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  • Lessons from Industrial Disaster in an Unpredictable Age

         As the Gulf oil spill of April 2010 came and went — public outcry now quieted and offshore drilling now resumed — so too seems the case with the nuclear fallout of Japan. Currently, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) are determining the future of more than a dozen aging nuclear reactors in the United States, some of which are of the same design as the Fukushima Daiichi reactors that exploded and melted down last month. The bureaucrats at NRC however, have never denied a nuclear plant application for renewal. No other time is more appropriate to reconsider the sensibility and safety of nuclear energy than now, and yet, no other time was more appropriate to reconsider offshore drilling than after the Gulf oil disaster.

         When industry fails — and history recounts it always has — our response needs to be an innovative outlook into the sensibility of the industry accountable. Too often however, industry complies with middling safety improvements and well-clad public relations campaign. Take, for instance, the Bhopal disaster of 1984, in which a Union Carbide pesticide plant leaked methyl isocyanate gas and other chemicals, exposing hundreds of thousands of people to its poisons. In response, Dow Chemical purchased the company in 2001, and launched a $US10 million public relations campaign, introducing such marketable notions as "the human element", assuring the public that the company's ethics have changed for humanity's benefit. British Petroleum's response to the Gulf disaster created further environmental disruption. Rather than turning to any of the other innumerable non-toxic methods of cleanup, BP treated the Gulf with two highly toxic dispersants, Corexit EC9500A and Corexit EC9527A, both of which are well associated with Exxon and BP.

         With a history of disreputable industrial-led cleanup, one understandably grows concerned over the recent response to the nuclear fallout of Fukushima Daiichi. When radiation levels above reactor 2 continue to increase to 6,500 times over the legal limit, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spends afternoon tea with Emperor Akihito, one doubts the legitimacy of solutions underway.

         Safety standards prove incompetent to contain the unpredictable and volatile. Two weeks before the Gulf disaster, President Obama had reopened much of coastline to drilling, stating, "It turns out, by this way, that oil rigs generally don't cause oil spills. They are technologically very advanced." Having to sheepishly recount this statement after the oil platform exploded, Obama assured the nation that he would only lift the moratorium "under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe."

         Now, I'm not sure what President Obama's criteria for "absolutely safe" is, nor do I know under what measures the NRC has determined that every single nuclear plant is safe for renewal. But I do know this: the unpredictable is inevitable. In an age of rapidly changing climate, when unpredictable weather is the new normal forecast, we cannot consider industry in the same manner that we originally exercised in order to build our current industrial era. Following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, President Obama called for a safety review of the 104 nuclear power reactors in the United States. Yet, no safety review can possibly be comprehensive enough to secure against a hostile, most unpredictable era of climate change. In today's broadcast, when fires rage across Arizona, and tornados flatten much of the South, even the unlikeliest of hazards become high risk.

         The signatory warning of a failing industry however, should not depend on disasters like the Bhopal leak, the Gulf oil spill, or the nuclear fallout in Japan. Even if these industry sectors performed with perfect records, meeting the most rigorous standards of safety, they would still be the primary cause of species extinction, climate change, acid rain, ozone depletion, and a whole list of other irrevocable planetary disasters. In the words of the environmental economist E.F. Schumacher, "Man talks of a battle with Nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side." President Obama's "absolutely safe" standard seems not to include these inevitable effects, nor does the NRC seem to consider the 10,000-year half-life of nuclear waste or the horizon of volatile storms, nor does Dow Chemical seem to include real human life in their "human element" campaign.

         And though a swelling bandwagon is bustling towards the likes of solar, wind, and geothermal energy, the central problem is still left unconsidered. With global population topping 7 billion, and the level of consumption ever-growing — developing nations pursuing the equivalent quality of life as the United States, and the United States demanding still better and more — these alternative energy sources cannot fulfill their demands. A "small is beautiful" era is needed. A retirement, not a safety review, is most needed for the oil, nuclear, and pesticide industries — idealistic, wishful thinking, of course, yet not nearly as naïve as the industrial assumption of infinite resource exploitation, unlimited population growth, and unregulated dumping.

         The rare disaster is only a phase of debate and outcry. Time pushes each disaster back into a hazy memory until the next adversity of unpredictable strikes. This age needs to be different. Public outcry cannot die because climate change is not going away anytime soon. The more industry expands its sectors to meet energy needs, the more at risk are public health, public safety, and planetary security.

     

    Guy Walker is a young environmental activist from Idyllwild, California. The summer of 2011, he will bicycle across the United States, confronting corporate agricultural powers, helping to return food democracy to the people.

  • Harvard’s embrace of Christie – shameful but not surprising

    Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) at one time had space for progressive ideas, (that’s where I earned my doctorate) but it was never a “liberal bastion.” True HGSE had space for critique of US society, but the culture and institutional structure were dominated by the very wealthy annoyed that their children had to be exposed to critiques of US society in order to get the Harvard credential to which they consider themselves entitled. As neoliberal thinking has permeated US society, HGSE has been making its ideological contribution to the struggle, on behalf of the advantaged, masking its shift in the rhetoric of supporting equal educational opportunity. HGSE gets much of its money from foundations funded by what Diane Ravitch has termed the “Billionaire Boys Club” (BBC hereafter) and directly from the guys themselves.

    So the term BBC accurately conveys the class nature of the attack on public education. However, there’s much more to this mammoth social engineering we’re witnessing. As I explain in a panel with Ravitch and a piece for NP,  this is an international political project that aims to satisfy capitalism’s most ardent desire, a compliant workforce. The project requires destruction of teachers unions, which are the most stable and potentially powerful force to protect the structures of public education and teachers’ potential to convey ideals of democracy and social justice that threaten the behemoth. Howard Stevenson puts this well:

    “Teachers deal with ideas, and the importance of their ideological function is well understood. There is of course nothing inevitable about what teachers do or how they work – education has the power both to reproduce and transform, and will always contain elements of both and be a struggle between both. Teachers do not automatically work in progressive ways – but it is their potential to work in critical and transformatory ways that mean they are always a threat to the established social order.”

    In welcoming a governor who has built his political career by bullying teachers and making clear his goal of destroying teachers unions, HGSE does not surprise. Of a piece with inviting an avowed union-buster is the refusal to tenure Mark Warren, a faculty member whose research and activity demonstrated commitment to democratic school reform. The sort of bastion HGSE is and has always been is one of social privilege. HGSE’s contribution on the wrong side of the class struggle has just changed along with the rich and powerful who have always controlled the media and institutions. They no longer think they have to allow space for critique.

  • How the Islamic "virus" broke out of the imperialist laboratory

    [Editor's note: This article continues Richard Greeman's series about Islamism.] Over the years, the British-backed Moslem Brotherhood’s activities spread far beyond Egypt. Not by coincidence did the first Arabic translation of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” still in circulation today, appear in Egypt the 1920"s. This anti-Semitic forgery was created by the Imperial Russian secret services around 1905 in order to designate a scapegoat and divert the growing Russian revolutionary movement into reactionary channels (pogroms, Black Hundreds). Today, as in the 1920’s, it serves to divert the anger of the Moslem masses away from their despotic governments toward Zionism and the Jew-dominated West. However, in the 1970’s this did not stop the Israelis from encouraging and financing the Brotherhood’s evangelical and social activities in newly occupied Gaza and the West bank through its “Moslem Center” front in a “tactical alliance” against the Palestinian resistance led by the secular PLO. These activities were directed by the Brotherhood’s Palestine Apparatus as a base on which to prepare the creation in the 1980’s of the Islamic political party Hamas and for its future armed struggle against both the PLO and Israel. Divide-and-rule continued to bear fruit for the Israelis in the Twenty-First Century, when actual armed hostilities broke out between Fatah- and Hamas-oriented militias in the West Bank, demoralizing the Palestinians and paving the way for fresh Israeli incursions. Similarly, the “Islamicist” tactic of attacking civilians by placing car bombs in front of mosques was first introduced by the CIA in Lebanon in the 1970’s, according to award-winning journalist Allan Nairn. In the 1980’s we find the CIA playing the Islamic card against the Communists in the Great Game between Russia and the West over control of Afghanistan. If Osama bin Laden didn’t personally work for the CIA in the 80s (as did Saddam Hussein) his fighters received U.S. arms and money through the Pakistani secret services (ISI) to combat the Russians and the Afghani Communists (who incidentally had brought secular education, female equality and relative lack of corruption to Afghanistan during their years in government). Throughout ME/A history the imperialist West has consistently preferred to support pliant reactionary despots over democrats and nationalists for the simple reason that it is cheaper and more profitable to pay off a small ruling group and keep the lion’s share of the profits than to submit to popular demands for better wages, local development and a fairer distribution of the oil revenues. By and large, these divide-and-rule tactics have worked. And although the Clash of Civilizations paradigm presents the Islamic world as an aggressive, expansionist, ideological and military threat to pacific Western democratic liberalism, the historical record shows that the Western governments have consistently crushed every attempt at democracy or secular nationalism in the ME/A lands. One needs only to recall the 1953 CIA-organized overthrow of the elected government of Iran and its mildly nationalistic prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had dared to impose partial nationalization of Iran’s oil-fields (while offering to pay 25% royalties to the British). Or the 1956 French-British-Israeli invasion of Egypt, when the secular pan-Arabist government of Nasser threatened the Suez Canal. The reason secular strongman and former CIA “asset” Saddam Hussein suddenly got transformed from cherished ally in the war against the Ayatollahs into an Islamic “Hitler” had nothing to do with religion. As the surviving regional power after the defeat of Iran in their bloody 1980-1988 war, the Iraqi dictator got too big for his britches and tried to take a bigger cut of the profits. This would have set a very bad precedent, and it took the West two wars and an invasion to cut him down to size – naturally in the name of “democracy” and the “liberation” of the Iraqi people. And although the Bush II Administration attempted to link Saddam Hussein with the religious fanaticism of Osama bin Ladan as a pretext for invasion, Baathist Iraq was arguably the most secular, progressive, technically advanced state in the region. One recalls that under Saddam women occupied roughly half the jobs in the Iraqi civil services as well as in education and medicine. Well-trained Iraqi engineers and administrators were able to successfully repair the infrastructure after the devastations of the first Gulf War, despite the continuing U.S. embargo – something Halliburton has been unable to do after spending billions. Not surprisingly, in 2003 the U.S.-British occupiers immediately pushed aside the actual democratic forces within Iraq – women, organized labor, and the educated middle class of doctors, lawyers, engineers – and based themselves exclusively on the reactionary religious and tribal elements whose reign of Islamic terror went viral andcontinues to this day. Another case of divide-and-rule imperialism playing with fire, “creating” Islamism – and then getting caught in the “blowback.”

  • Rising Above the Herd: Keith Preston's Authoritarian Anti-Statism


    "Perhaps what I champion is not so much the anarchist as much as the 'anarch,' the superior individual who, out of sheer strength of will, rises above the herd in defiance and contempt of both the sheep and their masters."

    — Keith Preston, "The Thoughts That Guide Me: A Personal Reflection" (2005)[1]

     

    Introduction

         Freedom from government tyranny has always been a central theme of right-wing politics in the United States. From the original Ku Klux Klan that denounced "northern military despotism" to the Tea Partiers who vilify Barack Obama as a combination of Hitler and Stalin, U.S. rightists have invoked the evil of big government to both attract popular support and justify their own oppressive policies. Witness the rise of so-called National-Anarchism (NA), an offshoot of British neonazism that has recently gained a small but fast-growing foothold in the United States. National-Anarchists advocate a decentralized system of "tribal" enclaves based on "the right of all races, ethnicities and cultural groups to organize and live separately." National-Anarchists criticize statism of both the left and the right, including classical fascism, but they participate in neonazi networks such as Stormfront.org and promote anti-Jewish conspiracy theories worthy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Anti-statism is a key part of National-Anarchism's appeal and helps it to deflect the charge of fascism.[2]

         Keith Preston, who calls himself a "fellow traveler" of National-Anarchism, is in some ways even more dangerous. Preston is a former left-wing anarchist who advocates a revolutionary alliance of leftist and rightist libertarians against U.S. imperialism and the state. Unlike many far rightists who claim to be "beyond left and right," Preston actually incorporates many leftist ideas in his political philosophy and apparently is still in touch with some actual leftists. An intelligent, prolific writer, Preston has established himself over the past decade as a respected voice in libertarian, paleoconservative, and "Alternative Right" circles. His "anarcho-pluralism" represents a sophisticated reworking of far right politics that is flexible, inclusive, and appeals to widely held values such as "live and let live." Unlike most rightist ideologies, it also has the potential to serve as a bridge between a wide variety of rightist currents such as white nationalists, Patriot/militia groups, Christian rightists, and National-Anarchists — and even some left-wing anarchists, liberal bioregionalists/environmentalists, and nationalist people of color groups.

         In this article I will outline the major features of Preston's political program, strategy, and underlying philosophy. Although Preston claims that implementing anarcho-pluralism would result in an expansion of freedom, in reality it would promote oppression and authoritarianism in smaller-scale units. Although Preston is an individualist who does not directly advocate the racial determinism and separatism of his friends the National-Anarchists, he has made it a priority to (in his own words) "collaborate with racialists and theocrats," claiming that leftists who oppose such collaboration are the true bigots. Digging deeper, Preston's opposition to the state is based on a radically anti-humanistic philosophy of elitism, ruthless struggle, and contempt for most people.

         Preston offers a window into the larger issue of right-wing decentralism. This article will trace both the historical roots of the phenomenon and its various branches of recent decades, including libertarian, Christian rightist, neonazi, and Patriot movements in the United States. Preston blends these U.S.-based influences with ideas drawn from the European New Right, a decentralist offshoot of classical fascism, and from German Conservative Revolution figures of the 1920s and 1930s, who influenced but mostly stood outside of the Nazi movement. Preston's own relationship with fascism is much closer than he acknowledges. While he lacks fascism's drive to impose a single ideological vision on all spheres of society, he offers a closely related form of revolutionary right-wing populism. Above all, Preston and his rightist allies embody the main danger associated with fascism — to preempt the radical left as the main revolutionary opposition force.

    Anarcho-pluralism: Let a hundred authoritarianisms bloom

     

         Keith Preston is the moving force behind the Attack the System website/blog [ATS] and its affiliate organization, American Revolutionary Vanguard [ARV]. He is a contributing editor at AlternativeRight.com and has written for a number of paleocon and libertarian sites, including Taki's Magazine, LewRockwell.com, and Anti-State.com. Yet his early political years were spent on the left. In "Learning the Hard Way: My Life as an Anarcho-Leftoid," Preston writes that he became an anarchist at age twenty-one and was active for several years in "hard leftist" circles, including the Industrial Workers of the World and the 1989 founding conference of the Love and Rage network, but became alienated by what he saw as the movement's dogmatism and sectarianism. He then joined the Libertarian Party and began to read libertarian and conservative theorists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Thomas Sowell, and Charles Murray. Gradually he developed a highly eclectic political philosophy:

    I like to think of my political views as being analogous to an architectural work. Classical Proudhonian-Bakuninist anarchism is the foundation. The classical liberalism of the Enlightenment thinkers and American founders is the soil on which the foundation is laid and modern free market economics provides the overall structural framework of the building. Traditional American populism is the general external design. Ideas on strategy and infrastructure acquired from the militia/patriot milieu are the nails and screws. Traditionalist conservative emphasis on intermediary institutions as a bulwark against the state, Third Positionist and "national-anarchist" criticisms of the pernicious influence of international Zionism and the need for cross-ideological alliances against globalism and those elements of Marxism and Maoism that I find useful comprise the remainder of the interior decorating and external trimmings. Confused yet?[3]

         The product of Preston's eclectic synthesis is "anarcho-pluralism," a vision of revolutionary change that centers on replacing centralized nation-states with a diverse array of small-scale political entities. Anarcho-pluralism, Preston writes, "is 'anti-universalist' because it rejects the view that there is one 'correct' system of politics, economics, or culture that is applicable much less obligatory for all people at all times and in all places." Instead, any group of people could organize and govern themselves as they wished, as long as they leave other groups free to do the same. These self-governing units could be based on ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, political philosophy, or cultural practice. This, Preston argues, is "the best possible method of avoiding the tyrannies and abuses of overarching Leviathan states, and accommodating the irreconcilable differences concerning any number of matters that all societies inevitably contain."[4]

         To achieve his revolutionary vision, Preston advocates a broad alliance of all political forces that want to dismantle the U.S. central government. More specifically, he calls for a "pan-secessionist" strategy, based on a coalition of those across the political spectrum who want to carve out separate, self-governing political enclaves free of U.S. government/imperialist control:

    Within the domestic US, the ranks of separatists include Christian Identity, Nation of Islam, Aztlan Nation, Christian Exodus, Free State Project, Neteuri [sic] Karta, American Indian Movement, Republic of Texas, Confederate State Project, Black Panthers, Green Panthers, Earth Liberation Front and many others…. A military/political/economic confederation of these various resistance forces would prove quite formidable, particularly when the struggle is taken internationally to include the EZLN in Chiapas, FARC in Colombia, Shining Path in Peru, Peoples' War Group in Nepal, Baathists in Iraq, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, etc.[5]

         This is certainly a broad array of potential partners, encompassing Marxist-Leninists, white separatists, libertarians, neo-Confederates, indigenous rights activists, Christian rightists, Islamic rightists, militant environmentalists, and anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews.

