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  • Metal Workers & Miners Unions Consider Merger

    Unions Representing Workers in Canada, Mexico qnd U.S. Explore Merger:
    Would Create International Union of One Million Metal Workers and Miners

         The United Steelworkers (USW), which represents 850,000 workers in Canada, the Caribbean and the United States, and the National Union of Miners and Metal Workers (SNTMMRM), known as the Mineros, which represents 180,000 workers in Mexico, have announced plans to explore uniting into one international union. The agreement to begin exploration of a merger was signed on June 21.

         This first step in the creation of a global union—as opposed to a global federation of unions—represents a significant new development for labor in the Americas with implications for workers around the world. Building on the 2008 trans-Atlantic merger between Unite in the United Kingdom and the USW, now the USW and the Mineros are working to build a worldwide labor union with the power to confront the concentrated capital of the mining and metal working industries.

         USW President Leo W. Gerard and Minero general secretary Napoleón Gómez Urrutia together asserted the two unions continued “common commitment to democracy, equality, and solidarity for working men and women throughout North America and throughout the world.”

         The two unions have had a strategic alliance since 2005. Now a commission made up of five members from each of the unions will create a joint commission to propose “immediate measures to increase strategic cooperation between our organizations as well as the steps required to form a unified organization.”

    Several Years of Close Cooperation

         The attempt to create an international union by these two unions arises within the context of the 16-year old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) countries. Since NAFTA took effect in on January 1, 1994, several Canadian, Mexican and U.S. unions have sought greater cooperation as they faced transnational corporations with new reach and power. This is, however, the first attempt to create a new international union in response to the greater mobility and power of international capital since NAFTA and what has been called the neoliberal era of privatization and free trade.

         This new development also comes as a result of several years of intense and intimate collaboration between the Steelworkers and the Mineros at many different levels. The two unions have joined together in campaigns against common employers and in mutual support on issues facing them. Most notably, the USW has helped the Mineros as it came under a brutal attack by Grupo Mexico, that country’s largest mining company, and by the administration of Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president. “

         When the Mexican government brought trumped up charges against the Mineros’ general secretary, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, threatening to jail him, the USW played a central role in helping him find safety in Vancouver, B.C. For three years with the aid of the USW, he has been leading the Mineros through a series of difficult strikes and other confrontations from that city.

    History of U.S.-Mexico International Solidarity

         This is by no means the first time that unions in the three countries have attempted to build more powerful labor organizations through international solidarity. The path to solidarity has been fraught with problems and strewn with the wreckage of failures, while at the same time filled with inspiring examples and some significant successes. While today’s situation poses altogether new challenges, the past history holds some lessons too.

         With the development of modern industrial capitalism in all three nations in the late nineteenth century, there developed a complex exchange of organizational methods, union strategies and tactics, and social and political programs. At the center of the process was the construction of the railroad networks first in the United States and Canada and then in Mexico.

         Mostly the influence spread from the more advanced and industrialized United States with a long history of trade unionism to Mexico. Those railroad lines, built by U.S. and British capital, employed British, Canadian and mostly U.S. railroad workers. The American railroad workers carried with them their 16 craft railroad craft unions and their practice of striking the employer over grievances, structures and strategies soon imitated by the Mexican workers.

         Mexican workers who went to work in the mining industry in the United States joined the American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions or more frequently the Western Federation of Miners or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), adopting their militant strategies and revolutionary syndicalist politics. The influence was not all one way. The Mexican Liberal Party, actually a revolutionary anarchist group, came to organize workers in Mexico and sometimes in the Southwest of the United States.

         After the discovery of oil in the Mexican states along the Gulf of Mexico around 1900, accompanied by the growth of oil storage and shipping facilities at the docks, the IWW became established there among the oil workers. At the same time, Spanish revolutionary syndicalists won a strong base among seamen, and their influence spread into the ports of Mexico, while Spanish anarchists came to organize department store clerks, restaurant workers, and factory workers in central Mexico. Their influence became pervasive. By the time of the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the anarchist House of the World Worker with branches in many major Mexican cities had become the dominant labor movement.

    The Mexican Revolution and Samuel Gompers

         During the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the Constitutionalists—founders of what would eventually evolve into the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and rule Mexico for decades—reached an agreement with a faction of the House of the World Worker to provide troops for that wing of the revolution in exchange for support for the union’s organizing efforts. So thousands of workers organized in Red Battalions rode off to fight Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, leaders of the plebeian and peasant leftwing of the revolution. Thus the Mexican state came to control the formerly anarchist labor movement.

         In those years, as the new state was being established first under Venustiano Carranza and then under Álvaro Obregón, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor moved into Mexico. The new Mexican government welcomed Gompers as an aid in helping to create the state-sponsored Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) which with the government was fighting to destroy the anarchist General Confederation of Workers (CGT). So between 1920 and 1925, anarchist unions with an internationalist perspective battled the business unions with a nationalist vision backed by the Mexican government, a war ultimately won by the government-backed unions with the breaking of the Mexico City streetcar workers union in 1924.

         Gompers principal aim, however, was to expand the reach of his Pan-American Federation of Labor (PAFL), an international union confederation that had already established branches in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. As U.S. capital and the U.S. State Department spread their power and influence throughout Latin America, Gompers expected to see the PAFL spread the model of his so-called “pure-and-simple” trade unionism, sweeping aside the Red unions of anarchists and Communists. Gompers death in 1924 followed by the Crash in 1929, and the Great Depression for the next decade meant that his dream was never realized.

    The 1930s Upsurge and the Post-War Right Turn

         The worldwide economic crisis of the 1930s led to a working class upsurge in Canada, Mexico and the United States, initially under the leadership of a variety of political leaderships: Socialist and Communist, Catholic and conservative, but all independent of the employers and their respective governments. The brief period 1929 to 1939 saw powerful unions and new labor federations grow up in all three countries.

         In the United States and Canada, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organized industrial workers, while in Mexico the new Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) organized a broad spectrum of workers in industries of all sorts. The CIO and the CTM and some of their industrial unions established strong fraternal relations during this period. The CIO-CTM alliance evolved and was transformed during the course of the U.S.-Mexico alliance against the Axis Powers during World War II. Both the CIO and the CTM emerged from the war having been drawn into closer relations of partnership with the corporations and with their respective governments.

         With the outbreak of the Cold War in 1948, the governments of both the United States and Mexico, working closely with the employers forced a purge of leftists from the unions, while in the U.S. the Taft-Hartley Law hamstrung the unions. In Mexico the purge was particularly violent and brutal, as the Mexican government sent police and gangsters into the industrial unions to conduct a transfer of leadership at gun point. The independent elected union leaders were turned out in favor of men would were loyal to the government.

         So by the 1950s, while ties still existed between the CIO and the CTM, they were now relations between U.S. labor officials who working closely with the U.S. State Department and American corporations and Mexican officials subservient to their government. Meanwhile, around the world labor unions divided between the Communist-led and pro-Soviet World Federation of Trade Unions and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions led by U.S. and European unions under the tutelage of the U.S. State Department. Within this context, real working class solidarity virtually disappeared, as the U.S. and Mexican unions’ tasks on the international scene became working to stop Communist, nationalist and other radical unions throughout the Americas.

         For a hundred years attempts to build international worker solidarity have been disrupted by the imperial power of U.S. corporations and the U.S. State Department and by the Mexican nationalist government, as well as by conservative business unions loyal either to government or employers. Genuine international worker solidarity was greatest during periods of working class upsurge in the 1910s and 1930s within the context of worldwide labor mobilizations. The opening of the era of globalization raised new challenges.

    NAFTA Changes the Game

         Such was the state of labor solidarity in North America in the 1990s when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was being negotiated. NAFTA, opened up the borders to capital (while keeping the movement of labor restricted), suddenly changed the rules. While the U.S. and Mexican union bureaucrats of the AFL-CIO and the CTM had been able to cooperate within the context of the Cold War, they suddenly found themselves at odds in the age of neoliberalism and free trade.

         U.S. labor unions opposed NAFTA, fearing that it would lead to the importation of products produced with cheap labor, commodities which would undermine their employers’ market share and therefore their jobs. Mexico’s “official” or government controlled unions such as the CTM had no choice but to follow the government’s directives and support the agreement. With U.S. unions opposed to NAFTA and Mexico’s “official” unions support it, the pact between the AFL-CIO and the “official” CTM practically dissolved under the impact of NAFTA, forcing U.S. unions to look for other relationships. At the same time, independent unions in Mexico which were critical of NAFTA also looked for other relationships abroad.

         The United Electrical Workers (UE) which represented workers in the United States, and which was not part of the AFL-CIO, discovered the independent Authentic Labor Front (FAT) in the early NAFTA period. Those two unions formed a model strategic alliance, and many other U.S. and Mexicans began to establish ties of various sorts in the 1990s and 2000s. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), for example,, established a relationship with the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM). At times there were attempts to establish broader organizations around specific industries or problems, such as the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras.

    Steelworkers and Mineros: Toward Unity

         All of this then forms the long and complicated background to the events taking place today, at the center of which now, however, is fight against the mining companies. At the moment the USW is in the 11th month of a strike of 3,500 of its members against Vale Inco, a huge Brazilian mining company in Sudbury, Canada, while the Mineros, after three years on strike at Cananea, Sonora, face the military occupation of their town to break the strike. The USW and Mineros plan to build the power to stop such assaults on miners and metal workers in the Americas.

         The Minero-Steelworker agreement to begin exploration of unity represents an exciting new development in international labor solidarity. With such unity, workers might have greater power in confronting the transnational mining and metal companies, and could respond to challenges more rapidly and with more flexibility than a federation of union usually can. Still, the challenges to this process will be enormous. No doubt both the employers and the governments will work to sabotage any arrangement which threatens to empower workers, and the unions themselves which have worked together so well for the last few years will face new challenges in developing a common leadership, organizational structure, philosophy, strategy and vision.

     

    Dan La Botz, a teacher, writer, and activist, lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

  • The Gaza Flotilla

           Alan Dershowitz has suggested that to be effective Israeli propaganda should support 80 percent of what Israel does, and be critical of the other 20 percent. So I expected that Dershowitz would only approve 80% of the Israeli killings on the Gaza flotilla, while expressing some mild criticism regarding the IDF’s other victims. Silly me. Dershowitz promptly weighed in to declare that the Israeli assault was “entirely consistent” with international law.

           Anyone concerned with reality might check out the hour-long video smuggled out by Iara Lee or the legal arguments by Lynda Brayer, George Bisharat, the Lawyers Committee for Palestinian Rights, or Ben Saul of the National Lawyers’ Guild, among others. And regardless of what exactly took place on the Miva Marmara, the crucial context of the whole situation — as I argued in my article But What Could Israel Do? — is that the blockade has nothing to do with Israeli security, since Israel could always end rocket attacks on its people by agreeing to a ceasefire with Hamas that included a lifting of the blockade. This Israel has been unwilling to do, just as it has been unwilling to end the occupation by accepting an independent and viable Palestinian state on the territories it seized in 1967.

            The craven Congressional Democrats have been giving full backing to Israel, including its latest flotilla attack. Among the more disgusting contributions have been Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) openly endorsing collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza, and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), chair of the House subcommittee on terrorism, nonproliferation and trade, urging the prosecution of U.S. citizens involved with the flotilla.. More significantly, the White House has blocked any international action against Israel.

            This is supporting Israel not just 80 percent, but 110 percent.

  • Max Lane on Indonesia: A review

    Max Lane. Unfinished Revolution: Indonesia Before and After Suharto. New York: Verso, 2008. 312 pages. Notes, index. $29.95

          Perhaps no other non-Indonesian knows as much about Indonesia, its culture, and the left as the Australian Max Lane, lecturer on Asian Studies at the University of Sydney. Lane is responsible for the magnificent translation of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s great novel The Buru Quartet, as well as being the translator of other works by that author and other writers. In addition, he worked for years with various dramatists and actors in the Indonesian theater, and he is a writer and poet in his own right. He has also been a leading figure in building solidarity with the Indonesian left and popular movements and over the years written innumerable articles about the struggles against the Suharto dictatorship and the tumultuous period which followed it. (See his blog.)

          Unfinished Revolution represents Lane’s attempt to tell the story of modern Indonesian people’s movement, of the left, and of the most important contemporary far-left party, the Partai Rakyat Demokratik (PRD). It also represents an important interpretation of the history of modern Indonesia, a country dominated first by the figure and following of Sukarno, leader of the national revolution against the Dutch, and later dominated by the murderous counter-revolution and dictatorship of Suharto, undertaker of the national revolution. For Lane, the crushing of the Sukarno-led national revolution interrupted the emergence of an Indonesian nation, culture, and a movement toward socialism. The Suharto coup which killed between one and two million people left the revolution therefore unfinished. Lane argues that the common people—rakyat in Indonesian—stood at the center of that process and also represents its future.

          Lane’s book deals with the period between the Suharto coup in 1965 and 2008 when he completed his book, supplemented with some discussion of the Sukarno period which preceded it. He argues that the Indonesian national movement led to a period of intense activism and movement building in the post-independence period of Sukarno and again in the period leading up to the overthrow of Suharto and just after. For Lane, the heart of the Indonesian national revolution has been this experience of activism and its life in the country’s popular consciousness and history as well as in its literature, above all in the literature of Toer and of the poet Rendra.

          Lane tells how small groups of students helped to detonate broader popular movements of workers, the urban poor, and peasants which within a decade brought about the overthrow of Suharto. The student movement evolved into many NGOs and social movements, a kind of civil society movement which provided a broad base of young activists. The PRD, the leading group on the far left, played a central role in this process through its advocacy of aksi [actions]—demonstrations, strikes, and other confrontations with the dictatorship—which created powerful movements. In doing this, they and other parties built on lingering memories in the popular consciousness of the Sukarno nationalist period. The PRD and the student left, however, constructed movement but failed to establish more stable institutions, and most important failed to build a major political party to give expression to that movement.

          After Suharto fell, the PRD promoted “peoples committees” among workers, the urban poor and peasants, but these caught on in only a few areas of this immense island nation. Reformist figures, some with ties to the Suharto regime and huge organizational bases—Megawati Sukarnoputri, Abdurrahman Wahid, and Amien Rais—succeeded in out maneuvering the small leftist groups which had been key to overthrowing Suharto. In the post-Suharto period, actions and movements continued, but they became ever more fragmented.

          Faced with these problem posed by this failure of the movement, and attempting to salvage it, Lane argues at one point that “Aksi [protest action] itself is a form of organization.” (p. 209) Or he suggests that the student movement of the 1990s lives on in intellectual criticism. Perhaps. But by the time Lane wrote his book, the student movement had disappeared and other social movements were marginal, without influence on society. The left had failed to build a mass party. Meanwhile the left suffered a crisis of leadership as it confronted the problem of generational change. Lane suggests that the future lies with the memory of Sukarnoism, with the people, and with a revival of activism.

          While there is much to be learned about the left in Indonesia between 1990 and 2008 from Lane’s book, his interpretation of events seems to me quite problematic and contradictory. While Lane would consider himself a Marxist, his book becomes a defense of the left nationalist populism of Sukarno and his followers and of the revival of that populist current in the 1990s movements and in the PRD. He argues that because the working class is so small and the numbers of rural and urban poor so large, workers’ unions will not be the central organizations of labor, while the impoverished masses of the rakyat or people constitute the agent for social change. For them protest movements and riots are their natural forms of struggle and also lie at the heart of the popular culture. Yet, he recognizes that such populist movements remain fragmented, and even at their best often become subject to patron-client relationships. He acknowledges that Sukarno in fact created a cult of personality which diminished his role as leader and voice of the mass movement of the people.

