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Michael Lebowitz Tries to Tackle "Real Socialism"—And Misses
Michael A. Lebowitz. The Contradictions of "Real Socialism": The Conductor and the Conducted. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012. 222 pp., $15.95

Initially, I was very enthused at the chance to read and review Michael A. Lebowitz's Contradictions of "Real Socialism," expecting to find an incisive analysis of how and why the countries of "real socialism"—those heir to the Bolshevik legacy, no matter how distorted, developed after the October Revolution of 1917—failed as they did, ending their reigns of "socialism" with either the restoration of capitalism itself, as in the former USSR and Eastern Europe; or the triumph of capitalist institutions and investments within the building of what survived as "socialism," as in China and Vietnam.[1] Unfortunately, I was to be disappointed: despite salient elements within Lebowitz's analysis, in which he tries to analyze this "real socialism" as a socio-economic system with fundamental characteristics and contradictions the way Marx had analyzed capitalism as a system in Capital, he's departed crucially from the historicity of Marx by creating an economic model of "real socialism" that is ahistorical and schematic. Thus, Contradictions of "Real Socialism" lacks the richness of both historical context and specific referents found not only in Capital, which can be seen as developing a general schematic of capitalism, but certainly in the historical writings of Marx, in which this schematic is provocatively enhanced, expounded and qualified through rich and detailed expositions of the actual working-out of events.

     Lebowitz does too much and too little at the same time—as he himself explains in his "Preface," numerous elements and investigations he wished to include in this volume would have to wait for later books; so that, in Contradictions, he's left us instead an ahistorical bare-bones model of "real socialism" that confines itself only to relations between workers, managers and economic planners as they were within the aggregate factory workplaces—omitting the macroeconomics of this "real socialism" nationwide, and leaving out all consideration of the way political decisions made by the leaders of "vanguard Marxist," i.e., Marxist-Leninist, parties impacted the economic actors. He also confines his consideration to the palpable repression that existed in "real socialist" societies to the way workers' initiatives were frustrated on the factory floor, and how workers were channeled into specific modes of working—leaving out entirely the subjugation of the arts, culture and literature to Marxist-Leninist Party norms; all discussion of political repression; and the role of gender and nationality in framing economic and political decisions, decision-making, and access to political and economic power. He leaves us, then, with only a detailed economic model of one part of the system of "real socialism," the microeconomic workings of individual enterprises, and the social relationships between planners, managers and workers as they develop in the course of enterprise performance. All else has been abstracted out of consideration by this partial model which Lebowitz considers the essential, systemic whole.

     Lebowitz justifies this ahistorical schematism on p. 10, where he writes:

"To select and blame a different element from the combination that made up Real Socialism—for example, underdeveloped capitalism, the lack of world revolution, short men with moustaches? That can be an entertaining parlor game but in the absence of a careful consideration of precisely how various elements within Real Socialism were interconnected and interacted to make up that whole, can we really understand its fate? Which were inherent, indeed necessary, aspects and which were contingent, merely historical elements? [Emphasis in original.]"

While Lebowitz has a point here, he ignores the way in which these "contingent, merely historical elements" shaped and defined the "inherent, indeed necessary, aspects" that came to be "real socialism" as we understand it. Especially as, for the sake of his analysis developed in Contradictions, he takes as his referent for "real socialism" the system in existence in the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1950 through its collapse in 1989-1991, a system that by 1950 already had its "inherent, even necessary, aspects" firmly in place as they had been put there by a "short man with moustache" and, before that, by two men with goatees, whose "contingent, merely historical" political leadership of "real socialism" in the USSR established that system, dictated what it would be and would not, and proclaimed it as the model of socialism in practice to Marxists worldwide. Many of the "inherent" elements which Lebowitz scathingly criticizes—the inequality, the power of managers, the tussles between managers and planners, the bonuses for achieving or exceeding production goals—were those that had won out after "contingent" battles over policy in the top echelons of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. While Lebowitz has a point when, in his model, he notes, emphasizes and develops the similarities, the parallels, between the "real socialism" of the USSR and the "real socialism" of the various countries of Eastern Europe (without specifically referencing them by name), he fails to note that there were also differences and departures; jus as, historically, there were similarities and parallels in the capitalism of England, France and Germany, there were differences and departures as well—not insignificant in how different social systems both within "real socialism" and capitalism specifically developed.

     Yet Lebowitz's model is definitely not without merit. His model clearly defines and delineates the social roles played by three distinct strata within the economic system of "real socialism" whose interests were often antagonistic, but which the system required be brought into equilibrium: the planners, who set production goals with the aim of increasing quantity of output, and often arbitrarily; the plant managers, who had the most to gain materially through lowered goals, which could be met more easily and thus the managers rewarded with bonuses for meeting or exceeding production; and the workers themselves, the most powerless of the three strata, who, despite their formal "ownership" of the means of production, were the least able to change the production goals and the conditions of the workplace. Thus did the system resemble a Hobbesian "war of all against all," pitting planners against managers, and both against workers, who embodied under this system of "real socialism" a concrete manifestation of alienated labor that could only resist the ukases of planners and managers indirectly. For developing the details of the workings of his model, Lebowitz relies heavily on the works of Janos Kornai, a Hungarian economist under "real socialism" who first wanted to reform the system in place, but later emigrated to the United States and became a neoliberal. With extensive help from Kornai's writings, Lebowitz develops this truncated system in detail, and shows the various interactions and direct thwarting of other actors' efforts when they crossed the narrow material interests of one of the actors, but confines all this to only looking very deeply at one aspect, as noted above—the economic battle as played out on the factory floor.

     While pointedly noting that all three of these strata were supposed to be in "harmony" by the mythology of official Marxism-Leninism, and thus appropriately all members of the same Marxist-Leninist party, this membership subsumed and hid not only the antagonisms within these three strata, but also obscured and hid the real loci of power, which essentially lay with the managers against both the planners (who were often only able to plan in a formalistic sense) and the workers themselves. But the weakness of this model, as noted above also, is its ignoring the role of the political leaders of the party, who more often than not decided the economic goals to be achieved, whether economically feasible or not, and told the economic specialists what they were to do and not to do. As Lebowitz notes acidly from the beginning, indeed makes the centerpiece of his analysis of "real socialism" as a system, the result was a system plagued with chronic shortages and hoarding at all levels, for "real socialism" was, at bottom, economically very inefficient. Yet Lebowitz, a retired professor of economics, limits himself to a sociological analysis and never discusses the economic problems of inefficiency—of misallocation of resources, of periods of stagnation in the production of goods followed by frenzied speedup and overtime as the deadline for meeting production goals approached, the bureaucratic nature of the planning mechanism itself, and the sacrifice of quality in order to achieve quantity. Lebowitz's analysis could've definitely benefitted here from the study of two basic works on what went wrong with the "real socialist" system, Irwin Silber's Socialism: What Went Wrong? (Pluto Press, 1994) and David Schweickart's analysis of the Soviet planning system in Against Capitalism (Cambridge University press, 1993), where he pointedly notes (p. 87), following Alec Nove, that some 50,000 industrial enterprises produced 12 million identifiably different products, where the information required for planning such production would tax even an optimally efficient planning mechanism.

     At fault in all this, Lebowitz argues, is the notion of "vanguard Marxism," which is, of course, classical Bolshevik-legacy Marxism-Leninism, although he doesn't say so; and the solution, for Lebowitz, is a socialism that embodies genuine workers' democracy and the participation in the decision-making process. Here he follows many an argument presented by the workers' councilist and anarchist critics of Bolshevism. Certainly this is to be preferred to the authoritarian, hierarchical brand of socialism that came to be called "real socialism" or "already-existing socialism." Yet, in his paean to workers' democracy one can't help but wonder if Lebowitz isn't romanticizing workers, and that somehow collective ownership of the means of production coupled with workers' participatory democracy isn't the automatic panacea Lebowitz assumes it to be. For him, in the last part of the book, where he discusses the virtues shown by workers both under capitalism and "real socialism," Lebowitz seems ready to see workers qua workers as embodiments of St. Francis of Assisi; yet even the best of human beings can be very flawed at times, can let down and be let down by the ordinary vicissitudes of life.

     Isn't it better to follow Eugene Debs on this when he states, "Socialism will not make men good, but it will make them better"? While we can certainly applaud Lebowitz's conception of socialism as an efficacious means to make ordinary workers (which actually embodies far more than just factory hands) "rich human beings," as Lebowitz puts it several places, wouldn't it be far better for the cause of socialism not to aim for such empyrean goals, but settle for a slower pace embodied in settling for less than maximal social transformation, but achieving concrete, but more limited, results that make people's lives demonstrably, measurably better? Haven't we socialists done a disservice to socialism itself by expecting too much of it? With the result that "real socialism" is what came to be, what got accepted and rationalized as socialism; and we socialists are stuck with its unfortunate, too often unpalatable, legacy—which itself becomes an obstacle, for achieving a humane 21st Century socialism.

Note
1. In referencing certain counties as (or having been) "socialist," as well as in using the terms "Marxist-Leninist" and "Bolshevik legacy," I am using them in their colloquial senses, and not distinguishing between Stalinist and non-Stalinist conceptions of the terms.
This review is dedicated to my academic advisor in economics at Indiana University-Bloomington, Scott Gordon, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics and History and Philosophy of Science, now 88: excellent and accomplished scholar, encouraging friend and supporter who pushes me to do my best consistently, and self-professed "man of the left."

George Fish is a socialist writer and poet in Indianapolis who has published extensively in the left and alternative presses, and is a regular contributor to New Politics. He is also a Lenny Bruce/George Carlin-style satirical stand-up comic and a precariously employed temp worker. He can be contacted at georgefish666@yahoo.com.
November 19, 2012
Communism Confronts the Mexican Revolution

Daniela Spenser. Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico: The Early Years of the Communist International. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011. Translated by Peter Gellert. 205 pages. Notes. Index.

Daniela Spenser, the accomplished Mexican historian, has produced an assiduously researched, meticulously detailed, and very nicely written account of the early years of Communism in the Mexican Revolution (1918 to 1922, with a less detailed epilogue carrying events up to 1929). She argues that the Bolshevik international revolutionary project and the Communist International had only a sketchy understanding of Mexico and thus failed to grasp the powerful impact of the country’s revolution. That fundamental problem was complicated by the fact that the Mexican Communist party was founded principally by foreigners who themselves did not have a profound knowledge of Mexican society and politics. Other problems included the relative isolation of the foreign Communist International agents sent to foment revolution in Mexico, as well as the early party’s lack of resources. Her principal point is that the experience of the Mexican Revolution and the achievement of the Constitution of 1917 gave Mexican workers an investment in the new revolutionary state with which the Communists could not compete in the early years. In the excellent translation by Peter Gellert, the book is a fascinating read.

It’s a little irregular to review a friend’s book, so I should inform readers of this journal, that in 1995 when I arrived in Mexico with a Fulbright fellowship to study a group of American war resisters who had been among the founders of Mexican communism, my host institution, the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropolgía Social (the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Antrhopolgy or CIESAS), assigned me to work with Daniela Spenser who was also doing research on Mexican Communism. We shared documents, I offering her copies of documents in English that I had from the Library of Congress, the U.S. Military Intelligence Division, and the U.S. Bureau of Investigation, while she gave me copies of documents from the Russian archives, principally in English or Spanish. Daniela also shared with me her knowledge of the various Mexican archives in which I was working. Her assistance helped me with the research for what became my Ph.D. dissertation “‘Slackers’: American war resisters and Communists in Mexico, 1917-1927” (1998). We became friends, though sometimes over the years we argued about our somewhat differing interpretations of the Bolsheviks, the Communist International, and the Mexican revolution. In the end, I think our views have converged, probably because she has convinced me and I have moved in her direction. I might also confess that the translator, Peter Gellert, is a friend with whom my wife and I had shared an apartment in the 1980s and whom I had introduced to Daniela.

Daniela’s research during those years resulted in her fine book, The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia and the United States in the 1920s, based on her Ph.D. dissertation earned at the University of North Carolina, as well as many scholarly articles and most recently Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico. She has also written a book on the history of the Mexican Communist Party during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40), available only in Spanish; its title translates as Unity at All Costs: the Third International during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (Unidad a toda costa: la Tercera Internacional en México durante la presidencia de Lázaro Cárdenas, 2007).

Daniela brings to her scholarship a unique personal history. Born in Czechoslovakia, her parents fled the country in 1968 at the time of the Soviet invasion that crushed the democratic aspirations of the Prague Spring. Her father, a radio broadcaster, and her mother, a high level interpreter, fled to England where Daniela studied at the university. As a young adult, she same to the United States and went to Florida where she worked for a while in hotels as a waitress. She once said to me, “I saw that I didn’t like American capitalism much better than I liked Soviet Communism.”

Looking for an alternative to the two, Daniela turned to the developing world. She moved to Mexico’s most southern state, Chiapas, where she worked first with coffee coops and later with the Mexican government’s state-owned coffee company, becoming an authority on coffee who years later was sometimes called upon as a consultant. In the 1980s, she moved to Mexico City and became a researcher at CIESAS where one of her early books was a history of the Socialist Party of Chiapas (El Partido Socialista Chiapaneco: rescate y reconstrucción de su historia, 1988).

In Stumbling, Daniela narrates the history of the early Communist Party in Mexico through a series of short biographies, first of the foreign founders—American Charles Francis Phillips, the Indian M.N. Roy, and the Russian Mikhail Borodin—and then of the Communist International’s agents in Mexico—Louis Fraina and Sen Katayama. The biographies and the narration are set within both the history of the Communist International and within the economic, social and political history of Mexico. All of this is grounded in Daniela’s command of primary sources in Spanish, English, and Russian from Mexican, American and Soviet archives as well as a mastery of the vast secondary literature on Communism.

Daniela’s conclusion is that the Bolshevik’s early projection of world revolution as a uniform prescription for country’s around the world disoriented would-be Communist revolutionaries in Mexico who did not grasp the significance of the profound revolutionary experience and the achievements codified in the Constitution of 1917. Later, the Communist International agents Fraina and Katayama, proved incapable of grasping the complexity of the agrarian movements and the labor movement before the International ended that phase of its attempt to establish a Communist party in Mexico. In the Epilogue, Daniela discusses the International’s Bolshevization of the Communist parties, including the Mexican Communists, and their alternating strategy of first attempting to permeate the agencies of the government of Plutarco Elías Calles and then becoming involved in schemes to overthrow it. All of the early attempts to found a Communist Party bore little fruit, and only after Joseph Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union and in the International was a Communist Party successfully installed in Mexico, though that was an altogether different thing than what had been envisioned by the Communists of the teens and early twenties.

A few of the handful of early Mexican Communists no doubt had the idea of creating an independent revolutionary socialist movement. The power of the Mexican revolution and the more distant power of the Soviet revolution made that impossible. By the late-1920s, not only the Communists, but also the more deeply rooted and larger anarchist labor movement had also been effectively suppressed. Other social movements were coopted, often after their leaders had been assassinated. By 1929 Calles had founded a state party and during 1930s Lázaro Cárdenas brought the peasant, labor and popular sectors into the state party which somewhat later was named the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Not until the late 1960s would there again be an independent left movement in the country, but then that too would submerge itself in the late 1980s into the Party of the Democratic Revolution founded by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. It seems that every time Mexico succeeds in creating an independent left movement, either the moth flies into the fire, or the flames flicker and catch the moth.

While beginners in the study of Mexican Communism will still want to start with Barry Carr’s Marxism & Communism in Twentieth Century Mexico (1992), anyone who wants more detailed information and a more profound and updated understanding of the early years will turn to Daniela’s Stumbling.

November 12, 2012
Workers' Control: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation

Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini. Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011. 443 pages. Notes. Bibliography, Index. Paperback $19.

Virtually every crisis of modern capitalism from the late nineteenth century to today has been accompanied by workers’ strikes, insurgencies and sometimes revolutions in which workers have taken over and run their workplaces. Workers took control of their factories through their strike committees, factory committees, and workers councils. Sometimes they did so in collaboration with a working class political party that was also fighting to create a workers’ government, at other times they saw their workplace committees themselves as the government. Always workers fought the capitalist class of financiers, industrialists, and merchants, and sometimes they struggled with a socialist government or against a dictatorial communist state. Sometimes the experiments in workers’ control, hamstrung by capitalist or state bureaucracies, were strangled in red tape and buried in government decrees. At other times, often in the most important cases, they were crushed by bloody counter-revolution. Almost always briefly, workers showed that they had the capacity not only to work, but also to manage a factory, and sometimes even to administer an industry. In the course of these all too brief experiments in workers’ control, they showed how an entire society might be run differently, for the benefit of all and not only for the wealth and power of a few.

