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  • Towards meaningful solidarity? Union democracy too?

    As readers of New Politics and/or my new book probably know, I’m not bashful about criticizing the politics and policies of the international confederation of teachers unions, the Education International (EI). So what does it mean that the EI has just published my blog about what EI should be doing – but isn’t? Is this a rhetorical shift meant to allay critics who are pressing for real leadership against what Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin describe in their (must-read)  book as “the new American empire”? Or does it mean that the AFT and NEA leadership is beginning to think about allowing real democracy in the unions? Readers, your thoughts?

  • Notes on teacher unionism in the UK – same struggle as here

    Preamble: Last weekend I spoke at the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers (NUT)  in Liverpool, the UK’s largest teachers union. Largest in Europe too, I think. (NUT – correct me if I’m wrong, please.) I was invited to address the Campaign for a Democratic and Fighting  Union, what we in the US would call a reform caucus. The CDFU has won some of the seats in the NUT’s leadership but not all.  In this respect it looks to me like the CDFU is in pretty much the same position as reformers in the Los Angeles teachers union. One significant difference is that the NUT has a history of mobilizations in recent years, including a glorious boycott of their version of standardized tests. Another is that labor unions in the UK have a far higher density than they do in the US, and it may still be possible to talk about there being a “labor movement” there, which I don’t think exists in the US. Still, the neoliberal project in education, begun under Thatcher,  has scored breathtaking victories, including privatization of governmental oversight of schools and teachers. And now the government aims to do away with the national pay scale for teachers, increase pension contributions, and delay retirement. Sounds very familiar, right?  In my remarks to the CDFU, unfortunately not videotaped, I push activists to change their mindset, going on the offensive. I was asked to discuss lessons from the Chicago teachers’ strike.  Here’s the text of my speech, with relevant links inserted.   Tonight I’m going to lay out thoughts about what has occurred in the struggle over Chicago schools and implications for the NUT generally and the upcoming mobilizations in particular. I’ll be drawing on my new book, “The future of our schools.” Obviously in 10 minutes I cannot summarize everything in the book, so I urge you to read it. The book is short and accessible. I have written it for busy teachers. First, let us establish the context for our discussion.  Globally we are in a life-and-death struggle for education and our profession.  Our opponents aim to destroy our livelihood and the ideas that brought us into the profession. Their goals, which they mask in rhetoric about “Making Schools Work,” are to make public education a “free market” open to entrepreneurs; create a revolving door of minimally-trained teachers; reduce the curriculum to basic math and literacy content that workers will need to compete for low-paid jobs; control teachers and students with standardized testing; and weaken public oversight by breaking up school systems and replacing them with privately operated schools.          The biggest impediment to their carrying out their plan is teachers unions. Our enemies understand the potential of unions, better than do many teachers, and it is for this reason that the unions have been the target of such a well-orchestrated global campaign to cast teachers, like other public employees, as selfish shirkers and lazy incompetents, blocking educational improvements that will benefit poor children. Teachers unions are dangerous because we put forward ideals of collective voice and action that contradict the neoliberal valorization of individual effort and competition. Moreover, unions plant the seed of democracy in the school.  For research explaining and supporting these ideas I refer you to the book Mary Compton and I co-edited, “The global assault on teaching, teachers, and their unions: Stories for resistance.”         Neoliberalism has won a significant ideological victory that we must foreground in developing successful resistance, in putting our opponents in a defensive position.  We need to listen to students, parent and community groups and really learn from and with one another, in common struggle. In doing this, we push back on a reality that our enemies exploit, though it is of their making: Working and poor people often make less money and have a more precarious economic existence than do teachers. Enfuriating though it is,  we have to recognize that the rich and powerful who control media and government have persuaded many parents that there is nothing that can be done to increase funding for schools, to pay for pensions and salaries that are better than what parents have. Complicating this challenge is the racial, class, and language divide that often occurs between teachers and working class and poor parents and their communities.          We have much to learn from the victory of CORE, (Caucus of Rank and File Educators), the reformers who won the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). At the same time, Chicago’s history as a city and school system make many factors in the union’s development singular. This may seem self-evident, but I have found that many teacher union activists want to be told what to do, based on CORE’s success.  We need to remember that there is no template.           Chicago had a significant history of parent and community organization that preceded CORE’s victory. While CORE has developed and strengthened alliances with poor and working parents of color, parents’ self-organization preceded CORE’s election to union office. Community and parent groups in Chicago had organized on school closings, and CORE benefited from this legacy. CORE’s commitment to social justice helped the union to win over many radical teachers not previously active in the union but here too, CORE drew on the existing resource of Teachers for Social Justice, a group of young, radical teachers committed to  social justice in education. CORE was also assisted by the work of activist/scholars, especially Pauline Lipman.  Though they may not have seen their work through the lens I use to explain it, social movement teacher unionism, they were, in fact, developing a social movement of teachers, with the union providing the filament that kept the fabric whole.  How might we apply this to the NUT? Based on what I have heard in debates during Conference, I think you have laid much of the ground work to be a social movement teachers union. What’s needed now is to make that shift conscious, using it to guide every element of union life. Your message in every campaign must educate members and persuade parents and community that you – not the politicians and bankers – are the real defenders of children.   Consider how you discuss the elimination of the national pay scale. Certainly this reform harms teachers and the profession. But the political meaning of eliminating the national pay scale must be your message. This reform  is intended to make schools more unequal, to give some students access to a professional teaching force while subjecting others, the vast majority, likely those who are most needing of high-quality instruction,  to a revolving door of low paid instructors. THIS is the key message to take to the public in your campaign about eliminating the national pay scale. Embed the need to protect teaching as a profession in that larger political story. Take back the ideological terrain and the narrative that has been stolen. It is we who are the defenders of children from poor and working families, of all children, not the politicians, corporate profiteers, and bankers.  Likewise with pensions.  Strike action, no matter how militant,  will be undercut if the pension issue is not linked to a demand for the bankers to pay their fair share for education.  The precise demand I leave to those with more knowledge of the particulars. I think you get my point. This is a war for people’s minds. There are many more parents than there are teachers – and it is them to whom we direct our slogans. If you want to fight and win on OFSTED [note: the body doing inspections of schools], as I agree you must, cast this in ways that addresses parents’ fears about school quality.  Again, you know the particulars better than I do, but since OFSTED has been privatized, I’d like a campaign that says  “Don’t let the profiteers control your children’s school.”           I’ll close with one suggestion. The Chicago Teachers Union produced a remarkable document, “The schools Chicago students deserve.”  This is their vision for educational change. They name educational apartheid and describe how students have been harmed by the reforms put in place to make schools work. The union exposes tax breaks given to banks and corporations and demands that this money be used to fund programs needed for students’ well-being, from smaller classes to libraries, the arts, and support services. It exposes the racism in the system’s unequal allocation of resources to schools. One has to read well into the booklet before seeing any mention of teachers’ economic demands. These important bread-and-butter demands are configured as one key support for quality schools, but not the only one, and not the first.  This was the message the union took to members, parents and community. Their strike was for public education.  Because of the coaltion-building the union had done over many months,  the news media could not persuade Chicago parents or community that the strike was waged by selfish teachers out to line their pockets at the expense of students.  Before the vote to strike, members had been tested in mobilizations; teachers felt empowered;  and parents and community trusted that the union was, indeed, at their side, defending them and  their children.  Chicago teachers have altered the political terrain. Whether they are able to sustain this ground depends in good part on whether teachers in the rest of the US – and the world – yes, the NUT – follow their lead in being social movements that defend public education. As in the US, mass public education in the UK was won by militant struggles of trade unionists. They succeeded because the unions were part of a social movement that projected a vision of a different kind of society, one that was more equal, just, humane, free.  That broader movement does not exist today, and it is our job to be part of creating it. We start by making our own union a social movement that works as allies with parents, community, and other unions – when they will work with us.  So let’s talk now about the UK and the NUT.  Thanks for inviting me and please consider me a resource.  Post conference advice:  NUT officers should learn from CORE’s policy of lowering officer salaries so that CTU officers and staff earn no more than Chicago teachers. That’s how to answer the hypocrisy of the Telegraph, which defends billions to profiteers while focusing on  teacher union officers’ pay. Still we can’t give them an opening like this…    

  • South Africa–The Marikana Massacre and the New Wave of Workers’ Struggle

    [This article will be appearing in the summer 2013 issue of New Politics.]

    JG: I’M HERE WITH MAZIBUKO JARA. Mazibuko is from the Democratic Left Front of South Africa. He was spokesperson for the South African Communist Party and the deputy secretary for the Young Communist League, back a decade and more ago. He is one of the co-founders of Amandla magazine and the Democratic Left Front, and they’ve been extremely active in the support for the Marikana miners and for South African farm workers, and elsewhere. We’ll talk about this and more in this interview. Today is Sunday, Dec 2, 2012.

         Mazibuko, can you give us a bit of background on the current events in South Africa and how you personally got involved and became so prominent in the South African movement?

    MJ: I became a socialist in 1989, in the last years of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Since then I’ve been a committed Marxist socialist, so that explains my long-term involvement in the political struggles and movements in South Africa. Right now, I’m part of the Democratic Left Front, which has actively supported the recent wave of mine worker and farm worker strikes in South Africa, starting with platinum workers at the Lonmin Corporation’s Marikana mine and spreading to other mines. That Marikana movement of workers’ struggles has thrown the DLF into the spotlight in terms of what it can do to support the workers’ struggle and also to bring a socialist perspective into those workers’ struggles that goes beyond the immediate workplace issues. That is important because there have been some 18 years in South Africa of a post-apartheid political dispensation founded on a democratic constitution and including a democratically elected government, which has been dominated and led by the party of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC works together with the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in the form of a tripartite alliance. Those 18 years have left a number of systemic features from the past quite intact. Firstly, the economic structure of South Africa remains a capitalist economy owned by a small number of capitalists, particularly in the mines and in finance and in agriculture, and a smaller layer in industry, especially manufacturing. Of course now, there’s been a rise in the services sector alongside a wave of increased financialization of the economy.

         So the post-apartheid administration has not really challenged the ownership/control of the economy by this capitalist class as well as the power of this capitalist class in general. There has not been significant redistribution of wealth through taxation or through land redistribution or other measures. But we’ve seen high levels of profits—super-profits in some instances—by South African companies. And these high levels of profits have been at the expense of South African workers. Workers have been more productive, which means they produce more profits. But we’ve seen a decline in the share of national income going to workers. This explains then why there has been a lot of unhappiness among workers, because there are billions of rands in profits, which are being held onto by the bosses instead of being invested in more productive investments or being paid as wages to workers. Of course, beyond workers there are millions more of unemployed people who are structurally out of the economic system. These unemployed people basically depend on the minimal social security program that the state provides with some elements of a social wage (basic amounts of water and electricity, free housing for the poor, etc.) But the social security grants and the elements of a social wage system are immediately undermined by the economic policies of the state, immediately undermined by the huge unemployment crisis. For example, the logic of a social wage is undermined by cost recovery, wherein the unemployed are expected to pay for the costs of these services. So the restlessness that we see among the unemployed and the workers in South Africa is basically an attempt by ordinary people to say what’s the benefit of this constitutional promise if it’s not changing our lives?

    JG: The massacre of the Marikana miners this past August 16 has received international attention. Can you describe the events that led up to it, because there has been a lot of controversy and confusion surrounding these events? We’ve heard charges of “anarchism,” and “nihilism” leveled at the Marikana miners and / or their leaders. There have been allegations that the Marikana miners have been deceived and led to murder their opponents. There have been accusations of “dual unionism.” Can you explain the background to the miners’ strike and the August 16 events?

    MJ: The strike at the Lonmin mine in Marikana has deep systemic roots in the conditions of workers in that mine. For several years now that mine has increasingly used labor from labor brokers. So they would hire a company to bring workers on a part-time basis to work the mines, particularly underground. That group of workers who were brought in through labor brokers did not have full benefits and were paid very low wages. So that’s quite significant, because many of these mine workers need to support two families: one in the mining area, and one in their rural homes in far-flung provinces or in nearby countries. But also, another factor is that the mining system has taken away the subsidy for accommodations that it used to provide to workers. It is true that these accommodations in the mining compounds were horrible. But now, the mining companies charge the workers for these accommodations in the mining compounds. So many of the mine workers have opted to stay in the informal settlements that emerged around the mining areas. That was a further squeeze. Apart from that, there have been very problematic attempts by management to increase salaries for certain parts of the workforce, but not for the entire workforce. And by the union’s own calculation, that was meant to reward those more critical in the production process. But you can imagine the kind of unhappiness that this would generate, given that very few workers were getting any kind of fair wage.

         But also: the National Union of Mine Workers (NUM), the largest union representing mine workers in South Africa, had increasingly become removed from the conditions, the grievances, and the demands of the lowest rank of the workers, the most exploited—particularly those who drill the rocks. Because those who drill the rocks must be physically strong, since they work the hardest and work the longest, and they were not getting increased wage rates at all. The NUM had increasingly been led by a layer of quite streetwise, English speaking, white-collar workers. Most of them had been working above the ground, as mining clerks or other officers in the system. So this combination of factors meant that there was no outlet, there was no forum, to hear and address the grievances of underground workers. In this combination of circumstances what then emerged was very significant anger, very significant agitation, which led to what is called an unprotected strike from the end of July or the beginning of August at Marikana when workers demanded a way out of their squeeze: they demanded a living wage, a wage that would make it possible for them to meet their expenses and live decently. This strike was basically an initiative of the workers themselves. Of course, the NUM was facing some competition from a smaller breakaway union called AMCU (Association of Mine Workers and Construction Union). However, to view the strike as NUM vs. AMCU is not helpful, because it ignores the real, concrete conditions that workers were unhappy about. NUM vs. AMCU is a dynamic that is part of the strike, but it is not the main dynamic. And anyway, as it turned out, that strike saw workers wanting to negotiate with the management on their own. That logic of workers wanting to feel their own power was also present in other strikes triggered by Marikana.

    JG: I’m looking through the current issue of Amandla, the South African journal that you co-founded. Most of the issue is devoted to the uprising in the mines, beginning with an article “Marikana: 38 years.” Here’s a quote from this article: “South Africa is by all accounts the world’s richest country in terms of the value of its mineral resources. In 2010 these were valued at between $2.5 trillion and $4.5 trillion.” The article goes on to quote Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s president, saying, “We plan to develop and integrate rail, road, and water infrastructure centered around two main areas in Limpopo: the Waterburg in the western part of the province, and Steelport in the eastern part. These efforts are intended to unlock the enormous mineral belt of coal, platinum, palladium, chrome, and other minerals in order to facilitate increased mining as well as stepped up beneficiation of minerals.” That’s from Zuma’s State of the Nation address made this past February (2012) and the article says that this is part of the South African government endorsing the sentiments of the captains of industry that “we cannot miss out a second time on a commodities supercycle.” So is this an essential part of the background to what happened, that is that the state is pushing hard and intervening at this point because of the cyclical increase of prices of commodities on a world scale, and for that reason trying to maximize profits by extracting more at this time?

    MJ: The policy of government is to build significant infrastructure—road, rails, water transport—to ensure the smooth, efficient, and cheap transportation of minerals to the coast, so that they can be taken from there to global markets—China, Europe, North America. That’s the basic logic. But then there’s logic that says “let’s take the minerals out as quickly as possible and maybe we can introduce some ways to do this efficiently,” but the primary logic is to extract as much as possible. Now that is the option that the ANC government is going for. It’s not even including the option of nationalization or any form of state ownership of mines in any significant and transformative way. Basically, that kind of infrastructure, financed by public resources, would make it easier for global capital to get minerals from South Africa more efficiently. Now, what that logic avoids is something that has been raised in huge debates in South Africa by COSATU but also by other left forces that have critiqued the structure of the South African economy as an energy-intensive, minerals and energy complex. Basically, this complex is about the extraction of minerals on the basis of cheap energy and cheap black labor. This complex has been the foundation of capitalist development in South Africa and its post-1994 reinsertion into the global economy even though the process of extraction of these minerals is polluting, even though this process cannot really encourage the development of other forms of industrialization.

         So the development of the mineral and energy complex over the past 140 years has really structured the market economy in ways that have limited job-creating industrialization and the development of other sectors in that economy. This infrastructure development policy and program is compromised and limited in so many ways: extractive, thus maintaining the minerals-energy complex and maintaining the skewed structure of the economy. Also, what is not said very much is that this policy is based on financing which will be sourced from the financial markets. There’s not going to be new fiscal allocations, but the funds will come from the financial markets. So this ties South African development even more closely into the global capital markets, because these financial markets will impose conditions which will maintain the structure capital knows to maximize its profits. This will have cost-recovery implications later on as well. It’s a very significant policy arrangement that ties the South African economy further into the systematic exploitative and oppressive features that were imposed on us over the past 140 years and have not gone away but rather have been inherited and, as I have been saying, are indeed today deepening.

    JG: Within the past few weeks an ANC government official was quoted in the Financial Times as saying that she thinks that mining, or at least some mines, should be nationalized. And there have been articles in the South African press about some of the older mines being closed down. Does this mean that companies will attempt to divest themselves of the least profitable and most dangerous mines, the old mines where drilling now must go much more deeply? Are these the mines that the ANC government is most likely to nationalize—these less efficient, more dangerous, and less profitable mines—while leaving the more lucrative mining operations in the hands of private capital? Also, will the threat of mine closures and consequent unemployment be used to try to batter workers into giving up their struggle and lowering their demands? What are the different groups doing about that? (ANC; SACP; COSATU; NUM; etc.)

