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  • Mexicans Vote to Return the PRI to Power

         Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has won the Mexican presidential elections with a plurality of 37 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 31 percent of the vote and Josefina Vázquez Mota of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) who received about 26 percent.

         Peña Nieto, who had the tacit 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 which criticized his links to the mass media and his record of political repression in Mexico State where he had been governor. 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 which had been predicted for months by the polls.

         Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who claimed to have won the presidential election in 2006, abandoned the more radical rhetoric of that campaign which led the media to compare him to Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, this time portraying himself as a moderate reformer who would follow the example of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, the former president of Brazil. López Obrador sought to win the confidence of the Mexican business establishment and of Mexico’s middle classes, as well as of his traditional base among working people, peasants and the poor. The move to the right clearly failed to improve on his 2006 performance.

         The Institutional Revolutionary Party has its origins in the Mexican Revolution, created in 1929 by President Plutarco Elías Calles as the party of government functionaries and transformed by President Lázaro Cárdenas in the 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. During 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.

         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. In terms of political program, Mexicans could find little difference between the PRI and the PAN. Presidential candidates Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and López Obrador of the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution offered an alternative, but the PRI and the PAN used their political power, corruption, and—many believe—electoral fraud to keep the leftist candidates from winning.

         For the last six years, Felipe Calderón, also of the conservative PAN, has held office, overseeing Mexico’s economic crisis and pursuing a war against drug dealers that saw the deployment of 40,000 soldiers and thousands of police officers, widespread violations of human rights, 50,000 killed, 10,000 disappeared, and thousands forced to leave their homes for other states. Tremendously unpopular with the Mexican people, PAN candidate Vázquez Mota faced an uphill battle in the attempt to represent her rightwing party, and she was ultimately defeated by the legacy of Calderón.

         With the PRI back in power, many Mexicans will be asking themselves is this a case of back to the future? Will Mexico become once again a one-party state ruled by an authoritarian party? 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. The Mexican right, the National Action Party, will find it hard to compete with the nearly equally conservative PRI and overcome the legacy of Calderon’s military policy. The question of the moment, for most Mexicans, is what will the PRI be able to do about the economic crisis and the drug war? The PRI may have its honeymoon period, but one suspects that the honeymoon will be short.

  • Blaming the public employee

             It has become fashionable, especially among conservatives, to portray public employees as lazy and inefficient, as compared to private sector workers who are touted as hard working, efficient, and cost effective. In this invective, all public sector workers are lumped together— teachers, police, firemen, welfare workers, Social Security workers, etc.

             This negative portrayal ignores the system where public employees work. Welfare workers, for example, are working for a system that encourages them to discourage applicants from applying, and hassles people after they are accepted for welfare. They get more credit for kicking people off the rolls than for accepting them on the rolls. The same is true for SSI workers. The system is set up to discourage people from applying. On the other hand, workers in the Social Security system generally don’t discourage people from applying. They are expected to deliver benefits efficiently. Public benefit systems reflect society’s and legislator’s priorities and values.

             Conservatives want everything to be privatized. Their bottom line is profits. When public services are privatized, as with welfare systems, the customer suffers because workers are fired and service is cut back.

             Public workers are often inefficient and overly bureaucratic, but that is more of a political problem than an individual problem. Some systems are designed to serve the public well, some are designed to discourage people from applying.

  • On the Eve of the Elections: The Impact of the New Student Movement

         As Mexicans prepare to vote on Sunday, July 1 in the national elections, two presidential candidates have pulled ahead and each claims that he will win. Enrique Peña Nieto, candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico for over seventy years, is ahead in all of the polls, buoyed up by the PRI’s political machine and the corporate media. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) who pulled into second place and has been gaining on the leader, has the backing of the organization that he spent the last six years building, made up hundreds of committees and tens of thousands of supporters. Peña Nieto might be called the center right candidate who will continue the neoliberal polices of the last quarter century and López Obrador the center left candidate who advocates what could be called social liberalism, capitalism with a human face. (See La Botz, “Populist candidate López Obrador moves up in polls in Mexico as his Keynesian impulses give way to appeals to business.”)

         The latest opinion polls show Peña Nieto likely to win 42 percent of the electorate and López Obrador only 30 percent. But López Obrador says the polls are wrong and his understanding of the Mexican people tells him otherwise. “We are going to win again,” he says, alluding to his claim to have won the Mexican election in 2006 only to have it stolen by the sitting president Felipe Calderón. Calderón’s colleague, Josefina Vázquez Mota, the candidate of the National Action Party (PAN) who hoped to become Mexico’s first woman president, has been falling behind, now at only 24 percent in the polls, dragged down by all the problems of Calderón’s presidency: the violence of the drug war that has taken 50,000 lives, the economic crisis, the lack of opportunity for the country’s youth.

    The Impact of the New Student Movement

         During the last several weeks the sudden upsurge of the new student movement in Mexico known as “I am 132” has begun to throw itself into the balance, and things now begin to tilt a little toward López Obrador, though it is not yet clear that they tilt far enough and fast enough to bring him victory. The new movement began when a group of socially-conscious students at the elite, private, Jesuit Ibero-American University in Mexico City protested against Peña Nieto for his record of violent repression of social movements in the State of Mexico where he was governor.

         When Peña Nieto dismissed his youthful critics as a handful of 131 student protestors, others began to put their names and faces on the social media announcing, “I am 132.” Since then the movement has spread to Mexico public university system and now there are almost daily demonstrations throughout the country against the PRI candidate and the corporate media that back him. Marches in Mexico City have drawn tens of thousands and in other cities thousands, and they are marching everywhere and daily taking up new issues. The student protests have been fueled by the British Guardian newspaper’s reports that Televisa had been paid by Peña Nieto and other politicians to carry favorable coverage of their campaigns. (Links to the Guardian coverage can be found at the end of this article.)

    How Independent are the Students?

         The appearance of what is now a national student movement attacking the alliance between the PRI’s Peña Nieto and Televisa clearly helps López Obrador, though both he and the students deny that there is any relationship between his campaign and the movement. The Mexican students say simply that they do not want to return to the past of the authoritarian, corrupt and repressive government of the PRI. The students sometimes call their movement “The Mexican Spring,” alluding to the Arab Spring of a year ago, and they invoke the Spanish indignados and the Quebec student strikes and protests which are taking place at the same time. The students argue that it is time for change in Mexico, though their movement has not yet articulated the kind of change they seek.

         The PRI has accused López Obrador of using his organization and funds to manipulate the student movement, a charge denied by both López Obrador and the students who claim that they are completely independent.

         On June 11, a new “Generation MX” (MX for Mexico) video appeared on the internet, supposedly made by half-a-dozen students, which criticized “I am 132” for serving party interests and having no direction. The video proved to have been made, however, under the direction of Rodrigo Campo, an advisor to the president of COPARMEX, the Mexican Employers Association, though Campo claimed that no political party had had any hand in the creation of the video or the alleged other new student movement that it claimed to speak for. The “Generation MX” video appeared to have been a failed attempt by one of Mexico’s most conservative organizations to derail the new student movement.

    What Will Be the Impact?

         Despite it’s unlikely beginnings at the elite Ibero, “I am 132” has become a genuine national youth movement, spreading from the Ibero to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with its 300,000 students, and then to other public universities across the country. The new student movement’s presence on the public university campuses and its protests and mass marches have allowed it to begin to have an impact on the country’s “ninis”—those who, because they don’t have the economic resources, neither study nor work (ni/ni = neither nor). The new student movement has also joined with other social movements, such as those that fight for the rights of Central American immigrants who suffer from police violence and corruption.

         Whether or not this new movement is moving fast enough and becoming large and broad enough to help López Obardor’s campaign remains to be seen. If it survives the election, and his likely defeat, it could go on to have an impact on the society at large and possibly on the labor movement. Despite the massacre of hundreds at Tlatelolco, the Plaza of the Three Cultures, in October of 1968, many of the students of that generation went on to become activists in the labor unions and in other social movements; they joined left political parties and contributed to the struggles that finally ended the rule of the PRI in 2000. This generation of student activists, even if their activism doesn’t swing the election toward the populist López Obrador, may have a long term impact on Mexican society.

     

    British Guardian newspaper coverage of Televisa scandal.

    June 7, 2012

    June 8, 2012

    June 11, 2012

    June 12, 2012

  • Chicago teachers lead the way, again

    Teacher unionism was born more than a century ago, in Chicago. Teachers in Chicago are once again leading the way by authorizing a strike over the policies that are destroying public education in communities across this country – and the globe. In a letter to education activists, Pauline Lipman, a professor at University of Illinois, Chicago, describes the background to the strike and explains why Chicago teachers deserve support from anyone who wants good schools for all kids:
     "Chicago – a birthplace of the neoliberal corporate agenda for schools is now a focal point of the offensive against it. On Monday, June 11, the Chicago Teachers Union announced that 89.73% of its members voted to authorize a strike vote if contract negotiations with Chicago Public Schools fail… Last year, Stand for Children and other education privatizers and Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel engineered a state law requiring 75% of all eligible CTU members to vote yes to authorize a strike vote. Stand for Children leader, Jonah Edelman, bragged that the CTU 'will never be able to muster the votes to strike.' But the arrogant privatization billionaires behind the assault on teacher unions did not count on the profound anger of teachers, paraprofessionals, and clinicians that has been percolating beneath the surface and the courage of a progressive union to stand up. As CTU president Karen Lewis said, the vote was a resounding “indictment” of CPS policies. The vote was amazing: Total CTU voting membership 26,502:  23,780 voted “yes,” 482 voted “no,” and 2,240 did not vote or their votes were spoiled (all these were counted as “no” votes) (Chicago Teachers Union)."
     
    Wisely, the CTU has reached out to parents and community. Pauline Lipman exlains this background: "On June 9, parents and community organizations across the city allied with the CTU, also launched a campaign to end mayoral control and institute an elected representative school board. The battle in Chicago for reinvigorated public education is on and it’s strategic.  The billionaires behind Stand and other groups are pouring money and forces into Chicago against the CTU. The week of the vote the hedge fund-backed, pro-charter organization, “Education Reform Now,” spent $100,000 to flood Black radio stations with ads to turn parents against the union.  This is only the beginning. Meanwhile the union and community organizations are also gearing up a grassroots campaign to support the CTU in their courageous fight for the schools our children deserve
     
    The CTU is an example of what good teachers unions can do to push back on policies that are destroying educational opportunity for the vast majority of children in our nation's schools.  Chicago's teachers are no different from teachers in Philadelphia, Detroit, or Los Angeles. What's different is their union leadership, which has the courage and confidence to fight for what's right.  Imagine if Karen Lewis were AFT President!
     

  • Did organized money defeat organized labor?

    That appears to be the Democratic Party’s takeaway from its humbling defeat in the Wisconsin recall election. That and the ever familiar lament that workers no longer seem capable of voting consistently in their own financial interests, consistency in this case meaning in solidarity with embattled public sector workers and their unions. 38% of households with union members voted for the incumbent, as did a majority of non-college graduates. Walker carried the 10 poorest counties in the state by a 13% margin. The Wisconsin results paralleled voter approved public sector pension cuts in San Diego, an initiative of that city’s Democratic mayor, and San Jose.

    How did the labor movement find itself in this predicament? The mass protests in Wisconsin ended in March 2011, when Scott Walker signed Act 10, (“the Budget Repair Bill), turning Wisconsin’s public sector into an open shop. Trade union leaders told their membership to go back to work and shifted their focus to recalls and elections. Support groups such as United Wisconsin followed suit, thereby initiating a two-pronged strategy: to reclaim the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the hope that the bill might be declared unconsititioutional and to reclaim the state senate and remove the sitting governor. Union money and staff was diverted from training and organization building to the Democrats.

    The Republicans, nevertheless, outspent the Democrats 7 to 1, two-thirds of which was raised from out of state business donors who sought to turn this election into a test case for public sector union busting.

    But neither did Walker’s opponent, Tom Barrett, run on a progressive platform. He never mounted a robust case for union rights and, as mayor of Milwaukee was not above invoking Walker’s Act 10 collective bargaining restrictions to increase pension and health care contributions from city workers. It is also true that Barrett was not the first choice of the labor bureaucracy. Their choice was a candidate seen by the Democratic establishment as being too progressive for the state, despite her refusal to commit to a firm stance against budget cuts and concessionary contract negotiations with public workers. The Democrats were initially pushed from below into a confrontation they were reluctant to undertake by a labor bureaucracy more comfortable with doorbell ringing and manning phone banks than with the unpredictable prospects of mass street mobilization that could easily escape their control. And, all too predictably, pollsters, consultants, advertising campaigns and Democratic functionaries came to eclipse labor’s influence. For its part, the extent of the Obama commitment could be measured by a single tweet.

    After three rounds of elections, labor was been left virtually empty handed. Republicans captured the critical Wisconsin Supreme Court post in April 2011. Then in August, the GOP managed to retain four out of six senate recall seats. Even the senate majority they now captured is too little too late. There is no legislative session planned before January 2013, that is, after the November elections, when Democrats may likely lose the majority due to Republican gerrymandering, prior to ever having exercised it.

    American politics at the state level operate in a uniquely reactionary context. Incumbent governors campaign on their records of economic growth and job generation that their “polices” purportedly engender. But state governments have a very limited arsenal at their disposal. Their success crucially depends on their ability to woo business from other states by offers of more generous subsidies, tax rebates and every other imaginable means of financial inducement. Capital adroitly plays state against state in a competition for the most business-friendly playing field. The difference between Republicans and Democrats often boils down to this. Republicans offer capital a union-free environment; while Democrats reassure business that their traditional “friends of labor” reputation can be harvested to deliver labor docility.

    At the same time, most state budgets must, by law, be in balance. While socialists and progressives favor taxes on investment property over labor, the entire dynamic of state politics militates decisively against this. Consequently, working people are steamrolled by a budgetary process that picks their pockets at every turn. While 50 million homeowners are under water, they are squeezed even further by mounting real estate taxes; while hanging on to employment by a thread and without realistic hope for pay raises, they face burgeoning income taxes, as well a regressive sales taxes. Even cops are routinely unleashed to blitz working people on their way to and from work with traffic fines, not to enhance public safety, but to raise additional streams of revenue.

    It should have been obvious that the local electoral arena is extraordinarily toxic to labor solidarity. The system is rotten ripe with possibility for an alliance between business elites and private sector workers against the public sector. To deny that private sector workers are acting in their own immediate interests is to be blind. It is utterly irrelevant to dispute the contention that public sector employees’ compensation, including health and retirement benefits, are accurately depicted as excessive compared to their private sector counterparts. The continuity of government has provided public workers with a degree of job security that is the envy of the private sector, and that continuity and those benefits, whether excessive or not, are paid for by private sector working class taxes.

    And the Democrats did nothing to rewrite the playbook. Neither at the local level, where Barrett said little or nothing about raising state revenues by taxing the wealthy or corporations, nor at the national level. Obama, following in the footsteps of Bush, cemented the predicate for this top-down Republican alliance. He could have stimulated the economy and indirectly recapitalized the banks from the bottom up by bailing out state and local governments and by placing imperiled pension funds, public and private, on the Fed’s balance sheets. He could have expanded aggregate demand by an immediate moratorium on all federal payroll taxes. He could have devised a program of wide-scale mortgage relief. He could have spurred investment in new energy, infrastructure and education initiatives. He could have revived New Deal public works style projects.

