, was one of the two principal leaders of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. After the other, Vladimir Lenin, died in 1924, their comrade Joseph Stalin had carried out a kind of creeping coup in the Soviet Union that would eventually centralize the party in his hands, destroy the workers councils (soviets in Russian) and kill at the hands of his new bureaucratic state virtually all of the “Old Bolsheviks,” the men and women of Lenin’s party who had been instrumental in the revolution. Trotsky was Stalin’s principal adversary in the Communist Party, and so at the beginning of that creeping, counter-revolutionary coup, Stalin had organized the expulsion of Trotsky from the Communist Party and then from the Soviet Union, sending him into exile in Turkey in 1929. Expelled from Turkey, the government of France offered Trotsky asylum in 1933, though he was forbidden to visit Paris. When France decided it no longer wanted him, he found refuge in Norway in 1935, but there he was placed under house arrest. In 1936 Norway, anxious to sign a commercial treaty with Stalin’s Soviet Union, informed Trotsky he would have to leave.

         Where could he go? These were of course the years when Mussolini and the Fascists held sway in Italy, Hitler and the Nazis were in power in Germany, Franco was launching his Falangist coup in Spain. In all of those regimes and others in Europe Socialists and Communists were anathema. The Anglo-American democracies, as they were called, Britain and the United States, had no desire to domicile the Russian revolutionary. The Communist Parties of the world, loyal and obedient to the Stalin and the Communist International, railed against Trotsky whom they slandered as a traitor and a fascist. Communist influence, working through their liberal allies, kept the pressure on European governments to deny Trotsky asylum. Fascists, Nazis and Communists, Conservative and Liberals all agreed they did not want him. No European country would offer him a visa. And, if Trotsky failed to get a visa and were returned to the Soviet Union where the famous “show trials” were taking place, he would surely have been put on trial, condemned, and executed. The situation looked hopeless. As the French surrealist poet André Breton put it, “The world is a planet without a visa for Trotsky.”

         To the surprise of the European world, the virtually unknown president of Mexico, the left-leaning nationalist Lázaro Cárdenas, despite the protests of the Communist Party, offered asylum to Trotsky. Cárdenas was a man of remarkable personal courage and great integrity. He explained to his Foreign Minister Eduardo Hay that he had done so not because of any political affinity with Trotsky, but because “established international norms” and “the evolution of Rights in the sense of justice” made it clear that Mexico had a duty to offer asylum to any person, regardless of their origin, who was exiled for political reasons. (Olivia Gall, Trotsky en México y la vida política en el period de Cárdenas, 1937-1940 (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1991), p. 25.) The same commitment to this sense of Right and justice would lead Cárdenas to offer asylum as well to 40,000 Spanish refugees from the Civil War after the victory of Franco and defeat of the left in 1939.

         One wonders, why has no Cárdenas come forward to rescue Snowden? Is there today no government as far left as Mexico in the 1930s or no leader with the principles and integrity of Cárdenas?

     

  • Union "reform" or reform?

     In These Times describes reformers winning elections in two key teachers unions, Washington DC and Newark NJ.  While the change in the DC local shows members’ dissatisfaction, that’s nothing new in the local, which for many years has been riven by competing cliques and individuals vying for power.  In contrast, the caucus that provided the organizational backbone for the challenge to the Newark union leadership aims to build the union at the school level and  has been working with parents and students, forming real alliances over school and district issues.  Their inspiration has been CORE’s work in the  Chicago Teachers Union.   For teachers unions to survive in anything but name, they have to be transformed, both in how they operate and the vision for which they fight.  We can’t afford to mistake thorough-going change with replacing the “ins” with the ‘outs.” which is what occurred in DC.   So while two union elections resulted in new faces in leadership positions, only the Newark election posed a threat to the business unionism that characterizes the national AFT – and most of its locals.

  • The Killing of Clément Méric

         The killing of Clément Méric, an 18-year-old anti-fascist activist and member of a student union, by a young fascist skinhead in Paris on May 6th has shocked French public opinion. It comes in a context which many see as a sinister remake of the events that fostered the rise of the far right in France and Europe in the 1930s—increasing poverty, a financial crisis with mass unemployment which successive governments seem powerless to stem, a rise in physical attacks on homosexuals, immigrants and left-wing militants, and the recent mass pro- and anti-gay marriage demonstrations, together with an endless string of corruption scandals and an increasing mistrust of the European Union. All of these have encouraged the rise of so-called “populist” movements, particularly the far right National Front (FN), under its present leader Marine Le Pen, whose skillful rants against a mainstream political class that is “rotten to the core” resonate strongly with more and more regular voters.

         Critics of this alarmist view point to differences between the France of the 1930s and the France of 2013. First, thanks to unemployment and social benefits, the depth of poverty in France today cannot be compared with that of the 1930s, which should keep social tensions under restraint. Secondly, the violence in mass demonstrations is mostly caused by a minority of hangers-on and trouble-makers outside the main body of peaceful marchers and is on a very small scale, compared to the levels reached in the 1930s, when for example there were 15 deaths and 1,500 people injured in a single mass demonstration organized by the right wing Croix de Feu on 6 February 1934. In addition, the international context today, in which France is one of the foremost actors in the European Union, bears little resemblance with the Europe of the 1930s, with Mussolini’s fascists in Italy, the Nazis in Germany and in Spain a civil war which would end in the victory of Franco’s fascist party.

         However, such reassurances can only go so far. According to the traditional Marxist definition, fascism is characterized by its boast of reconciling “workers and bosses” through nationalist propaganda, its strong ruling party, and its gangs of street thugs. Fascism is a reactionary ideology, whose aim is to crush democratic movements and workers’ rights and to destroy autonomous trade unions. However, fascism is also a populist movement that claims to empower the “common man” and give voice to the aspirations of various layers of society, especially those that feel let down by social and economic changes—the lower middle classes, small business owners, and the unemployed. Fascism was in the past characterized by a constant contradiction between its reactionary aims and the lower middle class origins of many of its supporters, who thought of themselves as “the people.”

         Indeed, the Nazi appeal to the German middle class was directed against the bankers above them and the communists and trade unionists below them, both of which were better organized than the middle classes and both of which the Nazis asserted were dominated by Jews. Especially in Germany after the Nazis took power, the working class could be won over, on the basis of the economic expansion driven by militarism and the nationalist ideology that the Social Democrats had to some degree shared.

         Today, with the left parties and unions now so weak, the fascist movement has greater appeal to the working class, with many applauding when the financial establishment is regularly criticized and who are receptive to a xenophobic sentiment that is increasingly easier to articulate and manipulate. Immigrants and certain minority groups are thus lambasted as scroungers and parasites. Greece has witnessed the rise of Golden Dawn, a party with overtly Nazi views, and traditionally open and tolerant societies, like the Netherlands and Sweden, have been the scenes of anti-immigrant hostility.

         The growth of far-right views is undoubtedly on the increase in Europe. Growing social inequality, poverty and unemployment mean large segments of the population feel disenfranchised. Fascism in France and in Europe today feeds on fear of the future, fear that tomorrow’s children will be worse off than today’s. There are 5 million French people unemployed and every month 30,000 more swell their ranks; 8 million are living in poverty, and the questions of social justice and the fair distribution of wealth have become acute. Political democracy has not delivered and desperate people are ready to try something different, outside the beaten track.

         The current French President, François Hollande, and his “Socialist” government have rapidly become more unpopular, losing the confidence of their own voters because of the austerity policies they have introduced. Hollande has reneged on his campaign promises, and instead of “change” has begun to implement a string of anti-social measures such as a decrease in pensions and social welfare benefits, together with tax increases that do not particularly target the rich, but rather force middle and working class families to pay more. This was why, in an attempt to placate progressive supporters, the Hollande government decided to implement a “societal” measure, one of Hollande’s campaign promises: the legalization of gay marriages and the right for gay couples to adopt. Opponents of these proposals, mostly social conservatives and members of the Catholic Church, organized mass demonstrations in Paris which counted up to a million protesters. The government was taken aback by the scale of the disturbances, with debates dragging on for months in Parliament, thus preventing the study of terribly pressing economic problems.

         The right-wing opposition saw here a means to embarrass the government and lent support to the anti-gay marriage protesters. An elected FN politician marched in Paris with politicians of the mainstream right-wing parties, who until now had sworn never to have any dealings with the far-right. This seemed to confirm previous signs that the mainstream right, Nicolas Sarkozy’s former party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), has indeed become more hard-line. In an effort to surf the right-wing populist wave, the French right has openly used traditional far-right rhetoric in connection with issues of immigration and law and order, and has more openly opposed the granting of rights to minorities. “The Right has lost its inhibitions,“ claimed the present leader of the UMP, Jean-François Copé. While the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations proceeded week after week, more and more members of small neo-fascist groups started mingling with the marches, rioting and attacking the police.

         The issue of same-sex marriage was seen as a unique opportunity for the far right groups to appear in the open. With the divisive debate surrounding gay marriage, radical right-wing views with a homophobic and anti-immigrant slant have begun to be voiced more openly. Clément Méric was, like many other progressive activists, directly engaged in the struggle for working-class emancipation and for the rights of immigrants, women, and LGBT people.

         On May 6, Clément Méric and three or four friends went to a private clothing sale in an apartment building in Paris where they encountered some members of the Jeunesse Nationaliste Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Nationalist Youth), a far-right group. Insults were hurled about and when Méric came out onto the street with his friends, in the ensuing fight his head was battered by a 20-year-old skinhead and he was pronounced brain dead even before being transported to a hospital. The Prime Minister called for the banning of “extremist groups,” the media analyzed the meaning and ramifications of the horrifying event, the trade union movement issued a joint condemnation and an anti-fascist march has been called for June 23 in Paris.

         In an attempt at damage control, the right-wing media hastened to qualify the killing as a sort of unfortunate gang encounter and not a politically motivated murder. (The present charge against the perpetrator is involuntary homicide.) However, there is something disturbing in the glib equation of “left-wing extremists” with “right-wing extremists” that is being spouted by many politicians. Physical violence and political murder is an integral part of the ideology of fascist groups. In a sense it is their raison d’ecirc;tre. Indeed some far-right web sites do not hesitate to pour scorn on Clément Méric, accusing him of having a big mouth but being a weakling, without the guts for a real fight. Thus, to say that they were simply rival gangs facing up to each other and that both parties are equally guilty is disingenuous.

         Like its infamous predecessors in Germany, Italy and Spain, the French FN claims to be neither right wing nor left wing and to have distanced itself from its neo-fascist origins in the early 70s. So far it has remained aloof from the Clement Méric killing and Marine Le Pen has denounced such violence as unacceptable. In fact, the FN is terrified of being linked to the killing and denies any connection with such thuggish behavior. Over the past few years, all demonstrations involving the FN have been carefully policed by its own marshals who have strict instructions not to engage in controversial incidents—such as displays of the Hitler Salute or intimidation of journalists and political opponents—that often characterized such gatherings when Jean Marie Le Pen was in charge of the movement. Indeed the FN has undergone a major makeover since Marine Le Pen took over as leader from her father, Jean Marie Le Pen, whose outspoken anti-Semitic views grated on people who were otherwise attracted by the FN stance. Polls today show Marine Le Pen is one of the most popular French politicians and she is regularly invited to give her views on the media, whereas before her father was regularly persona non grata. She is collecting the good opinions of disappointed working class voters, and even many former Socialist voters and upper and middle class voters, as she calls for priority to be given to French people when it comes to jobs, housing and social benefits, and as she rails against the European Union at present seen by many as the source of France’s woes.

         Although some fear great success for the FN in the 2014 municipal elections and the European Parliamentary elections, the movement so far has never done well in local elections, first because it does not have enough good local candidates embedded in the community and secondly because there is still some stigma attached to a vote for the FN and many people will still hesitate to indicate such a preference to their neighbors.

         However, the political scene is definitely changing in favor of the FN. A vote for the party is no longer seen as a wasted vote for an insignificant minority party but an empowering vote that can actually bring the party to power. The reason for this lies in the particularity of the French two-round electoral system; that is, there is a first round of elections to allow citizens to express their real preferences, for example for minority parties, and this eliminates the weaker candidates. A week later, the two leading candidates face off in the second round.

         The problem today, as illustrated in a by-election last week, is that the FN is now strong enough in many election districts to qualify for the second round. There is also a growing threat of a second round “triangulaire,” that is a triangular list of three candidates—an FN candidate, a mainstream conservative right-wing candidate and a mainstream left-wing candidate. The dilemma for the two mainstream parties is whether one of them should withdraw its candidate, thus allying all the mainstream democratic forces against the FN candidate, but losing its Parliamentary seat in the process or, on the contrary, should both mainstream parties maintain their candidates thus allowing the FN candidate to win, as occurred in two circumscriptions in the 2012 elections. The alliance of the mainstream parties against the FN of course plays directly into the hands of Marine Le Pen, who condemns the whole political caste for being exclusively focused on protecting their collective interests and feathering their own nests at the expense of the common people.

         A further development is the hardening of attitudes in the mainstream conservative UMP, which has adopted certain positions inspired by the FN in order to cash in on the perceived growing conservatism of the French population in general. So far, the official UMP line has been “no alliances with the National Front,” but local ad hoc alliances look increasingly probable in the coming years. According to an FN spokesman, if a partial system of proportional representation is introduced soon—another of Hollande’s election pledges—on the basis of current election polls the FN could have over 100 elected members of Parliament.

         The leader of the FN, Marine le Pen, is aiming for the 2017 Presidential elections and her prospects appear to be steadily increasing as she presents herself as a respectable and effective alternative to the mainstream right and left. It is this gradual, insidious spread of authoritarian ideologies that the movement protesting the killing Clément Méric seeks to prevent today.

     

    Elizabeth Koechlin is affiliated with the Université Paris IV-La Sorbonne and a union activist.

     

  • Let’s Accept an Invitation from the Trumka of 1970—to Revolt

    When Herman Benson writes about the labor movement, I read with interest what he has to say, knowing that his last 50 years as head of the Association for Union Democracy (AUD) represent only the most recent part of an even longer career in the labor movement that began when he was a machinist in the auto industry and a member of the United Auto Workers after World War II. Later he became a labor journalist, the trade union editor of the Workers Party newspaper Labor Action, an activist in the Socialist Party, and an active member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Throughout his long and distinguished career he has put at the center of his concerns the rights of workers and workers’ power in the workplace, in the union, and in society. Over the years he joined with rank-and-file workers in a wide variety of labor unions to help them clean up unions controlled by mobsters, by corrupt officials, or by bureaucrats who denied them their rights.

    At the heart of brother Benson’s political convictions is the view that when workers have the chance to think about, discuss, and debate not only their immediate union issues, but the larger issues of society and politics, they will make intelligent decisions. Knowing that he and I both believe that debate stands at the heart of a healthy labor movement, I am going to take issue with his recent article “Getting ready for the future: Replying to an invitation from Rich Trumka,” believing that his article puts forward two contradictory positions, only one of which can be right.