    MJ: There has already been an earlier round of mining capital getting rid of marginal mines. This was done to entire shafts and even entire mines—entire companies, to aspiring black capitalists, under a program called Black Economic Empowerment. That program was used by mining capital and by government to say that this was the beginning of a change in the South African mining sector. Of course, that was limited, and anyway, it does not change the fundamental problem. So this current round of divesting away from marginal mines will build on that. But as you’re saying, it’s also something that will affect the workers’ demand for a living wage from mining capital. But there have been a few reports that suggest that together with getting rid of marginal mines there is also the threat of more capital intensiveness with consequent reduction of labor in mining. So this is clearly part of a bigger logic: to maintain profits by reducing labor costs. This is a huge struggle that the mineworkers are going to face.

         We of the Democratic Left Front are working with workers’ committees in the platinum belt to convene a workers’ assembly to work out a working class response from below to this threat. It will be a real test for the workers’ committees. COSATU, the main workers’ federation, which is aligned to the ANC government, is unlikely to lead a principled and sustained fight to resist and win against such threats. The ANC government itself is not about to go around nationalizing the mines—not even marginal mines. In its “State Intervention in the Mineral Sector” (SIMS) document, the ANC basically calls for the state to create a mining company which will buy shares, but otherwise will seek to explore new ventures when the state issues new mining rights. Already there is a state company called Alexkor, which is beset with problems, and anyway is not a major player. So, the creation of a new state company is not going to change the features of mining at all. It is different from nationalization because the state company is just one player amongst many other players in the mining sector. But also, it’s likely to follow similar logic as any other private capitalist company.

         The other thing they’re talking about is then to increase taxes and royalties. Now, that would be quite significant. But still, it would not change the overall structure of mining or even the overall weight of the mineral-energy complex in the economy. This relates to changes in an important law called the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act. That act did something very interesting. According to this law, all mining rights are owned by the state, and then the state issues them in the form of licenses to companies on long-term leases. Now that’s quite significant. It’s still not the same as nationalization, since only the mining rights were “nationalized” and not the actual mining operations themselves. Now, other provisions of this law had called for effective consultation with communities when granting mining rights would affect the land rights of these communities. This law also had required that some of the revenue from mining investment should be disbursed in the form of social plans. But the state has been very weak about enforcing this. In fact, we’ve seen the state evict some mining communities, and we’ve also seen the state limit the land rights of other mining communities. Now, the debate taking place is how to strengthen the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act so that it also meets real needs, including true beneficiation, (i.e. doing more of the mineral processing within South Africa). That is seen as value-adding, which could possibly create jobs. But again, there’s a big question: Does that really change the structure of capitalist mining? Does that change the weight of the mineral-energy complex in the South African economy?

         There’s a bigger debate, a debate about which industrialization path South Africa should follow. Now of course, what we of the Democratic Left Front advocate is a link to a low-carbon path of economic development that’s socially owned. Now, the kind of debates that the DLF has taken to the workers’ committees and to the workers’ strikes—what we are saying to them is that yes, the immediate struggles are crucial, but actually the immediate struggles are explained by bigger forces at play that will in the future be shaped by much larger and more confident fighting workers’ forces.

    JG: Doesn’t the history of the past give some evidence that it’s not going to be possible to proceed to a society with economic justice unless there is social ownership of many of the key industries in the economy? Isn’t it the case that another path has been followed in post-apartheid South Africa, one where some prominent black anti-apartheid leaders—like Cyril Ramaphosa, who for many years was president of the National Union of Mineworkers, now are themselves wealthy capitalists, and that although they are a relatively small number, their affluence is pointed to as supposed evidence of fundamental change, while in fact the multinational corporations continue to profit, continue to have their way, while the masses continue to suffer exploitation and oppression, as you have so clearly explained? And is anything being offered now—any path other than social ownership? Is what the ANC government is now exploring really just saying, “We will continue down the old path of private ownership? But some of that is failing—some enterprises are unprofitable. We will take over the unprofitable ones and continue to leave the profitable ones in private hands.”

    MJ: That’s the heart of the systemic crisis of the South African economy. Because that economy has been about the production of cheap labor as the base for accumulation. Cheap labor under the conditions of private ownership of the means of production—those two factors combined form the basis for accumulation. Now the Marikana movement shows that the majority of the people do not accept that. Now, can the ANC offer something as an alternative? The ANC is not about to break with the fundamental logic it has followed. It may foster some changes here and there, but the key contradictions remain the same, remain unaltered. This is a crucial issue, because any path to a more just economic system will require significant changes in who owns, who controls the means of production. What’s needed is not just public ownership by the state, but under workers’ control. That’s crucial. But also important is the actual process of the extraction of surplus. Therefore labor conditions and how to organize workers are also crucial issues. Related to that is also the control of the distribution of the surplus. Right now, the measures the ANC government proposes say nothing about the extraction and the distribution of that surplus. Again, this goes back to the kind of systematic change that’s required: workers’ control goes beyond the logic of the capitalist system.

         Even though to me those solutions seem logical from an objective perspective, to actually achieve them is another matter altogether. Because to do this requires a confident working class that fights it out and wins it. We’re still some distance away from that. So what we’re likely to see are still changes within what we have. We’re likely to see the ANC government try to protect capitalist profitability, capitalist ownership whilst maybe introducing some reforms here and there, as I’ve mentioned earlier. That may offset the crisis for a few years, but it’s not going to displace or destroy the crisis.

    JG: Speaking of the crisis: Can you talk about what appears to be a major uprising among farmworkers in the Western Cape, and possibly relate their actions to the miners’ strikes and demands?

    MJ: Farmworkers in South Africa have not ever gone out in the thousands into strike action on a collective basis until what we saw at the beginning of October in a small town in the Karoo Desert called De Doorns. De Doorns, by the way, had broken out in violence in 2008 and in 2011, tensions between workers from Lesotho and Zimbabwe on the one side and South African workers on the other, because the workers from the other countries were being paid less than the South African workers. Now the interesting thing is that in this current strike, we’ve seen the unity of all the workers. By the way, the same farmers also exploited the differences between African workers and so-called “Colored” (mulatto) workers. So now what we’ve seen in this strike is working class unity across these divisions.

         Now, in terms of systematic explanations, what explains the farmworkers strike? The agricultural sector in the Western Cape emerges from a history of slave ownership and slave-master relationships going back to the 16th and 17th centuries. So that logic pertains to this day. That explains why we have such low levels of organization. Even though the new post-apartheid government introduced minimum wage and some minimal conditions for farmworkers, those did not really mean anything because they were so far away from a living wage. The deregulation and liberalization of agriculture was much more systematic. When the new government deregulated and liberalized agriculture in 1996, it took away a floor of support that was built up by the apartheid regime, a floor of support that was publicly financed and publicly owned and also made a difference in protecting, for example, income of farmers but also in ensuring low prices of food for consumers. This is part of the bigger picture of the post-apartheid government sending signals to global capital that South Africa will play in the new liberal game. Now, deregulation and liberalization exposed South African farmers to competition from well-subsidized farmers in the North. As a result, there have been significant shifts in labor—shifts to seasonal and casual work, thereby undercutting the impact of the new labor relations regime that was supposed to protect farmworkers. So there were two opposing shifts taking place at the same time: one introducing farmworker rights under labor law, but on the other hand seeing systemic shifts in the labor regime under deregulation, liberalization, and globalization of agriculture.

         So the heart of the problem goes back to agricultural policy. Yes, the farm workers demand to double their wages from something like 69 rands (which would be about 8 dollars) a day; now farmworkers are demanding about $15 or $16 a day. That is still not anything close to what is required for a living wage, but it is a significant step forward. The government now promises that it will institute public hearings and will solicit inputs, suggestions, and questions from the public. Of course, the public includes very reactionary farmers, who have now armed themselves to the teeth in preparation for a second wave of farmworker strikes. So without a change in agricultural policy, we are not going to see a change in the agricultural sector. This also raises the question of land redistribution, because the farmworkers should be the owners, the controllers, along democratic lines, of these farms. Of course the workers have not put the demand in that way. But many of these workers have been evicted from farms because they had owned a few head of cattle or had planted a few hectares for their own consumption. In addition to the question of the minimum wage there is the question of land redistribution. For the first time this demand is really out there, and it would mean that there would never, ever be a return to the slave-master relationship. That relationship has been broken now by the farmworkers coming out in the way that they have. The strikes may be temporarily defeated, or may not achieve all of their demands, because of factors that for now favor the current system on the land, such as the mobilization and power of the farm owners and the lack of political will on the part of government. The challenge facing us now is how do we build on this militancy of the farmworkers, who have broken out now from a structure of isolation and oppression.      

    JG: You mentioned that the Democratic Left Front has been active in the workers’ committees at Marikana and also among other miners, and that the DLF is calling a conference for early next year. Has the DLF also been involved in support activities for the farmworkers?

    MJ: The Democratic Left Front is an active part of the struggle of farmworkers. We have two affiliates who are very crucial in these farmworkers strikes. The first affiliate is a trade union called the Commercial Stevedoring, Agricultural and Allied Workers Union (CSAAWU), which has some 8,000 to 10,000 members in the farming districts. The second affiliate is called Mawubuye Land Rights Forum. Mawubuye means “let the land return” to its owners. This affiliate organizes farm dwellers and people who have been evicted, landless people in the farming districts. Those two groups have been crucial in driving the farm workers strikes. Yesterday—or rather, today South African time—there was a rally of 1,200 farmworkers that was organized by these two groups, with the support of the DLF. Last year [i.e., 2011—JG] both organizations, together with the DLF, organized a speak-out campaign, the “listen to the people” campaign that reached about 5,000 farmworkers. Farmworkers would come out to speak about their conditions. There were many such local meetings. Out of this campaign and these meetings came the decision on the part of CSAAWU, Mawubuye Land Rights Forum, the DLF, and a few other organizations to establish what is called the Legal Center for the Defense of the Rural Poor. It’s not going to be a legal group that replaces the workers organization, but it is going to use the law to defend workers and farm dwellers. That’s crucial because there’s an axis of social relations in the farming districts that includes the magistrates, the police, and the farmers and other officials in the state system. This axis acts to keep the workers repressed and tied down. The biggest difficulty is still the social conditions in the farming districts, because the farmers have inordinate power and also because of the vast size of the agricultural regions and the lack of money, resources, and organizers to cover such vast distances.

    JG: So it seems as though there’s not just enormous unrest, but that there are indeed enormous tasks facing the South African working class and facing organizations like the Democratic Left Front who are attempting to support and help organize and give coherence to these struggles. You’ve already spoken about the DLF’s work with the miners and with the farmworkers. Can you discuss the DLF’s overall approach, and how it hopes to be able to rise to the pressing needs of the overall struggle—in terms of its organizing, its publications, etc? It seems like there are enormous tasks and with them enormous opportunities.

    MJ: The tasks are huge. Our strategy towards the overall situation, and towards the tasks arising from this situation, is to attempt to foster a broad front of fighting forces of workers and unemployed in order to consolidate their anti-capitalist instincts into a consciously anti-capitalist set of organizations and struggles. This front would also then put forward programmatic perspectives on immediate reforms, immediate demands, alongside what we have called an eco-socialist program. To say this in different words: the Democratic Left Front’s strategy is to then build a united front of struggle on an anti-capitalist basis and also to advance alongside it an eco-socialist program, and this includes taking up immediate struggles around immediate demands for immediate reforms. That’s a huge task, given how vast the country is and how vast the working class is, and how powerful the capitalist class is. And of course, there is the institutional dominance of the ANC and the South African Communist Party and COSATU. The still fairly modest work on our part since early last year has begun to give confidence to sections of the working class that have previously been marginalized or misrepresented by the dominant institutions in that society. Now the key challenge that we face is how to quickly step up what we want to do, in order to meet the rising tempo of workers’ struggles that have taken place since the massacre at Marikana. Without a doubt, we can expect to see hundreds more struggles—strikes and other forms of protest—particularly because the trade union leaders of COSATU are still willing to compromise and not push struggle as far as they should.

         So there are many questions that the workers are asking through their actions. But of course also what we have seen is a denialist response on the part of government. This adds to the tasks confronting us, because communities and workers must be defended legally and in other ways when the state now calls for direct physical attack. So these tasks are huge. We have a limited activist base, but we have learned quite a lot in a short space of time. But we still have so much more work to do to consolidate the lessons learned and the gains. This will not be easy. The DLF will have a conference in April to discuss how to deepen what we have been doing up until now. We do not want to fool ourselves into thinking that now that we have arrived on the scene, we can rest on our laurels. In fact, the fact that there is now recognition by the conscious and fighting elements of the working class of a left perspective throws even bigger challenges, because this struggle is still in its very early stages. Now, if we are to sustain and enlarge that confidence that they are developing in a left perspective, then that left formation must be much more sophisticated, much more advanced than we are at this stage.

    JG: Do you see the DLF as being the nucleus of a future mass workers party in South Africa? Do you see the need for such a party?

    MJ: Without a doubt, there is a need for a mass party, founded on the basis of a socialist program that would be based among workers and the unemployed. However, such a party is not going to come from on high as a result of a declaration from the left. It can only be an outcome of a combination of left work on the ground and also working class struggles of the kind that we are beginning to see, working class struggles that open the door to education, to debates, to consciousness of the need for such a party. Yesterday at the farmworkers’ rally some of the speakers called for a party of this kind, and there was a huge response from the crowd of 1,200. But that response alone is not enough to say that we can go ahead and start such a party now. There are debates in the DLF about that. Some of the affiliates of the DLF, for example, the Mpumalanga Party, which is a breakaway from the SACP in Mpumalanga province, as well as a few other groups argue for forming a workers’ party now. For me, the debate needs to be approached very much along the lines of what I have said. And also, we must avoid an electoral focus for such a party. The notion of a party in South Africa tends to focus narrowly on the questions of elections of a president and parliament and those kinds of institutions. For me, such a party will be a powerful influence only if it remains rooted in working class struggles. And it must ensure that working class movements remain organized, remain conscious, and are oriented towards an anti-capitalist perspective. That is going to be crucial. I see the DLF indeed as a major component of such a party. Basically speaking, the DLF is the largest left initiative in South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994, representing a wide range of left and working class forces and groups in struggle.

    JG: You’ve talked about the potential and the possibility in the future of building a mass workers’ party. On the other side, do you see a development to the right of the ANC, or inside the ANC (perhaps Julius Malema) that could pose a threat to move to an even more explicitly repressive, right-wing populist approach than the ANC government’s current policies? You described how the post-apartheid ANC government moved to deregulation in the farming area, and perhaps a bit later you can also talk about education where they also seem to be following neoliberal policies. Although they are following neoliberal policies, given what’s happened at Marikana and more generally throughout the mining sector, and given the intense conflict in the Western Cape’s agricultural region, is it going to be necessary to move to a more openly repressive strategy that would retain the veneer of the ANC’s image while moving to a more openly repressive, right-populist strategy, such as organizing gangs and probably inciting inter-tribal violence?

    MJ: Some of the phrasing used in the Democratic Left Front has referred to the securocratic logic of the ANC (i.e., the increased influence of the repressive state security apparatus in overall state policy) and the state as being authoritarian populist. Zuma, the current president, has consolidated the security cluster—that is the police, the army, and the intelligence organizations. He has now interfered politically in the criminal justice system—in the courts—in ways that attack movements and attack struggles. In addition to that, consistent with Italian populism, the Zuma government has also attacked access to information, the right to know, the right to protest. The Marikana massacre was part of the use of the security cluster to suppress dissent. So the ANC doesn’t need a split for that to happen. It’s already doing it. It’s quite capable of doing it. What’s going to reinforce that logic is the fact that there’s a huge social crisis that the ANC is not capable of resolving, because of the global crisis, because of the continued capitalist ownership, which continues to produce and reproduce this huge reserve army of labor, and also these underemployed workers. What we have seen elsewhere in post-colonial southern Africa has been this kind of shift to securocratic responses to the failures of the post-colonial government to address systemic issues that it should have addressed. My prediction going forward is that there will be a continuation of those policies, but that they will be combined with some form of additional social programs—whether it will be social security grants or some other programs. And that will be used as an example of the ANC being able to meet needs and demands. There are not enough dynamics within the ANC to lead to a split. A split would be possible if the Communist Party and COSATU were to the left of the ANC and pushing on key demands. That’s not happening, and it’s not going to happen.

    JG: Maybe we can talk for a few minutes about education. I’m particularly interested in this as an education activist and retired public school teacher. What are conditions like in education, in the schools, in South Africa?

    MJ: The main achievement of the post-apartheid education system has been to deracialize education formally and then to equalize the amount of expenditure. Under apartheid, the white child got about 36 times more money from the state for education than did the black child. The post-apartheid government equalized those expenditures. Also, a significant part of the country’s GDP is spent on education. However, that has not improved the quality and outcomes of the education system. That is because the education system has been structured on a neoliberal basis. So there has been downsizing introduced, forcing experienced teachers out of the system. And senior managers have been put in charge of the system who have no idea how to develop human resources, on how to educate. For example, in the Eastern Cape, in the 18 years since the end of apartheid, there have been at least 14 heads of the education department. So on average, each head of the education department there has lasted little more than one year. That is indicative of the kind of crisis of leadership that exists in education in South Africa: no meaningful changes develop, because as you know it takes time to introduce meaningful changes in education. Also, the post-apartheid government still has not addressed the working conditions of teachers and the wages of teachers. Teachers’ wages are still very low. And then thousands of schools across the country still lack labs, lack libraries, lack basic facilities and infrastructure. The minister of education had to concede this in court last month [November 2012—JG], where she agreed to put in place a school infrastructure program. So, although South Africa has put money into education, its schools, teachers, and students remain the victims of neoliberal policies that imposed downsizing, large class size, low teacher wages, inadequate resources and facilities, and an overall lack of understanding of the nature of education on the part of senior education management. The other problem is that the teacher unions and the main student organizations have been politicized very narrowly along ANC lines, and to be uncritical supporters of the ANC. They have not been politicized in a class sense. So they do not primarily take up as issues the real educational needs of the working class, especially the need to overall improve the quality of education for children of working class families. This does not happen at all.