          I disagree with Max Lane’s interpretation, believing that it tends to under estimate the potential of the role of the working class, and particularly the industrial working class in Indonesia and its future. As I argued in my book Made in Indonesia: Indonesian Workers Since Suharto. (Boston: South End Press, 2001), which covers much of the same ground as Lane’s, workers, unions, and working class politics have a potential to play a leadership role in Indonesia. In my view, Lane’s “people,” made up as they are of peasants, rural laborers, industrial workers, artisans, self-employed petty merchants and vendors, are too diverse to provide a coherent class base or political program for Indonesian society. In Indonesia and other countries in the developing world such populist masses tend to be dominated by a charismatic leader or sometimes by the state or by a state-party. The alternative is the development of a primarily working class party with clear objectives which can give leadership to the diverse masses of the society. The question, as Lane would agree, I think, is that the unfinished national revolution must be transformed into a socialist revolution. Lane’s people’s revolution appears to me to put an obstacle in that path, that is in making the step from nationalist to workers’ revolution, because it is precisely the people conceived in this populist way who historically form the social basis for nationalist revolutions which then institutionalize into obstacles to socialism.

          Setting aside for the moment Lane’s interpretation, I regret to say that I feel that he has not succeeded in telling the story in a way that will be accessible to most readers. Though Lane understands the history, culture and politics, perhaps better than any other non-Indonesian, he does not always succeed in weaving the strands together in way that will be understandable to readers who are unfamiliar with that terrain. Beginning as it does in the post-1965 period, Lane’s book does not discuss even briefly the history of Dutch and Japanese imperialism which led to the emergence of the modern nationalist movement, while his extended discussion of Sukarno and his role in the nationalist movement comes unfortunately only towards the end of the book.

          Lane’s interesting early chapter on Toer and Rendra, their role as public intellectuals of the left, and the relationship between the nationalist movement and culture suggests that these ideas will form a central argument of the book. Yet we lose the thread of that cultural argument in long descriptions of the actions of the contemporary (1990s to 2000s) radical movement, and occasionally narrative gives way to chronology as developments are followed in a level of detail in which the most important events and the author’s sense of the significance of these events may be lost. Lane also uses a number of Indonesian words to give us the flavor of the culture, but, as the foreign terms multiply, and as he introduces dozens of NGOs and political party initials, the reader can be overwhelmed by the detail.

          Yet, despite those literary issues and my own disagreement with the political interpretation of Indonesian history and politics, Lane’s book offers the best narrative we have of the popular movements that overthrew Suharto and the fullest and most coherent description of the role of the PRD. Those who want to know that history will find the book very worthwhile. I remain, despite our differences, a great admirer of Max Lane, both for his wonderful translations and for undertaking to tell his version of this story.

  • The Need to Say NO

    [This review appeared in New Politics, vol. I, no. 4, summer 1962 (old series).]

    As a novelist, a middle class man of the mid-century, a Jew and a socialist, Harvey Swados is that wonderful rarity in the United States today, a committed human being. His recently published collection of essays written over the last ten years, A Radical’s America,* reveals his deep sense of disturbance about the quality of contemporary American life, its cant and corruption.

         Unwilling to accept the latest wrinkle in sociological interpretations of the manners and mores of the American working class, Swados has written a number of essays on the nature of work, exploitation, leisure and cultural backwardness which do an enormous amount to destroy the Madison Avenue image of the American worker as a member of the middle class. “But there is one thing that the worker doesn’t do like the middle class: he works like a worker,” Mr. Swados writes in an essay entitled “The Myth of the Happy Worker.” “The steelmill puddler does not yet sort memos, the coal miner does not yet sit in conferences, the cotton mill-hand does not yet sip martinis from his lunch-box. The worker’s attitude toward his work is generally compounded of hatred, shame and resignation.”

         In “Labor’s Cultural Degradation” he gives voice to the complaint that it is the man at the bottom of the heap, the man who does the dirty work, who is the particularly exploited victim of the mass media, not given an honest possibility of developing an individual taste for individual works of the human imagination, not having the range of cultural choice available to members of the middle class. “I for one think that the working class-regardless of whether it is envied by other proletarians who would like to drive cars instead of riding bicycles, or would like to ride bicycles instead of walking—is being cheated, swindled, and degraded as ferociously as ever its English counterparts were a century ago when Marx and Engels were anatomizing them. The fact that it may not be aware of its exploitation does not alter the reality of its situation.”

         The very nature of work, its boredom, frustration, lack of personal fulfillment is probed in the essay “Work as a Public Issue” in which questions are raised about the possibility of those working in factories, participating in decision making affecting their own working lives; the decentralization of productive facilities to the point where their management can be at least partially controlled by the workers themselves. If he has no definitive answers to many of the problems he raises, his suggestion that “the meaning of work be brought forth from the philosopher’s study and placed where it belongs—in the political arena—as a public issue” is both valid and welcome.

         Harvey Swados’ concerns encompass Jewishness and alienation in “Certain Jewish Writers,” the plight of the contemporary American woman in “The Dilemma of the Educated Woman,” the special problems of the young in “Work and the Professions,” “Popular Taste and the Agonies of the Young,” and “Why Resign from the Human Race?”

         Lest we forget, he reminds us of the misery of the unemployed in “The Miners: Men Without Work” and the acute problems faced by striking workers and their unions in “The Myth of the Powerful Worker.”

         These are not the writing of a detached, objective onlooker. A Radical’s America is a passionate indictment of contemporary values by an intellectual who is an active participant in American life, who holds that “a socialist attitude is at least as firmly in the American grain as a liberal or an absolutist stance” and who clearly differentiates himself form those intellectuals drawn to the Washington orbit, as well as those drawn to Moscow, or more recently, Belgrade, Peking or Havana.

         The essays are required reading for the young and idealistic, for the old and disenchanted. They offer evidence “that those of us who persist in saying No to a society built on worship of the buck for the things and people it an buy, those of us who persist in dreaming of a society built on mutual respect, have just as much right to consider ourselves as representative of an essential corpuscular element in the American bloodstream as do the Luces, the Nixons, the Kennedys, and all those who, in appropriating for themselves even the rhetoric of our common dream have turned it into a nightmare.” For Harvey Swados, that dream still holds a large measure of enchantment.

    * A RADICAL’S AMERICA by Harvey Swados, Little, Brown and Company, 1962, 437 pp., $5.00.

  • Does "union democracy" undermine "solidarity?"

    [We have asked labor activists to respond to "Card Check: Labor's Charlie Brown Moment?" by Robert Fitch, to encourage discussion on the important issues raised in the article. What follows is the response of Herman Benson.]

     Whenever an intractable phenomenon resists explanation, curious systems are offered as answers. Humanity's mysterious place in the universe gives rise to some puzzling religions; the left's need to find a satisfactory place for the labor movement in society comes at one of those times. And so, Bob Fitch's provocative journey through history, philosophy, and janitors' wages should prompt a wide range of comment. In the course of all this, he seems to suggest what we might actually do, I'd like to summarize what seems to be the crux of what he proposes:
    Because the labor movement, doing the same thing over and again like Charlie Brown, he says, it has failed to live up to our expectations and is not reformable, we must work to create a new, what he calls, solidarity labor movement. By his standards it would appear, the left, aiming at labor reform, seems to be another Charlie Brown, futilely doing the same thing over and over; and so it needs to do something new. These two objectives are inextricably interlinked. The left, he seems to say, will rejuvenate itself only when, following his call for a new solidarity labor movement, it abandons the hope of changing this mortally defective labor movement and goes out to build that new solidarity movement.
    Now, from his point of view, just what is the essential defect of what calls itself a labor movement today? It represents, he says, a minority that is interested only in itself; it is a special interest group that makes gains at the expense of the working class. Yes, he sometimes admits (but not always,) there is a "union premium" but it is won by sacrificing the interests of the mass of workers. So far, he must realize, this is precisely the basic philosophical argument of extreme right wing apologists who insist that unionism itself is a parasitic growth upon society. Fitch expands the scope of that argument leftward. To that basic defect, he attributes all the other myriad ills: corruption, authoritarianism, decline of unionization under the impact of competition, and what not, adding that well-meaning progressives who enter the cesspool of that special-interest unionism, hoping to reform it, are bound to become corrupt themselves.
    And so he wants a new labor movement that advances the broad interests of the class not the narrow, self-serving, special interest minority. The idea is not new; no question that it can be a seductive idea; it has been attractive enough to entice a whole cadre of left-leaning union activists, community organizers, and civil rights advocates to support the Andy Stern-Steve Lerner vision of a new labor movement. Calling for a union that strives for "Justice for All" and not "Justice for Us," they accuse Sal Rosselli of defending the "narrow " interests of his own members at the expense of those exploited workers on the outside.
    A policy-program of action based upon a presumably profound conflict between the interests of the working class and the interests of its organized minority gets us nowhere. Unions organize first where workers are best situated to win their battle. As they raise the standards of those who are victorious, they tend to lift the standards of the class, even those not organized. The "union premium" surely means that unions will always face competitive danger from non-union employers and not always successfully. I don't quite understand how Fitch's solidarity unionism, even in theory, solves that problem. When a few hundred UE workers win severance pay by temporarily occupying a factory whose owners benefit from the bailout, that seems for him one example of the new solidarity unionism. If the SEIU wins a pay boost for several thousand New York janitors, that, we must presume, is the old style bankrupt unionism in action. But in each case, where did the rest of the working class fit in? My guess is that he feels that the UE has contributed to creating "a national-popular will." Translate that into less mystical language: he likes the rhetoric, it's better propaganda. I don't want to denigrate rhetoric and propaganda. But is that the new way to a new labor movement? What else has the left been doing all these years? In general, Fitch faces reality with abstract rhetoric. He makes me think of an incident in Frank Schonfeld's early battle against racketeers in the Painters union in New York, A dozen of his caucus members were parceling out assignments in their election campaign. "You pass out handbills at the Local xx meeting; you at Local xxxx; you at the Bronx big job site; we all go to the pensioners meeting; etc etc." One advanced thinker got impatient, "We're wasting our time. What we have to do is organize the workers in struggle."
    Workers join unions for higher wages, better conditions on the job, security.(A platitude? I think this simplistic truism belongs in this discussion of deep stuff!) Union leadership, in the name of noble objectives like "collective will formation" or solidarity unionism (or justice for all, or sweetheart deals with employers and politicians, or simple swindling), surely can downgrade these mundane pursuits. But in order to keep these "special interest" impulses under control, the leaders invent all kinds of bureaucratic and autocratic devices. That is, they undermine union democracy, which is precisely what explains the course of those well-meaning Stern zealots. And which is precisely where Fitch's theories would lead us, assuming anyone would try to implement them. Does that seems a stretch? Unfair? Think of where his convoluted thinking has led him:
    Like the Stern ideologists, he derogates "union democracy.," (Watch those familiar demeaning quote marks." Here is one example of how he takes flight from reality into the world of abstraction where he is more comfortable. We, at the Association for Union Democracy for example, campaign for certain specific rights for members in their unions to free speech, fair elections, due process, fair job referrals systems , etc. (How successful? We can argue about that.) He finds that "troubling" because all "union democracy" does is to give workers the opportunity of pursuing their own narrow interests as against the interests of the class. If you didn't get it from a quick reading of his piece, it's because he embellishes his notions with the dizzying trappings of philosophical speculation. He finds the advocacy of "union democracy" "troubling" because under that concept "the vital distinction between the mechanical and organic forms of solidarity disappears. And what's promoted is a kind of Smithian view of the labor movement in which the welfare of all is advanced by the democratic participatory strivings of members in each local union aiming strictly at its own welfare." Get it? Translate that into manageable English: Give rights to those narrow-minded workers, and they'll use it for their own selfish interests. Every condescending savior of the working class would agree. It's not a new idea. It is what propels the Stern-ideologists drive for a newly centralized, authoritarian labor movement which puts power into the hands of a know-it-all officialdom in the name of their version of solidarity.
    Those who would help solve labor's problems by moving toward a highly centralized, authoritarian structure want to put an end to the rights of members in their locals. The Carpenters, for example, by turning locals into impotent administrative shells. The SEIU Sternites by merging locals into huge mega structures where it becomes extraordinarily difficult for any opposition independent of the establishment to take form.
    Fitch's idealized brand of unionism leads him in precisely the same direction. Local autonomy does not fit in comfortably with his notion of solidarity. As he puts it — a leftist slant to an authoritarian idea —" Subdividing American labor into 20,000 semi-autonomous locals … subdivides the possibility of solidarity. Each local has its own contract, its own local grievances —it remains a tidy, microcosm, self-sufficient to itself."
    Fitch, I am sure, believes all that stuff — in his head. But in his heart? I wonder, because I know he is a fine fellow. And so, let's submit him to a simple test: Fitch is about to enter a store only to confront an IWW picket line of workers who are on strike to demand a $5 increase for seven Starbucks employees as part of the IWW eternal struggle to liberate workers of the world united. Will he respect that line? Of course! But let's say he meets a strike picket line brandishing labor banners protesting against the hiring of Muslims, would he respect that line? Of course not! These are workers fighting in their own narrow special interests. In the name of solidarity, he would never betray the cause of racial equality.
    But let's say the picket line sought an increase in the wages of 100 members of one of those special-interest unions, one which he would replace because it seeks to gain at the expense of the working class. Would he respect it? I think he surely would, even though, according to his theory, he would seem to betray the requirements of class solidarity. Something must be wrong with his theory. Still, there is a seductive element of truth in everything he writes. As Walter Reuther would say — repeated over and again by Victor — we can't be satisfied with a nickel-in the-pay-envelope unionism. Those on the left — and dedicated activists, and intellectuals, and students — who direct their time and energies and emotions and sometimes their lives to unions, do so because they are convinced that the labor movement can serve as a transforming force for social justice. It can be frustrating to see how far short unions can fall from that end, and it can be disappointing to see them preoccupied with the "narrow" interests of their own members and deaf to leftist appeals for broader solidarity.
    But we must remember this: Because unions arise out of the basic need of its worker-members for higher wages, security, better working conditions, the labor movement — even as a minority of the working class — acquires a stability, a long-range endurance, a continuity that distinguishes it from other social movements and from the multitude of charities and worthy causes that hope to serve ailing humanity. The left builds upon that quality of endurance; it is that quality that makes the union movement so powerful a potential force for social justice. But Fitch bases his philosophy upon the presumed antagonism between the simple drive of one group of workers to better its lot and the needs of his solidarity unionism.
    The evils of corruption, and authoritarianism, and the dangers to democracy in the labor movement do not arise out of the lack of class struggle policies or, as Fitch might put it, from a shortage of solidarity. These problems transcend social and political line. All those class struggle unions he so nostalgically admires, those created in the thirties by the radical founding fathers, seem to have evolved into the kind of unionism he rejects. If we could start all over again in perfect virtue, what reason to believe that we would end anywhere else?
    Full disclosure: Here, briefly, is what I believe. The labor movement today, with all the defects that Bob catalogues once again, falls far short of what we want. But I believe it has been inching slowly, painfully, inconsistently, in the right direction. In large part that movement has been impelled by the work of union democrats, leftists, and dissidents —like TDU, Labor Notes, and reform caucuses that come and go — with the help of federal law on union democracy. I mention this with some diffidence only because it may provide Bob, in his rebuttals, with the opportunity to tell us again at length how degenerated he finds the labor movement and how far it falls short of his ideal, maybe even worse than ever. But, Bob, you have succeeded in convincing us of the evils that exist. You insist that what we are doing do is futile. Enough of that. Now tell us how you propose that the reoriented left is build the new labor movement and how it is to create the constituency in and around the labor movement, as it exists, to campaign for the new labor movement, one that exists now only in your heart's desire.
    There is a real problem in the labor movement today. We do need strong national unions armed with the authority and power to deal with centralized capital. Using that need as a pretext, one dangerous tendency in the labor movement would seek that power by turning locals into impotent administrative shells. Another would transform locals into uncontrollable monstrosities. The requirement for central authority in unions (aka, solidarity) must be mitigated by a vigorous union democracy. Just at a time when union activists on the left — and right and center — must emphasize union democracy as a means of strengthening union power, Fitch, in the name of solidarity, derogates "union democracy" and the efforts of those who campaign for it.
    To sum up again what seems his program for reviving the left: Replace what he sees as a degenerated labor movement, a special-interest institution that promotes the narrow privileges of its members at the expense of the working class, by creating a new labor movement which represents the whole class. Toward that end, he would work for the end of maintenance of membership requirements and for an end to exclusive bargaining rights. As a platform, it is a left wing recipe for suicide; but it does have one redeeming feature: no one will have to suffer the consequences because it will never happen. We all may talk about it, but no one will ever do it. The downside is that the consolation of talking may relieve us of the burden of doing anything.