         Preston even envisions support for his pan-secessionist coalition from a block of "rogue states." "Preferably, a future revolutionary Russia, perhaps led by the National-Bolshevik Party, leading a confederation of anti-NWO regimes from North Korea to Venezuela, would to some degree play the same role as the old Soviet-sponsored Warsaw Pact as a bulwark against Western imperialism…"[6]

         Preston's vision of a pan-secessionist alliance can be seen in embryonic form in the recent series of North American secessionist conventions sponsored by the Middlebury Institute, which is led by bioregionalist author Kirkpatrick Sale. These gatherings have brought together representatives of such varied currents as the left-leaning Second Vermont Republic, ethnically based sovereignty movements in Hawaii and Quebec, and right-wing groups such as the Alaska Independence Party and neo-Confederate League of the South. Preston has helped to promote these conferences and attended at least one of them.[7]

         Bringing together left and right against the U.S. state and empire is a central thread running throughout Preston's work, as evidenced in American Revolutionary Vanguard's "Twenty-Five Point Program." Some points in the program borrow from the rightist libertarian or Patriot movements, such as support for building civilian militias to resist "creeping domestic and global tyranny," "common law courts supervised by volunteer juries and private judges," and local currencies based on gold or silver. Other points draw from the left, such as advocating labor militancy, affordable health care, reliable consumer information, tenant organizing, and abolition of jails and prisons. Still other points seem designed to appeal to both leftists and rightists, such as promotion of alternative media, tax resistance, the right to bear arms for self-defense, and opposition to U.S. military aggression against other nations.[8]

         Preston often blends leftist and rightist themes in a pragmatic effort to build coalitions. On race relations, for example, he advocates "sovereignty, reparations [for slavery] and amnesty [to most prisoners] for the advancement of the interests of blacks and the elimination of race-based favoritism, affirmative action, ant-discrimination laws, etc. for the advancement of whites." Similarly, he argues that "we should be tough on crime, but equally tough on cops, courts, and laws." This means a "liberal" position on defendants' rights and prison conditions, but a "conservative" position on the right to bear arms and form private organizations for protection against crime.[9]

         Leftist influence on Preston's politics goes beyond tactics and bullet points in a program. His critique of the "partnership between the forces of state and capital" draws largely on the historical work of Gabriel Kolko. Although mostly hostile to Marxism, Preston sometimes discusses it favorably, arguing for example that Marxist analysis of crime in terms of class conflict "has much validity," although it needs "sharp revision" when applied to an advanced industrial society. In discussions with conservatives, he periodically invokes thinkers such as C. Wright Mills, Max Horkheimer, Sam Dolgoff, and others likely to be outside his readers' comfort zone. His essay "What Maoism Has To Offer Anarchism" could have been written by a leftist and cites many aspects of Maoism as valuable, such as its emphasis on criticism/self-criticism, revolution as an ongoing process rather than a one-time event, and the need for revolutionary activists to maintain close contact with "the masses."[10]

         Despite all this, Preston's politics are fundamentally right wing with a leftist gloss. Preston has made right-wing circles his political home, embracing the project to build a radical Alternative Right rooted largely in paleoconservatism and white nationalism. While defending his choice to "collaborate with racialists and theocrats," he has called for "a purge, if not an outright pogrom" to drive anti-racist whites, feminists, and queer activists from the anarchist movement in order to "attract more young rebels into our ranks." (He later claimed that critics had taken this statement "way too seriously.") By presenting white separatists and religious rightists as valuable allies in the struggle against U.S. imperialism and the state, Preston misportrays them as positive contributors to social and political change, and obscures or trivializes the harm they do now and the vastly greater harm they would do if given control of autonomous, self-governing territories.[11]

         Preston embraces "a philosophical conservatism regarding human nature and the nature of society," whose tenets include "natural inequality of persons at both the individual and collective levels, [and] the inevitability and legitimacy of otherness…"[12] He is harshly critical of the left's egalitarianism and universalism. Instead, he offers an elitist, anti-humanist philosophy that echoes Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Jünger, and Ayn Rand:

    those who obtain the upper hand in the ongoing power struggle will almost always be the most ruthless, cunning and merciless of the competitors. The wolves will always win out over the sheep. Within the bleak framework of a perpetual war of each against all, there from time to time arises the exceedingly rare individual whom Nietzsche referred to as the "ubermensch." This is the individual of superior will, strength, mind, spirit, discipline, intelligence, intuition, perceptiveness, shrewdness, wisdom, creativity, inventiveness, generosity and other such characteristics that set the human species a half step above the other animals. It is this individual who becomes the "anarch," the "egoist," the one who rises above the perpetual fog in which both the sheepish people and their vicious masters dwell…. It is persons such as these who carry with them the seeds of cultural and civilizational growth. For any sort of human existence to emerge beyond that of the merely animalistic, this type of individual must thrive…[13]

         Preston argues further that "the first purpose of any politics or ethics beyond the purely material or defensive" must be to protect and foster these rare, superior individuals, the anarchs. "It is apparent that the political framework most conducive to the advancement of the anarch is some sort of anarchism." In other words, the main reason Preston supports anarchism is not to liberate all people — but to help a handful of superior individuals rise above the bestial mass of humanity.[14]

         It would be a mistake to see Preston's elitism as a mask for bigotry against any specific group of people. Still, standard right-wing prejudices periodically creep into his prose. He argues that "multiculturalism will not work out in the long run because human beings are by nature tribal creatures. Feminism will implode because males and females have different biological destinies and therefore different social destinies." He endorses claims that non-white immigrants threaten to destroy Western civilization and argues that white nationalists have many "legitimate grievances," such as racial preference schemes, hate crime laws, and welfare programs that benefit people of color at the expense of whites. He portrays homosexuality as weird and somewhat distasteful but "not a problem" as long as it's kept private; any efforts to challenge heterosexism collectively and publicly are, at best, trivial distractions from the important job of overthrowing the U.S. empire.[15]

         Although Preston is an elitist who expresses contempt for most people, he is also a populist. More specifically, his anarcho-pluralism represents a form of right-wing populism — that is, it seeks to rally "the people" against established elites based on a distorted analysis of power that both masks and reinforces oppressive social relations. Right-wing populism offers a plausible target for anti-elite rage that channels it away from a thoroughgoing attack on the oppressive order. Some right-wing populists target a specific ethnic group (such as Jews) or even a specific sub-group within the elite (such as bankers or multinational corporations). Preston targets the state. More precisely, he falsely equates oppression in general with the large, centralized state, in a way that both obscures and promotes other forms of social oppression and political authoritarianism.

         In keeping with right-wing libertarian thought, Preston portrays the state as the only significant source of oppression, and sees "corporate plutocracy" purely as a result of state interference in the market economy. It's quite true as he argues that the state has actively promoted the concentration of wealth and economic power, but his assumption that "natural" markets can be separated from "unnatural" state involvement is a libertarian myth. Both state and market are institutions created by human beings, and the two are closely intertwined. Market relations have expanded enormously under capitalism — not in spite of, but largely through, state intervention (forcing subsistence farmers across the globe to become wage laborers, for example). "Freeing" markets from the centralized state would certainly reshape capitalist power, but would not abolish it. Rather, it would benefit certain forms of capital and certain business factions over others.

         Similarly, Preston only acknowledges oppression along lines of race, gender, sexuality, or other factors to the extent that these are directly promoted by the state, particularly through formal, legal discrimination against specific groups of people. Arguing that "the state is a unique force for destruction," Preston ignores or trivializes the dense network of oppressive institutions and relationships that exist outside of, and sometimes in opposition to, the state.[16] It is these societally based systems of oppression, not state intervention, that perpetuate dramatic wealth disparities between whites and people of color, widespread domestic violence that overwhelmingly target women, and suicide rates much higher among LGBT teens than heterosexual teens, among many other examples.

         Dismantling the central state won't abolish other systems of oppression. It will simply create a power vacuum where they can function in a more fragmented, unregulated way. This is a recipe for warlordism, a chaotic society where anyone with enough physical force can make the rules. As Kersplebedeb has argued, "There is an organic tendency towards warlordism in communities that have tasted capitalism and patriarchy and colonialism. Even oppressed communities."[17] This is a problem if your goal is to dismantle systems of hierarchy and oppression, but not if your goal is to help a handful of superior individuals rise up through ruthless struggle.

         Authoritarianism doesn't require a large centralized state, but can operate on any scale, such as a region, a neighborhood, or a family. With no program for liberation except ending big government, pan-secessionism would foster many smaller-scale authoritarian societies. For example, one of the political currents that Preston hopes to include in a pan-secessionist confederation is Christian Identity. This doctrine, which has been embraced by a number of neonazi groups such as Aryan Nations, holds that Anglo-Saxons are God's chosen people; many Christian Identity advocates also believe that people of color are soulless "mud people" and Jews are children of Satan. Another current on Preston's pan-secessionist list, Christian Exodus, advocates an independent Christian nation based on a right-wing interpretation of biblical law. The Christian Exodus website prominently features the writings and speeches of Matt Trewhella, leader of Missionaries to the Preborn, who has publicly endorsed the murder of abortion providers as "justifiable homicide." A third secessionist current, the League of the South, advocates a society "structured upon the Biblical notion of hierarchy," where "Christ is the head of His Church; husbands are the heads of their families; parents are placed over their children; employers rank above their employees; the teacher is superior to his students, etc." The league's ideal society also "stigmatizes perversity and all that seeks to undermine marriage and the family."[18]

         While claiming that anarcho-pluralism would raise the overall level of freedom, Preston himself acknowledges that "there might also be a proliferation of a number of relatively or intensely closed communities, particularly among those operating within the framework of some sort of racial, religious, or cultural exclusivism or some sort of overtly authoritarian political ideology." He has no problem with the idea of "anarcho-feudalism" or "anarcho-monarchism."[19] As far as I know, he has not directly addressed the question of "anarcho-slavery," but it's unclear why this would be any more objectionable.

         Preston portrays secession as a voluntary process, in which many varied groups of people decide to go their own separate ways and coexist peaceably side by side. But what does "voluntary" mean in a context where wives are expected to submit to the authority of their husbands, workers to obey their bosses, or homosexuality is regarded as a perversion and a crime? And how long would peaceable coexistence last in the face of absolutist ideologies that are inherently expansionist? The leaders of a Christian Right statelet would believe that homosexuality and feminism are wrong not only within the statelet's borders, but everywhere, and they would feel a religious duty to enforce this belief as widely as possible.

    U.S. roots of right-wing decentralism

         Preston has invoked the heritage of the American Revolution, claiming that the "highly decentralized, largely libertarian regime" of the Articles of Confederation (1776-1789) — if it had not been replaced by the "state-capitalist class dictatorship" of the U.S. Constitution — would have given us "a decentralized federation of sovereign territories and communities with a worker-farmer-inventor-artisan-merchant dominated economy with localized production for local use," as well as a neutralist foreign policy and moderately integrated ethnic groups coexisting amicably.[20] This romanticized view of the nation's origins hides an uglier reality: Throughout U.S. history, political decentralism has often been a vehicle for intensifying oppression, not reducing it.

         The most obvious example of this is the Confederacy's secession in 1861, which was engineered by the South's elite to defend and expand their region's slave-based economy. Contrary to Preston's simplistic portrait of a U.S. ruling class wedded to the central government, different capitalist factions have varied widely in their relationship to federal authority. As historian Mike Davis has pointed out, "in contrast to the geo-financial centralism of other capitalist countries, the dominance of Wall Street has always been qualified by competition with financial centers in Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco and, more recently, Los Angeles and Houston." Davis notes that regionally based business factions, exercising political power at the state or city level, have repeatedly challenged older capitalist factions for national primacy.[21]

         The United States is also distinctive in the degree to which business has taken on what are normally thought of as government functions — including the supposed monopoly of force. Between the 1870s and 1930s — the critical period in the development of U.S. industrial capitalism and industrial class relations — business relied on private armies and police forces more than the state to repress labor activism. During the late nineteenth century, the Pinkerton Detective Agency alone had more men than the U.S. Army. And in thousands of "company towns" across the South, Midwest, and West, a single business either economically dominated or owned outright an entire community, effectively controlling all trade, services, politics, and cultural life.[22] Many of these towns — which were virtually free from any central state oversight — came nearer than anything created by Hitler or Mussolini to the classic Comintern definition of fascism as "the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital."[23]

         Not only capitalists, but also middle- and working-class white men have engaged in "highly decentralized, largely libertarian" armed activity through much of U.S. history. Volunteer fire companies in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, in Noel Ignatiev's words,

    fought continuously over control of territory within the working-class districts of the city or suburbs. Arson was high on their list of weapons: one of their favorite tactics was to set a fire near the territory of a rival company, and then lie in wait to attack it when it showed up; they also extorted money from nearby homeowners who had good reason to anticipate fire if they failed to contribute… [Each fire company] became identified with a particular ethnic group and played an important role in establishing the place of that group within the city…. only the free Negroes were without their own fire company.[24]

         In the absence of a strong central state, non-governmental armed organizations have often played a vital role in imposing social order and hierarchy. The citizen militias of the 1990s, the anti-racist newspaper Turning the Tide has argued,

    are the descendants of the armed settlers who banded together to take land from the indigenous people. They are descendants of the slave posses that enforced the slave codes before there was any law enforcement apparatus. The white supremacist Arizona Rangers who plotted to bomb federal buildings in the '80s are descendants of the 19th century Arizona, Texas, and California Rangers, which developed from lynch mobs terrorizing the conquered Mexican population in the 1840's into the rudimentary apparatus of law enforcement by the Euro-American state in those territories conquered from Mexico.