    JG: Do you think that since the state has been managing and running education as you have described, is this an argument against nationalizing the mines?

    MJ: Liberals and the capitalist press have made this argument. What it forgets is that to build a state that works takes time. And particularly if workers’ control is introduced, then certainly we are looking at a very different dynamic.

    JG: Mazibuko, we’ve now been speaking for over an hour. I think that this has been very valuable, very informative. Is there anything you would like to add?

    MJ: I think two things. One: those in the United States progressive movement need to understand that Mandela’s ANC has failed the project it mobilized the world for: to defeat apartheid and bring justice to South Africa. There’s no doubt about that. Whatever loyalty people may have to the ANC and to Mandela should not blind them to that reality. Then that leads me to the second conclusion: that as the result of the failure of Mandela’s ANC, very active fighting by the South African working class against these conditions is not going to stop, not even in the face of increased repression. So this throws a huge challenge to people in the United States, who must decide on which side of the struggle they stand. Will they heed Mandela’s own call, made at the COSATU September 1994 Congress? Mandela said then, “If the ANC government does to workers what apartheid did to them, then workers must do to the ANC government what they did to apartheid.”

    JG: Thank you, Mazibuko. Thank you very much.

     

    Jack Gerson is an Oakland-based writer and activist. Recently retired from public school teaching, he was a founder of the Occupy Oakland education outreach committee and of the Oakland Education Association’s campaign to bail out schools and services, not banks.

  • Timing of the Chicago School closings?

     Rahm Emanuel has timed these school closings to frighten Chicago teachers, to punish them for their successful challenge to the rich and powerful who control Chicago’s schools, to make Chicago teachers doubt their strength — and to sway the upcoming union election. The  Caucus of Rank and File Educators, (C.O.R.E.), which now leads the Chicago Teachers Union. (CTU) is facing its first test for re-election.  The stakes in this election are very, very high, for Chicago kids, parents, and teachers – as Chicago teachers no doubt realize.  What may be less apparent is what’s at stake for the rest of us outside of Chicago who want to save public education. I’m often asked how we to push back successfully on these “deforms” to education.  Our opponents are so powerful. They control the world’s productive resources and now use their power and wealth to make schools do their bidding. They aim to dictate what is taught, who is taught, and what is learned. They aim to do away with elected school boards and with public control of schooling. As they edge closer in accomplishing their goal, people are beginning to mobilize. This is not just  about test scores or even school closings. It’s about whether the wealthiest people in the world will  have their way in controlling what our society looks like.  This struggle is really about democracy and teachers unions have to be in the forefront of this struggle – which they have not, unfortunately, done so far in this country – with the exception of the CTU.Praise for CTU President Karen Lewis is well-deserved. What an articulate, passionate, intelligent defender of teachers and public education!  What’s often missed is that when she speaks, she is heard because of the collective power and courage of CTU members. That collective voice and strength has been organized by C.O.R.E.  This group of activists has shown the world what happens when a union really trusts its ideals of social justice, its members – and democracy. Chicago teachers have displayed inspiring courage. It’s not every day that a group of ordinary people have the opportunity to make history.  They’ve done so already and I urge them to do it again.So here’s a personal request to CTU members: You’ve made so many of us proud to be teachers. Do it again, please, by resisting these school closings with all your heart and soul. And by voting for C.O.R.E. to continue this struggle that is being watched by teachers around the world.      

  • Rebutting David Greenberg's Hit Job on Howard Zinn

    The March 25 issue of The New Republic offers a lengthy piece by Rutgers professor David Greenberg, “Agit-Prof: Howard Zinn’s Influential Mutilations of American History.” The essay presented as a review of Martin Duberman’s Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left (2012) [read the review by Ron Briley, the book editor of History News Network (HNN), here], ranges widely, with attacks on Staughton Lynd and myself, the American Historical Association’s Radical Caucus of 1969, New Left historians; and with positive words about other historians, including consensus historians and Eugene Genovese—who Greenberg calls, in the understatement of the year, “cantankerous.”

    Here are critical responses submitted to TNR — and posted on HNN — by myself, Staughton Lynd, and Robert Cohen. Lynd and I, New Left historians, were leading participants in the 1969 Radical Caucus, and the caucus ran Lynd for president of the association. At that same tumultuous 1969 meeting, I presented the paper which was later published as On Active Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession (Toronto 1975). Cohen (NYU) is author of a biography of Mario Savio and other books, and, on HNN, “When Assessing Zinn, Listen to the Voices of Teachers and Students.” He is editing for publication Zinn’s 1963 Spelman College diary.

  • President Pena Nieto on a Roll

         Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is definitely on a roll. For Peña Nieto, the Institutional Revolutionary Party which he heads, and the business class that he represents, things could hardly be going better.

         Even before becoming president, the former administration of Felipe Calderón of the even more conservative National Action Party (PAN) passed the Labor Law Reform sought by business organizations since the 1980s.

         Then, Peña Nieto and his party passed the Education Reform Law through the Congress and saw it ratified by the states. While the word “reform” is used in connection with both of these laws, we should understand that there is nothing progressive about these laws in any sense. Both are intended to strengthen the hand of the state and the employers and to weaken that of labor.

         Next , shortly after passing the Education Reform Law, Peña Nieto’s Attorney General arrested and jailed the President of the Mexican Teachers Union on charges of embezzlement, not only ignominiously ending her long corrupt career, but also warning other unions not to cross the government.

         Now Peña Nieto is pushing through Congress a law to reform telecommunications, aimed at breaking up the monopolies of Televisa, TV Azteca, Telmex and Telcel. This move takes some of the wind out of the sails of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his Morena Party which have criticized the role of the media in controlling Mexican politics, and it is bound to be popular with the public.

         Taking a page form López Obrador, Peña Nieto has also proposed a pension for those over 65 years old. It was López Obrador who won great popularity by giving pensions to Mexico City’s older citizens when he was mayor.

         On the political front, things couldn’t look brighter as the PRI’s two competitors are both busy slitting their throats or their wrists in different fashions. The left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution finds itself divided over whether or not to support the Pact for Mexico proposed by Peña Nieto at the beginning of his term. Some in the PRD want opportunistically to support the measure, while others just as opportunistically want to oppose.

         At the same time PAN, which went down to defeat in the presidential elections because of the Calderón administration’s disastrous six years of economic stagnation and drug war violence in extremis (60,000 killed and 20,000 disappeared), just held a convention that voted for the direct election of the PAN leadership. This surprising vote represents a repudiation of all factions of the old leadership and will lead in the short term to civil war within the party, now that no one is in charge.

         While the dissident teachers of the National Coordinating Committee recently held a demonstration for union democracy and against the Education Reform Act, they are about the only ones at the base of Mexican society with any politically conscious forces and the only ones fighting.

         Enrique Peña Nieto is on a roll, and it’s a steamroller that he’s riding.

  • Logos symposium on Labor

    Logos, the online, on point and highly readable journal of modern society & culture features in its most recent issue a symposium on the future of US unions. In addition to a piece by me [“So Why Don’t We Have Better Unions?“] are contributions from Melvin Dubofsky, Bill Fletcher Jr., and Steve Early and Rand Wilson. All worth reading. Enjoy.

  • Mexican Teachers Union Leader Jailed For Stealing Union Funds

         In a major event that will have a serious impact on Mexican politics and labor unions, Elba Esther Gordillo, who for more than twenty-five years has led the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), was arrested on Feb. 26 on the charge of embezzling millions of dollars in union funds which she reportedly deposited in banks in Europe and spent on real estate. Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam charged Gordillo with money laundering, saying she used the union funds to pay for airplanes, pilot training, her plastic surgeries, and purchases of luxury items in the United States.

         The attorney general said the arrest was based on information provided by the Financial Intelligence division of the Mexican Treasury Department. She reportedly spent in the last three years more than US$2.2 million at Neiman Marcus stores alone. President Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) reportedly followed the attorney general’s investigation and arrest of Gordillo closely, and justified the arrest by saying that the government was protecting union members’ funds.

         The arrest of Gordillo follows President Peña Nieto’s success in pushing through the Mexican Congress and the state governments an educational reform intended to weaken the Mexican Teachers Union. Gordillo and her union opposed the reforms, but proved incapable of stopping them from passing. The arrest of Gordillo by the PRI government is a signal by the President and his party that they will not tolerate opposition to their program from the labor unions or any other sector of society. Other corrupt union leaders—and there are many—have been put on notice that they had best not oppose Peña Nieto and the PRI or they will pay the price. Gordillo’s arrest is particularly aimed at intimidating Romero Deschamps, the head of the notoriously corrupt Mexican Petroleum Workers Union, who has opposed Peña Nieto’s plans to privatize the Mexican Petroleum Company.

         Deschamps, who is a PRI legislator in the Congress, has much to fear, not only because of his own history but also because of the way the government has dealt with his predecessors. When Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the PRI became president in 1988, he moved quickly to intimidate the Petroleum Workers and the Miners Union. On January 10, 1989, only a few days after taking office, Salinas sent police and army units to attack the Petroleum workers’ union headquarters with bazookas, blowing the doors off and arresting the union’s leader Joaquín Hernández Galicia, known as “La Quina,” on charges of illegal possession of weapons. Salinas then chose Sebastian Guzman Cabrera to head the oil workers union and he in turn was succeeded by Deschamps in 1993.

         Independent union leaders have also been put on guard. Presidents Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), both of the National Action Party (PAN), brought charges of embezzlement of union funds against Napoleón Gómez Urrutia of the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union (SMMRM). The Fox administration brought the charges against Gómez Urrutia after he accused the government of “industrial homicide” in the mine disaster at Pasta de Conchos on Feb. 19, 2006, that left 65 miners dead. More important, however, may have been Gómez Urrutia’s attempt to take over leadership of the Congress of Labor (CT), the umbrella organization of Mexico’s “official” unions which generally subordinate themselves to government policies and employer interests. When he took office in December of 2006, Calderón and his administration continued the attempt to persecute the miners’ leader and to weaken the union.

         The struggle revolved principally around Local 65 of the huge and historic Cananea mine in the northern state of Sonora. After many labor conflicts and altercations with government authorities, finally on June 6, 2010, Federal police stormed the mine, violently removing miners, their family members and supporters. Despite the Calderón government’s violent attempts to suppress the miners, Gómez Urrutia continued to lead the mine workers from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, while the miners continued to use job actions and strikes to win the best contracts in Mexico in mines and steel plants.

         On the legal front, the Second Chamber of the Mexican Supreme Court ruled 3-1 that the Mexican Labor Secretary had acted illegally when he withdrew legal recognition from Gómez Urrutia as General Secretary of the National Union of Mine, Metal and Steelworkers (Los Mineros), in 2008. Gómez Urrutia and the miners received strong support both nationally and internationally. Investigations by the international labor movement found the government’s charges to be false. Last spring, another Mexican court threw out the last criminal charge against Gómez Urrutia, who has lived in Canada with support from the United Steel Workers since 2006.

         What these various cases show is that the both the PRI and the PAN have been prepared to use the state to attempt to break the power of unions that stand in the way of their policies and their plans. Many other cases could be mentioned where the state uses its knowledge of union corruption or other illegal acts to bring charges against union officials, and then holds those charges over the union officers’ heads as a way of forcing them to adhere to the ruling party’s political line. In other cases, evidence and charges can be fabricated to bring a union to heel. What is happening now against Gordillo represents just one event, though a very important event, in the long history of state manipulation of Mexican unions.

    Perpetual leader

         Only last October Gordillo, who has led the union since 1989, was once again reelected to be its chief. In a union where her political machine controlled virtually every office, she received 3,205 votes in her favor with no opposing candidates, at a closely controlled convention with 3,287 delegates in attendance. While there are entire states where rank-and-file teachers have taken control and where tens of thousands regularly march and demonstrate to oppose her policies, the union opposition is regularly shut out of the national conventions.

         Gordillo’s domination of the union goes back more than a quarter of a century. When, in 1989, teachers throughout Mexico rebelled against their union’s then dictatorial leader Carlos Jonguitud Barrios, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari intervened, and with no legal basis for doing so, appointed Elba Esther Gordillo to head el SNTE. Gordillo, taking up the rhetoric of the rebellious teachers promised that the union “would never again be controlled by such a dictatorial political boss” as Jonguitud. Yet today, at age 67, Gordillo has become just such a boss. She is one of Mexico’s sempiternal leaders who once in power hold on until either they die or another president comes along to remove and replace them.

         Gordillo’s evolution should not be surprising. She began her union career as a loyal member of the Revolutionary Vanguard caucus headed by Jonguitud Barrios, a corrupt and violent bureaucrat who colluded with the Secretary of Public Education (SEP) to suppress critical voices and dissident. Barrios was, of course, loyal to the PRI, the party that had ruled Mexico from 1929 until 2000. His union served as the most important component of the PRI’s electoral machine, able to mobilize its one million members to turn out and vote. He was accused, though never convicted, of having opposition teachers murdered.

         Never part of the union opposition movement, not even during the democratic upsurge of 1988-89, Gordillo had remained loyal to the Revolutionary Vanguard machine. She never spoke out against Jonguitud, never joined the dissidents, and did not become the union’s leader through a democratic political process, but was rather appointed by recently elected President Salinas, with the understanding that she would head off the democratic rank-and-file rebellion in the union and keep the union structure and the PRI’s political machine intact. She proved more than up to the job.

         Gordillo used all of the resources of the Mexican state to reconstruct a political machine in the union. Like her predecessor, she colluded with the SEP. That provided her with economic resources: lots of money, jobs for her loyalists, and the power to discipline dissidents by having them fired. Hundreds of SEP ghost employees (they’re called “aviators” in Mexico) worked for Gordillo’s union machine rather than in the schools teaching children. Advancement in the workplace, in an educational career, and in the union depended on Gordillo’s approval. Several of those who served in union leadership positions were her relatives and in-laws.

         Gordillo also worked closely with the Institutional Revolutionary Party which she had joined in 1970, during a period when the one-party-state was engaged in violent repression of the country’s labor and social movements. She became a leader of one of the PRI’s most important labor unions, served the PRI as Secretary of Organization of the National Executive Council (1986—1987), General Secretary of the Council of National Popular Organizations (1997—2002), and General Secretary of the National Executive Council, the second highest office in the party.

         As a PRI Congresswoman, she headed up the PRI delegation in the lower house until the early 2000s, when Gordillo clashed with the PRI leadership. She then turned in the direction of the National Action Party (PAN), becoming a supporter of PAN presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón. In 2005, when she was on the outs with the PRI, her union also created its own political party, the New Alliance Party (PANAL), as one way to exert political pressure on the other parties. When Calderón’s fortunes began to decline, Gordillo veered back in the direction of the PRI, becoming a tacit supporter of Enrique Peña Nieto who was recently elected president.

    Beating Back Dissent

         Though her union’s constitution has a clause, typical of Mexican unions, prohibiting reelection, it has been ignored. She has not ruled the union without opposition. During her 24 years in office, she has been constantly opposed by the National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE), an independent, democratic, and militant opposition within the union, as well as by other opposition groups. The dissidents generally control the union in the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, and some Mexico City locals, and more recently in Michoacán, as well as having a significant presence in several other states. Yet despite the opposition’s remarkable organization and mass mobilizations of tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of teachers in protest marches, strikes, and mass occupations of state capitals and often of the Secretary of Education building and surrounding streets in Mexico City, they have been unable to build a majority movement that could unseat her.

         Gordillo has used her tremendous political power to beat back the opposition. She and her loyalists control virtually all of the top offices in the national union and fill all of the union staff positions. When it comes time for national meetings or conventions, the location is usually changed at the last moment to make it difficult for the dissidents to attend or protest. Sometimes, as in the national convention that has just reelected her, the convention site is changed to a remote resort locations such as Playa del Carmen in the state of Quintana Roo on the Yucatan Peninsula far from the dissidents in Mexico City or the states of central, western and southeastern Mexico. Those few dissident teachers who did show up are kept away from the event by the state police and private guards. The convention delegates, virtually all Gordillo loyalists, have been each year rewarded with expensive toys, one year Hummer automobiles and last year a computer for every delegate.

         Speaking to the convention, Gordillo told the delegates, “Friends, there is no doubt about it. This union is a democratic, pluralistic union, a strong union, the strongest in Mexico and throughout Latin America.” With the Mexican Congress debating a reform of the country’s Federal Labor Law, including proposals to make unions more transparent, she announced that the convention had approved new statutes that would create an oversight committee and establish full transparency. “We have nothing to hide,” she said. She promised the convention that if they worked hard they could have everything done by Saturday and rest on Sunday at the beach.

         Despite the union constitution’s prohibition of reelection, or to bypass it, Gordillo has until now held the position of “president for life.” At the last convention, Gordillo created a new leadership body called the Supreme General Council that stands above the union’s other leadership bodies. The new leadership Council was reduced from 12 to 8 members, and she gave up her old title of “eternal leader” to become the union’s general secretary, the top officer. The national executive committee has 43 officers, all of whom are her loyalists. At the same time, the terms of all union positions were increased from four to six years. She justified these changes saying, “We’re going for a horizontal union, completely horizontal.”

         And now she has been arrested throwing into disarray Mexico’s labor movement and politics.

  • Whatever happened to welfare?

         The ghost of Reagan’s welfare queen still hovers over conservatives. She is black. She is a large part of Mitt Romney’s 47 percent of moochers, and the “takers” that conservatives talk so much about.

