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  • Piety, Money, and Catholicism

         Review of Jason Berry, Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church, New York: Crown Publishers, 2011

         Render unto Rome author Jason Berry is a practicing Catholic living in New Orleans, and this is his third book on the present crises in the Catholic Church he remains a devoted member of—yet as such, a necessary prophet of conscience who uses his pen and his investigative skills to cry out as did Isaiah and Jeremiah. His two previous books on Catholicism, Lead Us Not into Temptation and Vows of Silence (with Gerald Renner) explored the ramifications of the priest-pedophilia scandal. Render unto Rome looks at another facet much related to priest-pedophilia, the finances of the Catholic Church—a system of fiduciary fiefdoms controlled by bishops with little financial accountability or constraint, who were called upon to quickly raise large sums of money to pay off lawsuits and other compensation to pedophile victims. Combine secrecy with sudden vast financial need, and a volatile mixture emerges—just how volatile in what Berry probes here in depth, in a well-researched tome that combines ample documentation with the storytelling grace of a thriller novel. Only the troubling tale presented here is all too true.

         Berry is a novelist, jazz historian and documentary filmmaker as well as a reporter, and his novelist’s art enters well into Render under Rome as Berry weaves a chilling story of seemingly disparate parts that he all pulls together to portray a Church deeply committed to, and corrupted by, Mammon. Render unto Rome discusses, and extensively documents, at length these various elements, at first glance seemingly unrelated, but all bound together: the parish closings in the dioceses of Boston, Cleveland, New Orleans and Los Angeles, and the indignant activism of the parishioners to stop the closings; the fascinating historical origins of the Vatican’s fiduciary system; the machinations and “financial considerations” given to, respectively, a corrupt Cardinal high up in the Vatican hierarchy, the founder and head of a cult-like Catholic religious order famed for fund-raising and once in very good favor with the Vatican, but who was exposed as an active sexual predator of both sexes with illegitimate children, and a bottom-line auxiliary bishop in Boston and later, bishop of Cleveland, who was more akin to a Wall street banker than to a spiritual leader; the Church’s massive investments in real estate, investments that went up and then plummeted with the Great Recession of today; and finally, a guarded but hopeful note that committed Catholics such as Berry himself and the activists who protested parish closings can reform the Catholic Church by righting the wrongs within, many of them exemplified by both the Church’s present financial crisis and its medieval-like financial system where bishops and high Vatican prelates rule over diocese and broader Church finances as unaccountable princes answerable only to themselves, and automatically given a pass by the higher-ups when assets become liabilities and bottom-lines go red.

         As Berry demonstrates, at the heart of the Church’s financial crisis is another Catholic crisis: that of priest-pedophilia and its deliberate cover-up, with the numerous ensuing lawsuits and settlements forcing dioceses to come up with large sums of cash very quickly. That was the core of the financial crisis that engulfed the dioceses of Boston and Los Angeles, where exposure of pedophilia cover-up led to exposure of financial cover-up as well. Further, changing demographics within the U.S. Catholic Church, as more and more middle-class Catholics moved to the suburbs and left poor Catholics, overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, behind to rot in neglected inner-city parishes, parishes that, while penurious financially, were often rich in spirituality and social justice activism for their parishioners and neighborhoods. But like a banker foreclosing on houses, diocesan officials now wanted to foreclose on these parishes, regarding them as fiduciary assets that could be sold to developers and other commercial businesses. Of course, this was also pushed by the frequent need to come up with cash to pay off pedophilia-related lawsuits, so the two meshed together, and brought forth a fiduciary crisis in tandem with a moral crisis.

         This thumbnail sketch of Render unto Rome can only begin to do justice to Jason Berry’s book, can only present schematically the vignettes, themes and analyses that Berry presents in great, frequently shocking, detail. Render unto Rome looks at Catholicism’s fiduciary crisis from spiritual, financial, political, economic, geographical, demographic, historical and legal aspects to paint a fully-detailed picture of the Church’s financial system and its interrelatedness to both the pedophile crisis and to the Church’s preoccupation with Mammon. As a writer, Jason Berry has the jeweler’s eye for significant detail that combines with the novelist’s art in telling a story; as a reporter and researcher, Berry is thorough, compelling, and complete; as a person of conscience and a devoted Catholic layperson, Berry is indignant over what has happened, but conscientiously wishes to right the wrongs of a Church he is still part of, though perhaps increasingly more akin to a Catholic such as Roy Bourgeois than to a soothing, Bing Crosby-like Going My Way prelate. But what Jason Berry has related in Render unto Rome needs to be told, told to a wide audience, and should Render unto Rome get the notice it deserves, it will serve as yet another needed tocsin in our troubled times of corruption, malfeasance, discredit and lack of compassion manifesting themselves today in all our formerly revered, venerable institutions, institutions that remained untouchable (except for those dismissed as cranks) only a few years ago. But now even the Catholic Church joins with Wall Street as objects of justified opprobrium by an aroused, concerned citizenry of conscience—as attested to by Catholics such as Jason Berry and Roy Bourgeois, by movements such as Occupy Wall Street, and by what only the blind can ignore in our daily newspapers and TV news programs.

  • The Movement for Justice and Equality in Mauritania

    New Politics interviews an MJEM activist in the United States

    Saidou Wane, who immigrated to the United States 15 years ago, resides in Cincinnati, Ohio where he is active in the Movement for Justice and Equality in Mauritania (MJEM, the French name of the Mauritanian parent organization is Touche pas à ma nationalité). MJEM exists to resist the Mauritanian government’s policy of discrimination against the country’s black Africans. Mauritania is located in northwest Africa, in the Maghreb and West Africa; much of the country is part of the Sahara desert. The country’s population is approximately 3.3 million: Berber-Arab peoples (sometimes called Moors), black Africans, and people of mixed race. (See the website http://mjem.org/ for more information.)

    New Politics: What are your organization’s concerns about the situation in Mauritania?

    Saidou Wane: We have several. First, we want to bring to justice the perpetrators of genocide who still are still high-ranking officials in the government of Mauritania. Second, we want to end discriminatory policies and slavery in Mauritania. The genocide took place from 1986 to 1992, during which time the government expelled over 100,000 African Mauritanians from the country, purged the administration and the army of black officers, killed thousands of black civilians, and erased hundreds of African villages in the south of Mauritania to make way for Arab villages. The government—the Mauritanian Army—organized and carried out the genocide. Those responsible have not been brought to justice.

         The genocide began as a dispute with Senegal, our neighbor to the South, and the government used it as an excuse to accuse all Mauritanian blacks of being Senegalese. High ranking administrators, general and coronels, who remain in the government and the army orchestrated that genocide. In Mauritania there are really three different social groups, the white Arabs, the Haratines who are former slaves and culturally Arab, and then the black African community. In the past, during the genocide, the government used the Haratines to carry out their dirty work, though there is now a rapprochement between the Haratines and the black Africans.

    NP: There was a great outcry by Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations at that time of the 1986-1992 genocide, but since then the issue seems to have dropped out of public consciousness. How and why did that happen?

    SW: The government of Mauritania became better at communications and propaganda. The president, Ould Taya, the dictator at that time, passed an amnesty law. Also Mauritania was one of only three Arab nations having relations with Israel, and after 9/11 the dictator also committed Mauritania to fight alongside the U.S. The two forces came together when Bush was seeking forces to support and fight alongside the U.S. and Mauritania was trying to overcome the stigma of being a human rights violator. So they came together. It was perfect timing.

         The current government passed a smokescreen resolution, organizing a prayer for the dead in a southern Mauritanian African village with a few African personalities present. They did this without any investigations of the genocide or whatever. The government now points to that act and says that this problem has been resolved.

         Now the Mauritanian government seeks favor from European governments and from the U.S. by committing itself to fight Al-Qaida. Although there are only a few Al-Qaida supporters, the government is doing its best to exaggerate the threat and to show the world that it is the primary anti-Al-Qaida force in North Africa in order to gain more support from the West.

    NP: What are the government’s current policies that discriminate against Mauritania’s black citizens?

    SW: The government refuses to recognize the African languages (Wolof, Fulani, Soninke); it only recognizes Arabic. It only teaches French and Arabic and refuses to include the black languages in the school curriculum. The civil service administration hires in a discriminatory fashion, and while Arabs make up only 30 percent of the population they make up 90 percent of the civil services employees. The land reform of 1983, which rejected community owned property (common among the African population), allowed wealthy Arab businessmen, who were the only ones with access to bank loans, to come in and purchase these lands.

         Most recently, in May of last year the government carried out a census and established a national registry of vital statistics which is the reason that we created the movement Touche pas. We objected to the fact that the government sent panels throughout the country to register Mauritanian citizens in the new system, but the panels rejected many black Africans because they could not speak Arabic or could not recite certain verses from the Quran. Hence the name of our movement: Don’t Touch My Nationality. Since last May, then, we have been staging peaceful protests throughout the country.

    NP: What are your movement’s demands?

    SW: The government is trying to change the ethnic make-up of the country. We want the government to bring the perpetrators of the genocide to justice. We want to end the land reform law. We want fair hiring. And we want African languages to be included in education and recognized in society. We also want to end the discriminatory census which is currently underway

         There is also the issue of slavery. Slavery has been a problem for centuries and continued into modern times. There is no longer slavery in urban areas, but it continues in the rural areas. One fifth of Mauritanians are slaves. All of the slaves are black Africans who have become culturally Arab, because most of the owners are Arabs. The government has passed three laws abolishing slavery, but this is just lip service. They do not enforce these laws. So we are demanding an end to slavery. The Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement in Mauritania (IRA) is our ally.

    NP: What has been the government’s reaction to your movement?

    SW: The government has been tone deaf. It has not heard our demands. It has been very repressive. Since we started our protests our activists have been tortured and jailed. One of our activists, Lamine Magane, 19 years old, was shot to death by the authorities. Yesterday the leader of our movement in the country, Abdul Birane Wane, was arrested. Right now our activists are occupying the police station—standing outside—where we believe he is being held. IRA activists are also harassed and jailed. We in the U.S. are organizing to put pressure on the U.S. government, since the Mauritanian regime is a recipient of both U.S. military cooperation and foreign aid.

         Besides reacting violently, they have been trying to paint our movement as anti-Arab in order to pit the two communities against each other. This accusation is absurd, since many of us who are black Mauritanians have Arabs in our families; for example, I have a step-sister who is Arab. We have some allies among liberal Arabs here in the U.S., but we are fighting the powerful propaganda of the Mauritanian regime.

    NP: What are the next steps for your movement?

    SW: We are getting organized in the U.S. to raise awareness of the Mauritanian issue, both among the public generally and to push U.S. lawmakers to do the right thing by demanding that Mauritania respect the basic human rights of black African Mauritanians. Many actions are being planned, including public events in Cincinnati and other cities throughout the country.

  • To the Occupy Kids — Some Words from a Geezer

    I

    I was your age
    back in the tumultuous Sixties;
    and like you,
    I was determined,
    feisty,
    and idealistic—
    unwilling
    then
    (or later)
    to make all those
    rotten compromises
    that supposedly come
    with “adulthood;”
    or blind myself with
    all those facile rationalizations
    that make those
    rotten compromises
    palatable and acceptable
    for that “higher” purpose
    of “making a living”
    rather than living properly.
    (Yeah, I’m like you,
    right? Won’t grow up,
    won’t take a bath,
    won’t get a job!)
    Well, I guess
    that’s why
    you Occupy kids
    give me hope
    and determination
    to still carry on
    the good fight,
    and I’m immensely grateful
    for that.
    Don’t ever forget it!

    II

    I was proud to stand with you
    and participate as I could,
    and I welcomed your
    welcoming me,
    and your asking me
    What could we learn
    from older radicals
    like myself?
    For I was different
    from the rest
    of these older
    talking heads
    in that I stood with you
    and didn’t feel the need
    to stand above you;
    had no desire
    to preach to you,
    or most of all,
    to “lead” you,
    as my “vast experience”
    and “standing in the community”
    would wont.
    No desire to be a
    Rt. Rev. Progressive
    Spiritual Guru,
    freely telling you
    what you should
    and should not do;
    nor to be yet another
    “community political leader,”
    complete with his
    own web site
    and his own
    miniscule paper organization
    where he’s Executive Director.
    You kids did an
    excellent job of
    leading yourselves;
    and you made us follow you.
    That’s enough—
    in fact, more than enough!

    III

    But if you don’t mind
    a little advice
    from one who
    grew up back
    in the age of the dinosaurs,
    but who has fought for
    social justice all his life,
    Even though
    you’re right to realize
    that “leadership”
    often veils elitism,
    take a lesson
    from that
    musical group
    popular back
    in the age of those
    dinosaurs,
    the Beatles,
    who also protested,
    “We have no leaders,”
    but who did have
    a “chief Beatle,”
    John Lennon.
    Because you will need
    “chief Beatles,”
    you will need
    leadership
    you can respect
    and look up to,
    those who are your
    First among Equals.
    But keep up
    with the democracy
    and the vigilance,
    and don’t swallow that
    Orwellian
    “Some are more equal
    than others,”
    or even worse,
    “One is more equal than
    all of us put together.”
    And develop a program
    for the 99%
    that’s based on
    your real needs, and
    the real needs of the 99%.
    But let it flow,
    let it come out of
    your discussions,
    and your fervor.
    For you will need it.
    But just your fight-back
    is the beginning
    of a program in itself.
    Don’t forget that, either.

    IV

    Kurt Vonnegut
    so aptly wrote,
    “What should young people do with their lives today? Many
    things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable
    communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be
    cured.”
    Che Guevara said,
    again so aptly,
    “The revolutionary
    is motivated
    by feelings of love.”
    But you feisty Occupy youth
    did both, showed both,
    proved both of them right,
    all by yourselves.
    Be proud of yourselves,
    and of the toughlove
    you showed through
    your determination.
    (Toughlove being
    the only concept
    to come out of
    the Religious Right
    that has any validity
    whatsoever.)
    You woke us up,
    we slumbering
    demoralized of the
    quiet and quietistic 99%.
    Your insouciant toughlove
    hurled missiles
    of defiant truth
    at those who
    though it was
    all about the
    Kardashians,
    and not about democracy,
    equality and freedom.
    You rudely woke up
    all those
    who’d forgotten about
    The 1%
    as they gleefully followed
    The Kardashians’
    “reality” fantasy,
    were too preoccupied
    with Kim’s marriage
    or her booty,
    and couldn’t understand
    that your protest
    wasn’t about the
    Kardashians at all!
    You also showed
    your loving toughlove
    as you behaved as
    Confucius’ man,
    giving him a fish to
    feed him one day
    and teaching him
    how to fish
    to feed him for a lifetime—
    bringing in that
    fecund harvest,
    nets overflowing,
    with the empowerment,
    determination
    and hope
    that comes from
    direct action
    and bold moves,
    that comes from
    standing up
    and saying “Enough!”
    And though you did not
    personally hate
    the 1%,
    you hated correctly
    their oppression,
    their avarice,
    their greed
    which they identified
    with the good
    and the right,
    even with Jesus
    himself;
    Jesus on the Cross
    which the 1%
    mass-marketed
    into Crucifixes
    for sale at all
    better retail outlets
    for a mere
    $15.99 apiece!

    V

    For how could anyone
    want something better
    than a “shopping experience”?
    You Occupy kids did;
    and you showed us
    of the 99%
    a much, much
    better way
    because you did.
    That’s another thing
    you should never forget.

  • The Poor Poverty Line

         Government officials tell us how many people are living at or below the poverty line, but they don’t tell us how low the poverty line is. A more appropriate name would be the “near starvation line.” The federal poverty line is based on a formula arrived at in 1963, which set the poverty line at three times the annual cost of food under a “low-cost budget,” without considering housing, fuel costs, or child care costs, all of which have escalated substantially in the past forty-nine years. The poverty line is the same for all the states except for Alaska and Hawaii, which are higher. The 2010 poverty guidelines for the forty-eight Contiguous States and the District of Columbia were: $10,830 for one person; $14,570 for two people; $18,310 for three people; and $22,050 for four people. The federal poverty line is an outmoded measure that grossly misleads the public into thinking that only a small percentage of the U.S. population is poor.[1] In 2009, 43.56 million people lived below the poverty line, 14.3 percent of the population.[2]

         Researchers at Wider Opportunities for Women figured out what it really costs to maintain a bare minimum standard of living. They found that in 2010 a family with one adult, one preschooler, and one school-age child living in the Bronx in New York City needed to earn $60,934 a year, while in South Manhattan it required $91,552 a year to be sulf-sufficient.[3] This standard took into account the costs of child care, housing, health care, and transportation, in addition to food, now estimated to consume about 10 percent of a family’s budget, but it did not allow for any luxuries.

         The cost of living varies between states and localities within states, so it is customized for different localities. WOW has also computed the wages required to meet the standard. Even in the states with the lowest wages required to meet the self-sufficiency standard, the wages were far above the national minimum wage, which in 2011 was $7.25 per hour.[4] For example, in Erie County Pennsylvania in 2010 a family consisting of one adult, one preschooler, and one school age child needed $46,676 to be self-sufficient. The poverty line for a family of three was $18,310. The cash value of the basic public assistance package, including TANF, SNAP (food stamps) and WIC, amounted to $11.661 per year for three person families in Pennsylvania. This was just twenty-four percent of the Self-sufficiency standard and is sixty-four percent of the Federal Poverty Level.[5]

         If you used the self-sufficiency standard’s yearly wage as the official poverty line, rather than the government’s level, the number of poor people in the United States would be millions more than the estimated overall poverty in 2009 of 47.8 million people.[6]

         The poverty line is used in determining eligibility for some government benefits. Some benefits, such as fuel assistance and Medicaid, use a higher percentage of the poverty line than 100 percent. TANF payments are below the poverty line in all states, far below in southern states. Setting the percentage often becomes a struggle between advocates and legislators. In Massachusetts, for example, the eligibility level for shelter for homeless families in 2010 was 130 percent of the poverty line. Legislators tried to cut that back to 100 percent of the poverty line. Whichever the level, if clients earn even a dollar more, they remain homeless.

         Even the U.S. government recognizes that the poverty line is not a realistic measure. The U.S. Census taken in 2010 did some revised poverty calculations with the census data it collected. However, that was not used to revise the federal poverty line, which is codified by law.

         The income gap is one way to measure poverty, but the wealth gap is also crucial, and racial disparities are drastically greater in terms of wealth than in terms of income. “The median wealth for single white women in their prime working years, age 36-49, is 61 percent of the wealth of their male counterparts, who own $70,030. The corresponding ratio between women and men of color is nearly off the charts, at just 0.05 percent—$550 versus $11,000. Almost half of single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth. Single black women have a median wealth of $100 and Hispanic women of $120—dramatically lower than white men ($43,800), white women ($41,500) or black men ($7,900).”[7]

         Wealth is particularly important in an economic crisis. It influences your ability to retire or support yourself in old age. Women of color have had the highest foreclosure rates of any group during the current recession—both as a result of their lack of wealth and their being targeted for subprime mortgages, regardless of their income level. “Wealth also helps people get ahead. Home equity can be borrowed against to send children to college, for example, and wealth can be passed down through the generations to provide them with more stability, access and options. Family wealth is the biggest predictor of the future economic status of a child, giving lie to the old American ‘bootstraps’ mythology.”[8]

     

    Notes

    1. M. Rosenthal, Letter to the editor, Boston Globe, January 17, 2007.

    2. Tim Casey, “New poverty data for 2009—some ‘highlights.’” endpovertynow@googlegroups.com, September 16, 2010.

    3. D. Pearce, “The self-sufficiency standard for New York State 2010.” Center for Women’s Welfare, School of Social Work, University of Washington, June 2010.

    4. Some states (California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Washington) have a higher minimum wage.

    5. D. Pearce, “The self-sufficiency standard for Pennsylvania 2010-2011.” Center for Women’s Welfare, School of Social Work, University of Washington, May, 2010.