  • Open Letter of Solidarity with Egyptian Workers from the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, April 30, 2020

    We are writing to extend our heartfelt solidarity and support to you, Egyptian workers, who in recent months have been courageously demanding that your government address your desperate economic conditions. The American press has been shamefully muted about the grim economic and political realities of life for people in Egypt, a key strategic U.S. ally in the Middle East. But in an eye-opening article in The New York Times of April 28, 2010, “Labor Protests Test Egypt’s Government,” by Michael Slackman, the curtain was lifted, for a moment at least. The article says,

    CAIRO — Day after day, hundreds of workers from all over Egypt have staged demonstrations and sit-ins outside Parliament, turning sidewalks in the heart of the capital into makeshift camps and confounding government efforts to bring an end to the protests.

       Nearly every day since February, protesters have chanted demands outside Parliament during daylight and laid out bedrolls along the pavement at night. The government and its allies have been unable to silence the workers, who are angry about a range of issues, including low salaries.

       Using an emergency law that allows arrest without charge and restricts the ability to organize, the Egyptian government and the ruling National Democratic Party have for decades blocked development of an effective opposition while monopolizing the levers of power. The open question — one that analysts say the government fears — is whether the workers will connect their economic woes with virtual one-party rule and organize into a political force.

       This week, with blankets stacked neatly behind them, at least four different groups were banging pots, pans and empty bottles and chanting slogans. There were factory workers, government workers, employees of a telephone company and handicapped men and women. The group of handicapped people said they had been there for 47 days, demanding jobs and housing….

       The government has tried to define workers’ complaints as pocketbook issues, analysts said, hoping that if specific demands are met, workers will disband without blaming those in charge and without adding political change to their list of priorities.

       Try as the Egyptian government might to define your complaints as simply narrow “pocketbook issues,” divorced from democratic rights to protest, assemble, and assert labor’s interests in the political arena, the distinction won’t hold. They are inextricably linked, and this is true today in Egypt, Iran, China, the Philippines and everywhere else. Egyptian workers must have the right to freely assemble, protest and strike, and to form independent trade unions and political parties.

       As Americans, we repudiate the hypocritical policy of the United States, our own government, which turns a blind eye to human rights abuses on the part of its allies, such as Egypt, while decrying such transgressions by governments that defy U.S. power. The Campaign for Peace and Democracy firmly believes that a just and peaceful world must be based on respect for human rights.

       We salute you in your brave struggle. We understand that the Mubarak government, which heads a de facto one-party state, is contemplating a crackdown on labor protesters. We will do all in our power to mobilize here in the United States and in countries around the world to prevent this from happening.

    In peace and solidarity,
    Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison
    Co-Directors, Campaign for Peace and Democracy
    New York City
    Web: www.cpdweb.org Email: cpd@igc.org

  • Los Suns

    It's not unprecedented for athletes here to object to racist policies, military invasions, and various other crimes and stupidities.

       The raised, gloved fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the 1968 Olympics provide the most dramatic and public example of athletes taking a public stand against oppression. For their courage, Smith and Carlos were demonized and hustled out of town by the U.S. Olympic Committee, though today they are celebrated, at least in some circles.

       Muhammad Ali gave up several years of his career in the ring and risked prison when he refused induction during the Viet Nam War.

       Mahhoud Abdul-Rauf, late of the Denver Nuggets, brought down a rain of boos on his head for electing not to stand during the singing of the national anthem before basketball games.

       More recently, we have become accustomed to the Michael Jordan theory of avoiding controversial positions. Asked why he would not support a Democrat, Jordan allegedly replied, "Republicans buy sneakers, too."

       So it's encouraging to see Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns object to the new law in Arizona, and encouraging also, as well as surprising, to see the owner of the team dress his players in uniforms that read "Los Suns." (One wonders why not "Los Sols," but perhaps that would have been too much to expect.) Major League Baseball's players' union has also objected to the law, although the union's contention that Latino players coming into Phoenix to play the Diamondbacks might have cause to worry about their own safety seems a little forced. Wealthy ballplayers are unlikely to be victims of profiling, but good for the union for their sense of solidarity.

       It will be interesting to see whether Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig will pay any attention to those who've urged him to pull the 2011 All-Star Game out of Phoenix. If he does, I hope he'll refer to those most likely to be persecuted under the new law as "undocumented" rather than "illegal," though that, too, might be too much to expect.

  • Phyllis Jacobson, 1922-2010

    The editorial board of New Politics is very sad to report the death of Phyllis Jacobson, co-founder and long-time co-editor of the journal. Phyllis died on March 2, 2010, after suffering a devastating stroke close to ten years ago. We are deeply indebted to Phyllis and her late husband Julie for tirelessly holding high the banner of radical, democratic socialism and independent politics. 

         The Jacobsons did not want an editorial board of clones. They welcomed board members from a range of left perspectives that supported the basic orientation of New Politics: standing "in opposition to all forms of imperialism," "uncompromising in its defense of feminism and affirmative action," and above all insisting "on the centrality of democracy to socialism and on the need to rely on mass movements from below for progressive social transformation." We are proud to have worked with Phyllis in this ongoing struggle.

      PJacobson pic1   For over a half-century Phyllis was an indefatigable fighter against injustice, an anchor for those of us committed to independent socialism. Her brilliance, her dynamism, her determination have given independent socialists hope. She continues to inspire us today.

         We collect below some memories and thoughts about Phyllis. If others would like to add to this collection, please write us at newpoliticsjournal@gmail.com.

    — Joanne Landy and Stephen R. Shalom for the New Politics editorial board

    Phyllis

     

    Some New Politics articles by Phyllis Jacobson

  • For Phyllis Jacobson, A Comrade

    Those of us who knew Phyllis Jacobson and her husband Julie will realize that her death brings to a close a long and rich chapter in the history of the revolutionary and democratic socialist left in the US. She was the last of a small but heroic generation. Starting with the YPSL Fourth International, the youth section of the Socialist Party that split under Trotskyist leadership to set up the Socialist Workers Party in 1938 she and Julie ended up in the Workers Party (later the Independent Socialist League) when it was formed in 1940. She and most WPers, followers of a then still revolutionary socialist Max Shachtman, spent the years of the Second World War working "in industry," trying to radicalize the fast growing Labor movement. After the war Julie and she founded the anti-war Third Camp socialist journal ANVIL, which was directed at students and which had a circulation in many thousands . I remember we sold more than 1,000 at City College alone in 1951, and it was a big item on the slowly growing student left in Berkeley, Chicago, Brooklyn and other centers of student activism against the Korean war. It was at ANVIL editorial board meetings in their Greenwich Village apartment that we first met.

         The Jacobsons remained active when the ISL and ANVIL ended up in the Socialist Party in 1957. In the Party she (and I) remained "hard left" third camp anti-war socialists. When the Party split in 1970 and DSOC (later DSA) were founded we lost regular personal touch, but we remained in contact through New Politics, which was and remained the premier Third Camp, anti-Stalinist independent socialist journal in the US, perhaps the English-speaking world.

         In her last years she was very ill. Her life companion Julie died leaving her to cope with almost complete paralysis. Her son, Michael and daughter-in-law Lynn remained political and active in DSA. She will be missed as a brave link to a revolutionary democratic socialist past which must not be forgotten.

    Bogdan Denitch
    Honorary Chair DSA, one of the founders of YSL, DSOC and DSA

  • Condolence Statement

    We would like to send our condolences to the family, friends and comrades of Phyllis Jacobson. As a founding editor of New Politics, Phyllis played a crucial role in advocating the core principles of "socialism from below," including opposition to Stalinism and support for independent working-class political action. Her commitment to internationalism and solidarity was genuine and heartfelt. Without any hesitation, she opened the pages of New Politics to us when we organized campaigns to defend socialists in Greece and South Korea who faced government persecution. Phyllis helped to educate many generations of socialists. Today's socialists will pay their respects by carrying on the cause to which Phyllis devoted her life.

    International Socialist Organization

  • Good Bye, Phyllis

    I met Phyllis and Julie in September of 1961. I had just graduated from the University of Chicago where I had joined the YPSL, and was passing through New York on my way to London. I met them at Julie’s machine shop in Great Jones Street in the East Village and they took me out for lunch at the corner diner on Lafayette and Great Jones. There they told me that the first issue of New Politics had just come out, and as the good and experienced organizers they were, they immediately enrolled me as their London distributor. For the two years I lived in that city I duly and enthusiastically distributed a sizable bundle every quarter — with the help of a British comrade who had a car — to some eight or ten major bookstores in the metropolitan area.

       As a young student who had just begun to get a political education, I read practically every single article and book review that New Politics published in the sixties, and continued to do so as I became a politically mature person in later decades. For its first few years, New Politics published an article by Hal Draper in each of its issues; these articles along with "The Two Souls of Socialism," also published in the journal, became the foundation stone of my Socialism from Below politics. It was New Politics that introduced me to American labor. The articles by the labor attorney Burton Hall on the legal aspects of union democracy, Herbert Hill on racism in the unions, and Stan Weir and Steve Zeluck on the fight for union democracy in the ILWU and AFT became the main foundations of my understanding of American labor at a time when the postwar boom was coming to an end. It was also through New Politics that I began to acquire an understanding of the nature of the Soviet bloc, and became exposed to the critical issues facing the black and women’s movement.

       From the beginning it was evident that Phyllis played a central and indispensable role in the journal both as an excellent editor with a sharp eye for academic and sectarian nonsense, throat clearing and other writing vices, and as a contributor on her own right. Like Julie, she was a child of the now extinct Jewish blue-collar working class — Phyllis’ father was a waiter at Ratner’s for many years, and like Julie, she was among the rapidly diminishing number of self-taught public intellectuals who never held an academic position whether as a professor or as a professional researcher. I am convinced that many of Phyllis’ strengths as a writer and as an editor were rooted in her having been untouched by the academic world.

       In 1983, Selma and I moved to Brooklyn a couple of blocks from the Jacobson’s magnificent brownstone on Clinton Street. This introduced a whole new element into my relationship with them. I got to know them as people and as neighbors. Shortly after we moved into the neighborhood, Bell and Howell, the corporation that had bought Julie’s machine shop and retained him as a manager, shut down the business “deindustrializing” Julie and his workers (who had become unionized after Julie brought the UAW into the shop). He and Phyllis, who had also stopped working full time for pay as an editorial assistant, began to alternate between spending several months editing New Politics and spending the rest of the year in southern Europe. Phyllis helped to pay their way there by working as a part-time travel agent (we were among her clients). As friends and neighbors, Phyllis and Julie would give us advice about wine and restaurants, house painters and contractors, and gave us shelter when our boiler shut down in the middle of a terrible snow storm. We in turn tried to be as helpful neighbors as possible and kept an eye on their house, which to us was like a museum, and their garden while they were away in Europe. They had only a flimsy lock on their entrance door and we worried that during our watch the house would be burglarized and all their collected treasures would vanish from one day to the other. As we were in the process of selling our house to move to Manhattan, we were surprised and amused by Phyllis’ frantic reaction to the news that a political person she particularly disliked had come to see our house as a potential buyer. Fortunately for her, there was no second visit, much less any purchase offers. Years later, when we used to visit Phyllis in the nursing home, I would go over that and other stories and always got her reaction: a smile and a raised finger like she used to do in a previous time when making one of her incisive comments. That’s how I knew she and I were connecting.

       Goodbye Phyllis. It has been a real privilege to be your comrade, friend, neighbor.

    Samuel Farber
    March 22, 2010

  • A Robust Voice for Such a Diminutive Person

    The image of Phyllis that remains most salient, and the one I most miss, would begin with a phone call. I would answer with a lugubrious “hello.” And from the other end, I would hear a buoyant “HIYA, STEVE, this is PHYLLIS.” A robust voice for such a diminutive person. And a twang that seemed more Texan than Bronx.

         The purpose of her call was always the same: to hustle up some copy for an upcoming issue. Has anyone here ever said “no” to Phyllis? Not that I’m complaining: Phyllis provided the nudge and New Politics the venue that kept me writing. But I’m trying to convey how she ran the journal through the force of her personality.

         Phyllis was also a formidable intellectual and a fierce critic, especially when it came to fighting old battles. In her last piece in the Summer 1997 issue of New Politics—she wrote a review of Joan Mellen’s book, Hellman and Hammet. She began by noting that Mellon portrayed Hellmann and Hammet as “a pair of mismatched lovers; he, a compulsive womanizer, she a compulsive liar.” And Phyllis was just warming up! She brushed aside Mellen’s preoccupation with their marriage and sex lives, and zoomed in on their politics. She skewered Hellman for denying that she was ever a member of the Communist Party, when she and Hammet were signatories to the 1938 Moscow Trials, and stuck to the party line right through the war years. For our demure Phyllis, Hellman “was not only a liar but, despite her disclaimers, an unregenerate Stalinist.” And she ended with this knock-out blow:

    Hellman said that ‘radicals’ like herself had done no harm. She was mistaken. By promoting a totalitarian movement in the name of socialism she and they had done enormous harm. They had impeded the development of an authentic socialist movement by distorting the basic concepts of socialism, promulgating the idea that a society based on the destruction of working class independence, on terror and the liquidation of millions was socialist. They not only distorted history but made a mockery of the American radical tradition.

    Vintage Phyllis and our credo at New Politics.