         Most people don’t talk about welfare or know much about it, but conservatives, who also don’t know much about it, use it as a threat when they seek reelection or talk about policy. Republicans, and some Democrats, declare that welfare reform was a success because it brought the rolls down and put “free loaders” back to work.

         But what really happened to welfare since the welfare “reform” law in 1996 created the TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) program as a block grant to states? To discuss this, the Center for American Progress held a conference about TANF on February 7 entitled “Learning from the Past, Planning for the Future.” The panel that presented their findings was chaired by Peter Edelman, Professor at Georgetown University Law School. He had worked for the Clinton Administration, and resigned in protest when Clinton signed the welfare reform legislation.

          La Donna Pavetti, vice-president for family income support policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, presented findings from her study of TANF. The TANF rolls have declined since its inception. Before the 1996 law was passed, 68 percent of poor families received AFDC (Aid to Families of Dependent Children). Now only 27 percent of poor families in the nation receive TANF. Half the states have fewer than 20 percent getting TANF. Wyoming has only 4 percent of poor families receiving TANF, the lowest number of all states. The TANF benefits are less than 30 percent of the poverty level in most states (less than $5,400 annually for a family of 3).

         In 1995, AFDC kept over 2.2 million poor children from falling into deep poverty (define as below half the poverty line, or less than $11,500 for a family of 4 today). AFDC lifted over 62 percent of poor children out of deep poverty. TANF lifted just 21 percent of children out of deep poverty, or just 650,000 kids. TANF has contributed to the number of people living in deep poverty rising from 12.6 million in 2000, to 20.4 million today. This includes over 15 million women and children (and nearly 10 percent of all children). Food stamps are increasingly the main source of income for people in deep poverty, mostly families with very young kids. There are 6 million people whose only income is food stamps. Eighty percent of food stamps recipients are working. Food stamps provide an income at a third of the poverty line, close to $6,300 for a family of 3.

         Conservatives’ claim that the TANF work requirement led to huge employment gain among single mothers is bogus. While there was a significant increase in employment in the late 90s, it is largely because there was a booming economy. These gains began to decline in 2000 and have vanished today. Although the stated goal of TANF was “work first,” states overall spent less than 10 percent of the funds on work. Some states spent only 1 percent. States have been spending TANF funds for a lot of other purposes, including child welfare (foster care), pregnancy prevention, and other uses. Texas spent only 5 percent of TANF funds on benefits and spent a massive amount on child welfare. The highest state has 14 per 100 recipients employed; the lowest state less than 1 per 100.

         In 2010 and 2011, a subsidized job program called Way to Work placed 260,000 unemployed low-income parents and young adults in jobs. Although the program enjoyed bipartisan support from governors, House Republicans allowed the program to expire. A member of the panel, Sherine Mcghee, a former TANF recipient, said that this federally subsidized program allowed her to work for the Coalition Against Hunger doing SNAP (food stamp) outreach and educating other mothers about nutrition. With that work experience, she was able to obtain a job as a nutrition assistant in the Philadelphia WIC program, where she has been employed for 2 years. Mcghee described her experience in applying for and receiving TANF. She waited in long lines, and was rudely treated by workers. She only received $149 a month, not enough to live on. She couldn’t have survived if she didn’t live with her mother.

         The federal law is very rigid about which kinds of education and training can be counted toward the work requirement. The law allows no more than two years of higher education, and that must be in a vocational program. The AFDC program had allowed parents to attend 4-year colleges, and many of those educated parents were able to get well paying jobs. Some got prestigious jobs. The mothers of President Obama and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick had mothers who received AFDC. TANF recipients can seldom count their education as part of their work requirement. Everyone on the panel agreed that TANF should allow more education.

         Throughout the nation, 60 percent of unemployed workers are unable to get unemployment insurance. Deborah Schlick, project manager of Transitions to Economic Stability at the Minnesota Department of Human Services, said that only 40 percent of Minnesota workers are able to collect unemployment insurance, so very low wage workers and their children are forced to get TANF. Minnesota is regarded as one of the “better” states in administering TANF, but only 25 percent of poor children get TANF. Grants haven’t increased since 1996. More than one-half of the homeless are children in need. Minnesota has a five billion dollar deficit, and it has made cuts in TANF, including work support services.

         Another member of the panel, Dr. Kristin Seefeldt, studied how women managed on TANF and wrote the book Working After Welfare. She said that in the late 90s, women were able to find stable jobs with decent wages. Now it is different. Jobs aren’t giving that many hours and wages aren’t enough to support a family. Those who try to get education are saddled with huge debt and have a hard time juggling education, jobs, and children. TANF programs that are labeled as training do not provide real training; typically they consist of training in writing a resume and an hour of telephone time looking for a job. TANF is not playing much of a role in employment. Women who are referred to a job program look at a computer 8 hours a day. Lots of women are racking up lots of debt and their credit scores are down. Jobs are worse and are low-paying. Many women who were previously doing o.k. are now poor.

         Mary Anna Tilton, Associate Professor at Drexel School of Public Health, presented some of her findings from a study of TANF. Since 2002, food stamp use has increased 50 percent as people were cut off TANF. There has been an increase in hospitalization. There is an increase in child hunger. A woman who was required to do community service for TANF had to do a huge filing job. She was constantly in the emergency room with her two children, a 6-year-old and a toddler. She said, “Welfare is like a chain, keeping us down.”

         Case loads in TANF have decreased from 14 million in 1995 to 4 million now. There are so many hoops that people have to go through to receive TANF that many women will do anything rather than apply. Women are discouraged from using their own initiative to start a business such as hair styling, selling food, or doing nails. TANF is cut off if a woman is earning too much. Some women have businesses under the table but don’t report it. There is no encouragement to make extra income. Women can’t get education because they have to work.

         If a state doesn’t meet the federal work participation rate, it is penalized. The state’s behavior is driven by work participation rate. The philosophy of TANF is work first. Letting someone get education first is wrong.

         Deborah Weinstein pointed out that over 40 percent of TANF recipients are disabled. The most common disability is mental health. Some people move to SSI, but many are denied and most have a long period of waiting before they are accepted. Some live very desperate lives. Some children end up in foster care; some parents are in jail. Even those who get cash are not getting the services they need.

         The federal Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation did a study of TANF time limits, which they published in 2008.[1] Federal law gives states flexibility in setting time limits. States may set a shorter time limit, or no limit. TANF funds can be used to support 20 percent of the caseload beyond 60 months. The 60 month limit does not apply to state funds, which may be used to extend the time limit. Washington is the only state that used the full 20 percent extension rate.

         States vary widely in their time limit policies, and even from welfare office to welfare office in some states. Indiana has a two-year time limit. Michigan implemented a 2-year time limit in 2007. California removes adults from the case after 5 years, but continues to provide assistance to children. New York allows people to transition to a state program that provides the same level of assistance, and sets no time limit.

         Some states provide exemptions from the work requirement for certain groups of families, based on medical condition or domestic violence, or families with very young children. However, staff, frequently do not discuss these policies with recipients. Caseworkers rarely recommend the extensions allowed by law. In some states, much documentation is required to get a medical exemption.

         States are not required to provide ongoing food stamps to TANF leavers.

         Since the law was enacted, at least a quarter million cases have been closed due to reaching a time limit, about one-third of those in New York, which provides post-time-limit assistance. (The study was done in 2006 and 2007.) Families closed due to time limits were more likely than other cases to lack a high school education, to have never married, to be living in public housing or receiving a rent subsidy, and to be African-American.

         Few people were induced to work by benefit termination.

         The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 reduced some of the flexibility provided to states. It toughened the work requirement.

         In an article in the Washington Post,[2] Peter Edelman describes the process of cutting the welfare rolls: The techniques of radical reduction were: “shut the front door almost completely; staff the back door with the equivalent of a tough nightclub bouncer; and, in between, hassle applicants to the point where they just give up and go away.” At the back door, people are sanctioned for a variety of reasons and for no reason—”being late to a work assignment (no excuses for sick children, late buses, or car breakdowns) or didn’t show up for an appointment at the welfare office (no excuses for failure to receive notice of an appointment or inability to understand English). In some states multiple infractions of this sort can result, legally, in lifetime disqualification.”

         In his book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity,[3] Loïc Wacquant, a Sociology professor at University of California Berkeley, has expanded the theory of the neoliberal state beyond the usual economic definition. He has linked the criminal justice system with the welfare system as two parts of the same policy of enforcing conformity to an unstable job market of temporary, part-time, low-paid, and flexible employment. Both the men in the penal system and the women in the welfare system are considered morally deficient unless they periodically provide visible proof to the contrary. Their behaviors must be supervised and regulated. If they do not conform to rigid bureaucratic requirements, they are cast “outside the civic community of those entitled to social rights, in the case of public aid recipients, outside the society of ‘free man’ for convicts,” a kind of “social death for moral failing.”

         What is to be done about women’s poverty? Gwendolyn Mink says the sorts of policies that would help low-income mothers will advance equality for all women through economic justice. She makes ten recommendations that will start us on that path:[4]

    • Strengthen laws prohibiting and remedying discrimination in employment, including pay discrimination.
    • Re-value work performed by women in the labor market through, for example, comparable worth policy.
    • Index the minimum wage to provide a living wage.
    • Provide universal, quality child care.
    • Guarantee universal, quality health provision.
    • Expand unemployment insurance for workers who leave or lose jobs when child care breaks down; to deal with domestic violence; or to avoid sexual harassment.
    • Provide paid family leave for workers who leave employment to bear or adopt a child; care for sick family members; or assist elderly kin.
    • Provide paid sick days for workers to deal with their own medical issues.
    • Guarantee a caregiver’s allowance to provide an income (and economic recognition) for the work of raising children or caring for family dependents.
    • Apply a caregiver’s income credit to the Social Security system’s income history and benefits calculation for retirees.

         Mink says, “As policymakers confront economic issues beyond the bailout—a stimulus package and the sorry state of the social safety net—we must insist that they also confront the economic inequalities endured by women/mothers in the labor market and at home. If we can socialize capitalism to bail out financial institutions, surely we can feminize patriarchy to meet the coextensive goals of equality and economic justice.”

         There are many people who are unable to work because of disability. I would add one more piece of advice to Mink’s: “Strengthen the SSI and SSDI programs (especially SSI, which is means-tested). Make it easier to get SSI and raise the grant to the level that meets basic needs. Strengthen social services for disabled people.”

         Means-tested programs are subject to cutbacks, as seen in the welfare program for families, originally called ADC, Aid to Dependent Children. Conservatives are talking about means-testing Social Security. That would lead to further cutbacks. It should be strongly resisted. Franklin D. Roosevelt resisted means-testing Social Security as he knew that would make it politically vulnerable. He knew that it had to be a universal program so that it could resist political attacks. It was work-based, and at that time the majority of workers were men. Domestic workers and agricultural workers, many of whom were African-American, were not included in the program.

         The ADC program was part of the 1935 Social Security Act. It was created by women who worked for the Children’s Bureau, and they believed that poor families who receive assistance should be supervised to make sure they care properly for their children. Mothers were not even included in the grant until 1950. The grants have always been small and recipients have always been closely supervised. There was no time limit until 1996, when its administration was handed over to the states, with block grants from the federal government.

         Some people are advocating a Basic Income, a guaranteed income to all citizens. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Network emphasizes this absence of means testing in its definition, “The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs. . . The Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is a government ensured guarantee that no one’s income will fall below the level necessary to meet their most basic needs for any reason. As Bertrand Russell put it in 1918, ‘A certain small income, sufficient for necessities, should be secured for all, whether they work or not, and that a larger income should be given to those who are willing to engage in some work which the community recognizes as useful. On this basis we may build further.’ Thus, with BIG no one is destitute but everyone has the positive incentive to work. BIG is an efficient, effective, and equitable solution to poverty that promotes individual freedom and leaves the beneficial aspects of a market economy in place.”

         In the present political climate, there is no chance of getting a Basic Income. Yet it is important to debate it and to work toward safety net provisions that are universal rather than means-tested.

     

    Notes

    1. Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation of the Administration for Children and Families, “Welfare Time Limits: An Update on State Policies, Implementation, and Effect on Families,” April 15, 2008.
    2. Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Why welfare reform fails the recession test,” Washington Post, December 6, 2009.
    3. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
    4. Gwendolyn Mink, “Women’s Work, Mother’s Poverty: are men’s wages the best cure for women’s economic insecurity?” Keynote, Women and Society conference, October 24, 2008.

     

    Betty Reid Mandell is an editor of New Politics.

  • The Last American Idealist

         Christopher Dorner's brutal killings of multiple people vaguely associated with the Los Angeles police have caused debates over both the department's deployment of manhunt drones and the disastrous trigger-happiness that had them showering bullets on any hapless civilian with the misfortune to drive a truck resembling Dorner's. But what deserves close attention is the extended statement Dorner released on his motivations, which in its non-menacing parts is unsettlingly eloquent, and which stands as a testament to the destructive consequences of American mythology.

         Following the press's standard line, the Christian Science Monitor summarizes Dorner's writings as "alternately horrific and pathetic," full of "vengeful bitterness over perceived slights and injustices ranging from racial slurs in grade school to his firing as a Los Angeles police officer"; standard homicidal maniac material. But an actual close reading of the statement shows otherwise. "Horrific" it certainly is, in detailing Dorner's intention to use the police's own tactics and weaponry in a bloody war against them. But the "perceived slights" are in fact a quite substantial history of LAPD racism and unaccountability, including the case of an officer who "found it very funny and entertaining to draw blood from suspects" and "even intentionally ripped the flesh off the arm of a woman we had arrested." Dorner says officers routinely shrug off wrongful criminal accusations by saying "I guess [the accused] should have stayed at home that day." The "grade school" incidents referred to by the Monitor are similarly misrepresented: they are in fact Dorner's account of the humiliations of being called "nigger" growing up in an all-white school, which he offers in response to the anticipated accusation that he has a history of violence and bullying.

         The first point to note about this unusual document is that Dorner appears to be right about the circumstances of his firing. Dorner was dismissed from his position for making false statements after he filed a complaint against an officer for kicking a Christopher Gettler, a mentally ill man, multiple times in the face and torso. But video evidence confirms Dorner's account: both Gettler and his father recount the kicks. In the evidentiary fog that generally surrounds police brutality claims, it's very rare to find proof this clear. Given that, along with the detail of Dorner's accounts and his outright begging of journalists to investigate his claims, some credence therefore appears due to Dorner's claims of an LAPD rife with blind-eye turning and "blue line" protection of corrupt officers, one that "has not changed from the Daryl Gates and Mark Fuhrman days."

         But the second striking fact is that despite his allegations of massive departmental racism, Dorner writes as a perfect political moderate rather than a racial firebrand. He speaks of being inspired to a military career by Colin Powell, of having pride in his badge. The last passage pays tribute to Bill Cosby, saying Cosby's criticism of black society is dead-on: "Blacks must strive for more in life than bling, hoes, and cars. The current culture is an epidemic." Dorner places himself squarely within the bootstraps school of American political thinking. And though he wishes pain on George Zimmerman, he has harsh words for black officers who carry the "intent of getting retribution toward subordinate caucasians officers for the pain and hostile work environment their elders inflicted on you as probationers," since they "breed a new generation of bigoted caucasian officer when you belittle them and treat them unfairly."

    "I'm not an aspiring rapper, I'm not a gang member, I'm not a dope dealer, I don't have multiple babies momma's. I am an American by choice, I am a son, I am a brother, I am a military service member… I didn't need the US Navy to instill Honor, Courage, and Commitment in me but I thank them for re-enforcing it."

         Dorner fully bought the bullshit they fed him about the rewards of Working Hard and Being Honest, and the disjunction between these deeply internalized myths and the reality of an irredeemably racist LAPD culture appears to have driven him mad. Despite his disgust with the LAPD, he still ludicrously believes the country's tales about itself. There are passages full of a sweetly naive optimism that would make a junior high civics-class A-student blush:

    "America, you will realize today and tomorrow that this world is made up of all human beings who have the same general needs and wants in life for themselves, their kin, community, and state. That is the freedom to LIVE and LOVE. They may eat different foods, enjoy different music, have different dialects, or speak a second language, but in essence are no different from you and I. This is America. We are not a perfect sovereign country as we have our own flaws but we are the closest that will ever exist."

         Dorner comes across as having a childlike faith in the redemptive possibilities of the country's institutions. He commends Ellen Degeneres because she "changed the perception of your gay community and how we as Americans view the LGBT community." He wants to see Jeffrey Toobin on the Supreme Court, because he would bring "some damn common sense and reasoning instead of partisan bickering" (although "in true Toobin fashion, we all know he would not accept the nomination"). And even witness his hopeful comments on Hollywood:

    "It's kind of sad I won't be around to view and enjoy The Hangover III. What an awesome trilogy. Todd Phillips, don't make anymore Hangovers after the third, takes away the originality of its foundation."

         Dorner actually believes the question of whether or not there will be a Hangover IV is affected by something other than the box-office receipts of The Hangover III. He thinks government can exercise integrity, he likes both Barack Obama and George H.W. Bush but not Wayne LaPierre or the Westboro Baptist Church. Except where he is threatening policemen's families, Dorner consistently writes as an optimistic Everyman Moderate, perhaps the last person to believe so totally in the country's myth, and as a result the person most wholly destroyed by its contradictions.

         The Dorner note is somewhat reminiscent of the one issued in 2010 by Joseph Stack, the Texas man who flew his plane into an IRS office. Stack, too, had believed what he was taught, but had come to the despairing conclusion that the capitalist creed was "from each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed," and didn't know how to proceed except with irrational violence. Analyzing Stack's note, Noam Chomsky wrote that "[a]n acute sense of betrayal comes readily to people who believed they had fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with business and government, only to discover they had been only instruments of profit and power." Chomsky said that the Stacks of the world need to find hope before they "destroy themselves, and maybe the world." Like Stack, Christopher Dorner chose the monstrously wrong path of destroying himself and multiple perfectly harmless people.