    6. Fox News, “Census: Number of poor may be millions higher,” January 5, 2011.

    7. J. Hollar, “Wealth gap yawns—and so do media,” Extra! Common Dreams, June, 2010.

    8. Ibid.

  • A WPA for History: Occupy the American Historical Association

    [Partly in response to my calls to the American Historical Association to deal with the jobs crisis in the field, AHA President Tony Grafton organized on short notice a special session at the 126th Annual Meeting of the organization in Chicago on January 6, 2012. The session, entitled "Jobs for Historians: Approaching the Crisis from the Demand Side," was well-attended, with about 250 people in the Sheraton Chicago’s Ballroom VI. Grafton chaired, and I was one of four speakers. What follows is a slightly longer version of the talk than I was able to give within the session’s time limits. (My presentation may be seen on video here).]

         First, my thanks to the AHA and to Tony Grafton for recognizing the gravity of the crisis and setting up this session on short notice. This responsiveness contrasts with the honcho I know at the National History Center in Washington who floored me with his perception of the urgency of the jobs crisis by saying that this is definitely something that the AHA should look into—in 2013!

         I want the AHA, and its sister organizations, like the Organization of American Historians, to work now, rapidly and effectively, for a new Works Progress Administration, as well as for increased funding for higher education, which is falling apart—consider as one example the University of California [For one of many accounts, see "State Cuts Fuel California Protests," Nature, December 8 2011. Anthony Grafton’s good piece, ""Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?" (New York Review of Books, November 24, 2011) nonetheless says hardly a word about the role of the collapse of public funding.] We need government funding for students and faculty, just as if this were a civilized country. The Thatcherite two-party consensus is at war with the very idea of public funding. Faculty are being cut, and young historians’ students lives are poor, brutish, and endlessly migratory as they travel across the country, trying to put together enough teaching gigs to live on. While we should of course rid ourselves of ancient hierarchies and snobberies about non-academic employment, as Tony Grafton and Jim Grossman have wisely proposed in articles in the AHA’s magazine, it’s a dead end to tell graduate students who can’t find work in academe to find it outside academe—where there are no jobs either. We need to create jobs, not to parsimoniously redistribute pieces of the shrinking pie. As Thomas Frank puts it in the December Harper’s, calling, as I do, for a new WPA ["More Government, Please!"] "if we are so concerned about job creation, why not just create jobs?" In advocating this, Frank joins growing ranks, including former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in The Nation and others. A WPA: what an obvious idea!

         I live in Manhattan, a few miles north of Zuccotti Park. For all of us, myself included, the Occupy movement has expanded our notion of the possible. But what is called "pragmatism" in the Obama era has infected the thinking of liberal intellectuals, among whom an updated version of End of Ideology pervades, with its dismissal of the obviously necessary as somehow utopian. "Now we are here," say Grafton and Grossman, and, "The reality is what it is." I hear in this echoes of Margaret Thatcher’s "There is No Alternative." Why accommodate to the unacceptable and accept the current banker-dictated immiseration as somehow necessary and god-given? It’s just dead wrong that the AHA should respond to a proposal for a WPA with archaic arguments that we should work "within an existing framework" and function only as a "clearinghouse." It’s working within existing frameworks that got us into the hole that we’re in, and we’re getting deeper and deeper into that hole. We’re losing a generation of historians. It’s time to say, "enough is enough; expand, don’t contract." Where will the money come from? Easy: tax the 1%, and corporate thieves like GE which pay zero corporate taxes. [For discussion, see the Atlantic, here.] We must get over what Wright Mills called "crackpot realism," see clearly what’s going on and think clearly about how to fix it. Don’t tell people who can’t find jobs in academe to look for other jobs outside academe that also don’t exist. It’s utopian, for instance, to urge them to find jobs in government unless we oppose the shrinking of government. Might as well tell them to look for jobs as Santa’s elves.

         (Another example of the limited qualify of AHA’s ideas of how political change comes about: executive director Jim Grossman tells me that the way to increase public funding is by "increasing the presence of historians in positions of influence" [email to JL 12/26/11, quoted with permission]. There’s an old-fashioned top-down pre-Occupy model of political change for you.)

         According to Grossman [December 16], there are congressional cutbacks in process for NEH, NHPRC and other History-related programs, including, Teaching American History and Title VI/Fulbright-Hays. Writing letters to our congresspeople is ineffectual in the face of the loony bipartisan budget-cutting mania, and I hear echoes of Grafton and Grossman’s title—"a very modest proposal"—in the kind of thinking that leads the National Coalition for History (of which the AHA is a member) to call a $2 million budget cut for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission a "victory" since the House Appropriations Committee had originally proposed a much larger cut. [The National Coalition for History gives a fuller summary.] Oh my God: Oliver Twist has asked for more! "Submit to the market," is in effect what these people are saying.

         A long history in radical caucuses has instructed me in the differences between asking our professional associations to take political as opposed to professional stands. This isn’t 1969; I’m not asking the AHA to oppose the war in Vietnam but simply to fight for the narrower but worthy goal of keeping our profession alive. If anything, my proposal can be attacked from the left as merely defending a guild interest. Along with academic freedom struggles, this is the most totally and clearly professional goal that I’ve ever fought for. Congress chartered the AHA in 1889 to promote History. That’s what it should do.

         Despite Grafton and Grossman’s insistence that we get real and abandon utopianism, the things that they propose founder on the rocks of the reality of reduced budgets everyplace: the economic collapse that limits employment in academe also limits employment in museums, archives, editorial fields, government on all levels, and private corporations. So, preparing graduate students for jobs in non academic fields sounds nice, but it will take years to have whatever impact it might have, and the grad students don’t have the time: it’s deck-chair stuff, while the society and the profession steam towards the iceberg.

         Consider the employment situation in two areas that G and G pose as alternatives: museums and archives.

         Tony Grafton has a lively piece on historians working in museums in the latest issue of AHA’s Perspectives on History. But at the back of the book, there are ads for 76 jobs, of which only one is non-academic. Some clearinghouse! The person who is the subject of his article on historians in museums has a temporary two-year position in a museum, and the article ends somewhat anti-climactically, "Let’s hope more institutions find ways to give early-career scholars a taste of public history." This is pious—I almost said pie in the sky—at a time when, speaking of art museums, Notion’s Capitol reports that "unlike other museums around the country…, one museum [in New York] is hiring"—seeking women at $10 per hour to sleep as part of an exhibition.

         Or, consider jobs in archives, another of Grafton and Grossman’s major models:

         William and Mary College’s apprenticeships in museum and archival management, which they cite as exemplary, have, they acknowledge, "disappeared for budgetary reasons," and it’s hard to imagine states hiring more archivists as state budgets collapse. Wisconsin? California? Are you kidding?

         So, in the face of all these failures of supposedly practical alternatives to academic jobs, I’m asking for a new WPA. Liberalism in the Obama era is so decayed that it takes a radical to speak up for simple liberal values. I don’t share the nostalgia for the New Deal which is rampant in a left that has forgotten the word "socialism." I’m sure that in 1935 I would have had a critique from the left of the inadequacy of the New Deal. So my proposal for a WPA is, within the spectrum of possibilities, quite a moderate one, and should get the support of other professional organizations and individuals, left and right.

         What was the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project? It lasted from 1935 to 1943, and, with employment as its purpose, provided jobs for some 7535 people [Petra Schindler-Carter’s 1996 dissertation "Vintage Snapshots: The Fabrication of a Nation in the WPA American Guide Series"], only some of whom were historians. In History, WPA gave us such landmark projects as the 10,000 pages of interviews with former slaves in the Slave Narratives Collection, the fifty-three volumes of the American Guide Series, and the Historical Records Survey. Of course these things were flawed—consider the Popular Frontism of the state guides, or the artifacts corrupting the interviews with former slaves, as well as outright censorship by some state editors. [For specifics on the latter point, I am indebted to Ken Lawrence, co-editor, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement, Series I, Volume VI, Mississippi Narratives (1977), lxix ff. For the complete work, see George Rawick’s monumental The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (41 volumes).] All this means is that, with that experience behind us, we can design better things.

         Well, what would a new WPA look like? Tom Frank suggests that we should be sending the unemployed "into the nation’s libraries to scan old newspapers and periodicals and make these universally available online." Good—but we can go beyond that to a general program to digitize and make available on line all sorts of local records, census data, etc.

         I have been impressed by the beauty and value of what’s come through in my thoroughly unscientific sampling of people outside of my usual frame of reference; I’ve found universal enthusiasm and numerous concrete proposals. We need a new WPA Federal Writers’ Project, adapted to the changed times, needs and technologies of today. And with newer technologies, including digitization and the web, just imagine what we can do in making sources available and accessible. And that would provide valuable work for hundreds of historians.

         I asked my friend Herbert S. Klein of Stanford, historian of slavery and of Latin America and of the demographic history of the U.S., what he would like to see a new WPA produce. Quantitatively oriented, he pointed me to the work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and to Cambridge historians Wrigley and Schofield’s The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction, which is based on registers of baptisms, births and marriages in 404 parishes. Claire Jarvis, the Leicester geographer, writes of "family reconstitution" of 19th century English rural communities, "ranging from age at marriage and fertility measures to infant and child mortality rates—can be extracted …documents such as tax assessments and poor relief records are linked to the family reconstitution forms." Klein bemoaned the lack of something like this for the U.S. which would have facilitated his work on his Population History of the United States.

         James Oberly of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire asks, "what about digitizing microfilmed records of federal agencies for other than genealogical purposes?" For instance, he cites FBI’s 1000 reels of "Old German" files consisting of some 400,000 investigations during 1917-1919. Or, consider scanning all the Chicago immigrant newspapers so that they could be "available in full-text searching," with the non-English materials run "through Google Translator for rough English translations…Much as WPA workers scoured … courthouses in the 1930s making inventories of county records," says Oberle, "two thousand or so 21st century public historians could scan the platbooks and parcel transaction histories stored in each county courthouse to provide the raw materials for the study of the private ownership of land in rural America."

         Another noted historian of slavery came up with thrilling ideas: analysis of plantation records in regard to slave families, births and deaths; economic organization of the plantations, production, technologies. Record linkage to allow study of migration locally and westward through individual names in census records, presumably with such records put in electronically searchable form. Height and weight records of prisoners and soldiers; disease and class in hospital and prison records; records for the study of businesses. All in all, says Herb Klein, there’s "no lack of employment for several hundred historians."

         I should also note that although much of the excitement that I have heard has come from demographically-oriented historians, the sources that they are interested in can be used for reconstructing the lives and even biographies of ordinary people. I have done some of this manually, tracing one Revolutionary War veteran’s migrations in the early 19th century using in part the local records assembled in microfilm by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And for the living, a new WPA could undertake projects in oral history of the scope of the Slave Narratives.

         (A word about Ancestor.com, which boasts, "only a few years ago one had to go through huge numbers of library records, micro films [sic], government files and cemetery ledgers in order to trace ones ancestors and build a family tree. Today your ancestors may be just a mouse click away… Download Original Historical Documents." Ann Gordon, who is editor of the Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony at Rutgers, has called my attention to the fact that "we’ve let a for-profit corporation take over vast amounts of the nation’s local public records…You need a subscription to Ancestry to access some of the records of California created and preserved with taxpayers’ money…")

         Well, how would we get this new WPA? Let me say in regard to implementation that the AHA would hardly be alone in seeking this, and might in fact arrive after the train has left the station, jam-packed with linguists, writers and others. AHA should begin now the important work of collaborating with other relevant professional societies, including the Society of American Archivists, American Studies Association, Association for Documentary Editing, and the Organization of American Historians, as well as the Modern Language Association. Obviously this is of interest beyond the AHA. I ask the AHA to endorse the idea, draw up a draft of legislation, announce the plan and its endorsement, and reach out to the other organizations and work with those in Congress who support History. Since this is an emergency, these things should be begun right now, when the Council meets on Sunday (January 8). Perhaps a WPA could be added to John Conyers's Full Employment Bill HR 5204, though it needs to be its own program. And we should also consider the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s bill that would "authorize the creation of several ‘corps’ that will quickly offer jobs to unemployed people." [Without efforts by historians, such well-intentioned legislators will not think of jobs for historians.] Or a WPA might even be established by Executive Order by the President [as proposed by George Fish, "Open Programmatic Proposal to the Broad U.S. Left for Directly Dealing with the Present Unemployment Crisis," New Politics, February 3, 2011].

         History is worth fighting for. So, in conclusion, I salute the Occupy movement and urge us to emulate them in bringing sanity back into the U.S. mainstream. History, with its reasoned understanding of causality, is more important than ever at a time when irrationality is rampant in public discourse. Finally, there is a moral commandment. We must get real, get serious and obey the sacred commandment that we take care of our young. Let’s do it!

    # # # # #

    Epilogue: after the AHA

         Seemingly in response to my earlier articles and those of others, the AHA set up on short notice a session at the annual meeting in which I delivered a shortened version of the above paper. This session seemed in anticipation a generous and open act, but now that it’s over it seems to me that it was, as we used to say, a shuck and a jive. AHA presented the session as an opportunity for the organization to listen (cf. Hillary Clinton’s "listening tour" before her run for the Senate a few years back), but in fact what was heard was, with the exception of my paper, a rehearsal of the points that Grafton and Grossman wanted made, adding up to calls for cultural changes within the profession but not in the least dealing with the jobs catastrophe (which one panelist forthrightly called a "depression"). (For a short account of the session, see Daniel Hertz, "What to Do About Historians’ Job Crisis," In These Times, January 9, 2012.) With all this taking place at the Sheraton Hotel, a few miles away from Harpo Studios, where the Oprah show came from, I was struck by the similarities. When the massive catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina hit, Oprah called for private charity, faith, hope and self-esteem. Just like G and G’s call for an end to snobbery about non-academic employment, these things are all benign. But urging people to look for jobs where no jobs exist (museums, archives, etc.) is finally unrealistic, obfuscating and even heartless, certainly a non-solution and an evasion, as I pointed out at the end of the session. We might as well tell graduate students, in Joanne Landy’s words, to look for jobs as Santa’s elves. There was no answer to my question to the panel, "Where will the jobs come from?" Certainly not from the "cultural shift" that one panelist advocated, a sort of turning inward a la Oprah.

         I was especially dismayed by the conservative rant—no, I guess it was a liberal rant (the two are sometimes indistinguishable these days)—from panelist Professor Lynn Hunt of UCLA, a former AHA President. She saw nothing but good in the AHA’s role, for which she flacked shamelessly, and in yet another of those get-real moments which we hear so often and so haughtily delivered in the time of Obama, she informed us that it was foolish to expect the American people to tax themselves for benign social goals like a WPA (see the video of her talk). I found this display of Liberal Rage particularly striking at a time when it’s widely agreed that the Occupy movement is forcing into public discourse issues to which the two parties have been utterly blind and opening new possibilities that politicians like New York’s Governor Cuomo are bending with, albeit so far only rhetorically. The times they may be a changin', and the AHA hasn't yet heard the news.

         After the session, I was accosted by the same honcho from the National History Center who had earlier urged consideration of the jobs crisis by the AHA—in 2013! He led, in that same get-real mode, with condescension and ridicule: "Jesse, I think there is something to the program that you seek, but you should not imagine that the AHA will take on the State for such a thing."

         Others historians of standing (who are liberals but not radicals) responded, as I had, that a WPA program was totally obvious, hardly a contest for State power, and should be non-controversial. These historians could not make sense of the AHA’s passivity. (I now think that AHA’s leadership places the survival of the profession second to the tenacity, even fanaticism, with which they hold to the Obama-esque ideology that calls itself "pragmatism." It's a kind of suicide.)

         On a personal note, the reaction that I most enjoyed was that of a graduate student who prefers to remain anonymous. She commented, "for an old dude, you really can kick ass." I hope others will join me in further ass-kicking on behalf of a new WPA.

    —January 9, 2012

     

    UPDATE January 21, 2012

         After the above was completed, new information came in that the reader should have in hand, since it calls into question the whole position that the AHA has taken previously. At the heart of what Grafton and Grossman have been seeking is a claim of anti-hierarchalism: in order to deal with the job crisis, they want to change the culture of the profession so that non-academic work will no longer be seen as "plan B," but will rather be given dignity and respect equal to that of traditional scholarship and teaching. But in fact, the argument is a stalking horse for a new hierarchy in which PhDs from elite institutions will get what will still be seen as the real jobs as scholars, and the academic proletariat will have to settle for non-academic jobs.

         Grafton (University of Chicago AB 1971, AM 1972, PhD 1975) is one of four contributors (three of whom, including Grafton, hold named chairs) to "How Can We Better Prepare PhD Students for Nonacademic Careers?" University of Chicago Magazine, January-February 2012. Grafton argues, as he has previously, for preparing history graduate students for careers outside academe. But he also stresses his agreement with Chicago sociology professor Andrew Abbott, who believes that "we should not at all modify our teaching, our aspirations, and our emphases. We are in the business of perpetuating critical scholarship… we should teach to the top of the market." Grafton states in response: "I agree with Andy that we have to keep the knowledge machine rolling, and that elite departments should be teaching people to join that machine at the top… [emphasis added].

         The translation is clear: the graduates of elite departments should keep the knowledge machine rolling (wow!) as critical scholars, and doors should also be opened to bring PhDs into what Grafton calls "government, policy think tanks, foundations, and other employers that also form part of the knowledge machine…" Grafton and Grossman’s seeming quest for equality turns out to be a reinforced two-tier class system in job placement.

    # # # # #

    Grafton, Grossman and Lemisch: the debate up to now

         The above discussion began with an article by the president and executive director of the American Historical Association: Anthony T. Grafton and Jim Grossman, "No More Plan B: A Very Modest Proposal for Graduate Programs in History," in Perspectives on History, October 2011. The same authors followed up with "Plan B: The Debate Continues…", and subsequently they wrote "Plan C?" in Perspectives on History, November 2011.

         Lemisch disputed Grafton and Grossman in a series of articles: "History is Worth Fighting For: Where is the AHA?" in Perspectives on History December 2011 (published earlier on the History News Network: 11/7/11); a rebuttal to Grafton and Grossman’s "Plan B": The Debate Continues" (also published earlier on HNN). And finally, leading up to the AHA’s annual meeting, Lemisch wrote "Occupy the American Historical Association: Demand a WPA Federal Writers' Project" for the History News Network, on Truthout and on Portside.

     

    Jesse Lemisch [jesse.lemisch(at)verizon.net] is Professor Emeritus of History, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

  • The Republican primary: garbage in/garbage out

         In his appreciation of the late Lucio Magri, the Italian Marxist and founder of the exemplary Il Manifesto newspaper, Perry Anderson tells the story in the most recent New Left Review of the trashing a young Magri took from Italian Communist Party elder Enrico Berlinguer for a speech Magri wrote that bordered on the substantive.

         “Magri,” Berlinguer said, “you have yet to learn that in politics one needs the courage of banality.”

         Leftists avoiding the Republican debates like the pox are missing some classic political banalities. And some quintessential propaganda moments, too. For a taste, here’s a bit of what former Mass. Governor and Republican presidential front runner Mitt Romney served up to supporters after clinching the New Hampshire party primary on Jan. 10.

    “What defines us as Americans is our unwavering conviction that we know [things] must be better. . . . We still believe in the hope, the promise, and the dream of America. We still believe in that shining city on a hill. . . . President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial… [He is] a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We must offer an alternative vision. I stand ready to lead us down a different path, where we are lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success. In these difficult times, we cannot abandon the core values that define us as unique—We are One Nation, Under God. . . . Our campaign is about more than replacing a President; it is about saving the soul of America. . . . [Obama] wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society. We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity. . . . This President puts his faith in government. We put our faith in the American people.”

         And while President Obama has done nothing but front for “free enterprise” and operate internationally with the same venal means as did his predecessor: threatening civil liberties in defense of homeland and hearth; conflating the national interest with corporate-class needs; and waging wars to secure the imperium, Romney attacks Obama because

    “He doesn’t see the need for overwhelming American military superiority. I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it. He chastises friends like Israel; I’ll stand with our friends .He apologizes for America; I will never apologize for the greatest nation in the history of the Earth.

