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  • George Clooney's Haiti — and Beyond

    George Clooney (currently in “Up in the Air”) organized on short notice a technically and musically fine two hour fund-raising telethon, “Hope for Haiti,” which was broadcast on January 22 on most networks, many cable channels, on the Web, and both in and beyond the US. Here are two samplers of the music: one and two.

    Performers included Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Bono, Rihanna, Madonna, Beyonce, Jennifer Hudson, Mary J. Blige, Sting, Shakira, Alicia Keyes, Dave Matthews, Justin Timberlake, Sheryl Crow, Coldplay, The Edge, Wyclef Jean, and many others. Strangely, most were not named, and your recognition of who was performing depended on how deeply embedded you are in current popular music, e.g. whether you can tell Madonna from Lady Gaga (who wasn’t there.)

    This was a worthy and well-intentioned endeavor, and we ought to be grateful to Clooney and the performers, who raised money for such good organizations as Partners in Health, and Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans Frontieres). As for the content, people with Movement experience will be particularly struck by Bruce Springsteen’s adaptation to the Haitian context of “We Shall Overcome,” with guitar, accordion, and trumpet. Jennifer Hudson sang a gospelized version of the Beatles’ “Let it Be”; and Wyclef Jean Gave an exhilarating performance, taking off from “Rivers of Babylon” (I’ll discuss this below).

    But, in most of the show, politics were verboten, as was anything about the history of the place. This left the audience to think that a terrible natural disaster had befallen Haiti, but ignorant of: the country’s origins in a successful slave rebellion (with US support for French efforts to crush it); more than a century of French draining the economy for the money value of the slaves they had lost; nineteen years of occupation by the US Marines; US complicity with the Duvaliers; after earlier support, exiling of Jean-Bertrand Aristide on a US plane; the banning of the left party, Lavalas; the crimes committed against the Haitian economy by neoliberal economics via such institutions as the IMF (which, amidst the earthquake announced a wage freeze for public employees in Haiti.). This all added up to an unnatural disaster: enormous poverty, flight from the countryside to the city as the result of the destruction of Haitian agriculture by US dumping (rice) and the promise of low-wage manufacturing jobs (which didn’t materialize); once crowded in the city, they put anything over their heads that they could, and of course these poor structures easily collapsed. Cutting down trees to make charcoal was one of the few ways of getting money, and that produced deforestation which produced floods. It denies history to see the US as free of responsibility for these things.

    Historians are coming to realize that very few things are simply “natural disasters.” Famines, for instance, can be made or exacerbated by governments. (Consider the English role in the 19th century Irish famine.) The earthquake would have been terrible anyplace, but because of Haiti’s impoverishment by the West, its impact on life went far beyond 7.0 on the Richter Scale. The horrors visited upon Haiti are no more an “act of god” than were the horrors of Katrina.

    Instead of the quite visible underside of the US role in Haiti , Clooney’s telethon gave us Anderson Cooper patting on the heads of little black children who had been pulled from the rubble, expressing genuine affection for them but offering a classic tableau of white paternalism: as in Hollywood, so on TV, the experience of the Other has to be passed on to us by Somebody Like Us (as in “Schindler’s List,” or “Amistad” as described in my “Black Agency in the Amistad Uprising: Or, You’ve Taken our Cinque and Gone.”). But most notable was the relative absence of Haiti itself from the music and sets (missing the color and wonder of Haitian art), conveying the accurate impression that this was something done for rather than by Haitians. There were a few Haitian performers including Jean and Emeline Michel (who sang Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross“). I was struck by the sight of Haitian singers singing (well) songs of Jamaicans Jimmy Cliff and Boney M., which reminded me of Ronald Reagan’s discovery of Africa: “You know, they’re all different countries down there.”

    The show came to a powerful and moving conclusion with Wyclef Jean singing the mournful “Rivers of Babylon.” Midway, he switches to Creole. Then, in a moment reminiscent of “Freunde, nicht dieser tone,” he brings the music to a stop and cries out, “enough! Hold up! Let’s show them how we do it where we come from,.” followed by tooting horns, drums and Jean bobbing, wrapped in the Haitian colors. A mournful song becomes a song of resistance to the fate seemingly laid down on Haiti.

