Advanced Search

Blog

  • 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

    Mexico election 1

    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 Ángel 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

    Mexico election 2

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

    Chamber of Deputies Composition by Party

    Mexico election 3

    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

    Mexico election 4

    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?"

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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. 

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

     

  • 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)

  • 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:

    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.

  • 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.”        

  • 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.

  • The Greek Grassroots Challenge to the Politics of Austerity

    Harrison and Landy recently returned from a trip to Greece, where they met with activists and others to gain a better understanding of the popular upsurge against the Greek government’s austerity program.

         The crisis in Greece began with the discovery that the Greek government had been concealing the size of its debt in order to stay within the monetary union guidelines: it was revealed to be 120 percent of GDP, one of the highest percentages in the world. This massive debt was the result of several factors: reckless borrowing, for example to finance the Olympics and to buy weaponry from Germany and the U.S. (Greece spends more on defense as a proportion of GDP than any other EU member) and flagrant tax evasion by the rich—but also the structure of the Eurozone itself, which was designed to create a market for German exports in Greece and the other weaker European economies by replacing weak local currencies with the Euro. This encouraged excessive borrowing. The “Troika” of the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund agreed to a “rescue package”—three big chunks of bailout money—in return for Greece signing a “memorandum” promising massive privatization of public assets and harsh austerity measures—cutting government spending on wages, pensions, social welfare—to free up money for paying down the debt.

         In part because of the worldwide recession, government revenues fell despite the spending cuts, and the debt continued to grow. Meanwhile, the austerity program provoked massive resistance from the Greek people. Huge protest marches on May Day 2010 were attacked by the riot police and followed by a general strike—the first of 16 since that date. Over the next two years, hundreds of thousands demonstrated repeatedly in the streets of Athens and other cities, Parliament was stormed several times, clashes with the riot police were a regular occurrence, and public squares across the country, including Syntagma Square in Athens, were occupied. As Parliament continued to do the Troika’s bidding, passing one savage austerity package after another, popular support for the two political parties that have dominated Greek politics since the 70s—the conservative New Democracy and the nominally socialist PASOK—collapsed.

         Elections in the spring of 2012 constituted a political earthquake. In the first round of voting in May, the Coalition of the Radical Left, SYRIZA, hitherto one of the country’s several minor parties, came in second, with nearly 17 percent of the vote, just behind New Democracy. PASOK saw its share of the vote plummet from 44 percent in the last election in 2009 to 13 percent. At the same time, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn gained parliamentary seats—18—for the first time as a result of winning more than 425,000 votes, close to seven percent of the total. This is in comparison to three years before, when Golden Dawn had a tiny .46 percent of the vote. After attempts to form a new government failed, another election was scheduled for June 17. With opinion polls showing that SYRIZA might come in first, the Greek corporate media and European, especially German, officials went into high gear, warning the Greek people that a victory by SYRIZA would bring internal anarchy and result in Greece’s expulsion from the Eurozone. To a certain extent this terror campaign worked. Despite the growing popularity of SYRIZA and its leader Alexis Tsipras, many voters apparently took fright and either abstained or voted for the parties of the memorandum. By the same token, however, many other voters rallied to SYRIZA for refusing to back down on its opposition to the memorandum. As a result, while SYRIZA again came in second, this time it won an astounding 27 percent of the vote.

         Everyone seems to expect that the current coalition government of New Democracy, PASOK, and Democratic Left—a more conservative social-democratic split-off from SYRIZA—will be short-lived and that new elections might very well bring SYRIZA to power. The Troika has so far appeared determined to make an example of Greece by not allowing any renegotiation of the memorandum. Meanwhile, the country is enduring depression-like conditions, with official unemployment now at 23 percent but probably closer to 30 percent in reality, and youth unemployment exceeding 50 percent.

         This was the background to our visit to Athens, July 5-12. We met with a number of SYRIZA activists, including party leaders, a woman involved in immigrant rights, and two young men from the Front of the Greek Anti-Capitalist Left, ANTARSYA. We also spoke to several people who were not political activists.

         Athens certainly does not look like a city in the midst of great upheaval, let alone on the verge of revolution. We were in a working class district at one point and in another residential area that seemed pretty modest, as well as in the center. Especially for foreign visitors, signs of economic distress were hard to detect, although we were told that there is great suffering “behind closed doors.” We can’t recall seeing any begging. Wherever we were, we scarcely ever noticed political signs or posters or people leafleting. Of course, it was summertime, when things simmer down for a while. Perhaps too we were seeing signs of fatigue after two and a half years of militant protest. On the other hand, steel workers were on strike in an Athens suburb, and there were environmentalist protests against gold mining in Chalkidiki. And we heard and read about almost daily attacks on immigrants by members of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, Chrysi Avgi (more about which below.)

    SYRIZA

         Michalis Spourdalakis, a professor at the University of Athens, told us some of the history of SYRIZA. Until now, it has been a coalition of several parties rather than a single organization. The largest by far is Synaspismós, whose older leaders come out of the Eurocommunist current that split with the Communist Party, the KKE, in the 1980s. SYRIZA itself emerged from the Greek wing of the anti-globalization movement about eleven years ago. But it was the great popular upsurge against austerity that turned SYRIZA into a major force. Since the crisis began, the organization has been joined by some of the more leftwing members of PASOK, including a few members of parliament. Its mass support, however, is recent and comes from the streets. Time and again we heard that SYRIZA had earned the respect and loyalty of activists, especially of young people, by its intense involvement in and its “non-hegemonic” approach to the strikes, demonstrations and occupations. SYRIZA, we were told, showed its commitment to listening to and building the movement—rather than simply recruiting members, building their own organization, and heavy-handedly insisting on acceptance of SYRIZA’s agenda.

         Spourdalakis stressed, as did most of the Greeks we spoke to, that SYRIZA is not a typical electoral machine but is instead rooted quite deliberately in mass actions—strikes, demonstrations, occupations—in the midst of which its MPs and officials can be found along with rank and filers. SYRIZA people we spoke to seemed acutely aware of the danger of substitutionism, that is, substituting the party for social movements. At the same time, Spourdalakis insisted, having a presence in parliament is essential because that is where so much media attention is focused and where, of course, major decisions are made.

         Now that it has achieved a position of great trust and potential responsibility, SYRIZA has decided to transform itself into a unified organization, rather than a coalition of different organizations, and to recruit aggressively. While we were in Athens, SYRIZA announced that it was launching a big membership drive with the goal of growing from the current 15,000 to a party with many times that number of members. The separate components of the SYRIZA coalition will be able to become tendencies within the party. Recruitment will take place at worksites, on campuses, in the streets and at the local assemblies that SYRIZA has been holding since before the elections. We attended one of these assemblies in an open area in the working-class suburb of Peristeri, attended by around 600 people, according to our estimate. Tsipras gave a rousing speech, and we were told there would have been a discussion period following the talk had it not been so hot outside.

         Spourdalakis was cautiously optimistic about SYRIZA’s future and said the party’s ability to grow depended very much on staying deeply connected to extra-parliamentary struggles. For one thing, SYRIZA is now engaged in organizing unorganized workers—for example, bookstore employees, couriers, tutors, and other urban service workers—into new unions. Greece has two main labor federations, one for public employees and the other for private, both of them controlled by PASOK, and a third, smaller but still sizeable federation run by the KKE. Most Greek unions contain caucuses that are linked to SYRIZA and ANTARSYA. We were told by ANTARSYA that their group is especially significant in the teachers’ union, as is SYRIZA.

         SYRIZA declares that its first act, on winning power, will be to repudiate the memorandum. It will then demand re-negotiation of the debt to write off a major part of it. If that demand is rejected, a SYRIZA-led government will stop debt repayments. The party promises to impose heavy taxation on corporations and the wealthy, to nationalize the banks and re-nationalize those public services that have been privatized, to restore the minimum wage and labor contracts that have been undermined during the crisis, to drastically cut military spending, to emphasize renewable sources of energy, and to construct a strong social welfare state.

         Panos Trigazis, head of Synaspismós’s foreign policy section, was our genial host in Athens, introducing us to SYRIZA leaders and intellectuals and bringing us to a press conference, where we met Alexis Tsipras. Panos explained a great deal, including the meaning of SYRIZA’s emblem: three superimposed banners, red for socialism, green for environmentalism, and purple for feminism and other social movements. As far we could see, the party’s foreign policy is not too well defined at this point. Its printed statements in English are pretty much limited to relations with the EU and to regional disputes. SYRIZA takes the position that Cyprus should be re-united as bicommunal, bizonal federation without foreign armies and foreign bases. It wants better relations with Turkey and a mutual reduction in armaments, and it calls for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. SYRIZA’s platform advocates the withdrawal of Greek troops from Afghanistan and the Balkans, and declares “No Greek soldiers beyond our own borders.” It calls for the abolition of military cooperation with Israel, and support for the creation of a Palestinian State within the 1967 borders. The platform does call for Greek withdrawal from NATO, but a few people told us that this meant severing the military connection only. In any case, the platform also calls for closing down the U.S. base in Greece.

    The KKE and ANTARSYA

         As for the KKE, virtually every leftist we spoke to expressed disgust for its grotesque Stalinism (this is not just an epithet; the party actually glorifies Stalin) and fanatical sectarianism, which has seriously undermined the anti-austerity movement. The KKE has refused to join any kind of united front, and apparently its chief slogan during the elections was “Do Not Trust SYRIZA.” In general, the KKE will not participate in any action it does not control—for example the huge annual Anti-Racism Festival, which we were lucky enough to attend. This three-day festival has been held in a park on the outskirts of Athens every summer for 16 years and is a moving expression of solidarity with the country’s beleaguered immigrant communities. This July organizers estimated that more than 22,000 people, immigrants and non-immigrants, had attended.

         The KKE is anti-EU, but so are other elements on the left, including a group within SYRIZA, the Communist Organization of Greece, the KOE, which has Maoist roots. Also in favor of an immediate “Grexit” from the EU is ANTARSYA. One afternoon at a café near Syntagma Square, we talked with two of its young members. They were worried about popular demobilization now that the elections were over and were skeptical of SYRIZA’s ability or willingness to spearhead struggles against the new government’s plans to privatize much of Greece’s state assets. They warned that SYRIZA was not preparing people for a showdown with the Troika and the EU. ANTARSYA calls for unilateral cancellation of the Greek debt, except for money owed to pension funds; this in contrast to SYRIZA’s position of repudiating some of the debt but negotiating the rest. And it advocates immediate withdrawal from the EU rather than attempting to transform and democratize it, which is the stand taken by SYRIZA’s leading elements.