Now, in the first comprehensive volume since the nearly forty year-old Workers’ Control: A Reader on Labor and Social Change, edited by Gerry Hunnius, G. David Garson, and John Case (Vintage, 1973), Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini have produced Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present, a collection of essays by 23 authors describing a wide variety of these experiences of workers’ control from a remarkable number of countries: France, England, Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Poland, Indonesia, Algeria, Argentina, Portugal, India, Venezuela, Brazil, Canada and the United States. In all of these countries between 1870 and 2010 we see efforts by workers to run everything from industry and agriculture to government offices and public services. When workers in the face of a crisis—economic collapse, war, or revolution—find themselves forced to reorganize production, they often also make it both more efficient and more humane, as well as more gratifying because they have taken ownership and control of the workplace. All of the essays provide fascinating accounts of workers’ struggles for control while dealing with the particular historical realities of their time.

There are too many different experiences here to review them all, but we might mention a few: In David Mandel’s essay “The Factory Committee Movement in the Russian Revolution,” we see workers take control of their factories under capitalism, then play a part in a socialist revolution, and finally deal with the centralization of power by the newly founded Soviet State. In Andy Dugan’s essay “Workers’ Democracy in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1937,” dealing with the period of the civil war and the struggle between Francisco Franco’s fascist Falange and the Spanish Republic, we see the anarchist workers of Catalonia decreeing and managing collective property under workers’ control, as they face opposition not only from the capitalists but also from the Spanish Republican government. Jafar Suryomenggolo’s essay “Workers’ Control in Java, Indonesia, 1945-46,” shows how the workers’ control that emerged during the independence revolution against Japan and then the Netherlands became stifled by the new nationalist state. Samuel J. Southgate’s essay “From Workers’ Self-Management to State Bureaucratic Control: Autogestion in Algeria,” presents a similar account of developments there following the Algerian revolution.

Today, as workers and those on the left are attempting both to create a new labor movement and a new conception of socialism, these essays challenge us to think about the complicated relationships between workers’ rebellions, labor unions, workplace organization, political parties, and the state. These essays suggest that meaningful change will have to come from below, from democratic movements of working people in their workplaces, and that a fight for a democratic socialist society will have to be one that forces unions, parties and a genuinely democratic government to express the needs and desires of those working people. Sheila Cohen, author of one of the four introductory essays, hers titled “The Red Mole: Workers’ Councils as a Means of Revolutionary Transformation,” argues, as her title says, that the most important thing about all of these experiences is that they were the first step, the partial expression, the beginning of a revolutionary transformation. When workers begin to control their workplaces, the experiences recounted in this book suggest, it is also possible that working people might control the society and transform the government to create a truly human society.

Manny Ness has generously donated copies of this book to the UE Research and Education Fund in order to support the cross-border work of the United Electrical Workers (UE) and Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT). For each tax deductible contribution of $25.00 or more, UEREF will send you a copy of this book. To make a contribution, click here.

Thanks for your solidarity!

November 8, 2012
Pleased by the election results?

In following commentary on Obama’s victory, I’ve been struck by the extent to which fear has driven people’s votes. Response to Obama’s re-election has been a sigh of relief (that we have been spared a Republican reign of terror) or an intensification of the fear felt (and drummed up) on the Right about our enduring four more years of a socialist president (I wish!) bent on destroying the country. Sarah Palin’s interview describing her disbelief at Obama’s victory was typical. What’s revealing about her incredulity is that it shows how much she and the Right believe their own propaganda, how captive they are to their own ideology. Some of my facebook friends, mostly education activists fight the neoliberal “deforms” of privatization of schools, deprofessionalization of teaching, and tacher union-busting are savoring this victory. Others are more ambivalent, questioning what Obama’s re-election means for teachers and students in the nation’s public schools. As I watched coverage of the Obama headquarters party, I thought about how the Chicago teachers who were at the Obama victory party felt, knowing that they had been striking against a vicous Mayor who was his former chief of staff, against he policies Obama’s administration has made its hallmark.A UK comrade summed up my own response: “I guess we must be pleased that Romney wasn’t elected even if we aren’t particularly pleased that Obama was – is that right?” Obama’s victory means continuation of policies that do harm. School reform, neoliberal syle – rather than a robust job creation program – will be made the chief instrument to end poverty. Charter schools, which end democratic control of school systems, will be pressed as a panacea for improving educational inequality. Standardized testing will allow corporations to control what is taught and how students and teachers are measured. So, take that sigh of relief that Romney has lost and enjoy the victory – but don’t make the same mistake Sarah Palin does. We need to recognize that neoliberalism has done an effective job of frightening people that there is no alternative for them or their children other than the educational program Obama/Duncan have advanced. Our job in the next four years is to show them that we have another vision and will fight for it. Yes, against our opponents in both parties, including the President just elected.

November 7, 2012
Interview with Socialist Alternative Candidate Kshama Sawant

Andrew Sernatinger: I’m speaking today with Kshama Sawant, a socialist running for a seat in the Washington State House of Representatives against Democrat Frank Chopp, presently the House Speaker. Kshama is a lecturer in economics at Seattle University and Seattle Central Community College, and is a member of Socialist Alternative. Kshama, thanks for speaking with me today.

Kshama Sawant: Thank you for having me.

AS: I wanted to do this interview because there are so few left electoral campaigns in the US, and when they happen I think they’re worth our attention and some examination. If it’s alright with you, I’d like to start at the beginning. Why did you decide to run for the Washington State Legislature, and what politically motivates this campaign?

KS: I think at the outset I should say that as a socialist and an activist in Socialist Alternative, we have a slightly different approach to elections or any other campaign for that matter. I don’t unilaterally decide that I want to run for office, rather the decision is about whether to run an election campaign as socialists or not, and then the people who are in the organization democratically decide who should be the candidate. I think that’s important to mention in itself because it demonstrates what vision we have for a future society: where genuine democracy, meaning genuine rights to make decisions that affect peoples’ lives, is at the center.

And as far as why we decided to run this campaign, I think our observation about political events in recent events is the answer. We live in very changed times since the last year. We’ve seen the Arab Spring, the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions, the Wisconsin uprising of the public sector, and the Occupy Movement. And in the United States the Occupy Movement really was a watershed event and it broke the silence on some things that people had been thinking about but had not been able to express. Meaning the deep economic inequality, the outrage at how the rapacious and greedy banks who caused the financial collapse were the ones getting bailed out while there were massive budget cuts to education and social services, enormous levels of foreclosures of ordinary people who had lost their jobs. So there is a lot of latent anger in American society and Occupy really crystallized that and brought it to the surface.

Our campaign is inspired by our involvement in Occupy, and we thought that the time was right for the Left to run candidates. In fact, I would say that many more candidates on the left should have run in this election year. I hope that in the coming years there will be a confluence of bigger movements of young people and older people and disabled and workers along with grassroots campaigns.

AS: Why did you decide to run for State office? Is there any reason in particular or it just happened to be something that was available?

KS: Primarily it was based upon where we could run a strong campaign, but it’s also a very interesting phenomenon that’s happening here. We’re running against Frank Chopp, who is the Speaker of the House and the most powerful legislator in Olympia [the capitol of Washington]. He has been in the Legislature for seventeen years and the speaker for ten years. Our campaign is raising critical points, not only about him but also of the entire Democratic Party. Statewide what we’re seeing is brutal attacks against funding for education and healthcare and other social programs, including disability.

It’s an interesting state because the Democratic Party has been in the majority for years, in both the House and Senate. They also have had the Governor’s Mansion for years. What we’ve seen is not what you might expect with liberal or progressive policies, but actually Washington State happens to have the most regressive tax system in the entire nation. The state also happens to be the home of major multinational corporations like Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks and so on, which pay historically low taxes on their profits.

We thought this was an especially striking situation where we have a phenomenally wealthy state where basic needs of people are not being satisfied. We hear this rhetoric over and over from the Democrats that, “we’re trying to save education and healthcare but we can’t because we need to balance the budget and this is the only thing we can cut.” But that is a blatant lie because they could be raising taxes on corporations and the super wealthy. One fact I’ll quickly mention is that the Seattle metropolitan area has the tenth largest concentration of super-wealthy people, households who have at least $30 million.

Our campaign is calling for full funding of free, good quality education, single-payer healthcare and high-quality public transit. We know that all this can be funded if we had political representation in Olympia that could boldly and courageously argue for taxing corporations and the super wealthy.

AS: To clarify, you’re running as the Socialist Alternative candidate in Washington. Is Socialist Alternative a party in Washington or how does that work?

KS: We are primarily an activist organization, but for the purposes of this campaign we are running as a party. I am running as the Socialist Alternative candidate and that’s what shows up on the ballot.

AS: You made reference earlier to the Occupy movement. How does your campaign relate to Occupy, and does what remains of Occupy see your campaign favorably and support your initiatives?

KS: Our campaign relates to Occupy in the sense that we are running this campaign in an era after Occupy has happened. There is a political space now where people are sick and tired of being silenced and accepting the status quo. That changed political atmosphere and consciousness is very much an outcome of this year of movements, which Occupy has been a part of. That has very much to do with why this campaign has been so successful already.

I would say that for a first campaign running on a shoe-string budget, running openly as socialists this has already been a trail-blazing campaign. We were written in by a community campaign into this position against Frank Chopp. We won 10% of the votes against Frank Chopp where we were not on the ballot but people wrote us in. I think that is a very strong indicator of how the political mood has shifted since Occupy. It gives an indication of the times to come.

AS: You were talking earlier about running on a shoe-string budget. The numbers your website give suggest you have about a tenth of the budget of your opponent, where you have roughly $16,000. How have you been able to organize your campaign to be so successful to get into the primary and then to where you are now?

KS: Right, I think that it really is a testament not only to the commitment and energy that our campaign team and all our volunteers have brought in, which I have to say is incredibly humbling and amazing, but its also reflecting the hunger that people are feeling for alternatives. I have myself tabled, been out on the street handing out leaflets and talking to people in the district and outside the district about our campaign. Overwhelmingly people have been supportive of the campaign precisely because they have had enough. They’re tired of not having options.

You can see that not only in our state race, and there’s no Republican running in our race. But nationally, if you see the enthusiasm that progressive voters had for Obama in 2008 versus what they have now, it’s a night and day difference. In 2008, women, youth, people of color went out in historic numbers to vote for Obama, but now a lot more people are probably going to stay home. Jill Stein’s campaign has gained some visibility. It shows that while people might end up voting for Democrats, its not the same as it was four years ago. Most people are just holding their nose and voting Democrat because they at least want to vote for the lesser evil. But in reality what they would like is a real alternative, a real campaign which in a genuine way represents the interest of ordinary people.

A very important aspect of why our campaign is striking a chord with people in the district and nationally is that we are very clear about where we stand. We’re not taking any corporate donations; we do not want to be beholden to corporations. We have no interest in making lucrative careers for ourselves. We want this campaign to serve as a rallying point for bigger movements, for bigger electoral campaigns next year. We’re talking about running a slate of candidates on the left for Seattle city council, and maybe even the Mayoral race if possible.

I think that actually not having corporate funding is helping us make a connection with people, because most people are angry that the control that corporations have on the political agenda. Its extremely refreshing for people to see a campaign that is gaining some ground that is being very principled about that.

AS: You were saying earlier that you’re running as an explicitly pro-worker candidate. How has organized labor and other parts of the left responded to your campaign?

KS: That’s a very interesting question because it contains some of the heart of what needs to change in the United States in order to have movements of the working class succeed. As far as endorsements are concerned, we’ve been endorsed by a local of the Communication Workers of America, Wash-Tech, and we are endorsed by a group of workers called the Organized Workers for Labor Solidarity.

But the reality is that even though many rank and file workers may be angry about the situation and want a change, the bigger reality of the labor movement in the past thirty years is that the labor leadership is tied at the hip to the Democratic Party. Labor unions bring out tens of thousands of foot soldiers for the Democratic Party to campaign for them; they give them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unquestioningly. Unchallengingly. Uncritically.

That is precisely why labor is getting battered. All the gains that ordinary people have made, that the working class has made has all happened because people went out in the streets and put pressure on the Democratic Party. You didn’t get that by giving the Democratic Party money and not asking them any questions.

AS: Earlier you said that your campaign is premised off of the idea that there is both an opening and a need for left, pro-worker candidates in this political moment. How do you respond to those like Bruce Ramsay, the Seattle Times columnist who wrote, “If the Democrats had tried to push through a hard left agenda, they probably would have quickly lost their majority.”

KS: Bruce Ramsay is probably a more right-wing libertarian, but whether he intended to or not he actually has presented a very insightful point. The reality is that there are some well-meaning people in the Democratic Party who truly want to carry out a progressive agenda, but this is what happens: if you belong to a party whose elite is in bed with corporations, then you cannot actually carry out an agenda that is in favor of ordinary people or the working class.

What the Democratic Party does, and this is classic of their role, is they play lip service to the working class but then their policymaking is primarily, or sometimes almost entirely, skewed in favor of big business. So its true, if Frank Chopp were to wake up tomorrow and call a press conference to say, “I’m going to fight for single payer healthcare. I’m going to fight for fully funded public education because I know it can be done, and I’m going to tax Boeing and Microsoft,” what would happen is that he would become a hero for ordinary people but he would be punished by his corporate masters. As long as he’s serving his corporate masters, he’s not going to be able to do that.

AS: One of the interesting things about this campaign is that it’s just between a Democrat, Frank Chopp, and yourself as the socialist candidate, which eliminates charges that you could “spoil” the election and hand it to the Republicans. What are our thoughts on the significance of this and what do you think are the broader implications of the race?

KS: I think that not having a Republican in the race makes it easier for people who are worried about the so-called “spoilers”. But to be honest, if a Republican was running in the race we wouldn’t let that stop us. This whole logic of lesser-evilism leads us nowhere. The logic is that sometimes the Democrats may appear a little bit to the left of Republicans, but you know conservative economics and capitalists always talk about “incentives”. Think about the incentive structure for the Democrats: if you’re going to vote for them no matter what they do, then they have no incentive to shape up and do something for you, which is where the pressure from mass movements comes in.

When a campaign like ours runs, whether a Republican is running or not, it provides us an opportunity to clarify that circular logic. Yes, there is no Republican in our race so if you’re a progressive you should freely vote for us. But, also realize the politics of fear is not the answer and its never going to be the answer.

AS: Do you feel like in your campaign specifically that the absence of a Republican has made people more attracted to your campaign who otherwise might be afraid of the “spoiler” issue?

KS: It’s hard to say because the district is a very progressive district and both the Democrats running in this district, Jamie Peterson and Frank Chopp, are both well to the right of many of the views of this district. This is a district that loves its public transit, very pro-progressive policies on homelessness and education. The district includes two of the biggest state institutions, Seattle Central Community College and the University of Washington-Seattle, both of which have seen ridiculous amounts of tuitions increases and loss of funding.

So it would be difficult for me to predict, but I would say that even if a Republican were running, just looking at the statistics from past races Republicans don’t usually get much of a foothold in this district. I would venture to say that even if a Republican were running we’d still be striking quite a chord.

AS: At the end of September you actually did get to have a direct debate with your opponent, Frank Chopp. I thought it was a little bit unusual that a major party candidate agreed to the debate. Can you talk about how that went and what you thought the outcome was?

KS: We did have debate; it was organized by the Socialist Alternative student club at Seattle University. They invited both me and Frank Chopp to the debate. Interestingly, Mr. Chopp assumed at first that it was going to be a tame forum: there wouldn’t be a real debate and both candidates would just state their campaigns and having a very nicey-nice dialog.

When he was sent the program for the debate he was livid and he actually called one of the student members and chewed her out. We didn’t hide the fact that we’re Socialist Alternative, so it seems inconceivable that we would invite you and not have you debate our candidate. But he did come and I thought he did pretty well. I thought the debate was a really excellent opportunity for us to have a serious discussion of the political discussion between the Democrats and our campaign. (It’s on YouTube for anyone to watch.)