         It is impossible to talk about Phyllis without talking about Julie. Their love for each other seemed to fulfill all of the bourgeois nostrums concerning marital fidelity and devotion. Except that this was the real thing. Their love sprung from deep friendship and genuine devotion and was born and lived through their shared politics. Nor was it a politics defined by any political orthodoxy. Their politics were developed in their youthful struggles as workers and as self-made intellectuals, and much later as the founding editors of New Politics, where they labored side by side, single-handedly attending to the myriad details, from reviewing and editing manuscripts to the production and distribution of the journal. Did you ever see such a labor of love?

         And what a formula they had for fusing politics and life: they would pour themselves into the next issue, send it off to the printer, and then take off—traveling to remote corners of France, Italy, or Spain, visiting chapels that housed some obscure fresco, laying over at historic hostels in the countryside, and of course, eating well wherever they went. What a couple they were: Phyllis and Julie.

         After Phyllis was struck down, did you ever see such a display of total devotion, as Julie moved the journal to her room in the nursing home? I remember that he would tell Phyllis about what was going on with the journal, sharing their private jokes, certain that she took in everything that he said. He simply would not go on without her collaboration and consent.

         Their legacy to us was New Politics, and the best thing we can do in remembrance and in love for Phyllis and Julie is to keep New Politics afloat. And to take their example to heart, and in-between issues, relish life and family and good food and wine. The last meal I had with them, just before they left on that fateful trip, was at their home with Herbert Hill. Or “Herbie,” as they insisted on calling him (after all, Herbie had been a playmate of Phyllis’s as toddlers in the Bronx). Truth be told, they both seemed frail and Herbert and I urged them to cancel their trip. But just as Phyllis and Julie remained steadfast in their politics, they stubbornly clung to their youth and their spirit of adventure and joy of living, and were not cut out to make concessions to age (any more than Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and other political stalwarts of that generation).

         Well, Phyllis and Julie are gone now, as is Herbert Hill. But we can take a measure of solace in knowing that Volume XIII, No. 1, of the second series, is now in press.

  • In Tribute to Phyllis Jacobson

    Julie and Phyllis Jacobson launched New Politics in the early 1960s, when they saw the absence of a voice for authentic left-socialist thought following the demise of the Independent Socialist current of the previous period. Ironically, although it was a time of reborn activism for civil rights, peace and what we now call “global justice,” the movement for a socialist politics fiercely independent of Washington, Moscow and Beijing had not organizationally survived to see it.

         New Politics, along with those activists who a few years later initiated the Independent Socialist Clubs, were instrumental in giving the movement a new beginning. New Politics brought to the international left’s attention the Polish Marxists Kuron and Modzelewski’s “Open Letter to the Party,” among other seminal texts including Hal Draper’s “The Two Souls of Socialism” and “Origins of the Middle East Crisis.”

         Julie and Phyllis were a remarkable team, but by all accounts Phyllis in particular was the guts and glue of the magazine’s production, circulation and financial management. And so it was again when they relaunched the journal after an eight-year lapse in the 1980s to address the new movements of that day, and through the tumultuous decade and more following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the monstrous bureaucratic tyranny that went under that grotesque label, “actually existing socialism.”

         It’s an interesting concidence that the years of Phyllis’s life, 1922-2010, match those of Howard Zinn. Zinn of course is justifiably famous, but fewer people really understand the contributions of Phyllis and those like her who are the stalwarts and geniuses of organization. There can be no socialist movement without people like Phyllis Jacobson, and there is no better testament to her life than the work of the team that keeps New Politics alive and kicking.

    David Finkel
    Against the Current magazine
    Detroit, Michigan

  • Phyllis Jacobson: An Appreciation

    Phyllis Jacobson, who died after a protracted illness on March 2 — just shy of her 88th birthday — was the dynamic force behind a remarkable political and intellectual partnership of shared passion that left an indelible imprint on three generations of twentieth century American radicalism.

         Phyllis, much like her future husband Julie, came to revolutionary socialism in her early teens. They met through the Trotskyist faction within the Socialist Party, later the Young People’s Socialist League, 4th International of the late 1930s after the split with the SP. There they, like so many of their radical comrades, many of whom — as they defected from their earlier commitments — became know as the New York Intellectuals, obtained a grueling political education in struggle not only with the much more influential Stalinists who dominated the left landscape, but with the mainstream Trotskyist faction who offered critical support to the Soviet Union long after the revolution was interred.

         Phyllis would later recall, with mixed pride and irony, that it was she who recruited her childhood friend, and future neo-conservative historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb, to the movement. Phyllis, like Julie, clearly shared with the New York intellectuals an ability to express herself eloquently and accessibly — without a hint of leftist cant — through a broad sweep of domestic and international political affairs, but differed from them in one crucial detail. They utterly lacked the requisite yearning for peer respectability. They accommodated their views to fit no political fashion; to curry favor neither with academia nor with any left mainstream. They fought against the war in Vietnam, without succumbing to illusions about Ho Chi Minh and the NLF; they struggled against American intervention in Nicaragua, without closing their eyes to the Sandinistas’s infringements on democracy; they fought against CIA- inspired overthrow attempts of Castro, while exposing the Castro regime’s repressive anti-democratic nature. They engaged the struggle for democratic unions, while condemning racism both in the ranks and in leadership policies of the labor movement. And they saw no contradiction in fighting for both at once. For that, they did more than most to save the good name of anti-Stalinism from the clutches of intellectual conciliators, apologists and outright propagandists of capitalism and reaction who were to emerge ever more dominant both on the liberal left as well as the neo-con right.

         If later radicalizing generations were to sentimentally embrace the memory of naively idealistic Communists fighting the good fight as premature anti-fascists, Phyllis was an early and persistent defector from that consensus. She retained bitter memories of these “sweet Stalinist grandmothers” who ripped Trotskyist leaflets from her and her comrades, shoved her to the ground and denounced them all as ‘Trotskyite’ whores and fascist agents. She remembered too how Julie’s Stalinist relatives once demanded of them an accounting as to how the ‘Trotskyites’ could justify their poisoning of Maxim Gorky.

         The rot of counterrevolution ran deep as she relentlessly reminded later generations, innocently inclined to forgive, what they never knew to forget. Writing about Lillian Hellman, Phyllis remonstrated, that Hellman and her Stalinist compatriots may not have actually engaged in much more than verbal violence, though their catalog of concrete crimes even on that level were certainly voluminous. But, if they were free of the actual physical crimes of Stalinism, and that more an accident of opportunity than of scruple, they nevertheless colluded in the larger political and intellectual cover-up.

    By promoting a totalitarian movement in the name of socialism, she and they had done enormous harm. They had impeded the development of an authentic socialist movement by distorting the basic concepts of socialism, promulgating the idea that a society based on the destruction of working class independence, on terror and the liquidation of millions was socialist. They not only distorted history but made a mockery of the American radical tradition.

    Theirs was a different type of violence, a lasting assault on the very soul of the modern emancipatory impulse that she and Julie dedicated their lives to repair.

         It was in the Workers Party — the third camp tendency, sometimes simplistically and misleadingly known as the Shachtmanites — that Phyllis and Julie first came to know one another. One from the far reaches of the Northern Bronx, the other from the hinterlands of Brooklyn, the sheer geography posed a difficult challenge in sustaining a relationship. Two hours each way on the subway, Herb Hill once recalled, was the death of more than one movement romance.

         The Workers Party, later the Independent Socialist League, was a dissident milieu that the two were quite rightly exceedingly proud of having experienced. It shaped their talents, honed their political perspectives and provided a richness of revolutionary activity that “stood in stark contrast to the crippling and suffocating airlessness of the Stalinist movement.”

         When the Independent Socialist League dissolved itself in the late 1950s and merged with the Socialist Party, Phyllis briefly became the SP’s Manhattan organizer. Julie joined so briefly, that many years later, he actually had no memory whatsoever of having ever belonged. Phyllis’s membership ended rather early as she grasped that the vaunted regroupment strategy that Shachtman sold as the basis for unification—to prepare a neutral ground to pick up the remnants of the disintegrating Communist Party after the Khrushchev revelations and the invasion of Hungary—was fast becoming a cover for abandoning socialist politics. When, a few years later, she returned to the SP office, now little more than a George Meany patronage machine, to reclaim bound volumes of the New International (the WP/ISL theoretical journal), she was met with unexpected resistance by the few “old, young men” — as she put it — who ran the office. Brooking no argument, she proceeded to spirit away the entire stock, stating firmly that it was the intellectual and financial contributions of her movement — not theirs — that gave her the moral right to do so.

         When asked why she and Julie never joined any subsequent grouping, Phyllis responded simply that they had participated in the most stimulating sect that they could ever imagine, but that they had no further interest in entrapping themselves into another sectarian shell. These, in her opinion, bred a self-destructive “lack of civility among comrades and friends” and a self-isolating sense of misplaced moral superiority. New Politics was envisioned as a way to break out of that shell, to create an arena for cross pollinating the wealth of political experience and insight that the WP/ISL had fostered with broader activist movements for change among other healthy radical traditions, among labor movement insurgents, the militant wing of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s and the emerging new left. The journal continues its long tradition of encouraging wide-ranging debate, with writers having extensive freedom to express views the editors disagree with.

         Of the two Jacobsons, Phyllis was clearly the more outgoing. Intellectually, they were joined at the hip. They struggled together over every phrase, every nuance and tone of each other’s writings. Julie freely admitted — and without a hint of patronization— that Phyllis was a very real coauthor with him, his indispensable editor, and his critical eye. And one can easily see this in their writing styles, as close as two different individuals might conceivably be. It was Phyllis who handled the day-to-day work of the journal. She cajoled authors and financial contributors to meet deadlines. She had the unique tact to convince often thin-skinned writers to accept editorial suggestions, and, when rarely necessary — editorial fiats. She maintained and meticulously updated the vast rolodex of contacts, donors, and subscribers. She coordinated the layout, printing and distribution. And she, unlike Julie, was the real schmoozer, with a rollicking laugh so infectious that rare indeed were those who could resist joining her. Phyllis enjoyed relating, as few political obsessives can, to a range of cultural and epicurean topics that permitted her to engage simply and naturally both to the radical and to the political bystander alike. Phyllis truly was — in that much abused phrase — the life of the party.

         This did not mean that she lacked a temper, nor an unyielding sense of political propriety. She, unlike Julie, never forgave Irving Howe and Lewis Coser from colluding with the publisher in demoting Julie to “an assistant” in the publication of The American Communist Party. Julie had done remarkable research for this volume. But they had academic ladders to climb — Julie was only a machinist– and the publisher in any case would only list two authors. So Julie was listed as a “co-author in all but name.” Forty years later, Phyllis still declared this episode a “disgrace.” And “disgrace” remained the ultimate denunciation. Phyllis memorably upbraided a prominent left scholar from the audience, who qualified his defense of affirmative action in a circumstantial cloud, by declaring quite audibly that his utterances were “simply disgraceful.” An act of political chiropratics was instantaneously performed, a spine was straightened, and the equivocation forthrightly and apologetically retracted. That was symptomatic of the authority Phyllis could wield.

         Remarkably, however, this diminutive powerhouse did not formally join the editorial board — and then not as the co-editor — until the summer 1968 issue. Her inclusion was made without prior announcement and with no fanfare; her name simply posted in alphabetical order on the list of board members. In fact, up until that point, there were no women either on the editorial board or on its sponsors’ list! Phyllis had argued passionately and skillfully in defense of the ERA, when that was still a debatable topic, particularly among labor movement activists; and in defense of the feminist movement against former comrades such as Irving Howe, whose “schmaltzy” defense of immigrant Jewish patriarchy — a microcosm of his larger evasion — left her particularly disgusted. She was quite conscious of coming out of a milieu, the neo-Trotskyist movement, which was, as she said, “far from generous to its women.” Yet, in a very real sense, it was the rising tide of the women’s movement that liberated Phyllis within the New Politics milieu. Even then, Phyllis only became a co-editor with the second series of the journal. It is a sad footnote that when the first series of New Politics ended in 1976, there were still no other women on the editorial board and only two women listed as sponsors, one of whom — Joanne Landy — had closely participated in New Politics since its inception. Still, the ongoing division of labor within the Jacobson family deprived the journal of the volume of literary output she should have otherwise produced. What we have of Phyllis’s writings constitute only a handful of articles, but memorable contributions all, and amongst the highest literary and political quality that the journal ever produced. Her writings on Stalinism, the American Communist Party and the Popular Front alone remain a unique source of political education for those who seek a concrete understanding of the nature of totalitarianism and the relationship of socialism to democracy.

         Phyllis — with Julie’s active participation to be sure — worked hard to see that the lack of women’s voices was not duplicated when the journal was resurrected a decade later. She campaigned for a properly consistent policy of gender, racial and generational diversity in the solicitation of contributors and in the choice of subject matter. And she never ceased to register her disappointment when these standards were not met.

         The last years of Phyllis’s life were heartbreaking to witness, a debilitating series of strokes that left her a shell of her former self — an ever cheerful and radiant political provocateur silenced, dependent and immobilized. Phyllis was visibly uncomfortable with sentimentality and it would be difficult to end on a note that violated her spirit. Her passing leaves a void of consistent polemical grace and unbounded political energies in the small, hard-pressed socialist movement of today that cannot easily be duplicated. She is missed.

  • A Personal and Political Tribute to Phyllis

    IT’S A STAPLE of American comedians to make fun of in-laws in general and mothers-in-law in particular. But, in my case and with no offense to Michael, I could have married my husband simply for his parents.

         In fact, I knew of Julie and Phyllis long before I met Michael. When I was at Princeton as a young woman, doing research on the U.S. left, I came across the book The Negro and the American Labor Movement edited by Julius Jacobson and written before the term African-American came into common and preferred usage. Because of this, I was already impressed when I met Michael Jacobson, the son of an American leftist – the quite-cool-and-interesting-to-me-sounding radical, “Third Camp Socialist” figure Julius Jacobson.

         But, as I know well as a feminist, much as I loved and respected my father-in-law, there could and would have been no Julie qua respected left democratic socialist theorist and debater without Phyllis. They were a team: Phyllis-and-Julie, Julie-and-Phyllis, inseparable and linked at the hip even though they grew up in (and tried to transcend) a traditionally gendered, raced and classed world. In some ways, their lives were conventional in terms of gender roles: Phyllis did more of the cooking, taking care of the house, more of the raising of Michael (it was, after all, the 50s), more of the administrative work for their long-standing publication New Politics — and more of the typing, transcribing and editing of all Julie’s articles. In other ways, though, their love – for I will always think of Phyllis and Julie’s story as, at one level, a love story – transcended gender hierarchies and conventions. I saw this very clearly after Phyllis’ tragic stroke when Julie, as so many men of his generation would never have done, refused to leave her bedside, setting up a telephone and bringing his books so that he could be by her side. He wouldn’t even leave to go to the Socialist Scholars Conference one year, saying to me that “being with Phyllis was much more important, and what gave his life meaning.”

         But why did Phyllis mean so much to me over the years I knew her, from the time we met when she was just about my age – i.e. in her 50s? The reasons are as much personal as political, emotional as much as if not more than intellectual. For, very soon after she came to know me, Phyllis accepted and loved me virtually as a daughter. She showered me with the unique combination of kindness and intelligence, dignity, and determination that I later learned marked her relationships with many other people as well. What I admired so much in her was the grace she created, her utter commitment with Julie to enjoying pleasures from eating to listening to music and appreciating the beauty of art and antiques to traveling. At the same time, Phyllis shared with Julie a passionate commitment to justice and overcoming inequalities: their anti-Stalinist socialism involved a vision in which everyone, not just class, racial and gendered elites, could partake of the beauties of day-to-day life.