    But Obama chose, instead, to continue the Bush bailout of bank shareholders and Wall Street investment firms, securing as its first priority the very epicenter of the financial quake that shook state and local governments to their foundations. He chose in effect to oversee a series of state and local budgetary crises that will be financed in no small part by asset stripping the public sphere. He threw none of the banksters in jail and exacted no meaningful concessions from a crimenogenic Wall Street, not even symbolic caps on executive compensation. The structures of the casino economy remain fundamentally unaltered, the economy one bubble away from a plunge down the abyss.

    In what world, then, should workers have entrusted the Democrats to deliver on the promise of elementary economic justice? In an every-man-for-himself context, why not go with the party that has an authentic claim to that message? If the Democrats cannot make government work for “us”, why not keep it as small as possible?

    Clearly, Obama and the Democrats picked their Wall Street benefactors over their working class base and the bewildered, panic-stricken labor bureaucracy picked the Democrats over mass action. Both marched over the cliff holding hands.

    What could have been done? In February 2011, thousands of university teaching assistants and striking public school teachers in Madison sparked an occupation of the capital after Walker unveiled plans to strip public-sector workers of collective bargaining rights and eliminate billions of dollars from public schools, higher education, health care, poverty and children’s programs. It sparked the imagination of tens of thousands of ordinary workers, students, young people, liberals and leftists—not only in Wisconsin, but nationally, foreshadowing the Occupy movement—precisely because it was a mass democratic uprising against the entrenched forces of austerity. Power was in the streets and the spirit of social resistance and fightback was palpable, electrifying and contagious. Talk of general strikes, sick-outs and rolling walkouts heated the atmosphere. This was clearly the only arena where concessions could have been extracted. The political arena, as it is presently constituted, is entirely stacked against labor and its allies. It is a democracy-proof bubble of elite consensus, swaddled by an ever-obliging corporate media. Only through the credible threat of crippling civil disobedience could the movement have inspired and emboldened private sector workers and other layers of society to act in a manner similarly commensurate with their own interests and to align their struggles with that of public workers. It is primarily through struggle and confrontation that movements cultivate an awareness of their own power and begin to break the spirit of servility that keeps its rank and file chained to a system that betrays and oppresses them.

    The Democrats, as is their wont, swarmed to the front offering to defuse the situation by negotiating givebacks in return for the maintenance of public sector collective bargaining rights. A grateful union bureaucracy fearing government retaliation from above and the loss of control to mass action from below and desperately seeking some way out eagerly seized this opening. But movements grow by taking risks and the increasingly moribund nature of the American trade union movement is ample testimony to the rampant risk aversion of its bureaucracy, of its alarmingly narrowed horizons. It has reduced labor to the level of special pleaders, of lobbyists often indistinguishable in the public eye from any number of other special interest groups. In Gallup’s annual poll on confidence in institutions, American unions now score close to the bottom of the list, barely above business and Health Management Organizations, but below banks.

    If there were a takeaway, it would be this. The more labor supports the Democrats, the more labor is treated by them with scorn and contempt. The less it supports them, the less it accommodates the status quo, the more it is respected and feared. Where labor’s loyalty is taken for granted, the capitalist parties close ranks to the right. Where labor resists, Democratic politicians find their dedication to bipartisanship to be suddenly conflicted. Labor’s response will, unfortunately, be to double down on Obama, as if endlessly pressing the reset button will change the outcome. The Democrats, in turn, will double down on corporate fundraising, leaving union concerns and social justice behind.

    For in the end, it is not organized money that defeated organized labor in Wisconsin. It was a long festering, self-inflicted wound called the Democratic Party.

  • Alternet's "New Economic Visions" Series

    Alternet has a new series on “New Economic Visions” that may be of interest to New Politics readers. Here’s the description from Alternet: 

    As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. In New Economic Visions, a special five-part AlterNet series edited by economics editor Lynn Parramore in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting ideas and projects that are shaping the philosophical and political vision of the movement that could take our economy back.

    You can read the five entries by clicking the links below: 

    “Capitalism Has Failed: 5 Bold Ways to Build a New World,” by Sara Robinson

    “Why Building Community Wealth is a Key Challenge to Corporate Power,” by Steve Dubb  

    “The Rise of the New Economy Movement,” by Gar Alperovitz

    “There Is a Way! Beyond the Big, Bad Corporation,” by Tara Lohan

    “Cooperative Banking, the Exciting Wave of the Future,” by Ellen Brown 

     

  • Some Lessons of 1989's East European Revolutions: Reflections of a U.S. Peace Activist

    [This article will appear in the forthcoming summer 2012 print issue of New Politics.]

    In the 1980s, the U.S.-based Campaign for Peace and Democracy/East and West was deeply involved in the struggle for "détente from below." CPD/EW collaborated with the European Nuclear Disarmament network to build solidarity and mutual support between, on the one hand, peace groups and progressive trade unionists in the West and, on the other hand, the democratic movements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. As CPD/EW co-director I traveled frequently to East-bloc countries, Western Europe, and Latin America to promote grassroots solidarity across Cold War boundaries. Now, more than two decades later, I would like to look back at our experience and explore critically the role of activists, East and West, in the years leading up to 1989.

         I will try to answer the question of why the outcome of the 1989 upheavals, despite their undoubted benefit of consigning the old Communist regimes to the dustbin of history, was in many ways disappointing, and why they failed to realize the hopes of millions for a new era of peace, social justice, economic betterment, and meaningful democracy. I will also discuss some implications of the 1989 revolutions for the historic movements of the last few years, from the 2009 Iranian mass demonstrations to the Arab Spring, to popular protests in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and the rest of Europe—and to our own Occupy movement.

         In the 1980s here in the United States CPD/EW succeeded in enlisting leaders of many peace groups—including the War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation, American Friends Service Committee, and Sojourners—in defense of Polish Solidarnosc trade union leaders, Charter 77 members in Czechoslovakia, and independent peace activists throughout the Soviet bloc. This defense of East-bloc activists transcended the crippling binaries of Cold War thinking that could be summed up in the unfortunate slogan "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." One example of such CPD/EW work was a 1983 New York Times ad entitled "U.S. Peace and Labor Activists Support Polish Solidarity Leaders on Trial" signed by 78 individuals, including Ed Asner, Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Allen Ginsberg, Maggie Kuhn, Manning Marable, David McReynolds, Robert Meeropol, Holly Near, I.F. Stone, and Cornel West.

         Moreover, CPD/EW argued that solidarity wasn't a one-way street, and in addition to organizing initiatives like the one described above it also succeeded in promoting solidarity in the other direction by engaging East-bloc activists in campaigns to oppose anti-democratic U.S. policies in countries like Chile and Nicaragua. In that vein, the Campaign in 1986 took out another New York Times ad entitled "Independent Voices, East and West, Speak Out Against Reagan's Nicaragua Policy" with dozens of Western signers and a large number of signatures from dissidents and independent activists in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, the USSR, and Yugoslavia.

         Though I wish we had been even more successful in our efforts, I am very proud of that record. Today we at the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (the name was shortened by dropping the "East and West" after the Cold War ended) continue to oppose war threats and imperial sanctions by our own government, while supporting the fight for democracy and social justice everywhere, whether it occurs in countries within the U.S. orbit like Egypt, Bahrain and Tunisia, or in countries to which the U.S. is hostile, like Iran.

    Critical Solidarity

    As we move forward, we need to think more about HOW we build international solidarity. Does solidarity mean automatic agreement with everything the leadership of a democratic movement says? A rubber stamp? I don't think so. There is a need for what Danny Postel, quoting Fred Halliday, called "critical solidarity" in his Summer 2010 New Politics article, ""Revolutionary Prefigurations: The Green Movement, Critical Solidarity and the Struggle for Iran's Future."

         In retrospect, I think we in CPD/EW could have been more critical in our solidarity work with East-bloc movements. While we did discuss and debate with East European activists about issues of peace and disarmament, and never concealed our own anti-capitalist perspective, we didn't talk as much as we should have about our view of what kind of society should replace Communism, nor did we discuss in any depth the disastrous consequences we believed would follow if their countries were to adopt the neoliberal prescriptions of privatization and slashing the social safety net. In thinking back, I believe one major explanation for this shortcoming was that while we were supporting struggling movements for democratic change in the Soviet bloc and on one level strongly believed in the possibility of their victory, it was nonetheless hard for many of us to really absorb the idea that East-bloc repressive governments, seemingly so invulnerable, would actually collapse within a very few years. Therefore it didn't seem so urgent to discuss future visions.

         When the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe fell, the new governments, virtually without exception, did not question the need for wholesale integration into the capitalist world economy and to one degree or another accepted the legitimacy of demands from the West that they undergo "shock therapy" to speedily achieve that integration. The result of that acquiescence has been that millions of people have suffered from unemployment, insecurity, and loss of social services that were provided by the old Communist governments. Moreover, many East European economies are further threatened by today's global economic and ecological crises.

         Within movements for democratic change in authoritarian societies there is powerful pressure not to pursue discussions of differences of opinion about long-term goals, given the imperative of fighting to end the rule of a terrible, repressive regime. But sidestepping those discussions comes at a high price—not only internally, within opposition circles, but more broadly because it means that ordinary people can't be aware of the debates, participate in them, and begin to think about and propose future alternatives themselves. Different political currents of course do need to unite in a broad movement against authoritarian governments—but there is also the need to explore and expose differences about agendas for the future.

     

    Why was it that East-bloc dissidents, mostly leftists in the 1960s and 1970s, failed to pose a left alternative by the time the system was coming apart in the 1980s? I am unsure of the answer to this question, but I will make a stab at an explanation.

         First of all, the decline of the global left was an important element in weakening the left in Eastern Europe. Despite the "Iron Curtain" there was historically a general awareness in the Soviet bloc of the existence of socialist ideas and movements elsewhere. Their appeal, however, was limited to the extent that the very idea of socialism was associated with pro-Communist elements of the left. For a time, in the 60s and 70s, the new Western independent left, especially the student movement, exerted an influence in the East. But as these left movements declined they had less standing in Soviet-bloc countries. Moreover, the failure, with some honorable exceptions, of what global left there was to actively and energetically support democratic movements in the East bloc tended to alienate people suffering from Communist repression. Finally, the advance of globalization made it even more difficult to mount a successful anti-capitalist struggle in a single country than it had been before, and this doubtless contributed to the feeling that trying to forge a socialist or left alternative would be doomed to defeat.

         I don't mean to argue that a better outcome would have been easy, much less automatic, had the dissident community maintained its leftwing politics into the years of Communist collapse. However, it's important to remember the great international moral and political power of the democratic upsurge of 1989. What if the democratic movements and new governments had made egalitarian demands on the world's political and economic leaders, rather than acquiescing with no programmatic resistance to the logic of capitalism and the nostrums of the IMF and the World Bank? Even if they had been forced to make concessions to the power of capitalism, if the new governments had resisted and challenged capitalism's legitimacy instead of embracing it they could likely have won at least some interim concessions for themselves while moving the terms of global debate to the left. This was a great opportunity lost.

    Implications for the Future

    What are the implications of the 1989 experience for the upheavals and revolutions of our time? It is clear that international solidarity is needed now more than ever, not only to defend labor, dissidents, student, ecological and women's rights activists, and religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities against state repression, but also, while respecting the rights of people within a country to determine their own destiny, to strengthen through grassroots solidarity left and liberatory currents such as socialists, greens, and feminists within broad anti-repression movements. Moreover, critical solidarity today ought not to be a one-way street. So, for example, democratic activists in Egypt or Iran should be encouraged to speak out against repression and inequality in the United States (as the Egyptians so wonderfully did when they sent pizzas to the protestors in Madison, Wisconsin) and also to express their views about debates within Occupy and other U.S. protest movements.

         There is ample reason to expect that the new governments in the Middle East will be under pressure from below to resist neoliberal prescriptions for their economic and social ills. An important contribution solidarity activists can offer to this resistance is to make it difficult, through public protests and campaigns, for wealthy countries and international financial institutions to impose their retrograde solutions.

     

    A major challenge grassroots movements everywhere face today is the absence of political parties that can champion their cause and offer progressive solutions to the larger society. In countries emerging from decades of authoritarianism one reason for the lack of left wing political parties is that they were illegal under the old governments, so left activists often have to start building parties almost from nothing. But the problem goes beyond this legacy. In the past year we have seen an explosion of protest in countries with more democratic liberties like Greece, Spain, and Portugal, as well as here in the United States with our Occupy movement—and these protests also have no electoral expression. All too often the consequence is that after massive demonstrations and inspiring protests the new governments that come to power are far to the right of the popular upsurge that propelled them to power, while the left remains politically disorganized.

         Notwithstanding technical obstacles to forming new parties, there is another, deeper explanation for why the contemporary left generally doesn't have parties of its own or the intention to form them, and that is the "anti-politics" sentiment of many of today's protestors—an outlook that incidentally was also shared by many of the East-bloc dissidents of the 1980s. This outlook is understandable given the terrible failure of existing parties to represent and defend popular aspirations, but it leaves protest movements at a political dead end. To paraphrase the old Greyhound bus ad, it "leaves the driving to them."

         We are entering an age of tremendous turmoil because of the failure of global capitalism to fulfill the economic, social and personal needs of ordinary people around the world, and because millions have asserted their claims to dignity and security and are inspiring millions more to do the same. We need to shake off the old Cold War "the enemy of my enemy must be my friend" way of thinking and build a truly international left that can honestly fight for the rights of people everywhere and connect their struggles—not in a sectarian way that counterposes the left to mass democratic movements, but as integral, independent participants in these movements. Those of us who are socialists face the challenge of rescuing the image of socialism from the bureaucratic authoritarianism of societies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that assumed the name, but this rescue effort is worthwhile because its success will help people to see a way out, to see that, despite Margaret Thatcher's deadening assertion to the contrary, there is a democratic, radical, and egalitarian alternative to the grim realities of contemporary capitalism.—April 19, 2012

    Notes

    This essay is adapted from a talk given at the Campaign for Peace and Democracy panel on the lessons of 1989 on March 17, 2012 at the Left Forum in New York City.

    The Campaign for Peace and Democracy's papers are available at New York University's Tamiment Library and its current activities are posted on its website, www.cpdweb.org. For more on the "détente from below" perspective of European Nuclear Disarmament see E.P. Thompson's Beyond the Cold War: A New Approach to the Arms Race and Nuclear Annihilation, Merlin Press, 1982 and The Heavy Dancers, Merlin Press, 1985. For a similar post-Cold War view, see the incisive essay, "Solidarity and Its Discontents," from Raha Iranian Feminist Collective, Jadaliyya, Feb. 19, 2011 and visit the website of the new group Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions and State Repression.

  • The Bipartisan Assault on Higher Education

         Obama and Romney agree that the Stafford loan program should be maintained at a 3.4% interest rate, rather than being allowed to double by this July. This, somehow, is seen as a great boon to students and evidence of a bipartisan commitment to the upcoming generation. Keeping interest rates low purportedly encourages prospective students to choose more education than they might otherwise aspire to, to select more expensive colleges than they could otherwise seek, and to finance this education through more debt than they would otherwise incur. The first is undoubtedly socially progressive.

         Taken together, however, this is a social train wreck, and not least for the left. The university as an institution has always been embedded in the larger society. It was always in the business of imbuing its pupils, in part, with a regimented curriculum reflecting to one degree or another the retrograde values of the existing social order. But the structure of student aid further corrupts the experience of education in more visceral ways. Student debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, an issue that is particularly painful in times of high unemployment. Therefore, saddling students with high debts at the beginning of work condemns them to a life of debt peonage. It relentlessly produces a more skilled labor force but drives that herd inexorably into the most lucrative, rather than the most socially useful, avenues of employment. It devalues even the minimal critical faculties of independent thought and creativity cultivated by a liberal education, thereby ever transforming the university system into a wholly-functioning capitalist subsidiary. It forces students, on pain of ruin, to leverage their accumulating financial liabilities into productive assets for capital. It redirects mountains of engineering students, mathematicians and physicists into finance, where creativity is expended self-servingly on fermenting novel means of hoovering income up the class pipeline. And in the end, it contributes ever less to the productive capacity or cultural enrichment of society that a radical movement could later liberate and socialize for the general betterment of humanity.