Something that I wasn’t anticipating was that he has never actually had any response for why such massive cuts have been necessary for ordinary people. It’s really illuminating to have an actual challenge to that kind of framework. We can say, “No, we reject that choice. It’s a false choice. What we really need is full funding and cutting most of the funding and leaving the crumbs for us is not what I’d call saving [services].”

In every subsequent debate he talks less like a canned politician and is trying to sound more like an activist. Simply having a genuine working class representation in opposition is forcing him to alter the language he’s presenting because he can see that people are rallying around our message. I think people should recognize that itself as a victory for this campaign. Understand that this is what puts pressure on Democrats. Not voting for Dems unchallengingly every four years, but challenging them because then they’re forced to do something about it. If we keep up this pressure, we can win actually material gains for the working class. We can win an increasing minimum wage, we could win single payer healthcare.

AS: Most people don’t realize that Washington State has among the most regressive tax structures in the country. Washington has no income tax and politicians often claim that they need to maintain a tangle of tax exemptions to keep the multinational corporations the states houses—earlier you mentioned Boeing and Amazon and the like. How has your campaign addressed this?

KS: Just to give you some background, in 2010 in the midterm elections there was a ballot measure, “1098” that was going to be a tax on high incomes. It failed. If you look at what happened in the run-up to the 2010 elections, when 1098 was first introduced it had two-thirds supporting it. What happened in the run-up to the general elections was that the right wing went on an all-out assault on the bill. They did an unbelievable media blitz.

It was directed to ordinary, working class people and they said, “if you vote for this measure, then in another couple of years the taxes will come to you and not just on the wealthy.” If you look at the facts, this was completely untrue, but do you know why most people ended up voting against 1098?

One reason was that the Democrats never counted that assault from the right wing. The Democrats are more powerful than the Republicans in this state, and they could have done their own media blitz. They could have knocked on doors. They could have been shouting from the rooftops that that was a lie and that 1098 would be good for the people. They didn’t do anything for it! I don’t remember seeing a single Democratic legislator when we were pounding the pavement for 1098.

The second reason people voted against it is that virtually every time the Democrats have passed a revenue increase, it has been regressive. They tax things like soda, candy, gasoline and cigarettes, which affect the poorest people the most. So it was not a stretch of the imagination for people to believe that if they passed this, eventually the taxes would come on their shoulders.

If you really want to fight for a progressive tax, then you have to take on corporate interests in a real way, not in a lip service way.

AS: How can people support your campaign if they want to?

KS: The first thing I would urge everyone to do is go to our website. Votesawant.org We would really appreciate financial contributions and other kinds of contributions: we need people with creative skills and ideas about how we can effectively use the last two weeks. We also want people to send us their views. If they really like our campaigns, we want to hear from them. Just get in touch with us and we’ll write back to you. If you want to know more about socialism I really invite you to have discussions with us.

At this point I’d really stress that we need financial contributions. We have a shoe-string budget and we’re making it go as far as it can go, but we have to face the fact that we need resources to print leaflets, to have yard signs, to allow people to take time off work so that they can work on our campaign.

AS: Is there anything else you’d like to say before we go?

KS: I hope that people draw a lot of inspiration and energy from how this campaign has gone. Most important of all, people should have conversations with others and spark that whole discussion and debate about what needs to happen. What we need very urgently in America is not just a huge movement, but many huge movements. The only solution to this is a revolt. You realize the latent power of the working class, we are the 99% they are the 1%. There are so many more of us and the only thing holding us back is our fear.

AS: Thanks so much for speaking with me, Kshama.

KS: Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew Sernatinger is an independent journalist based in Madison, Wisconsin.

November 3, 2012
Self Immolation and The Left: The Greens Do It Again!

Even in the age of extreme reality television, nationally broadcasted suicides remain a blessedly rare occurrence. And so the suicide which occurred during a Huffington Post sponsored debate on third party voting probably should have received more attention that it did.

The act in question was that of Green Party campaign manager Ben Manski who, objecting to condescending and impertinent remarks from the moderator and other participants, stalked off the set, leaving the floor to Matt Stoller, an anti Obama former Democratic Party operative by no means favorable to the Greens, conventional Democratic Party hack Emily Hauser, and, mainly, to Daniel Ellsberg who was recommending a vote for a Obama in swing states.

This should be described as a suicide because in objective political terms it was precisely that. It is, after all, the job of a campaign manager is to acquire votes for his candidate from whatever quarters they are forthcoming. What seems to have been lost on Manski was, first of all, that Ellsberg, while voicing some strategic reservations, had, in fact, stated that he would vote for Manski's candidate Jill Stein in his home state of California.

Second, much more important than this retail political calculus is that, as a few seconds' thought will reveal, the wholesale logic of Ellsberg's position was overwhelmingly in favor of Stein. For the other side of the coin of strategic voting recommended by Ellsberg and others is an explicit endorsement for Stein in the great majority of instances, namely in safe states.

Should progressives actually listen to Ellsberg (and other influential leftists such as Noam Chomsky and Jeff Cohen), Stein could be assured of millions of votes in undisputed states such as New York, California and Illinois. Or in states such as Texas, where Romney is a sure winner, a small percentage but large aggregate numbers of votes would go Stein's way. The result could be the Green Party achieving the holy grail of 5% qualifying them for $20 million in federal election funds, potentially helping them to establish themselves as a viable, and not merely symbolic alternative.

But rather than trumpeting Ellsberg's endorsement, Manski and Stoller chose to ignore it by focussing on the divisive and comparatively insignificant question of whether swing state voters should deliberately "send a message" to Obama by increasing Romney's chances to win. Stoller went further, doubting whether a Romney victory should be a cause for any particular concern, as there are areas where Obama may turn out to be worse. Regardless of the merits of this position, it is necessarily a speculative one, as no one can predict with any certainty how Romney or Obama will govern.

What is certain is that the votes to be gained in swing states are far fewer than those available to the Greens in safe states. Should the Greens capture these and achieve their 5%, this could, combined with serious organizing at the municipal level, constitute the seeds of an actual left alternative to the Democrats. The development of an electoral wing of the now dormant but hopefully reviving protest movement, much as has Syriza in Greece, would constitute a serious threat to the neo-liberal regime-much more so than the defeat or one of its two hand-picked candidates in a national election.

Finally, Manski could have pointed out that an explicit endorsement of a Green represents a significant concession for many among the left agenda setting media. Neither Ellsberg nor Chomsky, has, to my knowledge directly endorsed voting for a third party presidential candidate, even in the typically highly qualified and unenthusiastic form in which Chomsky couched his support for Stein this year. For Cohen, who, in a recent interview on the Real News network, defined strategic voting as voting for Obama in contested states and for Stein everywhere else, this was a much bigger step. A founding member of the Progressive Democrats of America, Cohen had both in name and deed, committed himself to reforming the Democratic Party as the only possible vehicle for progressive change. The change of allegiance to the non-partisan "Roots Action" is indicative that the Democrats can no longer count on this contingent for its critical, but effectively largely unconditional support in the past.

It is the catastrophe of the Obama administration which has led to this fracture and it is likely to be among the first of many cracks in Democratic Party edifice which has imprisoned within it leftists, and worse, stunted the left imagination for generations. The best hope of the left is to continue to allow the Democratic Party to undermine its own foundation as the Obama administration turns on and consumes its most loyal supporters-those whom the President's good friend and chief of staff charmingly referred to as "fucking retards."

At the same time, for it to pick up the pieces left by the near total delegitimation of the existing party system, the left needs to be ready with a serious, unified and viable political party capable of competing for and exercising state power .

By contemptuously rejecting Ellsberg's safe states proposal Ben Manski, and others who adopt his suicidal posture, are flushing many thousands of votes down the toilet, and in so doing, have shown they are not interested in joining the battle.

Until they recognize that seriously competing for state power is necessary to achieve it, the left will surely remain in the hole which, as this anecdotes shows, it has, to a significant extent, dug for itself.

JOHN HALLE is Director of Studies in Music Theory and Practice at Bard College.

October 28, 2012
Lessons of the American Revolutionary Left of the 1970s

Book review of: Michael Staudenmaier. Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986. Oakland: AK Press, 2012. Bibliography, index. 387 pages. Paperback, $19.95.

Michael Staudenmaier’s Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, recently published by the radical AK Press, is a thoroughly engaging critical history of one of the most interesting revolutionary socialist groups that emerged from the radical upsurge of the 1960s and 1970s. While Staudenmaier clearly admires STO, many of whose members he knew and several of whom were his friends, this is far from being a hagiographic work. The author presents the group with all its foibles, it many frustrations and its ultimate failures, without ever letting us forget that what he admires about this group was its attempt to develop socialist theory while also being deeply committed to organizing and struggle. It is not surprising that this book is being widely read by many of the new non-state socialist groups such as Advance the Struggle and the Black Orchid Collective that have arisen out of the social movements of the last decade and become visible through their work in the Occupy movement, for today they are striving to establish a theory and practice just as STO did—and just as many other groups from a full range of left perspectives did—in the 1970s. While there are now a pile of books about the party-building efforts of the 1960s and 70s, Staudenmaier’s is the most interesting one I’ve encountered.[1]

Perhaps I like this book so much in part because I lived in Chicago in the 1970s and knew a few of the STO members and always liked them. I was a member of the International Socialists (IS) and some of our members worked in the International Harvester tractor plant with some STO members and our two groups often collaborated, and sometimes differed, on workplace and community issues that arose there. Though STO formed part of the New Communist Movement and the IS had come out of the Trotskyist tradition, our groups overlapped in many of our political positions and in our work. We shared not only labor and community organizing experiences, but also found ourselves over the years involved in the same movements for international solidarity with the initial revolution in Iran in 1979 and with the Central American national liberation movements of the 1980s, and we shared preoccupations with the issues of African American struggles for civil rights and social justice and women’s fights for equality and liberation. Like STO, we in the IS wrestled with the problems that arise in a political organization from young people’s passionate personal relationships, with the issue of parenting and childcare, with the problems of leadership “heavies” who often seemed to make decisions without adequate consultation with the ranks. I think that anyone who was active in the left of the 1970s in almost any group would recognize themselves in parts of the STO story, and that new groups arising today will profit from Staudenmaier’s thoughtful examination of STO’s history.

STO’s Theory

The Sojourner Truth Organization was founded in Chicago in 1969 and Chicago remained its headquarters throughout its history, though in the 1970s and 80s the name was also applied to a network of organizations in cities mostly in the Midwest affiliated with and largely led by STO in Chicago. Several initial founders, who remained its leaders throughout most of its history, came out of Communist Party backgrounds. Don Hamerquist had been an outstanding young leader of the Communist Party who some believed would succeed its longtime chairman Gus Hall, but after attempting “to lead a coup in the party” and failing, he quit. Noel Ignatin (later known as Noel Ignatiev) had also been a Communist, but had left the CP with Ted Allen and Harry Haywood to found the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (the POC). Carol Travis was the daughter of Bud Travis, a Communist Party leader in the seizure and occupation of the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, by autoworkers in the strike of 1936-37. Many of the STO founders had also been members of Students for a Democratic Society (sds) and one had been a member of the Black Panthers. While STO formed part of the New Communist Movement, largely made up of Maoist organizations, it was from early on influenced by C.L.R. James who had come out of the Trotskyist tradition. Then too, Ken Lawrence had come out of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) experience, and brought the syndicalist idea into the group. Though its initial founding core had one African American and one Latina woman, both soon left the group and throughout most of its history STO was an all white organization.

What STO’s founding members had in common was a desire to build what they understood to be a Leninist organization based on independent workplace organizing and a belief that to do so they would have to challenge the racism of white workers. The notion of the importance of organizing workers had its roots in Marx and Lenin, but it had taken on a new sense of urgency and possibility as a result of the May-June strike in Paris in 1968, the “hot autumn” of strikes in Italy in 1969, and the massive strike wave in the United States in 1970. Unlike other groups in the New Communist Movement, the International Socialists, the Maoist “parties,” and other groups that had gone into the workplace to build rank-and-file or reform caucuses within the unions, STO argued that it was necessary to build completely “independent workers’ organizations” that would not be part of unions and would not contest to control union structures and offices. The theory of independent workers’ organizations (or workers councils as they were sometimes called), principally crafted by Don Hamerquist, was one of the two distinctive theoretical and strategic ideas developed by STO.

The other idea that STO developed and popularized was “white skin privilege,” a theory first suggested by Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen (not an STO member) in a paper called “The White Blindspot” originally written for a debate in sds in 1967. (Actually Allen had used the term in 1965 in a piece commemorating John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry; the kernel of the idea came from W.E.B. DuBois Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880.) White supremacy, they argued, was largely founded on white skin privilege, a set of real social and material benefits that accrued to those deemed to be white, from preferential treatment by government and police to first hired and last fired in the workplace. White skin privilege was seen as the principal obstacle to unity between black and white workers. STO argued that in the course of labor and social struggles, whites would have to repudiate their white skin privileges and show support for the struggles of African Americans and Latinos, and that by doing so, unity between white workers and workers of color would make possible a united proletarian struggle to overthrow capitalism.

Hamerquist, who helped to develop these theories about white workers’ racism and about the nature of the union, brought in the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci whose then recently translated Prison Notebooks used the concept of “hegemony” rather than simply the state’s monopoly of force to explain bourgeois rule. (Gramsci later became enormously popular among leaders of the more social democratic New Left, who used his concept of hegemony and the “war of position” rather than a “war of maneuver” to justify their turn to the Democratic Party. And, of course, Gramsci became enormously popular in academia where his writings were used for cultural studies rather than cultural or social revolution.) Hamerquist argued that bourgeois hegemony was exercised over the working class through the labor bureaucracy and through white racism. He developed the concept of “dual consciousness” (not to be confused with W.E.B. DuBois’ use of that term), meaning that workers tended to have in their minds a bourgeois and a proletarian consciousness, and the job of revolutionaries was to help them in strengthening their proletarian consciousness. (In the political tradition from which I come, we never had such a Manichaean notion of workers’ consciousness, but tended to recognize that most people of whatever class have a “mixed consciousness”—our minds made up of residues of beliefs and concepts from our family, religious training, grammar school education, the world of teenage peers, the bombardment from commercial advertising, and politicians appeals to patriotism—the challenge being to come to think clearly about the world—Marxism helps—so that they can make intelligent choices for a revolutionary alternative.)

While independent workers’ organizations and white skin privilege were the two key ideas that distinguished the STO from other left organizations, during the 1970s and into the 1980s, the group also developed other positions that differentiated it from the New Communist milieu out of which it had come. During the 1970s Hamerquist and Ignatin wrote important documents breaking with Stalinism: they repudiated Stalin, they rejected the notion that Khrushchev or his successors had reformed the Soviet Union, and they rejected the idea that China or Cuba were socialist states, arguing that all were state capitalist. No doubt the influence of C.L.R. James had been important in leading them to this conclusion. They also rejected the Stalinist forms of party organization, arguing that most of what the left called Leninism were actually undemocratic structures and practices that would better be called Stalinism.

Finally, STO had throughout its history a very healthy concern about the relationship between a cadre organization or a political tendency attempting to build a revolutionary party and the movements, usually small but sometimes mass movements, in which it worked. Later in the 1970s and early 80s, STO would characterize this question between what we call in my tradition the issue of “party and class” as the issue of “autonomy.” This notion of autonomy is perhaps what Staudenmaier values most in the STO experience, though as he would be the first to admit, nowhere did the group succeed in either adequately explaining the theory or in working it out in practice. Autonomy was for STO, as it has been the other groups on the left, a slippery concept expressing the high ideal of freedom of thought and action for a social group, but constantly entangled in the questions of organizational structure, leadership, and program.

Workplace Organizing

Staudenmaier provides a useful chronology of the STO’s activities: from 1969-1975, workplace organizing; from 1976-1980, anti-imperialist solidarity; from 1980-1986, tendency building and direct action. During the first period of workplace organizing, STO grew to fifty members in the Chicago area, many of those members engaged in organizing in factories in Chicago and for a while in steel mills in Gary, Indiana. In those workplaces STO often put out factory bulletins with names like Talk Back and Breakout! as well as its newspaper Insurgent Worker. STO, and the several lawyers in the group, also became involved in assisting workers in plants where it did not have members. While STO was sometimes involved in heroic and inspiring struggles, as Staudenmaier’s account makes clear, the group’s labor organizing activities seldom led to the formation of stable groups in workplaces. In part this was due to STO’s refusal to run for union office—though it did sometimes tacitly support reform candidates in the unions.

