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  • 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.

  • The Alfred Marshall the Left Doesn't Know

         Most leftists know economist Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), if they know him at all, only through the superficial account of him given in Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers,[1] as only a fusty Victorian preoccupied with abstract mathematical models of economic equilibrium. But Heilbroner's sophomoric popularization of economics doesn't even begin to do justice to this "Father of Neoclassical Economics." Which is not to say there isn't some knowledge of fact in Heibroner's account—but it only serves to vindicate the wisdom of Alexander Pope, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing…" Because knowing too little is indeed often a dangerous thing—like knowing only "a little" about Afghanis' reverence for the Koran is a dangerous thing if one is a U.S. combat soldier stationed in Kabul!

         The only redeeming feature to the account of Marshall in The Worldly Philosophers is that Heilbroner has the good sense to quote John Maynard Keynes, one of Marshall's most distinguished students, on him (pp. 277-78). Hopefully, this brief snippet from Keynes's much longer critical encomium of the man will lead the curious reader to Keynes' full essay on Marshall contained in Essays in Biography.[2] Keynes's memorial essay gives a much fuller account of this seminal and complex economist, Alfred Marshall, one that should lead us of leftist persuasion to a greater regard both for the man and his economic achievement.

         Indeed, that was precisely what happened to me as first, a university student economics, and them as an avid economic writer and enthusiast writing for left publications—I learned to appreciate just why my old academic advisor in economics at Indiana University-Bloomington, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Scott Gordon, a self-professed "man of the left," regarded Marshall as the "greatest economist." Which is not to say Alfred Marshall wasn't a fusty Victorian in some respects; but that's like saying Abraham Lincoln was only a President of the United States, comparable in this regard to Warren G. Harding or George W. Bush!

         Keynes duly notes in his essay on Marshall, in the passage that Heilbroner incompletely quotes, the following traits that made Marshall an excellent economist:

    The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be a mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician. Much, but not all, of this ideal many-sidedness Marshall possessed. But chiefly his mixed training [mathematics, philosophy and ethics before settling on economics] and divided nature furnished him with the most essential and fundamental of the economist's necessary gifts—he was conspicuously historian and mathematician, a dealer in the particular and the general, the temporal and the eternal, at the same time. (pp. 140-41. Emphasis in original.)

    Marshall himself wrote (in the third person) of his economic studies:

    While still giving private lessons in mathematics, he translated as many as possible of Ricardo's reasonings into mathematics; and he endeavoured to make them more general. Meanwhile he was attracted towards the new views of economics taken by Roscher and other German economists; and by Marx, Lasalle and other socialists. But it seemed to him that the analytical methods of the historical economists were not always sufficiently thorough to justify their confidence that the causes which they assigned to economic events were the true causes. He thought indeed that the interpretation of the economic past was almost as difficult as the prediction of the future. The Socialists also seemed to him to underrate the difficulty of their problems, and to be too quick to assume that the abolition of private property would purge away the faults and deficiencies of human nature…He set himself to get into closer contact with practical business and with the life of the working classes. On the one side he aimed at learning the broad features of the technique of every chief industry; and on the other he sought the society of trade unionists, co-operators and other working-class leaders….and while engaged, in conjunction with his wife, in writing a short account of the Economics of Industry, forcibly simplified for working-class readers… (Quoted in Keynes, pp. 151-52. Emphasis added.)

    Keynes further notes in regard to the publication of the first edition of Marshall's magnum opus, Principles of Economics (which Marshall repeatedly revised in eight editions over the course of his life, from 1890-1920):

    The book reached the general public. It increased the public esteem of Economics. The minimum of controversy was provoked. The average reviewer liked the author's attitude to his subject-matter, to his predecessors, and to his readers, and delighted Marshall by calling attention to the proper stress laid by him on the ethical element and to the much required humanising which the dismal science received at his hands; and, at the same time, could remain happily insensible to the book's intellectual stature. As time has gone on, moreover, the intellectual qualities of the book have permeated English economic thought, without noise or disturbance, in a degree which can easily be overlooked. (p. 191. Emphasis added.)

    Keynes writes apropos of Marshall's esteem for working persons, quoting again from Marshall himself:

    About the time that I first resolved to make as thorough a study as I could of Political Economy (the word Economics was not then invented) I saw in a shop-window a small oil painting [of a man's face with a strikingly gaunt and wistful expression, as of one 'down and out'] and bought it for a few shillings. I set it up above the chimney-piece in my room in college ant thenceforward called it my patron saint, and devoted myself to trying how to fit men like that for heaven. Meanwhile, I got a good deal interested in the semi-mathematical side of pure Economics, and was afraid of becoming a mere thinker. But a glance at my patron saint seemed to call me back to the right path. That was particularly useful after I had been diverted from the study of ultimate aims to the questions about Bimetallism, etc., which at one time were dominant. (p. 176)

    Keynes culled and transcribed the following thoughts from Marshall's lectures on economics:

    The chief fault in English economists at the beginning of the [19th] century was not that they ignored history and statistics, but that they regarded man as so to speak a constant quantity, and gave themselves little trouble to study his variations. They therefore attributed to the forces of supply and demand a much more mechanical and regular action than they actually have. Their most vital fault was that they did not see how liable to change are the habits and institutions of industry. But the Socialists were men who had felt intensely and who knew something about the hidden springs of human action of which the economists took no account. Buried among their wild rhapsodies there were shrewd observations and pregnant suggestions from which philosophers and economists had much to learn. (p. 171)

    But on Marshall's economics Keynes writes:

    …his strong sympathy with socialistic ideas were compatible, however, with an old-fashioned belief in the strengths of the forces of competition. (p. 186)

    and

    In earlier days, particularly between 1885 and 1900, he was fond of asking working-men leaders to spend a week-end with him—for example, Thomas Burt,[3] Ben Tillett,[4] Tom Mann,[5] and many others. Sometimes these visits would be fitted in with meeting of the Social Discussion Society, which the visitor would address. In this way he came to know most of the leading co-operators and Trade Unionists of the past generation. In truth, he sympathised with the Labour Movement and with Socialism (just as J. S. Mill had) in every way except intellectually. (p. 194)

    Scott Gordon remarked that Marshall's conception of the ideal economic society was one with both high productivity and high wages. Marshall wanted the working class to share in the fruits of economic development and progress, not just be consigned the rinds and the scraps. But he clung stubbornly to the idea that old-fashioned competitive capitalism was the best way to achieve this.

         Fortunately, the Eighth Edition of the seminal Principles of Economics, the last edition Marshall prepared in his lifetime, in 1920, is available as an inexpensive paperback,[6] and is just as fruitful to peruse today as it was earlier. (For decades the Principles of Economics was the standard college textbook in the field; Scott Gordon recalls using it when he studied economics as an undergraduate in 1940.) Here we can see clearly in this philosophical discussion below of the ends of economics the humane nature of Marshall's understanding of ultimate economic ends, and his sympathies for, and desire to better the lot of, the working class through economic activity. Marshall's argument is worth quoting in its entirety:

    In every civilized country there have been some followers of the Buddhist doctrine that placid serenity is the highest ideal of life; that is the part of the wise man to root out of his nature as many wants as he can; that real riches consist not in the abundance of goods but in the paucity of wants. At the other extreme are those who maintain that the growth of new wants and desires is always beneficial because it stimulates people to increased exertions. They seem to have made the mistake, as Herbert Spencer says, of supposing that life is for working, instead of working for life.

         The truth seems to be that as human nature is constituted, man rapidly degenerates unless he has some hard work to do, some difficulties to overcome; and that some strenuous exertion is necessary for physical and moral health. The fullness of life lies in the development and activity of as many and as high faculties as possible. There is intense pleasure in the ardent pursuit of any aim, whether it be success in business, the advancement of art and science, or the improvement of one's fellow-beings. The highest constructive work of all kinds must often alternate between periods of over-strain and periods of lassitude and stagnation; but for ordinary people, for those who have no strong ambitions, whether of a lower or a higher kind, a moderate income earned by moderate and fairly steady work offers the best opportunity for the growth of those habits of body, mind, and spirit in which alone there is true happiness.

         There is some misuse of wealth in all ranks of society. And though, speaking generally, we may say that every increase in the wealth of the working classes adds to the fullness and nobility of life, because it is used chiefly in the satisfaction of real wants; yet even among the artisans in England, and perhaps still more in new countries, there are signs of the growth of that unwholesome desire for wealth as a means of display which has been the chief bane of the well-to-do classes in every civilized country. Laws against luxury have been futile; but it would be a gain if the moral sentiment of the community could induce people to avoid all sorts of display of individual wealth. There are indeed true and worthy pleasures to be got from wisely ordered magnificence: but they are at their best when free from any taint of personal vanity on the one side and envy on the other; as they are when they center round public buildings, public parks, public collections of the fine arts, and public games and amusements. So long as wealth is applied to provide for every family the necessaries of life and culture, and an abundance of the higher forms of enjoyment for collective use, so long the pursuit of wealth is a noble aim; and the pleasures which it brings are likely to increase with the growth of those higher activities which it is used to promote.

         When the necessaries of life are once provided, everyone should seek to increase the beauty of things in his possession rather than their number or their magnificence. An improvement in the artistic character of furniture and clothing trains the higher faculties of those who make them, and is a source of growing happiness to those who use them. But if instead of seeking for a higher standard of beauty, we spend our growing resources on increasing the complexity and intricacy of our domestic goods, we gain thereby no true benefit, no lasting happiness. The world would go much better if everyone would buy fewer and simpler things, and would take trouble in selecting them for their real beauty; being careful of course to get good value in return for his outlay, but preferring to buy a few things made well by highly paid labour rather than many made badly by low paid labour. (pp. 136-37. Emphases added.)

    The somewhat formal and moralizing tone of Marshall's prose above belies the limpidness and luminescence of his thought, which is humane, and states principles the ecological, socialist and Occupy activists of today would readily rally around. Marshall wrote the Principles to be accessible to the average businessman of England (or for that matter, the literate worker, the trade unionist, and the socialist interested in economics), although it is a deep economic text—confining his formal expositions of economic theory and proof of economic propositions to footnotes, footnotes elegant and easily comprehensible to the reader who had studied high school geometry (Marshall preferred geometric diagrams to algebraic expressions). He was a complex man whose heart tugged one way, and his intellect another. Old-fashioned politically in some ways, yet in other ways a thoroughgoing humanist, Marshall had deep sympathies for the working and lower classes of society, yet believed competitive capitalism, not socialism, was the only workable way to their betterment. But whatever Marshall was, he was not a neoliberal as we understand the term today.