         The central contradiction of student life boils down to this. Students come to the university with the goal of leading humanly meaningful lives only to find themselves being programmed to be useful to capital. Students may well have realized they are being trained to prop up a decaying social order, but find themselves ever more powerless to resist it. The system of student aid, as it is presently constituted, chains them to the mentality of acquisitiveness, of competitiveness, to the celebration of inequality and habits of submission and conformity that enhance the prospects for employment needed to discharge debt.

         The Helpful Hannahs and Henrys of the Democratic Party do not, of course, question the desirability of this dynamic, but merely seek to rationalize it. Keeping interest rates relatively low is just one aspect of this. Senator Ron Wyden, for instance, recently introduced a bill that would have the government disseminate statistics about graduation rates, incomes, and debt levels so that students can better evaluate how their particular program of study measures up to the debt that they assume in pursuit of their degrees. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni would go even further, calling for “government and university incentives to steer students into fields of study that will serve them and society best. We use taxes to influence behavior,” he observes. “Why not student aid?”

         But system efficiency is now largely beside the point. The acute crisis of capitalism has thrown a wrench into the machinery of higher education. Students faced with the prospects of protracted unemployment, who – as they often say — have done “everything right,” now find themselves increasingly unable to assimilate norms that are so widely at variance with their actual social existence. They feel instinctively uneasy even though they have yet no clearly defined ideas of what is wrong with society, nor what an alternative and more fully human society could look like. The debts remain. But now they are coupled with a poisonous atmosphere of desperation, malaise and self-estrangement that together drive the impetus of the Occupy movement. Students find themselves ever more unable to identify their futures with the existing social system.

         This sense of resistance, no longer one of free-floating alienation that characterized student life in more prosperous times, means that their social opposition is also no longer abstract. It has pressing and concrete aspirations. This pulls the Occupy movement in two contradictory directions: an ambitious, but still amorphous desire to create alternative social structures that compete with existing institutions combined with explicit political demands on the state and the capitalist class that controls that state for redress of immediate grievances. To the extent that it is countercultural it tends toward the apolitical but to the extent that it also formulates demands that cannot be readily accommodated it suggests latent revolutionary impulses.

         As socialists, we do not believe that counterculutural institutions that threaten to supplant existing social structures will be ultimately tolerated, or that they can be successfully reproduced under capitalism. Neither do we believe that such structures could long retain mass appeal, even in the unlikely circumstance that they should survive, were they to become separate oases detached from broader social and political struggles. Still, socialists must make every effort to assimilate the authentically subversive impulses of the countercultural wing of Occupy into a broader political movement for change.

         This suggests that socialists can play a distinct role in the Occupy movement by, among other things, offering concrete demands relevant to students, while formulating these demands with an eye to arousing the thirst for a broader reorganization of society on a more life-affirming basis. We insist, for instance, that education is a universal right, not a privilege. In itself this demand has its roots in enlightenment liberalism. But where we depart from liberalism is in our insistence that transforming that demand into a reality means that the “right” to education itself must be decommodified, forcefully separated from the prevailing commercial nexus. It is not a question of negotiating better loan terms, or more generous student grants, or paying tuition on a sliding scale, or “pay as you earn” programs to cap monthly payments, but of a genuinely free, universal and open higher education system at the public level.

         It means pointing out that the entire student loan network is independently responsible for fomenting a self-sustaining dynamic of tuition inflation, which is, itself, a form of rationing and of working class family impoverishment. As the pool of available funds for higher education expands, whether initiated by the state and supplemented by the private banking system, the university complex is given a license equally to raise tuition fees, or to enlarge the pool of poor and working class students, in accordance with the rising nominal demand. The bias is clearly to the former. This allows even public universities to continue to increase tuition when individual state legislatures cut budgets.

         Tuition inflation is consequently three times the level of the general rate of inflation for commodities. This has occurred across the board, for public and private colleges and universities as well as junior colleges. (Medical inflation, by comparison, is twice the general rate of inflation.) As fees increase, the system is then prodded to further expand the availability of funds to encompass, in principle, the needs of more students. Eventually this back and forth reaches, if it has not already, a tipping point. The carrying charges on the one trillion dollars of loans eats up so much of the family proceeds that it prices out income layer after layer of potential enrollees. We may finally be reaching a point where the percentage of college graduates in the workforce is no longer expandable. This is, in critical ways, an extension and mirror of the larger bubble economy.

         Universal, subsidized public higher education is not possible at the individual state or local level. Funds must be distributed from the top down. Individual states and communities are revenue constrained by their tax bases. The federal government, in stark contrast, is the sole producer of the means of appropriation – money — and therefore bears no such intrinsic constraints. It uses taxes to neutralize private demand so that government spending does not push the economy beyond its capacity to produce, to discourage consumption of specific products and to redistribute access to markets. It does not use taxes to finance its operations. The capitalist parties nevertheless seek to suppress the appetites of the state to decommoditize chunks of the social surplus through innumerable legal encumbrances and budgetary ceilings. These provisions have the sole purpose of limiting incursions on capital accumulation caused by the siphoning of resources from the private sector.

         Insofar as any government is sovereign with respect to the issuance of currency, can pay its foreign debts in its own money and allow its exchange rate to float, it can never actually be held hostage to the bond market. Bonds do not represent government borrowing. Government spends by creating money and crediting this money to the accounts of the private sector. It then swaps the money it deposited, in a macro sense, with interest-bearing assets, bonds, on a dollar for dollar basis. The state thereby creates privately held government assets and credits interest payments on them in the same way it creates the means of payment — by computer keystrokes. There is, however, no overriding economic necessity for the issuance of bonds in general, or of their issuance on a one to one basis against spending in excess of taxes in particular. There is no fundamental necessity to issue treasury bills or bonds. This is simply a legislative legacy of the gold standard. The central banking system exploits the opportunity that these outmoded encumbrances of bond issuance present to regulate financial markets. It does so by selling bonds at targeted interest rates. But this is a political matter, not an operational imperative. The ruling class and its elected factotums either have no insight into how the system of fiat money operates or cynically manufacture a further spectrum of legal, budgetary – and propagandistic — restraints in the hope of triggering a Pavlovian response mimicking what would otherwise be triggered by the fear of a sovereign debt crisis. Either way, the entire mainstream debate conveniently overlooks the fact that such crises are only possible where states are not themselves the sovereign issuers of the means of appropriation (fiat currency), such as Greece, Spain, and, for that matter, California or New York City.

         The demand for universal access to free public education, when explained on this basis, explicitly exposes the utterly fraudulent claim of an impending fiscal crisis of the state. There is a crisis, a crisis of capital accumulation. There is a debt crisis, a private debt crisis of workers (including students) and overextended businesses whose debt-driven assets increased faster than incomes or profitability.

         What’s the alternative? We have no interest in taking responsibility for capitalism. Business debt is primarily incurred to the private financial sector. But we do have a specific interest in the cancellation of all student debt. To the extent that these debts are owed directly or indirectly to the federal government, their cancellation presents, as we have shown, no specific difficulties. To the extent that debts are owed to private banks and other financial intermediaries, this is a demand for the government to assume these obligations from the private sector. They can negotiate the terms of that swap. Either way we insist that the loss of revenues to the state has no impact on the ability of government to fund its other obligations. Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and other federal programs are not threatened by this demand. We therefore reject as utterly unfounded any ruling class effort to use this debt repudiation as a pretext to play off one generation of working people against another or to short-change any other social program or to impose wage or benefit restrictions on government employees.

         These demands may be impertinent, but they are not unreasonable. They are demands for a massive downward redistribution of resources. Does this expansion of government mean that we are asking the system to live beyond its means, as the ruling class propaganda machine tirelessly insists? This is absurd. No society can be said to be living beyond its means if there are unemployed workers and unused factories and offices. If capital cannot make profitable use of what the working class created and it idled, then we need to demand this excess capacity be put into operation on an entirely different basis.

         As socialists, we believe these demands are both legitimate and actionable. But we must be prepared to explain our case. The state can fully finance free and universally accessible college and university education. It can cancel all existing student debts. It can do so without imposing painful alternatives on other beneficiaries of public provisions. But this would require not only an educational offensive to acquaint the public with how the state actually finances itself, but a mass mobilization of students, the Occupy movement, and broad layers of society’s rank and file. We also believe that the ruling class is likely to close ranks and resist any large-scale diversion of resources for public rather than investment purposes that the realization of these demands would entail, even if capital as it is presently constituted cannot employ them. Ruling class intransigence in the context of this protracted crisis is itself a frank indictment of the political and moral bankruptcy of the system. But any success such struggles attain would massively embolden the movement to ask even more fundamental questions about the current organizational framework of society.

         Can these demands be fully won? No answer is possible. But we can say this. Struggle around such demands is necessary to try because it moves political consciousness in the right direction.

  • Every Day Is Memorial Day

    (Written the Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend 2011,when I was my usual long-term unemployed due to only temporary service work available at that time.—GF, May 18, 2012)

    This coming Monday is
    Memorial Day,
    same as it is every year
    at this time.
    Whoop-de-doo!
    But I’m laid off right now,
    same as I usually am
    around Memorial Day,
    so this is no special
    holiday for me.
    No time for me to
    rest from work,
    because I’m not working,
    but wish I were.
    For me,
    every day is
    Memorial Day,
    a “holiday” that’s
    not really a holiday,
    just another day of
    the same old-same-old,
    nothing to do
    and all day
    to do it in.
    No hot dogs
    over the grill,
    no outdoor
    barbecue
    for me over
    Memorial Day,
    because I
    can’t afford them
    without a job.
    Someone once said
    of my time
    unemployed,
    “I wish I had
    your time for
    reading.”
    Little did he know
    that, while there’s
    some time for
    reading, perhaps,
    there’s also time
    that necessarily
    must be taken
    to figure out
    just exactly
    how to pay the bills
    and scrounge for
    needed cash.
    Time to just sit and
    wait to be called
    back to work,
    itching anxiously
    for that e-mail
    or phone call
    saying that there
    is work once again.
    Senator Orrin Hatch
    had the chutzpah
    to say we
    unemployed
    don’t want jobs,
    all we want is
    our unemployment
    checks,
    so that we can
    buy drugs and
    vacation in
    Acapulco.
    Little, little
    indeed
    does he know,
    stupid ass!
    Buy drugs,
    take expensive
    vacations?
    Hell, I’m lucky
    if I can afford
    to go out and
    have a beer!
    Vacation, hell!
    Do you call
    scrounging for
    work because
    you really need
    better employment
    some sort of vacation,
    Senator Hatch,
    you with your
    gold-plated
    seat in the
    Senate,
    where you
    disgrace the
    institution!
    Well, Happy,
    Happy, Happy
    Memorial Day,
    everyone!
    (Yeah, I really
    mean it!)
    But it’s just
    another day
    for me,
    except that,
    since the offices
    and banks
    are closed,
    I have to wait till
    the day after
    Memorial Day
    to get my
    unemployment
    check—
    just another
    long, long wait
    superadded to
    too many
    long, long
    waits already;
    another
    three-day
    weekend
    where even the
    two-day
    weekends
    are just like
    the weekdays,
    only usually
    without money
    by the time
    they roll around.
    Memorial Day,
    where we honor
    the veterans who
    died for the
    Land of the Free.
    Only it ain’t
    so free
    when you’re out
    of work.
    Ah, but it does
    no good to bitch
    too much,
    for life’s a bitch
    anyway.
    So I’ll live with
    it and wait for
    another day,
    a different day,
    a real Memorial Day
    for me, when there’s
    not a holiday,
    just a blessed day
    when I actually
    have to get up
    early in the
    morning,
    going eagerly
    back to work
    again.

  • Populist candidate Lopez Obrador moves up in polls in Mexico as his Keynesian impulses give way to appeals to business

         Mexico’s voters face an increasingly murky choice in the rapidly approaching July 1 national election between three conservative, pro-business candidates and a populist candidate who until recently offered Keynesian solutions to the country’s endemic problems of inadequate economic growth, huge economic and social disparities, and a political establishment dominated by and in the service of a handful of oligopolies. All of the candidates promise to address Mexico’s greatest problem, creating enough jobs for its citizens, three of them principally by freeing business from government, and one of them through greater government intervention. While all of the candidates support the capitalist system, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has spoken most directly to the needs of the country’s small businessmen, working class, farmers and the poor. For the last few months, however, he has striven to garner more support from business by adopting a more conservative economic program virtually indistinguishable from the others.

         López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City and the candidate who almost won the last presidential election in 2006, had at the beginning of the current race been running behind the two other leading contenders for the Mexican presidency. Now he has moved up into a tie for second place with an estimated 26 percent of the projected vote. Tied with him in second place, also with 26 percent of the vote, is Josefina Vázquez Mota, former cabinet minister in the government of President Felipe Calderón and standard bearer of the National Action Party (PAN). Enrique Peña Nieto, former governor of the State of Mexico and candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) leads with 45 percent. Also in the race, Gabriel Quadri de la Torre, of the New Alliance Party (PANAL), a party created by the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), trails far behind with only about 1 percent of the vote.

    Neoliberalism vs. Keynesianism

         López Obrador, a populist who until very recently espoused Keynesian positions, is running against three pro-business candidates with neoliberal programs, that is, conservative programs aiming to promote business. While PRI candidate Peña Nieto talks more than the other two pro-business candidates about a state with a sense of social responsibility, he, the PAN candidate Váquez Mota, and the PANAL candidate Quadri de la Torre all argue that Mexico’s problems will be solved by completing the economic reform carried out over the last twenty years in order to create a free market in which capitalism can flourish. In particular, these three candidates would all privatize the Mexican oil industry and the electric power industry, and while the PAN attacks Peña Nieto for having blocked labor law “reform,” all of these conservative candidates are committed to restricting and weakening the power of the labor unions. The labor law “reform” would among other things make it easier to fire workers, harder to organize unions or to change unions, and harder to strike.

         Quadri, the candidate of the Mexican Teachers Union’s political party, has adopted a surprisingly hardline, pro-business platform—or perhaps not so surprising given the checkered political history of the woman who gives him his marching orders, Elba Esther Gordillo head of the Teachers Union. Over the past few years she bounced back and forth between the PRI and PAN until she seemed to wear out her welcome with both parties, even though her million-member union represents a huge army of potential door-knockers. Vázquez Mota, the first woman candidate of one of the major parties, has descended in the polls, presumably because of her association with the current Calderón administration which has overseen the persistent economic crisis and the slaughter of 50,000 in the drug war, and will probably continue downward. In the next few weeks then, it is likely that this will be a contest between Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary (Party), the governor of the State of Mexico best remembered for his heavy-handed repression of the Atenco protestors a few years ago, and López Obrador. The key issue in Mexico, as in the United States and Europe these days, will be the economy.

    López Obrador Abandons his Keynesian Program

         While best known as mayor of Mexico City for his public works programs and his support for old-age pensions, it now seems that López Obrador’s candidate Keynesian impulses have been inhibited by his appeal to big business. Even in his days as mayor he worked closely with Mexico’s richest businessman, Carlos Slim Helu, on the renovation of the city’s historic center and the accompanying gentrification. Still, what distinguished him in Mexican politics was his populist rhetoric, his mass following among the poor, and his advocacy of government intervention in the economy. Among all the candidates, he is still the only one who opposes the privatization of the oil and energy industries and stands against the proposed labor law “reform.”

