Advanced Search

Blog

  • Gloria Steinem and Diane Ravitch: Who's making the feminist case?

    Here’s how Gloria Steinem  announced her support of Bloomberg’s designation of Cathleen Black as NYC Schools Chancellor: “I’ve known Cathie Black for more than three decades, and I know she turns the impossible into success. In the beginning of New York Magazine and Ms. Magazine, she earned advertising support in a world still run by Mad Men, and at USA Today, she achieved a popular national newspaper that experts said couldn’t exist. As the first woman to be president of the Hearst Corporation, she initiated its most successful publication, “O” Magazine. Now, her abilities as a publisher are being held to a different standard than Joel Klein as a prosecutor, even though she is on the board of a Harlem magnet school. In short, she has a hard path to an impossible job — which is exactly why she’ll succeed. I support her because I know New Yorkers — especially students — will be very glad she’s there.”

    One irony in Steinem’s actions is that Diane Ravitch, now a relentless critic of the  Bloomberg/Klein reforms,  made her name in education as a neoconservative by blasting attempts of women and minorities to be included in curriculum. Much to her credit, Ravitch exposes the harm done by the reforms every place she can get a podium. Though Ravitch doesn’t cast her argument against the neoliberal reforms in feminist terms, her defense of teaching as a profession and the rights of teachers to have strong unions is what feminists should be saying and doing.

    Steinem’s clearly hasn’t learned what was wrong with a definition of “sisterhood” that excludes the economic concerns of poor and working women. Her defense of Black displays the same arrogant insularity and class hubris of middle class professional women displayed in the early days of the women’s movement.  I saw these attitudes up close when I became involved in a struggle about California’s protective legislation.  When the movement to adopt Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) went to the states, ERA supporters were often pitted against advocates (mainly trade unions) of laws that required employers to protect women against physical exploitation in the workplace. The ERA would have wiped out protective legislation.  Laws varied from state to state, but in California they required employers to give women regular breaks, drinking water and toilet facilities on the job site, and weight-lifting limits. Sometimes the laws were used as a rationale for discimination in hiring (“We have no toilet for women to use, so we can’t hire you.”) Sometimes the protections were extended to men because it was more practical for employers to do so. Labor union activists in California, under leadership of Anne Draper, tried, unsuccessfully, to have the laws extended to all workers. The affluent professional women who led the struggle for the ERA’s adoption sneered, literally and figuratively, at the need for laws that safeguarded workplace hygiene and safety. 

    Gloria Steinem’s very public support for Bloomberg’s appointment of Cathleen Black (and can we please call her by her full name and not “Cathy”? Was Joel Klein “Joey”?) is a sneer, intended or not, at lots of women who work for a living. It was feminist only in one sense: Black is a woman.
    This is feminism? Not to me.  Steinem supported not only an ill-suited candidate but also the Mayor’s right to make this decision without consultation with the people most involved in children’s education – women, teachers and mothers. They’ve been denied voice about their children’s fate – as have been New York’s citizens.  Probably about 50% of those citizens are women too.

  • Waiting for Superman? The title says it all

    The critique of “Waiting for Superman,” available mostly in the blogosphere, indicates that a backlash against the neoliberal project in education is developing. No doubt you’ve seen the barrage of propaganda for this ersatz documentary,  which touts charter schools as the solution to poverty and inequality and teachers unions as the enemy. But if you haven’t read the critiques by teachers and advocacy groups, be sure to look at the Rethinking Schools  webpage that refutes the film’s premises and conclusions. The site contains Diane Ravitch’s refutation of the charter school mythology, published in the New York Review of Books. TMI? Fairtest has a neat summary of the film’s inaccuracies.

    It’s disappointing that this newly galvanized opposition has missed the ways that gender should be considered. Much of the vitriol against teachers relates to the fact that teaching is women’s work. About 84% of all teachers K-12 are women. In “School work: Gender and the Cultural Construction of Teaching” Sari Biklen critiques the fact that superior teachers are often cast as heroes, like the Lone Ranger who rides into town and cleans up crime and mayhem. But in the real life of schools, teaching is best accomplished with the support and insights of others (often women) – parents, colleagues, students.  Maybe even administrators. For instance, good teachers take ideas from others – and readily acknowledge they do so.

    The movie and neoliberalism tweak  the “heroic model” of teaching while pressing for it to be the only way to construct teachers’ work. For instance, the Lone Ranger had Tonto. Superman has Lois Lane. True, Tonto was subordinate but he was present,  the helpful minority who could be a “cultural informant” if needed. But Tonto is gone, replaced by a white, female who hangs around but is never involved in the action, except to get in the way.

    This is neoliberalism’s new construction of gender, one in which race has been erased as a consideration, one that is intensely individualistic and competitive.  No where in this vast social engineering that is destroying public education is there acknowledgment of the need for collaboration among teachers or between parents and teachers. The nurturing traditionally associated with women’s paid labor outside the home (in careers like nursing and  teaching) has been pushed out of schools. When test scores are all that counts, there’s no payoff to consider children’s psychological and social needs.  But even Superman’s kids will need nurturing. After all, their dad is off saving the world and doesn’t have time to get refreshments for the bake sale or hear about the fight on the playground.

  • A Clash of Fundamentalisms

    In our previous articles, we emphasized the ideological nature of today’s problematic Islamic “threat.” Historically this “threat” fits into an established tradition of hysterical propaganda campaigns – whether against “Indians,” “Negroes” or “Reds” — which distort and exaggerate real and potential challenges to U.S. capitalism /imperialism so as to justify violence, state terror and wars of plunder. If the truth is “the first casualty” in war, then democracy is the second. Although framed by the U.S. in terms of defending (or spreading) “democracy,” today’s East-West conflict turns out to be not so much a Clash of Civilizations as an ideological Clash of Fundamentalisms. While hyping the threat of “Islamic Fundamentalism,” U.S. media and politicians conveniently fail to point out that their own outlook is based on the same kind of reactionary hard-shell fundamentalism as “Political Islamism.” Let”s call it “Political Christianism.” The Christian right in the U.S. aspires to the same kind of theocratic domination over government and peoples’ private lives as the Ayatollahs. It's members speak with the same hysterical absolutist certainty, believe the ends justify the means, and are willing resort to violent means – like murdering abortion-providers and bombing women's health centers. Both fundamentalisms offer identity and community to the disaffected masses while silencing opposition and bullying the hesitant through fear. The Zionists and the Jewish Religious Right are equally ruthless, and recently the U.S. Christian right has overcome its traditional anti-Semitism to form a reactionary pro-Israel, pro-U.S. alliance with right-wing, pro-Zionist Jewish organizations and leaders like the notoriously Jewish Senator Lieberman – much to the dismay of the vast majority of liberal, secular U.S. Jews. In this upside-down ideological world, the U.S. the domestic War on Terror seems to be aimed exclusively at hunting largely imaginary conspiracies among American Moslems and peace activists — to the exclusion of actually-existing white racist militias and violent rightwing Christian networks which operate with impunity. Thus, when the domestic terrorist Tim McVeigh, an avowed member of a network of right-wing Christian militias, bombed the Oklahoma City Federal building killing 168 people and seriously injuring 800 more, there was no broad conspiracy investigation or round up of suspects. Today, Christian anti-Choice organizations openly incite violence by posting “Wanted” posters of “Murderers” (abortion providers) on the Internet including the names and addresses of their families. The same groups regularly terrorize women's health clinics harassing personnel and prospective clients, all with impunity. And no one spoke of “terrorist conspiracies” when the saintly Dr. Tiller was gunned down in his church on a Sunday by a member of one of these fanatical anti-abortion organizations. Under George Bush, the “threat of Islamism” myth was evoked to justify the U.S.’s routine, brazen use of “secret” torture on captured Moslems. Of course, this torture was “secret” only to the U.S. media and public, not to the victims, their families and the rest of the world. Arabic broadcasters like Al Jazeerah gave U.S. torture-camps a big play all over the Moslem world. Machiavelli writes that cruelty is only useful as a deterrent to enemies if it is well-publicized. If letting potential “enemy combatants” know the fate awaiting them if captured by the Americans was the goal of the U.S. torture program, the “intelligence” community achieved it at the price of alienating a billion Moslems and eradicating any residual pro-American feelings dating from 9/11/01. The irony is that such “enhanced interrogation” methods have proven notoriously useless for actual intelligence gathering, since people will say anything under torture. Yet the torturers and their superiors in the Bush Administration who sullied America's reputation and who violated U.S. and international law remain unpunished. The new President was made to understand that the U.S. may need these guys in the future and so his Administration decided not to “look backward” only forward ! Forward to what ? More useless “intelligence” ? Further degradation of the image of progressive, liberal, Western democratic values exemplified by kidnappings, torture chambers and brutal concentration camps like Abu Graib? As we shall argue in our next piece, such extreme methods are evidence of desperation. With the oil-wars escalating and with U.S. and British voters less and less enthusiastic about paying for them, there is a need to ratchet up the pitch of anti-Moslem hysteria so as to “stay the course” in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan and Yemen. Given this ideological drive, it goes without saying that knowledge of the history, politics, sociology and even the languages of these threatening “others” would only get in the way. In fact, the CIA and State Department actually dismissed their staff of Arabic-language translators years ago, when “human intelligence” was replaced by spy satellites which capture megabytes of important information in Arabic which the Americans can't read. Who said: “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make blind”? Are not ideological constructions like the “terrorism” the blinders rulers put over their own eyes and the eyes of their subjects when they embark on a fatal course of hubris?