         To capture both the personal and the political, the emotional and intellectual, aspects of my relationship with Phyllis, I’d like to share with you some vignettes and images, through the many years I knew my lovely, kind, and intelligent mother-in-law Phyllis Jacobson:

    • One image goes back to when Michael and I were first together, and he was busy in the late 80s working in the City’s budget office. I would call Phyllis some afternoons when I was upset about the pressures of the Columbia tenure process I was going through, or lonely because Michael had to work long hours, and I can hear Phyllis saying immediately, "Come right over" and my knowing I would have a cheery evening of dinner and conversation.

    • And I can see Phyllis in my mind’s eye bounding down the stairs cheerfully when I would come, saying "Hi child." If I complained about Michael to her (as I remember doing sometimes during that particularly stressful period), she would say, "Oh, I don’t know what you do with someone like that."

    • Then so many dinners, wonderful evenings, come back to mind with Michael and Julie and Phyllis and I – dinners when the conversation was truly at least 50 percent about food and 50 percent about politics. We’d debate whether Empire chickens were the best or Murray’s, and whether Staubitz the butcher was too over-priced (as Phyllis would complain) and how to best cook some delicious dish Phyllis was making. Then the conversation would move as though seamlessly into politics and I can almost hear Phyllis’ voice as she decried one “miserable” politician or another (from Clinton to Cheney and back again). And then we would move from debating food to debating a political question – like capital punishment. For some odd reason, Julie didn’t share Phyllis, Michael and my opposition to capital punishment – and, at least on this issue, I would find Phyllis to be the better, more articulate and even fiercer debater than Julie.

    • And then, after we’d talked about food and eaten and talked about politics, there were so many evenings when I can see the maps coming out as we’d plan summer trips that Phyllis and Julie took so many times, and which before our son Alexander’s birth, for many years, we managed to take with them. Many people would think Phyllis and Julie had lots of money, but they might not know that both of them would economize all year (eating in pretty much all the time), saving all year for precious European voyages they loved). And then, many times, the four of us did meet up in the 14TH arrondissement in Paris on the Rue Boulard or sometimes outside Paris and even once (as I recall) in Venice, comparing notes and Phyllis saying enthusiastically "Let’s do it" about going to particular monuments or art exhibits or restaurants or just to a local market or store we’d heard about.

    • Then I remember when Alexander (whom Phyllis and Julie called "Sasha") was born, and a picture comes to mind of being in the Jacobsons’ house where Michael and I used to change Alex’s diaper on top of the washing machine. I can remember Phyllis shouting Julie’s nickname, "Yudi! Yudi! Come down here!" when we were about to change Alex because she wanted him to share with her the joys and sensuousness of her finally having become a grandmother.

    • This is where some of these "personal" beautiful memories start to become sad, though, as I remember the tragic years after Phyllis became sick and was confined – this wonderful lively, smart, energetic woman – to the nursing home. Yet somehow, someway – even from this horrific position when Phyllis’ stroke left her unable to speak and to move – there was something, in all those years, of the same dignity that characterized Phyllis in the years when she was well. Anyone who came to visit Phyllis in the nursing home might know what I mean about a certain recognizable dignified smile that came onto her face even under these conditions – when she was no longer living in her beautiful home surrounded by lovely antiques, and when there was nothing to offer any of us by way of food or drink or greetings. And yet somehow, someway, she would greet strangers and nurses with some of that same dignified poise and grace that characterized her in her better days – and she would still raise her fingers as though to make an older point of debate or argumentation. Michael and I could still make her laugh by telling her funny stories.

    WHAT DIGNITY, what an amazing testament to the human spirit, to strength of will, does Phyllis offer to us not only in her younger and happier days but even through and up to the end.

         But I want to leave you today not just with these images of Phyllis the beautiful and strong woman and person, but of Phyllis the intellectual. See, for example, her article "Black Outrage in Los Angeles" that she wrote for New Politics in summer, 1992, or the NP review she wrote in summer, 1997.

         Thank you, Phyllis, for everything – for the love and role model you presented me, and for the belief in a better personal-and-political world that I still share, and for providing me inspiration for the rest of my life, as a mother, as a teacher, as a friend. I’ll never ever forget you and what you meant to me: how could I?

  • A Rejoinder to the Monthly Review-Keynesian Debate

    Monthly Review magazine, which long continues to have cache on the left—especially with regard to economic analysis—is currently hosting a debate on the so-called “Minksy moment.” MR, of course, long defends the view advanced in the 1960s by Paul Sweezy’s and Paul Baran’s book Monopoly Capital. In brief, that book advanced the thesis that the method of accumulation in modern capitalism differs significantly from its more competitive past due to significant changes in the level of concentration and centralization, that is because of the monopolization process itself.

    The reason for this is that monopoly capital is able, through its market power, to alter the rate of exploitation, the rate at which value is divided and redistributed to capital, by operating below full capacity. This creates market shortages, artificially raising prices above the limits that might otherwise competitively prevail in the absence of monopoly restrictions on potential competition. These barriers to entry are due not to collusion as such, but rather to the prohibitively high cost of entry at the necessary scale of production needed to force prices down.

    The consequence, according to Baran and Sweezy, is the generation of a mass of surplus-value that cannot be readily recycled. There is no reason to build additional productive capacity when the key to monopoly profits resides in withholding production. The system therefore suffers from stagnation, a permanent difficulty in recycling its “surplus” (the preferred term in Monopoly Capital) by means of additional capital formation. In this unique sense, monopoly capitalism is said to suffer from chronic overaccumulation, which it attempts to counteract through a multiplicity of waste generating activities that absorb the surplus without arresting the central dynamic of overaccumulation. Whereas “competitive” capitalism lapsed into periodic crisis due to an insufficiency of surplus-value, the modern stage of capitalism is said to suffer from its inverse. Business cycles are replaced with an overarching tendency to stagnation, which is itself only periodically transformed into prosperity to the degree in which surplus absorption can be made successful.  This takes the form primarily of advertising, war production, and imperialist adventures, the latter two financed by taxes and by the issuance of government debt. But not only by those means.

    The “Minsky” analysis, named after the late left Keynesian economist, who most famously questioned whether “it”—a second Great Depression—could occur, dealt primarily with the issue of financial instability. The creation of new financial products as a result of a combination of innovation, deregulation or regulatory avoidance, Minsky argued, increased the appetite for financial risk. This engenders a speculative boom that can be maintained as long as a sufficient revenue stream is available. Financial booms pass through three stages: a hedge phase, in which revenues are sufficient to cover interest and principle on debt; a speculative phase in which revenues are sufficient only to cover interest; and a Ponzi phase, the most dangerous, in which revenues are altogether insufficient and reliance is now placed on unsustainable asset inflation to meet ongoing debt obligations.  The duration of the speculative boom requires therefore a particular architecture of profits to fend off onset of the Ponzi phase.

    This is what fits so neatly into the Baran and Sweezy analysis. For a capitalism systemically awash in a surplus that needs to be recycled, while retaining a relatively low level of capital formation, habitually seeks out other—speculative—avenues for investment that offer greater rates of return than, say, that on government debt.

    The problem, however, is this. There is nothing in the marriage of these two approaches that permits us to see why the Ponzi phase is ever attained. And, more significantly, there is nothing that helps us understand how the financial crisis is transformed from a self-contained bubble into a general capitalist crisis; how a crisis in the banking system broadly defined comes to profoundly disrupt the production of commodities—be they goods or services. For that to occur, we would have to see, as we have, a rise in the debt to revenue stream of nonfinancial capital. That is, we would have to see the Ponzi like dynamic transferred into the commodity producing sectors of the economy. But this is largely inexplicable in the MR framework.

    For, if we were to follow Baran and Sweezy, the disproportional growth of the financial sector should be no more destabilizing than the growth of advertising. The service they perform for capitalism, according to MR—absorbing the surplus, while not adding to capital formation—is after all in principle quite similar. Equally, there is no reason why the debt to revenue ratio should attain Ponzi like dimensions in a monopoly system of commodity production that is choking on its excesses of surplus-value. Why, in other words, would borrowing displace internal financing in the nonfinancial sector when profits are plentiful and the need for additional capital accumulation relatively modest? Conversely, if the traditional avenues for mopping up the excess surplus have overreached and actually created a capital shortage, what is the continuous source of excess capital that so over-fuels the growth of the financial sector without triggering a self-correction in the form of prohibitive interest rates?

    The MR framework is ill equipped to answer these questions. The reason, in part, is the insistence that “monopoly” capitalism has created new laws, new dynamics, that upend the previously understood laws of capital accumulation. But those previously understood laws were derived independent of the particular degree of market competition. They are concerned with the general characteristics of capital and are based on how the system regulates the relations between surplus-value and invested capital. The form of competition can alter the distribution of surplus-value and create disturbances in the reproduction process that flow uniquely from this redistribution. But that is a question of the concrete application of these laws operating within a monopolistic context.

    This is precisely what the MR theory fails to answer. The nonaccumlating capitalism awash in surplus that Baran and Sweezy postulate as a “fundamental structural change” is a theoretical fantasy. Monopolistic limitations on production, largely overstated in any case, do not create surpluses for the system as a whole, they merely redistribute surplus-value by suppressing the rate of profit in less competitive sectors. It may be argued that monopolies also convert paid labor or wages into unpaid labor or profits through price gouging. But, at the same time, the idling of productive capacity needed for price gouging means a sacrifice of the surplus-value that would otherwise be available to a system operating under competitive conditions where additional workers would be exploited to the point of full capacity utilization. In any case, monopolies that fail to innovate through the accumulation of capital will find themselves unable to maintain their monopolistic advantages. Moreover, the larger the already existing base of accumulation, the larger the investment required for replacing the existing stock with more effective means of production needed to secure an expansion of the scale of production beyond the reach of potential competitors.

    Large concentrations of capital therefore are continuously faced with the need to expand profits and are no less threatened by a shortfall of profits than their less advantaged counterparts. Waste production redistributes surplus-value, while withholding value from additional capital formation. For the system as a whole, nonreproductive investment converts profits into revenue. “Waste production” may indeed provide needed services for the social reproduction of capital—not only through advertising that creates brand loyalty, in empire building that extends the availability of markets or secures vital resources and in generating public works and social services that fosters social stability. But waste production also can impede capital accumulation if the rate of exploitation cannot be increased sufficiently to meet the needs of all the expanding claims on surplus-value.

    Exploitation has been pushed ever higher in the American economy over the past 40 years. To some extent this can be attributed to the all out assault on labor unions that commenced in the Reagan years, but also to the neo-liberal free trade policies of both Democratic and Republican administrations that threatened the export of jobs if wage restraint was not strictly adhered to. As a result, almost all the productivity gains of the last generation were captured by the ruling class. If working-class living standards were nevertheless roughly maintained this can largely be attributed to the massive accumulation of consumer debt. This is the consumer aspect of Ponzi-ism, insofar as workers were able to sustain previously unheard of debt levels, not through anticipated pay increases, but by refinancing home mortgages under the assumption of an ever appreciating housing market.

    Yet even this massive redivision of the collective working day in favor of capital was insufficient for the needs of additional capital formation. The nonfinancial sector found itself ever more reliant on borrowing, yet this external financing would have otherwise presented no fundamental problem if profit margins had kept pace with the requirements of capital accumulation. Instead, however, the ratio of debt to revenue blossomed out of control. The fragility of this business borrowing became evident insofar as equity asset prices increasingly bore only the most fictional relationship to the underlying profitability of the system as a whole.

    This entire process was underwritten not by a continuous flow of “monopoly profits” but by the undervaluation of the Chinese yuan with respect to the dollar. This kept the Chinese export accounts in perpetual surplus, allowing an ocean of recycled dollars flowing back into American banks and into the bloodstream of the economy in the form of cheap credit. It also allowed a relative measure of relief for capital, insofar as imported input prices were artificially suppressed slowing down the erosion of profits. The entire credit bubble therefore collapsed in on itself at its most overburdened point. As the consumer market began to default in housing it initiated concentric ripples from there to the stock market, the financial sector and to the remainder of the economy.

    Keynesians and MR radicals believe that countercyclical measures can theoretically restore full employment and prosperity. They differ however on the political feasibility under capitalism for the type of radical income redistribution and investment socialization, beyond deficit spending, that this would require. An examination of the contradictory nature of state intervention would take us beyond the limits of this essay. Suffice it to say here, that production of surplus value in the private sector is the determining factor in the development of the overall system. If state activities improve the conditions of accumulation to the benefit of private capital in the sphere of production, while also accommodating rising living standards and the annexation and reconversion of surplus value into improved social entitlements, a capitalist prosperity meaningful to working people can be restored. This is particularly unlikely insofar as capitalist prosperity generally first requires a thoroughgoing purge of capital values and cuts in working class living standards of sufficient magnitude to reestablish the conditions of capital accumulation on a profitable basis. Measures that restore full employment through the expansion of state activities at the expense of the private sector can only create a pseudo- prosperity that leaves the immediate causes of economic instability latent. But even if the state could temporarily contribute to the creation of a meaningful capitalist prosperity, it cannot arrest and eradicate the recurrent causes of economic crises, causes which are embedded in the fundamental class divisions of society.

    As socialists we are in no position to place society on a different footing. Our class loyalties demand that we make every effort to mobilize for remediation of working-class living standards, to demand government act, if necessary, as employer of the last resort. But it is also imperative that we lose no opportunity in explaining that every measure short of socialism is a stopgap to real working class security and prosperity. Neither the Keynesian nor the MR approach lend themselves to that.

  • The New Corporatism in American Politics and the Grassroots

    From the Tea Party to the Coffee Party, How Political Parties Grow the Grass and Mow the Lawn

    There are moments in history when driven by economic and social conditions, by war, or by political problems, grassroots groups spring up from below, among rank-and-file workers or people in local urban or rural communities. Usually the Democratic Party has succeeded in gathering up such movements, domesticating them, and gathering them into its fold and making them part of its electoral machine, to the benefit of corporate America. Overtime, however, the labor unions and the national African American and Latino civil rights groups became so tame and tired, that they ceased to provide the social base required by the party if it was to be successful in elections.

    So today, the major political parties, both Republicans and Democrats, are creating new foundations and non-governmental organizations to expand the base of the parties and attract new voters. Those party think-tanks and NGOs in turn create what could be called pseudo-social movements, often describing themselves as "grassroots," though, in fact, they are created and controlled from above by inside-the-beltway D.C. organizations. These new corporate organizations, now propelled by the internet and social networking, are changing the landscape of social and political life.

    The Republican Party and conservative think tanks and foundations summoned up the Tea Party to give the Republicans new life after its defeat in the national election. The Democratic Party has similarly over the last several years inspired or created a number of such group — MoveOn.org, Repower America, Reform Immigration for America, and the Coffee Party — organizations that both work to shape the politics of social movements and win a new base of support for the Democrats. The organizers of these groups, using electronic media, social networking, and creating coalitions that absorb other smaller groups, create organizations that often meet in the local coffee shop, churches, American Legion or union hall, but have an agenda set in Washington by foundations and NGOs which in turn are controlled by the two major parties.