         In a recent article in the Mexico City daily El Universal, he described his program, in the traditional language of Mexican nationalism, as a tripartite development model, bringing together the state, the private sector, and the social sector. He wants in particular to support “national industry,” to develop the backward South of the country, to build more gasoline refineries in order to escape dependence on foreign energy corporations, and to improve agriculture. He opposes monopolies and puts forward an ideal of “free competition.” His specific platform planks for improving the economy and creating jobs, however, are strikingly conservative:

    • To respect the autonomy of the Banco de México, the country’s central bank.

    • To maintain macroeconomic policies aimed at keeping down inflation.

    • To reduce the current government budget by 15% by lowering salaries of high level officials and reducing waste.

    • To take on no further government debt.

    • To create no new taxes.

         López Obrador’s economic program is entirely utopian, hoping to find enough money for social programs and economic expansion simply by cutting the fat, taking away the politicos’ perks, enforcing the tax laws, and ending corruption. The plan to cut government by 15% through these measures is either incredibly naïve or simply a disguised austerity program. The idea that there will be no new taxes, that is, no taxes on Mexico’s billionaires, their corporations, and their profits means that the country’s enormous economic inequalities will continue, and condemns tens of millions to continued poverty.

         At times it seems that López Obrador has two faces and each one spouts a different economic plan, a populist and Keynesian plan for his base of working people and a conservative, pro-business plan for the media and the business community. The problem is that such duplicity only makes him appear unreliable to the elites and unfaithful to the people, and both are too smart to be fooled.

         How one wonders, can this be what is left of the Mexican left? Why is there no socialism in Mexico? After all, there once was . . . wasn’t there?

    The Legacy of a One-Party State

         The candidates and parties on the ballot in this election all have their roots in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1940 and the state that it created. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 was fundamentally a revolt of peasants and workers against their conditions, but after the defeat of their movement led by Francisco “Pancho” Villa and Emiliano Zapata, it was the modernizing bourgeoisie led by Venustiano Carranza which founded the modern Mexican state. Following a political crisis and the assassination in 1928 of former president Álvaro Obregón, President Plutarco Elías Calles transformed the country’s revolutionary caudillos and political leaders into the Mexican Nationalist Party (PRN), founding the one-party state.

         The failure of Carranza, Obregón and Calles to solve the country’s social questions led eventually to a populist movement in the 1930s led by President Lázaro Cárdenas who finally distributed land to the peasants, recognized the labor unions, and nationalized the foreign oil companies. At the same time, Cárdenas completed the construction of the all-encompassing one-party state by incorporating peasants, workers, public employees and other popular sectors into the ruling party.

         Cárdenas changed the name of the party to the Party of the Mexican Revolution and adopted the slogan “For a Socialist Mexico.” The Mexican state that emerged from the thirty year revolutionary process was, however, a capitalist state with a mixed economy and predicated upon tariff barriers to protect the national market. During the following decades, the ruling party—now called the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—created a welfare state that provided education and health care and subsidized food, fuel and housing costs for low income people. The PRI’s authoritarian, capitalist, welfare state began to run into problems in the 1960s and 1970s, just like the rest of the capitalist world. In Mexico, the crisis took the form of a national debt that multiplied astronomically. While its booming petroleum industry allowed it to continue to expand into the early 1980s, by 1985 the old system failed when Mexico could no longer pay its foreign debt.

    The Rise of the PRI Technocrats

         The breakdown of the old system which had lasted for two generations, from 1940 to 1980, led to a division within the PRI over economic policy. A new group emerged as the leadership of the party, the technocrats, as they were called, led by Miguel de la Madrid. The new leaders, educated at Ivy League schools in the United States, and under pressure from the United States and from international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, abandoned Mexico’s nationalist model. Embracing the “Washington Consensus” as it was known, they aimed to liberalize Mexico’s economy and to bring the country into the world market.

         When the technocrats took over the PRI, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of the former president Lázaro Cárdenas, created the Democratic Current on the basis of the party’s old nationalist and social democratic political ideals. Cárdenas ran for president in 1988, but the election was almost surely stolen, and Carlos Salinas assumed the Eagle Throne. Under his presidency (1988-1994) Mexico sold off 1,000 state-owned industries and enterprise, permitted the sale of the collective land owned by peasant communities, and opened up the country to foreign investment. Salinas also ended the model of universal social security coverage, turning instead to a more limited program targeted at the most needy. Finally, Salinas negotiated with Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney and with U.S. presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

    The PAN in Power

         The Institutional Revolutionary Party, now led by the technocrats, continued to run the country until Vicente Fox, the businessman candidate of the National Action Party (PAN), won the presidential election in 2000. Fox received votes from many on the right and on the left who wanted to end the one-party state, but there was a striking continuity between the PRI technocrats and Fox’s PAN. The Mexican government not only continued its pro-business policies, but also reached a modus vivendi with the PRI’s labor unions, allowing them to continue to dominate the country’s workers movement so long as they carried on with their support for the government’s economic policies as they had done under the one-party state.

         Calderón continued the PANista’s economic counter-revolution while carrying out a war on two fronts. On the one hand, he virtually destroyed the Mexican Electrical Workers union which continues to fight for its life, and battled the Mexican Miners Union, and on the other hand he mobilized 40,000 troops and tens of thousands of Federal police in a frontal assault on the drug cartels, a war that has taken 50,000 lives, left 10,000 missing, and caused thousands of others to flee their homes.

    López Obrador—The Struggle Continued

         2006 saw a bitter election battle fraught with charges of violations of election law and fraud in which the incumbent president Felipe Calderón defeated Andrés Manuel López Obrador. López Obrador and his multitudes of followers filled the plazas and boulevards of Mexico City to protest the fraud, paralyzing the center of the city for days, but ultimately Calderón took office. López Obrador, however, refused to recognize the official decision of the election authorities and in a ceremony in the national plaza proclaimed himself the “legitimate president of Mexico.” He then spent six years traveling throughout the country and building organizations of his supporters in every state and virtually every significant city, town or village in the country. A few months ago he brought those followers together into his own organization, the Movement for National Renovation (MORENA), so that he did not have to rely upon the fractious and corrupt Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

    A Country without a Socialist Alternative

         López Obrador then is the candidate of the left, but not a socialist candidate. While at one time far left socialist and communist parties appeared on the ballot in Mexico, those alternatives are no longer an option to Mexican voters. During the 1970s, Mexican Communists and other leftists created political parties that gradually gathered an increasing percentage of the vote, eventually amounting to about 15% in national elections. While the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM), the former Communist Party, got most of the vote, the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party did well when it ran the first woman, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, for President in 1982. Within a few years, however, all of that was gone.

         When Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas left the PRI and founded the PRD in 1989, most Mexican leftists organizations of all stripes—pro-Soviet Communists, Maoists, Guevarists, Trotskyists and revolutionary nationalists—dissolved and joined the new organization. Other small leftist parties gradually lost their electoral support and finally their ballot status. The PRD subsequently evolved into a traditional electoral party, riddled with the factions of its founders, and corrupted by its involvement in the Mexican political system. Today López Obrador is the candidate of the PRD and two other political parties, the Workers Party (PT) of Maoist Origin, and the Citizens Movement (formerly the Convergence Party) with its roots in the PRI. He relies in large measure on MORENA to carry out his campaign.

         During the 2006 election, López Obrador, with his radical populist rhetoric and his mass following among working people, was branded by the corporate media as the Hugo Chávez of Mexico, and portrayed as a violent revolutionary who would bring havoc and chaos to the country. Burned by that experience, during this campaign he has moderated his rhetoric, reached out to the business class, and sought to placate the corporate commentators. Finally he jettisoned his Keynesian economic program, replacing it with the shibboleths of the global corporate elite.

    What’s Left of the Left

         Mexico actually still has a left made up of small Marxist parties, social movements, and radical labor union activists. Many of them, however, also signed on early to support López Obrador, believing that his political program and his social base of workers and peasants disillusioned with the establishment represented the best hope for the left. One wonders what they think now as their candidate wends his way to the right promising to reduce the federal budget, to take on no new debt, and not to raise taxes. Some outside left observers continue to be optimistic, but it is hard to see the basis for this. The rightward drift of López Obrador, carrying along his socialist supporters, represents a serious problem for the Mexican left. The problem will be even greater if he loses, which is likely unless things change rapidly in the next month and a half.

  • The Left and the U.S. Elections: A New Politics Symposium

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         It is half a year from the national elections in the United States. The campaigns are well under way, and the debate on the left as to how to relate to the elections is under way as well. New Politics has invited leftists with a range of different views to comment on what position they think the left ought to take.

         All the contributors lament the state of electoral politics in the United States today and all understand the limits of the Democratic Party. They diverge, however, in the conclusions they draw from these limitations. For some, the task is to change the Democratic Party or push it to the left. For some, the priority is to develop alternative parties that can challenge the two-party duopoly. And for some, the electoral arena is at best a secondary arena of contestation.

         We invite further comments from readers.

     

  • Running for President Against the System

         To run or not to run? This is a question that every left-wing organization faces every four years. We in the Socialist Party USA spend a good chunk of our National Conventions debating this very question. Yet, for us and for others in the Socialist movement, it is the capitalist system itself that has made running for President on a Socialist line a necessity. The massive economic crisis of 2008 has had the combined result of producing large-scale human suffering while also providing millions of people with a shared experience of being dispossessed by the system. As capitalism transitions from crisis economics to the cruel measures of austerity, a socialist voice in the elections is more important than ever.

         There are three vital reasons the Socialist Party USA must run a Presidential campaign.

         First, post-World War II capitalism in America had created a massive Military Industrial Complex. Democrats and Republicans alike have contributed to the bloated expansion of this sector. Not even an event as monumental as the collapse of the Soviet Bloc could put a dent in American militarism. The American way of war has produced countless deaths in the world, has crowded out necessary social programs and has had dire consequences for civil liberties in the US.

         A Socialist Presidential campaign will be a voice not just against the current wars, but one that is against militarism as a whole. Maintaining an anti-militarist stance on the campaign trail will allow us to add our candidate’s voice to those millions of Americans who oppose the policies of war-makers like Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. It sends the message to the world, especially through the media opportunities the campaign is afforded, that there is resistance to the war machine inside the US.

         Second, it is equally important that at a moment when so many Americans are paying attention to politics they are presented with a vision of an eco-socialist future. The lasting legacy of capitalism for our planet is one of deep environmental damage that has produced the extinction of entire animal species and global warming. The BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Explosion in 2010 stands as the clearest evidence of the suicidal nature of capitalist production and the impotence of capitalist-funded politicians, such as Barack Obama, who stood idly by in the face of the wanton destruction of the natural world.

         We need a new kind of socialism for the 21st century that proposes a different relationship between humans and the natural world. This certainly means a rapid shift toward renewable forms of energy. In some cases this will require the democratic management of large-scale energy companies while in others the emphasis should be placed on decentralized local initiatives. Overall, eco-socialism is the politics of transition—the movement away from unsustainable levels of consumption to new ways of living that promote harmony with nature.

         The lessons of eco-socialism—the damage done by the centralization of decision making in the hands of Corporate America and the short-term logic of the market—are equally evident in larger-scale questions about the capitalist economy. As a result, all human needs and all economic relationships are tested against the idea of maintaining profitability for corporations and maintaining the privileges of the 1%. Such approaches produce the current drive towards austerity. Both Obama and Romney are firmly committed to slashing social programs, to privatizing whatever parts of the State they can, and to increasing the role of the market in people’s everyday lives. No social program is sacred. There are no political third rails. Once the November elections are over, the cuts will begin.

         This leads to the third reason why a Socialist electoral campaign is vitally necessary. By speaking against austerity pre-emptively we can help to prepare people for what will come after the elections. By encouraging broader and more militant actions against the current cuts, we can help to connect with local movements and initiatives—offering a socialist program to them and learning about local conditions and innovative forms of organizing from them. And, by proposing the idea of workers' control of the means of production—in its many forms from worker owned and run cooperatives, to democratically managed public services and to militantly democratic takeovers of large-scale corporations—we spread the message that another world is indeed possible, and that our ideas, our commitment and our actions can play a role in creating it.

         Socialist electoral candidates in the US are certainly not alone in this effort. We see ourselves as being part of a growing international effort to represent socialist ideas in the electoral arena in direct defiance to the politics of austerity. The most recent effort to do so came in France where the Left Front — an electoral coalition of far-left organizations — candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon gained 11% of the national vote. Melenchon ran on a militant platform that included a 100% tax on all income above $470,000. The Left Front’s success proves that we need broader collaboration during the elections. The great weakness of the American Left is the continued separation of small organizations. Hopefully, this election cycle in the US will demonstrate the need for a discussion amongst left organizations about a unity candidate in the future.

         The very existence of the Occupy Wall Street movement proves that the political terrain of American politics has shifted. The goal of our Socialist Party Presidential campaign is to argue for a democratically run society in which people gain control over their lives and their future. This is something that capitalism can never deliver. We think that more Socialists, radical Ecologists, radical Trade Unionists and other left-wing people should consider running for elected office at the national and local levels. This would be a great accompaniment to our growing protest movements. Plus, we know what to do the day after the elections end—Resist!

     

    Stewart Alexander is a working man from Murrietta, California, and a lifelong activist, who has worked with the NAACP and the Florida Consumer Action Network (F-CAN), among other organizations. As a radio talk show host in Los Angeles, Alexander interviewed community leaders about crime, gangs, drugs and redevelopment. The success of Ross Perot’s independent campaign motivated Alexander to fight for alternative solutions to help working class people. In 1988, Alexander ran for Mayor of Los Angeles, personally visiting over 14,000 residences to get the necessary votes to appear on the ballot. Over 10 years ago, Alexander joined the Peace & Freedom Party. In 2005, he ran on their ticket for California Lieutenant Governor. Alexander has been an active member of the Socialist Party USA for over 4 years and was elected the Party’s presidential candidate at the SPUSA National Convention in Los Angeles, on October 15, 2011.

    [This article is part of a symposium on the elections organized by New Politics.]

     

  • Occupy Election Season!

         As spring comes to life and the Occupy movement stirs from hibernation, it finds the American electoral machine in full swing for the 2012 race. National elections are anathema to many on the radical left, but to most Americans they represent the only avenue of participation in the political process. That voting via the Electoral College for one of two pre-selected politicians every four years is the extent of citizens' interaction with our democracy is reason enough to scoff at it intellectually, but its material importance can't be overlooked. Not only are the (minor) policy differences between the two parties significant for many of the most vulnerable populations, the difference between President Obama and President Romney would be massive for the movement and the prospects for advancing the left. Obama is clearly better than Romney, but not better enough. The election is an opportunity for Occupy Wall Street and the American left to publicly stake a claim to our country, and try to leverage a government that is as progressive as possible.

         Following Republican victories in the 2010 midterm elections there was open talk among Democrats about giving President Obama a primary challenger for the 2012 race. Perennial lefter-than-usual-Democrat Dennis Kucinich called for this, but ruled himself out as a potential candidate, as did other usual suspects. Nevertheless, the idea of challenging Obama from the left was a sound one. Since there is so much on the line, the circumstances surrounding the general election are very different from those of the primary, and now that it is spring and the Republican nominee is all but finalized, a challenger from the left can be expected to encounter stiff resistance. Democratic strategists still bemoan Ralph Nader's success in 2000, when the 97,000 votes he boasted in Florida appeared to rob Al Gore of a victory in that decisive state, and have since used that example to bully any and all independent candidates on the left. It doesn't take much bullying, since Green, Socialist or left independent candidates have never managed to contest seriously for presidential office in the United States. But the Occupy movement might have opened up space to change that, and Democratic candidates ignore us at their own (and maybe all of our) peril.