         But like his madness, the turn to violence was also a logical consequence of the limitations of Dorner's ideology, in this case his lifelong immersion in police and military culture. In the most disturbing and bloodthirsty parts of his writing, Dorner lapses into a chilling series of martial acronyms as he detachedly describes his battle plans. He says he "will utilize every tool within INT collections that I learned from NMITC in Dam Neck" and that he "will utilize OSINT to discover your residences, spouses workplaces, and children's schools [and] IMINT to coordinate and plan attacks on your fixed locations." Dorner was too much of a military man and a police officer to see how futile violence is as a tactic. He thinks if you just kill enough people, deploy enough shock and awe, you can make your point. (It's ironic, of course, that the same rush to violence caused the LAPD to open fire on multiple civilians in their blind quest to destroy Dorner.)

         Christopher Dorner might have proven a great asset in the movement for police accountability. But lacking a radical analytical framework to explain the tension between the story he believed and the reality he saw, he went insane. Like the everyman-maniac protagonist in the dreadful film Falling Down, he sees a broken world and reacts with the hideous non-sequitur of killing everyone instead of creating a better one.

         Such is the consequence of believing in just institutions. Dorner had taken his case to the courts and been rejected, yet he says he refuses to accept that "sometimes bad things happen to good people"; that impossible tension can't be resolved but by forcing it to resolve. Lacking a grounding in popular struggle and organized resistance, he used the only tool he knew: the sickening bloodshed of the police and military.

         The Dorner case shows the tragic consequences of the American political religion meeting the American political reality, and a need for the kind of robust radical program that offers understanding and hope to future Christopher Dorners.

     

    Nathan J. Robinson is a student at Yale Law School and co-director of its prison visit program. He is also a contributing blogger at Huffington Post.

  • Nicaragua: Hunger, Malnutrition, and the Fight to End Them

         School began this week for children all over Nicaragua, but even before children entered the classroom the Nicaraguan government had begun supplying its School Feeding Program as the Ministry of Education transferred food from warehouses to 10,000 schools in 153 municipalities. For many Nicaraguan children, the School Feeding Program is essential to preventing hunger and malnutrition.

         The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently recognized that Nicaragua has achieved more in the area of meeting its people's need for food than any other nation in the Caribbean or Latin America in the period between 1990 and 2010. Fernando Soto, spokesman for the FAO, reported that 55% of the population was malnourished in 1990-1992, but by 2010-2012, that percentage had dropped to 20%, “one of the most notable advances in the [Latin American] region.” While acknowledging that this was still a high percentage of malnourishment, he said progress was being made and that the FAO would continue to help. Nicaragua, said Soto, “has the terrain covered” with multi-sector policies, appropriate laws, good governance, and efforts to coordinate local governments and their communities. The FAO, he said, will work with the Ministry of Family Economics on the Healthy Yard Program which this year will provide 120,500 families with seeds for vegetables, fruit, and medicinal plants in an effort to strengthen food security and better diet through family gardening in all the departments of the country. Government studies also show significant progress in reducing hunger, especially in young children. Without a doubt Nicaraguans have much, much more food available than they did in the 1980s during the Contra war when there was hardly anything on the store shelves and many commodities were rationed.

         Yet, driving around Managua on the first day of school and throughout the week, at every major intersection I saw many school age children, youngsters between eight and 16, either begging or working washing windows. They’re out in the dangerous intersections working and begging because they’re hungry. Unfortunately, they will not benefit from the snack being provided at the schools. They work because they’ve given up on school or because they must also help provide for a younger brother or sister.

         Despite the efforts of the government and non-governmental organizations, hunger remains a serious issue for many in this nation of 5.8 million people. Nicaragua was the second poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2012, second only to Haiti, according to the World Bank. The gross national income (GNI) per capita, based on dividing the national income by the total population, was US$1,100 in 2010, but of course this is a nation of tremendous economic inequality, and many live on much less. The World Bank estimated that in 2012 48% of the population lived on less than a US$1 a day (US$365 a year) and 76% on less US$2 daily (US$730). According to the Nicaraguan government, the minimum needed for food and clothing in 2012 was 12,053 córdobas, 1,208.45 córdobas for clothing and 10,844.84 for food, or US$502 altogether. (24 córdobas = US$1.00) With incomes so low, hunger is a persistent, chronic problem, despite the government’s school nutrition plan.

         In addition to the government’s school food program, some of the Catholic base communities informed by the Theology of Liberation also provide food through the Olla de Soya or Soy Crockpot. Community activists from the Catholic base communities organize volunteer mothers from various neighborhoods to feed children under the age of six whose weight is below normal. The Ollas de Soya project in several Managua neighborhoods provides soy-based milk and food for these children every day during the school year. The project attempts to win parents and children to eating soy products, which are cheaper and more nutritious than their usual diet, while at the same time providing pre-school education and socialization to the mostly five-year-olds.

         Not only is there malnutrition in Nicaragua, but there is also what we might call misnutrition, which is the adoption of less healthy eating habits. Traditionally Nicaraguans ate rice and beans, often mixed together in the national dish known as gallo pinto together with corn tortillas as well as yucca, potatoes and a variety of vegetables. Many Nicaraguans also ate a lot of meat since both beef and pork were plentiful and relatively cheap. The revolution, the Contra war, and the U.S. embargo that brought so much hunger and suffering to the country in the 1980s were followed by the conservative governments of the 1990s that turned their attention to enriching the wealthy while neglecting the poor. The Sandinista Front, which returned to power in 2006, though fundamentally adopting pro-business policies, also took measures to improve health, education and the basic welfare of Nicaraguans, the combination of conservative economic policies and somewhat progressive social policies that we have come to call “social liberalism.”

         The dramatic urbanization of Nicaragua in the 1980s and 1990s lead to a decline in the consumption of pork as people began to eat more chicken and vegetables. Meanwhile, the opening of Nicaragua to foreign trade after the signing of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement meant that local food stores began to carry more processed foods and junk foods, so that every pulpería, the ma-and-pa corner stores one finds in every barrio and town, now invariably stock not only soda pop made with corn syrup but also fried corn chips laced with salt, artificial flavors, and chemical preservatives. With changing food habits has come a rise in obesity throughout Latin America and quite notably in Nicaragua. Public health workers at the Aldo Chavarria National Rehabilitation Hospital in Managua report that more obesity has meant more diabetes and consequently more amputations.

         The kids out in the intersections begging and working on the first day of school may take their córdabas to go to a little restaurant and buy gallo pinto, but there’s perhaps a better chance that they will go to the pulperías and buy Coke and chips. Government efforts to get them back into school where they would be fed at least one more healthy meal a day will run up against the poverty of their families.

     

    Michael Kelly is an American writer living in Nicaragua. This is the fourth of an occasional series of Nicaragua Notes.

  • The Rosa Choir, South Africa

         Our correspondent and contributor in South Africa, Andre Marais, sent us the link to this recording of the Rosa Choir, a diverse group that sings in traditional songs in Afrikaans, Xhosa and English.

     

  • Nicaragua: Contentious Debate Over Social Security Reform

         Nicaragua is in the midst of a contentious debate that could become a serious social struggle over the reform of the nation’s Social Security system. President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government has proposed to increase the retirement age, the number of years one has to work, and the number of required contributions. Under his plan, the retirement age will increase from 60 to 65 years, the minimum number of years worked will increase from 15 to 30, and the number of weekly contributions required in order for a worker to retire will increase from 750 to 1,500.

         The proposed social security reform will exacerbate the contradictions of the Sandinista government that calls itself the party of the people, especially the working people and the poor, while it attempts to implement changes that will aggravate and antagonize both public and private sector workers. The Sandinista’s populist rhetoric here comes into open conflict with the neoliberal character of the reform intended to force workers to pay more and to work longer in order to be able to retire one day. Many complain that should the reform pass, they would have little time left to enjoy their retirement. Average life expectancy in Nicaragua is 72 years, though most men live to 70 while women live to 76.

         The Nicaraguan Institute of Social Security (INSS) now covers 600,000 workers who would be affected by these changes, as well as other workers who will be affected in the future. Under the current system, workers pay 2.25% of their salary and the employer pays 6%. After making contributions for two months, workers have the right to medical care and surgical operations, and they are entitled to time off if they have some problem working because of illness, for which they receive 60% of their salary for up to a year. Most are now able to retire at 60 years of age, though teachers may retire after working to age 55.

         The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been pressuring the Nicaraguan government to reform the INSS pension system for several years. Speaking back in 2010 when the matter first became public knowledge, Manuel Israel Ruiz Arias, an authority on pension systems, stated,

    “The IMF is demanding reform because it has calculated that without it, the State will have to assume huge costs within 10 to 15 years that will destabilize the economy. And it’s right to be worried. It’s insisting on reform but not privatization. And it’s not saying what sort of reform either. It and the World Bank are only demanding 'social security reform' to defend INSS’ financial capacity. But neither of them is saying what model to implement or what needs reforming.”

         While the IMF argues that its concern is solvency of the system, under this reform the system will be made solvent not by raising contributions from the corporations or by increasing the revenue base by expanding coverage to other groups, but rather by forcing workers to work longer and retire later.

         Today, the Sandinista government is complying with the IMF and the World Bank, but according to a recent poll 68 percent of all Nicaraguans disagree with the proposed changes. The poll also indicated that many of those who reject the proposed changes consider themselves to be members or supporters of the Sandinista party. One older worker who works in the private sector for a computer company said he was completely opposed to the reform. And he is not alone.

         Some of the nation’s union federations, the National Council of Workers (CNT) and the Sandinista Confederation of Workers (CST), reject the proposed reform and say that they have collected more than 10,000 petition signatures. They are also demanding that the social security pension system be extended to workers who are not now covered.

         Arsenio Vivas, a leader of the Nicaraguan Teachers Union, argues that the proposed law would violate an existing law covering career teachers which gives them the right to retire after age 55. Vivas is a member of the Teachers Union Group (Unidad Sindical Magisterial) that filed a complaint with the Permanent Human Rights commission (CPDH) demanding that the existing law covering teachers be respected. Vivas explained that elementary school teachers make 4,500 córdobas (US$187.50) per month, while secondary teachers make 4,800 córdobas (US$200). Teachers reject the idea that they should have to work ten years more before they can retire.

         Other unions have come up with their own Social Security reform proposals. The Nicaraguan Union Movement (MSN), the Sandinista Workers Center (CST-JBE), and the General Confederation of Independent Workers have each made their own proposals, but all insist that the 60 year retirement age and the 750 weekly payments be maintained.

         Most Nicaraguan workers, however, are not covered by the Social Security pension system. Nicaragua has two million workers, but 1.4 million of them, about 70 percent, work in the informal sector where workers have no social security coverage of any sort. These informal workers make about US$1.88 per day.

     

    Michael Kelly is an American writer living in Nicaragua. This is the third of an occasional series of Nicaragua Notes.

  • What Happened to the Nicaraguan Revolution?: A View from the Rank and File

    When the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) led the Nicaraguan people to victory over the dictatorship of Anastasio Samoza in 1979, Wilmer (not his real name) was only 14 years old. Having come from a family of modest means, he identified with the revolution that ended the long repressive rule of the Samoza family that with U.S. backing had for 43 years run, ransacked and ultimately ruined Nicaragua. A few years later, Wilmer became a leader of a Sandinista Youth Brigade and led his group of idealistic teenagers to help bring in the coffee harvest in Matagalpa. With the outbreak of the Contra War in the early 1980s, the Sandinista government created a military draft in 1983, and Wilmer was conscripted and fought for two years in the Sandinista People’s Army (ESP) in the Matagalpa area where he had previously picked coffee.

    A child of the revolution, Wilmer is now married with three children, one in college and two in private schools. Self-employed, he makes a modest living.. Wilmer has lived through not only the Revolution of 1979 and the first Sandinista government that followed, but also the two conservative governments of Violeta Chamorro and Arnoldo Alemán, the “Constitutional Liberal” government of Enrique Bolaños, and then the election victory of the Sandinistas in 2006 and again in 2011. Proud of the Nicaraguan revolution, Wilmer still holds his leftist convictions, but, in his soft-spoken way, he is highly critical of the Sandinista government, which, he says, has become a corrupt political group with its own financial interests. “When I see how the government works now,” says Wilmer, “I believe that the lives given in the revolution and the war against the Contras were in vain.”

    As we drive around Managua in a taxi, Wilmer points out the Sandinistas’ business interests. See that hotel, he says, pointing at the modern four-story, block-square building. President Daniel Ortega—one of the comandantes who led the revolution, became the country’s president from 1985-1990, and was reelected president in 2006 and in 2011—now owns the four-star Seminole Hotel. Another comandante, says Wilmer, Bayardo Arce, used his political position and control of government resources to build his own economic empire, most important his Agri-Corp and its subsidiaries which produce rice and other agricultural products.

    Wilmer points out that Carlos Pellas, one of Nicaragua’s richest men who owns a variety of plantations, corporations and banks, and former revolutionary leader President Daniel Ortega have become allies. Ortega’s government paves the way for Pellas’s various projects, such as his new hotel development on Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast, and Pellas supports Ortega politically. But it’s not only Pellas, says Wilmer; Ortega and the Sandinista government now work hand-in-glove with COSEP, the Superior Council of Private Enterprise that brings together all of the country’s major business interests. As Wilmer sees it, the Sandinistas who once talked about improving the lives of working people and the poor now help the rich get richer.

    Daniel Ortega and Carlos Pellas

    Daniel Ortega & Carlos Pellas

    The former Sandinista soldier is also critical of the way the government uses the enormous sums of money from oil-rich Venezuela that President Hugo Chávez has given to Ortega. They amount now to about to about two-and-a-half billion dollars. While not denying that Chávez’s generous gift to Ortega has helped provide housing and food for his fellow Nicaraguans, Wilmer is highly critical of the lack of transparency and accountability. The Venezuelan money, Wilmer explains to me, comes into Nicaragua through ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Latin America, a trade and development alliance of left-wing governments in Latin America originally created by Cuba and Venezuela. ALBANISA, Alba’s principal holding company, acts as a conduit for the Venezuelan loans to Nicaragua which will have to be repaid in 25 years. Beyond that, not much is known about how the money is distributed and used.

    The money given by Venezuela to Ortega, says Wilmer, is not part of the national budget and is not controlled by Congress. Ortega himself determines how the money is used. Ortega, says Wilmer, distributes much of the money to private companies owned by Sandinistas to carry out various construction and food programs. These views are not unique to Wilmer, and the controversy surrounding the Venezuelan money has been widely debated in the Venezuelan and foreign press. Wilmer and others also complain that Ortega used Venezuelan money to finance his election campaigns in 2006 and 2011.

    Perhaps what most disgusts Wilmer is that Ortega and the other Sandinista leaders act with complete impunity, there being no power in the country able to challenge their policies. He mentions the notorious case of Daniel Ortega’s step-daughter, Zoilamérica Narváez, who accused her step-father of having sexually abused her from 1979 to 1990. Ortega’s political immunity and the five-year statute of limitations kept the case from ever coming to court. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission accepted the case and recommended a friendly settlement, after which Narváez dropped her suit against Nicaragua and her step-father. When Nicaraguan feminists expressed outrage at the way the matter was handled, Ortega’s wife Rosario Murillo derided the country’s feminists as having women’s bodies but not a woman’s heart.

    Wilmer is no longer a Sandinista supporter, and hasn’t been for a long while, but he has never given up his leftist ideals. . There are many others like him in Nicaragua, people of his generation, over 40, who remember the Revolution and the Contra War and continue to hold on to the idealism of their youth. For today’s young people it is a different story. But we will take that up in a subsequent Nicaragua Note.

     

    Michael Kelly is an American writer living in Nicaragua. This is the second of an occasional series of Nicaragua Notes.

  • HP and the Occupation

    Image     In December 2009, the Israeli Knesset passed a law allowing for the creation of a biometric database of the inhabitants of Israel. As of January 2013, the program is in its initial testing stage.

         On December 1, 2008, the American corporation Hewlett-Packard won the contract for the development and dispersal of 5 million biometric identification cards as well as the creation and maintenance of the biometric database, a year before the law was passed. The contract was worth 270 million New Israeli Shekels (NIS), or $72 million. In that same month, an HP subsidiary, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), won a yearly 8 million NIS contract for the systemization of biometric data and the installation of the biometric data system in government offices that would issue the ID cards.

         The political and philosophical implications of the creation of such a thorough biometric database for a nation’s citizenry are complex and worthy of exhaustive discussion, but the implications of the creation of the same system for a population that has been militarily occupied for over 40 years and has no say in its occupier’s government deserves international outcry.

         There already is a biometric database for the Palestinians, the use of which is oppressive and a serious concern for whatever hope of peace that remains.

    Biometrics and Restrictions on Palestinian Movement: The Basel System

         Israeli officials contend that the separation wall, which snakes through the occupied West Bank dissecting agricultural lands from their owners, and the arduous, congested checkpoints that serve as the only permeable entry points for Palestinians laboring in Israel, are necessary and simply intended for security. Since the construction of the aforementioned wall, human rights organizations, church bodies, the international community and the International Court of Justice (save one US judge) have all expressed condemnation of the wall’s effect on Palestinian livelihood.

          In order to soften the international perception of the wall and checkpoints, a new system designed to reduce “friction” was implemented at many checkpoints. Here “friction” can be defined as “contact between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians.” The Basel system, as it came to be called, has been in use since 2005 and it requires that all Palestinians hoping to enter Israel carry a magnetic identification card on which biometric data is stored.