         This same contradictory complexity carried over in his views on other issues. He was opposed to admitting women to the degree programs in the traditionally male universities, despite his wife, Mary, being a former student of his, lecturer in economics at Newnham College, and collaborator of his in writing his first book, Economics in Industry. Indeed, he had taken up his position at Bristol University after his marriage "attracted thither chiefly by the fact that it was the first College in England to open its doors freely to women," and he had written in 1873 "how our progress could be accelerated if we would unwrap the swaddling-clothes in which artificial customs have enfolded woman's mind and would give her free scope womanfully to discharge her duties to the world." (Keynes, p. 202)

         Similarly, Marshall supported British involvement in World War I and was unflinching in that support, yet, as Keynes wrote, "he was much opposed to the inflaming of national passions. He remembered that he had 'known and loved Germany,' and that they were 'a people exceptionally conscientious and upright.' He held, therefore, that 'it is our interest as well as our duty to respect them and make clear that we desire their friendship, but yet to fight them with all our might.' And he expressed 'an anxiety lest popular lectures should inflame passions which will do little or nothing towards securing victory, but may very greatly increase the slaughter on both sides, which must be paid at the price of resisting Germany's aggressive tendencies.' These sentiments brought down on him the wrath of the more savage patriots." (p. 211)

         Marshall also believed in eugenics when it was common and respectable to do so, that time of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries when optimistic faith in science as social savior combined with uncritical endorsement of wholesale social engineering—and not just in biology. But Marshall was far from alone in this; those who endorsed eugenics at that time reads very much like a Who's Who of scholarly and renowned persons, many of whom considered themselves socialists, civil libertarians, and humanitarians.[7]

         So—while we of the left certainly can't call him Comrade Alfred Marshall, or even see him as a congenially consistent fellow traveler, we can see him as a beacon of lucidity among the obfuscatory darkness of ideological assertion, a conservative man and thinker whose sympathies were with the radicals and reformers. A contradictory conservative who, nonetheless, brings much enlightenment to the left he's not a part of, but contributes to.

         "What need have we of science?" an anonymous sans-culotte asked during the French Revolution when the great scientist Lavoisier, a monarchist, was guillotined. What need have we? The need we of the left all have for knowledge.[8] Knowledge is needed for consciousness, for informed left praxis. And comes from many sources, including contradictory Victorian economists who do not know themselves what positive revolutions they may help spark.

    Notes

    1. Fourth Edition, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972; Marshall is mentioned, discussed, on pp. 166, 199-204, 247, 277-78.

    2. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963, pp. 125-217. Originally published in 1933; the essay on Marshall was completed in August 1924, following Marshall's death in July. All references to Keynes below are from this essay.

    3. 1837-1922, British trade unionist and one of the first working-class members of Parliament.

    4. 1860-1943, British socialist and trade union leader.

    5. 1856-1941, British trade unionist.

    6. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1977, Great Minds Series. The reference cited below is from this edition.

    7. Scott Gordon, The History and Philosophy of Social Science (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 521. Among those cited by Gordon as supporting eugenics are prominent British socialists George Bernard Shaw, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski and H.G. Wells.

    8. After all, the Latin root word for "science," scientia, means "knowledge."

  • Mexican Unions Enter the National Elections Deeply Divided

         On the political front, the Mexican working class has never been more divided. Mexico’s labor unions are mobilizing for the national presidential, congressional and gubernatorial elections on July 1, but they are doing so in support of a variety of rival parties and candidates left, right, and center. There is no incumbent, because Mexico’s Constitution forbids presidential reelection after one six-year term, so President Felipe Calderón’s name will not be on the ballot. His party is in any case out of favor with the voters following four years of economic crisis, leaving nearly half the country living in poverty, and with almost 60,000 people killed in the drug wars. Over the last several decades, 13 million Mexicans, more than 10 percent of the entire population, unable to find a good job at a decent wage in their own country, have left Mexico and now live in the United States.

         Unlike U.S. labor unions, which despite their disappointment in Obama’s first term, have almost without exception rallied to the president and the Democrats, in Mexico some unions are supporting the coalition of the left-of-center Andrés Manuel López Obrador, while others support Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and yet others back Josefina Vázquez Mota of Calderón’s conservative National Action Party (PAN). The parties win union support in part by putting union officials on their slates as candidates for some of the seats distributed among the parties on the basis of proportional representation (seats called plurinominales). The Mexican House has 500 seats, 300 directly elected in specific districts, 200 elected on the basis of the size of each party’s vote. The Mexican Senate has 128 seats, 32 of which are based on proportional representation. Union leaders desire those proportional representation seats for the status, the salaries, the perquisites of office, and to put forward the union’s position in the Congress.

    From the PRI to the PAN: Still a Mafia

         For the 75 years that the PRI ruled Mexico as a virtual one-party state, leaders of labor and peasant unions—many of them put in power by the ruling party—turned out their members for every election, loading them up in buses, taking them to the polls, and giving them barbeque and beer in return for their loyal votes. Workers often felt they had little choice but to vote as told. Taking a job in industry or public employment meant automatic membership in a state controlled union and in the ruling party. Disloyal union members who supported other parties might be fired, expelled from their union, beaten, or, if there was a serious opposition candidate running, even murdered. Union officials who supported the ruling party got lucrative political positions, while workers could generally expect job security as long as they kept their mouths shut. So it was for decades.

         With the defeat of the PRI in 2000 and the election of Vicente Fox, the old state-controlled labor federations began to splinter and many federations and unions went their own separate ways. Under PAN President Felipe Calderón, the fragmentation of the labor unions has only increased, though this does not necessarily reflect the real interests, opinions or votes of the working class. Where once it was the unions that got out the vote, today it is more often television advertising that does most to motivate voters, and the airwaves are dominated by the corporate media and conservative candidates. The newfound political independence of unions and voters seems to be more a reflection of the growth of the power of the media and the breakdown of the old state-party-union system than it is of genuine independent-minded voters or workers’ class consciousness.

    Off to the Polls with the PRI

         A large section of the labor movement, most important the Congress of Labor (CT), the powerful Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), and the industrial unions, remains more or less loyal to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and especially so this year with the PRI’s Peña Nieto leading in the polls. Carlos Romero Deschamps, for example, the corrupt labor dictator who heads the Mexican Petroleum Workers Union (STPRM), will appear on the PRI’s candidates list for Congress. These “official” unions—authoritarian, bureaucratic, and callous at best, gangsterized, violent and utterly corrupt at worst—negotiate the majority of the nation’s collective bargaining agreements. Some 80 or 90 percent of those are “protection contracts” designed to protect employers from genuine unions. Many of these are “ghost” unions unknown to the workers they represent.

         When it held national power, the PRI put these union’s officers in the Congress, subsidized the unions with millions upon millions of pesos, offered them lucrative contracts, and used the Secretary of Labor and the Labor Boards to support loyal union officials against reformers and rank-and-file rebels in their unions. Wherever it holds state power the PRI continues to work closely with these so-called “official” unions. For many union officials, it’s understandably hard to imagine that another party or candidate could beat a deal like that. Naturally many of them will be working to put the PRI back in power.

    Some Unions Turn to the PAN

         Yet, some major unions have opted to support the conservative National Action Party, having been won over by that party’s blandishments during its 12 years in power. Most important among the unions which have swung over to the right is the National Union of Social Security Workers (SNTSS) headed by Valdemar Gutiérrez Fragoso. During the 1990s, the 350,000 member Social Security Workers broke with the political establishment, moving to the left and joining the new independent National Union of Workers (UNT) which tended to align politically with the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). But in the 2000s, Calderón succeeded in wooing Gutiérrez, supporting the union leader in his election as a Congressional Representative on the PAN ticket. So now in return Gutiérrez is supporting the PAN and its candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota. This is no small thing; his union members work in thousands of facilities of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS) in large cities, small towns, and rural areas.

         Gutíerrez Fragoso and the Social Security Workers are not the only ones supporting the PAN; several other labor federations and unions are doing so as well. The General Union of Workers and Peasants of Mexico (UGOCM), the General Council of Workers and Communities (CONSUCC), and the National Integrating Union of Solidarity Organizations and the Social Economy (UNIMOS) also support the PAN. López Macias, head of UNIMOS, will be a PAN candidate in the northern state of Coahuila. One of his close friends is reported to be Guillermo Velasco Arzac, head of the secret quasi-fascist organization, the Yunque.

    The Erratic Political Path of the Teachers Union

         Another major union, the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) has had quite an erratic political career under the leadership of its powerful and opportunistic leader Elba Esther Gordillo. Following a rank-and-file rebellion in the 1980s, Gordillo—never a rebel herself—came to head the teachers union through the support of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortaria of the PRI. She remained loyal to the PRI and became one of the party’s top leaders until 2006, when after a fight with another PRI leader she was expelled from the party. Not to be deterred in her quest for power, she formed an alliance with President Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party. This past year, however, as it became clear that the PAN was likely to lose the national elections, she changed sides again, returning to the PRI.

         Gordillo does not go to any party empty handed. Her Teachers Union has over one million members, the largest union in Mexico. Using her union as the base, in 2005 she also created her own New Alliance Party (PANAL), allowing her to run her own candidates but also to coalesce with other parties when it served her interest. With union locals and party committees in every state, city and town in the nation, her organizations are a potent political force allowing her to make big demands on her allies. This year, however, when she returned to the PRI, her asking price—expressed as the number of senators, representatives and governors she expected to be given—was simply too high, and once again they drove her away. So now Gordillo’s PANAL party has put forward its own candidate, the well-known environmentalist Gabriel R. Quadri de la Torre. He appeared out of nowhere, with no democratic niceties, supposedly invited to become the party’s candidate at a meeting of a book club Quadri had just joined headed by Gordillo’s party front-man Luis Castro Obregón.