Though many STO members were in unionized workplaces, the union was not an arena of struggle for the group and consequently it could not turn its workplace struggles into institutional victories that might have changed the character of the unions. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that in many of the larger workplaces in Chicago, such as the Stewart-Warner plant, STO was only one of several left groups—from the Communist Party to the New American Movement from Maoists to Trotskyists—that had organizers in the plant, often with their own bulletins and newspaper. STO’s refusal to permit its members to run for office led to splits in the organization, as several of its best organizers, such as its leaders of the Latino caucus at the International Harvester plant, left the organization. Nowhere did STO succeed in creating the independent workers’ organization which stood at the center of its political theory.

All of the revolutionary socialist groups on the left in the 1970s were attempting to build a revolutionary party out of their work in industrial workplaces. The STO experience might be compared to that of other leftist groups, mostly Maoists, that ran their members for election as union steward, built local union caucuses, and participated in broader union movements, such as Steelworkers Fight Back, a caucus that supported Ed Sadlowski’s campaign for president of the United Steel Workers (USW) in 1977. Local union and national campaigns gave activists an opportunity to talk not only about shop floor issues, but also about the large issues facing the union, the industry and the society. When workers found their shop floor work had an impact on union policy and relations to the employer, they achieved power, as well as a greater sense of their own power, and often also improved their wages, working conditions, and benefits. The most successful among the left organizations in such union work was IS, which was involved in initiating such caucuses in the United Auto Workers, the Communications Workers of America, as well as participating in such caucuses in the American Federation of Teachers and the USW. Most significant of these experiences was the IS’s role in establishing Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a long standing caucus in the Teamsters union.[2] The IS also initiated Labor Notes, the union reform newspaper and education center with biannual conventions that attracted a thousand union activists each year. While the IS initiated these projects, they were never conceived of as socialist projects and from the beginning were independent (autonomous) organizations with their own leadership, organization and resources, and programs. The collapse of the social movements of the 1970s (among African Americans, Latinos, women and students) and the end of the recent period of labor militancy with the recessions of 1974-75 and 1979-80, accompanied by the country’s rightwing administration under Ronald Reagan and depoliticization of the society, made the task of relating labor work to socialist ideas and organization a challenge for all of those on the left, with no simple answers.

Throughout that first five years of labor organizing, STO had constant interactions with African American and Latino workers and leftists, but its white skin privilege theory proved of little use in building alliances between white workers and workers of color, while STO could never decide if it should recruit people of color to its own organization, or urge them to join an African American or Latino socialist group. STO literature often challenged white workers to give up their white skin privilege and to support the demands of African American and Latino workers, but in practice it was not always clear what this would actually mean. Most other left groups viewed STO’s white skin privilege theory as liberal and moralistic; in any case, it proved no guide to action. Based on Staudenmaier’s account, African American and Latino organizations and leaders appear to have been mystified by STO’s theory and practice. The few African American workers who joined STO during this period left in the splits. By the mid-1970s, STO was reduced to six members.

Anti-Imperialist Work

In 1976 STO decided that the economic and political climate was at a “lull,” suggesting that workplace organizing would not be possible for some time. The group therefore should turn its attention to theory, education, and work in the anti-imperialist movements. (This is very similar to the notion of the “downturn” developed by Tony Cliff of the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain in 1978 and then the International Socialist Organization of the United States shortly afterwards.) So in 1977 Ken Lawrence developed the STO’s mandatory “Dialectics Course” with reading from Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Luckacs, C.L.R. James and Mark Twain (yes, that’s the same Mark Twain you’re thinking of). STO members would take a week off work and political activities to go out into the country for these sessions in which all members participated, first as students and then as instructors. The “Dialectics Course” helped to give the STO a reputation as one of the most intellectual and theoretical groups on the left.

Most of the group’s work at this time was in support for anti-imperialist struggles, particularly the struggle of Puerto Rico for independence. While STO worked at first with the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) a Marxist-Leninist party in Puerto Rico and the United States closely aligned with Cuba). STO eventually, however, became part of the National Liberation Movement (MLN), a collection of left groups that supported the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), a Puerto Rican group that set off 120 bombs in Chicago and New York between 1974 and 1983. STO members believed that they had to support the Puerto Ricans struggle against imperialism, including the armed struggle.

While STO sometimes differed with the FALN and other Puerto Rican groups, it would not make its political difference public because of the repression that the armed movement and other Puerto Rican organizations were facing. Consequently, STO’s own political positions became completely lost in its unconditional and apparently uncritical support of the MLN and FALN. Also, like some other left groups, STO took a position of support for the revolution in Iran, including initially backing the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who ultimately brought the rightwing Islamic dictatorship. Similarly, STO found itself becoming an unconditional and uncritical supporter of Central American revolutionary movements during the period of its participation in the solidarity groups such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). Throughout the years of this work, Staudenmaier explains, STO’s member worked frantically, rushing from one crisis to another, from one organization to another, until in the frenetic race from one emergency to another some in the group felt that they lost sight of their own identity and objectives.

Tendency Building and Direct Action

After five years of work in the anti-imperialist movements, STO changed its direction once again, this time to tendency building and an emphasis on direct action. STO had had a wealth of organizing experience, and despite being unable to point to many significant victories, its core ideas—independent workers’ organizations and white skin privilege—had become attractive to a number of organizations in cities in the Midwest and in some other areas of the country, most notably Denver, Colorado, and Portland, Oregon, though there was also an attempt at organizing in Mississippi. Led by STO, these local collectives now put their energies into the anti-war movement that had developed against Ronald Reagan’s wars in Central America and into the new anti-nuclear movement led by the Clamshell Alliance. STO was attracted to these movements because of their commitment to direct action, though appalled by their pacifism and opposition to violence, and frustrated by the middle class, white composition of the movements.

The attempt to build a national tendency eventually failed for several reasons. Since its founding in 1969 STO had been plagued by what Staudenmaier calls “informal hierarchies,” that is, a small group of the original founders—Hamerquist, Ignatin, Travis, and Lawrence, and a couple of others—dominated the group whether or not they held formal office. They tended to develop the positions, write the documents, maintain contacts with local and national organizations, and determine the course of the group. STO failed throughout its history to establish democratic structures and processes and that both undermined its own functioning and proved an obstacle to establishing a national tendency. Then too, STO’s core theoretical concepts—independent workers’ organizations and white skin privilege—seemed to be unrelated to the group’s work in the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements in the 1980s, work which had little to do with the workplace or with winning white workers from their racism. Finally, demography was a real factor: many of the group’s members were aging, a few were parents with responsibilities for their children, and others, having left the industrial workplace, were moving on to other careers. (Ignatin, for example, born in 1940, turned 45 in 1985, and left the group a year before it died.) While STO had been interested in building an international tendency in the 1980s together with the autonomia groups in Italy and Germany, the debilitation of its own based in the United States made this impossible.

After STO withered away in 1986, several of its leaders went on to have interesting jobs and professions in other areas. Carole Travis, breaking with STO’s historic opposition to taking union office, became the president of United Auto Workers Local 719 at the GM Electromotive plant, serving three terms (nine years), and later went on to work for the Service Employees International Union as Director of the Illinois State Council for thirteen years. Most recently she participated in the Occupy movement in both Zuccotti Park and Oakland. Michael Goldfield became a professor of labor history at Wayne State University in Detroit focusing his research on workers’ movements and labor, and in particular on the failure of the labor unions to organize the South. Noel Ignatin became a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, best known for his book How the Irish Became White and for his journal Race Traitor. The Sojourner Truth Organization’s survivors and successors have put its digital archives on the net, with as complete a collection as possible of its journals, newspaper, and pamphlets. Many of the former STO members retain their revolutionary socialist worldview and continue to contribute to movements as they have in some cases for fifty years.

The Lessons of the Experience

Sojourner Truth Organization represented only one of dozens of groups and involved only hundreds of the thousands of leftists who in the period between the late 1960s and 1980s were involved in attempts to build revolutionary organizations. American economic and political power, police repression, and the difficulties of developing a political theory and practice appropriate to the United States led all of those efforts to fail. In 1979-1981 most of the Maoist groups collapsed; the Socialist Workers Party, the largest Trotskyist group, after a belated and brief attempt at entering industry and the unions, evolved into a Castroite sect; the International Socialists split three ways between 1978 and 1979, and the New American Movement majority gave up its revolutionary vocation and merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) to form the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA). The STO suffered the common fate that befell what we can call the Generation of 1968.

After one has finished reading Staudenmaier’s book three points stand out in my mind. First, STO never succeeded in developing the democratic structures and processes necessary for an effective political organization. Second, STO’s two core theories—white skin privilege and independent workers’ organizations—never proved a guide to action. They did not accurately describe the nature of workers’ movements in the labor unions with their particular relationship to capital, nor did they adequately capture the nature of American racism in such a way as to guide the work of activists. Third, STO’s healthy concern about the autonomy of mass movements, workers’ organizations, and the struggles of African Americans and Latinos never emerged as a clear theory of any sort. While it always considered itself Leninist, STO never succeeded in describing the relationship between a revolutionary organization and the way it should relate to the movements in which it operates.

What lay behind the STO’s white skin privilege and union abstention theories? I suspect that STO’s theories were rooted in their attempts to grapple with the strengths and weaknesses of the Communist Party out of which either they or their parents had come. The white skin privilege theory expressed their profound frustration with the widespread racism of white workers—which had become so palpable South and North during the Civil Rights movement and the War in Vietnam—and which proved so obdurate. The Communists—despite the remarkable work they had done (not without its serious problems created by the vicissitudes of the Stalinist era, but better than everyone else’s), despite their often brilliant and courageous African American cadres, and despite their remarkable and also courageous white fighters against racism—had not been able to turn the corner on the issue in a big way on a national scale—organizing the South being the big unfinished job as Goldfield has pointed out—though they did a remarkable job in various places in the CIO period. The race problem in America is just so terrible and so intractable. And then, of course, the Communists Party had by the late 1930s become tied to a strategy of trying to ally with or to penetrate the union bureaucracy, a policy which had further distorted its own Stalinist politics. So STO leaders like Hamerquist, Ignatin, and Travis attempted to think their way out of these problems by developing critical theories of white racism and the nature of the labor bureaucracy, which is to their credit. But in the end, those two theories, this self-definition, failed to serve as a guide to action and also became so important to the group’s sense of its unique identity, that theory formed a barrier to practice, that is, to mass work, recruitment, and ultimately to the group’s survival.

Notes

[1] Others include: Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (New York: Verso, 2002); A. Belden Field, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York: Praeger, 1988); Fred Ho et al., Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America (AK Press, 2000); Milton Fisk, Socialism from Below in the United States: The Origins of the International Socialist Organization. Fisk’s book is really a history of the International Socialists (IS) up to the founding of the ISO. There are also many memoirs of revolutionary activists of the period now available.

[2] Dan La Botz, “The Tumultuous Teamsters of the 1970s,” in Aaron Brenner et al., eds., Rank and File Rebellion: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below during the Long 1970s (New York: Verso, 2010). See also Dan La Botz, Rank and File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (New York: Verso, 1990).

October 13, 2012
Film Review: “The Master”

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film “The Master,” starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Laura Dern, might alternatively have been titled “Masters and Followers,” for the movie is as much about his followers as it is about the character of the master, Lancaster Dodd (played by Hoffman).

Promotional Poster for The Master

The film is an exploration of what the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel called “the master-slave dialectic,” the relationship between the powerful and the powerless, between dominance and dependence. According to Rotten Tomatoes critics love this film (85%), general audiences not so much (63%), no doubt in part because the film's loose plot and unfulfilling conclusion fail to provide an adequate structure for the strong acting and brilliant cinematography. Anderson asks us to contemplate the patriarch-tribe, father-son, teacher-student, master-servant relationships, but also to ask whether or not in such a world as ours any sort of healthy, free and autonomous existence is possible, and what that would look like. The film’s attraction is its intellectual and moral challenge: can we live without masters?

     Freddie Quell (intensely portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix), a shell-shocked, broken-hearted, alcoholic, World War II Navy veteran and seaman, who in his post-traumatic state finds it hard to hold a job or establish a relationship with a woman, fleeing his accidental killing of a coworker, stows away on a ship that turns out to belong to Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a spiritual movement called The Cause. Dodd takes an immediate interest in Quell and through an intense psychoanalytic, confessional “processing” session leads his subject to face the fact of his broken heart. Master and servant bond, and even if the tie is not permanent—for Quell is one of those who would be free—the Master is powerful and for a while overpowering. (Trailer.)

The Master and the Cause

     Through the eyes of Quell, and the fabulous cinematography of Mihai Malaimare Jr., we learn about Dodd and the Cause, a transparent fictionalization of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, with the same mix of science and spiritualism, hypnotism and reincarnation, healing community and outright cult. When he first meets Dodd, Quell asks what he does, to which Dodd replies, “I do many, many things. I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher.” Dodd’s Cause, combining Christian perfectionism, Freudian psychoanalysis, spiritualism, and pseudo-science—just like Hubbard’s Scientology—proselytizes through a process of personal manipulation and intense brain-washing. (See here for a documentary with an interview of L. Ron Hubbard.)

Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd, The Master

    Hoffman as Dodd is appropriately magisterial, paternal, and pompous, while at the same time garrulous, intimate and sentimental, never a tyrant but rather the all-wise, all-powerful father beaming down on his tribe. Paul Thomas Anderson understands that the master of a cult is never simply a charlatan, but always as much self-deceived as he is deceptive, as monomaniacal as he is manipulative. In this case Hoffman’s young wife Peggy (Amy Adams)—a character in the story which apparently has no parallel in the life of L. Ron Hubbard—is the one person not under his control. She is his more opportunistic partner, the organizer of his household and entourage, and at times the driving force in his latest project.

The Nature of the Cult

     Set in the immediate post-war period, the film is also an examination of what author David Riesman, a sociologist of that era called The Lonely Crowd (1950) of modern American life with its “other-directed individuals” looking for meaning and direction usually from corporate advertising and their suburban neighbors. Those unsatisfied by the subdivisions and consumerism—the displaced and disoriented—sought direction and solace elsewhere. Dodd and the Cause, as suggested by the case of Quell, provide spiritual guidance and do social work for the lost, the broken, and the sick, while for the wealthy and well-off they provide meaning to those whose lives seem meaningless. Throughout the film as Dodd wanders from San Francisco to New York to Philadelphia, staying in the homes of the well-to-do, he conducts séances, gives lectures, and in general inspires his well off followers. In New York City, however, an argument with a critic and an altercation involving Quell lead to buyers’ remorse and Dodd is arrested and sued for bilking a foundation and practicing medicine without a license.

     All of this, of course, is in the nature of the cult: the enlightened guru, the inner circle of the cognoscenti, the mystical knowledge, the community of believers, good works or social welfare, the militant defenders of the faith, but also the financial shenanigans, the trouble with the law, the inevitable persecution and flight. And sometimes too there are martyrs. The cult speaks to those societies disrupted by modernization, to those individuals whose personal lives have been ruined by abuse, violence, divorce, untimely death, unemployment and eviction, or because they make up the downtrodden and the down-on-their-luck. The guru provides clarity to the confused, answers to the questioners, a destination to the seekers, and perhaps most important a community to the lonely, the alienated, and the desolate. In a world that for many is a spiritual vacuum, the guru and his cult provide a surfeit of the spirit. Dodd/Hoffman is the friendly face of the guru, the father, the guide.

     All of this is so familiar to us in the more usual religious way. We could be talking here about Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker of the Praise the Lord (PLT) Club, or anyone of dozens of Evangelical mega-church or television preachers. What’s different about Scientology or the Cause is the attempt to modernize the ancient spiritualism by combining it in some way with science or at least the aura of the scientific. We saw this at the beginning of the twentieth century when a split occurred in Madame Blavatsky’s purely spiritual Theosophist movement and Rudolf Steiner left to found the Anthroposophy movement, claiming to combine the spiritual and the scientific. Steiner too was a philosopher, scientist, and spiritual leader who blended Eastern religion and Christianity, subscribed to a kind of communitarianism, believed in reincarnation and called his Anthroposophy “the spiritual science.”