    Herman Benson opens his article praising the AFL-CIO leadership, writing that under President Richard Trumka’s leadership “the AFL-CIO is moving firmly in the right direction—its stand on immigrant workers, on taxes, its increased alliance with community activists, its support for the nation’s 99%, its call for social justice.” He praises Trumka for recognizing “that the AFL-CIO must convince a wider audience that the labor movement represents its interests.” Believing that Trumka is on the right track, Benson wants to help, writing: “To advance labor’s cause, union members need not rise up, or revolt!, or struggle, or come out of the shops into the streets and confront capital. All that they need do in the context of our times is to become forthright advocates of the union cause, to speak out to their neighbors, their friends, their relatives, on the job, in the lunchrooms, in the churches. And it is a simple message: ‘We are familiar with unions; they stand for people like us.’” In essence, Benson argues that all we need to do is support the existing labor bureaucracy as it attempts—without much struggle—to advance the labor movement through better public relations and liberal positions on social issues.

    Yet, on the other hand, because he has such long experience in labor and because he is a realist and a radical, Benson recognizes that given the nature of the bureaucracy, we aren’t going anywhere at the moment. Union members, he writes, are “disenchanted” because unions are so fundamentally bureaucratic and undemocratic. As he explains so clearly and powerfully:

    “The obstacle is the divided soul of American labor leadership. In most of the issues that come up for decision in the broad public arena, they can be counted on to stand for progress, for social justice, for democracy in the nation. But it all changes in the union. In their unions, the main leaning of union officials is toward limitation, even repression, of democratic rights. Their instinctive bulldog grip on union power blunts their ability to serve effectively as progressive leaders in the nation.”

    In fact, he writes, when things go to the courts, the unions are for the suppression of members’ rights. What Benson neglects to explain here is the reason for that, namely, that holding good positions on social justice issues ostensibly to be fought for by the Democratic Party (though actually often not) requires little from the unions, while democracy in the unions would force the unions to have to fight the employers and the government. And they do not want a fight. He concludes the section noting, “The AFL-CIO dilemma is personified in the figure of its top leader, President Rich Trumka.” We see here the divided soul of Herman Benson who wants to support the unions as they are, but knows that we need a completely different labor movement if we are to have real unions.

    Benson points out that when Trumka was a young man, he was a leader of the Miners for Democracy, a rank-and-file opposition group in the United Mine Workers that eventually wrested power from the gangster Tony Boyle, but that the union seldom mentions this history, in fact suppresses this history. Why? Because, “The unwritten code, accepted almost universally by the top labor leadership, holds that there is something, suspect, heretical, morally impermissible when a rank and file organizes against its leadership.” Yet the truth is that it is only when rank-and-file workers organize against their union leaders and either force them to fight—not likely—or drive them out of office and put fighters in the leadership—possible but difficult—that things really change. Such is the story of the recent struggle by the Chicago Teachers Union where a rank-and-file group, with socialists from various traditions in the leadership, won the confidence of the members, took office, and carried out the most important strike since the UPS Strike in 1997.

    The strategy needed for American unions is not that of collaborating with Trumka and the AFL-CIO or any of the International Unions and their officers, but rather of organizing rank-and-file workers around the issues they confront in the workplace and in their unions. The unions today are simply hopelessly ensnared in labor law and court decisions, embarrassingly involved in their partnership with the employers, slavishly dependent upon the Democratic Party, the result of a 70-year degeneration of the labor movement. They will not be changed without a fight that will have to transform their pro-capitalist ideology, restructure their bureaucratic organizations, and once again inspire militant class struggle unionism.

    To carry out that fight 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. Where is the model for such a movement? Lee Sustar, one of the country’s best labor journalists and analysts lays out these ideas in greater detail in a fine article in the International Socialist Review. The model for what we need today can still be found in the Miners for Democracy that Trumka led in the 1970s and in the Chicago Teachers Union today. We need to accept an invitation from Trumka, but not the Trumka who today heads the AFL-CIO, but from the young Trumka who invited us once long ago to rise up, to struggle, and to revolt! If workers do revolt they may find themselves seeking the assistance of Herman Benson and the Association of Union Democracy which has helped so many rebels in the past.

    Dan La Botz was a founding member of Teamster for a Democratic Union (TDU) and is currently a member of the United Auto Workers / National Writers Union. He edits the UE-FAT publication Mexican Labor News and Analysis. He is also a co-editor of New Politics.

  • Getting ready for the future

         If you’re a friend of labor, liberal or radical, Rich Trumka’s invitation applies to you. He’s asking for your thoughts on how the AFL-CIO can get ready for the future. (As you know, unions have not been doing so well these days, and maybe someone can come up with some good ideas.) Toward that end, he posted questions on the internet submitted by seven presumed notables, including former labor secretary Robert Reich and In These Times labor editor David Moberg. Within a few electronic moments, over a thousand comments poured in. If you want to get in on it, try www.AFLCIO.org and click on “Join the discussion.”

         I did my old-fashioned best to send in my piece, perhaps unsuccessfully; but that doesn’t bother me. It’s hard to believe that any deliberative council of busy labor leaders will ever ponder over this mass of digital printings and use it to work out a policy for the next AFL-CIO convention. Besides, that kind of concentration is hardly necessary. In the last year or two, popular and scholarly books, magazine articles, and internet submissions have proliferated with suggestions on how to steer the labor movements out of its doldrums. Some are written by academics based on research; some by labor organizers, based on experience. It’s already out there: Cooperate with community social organizations; encourage rank and filers and locals to organize; fewer male and pale bureaucrats, more attention to women, minorities, immigrants; demand collective bargaining rights even where unions lack majority support; use TV, radio, internet more effectively; activate city and state central councils; more and even more concentration on organizing; be bold; be imaginative; be demanding and militant; be responsible and compromising.; etc., etc., etc.

         A whole range of ideas has already been public for many months. Unions have been listening and taking advantage of what seems best and inching along in the right direction.

         Still, Rich Trumka’s latest invitation is a welcome sign. At one point, when unions were riding high, the main message of labor leaders to their liberal allies seemed to be: We know what’s best. Shut up and come along. Now in labor’s time of troubles, Rich Trumka is eager to show that they value advice from allies. (In any event, the AFL-CIO will accumulate a valuable new mailing list.)

         Here for your information is what I tried to submit. HB

     

    ————————

         In preparing for the future, begin at the starting point.

         If you study all its resolutions, its policy declarations, its expressions of good intentions, if you’ve heard the speeches of Rich Trumka, you should know that the AFL-CIO is moving firmly in the right direction—its stand on immigrant workers, on taxes, its increased alliance with community activists, its support for the nation’s 99%, its call for social justice. Back in 1995, when the Sweeney forces replaced the Lane Kirkland camp, the labor movement won the enthusiastic support of liberal and radical intellectuals who rallied thousands of students and teachers to pro-union teach-ins in the universities. But now, eighteen years later, although it won the hearts of liberal academics, the labor movement has failed to break through to a majority in the broad public, not in organizing, not in politics. That’s the problem.

         The union movement can count upon the loyalty of an impressive main base, the pro-union cadres who respond to its call at critical moments and constitute the pillar of its strength. We’ve seen them in action in massive demonstrations in defense of public employee unionism. We know that unions can convince many thousands of their loyal followers to go to the polls at election time, often enough to make the difference.

         But they are moving those already converted. On election day, a huge proportion of the unions’ own white membership (I think, a majority!) vote for labor’s adversaries. And, an amazing irony of our times: although the labor movement is actually the best organized and most numerous continuing people’s movement—reaching almost everywhere in industry and the nation, taking in every race, religion, sex, every philosophy and quirk—a vast section of the nation’s population, hoodwinked, sees it as a “special interest.”

         Rich Trumka, it seems, realizes that the AFL-CIO must convince a wider audience that the labor movement represents its interests. His broad solicitation for comments and his choice of David Moberg to monitor the discussion is a sign of that intention.

         What to do? Some gimmicks that have already been tried have fallen short: union credit cards, associate memberships for sympathizers, a labor-sponsored retirees’ organization. Right now, lots of good labor people are already experimenting with many ways of making labor’s message more persuasive. I am sure that people in the field, based on experience, will come up with excellent ideas for improving what is already in the works.

         Surely, there will be proposals to spread labor’s message more broadly and more effectively: the internet, TV programs, advertising, a newspaper aimed at a general audience. All of which would be worthwhile—and would be expensive. But we must remember that in everything that depends upon mobilizing practical resources, unions can never hope to match or cancel out the resources of their enemies. A single major U.S. corporation can easily afford to outspend the whole labor movement. Now in elections, it has the legal right to do so.

         However, we have one resource that they can never hope to match. They deploy money power. But we count on people’s power. At a time when the force of people’s power is being displayed all over the world, we are reminded that the labor movement has that kind of power at its disposal, but only as a potential. That power resides in the 15,000,000 union members and their families. Sad to say, unions are now able to draw on only a small fraction of that power, only upon its base, only upon its loyal, activist cadre. The AFL-CIO should look inward as well as outward to find the means for winning over its own membership and drawing upon their power.

         To advance labor’s cause, union members need not rise up, or revolt!, or struggle, or come out of the shops into the streets and confront capital. All that they need do in the context of our times, is to become forthright advocates of the union cause, to speak out to their neighbors, their friends, their relatives, on the job, in the lunchrooms, in the churches. And it is a simple message: “We are familiar with unions; they stand for people like us.” Imagine the change in the mood of the country if that message was actively conveyed into the public arena, not only by thousands of union activists and staff employees, but by millions of organized working people.

         A big part of the membership, probably a majority, is indifferent toward their unions. But what is disturbing is that a whole section of the membership, articulate and energetic, has become disillusioned, disenchanted with the labor movement as they see it today. Unions are antagonizing the very kind of active members who could be counted on to shake others out of their passivity.

         How many are there who are disappointed and disillusioned? Nobody is counting, But at one point, long ago, there was a kind of public record. In 1960, drawing upon his experiences as counsel for the McClellan Committee investigating what he called, “tyranny, corruption, and dishonesty” in certain labor unions, Robert Kennedy wrote that he had received “150,000 complaints during the committee’s life,” seventy-five percent from “representatives of organized labor, mostly rank and filers.” That was almost two generations ago, when the labor movement was a more formidable force. Since then, organized crime has been driven out of major unions. Members’ rights are protected by federal law, even though feebly and inadequately. The blatant evils of those days have been mitigated. From that standpoint, ours is a better labor movement, and it continues to change for the better.

         Still, the reality of the disenchanted unionist remains. True, there is no formal public record, but I can cite my own experience of the last fifty years as editor of Union Democracy in Action and then as a founder and executive director of the Association for Union Democracy. In that time, I have dealt with tens of thousands of union activists, as individuals, in caucuses, candidates for office, rank and filers, officers at every level. Part of that record is in the Reuther archives at Wayne State University.

         Except for a rare few, they remained pro-union in their sympathies. Their dissatisfaction resided in their feeling—justified—that their unions fell short of their enthusiastic expectations. From them, I heard about stolen elections, drumhead trials, job blacklisting of those who criticized incumbent officials, phony contract referendums, niggling restrictions on the right to run for office or campaign, arbitrary trusteeships imposed on locals whose elected officers criticized their international leadership, sometimes even arrant physical attacks and corruption. My point here is not to catalogue union flaws but to underline the need to regain the loyalty of these good union activists and restore them as crusaders for unionism. Walter Reuther once said that we must do more than organize the unorganized, we must unionize the organized. In that spirit, a democratization of the AFL-CIO will make it a more powerful force in the public arena.

         But what does all this mean in day-to-day practice? Based on my own experience, let me count the ways:

         Obey LMRDA Section 105 which requires unions to keep members informed of their democratic rights protected by federal law.

         Impose trusteeships over locals only for legitimate causes, not to suppress independent-minded local officers as so egregiously has recently been the case in the Operating Engineers, Machinists, and SEIU.

         Stop using union trial procedures to suppress critics. Institute an impartial trial and appeals procedure modeled upon the UAW Public Review Board.

         Extend the right to elect job stewards and vote on collective bargaining contracts. In major referendums, guarantee an honest count by retaining a reliable outside election agency.

         Where unions operate hiring halls or referral halls, make sure they are run fairly without discrimination. End the widespread patronage system of using control over job assignments to strengthen incumbents’ political machine and starve out critics.

         Encourage members to participate in fair union elections. Toward that end:

    • Guarantee an honest count, especially in major elections, by employing an outside agency, one with a reputation for integrity, to conduct the casting and counting of ballots.
    • End niggling election rules which suppress the right to run for office by the widespread two-year continuous good stand requirement.
    • Eliminate restrictive meeting attendance rules that block the candidacy of 90% of members.
    • Open up the publications to membership discussion, especially in the months before nomination and elections. Too many union periodicals are puff sheets which glorify the words, deeds, and photographs of incumbent officers

         In sum, the goal is to democratize the labor movement, to change the atmosphere within it, to convince members that the union belongs to them, not to its officials, Out of the mass of dues payers, the aim is to create an enthusiastic army of union advocates who are best able to carry labor’s message into the broad national public. These proposals are not intended as the panacea to solve labor’s pressing problems. We need democracy but we also need leadership and direction. But democracy provides people’s power behind any progressive program.

         Will the AFL-CIO ever respond, now or ever? There is no solid basis for easy optimism, but there are justified grounds for hope. The obstacle is the divided soul of American labor leadership. In most of the issues that come up for decision in the broad public arena, they can be counted on to stand for progress, for social justice, for democracy in the nation. But it all changes in the union. In their unions, the main leaning of union officials is toward limitation, even repression, of democratic rights. Their instinctive bulldog grip on union power blunts their ability to serve effectively as progressive leaders in the nation.

         In all of the many cases that have reached the higher courts, where the rights of members in their unions were at stake, the AFL-CIO and/or its constituent unions were on the side of limitation and suppression, never for the defense or extension of democracy in unions. The AFL-CIO dilemma is personified in the figure of its top leader, President Rich Trumka.

         Trumka is a superb public representative for the labor movement, perhaps the best since John L. Lewis or Eugene Victor Debs. He is eloquent, hard-hitting; his words are moving and persuasive. For me, and I am sure for any union loyalist, it is a pleasure to hear him speak out for fair play. But I fear that mainstream nonunion Americans listen skeptically to what they see as just another “fast-talking labor boss” saying and doing what he gets paid for.

         Yet, in one respect, Trumka is an unusual labor leader. As a young miner, he joined up with the Miners for Democracy, Joe Rauh, and Chip Yablonski in their battle to wrest control of the United Mine Workers from a corrupt officialdom headed by the murderer, Tony Boyle. Their success as insurgents opened the way for Trumka as UMW president and from there to the presidency of the AFL-CIO. And so, Trumka became UMW president, not by inheriting the post from an established bureaucracy but as the active beneficiary of an insurgent movement he helped to victory.