         At present the American left is incapable of beating Obama in a national election, but the Democratic fear mongers are probably correct that we have the capacity to lose him the election. At the same time, none of us should want to see a President Romney. Hopefully the callous "accumulation of misery" argument that the worse conditions get the faster the revolution will come was put to bed for good after the 2000 and 2004 elections. The disastrous presidency of George W. Bush resulted in tens of thousands of deaths worldwide, plenty of misery, and no revolution. Mitt Romney is an unimpressive candidate anyway, so the reality we face is very likely a second term Obama in 2012. The question is how we can push him to be as progressive as possible. Obviously he won't do as many good things in office as we would like, but he'll do some if we scare him enough. Thus far the President has been scared of losing to the right, and it shows, as he bends further and further to their side to guard against their political attacks (often in vain). But he has bent too far, and it is time to remind him to fear us as well.

         We don't want Romney in the White House, but the fear of that outcome is not a sufficient excuse to allow the Democrats their unchecked descent into the political right. If they want to win the support of progressives and the left, they must bring their policies to us, not the other way around. If not, we will all share the blame for Republican victories. In our broken and dysfunctional system, elected representatives have little to worry about from their constituencies most of the time, but on Election Day they do. Left and independent candidates need to step up and run for office (any and all offices) on the platform of abolishing corporate personhood, taxing the rich, reforming our social welfare system and other Occupy-popularized policies that can raise the standard of living for the people who need it the most.

         A full third of the voting public is registered independent, but despite the hoopla television pundits raise over that fact, taking it at face value is clearly misleading. The vast majority of those "independents" are that in name only and vote heavily along one or the other party lines. Nevertheless, a Gallup poll in October 2011 showed that 26% of Americans supported Occupy Wall Street (OWS), with 40% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans saying they believed in the goals of the Occupy movement. And these numbers represent people's feelings toward Occupy despite the often less-than-flattering corporate media coverage we received. Given that, one can imagine that OWS positions—such as financial accountability and abolition of corporate personhood—would resonate widely across the American electorate if they were to be adopted by mainstream politicians. If the Democrats want to preserve the base they take for granted in progressive regions, they will be forced to advocate for these popular policies.

         Voting doesn't take much. In fact, in many ways voting is the easiest and emptiest form of democratic participation. The most it takes is a couple of hours. In this author's hometown in New Jersey people wait on longer lines to buy confectionary from a reality show bakery. You don't even need to be able to think to be able to vote. Spending time organizing and sleeping out on the street, finding ways to protest a system of exploitation while creating a miniature society with egalitarian democracy, medical care, food, compost and indy media is much more work than checking a name and pulling a lever (never mind getting clubbed, pepper-sprayed and arrested). In other words, compared with what we have been doing, it costs us nothing to vote—but it could potentially help a lot.

         Whether or not progressive politicians are able to enact meaningful change in this country can be debated, but they can certainly help us create meaningful change. Our work on the ground—building a dual power movement capable of challenging the superstructure of power and exploitation and simultaneously building liberating institutions and norms of our own—is what ultimately has the ability to win. Good politicians, and those they appoint, can help tremendously by keeping the police off our backs here and there, and by enforcing the parts of the law that defend what we are doing, as opposed to straining to find the parts that criminalize peaceful demonstrations.

         As OWS reminded us all, voting is not the only way we can interact with politics, just as working and shopping are not the only ways we can interact with the economy. Those in political office are already worried about our own version of participation in the election process, as Obama recently signed into law a bill that makes it a felony to protest in the vicinity of the president, a candidate for president or anyone under secret service protection. But we are clever and creative and that will not stop us from making our points.

         Spring is here, and we are back. The corporate media would love to leave us in 2011, but our fight is too important to let that happen. And what better time for revitalization than the six months normally dedicated to the "democratic" selection of our nation's leader, and along with it, our nation's principles.

         The Occupy Wall Street movement that re-energized the left is comprised of a diverse set of groups and individuals, hungry for radical change to the political, economic and social systems in America. But we are smart and we are strategic. We recognize that real (as opposed to rhetorical) reform to the systems that we oppose can make life materially better for millions of struggling people in our country, as well as make it easier for us to push for deeper change.

         Whether President Obama is sincere in his progressive rhetoric, is a hypocrite, or is simply too weak to effect much meaningful change is irrelevant at this point. What is clear is that pressure from the Republicans has pushed him and his administration's policies to the right, and the Republicans wisely used the Tea Party to strengthen their bargaining position to that end. Unlike the Tea Party though, OWS wasn't manufactured by corporate television. We represent years of organizing and a population that is increasingly marginalized and jeopardized. OWS is real, and is only one face of a growing left movement in the US. It's high time for left politicians to wise up and begin using our momentum to get themselves elected, and push Democrats to start acting based on the principles they claim to uphold. Meanwhile, we'll be out here, organizing and working and struggling and growing, laughing and fighting and sweating and building the beautiful future we know is possible.

     

    Ben Case is an activist and writer living in New Jersey. He is a correspondent for the Inter Press Service newswire and volunteers for the Restaurant Opportunities Center. He is also a professional Muay Thai kickboxer, teaching and coaching fighters at a gym in NJ. Ben has been an active participant in Occupy Wall Street, Bloombergville, and other political actions in New York City.

    [This article is part of a symposium on the elections organized by New Politics.]

     

  • Progressive Election Strategy and the Norman Solomon Campaign

         We can’t devise a successful electoral strategy for “The Left”—meaning the forces of peace, social/economic justice and sustainability—unless we face a simple fact: We’re getting our asses kicked.

         For three decades, our country’s politics have moved steadily rightward and become more corporate-dominated. With few exceptions (gay rights, for example), the right wing has been winning on almost every issue. That’s why we have record levels of war-spending, with near record levels of poverty and wealth disparities. Labor is weakened and under attack, while corporate power over government and both major parties keeps increasing. Our earth faces environmental disasters while the mindless “Drill, Baby, Drill” slogan gains popularity. Issues we thought we’d won decades ago—like reproductive rights and separation of church and state—are under constant threat.

         There’s an essential reason for this sad state of affairs: Rightwing activists have seized one of the two major parties, the GOP, and used that party to amass power and dominate the terms of debate on most issues since Reagan was elected in 1981.

         Rightwing activists—not always with corporate backing—have been resolute in taking over local and state Republican organizations and electing movement allies to office at all levels. Unlike many liberal/progressive activists, these conservative activists don’t instinctively make apologies for politicians who sell them out or fail to deliver. Instead of apologizing for the GOP elite, rightwing activists keep electing a new crop—ever further right and more closely aligned with their extremist demands and litmus tests.

         This determined, strategic electoral activism is the reason that what passes for “mainstream” GOP positions today—denying Darwin and global warming while bestowing personhood on fetuses and ExxonMobil—are more rightwing than 30 years ago. And one can argue that the Tea Party-influenced 2012 Republican presidential frontrunners (including Mr. Etch-A-Sketch) were further right than George W. Bush . . . who was further right than the 1994 Gingrich “revolutionaries” . . . who were further right than Reagan . . . who was further right than the Republican mainstream of previous decades.

    A Roadmap for Progressive Power?

         Have rightwing activists given progressives a roadmap for political power? If so, why has there not been a concerted effort by progressive movements and activists to enter and transform the Democratic Party into a vehicle that can move our country in a dramatically progressive direction?

         Unfortunately, instead of implementing a “remake-the-Democratic-party” strategy, constituency groups like labor and the liberal netroots often function as loyal party operatives, pouring money behind whatever mediocre candidates the Democratic establishment serves up. Some big-spending unions are loath to intervene in primaries—which is where their money and activism could prove decisive in replacing business-as-usual Democrats with genuine progressives.

         It should be clear by now that electing Democrats—even Democratic majorities—is not enough. In 2009, Democrats held both Congress and the White House, as they did in 1993-94. How’d that work out for us? We got NAFTA, but no Employee Free Choice Act. It’s more than a trivial matter what kinds of Democrats are nominated.

         Among hardened leftists, there’s a different objection to the “transform-the-Democrats” strategy: a purist rejection of dealing with the Democratic Party—one of the “twin parties of capitalism.” So, even in this current period of mass disgust with the powers that be, electoral activism consists of running marginalized protest or third party campaigns that pick up a tiny percentage of votes.

         While it’s true that today’s Democratic Party is a corporate-dominated party bolstering elite rule, it’s also the party that most young people, women, people of color and progressive-inclined Americans look to for their choices. The Left needs to offer these groups vastly different choices, and transform the party in the process.

         I sure wish rightwingers had spent the last few decades as electoral purists—and instead of working to take over the GOP, they’d confined themselves to “protest politics” and self-marginalizing minor parties. Our country would be much better off.

         But the right wing went about seizing a major party, beginning with the failed Goldwater insurgency of 1964. We need to remember that the Republican Party of President Eisenhower was a moderate, status quo party that had acquiesced to the New Deal—with 90% tax rates on the 1 percenters, federal jobs programs and virtually no union-busting.

         Perhaps the main excuse for electoral timidity or abstention from progressives of various stripes is: “Rightwing movements have big corporate money behind them, and we don’t.” Actually, we do now have the ability to raise big money from small donors online. And corporate money doesn’t always explain rightwing success: the religious right, which drove much of our country’s conservative shift in recent decades, was largely a grassroots movement of middle-class whites, often triumphing over the moneyed Republican Old Guard.

         In my view, money is not the main advantage rightwing movements have over progressive ones. It’s leadership. And zeal for transformative change. Look at a rightwing leader like the late Paul Weyrich, who coined the term “Moral Majority,” founded grassroots religious right organizations and pioneered direct mail fundraising among small donors. (Yes, he also cofounded corporate fronts like Heritage and ALEC.) Thirty years ago, Weyrich remarked: “We are different from previous generations of conservatives. . . . We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country."

         Those who’ve led rightwing activists to power in recent decades have burned with a passion to radically transform our country. Meanwhile, those who lead large liberal/progressive groups today seem to burn with a passion to have lunch with Democrats in Congress, to hobnob with “our friends on the Hill,” to explain to the base why we can’t push too fast or demand too much of the Democrats.

         In the past century, the two periods of dramatic progressive reform—the 1930s New Deal era and the 1960s Civil Rights/War on Poverty era—were times when independent Left movements made increasingly bold demands on the Democrats. Martin Luther King, Jr. was repeatedly asked by the Kennedys and LBJ to slow down, but he never did—and he went to his grave as a vocal opponent of the Democrats’ war in Vietnam.

         In those eras of social progress, there were progressive movement leaders who acted with independence—more attuned to the base than to Democratic elites. They weren’t prone to constant apologizing for party leaders.

         In other words, they acted like left versions of the rightwing leaders of recent decades.

         It’s not glamorous work for activist movements to try to transform a major party. It’s slow and arduous—with more defeats than victories. But rightwing movements have shown it can be done.

         To do something similar in the Democratic Party will require coordinated efforts—across issues and movements—to elect progressive activists at every level: from local and state Democratic committees (reforming party platforms along the way) to local public offices to state houses. And ultimately to Congress.

         If such a process caught fire, we’d hear a drumbeat from mainstream punditry—not just at Fox News—about the “extremism” of progressive Democrats (despite their own polls showing that ending war, taxing the rich, protecting entitlements, etc., are majority views).

         Currently, we do have a Congressional Progressive Caucus of 75 members, the largest and most multiracial caucus in Congress. But it lacks cohesion and teeth. About 60 members pledged to reject any healthcare bill that lacked a public option—and then caved. More powerful than the current caucus might be a cohesive 25-member group ready to vote as a bloc against war and corporate policies, even when it’s a Democratic White House promoting such policies.

         Getting to a bloc of 25 genuine, principled progressives in Congress is attainable. What’s needed is a strategy and resources to develop candidates in dozens of solidly progressive congressional districts nationwide: black, Latino, college town, liberal urban, etc. When an incumbent Democrat sells-out or leaves office, activists in such a district should be able to call upon national organizational and netroots support to get a 100% progressive into Congress. Once elected by the grassroots in such districts, it’s hard for corporate or conservative forces to ever get them out. Think Bernie Sanders. Think Barbara Lee.

    The Norman Solomon Insurgency

         Which brings me to the Congressional campaign of lifelong progressive activist/author Norman Solomon (full disclosure: he’s a close friend, with whom I’ve written three books and hundreds of columns). An acclaimed antiwar leader who led three dramatic trips to Iraq in an effort to avert the U.S. invasion, Norman is running in a new, extremely progressive district on California’s North Coast that stretches from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border. The seat is open due to the retirement of Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a steadfast peace advocate who once co-chaired the Progressive Caucus.

         To prepare for this race, Norman paid his dues in local Democratic work. He’s been elected three times to be a delegate from the North Bay to the state Democratic central committee (where he coauthored the party’s “troops-out-of-Afghanistan” position). In 2008, he was elected as an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention—but he has never refrained from criticizing Obama policies that bolster Wall Street or the warfare state.

         Norman may or may not win, but he’s built one of the strongest, grassroots campaigns for Congress ever—with over 1,000 volunteers and more than 5,000 donors. He’s been endorsed by local elected officials in the district (both Democrats and Greens) as he’s campaigned on an uncompromising agenda popular with voters: tax Wall Street to fund federal green jobs programs; major military cuts; no attack on Iran; enhanced “Medicare for All”; end nuclear power. The primary is June 5, with voting-by-mail to begin early May.

         The good news is that the Solomon campaign raised—in mostly small, grassroots donations—an impressive half-million dollars by the March 31 federal filing deadline. The bad (but expected) news is that two corporate-connected Democrats raised $865,000 and $740,000; both will significantly outspend Norman on TV/radio ads. It’s a classic battle of grassroots vs. big bucks. Will his volunteer-based ground game beat the air attack of the moneyed candidates, as Paul Wellstone did when he got into the U.S. Senate after being outspent 7 to 1? (Like Norman, Wellstone had never previously held elected office.)

         In a 12-candidate race, experts in the district see Norman as now running second. The frontrunner is the Democratic establishment candidate, a well-funded state assemblyman who has received most of the labor and environmental endorsements—despite having accepted donations in recent years from companies like Walmart and PG&E that are despised by union and green activists. (The Solomon campaign refuses corporate and lobbyist money.)

         These membership groups face a choice in primaries: Do they embrace party regulars and the status quo, or back outsider candidates who want to transform the party . . . and the country. Several unions have endorsed the Solomon campaign, including the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). One of the strongest unions in the state, SEIU California, hedged its bets by endorsing Norman, along with the state assemblyman and another elected official in the race. Some progressive unions (like the California Nurses Association) have so far stayed out.

         National groups like Progressive Democrats of America and Blue America have backed the campaign from the start. Norman won the endorsement of Democracy for America (founded by Howard Dean) by finishing second out of 200 liberal/progressive candidates in DFA’s nationwide online straw poll.

         The Solomon campaign earns free media coverage each time a notable like Phil Donahue, Daniel Ellsberg or Sean Penn comes into the district to campaign. Other progressive leaders have endorsed, including Barbara Ehrenreich, Dolores Huerta, Rep. John Conyers and Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Raul Grijalva. Musician Tom Morello tweeted his support of the “antiwar, pro-Occupy candidate” to his 200,000 twitter fans. Blogger Glenn Greenwald, known for criticizing both Republican and Democratic politicians, was effusive: “When it comes to Congressional candidates, it just doesn’t get any better than Norman Solomon.”