    There’s more: fulsome phrases about “destiny,” not “detours,” and “restoring American greatness,” but you get the idea.

         Put this way, and Romney is a master of banality, his tropes effectively evoke damaging myths about America. It’s folklore the Democrats call on, too, if not so blatantly or so vulgarly: America a shining city on a hill (shades of Mario Cuomo, 1984); Europe foul with government excess and pessimism; America clean and optimistic; the U.S. a beacon for economic freedom, while government intervention is suspect for anything beyond feeding the military and cosseting the arms industry.

         Forget a revolutionary left. Where are the social democrats when we need them?

         In a sense, Romney has nothing else to run on. And Obama will run as the non-Romney. Some democratic choice for voters!

         Gene Debs, who knew the gaseous language of mainstream politicians was a cover for capital’s rapacity, once said that the key to their winning elections wasn’t their appeal to ideas, but sleight of hand. For Debs, the secret (and I’m paraphrasing) was pushing the candidate if the candidate is strong, featuring the platform if the candidate is weak, and having the band play loud if both candidate and platform did not impress.

         Welcome to Campaign 2012. I can’t wait for the Democratic response. And the band.

  • Bonus pay for teachers: An ideology, not a solution

    The New York Times front-page story extolling bonuses for “highly effective teachers” repeats claims about teacher quality and retention that are both highly inaccurate and widely-promoted, especially by those advancing “free market” policies in education. This piece marks a low in the NYT’s journalistic standards in reporting on education. (Oh for Fred Hechinger!) Dillon cites only one researcher – Eric Hanushek, from the Hoover Institution. Hanushek is a long-time academic shill for corporate market-based policies, including charter schools and linking teacher pay to standardized test scores. The Hoover Institution is a leading right-wing think tank. Their ideological commitments (and funding sources) are, of course, not mentioned. Dillon’s only (faint) attempt at objectivity is a short quote from the president of the Washington Teachers Union. His story, given the front-page no less,  is based entirely on a quote from Hanushek and  interviews with a few teachers who got the bonueses. He didn’t bother to interview teachers who did not receive bonuses. Or parents. Or researchers.  

    What readers of the New York Times will never know from its reportage is that we have solid empirical evidence that the primary reason effective teachers leave hard-to-staff schools is that they lack administrative support. (If Dillon were doing his job he would have talked with Richard Ingersoll, at University of Pennsylvania – or read his work.) Salary is not the main issue teachers stay or leave a school or the profession.

    The other canard in Dillon’s piece is his wholly unsubstantiated claim that advanced education doesn’t influence teacher quality. Does the NYT’s education reporter not know that the “nation’s report card,” the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2011 found that children in grade 4 perform better on standardized tests in reading when taught by teachers with master’s degrees? 

    As Dillon’s puff piece demonstrates, when advocates of corporate school reform, a group which includes the corporate press, find that standardized tests, their holy grail for measuring what schools should be teaching, don’t support their agenda, they just ignore the data. We do have evidence what works and what does not. We shouls use it. 

    Bonus pay isn’t a solution; it’s an ideology.

     

  • Carl Davidson, Bill Ayers, and Zig Ziglar Moments

    Adapted from an article originally published in the May 2011 Indianapolis Peace & Justice Journal—GF

         At the end of March 2011, the annual Midwest Peace and Justice Summit was held at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. (The title of the Summit was quite a misnomer, as a good 90% of the individuals and organizations participating came only from Indiana, the vast majority of these only from Indianapolis and its environs; almost no participants came from neighboring Midwestern states.) The sponsoring student group was the reconstituted Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which is quite a different organization from the old SDS that was the leading New Left group of the 1960s, especially from 1965 until it self-destructed in 1969. But the new SDS still maintains ties of nostalgia to the old one and regularly brings in as speakers former SDS leaders from that time. So it was at this year's Summit where old SDS leader Carl Davidson held a workshop on political organizing, and old SDS leader Bill Ayers was the keynote speaker.

         I myself was an activist in the old SDS from 1965-1969 on the campus of Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing. I personally knew Bill Ayers then, as he was based in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, and was active in SDS there as part of a radical countercultural tendency, the James Gang, which did not at all like the politics of the majority then in MSU-SDS, winter-spring 1969. Ayers and his followers regularly made the 60-mile trek to East Lansing to organize a breakaway tendency within MSU-SDS to oppose the “stodgy” majority, in which I played a leading role. (I’m quite proud to note that my activities in MSU-SDS are quite extensively chronicled in a well-regarded history of the anti-Vietnam War movement on non-elite universities, Kenneth Heineman’s Campus Wars [1993: New York University Press].)

         Later, after SDS's self-destruction, in which Bill Ayers played a major role, he became chief leader of what became the notorious Weather Underground, which tried to spark a socialist revolution in the U.S. through bombing selected buildings. I was glad to see that Ayers’ politics now were much more realistic, and that he finally had come around to the position we in the majority of MSU-SDS had then, that meaningful political change comes with the masses on the radicals’ side, not the radicals opposing the masses as “backward.”

         Carl Davidson was also a major leader in the old SDS, one of the principal theoreticians of the New Left. Both men, now in their late 60s (I’m only a couple of years younger, 64 at the time I originally wrote this, 65 now), have remained politically active over the ensuing decades. Ayers is now Distinguished Professor of Education Emeritus at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and Davidson is a National Co-Chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), in which I am nominally also a member (which means I sent them a check, same as my nominal membership in DSA). During the time of the heyday of the Weather Underground, the 1970s, Ayers and Davidson were bitter political opponents; now they’re political buddies, and allied crucially on many issues, generally for the good.

         But not entirely, as became evident during both these men’s separate presentations. What both gave were good old motivational pep talks on the value of radical organizing, which was seen as a pristine good in itself, irrespective of political program. They presented what were essentially Zig Ziglar moments, as if they were selling those “progressive movement” widgets: just psych yourself up for it, and your good attitude will make others want to buy those widgets. This is not the time to question whether those widgets have flaws in them that would make them unsatisfactory to the masses, who are potential widget buyers. Just psych yourself up to believe these are good widgets we’re pushing, and that if we sell them right, people will find them valuable and want them. Radical political organizing, in essence, is the same as selling refrigerators, and even Eskimos need them.

         But there are significant flaws in the left political widgets we movement activists wish to sell, and that’s the rub. Our widgets simply need vast improvement, and believe it or not, the masses know this. That’s why, even in this time of the continuing Great Recession, they are ignoring the left. While Bill Ayers didn’t talk much about left programs in his speech (which are the very essence of those left widgets), Carl Davidson did—and what he said was that good programmatic ideas are not nearly as important as organizing what is essentially a political machine to win the passive acceptance of the people and thus garner votes. Same as the ward-heeling Daley machine in Chicago, where Davidson lived for years, and to which he constantly made semi-favorable reference.

         And in this presentation, Davidson passed over the crucial flaw in the left widgets being proffered: the lack of a coherent political program for dealing with the unemployment crisis now. While Davidson talked about the importance of creating Green Jobs (which I support, as does Ayers), those kinds of jobs are off in the future. But the need for good-paying jobs that produce valuable goods and services is now, and without addressing the pressing economic issues that are undermining the worldwide economy now (and jobs is at the heart of them), which are what’s really on peoples’ minds, all those Zig Ziglar motivational moments are going to flop. Want to build the left? Start talking to ordinary people about the need for jobs now, and how we can concretely fight for jobs now, not off in the future. Then people will listen more when we talk about the importance of gay and women’s rights, struggling against racism, and opposing neocolonial wars like the one in Afghanistan that are futile in terms of GI lives lost; dead-end in winning the “hearts and minds” of the native populace, who, like the Vietnamese over 40 years earlier, resent dying for foreign imperial ambitions; and incapable of procuring either stable empire or giving the 99% who make up the vast bulk of the U.S. population anything to hold on to or cherish except rationalizations that the 1% are somehow part of “us” while Afghans are not.

         This above was originally written before Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy movements burst out and confronted power in the most dynamic way some six months later. Yet so much of what I wrote then was only confirmed by these subsequent actions. The organized left was caught off-guard and could play no significant role in the Occupy movements, despite the political naïveté and ignorance of many of the youthful instigators and participants. While the organized left was off selling widgets, masses of people were seething underground and would break out in rebellion unbeknownst to the organized left that had long “prophesized” that such rebellion would inevitably happen, but which, when it did, caught the left off-guard and unprepared to step in and “lead” as a “vanguard.” It also exposed that woeful lack of political education the left had been supposedly providing through its incessant ideological wars over “correct strategy and tactics” among its various splinters, offshoots and twigs over the course of decades that was supposed to somehow “educate” the masses, but only alienated them. New forms of struggle and new concerns emerged out of the Occupy movements that were not covered by the ideological “field manuals” of the traditional left, which left the left to follow, and not “lead” as the “field manuals” had predicted.

         Still, the Occupy movements themselves failed to grasp how to adequately connect with the 99% whose interests they championed; they could only do this obliquely, with varying results, and could not channel the mass sympathy the Occupy movements had among working people into active, committed support. That the Occupy movements had the sympathy of the vast majority of the 99% was always apparent; not only did public opinion polls show it consistently, the “mass” organizations that relied on being passively accepted by the 99%, such as organized labor and the Democratic Party, embraced the Occupy movements in order to try and channel that enthusiasm these movements generated. And once again, the nature and severity of the unemployment crisis remained unaddressed, not only by the Democrats (we could expect that), not only by organized labor (despite much rhetoric, it’s done essentially nothing to reach out to the unemployed, many of whom are former union members whose union membership and involvement ended with their jobs), but by the youthful rank-and-file of the Occupy movements themselves, who seemed quite unaware that they, too, would someday cease being students or student hangers-on and become unemployed workers (only around 55% of recent college graduates will find jobs,* and this among one of the more privileged strata of the 99%!). So while the Occupy movements have given the left a new, justifiable hope, they also exposed the left’s failure to engage the masses, who still remained unimpressed and uninterested in the traditional left widgets so avidly pushed by the likes of Davidson and Ayers, but which were regarded as irrelevant by both the vast majority of the 99% and by the Occupy movements themselves. Not always for good and clear reasons, of course; but not always for bad and foggy ones either.

    Note

    * 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.

     

    George Fish is an unemployed worker and socialist writer in Indianapolis who regularly contributes to New Politics. His proposal for a new WPA, “Open Programmatic Proposal to the Broad U.S. Left for Directly Dealing with the Present Unemployment Crisis,” was posted on the New Politics site Feb. 3, 2011. See also Brian King’s supportive response and historical notes on the WPA of the 1930s, “Jobs for All,” April 8, 2011; and Jesse Lemisch’s “Occupy the American Historical Association: Demand a WPA Federal Writers' Project,” Nov. 27, 2011.

  • How school reform gets hijacked by the Billionaire Boys Club: A cautionary tale for the Left

    A powerful new video, “The truth behind Stand for Children,” tells a cautionary tale for the Left.   Even if you already understand how charter schools have become a vehicle for destruction of public education, take five minutes to watch this concise analysis of how “Stand for Children,” which began as a grassroots organization of parents fighting for increased school funding and reform,  was taken over by the most powerful educational lobby in the world, the Billionaire Boys Club. The most chilling aspect of the video was, for me,  the clip in which powerbrokers brag that they’ve outsmarted the Chicago Teachers Union. 

    In the article I’ve written for the upcoming issue of New Politics, I discuss this defeat and what we should learn from it.  In a nutshell, we have to expect that activists who are democratizing the unions are  going to make mistakes, and this one was a lollapalooza. Just as did Occupy Wall Street, the CTU leadership and Chicago teachers are standing up to THE most powerful force in the world – US capitalism and its political executive committee. Remember that Chicago’s mayor is Rahm Emmanuel. So after you watch the video, take a look at the CTU website and Facebook page. They’re really inspring.

    It made my blood boil to watch the clip of the smug Masters of the Universe brag about taking down the union.  Clearly they think they’ve won; they mistake idealism for naivete.  But this new generation of  teacher union activists is passionate AND savvy. As long as they stay moored in their vision of a democratic union that  mobilizes its members to fight with parents and students for schools that serve all kids well, I think the Billionaire Boys Club is in for an unpleasant (for them) surprise.

  • Add another Frustration to Being Unemployed: A Case in Point from Indiana’s WorkOne State Employment Agency

         (I’m sure unemployed workers outside of Indiana have encountered very similar problems, and can relate well to this particular situation; just one more frustration added to the already-present myriad frustrations of being unemployed and not able to find a job. Originally published in the July 2011 Movement, monthly newspaper of the Indianapolis Peace & Justice Center—GF)

         On Friday, June 3, 2011, early in the morning, I went to an appointment at my nearby WorkOne office on Indianapolis’ Ease Side to get help with my resume. I had a good idea already of what my resume problems were, and hoped for concrete assistance on dealing with an unorthodox work record that didn’t show vital experience in certain areas where I had education, as well as workable tips on how to pursue a job search that would enable me to weed out potential employers who just wouldn’t be interested. Instead I got a canned spiel on resume writing in general, covering everything in more excruciating detail that I already knew, and the constant admonition “Stay Focused!” whenever I tried to ask a concrete question. Finally, after being written off for any job using my educational experience (I’m a college grad, plus a trained paralegal, but with limited experience in several key areas) because of “lack of experience,” I was then asked—oh so helpfully—by this resume “expert” about my unskilled warehouse experience. She asked really telling questions, such as this one (really!): “Did you ever load and unload trucks?” Real-world translation of the “skill” involved: “Did you ever pick up boxes?” But no warehouse employer is even remotely interested in a resume for essentially-unskilled warehouse experience! Or even skilled or semi-skilled, such as operating a forklift. When I protested this, I was quickly shown the door.

         A co-worker of mine at the strictly temp job both of us have, that of scoring the state school system standardized achievement tests such as ISTEP, a job that requires all of us to have college degrees, even though it only pays $10/hour, had a similar, frustrating WorkOne experience—that of a different employment “specialist” offering equally vacuous “assistance” with his resume. He wrote the following on his experience with two WorkOne resume building workshops: “I discovered at the workshops that unless one's life experience fit their preconceived cookie-cutter notions, they weren't really prepared to be of much assistance. The information they offered was more geared to someone who walked in off the street having no clue whatsoever on how to construct a basic resume. I'm pretty certain I learned a lot more from the book on resumes I purchased at the local bookstore than from the time wasted at those workshops.”

         From the above, it would seem that the only “employment assistance” that’s of any value from WorkOne is that of assisting its already-employed “experts” to keep their jobs, no matter how much they fail to address and satisfy the actual needs of the Indiana unemployed.

         And another thing—both of us got the same old saw that “There’s no such thing as ‘overqualified.’” Yet, that’s what we run through all the time in real job searches. The most common refrain heard among my fellow college grad co-workers looking for permanent work: “We can’t use you because you’re overqualified and underexperienced.” But of course, as college grads, we are qualified and experienced for strictly unskilled jobs, as WorkOne experts would tell us—but try and get one of those with a college degree!

         And Indiana wonders why there’s a brain drain! Is WorkOne part of the answer?

         But that’s just part of the malaise of unemployment and job search in Indiana. The fact is, all but low-paying jobs are disappearing from the state, and while we know the Republicans aren’t serious about creating jobs, if we go by the record we see the Democrats aren’t serious either. Both parties are committed, despite what they say, to settling for low-wage service jobs, with maybe a few high-paying specialized and professional jobs at the top. So Indiana is quite willing to import college grads with the “right” degrees from elsewhere, while leaving those Indiana college grads already here but who have the “wrong” degrees either packing up and getting out, or else ending up economically stranded—as my co-workers and I are, many of us having worked this strictly temp job for years now, coming back every year because there’s nothing else.

         Yes, it’s madness. But yes also, no one seems to care. And WorkOne has a successful jobs program, only it doesn’t tell the taxpayers what it really is—churn out worthless “assistance” programs that keep WorkOne employees employed, while the unemployed who need serious help can’t get it.

  • A Taxonomy of Capitalist Sharks

         Trying to reform Capitalism is a futile as preaching Vegetarianism to a Shark. And nearly as dangerous. Stay away from those gaping greedy Jaws if you don’t want to get eaten alive—the sorry Fate of many idealistic Liberals and Social Democrats! (See fig. 1)

     

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    Figure 1

         The sorry History of five hundred years of capitalist ‘Progress’ points to the Conclusion that, by its very Nature, Capitalism cannot expand without devouring Workers’ Lives and chewing up the Natural World—no more than a Shark can survive without gorging on fresh Flesh and Blood.

         The original Breeding Ground of Capitalist Sharks was Western Europe, where they set about devouring the Commons, knocking down the Peasants’ Cottages with the thrashing Tails, hanging the Homeless as ‘Vagabonds,’ driving free Yeomen Farmers off the Green Land into Dismal Factories, devaluing the Labor of Women, and persecuting them as Witches.

         Capitalist Sharks were sighted off the American Shores as early as 1492, ravaging the Caribbean. In their savage Hunger for Silver and Gold, they nearly exterminated the Native Peoples. So the greedy Colonial sharks were obliged to replace dead Native Americans with ever fresh supplies of Black Africans, kidnapped and sold to be worked to Death as Slaves. In their Home Waters, the voracious European White Sharks grew larger and hungrier, battening on Generations of toiling Men, Women and Children, sucking in and chewing up their Substance through fourteen daily hours of Dreary Labor in soot-darkened Satanic Mills or under the Lash on their American Plantations.

         Naturally, as the Capitalist Sharks grew their Appetites increased, and by the end of the 19th Century ravenous full-grown Imperial sharks were swarming in a Feeding Frenzy, driven by a desperate Urge to devour the teeming Populations and fabulous natural Wealth of Africa and Asia.

         As the 20th Century dawned, the Imperial Sharks began attacking each other (as sharks in a Feeding Frenzy will). The larger Capitalist Sharks naturally overcame the smaller, and the surviving Giants continued slashing and biting each other around the Globe, thrashing up blood-tinged Foam across both Oceans. Soon the various National Species were forming into great Schools for the purpose of Mutual Aggression. Political Ichthyology distinguishes at least four such Schools: the freemarketus omnovorus, the fascii viciocii, the stalinea rapacea, and the theocraticus ferocius.

     Image

    After each Orgy of Mutual Destruction, the surviving Species enjoyed a few prosperous Years of fat Feeding until leaner Years drove them to new Hecatombs.

         But by the 21st Century, the older Species of European White Sharks were being challenged in their former Feeding Grounds by younger breeds of fast-growing Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Russian and Brazilian capitalist Sharks, better adapted for preying on the local varieties of Fish and increasingly more competitive. Soon new Oceans were churning with Blood, but with so many Sharks competing, the supply of big Game-Fish was soon depleted, and only the Masses of Little Fish were left to prey on.

         The most successful Capitalist Sharks tempered their Ferocity with Guile. As the pickings got slimmer, these smarter Sharks adopted Protective Coloration to lurk in Shallow Shoals where they could sneak up on the Littler Fish (the only ones left) and devour them. Some clever Capitalist Sharks painted themselves Green. Others pretended to be Vegetarians the better to lull their Prey!

         Political Ichthyologist Doktor Bertolt Brecht of Berlin predicted this development as early as 1930: ‘If sharks were men there would be an end to all little fish being equal, as is the case now. Some would be given important offices and be placed above the others. Those who were a little bigger would even be allowed to eat up the smaller ones. That would be altogether agreeable for the sharks, since they themselves would more often get bigger bites to eat. And the bigger little fish, occupying their posts, would ensure order among the little fish, become teachers, officers, engineers in box construction, etc.’