         Tell that moving story, and tell it again, to the broad voting American public, and they will surely begin to see Trumka in a new light and receive his message more sympathetically and with an open mind. He will speak with effectiveness to more than those already converted.

         But this part of the Trumka story is classified in official labor channels as jealously as the White House classifies internet wiretapping. When he won office on the Sweeney slate at the 1995 AFL-CIO convention, his official biography released not a word about his admirable UMW insurgency. Not a word when he was later elected AFL-CIO president.

         The suppression of this Trumka story is symptomatic of what must change in the AFL-CIO. The unwritten code, accepted almost universally by the top labor leadership, holds that there is something, suspect, heretical, morally impermissible when a rank and file organizes against its leadership. That closed-circuit mood destroys the image of the AFL-CIO as a great people’s movement.

         There is hope because the labor movement has been changing. In two generations, corruption and organized crime have been pushed back and democracy is more robust in unions. But unions are weaker. Responsible labor leaders realize that something must be done to stop the decline and build the power.

         The United States boasts justifiably of its democracy, of the right of its citizens to criticize political leaders, of all the freedoms we enjoy. Despite its limitations, of the errors, even outrages, our nation may have committed, our democracy still stands as a beacon in the world. The hope is that a democratized AFL-CIO can become a beacon for social justice in America.

     

    Herman Benson was labor editor of Labor Action until it ceased publication in 1958. He published Union Democracy in Action until 1972 . He helped found the Association for Union Democracy and for many years served as its executive director and editor of its publication, Union Democracy Review.

  • Positive winds of change in Newark NJ public schools

    A reform caucus in the Newark Teachers Union (NTU) made remarkable gains in the union election that ended on Friday. Out of about 3,000 members eligible to vote, 1,200 NTU members cast their ballots.  (Sadly, that proportion is about par for US unions.) The New Visions candidate for President lost by only 9 votes to the long-time chief, Joe Del Grosso, who will now serve his 10th two-year term. New Visions won 18 of 29 slots on the Executive Board, giving this vibrant, multi-racial slate of reformers a majority. Quite an accomplishment for a caucus that really began to pick up steam only after AFT President Randi Weingarten used the national union’s organizers to push acceptance of a contract that strips Newark education workers of their most basic rights as professionals and workers. Shamelessly currying favor with Cory Booker and Chris Christie, Weingarten used the national union’s resources to push Newark teachers and kids under the bus. In this election of officers, NTU members pushed back. But don’t be surprised if Weingarten sees the handwriting on the wall and tries to make nice with New Visions. Still, I’m confident New Visions won’t be snookered. This savvy group of activists are building the union at the school site, working with parents and students, democratizing the union to “give Newark students schools they deserve.” New Visions understands that the future of their union – and public education – requires a different kind of teacher unionism – and union leadership. And they’re poised to provide it.

  • Remembering Margaret Thatcher, with Loathing

         The execrable Maggie Thatcher, erstwhile British prime minister, passed on April 8 with much rending of clothing by her nation’s Right but with something approaching joy by much of the nation’s rest. The following sendoff appears in the Summer 2013 Democratic Left, minus its last graf slapping the endlessly slappable Slavoj Zizek for writing that the Left could learn from her. (Something had to be cut, even if he deserved the slap.) I wrote her exit evaluation in the spirit of Moms Mabley, who observed that while “you should say nothing but good about the dead; she dead. Good!” And at Britain’s Glastonbury Festival, in late June, singer-songwriter Elvis Costello performed his Tramp the Dirt Down in another proper remembrance of her. Costello reportedly told the audience at his hour-long set that while he would not wish death by dementia on anyone, “The things she did to this country are still being done today…..It’s not about burying someone underground, it’s about burying an idea in the ground.”

     

          As minister for education in the early 1970s Tory government she was labeled “Thatcher the Milk Snatcher” for curtailing free milk to school children.

         That was a foretaste of Margaret Thatcher as the United Kingdom’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990, whose new-model austerity regime auctioned off public housing and bled the nation’s cost-free health care and school systems. She cowed the unions, jailed militant strikers, and forced the layoff of hundreds of thousands of workers as she shuttered or sold for parts state-owned steel mills, coal mines and rail lines from Lands End in southwestern England to John o’Groats in Scotland’s far north.

         Thatcher backed every imperial adventure of three U.S. presidents, plus one of her own—the war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. That martial drumming got her wobbly government re-elected, a stunt British writer Warren Ellis called “the most shameless, vote-grabbing, artificial war scam in 50 years.”

         Thatcher was the first European leader to abandon even a rhetorical commitment to cooperation with the trade unions. She jettisoned the then-prevailing conservative vision of a social market, which even the continent’s Christian Democrats endorsed. Long considered the architect of a bloodless neoliberalism—the corporate ideology of laissez-faire economics that boosts privatizing state-owned properties (usually at fire-sale prices), shrinking social services, prizing inequitable flat taxes over fair tariffs on business and the over-privileged, and blocking workers’ rights to organize collectively—she was more appropriately its first grand mason. She would shortly be followed by Ronald Reagan in the United States, but never exceeded.

         “The Iron Lady” is best-known for three chilling pronouncements. She referred to the then imprisoned Nelson Mandela as “a common terrorist,” when the anti-apartheid leader was neither terroristic nor common. Her oft-quoted “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families,” translated as denying the need for social welfare provision or collective responsibility. There was no social world in her cosmology. And her bluster that “there is no alternative” to capitalism was a taunt to the poor and cast-off to suck it up.

         If Reagan’s affect was as the kindly, if quackish, horse doctor administering strong medicine, Thatcher’s was Ken Kesey’s coldly brutal Nurse Ratchet. Her challenge to doubters in her own party, whom she derided as “wets,” was “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.”

         Predictably, she presided over an explosion in income inequality, something whose growth slowed under succeeding Labour governments and is galloping again under the present Tory regime. Out of office, when asked to name her greatest achievement, she responded “New Labour,” a reference to how Labour’s Blair and Brown governments that followed nearly two decades of Tory rule echoed her key economic policies, sans much of the brusqueness and ill-will that marked her own reign.

         In the end, she was formally undone by her own Tory parliamentary majority. Facing mass demonstrations and crashing poll numbers over her plan for a widely disliked flat “poll tax” and internal disagreements over closer monetary integration with the European Union, Thatcher was made to understand her party risked losing the next election with her as leader. So the “grocer’s daughter,” whose humble-like background she made much off despite her Oxbridge education and posh accent,, resigned in 1990 to a life of leisure as Baroness Thatcher and the great good friend of an actual terrorist, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet.

         Her death on April 8 at age 87 from advanced dementia—she was then living at The Ritz, London’s toniest hotel—was received variously. The current Tory government, despite crying poor-mouth over public spending, arranged a state funeral at a cost of some $16 million in public funds, while a hurriedly called House of Commons congress spent six hours beatifying her. Prime Minister Cameron applauded her as “not a consensus politician but a conviction politician” and one who “didn’t just lead our country, she saved our country.” The scabrous Daily Mail aped Cameron in naming her “The Woman Who Saved Britain.” Even President Obama larded it on, noting in classic Orwellian that “The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend.”

         Elsewhere on the Sceptered Isle, it was party time, with champagne and all-night dancing in the streets. Those living in England’s North, hardest hit by her and successive administrations’ industrial closings, were said to party the heartiest. In Northern Ireland’s Derry, a sign read “Iron Lady, rust in peace.” “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead” was among the most requested songs on Spotify and Pandora, placing second among commercial downloads in the U.K.

         It wasn’t all biliousness from the Left. Some were even covetous. Writing in The New Statesman, boutique Marxian philosopher Slavoj Zizek applauded her attack-dog certitude, likening her to a “master” who, ideology aside, is a fit political model in forcing a soft citizenry to do right, or in our case, Left. “The large majority—me included,” he writes, “wants to be passive and rely on an efficient state apparatus to guarantee the smooth running of the entire social edifice, so that I can pursue my work in peace.” Zizek disputes the democratic ethic that voters know what they want. “No, they don’t,” Zizek insists, “and they don’t want to know it. They need a good elite, which is why a proper politician does not only advocate people’s interests, it is through him that they discover what they ‘really want’.” So much for Marx’s self-emancipation of the working class.

     

    Michael Hirsch is a New York City-based labor and political writer, a member of the New Politics editorial board and an editor of Democratic Left.

     

  • The Victims of "Welfare Reform"

         The following letter from me was published in the Boston Globe on June 26, 2013.

    June 18, 2013

    The Boston Globe

    To the Editor:

         Senator Theresa Murray is pleased that the welfare bill she sponsored in 1995 has cut the number of recipients by half (“Senate drafts welfare overhaul,” Boston Globe 6/18/13). However, if she really cared about what happened to those recipients who were kicked off welfare, she might not be so pleased.

         According to a recent study by the National Poverty Center, the prevalence of extreme poverty has risen sharply since 1996, particularly among those most impacted by the 1996 federal welfare reform. Between 1996 and 2011 there was an increase in extreme poverty among U.S. households with children. (“Extreme poverty” is defined as having $2 or less, per person, per day.)

         In the midst of the slow recovery following the Great Recession, millions of parents are experiencing long spells of unemployment, but they have little immediate access to means-tested cash income support.

         Nearly 16 million children in the United States—22% of all children—live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level—$23,021 a year for a family of four. Research shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice that level to cover basic expenses. Using this standard, 45% of children live in low-income families.

         According to a 2010 study by the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of married couple families living in poverty was 6.2%. For single-parent households in that same year, the poverty rate was 27.3%; for single mother households, the poverty rate was 29.9%.

         Is this what Senator Murray considers a success?

     

  • On Syria

         During the past two years, the Campaign for Peace and Democracy has released official statements in broad support of the Syrian revolution: CPD Salutes Syria’s Courageous Democratic Movement and Message of Condolence and Solidarity from U.S. Peace Activists to the Syrian People. What follows, however, is not an official position but rather a personal statement by CPD’s co-directors about the current situation. We hope it will generate an on-line symposium with arguments opposing, supporting, or supplementing our view. Please contact us at cpd@igc.org if you are interested in participating in this symposium.

         We also invite symposium contributions and comments on an important issue that the statement below attempts to address, and that is the question of outside arms to the rebels. Many have argued that if the rebels, even the more non-sectarian and democratic-minded elements among them, get weapons and ammunition from outside, it will have one or both of the following bad consequences: 1) it will only perpetuate the bloodshed, and/or 2) it will greatly increase the influence of foreign powers that are actually hostile to the democratic struggle in Syria, and will thus inevitably pervert the struggle. Others maintain that the democratic rebels have a right to acquire weapons from anywhere they can, as long as they are able to maintain their independence, and indeed must obtain these arms if they are to both avoid defeat and successfully compete with theocratic forces.

         We look forward to hearing from you and to reading your comments and responses.

    In peace and solidarity,

    Tom           Joanne

    Thomas Harrison and Joanne Landy
    Co-Directors
    Campaign for Peace and Democracy
    New York, NY, USA

    STATEMENT ON SYRIA
    By Thomas Harrrison and Joanne Landy
    June 2013

         More than two years ago, the Syrian people, inspired by the Arab Spring, began a democratic revolution against the viciously authoritarian Assad regime, a revolution that we enthusiastically supported from its beginning and continue to support.

         For two long years now, we, like the rest of the world, have watched in horror as the Syrian government waged merciless war on its own people. Some of the revolutionaries argued that for strategic if not for pacifist reasons, the movement should have remained nonviolent despite the mounting repression it faced. However, the extreme violence and unspeakable cruelty, including the use of torture on a massive scale, that Assad unleashed against an initially peaceful democratic movement impelled many of the regime’s opponents to take up arms, understandably believing that they had no choice other than outright surrender, which would be followed inevitably by mass slaughter. Some of the rebels have also committed atrocities; these are indefensible, but it should be remembered that it is the Assad regime that has been the initiator and far and away the greatest perpetrator of violent outrages.

    Nonviolent Syrian demonstrators July 2011. Photo: AP

    Nonviolent Syrian demonstrators July 2011. Photo: AP

     

         Assad’s brutal effort to stay in power has led to more than 90,000 deaths and the displacement of some four million Syrians, almost 20 percent of the country’s population. The Syrian people have every right to depose him and his cohorts, and to hold them accountable for their crimes. While at this writing the strategy of the Obama administration remains unclear, it has signaled possible military intervention but is more likely to press for a “negotiated solution” that allows Assad or his regime’s military and security forces to remain in power. We would welcome an end to the violence in Syria, but we strongly oppose any diplomatic, not to mention military, intervention by outside powers that tries to dictate the shape of a future Syria or prevents the Syrian people from overthrowing the Assad regime. It is the Syrian people themselves who must make the decision as to how to defend themselves and their basic human rights, and what kind of society they hope to build. We stand in solidarity with their struggle and our hearts go out to them in their suffering.

         The fate of Syria must not be decided by foreign powers or forces, all with their own self-interested agendas. We condemn the support given to Assad by Russia, Iran, China and Hezbollah. Equally, we condemn the attempts by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other Gulf states to manipulate the Syrian revolution by promoting reactionary Islamist forces within its ranks. As for our own government and its allies, Washington, London, Paris and Tel Aviv are long-time enemies of democracy in the region; they cannot be trusted to help shape a free and socially just Syria. In particular, we condemn the recent Israeli bombing of Syrian targets.

         Consistent with our strong opposition to any kind of military intervention in Syria by the U.S., or other foreign powers, we also oppose providing air cover or establishing no fly zones. We do believe, however, that the democratic opponents of the Assad dictatorship have the right to get guns where they can, while resisting all attempts by those who provide arms to acquire political and military influence in return.

         At the same time, we are troubled by the growing strength of anti-democratic elements within the Syrian rebel forces. It is clear that extremist Islamist militias, armed and financed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and including foreign jihadists, are expanding. Increasing numbers of fighters are rallying to Jabhat Al-Nusra, a fundamentalist group with ties to Al-Qaeda. The Syrian revolution was rapidly militarized not only because of the savagery of Assad’s response, but also because it originated in the countryside; peasants and villagers could not readily confront the regime with strikes and other nonviolent mass actions. Once militarization began, leadership came to depend on access to guns rather than on political programs. This helps explain the growing power of heavily armed and tactically skilled Salafi jihadists.

         But if extremist Islamism is now a leading force in the Syrian revolution, it is not the only force. There is a great deal of evidence that the mass of ordinary Syrians, while mostly Sunni and devout, are nevertheless non-sectarian and democratic-minded, and that they are willing to challenge the Islamist militias. Anand Gopal, one of the few international journalists to actually go to liberated towns and cities in Syria, has noted that in some cases, when self-appointed Islamist authorities have attempted to repress women and political opponents, they have been met by effective resistance.