  • Contextualizing the Threat of Radical Islam: “Urgent Threats” of Yesteryear

    [Editor’s note: This is the second in a series by Richard Greeman.] To understand the lunacy of the problematic Islamic “threat” currently being hyped in mainstream U.S. political discourse, we need to place the concept in the historical context of Western, particularly U.S. imperialism’s collective self-image. White American identity has from the beginning defined itself in opposition a dangerous, threatening, darker “other” who had to be conquered, subdued, and/or exterminated : in the first instance the “savages” native to the Americas. Thus European invaders projected their own inner savagery on the “Indians” in order to brutally displace them in the name of “Civilization” as Richard Slotkin has demonstrated in his seminal Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier and subsequent works). After the “Indians” were deprived of their lands and nearly wiped out, the laboring classes replaced them as American capitalism’s terror-inspiring “other.” This “threat” was incarnated in two fear-inspiring images : the potent Negro slave ready to rape his mistress and slit his master’s throat in the South, and in the North the specter of bloody conspiracies among the immigrant workers, whether Irish (“Molly Maquires”), Italian (“anarchist bomb throwers”), Jewish (“subversive communists conspirators”) or just foreign-born (“disloyal”). These demonizing images of the “other” were useful for ruling class divide-and-rule domination, pitting native workers against immigrants and black bondsmen against free white labor – to the extent that even today labor in Dixie remains largely non-unionized under anti-labor “right to work’ laws. The Red Scare of 1919 mobilized these stereotypes to justify government roundups (the Palmer Raids) more violent than the Cold War witch hunts or the post-9/11 anti-terrorist campaign. At the end of WWI, returning black and immigrant vets were full of democratic aspirations. The high hopes inspired by Wilson's “self-determination of peoples” and ignited by the 1917 Russian Revolution were met with union-busting, mass arrests and massacres of strikers, deportations of the foreign-born, lynchings and race-riots against “Negroes.” A nation-wide campaign of Nazi-type raids on Socialists, Communists and Wobblies was organized, with the FBI, vigilantes and local police sacking offices, smashing presses, beating and arresting leaders. It wasn't until the Depression of the Thirties that the American Left came back to life. Likewise, in the Forties, after WWII had once again raised democratic aspirations, the FBI, HUAC and the Truman Administration came up with the mass anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthyite “witch-hunts” — investigations aimed at hounding alleged Communists and subversives out of their government jobs, purging radicals from the unions, the schools, the entertainment industry, the universities, thus silencing any political debate about foreign policy – henceforth considered “treasonable.” Americans were forced incriminate themselves and rat on their associates through compulsory Loyalty Oaths taken under pain of Perjury. To be sure, there were actually-existing Communists in the U.S., and yes some of them did agree to collect information for the Russians – albeit at a time when the Soviets were U.S. allies against Hitler. But the CPUSA had at most 180,000 members at its height, and by the late Fifties it had dwindled to the point where it was said that the dues payments of FBI infiltrators kept the Party treasury afloat. Back when I was coming of age in the Fifties, the word “Communist” was the functional equivalent of “terrorist” today in the world outside our Left-wing family circle. The sensational Rosenberg atom-spy trial was the Fifties “9/11 wake up call,” alerting Americans to the “urgent threat” of us Commies. After the 1989 collapse of Russian bureaucratic state-capitalism parading as "Communism" and with "Red" China born again as a U.S. capitalist trading partner, a new demon was needed to deflect from unrest over increasing economic and social inequality in the U.S. and around the world. The War on Drugs worked for a while. It proved useful for sending U.S. military advisors and equipment abroad to prop up pro-U.S. governments in Latin America while profitably filling the U.S. expanding US private prison system with unwilling customers from among unemployed Black and Hispanic youth. But after Osama bin Laden and his cohort pulled off the attacks of September 11, 2001, the War on Terror took precedence and "Radical Islam" was suddenly discovered as the major threat to Western Civilization. This distant threat has proven a sufficient ideological pretext for curtailing democratic freedoms and creating a security state at home while using torture, terror bombing and outright invasion in pursuit of insanely unrealistic hegemonic foreign policy goals in the oil-rich Middle East. Next article in series: A Clash of Fundamentalisms

  • Contextualizing the Threat of Radical Islam

    Note: This article begins a series by Richard Greeman. Longtime socialist and international activist Richard Greeman is best know for his studies and translations of Victor Serge, the Franco-Russian novelist and revolutionary. His recent book Beware of Vegetarian Sharks: Radical Rants and Internationalists Essays (Illustrated) is available online at Amazon.com and may be downloaded for free at www.lulu.com923573 I have done my non-specialist's best to make comprehensive sense of a complex 'hot-button' issue, taking care to give empirical evidence and historical examples based on variety of accessible sources. My goal is to situate the dangerous escalation of the conflict between Western democratic imperialism and radical Islam – the so called War on Terror – in the various contexts of ideology, history, geo-politics and popular struggles for democracy in the Moslem world. Reviewing Surrender : Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom by Bruce Bower, (NY.Times Book Review, Sunday July 26, 2009, p. 12.) The Times’ critic Stephen Pollard, began breathlessly: ‘There is no more important issue facing the West than Islamism, Islamofascism or – to use another label – radical Islam. And there is no more necessary precondition to countering that threat than understanding it, where it springs from, how it is expressed, and the ways in which it is spreading. But before we do any of that, we have to agree that the threat exists.’ But does ‘the threat’ indeed exist ? And is it really ‘more important’ than catastrophic climate change, proliferating WMD’s, or the world economic crisis ? If we sincerely wish to analyze the social forces which express themselves under the various banners of what Westerners have lumped together under the heading of ‘Radical Islamism,’ perhaps we should begin by deconstructing the concept and to situating it in the context of the Orientalist ideology of Western colonialism/imperialism. And what better place to begin our study than America's moderate, middlebrow Sunday Times Book Review, a generally a good barometer of middle-of-the-road opinion in the U.S. and a publication which has reviewed one or more of the proliferating new books on the Islamic threat almost every week over the past decade? Returning to the Times’ 'Appeasers' piece, the ‘insidious problem' for Pollard is that ‘many liberals and others on the European left are making common cause with radical Islam and then brazenly and bizarrely denying both the existence of that alliance and in fact the existence of any Islamic threat whatsoever.’ Bower’s book Surrender : Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom supports Pollard's thesis by rounding up the usual suspects : the insidiously charming Islamic theologian Tariq Ramadan, the left-wing former Mayor of London Ken Livingston, and the unnamed ‘Western leaders’ who allegedly failed to defend the publisher of the anti-Moslem Danish cartoons. The Times' Pollard concludes somewhat hysterically: ‘Bower is unquestionably correct, and that fact is quite simply terrifying.’ Terrifying? To be sure the silver-tongued scholar Ramadan, does send different messages to the Faithful and to the kaffirs (Arabic for ‘goyim’) ; and Livingston was an unprincipled, opportunistic Left politician looking for votes among England’s fast-growing Moslem population (along with the British Socialist Workers’ Party and its erstwhile ally Respect). But this is old news. Neither has much influence any more, and although ‘insidious’ they were hardly ‘terrifying.’ On the other hand, equating Western leaders’ alleged ‘appeasement’ of political Islam with the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930’s is sheer hysterical (and historical) lunacy, as those of us who actually live in Europe can testify. * In any case, writers representing the ‘Appeasers’ school of anti-Islamism (not to mention the Times’ fact-checkers) can hardly be unaware that for at least a decade the U.S. and Britain (not to mention Israel) have been systematically boycotting, bombing, invading Islamic countries and assassinating Islamic leaders. They call that ‘Appeasement ?’ The ongoing wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have already lasted much longer than WWII, with concomitant waste of lives and treasure and no end in sight. Can Messrs. Pollard, Bower and the Book Review editors who commissioned, headlined and ran this hysterical propaganda piece really believe that the feeble, phoney left-liberal voices of Ramadan, Livingston and the like threaten to prevail over negative stereotypes with which CNN, Fox News, the N.Y. Times and Western leaders have been bombarding us for years as justification for hugely expensive oil-wars in the Middle-East ? What we read in their texts is not empirical argument but ideology which, like religion itself, is supremely indifferent to fact and logic. It is easy for us Westerners to laugh at the Ayatollahs' depiction of dear old Uncle Sam as the 'Great Satan,' but harder to see the ideological demonization of Moslems and Arabs in our own 'liberal' media. * Far from 'appeasing' Islam, the Swiss, after a virulently anti-Moslem right-wing campaign, have just voted by referendum to ban the construction of minarets. Meanwhile, at this writing the right-wing Sarkosy government is orchestrating a summit-level discussion of ‘French national identity’ while simultaneously demonizing and expelling non-white immigrants including long-time residents and human rights activists. Nor is there a dearth of French anti-Moslem books denouncing the ‘appeasement’ of Islamicism with titles like Conquering the West: the Secret Project of the Islamists and France Infected with Islamism: Terrorist Threats within the Hexagon. Sylvain Besson, La Conquête de l"occident: Le projet secret des islamistes (Paris, 2005), cited in Patrick Haenni and Samar Amghar, "Un spectre hante l"Europe: Le mythe renaissant de l"islam conquérant," ("A specter is haunting Europe: the rebirth of the Myth of Islam the Conquerer") Monde diplomatique, Jan. 2010. See also Mohamed Sifaoui, La France malade de l"islamisme : Menaces terroristes sur l"Hexagone (Paris, 2002). Next article in series: ‘Urgent Threats’ of Yesteryear