    The new corporate movements inspired and controlled by the Republicans and Democrats have the same relationship to a grassroots movement that genetically modified grass imbued with the Roundup pesticide does to a country meadow. The new grassroots is not so much a pasture as it is a modern suburban lawn, seeded, fertilized, watered and mowed by the foundations — ultimately to be enjoyed by the Republican or Democratic Party as the site of campaign barbecues.

    A New Corporatism

    What we're witnessing is the development of a new corporatism in American politics. Some use "corporatism" to refer to control of our economy and culture, society and politics by the corporations — and certainly we have that problem. I use "corporatism' here, however, as political scientists use it, to refer to government and party control over other organizations and movements. Most important among these are those started by the Democratic Party, its leaders or simply those who share the party's goal of creating a new activist base, while also setting limits of activism and ideological dissent.

    The goals of the neo-corporatism are two: First, to be able to mobilize people concerned with social problems and turn them out to vote for the major parties. Second, to create a series of organizations that can prevent the development of politically independent movements with agenda of their own. The trajectory of these groups is that in the name of political realism and expediency, they become bureaucratically centralized — usually in Washington — and pursue opportunistic and pragmatic goals within the framework set by the Democratic Party and its legislative agenda. The ultimate goal of the Republican and Democratic Party neo-corporatism is to prevent the development of independent political parties which might disrupt the regular rotation to power of the two capitalist parties.

    Those who join these new groups are folk looking for a way to influence politics in a progressive direction, well-meaning people, often new to politics, though some of them longtime activists and genuine grassroots groups. They join and participate in these organizations because they seem to have the potential to influence national policy in a good direction, though in the long run the goal of the politicos who conjured up these organizations is precisely to circumscribe the limits of activism and to contain their followers within the ideological boundaries and political programs of their respective parties and of corporate capitalism.

    Neo-Corporatism: A New Version of an Old System

    Political parties, of course, have always given political expression to other organizations and movements and have always worked to create or to control others groups and developments for the parties themselves. The Republican Party was during the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries became the expression of groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the U.S. Chambers of Commerce, and other such employer organizations, or of wealthy capitalist farmers and later of corporate agribusiness. And the party acted in government as arbiter of those various capitalist interests within the capitalist system.

    At the same time the Republicans and those employer organizations worked to keep in tow and in check small business associations which were otherwise often at odds with the big corporations. The Republicans fundamentally fought for the interests of finance and heavy industry, while keeping small town merchants and manufacturers and farmers from breaking with big capital and heavy industry. Similarly they fought for the wealthiest farmer groups, while working to keep medium and small farmers from breaking ranks. The Tea Parties of those days were Citizens Alliances, Midwest Grange groups, and nativist associations which rallied and railed against socialists, labor unions and immigrants.

    More recently, the Republican Party's economic conservatives, still representing the interests of finance, industry, and oil, also both helped to create the evangelical religious right which acted to draw lower middle class and working class white voters into the party's fold. Perhaps that the starting point of the neo-corporatist organization of politics was with Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, established in 1979. Falwell's group provided the prototype for other such rightwing religious organizations which simultaneously drew people into the Republican Party and headed off the development of political alternatives on the right.

    The Old Democratic Party

    The Democratic Party before 1965 was based primarily on the Solid South — the racist white politicians who enforced segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans below the Mason-Dixon Line — and also the corrupt big city machines in place like New York and Chicago which turned out the immigrant and working class vote. At the same time it also always represented finance, industry, and service corporations — though often consumer goods rather than heavy industry. The Democrats, however, found their most important political support through mass organizations of labor, African Americans, Latinos, and women. Beginning in the early 20th century, the Democratic Party had succeeded in politically subordinating the American Federation of Labor and its craft unions to its corporate political agenda, while also coming under pressure from those organizations to adopt elements of their agenda.

    During the 1930s, a powerful, militant, and politically radical labor movement arose that in some states created independent labor parties. The experiment, however, as short lived. After the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, the Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats also succeeded capturing the CIO. With the AFL-CIO merger in the 1950s, the Democrats and the labor unions formed a partnership that lasted, with much better results for the Democrats than for the unions, until today.

    Similarly, with the rise and then the victory of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Democratic Party, after long resisting African American demands for equal rights, succeeded in drawing in and subordinating the NAACP and other African American organizations, while also becoming the primary vehicle, however inadequate, of the black political agenda. Likewise with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the National Council for La Raza whose leaders and members been drawn into the Democratic Party's sphere of influence. The organized women's movement too succumbed. The women's movement of the 1970s found its organizational expressing in the National Organization for Women (NOW), which also became politically subordinate to the Democratic Party, as did most other women's organizations.

    The Movements Ossify

    The workers movement of the 1930s, the civil rights organizations in the 1960s, and the women's groups in the 1970s had all been tumultuous movements, but once gathered into the Democratic fold they ossified. The bureaucratization of labor organizations and the growth of a privileged caste of labor officials, together with the routine character of collective bargaining from the 1940s to the 1970s, led the unions to become pragmatic, moderate, and weak. They also grew out of touch with the changing character of the workforce, far more "male, pale and stale" than the membership.

    Similarly, the civil rights organizations moved from the period of radicalism to respectability, from militant leadership to liberal leadership, and from real confrontations with power to symbolic reenactments of the past. The women's movement, linked to the labor movement and the democrats, largely shared the same fate of succumbing to the system, ceasing to be a movement in the streets and largely becoming a legislative lobby. Unions, African American and Latino organizations, and NOW and other women's groups became, at the political level, extensions of the Democratic Party and of a liberal establishment which supported the corporations and capitalism — and the actual economic, social and political interests of those groups were largely forgotten.

    All of these groups — labor, African Americans, Latinos and women — sought to use the Democratic Party as the vehicle for their political demands, though in that vehicle they were definitely not in the driver's seat, and sometimes they felt as if once the election was over, they were locked in the trunk. The Democrats — and the corporations they represented — succeeded because they held the steering wheel. The labor and social movements, locked up in the party of another social class, could not change the direction of the party, or government, or of the economy. And a crash was coming.

    When these groups pressed hard enough, the Democrats would take up their cause, and often even a token effort often proved to be enough to continue winning the votes of workers, African Americans, Latinos and women. Year after year, for example, the Democrats failed to pass labor law reform, including most recently the Employee Free Choice Act, yet labor continued to support the Democrats — because the alternative would mean a social struggle that the labor movement was not prepared to carry out. While disappointed with the Democrats' jobs of representing them, most of those groups felt that creating an independent party would be too difficult, though they had also learned that taking over the Democratic Party also proved impossible.

    A Shrinking Social Base

    The Democratic Party, however, was also disappointed with unions and the civil rights groups which by the 1980s were failing to keep voters loyal to the party. The unions shrunk from about 35% of all workers in the 1950s to just about 12 percent by the 1990s, losing power and influence. The Republican Party made gains among Hispanic voters. The historic African American civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP, passed through a series of organizational crises which made them less useful, though most black voters continued to vote for the Democratic Party seeing no alternative in the Republicans. While some new social movement had appeared — particularly the environmental movement and the gay and lesbian rights movement, and while the Democratic Party had gained most from them — they had not proven large and strong enough to rebuild the party's base. So by the 1990s the Democrats stumbled upon another strategy, the creation from above of new organizations that could both conjure up and control a mass following for the Democratic Party. The Democrats went into landscaping; time to plant the grass.

    MoveOn.org

    The Democrats' new corporatism might be dated from the establishment of MoveOn.org in 1998, originally as a group calling upon Congress to censure rather than impeach President Bill Clinton and then "move on." MoveOn.org opposed President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and became for one of the country's most important anti-war groups. MoveOn.org created Action Forums as local discussion and action groups and worked with MeetUp.com to organize street demonstrations and other events.

    MoveOn's fundamental strategy and method was to act both on the Democratic Party and within the Democratic Party. MoveOn became involved in the 2004 election and issued its Call for Change in the 2006 election, always with an eye to moving the Democratic Party to the left, but without moving to the left of the Democratic Party. The desire to serve the party gradually supplanted the responsibility to serve the movement. By the end of middle of the century's first decade it had become clear to many anti-war activists that MoveOn's fundamental commitment to the Democratic Party had become an obstacle to effective anti-war activism.

    MoveOn.org, though it had not exactly been created in Washington, provided the prototype of the a group created and commanded by Democratic party loyalists who wished to use the organization to both create and contain a social movement, a movement which might otherwise have found its way into other more independent channels, in the case of the anti-war movement into United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ ). MoveOn also provided the first model of organization for the new corporatism: an organization led by Democrats organizing from above, through an electronic apparatus which they controlled and reaching down into the social soil of America.

    MoveOn used the new electronic media and social networking as no other group had used them before, reaching out to millions with its ideas and its actions. MoveOn did provide many people with their first experience of activism, and set them in motion around issues such as the war in Iraq, and for many this was a politically important and personally meaningful experience. But the goal was always both to create that movement and to contain it within the political parameters of the Democrats.

    Eventually MoveOn, moved on to deal with all sorts of economic and social issues, becoming a broad liberal lobby that claimed five million members, more than twice as large as the country's largest labor union. MoveOn urged its members to vote, and to vote for Democrats and to support the Democratic Party agenda. MoveOn would provide the model for other groups — Repower America, Reform Immigration for America, and the Tea Party — which were more directly created and controlled respectively by the Democratic or Republican Party.

    Reform Immigration for America

    A similar process took place around the issue of immigration reform. Back in 2003 immigration national advocacy organizations, mostly based in Washington, D.C., and labor unions came together to create the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CCIR) also known as the New American Opportunity Campaign (NOAC). The founders of CCIR were four immigration advocacy groups — The Center for Community Change, the National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Forum, New York Immigration Coalition — and two labor unions, SEIU and UNITE. The groups organized the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, modeled after the civil rights freedom rides of the 1960s, and then went on to create an umbrella organization for all immigrant rights and immigrant organizations.

    When in 2005 Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) introduced the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act (or "McCain-Kennedy Bill") — involving legalization of a majority of the undocumented immigrants in the U.S., stricter border enforcement, a large guest worker program, and plans for the orderly control of future flows of immigrants — the CCIR became its principle organizing vehicle. CCIR worked on building support for the bill in immigrant communities throughout the United States. Well-funded and professionally organized, CCIR staff worked to convince local immigrant groups and regional coalitions, though local immigrant groups often objected that both the organization and the bill had been foisted on them.

    Many independent immigrant groups wanted all immigrants living and working in the U.S. to be legalized, objected to the heavy costs and penalties in the proposed bill, opposed guest workers, and rejected the idea of building more walls on the borders. Every major city or immigrant community saw tense arguments not only over the bill's content but also over the CCIR's top-down organization for it.

    Then, under the pressure of genuine grassroots groups — hometown clubs, soccer teams, local radio disc jockeys, church congregations — a tremendous movement developed in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and many other cities and towns. In the spring and summer of 2006 that movement took to the streets, not controlled by CCIR and not in support of any particular bill, but rather a social explosion of immigrants demanding the right to live and work in America. Those massive demonstrations, some as large as one million people — the largest social movement demonstrations in American history — threatened in some places to become a kind of general strike of Latino workers.

    Still, the movement could not overcome the backlash — fanned by conservative Republicans and some Democrats — that had developed among many whites. The Kennedy-McCain Bill failed to pass the U.S. Congress, and the CCIR went on to support other versions of "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" proposed to the Congress over the next few years. The Washington-based immigration advocacy groups held together around roughly the same program for immigration over the next several years.

    From CCIR to RIFA

    After the election of Barack Obama, the same core group that had created CCIR founded a new group, Reform Immigration for America (RIFA), to support another "comprehensive immigration reform" bill. Under the pressure of immigrant communities, RIFA created a program somewhat more progressive the former CCIR's, calling for more visas, rather than for guest workers programs. While RIFA's program puts forward more humane values, it is not without its problems. It would not legalize all immigrants now working in the country and would deny undocumented immigrants an opportunity to work legally, driving them into the underground market. More important, RIFA and the advocacy groups at its core are prepared to accept a far more conservative compromise bill in order to pass immigration reform in one version or another.

    Genuine grassroots immigrant groups and their allies will have little if any voice in the political process of passing some sort of immigration reform, which will remain in the hand of the Democratic Party. The Democrats will subordinate RIFA to their aims, and RIFA will keep local immigrant groups in line. Ultimately the Democrats will further weaken an immigration bill to please the Republicans. Neither RIFA nor the Democrats are prepared to organize the power of immigrant workers, which would in turn revitalize the labor movement.

    Repower America

    In 2008 multi-millionaire and former Democratic Party presidential candidate Al Gore created Repower America, an extension of his organizations the Climate Protection Action Fund and the Alliance for Climate Protection, which claim five million members worldwide. The group's home page says, "Founded by Al Gore, Repower America is dedicated to revitalizing our economy, strengthening our national security and solving the climate crisis through clean energy."

    Well funded and staffed, Repower America has put organizers in the fields in states throughout the country, and they in turn have hired young people to distribute literature and circulate petitions on environmental issues. The website invites "grassroots supporters" to engage in "grassroots" lobbying for the environmental agenda. Recently the group also created Inconvenient Youth to involve teenagers from 13 to 18. That site has a social networking to allow members to connect with others near them, cultivating the young shoots of the neo-corporatist grassroots.

    Founded by Al Gore, one of the Democratic Party's most important and, since his failed election campaign, most successful leaders — winner of both the Nobel Peace Prize and an Academy Award for his film "An Inconvenient Truth" — Repower America is clearly a Democratic Party project. Clearly Gore's goal is to build a top-down movement that will support the Gore's environmental policy within the Democratic Party.

    Interestingly, when the Obama administration recently decided to permit the oil companies to engage in drilling along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, Repower America created a petition where its members and others could appeal to President Barack Obama to reconsider and change that policy. One should not take that as a mark of political independence from Obama and the Democrats. While Repower America may be willing to criticize some particular administration policy, no one should expect it to fundamentally criticize Democratic Party policy or come to an independent position.

    Operation Free

    Gore's isn't the only neo-corporatist environmental game in town. The U.S. Department of Defense has created Operation Free, a "coalition of leading Veterans and national security organizations," to promote green environmental policies. The DOD sends veterans traveling around the country to speak on the need to "Secure America with Clean Energy." Locally sponsored by groups such as the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Foundation and Environmental Defense Fund, Operation Free tours the country in a big blue bus emblazoned with a military-style service patch displaying wind turbines and solar panels.

    Operation Free's veteran spokesmen and -women, talk about their service time in wars overseas, their commitment to the country, and to environmental policies. Sounding like liberal sheep in conservative wolves' uniforms, they tell environmentalist audiences that they oppose the oil companies and that they can better reach conservative voters and win them to support green policies. "We've won health care reform, and now we can win green environmental policies," one veteran told an audience in Cincinnati, Ohio. The carefully orchestrated meetings are dominated by the veterans' prepared statements and they permit only written questions, and most audiences hesitate to raise the issue of war and its environmental consequences.