         Turning the Tide also cites similar vigilante enforcement organizations in nineteenth-century Missouri, Idaho, and Montana, as well as the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, which "enforced Protestant 'Americanism,' family values, anti-immigrant hysteria, and Prohibition."[25]

         These examples of vigilante repression have often been accepted, if not actively aided, by the state. But other repressive forces have worked in opposition to the state. This primarily reflects the United States' history of colonial conquest and system of racial oppression, in which whites of all classes have participated actively but in different ways. For over 300 years, American hostility to "big government" has often been driven by European Americans who wanted freer rein to conquer or dominate people of color without the limitations that central authorities imposed for pragmatic reasons. For example, Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 began with a massacre of Occaneechee Indians by Virginia frontier settlers; the American Revolution was motivated partly by opposition to the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which banned colonial settlement west of the Appalachians. Both the New York City "Draft Riot" of 1863 and the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan combined anti-black terrorism with irregular warfare against the established central government. In the 1880s, the white labor movement in the western U.S. was built largely through anti-Chinese racism, including several pogroms. After World War I, even the refounded Klan often challenged local elites and sometimes aided striking workers. In the 1930s and early forties, a sizeable network of fascist and pro-fascist groups called for overthrowing the government. In the late 1950s, Southern politicians promoted a "Massive Resistance" campaign against federally mandated school desegregation.[26]

         Several interrelated branches of right-wing decentralism have grown from these roots. Libertarianism coalesced after World War II among advocates of free market capitalism, who denounced New Deal programs such as Social Security as socialistic. Libertarianism drew on broad-based U.S. traditions of individualism and a mythology of self-reliance associated with the frontier. Yet right-wing capitalists played a key role in funding libertarian institutions such as the Foundation for Economic Education and, later, the Cato Institute. In recent years, corporate-backed outfits such as the American Legislative Exchange Council have been instrumental in promoting the privatization of government functions such as education, social services, public transportation, and prisons.[27]

         Libertarianism's development has also been intertwined with the Christian Right. In the 1950s, conservative Protestant organs such as Faith and Freedom promoted a biblically based message of capitalist individualism, which has become one of the central tenets of Christian Right ideology. Hostility to big government has helped to shape one of the most hardline Christian Right factions, known as Christian Reconstructionism. Rooted in Presbyterian theology, Reconstructionism advocates a totalitarian application of biblical law but would administer it mainly through local governments and private institutions, especially the church and the family. This has led one scholar to describe Reconstructionists as "libertarian theocrats."[28] Prominent figures associated with Christian Reconstructionism include libertarian author Gary North; Matt Trewhella of Missionaries to the Preborn; and Howard Phillips, three-time presidential candidate of the U.S. Taxpayers Party/Constitution Party. The secessionist group Christian Exodus is influenced by Reconstructionism.

         New forms of political decentralism have also emerged within the white nationalist far right. During the 1980s, neonazi doctrines including Christian Identity and Third Position largely supplanted Klan-style segregationism among paramilitary rightists. Although classical fascists had promoted a highly centralized state, many of the new groups called for fragmenting or subdividing political authority. Aryan Nations, for example, advocated a separatist white homeland in the Pacific Northwest, while Posse Comitatus rejected all governmental authority above the county level as illegitimate. Also during this period, much of the U.S. far right was influenced by Louis Beam's promotion of the concept of "leaderless resistance."

         By far the largest recent example of militant, right-wing decentralism is the Patriot movement, which attracted an estimated five million supporters at its height in the mid/late 1990s and has experienced a partial resurgence recently. Encompassing a diverse array of groups and ideas influenced by neonazism, the Christian Right, libertarianism, and John Birch Society-type conspiracy theories, the Patriot movement represented the United States' first large-scale coalition of fascist and non-fascist activists since World War II. The movement developed out of fears that globalist elites were plotting to impose some sort of tyranny on the United States, and many members formed armed militias to defend against an expected crackdown. Although most Patriot groups disavow ethnic bigotry, ideas rooted in white supremacism have circulated widely within the movement, such as bogus constitutional claims that African-Americans hold "14th Amendment citizenship," which is inferior to the "Sovereign citizenship" held by white Christian Americans.[29]

         Of these various right-wing decentralist currents, libertarianism is the one that has had the biggest influence on Preston's politics. This is the source of his simplistic claim that the fight against oppression can be reduced to dismantling big government. Preston is neither a white nationalist nor a Christian anything, and his affinity to the Patriot movement is based on militant hostility to globalizing elites, not conspiracism or crackpot legal theories. Yet all of these currents have contributed to a broader right-wing discourse that blends decentralism with a belief in social hierarchy, populism with elitism. Preston's work is important, in large part, because of the ways it touches and blends with these other currents in Alternative Right circles. Moreover, Preston's big-tent approach to radical change supports and promotes all of these currents, and all of them would play a big role in shaping the society he hopes to create.

    The European New Right

         Another important element in Preston's eclectic politics is European New Right (ENR) ideology. Like Aryan Nations or Posse Comitatus, the ENR is a decentralist offshoot of traditional fascism, but it has gone much farther than these U.S. counterparts in distancing itself from explicit ethnic bigotry. Preston has written that he regards ENR philosophy as one of the best foundations for modern anarchism, and that "more than any other contemporary intellectual current, the ENR has developed a critique of the philosophical underpinnings of totalitarian humanism, as well as a rational response to the question of threats posed by demographic transformation."[30]

         The European New Right began in France in the late 1960s with the founding of GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes pour la Civilisation Européene) and then spread to other European countries, among them Italy, Russia, Germany, Belgium, and Britain. Its founders (most prominently Alain de Benoist) began as traditional far rightists who set out gradually but systematically to rework fascist ideology. While classical fascism had relied on paramilitarism and political mass mobilization, the ENR focused on transforming intellectual and cultural discourse. In place of the classical fascist ideal of a highly centralized, authoritarian nation-state, the ENR envisioned a federated "empire" of regionally based ethno-cultural communities. It espoused anti-imperialism, not expansionism, and cultural authenticity, not biological purity. Disavowing fascism and its familiar icons, many European New Rightists have resurrected lesser-known far rightists of the interwar period, notably writers associated with the German Conservative Revolution (a term coined by Swiss far rightist Armin Mohler, who called them the "Trotskyites of the German Revolution"). At the same time, the ENR carries forward traditional fascism's hostility to individualism, egalitarianism, and ethnic or racial mixing, as well as the paganism shared by some classical fascists.[31]

         A key feature of ENR ideology is the doctrine that Benoist has called "differentialism." European New Rightists claim to be champions of "biocultural diversity" against the homogenizing effects of globalization and liberalism. They argue that true anti-racism means honoring and defending racial and ethnic differences through separation. (Thus Benoist advocates immigration restriction, although he concedes that a mass departure of immigrants already in France is unrealistic.) Similarly, Benoist and Charles Champetier have argued that true, "differentialist" feminism means defending natural gender differences. Neutralizing these differences represents "a twisted form of male domination" because it requires women to "divest themselves of their femininity." Differentialism also means rejecting the principle of universal human rights as "a strategic weapon of Western ethnocentrism," since all rights depend on cultural context.[32]

         Many observers have argued that the ENR's political shifts are intellectually dishonest. Guillaume Faye, a former comrade of Benoist who criticizes him from the right, charges that GRECE's embrace of ethnopluralism began as a "rhetorical ruse" to allow Europeans to defend their identity without being accused of racism. This criticism is seconded by white nationalist Michael O'Meara, author of one of the few book-length English language studies of the European New Right, who argues that Benoist appropriated "the pluralist principles of contemporary liberalism — to defend Europe from its biocultural enemies."[33]

         While Faye and O'Meara argue that GRECE's deception backfired and led it to compromise its anti-liberal principles, critics further to the left point out that the ENR's pluralist rhetoric masks cultural chauvinism and authoritarianism. Anton Shekhovtsov argues that the ENR has turned the UN-recognized "right of all peoples to be different" into an imperative and "a way of legitimizing European exclusionism and rejection of miscegenation." Alberto Spektorowksi notes that while Benoist claims to regard all cultures as equal, he considers technological development to be "authentic" only for Indo-Europeans. Thus "by encouraging other cultures to remain confined in their own culture and their own 'nomos,' [Benoist] condemns them to a 'proud' underdevelopment." Roger Griffin argues that the French New Right remains true to fascism's "fundamental historical mission: to replace the decadence of liberal democracy with a 'new order' in which national/ethnic identities are intensified rather than diluted, and the differences between peoples enhanced rather than eroded."[34] He also warns that any attempt to realize the ENR political vision

    would in practice involve social engineering by an autocratic (super-)state pursuing policies of cultural and ethnic homogenization and exclusion. These policies…would deliberately set out to reverse the effects of many decades of liberal pluralism, multi-culturalism, multi-ethnicity, secularization, and individualism. The quest to restore "difference," "identity," and a pagan sense of the sacred on the basis of a claimed xenophilia would inevitably turn nationalism into ultra-nationalism, and introduce measures of social exclusion and ideological indoctrination…[35]

         The European New Right has had relatively little impact in the United States, at least until recently. Although the movement resonates with U.S. paleoconservatism in a number of ways, interchange between the two has been limited by the ENR's paganism and anti-Christianity, as well as its animosity toward the United States as the driver of globalization. The ex-leftist journal Telos has played a key role in bringing ENR texts and ideas to an English-speaking audience since at least the early 1990s. More recently, National-Anarchists have emerged as another important transmission belt. The ENR was a major influence guiding NA-founder Troy Southgate away from explicit racism toward a more sophisticated "ethno-pluralism," and National-Anarchists have also followed the ENR's lead in celebrating German Conservative Revolutionaries, above all Ernst Jünger, whose later work centered on the concept of the "anarch."[36]

         Preston has written that National-Anarchism was his introduction to European New Right philosophy.[37] Among many points of agreement, Preston has embraced the ENR's critique of cultural homogenization and "totalitarian" universalism, and its claim that ethnic separatism — including immigration restriction — is vital for preserving cultural diversity. He also took up the ENR's project to resurrect the work of non-Nazi far rightists from Weimar Germany, citing Jünger as a model of meritocratic elitism and producing an extended study of Carl Schmitt as liberal democracy's most insightful critic.[38] In addition, despite the differences in terminology, Preston's anarcho-pluralist vision closely resembles the ENR's federated empire of decentralized communities.

         Preston's main differences with the European New Right center on two issues: religion and liberalism. Most European New Rightists are neo-pagans who long for a "return of the sacred" and denounce Christianity as the root of universalism, egalitarianism, and other ills. By contrast, Preston is a pragmatist willing to work with people of any religious views, who mostly treats his own atheism as a personal matter. Even more importantly, the ENR criticizes not only modern welfare state liberalism, but also classical liberalism, individualism, and free markets, while Preston embraces all three. These disagreements inform an important difference in their political ideals. While the ENR utopia emphasizes "organic" communities rooted in a specific culture and region, Preston's vision emphasizes individuals choosing the communities they want and not bothering other people.

         By blending the ENR's differentialism with American pragmatic libertarianism, and by translating high-brow ENR discourse into more accessible prose, Preston may help to make ENR ideas more appealing for U.S. audiences. Discussions of ENR works and ideas are periodically featured not only on Preston's Attack the System website but also on AlternativeRight.com and other U.S.-based sites. The close ties between the ATS/ARV network and National-Anarchist groups further accentuate the ENR's growing influence in U.S.-based right-wing discussions.

    Why Preston matters

         Keith Preston is a right-wing revolutionary whose hostility to the U.S. ruling class is just as strong as his hostility to the left. He calls for dismantling the existing state and replacing it with a radically new political order. This revolution would take political and cultural power away from the representatives of the U.S. ruling class, but it would not directly challenge the systems of capitalism, white racial oppression, patriarchy, or heterosexism, and would promote other (ethnic, religious, and Nietzschean) forms of elitism and social hierarchy. All this Preston shares with fascism, yet he does not share fascism's totalitarian vision, the belief that all spheres of society should be subordinated to one top-down, unifying doctrine. Anarcho-pluralism is a dangerous and deceptive ideology, but rather than impose one comprehensive repressive order, it would foster a multiplicity of repressive orders.

         But anarcho-pluralist revolution is hypothetical, while oppression and exploitation are immediate, brutal realities for most people in the United States — not to mention the rest of the world. Given this, why should we care about Preston and his allies? Not because of any imminent threat that they will win power, but rather because they have the potential to "take the game away from the left," as Tom Metzger urged neonazis to do in the 1980s. Don Hamerquist's warning about emerging fascist movements applies equally to Preston-style right-wing revolutionaries: The real danger from such forces "is that they might gain a mass following among potentially insurgent workers and declassed strata through an historic default of the left."[39]

         Both sides of Hamerquist's warning — the left's historic default and the insurgent right's potential to attract a mass following that includes the left's traditional base — resonate alarmingly with Preston's own strategic thinking, as detailed in his February 2011 piece, "The State of the Resistance Two Years Into the Age of Obama." First, Preston argues, tellingly, that Obama's election accelerated the collapse of the antiwar and anti-Patriot Act movements, despite the fact that Obama has intensified the war in Afghanistan and continued President Bush's police state policies, because "the antiwar or anti-Patriot Act left was always more motivated by opposition to Bush or opposition to the Republicans than by opposition to imperialism or police statism themselves."[40]

         In contrast, Preston notes the emergence in recent years "of a 'permanent opposition Right' that opposes the establishment irrespective of what party is in power and fervently rejects so-called 'movement conservatism' of the Republican Party. The paleoconservative Right first adopted this stance during the Bush regime with its dominance by the hated neoconservatives, and the paleo movement has since evolved into the far more radical Alternative Right." Coupled with this, local groups affiliated with National-Anarchism, Preston's own ATS/ARV network, or related currents have grown significantly since Obama took office. Most of these affiliates "have appeared in areas that are solidly blue [i.e., left leaning], such as New York City, San Francisco, southern California, Ohio, Boston, Ontario, Washington state, [and] Wisconsin… Further, we have experienced grown among conventionally blue demographics such as African-Americans, Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Gays/Queers, Muslims, and others not generally thought of as being part of the American right-wing." (Although the number of people involved is no doubt small, these claims appear to be fairly accurate, and Preston is not given to bluster. I count at least 15-20 blogs and websites for N-A and ATS-affiliated groups in North America, most of which have appeared over the past year or two, along with a larger penumbra of right-wing anarchist, ENR-oriented, and secessionist sites of various kinds.)

         In conclusion, Preston argues that "the relevant future political struggles [will be] a kind of intra-Left civil war between the totalitarian humanist establishment and an anarchistic opposition that rejects the left-right paradigm, adopts a populist outlook, organizes among the lumpen elements of urban areas, is primarily though by no means exclusively youth oriented, and is allied politically with more conventionally right-wing populist sectors originating from more conservative or sparsely populated regions, and with revolutionary right-wing elements who have rejected this system in favor of a 'post-America' of more decentralized politics and seceded regions."

         Within the context of a broader oppositional right, Preston could well play a critical role in helping to make this strategic vision a reality. His background and outlook put him in an unusually good position to act as a coalition builder. He offers a political voice that is militant, analytically grounded, and strategically coherent. Although closely aligned with the National-Anarchists, his network may also attract some people, including leftists, who are put off by National-Anarchism's more obvious "tribalist" baggage. He is someone to watch carefully.

         Like other forms of revolutionary right-wing populism, Preston's anarcho-pluralism calls for a dual response from the left. Part of the response is to expose the oppressive and authoritarian reality behind Preston's claims to be promoting diversity and freedom. The other part — much more difficult but ultimately much more important — is to build a revolutionary left that functions as a serious opposition whether the government is controlled by conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats. Unlike Preston's version of revolution, that means fighting not just centralized state power, but all forms of oppression.

    Notes

    1. Keith Preston, "The Thoughts That Guide Me: A Personal Reflection," New Right Australia /New Zealand (Web site), 26 April 2006 (written 2005).

    2. Craig Fitzgerald, "Note on Racial Separatism," National Anarchist Tribal Alliance — New York (blog), 14 January 2011; see posts by Andrew Yeoman of Bay Area National Anarchists on Stormfront.org; for anti-Jewish theories see "N-AM Manifesto, Part One: Anti-Zionism," National-Anarchist Movement (Web site), 18 September 2010. See also Spencer Sunshine, "Rebranding Fascism: National-Anarchists," The Public Eye 23, no. 4 (Winter 2008).