  • Why Socialists Should be Deficit Hawks

    Christina Romer, the former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, argues in today’s (October 24) New York Times that “Now Isn’t the Time to Cut the Deficit.” Her argument, which is unexceptional among liberal economists, is simply that “tax cuts and spending increases stimulate demand and raise output and employment; tax increases and spending cuts have the opposite effect.” This, she reassures her readership, is a “basic message of macroeconomics.”

    This reasoning arises from an analysis of the economic crisis that is based on a shortage of aggregate demand, specifically that component of aggregate demand emanating from the business class. They are not investing nor are they consuming in sufficient volume to lift the rate of economic activity. On the other hand it is equally clear that the business community has no faith in an economy that is stabilized by the growth of the public sector at the expense of the private sector, which is what Romer’s prescription would bring about and what the President’s stimulus package has already resulted in. Insofar as political disruption by a renewed left is not an immediate issue, capitalism only has faith in that recovery, and that recovery alone, which arises from the restoration of profitability where the expansion of demand is driven not by state purchases, but by the process of renewed capital formation. That is, capitalism has faith only in an economy that has been adequately restructured through the devaluation of surplus capital, by downward pressure on wages and by the minimization of government overhead costs. It looks forward to a revival of economic activity based solely on a firm capitalist footing — not one limping along on government crutches.

    Deficit hawks argue, as they have in Europe, that there is a structural component to the addiction to the need for chronic borrowing which threatens the long term viability of capitalism. They believe that a burgeoning state demand will ultimately crowd out private investment, raising interest rates and choking off economic growth. But the immediate problem is a cyclical problem and the structural problem lies not with state demand, but the hypertrophic growth of the financial sector. And this is where capitalism’s ideologues have turned a blind eye.

    The left, I would argue, should demand that the state sector grow by becoming the employer of the last resort, independent of its effects on profitability or on the relative growth of the state. However, there is no reason to buy into Romer’s argument that the deficit needs to be temporarily enlarged for that purpose. What advantage is there for the state to borrow from the wealthy? To do so would mean creating assets in the form of public debt held by a class that has will not relinquish its unused liquidity. It will simply borrow the money from the Feds at a virtual zero interest rate and sit back and collect a future windfall, that the working class will in part be taxed to honor.

    The flaw in Romer’s analysis is this. She assumes quite reasonably that taxing the public to finance state demand simply reduces private demand and therefore is not, on balance, expansionary. One effect simply neutralizes the other. And if her description of the spending behavior of the wealthy were accurate, her analysis would be convincing. But the wealthy are not spending their income. Their demand is a potential demand, not an actual demand. The wealthy are waiting the recession out and therefore contributing to its duration.

    They should therefore be taxed. Taxing the wealthy under these circumstances would be expansionary precisely because it would entail injecting unused cash into the economy to expand government purchases. The state would be doing what the wealthy are not — transforming their potential demand into actual demand. And this would not come at the future cost of increased taxes.

    This is how socialists might address Tea Party concerns that are seducing so many of the white working class. It clearly identifies one of the levels in which the behavior of the wealthy contributes to the economic distress of working people.

    The other long term issue is that of the structural deformity of capitalism. And this too speaks to the worries of those who so resent the Wall Street bailout. It is, of course true, that revenues taxed to support state purchases are lost to the accumulation process.

    But there is something far more threatening to capitalist expansion which is festering within the very anatomy of the private sector. The financialization of capitalism — at least in the US, Britain and much of Western Europe — arises out of capital’s drive to free itself from the perils of productive investment. But its implications are structurally disruptive. Instead of recyling idle balances of profit back into the real economy, this new financial system increasingly neutralized these balances by transforming them into ever new financial instruments of risk aversion. It securitized mortgages; it created new forms of risk hedging, it created new financial insurance policies, etc. This internal recycling of funds within the financial sector — first skimmed from the productive sector — permitted a growth in asset values not justified by a parallel increase in surplus value.

    Capitalism had—in other words — massively overissued claims on future profits that were unsustaninable in light of the flagging rate of accumulation, which the financialization of the economy itself massively contributed to. The financialization of the economy transformed the relationship of Wall Street to the productive sector from symbiotic to parasitic and its continuance in this form is an ongoing permanent threat to the resumption of anything resembling long-term business expansion. Rather than addressing this, the business class would prefer to dismantle working class gains in what is left of the welfare state.

    The shredding of the safety net, however, will leave the real structural vulnerability of capitalism largely unaddressed.

  • Campaign for Peace and Democracy Iran sign-on

    New Politics readers and friends are invited to sign the Campaign for Peace and Democracy statement “End the War Threats and Sanctions Program Against Iran – Support the Struggle for Democracy Inside Iran.” The statement is being circulated widely in the United States and internationally. To sign on or see the evolving list of signers go to http://www.cpdweb.org/stmts/1015/stmt.shtml.

    Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison, Co-Directors, CPD, cpd@igc.org. The statement along with a selected list of signers is below:

    End the War Threats and Sanctions Program Against Iran
    Support the Struggle for Democracy Inside Iran
    Statement by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy-October 2010

            We, the undersigned, oppose the U.S.-led campaign to impose harsher sanctions on Iran, and the ongoing threat of war against that country. Despite Washington’s claims, its policy is clearly not animated by a genuine concern for protecting the world from the threat of nuclear war; otherwise how could Washington support such nuclear-armed states as India, Israel, and Pakistan, or maintain its own huge nuclear arsenal? Nor is U.S. policy driven by the goal of defending democracy. If it were, how could the United States support brutally authoritarian regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia and Egypt?

            Months after it began its recent program to sanction Iran for its nuclear activities, the United States, in a move described by The New York Times as “more symbolic than substantive,” denied visas to and froze the foreign assets of eight Iranian officials, citing their role in the post-election crackdown. This symbolic gesture cannot obscure the fact that Washington’s fundamental motivation for imposing the comprehensive sanctions aimed at Iran’s nuclear program is to neutralize or eliminate a major threat to its power in the region.

            In June 2009 people around the world were inspired by the courageous protests in Iran, when hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, took to the streets to demand their democratic rights. Since then the Iranian government has tried to repress the movement: hundreds of political prisoners remain behind bars, often tortured, deprived of medical care, and forced to live under dangerously unhealthy conditions. We support those who struggle for democracy and social justice inside Iran.