         Even if it is far from inevitable, it is possible that extremist Islamists may yet hijack the Syrian revolution and deflect its democratic potential. It would be a tragedy for the Syrian people if they ended up exchanging the rule of a brutal tyrant for a regime of bigoted fanatics committed to the oppression of women and gays under a theocracy. We are also concerned that the revolution’s democratic promise may be compromised by the oppression of Syria’s many ethnic and religious minorities under a post-Assad government. The largest of these minorities, the Kurds, have a long history of mistreatment, and their national rights should be respected as should the rights of Alawites, Christians, Druze and other minority religions.

         It seems clear, though, that millions of Syrians want neither Assad nor theocratic tyranny. The Syrian revolution continues, and the nature of a post-Assad Syria, should it come to be, is far from clear. But international solidarity can crucially help to influence the outcome. Global public opinion—and especially the left, social justice and human rights movements, and labor—must work both to support the revolution and to strengthen democratic and secular-minded forces within its ranks.

         We stand for full democracy, an independent labor movement, and complete equality for women, sexual minorities, religions and ethnic groups everywhere. We will do everything we can to support Syrian groups and individuals who share this democratic vision, and we call on people throughout the world to do the same.

     

  • Reaffirming the Chartists’ Revolutionary Moment

    Chartist book cover

    Book Review: David Black and Chris Ford. 1839: The Chartist Insurrection. Foreword by John McDonnell, M.P. London: Unkant Publishers, 2011. 233 pages. Chronology. Illustrations. Appendices. Index. £10.99.

         David Black and Chris Ford in their book 1839: The Chartist Insurrection, a history of the Newport Rising, set themselves a clear objective—though surprisingly they never tell us what it is, leaving that to John McDonnell who wrote the foreword and to Ben Watson who wrote the blurb on the back cover of their book. As McDonnell writes, “The Newport Rising [as the 1839 insurrection is also known] and other attempts to use physical, as opposed to moral force have been, if not hidden from history, then at least pretty well disguised.” The authors aim is to show that modern Britain, so often thought of as a model of moderation and gradualism, where all changes take place within the Parliamentary framework, guided by rules of decorum and deference, and always respecting authority—does indeed have a revolutionary, working class tradition. Their book on the Chartist Insurrection of 1839 is a study of a key moment in a political upheaval that produced an insurrection revealing revolutionary possibilities unfulfilled. Ben Watson writes on the back cover that this is a “revolutionary handbook,” though that would be going too far, for nowhere do the authors, who are great story tellers, attempt to explain the meaning of these events.

         Black and Ford have written a fast-paced, narrative history of the 1839 Insurrection, filled with thumbnail sketches of the Chartist movement’s major figures, descriptions of the most important Chartist organizations and their politics in brief, excerpts from contemporary speeches, and parliamentary debates, and wonderful descriptions of the movement’s rise, growth, and spread throughout Britain. All of this is based on the most masterful command of the sources: newspapers, parliamentary records, memoirs, private papers, and all of the secondary literature. They tell their story in the most straightforward way but at a breathtaking clip that contributes to the sense of the excitement of the movement and its culmination in the insurrection.

    From the Peoples’ Charter to the Insurrection

         The Chartist Party represented the first political response of the working class to capitalism and the industrial revolution in Britain. The combination of the steam engine and machinery began in the 1750s to create modern industrial production, which brought about competition between bosses and workers, the intense exploitation of workers, low wages, long hours, miserable working and living conditions, followed by unemployment and starvation. These conditions led workers first to rage against the machine and then to the creation of labor unions, first legalized in 1824, to try to end competition among workers and raise wages. The labor unions, however, were unstable. They rose with each period of economic expansion and fell with each contraction, while they also faced repression from employers and the state. Workers could do little to change government policies because they did not have the right to vote.

         The recognition by workers that their unions were not enough and that they needed a political party to change their social conditions and to make society more humane for all led the labor movement to enter politics. The British people, both the middle class (large and small business people and professionals) and the working class began to demand universal suffrage, Parliament passed the Reform Act of 1832, extending the vote to the middle classes, those worth at least £10 per year—effectively excluding the working classes. The Reform Act united the property-owning classes throughout the country against their laboring underlings. Britain in 1832 had what Lord Russell thought a perfect electoral system: in a nation of 25 million, half of them male, there were only 700,000 voters, all men of property. At the same time, political associations were banned to prevent the non-propertied classes from organizing.

         These developments led workers and their labor unions to call for The Charter that would give the vote to the working classes. While the Chartists were a political party, they were a party with a difference. As Friedrich Engels wrote in his pioneering book The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), “Herein lies the difference between Chartist democracy and all former brands of bourgeois political democracy. Chartism is a social movement.”1 Engels expected it to soon become a socialist movement.

         Black and Ford provide the reader no such context, but simply plunge into the story, describing the various organizers and their organizations within the broader Chartist movement—George Harney of the National Union of the Working Class; William Lovett of the London Working Men’s Association; Feargus O’Connor of the Great Northern Political Union and his newspaper The Northern Star; Bronterre O’Brien of the London Democratic Association, and local and regional groups and their leaders—as well as the differences and conflicts among them. There were rival personalities, differences of strategy and style, fierce arguments and debates and yet out of them emerged a movement made up of several elements.

    • First, The Peoples’ Charter first published on May 8, 1838 calling for universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, no property qualifications to run for office, equal representation for equal districts, and pay for those who were elected to office (making it possible for working people to take office if elected).
    • Second, a “National Holiday” or “Sacred Month,” that is, a general strike.
    • Third, a National Rent Fund to pay for the movement’s expenses.
    • Fourth, the General Convention of Industrious Classes or National Convention, so that leaders of the movement could plan a political strategy.

         The movement’s various leaders began to circulate throughout the country organizing mass meetings of astounding size: 200,000 in Glasgow; 60,000 in Newcastle; 200,000 at Birmingham; 300,000 at Manchester; 250,000 in the West Riding. Black and Ford tell us, “by the end of 1838 there were 608 organizations—Working Men’s Associations, Female Political Unions, Radical Clubs, Political Unions and Democratic Association et al.—collecting signatures for the petition and money for the National Rent.” (p. 23). Women participated in both the organizations and the mass meetings, though the Chartist movement never supported their right to vote. As the movement grew it adopted the slogan, “Peaceably if we can. Forcibly if we must.” As the authors point out, the slogan was ambiguous; was this a call to action or a call to arms?

         The National Convention began in February of 1839 attended by 71 delegates, 40 of them working men, the rest of them newspaper publishers and editors, small businessmen and professionals. It was not so much a Convention as a meeting of the general staff of the Chartist movement that went on for months. The Convention debated principles, strategy and tactics, there was a vote for a general strike, but then the strike was called off, and while Convention members at times threatened the use of force, there was never a clear call for revolution. Strikes and riots broke out in various places, suppressed by the police. Meanwhile the Chartist petition, bearing 1.3 million signatures was presented to the House of Commons which rejected it by a vote of 235 to 46—proof to the physical force tendency that there was no hope for change through moral suasion.

         The Convention collapsed, but a secret group within it had been organizing for an armed insurrection. John Frost, who had been elected the president of the Convention did not support the plans for an armed uprising, but felt that he had to take responsibility for the group, even if it went against his better judgment. The South Wales Directorate, meanwhile had at the same time begun to organize the uprising, planning on a general strike combined with an insurrection to take place on Guy Fawkes Day, using the disorderly celebrations for cover. The Convention’s secret conspirators and the Directorate decided to seize the city of Newport. Many Chartists were already armed and now prepared for the assault. Waiting and watching was General Sir Charlier Napier with about 5,000 troops.

         Frost led what is estimated to have been 5,000 Chartists in an assault on Westgate but were quickly defeated and scattered by a combination of special officers from the propertied classes and British troops. At least 20 of the rebels were killed and some 500 were imprisoned. Another convention was called, another insurrection launched, but only seventy men showed up and it fizzled. Frost and two other leaders were sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to transportation for life to Van Diemen’s Land, now called Tasmania, an island off the southern tip of Australia. Chartism continued as a positive force throughout the 1840s, though no longer with the same insurrectionist character. This is the story that Black and Ford tell, though obviously in far greater detail and nuance. They have made their point: “In our view what existed in 1839—and ceased thereafter—was a mass working class democratic movement, with revolutionary tendencies.”

         They conclude by writing, “….we can only salute them and try and understand why they lost.” Surprisingly—they make no attempt to do so, though there have been hints throughout the story suggesting what their explanation might be. Black and Ford, part of the theoretically interesting Marxist-Humanism current inspired by Raya Dunayevskaya, which tends to emphasize the self-organization and spontaneous action of the masses over political organization, seem to value the story much more than they do understanding and explaining it. I understand that 1839 is a book for the general reader and therefore does not have the usual historiographic discussion found in an academic book, but even a popularly-written book might have given us a sense of what sort of debate has gone on about the Newport Rising and how their book differs from other accounts and interpretations. I wondered if their theoretical commitment to the masses’ self-activity and to the role of spontaneity might be the reason that they do not offer more discussion of a variety of questions posed by the events.

         At the same time, the authors seem utterly uninterested in theory, dispatching in sentence or two the theoretical questonsthat arise over the relationship between economic depressions and labor movements (p. 37), on the role of the Welsh national bourgeoisie (p. 47), between wage levels and political consciousness (p. 50), or the later appearance of the “labor aristocracy” (p. 195), though they do spend five pages discussing the role of women in the movement and conclude that, “The Chartists’ failure to support women’s suffrage in 1838 left a legacy that lasted throughout the century.” (p. 64) With no guide to go by in the book—no historiography and virtually no theory—what are we to make of the Newport Rising?

         The authors seem to suggest, though they never say so explicitly and certainly never argue the case, that the movement failed because of the ambivalence of the leaders of the Convention, their lack of clarity about whether they would use physical force, and their failure to create a real command structure to carry out their attempt at insurrection which might have become a revolution. Dorothy Thompson, author of The Chartists: Popular Politics and the Industrial Revolution believes that the Newport rising was meant to encourage others who had been planning for a national insurrection and suggests it might have been successful had they assaulted the town at night or “if there had been no soldiers.” But, of course, there will always be soldiers.2 Edward Royle in his Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789-1848 thought that the insurgents lacked a better coordinated strategy for simultaneous risings in several cities. He writes, “Had the Chartists had better military leadership they would have planned a simultaneous rising in south Wales, rather than leaving the other attacks until after success at Newport was reported.” 3 G.D.H. Cole in his Chartist Portraits, more realistic than Thompson wrote that the “insurrection was hopeless,” because the workers were not well armed and the army was not likely to revolt. “Without a soldiers’ rebellion, a Chartist revolution was impossible.”4 E.P. Thompson has the most powerful explanation that he applies to Chartism and to the European Revolution of 1848:

    What held this movement together was hunger, wretchedness, hatred and hope. And what defeated it, in Chartist Britain, as on the revolutionary continent of 1848, was that the poor were hungry, numerous and desperate enough to rise, but lacked the organization and maturity which could have made their rebellion more than a momentary danger to the social order. By 1848 the movement of the labor poor had yet to develop its equivalent to the Jacobinism of the revolutionary middle class of 1789-94.5

         I would like to have heard what Black and Ford, who tell an important story so well, think about these alternative interpretations of events, and what their explanation is. I am sure they would have interesting things to say and only wish they had said them.

    Notes

    1. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. By w.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner (Stanford: California: Stanford University Press, 1958), p. 267.
    2. Dorothy Thompson The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 85.
    3. Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789-1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 108.
    4. G.D.H. Cole, Chartist Portraits (London : Cassell, 1941), p. 304.
    5. E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1799-1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), p. 216.

     

  • Brazilian Spring: a general panorama and some perspectives

         [Mass protests have been taking place in all the major cities of Brazil for the past week, beginning with a demand to reduce bus fares and expanding into a mass movement that demands improvements in all public services, health, education, and working peoples’ rights. While initiated in many cases by left activists—anarchists and socialists—and by students, the protests were soon joined by many middle class people, and most recently by the Movement of the Landless (MST), the United Confederation of Labor (CUT), and organizations of the favelas, the urban slums. At the same time, in what has now become an enormous, swirling national movement rightwing and even fascist groups have insinuated themselves into the movement.

         The protests are taking place against a left-wing government of the Workers Party headed by Dilma Rousseff, a former leftist guerrilla leader who was tortured in the early 1970s while imprisoned under the then-ruling military dictatorship. She is the successor to Inacio “Lula” da Silva, the leader of the Metal Workers Union whose strikes in the 1970s helped to bring down the military dictatorship that ended in 1985. It was Lula—the enormously popular union leader, a founder of the CUT labor federation, and founder and outstanding leader of the Workers Party—who first brought the party to presidential power in 2003. He remained president through two terms until 2011, when Rousseff succeeded him.

         Under Lula, the Workers Party, which had only a minority in the legislatures, began making cash payments to legislators in other parties in order to win their support. As president, Lula’s policies enriched the banks and the construction industry in particular, while he also extended services and economic support to low-income families, transforming neoliberalism into what has been called social liberalism. The Workers party, formed by the Metal Workers Union and the CUT in the heat of the struggle against the dictatorship, now had not only the continued back of the unions, but also the industrial employers and the country’s political elite as its institutionalized supporters. The history of the degeneration of the Workers Party is told in some detail in Perry Anderson’s excellent article, “Lula’s Brazil.”

         Rodrigo Santaella, the author of the article, lives in Fortaleza, the country’s fifth largest city with 2.4 million inhabitants. The events he describes there are characteristic of developments taking place across the country, as citizens protest the enormous amounts spent—as the Romans would have said—on “circuses” such the Confederation Cup, the World Cup, and the Olympics, rather than on schools, hospitals, and public transportation.—Dan La Botz]

         Brazil is living through a period of intense social mobilization, such as the youth of this country has never seen. Despite government claims to the contrary, our society is characterized by structural inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, as well as many other injustices and forms of oppression. In addition, public services and access to social rights such as health, education, and culture, are absolutely restricted and of poor quality. Our development model serves the concentration of wealth, the destruction of the environment, the increasing exploitation of the poor and the expulsion of indigenous and the maroon [descendants of escaped slaves]. All this happens in an environment of corruption, constant inversion of values and priorities, increasing empowerment of those who always had power, such as the media barons and the landlords. In addition, the economic downturn begins to show its effects here, with huge cuts in social budgets of more than US$50 billion in 2011 and 2012, together with rising inflation.

         There is a latent dissatisfaction in Brazil, which has always manifested itself in different ways, more sporadic than massive. The wave of protests that took the country today started with the fight against the increase in bus fares in several places, like Satilde;o Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and others. Police repression, violent and absolutely disproportionate, turned massive and the demonstrations spread throughout the country and continue. This, coupled with the realization of the Confederations Cup, set the stage for the wave of national mobilizations. The initial guidelines were linked to public transportation, police repression, and spending absurd amount of money for major events, and then later expanded greatly to include other issues. What began as a protest about bus fares became an amalgam of mixed agendas, all linked to this latent dissatisfaction, and centered around the struggle for rights and improvements in social programs.