    The Left Divided Too

         Not only are the major unions divided between the parties, but even the unions on the left are at odds about how to go about supporting their favorite candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the former Mayor of Mexico City. Some union leaders are joining López Obrador’s new political organization, Movement for National Renovation (MORENA); others are working with the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution, while still others have joined with the Labor Party (PT) or the Citizen’s Movement (MC), all of which taken together are called the Progressive Movement (MP). Others unions leaders, however, are supporting the new Political Organization of the People and the Workers (OPT) which also supports López Obrador, though independently. Each of these choices has its own particular political logic aimed at winning victory for some cause, or seats in the Congress for some union leader or would-be politician, or, in one case, intent on creating an independent workers’ party. The choices also measure how happy with or how disappointed the unions are in López Obrador’s past practice and his current campaign.

         López Obrador is usually praised on the left as the Mexico City mayor who gave pensions to the city’s elderly, but he also did much more. As Mayor, López Obrador worked to encourage private corporations and wealthy individuals to rebuild, modernize, and gentrify the city. Most famously he created a partnership with Carlos Slim, the multi-billionaire who is Mexico’s and the world’s richest man, to restore and gentrify the historic district of the city. He also offered tax breaks to large corporations to encourage them to build office and apartment buildings, leading to one of the biggest building booms in the country’s history. To take on Mexico City’s rising crime rates, he brought in New York’s former mayor Rudy Giuliani, known for his attacks on organized and white collar crime, as well as for his strict handling of low level crime and people that the well-off perceive as public nuisances, such as the homeless and panhandlers.

    López Obrador’s Problematic Labor Policy

         Most troubling to sections of the labor left was López Obrador’s labor policy. While mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador permitted the Labor Board to continue to deal with phony unions and their corrupt lawyers and union officials, while turning a deaf ear to the demands of independent unions, union reformers and rank-and-file workers. Some of the city’s 200,000 public employees found it impossible to have their independent labor unions legally recognized. Workers at the time said: whatever we have won we got by going to the streets—the López Obrador government gave us nothing.

         Almost every day, López Obrador finds new ways to offend his intellectual, working class, peasant and urban poor supporters. They are disappointed that among his closest advisors are men like Manuel Camacho Solís, also a former mayor of Mexico City who was among Mexico’s pioneer neoliberals. López Obrador has most recently infuriated his left wing by accepting as a candidate of his Progressive Movement Manuel Bartlett Díaz, the man generally believed to be responsible for stealing the 1988 election. With the left nationalist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas winning the election, Bartlett declared that the computer system had failed, and when the system came back online Salinas was the victor. Now Bartlett is backed by López Obrador. Once considered a radical, for the last several months López Obrador has been courting business, recruiting professional politicians with checkered careers, and wooing more conservative voters.

    From the “Legitimate Government” to La Morena

         Yet López Obrador hopes to bring his left wing supporters, some Mexican entrepreneurs, moderate voters, and all of the country’s disaffected citizens together, largely through the new political organization he created on October 2, 2011, called the Movement for National Renovation or MORENA. The acronym and nickname of the party, MORENA, deserves some explanation. Una morena is a dark skinned woman, symbolic of Mexico’s dark-complexioned working class masses. Months ago, López Obrador’s organizations produced a video, accompanied by the group’s official song, featuring a beautiful young woman of dark complexion, una morena, representative not only of the Mexican people but also of its youth.

         After he lost the controversial and probably fraudulent 2006 election as the candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), López Obrador, claiming to be the “legitimate president of Mexico,” spent five years as a peripatetic perpetual candidate, visiting villages, towns and cities throughout Mexico and building his new political organization. During his wanderings, he spoke to crowds of millions in Mexico City, to tens of thousands in smaller cities, and to hundred or even scores in the villages, all in a tireless struggle to keep his name before the public, to undermine the legitimacy of the PAN government of Felipe Calderón, and to put forward his own increasingly moderate program.

    The Loving Republic

         The creation of MORENA proved necessary because of the factional divisions and corruption in the PRD and the weakness of the Labor Party (PT) and of the Citizens Movement (formerly Convergence for Democracy), the three parties that have supported him and his program over the last several years. At the same time, the establishment of his own party also responds to López Obrador’s own character, politics and ambition. A charismatic caudillo, he wants his own political instrument, one capable of bringing together both his working class and poor people base and a section of the middle and business classes. López Obrador claims to have brought to MORENA from his years of wandering in the wilderness some 2,217 municipal committees, 37,453 local chapters and 179,000 local leaders of its four million officially subscribed members. This is his personal following and his political capital.

         Since he founded MORENA, López Obrador has announced that he is attempting to create “the loving republic,” a slogan that allows him to avoid talking about the serious issues of social class and political program. He has also made overtures to the Mexican business class hoping to win broader support on the right for his campaign. And he has attempted to win over the corporate media by arguing that he is not the fire-breathing López Obrador of 2006 whom the media constantly compared to Hugo Chávez, the radical president of Venezuela who calls for “Twenty-First Century Socialism,” but rather a moderate who should be compared to Luis Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, the recently retired president of Brazil who on the one hand brought social welfare payments to the country’s poor, but also worked closely with banks and construction companies during his presidency.

         Some union leaders have simply joined MORENA. Bertha Luján, for example, a former co-president of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), served as Secretary of Labor in López Obardor’s “Legitimate Government” and now works as his regional organizer in her home state of Chihuahua.

    The PRD, the PT and Labor

         Candidates, however, have to run on the ballot line of the Progressive Movement, a coalition made up of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, the Labor Party, and the Citizens Movement. The PRD, founded in 1989 by groups which had left the PRI, the Communist Party which had dissolved itself into the PRD, and other leftist factions, has always been a congeries of rival leaders and hostile factions, with a few genuine idealists and many opportunistic politicians. Over the years, the PRD came to function as the voice in Congress of the independent labor federation, the National Union of Workers (UNT). Yet the UNT had no control and really very little influence over the party and its politicians. As the current election campaign has developed, labor union leaders like Napoleón Gomez Urrutia of the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union (SNTMMRM), Martín Esparza of the Mexican Electrical Workers (SME) and Francisco Hernández Juárez of the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM), have been disappointed that the PRD, needing to reward its own party leaders, has declined to slate many of the independent union leaders, so they have turned elsewhere.

         Given the PRD’s failure to include them on its slate, some of these Mexican union leaders such as Esparza and Hernández Juárez, have turned to the smaller but more accommodating Labor Party (PT). The PT was founded in 1990 by a Maoist group and its satellite community, peasant and labor organizations, with the assistance of former President Salinas. Since 2000, the PT has been aligned with the PRD and the Citizens Movement, the three together constituting Mexico’s parliamentary left. In addition to Esparza and Hernández Juárez, several other union, peasant and social movement candidates are looking to be included on the PT list.

    An Independent Workers’ Party?

         Some in Mexico’s labor left, however, reject working with the MORENA, the PRD, or the PT, because they hope to form an independent workers’ party, something that has virtually never existed in Mexico. While there have been leftist parties—Communist, Maoist and Trotskyist—and several populist nationalist parties, such as the Mexican Workers Party (PMT) during the last 50 years, Mexico has never had a party which grew up as an expression of the labor unions and the workers’ movements. Nothing like the British Labor Party, the European Socialist and Social Democratic Parties, or the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) ever took off in Mexico. Now there is an attempt at creating such a party based on the most active and visible Mexican union, the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME).

         From the beginning, the backbone of the OPT has been the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) led by Martín Esparza (who as mentioned above is also seeking to run as a candidate of the Labor Party – PT). The force propelling this effort is the more than two-year experience of the Electrical Workers fighting to get back their former jobs. In October 2009, President Felipe Calderón ordered police and army units to occupy the facilities of the Mexican Light and Power Company; he then liquidated the company and fired the 45,000 person workforce. Since then 16,500 SME members have taken their struggle to the streets and the courts, to the legislature and to international organizations.

    Why the OPT? Different Motivations

         That struggle led to the OPT. In August of 2011, a thousand delegates from 22 states, members of Mexican labor unions, social movements and political organizations—but most of them Electrical Workers—met in Mexico City on August 27 to form the Workers and Peoples Political Organization (OPT) with the goal of “driving from government those responsible for the national disaster.” The OPT, like MORENA, is not a political party, but rather a political organization, a kind of proto-party, but its goal is precisely the creation of a workers’ party in Mexico. (The Manifesto calling for the founding of the OPT can be found here.)

         After trying unsuccessfully to win the PRI’s support to get their jobs back, the SME turned to López Obrador, creating OPT to support his campaign. The SME’s Esparza issued a public call for the creation of the new party, and in October 2010 at a rally of 60,000 people held in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. The OPT’s founding documents emphasize the need for a new economic and political direction for the country, and mention the word socialism, though only as a distant goal. The documents focus on opposition to Mexico’s richest industrialists, to the political establishment of the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and to the role of the United States in Mexico. In early February of 2012, López Obrador at a meeting with the Electrical Workers’ leadership and members promised to help the union win back the workers’ lost jobs.

    The Argument for a Workers’ Party

         The Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) of Mexico, a Trotskyist socialist group, has been quite involved in the founding and promotion of this new proto-workers’ party. The PRT has broader goals that go beyond winning back the electrical workers’ jobs. They want to use the mass mobilization around López Obrador to build a workers’ party. The PRT is pushing the OPT to bring in the miners, the dissident teachers, and all the other disenchanted and dispossessed. So far, however, the results of this campaign are unclear.

         The OPT at this point is a rather weak organization, made up principally of many but not all of the 16,500 fighting electrical workers. Those are not many compared to the one million teachers, the 350,000 Social Security workers, or the couple million workers in the unions of the Congress of Labor and the Mexican Confederation of Labor who are being mobilized for other parties and candidates. But the PRT would argue, the Mexican Electrical Workers represent the real vanguard of the Mexican working class at this moment. They and the miners and the dissident teachers. And, they would argue, this is a genuine attempt to move to the left, to avoid a popular front style alliance with López Obrador, one that subsumes and subordinates the unions, and to create a truly independent workers movement. These leftists may in the end find it will be very difficult if not impossible to avoid being drawn into López Obrador’s wake, but it is at least a serious attempt to address the issue. In the cacophony of labor’s voices, the OPT seems hit a clear if not a very strong note. We will find out soon if anyone is listening.