    The Obama Campaign

    Barack Obama's brilliant 2008 campaign for the U.S. presidency drew upon the experience of groups such as MoveOn.org and Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, creating an attractive website and logo, using electronic social networking that eventually involved millions, and then turned that electronic network into a campaign organization that mobilized tens of thousands to do precinct work. Many young people in particular, who had never been involved either in politics or a genuine social movement, experienced the Obama campaign as what was for them a social movement.

    The sense of excitement, the meetings and rallies, the door-to-door canvassing, though orchestrated from Washington, D.C. were experienced regionally and locally as the nearest thing to a movement that many of the participants had ever known. When the campaign was over and Obama was elected, he then turned his campaign organization into Organizing for America. OFA invites those who visit its website to join "grassroots OFA campaigns to support the President's agenda."

    OFA represents perhaps the largest and broadest of the neo-corporatist organizations, a "grassroots" group controlled by the Democratic Party President who is the head of the U.S. government and commander-in-chief. After Obama's election, however, interest in OFA declined, revived only briefly, sporadically and spottily by the campaign around health care reform. OFA called upon Obama supporters to engage in lobbying for his health care reform — without single-payer (Medicare for all) or a public option. Disappointment with the President on the left and the right, had left the door open for the Republican's neo-corporatist Tea Party.

    The Tea Party

    The stunning victory of Barack Obama in the 2008 election devastated the Republican Party. Not only did Obama win, but the Democrats also won a majority of both houses of Congress. At the same time, however, during his first year in office Obama failed to provide strong, clear leadership to the Democratic Party majority, to his supporters in the Democratic Party and to his followers in Organize for America. Enthusiasm waned, support dwindled, and the grass dried up. Then the crab grass came.

    Rightwing Republicans with strong support from conservative foundations such as Freedom Works and from FOX News and other conservative media, stepped into the vacuum created both by the lack of leadership from Obama and by the disorientation of mainstream Republicans. Beginning in 2008, rightwing Republicans and some Libertarians began to call for a Tea Party to protest against Obama's administration and its policies. By January 2009 the Tea Party had been born — with many claiming to be the fathers, mothers or midwives of the movement. Tea Party activists took a lead in opposing Obama's call for health reform, arguing that it was the first step toward socialism and the end of America as we have known it.

    While the proliferation of Tea Party websites, organizations, political programs, and ideological orientations gave the impression of a genuine grassroots movement, in fact the Republican Party and its most conservative think-tanks backed by the corporations had quickly taken command of the group. True, the Tea Party has its racists and fascists, its cranks and screwballs, but it's the Republicans who have paid the bills and provided the direction. Dick Armey, former leader of the House Republicans, lobbyist, and chair of Freedom Works, emerged as the principal party leader of the Tea Party, while Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008, became one of the group's favorite spokespersons. The Tea Party organizers increasingly promoted an anti-government and free market position, claiming that Obama was leading the nation toward socialism and the brink.

    By the spring of 2010 Tea Party organizations were active principally in Republican Party primary races supporting more conservative candidates than those wanted by the Republican Washington establishment. In a few place the Tea Party and its rightwing activists wrecked local Republican Party election plans. Such a development could threaten the Republican Party leadership and even the future of the party, still the Tea Party remains for now part of the party, not a genuinely independent political movement. Whether or not the Tea Party will be able to sustain momentum after the November 2010 elections remains to be seen, but we can be sure that the Republican Party will remain in place.

    The Coffee Party

    With the Tea Party garnering much of the media's attention, two Barack Obama supporters, movie makers Annabel Park and Eric Byler, decided to create the Coffee Party, with the motto "Wake up and Stand up!" in January of 2010. Using the kind of electronic media techniques developed by MoveOn and by the Obama campaign, they created a website, and then quickly called meetings in some 370 coffee shops throughout the country and a few overseas. The group claimed 150,000 members within six weeks. The initial meetings were followed a second round of meetings, often with a different group of participants.

    The Coffee Party, while clearly intended to be the Democrats' answer to the Tea Party, presents itself as non-partisan. The group's website explained itself this way:

     

    "The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them."

     

    The group's organizers failed to inform participants that the movement had been formed by Democratic Party loyalists, though that was obvious from the discussions that revolved around the Democrat's key issues, such as health care reform, with a clear intent to minimize calls for single-payer. Discussions of the wars abroad were generally off the table.

    Some of the Coffee Party's initial announcements asked people to turn from the extremes and to "meet in the middle." Local leaders explain that the group rejects the political extremes of left and right. Cincinnati's principal Coffee Party organizer speaking to a class at the University of Cincinnati said, "We won't want to be like those people out in the streets carrying signs with hand-written slogans." Sounding like an American Progressive of the 1910s, he said, "We want our discussion to be based on facts. When we have a question we go to the experts and read academic papers that have been peer-reviewed."

    Rather than taking to the streets, in Cincinnati at least the Tea Party has organized a meeting to thank a local Congressman for voting for Obama's health care reform. So, while the Tea Party has been in the streets winning a following by challenging the government, the Coffee Party has so far remained cloistered in mostly middle class coffee shops, eschewing the streets and rejecting confrontation.

    Grassroots Redefined

    All of these organizations talk about building "grassroots movements," but in a way that gives a new definition to old expression. Grassroots originally meant a movement with roots in local concerns and suggested the notion of a local group democratically controlled by some local community and the people involved in it. Grassroots suggested a kind of authenticity, a genuinely homespun movement of local people, even if concerned with regional and national issues. It also suggested a movement from below, in local communities or one sort or another that then reached up to try to influence the centers of power. These neo-corporatist movements, however, mostly have their origins in Washington, D.C., though, even if conceived outside of the beltway, they have been created by people loyal to the Republicans or the Democrats as the case may be.

    While mostly created from on high by the parties, party leaders, NGOs or foundations, there is no doubt that in many cases they have successfully reached down into the grassroots. Whether we talk about MoveOn, the Obama campaign, The Tea Party or the Coffee Party, almost all have found constituencies in communities across the country. None of them, however, really originated there, with the possible exception of some of the first manifestations of the Tea Party. Controlled by the parties, foundations, and NGOs, well-funded and usually with professional staffs, they have reached outward and downward — principally through electronic media and social networking — to attempt to build a local base. They are planting the grass they want, and view other things that pop up as weeds.

    Most of these groups do not have a democratic membership structure with an elected leadership, nor do they usually have local chapters with any degree of autonomy. Organizational directives and political positions move from the top to the bottom, from the center to the periphery, though some of these groups create some semblance of local autonomy. The Tea Party may be if not the most democratic, at least the most chaotic. While Dick Armey, the Republicans, Freedom Works, and FOX provide much of the real direction for the Tea Party, local chapters do their own thing from holding meetings, and demonstrations, to issues proclamations and manifestoes.

    The Democratic Party organizations create the regional and local structures and establish quite clear if not always publicly stated political parameters. And they may also offer a lot of space for local discussion and debate of the sorts that is either about high minded and abstract ideals — "How do we promote real democracy in the United States" — and therefore does not affect political policy, or is about organizational matters — where to hold the meeting — and therefore does not touch on any matters of substance. Generally, members have no way in a local chapter to make decisions that might affect the national organization, while the national organization makes all the substantive decisions for the local chapters.

    Still, both the Tea Party and the Coffee Party, and the other organizations, find followers looking for like minded folk with whom to socialize, commiserate, and chat (both actually and virtually). The success of these models has a lot to do with creating partisan substitutes for what were once more diverse and democratic town hall meeting, or with building new forms of party precinct and ward organizations which went out of business with the growth of radio and television.

    The Independent Left and the New Corporatism

    How should the independent left, that is people to the left of the Democratic Party, anti-capitalists and socialists, relate to these neo-corporatist organizations and pseudo-movements? Our goal in approaching this question should be to understand that we want to join people in action and while working with them, win them to our point of view. With that in mind, each of these organizations presents a different set of problems or questions.

    With regard to the Tea Party, while most of its members may simply be exceptionally conservative Republicans, there are within it various sorts of ultra-conservatives, some of them racist and some potentially violent. The more radical right-wingers often dominate protest demonstrations and put forward slogans and demands, and sometimes carry racist posters, which would make it impossible for us to participate in good conscience. We will probably not be able to even converse with much less influence people in the centers of these movements, though we might draw away people in their penumbra.

    Organizations like MoveOn.org, now that it has become a kind of generic liberal lobby, and groups like the Coffee Party call meetings in which we would want to be present, both to understand liberal arguments, and to meet some of the many fine people who participate in these meetings. We may through conversations with them be able to identify some who share our more independent views. When they call demonstrations, we may want to participate, though perhaps with our own slogans, signs and chants which raise a more independent political position.

    Similarly with Repower America which has put so much money into creating an apparatus to organize young people, one might want to participate in the movements without adopting the politics, while offering critical perspectives. Where Repower does draw young people into the environmental movement, we would want to argue, for example, for the need to socialize energy resources and to create socialized green production. We should look for opportunities within Repower to challenge the capitalist, liberal, and ultimately Democratic Party parameters set by the group.

    With Operation Free, on the other hand, we should take a different position. This is after all an organization of the Department of Defense — better called by its historic name the War Department — and we should try to rip off the green mask which covers the bloody red of imperial wars, occupations, mass murder, environmental disasters in victim nations, and the dislocation of millions, together with the drone missiles and the horrifying civilian deaths they cause. If we are members, we should insist that the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Foundation and Environmental Defense Fund cease to work with the War Department.

    Reform Immigration for America (RIFA) has to be approached much as we would approach some of the labor unions which founded and support it, that is, as a bureaucratic organization with reformist politics which has some degree of organizational and ideological influence over millions of workers. When RIFA calls meetings and demonstrations such as it has which involved thousands of workers, we must be present, but we should not accept the RIFA program which does not speak to immigrants' real needs. Where possible, and this depends on local conditions, we should introduce a critique of RIFA's immigration program, such as denying undocumented workers in the U.S. the right to a job and increasing border policing. Just as we do in the labor unions, we should work in the movement, but without accepting its politics, working to represent the interests of all the immigrants and of the broader labor movement.

    With regard to the anti-war movement, while keeping informed about MoveOn.org activities and participating when possible with independent signs and literature, one would perhaps rather work to build United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), though at this point most independent anti-war activists are working to build a new independent anti-war coalition of some sort. Certainly the continuing war in Iraq, the expansion of the war in Afghanistan, and the shameful and horrifying drone attacks on Pakistan which have killed civilians demand that we build a new anti-war movement, and MoveOn.org, with its commitment to the President and the Democrats cannot and will not provide leadership.

    Ultimately, for those of us work in the grassroots, the point is this: We need no condescending gardeners. We will rather work to cultivate movements at the real grassroots, the diverse garden of self-managed organizations independent of both the Democrats and Republicans.

     

    Note: In writing this article, I have found it helpful to refer to the Wikipedia articles on the various organizations discussed, from which I have taken some of the accounts and descriptions of them.

     

    Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati based teacher, writer and activist and the Ohio Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. Senate.

  • Sounding the alarm on "Race to the Top"

    How can we make neoliberalism’s project to destroy public education, captured in the Obama/Duncan “Race to the Top” proposal,  more understandable? The subject is complex, but bloggers in the US are taking up the challenge, as we see in Susan Ohanian’s excellent report on my work. (Thanks to all who have picked up the debate with Ravitch.)

    Still, we cannot can beat back this juggernaut alone. We in the US are conditioned to think that we have the answers. However, the rest of the world has been battling the neoliberal project far longer than we have, and we can learn from them.

    One valuable resource is the website hosted by Mary Compton, co-editor of our book describing the neoliberal project and resistance to it. If we had the teacher union movement we need, Mary’s website would be run by the conservative and bureaucratic Education International, the global federation of teacher unions.

    Another is the Anti-Academies Alliance in the UK. “Academies” are UK charter schools, and the Alliance, supported by the National Union of Teachers, is doing grassroots organizing from which we can and should learn. The Alliance has developed questions to put to candidates in the general election. Just change the names of the operators of the schools and you have wonderful talking points.

    1. Do you agree that state schools should be accountable to democratically elected representatives of the communities they serve and not to unaccountable private sponsors or providers?

    2. Given their patchy performance and the high cost of establishing academies, do you agree with the independent think tank Civitas that there should be a freeze of the Academies programme while an evaluation is carried out of its successes and failures?

    3. Do you agree that public funding of our schools should all be spent on educating our children rather than contributing to the profits of private educational providers like GEMS, Edison and Lilac Skies, paid to provide “outsourced” services to state schools?

    4. If elected as an MP, do you promise that you will vote against any proposal to allow so-called “free” [translate: “alternative”] schools to be run for a profit?

    We need to build an international movement. That means taking off the national blinders.

  • "Drunk, crazy, and manipulated by their betters" – Sailors and Democracy

     My research on Jack Tar, the American colonial seaman, began in rebellion against the highly politicized historiography of the 50s and early 60s, which reflected Cold War values, stressing the classlessness of American society, the lack of conflict, and the irrationality of those who dissented. A conservative historiography saw crowd actions in early America as drunk/crqzy, or manipulated by their betters. I undertook research on seamen, who were disproportionately present in the Revolutionary crowds, which I rescued from the contempt of the dominant historiography, finding rational motives and grievances (such as impressment by the Royal Navy. I published various pieces on the American Revolution as seen from the bottom up.
    Now, some 40+ years later, younger historians are continuing and refining this work. Thus at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Washington DC on April 9, I chaired a session on “From the Bottom Up: Sailors and Democracy.” Below is my introduction in text and in video excerpt, plus a video excerpt from the paper presented in the session by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. 

  • Kate Millett and Her Critics

    [This article appeared in the old series of New Politics, Fall 1970.]

     

    Sexual Politics by Kate Millet
    Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, N.Y. 1970, 393 pp. $7.95

    Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics has elicited awe, praise and sober criticism, but proof of its effectiveness is the appearance of a variety of articles and reviews marked by utterly unselfconscious vulgarity, philistinism and venomous hostility.

          “These are not normal women. I think they are freaks. Besides, they are dead wrong in their assumption that most women detest men, marriage and housework so much they can’t wait to e liberated from them so they can rush out to work all day in factory, shop or office. … Most women have a strong nesting instinct and they like taking care of their homes.” So writes Helen Lawrenson in the January 1971 issue of Esquire, a publication which has been trying manfully to change its “girlie” image since its editors realized years ago that it could not compete successfully with Playboy. The Lawrenson article, “The Feminine Mistake,” characterized by breezy ignorance and the social sage: “So you see, no matter how you slice it, it’s the same old sex game. Liberate me, daddy, eight to the bar.” Even the idiom is dated.

          Midge Dector’s response to women’s liberation is a “fable” called “The Liberated Women” which appeared in te October 1970 issue of Commentary, written in e form of a prolonged whine. Its whimsy cannot conceal its essential vulgarity:

    To judge from what she sys and does, however – finding only others at fault for her predicaments, speaking always of herself as a means of stating the general case, shedding tears as a means of negotiation – the freedom she truly seeks is of a rather different kind. It is a freedom demanded by children and enjoyed by no one: the freedom from all difficulty. If in the end her society is at fault for anything [my emphasis, P.J.], it is for allowing her to grow up with the impression that this is something possible to ask. Even the good fairies who attended her birth would never have dared so far.