         The ANTARSYA members said that SYRIZA is run by a small group around Tsipras, which is fairly autonomous, even in relation to Synaspismós members, and that a strong presence among SYRIZA’s leadership is also occupied by former PASOK MPs. The revolutionary groups within SYRIZA have almost no public profile, they said, and instead of pushing the party further to the left have restrained themselves in response to pressure from what they describe as the dominant social-democratic elements and a perceived need for unity. They claimed that after the June election, Tsipras had said that SYRIZA would not put people in the streets but would act as a “responsible” opposition.

          It was difficult for us to assess the validity of ANTARSYA’s various critiques of SYRIZA and its strategy of immediate exit from the Euro, but in any event we asked the young ANTARSYA members if the group might not be more effective as a left wing within SYRIZA, rather than outside it. They said no, it was necessary to maintain their organizational independence to avoid cooptation, which they charged was or would be the inevitable fate of internal critics. We questioned this conclusion. It seemed to us that SYRIZA was a party in motion, attracting mass support and membership, and with, yes, the possibility of capitulating to the Greek and pan-European elites, but also with the potential of sparking a powerful chain of resistance to those elites. It should be noted that many ANTARSYA members voted for SYRIZA instead of the party’s own candidates in June, and that some of ANTARSYA’s leaders have gone over to SYRIZA.

    Lessons for the U.S.

         In fact we were struck by the contrast between SYRIZA, with its base in popular movements and its radical possibilities, and the Democratic Party in the U.S., which year after year corrals progressive movements into a party dominated by corporate interests incapable of fighting for progressive goals. In our country there has been plenty of direct action in the streets, in the public squares, on campuses, in workplaces. But unlike Greece, this has not been accompanied by direct action at the ballot box through a political party that is not beholden to big business and is clearly a party of the left. We think that the millions of Americans who are outraged by the ruthless pillaging of their society by arrogant elites desperately need an electoral movement like SYRIZA that is rooted in popular struggles and committed to winning and using political power to achieve progressive change.

    Golden Dawn

         While we were inspired, even exhilarated, by the strength of SYRIZA and its meteoric growth in influence and potential power, at the same time, we became increasingly aware of the ominous threat posed by the rise of Golden Dawn. Although it denies any association with neo-Nazism, Golden Dawn has adopted Third Reich paraphernalia and uses a symbol closely resembling the swastika. Its leaders have written and spoken of their admiration for Hitler and the Nazis. It is mobilizing anti-immigrant sentiment among many Greeks who blame immigrants for the economic crisis. Currently, SYRIZA has 71 MPs, compared with Golden Dawn’s 18, which reflects the fact that so far they have been more successful than the right wing in gathering support from people enraged by the country’s economic horrors. But there is no guarantee that this relative success will last.

         Golden Dawn regularly terrorizes immigrants, particularly those from Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the streets, in the public squares, on the metro, and in immigrant neighborhoods. They recruit bodybuilders from the gyms, and clothed in black, run through the streets in groups of 30 or 40, shouting anti-immigrant slogans, threatening and beating people with darker skins. Many of its members are criminals convicted of contract killings, trafficking, assaults, rapes, and armed robberies. At the same time, they position themselves as the defenders of public order, for example offering to accompany older people to ATM machines to protect them from robbers.

         Golden Dawn has an alarming degree of support from the police, especially the riot police. It has been reported that as many as 50 percent of the police voted for its candidates in the June elections. Rather than protecting immigrants, the police regularly turn a blind eye to Golden Dawn’s assaults. They often tell immigrants who complain of being attacked that they will have to defend themselves, or that they will have to pay a fee in order to file a formal complaint. In fact there are no such fees. [For a fuller account, see the Human Rights Watch report “Hate on the Streets: Xenophobic Violence in Greece,” July 10, 2012.]

         Golden Dawn’s vicious xenophobia is accompanied by a crude male chauvinism that is shocking to see in the 21st century. We were told that the party believes that woman’s place is in the home not in public positions of power. This was acted out on a television talk show ten days before the June elections, when Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris threw water in the face of one female SYRIZA MP, Rena Dourou, and then hit another woman, Liana Kanelli, a Communist MP, three times in the face. Kasidiaris was elected to his seat in parliament in the elections that followed soon after this grotesque incident. The British Guardian reported “Several hours after the incident, with the group still resolutely refusing to apologise, two MPs with the socialist Pasok party were attacked by Golden Dawn supporters as they campaigned in northern Greece…. In recent months, and especially in the weeks that have elapsed between Greece's two [May and June 2012] ballots, the party has been linked to a number of attacks on migrants, liberals, human rights activists and journalists, particularly women. [“Golden Dawn MP's live TV assault shocks Greece,” by Helena Smith, June 7 2012.]

         Hilary Wainwright, founding editor of the lively left-wing British magazine Red Pepper, was in Greece at the same time we were. She has written an account of her trip in the current issue entitled “Greece: Syriza Shines a Light.” Wainwright gives the following account of SYRIZA’s response to Golden Dawn’s virulent racist behavior:

    On 23 June, for example, a gang of Golden Dawn thugs raided Pakistani grocers’ shops in the working class suburb of Nikea, near the port of Piraeus, telling them they had one week to get ready and go, ‘or else’. Syriza had won 38 per cent of the vote in Nikea . . . and after the attack the party helped to organise a rally and march of 3,000 in support of the shopkeepers. . . .

         SYRIZA has long opposed racism in Greece. It has for many years participated in the Anti-Racism Festivals. Meanwhile, however, the brutal attacks on immigrants continue, and we asked people in SYRIZA how the party was responding to these assaults on a day-to-day basis. Specifically we asked if, in light of the failure of the police to defend the immigrants, was SYRIZA organizing any kind of physical response to the Golden Dawn attacks.

         Leaders of SYRIZA told us that they believed that the effective response to Golden Dawn was political, to put forward a radical democratic agenda that could address the economic crisis in a progressive way rather than scapegoating immigrants. They also advocate human rights training for police and call on the police to do their job and protect victims of racist assault. They said that in their opinion to resist Golden Dawn physically would simply lead to disastrous fighting in the streets. SYRIZA wants to prevent the media from portraying a confrontation with Golden Dawn as a “clash of two extremes.”

         We were concerned that the SYRIZA response, while good in many respects, is not adequate, and we found that several young SYRIZA members and supporters we spoke with also thought that more was needed. One young woman, for example, told us that when she had seen a Golden Dawn thug menacing an immigrant on the metro, she walked over and confronted him, demanding that he stop. Which he did. But, she said, if there had been five Golden Dawn thugs instead of just one, she doesn’t think she would have been able to intervene in the same way. SYRIZA has to mount some kind of organized physical defense for the beleaguered immigrants, she thought.

         Another young SYRIZA member told us that recently in response to the repeated physical assaults on immigrants a group of young anarchists had beaten up a number of Golden Dawn members. He said that while SYRIZA wasn’t able to confront the Golden Dawn this way, he was very glad that this had happened. It was a blow against impunity.

         When we asked SYRIZA leaders whether Golden Dawn could attack SYRIZA, they replied that Golden Dawn “wouldn’t dare,” suggesting that SYRIZA was so much stronger and more numerous that such an attack would be foolhardy. But we were concerned that, in addition to the moral imperative to defend immigrant victims, a failure to respond to Golden Dawn more forcefully now could embolden them for broader aggression against the left down the road. Even now, as we noted above, women, journalists, human rights activists and leftists have been targeted on occasion.

         There is a battle between the left and Golden Dawn as to who will be able to tap into and organize the rage of Greeks responding to their desperate conditions. We were told by a young SYRIZA member how this struggle emerged as early as the 2010 occupation of Syntagma Square. As we knew, the lower part of the Square was occupied by SYRIZA supporters and other leftists, but we learned that the upper Square was occupied by non-political people and right wingers who were waving huge Greek flags and saying that all politicians, including leftists, are corrupt and hopeless sell-outs.

         Large sections of the Greek population are cynical about all politicians, and this cynicism is justified by the record not only of avowedly conservative and centrist parties but also purportedly left parties like PASOK and Democratic Left, which have shown themselves unwilling to challenge the Troika’s austerity prescriptions. The June elections of 2012 were marked by a historically low participation rate, which reflected this popular distrust of all political parties.

    The Challenge Ahead

         This is the challenge now facing SYRIZA: Can it sustain resistance to the Troika and crucially, if elected, can it carry out a radical program that addresses the needs of the Greek people? Admittedly this won’t be easy. There is a good chance that Greece will be forced out of the Eurozone if there is a SYRIZA government, though it seems that the country may be ejected even before that. Greece today revives many of the old questions about whether one can build “socialism in one country,” and we saw the disastrous consequences of the attempt to pursue that path in the Soviet Union. SYRIZA will need to implement the maximum possible anti-capitalist program at home, while at the same time engaging in the critical task of winning support for a radical, democratic socialist alternative from the rest of Europe—from other countries with weak economies like Spain and Italy, to the countries of Northern Europe which, while more prosperous, also suffer from inequality, insecurity, and down the line, instability.

    Solidarity

         Dimitris Vitsas, the secretary of Synaspismós, discussed with us the need to build international solidarity, not just with SYRIZA but with the Greek resistance as a whole. He suggested strengthening an international campaign that has already started around the slogan, “We Are All Greeks.” Vitsas said that Greeks refuse to be the guinea pigs for extreme neoliberalism. Greece has been the weak link in the chain of austerity, but now SYRIZA’s success offers the possibility that Greeks can show the way to fight back. We at the Campaign for Peace and Democracy plan to organize a campaign along these lines in the U.S., building on the Occupy Wall Street solidarity initiative several months ago. Stay tuned for future developments.

     

    Thomas Harrison and Joanne Landy are Co-Directors of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy in New York. They can be reached by email here. This article originally appeared on the website of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.

  • Reply to Balderston: Longview Contract Was Not a Victory

    [Reply to Bill Balderston's article, "Occupy Oakland and the Labor Movement."]

         I am going to focus my remarks on section 2 of Bill Balderston's article, which he subtitled "The Battle of Longview". Bill and I have very different views of the outcome of this battle, and what that outcome is likely to mean.

         I disagree with much of what Bill wrote in his section on Longview, but probably found the biggest problem to be what he omitted. "The Battle of Longview" fails to discuss the battle's outcome. This is like staging a three-act play without the third act. Not coincidentally, the article does not discuss the actions of the ILWU International leadership in isolating the Longview local by a series of orchestrated steps, before stepping in to negotiate and deliver a contract worse than what the Longview workers struck over in the first place.