         The Solomon movement is up against tough odds and big money. But, win or lose, it offers a model—a campaign that inspires activists and challenges power and the Democratic establishment, a campaign promoting the full progressive agenda without settling for a puny number of protest votes.

         It’s the kind of campaign we need to see in communities across the country in the coming years.

     

    Jeff Cohen is the author of Cable News Confidential. He and Norman Solomon cofounded the online activism group RootsAction.org, and he founded the media watch group FAIR (with Solomon and others). He has served on the advisory board of Progressive Democrats of America. The views expressed here are his alone—not those of any organization or campaign.

    [This article is part of a symposium on the elections organized by New Politics.]

     

  • The Left Should Declare Its Independence from the Democrats

         Obama's 2008 promise of "change" has been so outrageously contradicted by three and a half years in office that it almost looks like deceit. The domination of financial elites is now more absolute than ever. To the relentless grinding down of working people under years of Republican and neoliberal Democratic rule has been added the misery of millions of who have lost their jobs and homes and been left by the government essentially to fend for themselves—that, and a vicious assault on public employees, enabled and sometimes spearheaded by Democratic officeholders at every level. Arguably, U.S. foreign policy is even more militarized, more arrogantly imperial than it was under Bush. David Bromwich has suggested that Bush and Obama have both presided over a new historical stage in U.S. governance, one with particular characteristics: vastly increased "force projection" abroad and a powerfully enhanced national security state of secrecy, surveillance and indefinite detention. At home, "redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence. Only a Democratic president, and one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness."

         This was not a timid capitulation to corporate and military big shots, or an opportunistic appeal to conservatives and centrists for electoral advantage. Obama was and probably still is, personally, a liberal, of an exceedingly moderate Wall Street type to be sure, but not at all a hard-bitten reactionary like George W. Bush and his circle. He does not share the primitive prejudices of Romney, Gingrich, Santorum and their ilk. Obama's job, however, is to provide leadership for and to protect a heartless system that has its own grim logic and its own inexorable demands, of which corporate profitability is number one. Being a racist, homophobe or misogynist is not a requirement for this job. However troubled he may be by all the suffering his policies cause, Obama fancies himself a "realist." The corporate-dominated system may be unfair; but Obama, like other Democratic Party politicians, basically believes as much as Margaret Thatcher that There Is No Alternative.

         And now that the election approaches, and all but a very small part of the left are preparing to vote, even to campaign, for a president about whose policies there can no longer be any illusions, the question needs to be seriously faced: is there in fact no alternative? Because if there isn't, we may as well give up on a national system of free healthcare, a massive jobs program through public works, environmental policies that urgently address climate change, a major revival of the labor movement by organizing the unorganized, an end to bloated military budgets and bloody foreign interventions.

         Liberal magazines like The Nation and pundits like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich insist that we can win these things if progressives just try harder to build pressure on the administration and continue fighting to "reclaim" the Democratic Party. But do they really believe it? Attempting to change the Democratic Party—which is controlled lock, stock and barrel by corporate power—is a total, colossal waste of time, energy, and resources, worse than that, a disastrous misadventure for every progressive current in our society. Without an independent political party of the left, pressure can potentially extract only the most modest and insufficient concessions from a corporate-minded administration. Has the fact that the Progressive Caucus is on record in favor of single payer had the slightest impact on Obama? Can anyone reasonably imagine the Democrats putting the health insurance industry out of business—unless, perhaps, there were a real electoral rival on their left?

         If progressives continue to vote for Democrats, continue to cling to the belief that hidden somewhere inside this party—which is not a mass membership party but a congery of lawyers, operatives and corporate and political notables—there is a "soul" that can somehow be made to care more about the welfare of the Ninety-Nine than the One Percent, then we can not only forget about Medicare for all, radically cutting military spending, stopping imperial interventions, or making the rich pay; we will not even be able to prevent Social Security from being gutted.

         The issue of climate change poses the problem in its starkest form. As Naomi Klein has pointed out, real solutions to the climate crisis—not merely recycling and buying green products—are antithetical to "free market" dogmas, to which the Democrats cling as much as the Republicans, albeit "realistically" rather than enthusiastically. Klein explains that only collectivist measures might make a difference: heavy investment in rail transportation, large-scale development of renewable energy, and, above all, planning based on the common good, not profitability. That would mean a major assault on corporate "rights" and priorities, an assault that obviously would be fiercely resisted and probably could be overcome only by nationalization. The Obama administration's treatment of the banksters and hedge fund managers should make it pretty clear that a serious challenge to corporate prerogatives—let alone nationalization—is simply not on the table for the Democrats.

         So where does that leave us? The Wisconsin uprising, the struggles in Oakland and Longview, show that vast numbers of people are fed up and willing to fight. Last year, Occupy Wall Street electrified the nation and the world and won the sympathy of many millions. The day before I finished this article, a gigantic May Day march—perhaps the largest in U.S. history—proved that the Occupy movement is alive and growing. But what Occupy lacks, as do the unions, the environmental, antiwar and other social movements, is an electoral extension—a political party of the left. Such a party would not be a substitute for mass protests, occupations and civil disobedience, but rather an invaluable weapon, a means of organizing for political power. After all that has happened in the past two years, this is the next logical step. It is nothing less than a tragedy that progressives, workers, Blacks, Hispanics, feminists, LGBT rights organizations, civil liberties groups, etc., continue to support, even while "holding their noses," a political party that represents the interests of the their enemy: the One Percent.

         As Matt Taibbi put it, the Democrats "are not a progressive political party, not even secretly, deep inside. They just play one on television." The party has always had some sort of "progressive" wing, and its function has always been, as Barney Frank once put it, to "go out and calm down the left." Today, that role is evidently being played by something called the 99% Movement, a creation of MoveOn, the SEIU and Rebuild the American Dream. As Arun Gupta explained, "The 99% Movement employs the ideas and language of Occupy Wall Street towards ends diametrically opposed to it: support for Democratic Party candidates up to and including President Obama." Van Jones, the cofounder of Rebuild the American Dream, advises Occupy activists to abandon talk of class war: "The real enemy is not the one percent."

         So a political vacuum exists. There are Green Party candidates on many ballots, as well as other independent progressives running for office, and people should certainly support them, if only as a protest vote. But the Greens cannot begin to mobilize the forces that are needed for a creditable third party movement.

         At the same time, though, we cannot simply wait for a new groundswell. The initiative needs to be taken now, not to immediately proclaim a new political party but to begin laying the foundation for it. In the first place, that means challenging the myth that supporting Obama and the Democrats in 2012 is a practical way to defend the Ninety-Nine Percent and promote a progressive agenda. A great many progressive Americans sense that the Democrats offer no way out, but they are not yet numerous enough to form a left electoral alternative to the Democrats that could win the support of masses of people. Their numbers are far from negligible, however, and they should not let the 2012 election pass by assuming that it is pointless to oppose Obama and the Democrats when so many are in the panicky grip of lesser-evilism. On the contrary, it is during presidential elections, when fear of the Republicans and a concomitant progressive passivity toward the Democrats are at their height, when lesser-evilism is most effective at undermining the combativeness of oppositional movements, that it is most imperative to make a political demonstration against the two-party system and most likely that such an action will actually attract some attention and get people thinking about what needs to be done in the near future.

         What is needed is a declaration of independence from the Democrats, one that points the way forward toward a new, broadly-based political party of the left. With as much support as it is possible to garner from trade unionists and social movement activists, such a declaration would announce to the public that at least a portion of the left has decisively rejected the idea that progressive change can come from the Democrats and intends instead to challenge them, as well as the Republicans, for political power. It should forthrightly state the need for political opposition to the Democrats, not just technical organizational independence in the manner of New York's Working Families Party and other "fusionist" initiatives, which almost always end up urging their followers to vote for Democratic candidates either directly or on an independent ballot line.

         We should be clear. Political opposition means, once a reasonable amount of popular support has been mobilized, running candidates against Democrats (and Republicans, of course). The natural constituency for a new party of the left would be workers and unions, minorities, feminists, the poor, LGBT people, and progressives in general—those who have traditionally given their votes to the Democrats. In other words, a progressive third party can be built only at the expense of the Democrats, even if this allows Republicans to win in the short run. The growth of the British Labour Party in the early 1900s had as a direct result the reduction of the British Liberals, who had traditionally won the bulk of the working-class vote, to a small third party, and a political realignment of class forces—with the bulk of the capitalist class lining up behind the Conservatives. Should a popular anti-corporate party emerge here, something similar would doubtless occur. Our de facto one-party system would become a two-party system in reality, with Big Business on one side and working people on the other. Then, at long last, we can have an open political contest between the right and the left in this country.

         All the resources—money, phone banks, doorbell ringers—that labor lavishes on electing Democrats, in return for essentially nothing in terms of legislation or political support, could be devoted to a party controlled by labor and its allies, a party from which corporate and financial elites were excluded. Labor and progressives hesitate to break with the Democratic Party partly because they believe that without the support of at least a sector of the capitalist class they cannot build a new, potentially majoritarian party. This, far more than retrograde electoral laws, is what really stands in the way of independent political action. If labor and its allies could somehow overcome their timidity, their extremely low expectations for winning over a majority of the American public, they would rely on their own numbers and resources, form a new party and go all out to get those electoral laws repealed.

         Of course, even many of those who have no illusions in the Obama administration will still say that Romney is so dangerous that this is "not the time" to consider political independence. The same thing was said about McCain in 2008, and Bush in 2004 and 2000. But isn't it certain that the Republicans will put up somebody as bad as, or more likely worse than, Romney in 2016, 2020, and so on? Because the Republicans can only get worse, and the Democrats will inevitably follow in their wake, the prospect before us seems to be perpetual political enslavement to a rightward-moving Democratic Party. This downward spiral must be stopped. Even if Obama wins, the far right will continue to grow and indeed flourish, nurtured by the bitter fury of a plundered, ruined and manipulated population. If an independent left does not emerge to offer radical, anti-corporate solutions, people will turn more and more in desperation to bigoted nativism and ersatz radicalism of the Tea Party and kindred movements.

     

         Thomas Harrison is Co-Director of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and a member of the New Politics editorial board. Thanks to Joanne Landy for numerous helpful suggestions.

    [This article is part of a symposium on the elections organized by New Politics.]

     

  • Diverting the Spectacle: Radical Students and the Election Season

         Another election season dawns, and yet again students like myself are urged to "make our voices heard" by selecting our preferred candidate. Many of us will undoubtedly be caught up in the fervor of rhetoric and promises, some perhaps even believing that this time things will be different. As a radical student activist it's often difficult to view this bi-yearly charade as anything other than a perverse blend of distraction and manipulation. Seeing our fellow students fooled over and over again by the same shallow slogans and short-sighted policies, elections can be an exasperating process. However, we can hardly allow such a huge opportunity to engage with the general population to be routinely wasted. So the question then becomes how do we as radical students relate to elections, utilizing them for the cause of revolution without allowing them to corrupt our ideals?

         First off, anyone who has examined the US political system can't fail to notice its remarkable ability to represent the interests of the ruling class at the expense of the population in general. It is clear that our elections are bought, not won. With the demystification of Obama, an increasing number of students are awakening to this fact. Though they may still vote for Obama over any of the Republican field, many will do so more out of a lack of options than from any deep-seated belief in his abilities. As leftist students our alternative should not be a different face to vote for, or a begrudging support for the fabled "lesser of two evils," but rather a move for political participation beyond voting.

          I can still recall turning 18 and receiving a postcard from the government emblazoned with the slogan "your vote is your voice." It struck me that the unacknowledged subtext of this was that I don't have a voice outside of the ballot box. This is the ethos put forward by our society as a whole, that political participation means watching the news, choosing a candidate, and then disengaging until the next election cycle. This process is not democracy, but manufactured consent.

         Despite this, many people still feel that this process allows them to influence national discourse. While this is fundamentally wrong, at this point in time it is not a productive battle to be fighting. If someone wants to vote, fine, but this should not be where their political participation ends. Gradually, a deeper understanding of the system will no doubt expose the charade of US elections. In the meantime we should advocate for an independent approach to politics. Rather than becoming the passive bi-yearly voter, we should push to challenge the established agenda and to reinterpret the issues from a radical perspective. Protests, public debates, sit-ins, occupations, and most fundamentally organizing should be our goals during election season.

         Every two years, and particularly during presidential elections, the US political system hands us a fantastic opportunity. Suddenly politics becomes the center of attention; the media, though still vapid, obsessively covers every aspect of the campaign, and citizens are encouraged, in however shallow a manner, to reflect upon the last few years of leadership. Left to its own devices this system functions relatively smoothly, allowing popular frustration to be channeled into a safe, meaningless distraction.

         But a good revolutionary rarely leaves the system to its own devices. For us the bottom line of this whole process is that the cameras are rolling and people are listening. Even a relatively small event can disrupt the ongoing spectacle of election season, particularly in the setting of the university. A small march or carefully executed disruption can cause ripples throughout the population. The two-party system, for all its billions in advertising, is a pretty boring and hollow show. It is our job as radicals to peel back the facade and offer an alternative.

         So what are some concrete actions that we can take during election season to spread radical ideas on campuses and in our communities? One of the easiest things is to use the election fervor to get our ideas heard. As election day draws progressively nearer there is always a rising interest in politics across campus. Political events are held with regularity, the school paper begins covering more political issues, and political parties come to campus attempting to sway voters to their side. All of these things present a chance to reach people outside of our usual radical circles. Many of the organizers of official campus events are wary of the criticism that they only cater to the two-party system. This often makes them relatively enthusiastic to give "alternative perspectives" a voice; and the same holds true for many school newspaper editors. The bottom line is that we must use the tools that the system hands us.

         While using the established channels in this manner is an important basic step toward challenging the two-party discourse, it can't be the only effort we make. As stated above, we must reach beyond these approved methods and challenge the system through direct action. Established channels are not meant to foster change; rather they are designed to create a show, to provide a shallow level of participation while retaining the basic structures of class domination. They are intended to dissipate political energy, not focus it. Radical change cannot and will not come from a bureaucracy. Because of this, revolutionary students should always be reaching for a more militant and meaningful means of participation. While this can take many forms one of the most effective, especially on college campuses, is direct action, the practice of unmediated political participation. Direct action can involve anything, from a well-placed banner drop to the camps of Occupy Wall Street. Through such actions we can demonstrate and involve people in an alternative form of discourse, interrupting the scheduled programming of the capitalist system to outline a new perspective. One of the best opportunities for actions of this kind presents itself whenever one of the big political parties holds a large scale event. A carefully orchestrated march or installation can grab headlines and radically shift the discussion.

         These actions can look like almost anything, and I wouldn't presume to know what the level of political consciousness on each individual campus is, but the two key things to make sure to keep in mind are organizing and creativity. With respect to organizing: we are trying to build a movement, not just make noise, so our slogans and actions must be tailored to the people we are trying to reach. Shouting about class struggle to people who only associate the term with Stalinism is not a productive or useful enterprise. Some people come to college ready for the revolution, but many need to be brought in and radicalized gradually. Actions must allow space for both. Furthermore, there needs to be a way for people to learn more about one's cause: contact info, meeting times, etc. should be readily available for anyone interested. Otherwise we become interesting but not approachable.