         At this moment, the Brazilian rightwing organizations, the depoliticized part of the middle class and mostly mainstream media have attempted to isolate and criminalize the movement as a whole. Especially after Thursday, June 13, when the strength of police repression—including against journalists—led to the huge mass movement, the thing became unmanageable, and the media and Brazilian right discourses changed radically. The first concrete victories were won with setbacks for the government on the issue of bus fares. The movement, instead of being characterized as violent and criminal, suddenly became a legitimate protest in the eyes of the media. This caused the depoliticized middle class, as well as many other sectors, including some fascist elements, to go into the streets. The right’s tactic became to differentiate the so-called legitimate, non-violent, peaceful, and nationalist actions, fundamentally against corruption, from the “vandals and troublemakers.” Today, the context is a broad and national movement, related to a diffuse indignation and without a clear program. Fundamentally, it is a movement about grievances that can develop strength anywhere.

         Now, people are in the street. The Free Pass Movement (MPL), which began all these mobilizations somehow, and many other social movements, including leftist political parties that were always together with them, didn’t capitulate like the government parties, though governing parties too joined the protests, if only half-heartedly. There are also anarchist groups that have also always been involved in our social struggles. And huge numbers of unorganized people, from the poor parts of the country, disgusted with their life situation, came out as well. The middle class, concerned about corruption and maintenance of some privileges, now make up a large part of this movement, though smaller groups with fascist tendencies are also involved and mingle among the masses, inciting violence against the organized Left, especially against political parties.

         In this context, it is worth noting the antiparty feeling. Always present in the anarchist groups, it has also appeared among the middle class sectors and the media in particular have encouraged this feeling and this verbal attack on left parties, which the fascist groups take advantage of as they carry out violent attacks against leftist militants. The antiparty feeling is understandable if we observe the trajectories of concessions, endless setbacks and betrayals of the two major “left” parties of Brazil, the Workers Party and the Communist Party of Brazil. But the negative feeling is generalized to other leftist parties, the organized youth collectives, trade unions, and to whatever kinds of associations workers and students organized, and this is very dangerous. This discourse is supported and encouraged daily by the media, to the point that violent attacks have left many party activists seriously injured.

         Currently, this is the general scenario. A broad mass movement, with a concrete political agenda yet to be defined, but that is already pressuring Brazilian politicians, as became clear in the last two statements of the president, Dilma Rousseff, including the possibility of convoking the Constituent Assembly Process to “improve” some parts of the constitution for the country. Regarding the social movements, there is no doubt that direct action has also fulfilled an important role in putting pressure on the federal and state governments. Peaceful walks of 100,000 people wouldn’t have the same effect if there weren’t those who were there prepared to engage in confrontation and direct action. What is lacking among those who do and those who don’t engage in direct action are clear and defined objectives. We lack a common political platform for the movement. Anyone able to give this movement a political platform that connects all the sectors will surely help Brazilian society advance.

         In Fortaleza, the first major actions occurred as a reaction to the repression in Satilde;o Paulo. On Monday, June 17, we had an action against the police crackdown, in which more than 2,500 people participated. This was organized by anarchist groups in the city, and it was a large walk, with moments of tension inside the movement itself about the route that the walk would take. On Wednesday, June 19, the largest demonstration in the city so far took place, with 100,000 people protesting before and during the Brazilian football match outside the Castelatilde;o Stadium. Organized using Facebook, the protest took unexpected proportions and won the support of the entire population of the city. Everybody knew this would happen, and we had 5% of the city’s two million people there.

         We had managed to organize three days earlier in a large plenary safety, communication and agitation committees, which worked relatively well and ensured that the demonstration had some uniformity in its demands and behavior. The idea was to march as close as possible to the stadium and to draw attention to the contradiction of holding the Confederations Cup in the fifth most unequal city in the world. Police repression was absolutely disproportionate, with tear gas bombs, rubber bullets, bombs dropped from helicopters, assaults and arrests for no known reason, and the demonstration became a matter of international politics, putting Fortaleza definitely on the map of the national demonstrations. It was a historical demonstration, possibly the greatest of all time in the city.

         The next day, more than 30,000 people came to the financial heart of the city to demand the reduction of bus fares and the immediate delivery of student ID cards, delayed for months by the city. This also ended with repression and police violence in front of the Governor’s Palace. This protest was quite confusing since it gradually lost the focus of the initial agenda and was poorly organized in terms of the route. It became clear that the movement needed to get organized. There have been other protests in recent days also with a great deal of repression and with arrests. The next demonstrations, which will take place on the National Days of Struggle—June 26 against homophobia; June 28 for a reduction of working hours; and June 27 at the Confederation Cup game against the World Cup and its contradictions—promises to be the biggest in the history of Fortaleza.

         The major challenges of mobilization in the city are the same as the rest of the country: the movement needs to organize a clear political platform around which we struggle, more specifically to list priorities and seek uniformity in the guidelines for demonstrations. Undoubtedly, the movement may decrease slightly in size (but not cease to be a mass movement) or it may divide into two or three movements, but the ones with a clear program will become more powerful and less amorphous. The anti-party debate should be thorough and should seek dialogue among the activists, with or without a party, with or without an organized social movement. We must also seek a common interpretation of our direct actions, since it is inconceivable that protesters will criminalize their fellow protestors and denounce them to the police. Finally, we need to describe and differentiate to some extent the composition of the movement: while there are sectors who just want to change parts of the political game to maintain or increase their privileges, there are others who seek a radical transformation of society, from the perception that their own condition of life is unsustainable.

         In order to establish a concrete agenda it is critical to channel all of this mass action for a radical transformation of society. To think about 10% of GDP going to public education immediately and 10% of GDP going to public health, both with resources from the non-payment of the public debt (and an audit of the debt itself). An immediate reduction in bus fares towards free passes and zero carfare across the country. Tax Policy Reform. Land Reform. A forceful rejection of major events such as the World Cup and the Olympics, and the inversion of the priorities they reflect. A rejection of the proposal to lower the age at which youth can be tried for criminal activity. A correct and fair demarcation of indigenous lands. A rejection of the proposal to treat sexual orientation as a disease. The advancement of women’s rights. And many other points… To put those all on the political platform of the movement is more than urgent, because it is a way to politicize it and use the historical moment to transform our city and our country. With this large inclusive platform, the tactic would focus fire on specific issues and immediate ones, and go forward in concrete victories.

         Even with all the limitations and uncertainties, there is no doubt that what has been called the Brazilian Spring marks a new historical moment for us. Going to the streets, suffering police repression, acting collectively and participating personally in the demonstrations is very educational for a generation that had never experienced even one mass mobilization in the country. One of the most common expressions used to describe the moment is that “the giant woke up.” It may be true, but a huge part of the poor sectors in Brazil never slept, and maybe they are the background to these mobilizations. If there’s a Spring, there were those who were very alert during the Winter. It seems that the course of this process will be defined by the dialogue that those who never slept are able to establish with the still sleepy giant.

    Rodrigo Santaella is a Fortaleza-based political scientist and activist.

     

  • The End of Lethargy in Brazil

     Brazil protestsOur country was at the forefront of social and political struggles in the 1980s, and succeeded in preventing the introduction of neoliberalism in Brazil, so that Latin America’s “lost decade” was, for social movements and popular politicians in our country, exactly the opposite.

         In those years, a strong, oppositionist unionism flourished. Strikes grew and spread, exactly the opposite of what happened in the rest of the western world where they declined and shrank. Countless social movements were born. There was a growing opposition to the military dictatorship. A National Constituent Assembly was established, and in 1989 we had an election that divided Brazil between two alternative projects.

         The next decade was overwhelming: neoliberalism, the restructuring of production, financialization, deregulation, privatization and the dismantling of social programs. When the political victory of 2002 occurred with the election of Lula and his Workers Party, the scenario was profoundly different from the 1980s. The story is full of surprises, paths and detours; the 2002 election ended up transforming victory into defeat.

         Lula’s govt oscillated from a lot of continuity with the neoliberal policies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s government to a little bit of change, but none with substance, and his first term ended so bleakly that he was forced to change direction, though always with great moderation and without confrontation. We had the “family shopping bag,” which provided federal assistance to poor families, and soaring profits for the banks. The minimum wage was raised, while the rich got richer. We had no agrarian reform, but a lot of incentives for agribusiness.

         Our broken man rose from the ashes in his second term. He ended his term at a high point, as his chief of staff and future successor Dilma Rouseff demobilized almost the entire opposition movement. Anyway it was hard to oppose the former steelworker, whose support had been solidly built in the 1970s and 80s.

         Those who remember his situation in 2005, mired in the scandal of the monthly allowance of thousands of dollars to buy the votes of legislators, should also remember that at the end of his term in 2010, Lula was one of the most skilled and experienced politicians. If Rousseff, his political creature—a kind of boss of iron—knew how to win the election, we here in this same space, remember that something bigger was missing: the social support that Lula had enjoyed.

         With patience, critical thinking and a lot of persistence, popular movements were able to overcome this difficult cycle. They eventually realized that, in addition to economic growth and the fallacious myth of the “new middle class,” there was a deeply critical reality in all spheres of the everyday life of wage-earners.

    • In the much-maligned public health system,
    • the impoverished education system,
    • the absurd life of the cities, littered with cars as a result of the anti-ecological incentives of the Workers Party government,
    • the violence that continues to grow,
    • public transportation that is among the most expensive (and unreliable) in the world,
    • a World Cup stadium that enriches contractors but which is bleached white, to have no blacks or poor people. Stadiums that are crumbling, as in the case of the João Havelange Stadium, also known simply as Tricked, because it cost six times more than originally projected,
    • the colossal gap between the traditional political parties and the clamor of the streets,
    • and the brutal violence of the São Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin’s Military Police, with support from another politician, Fernando Haddad.

         This helps to understand why the movement has been so quickly embraced by the population. Whatever the consequences of these movements, the country will no longer be the same. We are just beginning.

     

    Richard Atunes is a Professor of Sociology at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and the author of Wealth and Poverty of Labor in Brazil, Vol II and The Meanings of Work. The translation is by Dan La Botz.

    Brazil protests

         This article originally appeared on June 20, 2013 in Folha de São Paulo, the newspaper with the largest circulation in Brazil. It is translated and reprinted here with the permission of the author. The original Portuguese can be found here.

  • Turkey: A De Facto End to the Hegemony of the Coup of September 12, 1980

         Maybe we are not organized, but we are neither apolitical nor without ideology. We were only afraid, because we are the daughters and sons of a generation, killed and tortured to death just before and after the military coup of September 12, 1980 in Turkey. But, we have now learned that cowards die many times before their deaths. We went beyond the fear threshold and achieved the collective confidence that one smells in the air. For that reason alone, June 1, 2013—the date that the symbolic squares were taken back by the millions mobilized all around the country—will go down in history as the day that the hegemony of the Coup of September 12, perpetrated on society by military decrees, was torn to pieces. That is why the police violence and the censorship of the media during the Gezi Park actions have been so harsh: Now, thirty-three years after that coup, the collective will has finally been awakened.

         The government’s plan to build a shopping mall in the park, the resistance of the environmentalists to this project and their violent repression by the police force was only a sparkle. All segments of society under attack from the neoconservative policies of the government—disgusted by years of humiliation, repression, and neglect—revolted against the government. Young people, women, ecologists, football fan clubs, Lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans-sexual (LGBT) activists, anticapitalist Muslims and revolutionary Muslims, the socialist left, labor unions, street children, Kemalists, Alevis, Kurds and Armenians were on the streets, behind the barricades. This revolt was not a surprise for the people in Turkey, though it was mostly presented as a surprise in the local and foreign media. All the social groups mentioned above have been organizing and putting up a fight for years against the attacks targeting them. The surprise was the coming together of all these struggles in the squares of Turkey on the basis of being honorable, equal and free citizens united against the repressions. That was what caused the panic of the powers-that-be.

    What were the components of the revolt? And why?

         It was not a coincidence that young people and women were on the front lines. Women and youth have been especially hard hit by unemployment. For years, youth has gathered an enormous amount of struggle experience against the YÖK (the Higher Education Council) that was founded just after the coup. The final straw for the university students was the new YÖK law that would enable the reestablishment of the universities as private companies to be managed in accordance with the rules of the free market.

         Women revolted, as they shielded their bodies to water cannons and teargas, because the government had started to interfere in even their decision whether to give birth by caesarian delivery and how many children to have. Murders of women increased by 1400% under the Erdoğan government. Not long ago, women all over Turkey demonstrated against a draft law trying to impose restrictions on abortion. And the government had to step back after these demonstrations. Therefore, the women in Turkey knew by heart that organized struggle forces the power to retreat.

         We saw the LGBT’s rainbow flag waving over many barricades. Nothing is without reason. Since 2002, 70 trans individuals have been killed. Some 18 trans women were the victims of hate murders only last year. Homosexual young people have been abducted and murdered by their parents. As a last shot, the resolution proposed by the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), and supported by the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) regarding the investigation of the abuse of rights of homosexuals was rejected by the votes of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). During the vote on the resolution, one of the AKP MP’s described homosexuals as “abnormal” and this has taken its place in the social memory of LGBTs and was one of the reasons that triggered the rage of LGBTs against the government.

         Anticapitalist and revolutionary Muslims have been exposing the injustices conducted by the government that portrays itself as the real face of the Muslim people of Turkey. They had a particular importance during this resistance. From the Ottomans onwards, the power in charge always attacked these dissidents by labeling them as irreligious, drunkards, heretics or atheists and attempting to delegitimize their resistance in the eyes of the religious groups in society. The Erdoğan government has also tried to spread the same slurs. However, Miraj (the ascension of the prophet Muhammad to heaven) was celebrated at Gezi Park during the resistance under the guidance of these groups, no one drank alcohol that day, and pastry rings usually consumed on holy days were offered to the visitors. Friday prayer was performed twice in Gezi Park by the anticapitalist and revolutionary Muslims with the protection of a security cordon around them made up of socialists. Anticapitalist and revolutionary Muslims proved that the government’s claims were false and refused to allow the government to delegitimize the revolt.

         The environmentalists’ struggle didn’t begin with Gezi Park. Environmentalists have been conducting a very organized and informed struggle against the planned construction of hydroelectric plants in almost every part of Turkey. The first martyr of this fight died two years ago, on May 31, 2011, which was also the date of the beginning of the Gezi Park resistance this year. Police violently attacked the people of Hopa (a town in Artvin) who gathered as a result of a call by revolutionary socialists to protest the sale of their streams before a meeting of Erdoğan there. Metin Lokumcu, a teacher and a revolutionary, died due to the intense use of teargas sprayed to disperse the crowd. There was a banner in his hand as he fell down: “Water is a human right and cannot be sold.”