          Miss Decter’s claim to fame is that, in addition to being the executive editor of Harper’s magazine, she is in the words of the biographical squib accompanying the article, “married and is the mother of four children.” It failed to add that she is married to the editor of Commentary which is surely the only explanation for an article of no merit whatsoever appearing in that journal’s pages.

          Harper’s, the magazine of which Miss Decter is the executive editor, selected for its reviewer of Sexual Politics a man whose polemical writing is marked by the royal put-down, invariably spiced with words and phrases from language he does not speak: none other than Irving Howe. Despite its pretentiousness (there are almost three full pages on Freud, an area in which Mr. Howe’s credentials are highly dubious), the review is marked by much more than his usual nastiness. Miss Millet, we learn is “a figment of the Zeitgeist, bearing the rough and careless marks of what is called higher education and exhibiting a talent for the delivery of gross simplicities in tones of leaden complexity. Brilliant in an unserious way. … She has a mind of great energy but small feeling for nuance. … She is the ideal highbrow popularizer for the politics and culture of the New Left. …” What is more “About the experience of working-class women she knows next to nothing. …” And then, for a coup de grace. Carried away by his own learned exposition of Freud, Howe steps into the role of diagnostician, “…there are times when one feels the book was written by a female impersonator.”

          The hostility of the review (How threatened can Irving Howe get?) is matched only by its philistinism. “And is the poor bastard writing soap jingles in an ad agency performing a ‘human’ task morally of psychologically superior to what his wife does at home, where she can at least reach toward an uncontaminated relationship with her own child?” And capped with truly unselfconscious vulgarity masquerading as “yiddishkeit,” “I think back, then, to the one other world I have known well, the world of immigrant Jewish workers. … Was my mother a drudge in subordination to the ‘master group?’ No more drudge than my father who used to come home with hands and feet blistered from his job as a presser. Was she a ‘sexual object?’ I would never have thought to ask, but now, in the shadow of decades, I should like to think that at least sometimes she was.” Fadeout to the soft strains of a yiddish folk song. Pure schmaltz!

          In any case, the point that escapes Howe is that Momma certainly was more of a drudge than Poppa. They both worked in garment factories, where she earned less than he did, both came home exhausted but Momma cooked, washed dishes, scrubbed floors and tended to Poppa’s other needs. Or does the reality intrude on the sentimental drivel Howe concocts for public consumption?

          Irving Howe has kind words for Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex now that Sexual Politics has arrived on the scene in the context of a women’s movement. Howe’s attempt is to use de Beauvoir to put down Millett. In his characteristically charitable style he says: “…anyone comparing the two books would immediately recognize the extent to which Miss Millett has drawn upon de Beauvoir’s famous work. The central ideas and sentiments of Sexual Politics are simply appropriated, in vulgarized form, from The Second Sex, and reviewers with some intellectual conscience might consequently have sown some restraint in praising Miss Millett’s originality of thought.” Generous to a fault!

          While Howe is careful to say about The Second Sex only that it is “famous,” by implication he also says that it is a better piece of work. The political conclusion should not be lost on the unsuspecting. When Martine Luther King emerged as the leader of an active, militant, civilly disobedient civil rights movement even downright reactionaries, not to mention the entire political Establishment, suddenly became the champions of Roy Wilkins and the NAACP. Faced with movement and inevitable change, they opted for a moderate. This is not to say at all that Simone de Beauvoir is a moderate on women’s liberation. It is only that her book (with an entirely different emphasis than Kate Millett’s) appeared in the United States during the fifties, a period of political apathy. While it received wide attention and, no doubt, succeeded in shocking its more backward readers, it could not possibly have had the impact and effect that Sexual Politics has today in the context of political movement among women. Fearful of any radical change, Irving Howe suddenly embraces Simone de Beauvoir.

     

    What is there about Sexual Politics that provokes this unseemly response?

          The threat is clear. Kate Millett has formulated a forceful indicetment of patriarchal society, illustrating her theory of sexual politics with examples from history, psychology and literature. One need not agree with every example, every argument presented to come to the realization that “there remains one ancient and universal scheme for the domination of one birth group by another – the scheme that prevails in the area of sex.”

          The evidence is overwhelming and whether she is discussing women in the economy, in literature, in totalitarian societies or their estimates of themselves, Miss Millett handles her material with great skill and, even more important, with insight, humor and compassion.

     

          Discussing women’s role in the economy where they constitute a large and underpaid factory population, Miss Millett draws a sharp difference between men and women in production. While neither owns nor controls the process in which they participate, women do not even comprehend it. Her example is illuminating:

     

    …the refrigerator is a machine all women use, some assemble it in factories, and a very few with scientific education understand its principles of operation. Yet the heavy industries which roll its steel and produce the dies for its parts are in male hands. The same is true of the typewriter, the auto, etc. Now, while knowledge is fragmented even among the male population, collectively they could reconstruct any technological device. But in the absence of males, women’s distance from technology today is sufficiently great that it is doubtful that they could replace or repair such machines on any significant scale.

    The conclusion is inescapable. “If knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a large factor in their subordinate position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy imposes upon women.”

          And despite the growing numbers of women involved in “higher education,” the society, through its insistence on retaining long outmoded cultural differences, enforces systematic ignorance in a way not too different from the manner suggested by John Ruskin in 1865. Female education for Ruskin was “not for self-development, but for self-renunciation.”

     

    Miss Millett’s discussion of anti-feminist attitudes in totalitarian societies – attitudes which are basically irrational and even harmful to the economies of those societies – bears out her contention that “…sexual politics, while connected to economics and other tangibles of social organization, is, like racism, or certain aspects of caste, primarily an ideology, a way of life, with influence over every other psychological and emotional facet of existence.” To be sure, while both Germany and Russia systematically excluded women from the labor force prior to World War II, there was a material consideration of overwhelming importance – increasing the population for waging war. In both countries there were bonuses for mothers and, in Germany, additional taxes for bachelors and spinsters and marriage loans with tax and interest rebates for each child born.

     

          In Russia, the anti-feminist attitudes and edicts were a product of the Stalinist counterrevolution. Immediately after the October revolution, a conscious effort had been made to free women and restructure the family. There was free marriage, divorce, contraception and abortion on demand. And while Kate Millett is correct when she writes that “Marxist theory has failed to supply a sufficient ideological base for a sexual revolution,” buttressing that judgment with a quote from Trotsky: “You cannot ‘abolish’ the family, you have to replace it,” such an ideology might have been developed in a revolutionary atmosphere. Instead, the Stalinist reaction was complete and in rapid order free marriage, divorce, contraception and abortion were all outlawed; replaced by strict edicts on bearing many children and strengthening the family. (There are those, otherwise enchanted by Sexual Politics, who are very critical of Miss Millett for her discussion of the Russian counterrevolution. Without adducing any evidence to the contrary, Irwin Silber took exception to the material on Russia in an essentially laudatory review which appeared in The Guardian. Since he presented no augment whatsoever to account for his criticism, one is led to believe he has none but simply feels that recounting the effect of the counterrevolution is a breach of faith. Miss Millett is fortunate that her book appeared in 1970. Had it come out as late as twenty years ago she would have been referred to as a “fascist mad dog.”)

     

    There are areas in which Miss Millet may overstate her case. She has been criticized for her unrelieved attack on Freud and for an imbalance in her treatment of biological differences between the sexes. Yet, she was not writing an appreciation of Freud. What she has done, effectively in my opinion, is to underscore Freud’s masculine bias, a bias so pronounced that it raises strong doubts, at the very least, about the value of his psychoanalytic theories of feminity. The quoted material from Freud’s books, papers and letters certainly give credence to Miss Millett’s view that “It is especially curious to imagine that half the race should attribute their clear and obvious social-status inferiority to the crudest biological reasons when so many more promising social factors are involved.” If she has overstated her case, it is unnecessary. The evidence of women’s inferior status and oppression that exists in all areas of life and literature is abundantly clear.

     

          The literary examples of sexual politics – Lawrence, Miller, Mailer and Genet – are illuminating and entertaining and if Miss Millett opts for Genet it is because “his notions of sex role and rank are the most flat-footed ones available in his culture, quite without Lawrence’s subtlety, archaic in their direct presentation of power and subordination: a vicious and omnipotent superservility contrasted to a fluttering helplessness and abjection.”

     

          Sexual Politics is a harsh indictment of the actual status of male and female in patriarchy. More than that, it is a call to rebellion: a call to rebellion at a time when there is a growing consciousness among women of their inferior status and growing women’s movement to heed the call. It is the very existence of the Women’s Liberation movement that is responsible for the hostile and reactionary response to Miss Millett’s book.

     

     

    In a postscript to the book, Kate Millett deals very briefly with the timing of the emergence of this new feminist movement. She believes that it was inspired by the example of black protest and was given additional impetus by “the sexist character of the New Left.” Black protest undoubtedly played an important role in the development of women’s movement but the New Left, given the contradiction between its idealistic motives and its elitist nature, was the catalyst.

     

          Filled with idealism and radicalized by a succession of struggles waged for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam war during the sixties, the women found themselves part of a movement which discriminated against them in the most direct and often gross manner. Women in the movement were consigned to the role of clerk-typist and, with the development of the new sexual freedom, to the role of sex objects conveniently available to minister to the sexual needs of the male “theoreticians.” Why should this have been the pattern? Was this kind of gross discrimination against women part of the so-called Old Left and therefore a carry-over of previous practice?

     

          Not really. In the movement of old (true, at least of the Trotskyist and neo-Trotskyist movement of which I was part), women were discriminated against in more traditional ways. To obtain positions of leadership, women had to be twice as talented, twice as capable as the men. They were generally made to feel that they could never quite comprehend the intricacies of the more complex political theories. All of which is to say that the movement was far from generous to its women. However, women did play a role and because many were twice as talented and capable they did rise to prominence. It was another age and, much more important, the movement was not characterized by the kind of political and personal elitism which characterizes the New Left.

     

          The movement of the sixties was marked early by its enchantment with the more recent forms of totalitarianism. While it forswore the computerized Russian leadership as “conservative” (Kosygin and Brezhnev while malevolent are also faceless), it took up the cudgels for Mao, Ho, Kim and, better still for its romantic elitist vision, Fidel and Che. The fact that the societies ruled by these “heroes” are totally undemocratic, that freedom is non-existent, that women are particularly oppressed, did not give them pause. Quite the contrary, the virtues of China, North Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba were written about extensively, much in the manner of articles extolling Stalin as “Sun God” that appeared in Soviet Russia Today during the thirties, with just as much basis in fact.

          Added to the political elitism was the devotion to machismo. What Hemingway is for Norman Mailer, Che is for the men of the New Left. (The number of young men who walk around looking like mirror images of Che is startling, if ludicrous.) Che is the man with the gun, fighting alone against heavy odds, the ultimate guerilla. Alone, or perhaps with a small band of guerrilla fighters, he will free us all. He is endowed with all the virtues of a Hemingway hero: strong, armed, compassionate, and infinitely wise. Even the fact that he blew it (not so infinitely wise after all) did not destroy the myth.

          Filled with notions of guerrillaism and machismo, the men of the New Left made the movement a distinctly unpleasant experience for their women comrades. “Throw her off the stage and fuck her,” some of them yelled during an anti-war demonstration in Washington when one of the women was speaking. The message of male superiority was nowhere delivered as stridently as it was in the New Left. And having developed some political awareness, women in the movement became convinced of the necessity for a women’s movement to struggle for sex equality.

     

    The Women’s Liberation movement is a new one with growing influence. Its very existence is largely responsible for the liberalization of abortion laws in many states. Despite the fact that it is marred by absurdities (the media adore the very notion of bra burning) and by an unfortunate kind of righteous puritanism (one of the purposes of the movement is to free women to enjoy their sexuality not to suppress it), the movement has enormous possibilities. Kate Millett’s conclusion expresses it well:

    It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination – and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of desert we inhabit.

    Humanity is the vision that should inform the Women’s Liberation movement.

     

     

    PHYLLIS JACOBSON is co-Editor of New Politics.

  • Phil Ochs – The Struggle Continues

    Phil Ochs was, until his untimely death in 1976, one of the great American folksingers and songwriters, whose powerful lyrics — political and poetic — helped to inspire a generation. His sister Sonny Ochs has worked to keep Phil’s memory and his message alive by organizing concerts bringing together current-day folk singers, offering a mix of their own material and Phil’s. The Hurdy Gurdy Folk Music Club of New Jersey presented one of these concerts on April 10 and it was a real treat, both musically and politically.

    The participating artists were Jen Cass, John Flynn, Greg Greenway, Kim and Reggie Harris, and Magpie (Greg Artzner and Terry Leonino).

    John Flynn, introducing a powerful song he wrote about the Dover Air Force Base, where the bodies of US soldiers killed in action are brought, pointed out that we have to hold Obama to the same standard as we held George W. Bush.

    Greg Greenway performed his “Standing on the Side of Love”; the title, he explained, comes from a line he heard at a concert in Virginia supporting same-sex marriage: when it comes right down to it, someone commented, I want to be standing on the side of love.

    Jen Cass sang a moving tribute to Phil, “Standing in Your Memory,” incorporating some of his own lyrics:

    Too many martyrs and far too many dead,
    Isn’t that what you said? Somehow you let it be again
    You became…another tragedy, a casualty of war
    What were we fighting for if you Ain’t Marching Anymore?

    The Harrises — who’ve written and perform an opera on the Underground Railroad, among many other musical creations — treated us to Reggie’s virtuoso guitar-playing and Kim’s vibrant and melodic voice.

    And Magpie updated Phil’s wonderful “Love Me, I’m A Liberal” (there are many shades of political opinion in the United States, Phil explained; and one of the shadiest of these is the liberal: 10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center when it affects them personally):

    Love Me, I’m a Liberal
    By Phil Ochs
    updates by Greg Artzner & Terry Leonino

    I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
    The tears ran down my spine
    And I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy
    As though I’d lost a father of mine
    But Malcolm X got what was coming
    He got what he asked for that time
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    I went to civil rights rallies
    And I put down the old D.A.R.
    I love Oprah and Michael and Tiger
    I hope every black kid becomes a star
    But don’t talk about revolution
    That’s going a little bit too far
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    I cheered when Obama was chosen
    My faith in the system restored
    And I’m glad that they caught Bernie Madoff
    He certainly got his reward
    And I love Pakistanis and Arabs
    As long as they don’t move next door
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    Those crazies who joined the tea parties
    Should all hang their heads in shame
    Now I can’t understand how their minds work
    Way too much Glenn Beck on the brain
    But if you want socialized health care
    You must be terminally insane
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    I read MoveOn.org and Progressive
    I’ve learned to take every view
    I watch Bill Maher and Jon Stewart
    And I laugh all the way to the loo
    But when it comes to the war on terror
    There’s no one more red, white and blue
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    I vote for the Democratic Party
    Though I’m sure that Kucinich is wrong
    I attend all the Pete Seeger concerts
    He still gets me singing those songs
    And I’ll send all my money to Haiti
    But don’t ask me to come on along
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    Once I was young and impulsive
    I wore every conceivable pin
    Now it’s causes on Facebook and Twitter
    Virtual marches and sit-ins
    Ah, but I’ve grown older and wiser
    And that’s why I’m turning you in (to the department of homeland security)
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    If you have a chance to catch any of these performers, don’t miss them. And be on the look-out for the next Phil Ochs Song Night!