         Following in Herr Dr. Brecht’s august Footsteps, your Humble Author has spent the past fifty Years patiently collecting Specimens of ‘vegetarian’ Shark behavior among both Left-finned and Right-finned Species from every corner of the Globe. These Anatomical Descriptions are designed to help the Reader recognize the different Species as they swim across the Aquarium of her TV Screen. This ‘Taxonomy of Capitalist Sharks’ is his modest scientific Contribution to the Cause of the Working People and other Small Fry in the Class Struggle (which the Rich have been waging against the Poor as a one-way affair for far too long!).

         Recent studies in Political Ichthyology have identified seventeen new species of Vegetarian Sharks, including the Oxymoronic Clean-Coal Shark, the Great Green Oil-Derrick Shark, the Elusive Trickle-Down Economics Shark, the Philanthropic-Billionnaire Shark, the Humanitarian War Shark, The Compassionate Conservative Shark, the Safe Nuclear Power Shark, the Slippery Shared-Sacrifice Shark, and the Change-You-Can-Believe-In Shark.

         These Corporate Sharks pretend to be Vegetarians, but never forget they really are Man-eating Capitalist Sharks! No point in trying to get them to give up Human Flesh or even go on a Diet, as Liberal Reformers urge us to do. They can’t. It’s not in their Nature. (See fig. 1 again)

     Image

         Today, these ‘Vegetarian’ Species are flourishing, despite the increasing Mistrust of the Little Fish, some of whom even want to ban Sharks of any kind from entering the Shoals(!) Indeed, through Natural Selection the surviving Little Fish have become smarter, and today Little-Fish Scientists and Whistle-Blowing Blowfish have been trying to understand why so many Little Fish continue to be fooled by their Predators’ apparently transparent ‘Vegetarian’ Disguises. The reason is that the Corporate Sharks have evolved glowing, Multicolored Media Eyes with which they are able to hypnotize their Prey. Corporate Species also inject a poisonous green Substance called ‘Campaign Contributions’ into the Small Fish General Assembly—effectively paralyzing its Members.

         These same Corporate Sharks also fatten different Species of Judas Goatfish, bred to mislead the other Fish. For example, the Demagogic Goat-Fish divide the Little Fish by tricking different Species into fighting each other—Whitefish against Black Bass, Smoked Herring against Smoked Salmon—meanwhile blaming division on the crafty Hooked-Nose Gefiltefish. At the same time, VoteForMe Goatfish are bred to ‘represent’ the Little Fish by luring them into the waiting Jaws of Lurking Privatizer Sharks (who of course swallow up everything including the Schools where Fish Children learn to swim). There are also innocent-looking Do-Gooder Goatfish which lurk in NGOs, Think-Tanks, Universities, Trade-Union Bureaucracies and Left Parties.

         The Irony of this situation is that the Billionaire Sharks and their pet Judas-Fish cry ‘Class War!’ every time some Liberal Little-Fish dares pronounce Forbidden Words like ‘Tax’ and ‘Spend.’ Nonetheless, many Little Fish secretly suspect that the Billionnaire Sharks don’t want to see their bloated Corporate Profits spent on Fish-Nursuries, Fish-Schools, Fish-Nests, Fish-Food and Clean Water. Meanwhile, Neo-Liberal Privatiser Sharks have nearly devoured the Undersea Commons in the so-called ‘Developing Oceans’, and now their Gaping Jaws are taking great Bites out of the Public Goods of the ‘Advanced’ Oceans.

     Image

         Today, Capitalist Sharks, first sighted off South America in 1492, continue devouring the Planet, penetrating every remote Corner of the Earth, polluting the Seas, privatizing the Fresh Water, fouling the Air, cutting the Trees, killing off the Creatures and enslaving the People in their ever-increasing Hunger for more Profits. These Profits are deposited by the Capitalist Sharks in Fish-Banks and inflatable Underwater Bubbles, and in 2008 one of them exploded, plunging the world’s Oceans into Dark Depression.

         Meanwhile, the Waters were growing warmer as a result of years of Frenzied Thrashing by Capitalist Sharks, and heat destroys the Coral Reefs on which the Little Fish Feed. Soon there will be no more Little Fish for the Capitalist Sharks to feed on, but this does not stop their Frenzied Thrashing for Profits. From this Somber Observation, Political Ithyology draws that Inference that Capitalism is no more likely to reform itself than a Man-Eating Shark is likely to embrace Vegetarianism. The Somber Inference points to an Unavidable Conclusion. To survive, we Billions of Small-Fry need to to turn the tables by uniting globally and waging Class War on the Billionnaire Loan Sharks who rule the World.

         The name of the Game is ‘Billions vs. Billionaires.’ Numbers are the Small-Frys’ trump suit. “We are many, they are few” the Poet Shelley famously wrote (anticipating the ‘99 percent-ers’ by 200 years). As for Strategy, if there is one chance in a hundred of winning this Game, Planetary Self-Organization is the card for us to play. Not by fighting capitalist Terror with Terror, capitalist Violence with more Violence (in any case, they have all the guns) but through Solidarity and militant, united Resistance.[1]

         Sound like a pipe-dream, Dear Reader? Just remember this: Thanks to the Internet, mass global Civil Disobedience can be organized in Real Time. The Day when all us Little Creative-Working-Fish wake up and go on a Planetary General Strike will be the Day when the Power of the Bankers and Corporations dissolves into thin Air. That day could be Tomorrow.[2]

    Notes

    1. Interested in joining a multi-player, online videogame called Billions vs. Billionaires (B&B)? Visit this Wiki set up for people interested in translating ecotopian visions and revolutionary class struggle tactics into entertaining popular foms designed to go viral and help save the world. Become part of phase one: ‘Collective Creation.’

    2. These lines were written in August 2010. Five months later, the‘Arab Spring’—linked by Facebook, Twitter and Aljazeera—spread from Tunisia to Egypt, Morocco, Yemen, Syria and beyond, inspiring workers in Wisconsin (USA) to fight back against the Right-Wing capitalist offensive. Ironically, Arabs were ‘teaching democracy’ to Americans. The Fall brought Occupy Wall St., which then went viral around the world. What will the next ‘tomorrow’ bring??? (For a glimpse of a possible future, visit this link.

     

    Richard Greeman is the author of Beware of ‘Vegetarian’ Sharks! Radical Rants and Internationalist Essays (Illustrated), Praxis, 2008. Free downloads here.

         

  • Occupy Wall Street and the Democrats

    New York magazine published an article called “2012=1968?”  Author John Heilemann implies that Occupy Wall Street should forge the “working alliance between Democrats and the movement” that Todd Gitlin hopes for. But in my view this alliance would be a suicidal disaster; it would rob the movement of its potential to spark real change. OWS needs to fight for remedies to foreclosures, bank ripoffs, grotesque student debt, devastating attacks on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., while challenging America’s fundamentally unequal and undemocratic economic and political structure. The Democrats, with their deep Wall Street ties, can’t be genuine allies in either dimension. The Dems may be pressured to make some immediate reforms — and we should welcome those reforms– but sustained pressure will come only from a movement independent of them. And of course the Democratic Party can’t and won’t work for a new democratic society free from corporate rule. How could it?

  • Euthanasia for the Rentier

         The immediate European economic crisis demonstrates, if there were any lingering doubts, that the architecture of the European Monetary Union is incompatible with countercyclical intervention. It was designed solely to contain inflation at 2%. There is no central fiscal authority and no mandate to either maintain acceptable levels of employment or to sustain working class living standards against the ravages of the business cycle. As it stands, not one proposal emanating from Europe's ruling classes intends to anything beyond saving its banks to forestall further private sector contagion, while asking these banks to accept nothing more than a modest write down of a small portion of their toxic assets. And even this request exempts the European Bank and the IMF. The further provision of underwriting loan guarantees to ailing private lenders to augment the hastily cobbled bailout fund is like recruiting kidney donors in a dialysis ward by offering them free health insurance.

         The more ramified component is the imposition of draconian austerity on Europe's southern periphery. It has only two functions with the same purpose: to transfer public wealth from debtor nations to private financial interests abroad, and to contract the internal price structure of these self-same nations in the vain hope that this will lead to an improvement in their balance of trade needed to service foreign debt obligations and recapitalize the banks.

         Therefore, even in the highly unlikely event that the balance of trade were to actually improve for the south—and not merely further balloon deficits as burgeoning unemployment imposes additional demands on these states—it would have little stimulative effect on the internal markets of European capitalism's weak links. Funds that would otherwise supplement domestic demand would be drained instead to satisfy external debt obligations. And to the extent that the targeted nations contract, the living standards of German workers and their employers' profits—whose livelihoods are codependent on the availability and expansion of foreign markets—would likewise be imperiled. German balance of trade surpluses have hitherto provided the same internal function as government deficits would have by supplementing aggregate demand as their internal market shrinks. This, of course, makes the condescending lectures from German elites all the more insufferable. The vaunted financial frugality of the Merkel government was only made possible by the wholesale transfer of income from the supposedly profligate south. The bailout package is simply a far more painful route to the same end.

         That this could be a cause for fitful celebration on the world's stock markets truly signals that European capitalism has entered a senile Brezhnev-like state of consciousness; a mindset in which passengers rocking to and fro on a nonfunctional railroad satisfies everyone solely by providing the illusion of movement. When that illusion is shattered, say, by noncooperative Greek workers, panic again ensues until the next round of mindless shaking occurs.

         Without a meaningful revival in capital accumulation, this entire process simply kicks the can down the road and buys the system some time. And the Weimar-obsessed German and French bankers are proving themselves champion can kickers in every sense. The entire EU still operates as if it were subject to the gold standard and gold supplies expand by about 2% per year, not so coincidentally the target inflation rate of the EMU. But the euro is not a commodity money. It has no intrinsic value, beyond the implicit content it acquires against the circulation of commodities whose net value is itself the product of the collective labor time productively expended by Europe's working classes.

         If European economies maintained separate non-commodity monies, foreign currency exchange rates would have the function of reducing units of labor of average skill and intensity in each national market into their foreign equivalents. Were a trade imbalance to persist, assuming exchange rates to be freely floating, this would signal the need for modifications in the pre-existing arrangements; a change in how the average labor hour expended in one economy is equated with the value-creating power of an average hour in another. The eurozone was designed, on the other hand, as if labor power in its various national components were equally productive, that a worker of average Greek education and training would operate with the same level of efficiency in a German factory as the typical German worker. Under such hypothetical circumstances, European specialization would presumably take place on the basis of those spheres in which each nation had a relative advantage due to other circumstances. But there would be no a priori reason for nations to experience persistent trade imbalances.

         The working class of the southern periphery of Europe, however, has not experienced the same mix of training, education and industrial discipline as its northern counterparts. A unitary currency therefore puts them at a dual disadvantage. It systematically "overvalues" the output of the periphery relative to the northern core. Therefore, unable to trade without running up huge deficits in their current account balances, the south is also unable to compensate for this disadvantage by allowing their currencies to float downward. They can only, under existing circumstances, rebalance by deflating their entire cost structure—forcing aggregate prices below aggregate values—which would require acceptance of prolonged semi-depression-like conditions. This is generally unacceptable to Greeks, bankers aside, for obvious reasons.

         Otherwise, the persistent drain on aggregate demand (domestic spending) caused by the excess of imports over exports must be offset, all other things being equal, by government deficits on a one-to-one basis. These budgetary deficits, like the trade imbalances that invoke them, therefore take on the character of being a structural component of the system's architecture. The relative portion of Greek government outlays composed of debt may undoubtedly be exaggerated by the ingrained habits of elite tax avoidance. But the absolute size of the debt is dictated by the leakages from the domestic economy itself, not by how effective the state is in harvesting its potential tax base.

         Were there a politically accountable fiscal authority in the euro zone, the expansion of euros could be aligned solely to democratic—and in this case, also counter cyclical—considerations rather than the material constraints of a marginal mining industry that no longer bears any inherent connection to the issuance of currency. Conceptually there are no a priori limits on the expansion of public demand denominated in a fiat currency, unlike a gold-based currency, beyond the productive capacity of the system to accommodate the additional public demands placed on it. The expansion of euro-induced demand, stated otherwise, is only intrinsically constrained by the limits of inflation. That limit is reached when demand expansion cannot induce any further capacity utilization or increased output. The system can then only respond to such additional demand by enhanced rationing via price increases.

         But we have seen across the board that capitalist elites seek to confine the operations of the public sector to that which would remain feasible were it actually subject to the discipline of the gold standard. The euro zone architects accomplished this most directly by their deliberate failure to create a consolidated fiscal authority answerable to a European parliament. In compelling the operations of the various component states to finance their sovereign operations by filling the gap between tax revenues and expenditures with loans from private financiers, the European ruling classes assured themselves truncated democracies ever subjected to the discipline of the bond market.

         But the dirty little secret is this. The final destruction of commodity-based monies heralded by the end of the Bretton Woods agreements in 1971 called into existence the very means and practical possibility of removing one significant tentacle of the ruling class's death grip over democracy. Fiat money contains within it the potential for euthanizing the rentier class. It does so by providing alternative path to finance public provisions at the central level, and can be extended much as revenue sharing does in the American context to its component states. No longer does liquidity first have to be pumped out of the private sector for it to then flow back to the market as state-induced demand. Because the state (or in this case, the European Central Bank) is the monopoly issuer of its currency, it (or the European Union) is not revenue-constrained. It does not need to operate by first diverting the stream of financial flows into the state so that the state can then access privately-produced commodities.

         This means that entities which are sovereign with respect to the issuance of currency, and whose external debts are payable in that currency, no longer need operate on the same financial basis as the private sector. There are no external limitations on the computer keystrokes (deposits) that sovereign entities can make to the accounts of private producers in payment for state purchases. The state does not need revenue on hand (tax receipts) or access to lines of credit (debt) before it can access goods and services.

         Of course, the European Union is no different from the United States, Britain and every other state issuer of currency, all of whose governing classes studiously refuse to exploit the openings this has created for fear of losing effective veto power over the state. This refusal is a soft sell given the abject ignorance on the part of American babbitry in particular, whose politicians cannot and will not fathom how any economic entity can operate on principles other than those that apply to any well-run middle class household in a capitalist economy. If American elites had an ounce of sophistication, the ginned up hysteria of a US facing a credible sovereign debt crisis could be written off as a cynical ploy to cow the electorate. But the sad reality is that this hysteria actually reflects the viral cluelessness of American politicians and business leaders.

         The Europeans are more straightforward. There banks have historically been entrusted as the first line of defense against the outsized appetites of democracy and a menacing reminder to wayward rebellious classes that the political structure does, after all, have definite capitalist limits. The European Bank by its charter can only operate by adherence to accepted business practices and it, in concert with other private banks, are obviously not above fomenting sovereign debt crises where there is an urgent need to redistribute income upwards in the face of flagging profits.

         But socialists too are missing in action on this front. There are many good egalitarian reasons to tax the rich. And they stand on their own merits. But a countercyclical program requires an increase in net spending, not merely an equal transference of spending power from the rich to government. In the American context, taxes on the massive pool of retained corporate profits (net business savings) matched by any addition to federal outlays would indeed be expansionary. There would be a net increase in total domestic spending. But a program that redistributes the incidence of taxes from the working class to the wealthy, without any net additions to aggregate demand, simply finances existing outlays on a more "equal" basis. (Of course, "equal" in this context is a misnomer insofar as all taxes paid by the rich were first pumped out of the working class by capital through their appropriation of surplus labor time.) So for "taxing the rich" to be an expansionary demand as well as a limited demand for justice, there must be parallel tax relief for the working class that exceeds the additional taxes imposed on the wealthy. A progressive overhaul of tax policy that is also countercyclical must free more spending power from below while maintaining or expanding the existing level of government outlays.

         But overhauling tax codes is the most roundabout means to countercyclical ends. The only immediate way to break the grip of Wall Street and the Bourse over the state is to press for a real democratization of fiscal authority. Socialists need to break out of the existing business consensus. The expansion of "entitlements" and mass public works projects are dependent only on the willingness of the state's central bank to create demand ex nihilo, an operation that fiat money arrangements fully support. It is by these means that the system's output can be expanded, permitting the removal of a growing quantity of it from the circuit of capitalist expansion and allowing this quota—now lost to capital formation—to be placed into public service. This too is not without difficulty, but these problems need not be discussed in this context.

         Capital is understandably wary of this. And it is not only because of the tight labor markets and enhanced working class power that this would sustain, though this is undoubtedly always a consideration. Business suspects that the expansion of induced profits would fall short of the additional future taxes needed to service and retire the ballooning public debt now summoned into existence to set this process in motion. And if the system was indeed subject to the discipline of the private bond market—as it is under current arrangements—such suspicions would be well grounded. But this again represents an inverted understanding of the mechanics of public debt and taxes under a fiat system of money. If this is a constraint, it is by legal alignment rather than operational necessity. When the state spends, it actually injects an asset (dollars, pounds, or conceivably, euros etc.) into the private sector. It can simultaneously neutralize this additional demand through taxation; or it can issue a bond for the same amount thereby swapping the non-interest-bearing asset (dollars or euros) for an interest bearing asset on a one-to-one basis. But the point is this. Governments spending at the central level, taxing and bond issuance are three separate and distinct operations, none of which is intrinsically tied to any other and all of which have distinct purposes. Government spending per se creates a net addition to private assets. This means that bond issuance involves no actual borrowing from the private sector whatsoever. The sole purpose of bond issuance is to allow government to influence interest rates levels in the private sector. Fiat money eliminates the need for any state reliance on the private banking system; it eliminates any need to face the consequences of "sovereign" debt crises. In the hands of socialists it would mean euthanasia for the rentier class; the complete severance of governmental operations from the private banking system and a huge victory in the war for democracy.

         Neither is there any inherent economic reason to retire debt at some specified future date by raising taxes. Taxes shred demand. They do not finance government operations. They are a tool for socialists to redistribute access to consumption goods in favor of the working class, the poor, the disabled and the aged and to do so while siphoning demand from the wealthy before inflationary pressures mount. Whether public debt multiplies permanently is irrelevant to these considerations. Government debt need impose no burdens on tax payers.

         There have been many imaginative blueprints by the left for a Greek workers' government, but—whether acknowledged or not— any actions needed to realize these program would certainly result in the expulsion of Greece from the euro zone. It would entail the reintroduction of a national fiat currency, the drachma, and either a debt default or a write down of debt payable in drachmas. Workers in the European core would be squeezed to compensate for the banking losses that capital will insist has been imposed by "irresponsible" Greek workers. Though a Greek workers' government would have all the benefits that fiat money accesses, the retaliatory trade barriers that will likely ensue would nevertheless wall them in. From north to south, all the reactionary nationalist poisons would be unleashed throughout the continent.

         Any real program based on working class internationalism should build instead on the democratic openings made possible by the modern financial system. In the US and Britain this struggle first needs to expose the "debt" crisis for the complete farce it is. It is nothing more than capitalism holding democracy in check as the profit system unravels. But for the southern periphery of Europe, whose national constituents cannot issue their own currencies, this ideological struggle also demands a continent wide struggle for an overhauled, consolidated fiscal authority under democratic supervision. If the euro system is to be maintained for the convenience of capital, the periphery will need to run perpetual deficits until the continental level of working class productivity is equalized. And beyond that, the general need for countercyclical spending would mean that the European Central Bank would have to finance the additional deficits in all member states that arise when capital accumulation stagnates. There is absolutely no reason why these deficits, whether structural or conjunctural, need to be underwritten by the private financial sector with all the punitive measures and restrictions this entails both to workers in the periphery and in the core of Europe. Let capital, not the working class, rescue the private banking system.

         For now, it is death to the rentier class and not the call for isolated workers' governments that allows a way out for Europe's rank and file.

     

    Barry Finger is on the editorial board of New Politics.