         From just reading Bill's article, one might conclude that "The Battle of Longview" was a victory, and one might think that the contract was a decent deal.

         Here are some of the inconvenient but necessary details:

         The ILWU International, which had opposed the December 12 West Coast Port Shutdown, was even more adamantly opposed to the Occupy movement's planned mass caravan to Longview to block loading of the first EGT vessel to dock at the Longview grain terminal. So when, on January 5, Dan Coffman, president of ILWU Local 21 (Longview) appeared at a meeting in Portland that included Occupy speakers, the International leadership immediately responded by removing pickets from all the other locals from Longview, leaving the small 233-member local isolated.

         To underline its hostility to Longview Local 21 acting jointly with Occupy to block the first EGT ship at Longview, on the following day (January 6) local presidents from the Seattle, Portland, and Tacoma locals, together with a handful of their supporters, disrupted a Seattle meeting at which several prominent ILWU activists from Longview and Oakland were speaking along with representatives from Occupy Seattle, Portland, and Oakland. The International used this provocation as an excuse to draw a line in the sand between the ILWU and Occupy.

         Bill does mention the January 6 meeting in Seattle that was disrupted by ILWU local leaders and goons. Bill does not, however, mention this in context of what happened before and what happened next. The previous night, January 5, the same crew of local presidents and their goons attempted to disrupt a meeting in Portland where Local 21 President Dan Coffman was speaking, along with speakers from Occupy. Following the meeting—in retaliation for Coffman daring to speak on a platform with Occupy—the International retaliated by pulling the pickets from all other Northwest locals out of Longview, leaving the 230-member Local 21 to fend for itself.] Then, following the January 6 meeting, the ILWU International flew all local presidents to San Francisco to meet with the International leadership for the purposes of totally isolating and quarantining the Local 21 leadership. Having cut the Local off from the Occupy movement, the ILWU leadership took complete control of the negotiations; they sat down with the company and the state and announced "a tentative agreement 'in principle,'" with the specifics to be worked out. In other words, the International agreed to agree—terms to be mailed in later.

         Bill does not deal with the actual contract. Veteran longshore activists I respect call it an awful deal. Local 21 (Longview) gave up control of the master panel, a major concession that will impact work rules and attrition. The contract does preserve a hiring hall, but in name only: all names must be submitted to the company in advance (facilitating blacklisting). The contract eliminates all of the traditionally strong clauses that have allowed ILWU members to express labor solidarity—honor community picket lines; refuse to handle "hot-cargoed" goods, etc.—and three violations will invalidate the entire contract (and the company has basically dictated the composition of the arbitration board). And on and on. It is down the line a major defeat when compared to the west coast master agreement—and will be used as the basis for the shipping bosses demands when that agreement is up in two years. (The full contract is available on the web at transportworkers.org. The same web site has a detailed breakdown of the rotten deal.)

         What do Longview rank and file members think of the contract? What do the Local 10 (Oakland / San Francisco) activists think? What do those mentioned in Bill's article think? I urge everyone to view the following video, where all of these folks hold forth for nearly two hours at a January 29 forum. You will find that as far as the contract is concerned, the views from Occupy Oakland, from the ILWU Local 10 activists, from the Committee to Defend the ILWU, from the Longview rank-and-filers are identical: "Sellout."

         It should be clear that the ILWU International leadership worked hand in hand with the state and the company to impose the contract. It is true that the ILWU retained jurisdiction at the port of Longview. But beyond that, the contract was a massive defeat, a setback that will have reverberations two years from now when the west coast master labor agreement comes up for renewal. The opportunity to wage a militant struggle with powerful community support was not just discarded; the ILWU International actively suppressed it. This is consistent with the "team concept" of management / labor collaboration that has proved to be so disastrous in auto and, indeed, throughout the private sector (where unions now barely represent one in 20 workers). The same losing strategy is being applied in the public sector by labor tops like the AFT's Randi Weingarten and the NEA's Dennis van Roekel. It is leading to the same disastrous end. Longview could have been otherwise, had it not been actively throttled by the International. There would have been a mass caravan, at a time when Occupy still could organize thousands, and at a time when the mass actions of October, and especially of November 2 and December 12, still resonated. At a minimum, this collaboration should have been cultivated, not forcibly severed as the International deliberately did.

         There are many questions that an article on this topic ought to address. Did Local 21 have to accede to the International's demand that it cut communications with Occupy? (This was done under the threat of the International refusing to defend the local against the massive fines threatened by the company and the state.) How does labor deal with the legal noose that functions to stifle strikes and other forms of militancy? What can and should be done besides just solidarity demos? (Rank and file caucuses? Organize the unorganized? Reject legalism? Organize against state intervention into the labor movement? And how?) These are important questions. Unfortunately, the article does not explore them.

         (Full disclosure: I was involved in occupy Oakland labor solidarity work through early February. Since then, I have focused my time on working to build the Occupy Oakland Education Committee (the group that organized and led the Lakeview sit-in and People's School for Public Education see saveoaklandschools.org for more information). So I haven't been closely involved with the labor support committee since February, and therefore won't comment on the last section of Bill's article.)

  • Mexican Movement Fights “Imposition” of PRI’s Enrique Pena Nieto

          The Mexican presidential election that took place on July 2 is over—but it is not done. Tens of thousands of Mexicans have been marching every week for almost a month in Mexico City and other cities throughout the country against what they call the “imposition” by Mexican election authorities of Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) as president of Mexico.

         Inspired by the “I am #132” student movement and forming part of the newly organized National Front Against Imposition, on July 27 some ten thousand people initiated a 24-hour symbolic siege of the Mexico City broadcast center of Televisa, the institution they see as representing the economic elite’s control of the political process. Many spent the night in tents, some wearing the Guy Fawkes masks inspired by the film “V for Vendetta” that were so popular during the Occupy movement’s encampments in the United States. At the same time, hackers supporting the movement succeeded in infiltrating the Televisa system and sending Televisa twitter messages against Peña Nieto.

         Meanwhile in the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF) and in the Congress there are proposals to investigate election vote buying, to void the election because of fraud, and to install an interim president until a new election can be held.

         While initially it was students who protested against Peña Nieto, beginning before the election, they have since been joined by Mexicans from all walks of life, among them school teachers, electrical workers, the urban poor and peasants. The students’ carnivalesque demonstrations have been completely different from the marches and rallies of political parties and labor union that are usually carefully managed, highly disciplined and usually serious affairs.

         This is a youth movement, with all of its creativity and energy, and now with its older allies, attempting to stir the conscience of the nation, speaking out against a man and a party that its adherents see as representing everything that is wrong with Mexico, and seeing in this election an opportunity to change the course of the country. While they like others object to the alleged election fraud, they also object to what they see as an authoritarian party that will continue the neoliberal economic programs of the last 25 years.

    Everything is Up in the Air

         While it is almost a month since Mexican election authorities announced that Peña Nieto had received 38.21 percent of the votes, a plurality that should have made him the victor in the national elections held on July 2, still everything appears to remain up in the air.

    • The election authorities have not yet certified the election and formally declared Peña Nieto to be president-elect.
    • Opposition candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who came in second with 31.59 percent of the vote, alleges that there is enough evidence to show that the PRI spent more money than allowed, bought votes with gift cards, and in other ways committed fraud. He is demanding that the TEPJF void the election and that the Congress install an interim president until a new election can be held. There are no provisions in the Constitution for an interim president as the result of a fraudulent election.
    • The Permanent Commission of the Mexican Congress has discussed the possibility of a revision of the Constitution to create a mechanism by which Congress would choose an interim president, though some have suggested that the President of the Supreme Court would become interim president.
    • The PRD and the conservative National Action Party (PAN, whose candidate Josefina Vásquez Mota won 25 percent of the vote), have called for Congressional investigations into the alleged vote buying. The PAN, however, is not seeking to overturn the election.
    • Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Mexicans, inspired by the “I am #132” student movement, have marched every Sunday since the election through the boulevards of Mexico City and the avenues of dozens of other cities throughout the country to oppose the “imposition” of Enrique Peña Nieto and the PRI on the Mexican people.

    Students Take the Lead

         The “I am #132” student movement has been the leader of the mass movement which has grown up in opposition to the “imposition” of Peña Nieto. “I am #132” defines itself as an autonomous, peaceful, student social and political movement, completely independent of political parties, candidates and electoral organizations. The PRI claims that López Obrador controls or manipulates the movement, a charge that its leaders deny. Many of those active in the movement no doubt are supporters of López Obrador, but they do not carry his signs, wear his t-shirts, and hardly mention his name; the struggle they say is about democracy.

    National Convention Against Imposition

         Arguing that “we cannot do it alone,” the students brought together hundreds of popular organizations, including unions, community organizations, and peasant groups in a National Convention Against Imposition held in mid-July. The meeting was attended by 115 delegates from 17 states who came representing hundreds of organizations and gave birth to the National Front Against Imposition, which organized the latest protest of ten thousand at Televisa.

         The Front takes the position that Enrique Peña Nieto “should not be president, not only because of the corrupt regime that he represents and because of his collusion with and subordination to Televsia, but also because of the threat that he represents for our country: privatization of petroleum, increases in taxes, labor law reform that will legalize the exploitation of works and the privatization of the health sector and pensions.”

         The Convention boldly laid out a timetable of further protests through October:

    • September 1—A National Day of Struggle against the Imposition, including a march from the TEPJF to the House of Representatives to demonstrate against Felipe Calderón’s presentation of his Sixth State of the Union Address.
    • September 6—which is the day by which the TEPJF must certify the election—another National Day of Struggle to include the taking of public places, blocking of highways, the taking over of toll booths and opening of toll gates.
    • September 15-16—Mexico’s National Independence Day — the occupation of the public plazas of the country with the cry: “Long Live Mexico without the PRI!”
    • October 2—a national student strike accompanied by marches.
    • Finally, a possible encirclement of the Congress to prevent Enrique Peña Nieto from taking office.

    Protesters a Minority

         This is of course a minority movement. Two-thirds of the country voted for the conservative National Action Party or the Institutional Revolutionary Party with its history of authoritarianism and corruption. While tens of thousands are marching, tens of millions either supported Peña Nieto or accept the election results, even if they believe fraud may have been involved. The question is whether or not the students and their allies can stir the inert millions on the left who tend to agree with them into action. They only have a few months to do so, and they are fighting the government, the parties, and the media.

  • Overlooking Outsourcing

             I have read many analyses of the failure to recall Gov. Walker in Wisconsin, and I am astonished that not one even mentions American industries either outsourcing or just folding their tents because they are unable to compete with foreign companies. Steel is an example of the latter: many steel workers now work as greeters at Walmart.