    3. Preston, "Learning the Hard Way: My Life as an Anarcho-Leftoid," AttackTheSystem.com (Web site) [abbreviated hereafter as ATS], 2002.

    4. Preston, "Anarcho-Pluralism and Pan-Secessionism: What They Are and What They Are Not," ATS, 8 August 2010.

    5. Preston, "Why I Choose to Collaborate with Racialists and Theocrats," ATS, n.d.

    6. Ibid.

    7. Preston, "Third North American Secessionists Convention — A Review," ATS, 19 November 2008.

    8. American Revolutionary Vanguard Twenty-Five Point Program, ATS.

    9. "Liberty and Populism: Building an Effective Resistance Movement for North America," ATS, 2006.

    10. Preston, "Free Enterprise: The Antidote to Corporate Plutocracy," ATS, 2008; Preston, "Crime and Conflict Theory, ATS, 30 January 2011; Preston, "What Maoism Has To Offer Anarchism," ATS, 2 June 2008.

    11. Preston, "Why I Choose to Collaborate with Racialists and Theocrats"; Preston, "Is Extremism in the Defense of Sodomy No Vice?," ATS, 20 May 2009; Preston, "The 'Purge' Revisted [sic]: Anarcho-Leftoids Unite in Hatred Against Keith Preston," ATS, 27 May 2009.

    12. Preston, "Paul Gottfried and Me: An Exchange on Left and Right and Anarchism," ATS, 7 December 2010.

    13. Preston, "The Thoughts That Guide Me."

    14. Ibid.

    15. Preston, "We Will Win: The Case for Optimism," AlternativeRight.com, 6 June 2010; Preston, "Liberty and Populism"; "Is Extremism in the Defense of Sodomy No Vice?"

    16. "The Critic Responds, and My Reply," ATS, 16 January 2011.

    17. Kersplebedeb, "Thinking about Warlordism," Sketchy Thoughts (blog), 29 August 2010.

    18. Chester L. Quarles, Christian Identity: The Aryan American Bloodline Religion (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2004), chap. 1; Christian Exodus website; "League of the South Core Beliefs Statement."

    19. Preston, "Reply to a Cultural Marxist Critic," ATS, 22 January 2011.

    20. Preston, "A Calm Anarchist Look at Race, Culture and Immigration," ATS, 2002.

    21. Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), 163-4.

    22. Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present (Boston: G. K. Hall, Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1978), 9-12.

    23. Extract from 13th Enlarged Executive of the Communist International (ECCI) Plenum (held in December 1933) on "Fascism, the War Danger, and the Tasks of the Communist Parties," reprinted in International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, ed. Roger Griffin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 59.

    24. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 143.

    25. People Against Racist Terror, "PART's Perspective on the Militias," Turning the Tide 8, no. 2 (Summer 1995).

    26. Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (New York: Guilford Press, 2000); on massive resistance see Tom P. Brady, Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation . . . America Has Its Choice (Winona, Miss.: Association of Citizens' Councils, 1955), excerpts reprinted in The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, ed.. Clayborne Carson et al. (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 83-96.

    27. "American Legislative Exchange Council."

    28. Michael J. McVicar, "The Libertarian Theocrats: The Long, Strange History of R. J. Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionism," The Public Eye 22, no. 3 (Fall 2007).

    29. Tom Burghardt, "State Citizenship: Patriot Ties To White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis," The Body Politic 5, no. 6 (June/July 1995).

    30. Preston, "Paul Gottfried and Me."

    31. Roger Griffin, "Plus ça change! The Fascist Legacy in the Metapolitics of the Nouvelle Droite," chapter for The Development of the Radical Right in France 1890-1995 (London: Routledge, 2000); Mark Wegierski, "The New Right in Europe," Telos 98-99 (Winter 1993/Spring 1994); Anton Shekhovtsov, "Aleksandr Dugin's Neo-Eurasianism: The New Right à la Russe," Religion Compass 3, no. 4 (2009): 697-716; Franco Sacchi, "," Telos 98-99 (Winter 1993/Spring 1994).

    32. Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, "The French New Right In The Year 2000."

    33. Guillaume Faye, "The Cause of the Peoples?," Terre et Peuple, Winter Solstice 2003, in "The Faye-Benoist debate on Multiculturalism"; Michael O'Meara, "Benoist's Pluriversum: an Ethnonationalist Critique," The Occidental Quarterly 5, no. 3 (Fall 2005).

    34. Shekhovtsov, "Aleksandr Dugin's Neo-Eurasianism"; Alberto Spektorowksi, "The French New Right: Differentialism and the Idea of Ethnophilian Exclusionism," Polity 33, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 299; Griffin, "Plus ça change," 9.

    35. Griffin, "Plus ça change," 7.

    36. See for example the Telos Winter 1993-Fall 1994 (nos. 98-99) special double issue on "The French New Right: New Right-New Left-New Paradigm?"; On the origins of National-Anarchism, see Graham D. Macklin, "Coopting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction," Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 3 (September 2005).

    37. Preston, "Anarcho-Pluralism and Pan-Secessionism"; for his self-description as an NA "fellow traveler," see Preston, "Response to a Left-Anarchist Critic," ATS, 13 January 2011.

    38. Preston, "America's Left Conservative Heritage," Taki's Magazine, 16 June 2009; Preston, "Carl Schmitt" (Parts I-IV), AternativeRight,com, 27 August – 29 September 2010 (Part I is here).

    39. Metzger quoted in "Metzger Begins Move to the Top," The Monitor (Center for Democratic Renewal newsletter), January 1988, 5; Don Hamerquist, "Fascism & Anti-Fascism," in Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement (Montreal and Chicago: Kersplebedeb, ARA Chicago, and Arsenal Magazine, 2002), 16.

    40. All quotes in this and following two paragraphs are from Preston, "The State of the Resistance Two Years Into the Age of Obama," ATS, 10 February 2011.

    Matthew N. Lyons has been writing about right-wing politics for twenty years. His review of Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of New Politics.
     

  • Rebels in Industry: A Story Told Well, and One Worth Telling

    Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s
    Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow, eds.
    Verso, 2010. $29.95

         Wordsworth's paean to the French revolution, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!" doesn't appear in Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s. It should.

         The notion of rising with a people risen was as true for the radical generation of the 1960s, as it was for any period when rulers seemed incapable of ruling in the old way and the ruled — certainly a significant portion of young working people — refused to play along. Historian David Montgomery called the period of working class ferment "a rebellion from below." It was.

         And it was an important decade, the long period roughly from the New York transit strike of 1966 to Reagan's crushing of the air traffic controllers' job action in 1981. In the early-to mid-1970s alone, miners, longshore, auto and railroad workers, teachers and construction workers went on both official and wildcat strikes not only for better wages and benefits but also for an end to hideous working conditions.

         Jimmy Carter's calling out the federal troops couldn't get the mines working and even the air traffic controllers, whose union (PATCO) had endorsed Ronald Reagan, walked off their jobs. It took the virtual collapse of the manufacturing sector with its millions of permanent layoffs, a shift in investment away from manufacturing and the Reagan recession to drive that movement underground. It would be a mistake to read this valuable and exceptionally informed book as glorification of one more contender for the "Greatest Generation" prize, nor is it pure validation for "industrializing," one approach to labor organizing favored by some radicals of that period. With the exception of a passing reference in two of the 13 essays, no socialist groups are mentioned.

         The emphasis is on, as co-editor Cal Winslow writes in his introduction, in words reminiscent of the late Edward Thompson, "a chapter in the history of an important decade," as well as "a rescue mission, a history of the workers movement in those years — from the bottom up." It charts, in 13 separate and well-informed essays covering industrial and social struggles and the larger national and international contexts, how an insurgent movement of workers was growing. It was a movement whose demands outstripped not just the politics of liberalism but the vision even of those labor leaders who — with the notable exceptions of the Machinists' William Winpisinger and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' maverick Tony Mazzocchi — called themselves progressives.

         There are lessons to be learned here for a new generation of militants, including what worked, what didn't and why. Certainly one weakness — which the authors don't adequately address because of their emphasis on self-activity, rank-and-file initiatives, and an evident reluctance to wage old wars by making convenient historical points about political strategy — was precisely the politics of the radicals who industrialized. Quite consciously guided by Rosa Luxemburg's wise maxims that "those who do not move, do not notice their chains" and that "chains must be broken where they are forged," many defined this condition narrowly, as forged only (or primarily) at the workplace.

         They also prided themselves on an anti-electoral stance even as corporate America was consolidating itself around neoliberal policies that outsourced jobs and reasserted the primacy of finance capital. In effect too much of the industrialized left gave too little thought to putting forward and organizing for alternative policy programs or engaging in local political campaigns, even as many of their own prized rank-and-file militants did. Nor did they have a vehicle for selling those programs in the cases, especially in steel, where such plans were put forward.

         But a more charitable view is that these young radicals (and I was one of them) were like Aesop's hedgehog — they knew one big thing. That big thing is common coin among community organizers today — that without a base of support the best plans of the most foresighted policy makers would die on the drafting table or in the seminar room or in a legislator's front office. They knew that government and corporations could only be forced to concede and initiate reforms with massive pressure, and at the workplace and not (or not just) at the ballot box. That's necessary if insufficient wisdom, but wisdom nonetheless.

     

    This review originally appeared in the spring 2011 issue of Democratic Left.

  • More national standardized testing is planned – but resistance is growing too

    The Obama administration is surreptitiously moving forward with its program to increase, vastly,  resources devoted to standardized testing. Stephen Krashen and Susan Ohanian explain the blueprint in their excellent post in Education Week.  A counter-movement, SOS, (Save our Schools), has emerged among teachers, who are planning a march on and in Washington to save public education, on July 30. It’s truly astounding how little news about  the growing opposition among teachers in the country, or the extraordinary resistance in the rest of the world, reaches us in the U.S. through our popular media.
    Another heartening development is that teachers who have not before thought of unions as  vehicles for organizing about  social justice – or defense of public education for that matter – are realizing they have to “own” the unions, democratize them and make them use their (still) considerable resources to mobilize against these destructive policies being in put in place by President Obama.

    SOS has called on teachers to recruit their union locals to join the march. The AFT national executive board has given the march its official approval. Put one point in the common sense column. Whether the AFT national apparatus will actually do anything to build the march is quite another question. Its usual idea of “support” is to send  staffers to appear at the rally in AFT T-shirts, have its PR people take lots of photos, especially if the union president is a speaker,  then publicize its support in the union newspaper and website, and refer to this “support” when questioned about its lack of involvement in progressive causes.
    Last I heard, the NEA national office had endorsement of the march on its agenda.  If the NEA can be pressured to endorse and actually build the mobilization, the AFT will feel pressure to do likewise.  This would be an important reversal of the “race-to- the-right” to gain political brownie points from the Democrats — and Republicans — that characterizes AFT and NEA politics.

    The July 30 march is an action that deserves support from anyone who cares about having a system of public education that does more than prepare kids to work as wage slaves, which is the real purpose of all this standardized testing. Can’t attend on July 30? Me neither so I’ve made a donation. I encourage you to do the same.

  • Once Again on Libya

         The basic issue for socialists in confronting the Libyan situation is this: we wish Qaddafi to be defeated, but we are not indifferent to who defeats him. That is because who defeats Qaddafi involves how the regime is brought down and the consequences of that downfall. We are not in support of capitalist imperialism being the agent of that defeat, even though almost any conceivable regime that replaces Qaddafi would most likely be a “lesser evil” to this, one of the world’s most horrific police states.

         It follows that any alternative that imperialism would summarily impose on the Libyan people would subordinate the ability of that nation to fully exercise their freedom to develop to the needs of capitalist accumulation. That is also why we refuse to endorse any imperialist lashup, such as resulted in Iraq or Afghanistan or which imperialists may be cooking up for Iran. These are obscene regimes, but we cannot condone actions which would replace one exploiter with another under the guise of “promoting democracy” or “humanitarian interests.” We do not, in more general terms, recognize — much less endorse — the moral or political legitimacy of one set of exploiters and oppressors to selectively displace another under whatever clever packaging imperialists currently employ to market their ambitions.

         How then do we apply these principles to a situation in which freedom fighters, heavily outgunned and struggling simply to survive, ask — in desperation — for a limited imperialist intervention on an “enemy of my enemy” basis, as opposed to offering a quid pro quo? How do we distinguish our response when imperialists are asked by a legitimate leadership group for limited assistance from those unilateral interventions in which these same imperialists simply arrogate to themselves the unquestioned right to impose their will, unchecked and unqualified, by a legitimate oppositional democratic force?

         Historically, socialists have distinguished between calling upon their own capitalist governments to give arms and aid to insurgencies that we support and the right of these insurgencies to arm themselves through whatever channels they can establish, even with imperialist powers. We reject the first alternative because it entails taking responsibility for involving imperialism in the conflict. Were we to do that, we would also have to accede in how imperialism chooses to provide this aid and to accept as legitimate the advantages imperialism seeks to attain through its involvement.

         Conversely, we accept the latter proposition in deference to the unchallenged right of all embattled democratic forces — including those fighting under authoritarian or bourgeois leaderships whose victory nevertheless does not foreclose broader democratic openings — to seek an edge wherever they can find it.

         The Irish rebels of 1916, according to third camp lore, accepted aid from German imperialism. If that were true, no revolutionist would have questioned the right of the Irish rebels to accept such arms, which the German government offered for its own reasons. That is, it would have been unchallenged as long as no strings were attached. Needless to say, this did not mean that Liebknecht and Luxemburg were called upon to request this aid from the Kaiser. Similarly, no socialist would have repudiated the right of Hungarian revolutionaries in 1956 from calling for aid from anywhere they could get it, including the Western powers. This did not oblige American socialists to ask Eisenhower and the CIA, not to mention the American military to intervene on Hungary’s behalf. The point is not our attitude towards the revolution, but our attitude toward our own imperialist government. We cannot raise demands that we cannot support.

         Along these lines, American socialists supported the call to lift the arms embargo on the Spanish loyalists during the civil war, while refusing to ask our government to send arms to the republicans.

         The capitalist democracies famously refused to answer the call from the Spanish democracy. Had they done so, the capitalists would have been free to choose who among the rebels to privilege, what arms to furnish, the schedule of deliveries they would adhere to, as well as the political terms around which they were willing to premise their aid. The desperation of the loyalists would have provided imperialism with a powerful set of tools to exact concessions from the rebels. Needless to say, we socialists would have advised the revolutionists, that unless they — like the Irish rebels of 1916 — could accept such aid as democratic imperialism was willing to offer without making a political deal in exchange, they would have our full support.

         But what if an insurgency is unable to satisfy these terms? How then would we gauge our response? What if “an enemy of our enemy” basis is insufficient and imperialism seeks concrete concessions, or seeks to shape outcomes or exploits openings to burnish its image?

         This is the crux of our dilemma with the Libyan situation. Up until now we have been successfully spared this conundrum. But that is also our problem. There are no obvious historical precedents to guide us, no historical lessons upon which we can draw. The imperial powers stated, in essence, that they would not release Qaddafi’s funds to the rebels, nor would they relax the arms embargo to the advantage of the democrats. They refused, in effect, to engage the rebels on an “enemy of our enemy” basis. Otherwise it would have been a matter of indifference to the West as to how they channeled this aid. The Western powers agreed, however, to answer the desperate call — a call to which the imperialists themselves are deeply implicated for failing to eliminate the embargo — and provide a no fly zone. We do not know what, if any, deals were exacted, but we do know, assuming that an actual NATO ground invasion is out of the question, that this is where the principle danger resides. Otherwise the refusal to lift the embargo remains — if not to exert political pressure or condition outcomes, in no small part, a mystery.

         Let us examine a few of the Left responses. Among anti-imperialist fundamentalists, Western aid in the form of direct military intervention at any level, either clarifies or redefines the dynamic. For that camp, it is Qaddafi who is seen as fighting an anti-imperialist war. And it is very difficult to understand why this conclusion would have been markedly different had imperialism simply lifted the embargo and either armed or allowed the insurgency to arm itself. It is not the nature of the intervention but the fact of intervention that is crucial to this position.