  • Occupy the American Historical Association: Demand a WPA Federal Writers' Project

         As part of his program to deal with America's economic catastrophe, economist Robert Reich has proposed a revival of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. Reich is hardly alone in putting forth such notions—I advocated a new WPA Federal Writers' Project ("History is Worth Fighting for, But Where is the AHA?")—and it is so obvious an idea that it can hardly be called ingenious. But the American Historical Association has responded to such ideas with lectures urging us to get real: AHA President Anthony T. Grafton and Executive Director Jim Grossman have written in the AHA magazine Perspectives that their goal is limited "to train[ing] fewer historians or to find[ing] a more diverse array of employment opportunities…," and they present us with what they themselves deem "a very modest proposal." They want to limit the AHA's activities to "working within an existing framework" and functioning as a "clearinghouse." Mired in the "pragmatic" politics of the Obama era, which have gotten us into the deep hole that we are in, the AHA has not begun to face the reality of the crisis in history.

         Historians of the future will look back on this period in the way that we now see the reassuring words offered in the early stages of the Great Depression. What can they have been thinking, these historians of the future will ask. What planet were they on? With commendable intentions, the best the AHA has thus far come up with is an exhortation to prepare graduate students, fewer in number, for careers outside of academe. They seem to want to challenge a hierarchical academic culture which ranks non-academic employment of historians as merely a "Plan B." This is a worthy endeavor. But as a solution to the problem, it is peeing in the wind: finding it cruel to prepare students for academic jobs which do not exist, they seek to prepare them for non-academic jobs which also do not exist. The economic collapse that limits employment in academe also limits employment in museums, archives, editorial fields, governments on all levels, and private corporations. So, although we should certainly support the upsetting of traditional snobberies which see academe as the only place for historians, it's cruel to urge graduate students to look for non-academic jobs which exist in fewer and fewer numbers. In short, what has been proposed by the AHA is deck-chair stuff, while the society and the profession steam ahead towards the iceberg.

         Perhaps these issues will come to a head at the annual meeting of the AHA in Chicago, January 5-8, 2012. But the weighty program booklet which members have received shows almost no indication that it is a time of crisis. Just about all the AHA has come up with is to cut back, suggesting that "American research universities are overproducing overspecialized Ph.Ds for the existing market." (For a presentation of such accommodationist thinking as somehow heroic, see "More Universities Break the Taboo and Talk to PhDs About Jobs Outside Academe"). In the meantime, the organization's president, Anthony Grafton, has recently written "Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?" in the New York Review of Books, with hardly a word about the role of the collapse of public funding for higher education. (Jeesus, just take a look at the wreckage of the University of California—and the wonderful rising student protests, which provide such a contrast to the AHA's passivity.) When I pointed out the crisis and proposed a Federal Writers' Project, the AHA replied that it was unrealistic. This supposedly pragmatic centrism, which deems reasonable solutions to hideous problems to be utopian, is a sad mark of the Obama era, a time when many liberal intellectuals are reverting to the conservatism of what was called end of ideology.

         We need a concrete program to face the crisis in history. As a limited, practical and pragmatic solution for a significant piece of the problem, we need a Federal Writers' Project. The WPA's FWP (1935-1943) employed 6,600 people, and employment was its primary purpose. They came from a variety of fields, including but not limited to history. The FWP's historical product was simply magnificent: the classic American Guide Series of the forty-eight states; the slave narrative collection, consisting of more than 10,000 pages of interviews with former slaves; and the Historical Records Survey. The AHA should call for a new federally-funded Federal Writers' Project, adapted to the changed times, needs and technologies of today. (The original was great, but not beyond criticism and improvement.) This idea has been kicking around in, around, and in spite of, the AHA at least since the 1970s, when what was then also described as an "oversupply" of PhDs led to calls to shut down the innovative new PhD programs (e.g. Northern Illinois University). The answer that bubbled up from the debate at the time was that history is a positive good, important for society and civilization, and so the way forward was to expand employment rather than to cut back. This is truer than ever today—and history, with its reasoned understanding of causality, is more important than ever at a time when irrationality is rampant in the society and in its leadership.

    Implementation

         The American Historical Association has a duty to see the crisis and to devise concrete plans to deal with it. Between now and the opening of the annual meeting, the AHA's Council should endorse the need for a Federal Writers' Project. (Try a conference call, folks.) It should implement this at the meeting itself with an emergency plenary session to announce this endorsement and to present for discussion by the membership a rough and preliminary description of such a program. It should publicize this and move towards drafting legislation. And it should begin the important work of collaboration on this with other relevant professional societies—including in particular the Organization of American Historians. The times are too serious to allow further evasion of the grim reality. The AHA was chartered by Congress to promote history. Let's do it.

     

         Note: My earlier essay, "History is Worth Fighting For," was accepted by the AHA's Perspectives On History for publication (albeit as a letter to the editor). It has not yet been published, while the magazine has moved ahead and published Grafton and Grossman's "Plan C" (November 2011).

     

    Jesse Lemisch, author of On Active Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession, is a fifty-year member of the American Historical Association. jesse.lemisch@verizon.net. This article was originally published on History News Network.

  • Andalusian Uprising: The Empire that Unites the Arab Spring and European Anti-Austerity Protesters

         In the seventh century, Musa bin Nusair, born in Syria, traveled and fought his way through the Middle East and across North Africa, expanding the Muslim empire headquartered in Damascus, Syria. With his general Tariq bin Ziyad in the lead, he crossed the Mediterranean from Morocco with an army of several thousand, taking control of most of Spain. From 711 until 1031, the Umayyad Empire stretched from Córdoba to Damascus.

         As a result of 1300 years of invasions, empires, occupations, colonies, population displacements, and cultural exchange that moved cultures and people across the boundaries that modern nation states have, the Mediterranean Sea proves to be an arbitrary boundary with more similarities on either side than we acknowledge. The Spanish southern coast is called Andalusia. A half-hour ferry ride away, northern Morocco uses the term "al Andalus" to discuss its own heritage from the empire. After North Africans ruled the Iberian peninsula, Spain, Portugal, and France ruled Moroccan El Andalus into the twentieth century. Spanish towns today retain "barrios Moriscos" ("Moorish neighborhoods"), and children in parts of northern Morocco greet visitors with "¡hola!" as often as "bonjour."

         The two countries continued to develop more parallels than we normally acknowledge. Spain called its economic stagnation during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco "the years of hunger." Neighboring Moroccans called their lost decades under the rule of King Hassan "the years of lead." Los años de hambre and les années de plomb have left both Spaniards and Moroccans with a passionate but contested commitment to political liberty. Though Spain escaped out from under its royalist despot before Morocco, citizens of both countries still work to secure a secular, liberal state against the background of resentment or resistance from the elite of the oligarchic era.

         The boundaries of the Umayyad Empire encompass most of the major mass uprisings of the past spring—from Spain's anti-austerity protests to the Tunisian-led Arab uprisings, through Libya and Egypt, encompassing the anti-inflationary, cottage cheese, housing, and doctors' protests of Israel, and the unrelenting struggle and bloody repression that continues today in Syria.[1] The protests of the past year seem to have little to do with each other if viewed through the window panes that have divided political geography for the past century into Europe, North Africa, Israel, and the Arab Middle East. But comparing two protests in El Andalus—those in Spain and Morocco—identifies promises and pitfalls that these diverse movements share not only with each other, but with the burgeoning protests worldwide. These two protests, at the intersection of Europe and North Africa, reveal defining aspects of the much larger movement that has developed globally since the Arab Spring and anti-austerity protests began.

         Though it is clear, as a disclaimer, that each of the two protests reflect particular, historically constructed discontents in their respective countries, their commonalities are notable. Both Spain and Morocco experienced mass protest movements this spring that came onto the streets with little advanced notice. First, in Morocco, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in at least nine cities for the "February 20" marches. These were at least nominally organized by a group called Liberty and Democracy Now, following the protests in Tunisia.[2] Less than three months later, a group called Real Democracy Now organized the "15-M" (for May 15) marches in 58 cities in Spain.[3] Tens of thousands participated, and in the following days protesters encamped in Madrid's Puerta del Sol.

         Both the protests were born of deep frustration and indignation. The Madrid protesters are called "los indignados"—the indignant, the outraged. In Morocco, frustrated citizens complain about the culture of la Hogra, of elites' contempt for lives of everyday citizens. Moroccans feel themselves to be Mahgour, despised.[4] Both were movements of large groups of people who were fed up, angered by the blatant self-enrichment and entitlement that elites had benefited from at the expense of most people. After all, how similar is today's global banker to a monarch, given the banker's sense that his debts should be serviced before others', that he must be financed without regard for the wellbeing of the people who underwrite his adventures, and that he can parade his misdeeds in public, impervious to public opinion and invulnerable to legal sanction?

         Nominally, the Moroccan protests were against the power of the monarch, King Mohammed VI. The Spanish protests were against austerity measures and the disproportionate power of the bankers. But beneath the surface, the longer lists of issues began to overlap, and in conversations with Spaniards and Moroccans in the months afterwards, the two overlapped even more.

         In the case of the Madrid protesters, "anti-globalization" was anchored by local roots. According to a survey of protesters by the sympathetic daily paper Público, the "primary objective" of los indignados was to fight political corruption, followed by demands for electoral reform, and limits to the power of the financial sector.[5] (Two-thirds of Spaniards supported the protesters.[6]) The protesters were also displeased by media coverage of the economy and of the movement itself.

         Likewise, the protests in Morocco activated deep frustration with political corruption; a sense that in a country with serious poverty (and illiteracy rates as high as 40 percent), the king, his family, and a circle of cronies helped themselves without shame to the nation's riches.[7] According to the sympathetic magazine Tel Quel (targeted to the French reading, liberal bourgeoisie of Morocco), needed changes included a shift towards democracy ("The king should reign—not rule," according to one slogan), limits on the royal and military budget, a more secular, modern, and tolerant society, and expanded social welfare policies.[8]

         But the Moroccan protesters' demands were more diverse than that. Behind the unifying slogans were others: Some protesters demanded recognition of Berber (l'Amazigh) languages as official languages. Others demanded a new constitution outright (which was ultimately granted, but which retained power for the king). Women cloaked in niqabs held signs warning of the dangers that threatened the Koran while still others held signs demanding that the leader of the outlawed Islamist movement Justice and Charity (Al Adl Wal Ihsane) share his fortune with the people. Islamists, secularists, and skeptics, liberals, moderates, and conservatives all found space to voice their views in a protest that Tel Quel compared to the freewheeling debates of London's Hyde Park.

         The protests in Madrid were similarly diverse, and disorganized. Given the diversity of views, there was an implicit (and sometimes explicit) "agreement not to disagree." Thus radicals, liberals, anarchists, students, and traditional trade unionists supported the march, but political parties and unions were banned from official participation. (Among other things, the two major unions had ultimately approved earlier austerity measures, including raising the retirement age. Left observers in the US have been concerned by this exclusion, while many left observers in Spain have seen it as a positive development that promises the movement independence.) But the polyphony of the protests was, while inspiring, a sign of its potential weakness. Unlike a coalition, which carefully articulates its members' shared goals, acknowledges individuals' priorities, and excludes areas of disagreement, these movements were not able to establish some kind of unity platform in advance. The risk is thus of one of two outcomes, should the movements gain the power to bring more changes. The first is that the middle-of-the-road, upper-middle-class consensus will steamroll more radical visions. Contrary to some of the Madrid placards, many in the movement were not revolutionary but, despite the rhetoric, reformist in its uncertain platform. (While some signs said "It's not a crisis, it's the system," a survey of protesters found the majority sought a "reform of the system, not a rupture."[9]) Those reformist sentiments may come to dominate the movement.

         That risk is evident in one of the movement's touchstone volumes, Stéphane Hessel's inspiring ¡Indignaos! (Get Indignant, published in English as Time for Outrage!).[10] The book was cited, along with George Orwell's 1984, as one of the most influential for the Madrid protesters.[11] Despite a title that would sound at home at a Tea Party rally, Hessel addresses his activist readers on the basis of his left and progressive bona fides: he was part of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation. He was captured and sent to concentration camps, and escaped. After the war, Hessel was involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hessel's story is unquestionably impressive. And he shies away neither from comparing neoliberalism to the evils of fascism, nor from pointing out to romantics that each political situation requires custom-formulated political responses: the Resistance for the Nazis, a new form of resistance to global capitalism. But while readers are called upon to resist—¡indignaos!—Hessel offers his readers few signposts as to what indignation might lead to, what they might work for, what resistance means. The result is exactly what righteous indignation translates to in American English: a brusque pride at one's indignation, but the lack of a political program to do anything about it.

         The risk of dissolution into middle-class discontent notwithstanding, the Madrid protests suggest that the Andalusian Spring has a more critical objective. After all, while Moroccans were marching behind demands for what sounded like liberal democracy, Spanish protesters were articulating the inadequacies of the motions of liberal democracy. In fact, both sought something more: real democracy, democracy now. Two days before the 15-M protests, the group Real Democracy Now occupied a bank. During the February 20 march, protesters had burned down one bank in Tangiers, and another in Al Hoceïma.[12] For both movements, "Democracy Now" means more than formal democracy or political reform. It represents the more radical demands articulated through action, the demand for popular power, not its institutionalization through negotiated reform. Such power is not a demand that states readily or easily accommodate.

         If middle-of-the-road indignation is not the outcome, one thinks, alternately, of the Iranian revolution, when a similarly diverse group of trade unions, communists, and Islamists took to the streets, but when political power was seized from the Shah, there was suddenly room only for those following Ayatollah Khomeini, and the others suffered severe repression from their former allies. Samir Amin recently warned that in Egypt, the US actually prefers the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood (who do not oppose the West's neoliberal agenda for Egypt) over a more democratic, and therefore radical, resolution.[13] Protesters in both countries will face both "anti-political" perspectives among protesters and reactionary threats supported from outside.

         Without a "big tent" platform, or projects like early twentieth-century Popular Front groups that sought to organize broad movements behind concrete left political objectives, the movements around the Mediterranean have remained dispersed. They have great potential, but without the time to build strong coalitions, they lack the political coherence to avoid political domination by either the less-critical center or the most-organized minorities. Distinct though these countries are, the movements of the Andalusian Republic cry out for recognition of the shared experiences of citizens constrained under global neoliberalism, and for a vision that speaks to those experiences.

         Throughout the twentieth century, Marxism united anticolonial, anticapitalist, and antiroyalist movements. Postmodernists sought to present the decline of that master narrative as a victory of radical skepticism and idiosyncrasy over totalizing narratives. In the post-Soviet vacuum, al Qaeda had hoped to provide an alternative master narrative for the Arab World's dissatisfaction. Commentators now argue that the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have relegated bin Laden's theology to the dusty shoulder of the highway to Tripoli.

         Such master narratives are constructed in the course of actual events, and respond both to the larger, historical materialist realities of capitalism and their local, immediate manifestations of colonialism, neoliberalism, and crisis. In addition to the immediate political gains that are already being made, such an articulation may be a vital legacy of the protest movements in 2011: if diverse narratives still must articulate their place in a larger mass movement, if religious extremism no longer organizes modern societies, then a new framework is needed. The work of protesters and their allies—in Spain and Morocco, in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Jordan, and Israel, in Great Britain and Greece, in the Occupy Wall Street encampment and simultaneous occupations—and the cities and countries that are joining this list daily—may of necessity articulate a cohesive position toward the shared opponents of these movements. The ideology of the Andalusian Republic would challenge political corruption, of course, along with cronyism and the overweening expectations of corporate bankers. It would necessarily include a frank critique of contemporary global capitalism, and a justification of deeper, radical democracy as an antidote to elites' power and brazen sense of entitlement. It would incorporate in that platform (as activists and organizers have tried to do), the political needs of movement participants including ethnic groups, women, religious minorities, LGBTQ, bread-and-butter trade unionists and hedonistic students. In the United States, at least, it will need to link its economic populist message to a vision of racial justice if it is to overcome the racial obstacles that have scuttled so many other progressive movements. Though the list of concerns is long, the short version is that the kind of expansive, inclusive political vision needed to articulate the demands of the diversity of protesters across al Andalus would expand the sphere of progressive and grassroots politics.

         Protesters in Madrid continually reoccupy the square. Citizens in Morocco are unimpressed by gestures toward reform made by the king. Dissatisfaction continues to percolate, and a network of online media, alternative press, and sympathetic mainstream news outlets are providing the forum in which the movement can frame the issues and articulate coherent, comprehensive, revolutionary solutions. The Andalusian Republic that encircles the Mediterranean—and has spread from there—holds the potential to articulate, for all of us, a libratory ideology for the twenty-first century.

     

    Notes

    1. Regarding the class composition of these movements, note the difference between the conservative Financial Times' account emphasizing that the Israeli protesters were "middle class," and progressive Haaretz's characterization of the protesters as an "organized effort led by a cross-section of Israeli society—including the middle class, young people, students, Holocaust survivors, and the elderly." See Ilan Lior, "Israeli police arrest dozens following Tel Aviv housing protest," Haaretz, July 24, 2011, and Tobias Buck, "Swelling List of Demands Fuels Israel Protests," Financial Times, August 9, 2011.

    2. In French the group is called "Liberté et Démocratie Maintenant." Youssef Aït Akdim, "Ça ne fait que commencer…," Tel Quel, no. 461, Feb. 19-25, 2011.

    3. In Spanish the group is called "Democracia Real YA."

    4. Abdessamad Dialmy, "Le Marocain, Ce 'Mahgour,'" Tel Quel, no. 485-486, Aug. 6 – Sept. 9, 2011, p. 29.

    5. " Primer Estudio Sociológico Sobre El 15-M," Público, July 17, 2011, pp. 2-5.

    6. Miles Johnson, "Indignados' Begin Long March To Madrid," Financial Times, June 26, 2011. On the "fuzziness" of an anti-corruption campaign, see Prabhat Patnaik, "Afterword on a Movement," MRZine, Sept. 12, 2011.

    7. Tahar Ben Jelloun, L'etincelle: Révolte dans les pays arabes, Éditions Gallimard, 2011. Note that while Jelloun provides a useful overview of the "Arab Spring," he seems to write with a clear desire to be welcomed back into the Royal Kingdom of Morocco, pulling his punches by concluding the chapter on Morocco with the line, "Morocco continues to advance its peaceful revolution with its king." (p. 99, emphasis mine.) Jelloun's formulation—of a revolution without dethroning the monarch—echoes Tel Quel's account of "La révolution avec lui" (revolution with the king). Morocco has enjoyed increased press freedom in recent years, and criticism is widespread. But criticism of the royal family is still verboten, as the royal family has made clear with the recent jailing of an editor and a blogger. Thus, revolution with the king may indeed represent Moroccans' preference, but from my conversations with Moroccans who were fed up with the king, it is more likely to represent a cautious course between criticism and prison.

    8. "Le 20 février, ville par ville," Tel Quel, no. 461, Feb. 19-25, 2011. See also Jelloun, p. 96. The two movements also share significant, but not necessarily majoritarian, secular (or "laica") commitments: Spanish protesters returned to the Puerto del Sol to protest the government's support of a visit by the Pope (a politically provocative visit for a country ruled for forty years by an ultra-Catholic autocracy). (See "La policía disuelve a glopes la conentración laica en Sol," El País, Aug. 18, 2011, pp. 1, 22.) And Tel Quel has hoped that changes in Morocco will include greater religious freedom and a more secular state. Working-class Moroccans I spoke to sought to present their country as relatively secularizing. (See "La revolution… avec lui," Tel Quel, no. 461, Feb. 19-25, 2011, pp. 18-29.

    9. "Ni apolíticos ni antisistema," Público, July 17, 2011.

    10. Stéphane Hessel, ¡Indignaos! Un alegato contra la indiferencia y a favor de la insurrección pacífica (Indignez-vous, translated by Telmo Moreno Lanaspa), Destino, 2001.

    11. Público's coverage included surveys of what protesters said were their most influential books. Rosa Fernández and Claudia Seva, "La revuelta está en los libros," Público, Aug. 3, 2011.

    12. Five young people were found dead inside the bank in Al Hoceïma. According to official sources, they were protesters trapped in the bank when another group set it on fire. See "Le 20 février: ville par ville."