          As for utilizing creativity, try to enjoy yourself! Come up with a new or unique way to attack a problem. Capitalist society long ago learned how to deal with traditional protests, trivializing even the largest events. A rally with a speakers' list and chants can still be a powerful unifying event, but it is far from the only option. People, the media, and especially students are often more willing to listen if they are approached in an un-orthodox manner.

         As a student at the University of Michigan, I have had the opportunity to plan and participate in a variety of actions. I work with the Student Socialist Union, a revolutionary multi-tendency anti-capitalist organization, incorporating everything from Socialism through Anarchism. We publish a bi-monthly zine, The Harbinger, and in the past we have executed banner drops, and participated in rallies and protests and other direct actions throughout the area. Through all of this I've noticed that the best actions are often those that the organizers feel most passionate about.

         With the 2008 collapse and a jobless recovery, Socialism is gaining ground for the first time in a decade. The election season is a magnificent opportunity for us to reach out to students who are unsatisfied with the spectacle, and while I can't offer a definite prescription for revolution, I do know that if there's one constant in every revolution, it's us, the students.

     

    Ian Matchett is a 3rd year Undergraduate at the University of Michigan studying Political Science and Studio Art.

    [This article is part of a symposium on the elections organized by New Politics.]

     

  • Independent Politics for a Green New Deal

         It is time for the Left to be realistic about how it is going to build the power we need to make the changes we want.

         The immediate solutions the left is calling for are not controversial. They are widely shared across the broad spectrum of progressive politics, from liberal reformers and left populists to radical ecologists and democratic socialists. Medicare for All. Public Jobs for the Unemployed. End the Wars. Clean Energy for Climate Stabilization. Debt Relief for Homeowners and Students. Tuition-free public higher education. Public Campaign Financing. Proportional Representation. Restore Constitutional Rights. End the Drug War and Mass Incarceration. Tax the Rich.

         None of these and other popular demands for reform are even discussed by the candidates of the two big corporate-funded parties. For progressives to support the Democrats as the lesser evil is to silence their voice, bury their program, and defeat themselves before the election is even held. Abstention has the same effect. Education, lobbying, and demonstrations for progressive reforms have little leverage in the U.S. electoral and political system in the absence of independent progressive candidates. Without independent progressive candidates competing for votes, the Democrats take progressive voters for granted because progressives have nowhere else to take their votes.

         I am campaigning for widely supported progressive reforms under the theme of a Green New Deal for America, starting with an Economic Bill of Rights featuring the rights to job at a living wage, to quality health care though Medicare for All, and to tuition-free public education from pre-school through graduate school. We aim to unite independent progressives with those progressives still hoping against all the evidence of the last 35 years that the Democrats will return to a program of New Deal style public jobs, social insurance, and market regulation. We want to recover the best traditions of the old New Deal. But we also want to update and go beyond it with a Green New Deal designed to build an economy that is democratic and ecologically sustainable.[1]

         The centerpiece of our Green New Deal is a direct public employment program in public works and public services. It aims to create living-wage jobs for all of the 25 million unemployed and underemployed Americans. We believe 16 million public jobs will stimulate the creation of another 8 million private sector jobs as consumer demand rebounds. It will be federally-funded, locally-planned, and democratically-controlled much like the New Deal's Works Progress Administration. It will more than pay for itself in reduced safety net expenditures, increased income tax revenues, and a sustainable infrastructure that will be productive for decades to come.[2]

         Climate jobs building clean energy, mass transit, and the other sustainable infrastructure are emphasized to address the twin emergencies of persistent high unemployment and pending climate catastrophe. We also include public service jobs in order to meet critical community needs and make public jobs accessible to all un- and under-employed people, not only workers skilled in the construction trades. Public service jobs are needed to revitalize our public sector provision of social insurance programs, child care and elder care, education, and recreational, youth, and cultural programs. Our full employment program poses a sharp contrast with the pro-corporate trickle-down austerity agendas of the Obama Democrats, the Romney Republicans, and Americans Elect, the third pro-corporate austerity presidential ticket backed financially by a small coterie of super-rich hedge fund managers.

         We believe a majority of Americans support our Green New Deal. We know from public opinion polling that most of the progressive demands I listed at the outset have majority support, usually upwards of 60%.[3]

    Breaking Out of the Two-Corporate-Party Trap

         The failure of the American electoral and political system is that these majoritarian progressive public values do not get converted into progressive public policies. The two-party-system of corporate rule is where progressive programs go to die and the corporate policy agenda prevails.

         The choice in the two-party system of corporate rule today is a choice between Center-Right Democrats and Ultra-Right Republicans. The Republicans play a particular role in capturing progressive voters for the Democrats. The Republicans' function is to scare the hell out of progressives to get them to vote for the other corporate party out of fear.

         The two-party-system of corporate rule is a trap for the Left. It captures progressive voters without having to take those voters into account when it comes to policy making. The structure of the U.S. electoral system, based on single member districts and the winner-take-all rules, encourages this co-optation of progressive voters into voting for the status quo. How can the Left spring this trap?

         The dominant strategy on the broad Left since the 1936 election has been to campaign inside the Democratic Party. After more than 75 years, we have plenty of evidence to see that this approach has disempowered and, indeed, disappeared the Left as a distinctive voice and force in American politics. Corporate New Democrats, not liberal New Deal Democrats, have dominated the Democratic Party for decades now. Democratic Party progressives have been reduced to campaigning for the Democrats' pro-corporate agenda with the uninspiring argument that the Republicans are even worse.

         The reason for the impotence of the reform Democratic strategy is plain to see. Progressive Democratic activists must support the Democrats nominated in primaries, no matter how conservative, if they are to have any standing in the Democratic Party going forward. They are trapped into supporting the Democrats' corporate agenda.

    Lessons from Third Party Movements

         To say that independent politics has failed is to ignore U.S. history. The Liberty, Free Soil Party, and then the Republican parties displaced the Whigs to give abolitionism, land reform, and the other progressive demands of the day a voice and power in government. The independent parties of the populists and socialists in the late 1800s—Greenback-Labor, Anti-Monopoly, Peoples—gave expression to popular demands concerning the money question, the emerging corporate monopolies, the rights of workers, farmers, blacks, and women, and led to progressive reforms. The Debsian Socialists, the LaFollette Progressives, and the Farmer-Labor parties of the early 20th century first raised the many social insurance, labor rights, and market regulation reforms that were finally realized during the New Deal.

         Independent politics has not failed since the mid-1930s. It has not been tried. The vast majority of progressive movements, organizers, and activists have spent 75 years trying to move the Democrats to the Left, which has enabled the Democrats to move Right as they take the progressive vote for granted. The lesson from the pre-1930s eras is that independent parties did move the political debate and win reforms. While they only won control of a small number local and state governments, their ability to win significant votes forced the whole political spectrum to move their way to compete for their voters. That is the power of independent politics, the power that the progressives surrender when they enter into coalition with the corporate powers that set the agenda for the Democratic Party.

         The Green Party, which has been running campaigns since the mid-1980s, has learned a few lessons about how build an independent progressive party in our time. We have learned that we cannot build a party from the top down out of a single presidential campaign. We have concentrated on building local and state parties that can compete in local elections and secure state ballot lines. We have learned that waiting to run until you know you can win means never running. We have demonstrated that we can build up a growing base of voter support in a district over several elections cycles to become a force that cannot be ignored. We have demonstrated that the Green Party can win elections, with 133 elected officials in 24 states currently holding office.

         The Green Party has also learned the lesson of uniting around independent politics for immediate demands, rather than an all-encompassing political ideology. The Greens believe that the basic problem progressives need to address today is not liberalism versus socialism, but independent political action versus the two-corporate-party system. We need an independent mass party of the progressive majority. We need a big tent party on the Left where we can discuss the important questions of ideology and analysis while we unite to fight for the immediate reforms we all want. We need a broad party of progressives, not competing sects.

    A Party-Building and Movement-Building Campaign

         My campaign is focused on party-building and movement-building. As we take the campaign across the country to Green Party primaries, caucuses, and conventions, we are making a special effort to support, participate in, and build alliances with local Occupy movements, the student campaign for erasing college-loan debt and making public higher education free, the anti-foreclosure movement, and labor, environmental, and anti-war demonstrations and campaigns. We are devoting a major portion of our resources to support ballot access drives to secure our place on the ballot in more than 45 states. We expect to meet the requirements for federal primary matching funds, a milestone that will double the cumulative contribution of every individual up to $250 until the Green National Convention in Baltimore, July 12-15.

         My path to independent politics and a presidential candidacy with the Green Party is similar to the path of many progressive issue-oriented activists. I am trained as a medical doctor and was a general practitioner. I saw in my day to day work that for-profit medicine didn't work and was getting worse. So I advocated for single-payer Medicare for All. I saw how toxics in our air and water, and the corporate food system were increasingly harming my patients and public health. So I campaigned for environmental health measures. It came to dawn on me that the elected legislators and executives I was lobbying were not responsive. The Republicans were not interested and the Democrats just took me for granted as another progressive who would vote for them whether they did anything or not.

         So I joined the Green-Rainbow Party of Massachusetts, a merger of the Green and the Rainbow Coalition parties of Massachusetts in 2002, and ran for a series of offices, including Governor in 2002 and 2010, State Representative in 2004 (with 21% of the vote in a three-way race), Secretary of State in 2006 (with 18% of the vote in a two-way race), and Lexington Town Meeting Representative in 2005 and 2008 (elected both times). In the 2002 race, I debated Mitt Romney in a televised debate where newspaper pundits called me the “debate winner” and “the only adult in the room.”

         That experience does not make me a household name who can command immediate attention nationally. However, it has prepared me for running a presidential campaign where, if nothing else, the Green Party will come out of it bigger and better organized than we went into it. As I campaign around the country, the disenchantment among progressives with Obama and the Democrats is palpable. We aim to translate that discontent into a Green Party campaign for president, in concert with Green congressional, state, and local candidacies, that will achieve another of our campaign objectives: to force popular progressive reforms into the national political debate.

         Real solutions can't wait. Time is running out on the climate emergency and the other planetary ecological boundaries that our civilization is breaching with catastrophic consequences for human survival. We must radically transform our productive systems in the next decade to have any hope of a sustainable society.[4] Meanwhile, a whole generation of Americans encompassing half the population—the majority of the working class—is being marginalized by high unemployment, foreclosures, debt-slavery, union busting, corporate globalization, and privatized health care, schools, and other basic public services. The working class majority is being consigned to the ranks of the working poor by the bipartisan corporate policy consensus. The corporate parties bluntly oppose ready solutions to these ecological and human problems. Only independent political action can raise the solutions in a way that the U.S. electoral and political system cannot ignore.

    Notes

    1. See a fuller statement of our Green New Deal.

    2. Our full employment program draws on the history, analysis, and financial projections by Rutgers professor of law and economics, Philip Harvey, in “Learning from the New Deal.”

    3. 3. In evaluating public opinion, one should go beyond self-labeling polls for liberal, moderate, or conservative (although progressive is the most popular term today and socialism is receiving surprisingly high favorability ratings). Where the progressive majority has revealed itself consistently for decades is in polling about specific policies. See Noam Chomsky's discussion of public opinion and public policy in Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2006), pp. 214-236.

    4. 4. The scientific consensus on this climate and ecological emergency calls for urgent action. See Rockstrom et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature, September 24, 2009, and Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society January 2011. The Republican leadership denies the science. The Democratic leadership acknowledges the science but lacks the courage to act on it.

     

    Dr. Jill Stein is a mother, housewife, physician, environmental health advocate, and candidate for the Green Party nomination for U.S. President.

    [This article is part of a symposium on the elections organized by New Politics.]

  • Strategic Reflections on the Quadrennial Extravaganza

         The quadrennial presidential election extravaganza is here and along with it comes the quadrennial intra-U.S. leftist bloodletting on the unpleasant question of how to best respond to the narrow "choices" handed down by the nation's corporate-managed one-and-a-half party system. The conservative corporate and imperial records of the Democratic Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and Barack Obama (2008-21??) administrations have been richly consistent with Upton Sinclair's observation more than a century ago that "the two political parties are two wings of the same bird of prey. The people are allowed to choose between their candidates, and both of them are controlled, and all their nominations are dictated by, the same [money] power."

         How might we on the left best respond to the latest big money, big media, narrow-spectrum, and candidate-centered election spectacle? I am aware of three basic positions:

         1. Hold your Nose and Vote Democrat to Block Republicans. This position holds that Republicans are so terrible that serious progressives should vote "for" the Democratic incumbent (however "disappointing" he or she may have been to liberal and progressive supporters) to block the G.O.P. Block the proto-fascistic Republican troglodytes and then work for progressive change beneath and beyond the elections.

         One variation on the nose-holding counsel articulated by the leading radical intellectual Noam Chomsky comes with two key caveats. The first qualifications holds that you remain free to protest vote for a third (or fourth or fifth, etc.) party presidential candidate in "uncontested states"—states where one of the major party candidates already has an Electoral College victory sewn up before the election. Chomsky has advised leftists to vote Democratic in contested states on the grounds that the differences between the two leading business and imperial parties are not irrelevant to many disadvantaged people (more on this below). Those differences might seem small to privileged leftists but they matter to millions living at the bottom of concentrated power systems like the United States.

         The second Chomsky caveat (also a major point made by Howard Zinn) counsels against fetish-izing the ballot moment. It holds that what you do (or don't do) in a voting booth for two minutes once every 4 years is a relatively tiny part of your political activism. "Serious ['left'] political action" is about building grassroots social movements with the power to shake the society and its politics from the bottom up on the model of the labor movement in the 1930s and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. That's how real change occurs.

         2. "Vote Your Hopes Not Your Fears." Since both of the dominant parties and their candidates are egregiously capitalist and imperial and we do (in most states) have the option of voting for third party left candidates, this position holds, serious progressives must always (even in contested states) vote outside the corporate duopoly. Always "vote your hopes, not your fears!"

         3. Ignore/Boycott/Mock. The personalized electoral spectacles that the masters stage for us every 4 years are such potent exercises in bamboozling the citizenry and creating the illusion of democracy that the best thing is to ignore or perhaps boycott them. As the early 20th century U.S. left anarchist Emma Goldman once said, "if voting made any difference they'd make it illegal." Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies ran a pig ("Pigasus") for president in 1968 to make this point.

         While my own voting behavior has tended to alternate between positions 2 and 3, these standpoints strike me as unimpressive for four basic reasons. First, "left" candidates never have the slightest chance of making more than a tiny dent in the American "winner- take-all" elections system (which is not going to be constitutionally overhauled between now and the first Tuesday in November 2012). That system is stacked against left "contenders" and those contenders' inevitably pathetic showing ends up reinforcing the false notion that left and progressive policy positions find little favor among the populace.

         Second, Chomsky is right about small differences mattering for millions under systems of concentrated power. The fact that a Republican president will attack the welfare state to a somewhat greater degree than a Democratic president might seem like small potatoes to a radical intellectual claiming to advocate workers' control, but it is not irrelevant to a poor family that cannot afford to lose its Food Stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid and/or public family cash assistance.

         Third, while advocates of positions 2 and 3 often note correctly (if obviously) that Democrats are far better than the Republicans at co-opting progressives, those advocates do little to disabuse citizens of the notion that the former represent a meaningful progressive alternative to the G.O.P. They may actually further that illusion, actually, because their voting/non-voting recommendations increase the likelihood of Republican victory and having Republicans in power reinforces many liberals' and progressives' false belief that the nation's problems can be reduced largely to the fact that Republicans are in charge. When the Republican trademark spoils as it did under George W. Bush in his second term, the ruling class remains free to generate the illusion of meaningful "change" by pulling the G.O.P brand from the shelf and putting the Democratic product (generally advertised as "hope" and "change") out front for a while.