            Far from helping the Iranian people, sanctions and war threats strengthen Ahmadinejad’s regime, helping it to shift the blame for worsening economic conditions from itself entirely onto the external enemy. In the past the Iranian elite has proven able to circumvent sanctions, but if Washington actually succeeds in preventing Tehran from importing refined petroleum, exporting oil and other items, and conducting normal trade and banking activities, over time millions of ordinary Iranians will suffer.

            We don’t want Iran, or any other country, including our own, to have nuclear weapons. But even the U.S. government admits that Iran does not now possess nuclear weapons and has no imminent prospect of acquiring them. Moreover, Iran has no less right than any other nation to develop civilian nuclear power. Many of us oppose the use of nuclear energy by any country, both for environmental reasons and because of its link to nuclear weapons — but that is not the issue in the present U.S.-Iran confrontation. The United States, a major producer of nuclear energy and by far the leading nuclear weapons nation, which continually upgrades its own conventional and nuclear arsenal and tolerates the possession of nuclear weapons by other reckless and aggressive powers, has no moral legitimacy when it tries to punish Iran for its nuclear activities.

            U.S. belligerence — its continual warnings that “all options remain on the table,” possibly including acceptance of an Israeli attack — only creates strong inducements for Tehran to seek nuclear weapons for its defense, or to become, like Japan, “nuclear-weapons capable,” i.e. possessing all the elements necessary to make a bomb without actually manufacturing one. And it’s not just Iran: U.S. militarism has helped to create a Hobbesian world in which more and more countries come to believe that their survival depends on nuclear “deterrence.”

            The United States can best reduce the danger of nuclear war by taking major steps to divest itself of nuclear weapons as part of a new, democratic and socially just foreign policy. This would include initiating both nuclear and conventional disarmament, encompassing missile “defense” as well as more obviously offensive weaponry; ending its predatory wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan; supporting a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone in the Middle East; giving real support to Palestinian rights rather than continuing one-sided support to Israel; and dismantling its more than 1,000 military bases around the world. Such steps would help undermine the rationale for Iran and other countries developing their own nuclear weapons. These actions would also be the most effective way to strengthen women’s, labor, and other democratic movements in the Middle East, and to promote the interests of ordinary Americans and real peace in the world.

    INITIAL SIGNERS: Bashir Abu-Manneh, Michael Albert, Greg Albo, Kevin B. Anderson, Stanley Aronowitz, Parvin Ashrafi, Ed Asner, Rosalyn Baxandall, William O. Beeman, Judith Bello, Medea Benjamin, Blase Bonpane, Eileen Boris, Sam Bottone, Joan G. Botwinick, Laura Boylan, MD, Frank Brodhead, Steve Burns, Leslie Cagan, Antonia Cedrone, Adam Chmielewski, Noam Chomsky, Margaret W. Crane, Hamid Dabashi, Gail Daneker, Bogdan Denitch, Manuela Dobos, Tina Dobsevage, MD, Martin Duberman, Lisa Duggan, Stephen R. Early, Carolyn Eisenberg, Michael Eisenscher, Mark Engler, Gertrude Ezorsky, Sam Farber, Thomas M. Fasy, MD, Dianne Feeley, John Feffer, Barry Finger, David Finkel, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Jean Fox, Dr. Harriet Fraad, David Friedman, Robert Gabrielsky, Bruce Gagnon, Barbara Garson, Irene Gendzier, Jack Gerson, Joseph Gerson, Sam Gindin, John Gorman, Greg Grandin, Arun Gupta, E. Haberkern, Thomas Harrison, Nader Hashemi, Howie Hawkins, Bill Henning, Michael Hirsch, Madelyn Hoffman, Iranian Centre for Peace, Freedom and Social Justice-Vancouver, Doug Ireland, Marianne Jackson, PhD, Melissa Jameson, Jan Kavan, Kathy Kelly, Tooba Keshtkar, Assaf Kfoury, Mina Khanlarzadeh, Jack Kurzweil, Dan La Botz, Micah Landau, Joanne Landy, Marc H. Lavietes, MD, Roger E. Leisner, Jesse Lemisch, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Nelson Lichtenstein, Amy Littlefield, Martha Livingston, Robin Lloyd, Jan Majicek, Betty Mandell, Marvin Mandell, Nasir A. Mansoor, Dave Marsh, Don McCanne, MD, Scott McLemee, David McReynolds, Debbie Meier, Martin Melkonian, Marilyn Morehead, Erika Munk, Ulla Neuburger, Mary E. O’Brien, MD, Derrick O’Keefe, David Oakford, Rosemarie Pace, Leo Panitch, Peace Action New York State, Christopher Phelps, Charlotte Phillips, MD, Frances Fox Piven, Danny Postel, Judy Rebick, Katie Robbins, Leonard Rodberg, Richard Roman, Elizabeth Rosenthal, MD, Matthew Rothschild, Saffaar Saaed, John Sanbonmatsu, Ajamu Sankofa, Jennifer Scarlott, Jay Schaffner, Jason Schulman, Peter O. Schwartz, Lance Selfa, Stephen R. Shalom, Cindy Sheehan, Stephen Soldz, Cheryl Stevenson, Bhaskar Sunkara, David Swanson, William K. Tabb, Hoshang Tareh Gol, Jonathan Tasini, Meredith Tax, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Chris Toensing, Bernard Tuchman, Adaner Usmani, Wilbert van der Zeijden, Steven VanBever, David S. Vine, Lois Weiner, Suzi Weissman, Naomi Weisstein, Laurie Wen, Cornel West, Billy Wharton, Sherry Wolf, and Julia Wrigley.

  • Marching with the Socialist Contingent

    Tomorrow, Oct. 2, I will be marching in the Socialist Contingent at the big march in Washington, DC.

    We will gather at 10am at 12th and Constitution and march with the Peace Table. Join us if you can!

    New Politics is one of the sponsors of the contingent, as you can see in this document. The contingent was sparked by Dan La Botz, Socialist Party candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio and a member of the New Politics editorial board.

  • Reply on the Abolition of the State

    Jason Schulman replies

    Like most left anarchists and too many Marxists, Wayne Price still holds to the vision of the councilist polity. But it is long since time to give up on this vision. Even in revolutionary Russia, workers' councils never functioned like a government in continuous session; they met discontinuously, with executive committees managing their affairs. The crisis of governmental authority in Russia in 1917 was “solved” not by soviets but by Sovnarkom, the government formed by the Bolsheviks (and, initially, their allies), and its ability to reach out through the Bolshevik Party as a national organization. Since 1917, soviet-type forms have appeared in many strike waves and revolutionary crises, but they have never in practice formed an alternative, authoritative decision-making center for all of society. The problem of institutional forms which will make authority truly accountable needs to be addressed in another way than that of fetishizing workers’ councils.

    I do not accept Price's definition of the state. Neither, in practice, did Marx or Engels, for what it's worth. Regardless of their not-very-well-thought-out ideas on the state's "withering away," Marx and Engels at least understood that the immediate goal of a workers' political revolution would be the radical democratization of the state, not its abolition — this is what the "dictatorship of the proletariat" amounts to. What would this require? For starters, the right to elect and recall all public officials; public officials to be paid only an average skilled workers’ wage; universal military training and service, democratic political and trade union rights within the military, and the right to keep and bear arms; the abolition of official secrecy laws and of private rights of copyright and confidentiality; self-government in the localities: i.e., the removal of powers of central government control and patronage and abolition of judicial review of the decisions of elected bodies; generalized trial by jury; and the abolition of constitutional guarantees of the rights of private property and freedom of trade. Such a state would be, in Mike McNair's words, an undiluted democratic republic, but it would still be a (workers') state. I realize this might not be enough for Wayne. Well, one can't please everyone.

    Jason Schulman

  • Letter on the Abolition of the State

    To the Editors of New Politics:

    In your last issue (#49), Jason Schulman takes Marvin Mandell to task for being "too kind to Wayne Price" in his discussion with me about his review of my book, The Abolition of the State. Apparently Jason Schulman believes that it is absurd to advocate abolition of the state. After an anti-capitalist revolution, "We are stuck with the state." He does not only reject anarchism, which wants to immediately eliminate the state, but also the views of Marx and Engels, and even Lenin, who thought that the state would gradually, eventually, be eliminated. This is so, he says, because there are political conflicts to settle, decisions to make and to implement, priorities to determine, and people to coerce. He claims that this requires "police…specialization…[and] hierarchy."