         In its most primitive form, this anti-imperialist fundamentalism entails actively politicking for Qaddafi as a genuine face of Arab independence and dignity. At a step down are those who, recognizing the repugnant nature of the regime, would have socialists extend military, but not political support to the Libyan police state.

         A somewhat weaker response along the same lines is the assertion that socialists no longer have a stake in this fight. Neither side, they argue, can any longer be relied upon to advance interests aligned to the needs of the Libyan people. The rebels by their choice of involving imperialism died a moral death and socialists have no obligation to save them from the physical destruction that they brought upon themselves.

         All factions of this anti-imperialist fundamentalism would raise the demand for an immediate halt to the imperialist intervention.

         These responses are distant enough from the traditions of third camp socialism as to not require any extended response here. This is not to claim that there are no self-identified third campists who lobby for these positions; only that they are no longer arguing within a tradition that we clearly recognize as our own.

         More pertinent are those who do not withhold their support for the insurgency, but would also, and above all else, actively intervene to demand an immediate halt to the imperialist enforced no fly zone. They have balled themselves into a knot, insisting incoherently that actions which would cleanse the perceived political stain from the rebels, that restores their unchallenged revolutionary “agency” — even if it results in their certain demise — is an act, not of treachery, but of unvarnished even unparalled solidarity.

         I think there is no escaping the conclusion that more crucial than the success of the rebels, from this vantage, is denying imperialism a platform to influence outcomes or repackage its image.

         Perhaps I am being overly generous here. Most of those who make the demand to halt the bombings, but who also claim to support the rebels, have not spelled out why precisely they find one form of imperial intervention and intrusion acceptable — the delivery of arms, while condemning another — the no fly zone. Both forms of intervention are limited. They do not involve an imperialist invasion and the displacement of the rebels to auxiliary status It is still the rebels who are doing the fighting and dying. The distinction is therefore only rational under the unspoken assumption that an elimination of the arms embargo alone would have signaled a “no strings attached” policy, while the NFZ is indicative of something else entirely.

         They have in any case confused themselves with the rebels. Socialists, having complete distrust in the motivations and designs of this intervention, did not call for a no fly zone and did not ask the imperialists to intervene. They are not implicated by the fact that an insurgency that they support did. They — and by that I mean, we — are similarly under no political obligation to call an immediate halt to activities that we did not call for, but which as things now stand permit the rebels to regroup, to consolidate and to extend their national alliances. And this is doubly so, if we have no viable alternative to offer.

         We would not of necessity call a halt to the delivery of arms if the embargo had been lifted and imperialism had exercised its leverage through means of extortion on that basis, as it might equally have, the semi-apocryphal case of Ireland notwithstanding. And we need not do so now. The rebels have opened the door to the imperialists to shape the conflict, but not wide enough to determine and dictate the outcome. If we accept that proposition, as I do, then we are under no obligation to politically sabotage actions, from whatever source, that may permit the rebels a slim chance of military victory, and therefore, the hope for democracy. If we do not accept that proposition, if we believe that imperialism is now in complete control, we have no further justification for continuing to support the rebellion. Political choices seldom conveniently present themselves in black and white. It is through the murky grayness that we have to feel our way to creative alternatives.

         That does not compel us to deny the real dangers that victory under such circumstances portends. This may be uncharted territory, but it is also the terrain in which the issue of revolutionary solidarity — of socialist internationalism — is decisive. We need, first, to forthrightly denounce the pretensions under which this intervention was undertaken. We must be clear that it has nothing to do with humanitarian interests and everything to do with establishing some level of imperialist credibility with the Arab masses in revolt. We can say in advance that we reject any imperialist mediation in the struggle and insist that this, should it come to a question of mediation, only be carried out under the auspices of regional elements sensitive to democracy such as NGOs from Tunisia and Egypt might provide.

         Beyond that, it is our duty to proclaim that any concessions made to imperialism in exchange for the no fly zone, were made under duress and cannot be seen as a binding quid pro quo on any future Libyan government. We will do our best to expose these conditions as we become aware of them and will fight along with honest Libyan democrats and socialists to nullify them. If economic concessions were demanded, we will fight our ruling class, with whatever meager political resources we can muster, to annul them. If political concessions in the form of future alliances or military bases are expected, we will dedicate our assistance in breaking them. If imperialism seeks to raise the Karzais and the Chalabis from the nether ranks of the insurgency and impose them on the Libyan nation, we will mount a campaign to expose this for the democratic fraud it is and mobilize domestic and international opinion against it.

         What I advocate here is that socialists show our support for the Libyan insurgency by actively fighting for the conditions under which a democratic foreign policy can be domestically understood and raise these issues in a way that clearly distinguished our position from the simple America first-ism of anti-war liberalism and the confused anti-imperialism of the “halt the bombings now” stripe. The point is to make our case to the vast majority of Americans who have no stake in the preservation of imperialism and do so in a manner commensurate with the aim of relocating them from the camp of dismissive cynics of Arab struggles to the camp of engaged allies of a democratic Libya and Arab East.

  • Nasrallah on Libya

         The left discussion on Libya has been informed by very few of the Middle East’s anti-imperialist voices. In an article posted on ZNet, I present extended excerpts from a March 19 speech by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon’s Hizbullah, on the Libyan uprising, the Arab revolts, and the role of the West.

         Nasrallah dismisses the claim that the Arab revolts were choreographed in Washington. He expresses solidarity with the Libyan opposition, and warns of the dangers of Western intervention — whose motives are entirely hypocritical. He does not, however, condemn the no-fly zone or call for its immediate lifting.

  • Jobs for All

    Recently, George Fish had a piece on the New Politics website entitled Open Programmatic Proposal to the Broad U.S. Left for Directly Dealing with the Present Unemployment Crisis. I urge New Politics readers to read and consider Fish's proposal.

         It's refreshing for me to see an American socialist make a suggestion such as this one. Fish urges everyone who considers her/himself a part of the left, to join together and advocate a movement that would revive, in a modern version, The Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930's. This is a great idea, and I'd like to explain why I think so.

         The WPA was a government jobs program that had a goal of putting to work everyone who wanted a job during the Depression. This lofty goal was never reached, but millions of jobs were created, making the WPA one of the most successful efforts of Roosevelt's New Deal.

         As George pointed out in his essay, the WPA was notable for it's flexibility in determining what jobs people could hold under its' auspices. There were all kinds of cultural workers, writers, artists, and performers earning a wage while working for the WPA at their chosen professions. A very good friend of mine, a Black woman from Kansas, worked as a librarian in her home town. She is over 90 now, and still remembers her WPA job warmly.

         This brings up an important point: The WPA always tried to put people to work close to where they lived. Other agencies, like the CCC engaged workers in projects that were far from home. Traveling a thousand miles to work on a dam, or plant trees, might have been exciting for young and unattached people, but not if you had a family and were rooted in a community.

         There were serious points of criticism with the WPA. It tended to discriminate against women, largely because it was believed that the government should hire only one person, usually the man, per family. Racial discrimination was a large factor, often due to the market influences of capitalism. In the Mississippi Delta, cotton planters complained that the WPA wages were so high(!), that it had become difficult to find workers to pick cotton at the miserable wages the planters were used to paying. Sadly, the wages were cut.

         The WPA never hired everybody who needed a job, but it was a good step in the direction of "Jobs for All," something we could use today, eh? I think Fish is right about getting the left to join together and advocate a new WPA. If we did this, we would develop strong ties to the whole working class in America, something most of us have long hoped for.

         I would like to recommend to New Politics readers that they check out the National Jobs for All Coalition. They have a website http://www.njfac.org/, and it has lots of great articles to look over. The "Jobs for All" folks are engaged in an organizing project that they call "First Fridays." On the first Friday of the month, you'll find Jobs for All picket lines in front of federal buildings in several East Coast and Midwest cities, because that's the day of the month when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announces the latest unemployment figures. It would be great to see this campaign grow to include hundreds of American cities, with large picket lines in favor of: "Jobs for All at Decent Wages — Bring back the WPA!"

         The jobs issue is vital on its' own account, but there is an important connection to an even more pressing concern

    Brian King
    Seattle

     

  • Libya: Another View

         The Libyan intervention has challenged many on the Left. Of course there are those who cheer U.S. foreign policy everywhere and those who think Qaddafi is a left hero. But for those who reject both these points of view, the Libyan situation has still been very difficult to sort out. Mike Albert and I wrote a question and answer offering our views.

         We take the position that protection of the rebels from imminent slaughter by means of a no-fly zone and a no-drive zone was justified in principle despite the sordid hypocrisy of the intervening powers. However, the actual UN Security Council resolution 1973 was far too open-ended and imposed too few constraints on the intervening powers to ensure that the moral and human benefits would exceed the moral and human costs.

  • CPD Statement on Libya

    The Campaign for Peace and Democracy has issued a statement “We Support the Libyan Democratic Revolution and Oppose Western Military Intervention and Domination.” Please circulate it widely.

    We Support the Libyan Democratic Revolution and
    Oppose Western Military Intervention and Domination

    By Thomas Harrison and Joanne Landy
    Co-Directors, Campaign for Peace and Democracy
    April 6, 2011

         The Campaign for Peace and Democracy stands in solidarity with the Libyan revolution. Even the brutal Qaddafi regime, bloated with oil wealth, defended by thousands of mercenaries, and ruling over a hollowed-out civil society, could not prevent a challenge from below. As is the case with all the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, the Libyan revolt holds the promise not only of democracy but also, along with political freedom, the emergence of a new left and labor movement that can offer an alternative to today’s violent, exploitative and unequal world order.

         At first, Libyans protested peacefully against Qaddafi’s regime. Then, in the face of a vicious attack, they defended themselves with their own arms, helped by numerous defectors from the Libyan army. As the Qaddafi forces reached the outskirts of Benghazi, the U.S. decided to support the calls from the rebels – and the British and French – for a no-fly zone. At that point, the Libyan Transitional National Council’s request was for a strictly limited intervention, explicitly excluding ground forces and aimed only at neutralizing Qaddafi’s air force. Since the Libyans believed they faced the threat of an imminent massacre, their appeal was totally understandable. Likewise, it was understandable that many progressive, normally anti-interventionist, supporters of the Libyan revolution throughout the world called for a no-fly zone as well, especially because the Libyans themselves had asked for it.

         While respecting the impulse behind this position, however, we do not support U.S. and European air and naval operations in Libya. UN Security Council resolution 1973 provided for a no-fly zone, but military intervention by the U.S. and Europe was much more than that right from the beginning, as was predictable given their history, relationship to North Africa and the Middle East, and imperial appetites. The operation, which is now under NATO command, immediately became a campaign to oust Qaddafi on behalf of western interests.

         NATO bombing is now forecast to continue for at least three more months, and an eventual invasion and occupation are possible if the situation isn’t resolved to the satisfaction of the western powers. U.S. and British secret service agents have been in eastern Libya for weeks, and appear to be assuming a growing role in military training, directing NATO air strikes, and perhaps political guidance for the National Council. Intervention may have prevented a massacre in Benghazi, but at the same time it has inserted NATO’s power into Libya, at the heart of a region in democratic turmoil, and dangerously compromised the political independence of the Libyan revolution.

         A “surgical” strike, limited to protecting civilians in Benghazi, was never a real possibility; the U.S. and Europe are not available for one-shot genuinely humanitarian intervention in a major oil-producing region. Libya’s revolution needs to remain in Libyan hands; western military intervention directly contravenes that goal and paves the way for western domination of all or part of Libya.

         In fact, NATO’s attack on Libya may well end up strengthening the hand of Qaddafi and other regional dictators by allowing them to pose as defenders of national self-determination, especially if air strikes end up maiming and killing large numbers of civilians, as they have in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

         In his relations with the west, Qaddafi went from pariah to partner, but Libya under his rule was never a dependable partner, like Saudi Arabia or Mubarak’s Egypt. There is no evidence that the United States or the European powers planned Qaddafi’s overthrow or even expected it before February 2011. But when the Libyan revolution broke out, after hesitating for a couple of weeks, they decided to intervene, reportedly working furiously behind the scenes to obtain Arab League support to legitimize their intervention – support which, incidentally, almost instantly evaporated once Operation Odyssey Dawn had begun. The western powers might well have been willing to deal with Qaddafi in power indefinitely, since he had granted plenty of access to Libya’s oil, collaborated in the sordid “rendition” program, and helped prevent African refugees from getting to Europe. However, once the situation became unstable they sought to assert more reliable control over Libya and its resources. With France and Britain pressing strongly for a no-fly zone, the United States may have felt that it was politically impossible to remain on the sidelines, both because Washington did not want to have its leadership position in NATO compromised by sitting this one out and because it wanted to assure that the U.S. would be in a position to reap the greatest gains in the aftermath of the conflict.

         The United States and Europe both want to prevent the coming to power of a government that uses Libya’s oil revenues to satisfy domestic popular needs, not to enrich itself and western corporations. The intervention was an opportunity to try to gain enough influence over the revolution to steer it in a direction favorable to western interests. This is all the more important because western powers have suffered a major setback with the ouster of friendly dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, as a result of which their power in North Africa and the Middle East is shakier than ever. It is especially true for the United States, which has also bungled its attempt to establish stable, cooperative client states in Iraq and Afghanistan, and whose credibility will likely suffer further as newly democratized Tunisia and Egypt, under the pressure of public opinion, reassess their relations with Washington’s foremost regional client, Israel.

         U.S. and European intervention is part of an emerging counterrevolution that threatens to blunt, or even reverse, the democratic promise of the Arab Spring. Despots in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and Syria have been increasingly cracking down on popular insurgencies, and in Egypt the military is moving to safeguard its power and curb radical reform, possibly in alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian military has so far refused to end the state of emergency and has tried, fortunately without much success, to ban strikes and demonstrations. Except in the case of Syria, all of this has almost certainly taken place with the tacit approval, and perhaps the direct connivance, of Washington – and even the repression in Syria has evoked only feeble protests from U.S. officials. In Yemen, Washington is reported to be moving away from support to President Ali Abdullah Saleh in the eleventh hour, as his rule becomes totally unviable, and favoring the transfer of power to a provisional government led by Saleh’s vice president, who the U.S. hopes will follow in the compliant footsteps of the present Yemeni government. Political leaders in the United States, and the corporate, military and political elites they serve, have a deep and vested interest in containing the revolutions now sweeping the Arab world. Lending support to their armed incursions would simply facilitate their success in this reactionary endeavor.

         The Libyan National Council originally called not only for a no-fly zone, but also for western nations to hand over Qaddafi’s frozen assets so they could purchase arms. It is revealing that the U.S. and Europe have so far neither supplied arms directly nor provided an opening for the rebels to acquire the weapons they desperately need. Of course, channeling weaponry to the Libyan National Council would also be a means of acquiring political leverage for the west, but that could be mitigated by the rebels acquiring weapons from diverse sources. In any event, the Council is not definitively under the control of the west at this point; it still seems to rest on a measure of popular support and to be at least somewhat accountable to Libyans — NATO, obviously is not.

         As long as the Libyan revolution expresses the striving of the mass of Libyan people for democracy and social justice, it must command the support of progressives everywhere. But that support cannot extend automatically to every political decision the Libyan rebels make, especially when we have good reason to believe that certain decisions undermine their ability to replace the cruel Qaddafi regime with a system of people’s power and enhance the retrograde influence of the western powers throughout the region; this is the great danger of the rebels’ willingness to accept NATO as a full partner. There can be little doubt that NATO’s increasing role in the struggle against Qaddafi helps promote the most pro-western elements in the National Council – former Qaddafi officials, emigrés with CIA connections, etc. – and strengthens them in relation to more progressive, anti-imperialist forces.