  • Mistrusting the poor

    [This is an expanded version of an earlier post, giving it a national perspective.—Betty]

         The Massachusetts legislature has decided that the poor can’t be trusted with money, and a legislative commission has considered not allowing recipients of food stamps (now called SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and recipients of welfare (TAFDC) to use cash for any of their purchases (such as paying the rent), and issuing vouchers instead.

         The legislature has already passed a law that doesn’t allow people who receive cash on their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards to pay for liquor, lottery tickets, casinos, or strip clubs. They are worried about people using EBT cards in other states, even though SNAP is a federal program administered by the United States Department of Agriculture and EBT cards can be used in all states. In order to avoid stigmatizing food stamp recipients, USDA said that an EBT card should be no different from any other credit card. When a member of the EBT Commission proposed to put a photo ID on EBT cards, a representative of retail stores said that this would be a nightmare because every shopper would have to have a photo ID, which the cashier would have to inspect.

          EBT cards can be used for food, or they can be cashed if a person receives welfare payments (TAFDC). Most people use cash to pay landlords, child care, or transportation. The SNAP program doesn’t allow any purchases except food (e.g., no household supplies or liquor).

         Mistrust of the poor is widespread throughout the country. Across the nation, lawmakers have proposed legislation to implement asset limits for food-stamp recipients, longer waiting periods for welfare benefits, and mandatory substance abuse counseling for people receiving housing assistance. At least 10 states are considering bills that would require photo identification for EBT cards. At least two states — Ohio and Tennessee — are considering restricting or eliminating eligibility for those convicted of drug felonies. (That would, of course, punish their children.) At least two states —North Carolina and New Jersey— are considering requiring people to perform community service to receive government help.

         Twenty-three states are considering drug testing for welfare recipients. Drug testing was proposed in Wyoming, but rejected by the legislature. It was also rejected by the Virginia and Indiana legislatures. Oklahoma passed the law. Florida passed the law and the ACLU is challenging it. Arizona and Missouri require testing for anyone they “reasonably suspect of illegal drug use.”

         Mitt Romney says drug testing for welfare recipients is an “excellent idea.” Newt Gingrich considers drug testing a way to curb drug use and lower costs to public programs. He also advocates drug testing for unemployment compensation and food stamps.

         Research shows that welfare recipients are no more likely than the general population to use drugs.

         Conservatives would like to eliminate all safety net programs, including Social Security and Medicare. In order to do that, they begin by means-testing programs. Then they stigmatize the means-tested programs and cut them. Demeaning programs such as drug testing result in fewer people applying for the program. Conservatives have proposed a means test for Social Security and Medicare, which is their first step toward cutting or eliminating them. If Social Security is means-tested, I wouldn’t be surprised if some legislator proposes to require drug testing of all retirees and prohibiting them from buying liquor or lottery tickets, or going to casinos or strip clubs.

  • Why López Obrador?

    Book Review: Arturo Ramos and Maria Teresa Lechuga, ¿Por qué López Obrador? Mexico: Cultura, Trabajo y Democracia/Ceiba/Comuna Oaxaca. Second edition. 2011. 232 pages.

         While in Mexico last week as part of a labor union delegation from the United States to meet with Canadian and Mexican union officials, I was given this book by a professor of history and design at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) She is also a labor and political activist, and, in fact, one of the book’s authors. Written in Spanish and difficult to acquire outside of Mexico, it is doubtful that you will ever buy and read it; still I wanted to share my impressions because I think it gives us some insight into how people on the Mexican left who consider themselves to be radicals, leftists or socialist are explaining their support for the campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or AMLO) for president. And it becomes the occasion here for a discussion of the state of Mexican politics on the left at this moment only a few months from the national presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections.

         Arturo Ramos, a professor of sociology, higher education and pedagogy at several Mexican universities, opens the book with his essay, “Utopia, Realism and Imagination in the Mexican Left: The Political Conjuncture of 2010-2012.” Ramos spends a hundred pages in a long, abstract and vague discussion of Mexican history and politics before coming to his point, namely that even Lenin and the Bosheviks held long discussions over the question of whether Czarist Russia needed a democratic or a socialist revolution. The author suggests that perhaps Trotsky, Lenin and the Bolsheviks made a mistake by opting for the soviets (the workers’ councils) and socialism—a decision which ultimately gave rise to a bureaucratic dictatorship—rather than pursuing a longer slower march through democratic revolution. Mexican radicals and socialists, Ramos argues, must not make the same mistake. They must make the leap from utopian idealism and the dream of socialism to practical politics and the fight for democracy. The task for today, he writes, is to support a democratic revolution and an alternative project for the nation.

         With an attempt to reach out to all those on the Mexican left, Ramos argues that the basis for a revolutionary democratic program can be found in the proposals of López Obrador, the Zapatista who led the armed uprising of 1994 in Chiapas, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of president Lázaro Cárdenas and founder of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Interpreting what he sees as the central elements of these various documents, Ramos argues that the democratic program must be linked to a structural transformation of capitalism; Mexico must recover its rights under the Constitution of 1917, but must add to those the rights of the indigenous, women, homosexuals and youth. Equally important, the country must create a real system of social security from food and housing to health and education for all of its citizens. Finally, in order to establish the rule of law it will be necessary to hold a constituent assembly to write a new constitution.

         Speaking to socialists’ desire to build an independent working class party, Ramos argues that participating in the campaign for López Obrador will give radicals and socialists the opportunity to organize the country’s working people and the poor as part of the long process of creating a more conscious and better-organized working class. He concludes his essay arguing that this call for socialists to work for the democratic revolution in Mexico corresponds to the theory of “permanent revolution,” though he has no discussion of where and how that theory arose or what it explained. With a few offhand references to Trotsky and Lenin, Ramos argues that socialists can fulfill their dreams through López Obrador’s populist movement.

         Lechuga’s essay, titled “A Political Psychological Profile of AMLO as a Candidate in the Political Conjuncture of 2010-2012,” attempts to paint a psychological portrait of López Obrador using the most eclectic theories, from the ancient four temperaments to Freud and Jung. She writes that the candidate is “of a choleric character: AMLO being characterized by being direct, frank, irritable, rational, willful, fatalistic, decisive, sure of himself, arrogant, proud, suspicious and a scrutinizer of reality.”

         López Obrador, austere and well organized, a realist and a problem solver, she suggests would be the perfect match for Mexico, a country with what she describe as having a tendency towards ambivalence. “We Mexicans don’t practice what we preach. We praise the laws in speeches, but in fact we violate them constantly, for example in the acts of corruption that we practice at all levels; we are fatalistic and we live with a faith and hope, we are individualists and egoists and at the same time mutually supportive and generous.” She offers her psychoanalysis of Mexico: “Thus the psychosocial profile of the country of Mexico is that of a nation divided, the product of an incomplete independence, of an unfinished revolution, its geographical location next to a neighbor as powerful as the United States; a profile which is the product of a variety of conflictive mediations of its history, an ambivalent personality: courageous, dramatic, impatient, naïve, capricious, finicky, colorful, festive, humorous, cheerful, pleasant, creative, self-sacrificing, and dreamy.” In short, she argues, López Obrador, strong, well-organized and decisive, is just the man that Mexico needs. Lechuga’s provides a psychosocial justification for a caudillo, a charismatic populist who can lead the Mexican people into a new era.

         Surprisingly, neither of the essays in this little book have any discussion of López Obardor’s actual biography and political practice. They have nothing to say about his role as a politician in the state of Tabasco. Nothing to say about his role as Mayor of Mexico City. Not a word about the class character of López Obrador’s “Legitimate Government” (2006-2011) or about the new political organization Morena (Movimiento para la Renovación Nacional or Movement for National Renovation). The authors have avoided all the hard questions.

         López Obrador is usually praised on the left as the mayor who gave pensions to Mexico City’s elderly, but he also did much more. As Mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador worked to encourage private corporations and wealthy individuals to rebuild, modernize, and gentrify the city. Most famously he created a partnership with Carlos Slim, the multi-billionaire who is Mexico’s and the world’s richest man, to restore and gentrify the historic district of the city. He also offered tax breaks to large corporations to encourage them to build office and apartment buildings, leading to one of the biggest building booms in the country’s history. To take on Mexico City’s rising crime rates, he brought in New York’s former mayor Rudy Giuliani, known for his attacks on organized and white collar crime, as well as for his strict handling of low level crime and what the well-off perceive as public nuisances such as the homeless and panhandlers.

         Most troubling was López Obrador’s labor policy. While mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador permitted the Labor Board to continue to deal with phony unions and their corrupt lawyers and union officials, while turning a deaf ear to the demands of independent unions, union reformers and rank-and-file workers. Many of the city’s 200,000 public employees found it impossible to have their independent labor unions legally recognized. Workers at the time said: whatever we have won we got by going to the streets—the López Obrador government didn’t give us anything.

         In 2006 López Obrador was the presidential candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), a party founded in 1988 by Mexican nationalist politicians from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled Mexico for 75 years as a one-party-state, but who rebelled against the party’s new technocratic and neoliberal leadership. The PRD also attracted the Stalinist Communists and other leftists and became a congeries of left sects and opportunistic politicians held together by their desire to displace the PRI from power. Both the PRI and the PRD were affiliated with the Socialist International, which includes the socialist parties of the world. The PRD suffered several scandals in the 1990s and 2000s, including internal elections marked by fraud and political payoffs that were videotaped and broadcast on television.

         When López Obrador lost the election in 2006 through illegal activity by the out-going president Vicent Fox and alleged massive voting fraud, he called for massive protests in which hundreds of thousands participated. That was followed by his National Democratic Convention and subsequently, standing alone on a platform in the national square, the Zócalo, in Mexico City, he proclaimed himself the “Legitimate President.” He then appointed a cabinet which he called the “Legitimate Government.” Since 2006, López Obrador spent six years as a peripatetic pretender to the presidency visiting hundreds of cities, towns and villages throughout Mexico and creating an organization of tens of thousands who support him.

         With the PRD’s growing reputation for fraud and infighting that nearly paralyzed it, López Obrador then turned his “Legitimate Government” into a new political organization called Morena. At this party’s founding convention on October 6, 2011, there were no votes and no elections, simply the assembly’s approval of López Obrador as leader and candidate. Afterwards López Obrador announced his cabinet appointments which included many figures with histories in the PRI and PRD who had espoused neoliberal policies in the past as legislators or directors of various institutions. With the PRD in crisis, some ambitious politicians have moved into Morena (without of course severing their ties to the PRD) in order to see if the new organization can help further their careers.