     It was the tendency of American Protestant Christianity of the Evangelical variety, and particularly the perfectionist strain within it, that led sociologist Howard P. Becker to coin the term “cult” in 1932. The cults Becker studied were the small churches constantly spun off from more mainstream Protestant faiths, resulting in myriad micro-sects each with its own unique theology. Led by charismatic preachers with mystical beliefs who created new variations of old rituals and practices, they proliferated throughout the American Bible Belt of the Lower Midwest and the South. Some of these Protestant preachers were simply hucksters retailing religion while others were conmen bilking the gullible and sometimes seducing the innocent. Fascination with that sort of cult led to Sinclair Lewis’ wonderful 1927 novel Elmer Gantry and the movie adaptation by the same title starring Burt Lancaster. Gantry portrayed by Lancaster says in the trailer, “Elmer Gantry is an all American boy. He’s interested in money, sex—and religion.” (See 1960 trailer.) We recognize that Gantry is kith if not kin of Dodd.

     While it is usually religion that spins off sects and cults as easily as the winds blow up dust devils on the prairies, politics can do so as well. Politics too has its cults. L. Ron Hubbard, who wanted one day to have his own kingdom, bears a striking resemblance to Lyndon LaRouche, the neo-fascist guru who also claims to know it all, from politics to economics to musical theory. While LaRouche represents the political cult on the far right, we also have Bob Avakian, perpetual chairman of the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party on the far left, the developer of what he calls a “New Theoretical Synthesis.” He takes pride in the cult of personality he has created around himself through the program actually called “Appreciation, Promotion and Popularization of Bob Avakian.”

Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell

     Sometimes the cult becomes transformed into more significant populist politics, as in the case of Huey Long, known as the Kingfish, the populist governor of and then senator from Louisiana. The master not as leader of a sect but as head of a political movement. Here we have the Evangelical preacher as radical demagogue and the search for meaning, security and community transformed into a political party organized around a personality. Robert Penn Warren’s powerful Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Kings’ Men, a fictionalization of Long’s career, was later made into a movie in 2006 starring Sean Penn as Willie Stark, the fictional Long. We see in this film another master who tells a younger man who works for him: “Boy, you work for me because I’m the way I am, and you’re the way you are, and that’s just an arrangement in the natural order of things.” (Trailer of All the Kings’ Men.)

     Toward the end of “The Master,” Quell has decided to leave The Cause and Dodd says to Quell, “Well, see if you can live without a master, for if you can, you will be the first human being in all of history to do so.” Dodd’s suggestion that we all live with masters is the film’s great question and challenge. Liberals and conservatives in our society claim to value the individual and his or her rights above all, yet we live in a society where for most the development of their individual abilities and personal fulfillment are not possible. The anarchists say “No God, No Master,” (“Master” in this case meaning boss) and “No Church, No State,” slogans that raise the idea of personal autonomy within the community of producers. Socialists envision a society organized around the idea that a society of abundance, collective ownership and democracy would allow the development and fulfillment of the individual. Yet socialist revolution has ended in the past in authoritarian states. The society without masters or servants remains a dream.

October 2, 2012
Movie Review: “Death by China,” a film by Peter Navarro

To call this feature-length film xenophobic, fear-mongering and hysterical almost understates the case. The whole thing is so over-the-top that, like a bad horror movie where you can see the strings moving the monster, it leaves us numbed and bored or perhaps laughing. Yet it’s not funny.

     “Death by China” opens with shoppers happily buying cheap Chinese products, turns to closed American factories, then to unemployed workers. Talking heads tell us that China, without workers’ rights or environmental controls, competes unfairly with American workers. The animation shows jobs rolling away to Chinese factories, as Chinese bombers, labeled “money manipulation” or “trade deficit,” bomb the American capitol repeatedly. Someone comments, “One day they’re going to own us.”

     China is shown as the conqueror of Tibet, as the persecutor of the Falun Gong (imprisoning its believers and harvesting their organs), and as the power behind Iran and Pakistan. Chinese products shown in graphic images threaten the lives and health of Americans, including poisoning American children, as well as killing American pets. Chinese pollution, dragged across the Pacific by a Chinese bomber, covers the United States with smog while dropping particulate matter. We see Chinese preparations for massive military buildup and the troops strutting and missiles rolling through Tiananmen Square, as an authority tell us that China “is the only country in the world preparing to kill Americans.” A Chinese knife stabs into the heart of a stars-and-stripes map of America, and the blood and life ooze out. (For a taste of this film, see the trailer.)

     While most of the incidents in the film are true, simply turning from one to another does not help us understand the situation any better. When the movie’s over, we don’t know more about China than most of us did when we went in, and in fact, its oversimplifications of the reality of China and its impact on the world would leave us knowing less, if we could have believed them.

     The film seems to be modeled on those 1950s anti-Communist films that mixed cartoons, historical footage and expert voices in the same way. In the end, the film may be so crude that it becomes almost comic, but the sentiments in it and the fears it plays to could lead to tragic consequences if its virulent nationalism were to take hold in the minds of anxious people and find expression in ambitious parties and politicians.

AFL-CIO Sponsors Showings

Who’s promoting this bizarre film with its crude cartoons and Cold War rhetoric? Organized labor. This month, in big cities and small towns throughout Ohio the AFL-CIO’s local labor councils are sponsoring a tour of Peter Navarro and showing of his feature length film “Death by China,” based on the premise that America’s central problem is an on-going and losing trade war with China, a conflict every bit as serious as a genuine military conflict. And failure to deal with trade policy now, Navarro suggests will almost inevitably lead to real military conflict in the not too distant future. America’s trade policy, the film argues, has permitted the Chinese to take over American markets, become America’s chief creditor, and undermine American security. Both at the opening and the end of the film there were brief statements that America’s enemy is the Chinese government, not the Chinese people, but those comments could not begin to temper the dominant message: that the Chinese nation threatens the American nation, and that we have to unite to stop them.

     Only in the last third of the film does Navarro begin to argue that the real problem is multinational corporations such as Cisco, Ford, Motorola, Intel, Apple, Boeing and GE that move their facilities to China to take advantage of low wages, lack of environmental controls, and China’s undervalued Yuan currency in order to reap enormous profits. These corporations and the National Association of Manufacturers, we are told, use their wealth to influence Congress and to shape America’s trade policies, taking their plants, technology, and jobs to China. But, we are told by Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO’s Policy Director and Chief Economist, corporations are supposed to make a profit: that’s their job. Our job is to get the government to force corporations to behave. To do so, it is suggested, we need a political movement that can force the government to change our trade policy. Various speakers also suggest that we might also need a movement to lead a boycott of Chinese goods.

     Navarro, an economics professor at the University of California at Irvine who has run and lost three times as a Democratic Party candidate in San Diego, calls his film non-partisan. Bill Clinton and both Bushes are castigated for their roles in bringing China into the World Trade Organization. Both Republicans and Democrats are featured in the film speaking out against China’s trade policies. Liberal activist actor Martin Sheen narrates the film. Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman from Youngstown, Ohio, who has introduced bipartisan legislation to stop China’s currency manipulation, is balanced by Dana Rohrabacher, an arch-conservative Republican congressman from California. Many of the talking heads come from the U.S. government’s U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and hold a variety of mostly conservative views. At the same time Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, is prominently featured at a couple of points in the film and policy director Thea Lee more frequently. And clearly the AFL-CIO sees the film as raising their issues, or they wouldn’t be promoting it.

     “My goal,” Navarro told the Cincinnati audience, “is to get this issue out there and to get both presidential candidates talking about it and promising to do something about it. If Mitt Romney and Barack Obama promise to deal with our China trade policy, then my job is done,” he told a mostly labor union audience at the Esquire Theater in Cincinnati. Navarro’s film hardly seemed necessary to do that, as both candidates have featured China trade policy in their campaign advertising. Some of those in the audience suggested that politicians will promise anything.

     If trade policy is the central point of the film, the maintenance and expansion of manufacturing is the film’s secondary theme. With multinational corporations as the villains, the heroes are small- and medium-sized business owners who the film argues are the country’s job creators. A number of small business owners, men and women, commented on the ways in which Chinese competition and U.S. trade policy had led to the failure or decline of their business, or left them wondering how they would be able to continue. There is the suggestion that this group, the small business class, would be the ones to lead the fight for the future. Business men and women are the heroes. And the workers?

What’s Missing?

Surprisingly for a film being promoted by the AFL-CIO, unions and workers hardly appear except as officials speaking up for policy changes or as workers being laid off. Unions nowhere appear as leading a social movement to fight the multinational corporations or government policies, nor are workers shown anywhere in the film in collective action. While there is from time to time talk of a need for a movement, we don’t see workers occupying the capitol building in Madison in 2011, and we don’t see the Occupy Wall Street movement that followed it. (Actually, a couple of the people in the film appear to have been interviewed at Occupy Wall Street, though the videography lifts them out of the occupation or demonstration, and Navarro carefully avoids mentioning the Occupy movement.) Demonstrations of real power that might lead to changes in policy are nowhere to be seen in this movie.

     Also missing are the Chinese workers. The film’s Cold War approach, where China is simply described as a Communist totalitarian country fails to take into account the profound political, economic and social changes of the last few decades. Most important it leaves out of the account altogether the enormous Chinese labor movement that has arisen in the last few years. Every year China sees tens of thousands of protests involving workers and peasants, and those struggles have led both to immediate relief in some cases and to structural reforms that have given workers slightly more leeway. (See Eli Friedman, “China in Revolt.”)

     Talking to the audience in the Esquire Theater after the film’s showing, Peter Navarro suggested that we in America need to get together and change trade policy. We need, he said, to be able to compete. The film’s goal is to build a fortress America that can resist the Chinese bombers. To bring together Democrats and Republicans, small business and labor to change U.S. trade policy. Nowhere is there a suggestion of the need for a struggle to defeat the multinational corporations or to deal with the capitalist system. China, not capitalism is the problem. That's a message that should make the multinational corporate executives and medium- and small-businesspeople sleep better. Though those Chinese bombers flying toward the capitol will steal the sleep from some.

September 20, 2012
NY Times Obituary for Michael Wreszin, New Politics contributor

In a surprisingly warm and positive obituary, the New York Times noted the death of Michael Wreszin in August of this year. The obit says of Wrezin’s writings, “His subjects were cosmopolitan, humanist thinkers who saw a growing militarism in American political culture but whose scrupulous habits of mind could make them misfits in the ideological camps they joined.” Mike Wreszin was a frequent contributor to New Politics. We miss him already.

September 17, 2012
Mexico: The PRI is Back, the Left In Disarray
The PRI is back—and the left is in disarray.

     Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) won the Mexican presidential election of 2012, with a plurality of 38 percent of the vote, returning to power the party that for 71 years ruled Mexico as a one-party state. His victory was largely a result of failures of out-going President Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party (PAN) who led the nation into a war with the drug cartels that took 60,000 lives, persecuted independent unions, and presided over a stagnating economy that grew less than 2 percent over a decade. With the Mexican financial and corporate elite throwing its weight behind him, and the major media promoting him, the youthful Peña Nieto campaigned and won as the leader of a new PRI promising democracy and reform.

     Andrés Manuel López Obrador, presidential candidate of the left in 2006 and again in July of 2012, has once again refused to recognize the decision of the Electoral Tribunal which upheld the victory of Peña Nieto. Contending that the PRI bought millions of votes, “trafficking with the poverty of the people,” López Obrador promises to continue a peaceful struggle to rid the country of the current government. Standing before hundreds of thousands of his supporters in the Zócalo or Plaza of the Constitution in the heart of Mexico City on September 10, thanking the 16 million Mexicans who had voted for him as a “decision to abolish the actual regime of corruption, injustice and privilege,” he announced that he was leaving the Progressive Coalition, made up of his Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Workers Party, and the Citizens Movement, and that his campaign organization, the Movement for National Regeneration or MORENA would continue the fight for the “moral regeneration” of Mexico.[1] López Obrador’s decision to build his movement and apparently to create a new political party has led to fear that Mexico’s already fragmented left—in addition to the three existing left parties in Congress there are other extra-parliamentary parties and armed movements—could be weakened even more. Nor is it clear how his decision to turn MORENA into a political party would contribute to the tasks of rebuilding the labor and social movements.

Not a Return to the Past

The victory of Enrique Peña Nieto, a man notorious for his repression of a poor people’s movement in the town of Atenco when he was governor of the State of Mexico and known as the public face of the country’s most notoriously corrupt party, represents a defeat not only for the left, but for democracy, decency and social justice in Mexico. But it does not represent a return to the one-party state of the past. Too much has changed in the last several decades to make possible the recreation of the powerful state party of the past. The end of the national economic model, the greater involvement of Mexico in manufacturing for the U.S. and world economy, the sell-off of state industries, the weakening of the industrial unions, the decline in the size of the peasantry, the increase in urbanization, the role of the modern media, and the growth in the power of the rival parties that have actually held power at the national or state level have all undermined the bases of the old political machine.

     The PRI, no longer so much a nationalist state party as a purely capitalist party, will push a conservative, pro-business agenda—coinciding in large measure with that of the PAN—calling for the privatization of energy, labor law “reform,” and regressive tax policies. The first item on the agenda is labor law reform which Calderón has now placed on fast track. The proposed reforms would render it virtually impossible to organize genuine unions, make it even more difficult than it already is to strike, and allow employers to subcontract and to hire temporary and part-time workers, practices now prohibited.

The Election Challenge Denied

The election was not entirely free and fair, though that comes as no surprise given the country’s well-deserved reputation for corruption at all levels and the experience of the controversial elections of 1988 and 2006 that several studies suggest were stolen. There is, however, no crisis of legitimacy as López Obrador has suggested. While the Televisa network, representing half the national TV duopoly, unfairly favored Enrique Peña Nieto, and though his party may have spent beyond the legal limits and may have engaged in vote-buying and other electoral fraud, such as inflated ballot counts, the government’s Electoral Tribunal ruled that all of López Obrador’s claims were “insufficient and inconclusive” as well as “vague, generic, and imprecise,” and concluded that such minor irregularities as there may have been would not have affected the outcome of the election which was won by more than three million votes. Most of the public and most independent observers appear to concur with that decision, recognizing that, contrary to López Obrador’s claims, the PRI could not have carried out vote-buying or fraudulent counting on a scale of millions. The notion that millions of Mexicans, however poor, would have sold their votes for as little as $10 and as much as $50, is not only insulting to the citizenry, but for logistical reasons beyond credibility on such a massive scale.[2]

     The charge made by López Obrador and by the student movement IAm132, that Televisa violated Mexican election law in its overt support for Peña Nieto was no doubt true. Yet the process was really very typical of elections today in much of the world, with big corporations and the news media guiding voters in making choices, usually between two capitalist parties, or in Mexico’s case between three. Even so, unless we are prepared to deny voters any integrity, intelligence or free will in the electoral process, we have to recognize most voters chose to vote for the handsome young candidate of an infamously corrupt party rather than for López Obrador, the white-haired champion of the electoral left, a left also known for corruption and internecine warfare, because they thought the former would better represent them.

     While the Mexican people may not whole heartedly believe in the legitimacy of this election, with their typical cynicism about politicians, parties, and the government, they by and large accept the PRI’s victory. We should also consider that many in Mexico, after all, have historically seen the PRI as both authoritarian, repressive, and corrupt and on the left in more or less the same sense that López Obrador is, that is, likely to use power to do something to improve the conditions of the majority. The Mexican people had had their fill of Felipe Calderón and his National Action Party, and, rejecting that party’s candidate, Vázquez Mota, turned to a party they thought would better represent their interests, and to most it seemed that that party was the PRI. The voters may not have recognized the degree to which the old PRI is dead and the new PRI is the party of business.

The Mixed Results: The PRD Remains a Force

While the PRI won the presidency, the PRD remains a force in Mexican politics, having captured Mexico City and many new congressional seats. The statistics in the presidential, congressional and state elections provide a complex picture of Mexico’s kaleidoscopic political voting patterns. With 63.02% of registered voters participating in this election, Peña Nieto received 38.2 percent of the vote and López Obrador 31.6 percent, with a 6.6 percent difference between the two, equivalent to 3.3 million votes. Josefina Vázquez Mota, candidate of the rightwing PAN received 26 percent of the vote. Peña Nieto, his victory having been upheld by the Tribunal on August 31, will take office on December 1, returning to power the party that ruled Mexico continuously from 1929 to 2000 through notoriously authoritarian, corrupt, and often violent methods.