         It should be remembered that other oppressed peoples have desperately called for great power intervention on their behalf – with fatal results. In 1994, in the face of ferocious repression, Haitians appealed to the United States to reinstall Bertrand Aristide; the result was an occupation (as in Libya, under the imprimatur of the UN) that persists to this day, a U.S.-sponsored coup that forced Aristide out of the country, a corrupt and undemocratic government, and ongoing desperate poverty arising out of U.S.-imposed economic policies. [Joanne Landy’s Op-Ed opposing U.S. intervention in Haiti was published in the August 7, 1994 issue of The New York Times.] Besieged Muslim Bosnians and Kosovar Albanians called for help from NATO; the results were permanent ethnic partition in Bosnia and the creation of a gangster state in Kosovo. Many Iraqis initially greeted U.S. troops as liberators from the hated rule of Saddam Hussein; but Iraq’s “liberation” immediately turned into a nightmare of bloody U.S. repression and sectarian strife.

         Since the end of the Cold War, military interventions by the United States and its allies have become more and more frequent, with disastrous consequences not only for the populations involved, but also for the left and the antiwar movement globally. To the extent that progressives and antiwar activists defend these interventions, they provide unintentional political cover for what are in fact exercises in imperial aggression – and help justify future bloody interventions.

         If our goal is a democratic world of self-determining peoples, free from imperialist domination, then the strategies we support should point with consistency toward the achievement of that goal. As long as the wealthy and powerful have the means to impose their will by force, they will prevent such a world from coming into being. NATO is one of their strongest weapons. We cannot support its incursions, even when they are disguised as efforts to protect civilian lives. This is especially important in North Africa and the Middle East, where western powers have a vital interest in preventing a real seizure of power by the Arab masses. The challenge that faces radical democratic movements around the world today is to find ways of offering meaningful solidarity and support to one another, rather than lending added legitimacy to the very forces that stand in our way. As future crises develop, this challenge will become more and more urgent.

         The insurgency in Libya, and democratic movements throughout North Africa and the Middle East will undoubtedly face painful setbacks as well as heartening victories as the revolutionary process unfolds. In Libya, we hope that it’s not too late for the popular insurgency to retrieve its independence. Its true friends in the region and around the globe are grassroots movements, unions, peace and human rights activists, with similar democratic goals.

         More than any event in decades, the Arab Spring has opened up the prospect of a better world, a world in which the fate of billions is no longer at the mercy of power-hungry, self-aggrandizing elites. At home, the wave of democratic revolutions offers an opportunity for those of us who have long opposed U.S. foreign policy and its reliance on authoritarian governments, military intervention, and reactionary economic policies to convince ordinary Americans that another road is possible and in their best interests.

    The authors are thankful to Frank Brodhead for his help with this statement.

  • Inventing Islam

    In what concrete ways can it be said that the West “invents” what it calls Islamism ? Contemporary imperialism inadvertently spreads Islamic militantism by stirring up the ME/A hornets’ nest through torture-camps and attacks on civilians. But Western agents have long supported Islamic movements in the region as a way to divert nationalism and democracy. Historically, the British Intelligence Service nurtured the Islamicist movement at its very origin. Said Aburish and Caroline Fourest among others have documented how the Moslem Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, was encouraged by the British as a diversion against Egyptian secular movements for labor rights, democracy and national independence. Likewise, and the strict Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia, encouraged by the British and then the Americans, has long been the main political prop of the despotic pro-Western Saudi monarchy — itself an invention of British colonialism. This convenient relationship provides immense royalties to the U.S./British oil companies operating in Saudi Arabia as well as lucrative sales of F-16’s to protect the Saudi royals from their benighted subjects – an imperialist sweetheart deal if there ever was one. No one seems to notice that Saudi Arabia, like Hamas which it has historically financed, officially remains an Islamic state which still refuses to recognize the state of Israel. And although the Western media occasionally react to such barbaric incidents as the beheading of a young princess for the crime of kissing a boy, somehow the Saudi Wahhabi fundamentalist semi-theocracy is never counted under the heading “threat of political Islam.” Proponents of this concept also conveniently forget that Osama bin Laden and most of his September 11 hijackers were Saudi subjects and that their avowed purpose was to expel from Saudi Arabia the U.S. bases, established during Bush I’s Gulf War against Iraq, which were seen as polluting Islam’s Holy places. Another “open secret” is the longstanding relationship between the Bush and bin Laden clans which culminated in the expatriation to Saudi Arabia of dozens of bin Laden family members residing in the U.S. in the days following the 9/11 attacks – despite the grounding of all civilian aviation and without any FBI or other interrogation as to their possible knowledge of the attacks. Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker than both. Where does Israel fit into this ideological picture ? I have always seen Zionism as a Hebrew remake of the American frontier movie transposed to Palestine, with the Arabs in the rôle of the Indians: a matzoh-ball Western called “How the East Was Won.” Like the courageous Euro-American colonists occupying an “empty” American continent, the Zionists fulfilled their own Manifest Destiny in an “empty” Palestine by shooting and expropriating the natives. The Zionist settlers saw themselves as “a people without land in a land without people,” creating a City on the Hill in the wilderness, making the desert bloom. The necessary ethnic cleansing was carried out by the same John Wayne methods : First encourage peaceful settlers to take over the natives’ land ; then when the natives fight back and some settlers get killed, holler “atrocity” and send in the Cavalry to exterminate the savages or drive them into camps and barren reservations to rot in idleness. When necessary, negotiate treaties you have no intention of keeping. Above all, demonize the natives so as to prevent poor or disaffected settlers from fraternizing or running off with them. Soon the only “good” Indian or Arab becomes the “dead” Indian or Arab and democracy will bloom. To me the tragedy of both the Jewish and Arab peoples is to be led by violent, corrupt, reactionary, religiously-inspired ultra-nationalist leaders who more and more resemble their opposite numbers. Their reciprocal power depends on mutually maintaining a state of crisis so as to silence internal opposition. I think the term “clerico-fascism,” originally applied to Franco’s Phalange and applied below to the Islamic Republic of Iran, is one useful way of understanding some of these reactionary religio-nationalist movements and regimes. “Clerico-fascism” is a more general (and less biased) term than than Washington’s ideological stereotype of “Islamo-fascism” since it includes the symmetrical threats to peace and democracy posed by Zionist Judeo-fascism and the Christo-fascism of the Religious Right in the U.S. not to mention the Hindu fascists in India. I can only conclude that the most urgent “Islamic threat” on the horizon is probably the threat that America's irrational Crusade against Islamo-fascism will either explode into nuclear war or seal the doom of democracy in the U.S. — where the Judeo-Christian version of clerico-fascism is looming large.

  • Nuclear armageddon and the experts

         New Politics readers will be interested in reading Mina Hamilton’s sharp analysis of Japan’s nuclear crisis in her recent article on Dissident Voice. Since the article was published on March 16, Mina has added the following note:

    “The latest: radioactive steam continues to pour out of several stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex. All six reactors now appear to be in trouble. Gregory Jaczko, the Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, appears before the US Congress. Warning of ‘extremely high radiation,’ Jaczko says one irradiated fuel pool is totally without coolant. Meanwhile, Japan desperately tries to provide sea-water coolant via helicopters and water-cannons.”

  • Solidarity With Zimbabwean Political Prisoners

    [The following appeal has been endorsed by New Politics as well as The Nation, The Progressive, and the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, among others.]

             Six people in Zimbabwe are now imprisoned on charges of treason for organizing a meeting to discuss the mass movements in Tunisia and Egypt. For this “crime” they face a possible death sentence. They have been tortured and are now in solitary confinement.

             An international day of action to demand their release will be held on Monday, March 21, when they are scheduled for a court hearing.

             Our message is simple and urgent: We demand that the government of Zimbabwe drop all charges and release them immediately.

             Plans are underway for demonstrations in a number of countries. We urge concerned people everywhere to join us in organizing meetings and demonstrations in solidarity with the prisoners. Please translate and distribute this appeal as widely as possible. Let us know know what you are doing at the contact addresses below.

             The worldwide significance of the struggle to free the Zimbabwean prisoners is reflected in a recent statement of support from the Congress of South African Trade Unions. “The Egyptian and Tunisian experience have inspired many workers and poor people all over the world to stand up and demand an end to dictatorship, corruption and injustice of whatever kind.”

             The arrest and prosecution of the six may seem like only the latest round of repression by Robert Mugabe’s government against opponents. But it is also an attack on the spirit of Tahrir Square, which has inspired people all over the world. The six prisoners include trade unionists, intellectuals, and activists in the struggle for women’s rights. The effort to suppress them — and even to kill them, whether by execution or through torture and denial of medical treatment while in custody — is a vicious assault on all of us.

             To learn more about the six prisoners and the struggle for their release, see the website Free Them Now! and the Facebook group (open to non-Facebook users) Calling for the Release of Zimbabwean Activists.

             To join the March 21 actions, please send a message to both of these addresses: zimtreasontrial@gmail.com and solidarity@freethemnow.com

             For more information on events in the United States, see this blog.

  • Tyrants Tremble

         Since the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, tyrants everywhere have been trembling, as have their backers in Washington, Paris, and Tel Aviv.

         Now Haaretz reports that the Israel Defense Forces (sic) are updating their plans for dealing with massive, nonviolent protests in the Occupied Territories.

         Interestingly, IDF officers seem much more worried about a nonviolent struggle than a violent one. This shouldn’t be surprising given that Israel maintains a huge advantage in the means of violence, but a huge disadvantage in the tools of moral suasion.

    “Senior officers now serving, or who once served, in the West Bank say they have long felt there is no way to effectively contend with a widespread, nonviolent civil uprising. ‘There is nothing for it if something like what happened in Tunisia happens here,’ said one high-ranking officer serving in the [Judea and Samaria] division [of the IDF].”

         The article quotes other officers thinking Palestinian protests won’t remain nonviolent, but of course this depends on how violence is defined.

    “The IDF considers any attempt to damage a checkpoint or a security fence as a violent act, and will use force and such means as teargas and rubber-tipped bullets against all such actions.”

    Translation: in order to protect a fence that has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice, the IDF will attack protesters. And needless to say, such operations have sometimes killed protesters in the past.

  • The New American Workers Movement at the Crossroads

         The new American workers movement, which has developed so rapidly in the last couple of months in the struggle against rightwing legislative proposals to abolish public employee unions, suddenly finds itself at a crossroads. Madison, Wisconsin, where rank-and-file workers, community members, and social movement activists converged to create the new movement, remains the center of the struggle. In Ohio, which faces similar legislation, unions have also gone into motion, while working people around the country have been drawn into the fight.

         In both states, things are coming to a head. In Wisconsin the courts have ordered the capitol building closed and the governor is threatening layoffs to begin next week. In both Wisconsin and Ohio the legislators are threatening to push the bills through one way or another. And now, in the fight to win, the movement has come to a fork in the road.

         Two different tendencies in the labor movement point in two quite different directions. The top leaders of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions like SEIU have thrown their weight into the struggle in the only way that they know how. Following the model they use in political campaigns, they have reached out to established organizations to build coalitions. They have sent organizers into take charge and to reach out to communities. Their goal is to rebuild their institutional power and their relationship with the Democratic Party, hoping to turn the upsurge in support for public employees into a political victory.

    The Union Leaders' Approach

         In both Wisconsin and Ohio, while not publicly giving up the fight to defeat the anti-union legislation, the top union officials quietly suggest that the bills cannot be stopped in the legislatures. So the unions in Wisconsin and Ohio indicate they will be turning respectively to efforts at recall and referendum. With their usual orientation toward political solutions, the unions' Central Labor Councils in Ohio return to their reliance on the Democratic Party and prepare for the contest in the coming elections.

         The unions' top leaders at the national level shy away from mobilizing the social and economic power of the unions to win this thing, turning instead to their allies in the Democratic Party. It is not that the union officials don't want to win in Wisconsin and Ohio, but their notions about how to win and what winning means represent a particular conception of the role of the labor movement. For the AFL-CIO and other major unions, winning means preserving, through political influence, the existing model of collective bargaining — even though we know that under the existing model unions have been losing for the last 40 years.

    The Workers Power Tendency

         There is, however, another tendency in the new workers' movement which presents a different alternative. This alternative, which is not so easy to name but which might be called workers' power tendency, is made up of those rank-and-file workers and their union stewards and local officials, together with the community groups and social movement activists who have rallied to the cause. This group includes the teachers who called in sick and produced a virtual shutdown of the schools in Madison and other parts of Wisconsin. It is made up of firemen, policemen and other public employees who have spent every available minute surrounding the capitol in spirited demonstrations. And it includes the union, community and student activists who have occupied the capitol building and made it the center and the symbol of the new workers' movement.

         This tendency has demonstrated — even it is has not yet worked out an elaborate position on paper or issued some sort of manifesto — that for them winning means using workers' power to stop the anti-union bills and to stop concessions offered up by some of the union leaders. Some of these workers have been holding on to the capitol risking arrest. Others are considering some form of direct action or civil disobedience.

         These are the workers and their supporters who taken seriously the call for a general strike issued by the South Central Federation of Labor. Taking seriously the idea of a general strike of Wisconsin workers doesn't mean jumping into it. A general strike issue from the ranks isn't simply called — as some activists have been trying to do. A general strike is mulled over, it is prepared through conversation, discussion and debate. It is organized. And finally (but soon), when the moment is right, it is begun when one crucial group of workers has the courage to make the first move drawing others into the process.

    How We Win Makes all the Difference

         One might argue that the anti-labor legislation might be stopped either way, either by the union officials' program of working from the top down to build coalitions and create the alliances that will return the Democrats to power or by the workers' use of their economic and social power. Through either course, one could argue, the anti-union legislation will be stopped, unions and collective bargaining preserved, and the movement vindicated. But the lessons of the two courses and the results would be quite different.

         The lesson of a victory organized by the union officials and won by the Democratic Party in the legislatures would be that workers must rely on the Democratic Party to defend themselves, returning unions and workers to their usual dependence on a political party dominated by big business. We might remember that it was the Democratic Party's failure in Wisconsin and nationally to defend unions and workers' interests which has been responsible for getting us here. The result of the top union officials' strategy would be a return to the situation we were in yesterday, where employers forced the unions into retreat and where workers were losing ground. And so, it being yesterday again, the assault on workers in both the private and the public sector would resume — in truth, it would never have ceased.

         The other alternative is that workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states engaged in this battle — and almost all of them are — exert their economic and social power, through direct action, civil disobedience, and economic and political strikes, reasserting the power of workers in our society. The lesson of such an experience would be that workers do have power and that workers can lead. Such an upheaval — which would necessarily be met by the employers with resistance and repression and which would entail both defeats and successes — would necessarily lead to new tactics and strategies, to new leaders, to new organizational forms.

         We would come out of the experience with a new and revitalized labor movement. Such a new workers' movement might even create independent political campaigns, and, if it grew in breadth and depth, might even raise the question of a workers' political party. We would through the experience of fighting and winning this thing on our own, really have a new American workers movement and we would continue the fight on new and higher ground.

     

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

  • Welfare in France: A Review

    The Bureaucrat and the Poor: Encounters in French Welfare Offices
    By Vincent Dubois
    Ashgate, 2010
    Originally published in French as La vie au guichet: Relation administrative et traitement de la misère By Economica, Paris 2010 (1st edition 1999) Translated by Jean Yves-Bart

         This is a study of two French welfare offices, done in six months in 1995. Dubois says that it is the first study of French welfare offices ever done. He calls it a "critical policy ethnography." Dubois observed interactions between workers and clients, mostly at the reception desk. He is a political scientist/sociologist (he says that political science in France was redefined on a sociological basis in the 1980s). He was not a specialist in welfare policy, which he claims as an advantage as it left him free of preconceptions. I don't agree that it was an advantage. France has a complex welfare system — Dubois said there were more than 20 different programs at the time of his study — and it would be hard to understand some interactions between workers and clients without knowing something about how those systems fit together. For example, most of the clients (whom he calls "visitors") seem to receive housing benefits, but it is not clear whether those benefits are counted as income in computing other benefits. There is a glossary of acronyms in the book, but it would have helped to add a glossary of French social welfare benefits and how they fit together. The index is sketchy as it doesn't include some of the key themes of the book, such as "entitlement," "workfare," and "means-tested," and even leaves out the names of the benefit programs that the author discusses.