         So far López Obrador has failed to set in motion the vast popular forces he needs to win the election, running third in the polls. The candidate has addressed that problem by turning to the right. As head of Morena, López Obrador has announced that he is attempting to create “the loving republic,” a slogan that allows him to avoid talking about the serious issues of social class and political program. He has also made overtures to the Mexican business class hoping to win broader support on the right for his campaign. And he has attempted to woo the corporate media by arguing that he is not the fire-breathing López Obrador of 2006 who the media constantly compared to Hugo Chávez, the radical president of Venezuela who calls for “Twenty-First Century Socialism,” but rather a moderate who should be compared to Luis Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, the recently retired president of Brazil who on the one hand brought social welfare payments to the country’s poor, but also worked closely with banks and construction companies during his presidency.

         With the conservative National Action Party (PAN) headed by President Felipe Calderón in power, and with the rapacious Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) leading in the polls, many on the left in Mexico understandably see a vote for López Obrador as the best of all options or at least the lesser evil. Led by the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), some on the left and in the labor movement who are reluctant to simply join Morena founded the Political Organization of the People and the Workers (OPT) on August 27, 2011, as a vehicle to engage in the independent organization of workers while supporting López Obrador’s candidacy.

         The Electrical Workers have been leading a massive and militant fight for their jobs since October 13, 2009, when Calderón ordered the police and military to seize the Light and Power Company plants, liquidated the state-owned company and fired 44,000 workers. After trying to win the PRI’s support to get their jobs back, the SME turned to López Obrador, creating OPT to support his campaign. The Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) of Mexico, a Trotskyist socialist groups, has been involved in the founding of this new proto-workers party, as have many other social and political organizations. In early February of 2012, López Obrador at a meeting with the Electrical Workers leadership and members promised to help the union win back the jobs of the 16,500 workers who continue to fight for them. While the OPT at this point is a weak reed, it is a genuine attempt to move to the left, to avoid a popular front style alliance with a bourgeois candidate, and to create an independent workers movement within the context of the popular mobilizations surrounding the López Obrador campaign. This approach may in the end find it difficult if not impossible to avoid being drawn into López Obrador’s wake, but it is at least a serious attempt to address the issue.

         The problem with this book by Ramos and Lechuga is that it addresses none of the actual structural and political problems, discusses no actual political forces, parties, labor unions, social movements, and faces none of the issues raised by the record of López Obrador. Unfortunately, many in Mexican left and social movements, I fear, will also choose the simple path the authors have, entering Morena and backing Andrés Manuel López Obrador, believing that this strong and charismatic figure can lead Mexico into the Promised Land of democracy and perhaps even socialism. It is either a naïve dream or an opportunistic maneuver, but in any case it is a far-fetched prospect.

  • The True Story of Pascale Mauclair

    Here is an extraordinary piece about Digger Murdoch’s New York Post harassing a teacher who was rated poorly on the city’s bogus teacher evaluation. When the Los Angeles Times printed the same slanderous tripe a year ago, based on the same crap methodology, the Los Angeles United School District teacher involved committed suicide. It was a big story then. This one is no different, except that no one’s taken their own life, yet. Wish I’d written it.

    The True Story of Pascale Mauclair

    Leo Casey

         Within hours of the publication of the Teacher Data Reports (TDRs) last Friday, the UFT began to hear stories of teachers and their families being hounded by news reporters from the New York Post.

         On Friday evening, New York Post reporters appeared at the door of the father of Pascale Mauclair, a sixth grade teacher at P.S. 11, the Kathryn Phelan School, which is located in the Woodside section of Queens. They told Mauclair’s father that his daughter was one of the worst teachers in New York City, based solely on the TDR reports, and that they were looking to interview her. They then made their way to Mauclair’s home, where she told them that she did not want to comment on the matter. The Post reporters rang Mauclair’s bell and knocked on her window all Saturday morning. She finally called the police, who told the reporters that since they were inside her private housing development, they were on private property and had to leave. The reporters rang the bell again, leading to a second visit from the police and a final warning to leave. Later, Mauclair’s neighbors told her that that the Post reporters had been asking them questions about her.

         Other reporters were outside P.S. 11, closed for the mid-winter break, looking for parents of students to interview.

         On Saturday, the New York Post published an article with the headline “They’re doing zero, zilch, zippo for students.”[1] It singled out Mauclair by name, claiming that her TDR reports put her “at the bottom of the heap” of New York City public school teachers. The article revealed her annual salary and asserted that “DOE brass were confident she was ranked where she was supposed to be,” although no officials were quoted—this was the Post‘s inference, and nothing more.

         On Sunday, the Post published another story, now proclaiming Mauclair to be the “city’s worst teacher.” Next to this description, it printed a photograph of her taken from a yearbook. The Post quoted a single parent to whom it had provided this description as saying that he wanted to have his child removed from her class. Another parent whose child was no longer in the school was quoted saying Mauclair should be fired and her salary given to the school.

         And then there is the true story of Pascale Mauclair and her school.

         By every conceivable measure, Mauclair’s P.S. 11 is an excellent school. It is in strong demand in the community, and as a consequence, is overcrowded, well above 100% capacity. It has an experienced and accomplished staff, with a minimal turnover rate, and a strong educator and leader as its principal. The school has a strong culture of collaboration: staff and administration work together well, with a focus on the education of their students.

         Last year, the school earned an ‘A’ on School Progress Report, placing it in the 94 percentile of all NYC public elementary schools.[2] Over the last three years, the school has earned consistently high grades of ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘A’ on the reports. P.S. 11’s last Quality Review has the school as “proficient,” and its last School Survey has school staff, parents and students all giving the school very high marks.

         And in P.S. 11, Pascale Mauclair is known by her colleagues and her supervisors as an excellent teacher. Talk to the respected principal of P.S. 11, Anna Efkarpides, and she is completely unequivocal in her support for Mauclair, whom she sees as a very strong teacher. “I would put my own children in her class,” she says.

         What the publication of the TDRs and what the Post have done to Mauclair is “absolutely unacceptable,” an emphatic Efkarpides told me. She has taken the full measure of her teacher’s work, from classroom observations to examinations of portfolios of student work, and the misrepresentation of her teaching performance found in the TDRs and the tabloids is “just not who she is.” “The truth is the truth,” Efkarpides insists.

         When Mauclair returned to school this morning, her colleagues met her with a standing ovation.

         As in many other cases, the story of Pascale Mauclair and P.S. 11 begins with a tale of the flawed methodology and invalid measurements of the Teacher Data Reports.

         P.S. 11 is located at the epicenter of a number of different immigrant communities in northern Queens, and over a quarter of its students are English Language Learners. Mauclair is an ESL teacher, and over the last five years she has had small, self-contained classes of recently arrived immigrants who do not speak English. Her students arrive at different times of the school year, depending upon that date of their family’s migration; consequently, it is not unusual for her students to take the 6th grade exams when they have only been in her class for a matter of a few months. Two factors which produce particularly contorted TDR results—teaching the highest academic need students and having a small sample of students that take the standardized state exams—define her teaching situation.

         If a journalist with integrity had examined the TDR data, a number of red flags which suggested something was seriously amiss with the scores for Mauclair and P.S. 11 would have presented themselves.

         First, there was an extraordinary anomaly on the Teacher Data Reports (TDR) for P.S. 11. Of the seven 6th grade P.S. 11 teachers with TDR reports, three ended up with scores at the zero percentile. It is simply beyond all credulity that a school which is doing so well academically could have three of the poorest performing teachers in all of New York City’s 1400 schools teaching such a substantial portion of its graduating class.

         P.S. 11 is one of a number of exceptional elementary schools with a 6th grade. The great preponderance of elementary schools conclude at grade 5, with students matriculating to a middle school for grade 6. In the elementary school configuration, a single classroom teacher teaches the core academic subjects, especially English Language Arts and Mathematics. In the middle school configuration, instruction is divided into subject classes, taught by specialists licensed to teach the different subjects. Most ELA and Math 6th grade teachers are thus responsible for only their subject, which they teach to five different classes each day. An elementary school teacher with a TDR report would max out with a sample of 32 students taking an exam, while a middle school teacher with a TDR report would max out with a sample of 160 students. A 6th grade teacher teaching in an elementary school setting would thus find themselves in a stilted comparison with 6th grade middle school teachers that had a far larger sampling of students and were responsible for only one subject. This was the situation for the three 6th grade teachers from P.S. 11 who were placed at the zero percentile.

         Second, there was the glaring anomaly that while Mauclair teaches both English Language Arts and Mathematics to her class, there is only one TDR—Math—for her last school year. The numbers of students from her class who took the ELA test were so few that they fell below the minimum number—20—the DoE has set for 6th grade ELA TDRs. A much smaller threshold for 6th grade Math—10 students—left her just above the DoE’s cut-off point with 11 students, a very small sample which is easily distorted. Moreover, if you examine the total universe of students for Mauclair in Math over five years, it is 63—an average of 12 students a year.

         In explaining its school progress reports, the NYC DoE says:

    The minimum number of values used for all reported calculations at the school level is 15. Elements for which there are fewer than 15 valid observations at a school are not included because of confidentiality considerations and the unreliability of measurements based on small numbers.

         If the minimum number of values (in plain English, every value is a student score on a standardized exam) for an entire school is 15, how can one possibly justify a minimum number for a teacher at 10?

         Who is responsible for this cruel damage done to the reputation of an excellent educator who has taken on the challenging work of teaching the highest need students?

         Certainly, the Post gets its share of the blame. It engaged in the calculated effort to destroy the good name of a teacher whose sole crime was her vocation to make a difference in the lives of children. It set out to brutally strip her of her personal dignity, and paraded in public an egregiously false ‘naked’ portrait of her life’s work.

         But the Post and the rest of the New York newspaper corps which participated in this sordid episode of publishing the TDRs had willing partners in the highest offices of this city, and they need to be called out by name.

         There is Joel Klein, who as Chancellor gave his personal word and the institutional word of the NYC DoE to Pascale Mauclair and every other NYC public school teacher that the TDRs would not be used for evaluative purposes and would not be published, but would only be available to their supervisors and themselves, as a tool to inform instruction. It was the same Chancellor Klein who, once he saw political advantage to be gained from publishing the TDRs, broke his word and actively solicited the news media to file FOIL requests. And he did so with the full knowledge of just how profoundly inaccurate and invalid the TDR data was, with average margins of error in the 35% range for Math and 53% range for ELA.