         Unlike the biometric data stored in passports issued by the United States and the European Union, these cards hold information on facial dimensions, hand geometry and other biometric templates, as well as personal and security data. Upon entering any checkpoint equipped with this system, such as that separating the occupied Palestinian territory from its presumptive capital, East Jerusalem, Palestinians are subjected to a particularly clinical and dehumanizing process.

         The identification procedure occurs in a hallway which contains several small rooms whose walls are made of unidirectional glass. In the first room, a voice comes over the speakers and tells the subject to leave his or her personal belongings and step outside. Once outside, the room is locked and security officials enter to examine the subject’s effects. When the examination is complete, the voice returns to tell the subject to collect their things, continue to the next room and place their magnetic ID card in a bowl. The card is then passed through a small window to the computerized screening station. One must remember that the only people subject to these checks are Palestinian.

         The Basel system is not limited to checkpoints separating the Palestinian territories from Israel. Several of these checkpoints are located deep within the West Bank and have contributed to the moratorium on travel for intellectuals, medical complications and even death resulting from their placement between villages and hospitals. Such severe restrictions on freedom of movement, even during childbirth, exhibit complete disregard for internationally-accepted standards of human rights.

    The Palestinian Biometric Database

         In order to deal with the disparate populations residing within its borders, Israel developed a color-coded system of identification. A blue ID is issued to all Israeli citizens (Jews and Palestinians) and permanent residents. The latter include the 253,000 Palestinians who found themselves inside Israel's "borders" when East Jerusalem was annexed after the 1967 war. The vast majority of these have neither de facto nor de jure citizenship. They are permitted to apply for citizenship if they swear allegiance to Israel and meet certain other conditions, but most have not done so because they view their application as a validation of Israel’s sovereignty over their annexed capital. Several thousand have applied for and been granted citizenship in the past decade, but in the last two years the Ministry of the Interior has slowed down approvals.

         On the surface it would seem that the inclusion of these Palestinians defeats the idea of stratified citizenship, but until 2003 the “nationality” of the cardholder (Jewish, Druze, Palestinian, Bedouin,) was explicitly listed. After 2003, it was replaced with asterisks.

         Though no longer named outright, the “nationality” of the cardholder is easily gleaned by taking note of the identification number’s prefix (the cardholder’s ethnicity is stored in the population registry) and whether or not the surname of the paternal grandfather is included.

         Israeli policy concerning East Jerusalem has been discriminatory since the inception of the occupation. If a Palestinian fled Jerusalem due to the war and was unable to return for their original Israeli census, their right to reside in their home was annulled. If a Palestinian has been away from Jerusalem for 7 years or more, their citizenship is revoked. Over 1,360 Palestinians fell victim to this policy in 2006 alone. A newborn is awarded this non-citizenship blue ID only if both of its parents hold the blue East Jerusalem ID.

         The residents of the rest of the occupied territory were originally given orange IDs, but their color was later changed to green. These cards go as far as to list religion, but do not mention citizenship of any kind.

         Any holder of a green ID that should wish to enter Israel must apply for a permit, and since 2005 they must also attain the same magnetized biometric identification cards dropped in the bowl at every Basel system checkpoint. This requirement has led to nearly every person over 16 years of age in the occupied Palestinian territories being listed in a biometric database in which their facial dimensions, hand geometry, iris scans and fingerprints are maintained.

         In 2008, Hewlett-Packard acquired EDS, the main developer of both the Palestinian database and the Basel checkpoints. Since then, HP and its subsidiary have been responsible for the upkeep of this system of biometric oppression.

    Hewlett-Packard contra American Foreign Policy: An Occupation Catalogued

         In any conceivable 2-state solution, the Palestinian government will face a tall order. Substantial unemployment figures, over 350,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, settlements the size of cities, annexed East Jerusalem and the Palestinian Right of Return. The question of a military force is not among these concerns; under most 2-state proposals, a Palestine in charge of its own external defense is prohibited, leaving the duty to the Israelis Defense Force (IDF). Many Palestinians are concerned about the IDF’s continued presence further undermining civil society in their future state.

         There is marked cooperation that strengthens this concern, as shown by the blind eye turned by the Palestinian Authority to the December 11, 2012 Israeli raids on the prisoner support organization Addammeer, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committee and the Palestinian Nongovernmental Organizations Network.

         Palestinians fear that their future state will be more of the same, more violations of their sovereignty masquerading as the responsibility of defense.

         Domestic and international voices have taken note of these apprehensions and many now claim that a 1-state solution is the only feasible answer to this tiresome dispute.

         The complete biometric cataloguing of the Palestinian populace is yet another grievance to address, another blow to the increasingly invalid 2-state solution.

         Though there is no parallel to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a few passable comparisons may be drawn. Would the international community have been so forgiving of Serbia holding a comprehensive database of the citizenry of Bosnia and Herzegovina after its withdrawal from the hills surrounding Sarajevo? If Turkey currently knew the address of every Greek Cypriot; as well as their religious and marital status, would this not be seen as a threat to the island republic’s independence?

    Further Infractions

         America’s expressed foreign policy concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a 2-state solution based on the 1967 borders with mutually-agreed land swaps. The actions of HP and EDS are in direct opposition to this policy. The Orwellian reservoir of biometric data at the disposal of the Israeli government is perhaps the most significant, but one cannot discount the many contracts HP with various branches of the occupation.

         HP supplies all computers to the Israeli army, including those used at checkpoints. The company also won a contract for the outsourcing of the Navy’s intelligence technology infrastructure, including the management and operation of its computer and communications centers, information security, and user support.

         This is the same Navy that in the wake of a ceasefire tells the fishermen of Gaza, who may or may not have voted for Hamas, that their new boundary has been augmented by 3 nautical miles to a paltry 6 in total, only to attack and arrest them when they dare to venture out.

         Many of these men were the sole breadwinners for large families. With their boats impounded and destroyed, they are left with no recourse to provide for their loved ones.

         Even if the Israeli Navy allowed the fishermen free movement within the newly delineated boundaries, it would still be flying in the face of international standards, which set the minimum at 12 miles. Under the Oslo accords, the fishermen of Gaza were afforded a full 20 nautical miles.

         A computerized storage system provided by HP sits in the illegal settlement of Ariel, which houses the school recently awarded university status, and will reportedly always be under the sovereignty of Israel.

         Ariel is located almost halfway into the occupied West Bank between Ramallah and Nablus and the notion that it should always remain under Israeli control elucidates the hopelessness of the 2-state solution.

    Hewlett-Packard contra the Rhetoric of the Right

         "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

         Since President Reagan uttered those epitomical words during his inaugural address on January 20, 1981, the American Right has framed political discourse in the United States as a battle between government and personal freedom.

         In their worldview, government feeds on personal liberty, and any regulation placed on big business serves as seasoning for government’s meal of choice.

         While this rhetorical hat-trick has resonated with the workers and voters of the United States (so much so that American organized labor seems to be on its last leg), one only needs to look to the actions of largely unregulated transnational corporations to see the error in this line of thinking. Indifference and contempt for workers and the environment abound, but the American Right seems to be unfazed by these transgressions.

         Oddly, when debating this philosophy, Orwell’s 1984 is cited nearly as much as any work by Ayn Rand. Orwell was a self-professed socialist who despised reactionary policy, something largely lost on the proponents of his critique of “Big Government”.

         Perhaps the role of HP in creating these databases, and thereby helping the Israeli Ministry of the Interior inch ever closer to the role of the deplorable Ministry of Love, could serve as sufficient cause for alarm and reflection concerning boundless Big Business.

         After all, it is our principle ally in the Middle East, the region’s “only democracy”, who is subjecting not only its own citizens but those under the purview of the occupation, those who have no right to vote, to this Orwellian reality.

         In the case of the Israeli Biometric Database, Big Government and Big Business have come together to further the suffering of the occupied, limit the freedom of the occupiers and deal yet another blow to the moribund 2-state solution.

         Any person, regardless of political inclination, can easily find something to hate, including the founders of HP, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, who came up with guidelines to govern their company known as the “HP Way.” One of the tenets asserts that their employees “. . . at every level are expected to adhere to the highest standards of business ethics and must understand that anything less is unacceptable.”

         While commonly accepted standards of business ethics have effectively been forgotten in the globalized economy, one cannot help but contrast the original philosophy of HP's founders with the corporation's profiting from illegal settlements, population-wide restrictions on movement, military occupations and vulgar indifference towards the announced foreign policy of the United States and to common decency.

     

    Creede Newton is an American journalist based in Israel and Palestine. He works as a correspondent for Egypt based Bikya News. His writing has been published by BikyaNews.com, Fair Observer, Alternative Information Center, and elsewhere.

  • Letter of Support and Solidarity to Greek Transport Workers

    The following open letter was issued yesterday.

    January 26, 2013

    Letter of Support and Solidarity to Greek Transport Workers

         We have read about your strike against threatened pay cuts and the Greek government’s emergency decree and use of riot police to force you back to work. We are horrified by the attempt to toss your contracts aside; your pay is already not adequate to maintain a decent standard of living.

         We stand with you and all in Greece who are resisting the barbaric austerity regime, and we hope for a new government in Greece that can defend the interests of ordinary people ¬ sooner rather than later. We write this in solidarity with your struggle, in the full understanding that it is not only your living standards that are at stake (though that would be reason enough to write), but also that the Greek extreme neoliberal “experiment” will be imposed on the rest of us if it is allowed to succeed.

         Our best wishes for your success!

    Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison
    Co-Directors
    Campaign for Peace and Democracy
    New York City

    For more information on Greece, see the Campaign for Peace and Democracy website.

     

  • The Sandinista Government has Failed the Women of Nicaragua: Solis

    Image     Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista government have failed the country's women. That was the message delivered by Azahalea Solís, an attorney and a member of Nicaragua's Autonomous Women's Movement, speaking at the Ben Lindner Center in Managua on January 17 to an audience of Nicaraguans and American students from various universities. In a systematic presentation that touched upon politics, economic, employment, migration, and education, Solís presented a devastating critique of the government's policies.

         "I studied law," said Solís, "thinking that law could be useful in the class struggle, and later saw that law could also be useful in the fight for women's rights." The problem is, Solís said, that the government doesn't enforce the law and the people don't care about the law because, they say, the law doesn't feed us. "The ones who pay for disrespecting the law are women," declared Solís.

         If one looked at women in political and governmental positions, one might think that Nicaraguan women were doing well, said Solís. After the Sandinistas returned to power in 2006, women were appointed to many cabinet positions, including ministers of Health, Natural Resources, Culture, and Interior, the head of the nation's police forces. But, said Solís, women are not free to speak their minds. She gave the example of the former director of the Nicaraguan Cultural Institute (INC), Margine Gutiérrez, who was removed from office after she criticized President Ortega for his illegal and unconstitutional gift in 2007 of a manuscript dealing with Simón Bolívar written by the national poet Rubén Darío to President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. For daring to criticize the President, she was immediately removed.

         Solís suggested that women in high positions in the Sandinista Front and in the government have no freedom of expression, but have to toe the party line. "Women who hold government positions can't talk about their work, they can't speak to the media, and they can only speak when they are told to," she said. "So they can't really express themselves."

         And, added Solís, the Constitution requires that all ministers and ambassadors be appointed by the president and confirmed by the National Assembly, but none of them have received parliamentary confirmation. Legally, she said, all of the ministers and vice-ministers are illegal.

         The system of taxation in Nicaragua also has a negative impact on women, Solís explained. Carlos Pellas, one of Nicaragua's richest men, has built the $250 million Guacalito de la Isla Hotel on Nicaragua's "Emerald Coast." The hotel was built with a loan from a government bank and pays no taxes, Solís told the audience. "Yet workers have to pay a tax of 10 percent and another value added tax of 35 percent. "The very rich are exempt from taxes, while the working class has to pay ever more taxes. And this is done without consulting the working class. The government only talks to the rich," Solís said.

         High unemployment has led many men and women to migrate abroad in search of work, either to the United States or to Spain or Italy. Nicaragua's official unemployment rate has fallen from 8.2 percent in 2010 to 6.3 percent today, while an estimated two-thirds of Nicaraguans work in the informal sector.

         "During the last few years, more and more women have emigrated to other countries to seek work," said Solís. "What does this mean? One has to leave one's family and one's country to go to countries where xenophobia or discrimination may exist. One may have to learn a new language. And women sometimes face problems of sexual violence. Most don't want to emigrate, but they do it out of necessity."

         It's all about jobs. "Formal employment has not increased. Those who have formal sector jobs have regular employment and social security, but those in the informal sector have neither. Informal work has increased, meaning no steady work and no guarantees of benefits. Most women work in the informal sector."

         Solís put the employment problem in the broader economic context. "The government says exports have increased, but that's not true. We have the same quantity of exports, though at better prices. Meat and coffee have been selling at good prices. We have been selling the same goods at higher prices and this hides a terrible reality, because now the prices of those products are starting to fall."

         There are other economic problems as well. "Many coffee plantations have been affected by blight, so there will be less product and lower prices."

         Even where production has risen, productivity has not, says Solís. "Many Nicaraguans work in the cattle industry and do so as we have for 200 years. We have an extensive form of cattle production, meaning that trees are cut down to create new pastures. Now entire forests are being affected."

         "We really have two problems," said Solís, "anachronistic forms of production and thousands of uneducated workers."

          "This government is spending less on education than previous governments have. Yet we know that no society will make progress in the twenty-first century without education. The Free Trade Zones in our country which use unskilled labor correspond to our low level of education.

         While Nicaragua has lower levels of domestic violence than Honduras or Guatemala, the situation for Nicaraguan women is worsening, Solís believes. "We are having more cases of domestic violence every year, and women are being affected at increasingly younger ages."

         "The situation has led some women to talk about 'state terrorism,' and you might think that this term is inappropriate," said Solís. "But according to human rights workers, the government is responsible for not taking measures to protect women."

         "In Nicaragua, most criminals are not punished. Impunity is a constant throughout the country, and this affects the rights of women. We have a very notorious rape case here in Nicaragua where a man accused of aggravated rape was given eight years in prison, when the possible penalty was twelve years. He appealed and the penalty was reduced to four years. He then appealed to the Supreme Court which once again reduced the penalty arguing that the victim had collaborated with the rapist and that there were mitigating circumstances because the rapist was drunk. The idea of being drunk as an extenuating circumstance thus became a precedent. We protested vigorously against this." Few crimes against women go to court, said Solís, and guilty verdicts represent only 10 percent of all decisions.

         When asked by one of the American students present what should be done, Solís said that the most important thing was to raise consciousness, to make the Nicaraguan people more aware of their rights. Touching on the broader question of the nature of the Nicaraguan government today Solis said that the Samozas had a personal dictatorship, while the Sandinistas had an "institutional dictatorship," and while there were not the kinds of assassinations and massacres that occurred under Samoza, the government had found mechanisms to dominate politics and control society.

    Michael Kelly is an American writer living in Nicaragua. This is the first of a series of Nicaragua Notes.

  • One response to austerity

    The Austerity Allstars explain their political program.

    May it catch on widely!

  • Free Russian Political Prisoners!

             We the undersigned call for the liberation of the Russian political prisoners, both those already condemned, and sent to the new Gulag, like the two feminist activists of the Pussy Riot group, and those in jail awaiting trial – some 20 activists, socialists and anti-fascists, in connection with the demonstrations against Putin on May 6th. We endorse the call of the Russian Left organizations — Russian Socialist Movement (RSD), Autonomous Action, Left Front — to organize Days of Solidarity Against Political Repression in Russia between 29 November and 2 December, in front of the Russian Federation Embassy or any other representative institutions of the Russian government in our countries, demanding the immediate release of the illegally arrested or condemned and the immediate end of procedures based on torture and forgeries.

    Gilbert Achcar, political scientist, Athena Athanassiou, philosopher, Jean Batou, historian, Etienne Balibar, philosopher, Olivier Besancenot, former presidential candidate, Alex Callinicos, political scientist , Noam Chomsky, linguist, Samuel Farber, historian, Nancy Holmstrom, philosopher, Rada Ivekovic, philosopher, Isabelle Garo, philosopher, Joanne Landy, historian, Michael Löwy, sociologist, Stéphanie Prezioso, historian, Catherine Samary, economist, Jeanne Singer, sociologist, Enzo Traverso, historian, Eleni Varikas, political scientist.

  • Aaron Swartz: What We Know So Far, What We Need to Know

    Image     The reaction to Aaron Swartz's suicide has quickly reached a level of intensity which may have surprised those who will eventually need to respond to it.

         Much of this anger is directed at Assistant Prosecutor Stephen Heymann who, according to reports, pushed for Swartz's prosecution, refusing to negotiate any reduction in sentence without Swartz pleading guilty to all thirteen charges. Next in line is Heymann's boss, States' Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who may have recognized in Swartz's prosecution an opportunity to advance herself by claiming a highly coveted scalp: Swartz successfully organized the public against the passage of SOPA legislation (the "Stop Online Piracy Act"), to the great displeasure of the Washington establishment.

         At first, Ortiz's strategy seemed to be working—she was mentioned by Obama friend, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, as his possible successor. But by now, it has surely backfired.

         Petitions targeting Heymann and Ortiz are on file with the White House and are attracting thousands of signatures.

         Their receiving even a mild sanction, would, of course, constitute a major victory for Swartz's supporters. But, in the unlikely event this occurs, it needs to be understood that they will be taking the fall for higher-ups who bear more responsibility.

         Included within this latter group is one figure whose name has been conspicuously absent from much of the discussion of the case: former MIT President Susan Hockfield. It was Hockfield who, it appears, signed off on moving forward with the prosecution when JSTOR, the digital database that was the primary victim of Swartz's alleged theft, was more than willing to drop charges. Furthermore, according to press reports, "MIT administrators" scuttled a plea bargain arranged with the prosecutor, JSTOR, and Swartz's attorney under which Swartz would serve no jail time.