         Dubois draws on the theories of Michael Lipsky (Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services), the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, and Everett Hughes in this study. He combines Goffman's method of looking at everyday encounters with Bourdieu's sociology, which places interactions in the context of institutions and class, race, and gender.

         This book is a warning sign about what happens when benefits are means-tested rather than universal. Those who advocate privatizing Social Security and Medicare in the United States are sounding the death knell for the dignity of those programs and their claimants. Some French benefits are universal, not means-tested. Benefits are funded by employer and employees' payroll contributions. They include health and retirement benefits. Everyone with at least 2 children under the age of 20 is entitled to a family allowance. This was originally aimed at increasing the birth rate.

         In 1988, France added a new minimum benefit called the Revenu Mininum d'Insertion (RMI). Rising unemployment brought in a new, impoverished clientele, sometimes homeless, to the family benefit office. Those offices had previously dealt with people in more stable conditions, and workers (whom Dubois calls "agents") were confronted with massive poverty and had to shift their focus. Workers looked back longingly to the "golden age" when they served "normal people." Middle-class people who received the universal benefits came to the office only occasionally to straighten out some problem about receiving those benefits. They distanced themselves from the other clientele by a superior attitude. Workers tend to treat middle class clients with more respect.

         The RMI is aimed at people of working age without any income and no rights to contributions-based employment benefits. It requires people to commit to finding work within 3 months of the first payment. It contains a training component. The official policy says that it aims to "reintegrate people," which means getting them back to work. It was a neoconservative policy with the motto "beyond entitlement." Dubois says that generally, the tendency to replace welfare by workfare has developed in France as in other European countries. The United States has probably gone the farthest of any country in turning welfare into workfare, with strict sanctions that have resulted in millions of people being kicked off welfare.

         Another means-tested benefit was the single parent benefit, mainly for single mothers, called Allocation de Parent Isolé (API). During the period of Dubois' study, workers dealt mostly with recipients of RMI and API. Workers generally did their best to give all the benefits that clients were entitled to, but they also had the responsibility of checking whether the client was fulfilling his work requirement for the RMI, and determining whether the API client was cheating and was actually married or getting funds from a man. When the mothers' allowance was first created, motherhood was valued as a means of populating the country. However, when it became a poverty program, motherhood was devalued.

         Welfare control has greatly increased in France. The discretionary power of the worker has increased from entitlement to deciding on a case-by-case basis who is "deserving." The workers' previous role of dealing with the collective treatment of clients who received universal benefits changed to promote individualization in dealing with social problems. The 2008 financial crisis has worsened the situation. Family benefits offices have been overwhelmed by the economic crisis and rising unemployment.

         In 2004, under the regime of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the work requirement was enforced more strictly. In 2009 the Revenu de Solidarité Active (RSA) replaced the RMI. The RSA is more workfare-oriented. Dubois claims that his 1995 study is still relevant, as things haven't basically changed. It is hard to believe that the system hasn't changed in 15 years. The RSA had not yet been implemented when Dubois wrote the book, and he doesn't make any prediction about its possible effects. My guess is that things have gotten a lot tougher for clients.

         As far as I could tell from the observations that Debois describes, few if any people lost their RMI benefits for not complying with the work requirement, but workers continually nagged them about complying with the requirements. Although the RMI was supposed to reintegrate people into the work force, it sometimes became a barrier to working. One unemployed client who was working part-time was not eligible for benefits. His resources were much less than if he had received RMI and not worked. He complained that this was unjust, that the law did not encourage work. Some workers agreed that there were problems with the legislation.

         The cartoon on the front jacket captures the book's main message. It shows 6 people lined up in front of the RMI worker, all but one shabbily dressed, and all of them headless. There are two mice on the floor, one of them headless. The caption is, "Le plus pénible, c'est ce vague sentiment de n´être plus rien!" (The hardest thing is this vague feeling of being nothing.) The welfare bureaucracy creates a feeling of alienation. Even the mice feel alienated. Both workers and clients lose some of their humanity in the transaction between them. Clients are forced to play games in order to get benefits, either becoming docile and passive or protesting aggressively. Workers are in the dominant position of giving or withholding. The press of work rises as unemployment continues to rise, so that clients are not served well and workers burn out.

         Workers are responsible for meeting needs, but also enforcing social and institutional order. Workers use "the iron hand and the velvet glove." They give the client the feeling that their personal problems are understood, while at the same time reminding them that they need to adhere to the rules. An undercurrent of tensions is ubiquitous, an inevitable byproduct of the authority of the state. There are long waits, files are lost, computation errors are made, and computer-related problems are pervasive. Bureaucratic impartiality breaks down in practice. Workers are relatively uncertain of their function. There are tensions between "born and bred French" and "foreigners" (mostly North Africans, Africans, or Turks). There is a lot of prejudice expressed by the "born and bred French." They accuse the "foreigners" of cheating, having many children, and taking benefits unfairly. The poor whites find themselves on the same level as immigrants, with whom they don't want to be associated.

         Physical violence happens occasionally but is rare, although there is frequent verbal aggression. One of the offices that Dubois studied was in a larger metropolitan area, where the waiting time was longer and the atmosphere more aggressive. The workers are trained to avoid calling the police, and there were no security guards in the offices that Dubois observed. Recourse to the police is very exceptional. There is one security guard in the Lyon office. This contrasts with the welfare office where I have done outreach in Boston, the Dudley Square Department of Transitional Assistance in Roxbury, a predominantly African-American neighborhood. There are three state police stationed in the office permanently. A client once knocked a worker to the floor. Once when I sat in on an interview and the client raised his voice, a nearby worker alerted a policeman, who lurked outside the cubicle. The client actually posed no threat and he later complained to me about the policeman. I think the ghost of the 1967 black urban rebellion in Boston lingers in the minds of welfare officials. That rebellion began in the Grove Hall welfare office in Roxbury, and sparked rebellions in other cities.

         I was surprised at the apparent lack of a formal appeal process in French welfare offices. Aggrieved clients were sometimes told they could complain to the manager. When they did, workers sometimes complained that the manager gave in too easily. One worker said that managers cave in as soon as the recipient yells a little. "All you have to do to get more than the others is to yell a little." Occasionally a client went to the media, and workers often complained that this form of pressure makes the bosses give in too easily.

         In Massachusetts, there is a formal appeal process that can result in a fair hearing conducted by an arbiter. I have attended some of these hearings, and they seem to me to be conducted objectively and result as often as not in ruling in favor of the client. There are extensive legal services, many of them devoted exclusively to welfare clients. When I did outreach, I would often call one of their lawyers for advice, and I always advised clients to contact them if they felt they were being treated unfairly.

         The best part of the book is the sociological insights that Dubois uses in analyzing interactions between workers and clients, as well as the arrangement of the office and furniture. The desk is the symbol of the authority of the worker. The computer often serves as a screen, a protective device to avoid facing the client. (At the Roxbury DTA, workers look at the computer much more than they look at the client.) Workers sometimes blame mistakes on the computer. During rush periods, workers sometimes take the phone off the hook. (Clients at the Roxbury DTA are often unable to call workers because their voicemail is full.)

         As the stable institutions of family and work and socialization opportunities break down, poor people are increasingly isolated and lonely. Some people come to the welfare office "just to talk." Although the workers are not officially social workers, they sometimes take that role.

    Betty Reid Mandell
    Professor Emerita, Bridgewater State College
    Co-author of Introduction to Human Services: Policy and Practice, 8th ed. and editor of The Crisis of Caregiving: Social Welfare Policy in the United States

  • Something Fishy about the Pew Report

         Everyone knows that there’s an enormous looming crisis of underfunded public pensions, a veritable ticking time bomb that will saddle every man, woman and child with insurmountable debt. We know this because, among other reasons, the widely respected Pew Center for the States published a study entitled, “The Trillion Dollar Gap.” We know this because it echoes through the media — print, internet or talking head. A Google search shows more than 29,000 results for this pairing. The Pew report is the reference point for rabid Tea Partiers, Republican demagogues and resigned Democrats.

         The Pew report drives the dominant narrative. This trillion dollar gap, it is argued, burdens every household with a crushing $8,800 bill, threatening to destroy the plans of ordinary working people. Because of pampered civil servants, Joe the plumber may never be able provide for his children’s education or prepare for his own retirement. Something must be done. Freeloading teachers and sanitation workers, public defenders and file clerks, nurses and firefighters will have to carry their own weight just as Joe the plumber does.

         One would think that those who quote the conclusions of the report might also have actually read the report. But that would be asking too much. It seems that the $8,800 bill is what is owed not now, but over the course of 30 years. That comes to less than $300 dollars per year, or $75 per capita annually. It also presumes that the burden is distributed evenly between rich and poor; and therefore makes no attempt to differentiate between median and average burdens. It additionally assumes that there are no mitigating offsets by means of taxes on business profits or activities which could relieve the burden on individual families. When these considerations are added to the mix the problem seems a bit less dream crushing and soul searing. Then again, without the drama there is no story.

         And yet this simply assumes that the Pew report makes sense on its own terms. It assumes too much.

         If it’s too much to insist that the public be offered a closer reading, let’s settle on simply an actual reading. It seems that this trillion dollar gap in the Pew report is the difference between the anticipated collective liabilities of more than $3.35 trillion due 30 years in the future and the $2.35 trillion in assets currently amassed in the public pension systems at the end of fiscal year 2008. Who in their right minds makes such comparisons? It would mean that net contributions to the system over the course of the next 30 years are expected to be exactly zero. Expected by whom? And why?

         Perhaps because the manufactured urgency of the crisis can be best driven by screaming tabloid headlines suggesting that in the 29th year every family in America will be hit with an $8800 bill unless something drastic is done now to discipline the outsized appetites of public workers. And a good portion of the Pew report deals with such reforms as eliminating early retirements and reducing pension COLAs and raising employee contributions.

         But surely anything that hoped to pass for a rational discussion would first have to compare projected assets thirty years in the future with projected liabilities 30 years in the future. One would be hard pressed to find this calculation anywhere in the report. So let’s make a thought experiment. Let’s assume that net contributions grow at one half of the historic growth rate that the private sector experienced in the past 80 years, or 1.7%. At that rate compounded over the course of 30 years, the $2.35 trillion dollars in assets currently available would grow to $3.9 trillion, yielding a modest surplus of $550 billion.

         This roughly means that if real wages in the public sector grew by a modest 1.7% annually over the course of that period, and the investments portion net of withdrawals similarly grew at an annual rate 1.7%, a workforce of a given size would easily generate enough additional assets to cover anticipated liabilities. And it would do so without hitting the private sector for supplementary subsidies or requiring public workers to up their contributions levels to pension funds. Any combination of growth in the size of public employment, wages or returns on investment would drive the surplus even higher.

         Now according to the government accountants, with whom Pew concurs, a properly funded pension fund need only have assets amounting to 80% of liabilities. That would mean that the combined assets of the states would only have to grow by a very modest $2.8 trillion in the course of 30 years. This would require the 1.7% figure to be adjusted downward to about 0.5%, a very miniscule rate of growth indeed.

         Of course if, like New Jersey, the states default on their obligation to make payments to the pension funds from that part of workers’ compensation packages contractually earmarked for such purpose, all bets are off. But this is a different set of problems altogether. It’s called theft of service. The Pew report is remarkably nonjudgmental on this point. But, if a private sector corporation deducted social security payroll taxes and then, rather than paying the treasury, used them to offset other business revenue shortfalls, the public would be outraged. Most workers could readily identify. No one would accept a hectoring lecture from a CEO, as NJ public workers have had to endure from Governor Christie, advising them that if they expect to see a social security check in their future, they’d have to double down in their contributions to make up for this theft. However this rhetoric appears to be perfectly acceptable to the public when state workers are involved, in no small part because the corporate media will not draw the appropriate parallels.

         There is not much that socialists can do to intervene in the public debate. Our opinions are rarely invoked and never solicited. What we should do, however, is make every effort to not let nonsense pass unchallenged as incontrovertible fact.

     

    Barry Finger is a member of the New Politics editorial board.

  • American workers fight back

    [This is a modified version of an article first posted on the Workers' Liberty website.]

         The Great Recession and its aftermath have generated a wholesale and unprecedented assault on the living conditions and future prospects for the American working class. This is the backdrop for the dramatic conflict now unfolding in Wisconsin.

         The organized working class in the United States is a shell of its former self, pummeled by protracted neoliberal policies of aggressive union busting, globalization, and the relative decline of the manufacturing sector. While, at the same time, the Chamber of Commerce rebooted itself from a network of small town grandees into a confrontational and highly assertive national advocate for free market policies. Business elites plowed profits into conservative think tanks, transforming these into handsomely paid ideological sinecures whose "studies" widely displaced those of academic institutions in framing social policy initiatives. By 1978 unions had all but abandoned big ticket social programs, in favor of a modest package of labor law reforms believed needed to bolster its ability to organize. But here too it was cruelly betrayed by inaction on the part of Democrats who controlled both the Congress and the White House, just as it would again be under the first two years of the Obama administration, which declined to even bring the Employee Free Choice Act to the floor for a vote. But by abandoning its inspiring vision of an economy tightly bound by an interlocking web of social protections and unable to deliver wage growth and the spillover effects that such victories invariably provide, the union movement began — fairly or unfairly — to assume the whiff of a special interest lobby. Or at least this is how the business dominated media tirelessly recast it. Union density in the private sector dropped to just under 7%. The trade union movement became increasingly distant and irrelevant to the day to day the lives of most working people.

         And, with the loss of union standing within working class communities, the dormant habits of subservience to power resurfaced. Strikes, increasingly rare, were met with disdain and sometimes utter hostility in working class communities. The 2005 NYC transit strike was defeated to no small extent because it failed to elicit broad community support. Workers began to ape the attitudes of the ruling class, that union workers are a pampered, privileged and elite strata. The autocrats who run the economy incredibly re-sold themselves, with no little success, as "job creators" to a working class desperate to keep its head above water. The "scissorbill" mentality — to coin an old wobbly phrase — that any worker with sufficient ambition could still rise economically and socially, took hold in a period in which, ironically, the odds of experiencing a 50% drop in family income have more than doubled since 1970.

         An inauspicious time for the defining confrontation of our era, but let's remember. The strike wave of the early 1930s took place against a broadly similar backdrop. The roaring twenties was a period in which all the old conservative mental silt again encrusted itself into the mindset of American workers. Union membership was similarly seen as the elite confines of highly skilled workers. It was fortified by the manifest failures of the unskilled to independently sustain themselves organizationally and the indifference of the AFL to intervene on their behalf, which reinforced the public's perception of them as a narrow interest group.

         The American economy is now said by economists to be emerging from a traumatic economic dislocation. The vaunted boom in profitability which might presage a broader economic expansion, is however unconvincing to most capitalists. And for good reason. Pre-tax domestic non-financial profits as a percentage of the national income are at about 7%, far below the 15% of the late 1940s, and 12% of the 1950s and '60s. Profits are simply not that high by historical standards. And taxes are now at their lowest level since the end of the Second World War. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, it is the financial and overseas sectors alone that are exceeding the mid-century profitability levels. Domestic sales revenues have barely grown. To the extent that domestic profit margins have improved this is almost entirely due to cost cutting at the expense of the employed and the liquidation of inventories. Business is not investing. Not surprisingly, the economy is growing at an anemic rate of 2.8%, far slower than the 3.4% average of the past 80 years. This is an ignomious start, indeed, for a meaningful recovery.