    13. Samir Amin, "2011: An Arab Springtime?" Monthly Review, Aug. 22, 2011.

     

    GREGORY SMITHSIMON is assistant professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He is the author of September 12: Community and Neighborhood Recovery at Ground Zero (2011) and, with Benjamin Shepard, The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City's Public Spaces (2011).

  • Credit cards substitute for student ID's: Next up in the US?

    Thanks to a recent blog at the website of a UK teacher union activist, we know may be coming down the road in the corporatization of US public higher education. In a situation that has been widely publicized in the media in Turkey, students at Ordu University  have been forced to accept credit cards, issued by Vakifbank,  to use as their campus ID’s. Ordu’s administration cut a deal with Vakifbank, and refusal of the credit card means no admission to Ordu.  Student leaders of the movement opposing this commercialization of higher education have been punished by being fired from their campus jobs. Faculty supporters have also been met by reprisals from the administration.  US students and faculty can help keep this dangerous innovation out of this country by spreading word about the resistance at Ordu University.

  • Sharing the Torch: Youth of the 60s Meet With the Youth of OWS

         The evolving Occupy Wall Street movement continues to confound and surprise even its ardent supporters. Two days after Mayor Bloomberg’s brutal nighttime eviction of sleeping Occupiers from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, a massive candlelight march in support of Occupy Wall St. wound its way from Foley Square (opposite the federal courthouse), around City Hall and across the Brooklyn Bridge (police estimated 32,500 participants). As the participants marched over the bridge, suddenly in gigantic letters projected onto the side of the multistory Verizon building which faces the bridge they saw the slogans of their movement projected in giant letters: “We are a cry from the heart of the world!” “Another world is possible.” “We are unstoppable.” “99%.” and then in rapid succession the names of all the cities across the world where Occupy-like movements are taking place. The vision was magical—a little like seeing the hand of God appear.

         Three days after that event, the torch was symbolically passed from veterans of the 1960s movements for social justice to the contemporary Occupy movement in a ceremony in Zuccotti Park, which, although closed to overnight camping, and for a few days occupied only by the police, was again permeable to Occupiers. Similar ceremonies were held in selected Occupy sites around the country. The passing of the torch became possible after a “Council of Elders” was brought together in Chicago to strategize about lending their support to the Occupy Movement. Veterans of the Civil Rights, peace, farmworkers, feminist, Native American, gay and Central American solidarity movements of the 1960s-1970s—most now in their seventies, eighties and nineties—have been called out of their retirement and given a new lease on life by the OWS. Among some of the more well-known names are the Rev. James Lawson, Jr., non-violent strategist and trainer for the Civil Rights movement following the teachings of Gandhi; Dr. Vincent Harding, the historian and activist who had helped to write Dr. M. L. King’s most prophetic (and, at the time, most controversial) speech, “A Time to Break Silence,” which he delivered at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967 a year before his death; Dolores Huerta, Cofounder with Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers movement; Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, student leader and activist in the Albany Movement, one of the original Freedom Singers and African American cultural historian and founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock; Dr. Grace Lee Boggs, an internationally renowned writer and social activist from Detroit; Rabbi Arthur Waskow, writer and long-time peace activist working on the Israel-Palestine conflict; Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine sister who has worked for women’s rights in Church and society and who co-chairs the Global Peace Initiative of Women, helping to facilitate a worldwide network of women peace builders, and many more.

         After the ceremony in the park, the crowd reconvened at Judson Memorial Baptist Church in Greenwich Village where a two-hour discussion between the Occupiers and the Council of Elders, attended by some 300-500 people was held. It was an electric evening. One of the things I love about this movement is the genuine respect for and interest in older people that the Occupiers exhibit. They seem to understand, as so many of the young people in the 1960s student movement did not (remember the slogan: you can’t trust anyone over thirty!) that we always stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. During the mass rally in Foley Square the night of November 17, the young woman who was MC-ing made a special point of celebrating the elders who were in the crowd and of giving the stage to a chorus of union retirees. My husband, who is an “elder” and has to walk with a walking stick has invariably been assisted by young demonstrators during the several “Occupy” events/marches we have participated in; they walk beside him, warning him of curbs and other hindrances that might trip him up. They are also eager to ask us about our life experiences hoping to get some guidance for their own lives.

         During the meeting at Judson Church the Occupiers wanted to know, first, what the “Elders” thought about the Occupy movement. It was a touching moment—as if they were seeking approval from their parents. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, one of the Council of Elders replied: “I never dreamed I would live long enough to see you.” Rev. Nelson Johnson, another Elder who had led the 1979 Anti-Klan march in Greensboro North Carolina in which five anti-Klan marchers were shot and killed by Klan members, replied that the Occupy movement was “one of the most beautiful things I have seen in a long time. We really belong to each other,” he said. “The warmth with which you received us is quite humbling. We want to join with what you’re doing and offer what we’ve been doing. But first, we want to hear from you.” “We are not passing the torch,” said Rev. Phillip Lawson from Oakland, CA, another of the Elders, “We are sharing the torch.” A dialogue then ensued in which the Occupiers explained to the elders how they saw their movement, what their hopes and fears were and what they needed. Another thing I like about this movement is its poetry. A kind of parable was told by one of the Occupiers which seemed to sum up their vision of the movement as the kind of “beloved community” of which Martin Luther King had spoken so many years before. The parable went something like this:

    99 of us form a circle in Zuccotti Park. We stay there all night. One of the 99 can leave to go and get some rest, to get warm, to take a shower, but another one takes his/her place. Any needs are met in the circle by the 99%. The 99% are poor. 99% is the badge for anyone willing to wear it. Over time it will grow. It will eventually begin to glow. It will take down the powers that are trying to destroy us.

         From there the Occupiers raised many of the practical questions of strategy and tactics that have occupied hundreds of hours of discussions in their General Assemblies and work groups: How do we reach the other 99%? How do we include people of color as equals in a movement that at first was composed mostly of white people? How can the movement keep going without a physical base? How do we move the movement into communities around the country? How do we deal with the baggage that a lot of people bring into this movement? What do we draw on to deal with this since we are confronting problems that have been out there for a very long time? How do we build for the long haul? What kept you, the Council of Elders, committed to the movement? What do you, the Council of Elders, see as the mistakes of our movement? One of the Council of Elders stated that the Occupiers could not expect to literally take some experience in the past and apply it to another time. Each generation, he said, must discern its own mission. Nevertheless, the Occupiers were told, there were general things that can be learned. Any movement that has one tactic, they said, probably won’t survive. The movement has to have multiple ways of operating. Another piece of advice was the necessity of training. “All of us must enter into boot camp to learn how to become disciplined soldiers.” Yet another piece of advice: “choose your confrontations wisely. Fighting the police is not the basis for a movement. You should know that the police want a confrontation.” Another regarding the issue of space: “Who gets to name and frame the space is important.” On the issue of race: “Work on this issue with mutual respect, not guilt tripping; but you ought not to dodge the issue under the banner of unity.” In response to the question of what mistakes the Elders thought the Occupiers had made, the reply was: “We haven’t been close enough to know, but don’t fear mistakes. Learn from them. We certainly made our own mistakes, but you learn from them and grow from them.” “It is important,” another asserted, “that you know how powerful you are. You have already changed the conversation in the world.” And so the dialogue went on. Perhaps the most important piece of advice however, was to keep the movement spiritually grounded—not in any sectarian sense—but in the broadest kind of spirituality. “We have to approach this out of a spirit of humility and love rather than wanting to win,” said Nelson Johnson. “This begins to change the conversation.” And indeed it already has.

         After the dialogue in the church, the crowd reconvened in Washington Square Park. Each person was given a candle for a procession that was to walk south to the vacant lot on the corner of 6th and Canal from which a few Occupiers had been ejected by the police a couple of days before. There is an effort underway to put moral pressure on Trinity Church to find space for the Occupy movement to relocate. The procession was to have been led by a number of marchers carrying colorful, giant glowing parasols with Occupy slogans stenciled on them. The parasols were actually tents that had been erected and set on platforms and then attached to long poles that were wrapped with black and white candy-cane striped duct tape. Another thing I love about this movement is its artistic imagination! But in another bit of nonsensical police harassment meant to frustrate the movement, the police guarding the entrance to the park informed the protesters that they would not be allowed to carry the parasols as they were a safety hazard. There then ensued a period of negotiation in which it was decided that if the protesters cut the length of the poles in half they would be allowed to carry them. They did so, and the march proceeded, but the shorter parasols were actually much more of a safety hazard than the original ones would have been, as it meant that the sharp corners of the parasols were now at about head height, making it somewhat difficult for marchers on narrow streets to avoid getting struck by one of them. Fortunately, the march proceeded without further incident, marching past scores of sidewalk cafes where the uninvolved sat sipping their Cabernet Sauvignons and eating their Asian infusion salads as this strange circus marched past.

         On the way down to 6th and Canal we got to talking with a young singer/musician. Serita was eager to learn about our experiences in earlier movements, saying how privileged she felt to be talking with us. After she had probed us for a while we turned the conversation to her life and what had brought her here. She had moved to New York from Galveston, Texas, she told us, and now sings with an Algerian band. While not Algerian herself, she has learned Arabic so that she can perform with the band. She joined the Occupy movement because of the devastation that is being inflicted on her home community in Texas. Giant oil and petrochemical plants, she told us, continually spew toxic chemicals into the air. The incidence of cancer has risen dramatically and she fears that if it is allowed to continue, the cancer rate will only increase until everyone is sick. After exchanging email addresses with Serita we found ourselves at 6th and Canal where the Occupy movement was passing out coffee and donuts to everyone. Another thing I like about this movement is its sense of hospitality—the provision of food, clothing, books, medical, counseling and legal services to whoever was in need when the movement occupied Zuccotti Park; and now, coffee and donuts for the marchers! Such a movement can’t help but eventually win.

     

    Sheila D. Collins is Professor of Political Science Emerita at William Paterson University and a co-founder of the National Jobs for All Coalition, on whose Executive Board she serves.

  • Occupy the Democratic Party? No Way!

         At a moment when Occupy faces severe police repression and cold weather, and as we are both extending our movement to the streets and rethinking our future, various pressures are beginning to build with the objective of taking our movement into the Democratic Party. While our movement so far has remained politically independent and non-partisan, newspaper articles and commentaries suggest that the Occupy movement should give up its "utopian" demands for a different and better society and its "amorphous" participatory democracy and enter into the Democratic Party in order to have an impact on society. We will increasingly hear calls for Occupy to become a new "rainbow coalition" within the Democratic Party, a coalition that can at best capture the party and at least move it to the left. Yet history suggests that nothing could be worse for our movement than entering the Democratic Party where youthful ideals are transformed into cynical winks, where movement activists are corrupted and turned into party hacks, the place where for a hundred years movements have gone to die.

         Even as Democratic Party mayors are sending in the riot police to clear Occupy out of the parks, analysts and consultants from Democratic Party think-tanks and foundations are scouting movement activists and a few Democratic Party politicians have come down to rub shoulders with Occupiers. With many traditional liberal groups—labor, immigrants, environmentalists, and others—feeling disappointed in the performance of President Barack Obama and Democrats in the Congress, party leaders feel a desperate need to find new energy and they are strategizing ways to capture the Occupy movement and to channel its exuberance into the November 2012 elections. We will face throughout the next year a series of arguments from without and then from within about why Occupy belongs in the Democratic Party, and we should understand why that would be a disaster for our movement.

    A Variety of Arguments for the Democrats

         We read in Newsday, for example, that Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell recently told a Harvard University seminar that Occupy activists should "start registering voters, start playing towards the 2012 election. Not just the presidential, but congressional and Senate elections and state legislative elections. That's where they can make real change." This argument—that only electoral politics leads to "real change"—will be the mantra of Occupy's seducers, growing louder every week as we head toward the elections.

         The argument for cooperation between Occupy and Progressive Democrats is made in a soft and more subtle way in an editorial by Paul Rosenberg published in Al Jazeera. He suggested that Progressive Democrats should see Occupy as an ally in fighting the corporate wing of their party. Someone will soon take that a little farther and suggest that Occupy should enter the Democratic Party and ally with the Progressives and old time liberals to fight the corporations for control of the party. We have another, stronger version of this argument from Van Jones, the former green jobs czar for Obama. Jones says he wants 2,000 candidates running under the "99% banner." While he doesn't say so explicitly, these will presumably be 99%ers running in the Democratic Party. MoveOn.org, once a voice for the anti-war movement, before it moved on to become a fundraiser for the Democratic Party, is now working to co-opt Occupy, as Steve Horn pointed out in a TruthOut article. They too want to drag Occupy into the Democratic Party, liberal mainstream.

         Jesse Jackson, traveling around the country and bringing his passionate oratory to the defense of the Occupy movement has compared Occupy to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, but has so far avoided arguing that Occupy should get involved in politics. It is unlikely that he will refrain much longer, since he has built his career on work with and within the Democratic Party. When in the 1980s the Democrats were losing steam, Jackson organized the Rainbow Coalition of African American, Latino and labor voters, and, though it became something of an independent force, he led it into the Democratic Party, arguing that a party needs "two wings to fly," a left wing and a right wing. Today as the Democratic Party flails around like a one-winged, right-winged, rightward gyrating chicken, Jackson would like to see Occupy become the Democrat's new left wing, turning the Democrats once again from a neo-conservative to a moderate center-left party.

    Union Officials and Workers Not the Same

         The AFL-CIO and Change to Win federations represent yet another pressure on Occupy to become part of the Democratic Party operation. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and the federation's executive board have recognized the power of the Occupy movement which has taken on the task that the unions long neglected, namely: speaking out on behalf of all working people. Trumka has recently come to the defense of Occupy, and has adopted our language, talking about the 99% instead of the 10% of actually union-organized workers. Trumka and other union leaders see in Occupy a way to revive activism in their unions, but they want that activism to be directed toward reelecting President Barack Obama and putting more Democrats in Congress. While the Occupy movement and rank-and-file workers have everything in common—the need for economic justice, democracy, and a new and different kind of politics—union officialdom has its own agenda focused on the Democrats.

         The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the largest in the country, is working assiduously to co-opt Occupy into the Democratic Party, according to Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com. SEIU suggests Obama and the Democrats represent the Occupy movement's goals. Greenwald writes, "But whatever else is true, the notion — advanced by SEIU — that it's the Democratic Party and the Obama White House working to bring about these changes and implant these values of the 99% is so self-evidently false as to be insulting…to try to cast the Democratic Party and the Obama administration as the vessel for the values and objectives of the Occupy movement is just dishonest in the extreme: in fact, it's so extreme that it's very unlikely to work."

    And Not Just Arguments

         We should be clear that the invitation to enter the Democratic Party is not merely an intellectual and political one. The Democratic Party, the labor unions, the foundations and think-tanks, the various NGOs and all sort of other organizations offer not only ideas: they will also be offering jobs and in some cases careers. Ambitious young idealists and some middle aged and older ones too will be invited to come on the staff of the party or one of its front groups. Seasoned politicos will argue that a job with the party or with one of the other organizations working for the party represents a real chance to put Occupy's politics into practice. What really counts, they will argue, is electing politicians and passing legislation. Doing that work, they'll suggest, is a valuable contribution to society, and there's no reason that it shouldn't be well paid. At a moment when jobs are hard to find, the party and its various arms will offer jobs of all sorts, some of them paying good salaries and carrying expense accounts or providing cars. Occupy activists will be invited to enter another world with its own élan, excitement and energy, a place which offers both opportunities to make a career and to meet attractive and interesting people. For some the material attractions will weight as heavily as the arguments. Those who take these jobs and make careers out of them will be the ones to similarly fish leaders out of future movements and take them into the Democratic Party.

    The Democratic Party is Not a Park

         What would happen if Occupy were to enter the Democratic Party? The Democratic Party is not a park, not a public space to be occupied. The Democratic Party exists to bind working people, the poor, and small business to the program of corporations and banks. The Democratic Party is a hierarchical organization made up of powerful politicians with strong ties to government, banks and corporations, and the military. It is financed by corporations and wealthy individuals who provide millions, though it has also proven successful in raising funds from millions of ordinary Americans. Its program is written by the politicians along lines proposed by corporate consultants. On a daily basis, year in and year out, the Democratic Party, working in the White House, the Congress and in state legislatures puts forward legislation intended to keep the capitalist system working and to serve the banks and corporations.

         We should remember that this Democratic Party failed to bring an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rejected single-payer health care, increased the round-up and deportation of undocumented immigrants, bailed out the banks while letting the foreclosures continue and unemployment soar, and allowed the increase of police power and the loss of civil rights to continue. We should remember that this Democratic Party and Obama's White House brought us Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, the man who proven to be the bankers' best friend. This Democratic Party gave us Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the enemy of public schools and teachers' unions. This is the Democratic Party that Occupy is asked to join, the one where hope dimmed and change never took place.

         The idea that Occupy might enter the Democratic Party and join with progressives to change it is an old strategy that has failed before. During the 1960s, Michael Harrington, leader of the group that became the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), argued that if socialists and people from the civil rights and anti-war movements entered the Democratic Party they could change its direction. Yet during a half century of work as progressives in the Democratic Party, despite their considerable influence in labor and liberal factions of the party, DSA utterly failed to move the Democrats to the left. In fact, under the influence of the banks and corporations, the organizations which in fact own the Democratic Party, it moved considerably to the right, so that today the Democrats stand to the right of Richard Nixon's Republican Party of the 1970s. The pro-Soviet Communist Party and some pro-Chinese Maoist groups pursued similar strategies (the Maoists with a one-foot-in-one-foot out variation) and with no more success.

         If Occupy activists either individually or in large numbers enter the Democratic Party, we should think about the impact it would have on the movement, as has happened from time to time in some large cities where Democratic Party mayors won support from the left. Many talented organizers, writers, and speakers would be sucked out of the movement for months at least, but probably for years because they would find their lifestyle and their political objectives transformed. With leading activists raptured up into the Democratic Party, there would be roles left unfulfilled in the movement, and the movement's dynamism and its energy would decline. At the same time, because people had come out of Occupy, they would still have influence within Occupy, and Democratic Party organizing goals, methods, and styles would also transform our weakened movement into a kind of shadow of the party. Not a pretty picture to contemplate.

    Larger Movements Derailed

         The idea that the Democrats could be a vehicle for progressive social change was attempted on a larger scale over the last hundred years by farmers, workers, and the African American community, and while they had some impact on the party and through it on American society, by and large the result was the death of those movements. The Populist farmers movement of the late nineteenth century entered the Democratic Party in 1896, enticed by William Jennings Bryan's "cross of gold speech." After that date the movement which had succeeded in several states in forcing changes in legislation and which had had an impact on the courts and their decisions, ceased to be a factor in American life.

         Similarly in the 1930s, the great labor upheaval that began in the 1934 sit-down strikes had led to the creation of local labor parties and union proposals to create a labor party, a party for working people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been elected as a moderate in 1932, moved to the left long enough to capture the Socialist Party, the Communists, and the new Congress of Industrial Unions. The old left and labor movements, particularly their leaderships, became deeply involved in the Democratic Party and during the World War II period became transformed into partners of the corporations and the government. By the 1950s the AFL-CIO had become largely an extension of the Democratic Party's political operation, no longer a vehicle as it had been in the 1930s for workers' struggles for a better life.

         The African American civil rights movement which began in 1956 became a powerful force not only for blacks' rights but also progressive change in the United States. By 1965 the civil rights movement had succeeded in winning the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and in ending de jure segregation in the South. From that time on, President Lyndon Baines Johnson and other politicians of that era opened the door of the Democratic Party to African Americans, bringing them into the party, and closing the door on civil rights progress. Once the Democrats had captured the civil rights movement, progress toward solving the more complicated problems of racism in the North was virtually abandoned. Every movement that entered the Democratic Party became stuck in the quicksand. Few escape. Bones of former activists litter the landscape.

         All of those movements—Populists, 1930s labor, and African American civil rights—were far larger and more powerful than Occupy is today. If they could not transform the Democratic Party, there is little chance that we could. Meanwhile, however, entry into the Democratic Party is likely to domesticate the movement and thwart its potential to spark the kind of alternative political force this country so desperately needs.