         Kemalists, followers of Mustafa Kemal, also known as Atatürk, who established the secular republic in the 1920s, have been on the streets for the last few years because they thought they were losing the gains of the Republic one by one, secularism being the first on the list. There are many groups in Turkey ranging from the CHP, many Kemalist associations with infinite ideological and political variations leaning towards both left and right, to ex-Maoist, and quasi-fascistic Labour Party describing themselves as Kemalists.

         Alevis are a religious group that was persecuted and sometimes massacred under both the Ottomans and the Republic. Among other pogroms there were the 1978 Malatya and Maraş massacres, the 1980 Çorum massacre and the 1993 Sivas massacre, all of which are still fresh in our social memories. By using nearly every ideological apparatus, most of the people are indoctrinated that Alevism is a perverse belief. The government has recently proposed to name the planned third bridge over the Bosphorus after Yavuz Sultan Selim, a former Ottoman ruler who killed nearly 40.000 Alevis in Anatolia. Fearing that the Alevis might support his military rival, Shah Ismail, Selim instructed religious scholars to issue fatwas against Alevism to justify the massacre; these fatwas accused Alevis of burning the Koran and mosques and using women as common property, slanders that are continued to this day. During this revolt, Alevis were also in the streets in great numbers. As always, they didn’t withhold their support from the progressive forces of the country.

         Although there have been many Kurds on the streets, the Kurdish movement didn’t join the rebellion with its masses. The cities of Turkish Kurdistan remained silent during the last 20 days, some organizing only symbolic press releases together with the unions, NGOs etc. For this reason, the activists in the streets were unfortunately unable to force the construction of a social negotiation platform for an actual democratic resolution of the Kurdish issue on the basis of the principle of peaceful coexistence.

         The trade union movement has been under constant and intense attack since the AKP’s ascent to power. Workers, especially the private sector, face widespread subcontracting and precarious employment. The spring 1989 strike wave and the TEKEL resistance were inspiring historical moments for the union movement. After a long-running fight extending over many years, in 2010 unions and the socialist left were able to take back Taksim Square, accepted as the May Day Square of Istanbul, which was closed to the workers and progressive forces after the massacre on the May Day in 1977 . However, the government banned the May Day celebrations in Taksim Square in 2013, using the construction activities in the square as an excuse. This year there were clashes between police and the people trying to go to Taksim Square from various streets. After this year’s May Day, the police attacked every group trying to gather in the square for a press release or protest, using their TOMAs (riot control vehicles) and teargas. The ban on meeting in Taksim Square was one of the most important sparks that fired the revolt.

         The Confederation of Public Laborers’ Unions (KESK) and the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DISK) added their support to the resistance, declaring strikes twice, first on June 5 (only KESK) and then on June 6, and again on June 17. Night after night, there have been repeated marches in different working-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts of cities such as Istanbul and Ankara. It seemed that the working-class’s response and support to the resistance was more spontaneous and direct than that of its organizations.

         Revolutionary socialists have for years been involved in most of the struggle mentioned here, fighting for justice, freedom and equality, and trying to translate this large scale social opposition into an informed and organized grassroots movement.

         All of the groups in Turkish society that have been harmed by the government’s neoconservative policies came together behind the barricades in Taksim Square and Gezi Park and also in the other cities of Turkey. What made the barricades so strong this time was the coming together of revolutionary socialists who are experienced at defending the barricades and the thousands of people who took their places with their chants just behind them every night. What these groups together will be able to achieve is as yet unknown. But there is no doubt that the hegemony of the 1980 coup is gone.

     

     

    Özlem İlyas Tolunay is an İstanbul/Turkey-based translator/editor

     

  • Havaar on the 2013 Iranian Presidential Elections

          Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions and State Repression is a grassroots group of Iranians, Iranian-Americans and allies who have joined together to categorically oppose any military action and the U.S.-led sanctions against Iran. They stand in solidarity with the Iranian people’s struggle against war and sanctions and against state repression; all of these forms of violence, they insist, hurt the lives and aspirations of ordinary Iranians. Thus, Havaar supported with the Iranian people’s struggle for democracy in 2009 and has worked against U.S. sanctions and war threats. For more on Havaar, see their website. Havaar now offers this statement on the recent elections.

     

    The 2013 Iranian Presidential Elections
    Solidarity with the democratic movement in Iran!
    Lift U.S. sanctions against Iran! End collective punishment of the Iranian people!

          Along with millions of people both inside and outside of Iran, we are deeply inspired by the determination of the Iranian people to use the June 14th elections to press the realization of their own democratic aspirations. Hassan Rouhani won a decisive victory over five other candidates in the first round of voting, securing 50.7 percent of the more than 36 million votes cast in a massive turnout, with 72.7 percent of eligible voters casting their ballots. Rouhani describes himself as a “moderate,” and he has not challenged the fundamental principles of the Islamic Republic. Nor does his election change the fact the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard continue to control the most important levers of power. Nonetheless in the course of the election campaign Rouhani took several stands that encouraged people who are dissatisfied with the Iranian government to vote for him: for example, he criticized the morality police, called for lifting restrictions on the Internet, lamented the fact of widespread unemployment, and declared that, “in consensus with higher officials,” political prisoners would be freed.

         Despite relentless political repression and massive economic instability, medical shortages, inflation, unemployment, etc., exacerbated by U.S. sanctions, the popular democratic movement in Iran has shown itself to be remarkably resilient: tens of thousands of Iranians marched in cities across the country on June 15th to celebrate the election results, and their chants and slogans such as the following showed the enduring momentum for change and a desire to keep alive the memory of those who lost their lives during 2009′s post election uprisings:

    • Green movement! Happy Birthday!
    • This is the remembrance of 2009 protests
    • Hassan (Rouhani)! bring the key, and open the Evin prison
    • June 14th gets our stolen votes back
    • Green movement/reform has not died, it has brought Rouhani
    • Rouhani do not forget, Mousavi must be released

         In response to the Iranian elections, the White House and Secretary of State John Kerry praised the “courage” of the Iranian people, attempting to position the United States on their side against their government. But the administration’s tribute is blatantly hypocritical: U.S.-led sanctions are directly contributing to the suffering of these “courageous” people, particularly most recently. In the run up to the elections, the U.S. escalated sanctions against the petro-chemical industry, the car industry and the Iranian currency itself, greatly exacerbating the difficulties Iranians already encounter in meeting the needs of everyday life. Instead of offering empty phrases of admiration for the Iranian people, the U.S. should lift sanctions now and stop the collective punishment and intimidation of ordinary Iranians.

         As the Iranian people continue to resist from below the many sources of oppression they face, both internally and from U.S./Israeli aggression, we in Havaar call on the Obama administration to lift all sanctions on Iran immediately and stop the devastation of millions of Iranians’ lives. For example, there is an urgent and proliferating health care crisis caused directly by sanctions on “dual use” goods and on hard currency needed to buy medicine and medical supplies. As Iranian hospitals run out of essential medications and the parts to fix medical equipment, more patients will die prematurely of easily preventable deaths. Havaar has launched a campaign to enforce the exemption for humanitarian goods, including medicine, and we urge the Obama administration to issue an unequivocal statement to banks that they will not be penalized for facilitating the purchase of items that fall under the exemption clause and to provide a clear exemption from banking sanctions for humanitarian transactions. This can be a first step towards alleviating the harsh effects of the U.S. sanctions program.

         We congratulate the millions of Iranians who seized this electoral moment to show yet again the political force they are. And we call on President Rouhani and the new Iranian government to live up to the hopes of the people who voted for change. We call for the freeing of Green movement leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi and all political prisoners, and for an end, at last, to state repression in Iran. Movements for women’s rights, labor rights, and all human rights need the freedom to organize without fear of governmental punishment.

         We furthermore call on our government here in the United States to stop adding to the burdens Iranians face and lift the sanctions and end the war threats now!

     

  • Are Conservative Evangelicals Hampering Anti-Trafficking Efforts?

    Human trafficking is an issue so entirely abhorrent, it seems that it would be impossible to inappropriately address it. And yet a forthcoming paper (to be published in by Dr. Hebah Farrag, Richard Flory and Brie Loskota) argues that often religious organizations fail to get the job done right.

         Over the past ten years, Christian groups, most notably Evangelical Christians, especially social conservatives, have rallied to raise money and form organizations to address human trafficking. Many have teamed up with some feminists of the Dworkin camp in opposing all forms of prostitution and pornography as “exploitative,” fracturing both Christians and feminists. There are four intertwined areas of conflict in the sex trafficking debate.

         The first problem is that trafficking often does not involve sexual exploitation. Dr. Richard Flory, Director of the Center for Religion & Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, writes that trafficking for sex is, “the least common instance of human trafficking when compared to sweatshop labor, agricultural work or even corporate crime.” Many evangelicals decry sex trafficking and prostitution while arguing that sweatshops are entirely acceptable; saying that the “alternative” (read: prostitution) is worse. Dr. Yvonne Zimmerman, author of Other Dreams of Freedom, argues that this amounts to a form of colonialism, since often the people Christians try to “free” may well prefer prostitution to starvation. Dr. Catherine Mackinnon of Harvard University disagrees. She writes to me,

     

    “Most trafficking of human beings is for the sex industry. Prostitution is its impetus and its destination. It is also false that ‘all the money and attention’ goes to sex as opposed to labor trafficking. This view is promoted by people who live off money and attention and also trivialize sex trafficking, mainly by insinuating that prostitution is either a form of freedom or that it is not so bad as an occupation for ‘some women.’ Those who work against sex trafficking never minimize the issues or horror of labor trafficking or suggest that the people who are so trafficked are doing just fine.”

         But Dr. Rhacel Parrenas, University of Southern California points out that the International Labor Organization report for 2012 finds that there are 21 million victims of forced labor globally and 4.5 million victims of forced sexual labor. That doesn’t even include exploitive manufacturing, domestic work and backbreaking agriculture. The dangers of exploited labor were recently revealed in Bangladesh.

         A second hitch, which flows from the labor and sex debate, is the issue of prostitution. Some organizations, especially feminist and Christian organizations oppose all prostitution, regardless of the age of the woman involved. Other organizations distinguish between “trafficking in women” or “forced prostitution” and “voluntary prostitution.” Dr. Catherine Mackinnon of Harvard argues that,

    “Prostitution is based on inequality—economic, sex, race, age. The Swedish Model addresses it at its origin, which is the demand for sex by people who do not share these inequalities—i.e. relatively rich white older men. Anything that addresses women’s inequality gets at the root causes.”

         This question has cleaved the feminist movement and strikes at the core of the issue. Elizabeth Bernstein of Barnard University notes in The Sexual Politics of the “New Abolitionism,” “prostitution, something previously of concern only to local law enforcement and to relatively small numbers of committed feminists and sex-worker activists, has come to occupy the center of an ever spiraling array of faith-based and secular activist agendas, human rights initiatives, and legal instruments.”

         But it is far from clear whether prostitution is inherently slavery or deserving of particular attention. Laura Agustinwrites that, “Instead, it is clear that the lines between commercial and non-commercial sex have always been blurry, and that middle-class marriage is itself an example.” She argues that adding inequality to the equation does not produce a clear-cut moral distinction, writing that,

    “For some critics, the possession of money by clients gives them absolute power over workers and therefore means that equality is impossible. This attitude toward money is odd, given that we live in times when it is acceptable to pay for child and elderly care, for rape, alcohol and suicide counseling and for many other forms of consolation and caring.”

         Instead, she concludes, “we cannot assume there is a fundamental difference between commercial and non-commercial sex.” Just as some men work in coal mines and others find it abhorrent, some women are willing to have intercourse for money while others are not. The idea of “rescuing” men from coal mining strikes us as paternalistic and yet many Christians and feminists see no problem “rescuing” women from a job they have freely chosen. These feminists label those opposed to prostitution colonizers, because they impose their values on those whom they seek to “free.”

         One aspect of this “moralistic” approach (which is not confined only to religious people, but rather those who take a moral, rather than socio-economic view of the issue) is the “rescue model.” Dr. Flory worries that Evangelical groups rely far too much on the “rescue model”: busting in, saving some women and then leaving. Too often, the women end up right back in the hands of the captors. Dr. Mackinnon tells me, “Myself, I don’t agree with the moral approach, although rescue, with follow-through, can help the people it helps, which is that many more than were helped before.” She argues though, that the ultimate solution will be ending demand.

         The failure of the rescue model strikes at the perennial question, “what happens the day after?” Dr. Zimmerman, in collaboration with Dr. Claude d’Estree have outlined a code of conduct for religious organizations that includes, “Pastoral counseling, religious based therapies, and spiritual direction are not a substitute for standard therapeutic models and should only be offered at the request of the trafficking survivors.” She tells me that her work at a rape crisis center taught her that no victim is the same, and no victim needs the same care.

         Alicia Peters, a professor at the University of New England, offers a hopeful example of such a model. In New York City she says,

    “I’ve seen a very successful collaboration between a rights-based service providing agency and a shelter run by a group of sisters. The service organization would never place clients in a shelter that focused on ‘rehabilitating women’ and restricted their mobility, but in this case both organizations were committed to recognizing the women’s agency and assisting them to make their own choices about moving forward post-trafficking.”

         The problem with raids is that they implicitly assume that anyone working in the commercial sex sector are necessarily trafficked or “enslaved.” Such raids, she tells me, are particularly popular among Evangelical groups, even those that are more established in the mainstream like the International Justice Mission.

         The raid and rescue model flows into the final cleave, whether anti-trafficking efforts should strike at the supply or demand for prostitution. Flory told me, “because Evangelicals tend to frame [human trafficking] as a moral issue, they focus on the supply side, not demand.” Mackinnon agrees about the importance of fighting trafficking on the demand side, a model she writes in her article, “Trafficking, Prostitution, and Inequality,” published in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review that has best been developed and executed in Sweden.

         Flory tells me that there is often misunderstanding and “a stunning lack of ability to actually talk to each other.” He tells me he is an optimist, but in order for cooperation to occur, religious groups must look beyond the moral side. I talked to Sara Pomeroy of the Richmond Justice Institute about cooperation between secular and religious organization. She tells me that the International Justice Mission often works with secular organizations, noting a recent collaboration with Polaris Project. Religious organizations, she tells me, often help rescued women with job retraining, work with local police and lobby for laws. Furthermore, she claims they are concerned with labor trafficking.

         But some feminists think that this new “bipartisan consensus” is just as destructive as the “bipartisan consensus” that rallied behind the Comstockery of the 1980s. These feminists, including Drs. Zimmerman, Bernstein and Agustin don’t agree on everything, but they find much wrong with the current paradigm. The idea of imposing freedom is hardly as salvific as the broad consensus makes it out to be. Further, the question of trafficking is not as black and white as these groups portray it. There is not always an “exploiter” and an “exploited”; often underlying socio-economic conditions are much more important. Dr. Zimmerman tells me, “Often the groups that do the most to combat human trafficking aren’t ‘human trafficking’ groups; they are groups that put women in apartments, that offer medical care, food and legal aid. If a woman has access to affordable food and housing she has more options.”