    ***

    The US continues to view Haiti through a racist lens. This was shockingly clear in David Brooks’s January 14 New York Times column, “The Underlying Tragedy.” “It is time,” Brooks writes, “to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty.” What follows is pure culture-of-poverty blame-the-victim stuff, reminiscent of, among others, Moynihan on the “pathology” of the Black Family: “Haiti … suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences,” including Voodoo and “high levels of social mistrust.” “Responsibility,” he froths,”is often not internalized.” Brooks has all but told us that they are a nation of welfare queens.

    A different manifestation of this kind of thing appears in the portrayal of Haitians as constituting an unruly mob amidst “anarchy” and “chaos.” This has been reflected in a shameful US policy of giving preference to the military over relief (food and medicine) on the assumption that the military is needed to keep order. The US simply occupied the Port –au-Prince airport, set up their own air traffic control to replace the damaged original and proceeded to one of the great atrocities of this period: with priority given to US military flights, they turned away eight planes with field hospitals etc. provided by Medecins sans Frontieres. (They also yielded to high-level string pulling for the Pennsylvania governor’s plane, and, incredibly, gave priority to two planeloads of Scientology healers paid for by John Travolta). The claim that an armed military is needed before food and medicine takes us back to the era of Gustave LeBon and the even more ancient idea of ordinary people (especially non-whites) as animals, mindless and selfish, predisposed to riot. This may yet happen, but only because authority has demonstrated again and again how unworthy it is of popular trust. Meantime, belying the stereotype, most Haitians patiently queue.

    This takes us a long way beyond George Clooney. But both in popular culture and in foreign policy this country desperately needs to re-examine the lenses through which it views the non-white world.

  • Scott Brown's Win in Context

    To put the Massachusetts Senate win of Republican Scott Brown in context…

         — People are fed up w/ corrupt Democratic politicians: Indicted, Chuck Turner (councilman), Dianne Wilkerson (state senator), Sal DiMasi (former Speaker of the House); convicted and disbarred, Thomas Finneran (former Speaker of the House)

         — Mass. has had a series of Republican or right wing Democrat governors and would-be’s (William Weld, Paul Celucci, Jane Swift, John Silber , Ed King, Mitt Romney). All of these are or pretended to be socially liberal, while being very conservative fiscally

         — I think Brown was able to scare many people into thinking that their health ins. rates might rise. And this  is not irrational. With no public option (thanks to Brown’s Repub. friends and bluedog Dems), what is to prevent the insurance companies from jacking up prices, esp. since 35 million more people – many of whom are indigent – will be on the rolls?

         — And Obama’s close association with Geitner, Emanuel, and Summers only angers people. Goldman Sachs is a bigger beneficiary of Obama’s regime than the jobless or someone facing foreclosure.