         And there is Michael Bloomberg, who as Mayor betrayed the explicit pledge to NYC public school teachers that the NYC DoE and the City would oppose any FOIL request to obtain and publish the TDRs, but ordered DoE and City lawyers to not oppose the FOIL requests in court.

         New York City public school teachers bear witness to what you have done to Pascale Mauclair and to us.

    Notes

    1. We will not link to the Post articles. If not self-evident, our reasons will become clearer in the remainder of this post.

    2. According to the NYC DoE, ‘A’ grades begin at the 75th percentile, so an ‘A’ at the 94th percentile is a very high ‘A.’

    First published on the Edwize blog.

  • Demonizing the Poor

             The Massachusetts legislature has established an Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) Commission, which is now holding hearings on how people use their EBT (food stamp, aka SNAP) cards. They heard that a Massachusetts resident had used an EBT card in Hawaii. They concluded that there must be some fraud involved, which they should investigate and put a stop to. In fact, food stamps are national, administered by the United States Department of Agriculture, and can be used in any state. In order to avoid stigmatizing food stamp recipients, USDA said that an EBT card should be no different than any other credit card. When a member of the EBT Commission proposed to put a photo ID on EBT cards, a representative of retail stores said that this would be a nightmare because every shopper would have to have a photo ID, which the cashier would have to inspect.

             Rather than investigating the shady practices of banks that forced millions of people out of their homes, politicians choose to stigmatize the poor. They mount investigations of presumed fraud and investigate what kind of food parents are buying, even though a parent of two children receives only $238 a month from food stamps. Many people who are eligible for food stamps can’t even receive them because the DTA workers are so overwhelmed. Each worker has over 1,000 cases.

             A Massachusetts study of welfare fraud (including TAFDC and Medicaid) found that almost all fraud was vendor fraud, e.g. contractors for computer systems, medical supply companies, druggists, doctors, and pharmacies. They get the big money from the government. Why not investigate them?

  • The “Jobs For All” Issue: It’s Still the Economy and Unemployment Front and Center, Not the Occupy Movement

         Noted socialist writer Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” That doesn’t just apply to the business and managerial classes alone—I submit, it can also apply to those who are economically comfortable either as workers or as retirees—and thus have no inkling of what it’s like to be one of the working poor, what it’s like to be chronically unemployed and “living” on a mere $600/month in unemployment compensation, to live constantly desperate. Such as I do. And yes, Upton Sinclair’s remark applies to many a putative socialist as well, and to numerous “activists” in Occupy movements and left groups who don’t have to worry about the economic wolf at the door, at least for the time being.

         It is literally shameful the way the U.S. left has ignored the unemployment crisis, either slighting it through silence altogether, or not proposing bold Keynesian measures such as a new WPA, which created 8.5 million jobs in the 1930s and provided paychecks to 9.7 workers then, according to Ucubed, the “union of the unemployed” set up by the Machinists’ union (but which is not conceived as an “unemployed council” such as were established in the 1930s, but merely as a voting bloc to pressure Obama and the Democratic Party to “do right.”). The reformist socialists such as DSA and CCDS only advocate for Obama’s tepid jobs program, which will create merely 1.2 million jobs in an economy with a far bigger workforce than existed in the 1930s. The “revolutionary” socialists are even worse, aiming their fire at the “inadequacy” and merely “reformist” measures that would result from implementing Keynesian measures such as were instituted during the New Deal. So afraid of “saving capitalism,” our “revolutionaries” would rather sacrifice the unemployed upon the altar of ideological purity, thus presenting themselves through their inaction as tacitly “aligned” (though for much different reasons) with the obstructionist Republicans and Tea Partiers—who also don’t want any Keynesian measures applied to help the unemployed by providing decent-paying, productive, valuable jobs that fulfill real economic needs such as repairing infrastructure, and can actually become Green jobs.

         Fortunately, there is one honorable socialist exception, the socialist journal and website New Politics. I published on New Politics online on February 3, 2011 my “Open Programmatic Proposal to the Broad U.S. Left for Directly Dealing with the Present Unemployment Crisis,” calling for a new WPA; in this I was ably seconded by Brian King’s supportive article and history of the WPA, “Jobs for All." Radical historian Jesse Lemisch also contributed mightily to this discussion with two articles on New Politics online, “Occupy the American Historical Association: Demand a WPA Federal Writers’ Project,” and “A WPA for History: Occupy the American Historical Association.” I also briefly discussed Occupy youth and their roles as probably unemployed workers once they leave the student confines in “Carl Davidson, Bill Ayers, and Zig Ziglar Moments.” But these are virtually unique in what is otherwise a blackout of articles and analyses on the unemployment crisis in “revolutionary” socialist publications!

         Much of what we read in the revolutionary left press is but a compendium of economic statistics that leads only to the weak, deterministic conclusion that essentially the unemployment and ancillary crises caused by the Great Recession can’t even be seriously ameliorated under capitalism. A “revolutionary” call to passivity in concrete action now while calling for the overthrow of capitalism in the indefinite future. Certainly not a call for a “Jobs for All” new WPA as we called for in New Politics, which, while possibly “saving capitalism from itself” (albeit with major restructuring of this “saved” capitalism), would directly benefit millions, galvanize and energize them, and draw them into more militant political action precisely because they would now feel a sense of real hope and empowerment—plus having the material means to live a decent life, not merely scrounge to survive! Same as the (admittedly) reformist and inadequate New Deal did in the 1930s—which aside from achieving real changes in the way capitalism worked, also radicalized millions and pushed the “limits of the possible” much further to the left. Good things, yes? One would really think so, especially on the part of the “revolutionary” left these “revolutionaries” tragically disappoint by only wanting to say “no” to this.

         Thus, socialists such as myself, Brian King and Jesse Lemisch who are aware of the horridness of the unemployment crisis and the sting of unemployment are offered only two terrible alternatives: either reformist tailing after Obama’s inadequate approach, or tacit “alignment” with the Republicans against Keynesian measures that would actually work on the part of the “revolutionary” left (although, again, for entirely different reasons), as demonstrated by the deafening silence coming from the “revolutionaries”!

         While the enthusiasm over the Occupy movements by our quite fragmented and marginalized left is certainly understandable, I very much feel it misses the point; the issue is still the economy, still the unconscionably high unemployment rate, still the ongoing recession that now enters its fifth year, even though it “officially” ended in the summer of 2009. Funny how we didn’t notice it. “Jobs for All” is still the issue, and accepting a rate of unemployment that’s officially 8.3%, and a gross understatement of the actual unemployment rate, unconscionable. It may seem too outré, too New-Dealish to mention it, smacking too much for settling for a “reformed capitalism” rather than overthrowing it (as if that were even on the agenda!), but it is precisely what the masses are calling for, it hits at their greatest fears—unemployment if they have a job, continuing despair if they don’t. It is the issue of now, and the left had better realize it.

         Even for Occupy activists themselves, unemployment will soon be an issue, if it isn’t already. As I noted in the footnote to my article, “Carl Davidson, Bill Ayers, and Zig Ziglar Moments”: Only 56% of the graduates of the Class of 2010 had at least one job by the spring of 2011 (Catherine Rampell, “Many with New College Degree Find the Job Market Humbling, New York Times, May 18, 2011).

         Yes, even in our “new, improved” job market, there are still four applicants for every job opening; only the congenital Pollyanna could gloat about this as “significant improvement,” that it’s down to merely four when it used to be seven. Despite Occupy, the economy is still the issue, unemployment is still the major economic problem, and “Jobs for All” the only solution. It may not be “revolutionary” in raising the left to empyrean flights of activist fancy, but it is what the working masses need, want, and what I say, they will rally around—something distinctly absent from left appeal today, marking this current recession as a historical anomaly, a time when vast numbers of ordinary folk did not turn noticeably to the left, did not flock to specifically left organizations. Despite the enthusiasm that Occupy has generated on our fragmented and marginalized left today, it is too amorphous, inchoate and disorganized to adequately serve as a specifically left pole of attraction. Without a specifically left pole of attraction, the pole stays embedded in the center and right, and political debate stays focused on the “solutions” offered by the center and the right. And both of them are quite happy to settle for something considerably short of full employment, despite rhetoric that tries to say otherwise. Will the left continue its course of joining them by default? For that is what it is doing by not pushing a “Jobs for All” political agenda, with demands for programs that ensure precisely that.

  • Russia, The Return of the Revolution: An Appeal

         “Yesterday (Feb. 4, 2012) more than 100 000 people marched on the streets in the centre of Moscow despite severe cold (-20C) demanding free and fair elections and the end of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule. Following on the mass demonstrations of December 10th and 24th in Moscow, in which tens of thousands of people took part, this shows clearly that the period of social passivity in Russia is over; the Putin era is nearing its end. The last time such large demonstrations took place in Moscow was in 1990-91 at the height of the democratic wave directed against the domination of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As a result of these mass actions, the whole party-state system of the USSR began to crumble. Those who participated in those events twenty years ago are feeling the same atmosphere again: revolution is in the air."

         So writes Alexei Gusev, a prominant activist during the 1990-1991 democratic upsurge and today Prof. of History at the University of Moscow. "The rising wave of protest has demystified the key myth of Putinism : the myth of a durable ‘consensus’ between the people and the authorities in Russia. What was revealed, is that it was not just a few small ‘marginal’groups but the mass of ordinary active people who no longer were willing to exchange their civil and political rights for Putin-style ‘stability.’"

         The full text of Alexei’s "The Return of the Russian Revoluion: Nature and Perspectives of the Wave of Social Protest in Russia"—a classic Marxist analysis of the class composition of the demonstrators, the foundations of Putinism, the weakness of the regime, the limits of the revolution, the dangers of nationalism and perspectives for the future—will appear in the Summer 2012 issue of New Politics.