             Surely this is an important cause of labor’s sad decline. Industrial capitalism has given way to finance capitalism, as everyone knows.

             Leftists are adept at flagellating themselves—if only we had done X, Y, or Z. But perhaps the real reason for this omission is that industries’ outsourcing and giving up are too painful to consider.

  • Statement on Mexican Election from Group in Veracruz

    [Introduction by Dan La Botz: As tens of thousands throughout the country protest the results of Mexico’s presidential elections, a group in the State of Veracruz has issued a statement calling upon Mexicans to both refuse to recognize the results of the election and to engage in a campaign of civil disobedience to make it impossible for the new government to rule. The statement was issued by the Network United for Human Rights of the Huasteca-Totonaca region in the State of Veracruz, a region with a high percentage of Totonaca peoples, one of Mexico’s many indigenous peoples.

    The Network received some notoriety a couple of years ago because of its advocacy of withdrawing from the national capitalist economy and creating an alternative market place and currency. In September 2010 when they first began to circulate a new and unofficial currency called the túmin, from the Totonacan word for money, the Banco de Mexico, Mexico’s central bank, brought charges through the Attorney General’s office against the creators of the túmin.

    The group’s statement on the election combines criticism of the recent election with a general denunciation of Mexico’s political parties and the state and the advocacy of a turn to a communal economy and local self-governance.

    The English translation is followed by the Spanish original.]

    DECLARATION OF THE NETWORK UNITED FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
    WE WILL NOT LET THEM GOVERN
    WE DO NOT RECOGNIZE ENRIQUE PEÑA NIETO AS PRESIDENT

    1. While our movement and our Network United for Human Rights (RUDH) in the Huasteca-Totonacapan is non-partisan and doesn’t participate as an organization in the electoral process because we don’t believe in the state institutions or in the political party system, at the same time we refuse to recognize Enrique Peña Nieto as the winner of the republic’s national elections on July 1, 2012.
    2. We express our rejection of the manipulation of the media and of the polling organizations in the electoral process, and we reject the lack of democratic commitment on the part of the institutions and the functionaries of the government, in particular of [President] Felipe Calderón, whom we have also refused to recognize as president since the fraud of 2006.
    3. We reject in the name of democracy that we are having imposed upon us another president who has been repudiated throughout the country, for whom only a minority of people voted, people who were brought to the polls to vote under pressure, were tricked, or were corrupted with money and other gifts. We reject all forms of fraud, including the computer fraud that has been tolerated by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). The IFE is an organization which completely lacks credibility because it has not guaranteed the validity of the elections. It is an instrument of social domination, with the exception of a good number of citizens of good faith who participated as precinct officials, who were also duped.
    4. We invite conscious citizens to defend their vote, and once they have become fed up with the institutional avenues [of protest], to join us in putting aside the institutions of the state and together look for new forms of political activity, based on cooperation, equity, freedom and a real sense of democracy where the people give the orders and the government obeys. Don’t participate any more in the elections called by the IFE which only serve to elevate the political class and to legitimize the perversion of the government.
    5. We invited our fellow citizens to begin a stage of civil disobedience, disobeying the government in every way possible. This is about a peaceful revolution. If you can, don’t let them count you, don’t tell them anything, don’t pay fines, don’t pay sales taxes, don’t pay other taxes. Our taxes can be seen in the insulating salaries of the political class, in the pensions of the ex-presidents, the traitors to our country, in the financing of electoral fraud, in the rescue of the bankers and the businessmen who have taken over the firms that once belonged to all Mexicans. They themselves don’t pay taxes enriching themselves at the expense of the nation.
    6. If you are a teacher, teach the students about what is happening in our Mexico: tell them who the traitors, thieves, and murders are, those who deceive and kill the people. Create with the children the missing pages in the textbooks and change what isn’t true. Create a new generation of citizens conscious and courageous, human beings concerned about their country and about humanity.
    7. Don’t let them govern. Let’s think collectively about what we can do to stop obeying. If it is possible, don’t pay your credit cards. Liberate yourself from that slavery which has shackled us. Feel proud to have bad credit. Feel ashamed to be docile and to do everything they tell you to. If possible, don’t buy in the big supermarkets or in the transnational chains or in the shopping centers, and least of all in Soriana. Buy in the small Mexican stores. Buy natural products. Buy in the informal economy.
    8. When it is possible, buy pirate goods; don’t consume luxury products. Give things away. Freely offer a product or a service. Don’t accept anything from the government, whether it’s cheap or given away free. Don’t ask the government for anything. Don’t demand. Don’t protest. Ignore it. See with your heart and trust people. If it is possible, go with your neighbors and change your street name, at least on your block. If possible, put up a sign outside your house declaring “Autonomous Home.”
    9. If it is possible, don’t pay the light bill, cut it off. If it is possible, don’t respect daylight savings time. Don’t buy patent medicines, go to a natural healer. If it is possible, produce in your own home, let’s create family gardens and offer alternative products. Let’s make every home an informal store. Lower your prices. Exchange products. Accept alternative currency. When it is possible and only if it is absolutely necessary, name an alternative authority who will lead by obeying, but not as part of the government.
    10. If it is possible for you, conspire, because all of this is not enough, and the government is conspiring against you all of the time. This is a revolution of consciousness, and that’s the beginning.

    From the Huasteca-Totonacapan, México
    July 7, 2012

    “Sow justice and the fruit will be peace.”
    Network United for Human Rights

    Translation by Dan La Botz

    Spanish original:

    PRONUNCIAMIENTO DE LA RUDH
    NO NOS DEJAREMOS GOBERNAR
    DESCONOCEMOS A ENRIQUE PEÑA NIETO COMO PRESIDENTE

    1. Si bien nuestro movimiento y nuestra Red Unidos por los Derechos Humanos (RUDH), en la región Huasteca-Totonacapan, se declaran apartidistas y no participan como organización en el proceso electoral por no creer en las instituciones del estado ni en el sistema de partidos políticos, desconocemos a Enrique Peña Nieto como triunfador en las elecciones a la presidencia de la república el pasado 1 de julio de 2012.
    2. Expresamos nuestro rechazo a la manipulación de los medios de comunicación y de las llamadas casas encuestadoras en los procesos electorales, y rechazamos la falta de vocación democrática de las instituciones y funcionarios de gobierno, en especial de Felipe Calderón, a quien también desconocemos como presidente desde el fraude electoral de 2006.
    3. Rechazamos que a nombre de la democracia se nos imponga otro presidente que ha sido repudiado en todo el territorio nacional, para el cual sólo votó una minoría de gente acarreada, presionada, engañada, denigrada con dinero y otras dádivas. Rechazamos todas las formas de fraude, incluido el fraude cibernético, tolerados por el Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE), el cual carece de toda credibilidad al no garantizar la certidumbre de los comicios y al ser un instrumento de dominación social –con excepción de un buen número de ciudadanos que de buena fe participaron como funcionarios de casillas, los cuales también fueron engañados.
    4. Invitamos a la ciudadanía consciente a que defienda su voto y, una vez agotadas las vías institucionales, hagamos a un lado las instituciones del estado y juntos busquemos nuevas formas de hacer política, basadas en la cooperación, en la equidad, en la libertad y en una verdadera democracia donde el pueblo manda y el gobernante obedece. No se acuda más a los comicios convocados por el IFE, pues sólo sirven para encumbrar a la clase política y legitimar la perversión del gobierno.
    5. Invitamos a la ciudadanía a que comience una etapa de desobediencia civil, a que desobedezca al gobierno en todo lo que pueda. Se trata de una revolución pacífica. Si le es posible, no se deje censar, no informe, no pague multas, no facture, no pague impuestos. Los impuestos sólo se reflejan en los insultantes sueldos de la clase política, en las pensiones de los ex presidentes, traidores a la patria; en el financiamiento del fraude electoral; en el rescate a los banqueros y a los empresarios que se han apropiado de las empresas que eran de todos los mexicanos y que, además, no pagan impuestos, enriqueciéndose a costillas de la nación.
    6. Si es usted un buen maestro, enseñe a los estudiantes lo que pasa en nuestro México: quiénes son los traidores, los ladrones, los asesinos, los que engañan y matan al pueblo. Construya con los niños las páginas que faltan en los libros de texto, cambie lo que no es cierto. Construya un nuevo ciudadano consciente y valiente, un ser preocupado por su patria y por la humanidad.
    7. No se deje gobernar. Pensemos colectivamente en lo que podemos dejar de obedecer. Si le es posible, no pague sus tarjetas de crédito, libérese de esa esclavitud a la que nos han orillado; siéntase orgulloso de estar en el buró de crédito, sienta vergüenza de ser dócil y cumplir todo lo que le imponen. Si le es posible, no compre en los grandes supermercados ni en tiendas transnacionales ni en centros comerciales, mucho menos en Soriana; compre en pequeñas tiendas mexicanas; compre productos naturales; compre en el comercio informal.
    8. Cuando sea posible, compre productos piratas; no consuma productos de lujo. Regale, ofrezca gratuitamente un producto, un servicio. No acepte nada del gobierno, ni barato ni regalado; no le pida nada, no le exija, no proteste, ignórelo. Vea usted con el corazón y confíe en la gente. Si le es posible, cambie con los vecinos el nombre de su calle, por lo menos el de su cuadra. Si le es posible, ponga un letrero afuera de su casa y declárese “Hogar Autónomo”.
    9. Si le es posible, no pague la luz, cuélguese. Si le es posible, no respete el horario de verano. No compre medicinas de patente, acuda a la medicina naturista. Si le es posible, produzca en casa, tengamos huertos familiares y ofrezca productos alternativos; hagamos de cada casa una tienda informal. Baje sus precios, intercambie, acepte monedas alternativas. Cuando sea posible, si y sólo si en verdad es necesario, nombren una autoridad alternativa que mande obedeciendo, pero no un representante ante el gobierno.
    10. Si le es posible, conspire, porque todo esto no basta, y el gobierno todo el tiempo conspira contra usted. Ésta es una revolución de conciencias, para empezar.

    Desde la Huasteca-Totonacapan, México
    7 de julio de 2012

    “Sembremos justicia y el fruto será la paz”
    Red Unidos por los Derechos Humanos

     

    Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati-based teacher, writer and activist. He is the editor of Mexican Labor News & Analysis.