Mexico’s 2012 Presidential Election Results: Party Preferences by State

Source: Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). Prepared by CRS Graphics

     In the Congress, the PRI and its satellite, the Green Party (PEVM) will have 241 of 500 seats in the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, while the PAN will have 114 seats, giving the two conservative parties together a majority. The PRD is not by any means irrelevant; on the contrary it has significant political power in Mexico City and in the congress. The PRD candidate for mayor of Mexico City, Miguel &AACUTE;ngel Mancera, a social liberal in the style of his predecessor Marcelo Ebrard, won election with 64% of the vote against 20% for the PRI candidate: A simply smashing victory for the center-left. At the same time, the PRD and its coalition partners, the Workers Party (PT) and the Citizens Movement (MC), made remarkable gains in the lower house, increasing its representatives from 88 to 135. Looked at one way, López Obrador won 31.6 percent of the vote while the PRD’s representatives claimed only 20 percent of congressional lower house seats. But relative to the previous election, López Obrador’s percentage stayed about the same, while the PRD had a 45 percent increase in congressional representatives.

Senate Composition by Party

Source: For 2009, figures are from the Mexican Senate. For 2012, figures are from IFE. Chart from CRS.

Chamber of Deputies Composition by Party

Source: For 2009, figures are from the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. For 2012, figures are from IFE. Chart by CRS.

The Governorships

At the state level, however, the PRI’s powerful patronage organizations either survived the end of its national rule in 2000 or have been rebuilt since, and they made it the force to be reckoned with. While the PRD won the mayoralty of Mexico City (larger than most states in population) and the governorships of Tabasco and Morelos, it lost the governor’s race in Chiapas, and overall the PRI is now dominant in the states. The PRI holds governorship in 19 states, while the PAN holds 8, and the PRD only four and the Federal District.[3] Most Mexicans have voted at the state level—perhaps because that is where patronage machines provide the most direct and immediate benefits to their political clients—to live under the rule of the PRI. The election results suggest that political power in Mexico has become at best democratically divided among the parties, or more realistically fragmented among the competing parties and politicians. They also suggest that the country remains geographically split between the more prosperous North where the PRI or PAN generally hold power and the poorer South where the PRD does well.

Mexico’s 2012 Gubernatorial Election Results

Source: Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). Prepared by CRS Graphics.

A Leftist Strategy Tested in the Election

No one would deny, I think, that López Obrador was the candidate of a capitalist party, the PRD, and that his campaign this time was more moderate than in 2006. He dropped his earlier election motto, “For the good of all, the poor first” substituting for it the vapid slogan “loving republic.” He continued to defend the nationalized petroleum and energy industries, but this time he appealed to business and attempted vainly to charm the media by suggesting that he was a moderate, not a radical. He built as an extension of his own personality his top-down campaign organization, MORENA, which represented a multi-class coalition, though he failed virtually completely to find representation from the banks and corporations, so that it was preponderantly a middle class, working class, and peasant movement. Most of Mexico’s left, excepting the Zapatistas who eschew all electoral activity, joined MORENA (not as organizations but as individuals) and backed López Obrador. MORENA represented a modern Mexican popular front, that is, a bourgeois party with radical rhetoric and working class support.

     What about the revolutionary left, or that wing of it which believes in participation in elections but rejects capitalist parties? The Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT), affiliated with the Fourth International, together with some Maoist organizations, worked with the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) and other unions and social movement to create the Political Organization of the People and the Workers (OPT). The idea was that the OPT would avoid the pitfalls of popular front politics, allow workers, leftists, and movement activists to vote for López Obrador for president along with leftist labor candidates on the OPT line. At the same time, the campaign organized by this party would lay the basis for a workers’ party in the future. After López Obrador, the leading figure on the OPT ticket was the candidate for representative, Martín Esparza, both the elected leader and the most prominent public spokesperson of the electrical workers who had been fighting for their jobs for two years. But he too lost his election. The defeat of Esparza, and of other union officials on the left such as Senate candidate Francisco Hernández Juárez, longtime head of the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM) and candidate of the PRD, suggests that there was no popular support for the idea of a workers’ party.

López Obrador Rejects Decision

López Obrador, has refused to accept the Tribunal’s ruling just as he did in 2006, accusing the Televisa television network of unfairly and illegally aiding Peña Nieto, charging the PRI with buying votes with supermarket gift cards, and faulting the Electoral Institute for failing to prevent those and other irregularities. When López Obrador lost in 2006 to Felipe Calderón of the PAN by a difference of 243,934 votes or just 0.58% of the total votes cast, his followers numbering between 500,000 and three million people filled the squares of Mexico City and blocked major boulevards for 47 days. Recognizing that the massive demonstrations of 2006 alienated many upper and middle class citizens and also that given the results it is unlikely that such protests could be organized this year, López Obrador and the IAm132 movement have so far declined to attempt to organize such a massive civil disobedience movement—though that could still happen.

     The election poses numerable problems for the Mexican left. The IAm132 movement which arose so quickly just before the election, manifesting itself so creatively in protests against Televisa and Peña Nieto across the country, seemed to disperse just as rapidly. Some of the more independent labor unions, such as the Miners and Metal Workers, declined to join protests against the legitimacy of the election, apparently looking to see if after years of attack by Calderón and the PAN they might make peace with the new president and the PRI. López Obrador’s decision to transform MORENA into a stronger social movement and a new political party threatens to create political chaos on the electoral left, while it is not clear how that decision to build his populist organization would contribute to building a broad democratic left or increasing the power of working people in Mexican politics. The left stands in disarray in the face of the return to power of the PRI.

Notes
1. López Obrador, “Mensaje íntegro de Andrés Manuel López Obrador en el Zócalo,” La Jornada, Sept. 10, 2012.
2. For discussions of the effect of fraud on the Mexican election, see: Mark Weisbrod, “Irregularities reveal Mexico’s election far from fair”; Joshua Tucker, “Could the PRI have bought its electoral result in the 2012 Mexican election? Probably Not”; James Cockcroft, “The Mexican Elite will not allow A López Obrador to be President,” The Real News; and Phillip L. Russell, “Who Won the Mexican Election?,” Truth Out.
3. For an overview of the election in greater detail, see here, and Clare Ribando Seelke, “Mexico’s 2012 Elections,” (U.S.) Congressional Research Service, Sept. 4, 2012. Also see this excellent summary: Harley Shaiken, "Return of the PRI: How did this happen? What does it mean for Mexico?"
September 16, 2012
Quantitative Easing 3

     Fed chairman Ben Bernanke announced yesterday that the Fed would buy mortgage-backed bonds at a rate of $40 billion a month until the employment picture improves and will leave effective interest rates near zero through 2015.

     The capitalist state has in theory essentially two means of modifying the shape of a downturn. It can stimulate purchases from the private sector by lowering taxes or by expanding direct government purchases in ways that do not dampen private spending; or it can expand the money supply. The first, or fiscal policy, requires legislative authorization; the latter can be done unilaterally.

     Bernanke’s actions are an end run around a do-nothing Congress using the only weapons that he has in his arsenal. What can we expect from this? Both fiscal and monetary approaches involve purchases. Fiscal policy involves the purchases of goods from the private sector for use by the government and buying labor-power to expand the scope and delivery of non-commodified output (education, medical services, infrastructure, armaments, etc.). Purchases of goods and services from the private sector and expansion of state employment has a widespread effect on lifting aggregate demand throughout the various spheres of economic activity.

     Monetary policy also involves purchases. But these are not of goods and services, but of financial assets. Financial assets are claims to a stream of future surplus-value. Mortgage backed securities generate income by pumping out surplus-value from the upcoming income stream of wage-earners. Interest payments convert paid labor into unpaid labor-time. Financial assets are essentially annuities. But Wall Street gobbles up these annuities and spits them back as gambling chits. These one-time annuities then assume a secondary revaluation as speculative instruments that are wagered against one another in a global casino.

     Because of the dramatic downturn in the housing market, mortgage backed securities have a more constricted efficacy as Wall Street chits than other assets. By purchasing them, the Fed injects a mass of liquid income into the hands of institutionalized gamblers, who, predictably, will use these to inflate a speculative bubble. That is all that Wall Street can, in fact, do. The Dow Jones has already responded to Bernanke’s speech with a massive rally.

     But how then does the Fed anticipate a translation of this Wall Street surge into a broader economic expansion? The Fed believes that expanding the worth of portfolios creates a “wealth effect.” As pensions and asset values expand, individuals and businesses supposedly feel free to save less and spend more. As the bubble entrenches itself, the private sector will begin to convince itself that it has achieved its wealth targets or is closer to meeting these targets. The pressure to withhold spending will therefore presumably be diminished. Since the proximate cause of all economic downturns is a lack of sufficient demand, caused ultimately by a failure of capital to accumulate, monetary policy exercised in this fashion should—according to the Fed—stimulates a more general up tick in economic activity. And it can do so without waiting for the underlying profit insufficiency that caused the deficit in capital formation to be resolved.

     In the short term, this may very well have that intended impact.

     But can this policy be self-sustaining? In the absence of government intervention, capitalism recovers by performing radical surgery on itself. On the one hand, unemployment drives down wages, strengthens industrial discipline and increases the intensity of work. It raises the rate at which unpaid labor time is extracted by capital. Fewer workers are generating relatively more profit.

     It also drives down the asset value of capital investments. This allows more efficient and better-placed corporations to gobble up real assets (machinery, factories, real estate, etc.) at bargain basement prices and to refashion the structure of production on a leaner basis. It purges excess claims on surplus-value. The combination of increased profits generated by a stock of means of production with diminished value is the precondition for a resumption of accumulation.

     The Fed’s end run is intended to arrest the barbaric means needed to restore profitability. Its activities would inflate the asset value of tangible capital while releasing the pressures for enhanced exploitation. The point is to simulate a recovery without waiting for the requisite restructuring to run its course. The Fed’s activities will build up capital values without laying the foundation for a concomitant increase in profits.

     This inflated capital would then provide collateral used to leverage access to additional productive assets, and a resumption of accumulation. But, in the absence of real restructuring, this process will also herald a return to what the maverick economist Hyman Minsky termed a ponzi investing system. The value of the debts incurred in accumulation under these circumstances must eventually exceed the capitalized value of the stream of forthcoming business revenues. In plain English, the ponzi scheme—lacking any underlying capital reconfiguration—can be expected to result in an unsustainable fall in the rate of profit, preceded by a burst Wall Street bubble shortly after the Fed’s “stimulus” is withdrawn.

     That termination should occur when the targeted rate of unemployment is attained or if inflationary pressures begin to get out of hand.

September 14, 2012
An open letter to Chicago parents

Dear Parents,Although we have never met, I’ve been involved indirectly in your children’s education, as a researcher on urban teacher education. I’ve been told that my books and articles, which explain what makes urban teaching special, have really helped city teachers do better at helping all students succeed.When I started doing my research, urban teaching was very tough work but it could also be extraordinarily satisfying. However, conditions have great deteriorated in the past several years. Schools have eliminated time for anything that’s not tested, including recess and the arts.Teachers are often not permitted to use their professional judgment, and worse, are blamed for situations over which they have no input. Support services have been cut, leaving children and families without the help they need to deal with problems beyond their control, like unemployment and financial stress. Yet, while city governments cut school budgets to save money, they give away millions of dollars to corporations in the form of tax breaks.As is the case in other big cities, children of the wealthy, powerful corporate and political elite that runs CPS go to (private) schools with small classes, art, music, and recess. Teachers in these elite private schools don’t pay for tissues, crayons, and paper out of their own pocket. Nor do they worry about whether their school will be shut down and sold off to a charter school operator. Their classes are small so they can know all of their students as individuals. Don’t your children deserve these conditions too?My daughter attended public schools in New York City, and as the breadwinner in my family, I know how difficult it is to make arrangements when the schools are closed. This strike is a hardship for you, no doubt about it. Who’s responsible? The media are blaming (greedy) teachers. Some parents are saying both sides are at fault. The way I see it, the job of the Mayor and the CPS Board of Education is to find the money to give your children what they need and deserve. They have failed to carry out their responsibility, and Chicago’s teachers are using the only power they have left, their right to strike, to insist that Mayor makes real the CPS slogan “Put Children First” and end the tax breaks for the wealthy that are impoverishing your children’s schools.We know from research that children and teachers do best when their schools are caring communities in which everyone is treated with respect. This is what Chicago’s teachers are demanding, no more and no less. Please join with me in supporting them.Lois Weiner, ProfessorDept. of Elementary and Secondary EducationNew Jersey City University

September 10, 2012
The bottom line for Chicago teachers?

As the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) holds fast to its strike deadline of Sept. 10, negotiations continue. It’s always risky to trust reports in the mass media, especially the virulently anti-teachers union media that we have today, about what’s happening in negotiations. They want to see the unions discredited, and one way to do that is to cast teachers as greedy and selfish. So we should be taking the recent article in the Chicago Sun-Times about negotiations as another salvo in the propaganda war against teachers.The article reports only on aspects of the contract dispute that take up teachers’ wages and benefits. In contrast, what has made this mobilization of Chicago teachers so powerful and exciting is the CTU’s commitment to locate demands about teachers’ economic well-being in a package that addresses what needs to be done to give Chicago children the schools they deserve. The union has done this remarkably well in its report about the “apartheid” conditions in the schools. During my recent visit to Colombia, teachers in Bogota told me that their union should be issuing a similar report.The Chicago Sun-Times article illustrates that Chicago’s power elite wants to make this struggle fit the mold of a “traditional” labor dispute, one that might be settled by giving a tiny bit more money to teachers. What the bankers, corporate chiefs, and politicians that do their bidding want is complete control over what children learn. The bigger picture that is often ignored in the US is that this is a global project, one spelled out in World Bank reports, to reduce education to vocational training, accomplished through the “accountability” of standardized testing. Yet, there is world-wide resistance to this project, little news of which appears in the popular media, and this global context frames the struggle in Chicago. CTU’s leaders face enormous pressures, so I was relieved to that a bargaining update on the union’s website still contains the CTU’s demand for “A ‘Better’ Day—with Art, Music, World Language, Physical Education and other services like counseling” and lower class size. Certainly the union needs to fight for job protections and re-hiring teachers who have lost their jobs in school closings. Its struggle for the salary and economic benefits teachers deserve is essential. But it must also hold onto the demand for lower class size and restoring the subjects and services students (and their teachers) need so very much.Chicago’s teachers should expect no help from the national union (American Federation of Teachers) in holding fast to what Chicago’s students deserve. AFT President Randi Weingarten showed when she headed the union in New York City that she would give away everything and anything that mattered in having quality schools in exchange for paltry salary increases. My hunch is that she’ll be using all the power she has to pressure the CTU to settle for the same kind of contract she negotiated in NYC. I don’t think Obama wants a strike of Chicago teachers, so he’ll be putting pressure on his guy Rahm to settle on money. Weingarten will be doing the same. The question is whether CTU’s courageous and dedicated leaders will have the confidence in their ideals to lead Chicago’s teachers in a new direction, one that will show what can be won when a teachers union really stands up for public education and so wins support from parents and students who deserve better schools.

September 6, 2012
Beyond November: Thoughts on politics, social movements, and the 2012 elections

[This article first appeared in the September issue of Jacobin.]

     Marx wrote in The Civil War in France that every few years workers got to decide which members of the ruling class were to misrepresent them. How right he was. And is. That is uncontestable. What’s at issue are the implications. What politics is necessary in a formal democracy where elites have a stranglehold on national election outcomes and even candidate selection? What is to be done when the working class acts less like a class for itself and more like a crush of sharp-elbowed shoppers at a Walmart Presidents’ Day sale?

     While movements for social and economic justice are in the final instance the agents of historical change, election efforts should reflect those movement interests. Yet the form electoral action takes rarely jibes with movement needs.

     In no advanced industrial nation, and especially not the United States, have the needs of social movements and electoral gains been conjoined. Worldwide, the Occupiers deny a connection is even warranted—the Spanish Indignados are the most vocal—saying that political parties of the Left and Right inevitably work to maintain social order. Descriptively, it’s true; that is how governments of the Left and Right have acted, at least since the Second World War. But it’s not inevitable, and abandoning politics is no solution.