         Alexei concludes : "The objective task of the democratic revolution in Russia consists in liberating civil society from the authoritarian and bureaucratic yoke, in creating a political space where all social forces can express their interests. In the long term, this will permit the void on the left wing of the political milieu in Russia to be filled. The absence of an organized left movement (outside of tiny Trotskyist and anarchist groups) cannot continue for a long time, and the different neo-Stalinists and bogus ‘social democrats’ (members of Just Russia party parading as ‘Leftists’) are not up to filling the bill. Today already, 17% of the protesters identify with the non-Communist Left. Their position is not yet represented politically. But sooner or later, the consolidation of the democratic left forces that are anti-totalitarian, internationalist and defend human rights and the rights of the workers must begin." The Praxis Research and Education Center, of which Alexei Gusev is Chair, has been defending that political space in Moscow for nearly fifteen years. Today, Praxis needs your help.

         In 1997 Praxis opened the Victor Serge Library in Moscow (with over 6,000 radical books in six languages) as a home for anti-totalitarian, internationalist socialists, anarchists, ecologists and human rights activists in the ex-Soviet space. Praxis has translated published a score of left classics for the first time in Russia including Victor Serge’s Memoirs, Voline’s Hidden Revolution, Maximilien Rubel’s Marx Critic of Marxism and just this winter Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, with Jonathan Neale’s Stop Global Warming Now! in press. Praxis has survived two politically-motivated evictions. We can’t get a printer to run off our paper Free Thought, but our website gets lots of hits, and we have now opened a branch in Kiev. All on a shoe-string.

         Now—just as perspectives are opening for the independent Left in Russia – Praxis has run out of money! And so we are asking our friends and supporters around the world to help us kindle the flame of truly democratic socialism in Russia as the ongoing revolution advances to an uncertain future. Send US tax deductable contributions (in dollars, euros or £) to the Victor Serge Foundation, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit, at 16 Rue de la Teinturerie, 34000 Montpellier France.

         To learn more about Praxis, please go to http://www.praxiscenter.ru/about_us/english/.

  • Chicago and NYC school reform: Creating possibilities versus surrendering without a struggle

    As I write, the  Brian Piccolo Specialty School in Humboldt Park, Chicago is occupied by parents, teachers, and students, with Occupy Chicago and others camped outside the schol in solidarity.  The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is building this movement, with a  wonderful wholeheartedness and passion. Bravo! The union is showing both brawn and brains.  In another sign of its commitment to fight hard for the education low-income kids deserve, the CTU  has released an excellent report on what we should demand of politicians who say they want to improve the schools. Another part of the Chicago strategy is using the courts. Parents are the backbone here but as a long-time community organizer in Chicago wrote me, “Honestly, we could not have done this without a progressive union leadership.” 

    In contrast, the New York State teachers union (NYSUT) has signed an agreement that is an abject surrender of teachers’ professional dignity and tightens the stranglehold of standardized tests.  Let us hope  – and mobilize – so that this Faustian agreement does not become the “national model” that  NYSUT (and NYC) teachers union leaders would like it to be.  Consider that  NYSUT applauded this agreement that allows up to 40% of teachers’ evaluations  to be based on their  students’ progress on standardized tests. Yet, according to NYSUT’s own poll conducted in January,  two-thirds of parents “believe there is too much emphasis on state testing in public schools.”  Public  opposition to testing has been organized by parent and teacher groups independent of the national unions, which are fearful of angering the corporate media and its political friends. Is there a  principle for which the NYC and NY state teachers unions will really fight? Hmmm… maybe the right to collect dues? 

    We have a tale of school systems in two cities being demolished with the same policies of privatization, school closure, and deprofessionalization of teaching. In Chicago, the teachers union has mobilized with parents and activists to turn the tide. In New York, the teachers union signs and applauds a deal that endangers the job security of teachers who want to use their creativity, skill, and knowledge to teach in ways that are meaningful to kids. Chicago shows us resistance can be mobilized, if a union leadership has the heart and vision, knows how to empower its members, and can work respectfully with parents. 

  • “A Dangerous Method”: Freud, Jung, and Spielrein

         David Cronenberg’s new film “A Dangerous Method” begins in the opening years of the twentieth century with the delivery to the Burghölzli Clinic of the Zurich Hospital of a young woman named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightly) who, suffering from hysteria, becomes one of the early patients to undergo psychoanalysis. Spielrein, a wealthy, well-educated, and lovely young Russian Jewish woman—whose hysterical outbreaks express themselves in fits, tortuous postures, tormented speech, and bizarre behavior—comes under the care of Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Jung, himself a follower of the Viennese physician Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), decides to experiment with his mentor’s revolutionary new treatment called “the talking cure.”

         The doctors pursue the unheard of radical course of listening to the mad patient. Rather than simply locking them up and administering baths, physical therapy and a regimen of work, these innovative doctors take an interest in the patients, in their symptoms and their words, in their family life and their current situation. Sitting in a chair behind his hysterical subject, Jung asks her to talk about her illness and her life in an attempt to help himself and her to understand the source of her hysterical symptoms. The idea is that through the process of coming to understand the source of her neurosis and by reenacting the relationship that brought about her mental illness through a simulation of that relationship with her psychologist, the patient will become a normal, mature adult. It will prove a dangerous method, for in the experience of the transference and counter-transference of the psychoanalytic experience—in violation of all the rules of Freud’s psychoanalysis—Jung succumbs to temptation and sleeps with Spielrein.

         Jung’s relationship to Spielrein stands at the center of this film, with all the other relationships organized and displayed around it. Freud sends to Jung a patient who is another psychoanalyst, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), a cocaine addict and womanizer who ridicules the Swiss doctor’s bourgeois morality and commitment to monogamy, daring him to sleep with his patient Spielrein. Jung succumbs to Gross’s taunt, to Spielrein’s intense sexuality, and to his own urges. The affair between Jung and Spielrein, between the older physician and the younger mentally ill woman, has quite different meanings for the two of them. Jung pursued the sado-masochistic sexual affair with Spielrein during the years that he was establishing his reputation at the Clinic and when he and his very wealthy wife Emma (Sarah Gadon) were raising their children. For Jung, however strangely it may have come about, the taking of a mistress simply conforms to his Swiss, Protestant, bourgeois, existence. Men of his class and age, of course, had wives and took mistresses. For Spielrein, a hyper-eroticized person who through the experience of childhood beatings by her father had become a masochist, Jung’s treatment leads her not only to sanity, but also to pursue a career herself as a psychoanalyst. She, as perhaps only a woman of her class, education and time could, experienced the affair with Jung as new found freedom as she becomes liberated from her hysteria and able to express herself sexually. For Jung the affair is really an additional way of confirming and assuring his bourgeois status, while for her it represent a step toward her own liberation.

         Through the depiction of Jung and Spielrein’s relationship then, the filmmaker thus takes up one of the great, contemporary moral issues: the role of sex in the individual’s life and the place of sex in modern society, while at the same time he presents one of the great personality clashes and psychological controversies of the twentieth century, that between Freud and Jung. They were not, of course, the first to theorize issues of the family and men’s and women’s relationships. Among others, the great nineteenth century theorists of revolution, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, had developed their theory of the historic defeat of women with the rise of sedentary agricultural class societies and the emergence of private property and the state. They had scathingly criticized the hypocrisy of bourgeois family values, property relations disguised as personal relationships, while at the same time describing how working class families struggled to survive in the midst of long hours of work, low wages, the super-exploitation of women and the scourge of child labor. Yet it would take a revolutionary of another sort, Sigmund Freud, to examine how family relationships produced both healthy and “normal” people and generated mental illness.

         Overturning hundreds of years of philosophy and medicine, Freud, the great champion of a humanistic notion of psychic equality, would argue that the sane and the insane, men and women, adults and children in fact shared the same psychological processes. Like his teacher Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud would conclude that hysteria was not simply a disease of women (from ὑστέρα or hystera the Greek word for womb), but rather had its origins in psychological processes common to both men and women. Freud would find the origin of those processes in family relations and conclude that both sexes could suffer from hysteria. Notwithstanding, the feminist movement’s critique of Freud for his apparent acceptance of bourgeois, male-dominated, heterosexual norms as expressed in concepts like “penis envy,” he was the great psychological equalizer. All human beings have the same minds, and psyches formed in the crucible of the family. For Freud there were no perverts, for all human beings were “perverse” in every way, “polymorphous perverse” as they passed through the various stages of their development, stages at which some got stuck because of family and childhood issues. This film portrays the world in which Freudian psychoanalysis first evolved, at a moment when most of the physician psychologists were Viennese Jews and most of their patients bourgeois neurotics tormented by sexual repression and frustrations found in the patriarchal families of the rich.

         Freud saw his young admirer Jung as the person might help him to take psychoanalysis out of the narrow world of Viennese Jews and into the world of Christian Europe. Jung became Freud’s fair-haired boy, his spiritual son, and his chosen successor. We see depicted in the film the very professional and polite breakdown of the relationship, profoundly disappointing to Freud. This was a clash not only of theories and personalities, but also of cultures. Freud stood in the tradition of the European enlightenment, a physician and neurologist who had spent endless hours at the microscope. He was an atheist who believed that science and reason, the collection of empirical evidence and its analysis could provide rational answers to all questions. Freud believed that the many cases he had studied showed that sexual drives stood at the center of all psychological issues. He believed that one day he would be able to show how the processes of the mind which he had discovered could be traced back to the neurology of the brain.

         Jung on the other hand, breaking with Freud, moved away from the empirical and rational Enlightenment tradition, toward an interest in parapsychology, the spiritual world and the occult. His Protestant and bourgeois values led him to feel squeamish about the discussion of subjects such as childhood sexuality and the so-called sexual “perversions.” Eventually Jung came to reject entirely Freud’s concept of the libido as sexual desire and to suggest that it referred instead to some vague spiritual energy. Freud became increasingly disgusted with his chosen son, finding his superstitious beliefs repugnant from both a scientific and moral point of view. Jung he believed couldn’t face Christian society’s moral judgments and wanted to sugar coat the bitter pill, the recognition that sex and its repression stood at the root of the family, society and culture. In the end the Christian spiritualist savant and the Jewish atheist scientist could not abide each other. Jung’s transparent hypocrisy in the way he handled the affair with Spielrein, first denying the affair and only later revealing it to Freud at her insistence, may also have played a role in their estrangement. The worldly Freud, who had heard everyone’s most intimate secrets, including his own, could understand having an affair; he could not understand failing to tell the truth about it. For Freud, truth was everything.