    However, most anti-statists do not deny that there will be decisions to argue out, conflicts to deal with, and even some coercion in order to implement decisions — and that some sort of institutions (a polity) will be needed to implement this. In a radically democratic, classless, participatory, communism, we believe that this can be done through some sort of federation of workers' councils and community assemblies, associated with an organized, armed, population (a militia). We do not call this a state because we define the state as a socially alienated, bureaucratic-military, machine, specialized, and hierarchical, standing over and against the rest of society. It is this — and not all forms of social coordination and coercion — which we believe can be eliminated. (I go into some detail about this in my book.)

    Our disagreement then, is not about whether to use the term "state" nor whether some form of coordination is necessary. It is whether this socially alienated, bureaucratic-military, institution can be replaced by a self-governing society. I understand that Jason Schulman does not think it can. But that is the issue.

    Wayne Price
    Bronx, NY

  • Fitch, Benson, and Early

         I read with keen interest 2 recent articles on the New Politics website: “Card Check: Labor’s Charlie Brown Moment?” by Robert Fitch, and “Does ‘Union Democracy’ Undermine ‘Solidarity?” by Herman Benson.

         I consider myself a life-long socialist activist, since high school, anyway. I’m retired now, but for the last 15 years that I worked, as a Respiratory Therapist, I participated in the Labor Party and wound up organizing the bargaining unit I worked in at Children’s Hospital in Seattle.

         I really agree with the sentiment expressed by both Bob and Herman, that Labor should be the fundamental building block for a movement to make America a progressive and decent society. I also agree with both of them, that the shrinkage of labor in the U.S. is a very bad thing. Getting so much smaller makes it harder and harder for Labor to play its progressive role, not to mention its role of protecting members’ interests on the job.

         Herman and Bob differ pretty strongly on the whys and what-to-do’s regarding the pickle unions find themselves in. After quite a bit of reflection, I find myself in more agreement with Benson than Fitch, but I want to emphasize how much respect I have for both of these two friends of Labor. The two articles are well written, and rich in ideas. I hope that they are widely read and studied by all who care about the strength and vitality of unions in America.

         I read Fitch’s book, Solidarity for Sale, a couple of years ago. I liked it a lot. It was a real breath of fresh air, and it was most enlightening about the problem of union corruption, which was always in the back of my mind while I was organizing at Children’s. Corruption is a scary thing for unorganized workers who are trying to decide whether or not to support a union. A friend of mine in the Labor Party told me one night at a meeting, that a president of the local we were working with had been found dead in a bath tub full of blood a few years back. Like I said, scary.

         I find Fitch’s ideas about dues check-off and exclusive bargaining rights interesting. The way I see it, Fitch would like to see American unions more like those in France, where dues are voluntary and workers can join any union that they want to. However, I agree with Benson, that taking up these exact positions would be suicidal for the left. Unions here have operated with exclusive bargaining and mandatory dues for a very long time, and a total change toward the French style would throw things into chaos and weaken unions in the U.S., when they’re already pretty far down.

         But we might want to take a look at dues check-off. Maybe we could make only a small portion mandatory, to be collected by the boss. 15 or 20 bucks a month could be subject to check-off, with another 20 or so collected by stewards. Asking people for money at work would be a great way to encourage communication among union members, and folks wouldn’t feel so boxed in.

         I totally agree with Benson, that union democracy is of paramount importance. Unless we have real democracy in unions, workers are not going to want to become members. I believe that having manageable-sized locals is an important part of union democracy. If the locals are too big, or national, nobody will ever be able to run for an important office by talking it up at work, and maybe organizing a committee for him/herself in the town where she or he lives. The crazy things we hear out of SEIU these days, about democracy not being as important as adding new members, should stop. Democracy is our lifeblood, and yes, Herman, it doesn’t belong inside ironic quotation marks.

         One of the things I love about democracy is how it encourages members to participate in their unions. The more labor takes on a non-professional face, the more comfortable everyday people will be with joining up. The most powerful words an organizer can say are, “I love the union, and I’m not getting paid to say that.” Professional organizers, important as they are, can’t say that. Unions that have a lot of member participation are going to be the most successful in the coming years, ,like the National Union of Health Care Workers (NUHW), in California.

         Another way of encouraging member participation, that’s a favorite of mine, is something called Stewards’ Councils. I’ve written about this idea in the past, on MRZine. The idea behind stewards’ councils is that you bring together elected rank and file leaders in a union local, or international, so they can have a voice, in the union, and to unorganized workers. I would like to see stewards’ council leaders have columns in local newsletters and the national labor press. I think that members would like to know what rank and file leaders think, not just paid leaders and staff, the way it is now.

         There is a recent article on the role of stewards in NUHW and elsewhere, on the MRZine website, by Steve Early. The Early piece reveals the power of the organized stewards in NUHW, which is allowing them to challenge the far richer SEIU this month at Kaiser, in what he calls the “the most important labor election in 70 years.” At stake in this election are Kaiser’s 44,000 SEIU members, and it looks like NUHW has a good chance to win, thanks to the support of the organized, volunteer stewards at Kaiser.

         What can the left do to help? We can help stewards’ councils get started throughout the Labor Movement. A national meeting could be held where stewards from unions across the country were invited to come and discuss the possibility of forming a National Stewards’ Council (NSC). The NSC could then take up the task of helping stewards’ councils get up and running throughout the Labor Movement. I bet there would be some interest in such an undertaking, from the NUHW stewards.

         It’s all a package, really:

    • Stand up for real union democracy.
    • Rely on support from the rank and file.
    • Make dues as low and voluntary as possible.
    • Organize the stewards, to make the unions more like their members. This will greatly help with organizing new members and help the Labor Movement become an even stronger progressive force in American politics.

  • Why our schools are broken – and how to fix them

    Almost all of what you’ll read in the new, just off the press,  education issue of the Brooklyn-based newspaper, The Indypendent, (“a free newspaper for a free people”) contradicts the narrative of school failure and reform you read and hear in the press and media. To understand the push for charter schools, privatization, and the standardized testing mania, as well as why teacher unions count, read the just-published issue, in paper or online. Warning – it’s a big file that takes a bit to load. But the wait is worth it. 

    John Tarleton’s two-page map of the global trajectory of neoliberal reforms is especially helpful in seeing the big picture. And in great to hear parents and students expose inequalities in the NYC schools – and describe how they are being combatted. Stanley Aronowitz’s article rightly reminds us that education has to be about human emancipation. Yes! (Note to  Stanley: The education major was eliminated long-ago. Now the struggle is to have teachers prepared for more than five weeks.)

    Here’s hoping that education activists in NYC  get out the word about  this powerful and empowering journalistic project. Many thanks to the Indypendent for this contribution to international resistance to neoliberalism’s destruction of public education.

  • Getting rid of bad teachers

    As a parent who sent my child to New York City public schools, as a former teacher myself, I’ve seen my share of bad teachers. Great, good, mediocre, and awful teachers exist in every school. The same range of job performance describes the lawyers, doctors, customer service representatives – you name it – I deal with on a daily basis.

    So what explains this hysteria, and it is a hysteria, about bad teachers? To start, we have “macro” factors I describe on Democracy Now.  But there’s a viciousness to the attacks on teachers that can’t be explained solely by economics. Gender is at work here too, a deep hostility to women and the  nurturing typically associated with “women’s work,” which teaching is of course.  (About 85% of all K-12 teachers are women. ) Neoliberalism has no use for  the life of the mind or nurturing because these activities do not produce profit, and in neoliberalism’s ideological universe, nothing counts but profit and Darwinian competition.

    This viciousness towards teachers is once again in the news, literally, in Los Angeles. The LA Times has created an online database of elementary school teachers, by name and published ratings for them based on their students’ standardized test scores. To understand the utter ludicriousness of this new system used to rate teachers, called “value added,”  imagine if doctors were rated on their patients’ health nine months after treatment began. The rating system had no controls for what patients did outside of the office, no controls for their health when they commenced treatment. Then newspapers published doctors’ names and ratings? Teachers who are named can post responses. One I found especially moving was written by William Torres.

    United Teachers of Los Angeles, the teachers union,  has organized a demonstration, Sept.14, 4:30 – 6:00 p.m. at the LA Times Building in downtown LA. The union calls the LA Times action “teacher bashing.” I think it’s something more as well – getting back at mom.

  • Teachers' jobs, paid for by cuts to food stamps – a victory?