         In pursuing a harsh punishment for Swartz, Hockfield placed herself in the vanguard of a new generation of college administrators who have actively sought confrontations with activist elements on their campuses.

         Others in this group are University of California chancellors Robert J. Birgeneau and Linda Katehi, whose militarized response to non-violent protest on the Berkeley and Davis campuses resulted in breaking the ribs of former U.C. Poet Laureate Robert Haas and a million dollar settlement against the university for pepper spraying of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.

         Remarkably, each of these figures has ties to Hockfield: Birgeneau is a former MIT Professor of Physics and Dean of Science who has served with Hockfield on numerous panels and boards. Katehi serves with Hockfield on the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, founded by the FBI for the purpose of "discussing . . . the promotion of strategic national security partnerships with academia."

         It appears that these "discussions" have reached the same conclusion reached by Ortiz: the promotion of national security requires "getting tough," meaning the routine violent crackdown on campus protest and the aggressive prosecution of those who would previously have been dealt with internally with a slap on the wrist, at most.

         Finally, the ultimate responsibility resides with the Obama Justice Department and Obama himself, whose successful marketing as a liberal and civil libertarian has enabled the movement of the conventional wisdom on such matters as indefinite detention, extra judicial execution, habeas corpus, and torture to a rightward point on the spectrum, which even extreme conservatives could not have dreamed of only a few years ago.

         University presidents cannot be expected to challenge elite consensus, least of all MIT presidents, who are, after all, reliant on the federal government for roughly half of their operating budget.

         But while Hockfield is not to be judged by the standards set by such great MIT dissidents as Norbert Wiener, Salvatore Luria, and Noam Chomsky, what MIT should expect is an administration willing to act with tolerance and forbearance.

         Indeed, MIT administrations going back many years have a long tradition of doing just that.

         According to one faculty member, Hockfield—described by him as a union busting import from Yale—is widely seen as having broken with this tradition by instituting "a 'rules is rules' mentality that was cold and bureaucratic towards students and anyone else who got out of line."

         In contrast, Hockfield's successor, Rafael Reif, is viewed very favorably, his appointment of Hal Abelson to investigate MIT's role widely hailed by the MIT community and Swartz's supporters.

         The best possible result of Abelson's investigation would be the public release of all communications between MIT and the Justice Department. Should these materialize, they will almost certainly show both the MIT and Obama Justice Department in a highly unflattering light. The latter surely deserves to have its shameful record of prosecutorial dishonesty, bullying, and abuse exposed to the light of day.

         It is of course a foregone conclusion that they will fight the release of these documents. The faculty and students at MIT and all of us who admired Aaron Swartz should recognize that exposing these is the best and most fitting commemoration of his life and work.

     

    John Halle is Director of Studies in Music Theory and Practice at Bard College.

  • Of the People, By the People

    Robin Hahnel's Of the People, By the People: The case for a participatory economy (Soapbox Press, 2012, distributed by AK press, www.akpress.org) is the latest and most accessible presentation of his argument that a new economy—based on equality, participation, solidarity, and self-management—is both desirable and possible. Originally formulated by Hahnel and Michael Albert more than two decades ago, the model has been continually refined and improved, addressing problems raised by critics. This is precisely the way vision for the future should be developed: through an ongoing process of criticism and revision.

    In this new book, Hahnel offers two revisions to his previous exposition. In previous versions, the planning process—participatory planning—made no distinction between the current annual plan and more long-term plans. Here Hahnel acknowledges that the latter involve some special complications that need to be addressed. In particular, our estimates of opportunity and social costs become less reliable the further off into the future we are projecting, and therefore long-range planning will have to rely more on discussion and debate among delegates to federations of consumer and worker councils. This will require finding means of maintaining popular involvement in the long-run planning process in the face of less direct participation.

    The second revision involves the annual consumption requests. How can people know what they want for an entire year, many critics asked? They can't, Hahnel says. But if their beginning-of-year guesses—which might just be "same as last year"—turn out to be wrong, then mid-year corrections can be made. There is no assurance, of course, that everybody can get whatever they want and are entitled to exactly when they want it, but not even a market system can guarantee that.

    This new book doesn't end the cycle of critique and revision, and in that spirit, I posed a number of questions to Robin Hahnel that came to me as I read Of the People, By the People. My questions and his responses follow.

    Shalom: Let me start on this question of the annual consumption requests of individuals. Submitting a "same as last year" request certainly simplifies matters. But there are still reasons to think this wouldn't be an easily manageable process. Seth Ackerman, notes, for example, that there are more than two million prod¬ucts in Amazon.com's 'kitchen and dining' category alone. [Seth Ackerman, "The Red and the Black," The Jacobin, no. 9, Winter 2013, p. 39.] Not all products are consumed within a year (so last year, for example, I bought an electric razor; I don't want "same as last year" for that). The sneakers that I bought two years ago have worn out; so I'd need to amend last year's request. And what about products that change over time? I had avoided a snack food last year because it had too much salt, but this year there's a low-salt version. And of course books, music, movies, video games, software—I don't want the same as last year.

    Hahnel: The two million products in the Amazon.com "kitchen and dining" section is a wonderful example of how consumers can become aware of the tremendous variety of products that will be available in a participatory economy. Just as Amazon.com can list millions of products—providing pictures and details about their characteristics—consumer federations can provide this service to consumers in a participatory economy for any who wish to shop online. And for those who prefer what some of my students once told me were "the pleasures of malling it" in person, consumer federations can host shopping malls where anyone who wishes can go, see what is available, and walk away with whatever strikes their fancy. Information about product improvements can be provided in these ways as well.

    If you remember that the sneakers you bought two years ago have now worn out you will add a pair of sneakers to your consumption request this year that were not on your consumption list last year. You will also not request an electric razor this year. Since I will not remember I need new sneakers but do not need another electric razor, and I would not bother submitting a revised request even if I did, my initial consumption request will be the same as last year and not include a pair of sneakers but will include an electric razor. Moreover, when my neighborhood consumption council sends me the revised indicative prices in the second round of the planning procedure and asks me if I want to revise my consumption proposal I will not respond again, whereas you may choose to modify some of your requests in response to updated indicative prices—perhaps requesting two pair of sneakers if their indicative price has fallen, or postponing your replacement sneakers another year if their indicative price rose significantly.

    The important thing is that no matter what you or I choose to do individually there will be an initial consumption proposal for the entire neighborhood submitted by our consumer council, and there will be revised neighborhood consumption proposals submitted in every subsequent round as well. And that is all that matters as far as how the planning procedure "works." What will happen when I discover during the year that I want a new pair of sneakers I didn't order but don't need the electric razor I did order? I will order a pair that looks suitable online, or pick up a pair at a distribution center or mall run by a consumer federation, and be charged the same indicative price you are for the item you ordered in advance and I neglected to order. I will not pick up an electric razor and therefore I will not be charged for one.

    It's important to distinguish between what we need to accomplish and what we do NOT need to accomplish in the annual participatory planning process. When the year starts worker councils need to know what they are expected to produce and what inputs they have been authorized to use to do that. If they know these two things they can get started producing when the year begins, so that is all the participatory planning process must accomplish. Before it can begin production on January 1, does a shoe making company in a capitalist economy know how many size 9 vs. size 11 shoes to make? How many brown vs. black shoes to make? How many high quality vs. low quality shoes to make? It has no way of knowing the answers to these "how much of each slightly different product should I make" questions, nor does it need to. Based entirely on its own guesses and research about trends in consumer demands, a capitalist shoe making company starts to produce shoes in January at a faster or slower pace than last year and then adjusts to unanticipated changes in the overall demand for its shoes, and shifts in demand for different sizes, colors, and qualities, on the fly as new information arrives. Shoemakers in a participatory economy will do this as well, except the annual plan provides them on January 1 with much better information about what to expect.

    It's important also to be clear about how workers and consumers are credited and charged for what they do. The planning procedure "approves" the behavior agreed to in the plan—for both worker and consumer councils. However, worker councils are credited for the outputs they actually produce and charged for the inputs they actually use during the year.[1] So if their approved production plan had a SB/SC ratio of 1.09 but their actual ratio at year's end turns out to be 1.03 the cap on average effort ratings for workers in the council next year is 1.03 not 1.09. Similarly, consumers, and consumer councils and federations are charged for what they actually consume during the year, not what was approved for them in the plan. Any differences are recorded as increases or decreases in the debt or savings of individual consumers, neighborhood councils, and consumer federations.

    We need to distinguish between how to adjust to unforeseen changes as the year proceeds and how to formulate the annual production plan in the first place. These are two different issues in all planned economies. The first issue is how to formulate the plan in the first place. And that is what advocates of participatory planning have written about—a way to arrive at an annual production/consumption plan that is qualitatively different from authoritarian, or central planning, and also quite different from most notions of how to go about democratic economic planning. But no matter how the annual production plan is formulated, any planned economy must come up with some way to make adjustments during the year. I have written very little about adjustments because the unique proposal we have made has to do with how to formulate the plan in the first place. What I have said about making adjustments during the year is: (1) Imagine people swiping debit cards at cash registers (or online), and being asked if they want to announce a change in their approved consumption plan when the pace of their actual consumption deviates by say 20% from what they ordered. (2) Remember that computerized inventory management systems linked to cash registers and "real time" supply changes are already features of the global economy. (3) Envision consumer federations as clearing houses for consumption just as regional Federal Reserve Banks clear checks for private banks operating in their region. (4) When changes in consumption among all consumers do not cancel then consumer federations will have to negotiate with industry federations for changes in production during the year. Which leaves one question to answer: Will indicative prices, which are the basis for crediting producers and charging consumers, also be changed during the year whenever desired changes in production cannot be made, or cannot be made in full? I can think of arguments for and against.

    If we want consumers to influence the annual plan we need input from consumers during the planning process. If we want worker councils to have a better idea of what to produce than firms in market economies this must come from the annual plan. In a participatory economy consumers influence production decisions primarily through the "self-activity" proposals of consumer councils and federations during the planning procedure. Consumer councils and federations respond to estimates of the social costs of producing different final goods and services by indicating how much they want, knowing they will be charged according to the prices "indicating" what it costs society to provide them. As those estimates of social costs are adjusted during the planning procedure by the IFB, presumably consumer councils and federations will change the amounts of different things they request when they submit revised consumption proposals.

    Shalom: Say there are 100 workplaces that produce product X. In the planning procedure it is determined that there is only demand for the output of 90 workplaces. (Assume it is determined that this represents a long-term trend, not just a one-time drop in demand for which it might make sense to keep 10 unneeded workplaces going to minimize transaction costs.) Assume that the workers all want to continue producing X (they enjoy doing so more than they do producing Y, a product with excess demand; or they don't want to incur the disruptions of having to be retrained; etc.). Which 10 workplaces will be closed or converted? Is this a matter of some objective measure (e.g., the social benefit to cost ratio, SB/SC) or of democratic vote? If the former, won't there be pressure on workers to "exploit themselves" in order to increase their ratio (just as under capitalism, bosses will try to increase the exploitation of workers in a competitive industry)? I don't mean that workers will feel pressure to increase a ratio that is less than 1 to a ratio that is greater than 1—that of course makes sense—but to go from 1.31 to 1.33 in order to beat out the workplace with a 1.32 ratio.

    Hahnel: There are a lot of issues contained in this one question, so let me break it up into pieces.

    You write: "Say there are 100 workplaces that produce product X. In the planning procedure it is determined that there is only demand for the output of 90 workplaces. (Assume it is determined that this represents a long-term trend, not just a one-time drop in demand for which it might make sense to keep 10 unneeded workplaces going to minimize transaction costs.)"

    That is not exactly how it would become apparent that roughly 10% of those working to produce X should no longer be doing so. Suppose each of the existing 100 workplaces making X submit initial proposals to make as much as they did last year, requesting the same inputs including different kinds of labor they currently employ. At the end of the first round of the planning process it turns out that there is only demand for 90% of the output that the X industry has proposed to supply. In the next round of the planning procedure the indicative price of X will be lowered by the Iteration Facilitation Board (IFB). To keep it simple, suppose it is lowered by 10%. This will change the incentives for both those offering to produce or supply X, and for those asking to consume or demand X. In the next round of proposals, because the estimate of the social cost of producing X is now lower, the aggregate demand for X should increase—presumably not as much as 10%, but some. So the excess supply will no longer be as great as 10%. But there will most likely still be excess supply, let's say 8%. However, each worker council proposing to supply X now only receives "credit" for increasing social benefits by 90% of what they used to for every unit of X they propose to supply. So if they persist in making the same proposal in the second round as they did in the first round the social benefits in their social benefit to social cost ratio will now be 10% lower than they were before, and their proposal would be even less likely to meet with approval. This "pressure" to reduce production of X, and/or switch over to producing Y, will fall heaviest on the worker councils with the lowest SB/SC ratios in the first place. Presumably, these are the least efficient X producers and they will be the ones most likely to reduce their production of X in subsequent rounds. So there is what we might call a "natural" process of selection among the 100 workplaces regarding who is going to drop out of X production.

    You write: "Assume that the workers all want to continue producing X (they enjoy doing so more than they do producing Y, a product with excess demand; or they don't want to incur the disruptions of having to be retrained; etc.). Which 10 workplaces will be closed or converted? Is this a matter of some objective measure (e.g., the social benefit to cost ratio) or of democratic vote. If the former, won't there be pressure on workers to 'exploit themselves' in order to increase their ratio (just as under capitalism, bosses will try to increase the exploitation of workers in a competitive industry)?"

    So my answer, above, is that this would normally be taken care of by what you are calling "some objective measure" rather than "a democratic vote"—by which I assume you mean of all workers in the X industry.

    About what you call "self-exploitation": In capitalism "self-exploitation" is not really self-exploitation at all. It is exploitation of workers by their employers. Employers go to their employees and say if you don't accept wage and/or benefit cuts or increases in work intensity I will lay off some of you, or shut down the plant altogether and move to where employees are more compliant. A better analogy would be a worker-owned cooperative producing X in a predominantly capitalist economy. If the members of this coop really liked making X more than Y or, if they really didn't want to have to change jobs—which can be personally costly since no capitalism other than Scandinavian capitalism has ever tried to minimize the transition costs of moving people from one job to another and socialize the costs of doing so—they could opt for a higher level of what you call "self-exploitation" to remain in business. I suppose the same holds in a participatory economy, which would allow a worker council producing X to continue to do so if they were willing to accept a lower than average SB/SC ratio, and any lower average consumption allowance that went along with it. Do I think this would happen often? Perhaps in the case of craft production. But if the transition costs of moving to a new workplace are minimized and socialized—as they would be in a participatory economy—I don't see why workers would want to "self-exploit" when they don't have to, unless they were very much attached to producing a particular product. After all, what the iterative, social planning procedure is signaling them is that product Y benefits society more than X. Why would workers reject this signal at their own expense? Craft, performance art… perhaps. In which case, I see nothing wrong with it. It is similar to allowing people to make their own "effort/sacrifice" vs. "consumption" choice. As long as you are being socially responsible—in this case working harder and/or accepting a lower effort rating and therefore consumption allowance in exchange for producing a particular product that society does not find to be as socially valuable as others, go for it!

    You write:"I don't mean that workers will feel pressure to increase a ratio that is less than 1 to a ratio that is greater than 1—that of course makes sense—but to go from 1.31 to 1.33 in order to beat out the workplace with a 1.32 ratio."

    It is SB/SC ratios less than 1 that are generally socially irresponsible and unlikely to be approved by others. Even in that case a group of workers could truthfully report so many people-years of welding labor, etc. to produce so many units of good X and get the SB/SC ratio up to 1 by planning on exerting above average effort on the job, and therefore be able to stay in business. That would be what you call "self-exploitation." Any councils with SB/SC ratios in ANY industry in the 1.30, 1.31, 1.32, 1.33 range ARE behaving in a socially responsible way and WILL have their proposals approved by others, so that is not a concern. But in the spirit of your question, a worker council deciding to exert above average effort/intensity to boost their SB/SC ratio from 0.98 to 1.00 to stay in business, while a worker council with a ratio of 0.99 who do not choose to "self-exploit" is the one that must switch to Y or shut down so its members have to find new jobs, is free to do so. And I don't think there is a problem with that.

    Shalom: You say (p. 76) that people hired as members of worker councils get full and equal rights from the moment they arrive. Does this preclude any sort of trial period? If so, won't this mean (a) more hiring errors, and (b) more reluctance to "take chances" in hiring?

    Hahnel: I did not mean to exclude the possibility of trial periods for new members—which is a common practice in many worker-owned cooperatives, and even in worker-owned enterprises self-consciously practicing all the norms of participatory economics, such as the Mondragon collectives in Winnipeg, Canada. But there cannot be second-class citizens in workplaces. A participatory economy does not tolerate this, though regrettably it is a practice in some cooperatives today, where there are members—with full voice, vote, and profit shares—who then hire others as their employees. That is what I intended to say was forbidden.

    Shalom: One of the interesting observations in your book The ABCs of Political Economy: A Modern Approach (London: Pluto Press, 2002, p. 70) is that small amounts of unequal sacrifice become permanent inequalities because the capital accrued from the extra work makes subsequent labor more productive. Is this a problem in a participatory economy? That is, might small differences in effort or small differences in interest-bearing savings (p. 83) lead via this same mechanism to income inequalities that will grow exponentially?