    The Role of the Institutional Left

         What might be called the "institutional left"—the Democratic Socialists of America, some old line Communists, some labor officials, groups of influential university professors, intellectuals and authors—play a key role as the gate keepers of the Democratic Party on the left. They work to encourage labor and social movement activists to enter the Party, and they work to keep them from leaving. Their arguments, of course, are not all the same, but they have the same impact ultimately.

         They argue—and have argued for decades—that unless we support the Democratic Party, the far right will come to power ushering in an era of reaction or perhaps even fascism. To stop this, they argue, we must enter and strengthen the Democratic Party as a bulwark against the radical right. To work for third parties or to abstain from electoral politics, they argue, undermines the democratic forces and strengthens the right and fascism. Yet the Democratic Party, far from being a bulwark against the right, has drifted over into the right. Democrats, like Republicans, represent corporate interests. Democrats, and not just the blue dog Democrats either, have adopted virtually the same austerity politics as the Republicans. Some Democrats do espouse pro-labor, feminist, pro-choice, pro-LGBT rights positions, but the rightward drift of the party means that their positions are often ignored.

         Left intellectuals have played and continue to play a key role in drawing leftward moving people in society back into the Democratic Party and in keeping those who get in from leaving. For example, since the 1960s Richard Cloward, now deceased, and Frances Fox Piven argued that the left should build social movements that would force the Democrats to the left, but should not challenge Democrats electorally from outside the party. Intellectuals like Piven have made strong arguments intended to both build social movements, but also to keep them operating as a pressure group on the Democrats rather than as an independent force.

         The institutional left often argues that leftists who are not in the Democratic Party are betraying the struggle for African American rights, women's rights, or some other group's rights. Failure to be in the Democratic Party, they argue, will lead to Republican victories which will both bring bad legislation and turn the Supreme Court and other Federal courts over to the rightwing. If we on the left fail to continue to build an independent pole and if we allow the Democratic Party to smother our movement, we will find that frustration with austerity, ongoing unemployment and economic stagnation is likely to promote extreme right wing forces in the absence of a genuine left alternative. Yet the truth is that all the great reforms in the history of our country were won not through the establishment parties, but rather through independent mass movements.

         The argument of last resort is always lesser-evilism: the Democrats are not as bad as the Republicans. We must work and vote for the lesser evil. When I hear this argument, I think of an equestrian astride two horses straining at full gallop, the man with one foot on the back of each, riding his team—over a cliff. Which is the lesser evil? What does it matter? Horses and rider are going over the cliff. Today we have two parties—Republicans and Democrats—both serving the banks and corporations, both riding toward the cliff of economic crisis and disaster for us. At the last moment, as in some early silent movie, the horses may turn away leaving the poor rider to go over the precipice and into the abyss.

         Voting for the lesser evil, voting for a party and for candidates in whom you do not believe has a terribly destructive impact on the individual. When we step into the voting booth, stand before the ballot, and lift the pen or touch the button and vote for something in which we do not believe, we take responsibility for destroying a little piece of our integrity, of our conscience, of our soul. We give our backing, our bona fides to something we know is not good, not right, not the best path for our country. We violate ourselves, or permit ourselves to be violated by the lesser evil argument. Don't do it.

    Occupy as a Political Force

         We may not have a party political alternative, but we do need to understand our Occupy movement as a political force.

         The idea that Occupy has to enter the Democratic Party to have political influence and power is ridiculous. In the first two months of its existence, precisely because it has been independent, it has had an enormous influence on society, on the media and on politics. Occupy has challenged the Republican and Democratic parties and the entire political system. Our encampments, our demonstrations, and out ideas have led millions to identify with our movements. Today most Americans are on our side, as numerous polls have shown. We must continue to be an independent movement, but we must throw our weight around in a more self-conscious fashion, using it to fight against rightwing policies and to push for policies that provide jobs, housing, education, and health care for all Americans.

         There is some truth in the notion that we need power in the formal political sense. A working peoples' political party—one led by, made up of and fighting for working people and all the exploited, oppressed and disenfranchised—would make a huge difference in this country. Unfortunately we do not at this moment in American history have the makings of such a party. While several left parties—the Socialist Party, the Green Party, and the Peace and Freedom Party in California—have many good people and good ideas, they do not represent the political expression of the Occupy movement, the labor movement, the African American, Latino, women's and gay movements. That is we do not today have a political party of the 99%.

         Why, you might ask, would we want a party? Wouldn't a party inevitably succumb to the corruption of government and the bankers and corporations who dominate the political sphere? There is certainly that danger. If, however, a powerful social movement arose—the Occupy movement perhaps, the 99% movement—and if it were committed to dismantling the economic power of the banks and corporations while building the political party of the so-called middle class, working people and the poor, as well as of all those who suffer discrimination and exploitation, we might, we just might be able to break the power of the 1%.

         Ours would have to be a party with a different conception of government, far more democratic and participatory. A different government altogether, based on our communities, workplaces, and social centers. Ours would have to be a party prepared to reorganize the economy, to reshape the culture, to remold our values from below. Ours would have to be a party led—and led in the most democratic sense—by ordinary workers, by people of color, by women, gays and lesbians. Ours would have to be a party of immigrants, those with documents and the undocumented. Ours would have to be the party of real equality, not only political and social, but also economic equality. Ours would be the party that took power away from the 1% but also redistributed economic and political power among the rest of the highly unequal 99%. Could we build such a movement and such a political party? I think we can. In any case, we have no other choice than to try.

     

    Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati based teacher, writer and activist. He is on the editorial board of New Politics.

  • The Camel and the Needle's Eye


    A certain ruler asked him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? . . . Jesus said to him, You know the commandments . . . . He replied, "I have kept all these since my youth." When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." But when he heard this he became sad; for he was very rich. Jesus looked at him and said, "How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."

    (Luke 18: 18-25)

         On November 15, 2011, along with an interreligious contingent of clergy and laypeople who had been meeting at Judson Baptist Church in Greenwich Village to discuss how best to support the Occupy movement (providing places for occupiers to sleep was one decision that was taken), my husband and I walked south to Sixth Avenue and Canal St. in lower Manhattan to lend our solidarity to the remnants of those members of the Occupy Wall St. movement who had been brutally evicted from their encampment in Zuccotti Park the night before.

         On the corner of Sixth and Canal is a large open site, Duarte Square. Normally, the site is a park that is open to the public 24 hours a day. But now, the park was surrounded by a high board wall, the entrance barred by chain link fences with a sign declaring, "Private Property. No Trespassing." The site is owned by Trinity Wall St. Church and licensed to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for a temporary art installation that was ostensibly closed for the season. This 17th century Episcopal church in the heart of the financial district was founded by royal charter in 1697 from King William III. Trinity is reputed to be the largest landowner in lower Manhattan. Its property, totaling in the billions, giving it a lucrative endowment for its charitable foundation, came about as a grant of the "Queen's Farm" by Queen Anne in 1705.

         Arriving at the site, we saw hundreds of people gathered in front of the barricade that faces Sixth Avenue. Some were sitting on the ground, others had climbed the fence and were sitting on top, holding large yellow banners and signs that said, "Occupy Wall St." "You destroyed our homes, but you can't destroy our spirit. We are the 99%."Still others were listening to an array of speakers express their outrage at the actions of the police the night before, but with a spirit that indicated, "you have only made us stronger." Flanking the protesters on two sides of the square were hundreds of stoney-faced policemen and women waiting for something to happen. One could see dozens of people looking down from the surrounding office towers.

         The protesters had been hopeful that they could move their encampment to Duarte Square. One of them said that they intended to have an interfaith service inside. They had been told that some clergy were even then negotiating with Trinity Church so that this could happen, but as time dragged on they were becoming impatient to find a new home. While waiting for the "something to happen," my husband, who was sitting on a bench, got talking to Jeanie, a woman who had been sleeping in Zuccotti Park for the past month. She was looking weary and still in a state of shock by what she had experienced the night before. She looked to be in her late forties or early fifties. Dressed in layers of clothing, she carried a torn knapsack on her back bulging with all her belongings. Jeanie told us that she had come here to participate in the Occupation of Zuccotti Park because her mother and aunt are out of work. "Too many people are suffering," she said. She had worked as a financial analyst on Wall Street for 13 years. When asked why she was part of Occupy she replied, "Because of what I have seen by working on Wall Street." She had seen the financial crash of 2008 coming. Now she is putting her knowledge of how the system works to use by conducting research on the financial industry for the movement. She told us that it was Goldman Sachs who had pressured the leaders of Greece and Italy to name bankers to run those countries and bypass the people and that the yield on the London bond market just reached its lowest level since the 19th century. This is absolutely terrifying, she said. This is Jeanie's account of the night of November 15 when the encampment at Zuccotti Park was destroyed.

    At about 1:30 I was awakened by people shouting, they are coming! This is it! They are going to evict us! Police in full riot gear had surrounded the park and had put up barricades so that people couldn't get out. The police presence was massive, maybe 2,000 police. They tore up our tents, took and threw all our belonging into garbage dumps. I managed to get out of the barricades and tried to get to a nearby mall. The police treated us like the worst kind of terrorists. There were pregnant women in our group. About 200 people were driven out of the park. Then came the violence. Police started pulling the people who were left into the street and then saying, "Now you're in the street (which is closed). You're under arrest." 10-15 police in full riot gear blocked all the exits. The police then began beating them and using mace and pepper spray right in people's eyes.

    By about 3:00 AM most of the occupiers had been dispersed. We were walking uptown, not knowing what to do. The streets were empty and we had nowhere to go. A police helicopter followed our group with searchlights. Police then caught us and arrested many. Those of us who were not arrested walked north to Foley Square near the Federal Court House. Police surrounded us in Foley Square, pushing their billy clubs in front of them and squeezing us into a tight circle. I learned this morning that they had destroyed our library of several thousand books, many on capitalism, socialism, economics, history, cooking, children's stories. They just threw them all into garbage trucks. We talked and talked, had some breakfast and came here [Sixth Ave and Canal Street]. This was the most terrifying night of my life." [Note: some 200 people were arrested that night.]

         We learned from reports the morning after that the carefully planned siege, using police trained in "counterterrorism" tactics, had been kept secret until the last moment from all but a few of the highest ranking officers, that all subway stops surrounding the area had been closed, that Google Maps had been shut off, and the Brooklyn Bridge shut down so that neither supporters from other parts of the city could come to help, as they had done during rumors of an earlier eviction that was called off for fear of its political repercussions, nor could journalists report on what was happening. In his book, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, Stephen Graham documents how ever since 9/11 there has been a shift from states-targeting-states to states-targeting-civilians. Around the world there has been a blurring of police and military functions. Cities are being policed with some of the same tactics and strategies used in occupied territories like the West Bank. Western militaries and security forces now perceive all urban terrain as a conflict zone inhabited by lurking "enemies." Helicopters, infrared sensing technology, video surveillance systems, Tasers and pepper spray have become common props in U.S. cities and are increasingly being used against peacefully protesting, unarmed people who have taken to the streets because that is the only way to get the attention of the country's political and economic elites.

         Shortly after listening to Jeanie's story, a young man stood up on top of the barricade, asked for a "mic check" and then said that it was time for some of the protesters to enter the site. While I can't quote from him verbatim, he said something like, "Trinity Church is our ally, and if it is our friend, it won't mind our making use of that friendship." There was a reason for the protesters to think that they had a friend in Trinity Church. The church's public statement on the Occupy Movement had said: "Trinity Wall Street respects the rights of citizens to protest peacefully and supports the vigorous engagement of the concerns that form the core of the protests – economic disenfranchisement and failure of public trust." Trinity had opened the doors to Charlotte's Place, its neighborhood center, to protesters who had made use of their meeting room to rest, use the toilets, get warm, catch up on email, or chat with other protesters. Believing they had the church's trust and that a positive answer would be forthcoming from the negotiations with the church, someone announced that the gate was open (apparently it had been opened with a bolt cutter) and a few protesters, perhaps not more than two or three dozen, started climbing over the barricade and surging toward the gate. But as they did so, the police, who far outnumbered the people who had managed to get inside, began to line up in formation. We could see orders being given by the commanders, and soon a squadron of riot-helmeted, baton-wielding police were headed for the inside, with shouts of "Shame! Shame!" and "The Whole World is Watching," arising from the crowd. All eyes, cameras, cell phones and video recorders were then focused on the narrow slots in the wall through which the action inside could be glimpsed. Trying to get a peek through one of these portholes, I could see that the occupiers were simply milling around when the police rushed in, batons at the ready. In one corner, behind some bushes about two dozen policemen bending over someone who was obviously pinned on the ground. "Overkill," I thought to myself.

         Shortly thereafter, word came down to the clergy, who were waiting in the square outside the barricade that Trinity Church had said "No," to the occupation of the space. In his internet message to the congregation, the Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper, Trinity's rector, stated in the diversionary way so often used by those in power when they don't dare to state the real reasons they are rejecting the pleas of the powerless that "while Trinity supports the Occupy movement's right to protest peacefully and lawfully, and provides responsible assistance, the parish simply cannot be turned over to a single cause. Trinity welcomes protesters to participate in parish life, but not to occupy parish life in such a way that excludes anyone from taking full part in the vital and dynamic place of faith that is Trinity Wall Street." (Since Occupy Wall Street encampments welcome everyone, his presumption that the Occupiers were exclusionary rang hollow as did his assumption that an empty lot that was several blocks from the church was somehow part of its "parish life.") It was the same kind of diversionary language used by billionaire Mayor Bloomberg when he claimed he had to clear Zuccotti Park to protect the health and safety of the protesters and the neighborhood. All the while his police were affecting the health and safety of the protesters and the neighborhood. Klieg-lights swept the area, helicopters buzzed overhead, loudspeakers roared, police sirens screamed and hundreds of people were violently roused from their sleep, some handcuffed and thrown into police vans, while others were sent away, bewildered and terrified to wander the silent canyons of New York.

         When all of the two dozen people who were arrested in the next day's police crackdown at Duarte Square were led away, the crowd began drifting north toward Zuccotti Park. By nightfall of November 15, 2011, the park was again packed with people, the yellow-orange fall foliage above the park giving it a festive air despite the disappearance of the accoutrements of a "community." Gone were the tents that had been ripped apart, the tent poles that had been sawed in pieces, the blankets, pillows and sleeping bags, the boxes of food, the brooms and mops, the laptops that had provided communication with the outside world, the bicycles that had provided power after the mayor had confiscated the generators—all were thrown into a heap and carted off by the sanitation department. But, like a butterfly escaping from a mine, protesters had already managed to replace about 100 of the 5,000 books that had been carted away from the "people's library," the night before.

         The Trinity Church leadership had supported the British in the first Revolutionary War. Over 200 years later, on July 12, 2011, about a dozen people gathered in the churchyard of Trinity Church to mark the 207th anniversary of the death of Alexander Hamilton, first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, founder of the Federalist party, and patron saint of the aristocratic wing of the founding elite. Canon Anne Mallonee, Vicar of Trinity Wall Street, spoke of Hamilton's continued relevance. "His beliefs affect our daily lives to this day," Mallonee said. Therein hangs a tale.

     

    Sheila D. Collins is Professor of Political Science Emerita at William Paterson University and a co-founder of the National Jobs for All Coalition, on whose Executive Board she serves.

  • Gertrude Ezorsky: From Left Democratic Socialist to Left Democratic Socialist


    (A presentation at a conference at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on November 18, 2011, held in honor of Gertrude Ezorsky and sponsored by the New York Society For Women in Philosophy)

     

         There is a famous quip by Georges Clemenceau: "Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head."

         Now Clemenceau himself was an illustration of the limitations of his own comment: a radical in his youth, he later became a reactionary, anti-labor, war-monger—showing a lack of both heart and head.

         Clemenceau's quote, however, reflects a widespread notion that idealism is something just for the young. Now I hasten to add in the presence of so many philosophers that I am not speaking of idealism in the technical philosophical sense, but in the everyday sense of being committed to decent values, caring about other human beings, wanting to see a more just and humane world. It is widely held that these noble values are charming in the young, even appropriate, but that once one grows up, one has to be realistic and dispense with such nonsense; one has to set aside the foolish dreams of youth and get down to the business of business, to making money, to getting ahead. One is reminded of an advertisement trying to recruit people to the Peace Corps back in 1967. It read:

    "So you'll get to be the President of U.S. Copper two years later. What's your hurry? You know everything you want to do will still be here to do in a couple of years. The only thing you don't know is what a couple of years in the Peace Corps will do for you. Maybe it'll help you get to be President of U.S. Copper faster…."[1]

    But, no: if moral behavior is right at 18, it's right at 80, too. A lifetime of being committed to good values is both rare and commendable.

         To be sure, this doesn't mean one should stick stubbornly to old mistakes. Stupidity does not become more impressive through repetition. Of course one should learn as new evidence and experiences become available. Age, with its greater experience, will often confer an advantage. On the other hand, youth, less tied to encrusted routine, and with neurons increasing rather than decreasing, will often be more open to new approaches, new technologies, and new ideas. But basic values—as opposed to factual knowledge—should not be a function of age. We ought to be committed to social justice, freedom, and equality at any age, throughout our lives.

         Gertrude Ezorsky has learned many things over her long career. She has changed her views based on new information. She has shifted her position based on new arguments. She has made predictions, necessarily based on incomplete information, some of which turned out to be wrong, even horribly wrong. But the underlying values have been admirably consistent and consistently admirable.

         As an 18-year-old at Brooklyn College in the 1930s, Gertrude was a socialist. Her socialism came not from a careful reading of volume 3 of Capital or the Gundrisse, but from a belief in certain fundamental values: democracy, equality, and fairness. Looking out across Depression-era America, it was clear that the United States—with its Jim Crow, with its privileged 1%, with its mass unemployment and impoverishment—lacked these values.

         Now the term socialist means different things to different people. Many of those who called themselves socialists in those days were admirers—and one could say worshippers—of the Soviet Union. But to Gertrude, Stalin's Soviet Union was the very antithesis of socialism. For her, socialism meant the extension of democracy from the political realm to the economic realm, which in turn would allow it to become real in the political realm. That is to say, if democracy means rule by the people, then self-rule ought to apply not just to the election of mayors and legislators and presidents, but to popular control over the key economic institutions of society. How could one democratically determine one's own fate if one could not make crucial decisions regarding investment or the nature of one's work life? Moreover, under so-called democratic capitalism, even apart from racial discrimination, the inequality of economic resources meant that real democracy was lacking in the political sphere as well as in the economy. Even before the Supreme Court's awful Citizens United decision, those with wealth had a vastly greater say over the political system than those without. So for Gertrude, democracy has always been an essential, defining characteristic of socialism. This was her view in the 1930s. It is her view today.

         Even before Khrushchev's 1956 revelations it was clear that the Soviet Union was no democracy, and thus for her it couldn't be socialist. In more recent years, many other regimes have called themselves socialist and found their admirers on the left—Cuba or China or even Libya—but Gertrude always insisted that if it's not democratic, it can't be socialist. When leaders hold absolute power for life, that's not democracy and that's not socialism. When the people cannot change their leaders or criticize their leaders, that's not democracy and that's not socialism. And when people must conform to sacred texts—whether they come in holy scrolls or little Red Books or middle-sized Green Books—that too is not democracy and not socialism.

         But it's not just police states that have usurped the term socialism. Various political parties in the West—some calling themselves socialist, some using "social democratic" or "labor" but all affiliated with the Socialist International—have expressed their ultimate goal as a more humane capitalism. Now God knows (if she exists) that capitalism could use a little humanizing. But a reformed capitalism, however much an improvement it represents over what prevails in many countries, is still capitalism, which means that private individuals (that same 1%) still make the key economic decisions that affect people's lives. The bankers in Berlin and Paris and London played virtually the same role in their countries under Schröder, Mitterand, Blair and Brown as under Merkel, Chirac, Sarkozy, and Cameron. And German, French, and British workers have barely more control over their own destinies under social democratic governments than they do under rightwing governments. For Gertrude, this sort of social democracy was not and is not socialism.