    The House of Representatives has passed a $26 billion jobs bill, engineered by Democrats, that is aimed to save jobs of public employees, mainly teachers and help states pay for Medicaid health insurance. Funding will come from taxes on multinational corporations– and from slashing money for food stamps. Congressional Republicans lament that this is a “giveaway” to teachers unions. (The Republicans demand, instead, that we give taxpayer money to the wealthy and the transnational corporations. We expect this from Republicans, no?)
    Of course the bill is giving money to schools and kids, not the unions. It’s not a lot of money when you consider that the budget of the NYC schools alone was over $1 billion last year. But it will help stave off disaster. Students in districts serving poor and working class families will probably be spared obscenely large classes of 40, 50 and more. The law is also a “giveaway” to tens of thousands of kids in more affluent school districts, who are losing “frills” that are a distant memory in urban schools: art, gym, music, sports, after-school programs. The Democrats protest that they included the cut to food stamps to get Republican votes and that they will win the food stamp funding back…somehow. But the real story is that liberal Democrats collapsed in their efforts to make the party support jobs AND foodstamps, as TheHill.com reports:
    “House Democratic leaders had resisted earlier suggestions by the Obama administration to redirect food-stamp money to the jobs bill. The White House had noted that the 13.6 percent stimulus increase in food stamps was initially designed to last until 2014. It was going to last until 2018 because of unexpectedly low food prices during the recession.
    “Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get,” House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) said in a Fiscal Times interview last month.”
    The Democratic Party makes no mention of the food stamp cuts. It calls the legislation a “a victory for cash-strapped states, parents, children and middle class families across our country.” “Thank you, Congress!” crows the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The National Education Association (NEA) is just a tad less sycophantic about bill’s passage, but its story gushes praise for the Democrats too -and fails to mention the food stamp cuts. The AAUP, (the American Association of University Professors) notes, correctly, that post-secondary education was short-changed in the bill and that public higher education is a right. Still, it mentions nothing about the food stamp provision when it calls for Congress “to similarly attend to maintaining and building human capacity in postsecondary education.” 
    The NEA and AFT have allowed the Democrats to save teachers’ jobs by, quite literally, stealing food from children. The bill is a giveaway to the unions only if you think that teacher unions can defeat the neoliberal onslaught by sticking to the old “bread and butter” unionism they have practiced for decades. The 140,000 saved  jobs came at a very steep political cost: Teachers unions have lost legitimacy as a force capable of mounting a meaningful challenge to the barbarism that demands that kids go hungry to pay for teacher salaries.

  • Update to "Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes"

    A note on "Mean Bastards": This short piece, posted after the death of George Steinbrenner, has received a kind of confirmation in Ellen DeGeneres walking out on her five year contract worth tens of millions with "American Idol." I had criticized Simon Cowell (a former AI judge) along with Steinbrenner, Trump, etc. as "Mean Bastards." According to the New York Times, DeGeneres seemed "uncomfortable in the judges' chair… she had a hard time hurting the feelings of the young contestants who… get voted off each week during the live telecasts…"  Current American culture is so mean that we have to look wherever we can to find resistance to it.

  • Obama's speech to the Urban League: Selling a toxic remedy

    President Obama’s speech to the Urban League about education July 29 didn’t cover any new ground, but there were some shifts worth noting. He tweaked his administration’s rhetorical stance towards teachers and teacher unions, adopting a less combative stance than his and Arne Duncan’s support for firing teachers in a “failing” Rhode Island school. No doubt in response to teachers’ outrage and resulting snubs from the two national teacher unions at their national conventions, Obama now says “the vast majority of teachers are working tirelessly, are passionate about their students, are often digging into their own pockets for basic supplies, are going above and beyond the call of duty.” Score one point for reality.

    Reality loses when Obama discusses the reasons poor kids (of color) have lower levels of academic achievement. The kids are “victims” to be sure, but of their communities, as he says? Of parents failure to support “educational excellence?” What about racism? Addressing criticisms that he is “always talking about parental responsibility in front of black folks?” Obama responded, “I talk about parent responsibility wherever I talk about education.” This flip explanation ignores the rhetorical defense of reforms his (and the Bush administration) have made to schools – leaving no child behind. The “child” in case is understood to be black or Hispanic.

    Neoliberal reforms, including Obama and Duncan’s “Race to the Top,” have been touted as the means to equalize educational outcomes. But we know what’s occurred when these reforms have been imposed by the World Bank. They increase social inequality. They decrease school attendance and graduation rates. They decrease rates of literacy in countries with previously high literacy rates. All of this has been documented by researchers, especially in Latin America, where the reforms were put in place by military dictatorships (supported by the US). When you compare the analysis of Adriana Puiggros about reforms  in Latin America to “Race to the top” you see an identical architecture.

     *Gut the power of traditional sources of school oversight, like school boards, by creating lots of “alternative schools” that function free of social control.
    *Judge schools, teachers, and students exclusively by standardized tests (created by private companies).
    *Create pressure to privatize by refusing to fund all schools adequately. Dole out a relatively small amount of additional funding to parties that conform to the master plan.
    * Attack the teachers unions – which are the greatest impediment to the project.

    The other assumption in Obama’s speech is that education is the key to the nation’s economic resurgence. As Jean Anyon and Kiersten Greene demonstrate, new jobs being created require less education, not more. If we want to put people back to work, we have to create well-paying jobs and beef up social supports, which is what Obama and the Democrats should be doing. We know from looking at the rest of the world and from documention by advocates-turned-critic, most recently, Diane Ravitch, that the policies he advances are destroying public education in all but name.

    Obama boasts that four billion dollars is being awarded to the winners of his race. That sounds like a lot of money. But NYC alone had an operating budget of 21.9 billion dollars last year, and a piddling $800 million extra came from the federal government legislation to save jobs. Or compare the four billion dollars for education to the recent appropriation for war-related costs, $59 billion (a comparison the still neo-conservative Diane Ravitch won’t make – but we should).

    I’ve encountered many liberals who are reluctant to criticize Obama in public, taking what they assume to be his desire to do good to excuse the harm done by his educational policies. Obama demands “accountability” from schools and teachers. We should use the same standard in judging his administration. Whether the increase in social inequality his policies are bringing is intended or not is ultimately irrelevant.  I hope the Urban League wasn’t buying Obama’s speech. He’s a great showman selling a toxic remedy.