         Fourth, Chomsky is right about what constitutes "serious political action" and the third party candidates for whom I have marked ballots in the past (including Nader in 2008) never seem to leave anything behind in the way of social movements.

         It would seem that I am arguing for a simple return to position #1. Not quite. As Glenn Greenwald has argued, the price of Chomsky's "small differences that matter" is not the only ethical calculus to consider in approaching the voting/non-voting dilemma. We must also weigh the cost of telling the Democrats that they and not the only other party that can actually defeat them (under the current elections system) can count on our votes, pretty much no matter how clearly they act in accord with Sinclair's dictum.

         As it happens, there's a different, rarely noted strategic and radical case for wanting the Democratic wing of the bird of prey to "win." This case has nothing to do with "lesser evilist" thinking and everything to do with exposing the corporate and imperial Democrats for what they really are. Let's call it Position 4: the Hope of More Bipartisan Disillusionment. Left adherents of positions 2 and 3 are correct to worry about the role of the Democratic Party in co-opting rank and file social and political movements and popular energies. But how, Position 4 asks, are the Democrats best revealed as agents of the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire? Which is better for the development of "serious," and I would add lasting, "political action" (grassroots, and non-co-opt-able citizen and workers' activism and organization) beyond the masters' quadrennial electoral extravaganzas—(A) radically regressive Republicans holding nominal power or (B) dismal dollar Democrats sitting atop the symbolic ship of state?

         The answer according to advocates of Position 4 is clearly B. It would be best, this position (mine) holds, to get Obama back for a second term for two key reasons. First (let's be honest), the intensity of the corporate and social-conservative assault on the U.S. populace will be somewhat less severe under Obama's second term than under Mitt Romney's (or Rock Santorum's) first term. Second and most important (since the main task is to get serious left sociopolitical movements underway), the presence of another Republican in the White House will just encourage liberals and progressives and others to blame everything wrong in America on "those insane evil Republicans." That just leaves elite power centers free to tamp down the resulting popular anger by bringing the Democrats back in the names of "hope" and "change"—the keywords of both Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign and Obama's 2008 campaign.

         I wanted Obama to win the 2008 election for what might strike some as a strange reason. I hoped Obama would triumph because I thought there was radical potential in U.S. voters and citizens, especially younger ones, experiencing the aforementioned dictatorships under a Democratic administration that seemed to offer special promise of progressive change. I wanted Americans (young ones above all) to come into more direct and visible contact with the bipartisan nature of the American imperial and business system and to confront the gap between their expectations of transformation and the harsh reality of persistent top-down corporate, financial and military rule with the "dismal Dems" (Doug Henwood's term) at the outward helm of the ship of state. I wanted them to be subjected to the reality that, to quote the Marxist commentator Doug Henwood nearly four years ago, "everything still pretty much sucks" when Democrats hold the top political offices—that the basic underlying institutional realities of capitalist and imperial rule stay the same. As the antiwar activist, author, and essayist Stan Goff noted two years ago, "I'm glad Obama was elected. Otherwise, people would blame the war on McCain and the Republicans and continue with the delusion that elections can be our salvation."

         Radicals want workers and citizens to grasp that the real problem is not which of the two wings holds political office but the rule of capital and Empire behind the charade that passes for democracy. Having Democrats in office is strategically preferable for the Left because it helps bring that lesson home.

         My dark dialectical hope for Obama has been born out by the rise of the Occupy Movement, which fed off youthful disillusionment with Obama and the Democrats—a bursting of political "hope" bubbles that followed two years after the bursting of the real estate and financial bubble to fuel disenchantment with the underlying profits system. Obama has been a great object lesson in the wisdom of something that the great American radical historian Howard Zinn once wrote: "the really critical thing isn't who's sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in—in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating—those are the things that determine what happens."

         Bringing back a Republican to the White House will reinforce the longstanding liberal claim that installing Democrats in power is the cure to the national malaise. We can't bypass the confusion and co-optation created by the Democrats by indirectly voting in Republicans. We can't dance around the Democratic Party problem. Like the Civil Rights Movement and New Left in the 1960s and the "old" Left and industrial workers movement in the 1930s and 1940s, we have to develop and sustain our abilities to mobilize, march, occupy, strike, organize, strategize, and develop radical vision when Democrats hold office.

     

    Paul Street is the author of numerous books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (2007), Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008), The Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (2010) and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party (Paradigm, 2011).

    [This article is part of a symposium on the elections organized by New Politics.]

  • Meet the enemy

    One of the most amazing aspects of the current political landscape is the brazenness with which elites destroying public education, while claiming they are saving children, announce their strategy to the world. They have no fear of being stopped.Take a look at the “Guidebook for a New Landscape,” for example. As Joanne Barkan’s article in Dissent explains, the non-profit/pro-profit reformers like the Gates Foundation and Democrats for Education Reform, who aim to privatize public education, destroy teachers unions, and reduce every child (except their own) to a standardized test score, are shifting resources into state and local political campaigns.They can’t buy the schools outright, at least not yet.  The Constitution makes education the responsibility of the states, and the states mostly fund schools through local property taxes, adding revenue from the state coffers. To control schooling more completely, the reformers are shifting to  the states, relying on ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a non-partisan (I’ll get to that later),  membership association of corporations and right-wing donors, like the Koch brothers and more recently, the Gates Foundation. ALEC pushes conservative policies in state legislatures.  Education reform of the sort Gates et al want now joins anti-immigrant policy in ALEC’s agenda.ALEC can be non-partisan because Democrats and the Republicans vary mainly in their stridency not in the substance of their educational policy. And while Barkan is correct in pointing out the links between the privatizers and Republicans, it’s also essential to see that Democrats for Education Reform and the Obama administration are no friends to public education. Barkan could take some lessons from researchers like Ken Saltman, who  have exposed the complicity of both parties in the corporate hijacking of public education. Though his writing is more academic than Barkan’s, Saltman’s “talking points” cut to the quick: We have to talk about capitalism to explain the rapacioiusness of these attacks. We can’t turn back the attacks on the state level by ignoring the support of Democratic governors and legislators to the testing, de-funding, and teacher-bashing. Building a powerful movement. which is what Barkan says she wants,  means taking on the enemy, which includes the Democratic Party.

  • Workers and Leaders

         I have considered myself a Marxist for forty years, yet my main concern for quite a lot of that time is that working people have more control over their own lives. That's not necessarily going to be the case if a communist party comes to power. Then political cadres transform themselves into bureaucrats and "lord it over" working people. We can see that in China, Vietnam and Cuba.

         I think part of the problem is that Leninist or communist parties are traditionally led by "de-classed bourgeois intellectuals." Even if those are "petty bourgeois" rather than bourgeois intellectuals, the fact is that most of those folks carry within themselves a sense of entitlement. They think of it as naturally their right, even their "calling," to speak for the workers. They believe workers need people to represent them and that they are those people.

         I have been involved in the trade union movement for many years now, never as someone who works for a union, but rather as a rank-and-file union member. I have seen it demonstrated over and over again that we working people are perfectly capable of speaking for and representing ourselves. It may be true that we don't come naturally to a socialist consciousness, but we do quite naturally come to the ideas that we need to work together and to be fair and equitable with one another.

         Those latter notions are not ideas divorced from reality. I have seen them demonstrated over and over again. Of course, not every working person is going to come to such conclusions and act accordingly. However, I have seen even the most selfish, self-centered coworkers come to the defense of their sisters and brothers when faced with threats from the boss.

         Working people can generate their own organizations, quite naturally growing out of situations like those above. Then the problem is, how do you ensure these groups have staying power; that they're not just flash-in-the-pan entities created only to deal with a specific grievance or situation and then fade away? We have seen that with Obama for America. The problems are at least twofold. One is that many working people's organizations come together spontaneously (or almost so) to accomplish specific things or deal with particular situations. Once those things are accomplished or those situations are dealt with, they lose their purpose.

         The way people most often deal with that is to choose a leadership that will be around from one crisis to the next. The problem is that those leaders then tend to think of themselves as entitled to lead and that they are somehow better; that they know more and therefore, people should listen to them and not to others.

         It's a problem that's been seen with every political revolution. Working people, whether the sans culottes of the French Revolution, the proletarians of the Bolshevik Revolution or the peasants of China and Vietnam, do the fighting and dying which bring Milovan Djilas's "new class" to power. Then, just as in Orwell's Animal Farm, "The pigs began to look more like humans every day."

         It's called "puttin' on airs," "emulating your 'betters'." Leaders act the way they think leaders are supposed to act, and this begins to separate them from working people. No matter how well intentioned the leaders are, if they have people surrounding them who are constantly telling them how good they are; how wise their decisions are, they're going to develop an inflated sense of self-worth, and thus entitlement. Then the Shanghai limousines get driven around town and people like Zhang Zhunzhiao write pamphlets like "On the Curbing of Bourgeois Right."

         These problems are exacerbated by the natural tendencies of the "revolutionary masses," the working stiffs, like us, to want to get back to productive work, to earning a paycheck, to going home and playing with our children and surfing the Net. Periods of "punctuated equilibrium," of revolutionary fervor, of intense activity are naturally followed by periods of quietude in which most people want to return to uneventful, daily routines.

         It's then that we have the danger of revolutionary leaders listening to the "yes" men with whom they surround themselves, looking in the mirror and thinking they see the "fairest one of all" staring back at them, and not just an ordinary Joe or Jane.

         It's then that Thermidor occurs. Relations become frozen, stiff, they start to ossify. Leaders become misleaders. It's like in Eugene Ionesco's play, The Rhinoceros. Those ugly creatures come to town. Suddenly, they start appearing everywhere, and the heroine looks from her boyfriend to the rhinoceri and says, "Look how beautiful they are! How strong!" And she rejects her boyfriend for a rhinoceros.

         So what are we working people supposed to do, if we don't want a "new class" springing up; if we don't want the pigs to start looking more like humans; if we want a team of leaders to remain a team, and not degenerate into grasping, competing, power-hungry individuals?

         We might think, no, that's not going to happen. Well, we've said the same before. We've been disappointed before. The solution is like that Jefferson proposed: to have a revolution every twenty years. But in the 21st century time is encapsulated into ever-smaller units. We don't have twenty years to figure out how to do something all over again, not in our era of extremely rapid change. In the case of a nation, we've got to hope and actually see to it, to the degree that's even possible, that an Occupy or something similar appears regularly on the scene to keep us honest. Maybe then we can avoid a Thermidor. Maybe then we can avoid falling in love with a rhinoceros. Maybe we working people can keep our leaders honest.

     

         Greg King is a labor activist and city worker in Boston, Mass.

  • Goodbye, Mr. Keynes?

    Paul Mattick, Business As Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism. Reaktion Books, London, 2011. 126 pp.

    Paul Mattick has produced a succinct and clearly written orthodox Marxist account of the origins of the present global crisis of capitalism. I say “orthodox” because—consistent with the famous argument in Marx’s Capital, Vol. 3—he claims that the current crisis is the result of there being an insufficient amount of profit produced by workers relative to the amount necessary for a substantial expansion of investment. The crisis, says Mattick, was not caused by “exogenous shocks” to the system, still less by “Wall Street greed,” but by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as capital investment grows more quickly than the only source of value for the capitalist system as a whole: labor. Real profitability in productive industry, he argues, never recovered from the decline of the late 1960s; in Mattick’s words, “[w]hat we are faced with today is a further, more serious manifestation of the depression that first announced itself dramatically in the mid-1970s, but which governmental policy was able to hold at bay . . . largely by a historically unprecedented creation of public, private and individual debt . . . for 30-odd years.”

    Those who hope for a Keynesian, government-stimulus-package way out of the crisis are bound to be frustrated by Mattick’s analysis. Though Keynesian policies saved capitalism from depression in the 1970s, such measures are virtually impossible for governments to execute today. Keynesians, Mattick claims, have refused to consider the ultimate costs of ever-increasing government debt, which in the U.S. has risen from $16 billion in 1930 to $12.5 trillion today. This public debt, combined with an unparalleled growth of corporate and private consumer debt, ran into the continuing failure of the capitalist economy proper to expand at an adequate rate, and the result was the crisis of 2007-onward. Now, with Keynesian measures already exhausted, capitalist governments are torn between fears of resistance to austerity measures as the crisis “plays out” and the dangers of further stimulus spending, leading to disastrously high levels of sovereign debt.

    On this point, however, Mattick has an insufficient appreciation of public finance, of what can be demanded of the state and what the state can actually be made to deliver. In the U.S., at least, Keynesianism is not as dead as he thinks it is; potentially it can be radicalized beyond the wishes of mainstream politicians. As Barry Finger has argued, fiat money—state currency not pegged to gold or any other currency or basket of currencies—gives Keynesianism much broader sweep and allows public financing to be detached from the tyranny of bond holders. Socialists can still raise realistic and bold demands for public employment, guaranteed incomes, national pensions, green energy alternatives, quality education and decent public accommodations from a U.S. state which, at the national level, can fully fund such demands. It can do so precisely because it is not revenue constrained and does not need to redistribute demand first from the private sector so that the public sector can spend; it can create that demand ex nihilo. State spending by entities that are fully sovereign with respect to the issuance of currency adds net assets to the economy; it is not a drain.

    Perhaps Mattick’s strongest argument is that mainstream economists—both right-wing and left-wing—lack an adequate theoretical understanding of capitalism. For most economists, the point of any economy is the allocation of resources to meet consumer demand, with profit-making being a device for getting people with money to invest in the production that serves consumption. However, as Mattick says, capitalism is a system “not for the production of useful things but the increase of capital”; it does not provide “employment” as an abstract goal but employs people who produce profits. Keynesians like Paul Krugman therefore do not understand that “the problem is not insufficient consumer demand but insufficient profits for business expansion (which in turn determines the extent of consumer demand).” Further, Mattick—echoing other Marxist economists such as Hillel Ticktin—understands that we are living through the decline of capitalism: “The very idea that companies like AIG, the Bank of America or Citicorp are ‘too big to fail’, and must be supported by government funds, amounts to a declaration of the failure of the market economy.”

    Also in decline, however, are the global left and the labor unions. Yet Mattick is not troubled by this, as (according to him) the unions, mass parties and sects of the left long ago proved themselves to have “lost all significance as agents of social transformation”; with capitalism’s increasing need for state intervention, “what had remained of the left was swept away: into the politics of the welfare state, into sectarian insignificance or into some combination of one (or both) of these and service to the Russian state.” This may seem broadly plausible where the U.S. left is concerned. What is not plausible, however, is Mattick’s spontaneist strategy for overcoming capitalist social relations—occupying empty housing, seizing stocks of food and other goods, occupying and operating the means of production and distribution, etc. However much such a strategy may fit with the current “Occupy” Zeitgeist, it cannot substitute for the rebuilding of an organized workers’ movement which—yes—will necessarily take the form of unions and parties. Mattick’s aversion to these forms—and to any idea of reforming them—stems from his “left communist” politics, inherited from his (economist) father, the late Paul Mattick, Sr. For left communists, building mass workers’ organizations under capitalism inevitably leads to their control by the capitalist class—they become tools of capitalist rule. But it is just as true—if not more so—that spontaneism can lead to the “tyranny of structurelessness.” It is a mistake to underestimate the importance of workers learning to manage their own affairs—their own organizations—under capitalism prior to taking political and economic power.

    Strategic problems aside, Business As Usual deserves a wide readership. If its politics are ultimately weak, its understanding of the fundamentals of capitalist accumulation is strong and deserves close attention.