         We can see how Marxists seeking to deepen their understanding of the nature of bourgeois society, its social classes and the family would later turn to Freud. The psychoanalyst and socialist Wilhelm Reich and the radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse would attempt to theoretically combine Marx and Freud in provocative studies that linked social and psychological repression. Feminists, including socialist feminists of the 1960s and 1970s would challenge Freud’s interpretation, but often on the basis of their own analysis of the origin of male and female psyches in the family, analyses deriving from Freud’s original model. Modern psychology and psychopharmacology have largely displaced Freudian analysis, except among the privileged classes. Yet Freud’s analysis of the role of sex in society and of the familial root of our psychological problems survives. As Auden wrote in his magnificent poem to Freud, “to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives.”

         “The Dangerous Method” is a great story, with splendid period costumes and settings, wonderful cinematography, and talented actors; nevertheless it fails to engross and compel us because the director did not find a way to coordinate the various fascinating elements of the plot and subordinate them to a dominant storyline. The various rhythms of the film—the love affair between Jung and Spielrein, the struggle between Freud and Jung, and the rise of psychoanalysis to become central to our modern way of thinking—somehow never come into sync. The movie becomes a series of episodes. While there are some excellent scenes, the film fails to engage and convince us. Keira Knightly, who as Spielrein stands at the center of the story, does not succeed in leading the audience to identify with and care about her and for her. Her unconvincing performance inevitably detracts from Fassbender’s, though Mortensen as Freud and Cassel as Gross—superego and id, we might say—give fine performances. Those who are interested in the characters and the issues will, as I did, want to see this film. Those who are hoping to see a great film will be disappointed.

  • Occupy Wall Street and Labor: The Closest of Strangers

    A sign on a lower Broadway storefront window just one block south of Wall Street reads “I can’t afford a lobbyist, so I organize.” The sign, one of many put up by Occupy Wall Street activists, sits inside a cavernous street floor space the United Federation of Teachers lent gratis to OWS for storage and coordination. The UFT, like other city unions, can afford lobbyists—subsidized by its own members through voluntary contributions. Like other city unions it operates an extensive volunteer political action arm, and massaging or muscling elected officials is seen as key to improving members’ wages and working conditions. And, like other unions in a state boasting the nation’s highest concentration of union households and home to the largest number of Fortune 500 mega-corporations and public-sector-union-averse think tankers, it also organizes aggressively.

    Organizing and lobbying are tactics used by the Transport Workers, Service Employees, Communications Workers, AFSCME and Unite-Here, too—key supporters of the Occupy movement nationwide. Yet the slogan hints at outstanding contradictions between two movements that view the world—at least right now—quite differently, even as its activists are building warm relationships with each other.

    What labor and Occupy share is a common enemy in corporate America. What else shared is not so clear. Much of the discussion at a recent forum on “Can the Labor Movement and Occupy Wall Street March down the Same Road,” sponsored on Jan. 27 by The Murphy Institute, a graduate labor program at City University of New York, was about fostering dialogue and the need to see things from others’ perspectives. Certainly the plague of joblessness, growing economic inequality, environmental genocide, needless military adventures and federal and state policies that reward the financial industry even after it sunk the economy are all powerful incentives for cooperation. But substantively, in my view, very little was exchanged.

    Occupy Wall Street is a movement that eschews political demands. Its blogs are rife with comments that demands in themselves validate government and reinforce the social order. That sentiment, wrong on its face, embodied at least a smart tactical move, initially. It maximized participation, mainstreamed a radical slam at the rich and powerful and restated Jack London’s classic charge against business: “you have mismanaged.” In one moment, Occupy switched media attention from the growing federal deficit to the venality and homicide of corporate society. Occupy has returned a sense of “them and us” to the American psyche. It is, as panel moderator and author Steve Fraser said, a movement that is inherently “anticapitalist,” and “using liberated language.” It’s allowed,” said panelist John Samuelson, president of the city’s subway workers and bus drivers union, “labor contracts to be concluded because the other side doesn’t want job actions” in the era of Occupy.

    In the same vein, Mario Dartayet-Rodriguez, organizing director for AFSCME’s District Council 37 , sketched the two movements’ similarities, saying that “Despite differences over politics and the ballot box, no one else has the same view of the concentration of power,” adding that “As long as wage disparities and joblessness exist, there’s plenty of room for collaboration.”

    Tammy Kim, staff attorney at the Urban Justice Center and an active member of the Occupy Wall Street Immigrant Worker Justice Working Group, gave examples of wage theft committed against immigrant workers. She reminded listeners—if indeed we needed reminding—that organized labor (or as she unfortunately put it, “Big Labor”) is just one part of the working class.

    Amy Muldoon, a Verizon repair technician serving as liaison between her Communications Workers district and Occupy, and whose union donated mattresses, walkie-talkies and other supplies to the occupiers, said Occupy’s attraction came from “class anger at 30 or 40 years of attacks,” and how the occupation was “incredible and intoxicating for those of us who slog in the unions.” She said the rage contained in OWS was effecting “a groundswell for change in unions and against organizational inertia.” She even quoted German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, about movements advancing and retreating “but always leaving a footprint.”

    I’ll even add that culturally Occupy legitimates giving the risible finger to the invisible hand, something that is not just the bravado of a subculture but a rational and helpful political act in itself

    Is any of this enough? Is any of it, well, bankable?

    Samuelson, whose union was the first of many in New York to embrace the occupation, said the number one question for the day was “What can each movement learn from each other?” Fraser, whose book “Every Man a Speculator,” is a withering critique of Wall Street, said that while collaboration between the two movements was crucial, activists had to be aware that the movements diverged in terms of structure, demands, political perspectives, as well as over tactics and strategies.

    “These differences need to be worked on, and that’s what we’re doing today,” said Fraser said.

    A worthy goal, but it didn’t happen. To me, the meeting was more an exercise in mutual validation and less an actual exchange of ideas and experiences. There was a lot of talk of “dialogue,” but it was more monologues on parallel tracks.

    All speakers praised Occupy’s focus on horizontal organization as a replacement for what they saw as a prevailing bureaucratic mentality, but there was little recognition that labor’s problem is structural and not (or not primarily) cultural. A fixation with horizontal organization as a cure-all doesn’t take into account the legal and contractual strangleholds holding unions back, leaving it, instead, at attitude problems. Sure, the laws, the timed contract system, even the lack of a political party that speaks unambiguously for working people, aren’t permanent roadblocks, though Samuelson admitted that getting unions to change direction “was like turning the Titanic.” Certainly the top-down union structure allows leaders too much sway to cut side deals and too little incentive to empower members. But is lack of imagination really labor’s Achilles’ heel? Is changing the “culture” of the unions just a matter of style or substance?

    And where was the recognition of Occupy’s own dirty little secrets: that the General Assemblies enable one individual to stymie the will of thousands; where endless debates restrict decision making to those with the time and energy to occupy 24/7—giving the edge to those without jobs or families—and where, as in one New York case, a workgroup focusing on demands was effectively neutered not on the merits but after daring to change its own internal workings to require a 75 percent supermajority on decisions when consensus failed. Then there’s the predilection for confrontation. Civil disobedience is a powerful weapon, but too many encounters with the police—at least the ones not provoked by the police high command—were done with little preparation or even sufficient legal observers present. Ouch!

    OWS activists consider nonhierarchical structures and open sourcing to be the indispensable condition for good social organization if not prefigurations of the good society. With all its talk of consensus, OWS boils things down to a minimum. At its worst moments, it’s a talk shop with meditation. Labor, for its part, is hierarchically structured; its message is crafted (hopefully with input from the bottom up) but its democracy is centralized. It’s the leadership that speaks. Unions—the good ones at least—see democracy as the basis for mobilizing members for a goal and training activists. Then they prize representative democracy as a good in itself, a tricky proposition no less problematic than is the participatory alternative. There’s also a tendency for even the most social-justice-conscious trade unionists to give breathtaking critiques of corporate greed, yet their solution is a one-shoe-fits-all electoral involvement. Political action is at best one part of a solution.

    And of course union leaders are not blameless. If they were, we wouldn’t need a blog called Talking Union. DC 37, for one, was generous with its meeting space, allowing two separate labor-oriented workgroups to hold weekly meetings, which are still going on. But that didn’t stop AFSCME’s International Executive Board from endorsing President Obama for re-election with hyper-exuberant language, stretching credulity to claim this much failed president deserved re-election on the merits, rather than because the GOP is so god awful and dangerous. The February issue of Public Employee Press cites AFSCME’s President Gerald McEntee as saying in pure Occupy speak, how “Obama is the only choice for the 99 percent.” It quotes Lillian Roberts, the DC 37 executive director on a counterfactual, that “Obama is a proven fighter whose stand on economic, political and social issues demonstrates strong support for protecting the rights of working men and women.” Gee, Lillian, wasn’t McEntee’s saying “we’ve got no choice” sad enough?

    Of course, there are good things both movements can learn from each other, and dialogue should facilitate that learning, but it won’t come without engaging each other, too. Right now, solidarity between the two movements is as broad as a football field and shallow as the turf. It can’t be allowed to stay that way.

    The possibilities of real dialogue are exciting. The OWS may be inherently anticapitalist, but it’s worker-lite. The Labor Movement breathes the language of class, but is only anticapitalist in the final instance. Until then, it’s all negotiable. For now, unions straddle the fence between defending labor power and selling it. OWS could give up its biblical prophet pose and talk about real solutions, while unionists could explain their legal and contractual binds and the real inhibitions on making every member an activist, including how plenty of workers vote Republican, as every political director knows. (Keeping that number below 30 percent is considered a victory). That’s an exercise that could give fresh thought to ways of breaking those binds. That’s a discussion that should happen soon.

    Instead, OWS activists segregate themselves into work groups with little in common with the larger OWS. The two labor workgroups comprise union activists, officers and staff. It presents some interesting possibilities for joint work between elected leaders and shop-floor militants, but these can’t affect the overall OWS sensibility. An exciting labor solidarity project to help locked-out union art handlers at the tony Sotheby’s Auction Gallery got a lot of media play, but was done largely by unionists affiliated with OWS. For too many of the rest in OWS, it was the spectacle at Zuccotti Park that counted. That and the drumming.

     

    Michael Hirsch is a veteran union activist and a member of the New Politics editorial board.