  • "Right-to-Work," Organized Labor, and "The Proletariat as a Whole"

         On January 31, 2012, the Republican majorities in both the Indiana Senate and House passed "right-to-work" legislation, riding roughshod over both the Democratic minority and tens of thousands mobilized workers and their allies. Indiana thus became the first new "right-to-work" state since Oklahoma, which became one in 2002—and a possible harbinger of more defeats for organized labor to come.

         "Right-to-work," of course, means no such thing, as it has no direct bearing on the unemployment rate; its proponents tout it as a means to promote economic development and create new jobs, but no such results have been firmly established. In fact, just the opposite—"right-to-work" states have not benefited from an influx of new jobs, and the general economic effect of 'right-to-work" legislation has been to reduce workers' pay, eliminate benefits, and erode on-the-job protection for those employed. All of this has been documented in study after study.

         Organized workers make up a small minority—11.8 percent—of what Marx and Engels called "the proletariat as a whole." Compare this to 1955 when organized labor represented about 35% of the U.S. workforce. Associated Press reporter Sam Hananel noted earlier this year, "public-sector workers had a union membership rate of 37 percent, more than five times that of private-sector workers…. About 7.6 million employees in the public sector belonged to a union last year [2011], compared with 7.2 million workers in the private sector." Though the number of union workers increased slightly last year, the actual union share of the workforce dropped from 11.9% to 11.8%, "the lowest percentage of union workers since the Great Depression of the 1930s." Moreover, this slight increase in union membership came after a loss of nearly 1.4 million workers in the last two years alone, with steady declines in union membership since the 1990s and before. Back in 1991 labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan noted in his book Which Side Are You On? (Plume Books ed., 1992, p. 256) that "unions barely organize 0.3 percent of the workforce annually," with the obvious consequence that "the unionized share of our work force drops every year."

         In Indiana, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, organized labor lost 99,000 members between 2001 and 2011, despite a gain of 23,000 from 2010 and 2011. The rate of unionization in Indiana dropped from 14.6% in 2001 to 11.3% in 2011—below the national average. New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse notes that while the percentage of union workers in Indiana's private sector, 8.2% in 2011, was above the national average of 6.9%, this was down by nearly 20% since the 1980s because of Indiana's loss of manufacturing jobs. In Indiana and nationwide, then, there were slight gains for organized labor after three prior decades of heavy losses.

         Of course, in the past—not really so long ago, though it seems like an eternity now—even non-union workers benefitted from organized labor's relative strength vis-à-vis capital and from the gains it achieved in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, even into the 1970s: the weekend, the 40-hour workweek, overtime pay, a minimum wage that tended to increase over time, relatively high wages coupled with benefits and real pensions that made industrial workers part of that "middle class" whose purchasing power sustained a general prosperity. Significant economic and social gains were made even by the least well-off sectors of the working class—African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities, and women—which, though still unequal compared to those gained by white males, opened doors of opportunity that had hitherto been closed, and fueled social and political militancy coupled with organizational savvy, much of it learned from organized labor itself. This managed to occur even in those dreary days of Meany/Kirkland complacency and even when the official labor movement was hostile to organizing women and minorities outside of its boundaries.

         Each of these real gains, gains made possible by organized labor's former strength, is now under fire and faces demands for massive cutback, even elimination. And not just for the non-unionized but for the unionized themselves, forced increasingly into purely defensive battles just to sustain what they once had without question. Clearly, there is an aggressive class war being waged against "the proletariat as a whole," and the lines of battle have been drawn in crucial states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. Some labor leaders even publicly doubt that there will be labor unions five years from now.

         Organized labor "lifted all working-class boats" when it was a force with strength; now, with its palpable decline, union workers' boats sink along with those of non-union workers. Just as the strength of the organized minority benefitted "the proletariat as a whole," today the decline of organized labor threatens "the proletariat as a whole." But organized labor hasn't seemed to have gotten the message—it still narrowly organizes on its own parochial turf, going it alone and looking out for the interests of only union workers, even in the face of support from non-union forces who realize that more is at stake than just organized labor's ability to provide high wages and substantial benefits and protections for its own membership. Forces such as students, activists and others understand that organized labor is bigger than itself; that it is a beleaguered, steadily shrinking army in the class struggle, of which the attacks on unions are only a part, although the most visible part.

         But despite a greater verbal militancy on the part of certain labor leaders, notably AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, and even public statements of support and identification with the Occupy movements, organized labor as a whole is still mired in the discredited, complacent policies of the Meany/Kirkland era; still devoted to the stale "union philosophy" of Sam Gompers, "More!" and still not actively reaching out to and building alliances with non-union forces who understand what organized labor has yet to really grasp—that "An injury to one is an injury to all" and that the vital need of organized labor is to "Organize the unorganized." This was made palpably clear here in Indianapolis, Indiana, where I live, where, both in 2011 and in 2012, Indiana's organized labor force made no effort whatsoever to mobilize non-union workers and supporters to fight "right-to-work," relying instead only on its own minority forces and Democratic Party members of Indiana's General Assembly. The result was a standstill on "right-to-work" in 2011, and a major defeat in 2012, as an aggressive, Tea Party-dominated Republican majority used every method available, scrupulous and unscrupulous, formally democratic and blatantly undemocratic, to ram through "right-to-work" legislation in both House and Senate of the General Assembly and present it for signature to an eagerly-awaiting Republican Governor Mitch Daniels.

         In the wake of this major defeat, all Indiana's union leaders and the Indiana AFL-CIO itself would say is "Just wait till the 2012 elections!" Appeals to defeat "right-to-work" during the legislative session were made on strictly economistic grounds (i.e., "right-to-work" won't bring the economic growth and increased numbers of new jobs its proponents tout; it's just the "right to work for less" when, as of January 2012, Indiana's unemployment rate was 8.7%, which meant 279,000 workers were without jobs, period!), and this ineffectiveness was seconded by labor allies such as the chapters of Jobs with Justice and other social movement forces. No appeal whatsoever was made to Indiana's 88.7% of the workforce who are non-union to join in solidarity on this issue that vitally affects "the proletariat as a whole," but which Indiana organized labor saw as only affecting itself and made appeals only to others to come down to the Indiana Statehouse downtown to join organized labor's rallies and lobby their state legislators—much of this activity taking place during Super Bowl Week (Indianapolis hosted Super Bowl XLVI on February 5, 2012), when simply to park one's car cost $20 per vehicle, where even normally metered parking (if one could find a spot) is $1.50 an hour, where public transportation in Indianapolis is glaringly inadequate and frequently nonexistent, and where, except for fast food, all downtown restaurants are upscale and expensive—effectively freezing out many supporters such as myself who had the "leisure time" to participate because of unemployment, but not the wherewithal to make their physical presence felt.

         The Indiana AFL-CIO merely reflects, rather than tries to change, the generally right-wing, Red State nature of Indiana politics; it deliberately eschewed and stood apart from the several Occupy movements that had grown in Indiana towns, cities and campuses; and tolerated their involvement on "right-to-work" only as long as they followed where the union leadership wished to lead. (One Central Indiana DSA member of my acquaintance once complained that the labor movement here is still mired in the Henry "Scoop" Jackson "Guns and Butter" model of Cold War anti-communist liberalism.) Organized labor as a whole and at the national level is not much better, and is certainly not trying to be a voice for "the proletariat as a whole."

         Consider UCubed, the "union of the unemployed" organized by the International Association of Machinists (IAM): it organizes the unemployed only as a voting bloc to pressure politicians to vote for "pro-labor" legislation rather than as an actual, grassroots organization of the unemployed; and on the issue of unemployment, despite occasional calls for a new WPA which are never advanced seriously, is quite willing to follow Obama's lead as advanced in his tepid "jobs program" that would provide only 1.2 million jobs when there are still 13 million workers unemployed, many of them long-term. It's now the case that "help" for the unemployed consists mostly of websites for unemployed workers on how to fine-tune their already-useless résumés for a job market where, despite some recent job growth, there is still 8.2% national unemployment. In some states, of which Indiana is one, because the official unemployment rate is below 9%, extended unemployment benefits will no longer be available; and it's become increasingly fashionable to blame the unemployed for their unemployment, and to require new, humiliating screening of the unemployed (such as mandatory drug tests) in order to "qualify" for the "privilege" of receiving unemployment (which is capped in Indiana at the princely sum of $390 per week, or the equivalent of 40 hours at $9.75 an hour; but for many unemployed workers, the amount they can receive is much less).

         Indeed, the currently fashionable cry for "right-to-work" legislation and other punitive measures against the very idea of union representation and collective bargaining is yet another capitulation to the "race to the bottom," where the "high wages" achieved by unionized U.S. workers allegedly render the U.S. economy "uncompetitive" with low-wage powerhouses such as the People's Republic of China. Organized labor's chief response to the "Chinese threat" has been only to decry "unfair trade practices" and "deliberate undervaluation of the yuan" and call for sanctions against the Chinese government, not call out in the least for worldwide solidarity with the overworked, low-paid Chinese proletariat. But this is a Chinese proletariat that has become increasingly militant the last couple of years in demanding real union representation and an end to those intolerably-low wages and slave-like working conditions notoriously exemplified in Foxconn, chief manufacturer of the popular Apple iPhones and other electronic gadgets.[1] This militant Chinese proletariat should be seen as a role model, not a threat!

         As regards "the proletariat as a whole" internationally, U.S. workers' greatest need is to stand in solidarity with their Chinese and other foreign counterparts, and the U.S. labor movement should be taking the lead in organizing this solidarity. Instead, organized labor focuses on "Buy American" campaigns and other displays of narrow nationalism.

         And while it is the Republican Party generally that is most vociferous in beating the drums of "free trade" and blaming unions for making the U.S. economy "uncompetitive," this is truly a bipartisan effort, with not only many leading Democrats but the Obama Administration itself supporting new "free trade" agreements and touting the return of jobs to the U.S. in low-wage (and "right-to-work") states such as Arkansas.

         Instead of cheering low-wage jobs, addressing this travesty should be the labor movement's focus. It is precisely in this neglect of "the proletariat as a whole" that we see where organized labor has gone amiss—failing to organize the unorganized and undermining what it can gain for its own members. Not only are those who are worst-off usually excluded from, even shunned by, the unions themselves, but the situation is made worse for all. The condition of the working poor in the United States is extremely grim:

         In 2011, the US Department of Labor reported at least 10 million people worked and were still below the unrealistic official US poverty line, an increase of 1.5 million more than the last time they checked. The US poverty line is $18,530 for a mom and two kids….About 7 percent of all workers and 4 percent of all full-time workers earn wages that leave them below the poverty line….