         We know what works when it comes to combating trafficking. The issue must be treated a socio-economic issue, like sweatshop labor, and not as a moral one. To treat the issue with moralistic language devalues the women involved and hampers progress. Groups, whether religious or secular that are willing to approach this issue in this manner, should be encouraged. The question is whether Evangelicals will leave the moral approach. They have encouragement from within. A prominent Evangelical pastor, Brian McLaren, has challenged his church, saying, “It’s disturbing that nonprofits can raise money to fight sex trafficking in Cambodia but it’s much harder to raise awareness about bad trade policies in the U.S. that keep Cambodia poor so that it needs sex trafficking.”

     

    Sean McElwee’s articles have appeared on TheModerateVoice.com, WashingtonMonthly.com, Alternet.orgReason.com, Antiwar.com, and Salon. His most recent pieces can be found at his blog: seanamcelwee.com.

  • Creating a Transcontinental North American Working Class Movement

         Richard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui. Continental Crucible: Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America. Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2013. 148 pages. References. Index. Paperback. Price: $19.95 CAN.

         As the title suggests, Continental Crucible: Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America by Richard Roman and Edur Velasco looks simultaneously at corporate political strategy, the unions’ responses, and the effects of industrial relocation and worker migration. It is this (as I wrote in a blurb for the book) that makes this book unique and so valuable. We are asked to look at class dynamics and class struggle and their impact on industrial investment policies and demographics throughout North America in a holistic way that is seldom attempted. The authors argue that these dynamics have laid the foundation for a new and necessary stage of international working class solidarity both in North America and in the world. Yet, while the fundamental approach is correct, it seems to me that they 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.

         Before turning to my doubts, let me first explain the approach of this book and point out its strengths. Continental Crucible provides an essential framework for thinking about North American labor issues in terms of business policy, union strategy and migration patterns. And it traces in detail the ways in which business organizations in Canada, Mexico and the United States, each for their own reasons and somewhat differently, eventually arrived at the common policy of adopting neoliberal strategies and a vision of continental economic integration. The U.S. Business Roundtable, the Canadian Business Council on National Issues, and the Mexican Business Coordinating Council turned to neoliberalism and economic integration as a way of responding to a decline in profitability, confronting labor militancy and imposing labor discipline, ending older social pacts and in the broadest sense changing the national cultures to put competition and consumerism at the center. Though we cannot go into those differences here, the book deals with the initial differences between each of the national strategies that ultimately put them on the same road.

         Taken together, these strategies eventually converged to create the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a treaty that, while most beneficial to U.S. corporations, also offered important incentives and benefits to both Canadian and Mexican business as well.. The result of these economic changes generally and of NAFTA in particular was even more uneven economic development among the three countries and regions within them, leading to increased wage competition, downward harmonization, and more migration.

         The Canadian, Mexican and U.S. labor movements each responded differently to these developments and failed to come up with a common and coordinated response, so a new North America political economy was created that now provides the terrain of struggle. In the authors’ view, two historical developments laid the basis for labor collaboration in North America today: first, the creation in the twentieth century of the International Unions—really U.S.-based unions—that have local union affiliates in the United States and Canada; second, the combination of U.S. plant relocation to Mexico and Mexican migration to the United States, which means that millions of Mexican workers are employed by U.S. companies on both sides of the border. The U.S. labor movement is the hinge, linked to Canada through the International Unions and to Mexico through investment and migration. At the same time, women have entered the workforce and the migrant streams in enormous numbers in all three countries, changing the existing patterns of employment and implicitly challenging patriarchy and the existing gender hierarchies.

         Roman and Velasco argue that though these developments have been going on now for more than 30 years, the labor unions continue to operate on antiquated and obsolete strategies derived from national and nationalistic principles, and from narrow trade union conceptions of the role of unions. The result has been that unions have failed both to develop a class-wide model of struggle in their own countries and have also failed to create the international coordination necessary to confront the big business on the continent. The authors assert that the development of overlapping labor markets, continental production chains, and massive migration laid the basis for a new kind of labor solidarity and struggle. They see hope in the strategic alliances between unions such as the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) in the U.S. and the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) in Mexico, and in the attempt by the United Steel Workers (representing U.S. and Canadian workers) and the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers (Los Mineros) to create a new transnational union.

         They argue that if we are to build a continental labor movement the unions need a new vision as well as a new strategy.

    “Solidarity can only be built on the bases of a struggle for upward harmonization, which would require regulating capitalist investment and labor markets, tasks that would require challenging the power of big business or struggling for a transformation of the economy from capitalism to one of socialist democracy. Either would require a powerful workers’ movement, rooted in communities and workplaces, with a strategy of struggle and an alternative vision of society; a vision that rejects competition and embraces solidarity.” (p. 105)

         This book then is not simply about cooperation and coordination between existing unions, but a call for a profoundly democratic, anti-racist and anti-sexist transformation of the existing unions to make them genuine fighting organizations of the continental working class. It is this complex and combined analysis of business, labor, migration and gender relations that makes this book so powerful and important.

         Nevertheless, the book still raises doubts for me. Like many of us on the left, Roman and Velasco, it seems to me, have a tendency to exaggerate the size, scope and character of the contemporary class struggle. The opening sentences of the book read: “The crucible of North American transformation is heating up, but its outcome is far from clear. There is a growing clash between those pushing to continue the corporate agenda and the movements of resistance.” (p. 1). I wish I could agree with this—but I cannot. The capitalists in North America continue to push the neoliberal agenda, but there seems to me at the moment to be little significant resistance. The level of class struggle in the U.S. is at an all-time low and Canada’s not much better.

         Regarding Mexico, the authors’ claim that “Mexico is the only country whose very institutional framework could be fundamentally challenged in the short and medium run,” and that we can expect a “growing insurgency” (p. 113) strikes me as wrong. They assert that “…the working class of Mexico still has revolutionary, collectivist and class-conscious rhetoric and traditions in spite of the ceaseless neo-liberal cultural offensive. The repertoire of popular protest in Mexico continues to have insurrectionary and revolutionary images and options.” (p. 114)

         The authors seem to want to say that Mexico is in a pre-revolutionary situation, though they carefully calibrate their language. Having closely followed Mexican working class, trade union and political developments for more than 25 years, I have become convinced that Mexico’s supposedly revolutionary traditions, rhetoric, and images actually inhibit the development of a serious and realistic revolutionary politics appropriate for today. Mexico sees many protests, but few major conflicts; it is the only nation in Latin America that has never had a general strike. Moreover, in Mexico the Institutional Revolutionary Party that just returned to power under Enrique Peña Nieto is on a roll, either coopting or sweeping away its opponents. Mexico authoritarian regime, its corruption and violence, inhibit class struggle; workers mostly have been losing. I do not find the claim that Mexico will be the spark for a new wave of North American class struggle to be convincing. I will be delighted to be proven wrong by subsequent developments.

         I am also not convinced that the U.S. International Unions, with their locals in the U.S. and Canada, represent the basis for any sort of international solidarity movement. There has always been a simmering resentment among Canadian workers against the U.S. unions, leading some 20 years ago to a series of splits, the most important being the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) leaving the United Auto Workers. I am not sure that those tensions have completely disappeared. Moreover, the International Unions are dominated by a bureaucratic caste of officials that has proven unwilling and unable to lead their members in struggle in the two separate nations. I see no reason to believe that the International Unions would be more successful in an international struggle for which they have shown little aptitude so far.

         Finally, I find Roman and Velasco’s treatment of Mexican immigration to the United States to be too simplistic. They argue that, “The curse of poverty follows them to their ‘new’ life.” (p. 62) While it is true as they argue that Mexican immigrants are part of a labor reserve army that experiences particularly intense exploitation, suffers racial discrimination, and often endures poor living conditions, some immigrants also achieve relative success in new jobs and new communities and see their children find other opportunities, while many assimilate partially or wholly to American society. This is, of course, why immigrants come to the United States: because work pays more, and in addition—especially if one has papers (and many do) and certainly for the second generation—there is less repression and one has more democracy and more rights than in Mexico. The authors paint the immigrant condition with too broad a brush and too monochromatically.

         Their misunderstanding of the Latino immigrants in the United States appears clearly in a statement like the following:

    “The extreme poverty and racism that undocumented workers have been enduring has now spread to large sectors of the rest of the Latino population. It is this increasingly common situation of poverty that has united Latinos, with or without documents, and gave the immigrant protests of 2006 and 2010 a radical character.” (p. 82)

         In my view, the predominantly Latino immigrant demonstrations of 2006 represented a broad demand for dignity and democratic rights and achieved significance from the mass participation of Latinos, many leaving work to participate, giving some of the demonstrations the character of a kind of Latino general strike (or “A Day without a Mexican”); nevertheless, the demonstrators carrying the flags of their own nations and that of the United States, coming from the churches, soccer clubs, and labor unions, never had “a radical character”—if what we mean by radical is a challenge to the established economic, social and political order. Immigrants by and large were demanding green cards and a path to citizenship, the right to participate in American society, not a fundamental change in American society.

         Despite these reservations about their reading of the political and social climate in the three countries, and especially in Mexico, and though I differ with them about the Mexican immigrant experience here, I believe that the complex analysis they present and the conclusions that they draw from their analysis of business, unions, and migration are fundamentally correct. As they argue, we need to build rank-and-file movements to make unions in all three countries more democratic and militant. We need to fight racism and sexism in society, at work and in the unions. And we need to build international solidarity. All of those interested in understanding the nature of the problems we face in taking on the capitalist class and building a new continental labor movement will find this book essential.

  • The Persecution of the Mexican Miners

    Napoleon Gómez. The Collapse of Dignity: The Story of a Mining Tragedy and the Fight Against Greed and Corruption in Mexico. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, Inc., 2013. 344 pages. Photos. Index. $26.95 U.S. / $36.00 CAN / Kindle $11.99.

         Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, the general secretary of the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union, has written this memoir to tell the story of his career as head of the union, particularly his persecution and the persecution of the union and its members by the Mexican government and the mining companies. Like most autobiographies perhaps, this one is self-serving, it obscures as much as it reveals and creates a kind of fictional public persona, though it also tells us a good deal about the contemporary Mexican labor movement. The book recounts convincingly and in great detail the Mexican government’s use of trumped up legal charges, kangaroo courts, and slanderous media campaigns in an attempt to destroy the reputation of Gómez Urrutia, as well as efforts of Grupo Mexico, the country’s largest mining corporation, to crush the union and eliminate the contracts that protect miners’ wages, working conditions, and health and safety.

    Gomez cover     The story, which has been pretty well told before piecemeal in Canadian newspapers and in Mexico’s left publications the La Jornada newspaper and Proceso magazine, has not received much attention in the U.S. press except in the left and labor press. For seven years in Mexican Labor News and Analysis we have covered this story of the suppression of labor union and workers’ rights for our subscribers and readers who are mostly labor and human rights activist. The story is a fascinating example of the utter corruption of the Mexican government, the avarice and viciousness of the mining companies, of the tenacity and ambition of Gómez Urrutia, and of the courage of his union’s members.

         In brief, the story is this. In the early 2000s, I began to notice that something new was happening with the Mexican Miners Union (also known as Los Mineros); they were rather suddenly taking on a new more militant attitude. After Gómez Urrutia took over leadership from his father (Napleón Gómez Sada) in May of 2002, the union began to engage in more strikes and in solidarity strikes with unions and workers in Latin America and in the United States. Then in February of 2006 Gómez Urrutia made a move to take over control of the Congress of Labor, the umbrella organization to which most of Mexico’s labor federations and unions then belonged. At about the same time, on February 19, 2006 there was a deadly explosion in the Pasta de Conchos mine in Coahuila State taking the lives of 65 miners, a disaster that Gómez Urrutia called “industrial homicide.” Gómez Urrutia’s attempted coup in the Congress of Labor and his denunciation of the companies for their role in the Pasta de Conchos disaster made him persona non grata with all the powers-that-be.

         Those events led the Mexican federal government as well as several Mexican state governments to attempt to remove Gómez Urrutia from the scene by accusing him of having defrauded his union and its members of $55 million. They brought charges that would have kept him in jail indefinitely while awaiting trial and which could have eventually sent him to prison for years if not decades. He wisely fled to the United States and then to Canada. At the same time Grupo Mexico attacked the union at the large Cananea copper mine and other mines, eventually succeeding in breaking the union at Cananea though not at the other sites. Miners were fired, their families evicted, their local unions besieged, their lives made miserable.

         With the support in particular of the United Steel Workers, as well as the International Metalworkers Federation, Gómez Urrutia and his attorney succeeded in proving repeatedly in a variety of Mexican state and federal courts that there was no basis for any of the charges against him. Yet he has not returned from exile in Vancouver for fear that new charges would be brought or that he might be killed by agents of the government or the companies, fears which seem quite reasonable. Meanwhile, being repeatedly reelected general secretary by his members, he has continued to lead the union from Canada as it engaged in strikes and negotiations that won its members outstanding contracts. Today he continues the fight from Vancouver and the union’s members keep the faith in Mexico’s mines, constantly under pressure from the employers.

    Not a Convincing Memoir, However

         While Gómez Urrutia, who is not much of a writer, tells the story of his union and its struggle well enough (though there will be too many events, names, and agency initials for many readers), his own biography is not convincing and we are therefore left in doubt about his character and his real motives. We are pretty sure by the end that there is no real person who corresponds to the hero of his book.

         He wants to convince us that he is a son of the working class, but this is a fiction. When Gómez Urrutia was a boy, his father, Gómez Sada, was a miner and then a local mine union leader who by 1960 had become head of the Miners Union. That was at the height of the power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that controlled the unions and more or less appointed their leaders, leaders who did the party’s political bidding and did not create problems for the employers and especially not for the foreign mining companies. Gómez Sada was a typical charro of the era, that is, a union bureaucrat who owed his position to the government’s violent purge of more leftist, radical or militant union leaders and to his own acquiescence. My wife and I met him once at his office and he was gracious and generous as only an aristocrat can be, having some of his underlings take us around to visit mines and steel plants. He prided himself on the fact that his union had always been “institutional,” that is, “official,” supporting the government, even when the conservative and corporate Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) was elected president. The PRI rewarded Gómez Sada by making him a Congressman and a Senator. He became the Mexican equivalent of a kind of a Count or Duke of labor.