         Moreover, while the financial sector revived because the government pumped out the poisonous assets and saddled them on the public, the engine of finacialization is exhausted. The mid 2000 boom was inflated by excess consumer demand supplemented by continuous refinancing of the housing stock. The value of that stock has now been drained of 35% of its value. Exploitation hit the working class at both ends, both in the process of production and at the point of consumption. Workers lost a collective $743 billion each year during that boom, while the top 1 percent gained $673 billion. The working class can no longer maintain its standard of living by syphoning the value from its only significant asset. Consumer markets are consequently blocked, and the mechanism of enhanced exploitation—which is the real significance of financialization— has been disengaged if not disabled.

         The only cost left for business to cut is its overhead tax burden. Cheap government has always been the battle cry of small business. This has now caught on across the business spectrum. The recession itself blew a hole in state government finances, with tax receipts—income, sales, and property taxes—declining sharply, while the demand for state services grew dramatically. The AIG bailout alone, if it had been applied to the states, would have been sufficient to cover the combined costs of state deficits and it would have provided a more robust thrust to economic expansion than the banking bailout ever could. But that was never on the table. Business is desperate to dismantle the last vestiges of the welfare state, the remnants of "big" government. But this cannot be done without decimating the public sector unions that stand in its way.

         Business has been preparing the public for this assault for months. It has ginned up a near lynch mob mentality against public workers. It successfully took tax increases for the obscenely wealthy — happily characterized as "job creators" — off the table, while castigating "selfish" government employees (and retirees) for not accepting cuts in their pay and benefits needed to subsidize the profits of these beleaguered "job creators" in their quest to jump start the economy. This is a two-pronged attack. On the federal level, it's a struggle against "entitlements" — social security and medicare/Medicaid — that is, to further beggar the working class itself as it looses its commodity status due to old age or disability. On the state level, where most government workers are employed, it is an assault against the operating costs of government through squeezing state workers and reducing or eliminating services.

         Republican governors have been in the forefront of this assault. First it was a question of givebacks, but this morphed in Wisconsin into a basic question of union bargaining rights. The governor and his Republican assembly had already precipitated the immediate crisis by giving a tax break to the wealthy, which made the projected shortfall in revenue immanent. He reinforced and made permanent this revenue shortfall by ramming through a bill that requires a two thirds vote in the assembly to pass tax rate increases on income, sales or franchise taxes. Walker then decided to kill two birds with one stone. Not only would he demand givebacks, but he would limit future bargaining to basic wages and put any negotiated wage increase above the cost of living to a state plebiscite for approval. He would also demand a recertification vote for public sector unions on a yearly basis and eliminate dues checkoffs from paychecks. In other words, he would render state workers defenseless.

         What is particularly outrageous is precisely how the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, has twisted the facts out of all relation to reality in order to sell this program. The elimination of "dues checkoff" would simply cripple unions. His justification for this is the bald-faced lie that union dues are used for political purposes, that is, to fund his Democratic opponents. Unions are in fact prohibited by law from using dues in this way and must ask for voluntary pledges earmarked for political purposes.

         Then there is the assertion that public workers are overpaid relative to their private sector counterparts. Were this so, it might be a selling point for the union cause. As it is, however, this lie is simply red meat to overtaxed working people. The truth is that public servants enjoy a pretty hefty pay cut for the privilege of being employed by the state. Adjusting for age, experience, gender, race, etc., Wisconsin public sector workers face an annual compensation penalty of 11%, 5% if adjusted for their slightly shorter work week. Even this understates the problem. The equation of government sector benefits — the equivalent of medium to large corporations — with the private sector, whose average undertaking is dwarfed by the scale of government, is indefensible. The large share of small businesses in the private sector, which typically offer lower wages and benefits, so distorts the issue as to make comparisons useless. To properly make the Governor's case would require matching the compensation package of public sector workers with packages of workers employed by medium to large corporations. This is never done. It would not serve Walker's purpose of playing both sides against the middle.

         Finally there is the Governor's assertion that public sector workers are being given an extra gift by the taxpayers in terms of outlandish pensions and Cadillac health care plans. This is malarkey on stilts. And it is a lie that is swallowed and regurgitated by the mainstream media almost without exception. Many if not most states have low balled their wage packages to public sector unions over the years, but sweetened the pot by offering enhanced benefit packages that may entail obligations from the taxpayers should there be investment shortfalls, as a result, say, of a stock market downturn. But not in Wisconsin's case. The Pew Center for the States demonstrates that

    (s)ome states are doing a far better job than others of managing the bill that is coming due. Such states as Florida, Idaho, New York, North Carolina and Wisconsim all entered the current recession with fully funded pensions.

         As Pulitzer Prize winning tax reporter, David Cay Johnston, explains it

    (o)ut of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

    How can that be? Because the 'contributions' consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages — as pensions when they retire — rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services.

         It is therefore utterly meaningless to demand, as the Governor has, that public workers contribute a larger share of their wages to health care and pensions. It would not save tax payers a single dime. All the state does is distribute a part of negotiated earnings on behalf of the employee to the different funds, modifying the apportionment that was previously agreed to in the contract. It does not add to that fund from state revenues. Walker's demand would merely present an accountant's problem of redividing payment to reduce cash wages and expand health or retirement funds. What Walker is really asking is that state workers take a pay cut so that the state of Wisconsin can use the additional funds freed up to fill the hole that Walker himself created.

         Again, the purpose of this whole charade is to bamboozle hard-pressed private sector workers into believing that the Republicans are removing greedy state hands from their pockets. When the propaganda, distortions and misrepresentations are swept away, the attitudes of the oh-so conservative Republicans resemble nothing as much as Polish Stalinists of a thankfully bygone era confronting workers in the Gdansk shipyards. Strikes against the state offer socialists unique opportunities, because labor struggles for wage and working conditions can only be divorced from the broader economic and political struggles at their peril. It is in such confrontations that workers directly experience the latent authoritarianism of the business dominated state, the intersection of capital and politics. That is why, in times of heightened struggle, street solidarity is "what democracy looks like."

         The spirit of Wisconsin street solidarity is inspiring union members in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan to jam capitol buildings by the thousands to fight a raft of union-busting bills in their states.

         That next stage in that struggle may soon commence. In sly defiance of the Taft-Hartley act, the Madison AFL-CIO local requested that the "Education Committee immediately begin educating affiliates and members on the organization and function of a general strike."

     

    Barry Finger is a member of the New Politics editorial board.

  • Madison, Wisconsin: State Violence Threatened—and Rebutted

    A small and curious bulletin begins this note from the front lines: as of several hours ago, the head of the Wisconsin professional police association announced that its members would not eject demonstrators from the Capitol building, and suggested some would be spending the night with the demonstrators in order to protect them. This follows an announcement from the Governor’s staff that by February 25, the building’s upper floors would be cleared, all sleeping bags and blankets anywhere in the building removed, and as of 6:00pm, Saturday, February 26, the building as a whole would be cleared. Which is to say: by all means necessary, even if (as at present) up to 8,000 people of all varieties, Wisconsin citizens and others from as far away as Los Angeles, would need to be pushed out the doors. The sheriffs, left to their own devices, might do it. Against the opposition of the police: no, not likely. Young people and others not young have had the experience, here in Madison, within the last ten days of nonviolent demonstrations, hearing occasional rumors of an approaching violent crackdown but happily not (yet) seeing clubs fall on the heads of their friends, family members, neighbors, new-found comrades and themselves. It is a surreal experience, this good-natured mass gathering, and not likely to be forgotten with the passage of time. Some hundreds of us remember a different Madison scene from long ago: a police riot. Shooting and bombing no doubt make any such experience of peaceful protest a thousand times worse. And yet with mere clubs coming down, there is always a sense of violation, loss of control, a chaos organized from above, and with dark intent. The purpose of every such attack is not only to clear up some geographical area, return it to control, but to terrorize, humiliate and dehumanize. A glance at any on-sight police or public official in charge of “crowd control” reveals, I insist, the same amoral will to overpower by whatever means are to be allowed. I was, after all, close enough to see it happen, four decades ago and counting. The eyes of the man waving the club at me would have looked the same as his counterparts across the Middle East and beyond today. Violence here so far has been so totally nonexistent, with police actually congratulated the crowds, in public statements, for their good behavior. We wave back and exchange pleasantries, thousands of us each day, in response. Our mass demonstration day after day has more more notably peaceful, in the sense of any infraction, than the scene of the only scene that rivals it in numbers and zeal: any average UW home football game, with its crowds, omnipresent drunks and rowdiness. Nevertheless, rumors overnight, for several nights, hinted that orders would be given to drive hundreds of protesters from the capitol building at some point in the early AM. Uniformed firefighters from the around the state, steel workers and assorted others vowed themselves to stay overnight. Seminars in nonviolent protest have now been given to perhaps a thousand protesters. The police raid did not happen, again and again. On Wednesday, hated Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker warned that legislative chambers (a small part of the Capitol building) and “corridors” (that is, a very large part of the building) were going to be “protected” by which he meant “cleared” for “security reasons.” As the Democrats in the Assembly stalled bills and the Democratic Senators stayed missing, not a single challenge took place. By the time of his 6:00pm press conference, thousands of demonstrators had again taken over the atrium of the building, and we climbed close enough on the stairs for a roar in the back of his press conference. Along with a characteristic New York Times report of the day that Wisconsin is “divided” over the issues at stake, these were worrisome signals for the possibility of the assault–and justification in advance for police violence as “maintaining order” of a troublesome minority that only happened to include teachers, social workers, senior citizens , the handicapped and parents with small children in their arms. It must be stressed that the great majority of the police at the Capitol, local and county in particular, continue to express all the body language of being on the side of the strikers—at least so far. Sheriffs, brought in from around the state, along with police from distant districts, are noticeably less cheerful and friendly than their local counterparts and perhaps a little on edge. That old macho, the swaggering impulse to show those demonstrators who is in control, was not entirely absent. So far, however, they lack anything (apart from sidearms) in the category of weapons, specifically billy clubs. Probably they have gas canisters, but if push might come to shove, even in the most peaceful and nonviolent circumstances, 500 sheriffs without means to beat and brutalize a crowd would evidently be not only outnumbered but also outpushed. And they know it. There is no sign of weakening on either side. For that reason more than any other, the memories come back. Oldtime peaceniks and other radicals tend to stay in Madison or drift back, so I could imagine, within this throng, dozens of gray (or bald) heads that had been struck or not struck in the famed police riot on campus in October, 1967. At least I was there and I can think of a few others in the crowd of the last week who also sat in at the Commerce Building (since renamed), pledging to remain sitting, and non-violent, until the Dow Chemical Company job interviewers left the campus. There were among us former civil rights workers back from the South, and the familiar advice to remove earrings lest the police rip them out of ears (in those days, the warning applied only to females), but I can safely say that we considered the prospect of an armed attack very remote. Campus authorities could simply move the interviews off campus, for starters. Or ask to postpone them. Or (speaking of high university officials) even come to the crowd of 225 and carry on a dialogue with all of us about democracy on campus and the ways in which the Vietnam War had raised new questions of university complicity in what could only be described as mass murder (for the Dow company, mass profits, indeed patriotic profits). And then it came, an orgy of beating, dragging students through shattered glass doors, then the arousing of the campus at large in an unprecedented degree as news spread, and crowds of several thousand gathered. It had all seemed so small at first that we could almost glimpse at middle range the Chief Inspector, well known to stock John Birch Society pamphlets around his office. He was discussing the rapidly deteriorating situation with the campus security chief, and calls were evidently being made back and forth with the administrators. Then, as the crowd swelled, vastly outnumbering the police and stealing away their self-confidence, orders were given to use gas, tear gas and then Mace, at long and short range. Just as in Cairo, tear gas canisters fired at the crowd were picked up with jackets, and hurled back. Advance and retreat, advance and retreat. Finally, as reinforcements arrived, the crowd faded back into a different strategy: organizing a campus wide strike. That evening and the next, in 1967, offered the perfect opportunity to explore the situation tactically. When the crowd in the Capitol Rotunda today hurled the charge, “SHAME, SHAME!” at the governor and the Republican politicians supporting him, my mind went back to that corridor going out from the UW Memorial Union ,where our professors walked while leaving the faculty meeting in which they decided to keep the school open, no matter that they could have ended the confrontation and cooled tempers, furthermore pressing the administrators to do what college presidents only agreed to do in 1970, that is, call for an end to the War. Rumors passed swiftly and we knew our friends among the professors—as we knew the war hawks happy enough to send us off to die, and the moral cowards, thinking of their careers. ” SHAME, SHAME!” It was fitting send-off. Not even the liberal Capital Times, launched way back in 1917 to protest the equally unpopular (in Wisconsin, that is) First World War, could bring itself in 1967 to blame the police, the administration or the Dow company. Local conservatives roared in rage, the liberals barked softly, and the students, along with a minority of faculty members (some of them escapees from Fascist Europe) and townspeople who supported them. Eventually and after years more of controversy, the war wound down, a leading protester, Paul Soglin, was actually elected mayor for the first of several terms (the new voting rights of 18 year olds would be decisive), and the several worst of the leading police officials died or retired. By 1975, Madison was properly famed as a progressive, tolerant place where “protect and serve” became real, to a large extent, and those who did included far more women, minorities, and people educated for their jobs. The police themselves in general happier about it, too—although never quite so liberal as the Firefighters. The memories of 1967-73 would seem to put us a million miles from 2011 and the crowds of middle class and middle aged workers, joined by blue collar trades, students and others by the thousands who remain in the Capitol as I write. The distance would be an illusion and pose a danger in forgetting. Locals and history bugs know that the official versions of police violence offered of 1967, most dramatically in Pulitzer Prize runner-up, "They Marched into Sunlight," by David Maraniss–son of a once-famed local liberal newspaperman–are as suspect as the final pages flattering UW graduate Dick Cheney (he chose to stay in school rather than going to Vietnam). The need to rewrite history, making a visiting San Francisco Mime Troupe more guilty than thuggish police commanders, too closely resembled the rewrites of current affairs by New York Times reporters and commentators. I call it ominous because this way lies the rationale for public violence, described as “keeping order.” So far, in 2011, the police themselves say "No."

  • Simple Solutions

    There are three simple solutions to the deficit, Medicare, and the Social Security problems.

    First: Just after WW2, due to the Depression and the war, the deficit was huge, greater than today’s deficit relative to the Gross Domestic Product. It was paid off by a 91 percent tax on the upper bracket, that is, on annual income over $400,000 ($200,000 before 1948). This 91 percent tax prevailed under the Republican Eisenhower administration as well as under Democratic administrations. It paid for the GI Bill and helped finance both the VA and FHA loans. In short, it built the middle class. (I, for one, would never have been able to afford college had it not been for the GI Bill; as a veteran of WW2 — 88th Infantry Div., Italy — I received complete tuition plus a salary.) Republicans and some Democrats fought tooth and nail recently to keep the tax on the top bracket from rising to 39 percent! And President Obama caved in. If we are serious about reducing —eliminating! — the deficit, we would return to the 91 percent tax on incomes over $400,000. The alternative is to punish the poor by destroying such programs as WIC, that is, literally taking milk from infants’ mouths.

    Second: There is no Social Security problem: SS has been piling up surpluses in the trillions of dollars; it has not contributed a dime to the deficit. But we can add to the surplus (now building toward 4 trillion dollars!) by removing the cap on income taxed by Social Security — that cap is now set at $106,000; remove it so that the rich pay SS tax on all their income, as they do now for Medicare.

    Third: Replace the Health Care law with a single payer plan. European countries with this plan deliver twice as much medical care and pay half as much as the United States. This is something Obama should have fought for from the beginning, as Dr. Marcia Angell and many others have said.