     In Western Europe, the social-democratic parties act as the kinder, gentler face of neoliberalism. In the United States, the labor movement can’t point to a signal federal legislative victory since the 1970 passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act—and that under a Republican president. In most developing countries, politics is a reflection of the competing demands of comprador and local bourgeois factions; working-class struggles are subterranean. The magnificent Arab Spring was remarkable for what it was and not for what it portended. The contenders in Egypt’s first elections were the army and the Muslim Brotherhood, both with infrastructures in place and both former collaborators with the hated Mubarak regime.

     In 2012, the US presidential election will once again be decided not on wants or needs but on fear. With neither candidate likely to gin up much energy for themselves based on program, personality, or merit, the election will go to the campaign that scares key voting blocs the most about the opposition.

     The prospects of selling Obama as the preferred candidate are daunting, if worth doing at all. With his proliferation of the national security state, his refusal to put juice behind the Conyers  jobs bill, his water-carrying for the insurance companies and destruction of any near-term possibility for single-payer health care, his failures on card check and other labor law reforms, his refusal to treat Wall Street as a criminal enterprise, his embrace of reactionary education philosophies, his incursive black-ops foreign policy, and his ten o’clock scholar’s embrace of gay marriage, his is an administration not to praise but to damn.

     So what to do? Or how do we even think about what to do? That’s not like asking, “Why is there no labor party in the United States?” Political sociologist Robin Archer offers a compelling argument that points out specific conditions—the weakness of the early industrial union organizing efforts, the level of state repression, the structural divides determined by religious affiliations, the bonkers politics of Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor Party and the equally malignant and self-interested craft union response—conditions that in combination were true nowhere else. These inhibited any class-based politics, even of the most tepid kind. Archer explains why the US was late to the game, if not AWOL, but not why corporate ideology is still the common coin of both parties, let alone what can be done today.

     Radicals, since at least the 1936 reelection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,  have battled over two key electoral strategies: relate in whatever way possible to progressive forces around the Democratic Party or denounce the two-party system as a sham and build a progressive third party. The two don’t exhaust the list of left possibilities, but they take to the field at election time as dueling perspectives. We find the first simplistic and the second at least a telescoping of events.

Electoral Politics and the Burden of History

     Veteran labor activist Bill Fletcher, Jr, writing in his Organizing Upgrade blog, argues that election perspectives need to be strategic, and that dismissing electoral politics as hopeless or building third parties out of whole cloth “are actually unpolitical and lack any sort of concrete analysis.” He’s right. Absent strategy, anything else is just expressing a shopping preference.

     Strategic planning includes sizing up your own side’s strengths. Frankly, we’re too weak to have any effect on the Democratic Party network at the national level.

     At the same time, we can’t build much of a third party with impossible state ballot access requirements, winner-take-all elections and a lack of institutional support. Anything a third party can do—anything a third party should do—can also be done in local and state Democratic primaries.

     Parties are not creatures of desire alone. They are political expressions of movements arising at historical conjunctures, or comprise decades of work culminating in effective interventions in crisis situations. The last third-party effort institutionalized nationwide was the Republican Party. Not only was it the outcome of the struggle over slavery—something the Whigs could not get right—but the Lincoln election was the proximate cause of the South Carolina secession and the Civil War that followed. The GOP’s creation was not epiphenomenal; it was structurally driven, and the war emerged as the central and as yet unrivaled organizing event of the modern American party system.

     Yes, radical parties had influence, too. The Socialist Party that thankfully succeeded the SLP in prominence excelled before and during the First World War, electing thousands of local officeholders. But it sent just two members to Congress—one from New York and one from Milwaukee, cities with substantial foreign-born populations with radical views and roots in European working-class organizations. The party had its faults, including an electoral orientation that could not abide the direct-action tactics of its own supporters, but it acted as the party of a class—something no third party can do today.

     Absent mass upheavals that make electoral reform a concession, US third- party efforts are also handicapped by a political system that is not analogous to that of any other liberal-democratic state. Here, it’s the state, not the parties, that controls who can join (anyone who registers). The parties have no sway over who registers, runs in their primaries, or holds office under their name. Yes, election lawyer-wizards do challenge dissident Democrats’ election petitions at the behest of county-based, paid political functionaries. The outcome: candidate suppression, especially of the novice hopeful. But it’s state law, not party manipulation, that is responsible for voter suppression, the more toxic threat to free elections.

Understanding the Democrats

     That complicates things is that Democrats themselves talk about one big party, under one big tent, dancing to one tune. It’s rubbish. The US effectively has 435 separate Democratic Party organizations corresponding to incumbents or challengers in each congressional district, with the loosest of national affiliations. Politics USA-style is candidate-, not party-driven.

     It’s not the party that does the lion’s share of fundraising, either. It’s the candidates, and—thanks to the Supreme Court—the virtually flying-under-the-radar corporate-run Super pacs. One effect of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law is that even fewer dollars will be coordinated by the national parties. The AFL-CIO, its numerous constituent unions, and others expect to ride that money-churning tiger, but the advantage goes to business.

     The Democrats are not even a rule-from-the-top party that disciplines its elected officials, though under Rahm Emanuel, progressive candidates were pushed aside by the party’s congressional fundraising arms in favor of more mainstream and ostensibly electable moderates. Party discipline at times is enforced by promising or denying “pork” or committee chair posts, yet for all those cozy arrangements, party politics is decentralized. This means grassroots efforts to elect allies or punish enemies are viable.

     Want to punish incumbents? Primary ’em up. Even if you lose, you’ve killed their summer and made your point. The Left is in no position to affect national party policy, but it can still hold a local candidate’s feet to the fire.

Structural Barriers and Coalition “Parties”

     Short of storming the Winter Palace, politics requires coalitions. But what kind of coalitions? Both main parties are coalitions of disparate elements. Ostensibly, class-based parties in a parliamentary system function the same way, with the deals cut after the election, but they have the advantage of raising sharp differences during campaigns and allowing radicals a role, at least before entering government.

     The US party coalitions are not particularly unified. Both have a hard core of ideological or interest-group supporters, and a periphery of idiosyncratic centrist allies. The cores are always dissatisfied that their interests aren’t served, while the moderates entertain fantasies of a great party of the center-right, which would ostensibly sweep any election. Today, the chief exponent of that view is the drearily predictable New York Times scribe Thomas Friedman.

     It should be no surprise, then, that every Democratic president since the Civil War has come from the middle of the coalition. That’s the nature of the Democratic Party, and it is that way because of the reality of the US political system. Changes in state laws permitting multiple-party endorsements, the alternate vote, proportional representation, same-day registration, and the like would vastly improve prospects for third parties, but winning these means fighting state-by-state. Even a constitutional amendment requires some thirty states to agree. It’s a fight worth having, but short of that, or short of a cataclysm delegitimizing the main parties, coalition politics and the sort of incrementalism revolutionaries despise—in part because there are so few increments—is the only contemporary politics possible.

     That’s why the links institutions like the NAACP and the AFL-CIO have with the Democratic Party won’t be overcome by an act of will or even the election of a new generation of Marxists to a handful of top union leadership posts, as desirable as that would be.

     Those on the Left who call for a third party are basing their choice on a prayer, not a plan. Think of Shakespeare’s Glendower boasting that “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” To which Hotspur aptly replies, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?”

     Even Hotspur’s advice, “Tell truth and shame the devil,” has its limits. The Left has ample truths deserving of a hearing, but given its weakness and disconnect from the lives of working people, who’s listening? And given that we can’t deliver, and that our self-appointed  vanguard tribunes know they can’t deliver, it’s like hawking shoddy goods to demand that working people must, as at least one sect said in all seriousness, “Break with the elephant; break with the ass. Build a party of the working class.”

     Support for a nationwide third party today isn’t a political response, but a propagandistic one. It’s also bad propaganda because it assumes that the Democrats are hegemonic due to voter ignorance. It’s not illusions that drive voters. Asking working people to forgo their only practical form of politics is like urging the religious to abandon their gods. That’s something even the twenty-four-year-old Marx knew was nonsense, when he wrote that the world of atheists “reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man.”

     The Democrats as a coalition are hegemonic because they provide a service, finite as it is, that is indispensable for institutions, whether they be unions, social service providers, or community-based organizations.

Assessing Left Party Campaigns

     If parties grow from movements and from cultures of resistance, where is the utility or veracity in claiming that today’s Green Party represents a core wing of environmentalism, let alone civil rights, peace, labor, immigrant rights, or others? In many ways, the Green campaign for governor of New York in 2010 had a model program and an attractive, knowledgeable candidate in Howie Hawkins. And that was all it had, though that was enough to secure state ballot status through 2014. It’s been somnolent since.

     Dan La Botz, an articulate campaigner on the Socialist Party line for Senate in Ohio, ran on a platform lightyears ahead of anything the two major parties offered. He declared:

"We need to organize a movement. To fight for jobs and full employment. To win health care for all. To really confront the environmental crisis by turning from coal and oil to wind, solar, and hydrothermal. To end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I want to be the Senator who speaks for that movement."

     We wish he could, too. La Botz’s traction—despite his garnering “more than 25,000 votes for socialism in Ohio,” as his campaign put it—was the result less of his ability to front for mass movements and more that the Democratic candidate had no chance of winning. La Botz was a protest candidate at a propitious moment. That’s no knock. Often the Left can’t manage even that.

     Here we make no claim that La Botz or Hawkins could have made a difference running in statewide Democratic Party primaries. We do suggest that insurgents backed by reform groups with local standing could run in area primary races and win.

Unmasking Obama

     Still, the issue for November is how we impact political discourse among those living perilous lives.

     Someone’s got to tell the truth about the scabrous Obama presidency, and it won’t come from the three-wise-monkey approach of the liberal left or the venality and rampant racism of the Right.

     Yes, the Republicans are almost always worse, and that algorithm gives Democrats a free ride. The GOP’s not always worse, though. PATCO’s strike was broken by Ronald Reagan, but the rage that consumed air traffic controllers in 1981 was the accumulation of two decades of pressing grievances against mostly Democratic-appointed heads of the Federal Aviation Administration. No wonder the PATCO leadership made a Faustian bargain to endorse Reagan in 1980 in return for a deal that unraveled over, among other things, acceptance of collective bargaining over wages.

     Anyone who says the future of working-class America depends on beating Romney downplays the harm successive Democratic administrations did in shilling for corporate America.

     Let’s face reality: Obama is the worst Democratic president since Grover Cleveland. He’s a Wall Street enabler, and like his sorry predecessors, he’s let his agenda be determined by corporate pressure and far-right hysteria.

     Just because the worst scum in America want Obama gone, unions neutralized, and the shreds of the welfare state effaced is not reason in itself for the Left to mute criticisms and act the good soldier. The only sound justification given for backing Obama in 2008 was that he’d give the movements enough room and time to grow. We got neither.

     The reason that we don’t write off Democratic Party campaigns is that at the local level, anyone involved in any sort of community organizing or public-sector bargaining has to have a relationship with some elected officials. And that means visibly supporting them, even if critically. Either that or preparing primary competition. And when a mass left party emerges, it won’t be the expression of a rootless counterculture.

     But we’re not doing our allies any good by echoing the line taken by the AFL-CIO today, which is that the November election poses a choice between two economic worldviews. Would that it were. The real subtext is “Vote Obama: He’ll screw us less.”

     Independent left participation in the 2012 election should be based minimally on preparing people now for the fight we’ll be in after the election, no matter which party wins. That means no lionizing Obama and no relying on ghoulish tales about what a GOP monopoly of government and a knuckle-dragging Supreme Court could unleash. Allowing Obama to be reelected without any critique from the Left—even one that is purely propagandistic, as the Green and Socialist parties will offer—only ratifies his centrist approach of cottoning to and co-opting the Right while neutering the Left and any possibility for substantial social gains. We can do better.

Michael Hirsch is a veteran labor journalist and an editorial board member of New Politics and Democratic Left. Jason Schulman is an editorial board member of New Politics.

August 31, 2012
Occupy Nigeria: ‘When the Cup is Full’

"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men." – Abraham Lincoln

     Occupy Nigeria came and went like a flash of lightning, but its impact was significant and demonstrated the power that lies with ‘the people’. At first, Nigerians did not join the Occupy Movement, which started in 2011 with OWS in New York and spread to a considerable number of countries, but this changed in early January 2012. What exactly changed people’s minds? What instigated the Nigerian people to stand up and join the clarion call for change? Understanding this requires at least a basic knowledge of the political and economic milieu of the country.

     Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, with a population of over 140 million people. It is also an oil-rich state, ranked the world’s second biggest oil exporter by volume and seventh in terms of oil reserves according to OPEC Annual Statistics 2010/2011. Notwithstanding, World Bank statistics place the Gross National Income per capita of the country at $1,180, and about 64% of the population lives below the international poverty line of $1.25 per day as of 2010.

     Despite being a major crude oil producer and exporter, Nigeria relies on imports to supply its daily oil consumption due to the incapacity of its major oil refineries (which crashed due lack of maintenance and mismanagement) to meet domestic demand. The country basically exports crude and imports at a much higher price refined oil and petroleum products for local consumption. This makes fuel expensive and unaffordable for the majority of the population. It became necessary to implement a program to subsidize fuel. However, the government spends approximately $7.5 billion monthly to sponsor the subsidy program and has been running a deficit. Over the years, there were talks of removing the subsidy, but it was always very challenging because oil is central to everyday activities of Nigerians, and because most industries like transport, agriculture, and manufacturing depend on it. It is more or less a basic necessity for households and businesses and is in high demand, especially in the absence of a reliable power supply.

     However, on January 1, 2012, the Federal Government, through the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) announced the withdrawal of the fuel subsidy. This action caused fuel prices to jump more than 100%, from N65 per liter to N141 per liter. Nigeria’s consumer inflation rose from 10.35% in December to 12.6% in January. Specifically, food inflation rose from 11.5% to 13.1% within that month as reported by the National Bureau of Statistics. In a country with a very high unemployment rate, very low minimum wage, increasingly high cost of living and no government welfare programs, removing the subsidy without a way to mitigate the economic hardship it would cause was nothing short of unconscionable.

     One might be tempted to support the government’s argument that the subsidy removal was necessary due to the financial burden it placed on the country and the risk of economic collapse. But it is impossible to sustain this argument when you consider the billions that get looted by public officials and flash across the front pages of the news on a regular basis. Alas, the government did not think to go after these funds or take concrete steps to stop the endless embezzlement that poses even greater threats to the economy. To the government, removing the subsidy was an easier course of action. To a lot of Nigerians, though, the subsidy represented the only dividend of democracy that they enjoy in the absence of adequate infrastructure and basic social amenities or benefits. Its removal was yet another way of perpetuating injustice against the people and they were not going to take it sitting down. It was definitely time to act!

     Occupy Nigeria started on Monday, January 2, 2012, when a group of people in Lagos, the commercial capital of the country, gathered to protest the new policy. They occupied streets and major roads and marched to the State House of Assembly and on to Gani Fawehinmi Park in a mass rally that pulled over 10, 000 people. Some demonstrated at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, while others rallied on streets holding signs condemning President Goodluck Jonathan’s actions and calling for the reinstatement of the subsidy. In the days that followed, the protest spread to most cities in the country, notably Abuja, Ibadan, Kano, Illorin, Benin, Kaduna, Makurdi and Oshogbo.

     Government responded harshly in its quest to clamp down the protest. Military and police officers were deployed all around protest cities and some states imposed curfew. Security officers used tear gas and batons and in some instances, lethal weapons against protesters. Time Nigeria reported that at least 20 people were wounded and 3 killed in Lagos when police opened fire on protesters. In Kano, about 300 people were reportedly injured and 19 arrested during the protest. Other protesters were killed in Oyo, Kaduna and Niger states, amounting to over 25 persons. Several pictures and videos show police assaulting protesters. Media houses, notably CNN offices in Lagos were raided and journalists and human rights activists like Femi Falana were arrested and detained. Other detainees were arraigned before the Magistrate Court for alleged breach of peace and robbery.