         Gómez Urrutia then was the son of a kind of party-union aristocrat, a privileged position that made it possible for him to study economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and then to go to graduate school at Oxford University in England. He mentions that, “The late sixties was a time of social upheaval. At the universities in the United States, France, England, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and many other parts of the world, student movements were erupting against colonial wars, inequality, repression, and racial discrimination throughout the world.” Yet somehow Gómez Urrutia fails to mention that in Mexico the social upheaval took the form of a movement for democracy, a movement against the PRI, the party of his father and later his own party. He fails to mention that the PRI President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz sent the army and the police to suppress the movement killing an estimated 300 young people in Tlatelolco, the Plaza of the Three Cultures. The student democratic movement was followed—as some radicalized students went into the mines—by the “labor insurgency” of the late 1960s, as it is called, a rank-and-file movement from below in the auto part plants and in the steel mills and even in some mines. There was also the mid-1970s movement of the Electrical Workers (STERM) and their Democratic Tendency, suppressed by the army. Gómez Urrutia never mentions these movements; perhaps he knows nothing about them, though one suspects that he knows them quite well but prefers to avoid mentioning the real labor movements of his youth because his father and he opposed them as did all the official unions and PRI politicians.

         Gómez Urrutia returned from his studies abroad taking positions first as an economist at the Banco de México, then as a professor at the UNAM. In the mid-1970s President José López Portillo appointed him to be an Assistant Director for Planning in the Department of Planning and the Budget, and finally he worked for ten years at Moneda de Mexico, the Mexican mint. That is, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia was ascending the staircase of the Mexican nomenklatura until, motivated by excessive ambition, he made a political misstep in the early 1990s by running for governor of Nuevo Leon as a candidate aligned with Donaldo Colosio, an opponent of president Carlos Salinas. Only after he failed in the party primary process in the PRI, more or less ruining his political career, did he then turn his attention to the union.

         While Gomez Urrutia tries to convince us that he became general secretary because the miners had all known him since he was a child, because of his volunteer work for his father, and because of his own experience as a mine employee in the accounting department of a mine and therefore a union member, none of this is convincing. Not at all. It is quite clear that when his father died, he inherited the position of general secretary, head of Los Mineros. And since his story of how the miners loved and trusted him is so phony and corny—“They knew I would never betray the union or the workers. I was already their colleague, their brother, their friend.”—it would have been better to have simply and honestly written, “I inherited the union’s top post from my father but had other ideas and began to take a more militant approach.”

         While this book poses no interesting questions, there are important questions to be asked. They are, I think: Why did Gómez Urrutia take a more militant approach? Why was that possible given the long history of state-party control of the unions? What does this mean for the Mexican labor movement? What are the possibilities for the future? As his earlier flirtation with politics suggest, Gómez Urrutia was interested in power; to become head of his father’s union and then head of the Congress of Labor would make him a real power, perhaps even a king-maker in the PRI or possibly even in the PAN. The Miners Union was for him a path to political redemption. (Certainly that was the lesson also drawn by Elba Esther Gordillo, head of the Mexican Teachers Union who also tried to become leader of the Congress of Labor in the same period, also unsuccessfully.) Gómez Urrutia’s espousal of militant unionism and international union solidarity proved an almost successful strategy for enhancing his own political position.

         What made it possible of Gómez Urrutia to take a more militant line was the expansion of the mining industry that was taking place, the privatization of that industry, and its technological transformation. The Mexican Miners Union was large enough, strong enough, and well situated enough to be able to take on the mining companies one by one and win better contracts. Those contracts gave Gómez Urrutia the loyalty of the members and allowed him to make his power play for the Congress of Labor. His demonstrations of international solidarity also strengthened his hand, giving him that American connection desired by all Mexican politicians. At the same time, the combination of the transformation of the Institutional Revolutionary Party as it was taken over by the technocrats and ultimately by Carlos Salinas, and the experience of neoliberal globalization as Salinas dismantled the nationalized industries, opened the markets, and invited in foreign investors, meant that the unions were also under enormous political pressure, suffering structural dislocations, and seeing rank-and-file resistance.

         The conditions created the opportunity for Gómez Urrutia to make his move at the Congress of Labor. But, just as he had done earlier when he ran for governor of Nuevo Leon, he had chosen the wrong side. The state and the official unions were still too strong, and he lost. Nevertheless, through the assistance of the United Steel Workers and the IMF, he has been able to hang on to his base in the Miners Union. At the same time, Grupo Mexico saw that by working closely with the state, it had a chance of breaking the union, at least at the Cananea mine.

         Still, under Gómez Urrutia’s leadership the Mexican Miners became an independent union that found itself fighting the state and the companies. The union’s besieged position forced it to seek even greater international solidarity in Canada, the United States, and in the world labor movement. The attack by Felipe Calderón’s government on the Electrical Workers Union (SME) and on the teachers union brought the Miners allies in Mexico. These are all unions waging a rearguard action as they try to carry out a retreat always in fear of being routed.

         While Gómez Urrutia has proven to be a remarkable son of the old PRI-union aristocracy, a curious kind of Knight of the old order, that is not the way the Mexican labor movement will be revived. Rank-and-file workers in the unions will have to create and push forward their own leaders who fight for a different sort of unionism, a different sort of politics, and a different society.

  • Police Drive Protestors from Taksim Square—Struggle Continues

         Last night Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered police to drive protesters from Taksim Square in Istanbul and with water cannons, tear gas and clubs they did so. The day before Erdoğan had promised to meet with the dissidents who opposed the transformation of the park into a shopping mall and a military barracks, demanded an end to authoritarianism and called for democracy, but then the president changed his mind and now plans to meet with representatives of the artistic and intellectual community. He may have calculated that with the new democracy movement having spread throughout the country, and two labor federations having called strikes in support of the movement, it was time to remove the demonstrators in Taksim who have been the source of his recent problems.

         Erdoğan’s attempt to repress the movement over the last two weeks has taken three lives and left 4,947 injured, according to The New York Times. While the protests were initially called by environmentalists to protect the park, others quickly joined the occupiers, seeing the crackdown as another demonstration of the reactionary and authoritarian agenda of Erdoğan. Many Turks have opposed his combination of conservative Islam and neoliberal economics and particularly object to his government’s violent repression of Kurds, arrest of journalists, and general suppression of dissent, thereby creating the mass base for social opposition. Erdoğan has also alienated the Alevis by planning to name a third bridge over the Bosphorus after Yavuz Sultan Selim, a ruler who killed thousands of Alevis during his reign.

         Erdoğan’s political rigidity brought him to the point where he was damned if he made concessions which would only encourage the movement and damned if he repressed the movement only proving that he was the dictator that the opposition claimed he was. We will see now how the country reacts to his violent ejection of the environmental, democratic and leftist activists from the park. We print below their latest statement.

    This is our call to the whole world

    11 June 2013

         Police violence that began at Taksim Gezi Park on the morning of the 14th day continues as of midnight.

         After the failure of the inept play of provocation staged in the morning by the police, the gas-bomb attack that the police continues as of now has led to hundreds of injuries -including many head traumas. All the animals and birds around Taksim Square are dying because of intense gas.

         Our people, our children in Taksim Square and Gezi Park continue their resistance, risking their lives to protect their dignity.

         We invite the whole world to show their reaction to stop the police violence carried out by the direct order of the government, and to support our people.

     

  • Occupy Taksim Gezi Park

         The on-going resistance to the remodeling of Taksim Square in Central Istanbul, Turkey took on a new more militant form on Monday evening when bulldozers arrived at the park and began demolishing some parts of the Gezi Park’s wall and removed nearby trees. Taksim Solidarity, the resistance movement whose members were at a regular meeting at the park during the demolition, succeeded in stopping the demolition when they moved into the area where the bulldozers were removing the trees. A group of 20 to 30 people stayed on guard duty throughout the night.

         Police forces entered the park around 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday to continue the demolition and resorted to tear gas to disperse the group that stood in the way of the excavators. When that occurred, thousands of people rushed into the park volunteering to help stop the demolition. Police attacked the resisters with tear gas again early Wednesday morning and burnt the tents of the resisters on night watch at the park. There were more than 10.000 people at Gezi Park on Wednesday evening. Slogans resounded all over the park: “Shoulder to shoulder against fascism,” “AKP will pay the price before the people,” “Taksim is Ours, Istanbul is Ours,” “Police Out Istanbul In.”

         Police raided Gezi Park brutally early Friday morning with tear gas again, dispersed the crowd together with the MPs, evacuated the park, and and completely closed it off with the barriers. There were many injured in the hospitals. All the streets leading to Taksim Square have been under tear gas clouds since the morning. Ahmet ŞŞık, a journalist for the newspaper Birgun (http://www.birgun.net/) suffered a head injury during the police attack on the park occupiers. Witnesses said that the police targeted his head while he was taking photos. Sırrı Süreyya Önder, a Member of Parliament of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), was also injured. Both have been hospitalized. There were many people (nearly 5000) in the Taksim Square protesting the police attack at the moment. Taksim Solidarity made a press declaration in the Square. TV channels are still silent.

         One demonstrator, who preferred to remain anonymous, said, “We know that, what they are trying to do to Gezi Park is not independent from the other ongoing projects of the government in Istanbul. The urban transformation projects in Tarlabaşı, Sulukule and Ayazma or the demolition of Emek Movie Theater–they are all related. On one hand the poor and the lower classes are displaced and dragged outside of the center towards the outskirts of the city; on the other hand, a cultural place like the Emek Movie Theater, which is committed to the collective memory, shares the same fate with these people. Personally, I believe that the issue of urban transformation is another form of class struggle. Therefore, Taksim Gezi Park is not only a park like Emek Movie Theater which is also not only a place where people watches movies.”

         The Justice and Development (AKP) government aims to demolish Taksim Gezi Park, one of the last green areas in the city center at Istanbul Taksim Square, and plans to build a complex that would include a redesigned Topçu Kışlası –the artillery Barracks which was demolished in the 1940’s due to being used as torture center by the occupation forces during 1910s—a shopping mall, and a residence, all of which is a part of a bigger plan of redesigning the Taksim Square. This government project has been on the agenda for nearly a year and a movement called Taksim Solidarity is resisting this. Taksim Solidarity is an organization founded with the support of over 70 groups and, in conjunction with Taksim Platform it is putting up a strong and growing opposition to the controversial Taksim Project – the impending municipal initiative to remodel Turkey’s most symbolic square. The Taksim Solidarity activists are organizing festivals at Gezi Park, gathering signatures against the plan, and trying to inform people about this project.

         Since the events of Monday evening, people have been trying to share information from the park through social media, but internet access is blocked in the park, no live broadcasting is allowed, and all kinds of communication are obstructed by jammers. Members of the Turkish Parliament from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main oppositon party, and from the BDP are regularly visiting the Park. Political parties, unions, activists, actors, artists, students, academicians, music groups are all there. A forum has established and all the components of the solidarity are visible at the forum.

         Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan dismissed the protests saying: “Whatever you do, we have made a decision and we will do it.”

         Another protester at the park, who also declined to give his name, said, “We are under the threat of many projects which increase the exchange value of the urban space, produce use value for the sake of the privileged people of the city, and ignore the planning principles and the public welfare with a single decision. Therefore, we can’t isolate these projects which are transforming the city in parts and consuming the common values that make up a city. Today the foundation of the third bridge over the Bosphorus was laid and the bulldozers started the demolition of Gezi Park. Today, we should gather as all the citizens and protect our city which is indeed an arena of struggle.”

         One woman at the demonstration told us, “It is all of our responsibility to raise our voices for the protection of an area that is integral to our culture and history. If these plans go ahead, the history associated with Maksem [the historical water depot at the square], the Atatürk Cultural Center, the Taksim monument and Gezi Park will be destroyed.”

         “If the municipality’s project goes ahead,” said one Taksim Solidarity activist, “the annual rally attended by tens of thousands of Turkish citizens at Taksim Square on May 1, Turkey’s Labor Day, will become impossible. This is a day of huge significance to our people, yet it will become impossible and even dangerous if the Taksim Project is realized. With the limited access to the square that the project proposes, the slightest panic among the crowd could escalate into a disaster.”

  • Taksim Solidarity press release, June 5, 2013

    To the Government of the Republic of Turkey and the Public

         Citizens have been expressing their democratic outrage in Taksim Istanbul and all around the country against the insensitivity of the government for the public concern about the de-facto destruction of the Taksim Gezi Park that took place around 10 PM on May 27th.

         We share the pain of Abdullah Comert’s and Mehmet Ayvalitas’s families and wish to extend our get-well wishes to thousands of wounded citizens.

         Unfortunately, the government insists on its violent, repressive and prohibitionist policies against the public’s wish to express its democratic and human rights based demands. We would like it to be known that we are making an extreme effort to reach a social climate where no one is hurt, tensions are resolved and democratic demands can be expressed.

         For these reasons, as Taksim Resistance, we are waiting for the government to take substantive steps towards the realization of the demands below.

         WE DEMAND THAT:

    • Gezi Park should remain a park. There should be no construction on the park under the name of TopcuKislasi or under any other name. An official statement should be made announcing the cancellation of the project. The attempts at the demolition of Ataturk KulturMerkezi should be stopped.
    • Starting with the Governors and Chief of Police of Istanbul, Ankara and Hatay, all responsible persons who have stood in the way of people’s right of expression in the resistance at Taksim and other places; persons who ordered the use of violence; and persons who supervised and carried out these orders should be removed from office. The use of tear gas bombs and similar devices should be banned.
    • The citizens who have been detained all around the country for supporting the resistance should be freed immediately. There should be a statement announcing that no further investigation will be pursued against these individuals.
    • The prohibition and de-facto obstruction of meetings, protests and demonstrations in our squares and public places should end, starting with Taksim and Kiziliay Squares, the sights of May 1st celebrations. Barriers to freedom of expression should be lifted.

         Furthermore, we think that the authorities should understand the content, spirit, hopes and demands of the reaction that came from the streets and all kinds of public places since May 27th, 10 PM. Trying to explain away what happened by referring to “marginality” would be the same as ignoring these events. We can see that citizens interpret the intervention in Gezi Park, which symbolizes the government’s general thinking, as “an intervention in their beliefs and lifestyles and a sign of condescension,” eliciting a cry of “we are here and we have demands“ and a public outrage from all kinds of people, whether they be women, men, young or old.

         We would like the ruling authorities to realize that the reaction of the citizens is also about the Proposed Law on The Protection of Nature and Biodiversity that came into the National Assembly’s agenda and the projects that plunder our ecological riches, starting with the third airport in Istanbul, the third bridge over The Bosporus, the construction on AOC, and the hydro-electric power plants (HEPP). The reaction is also an expression of “the wish for peace, and resistance to the war politics being played in our country and in the region; the sensitivities of Alevi citizens; the rightful demands of the victims of urban transformation projects; the voices raised against the conservative male politics that control women’s bodies; the resistance to the coercion against universities, the judicial branch and artists; the demands of all workers, starting with the employees of Turkish Airlines, against the appropriation of their rights; the struggle against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity; and the demands for the clearing of the way for citizen’s right of access to education and healthcare.”

    TAKSIM RESISTANCE