         These are certainly an integral, numerically significant part of the "proletariat as a whole." They are also certainly among those least likely to be unionized, and that's important—unionization of a significant part of the U.S. and other countries' workforce was crucial to creating the broad "middle-class prosperity" that characterized the U.S. and Western European economies in the 1950s and 1960s, and in expanding the "welfare state" (tepidly in the U.S., more substantially in Western Europe).

         Now we're all feeling the brunt. Unionized UAW auto workers who are newly-hired make only around $15 an hour, down substantially from the average of around $28 an hour that used to prevail in the UAW-organized shops. Unemployed college graduates are as vulnerable to long-term unemployment now as high school dropouts. In 2010, only 56% of new college graduates found jobs. Young workers looking for entry-level positions will find that their salary prospects are much dimmer than they were a decade ago. Half of all U.S. workers made less than $26,000 in 2010, and "[S]ome 127.5 million people—are liquid-asset poor. If one of these households experiences a sudden loss of income, caused, for example, by a layoff or a medical emergency, it will fall below the poverty line within three months. People in these households simply don't have enough cash to make it for very long in a crisis."

         John Schmitt's January 2012 report, "Low-wage Lessons," is a cornucopia of disturbing facts on low-wage workers in the U.S., who, of course, are overwhelmingly non-union. Schmitt notes further that low wages are "often among the least of the problems facing low-wage workers, especially in the United States," citing lack of health insurance, paid vacations, paid sick leave, paid family leave, "welfare state institutions" and the protection of "labor laws": all those things labor unions historically have won for their members and fought to extend to all workers! But with organized labor in the doldrums and preoccupied with purely defensive battles, "the proletariat as a whole," especially those outside of organized labor, are in a real bind—especially if poor, unemployed, or barely surviving the crisis of the current Great Recession. But too often it's precisely these massive sectors of "the proletariat as a whole" that organized labor has defaulted on, and the left's current preoccupation with organized labor to the virtual exclusion of those workers not in unions have only exacerbated the problems facing not only organized labor—but all those 88.2% of "the proletariat as a whole" standing outside the unions.

         Is there hope for the future? Perhaps, with the emergence of Occupy movements on a nationwide, even worldwide, scale after decades of quiescence, along with a greater militancy among organized workers themselves, especially if they understand the vital need to reach out to their unorganized and unemployed brothers and sisters. Recent moves by the United Steelworkers Union in active alliance with Spain's highly successful Mondragon workers' cooperative network to promote direct worker ownership and workers' cooperatives is also encouraging; but so much more still needs to be done, and organized labor is only playing catch-up. While some labor leaders may be waving their arms and saying "Here we are! Better late than never!" let's hope it doesn't end up with "the proletariat as a whole" ruefully saying after the fact, "Too little too late." That means the left itself will have to do more to reach, organize and galvanize "the proletariat as a whole" and not just its organized sector; not simply, naïvely count on this tiny organized minority of this "proletariat as a whole" finally doing what it should've been doing decades ago.

    Note

         1. But Apple isn't alone. Popular toymakers such as Mattel and Disney are also prime beneficiaries of horribly-exploited Chinese labor, as is Walmart and the many others firms. All this is extensively documented by SACOM (Hong Kong-based Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour) and other watchdogs. Walmart's toleration of abuse by its Chinese contractors is the subject of a special report by Andy Kroll in the March/April 2012 Mother Jones.

     

    George Fish is a veteran socialist activist, writer and marginally-employed worker living in Indianapolis. His activities in SDS and the antiwar movement of the 1960s are chronicled in Kenneth Heineman's Campus Wars (New York University Press, 1993), a history of the anti-Vietnam War movement at non-elite universities. This article is a shortened, modified version of one that appeared on ZNet May 18, 2012, "'Right-To-Work' And Labor's Wrongs: Why Organized Labor's Present Doldrums Are Largely Of Its Own Making." Special thanks to Stephen R. Shalom for very helpful editorial assistance.

  • Tens of Thousands of Students March in Mexico Against Growing Fraud Scandal and the Imposition of PRI’s Peña Nieto

         Carrying signs denouncing fraud, tens of thousands of students and other voters marched through Mexico City on July 7 to protest what they see as the government’s imposition on the country of presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Peña Nieto received 38 percent of the vote, compared to 32 percent for Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and 25 percent for Josefina Vázquez Mota of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). López Obador claims that the election was fraudulent and has called upon the election authorities to investigate claims of vote buying.

         Students, however, have led the protests. In addition to the mass march in Mexico City, they also marched in smaller numbers in several other major Mexican cities, including an impressive demonstration by an estimated 7,000 in Guadalajara two days ago. The protest was organized largely through social media by the “I am #132” movement which has dogged Peña Nieto for two months, criticizing in particular his close ties to the powerful Televisa television network.

         The Mexican Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) has declared Peña Nieto the winner, though final tallies are still not in. IFE says it is investigating alleged vote buying. Students carried signs reading IFE: Institute of Electoral Fraud. The protest, after rallying in the Zócalo, Mexico’s national plaza, ended up at a wedding of television stars being broadcast by Televisa.

    Imposition Claimed in 1988 and 2006

         The idea of the government imposition of a candidate resonates in Mexico where many believe that the government imposed candidates who actually lost the presidential election in 1988 and in 2006. In 1988, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas may have actually defeated Carlos Salinas de Gortari who was declared the winner. Cárdenas told me in 1996 that he had not led a national movement to demand that his victory be recognized because he feared violence that might end in a bloodbath. Similarly, there is good reason to believe that Andrés Manuel López Obrador may have won the 2006 election, though the IFE declared Felipe Calderón to be the winner by a margin of 0.58% of the vote. Protesting that decision López Obrador mobilized his followers who rallied in Mexico City by the hundreds of thousands and eventually a million blocking the city’s major thoroughfares, while leftist legislators attempted to block Calderón’s inauguration in a chaotic Congress where representatives of the rival parties came to blows. Calderón was finally smuggled in by a back door and sworn in before Congress to the applause of the right and the chanting and jeering of the representatives of the left.

    Vote Buying Scandal Grows

         The students protest came as the PRI’s alleged vote buying scandal continued to grow with well substantiated allegations that the PRI had spent hundreds of millions of dollars (estimates range from $250 to $500 million) to purchase plastic gift cards worth approximately $7.00 each which were used by PRI operatives to buy votes. The PRI apparently bought the cards from Soriana, Mexico’s largest retail chain, and distributed them to voters in exchange for the promise to vote for Peña Nieto. The dispersal of so many cards led to long lines of customers at stores in some areas.

         The PRI, which ruled Mexico from its founding in 1929 until 2000, is infamous for its political machine and for corruption. Throughout much of its history it ruled a one-party-state where workers in government industries, public employees, workers in the private sector and peasants were taken to the polls to vote under the eyes of their employers and the political bosses. Soldiers’ ballots were sometimes filled out and cast by their officers. The PRI machine bought other votes with barbeque and beer or with promises of metal lamina for the roofs of concrete block houses and milk for children. The PRI claims to have become a modern and democratic party, but it seems to many that simply means that they use a plastic gift card with a magnetic strip rather than a taco and a bottle of beer to buy a vote.

  • Mexicans Vote to Return the PRI to Power: Updated

    [This report updates the report written and posted on the New Politics blog on July 3.]

         The PRI is back in power. Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has won the Mexican presidential elections with a plurality of 38 percent of the vote, returning to power the party which ruled Mexico as an authoritarian one-party-state for decades. Peña Nieto defeated the left-of-center Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) who got 32 percent of the vote and Josefina Vázquez Mota of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) who received about 26 percent. For the Mexican left, the election results are a stinging defeat not only at the presidential level, but also in the congressional elections.

         López Obrador, who claims to have won the last election, has not accepted the election results either and is asking the electoral authorities to investigate. Thousands of his supporters marched through Mexico City the day after the election, claiming that their candidate had once again been defrauded of his victory. López Obrador claims that Peña Nieto and the PRI violated spending limits; he argues that through fraud they have stolen one million votes. The Mexican electoral authorities have agreed to recount more than half the ballot boxes because of irregularities found in vote tallies. Peña Nieto won the election by more than three million votes according to the authorities. The PRD, however, won again the mayoralty of Mexico City with 60 percent of the vote and won the governor’s elections in the States of Morelos and Tabasco. The PRD thus remains a political power in the country though it did not win the presidency and has a minority in the congress.

         While López Obrador attributes his loss to his opponents’ violations of election law and fraud, his own decisions no doubt also had an impact. In 2006 the Mexican election authorities reported that he had lost by a quarter of a million votes and many believe he actually won; this time he lost by more than three million votes and no one but his most ardent followers are asserting that he was the winner. Why did López Obrador lose in 2012? Perhaps it’s because he abandoned the more radical rhetoric of his 2006 campaign, which led the media to compare him to Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and this time portrayed himself as a moderate reformer who would follow the example of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, the former president of Brazil. López Obrador sought this time around to win the confidence of the Mexican business establishment and of Mexico’s middle classes, while still holding on to his traditional base among working people, peasants and the poor. Did some of his potential voters lose confidence in a candidate who changed his identity from left to center? Perhaps. In any case, the move to the right clearly failed to improve on his 2006 performance.

    The Future: A PRI – PAN Alliance?

         The PRI in power under Peña Nieto will not for the foreseeable future be in a position to recreate the one-party state that it was in the past. While final statistics are not yet in, the PRI will likely have little more than 240 seats in the 500-seat lower house. The PRI will only be able to rule by making an alliance with the PAN with which it shares a common economic program, and the PRI and the PAN together will have just enough votes to make it impossible for the PRD to block their program. Mexico’s former Foreign Minister, Jorge Castañeda, believes the outcome of the election will lead to cooperation between the PRI and the PAN on the basis of their common economic agenda. Under a Peña Nieto presidency and a PRI-PAN alliance, Mexico’s neoliberal policies will continue and will expand, with the country likely to see continued piecemeal privatization of the petroleum industry and the passage of a labor law reform bill that would weaken unions. There is also, however, the possibility of political deadlock, an alternative that led to a fall in Mexican stock prices as the election results were reported.

    The Student Movement—Too Little Too Late

         Peña Nieto, who had the support of the powerful Televisa network and of the PRI’s powerful political machine, faced a rising challenge in the month before the election from a new student movement that criticized his links to the mass media and his record of political repression in Mexico State where he had been governor. The student movement expanded from the elite Ibero-American University, to the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and then to state university campuses throughout the country, raising its cry again money’s corrupting power in the media in ways similar to the American Occupy movement.