     Despite all this, protesters did not relent. On January 9, 2012, the Nigerian Labor Congress (NLC), after a series of unsuccessful negotiations with the government, declared an indefinite national strike. The NLC is very influential since it basically represents the entire labor force of the country and is reputed for locking horns with the government on behalf of the people over repressive policies. The persistent protests coupled with the strike forced the government to go back to the negotiating table and reach an agreement with NLC. It accepted to reinstate a percentage of the subsidy, reducing the price from N141 to N97. In addition, it undertook to launch a mass transit intervention program and rehabilitation of some major railway lines in the country to facilitate cheap transportation and create more jobs. The NLC agreed to these terms and called off the strike and appealed to protesters to cease demonstrations. NLC came under a lot of criticism for the compromise it made with the government. First, the people felt they were not consulted before the agreement was made; and second, since the subsidy was reinstated only in part, it meant they were still going to shoulder a certain amount of additional financial burden. However, it was a significant victory and many protesters decided to accept that.

     Occupy Nigeria is considered a success today and the question that comes to mind is ‘why’? Several factors accounted for its success. First, the combination of the protests and the strike was unprecedented and attracted popular participation and support. The National Human Rights Commission released a statement emphasizing the fundamental nature of freedom of assembly and the need for the government to respect that and refrain from use of force. Nobel Prize literature laureate Wole Soyinka also warned that Nigeria might be spurred into yet another civil war if the government was not careful. The Nigerian Bar Association and Nigerian Medical Association as well as other stakeholders expressed their support. In Lagos, prominent activists, musicians and actors like Femi Falana, Tunde Bakare, Femi Kuti, Banky W, Kate Henshaw, Bimbo Akintola, and Desmond Elliot joined the protest and made speeches at rallies. In the northern part of the country, for the first time in a long time, religion was not a barrier. In Kano, a core northern state volatile with religious crisis, in a show of what many referred to as rare solidarity, Christian protesters stood guard and acted as cover for Muslim protesters while they said their prayers. The people were united in this one cause from north to south, east to west.

     A second factor that accounted for the success of Occupy Nigeria was the effect of the strike on the economy. The economy was practically paralyzed and government found itself losing money it was hoping to save by removing the subsidy. Media reports, though inconsistent and imprecise, indicated that the amount lost in the first six days of the strike was between N207 billion and N2 trillion. The stakes were high and the government could not afford to remain adamant.

     However, the most essential factor was the strong resolve and solidarity demonstrated by Nigerians. Nigeria is a country with more than its share of socio-economic injustices; a country that struggles daily with the devastating effects of corruption; a country where the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ is constantly expanding. Notwithstanding these problems, citizens have generally seemed content with verbal complaint without overt action. Elie Wiesel notably said: “there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” For Nigerians that was the defining moment—the last straw that broke the camel’s back—and once the protest started there was no stopping it. The spirit was too strong to be broken even in the face of government brutality and the dead bodies and injured victims that laid in the wake of violent crackdowns. It became evident to the government that the people were serious about their demands and it would be completely impossible, even foolhardy, to ignore them; thus the compromise.

     Though Occupy Nigeria was a direct reaction to the fuel subsidy removal, on a much deeper level it was a resistance to the injustices and corruption that have plagued the country for a long time. Perhaps the biggest success of the movement was not the reinstatement of part of the subsidy, but the awakening of the people to the reality of the power they have and the duty they owe themselves and the country to condemn injustices and be more involved in the affairs of the country. The protest was also significant because it ushered in a people-driven anti-corruption campaign. It exposed the massive embezzlement that was going on in the subsidy program. The government was forced to set up a committee to investigate the allegations. The committee uncovered an embezzlement scandal implicating staff of the Nigerian Petroleum Corporation, the PPPRA, petroleum marketers, and companies amounting to about two trillion in Nigerian currency. Already, there are allegations that those involved are attempting to doctor the report. This has been the trend in the country where most embezzlers end up escaping justice and funds are never returned. But Nigerians are on alert now and hopefully, anything short of justice would be unacceptable.

     But where is Occupy Nigeria now? It is easy to say that the movement ended after the agreement was reached. And in a way, this is true. However, Occupy Nigeria is very much alive in the hearts of Nigerians. So although the physical protest is gone, the experience created a bond, a new spirit in the minds of the people that will serve to foster future collaboration for change and ensure that they are given due consideration and actively participate in matters that affect them.

     Putting this in the international context, this rings even more on point. The Occupy Movement transcends boundaries and binds people throughout the circumference of the globe. This resolute and unprecedented solidarity is ushering a new emphasis on people’s governance, which will hopefully stand the test of time and usher in a new dawn of leadership that will redefine what we currently call ‘democracy’. This is especially true since, although in principle power lies with the people, in practice, the same people are regarded as the ‘followers’. And sure, the people will follow, the people will tolerate the ‘leadership’ and its excesses; but when these excesses turn into gross injustices and threaten the very foundation of democracy, then the people will act, and they will protest until there is change…because THE PEOPLE ARE THE 99%!

Elizabeth Hassan is a lawyer and activist from Nigeria. She worked in Nigerian civil society in the area of human rights and good governance and has participated in several advocacy programs on youth participation across Africa. She also conducted extensive research on the Occupy Movement with focus on Africa, North America and the Middle East. She recently graduated from NYU Law with a Master's in International Law.

August 31, 2012
Factcheck.org on the GOP and Abortion

Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, often plays a useful role in exposing lies by political candidates. Sometimes, however, its factchecking is rather tendentious. Its coverage of the abortion stance of the 2012 Republican Party platform is a case in point.

Factcheck.org is right that the Obama campaign has overstated its critique of Mitt Romney’s position on abortion. Trying to pin the slippery Romney down on anything is rather difficult, but it seems clear that Romney has indicated often enough that he now favors the outlawing of abortion in all cases, except rape, incest, and the life of the mother. These are the same exceptions supported by Bush senior and junior. These account for under 5 percent of all abortions, so while Romney and the two Bushes did not want to end legal abortion in every case, they do or did favor ending it in at least 95 percent of cases.

But what about the Republican Party platform? According to Factcheck,org, the GOP’s 2012 anti-abortion plank is agnostic on the question of exceptions:

“The Obama campaign is falsely accusing the Republican Party’s platform of calling for banning abortions even in cases of rape or incest. That’s not true. The 2012 platform is silent on exceptions — leaving that decision up to Congress and the states — just as it was in 2008 and in previous presidential election years.”

But silence on exceptions is not the same as being open-minded on the question. If someone says “I believe X, period,” we do not assume that they mean “I believe X, with the following list of unstated exceptions.” If someone says “I want to outlaw capital punishment,” with no further qualification then we properly conclude that their opposition to the death penalty does not recognize an exception, say, for aggravated murders. If they favored such exceptions then they would have had to say something like, “I want to outlaw capital punishment in most cases.”

Factcheck.org says that the 2012 GOP platform leaves the decision on exceptions “up to Congress and the states.” But there’s no mention of Congress and the states in the platform plank in question. Obviously, party platforms do not make law and so before there could be any enactment of an abortion ban, Congress would have to act. That doesn’t mean, however, that every platform plank is actually a call for Congress to enact whatever exceptions to the plank it feels like enacting.

There is presumably no one who believes that abortion should be legal in every case — for example, after 8 months and 29 days of gestation because the eye color is not the desired one. Therefore, according to Factcheck.org’s odd logic, even a strong pro-choice advocate would be happy with the Republican platform, since by its silence on exceptions it allows any conceivable exception (no pun intended), and hence pro-choicers too support the plank — with an exception for abortions performed before the ninth month.

So what exactly does the platform wording say on abortion? The abortion plank begins:

“Faithful to the “self-evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.”

This certainly doesn’t suggest any agnosticism on exceptions. If the “unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed,” then rape and incest would no more allow an abortion than they would infanticide.

Factcheck.org then tries to substantiate its claim that the platform language is totally permissive by checking with the author of the abortion plank:

“Just to be sure we weren’t missing anything, we contacted the amendment’s author, James Bopp, who is also co-chairman of the party platform’s Subcommittee on Restoring Constitutional Government. He told us what he has told others in the news media:

‘James Bopp, Aug. 23: The Republican Party plank endorsing a Human Life Amendment does not take a position on which version of a Human Life Amendment should eventually be adopted. We leave that decision to Congress and the people of the United States at that time. Thus, we do not take a position on which exceptions should be included in a Human Life Amendment.’”

It’s no surprise that GOP bigwigs would try to fudge party support for a position rejected by an overwhelming majority of the population, a stance that is especially toxic now in the aftermath of Todd Akin’s crude remarks on rape. What is surprising though is that Factcheck.org would take this as definitive evidence of the meaning of the platform plank.

But here’s the thing. We don’t need to ask Bopp or Factcheck.org how they interpret the GOP platform. We can consider how Romney interprets the platform. On August 27, CBS’s Scott Pelley questioned him:

“The platform does not allow for exceptions on abortion with regard to the health of the mother or rape or incest. Is that where you are?”

Romney replied, “No, my position has been clear throughout this campaign,” and he went on to affirm his support for the exceptions (though with a little hedging on health of the mother versus life of the mother). He offered no dissent from Pelley’s summary of the platform.

Reince Preibus, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, told MSNBC: “This is the platform of the Republican Party; it’s not the platform of Mitt Romney.”

But the most telling confirmation of the proper way to interpret the platform language on abortion comes from rank-and-file GOP delegates interviewed by the Daily Show’s Samantha Bee. These enthusiastic delegates had no problem with Romney taking a different view from the platform because they believe in “choice”: no one should have the right to tell others what to believe on these matters. Hilarious.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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August 31, 2012
Educating welfare mothers

[This is an expanded version of a letter sent to the New York Times and not printed.]

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough says that the key to eradicating poverty is education. (“What does Obama really believe in?”, Aug. 15, 2012). Yet he does not mention that the welfare reform bill, enacted in 1996, prevented the parents of children who receive welfare from furthering their education. AFDC, which preceded TANF as a welfare program, allowed parents (most of whom were mothers) to obtain a degree in a 4-year college program while they received welfare. This enabled them to obtain jobs that would support a family. Many well-known and successful women were helped by a welfare grant to get an education. Obama’s mother was one of those women.

Soon after the welfare reform bill was passed, there was a precipitous decline in college enrollment among welfare recipients. Studies show that most women who finished college did not return to welfare and obtained jobs that supported their family. One study of six states found that 87 percent of recipients who graduated from two-or four-year colleges were still off welfare six years later. A study by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee found that as of 1998, only one out of six women forced off welfare had a job that lifted her out of poverty. Meanwhile, the average salary of someone with a one-year or two-year degree from Milwaukee Area Technical College ranged between $20,000 and $24,000. (Derrick Jackson, “Women on welfare need education – why deny them?” The Boston Globe, 4/15/98)

August 30, 2012
The Neoliberal Assault on Disability Rights
A Public Forum

The Neoliberal Assault on Disability Rights

Thursday, October 4, 2012 7:00pm
New York University
Room 803, Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Square South, Manhattan

sponsored by New Politics, Radical Film and Lecture Series(RFLS),
and Campaign for peace and Democracy (CPD)

Articles based on the talks:
- Nadina LaSpina, Joining Forces to be Stronger
- Paula Wolff, Beyond the Americans with Disabilities Act
- Ravi Malhotra, Theories of Disablement
- Jihan Abbas, The Unpaid Labor of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities in Institutional and Community-based Disability Services.
Thanks to Beth Haller and Mark Schwartz for producing the video.

Featuring Speakers: Nadina LaSpina, Paula Wolff, Ravi Malhotra, and Jihan Abbas.
- Nadina LaSpina is an activist for social justice and in particular for disability rights. She has been arrested countless times for civil disobedience and is an organizer for American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today (ADAPT), Not Dead Yet and the Disability Caucus of Occupy Wall Street.
- Paula Wolff is President of Disabled in Action and active in Occupy Wall Street. She has participated in the disability rights movement for more than 35 years. She is a social worker and direct services supervisor at the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York.
- Ravi Malhotra is a disability rights advocate, a sponsor of New Politics, and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada. He has published widely on disability rights and serves on the human rights committee of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities.
- Jihan Abbas is a Vanier Canada Graduate scholar and PhD candidate at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests include disability and the labor market, social policy, and inclusion.
Co-Chairs: Joanne Landy and Adaner Usmani.
- Adaner Usmani is a member of the New Politics editorial board, a graduate student in Sociology at NYU, and a member of the Radical Film and Lecture Series.
- Joanne Landy is a member of the New Politics editorial board, Co-Director of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, and former Executive Director of the NY Metro Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.
Click here for an audio of WBAI's "Largest Minority" program from Sept. 26, 2012, which includes an interview with Ravi Malhotra, Jinan Abbas, and Anne Finger.

The October 4, 2012, public forum was inspired by a special section in New Politics #53, edited by Ravi Malhotra. The section brought together four contributions: from Chris J. Ford, a New Zealander, on neoliberalism and disability rights, Anne Finger on Antonio Gramsci, Jihan Abbas, a Canadian, on intellectual disability and labor who is here with us today in Manhattan and Rachel Garaghty on cuts to attendant services in Minnesota. Malhotra and Abbas also participated in the forum.
August 25, 2012
The education wars, part 2: Giving support to Chicago and Colombia's teachers

I’ve been asked by readers how they can show their support to teacher unionists in Chicago and Colombia, whose struggles I describe in my recent NP post. One way is to contribute to the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) Solidarity Fund. The billionaires are pouring big bucks into defeating this movement and union dues alone won’t be able to cover the union’s costs in trying to win this battle to protect public education. You can also send messages of support directly to the President of the Colombian teachers union, FECODE, at presidencia@fecode.edu.co or prensa@fecode.edu.co .Right after I contribute to the CTU Solidarity Fund, I’m sending this message to FECODE:”I send with this message my support and encouragement to teachers in Colombia and Chicago, who are fighting the same battle to save public education and our students’ futures. The project to privatize education, reduce teaching and learning to testing, and deprofessionalize teaching will destroy the dream of free, quality public education for the world’s people’s. I stand with you in your struggle.”

August 23, 2012
Education wars are heating up – and lives are at stake

You wouldn’t know it from the US media, but the education wars are heating up globally. Three of the hottest spots are Chicago, Chile, and Colombia. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has revved up its struggle to protect public education in that city, with a vote to issue a 10-day strike notice (no strike date set). The teachers in Chile have voted to strike on August 28 in solidarity with students protesting educational reforms that deprive them of access to public education. The Chilean government has vowed to prosecute youth who are involved in the protests – just as the UK did with the students who protested last autumn in London. I’ve just learned the Colombian teachers will strike on September 4 and 5, with their primary demand being that the government protect teachers from threats and assassinations from paramilitary groups that the military clandestinely (and not so clandestinely) supports. As a well-documented (and terrifying) report issued by the Education International (EI) explains. Colombia’s teachers union, FECODE, is experiencing the lion’s share of the violence against labor union activists in Colombia. FECODE needs international support, especially from the US, which should be putting pressure on the Colombian government to halt these human rights violations. While the EI has issued this excellent report, it needs to do much more, but probably won’t, (for reasons I explain elsewhere.) In speaking to people in human rights organizations in Colombia, I’ve learned that international visibility is an important defense against the violence. The government is quite sensitive to negative publicity about its human rights record.As is explained in the new World Bank report, “Making Schools Work,” what’s planned to make teachers more “accountable” is to reduce their working conditions and status to that of “contract labor.” Understanding that this is a global project illuminates that the struggle in Chicago to give Chicago’s kids the schools they deserve, is exactly the same one that is being waged in Colombia, where the union wants to protect public education. While we are pushing the EI (and AFT and NEA) to do what they should, we need to form alliances from below. The IDEA network, an alliance of teachers unions in the Americas, is doing good work but needs help. The simultaneous struggles of the Chicago and Colombian teachers provides us with a chance to develop the mutual support teachers internationally really need.US schools are suffering the effects of school “deform” because we did not stop the neoliberal project in education in its first iteration, when it was imposed in Latin America, under dictatorships supported by the US government in the 1970s. Colombia seems remote from the Windy City, I know, but this is a global project that requires a global resistance. Let’s find a way to have FECODE support the CTU in its struggle, as the CTU supports FECODE. This is for Colombia’s teacher unionists truly a life-and-death struggle. Finding a way to develop a connection and mutual support is a “win/win.” And we can be sure that if we fail to make these connections, we’ll all be suffering a “lose/lose” and sooner rather than later.

August 22, 2012