         Of course, free market ideologues claim that the capitalist workplace is a model of freedom. If anyone were not happy with their remuneration or their conditions of employment, they could simply go elsewhere. But the power to quit or to exit is not the same as having a democratic voice; we wouldn't call a dictatorship democratic simply because it allowed its citizens to emigrate. In any event, however, quitting is not a real option when one needs a job to support oneself and one's family. One is not acting freely when one stays in a horrible job. As Gertrude argues in her book Freedom in the Workplace? no sensible commentator would say that a person is acting freely when she turns her wallet over to an armed robber. Yes, it's true that she could as a logical possibility refuse the robber's demands and accept the bullet between her eyes, but it is clear that there is coercion here, and where there's coercion there's no freedom.[2] The same applies to the workplace under capitalism. Workers don't freely choose their jobs. They act under the compulsion of starvation or misery. They are not free.

         Social democracy fails to live up to socialist values in another crucial respect. Socialism is based on the principle of equality. But capitalism requires inequality—not as extreme as in the United States today—but inequality nonetheless. Adam Smith's invisible hand uses inequality to provide incentives; it uses inequality to allocate resources; it uses inequality to reward winners and punish losers. There can be no capitalism without inequality. Thus a social system based on equality requires an end to capitalism and to the capitalist class system.

         There are of course other forms of inequality aside from class inequality: there is inequality based on race, caste, gender, and sexuality, among other characteristics. Some socialists see these other dimensions of inequality as part of the "superstructure" of society, not the "base," and therefore problems that will automatically disappear once class inequality is eliminated. Moreover, these socialists argue that to champion the victims of these other forms of inequality necessarily divides the working class, and weakens the class struggle. Gertrude always rejected this view. Early in her political career she was influenced by the Afro-Caribbean socialist C.L.R. James for whom racial discrimination was a powerful independent social phenomenon, not simply a reflection of social class. For Gertrude there were always two powerful reasons why all forms of discrimination needed to be independently addressed. First, there was her commitment to equality and fairness: it was simply wrong for African Americans or women or any group to be treated as second-class citizens. And, second, there was her deep belief that far from weakening the working class struggle, challenging these other forms of discrimination was essential to strengthen the movement for social change. If a union discriminated against African Americans, for example, it was no favor to the class struggle to pretend that racism didn't exist. The bosses would always be able to defeat a strike by one racial group by importing strikebreakers from the other. Only by directly confronting racism and taking steps to address it would a union, or the working class more generally, be able to resist the bosses' divide-and-rule tactics.

         And so Gertrude became a champion of—and a leading scholar of—affirmative action, explaining to us all in her writings on the subject the moral imperative of equality on the basis of race and gender. It is now so commonplace in academic circles that women are entitled to equality that one tends to forget that before Gertrude and others threw down the gauntlet it was equally commonplace in academia—even among male leftists—to discriminate against women. Discrimination, of course, has not disappeared; but virtually no one today will publicly admit to supporting it.

         In 1986, Gertrude joined the editorial board of the journal New Politics. New Politics began in its first incarnation in 1961 as an independent socialist publication, affiliated with no party or sect, committed to "third camp socialism"—opposed to both U.S. imperialism and Soviet imperialism—and a belief in the importance of building political power from below. Its initial editorial board and endorsers consisted of more than three dozen distinguished leftists, distinguished in part by the fact that they were all male. In this respect, New Politics was a product of its times. The journal stopped publication in the 1970s and then re-emerged in its second series in 1986, but this time its nominal commitment to gender equality was matched by the presence on its board and among its sponsors of distinguished women leftists, Gertrude among them. The journal continued to define itself as "third camp"—opposed, for example, to both the U.S. war on Iraq and to Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship—socialist, democratic, opposed to racism and sexism, and in support of affirmative action. I joined the editorial board of New Politics a decade after Gertrude. I found the journal to be more influential than its small subscriber base might suggest. It was always a voice for non-sectarian radicalism, always asking the left tough questions. And in our internal deliberations Gertrude has always asked the tough questions and been a strong voice for affirmative action and feminism—and for more female and minority board members.

         Some progressives have taken the view that we should dispense with race- or gender-based affirmative action and just support color-blind, gender-blind, class-based affirmative action. Others have argued that the totality of justice is represented in the fight for race- and gender-based affirmative action. As was to be expected, Gertrude's approach was neither of these: we need both, she insists. Both sorts of programs are important; neither should be ignored. Her approach is best seen in her analysis of a case involving New Jersey firefighters.[3]

         The NJ Civil Service Commission had been found to have discriminated against minorities and it signed a consent decree agreeing to increase the proportion of minority firefighters. Some years later budgetary shortfalls in Newark led to the need to lay off some firefighters and the question arose as to which firefighters should lose their jobs: more senior white firefighters or less senior minority firefighters who had been hired as a result of the consent decree. Now one could sidestep this dilemma by saying we need socialism and there's no good solution under capitalism. Period. But socialists and philosophers and socialist philosophers can't so easily avoid addressing an actual issue that actually came up. The U.S. Supreme Court took the view that affirmative action cannot trump seniority and upheld the laying off of the minority firefighters. Gertrude's solution—and the solution of the District Court judge who was overruled—was that layoffs should be done in such a way as to maintain the proportion of minority firefighters, and that the white firefighters who thereby lost their seniority rights should be financially compensated by the federal government (just as they would be if their homes had been taken to make way for a highway).

         To Gertrude this solution would have served three valuable purposes. First, it would have supported the principles of affirmative action. Second, it would have been fair, not just to the previously excluded minority firefighters, but to the white firefighters as well, who should not have to alone bear a burden that is society's responsibility. And third it would have helped to build support for affirmative action by avoiding pitting one group against another.

         Gertrude's commitment to socialist values is expressed in one other area of her work: her articles on Hannah Arendt and Eichmann. Clearly the main thrust of her case against Arendt relates to questions of fact: did Eichmann really not hate Jews, was he just following Hitler's orders, was he a Zionist, was he a mediocrity? Was Jewish cooperation indispensible to the Nazi project, did Jewish leaders collaborate, did Jews more cooperate in the Holocaust than resist it? On all these factual matters, Gertrude has marshaled compelling evidence. But less noted is that Gertrude also offered a political critique of Arendt.

         The critique comes from Gertrude's understanding of socialism as something that is not bestowed as a gift from on high. It is the people from below who make social change, and it is they—and only they—who can bring about the fundamental social change that would be socialism. So when Arendt insisted that Eichmann was a normal, average man without anti-Semitic convictions, to Gertrude this was not just empirically questionable, but part of an argument claiming that ordinary people are incapable of making a better world. And when Arendt criticized Jewish community leaders who were placed in an impossible situation for trying to mitigate harm, stating that it would have been better had they done nothing at all, Gertrude pointed not only to Arendt's sloppy facts and considerable lack of empathy, but to Arendt's denying the capacity for political action.

    ~~~

         A logician, a Stalinist theoretician, and Gertrude Ezorsky were trapped in an elevator during the power outage that crippled the tri-state area following the unusual snow storm we experienced a few weeks ago. How are we going to get out, they wondered? The logician said, "Assume that we are rescued and that the power is restored." The Stalinist said, "I'll have all the electric company workers shot!" Gertrude said, "Power to the people!"

         And she's been saying that all her life.

     

    Notes

    1. Marshall Windmiller, The Peace Corps and Pax Americana (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1970), p. 57.

    2. Gertrude doesn't actually say that people are "coerced," but that they are "forced," a technical philosophical distinction that I neglected to draw in my remarks.

    3. Vulcan Pioneers v. New Jersey Department of Civil Service, 34 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 1239 (D.N.J. 1984).

  • Behind the Euro Crisis: Germany Gambles on the Old Dream of European Hegemony

         German industrial and financial power is the key to understanding the complex and often confusing international maneuvers around the Crisis of the Euro. Germany is Europe’s industrial powerhouse, the only country that has survived the Great Recession with a healthy economy, low unemployment, rising GDP, social stability and a favorable balance of trade. Yet, only within the solid framework of a strong European Union can Germany, Europe’s principal creditor nation, ever hope to collect on her Southern European loans and investments. The stability of the European currency is essential to a continuation of Germany’s favorable economic situation, even if this means extending more credit to failing economies like Greece, Italy and others down the line, as Chancellor Merkel told her own fiscally conservative party in no uncertain terms on November 15.

         For Germany (and its American ally) the Euro-zone is ‘too big to fail.’ And since the European Union lacks a mechanism like the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, only Germany is in a position to underwrite the necessary major bailout. This is a financial gamble of historic proportions, and it comes at a political price: hegemony in Europe, Germany’s century-old dream.

    Bismarck Makes Germany a Great Power

         Paul Kennedy’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) classifies Germany as the hegemonic (or would-be hegemonic) military-industrial power in Europe from the year 1870. That was when Bismarck, the ‘Blood and Iron’ Chancellor of Prussia, tricked the French Emperor Napoleon III into hastily starting a war that Prussia had long been preparing for. After a stunning defeat (Napoleon was taken prisoner when the Prussians surrounded the main French army), Bismarck crowned his somewhat reluctant feudal sovereign as Kaiser Wilhelm I, ruling a vastly expanded, united German Reich (including two captured French provinces and most of the Southern German-speaking states) from his own capital, Berlin. (Bismarck, Démon ou Génie? by Marice Ezran, Paris 1994.)

         By the end of the 19th Century, efficient, scientifically-organized German industry was challenging Britain’s outdated industrial plant for economic supremacy. Meanwhile, Prussian militarism, supported by this industrial and financial expansion, prepared for future political hegemony and territorial expansion. During the 20th Century, two drawn-out mechanized World Wars were required to prevent the German Reich from transforming its industrial and financial power into imperial domination of the Continent. The main factors that prevented capitalist Germany’s ‘natural’ ascendancy to European hegemony were military: 1) Geography. Situated in the center of Europe between the vast Russian Empire and its ally the French Republic (still a major military power), Germany was obliged to fight on at least two fronts in both World Wars, as well as at sea against the formidable British Navy. 2) The rise of a new, rich and vastly more populous military-industrial power, the United States, allied with France and Britain. 3) The lack of access to modern petroleum-based energy.

    Defeated, Divided and Demilitarized, Germany Rebounds

         In 1945, the demilitarization and division into East and West of post WWII Germany was designed to prevent yet another attempt at hegemony, but by 1960 (the year I bought my first VW!) West Germany’s industrial plant had risen from the ruins, modernized and become competitive with U.S. industry. Demilitarization freed up huge amounts of German capital, whereas Germany’s conquerors, the U.S. and the USSR, were draining their economies in a costly arms race. Moreover, West Germany found unlikely diplomatic support from ex-enemy de Gaulle of France, who forged a close alliance with Chancellor Adenauer while carrying out France’s independent, anti-US foreign policy during the Cold War. Today, France’s Sarkozy rides shotgun as Merkel’s ‘Deputy Sheriff,’ foreclosing on European debtor nations. As for Russia, as early as the 1970’s, West German leader Willi Brandt dared to break the ice of the Cold War with his independent Ostpolitik, opening up lucrative German trade with its Warsaw Pact neighbors. Today, Germany and Russia are staunch allies and trading partners to the point where Immanuel Wallerstein talks of a ‘Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis.’

    United Germany’s Great Gamble

         When the Soviet Empire collapsed and the two Germany’s were reunited in 1990, far-seeing West German capital took the risk of investing huge amounts in integrating and modernizing the impoverished East. The West German investors’ bet paid off so successfully that today a former East German, Angela Merkel, rules over a rich, populous, and powerful united Germany, from the Chancellery established by Bismarck in Berlin back in 1871.

         Right now, Chancellor Merkel, a Conservative like Bismarck, is dragging her centrist coalition—uniting all factions of German capitalism—into another daring gamble. The terms? Bail out the Euro zone and end up owning it. In other words, German hegemony, without German militarism. In the words of Meyer Rothschild (whose financial house bank-rolled Bismarck): “Give me the right to issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who governs the country.”

         Using diplomacy and ‘soft’ power, the Chancellor will now collect the debts that the Greeks and Italians owe the Frankfort bankers as effectively as the U.S. Marines collected the Central American debts for the New York bankers a century ago. Only, instead of sending gunboats and installing ‘friendly’ dictators, Merkel employed canny diplomacy and financial clout to engineer the fall of Papandreou and Berlusconi, Europe’s two most long-serving and popular Prime Ministers. (The ‘Socialist’ Papandreou was brave enough to call her bluff and announce a popular referendum on the Euro at the Cannes summit, but then he shamefacedly backed down.) That crafty manipulator Bismarck (who after 1870 actually preferred diplomacy to war) would have been proud of his disciple.

    Bloodless Regime Change

         The deposed Greek and Italian heads of government have now been replaced by so-called ‘technocrats’ subservient to the German-dominated European Union Central Bank. Both are representatives of Big Finance:

         "Mario Monti, who will replace Berlusconi, was formerly the European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission and a member of the Bilderberg Group. He is also listed on Goldman Sachs board of international advisers. Lucas Papademos, who will replace Papandreou, was formerly the Vice President of the European Central Bank (ECB), and served as Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 1980. He’s also been a member of the Trilateral Commission since 1998."

         The Chancellor has also dispatched teams of German bankers to ‘advise’ them, much as U.S. Embassy staff ‘advised’ the Mexicans and Nicaraguans: Pay up or else! The advisors are there to make sure that the technocratic puppet regimes carry out the most stringent austerity measures and force the Greek and Italian working people to pay the debts previously contracted by their own shady bankers and corrupt rulers. This may not prove to be easy.

         Meanwhile, the future implications of Merkel’s historic ‘beheading’ of two European heads of state may be as far reaching in their own way as the double beheadings in Tunisia and Egypt. To begin with, Germany’s de facto imposition of these super-national ‘receivership’ regimes means an end to democracy and national sovereignty for Greece and Italy. Classical Europe’s two historic Great Powers, the fountains of European civilization, the cradles of democracy (Greece) and of the rule of law (Rome), are henceforth vassal states under the regency of German and North European banking capital.

    Diplomacy Trumps Militarism

         From an international perspective, Merkel’s diplomacy and soft power have succeeded in dominating two of the countries where Hitler’s hoards came a cropper in 1944. Meanwhile, on Germany’s once-vulnerable Eastern front, Wallerstein’s ‘Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis’ has literally been sealed in concrete with the recent inauguration of the Nordstream pipeline, which will provide Germany (and France) with an endless supply of cheap Russian gas and a bottomless market for Mercedes and Peugeots. The Nordstream pipeline, developed by private capital, runs under the North Sea from Vyburg, Russia, to Germany, thus cutting out East Europe and changing the balance of power. And this time around, the U.S., whose precarious finances also depend on the stability of the Euro, will have to support Germany, even if this means helping a rival German-dominated European economy to become more powerful and productive than the declining American economy.

         Merkel’s Bismarckian diplomacy has thus succeeded in removing the three principal historical obstacles to German economic-military hegemony: 1) the geographical necessity for a Central European Power to fight a two-front war; 2) the previously unmatched military and economic power of the United States; and 3) inadequate access to modern petroleum-based fuels.

    New Possibilities for Struggle?

         From the perspective of the European class struggle, this new situation creates new possibilities. For over a year now, the Greek youth and working classes have been striking and rioting against being forced to ‘pay for their crisis’, and now the Italians, with a long history of self-organization, will be called upon to defend their interests as well. These inevitable struggles will take place in the revolutionary atmosphere initiated in the Arab Spring and now gone global with the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement of the 99% -ers. No more illusions about capitalism’s ‘trickle-down’ effect.

         Moreover, the new technocratic rulers of Greece and Italy and their bean-counting German advisors will be hard put to cope politically with rebellious populations who will see themselves as debt-slaves to the creditor German banks. Some Greek protesters have even carried blue European Union flags with yellow swastikas in the middle and compare the debt deals to the occupation of Greece during World War II. It would take a showman like Berlusconi or a populist like Papandreou to continue to bamboozle the masses into acquiescence, and now they are gone.

    Dangers and Opportunities

         In this new situation in Greece and Italy, one can expect a rise of national resentments as well as splits within the national bourgeoisie between pro-Europeans (finance capital) and local business interests (like tourism, retail, and export industries) who may align with the working classes. Such an alliance might demand an exit from the Eurozone, so as to liquidate their debt through default (as was successfully done by Argentina), devalue their currencies, and become competitive again. On the other hand, as the world economic crisis deepens, the dangers of far-right nationalism may increase in Europe’s debtor countries, leading even to fascism, as they did during the Great Depression.

         Yet despite this striking historical parallel, today’s global political context is vastly different. During the 20th Century, Soviet Russia was perceived as a revolutionary threat, and so the capitalist democracies tolerated and encouraged the violent anti-Communist movements of Mussolini and Hitler until it was too late to stop them.[1] At the same time Stalin, who cynically manipulated the European Left in the interests of Russia foreign policy through the Communist International’s control of local Communist Parties, divided and demoralized Europe’s working classes, opening the gates to fascism.[2] In the 21st Century, the masses have no such divisive illusions about ‘revolutionary parties’ and ‘socialist fatherlands.’ In today’s globalized multi-polar world, the workers in every country, from Greece to ‘Communist’ China, are confronting the same neo-liberal ruling class attacks and fighting back through strikes and occupations.

    Internationalism

         So if national resentment doesn’t turn into chauvinism and if the 99% -ers remain independent of their national-bourgeois allies, recent developments may open up new prospects for struggle. The key factor will be internationalism. Only if the Greek and Italian working classes are able to unite (and draw in the Spanish, Irish and other European workers) will they escape from debt-peonage to the German-dominated European banks while avoiding the dangers of nationalism on the Right.

         Up to now, the established European labor unions and the Left parties (Communists and Socialists) have succeeded in confining class conflicts within their national borders, while at the same time limiting resistance to ritual one-day ‘general strikes,’ and channeling discontent into local and national elections. (Of course elections are now superfluous under appointed receivership governments responsible to a European super-government.) Nonetheless, the entrenched, class-collaborationist national labor unions and ‘Left’ parties—although rejected wholesale by Greek youth and the Spanish indignados—still have a powerful influence in Italy and France. If more spontaneous, self-organized, horizontal movements like the Arab Spring, the indignados, and the international ‘Occupy Everything’ movement spread into Old Europe (including into Germany), the straightjacket hold of the official Left on European social movements may be broken, releasing new energies and the creation of international solidarity among the 99%.

         This international solidarity will be needed when the next financial bubble bursts—as it inevitably will—and turns the Great Recession (from which only the 1% have ‘recovered’) into a globalized Second Great Depression. We live in heady times, rife with dangers and rich in possibilities.

    Montpellier, Nov. 16, 2011

    Notes

    1. Similarly, U.S. and British imperialism cynically encouraged Islamism in the Arab world as a foil for socialism and secular nationalism, while arming the likes of Osama bin Laden against the Russians—only to be overwhelmed by ‘blow-back.’

    2. In 1932, the Comintern ordered the German CP to support the Nazi’s against the Social-democrats under the slogan ‘After Hitler Us!’ In 1936, when Stalin made his alliance with the Western capitalist democracies, the Comintern created the class-collaborationist ‘Popular Front Against Fascism.’ The French CP/CGT called off the revolutionary June 1936 nationwide factory occupations in order to placate Stalin’s bourgeois allies. In 1937 in Civil War Spain, the Communists, allied with the Liberals, brutally suppressed the more radical socialist, anarchist and syndicalist workers’ and peasants' movements who bore the brunt of the fight against Franco, thus provoking the defeat of the Republic. In 1939, Stalin signed his infamous pact with Hitler, and the Communist Parties changed their ‘line’ from ‘anti-fascism’ to pacifism, politically disarming the French working people in the face of the 1940 German invasion and occupation.