         But the student movement, known as “I am #132,” which grew rapidly and attracted attention from throughout the country, was still too little and too late to change the election victory for Peña Nieto and the PRI that had been predicted for months by the polls. The question now is, will the student movement that arose out of the 2012 presidential election be able to continue as a significant social movement once Peña Nieto takes power? Other student movements of the late 1960s and the mid-1980s had an important progressive impact on society at large, and this one may too if it can recover from the election hangover and tackle the society’s economic and social problems.

    The PRI’s Past

         The Institutional Revolutionary Party has its origins in the Mexican Revolution. It was created in 1929 by President Plutarco Elías Calles as the party of government functionaries and transformed by President Lázaro Cárdenas in the late-1930s into a mass party of workers and peasants. By the 1940s the PRI had become an authoritarian and corrupt party with a nationalist economic program; it oversaw the state banks and industries, encouraged private capital and used its control of the labor unions and peasant leagues to ensure labor peace. The “Mexican Miracle” of the 1950s and 60s was based on the PRI’s policy of keeping wages down, though providing workers with subsidized health care, housing, food, and fuel. By the 1980s, however, the PRI abandoned its nationalist economic program and adopted neoliberal policies to encourage foreign investment, open markets to free trade, cut the social budget, and weaken labor unions. Since the 1970s, the PRI had loosened its hold on the political process and by the 1980s there were growing political parties left and right.

         When the PRI turned right in the 1980s, the nationalist wing, led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas broke off forming the Democratic Current and then a National Democratic Front, which also included the former Mexican Communist Party and other left groups. Cárdenas ran as the Front’s candidate in 1988 and is widely believed to have won the election, but the PRI President Miguel de la Madrid and the electoral authorities declared Carlos Salinas de Gortaria the winner. Salinas then oversaw a vast privatization of industry that transformed Mexico’s political economy. In the election which just took place, Salinas supported Peña Nieto, and some argued that Salinas will be the power behind the throne.

    The PAN’s Failure

         In 2000 Vicente Fox, a Coca-Cola Company executive, businessman and rancher, ran as the National Action Party’s candidate for president and won, ending over 70 years of rule by the PRI. Fox had received votes from both the right and left, from all of those who wished to end the long rule of the PRI. Fox oversaw the emergence of multi-party political democracy, but did little to change the economic direction of the country. Many were surprised to see him maintain the alliance with the country’s corrupt official unions. When Fox retired, he left to his successor Felipe Calderón the country’s continuing economic difficulties and its fundamental social problems. In this election, Fox declined to support the candidate of his own party, Vázquez Mota, and instead endorsed the PRI’s Peña Nieto as the best option for voters.

         For the last six years, Felipe Calderón, also of the conservative PAN, has held office, pursuing a war against drug dealers that saw the deployment of 40,000 soldiers and thousands of police officers, widespread violations of human rights, almost 60,000 killed, 10,000 disappeared, and thousands forced to leave their homes for other states. He has also presided over an economic crisis that saw annual per capita growth of less than one percent throughout his term, with millions unemployed and a growing number of youth who could neither continue their education nor find jobs. Real GDP growth for the last dozen years has averaged 2.3 percent, low for a developing country. Some have argued that the terrible economic situation helped to drive tens of thousands of Mexicans to seek work in the illegal drug trafficking business. Calderón thus became tremendously unpopular with the Mexican people, making PAN candidate Vázquez Mota’s campaign an uphill battle. The people punished Calderón and the PAN by denying her their votes.

    The Left’s Future

         Mexico’s left, which invested so heavily in the rightward-moving López Obrador must ask itself whether it made a mistake and might not have done better pursuing some other alternative. Lacking confidence in the Party of the Democratic Revolution, López Obrador created his own campaign organization called MORENA (Movimiento para la Renovación Nacional or Movement for National Renovation). MORENA became an umbrella for a variety of social movements and small left political parties who stood under it or just outside of it, anxious to find a candidate who could advance the left. Speaking to the left, López Obrador said he wanted “real change,” and the revolutionary left interpreted this to their followers as “regime change” that would restore democracy and create a popular political economy. The appearance of the student movement “I am 132” encouraged the left to believe that their time had come. The Mexican left thus embraced a rightward moving populist, a strategy that in the wake of López Obador’s defeat leaves it disappointed and disoriented.

         What is new and exciting coming out of the election is the new student movement. On July 4 in Guadalajara, one of Mexico’s largest cities but also generally a conservative one where the largest demonstrations by social movements, unions and the left seldom exceed 500 people, students using social media organized a 7,000 person protest against Enrique Peña Nieto and the PRI. Something is happening among Mexico’s young people and they deserve to have options on the left besides populism; their demand for democracy and social justice needs to find expression in a revolutionary rejection of capitalism and a vision of democratic socialism. If the left is to offer it, it must critically examine its own illusions regarding the existing political system, its parties and its candidates.

     

    Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati-based teacher, writer and activist. He is the editor of Mexican Labor News & Analysis.

  • The People Rule

         What is democracy? Well, as most of us know, it comes from the Greek demos kratos—the people rule. But what form has that rule taken? Well, in the days of the ancient Athenians, free Greek men used to gather in the agora—the marketplace, to debate public policy and vote on it. Fast forward to the Magna Carta signed by King John of England at Runnymede, and it meant limiting the power the king had over his nobles. The serfs and townspeople were left out of the mix. Gradually, though, Parliament came into existence and developed in a more democratic direction over many years, helped along by Cromwell, the Glorious Revolution, the Diggers, the Levellers, the Chartists and others.
         In the meantime, in continental Europe, progress was slower, happening first in places like Holland, Switzerland and the Hanseatic League. Gradually, towndwellers—burghers, bourgeois, or folks more commonly perceived as merchants—gained incremental bits of a say over their communities' affairs. The Church as a major property and power holder held things back in continental Europe, as they also had in England. Very little progress in that direction was made until John Locke's ideas, partly brought into formation by the Protestant emphasis upon the individual, helped engender the American Revolution, along with resentment of the planters, bankers and merchants over tax policy. Then the French Revolution, helped along largely by the price of bread, but also by the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire and the royal and noble impediments to their well-being perceived by French merchants and traders, brought liberte', egalite' et fraternite' to the fore. Then, once Napoleon set his troops to marching, those soldiers spread the ideas of the Revolution throughout Europe.
         Colonialism and imperialism meant the elites of Europe and America—the metropole—grew ever richer and more willing to share some power and resources with those who could help them rule, with a few crumbs of the crumbs wrested from the colonies granted by the elites to the rest of us. For the people in the hinterlands controlled by that metropole, it meant increasing misery and oppression, but also exposure to Western political and philosophical concepts which they adapted to their home turf.
         Filtered through Jean Meslier, Hegel and Feuerbach, democratic ideals were further extended by communist philosophy. This brought forth, thanks to Marx and Engels, wonderful ideas such as "the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all." That concept, along with the socialist stage, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work" and the communist stage, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," pretty well summed up the ideals of that movement, as embodied by a working class in revolt. The ever-growing power of the proletarians gradually pushed back the boundaries of suffrage, so that more and more men were able to vote. For women it came later. In some societies, much later. This despite the fact that Mary Wollstonecraft's Declaration of the Rights of Woman was written not long after the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the Seneca Falls Convention, pushing women's rights, was held in the same year as the publication of the Communist Manifesto. Black people were finally freed from slavery in the United States, years after the first Black republic was fought into existence in Haiti, whose people took inspiration from the ideals and example of the French Revolution. Freedom for America's enslaved came some years after bondage was outlawed in the British Empire. Shortly before Blacks were freed here, peasants were released from serfdom in Russia. Immediately after the withdrawal of Union troops from the South, though, the vote and much of their freedom was taken away from African Americans by Jim Crow laws.
         The Communist movement sprang out of Social Democracy as a result of the latter's betrayal of European workers in World War I. Ordinary folk were emphasized in speeches, in political and popular literature as a result of the Communist movement. Real, democratic gains were made, especially by trade unionists, due to the dedicated leadership of Communist cadres. This started transpiring all over the world.
         The communist movement, along with Enlightenment ideals, inspired intellectuals and leaders in the hinterlands like Frantz Fanon, Kwame' Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Mao, Gandhi, Nehru, Ho, Che' Guevara and, in South Africa, Nelson Mandela, whose African National Congress-led revolt against apartheid inspired the world. The resultant Constitution of South Africa is among the world's most advanced and liberatory, even if neoliberal policies are followed by those now in power.
         But then in those countries where communist parties gained power, apparatchiki, nomenklatura, in other words, Party bureaucrats grasped more and more power. What little say over their own affairs working people had won was taken from them. It was taken back by them from 1989-'91, but soon lost again to apparatchiki turned capitalist. In our own country, the Civil Rights,antiwar, women's, GLBTQ, disabled and senior movements extended democracy beyond the suffrage finally won by women in 1920. Eighteen-year-olds won the right to vote.
         Already by the mid-'70s in our own country, a pushback had begun. "Too much" democracy was declared dangerous by rightwing intellectuals. Their theories were hearkening back to John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others and their fears about "King Mob." An all-out assault was made on trade unions. Tens of millions of dollars flowed to conservative thinktanks, churches and the Republican party. Smaller, but still sizable contributions flowed, much of it from the financial world, to the Democratic party as well. The Republicans got more than their share from Wall Street. Elections became more and more expensive for candidates, making them increasingly dependent on massive infusions of cash from the corporate and financial worlds. Regulations in place since the Great Depression were relaxed or eliminated altogether. As a result, wild speculation became the order of the day and, with the collapse of major Wall Street players, we had something called the Great Recession. Millions of Americans were thrown out of work who had not already lost their jobs in the midst of the de-industrialization of America and the gravitation of those industries to low-wage, low-regulation countries. Many of the jobless lost their homes to foreclosure. Many older people lost their life savings, as the bottom fell out of their 401(k)s.
         As one consequence of this and the continuing attack on trade unions, a fightback developed among workers, students and other mostly young people. Madison, Wisconsin became the epicenter of a working-class resurgence. Zuccotti Park gave birth to Occupy Wall Street and the many Occupys which started spreading all over the country and the world, along with the Indignados of Spain and the people in revolt in Greece, Britain, Ireland and elsewhere. They were joined by millions of Middle Easterners in the Arab Spring, which developed a like-movement in Israel and had really begun in a non-Arab country, Iran. Working people in China, Vietnam and Thailand fought back against corporate and governmental repression. Popular movements got themselves elected into power in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador and, briefly, in Honduras and Chile.
         Democratic movements were on the rise. In the world of theory, in the meantime, post-Marxists, post-structuralists, postmodernists and their more recent manifestations helped along already-extant multi-culturalist movements and something called radical democracy, a major statement of which was Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony & Socialist Strategy. Following later on the heels of that was the horizontalism, the general assemblies, the human microphone and the consensus-seeking of the Occupy movement, thanks to anarchist impulses.
         With the threat of catastrophic climate change and the race not only to the bottom but perhaps even into extinction which has been developing parallel to all this, the 21st century's democratic impulses could not have come along at a more critical time. If popular movements all over the world can link up, which they can through their mobile phones, their iPADs, their text-messaging and their videos, recording flash mobs and other democratic impulses, we may well save the planet and the vast majority of its people yet. Demos kratos will have gone from being the purview of free Greek males to being everybody's purview.
     