  • Hacker and Dreifus’s Higher Education? A Neocon Screed

    I admire Claudia Dreifus’s interviews with scientists in the New York Times Tuesday Science section, and particularly her attention to women in science, and I know of her honorable history in the left and feminism. So I befriended her on Facebook. There she publicized her book, with Andrew Hacker, Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing our Kids – and What we Can Do About It, to be published by Times Books/Henry Holt on August 3. To my dismay, the book turns out to be propaganda for a neoliberal program of cuts in higher education, part of the international retreat from earlier social gains in pensions, vacations, education, health care, and part of the attacks on social services and on public employees. Although I was never an Obama fan, I guess I feel a little like those who were, but who now see their illusions smashed by another blast of right-wing centrism — in Hacker and Dreifus’s case, dressed up as liberalism. I read Hacker and Dreifus’s (HD) book. I found myself at home with their endorsement of unionization of teaching assistants, a cause in which I have long been active. And of course I share their disapproval of high salaries for college presidents (page 242). And although it never seems to occur to HD that government support might do away with exorbitant tuitions, of course one has to agree with their protests against through-the-roof tuitions. In their book, these generally available platitudes are used as the vehicles to carry conservative freight. With the above exceptions, HD is compatible with current right-wing thought on the frivolity of higher education and the need to cut it back. Indeed, although they solicited blurbs from liberals, support is beginning to emerge from neocons and will doubtless flower when the book is officially published and public debate begins. What is their program? HD seek to cut back faculty research, publication and sabbaticals as expensive gewgaws. They describe abolition of tenure as their most important goal (239-240). They want to banish medical schools and research institutes from campuses and send into such exile those who want to engage in research (242). They want to abolish paid sabbaticals: as they see it, we have too many new books and articles already (240)! (I had two sabbaticals in thirty-nine years of teaching, the last one at 50% of salary. In an era of HDian cutbacks, they are rarer and rarer.) They dismiss as a mere “mantra” (62) the idea that research is relevant to teaching, and they seem to understand the connection only in regard to keeping up with the literature – a notion that they dismiss with a quotation from right-winger William Bennett (83), who was among other things Reagan’s Secretary of Education. HD like what Bennett says so much that they use it again: (238). They also call in that amazing Straussian (and defender of Lawrence Summers at Harvard), Harvey Mansfield, to testify in support of their ridicule of courses on such subjects as gay autobiography; and the break-up of Yugoslavia (84-85). It never occurs to them that doing research acquaints the researcher first-hand with the complexities of establishing truth – a notion that should be close to the heart of good teaching. But for HD, “there’s an inverse correlation between good teaching and academic research” (89. (After I had predicted that HD’s book would get a warm response from neocons, I came across the following in support of HD in a largely critical Forum on the Chronicle of Higher Education website. The writer, Robert W. Tucker, is a noted neocon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Tucker) “Great article! I appreciated the fact that you are willing to put yourselves on the line with concrete suggestions which, for the most part, generate empirically testable claims. .. Again, with so much rancor and narrow opinion expressed on these pages, it is refreshing to see your piece. My disagreement with some of your points is part of the rational process. Robert W Tucker) HD belittle the work of preparing and teaching and instead comment on “how little is asked from professors during the months when classes are taught” (26). Andrew taught Political Science at Queens College in CUNY, but there is next to nothing about this besieged institution – with the exception of his retrieval from his years at Queens snide memories (“several years ago”) of the job candidate who had the temerity to ask about teaching load and sabbaticals (13-14). (I retired from CUNY when I found that my body could no longer support a four-course teaching load.) What about the curriculum that HD’s non-researchers will carry out? HD hope for a return to teaching the “Great Ideas.” They praise Allan Bloom’s teaching (80) but never mention this University of Chicago professor’s national impact with his 1987 Closing of the American Mind – the right wing of the culture wars – of which their book is in a sense a sequel/updating. In short. HD don’t think about the grotesque funding cutbacks for higher education while offering rationales for more of the same. Their vision for American higher education is quite Dickensian, with Oliver Twist as the professoriate that asks for more, not less, in pursuit of the goals of education for all. =================================================================== Dreifus-Lemisch discussion To her credit, Claudia Dreifus argued these issues through (though not satisfactorily) on Facebook. Here are some selections from the back-and-forth. With limited skills, I have attempted to arrange them with the most recent first. Lemisch: I welcome this discussion, Claudia, and hope you will stay with it. (It may be good preparation for what lies ahead :-)). About Bloom: you endorse a return to teaching the Great Ideas. That inevitably combines with complimentary mention of Bloom. I can't imagine doing that without at least a parenthetical mention of disagreement with his right-wing views, but I don't think you do disagree with those educational ideas. You say you don't view these issues "on a left-right axis." At a time of world-wide neo-liberal cutbacks in civilized gains in health, education, pensions, retirement, vacations, "entitlements," etc. you had better see the political context in which you propose your wholly compatible cutbacks. You appear to take the high road when you say, despite the Bloom matter, "we'll let students make their own judgments about ideology." Fine: but this hardly fits with your endorsement of Bloomian ideas for the curriculum, whose conservatism I know first hand from experience teaching at the University of Chicago. Your science interviews are wonderful. If you and Andrew achieve what you want in this book, I guess the scientists will be even more dependent on corporate funding. Certainly you don't want these unproductive drones taking up space in expensive buildings for their career-building research, and all the while, not spending enough time teaching undergraduates. Dreifus: Jesse, I’m a journalist, not a politician. I don’t think about “political context.” Lemisch: Say it ain’t so, Claudia. People who don’t think about the ‘political context’are well on their way to accepting bad political ideas rather than questioning them. Lemisch: Yes, I've seen your blurbs. Your failure to think about political context leaves you ill prepared for praise from rightwingers. Really, except for your endorsement of adjunct unionization, I can't see much that they would disagree with, including especially your support for abolition of tenure. The approval you have received from Neocon Robert W. Tucker (Chronicle of Higher Education site) is a sign of what's to come. How you will deal with such praise for your program? It should make you think twice about ignoring political context — or perhaps you'll just be happy with praise from the right. Lemisch: Definitely: cut back on colleges and universities, faculty sabbaticals and research, etc. Run them more like prisons, and more cheaply! Really, Glen Beck et al will eat up these prescriptions. How do we distinguish contemporary centrism from the right? Dreifus: Hey Jesse, how about actually reading the book, or even the article for that matter, before making knee-jerk judgements and calling names. We're not talking about cutting back on colleges and education, but on hot-tubs and gyms. We're for paying adjuncts a living wage and valuing the work of people who actually teach the next generation. Paying senior professors NOT to teach is part of the escalating cost- game that hurts access, we believe. You may disagree, but that doesn't mean we're advocating anything at all like what you suggest. Lemisch: In fact I have indeed read the book. Good for the two of you about TA unions. But consider the following things you endorse: cut back on faculty research , publication and sabbaticals as expensive frivolities; get rid of the research functions of universities, even in situations like Minnesota where these functions grow out of earlier Progressive movements; don't talk about grotesque funding cutbacks while offering rationales for more of the same; return to teaching "the great ideas" (Allan Bloom? You praise him while ignoring what he was about); return to "peasant soup" and the other horrors of traditional college dining hall menus (presumably including getting rid of Yale dining halls attempts at locally grown food). High priced presidents, Abu Dhabi campuses etc. should definitely go, but you use these as vehicles to convey otherwise conservative messages. Too bad. I know your positive side and regret that you have fallen into this stuff. Lemisch: I guess the tragedy of this, Claudia, is that you don't indeed think that you are advocating a conservative agenda, but with some exceptions, that's what it is. Look forward to adoring reviews from the right.

  • Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes

             All day long, and on into a second day, here in New York, the media have been full of George Steinbrenner. He’s always been a Mean Bastard — even in the Seinfeld version — and that’s how he is memorialized: a Mean Bastard and a Winner. Sometimes he’s represented as a Mean-Bastard-with-a Heart-of-Gold-who-Gave-Money-to-Good-Causes. It would seem paradoxical to be deep in grief over a man universally acknowledged to be a Mean Bastard. But, it’s no paradox: the culture is in such depraved condition that MBs are adored, even by many of those on whose faces they tread.

             Consider the following media figures, bound together in a complex that delights in meanness and brutality:

             Steinbrenner, “The Boss,” was known for firing people. So is Donald Trump (“The Apprentice”), who fires people with his trade-mark “You’re Fired!” Despite a catastrophic employment situation, he is widely admired for this.

             Simon Cowell was the abusive judge on “American Idol,” where his central role was to be as insulting as he could in dismissing the candidates who performed before him.

             Like the others, Judge Judy deals in explosive insult. And consider the brutality of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” — more versions of “You’re Fired!” If these things get you down, watch Dr. Phil berate people in the name of tough love.

             If you haven’t seen these horrors, you ought to acquaint yourself with them. They give strength to the environment in which Sarah Palin and the rest operate, as well as the more sophisticated versions seen in David Brooks et. al. Indeed, this cultural phenomenon may be in some ways more important than the politics that surfs along on the wave that these people help to create.

             We need to present and get out there in new ways an alternate set of values, just, humane and non-competitive. The left won’t make a better world so long as we dismiss such concerns as “soft,” and leave the presentation of alternate values to the right, or to Oprah.

  • The Decommissioners – Update

    The trial of the Decommissioners lasted three weeks, in which time the jury heard not only from the Decommissioners but also detailed evidence of war crimes committed in Palestine and testimony from EDO managing director Paul Hills, who faced questions about his company’s dealings with Israel. All the defendants were acquitted by unanimous jury decisions. One of the defendants, Chris Osmond, said: “It was the right verdict. Our action was because nobody else was willing to take action.
    “During one operation 1,400 people had been killed, 350 children had died, and nobody was willing to take action. Our politicians and the United Nations were not taking action to support the people of Gaza and it was necessary for ordinary people to take action like we did.”

    He added: “Ordinary people in Brighton won’t stop campaigning until EDO MBM closes down. We are going to be here until they are not.”

  • Teachers in Oaxaca: A Review

    Diana Denham and the C.A.S.A. Collective, Teaching Rebellion: Stories from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca (Oakland: PM Press, 2008) and Peter Kuper, A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Oaxaca (Oakland: PM Press, 2009).

    The young PM Press of Oakland has published two interesting and quite different books about the civic uprising in Oaxaca in 2006. Teaching Rebellion by Diana Denham and the C.A.S.A. Collective brings together 23 interviews with people who participated in or were caught up in the Oaxaca rebellion together with a concluding essay by Gustavo Esteva and a study guide by Patrick Lincoln. The book is profusely illustrated with photographs. Peter Kuper's A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Oaxaca is a beautiful and bilingual book of drawing, paintings, cartoons, and photographs — a collage of the two years he spent in the city with his family.