    Hahnel: I certainly hope not. But fortunately I don't believe this would be a problem. In the models you mention any extra sacrifice in an early time period is transformed into more capital to work with in the future—which is not bad in and of itself since more tools as well as better tools makes us more socially productive as time goes on. In the models you mention the most egregious case of turning this good thing into a bad thing arises when the additional capital that comes from an early extra sacrifice is used to hire an employee whose greater productivity when working with the additional capital is appropriated as profits by her employer, or when the additional capital is loaned to someone whose greater productivity when working with the additional capital is captured as interest by the lender. In these cases I think the term "exploitation" is appropriate. As you mention, in these cases inequality that quickly exceeds the amount required to compensate for an initial extra sacrifice increases "exponentially" over time. However, in the models you mention even in the case when there is no labor or credit market, if the person who made the extra early sacrifice in week 1 uses it to work with more capital than others have to work with, after a certain number of weeks they will have benefited far more compared to others than can be justified by their one-time, early sacrifice. In this case the unequal outcome each week stays the same (i.e. does not increase exponentially), but as the weeks march on the cumulative injustice increases. In this last case, since there is no unequal social relationship that creates the unjust outcome I think it is contrary to common usage to call the outcome "exploitative," but it is unfair nonetheless.

    What happens in a participatory economy?

    In a participatory economy any increase in the capital stock during a year—which is the result of the investment plan—is added to society's stock of productive capital for the following year. And once it is there it belongs no more to one group of workers than to another. Every year all worker councils "propose" which parts of society's capital stock they wish to use, and the decision regarding who finally gets to use what is made when worker and consumer councils approve proposals. Ultimately, one worker council may well end up with more or better parts of society's capital stock than another. However, (1) this will be because they demonstrated an ability to make better use of it, and (2) they will be "charged" for the extra quantity or quality of capital stock used according to the estimates of the opportunity cost of those inputs as generated by the participatory planning procedure. Any worker council with more or better "capital" will have a higher SC in the denominator of their SB/SC ratio than a worker council with less or worse capital, which will require them to generate a higher SB to warrant being allowed to use it. So the expected value of the SB/SC ratio for a worker council that has more or better capital should be no higher than the expected value of the SB/SC ratio for a worker council with less or worse capital. And therefore differences in quantity and quality of capital used in different worker councils should not generate any differences in consumption rights for people in a participatory economy. This is not true in economies with labor and/or credit markets. It is not even true in economies where everybody is completely self-sufficient and where those who make more sacrifices early on are allowed to keep the extra capital that results as their own to work with in the future—as the models you cite in the ABCs of Political Economy demonstrate.

    There can be no increase in society's capital stocks for next year unless society produces investment goods rather than only consumption goods this year. How much, and what kind of investment goods to produce, and therefore how much not to consume, but "save" this year, is decided through the investment planning procedure in a participatory economy. In other words, this means that society's tradeoff between consumption now and in the future is determined by the investment plan.

    Every year individual consumers—and federations of consumers—have the choice of whether or not to save, borrow, or consume exactly the amount of income they are allotted in a participatory economy. But every year they do this in the context of whatever amounts of consumption goods will be produced that year. If the investment plan calls for 40% investment this year and only 60% consumption, there will be fewer consumption goods for consumers to bid on than if the investment plan called for only 10% investment leaving 90% for consumption. This means that the higher the rate of investment the higher the indicative prices for consumption goods will be that year. That is the context in which individual consumers are free to decide if they want to save or borrow in any given year.

    What about interest? Should consumers who save be paid a rate of interest and consumers who borrow be charged a rate of interest? And if so, what should this rate of interest be? Notice that whatever rate of interest is chosen can have no effect on the division of production between investment goods and consumption goods since that is determined by the investment planning process. So all that the rate of interest does is re-distribute income among consumers. Society does not require a high rate of interest to stimulate investment. The simple choice is to make the rate of interest zero. In this case the answer to your question is that nobody could increase their consumption rights over time by saving—saving is simple deferral. However, one could also make an argument for setting the rate of interest equal to the expected rate of increase in overall economic well-being per capita. In this case an individual could increase her total consumption rights by using less of them early in life since saving earns deferral plus interest. However, this in no way increases her expected income in future years since that is determined every year according to whatever sacrifices or effort she makes when working. In sum, even if a frugal Calvinist saved a great deal of her consumption rights during the first 20 years of her work life, and even if her savings were not merely deferred but were paid a rate of interest, and therefore grew "exponentially," all she would be able to do is consume more in her later years. I suppose she could also retire earlier than others. If those who borrowed early in life were charged interest it would simply reduce the amount they could consume later in life more than it would have had the rate of interest been zero.

    Shalom: When a particular workplace is inefficient and must be disbanded, you say (p. 110) that the annual produc¬tion plan provides for full employment, so there will be jobs for these workers in more successful worker councils. You add that "their expected income working elsewhere should be as high, or higher than it was in the coun¬cil that was disbanded." I don't understand this. If they're working at the same effort level as they were before, why won't their incomes always be exactly the same?

    Hahnel: Because a participatory economy is a planned economy there will be jobs for everyone in the workforce in the annual plan every year. That is something no market economy can guarantee. That was what I meant when I said that there would always be new jobs for any workers who lose their jobs. If the participatory economy chooses to stipulate that the average effort rating in all worker councils must be the same, then you are correct that everyone's expected income remains the same when they move from one worker council to another. On the other hand, if the participatory economy decides to set the average effort rating in a worker council equal to the council's SB/SC ratio, then workers' expected income is equal to the council's SB/SC ratio. The planning procedure will generally shift resources—in this case workers—from workplaces with lower SB/SC ratios to ones with higher ratios. This is what I meant when I said that laid off workers might even expect their incomes to rise from their change in employment.

    Shalom: You say (p. 111): "In a participatory economy new worker councils bid for the -resources they need to get started in the participatory planning process. If they submit a proposal that is accepted, they're good to go. Otherwise not." Is there any preference given to existing worker councils? That is, if the demand for widgets is being precisely met and a new worker council proposes to make widgets (more efficiently, they claim), will their proposal be accepted, replacing an existing worker council? Imagine if every worker in the US today were under constant threat of being replaced by a marginally more effective worker. Fear of disruption and sabotage might prevent this, but in a participatory economy shouldn't there be a certain deference paid to continuity?

    Hahnel: These are matters that people living and working in a participatory economy would have to decide for themselves. After all, whatever any of us write about these choices today is nothing more than a recommendation based on some argument. You have presented the case for a preference for existing worker councils over new entrants. On the other hand, discriminating against new entrants too severely, even if it means that some existing worker councils must shed employees, or be shut down altogether, could be a recipe for discouraging productive innovation. In chapter 15 practical issues regarding the birth and death of worker councils are briefly discussed. I argued there that industry federations who monitor changes in industry production would have to review applications from new groups of workers who want to enter an industry to make sure that they are "credible" in any case. That would be the appropriate place for applying "scrutiny."

    Shalom: When discussing the challenges of doing long-term investment and development planning, you point out the problem of not having accurate data on opportunity and social costs for the future. In a footnote you comment that:

    "This is not a problem unique to participatory planning. Authoritarian planning and market systems face the same dilemma but in effect, simply pretend the problem does not exist. Nobody knows what future costs and prices will be. So people look at present costs and prices, and make adjustments using more or less complicated forecasting methodologies. But in the end these are simply more or less accurate guesses." [p. 116n1]

    But how do you reply to the following pro-market argument? In a market system, no one knows the future and therefore everyone just has to make guesses. But the system rewards those who make the best guesses over time, so the system selects for good guessers, making them the ones most likely to make guesses in the future. Apple has gotten amazingly rich making good guesses. So the market has enabled them (rather than, say, the maker of the Edsel) to make future guesses.

    Hahnel: I was referring to a particular area—investment and long-term development planning—where there was a particular problem: estimates of social rates of return will involve more guesswork than estimating opportunity costs during participatory annual planning. But in this situation why can't WE, THE PEOPLE, when WE engage in OUR long-term investment and development planning, keep track of who among the experts who advise us regarding estimates of social rates of return prove to be more prescient and who prove to be less so? And why can't WE take their track records into account when we evaluate their opinions? I know the present system rewards failure at high levels with promotions more often than not, but WE needn't do so.

    More generally, your question has to do with the proper role for expertise and whether ordinary people can make wise decisions, or whether we are better off allowing some "superior" elite to make our decisions for us. I argue in chapter 11 that there is a role for expertise in a participatory economy. But that role is to advise about the predictable consequences of different choices when those predictions are complicated and require expertise we cannot all have. Once WE have heard expert opinion—including dissenting opinions among experts—I believe WE, THE PEOPLE, not only have the right to make our own decisions, but WE are the best "experts" to judge how WE feel about the consequences experts can help us estimate.

    Besides, as you point out, in capitalism there have been Edsels as well as Apples. In other words, we can look at the track record of the captains of industry—and more importantly the admirals of finance these days—and ask how well they have done making decisions for us. I think more and more of us are realizing that the track record of our ruling capitalist elites is checkered, to say the least. Have the Wizards of Wall Street channeled the savings of the world into investments that make our economies more productive and sustainable, or instead steered savings into one destructive asset bubble after another over the past 30 years?

    Shalom: In discussing who is affected by some environmental pollutant, your examples (pp. 124-26) are essentially concentric circles. When just the innermost circle, Ward 2 of Washington DC, is affected, you say let the Ward 2 council consider the cost-benefit trade-offs. If the next circle, all of Washington DC, is affected, then you say let the Washington DC council consider the trade-offs. And if it's the next circle, the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed region, that is affected, then you say let the Chesapeake Bay council decide. But what if the pollution affects just Ward 2 and Ward 3? There's no separate federation for those two wards alone. But if the Washington DC council makes the decision, most of those voting are not affected. In other words, the impact of a pollutant need not coincide with the boundaries of a federation. So doesn't it seem that some means is needed for allowing two ward-level councils to make a decision that does not affect all the other wards (and not just for environmental issues)?

    Hahnel: You are correct. In an article under review at the Eastern Economic Journal, "Wanted: A Pollution Damage Revealing Mechanism," I treat this issue at greater length. There I argue that it will be necessary to determine what I call the "community of affected parties" (CAP) for different pollutants. I explain why these CAPs may not always coincide with neighborhood consumer councils and federations, which is inconvenient. And I point out that we should not expect the definition of CAPs to always be easy. Which of many possible concentric circles is the most appropriate for each pollutant may be contentious for exactly the reason you point out. I conclude:

    "Since membership in a CAP entitles one to extra consumption rights people might well claim to be adversely affected and deserve membership in a CAP even though they are not. This means the process of defining CAPs—deciding who should, and who should not be included—must be carefully monitored. It might even be necessary to create a formal 'judicial' system for settling disputes over membership in CAPs. Presumably expert testimony of scientists and medical personnel would be relevant, along with testimony on the part of individuals petitioning for membership, as well as testimony from current members contesting their claims."

    Shalom: Apart from the concentric circle issue, the procedures you describe for dealing with environmental questions seem to have a further problem. You seem to assume (pp. 124-26) that everyone is either affected by a pollutant or not, but no consideration is given to different degrees of being affected. So if a pollutant affects only Ward 2, they decide alone. But if there's the slightest effect as well on other Washington DC wards, then all the wards together get to decide even though residents of Ward 2 are overwhelmingly more affected. Moreover, the residents of the other wards who are just barely affected have an incentive to allow the pollution (since they get a boost in their consumption allowance, the same boost as the folks in Ward 2 who are gravely affected).

    Hahnel: Again, you are correct. However, in this case it turns out there are better remedies: Again, quoting at greater length from the same article:

    "Even after membership is settled, might there not be a perverse incentive for members of a CAP to exaggerate the degree to which they are adversely affected by a pollutant? This depends on how CAPs decide to distribute their extra consumption rights among members. If extra consumption takes the form of more collective consumption of some kind by CAP members there is no incentive for individual members to exaggerate damages. Or, if extra individual consumption rights are distributed equally to all members of a CAP, there is no incentive for anyone to exaggerate damages. Only if a CAP tried to distribute more individual consumption rights to members who were presumed to be more adversely affected is it possible that individuals would seek to take advantage by exaggerating their damages. Conventional wisdom in public economics long held that there was no way around this perverse incentive to 'report untruthfully.' However, path breaking work by Clark, Groves, Ledyard and others in the 1970s revealed that, surprisingly, this turns out not to be the case. The key is to break the link between an individual's reported damage and how much she receives by using a formula to assign compensation based not on her own declared damages, but instead on the damages reported by others in the CAP. For example, an individual's payment could be set equal to the average payment minus the sum total damages reported by all others in the CAP. In this way: (1) An individual cannot affect the size of her own payment by her own reported damages because her reported damages do not appear in the formula for calculating her compensation. (2) By misreporting damages an individual would only cause the total amount of emissions to deviate farther from what she would truly prefer. (3) Yet an individual reporting more damages than others would receive a higher payment since what is subtracted for her is lower than what is subtracted for others since what is subtracted for others includes her higher damages; while an individual reporting less damages than others would receive a lower payment since what is subtracted in her case is higher than what is subtracted for others since what is subtracted for others includes her lower damages. In any case, a CAP that wished to award more consumption rights to members who are more damaged could avoid creating perverse incentive to exaggerate claims by using any of a half dozen incentive compatible mechanisms now available."

    Shalom: You say (p. 127) that councils and federations have incentives to truthfully reveal the extent to which they are damaged by pollution. By why isn't there an incentive to overstate pollution damage? When you know others want to pollute because they will benefit from it, it is in your interest to exaggerate the degree to which you are harmed by the pollution because you will be compensated for it.

    Hahnel: Again, you have a point. It turns out that if CAPs have enough information about the demand for permission to pollute and if CAPs behave strategically we may end up with sub-optimal levels of pollution. But while economists are likely to rue this "inefficiency" environmentalists may well feel otherwise! Again, quoting from the same article:

    "If both enterprises asking for rights to emit pollutants and communities of affected parties granting emission rights behave as 'price takers' in the participatory planning procedure—as all worker and consumer councils, federations, and CAPs are directed to do when submitting proposals during the participatory planning process—neither will misrepresent how they are affected by emissions and the procedure will settle on the efficient level of emissions. So the issue reduces to whether or not either polluters or CAPs are likely to violate the directive to treat indicative prices quoted during a round of the planning procedure as 'parametric,' and if so, what the consequences would be. In most cases there will be many different enterprises asking to emit a pollutant in an area, none of which is likely to have information about how much the members of the CAP supplying the emission rights are truly affected. So not only would polluters lack information about the supply curve for emission rights necessary for strategic maneuvering, their status as one among many seeking emission rights would prevent them from taking advantage of any such information even if they had it, unless they were able to form a 'polluters cartel.' On the other hand, in a participatory economy there is a single supplier of emission rights for any pollutant—the community of affected parties. If a CAP knew what the aggregate demand curve for emission rights looked like, instead of treating the indicative price quoted by the IFB as a given it might be tempted to behave like a monopolist in a market where the monopolist knows the market demand curve. In this case the CAP would supply fewer emission rights than are socially optimal to gain what is traditionally called 'monopoly profits,' even though this means the loss of some of what is traditionally called 'producer surplus' due to failure to grant permission to emit additional units for which the CAP would have been paid more than the damage they caused its members. Therefore, if a CAP is willing to ignore the directive to behave as a price taker, and if a CAP knows what the aggregate demand for emission rights looks like, a CAP might restrict emissions below the optimal level. While this would be undesirable, one must admit that at least it would be an interesting new problem to contend with—an economic system with a potential tendency to pollute too little."

    Shalom: There is a lot of philosophical debate about what we owe to future generations and, as you discuss (pp. 129-31), this is an issue in a participatory economy as in any other. What do you think about giving extra votes to those with minor children? (Note that when we apportion representation in the United States today, it is based on population—not voting age population—even though the representation is put into the hands only of those of voting age.) Might this be a reasonable approximation to a method for factoring in the concerns of future generations? (Each person would be counted only once, and we would be counting only those actually alive, not the as-yet unborn future generations. In a participatory economy, parents already submit consumption requests for themselves and their children—at least in nuclearish households.) This might also be a neat way to deal with the current problem in some towns, where whenever there's a vote on a school budget, those with school-age kids are more likely to be in favor than are those without, and when the latter are numerous, the school budget is often rejected.

    Hahnel: While true that those with school age children are often more likely to vote "yes" on school bond referenda than the childless, no political system that I am aware of has decided to give some people more votes than others on this issue. Of course that doesn't mean we should not do so. After all, if we went according to custom very little proposed in the vision of a participatory economy would be done! On the other hand, why not give grandparents more votes as well? Perhaps on environmental issues we should give every person as many votes as they have children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren in grand total—although that would be a lot of votes for some of us who are now closer to the end than the beginning of our own lives. Instead of suggesting giving people a different number of votes what I pointed out is that this potential problem demonstrates that there remains a role for committed environmentalists and environmental organizations in participatory economies, precisely to speak up, like the Lorax, for the interests of future generations and the natural environment itself—shaming their peers should they be tempted to behave selfishly when the living deliberate democratically. The difference is that in a participatory economy the information that reveals intergenerational injustice is right in front of people when they make long run investment, development, and environmental plans.

    I would like to thank you and New Politics for this opportunity to further explore how we can best organize our economic affairs once we have shed the albatross of capitalism that hangs ever more heavily around our necks. In some cases I feel there are very sound answers to questions you pose. In other cases my answers are more tentative. Hopefully, if not us, our children and grandchildren will have the opportunity to find out what does truly work best.

    Note

    1To be more exact, they are credited for production that is accepted as meeting specification. Consumers who find products faulty return them to consumer federations. If the consumer federation agrees with the consumer it refuses to credit the producer for the delivery. Through its industry federation a worker council can protest this decision if it wishes, leaving the matter to be settled between the industry and consumer federations.