    Greg King is a member of SEIU, Local 888

  • Cuba, Socialism and Democracy

         In January 2011, members of the Participatory and Democratic Socialism Movement proposed that the Cuban Communist Party adopt its "Proposals for the Advance of Socialism in Cuba." ("Socialism and the 'Citizens' Demand for Another Cuba," Pedro Campos, Havana Times, June 24, 2012)* These socialist critics of the Cuban regime offered a program of radical democratic proposals including full freedom of speech and press, freedom of association (including parties and unions), freeing of political prisoners and the like—while supporting the continued criminalization of receiving foreign "aid" that seeks to undermine the Cuban "constitutional order." Not surprisingly, the Cuban party congress—which approved massive lay-offs from the public sector—rejected these proposals.

         Many leftist defenders of the Cuban regime argue that such proposals reflect "perfectionism." ¬ They claim that socialists like those who support Havana Times (or New Politics) are engaged in a "Platonic" exercise of defining some sort of "ideal" socialist society¬ and condemning all deviations from that ideal. Is this the case?

         The critique of the absence of effective democratic workers power in the post-capitalist societies of the 20th century (and those that survived into the 21st century) is not a "deviation from the ideal," but an assessment of the structural root of the crisis and collapse of these societies. Most of us who have been critical of all of these societies, including Cuba, never argued that only a fully nationalized and planned economy where workers democratically make any and all economic decisions was the only acceptable form of socialism. Instead, we argued that the shifting boundary between planning and market mechanisms—which characterizes the transition to socialism—must be determined democratically as should all fundamental economic decisions. In order for working people to be able to determine both the boundary between market and plan and the fundamental goals of economic planning there must be, at the minimum, the right to form competing political parties/formations that put forward different proposals, free speech/press for all who do not take up arms against the regime, the ability to form independent trade unions and organizations of women, the racially oppressed, LGBT people, etc.

         Some have claimed that the repression in Cuba is justified by the demands of fighting the threat of counter-revolution. Since the early 1970s, however, one would be hard pressed to find examples of armed opposition to the Cuban regime that would justify its repression of non-violent political dissidents.

         Others cite such institutions as the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), the unions, and the elected popular assemblies in the neighborhoods and workplaces as examples of Cuba's revolutionary democracy. The CDRs are not open to all Cubans who seek to defend the revolution. Instead, they are much more limited in their membership and goals. Only those who are judged "ideologically integrated" by their local Communist Party organizations are permitted to join the CDRs. The main tasks of the CDRs is to root out those who are "ideologically suspect"—whether or not they are engaged in armed political activity—and to aid in the administration of rationing and other social and economic tasks. Many commentators have argued that the CDRs are simply extensions of Cuban State Security (the political police). In any case, participation in the CDRs declined sharply since the 1990s, especially in Havana, as more and more Cubans have had to work longer hours in official and unofficial jobs to make enough to subsist.

         The Cuban unions are almost identical to those that existed in the other dictatorial post-capitalist societies. The Cuban unions, like their Soviet, Eastern European and Chinese counterparts, are not allowed to strike or take other direct action in defense of workers' interests. The question of whether revolutionary socialists would advocate strike action in a democratic workers' state is an important one. However, unions that do not have the right to strike cannot act as an effective counterweight to the state managers and planners—the role that Lenin envisioned for independent unions during the debates with Trotsky (who advocated the bureaucratic "statization" of the unions) and the "Workers' Opposition" (who advocated trade union administration of the economy) in 1921. Instead, the Cuban unions act as "transmission belts" between the party and the workers—encouraging workers to fulfill production quotas, accept managerial authority and the like. Put simply, the Cuban unions function as an extension of the unaccountable and undemocratic party-state management in Cuban workplaces, not as independent voices of the workers.

         Finally, there are the elected popular assemblies created by the Cuban Constitution of 1976. Despite what some have claimed, these assemblies do not mark a radical departure from forms of popular participation that existed in the other post-capitalist societies. Like elected assemblies in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe or China at various points in their history, the Cuban popular assemblies have extremely limited powers. At best, they have "input" into national economic and social decisions (production goals, boundary of market and plan). For the most part, they decide how to implement decisions made "from above" in unelected, unaccountable institutions. In sum, the popular assemblies allow millions of Cubans to participate but not control political and social life. The French students and workers in 1968 understood the difference in their slogan" "I participate, you participate, they profit." In the case of post-capitalist Cuba, the slogan could easily be modified to "I participate, you participate, they decide."

         Today, the website Havana Times is filled with stories of the repression of the most elemental forms of non-violent free speech and free association on the island. In late May, some sixty left-wing dissidents organized the sixth "National Critical Observatory Social Forum"—the independent Cuban social forum. Raising slogans like "Socialism Is Democracy," "Kick out the Bureaucracy," "Down with Capitalisms," "If You Think Like the Bourgeoisie, You'll Live Like a Slave," and "Let's Make Our Revolution," these dissidents discussed the looming destruction of guaranteed employment and the need for greater self-organization in Cuba. The authorities, after initially granting the use of state facilities, shut the meeting down early. ("Cuba Social Forum Successful, but Cut Short," Isabel Diaz, Havana Times, June 3, 2012). Access to the internet remains prohibitively expensive for most Cubans ("So Now We Have Internet Access in Cuba?" Daisy Valera, Havana Times, May 21, 2012).

         In the absence of such minimal democratic controls, what we got in the post-capitalist societies of the 20the century was a form of social production that was able to initiate extensive growth—the multiplication of means of production and labor based on the import of existing technology from the capitalist west. The result was a rapid quantitative increase in both producer and consumer goods. Extensive growth, combined with economic planning and attempts to shield the command economies from international competition, allowed the growth of popular living standards for a period of time, including extensive "welfare states" (guaranteed employment, inexpensive housing, free medical care, etc.)—the concrete gains workers made in these societies.

         While the unaccountable officials of the party and state were able to promote extensive economic growth, however, they were unable to translate this into intensive growth— the continuous growth of labor productivity through the introduction of new and more sophisticated means of production and the continuous improvement in the quality of producer and consumer goods. Bureaucratic privilege and secrecy systematically undermined the planning process, leading to massive waste of labor and resources and chronic problems of quality. Lacking either the discipline of the market (competition forces capitalist firms to lower costs through the introduction of labor saving technology) or the democratic control of the producers (workers' have a stake in reducing their labor time through the introduction of labor saving technique), these authoritarian command economies—including Cuba's—experienced economic stagnation beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hyper-centralism in economic planning combined with voluntarist calls for the masses to work harder and sacrifice consumption and working conditions for the "good of the revolution" in the mid-1960s (when Che shaped economic policy), the early 1970s (the "10 million ton" sugar harvest) and again in the late 1980s and early 1990s (the "exceptional period" after the collapse of the Soviet Unions) all failed to produce the sustained intensive growth necessary to support the growth of collective services in Cuba. Faced with a growing economic and social crisis, the officialdom was compelled to reintroduce market mechanisms—greater independence for factory managers in obtaining inputs and selling outputs, the ability of managers to keep "profits" which were often shared with their workers, greater openness to international capitalist investment, etc. These experiments in "market socialism" did little to solve the deepening crisis of these societies. On the one hand, "market reforms" did not bring new, intensive economic growth because individual factory managers were never faced with the possibility of bankruptcy if they failed to "turn a profit." On the other hand, the expansion of the market brought greater social and economic inequalities between the bureaucracy and the workers, between sectors of the economy and among different regions. Combined with continued political repression and the inability of workers to organize their own independent institutions, the "market reforms" set the stage for capitalist restoration in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China. Today, the Cuban party-state regime is preparing to abolish one of the central popular gains of the revolution—guaranteed employment and income. While massive lay-offs in the state sector are looming, real wages are stagnant and the ration card—which guaranteed consumer goods like tobacco and personal hygiene items outside the marketplace—is slowly being abolished. The regime has begun charging for formerly free workplace-based child-care, and cafeterias are also massively underfunded, leading to a sharp decline in quality. ("The Cat Test," Daisy Valera, Havana Times, May 30, 2012).

         The absence of workers' democracy—the ability of the working class through formal democratic institutions to effectively control economic and social life—lay at the root of the crises of the bureaucratic post-capitalist societies. The suppression of democratic rights—the right to organize politically, free press, free speech, etc.—did not prevent capitalist restoration in the east. In fact, the repression of all political dissent, whatever its political and ideological complexion, undermined the ability of pro-working class and socialist forces to organize a democratic, socialist alternative. Instead, only pro-market—pro-capitalist—political forces appeared to be the consistent advocate of "democracy" in these societies. In all of these cases, a wing of the old Communist party officialdom—not pro-western dissident intellectuals—led the counter-revolution under the banner of "democracy" and the "market".

         For many of us, the evidence indicates that Cuba is proceeding along the same lines, toward a party-state led restoration of capitalism. In the past two decades, the party leadership has encouraged the private sector on the island, with the Cuban army (headed by Raul Castro) initiating joint-ventures with European, Canadian and Israeli transnational corporations in tourism, mining and agriculture. Not surprisingly, the Cuban press glorifies the Chinese model of "socialism"—a restoration of capitalism under the repressive leadership of the Communist Party. This reality has not been lost on the leading representatives of U.S. imperialism. In late 2010, Wikileaks revealed that the Obama-Clinton State Department—including the US interest section chief in Havana—had concluded that the pro-Miami exile dissidents on the island had little support and the best hope for capitalist restoration in Cuba was found in the Cuban Communist Party!

         Put simply, the absence of any minimal democratic rights in Cuba facilitates the restoration of capitalism, undermining the ability of working people on the island to organize against the Cuban party-state's steps to end guaranteed employment, free health care and open the Cuban economy to the ravages of the world market.

     

    * The Havana Times is not published in Cuba, where censorship of independent sources continues, but outside the island.