    The interviews in Teaching Rebellion were done by the C.A.S.A. Collective, "a group of international activists, human rights observers, and volunteers for grassroots organizations." The 23 subjects of the interviews come from many walks of life in Oaxaca — teacher, student, housewife, vendor, reporter, and many others. The oldest person interviewed was in her 70s and the youngest just 9 years old, though most were young adults and middle aged people who had taken part in the movement, including involvement in the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) which became for a while a kind of alternative government, peoples' government in the city. The interviews constitute a view of the movement from the grassroots.

    All of the important events of the Oaxaca Commune, as some have called this experience, are discussed from the teachers' sit-in, to the mega-marches, to the movement's seizing of the radio stations, and the creation of APPO. Personally, I found most moving the testimony of Aurelia, a 50-year old illiterate maid who had not participated in the movement, but who found herself caught up in the repression, mistreated, insulted, flown out of Oaxaca and jailed in the state of Nayarit. Her story, and the stories of others who faced repression — including the 20 killed by death squads — remind one of the tremendous force of the state unleashed against participants in the movement.

    What seems missing from these interviews, however, is any discussion of the internal political debates within the movement. For example, we have no real discussions of the conflicts within the Oaxaca local of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) or between el SNTE and the APPO. The leftist groups that existed in both the SNTE and APPO and in the movement, such as the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist of Mexico and the Popular Revolutionary Front, are not mentioned. The guerrilla group, the People's Revolutionary Army (EPR), is mentioned but not really discussed by any of the participants. Since all of these groups were, to one degree or another, actors in the 2006 uprising, so one wonders why the C.A.S.A. apparently avoided talking with people who would have identified themselves as members of one of these groups, so that they could discuss their political views. What was the interaction between the grassroots activists portrayed here and the political organizations? The absence of a discussion of these groups and their politics leads one to feel that the book has been sanitized, presenting all grassroots activists as political innocents.

    One also feels — though the authors should not be faulted for this — that we would like a more complete vision of the Oaxaca events of 2006. We need other books that tell us what Governor Ulises Ruíz of the Institutional Revolutionary Party and President Vicente Fox were doing and thinking at the same time. We want to know what the local political and political and police authorities in Oaxaca talked about during the rebellion. We would like to know what the very rich of Oaxaca did during the rebellion as well as the comfortably well off. What was the larger social and political picture into which this civic uprising fit?

    Kuper, his wife and daughter arrived in Oaxaca in July 2006 and spent two years there, years which he recorded in his sketchbooks. As he writes, he felt compelled to capture Oaxaca's "dark times" but also to "capture its light." Kuper's sketchbooks — turned into what is a beautiful, colorful art book — accompanied by a bilingual diary, touch on all the famous sites and activities that tourists find and locals know in Oaxaca. His drawings are clever and campy, kitch and corny, funny and wild. Anyone who has spent some time in Mexico and particularly in Oaxaca, will be reminded looking at this book and reading the text of their own experiences. The book is charming.

    In truth, the events of the upheaval of 2006 represent only a small part of this book. Kuper has captured much more of Oaxaca's light than of its dark times. That too proves useful, allowing us to situate the year of upheaval within the broader context of a city filled with tourists and visitors like Kuper himself.

  • The Israeli Military and the "Decommissioners"

    On the 17th of January 2009, Israeli warplanes pounded the terrified inhabitants of the densely populated Gaza strip in over 50 air-strikes. It was the 22nd day of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military assault on Gaza that left an estimated 1400 dead, including over 300 children.
    In the early hours of that morning on a quiet industrial estate 2000 miles away, six peace activists scaled the perimeter fencing of the UK factory EDO/ITT, which, it is claimed, makes vital components for Israeli F-16s – the backbone of the airforce bombarding Gaza. After entering the factory through a broken window, the six set about systematically destroying computers and machinery with hammers. When they were finished ‘decommissioning’ the factory, they had caused an estimated $300,000 worth of damage. They then lay on the floor and waited to be arrested.
    The trial of the activists, who have become known as the ‘Decommissioners’, began a week after Israel once again caused international outcry – this time with killing of nine peace activists, whom Israel accused of being a violent ‘lynch mob’. Like the attempts to defend the Mavi Marmara from Israeli commandos, the actions of the Decommissioners have sparked fierce debate over the line between passive resistance and aggressive action and how far it is reasonable to go in defying aggression. The activists stand accused of conspiracy to commit criminal damage. They are pleading not guilty on the grounds that they were acting to prevent a greater crime – the killing of civilians in Gaza. In a video statement filmed before the action, one of the six, Elijah Smith, said:"I don't feel I'm going to do anything illegal tonight, but I'm going to go into an arms factory and smash it up to the best of my ability so that it cannot actually work or produce munitions … [which] have been provided to the Israeli army."
    The trial is set to last for seven weeks, during which time the defendents hope to prove that components produced in the UK factory are used by Israel in the occupied territories, a fact which the company denies. If they are found guilty they could face years in prison. The Decommissioners are supporters of Smash EDO, an often controversial anti-militarist campaign that has targeted the EDO/ITT factory in Brighton, on the south coast of England, since 2004. The campaign grew out of the disillusionment with the massive but ultimately ineffectual anti-Iraq war movement guided by the Stop the War coalition. Smash EDO spokesperson Chloe Marsh said: “If, when millions of people were mobilised against the war across the UK, we had looked at who the companies were who were set to make a profit from the war and targeted them, our resistance could have been far more effective.”
    But the decision to target individual arms manufacturers was not the only tactical break from the Stop the War campaign. Writing in British magazine Red Pepper, Smash EDO’s Andrew Beckett said: “The whole thrust of the Stop the War coalition’s approach was that marching from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square would ultimately compel the government to see sense. A march, a few speeches and a coach home … is it any wonder that our government felt safe to go to war?” Instead, Smash EDO’s approach has been determinedly focussed on direct action.
    The campaign announced itself with a rooftop occupation and has maintained pressure on the factory with diverse and frequently confrontational tactics – from noise demos and street theatre to lock-ons and the dumping of manure and concrete outside the factory. The tactics have often wilfully crossed the line of peaceful, legal protest, with the campaign insistent on differentiating between moral law and legal law. The factory and its investors have been consistently targeted for vandalism. Protests at the factory have seen activists bursting into the compound, smashing the windows and graffitiing the building, while street demonstrations have led to aggressive confrontations with police after their attempts to confine and control protesters. The relentless pressure has had a serious impact on EDO. It has cost the company millions in legal costs, lost working time, security costs and property damage. One of the company’s two premises in Brighton has already closed down, staffing levels are down and eight directors, including the managing director, have resigned since the campaign started.
    The success of Smash EDO has also inspired activists around the country to set up similar campaigns. Groups in the cities of Nottingham, Manchester and Bristol have launched their own direct action campaigns targeting arms companies Heckler and Koch, Brimar and US company Raytheon. The proliferation of these campaigns has British activists talking excitedly about a new ‘anti-militarism network’ that gives impetus and energy to a peace movement that increasing numbers of frustrated activists are calling ineffective and obsolete.
    However, the campaign’s tactics have drawn heavy criticism, not only from a hostile media but also from many on the traditional left, who have accused the group of alienating the public with their aggressive street presence and property destruction. Milan Rai, co-editor of the British newspaper Peace News, wrote: “The question is whether the tactics that can win particular battles contribute to larger successes, or whether they may be undermining the building of the mass base of opposition that is essential to overall victory.”
    The activists behind Smash EDO hotly dispute this. Instead, they say, the barrier to building a mass movement is the belief that it is impossible to change anything, no matter how many feet march through the streets. Like the activists aboard the Freedom Flotilla, Smash EDO’s supporters maintain that the only way to break through this barrier is with real, not symbolic action. Amongst British anti-militarists, no one has taken that idea further than the Decommissioners.
    While opinions on the justification of their actions remain deeply divided in Britain, according to Ewa Jasiewicz, a human rights activist, journalist and eyewitness to Operation Cast Lead, people in Gaza are less equivocal. She recently commented: “I told many people in Gaza about the people’s strike on EDO… When I recounted this action to people, I saw an expression come over their faces that I hadn’t encountered before when talking about international solidarity. It was a kind of respect, a sense of surprised pride at a tiny move towards a levelling between the blood sacrifices and living hell of so many here, and sacrifices made by people in comparative comfort zones on the other side of the world – for them.”