  • A Hostile Biography of Leon Trotsky

    Robert Service. Trotsky: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. 600 pages, including end notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. Robert Service’s study is quite readable. The prose is clear, and the story interesting. It follows the basic outline sketched by Trotsky himself in his literary masterpiece My Life, supplemented by Isaac Deutscher’s brilliant trilogy – The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast. This provides a coherent structure, which Service seeks in a workman-like manner to compress into a more succinct, relatively fast-paced narrative, while giving it his own sharp twist to the right. In some ways — not in all, as we shall see — Service proves himself a capable historian. He spent many years researching Lenin, producing a capable if increasingly hostile three-volume political summary, “capped” by a sadly inferior (though widely lauded) biography. This has given him a fair sense of the shape of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement leading up to the 1917 Revolution. This stands him in good stead as he contextualizes much of Trotsky’s story. In addition to this, and the use of a considerable amount of secondary literature, he actually spent time mining the archives and has come up with new material. Service makes much of this archival exploration, promising new revelations supposedly culled from earlier drafts of My Life and other writings. While there are, in fact, no stunningly defamatory “revelations” forthcoming from the archives, there are insights offered from – for example – correspondence between Trotsky and his first wife Alexandra. A youthful Trotsky, imprisoned for revolutionary activities, writes to his lover: “Mikhailovski in an article about Lassalle says that one can be more frank with the woman one loves than with oneself; this is to a certain degree true but such frankness is possible only in a personal conversation but not always, only in special and exceptional circumstances.” Engaging with such correspondence, Service comments aptly: “Then and later he favored extreme images and striking turns of phrase. This was no artificial invention. It flowed from the personality of someone who did not feel alive unless he could communicate with others.” (52, 53) A Remarkable Sloppiness At the same time, there is a remarkable sloppiness that crops up in this book. For example, Service speculates that Trotsky’s father hired a rabbi to teach his young son the Torah (24) – but his source is the short account by Max Eastman in Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth, which makes it clear that the father hired a private tutor — one who had a beard, to be sure, but who was an agnostic scholar, not a rabbi. This matches the relatively secular inclinations that Service acknowledges were characteristic of Trotsky’s father. It is odd that, with no more evidence to cite than Eastman, Service converts this into Jewish religious instruction. At times, his “facts” are simply wrong. Service tells us that Trotsky “spoke out against ‘individual terror’ in 1909 when the Socialist-Revolutionaries murdered the police informer Evno Azev, who had penetrated their Central Committee.” (113) But this is impossible. Azev most definitely was a police spy who held a position of immense authority within the Socialist-Revolutionary organization: coordinating the terrorist assassinations carried out by the Socialist-Revolutionaries. This was a tactic which Trotsky and other Marxists of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party absolutely opposed. But Azev himself, after being exposed, escaped to Germany, where he was imprisoned until 1917 and apparently died of kidney disease in 1918. Why would Trotsky denounce a murder that never happened? Of course he didn’t. But it certainly undermines one’s confidence in Service’s ability to get things right. There are also examples of important facts being left out.. One of the most disconcerting comes up in Service’s seemingly detailed account of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. The Bolshevik Revolution had come to power promising “peace, bread, land.” One of the highest priorities for the new soviet government was to extricate Russia from the devastation of the First World War, with Trotsky as the chief peace negotiator with the Germans, “moving like a weaver’s shuttle between Brest-Litovsk and the Russian capital,” as Service nicely phrases it. (208) The German military sought to impose a very nasty settlement, which the revolutionaries were loathe to accept. Some argued for waging “revolutionary war” against German imperialism while Lenin insisted that the regime must sign the German peace terms, however odious. Trotsky took a middle position – “neither peace nor war” – in hopes that through drawing the negotiations out and peppering them with widely-publicized revolutionary speeches, the proletarian ferment visible in Central Europe would be transformed into workers’ uprisings. Service notes that Trotsky first won a majority (even the anxious and skeptical Lenin went along). But then, he tells us, Lenin somehow – presumably through persuasive conversations and lobbying among his comrades – was finally able to secure a majority for making peace. How did this happen? What Service inexplicably fails to mention is that the German military, losing patience, launched a massive and successful offensive which demonstrated the hollowness of the “revolutionary war” notion and the inadequacy of Trotsky’s compromise position. The German High Command then put forward even more odious demands which Lenin now had little difficulty persuading a majority to accept. There are additional, surprising examples of minor sloppiness. For example, André Breton, the poet and theorist of surrealism who sympathized with Trotsky, is consistently but incorrectly identified as a “surrealist painter.” (399, 453, 461) The anti-Trotskyist Bertram Wolfe is mistaken for Trotsky adherent Bernard Wolfe (441). At one point Service tells us: “Instead of calling his first son after his own father, he and Natalya had chosen the name Sergei.” (201) But of course Sergei Sedov was the second son and Lev Sedov the first, as Service himself documents elsewhere in the book. The Story Service Does Not Tell Regardless of one’s political standpoint, serious engagement with Trotsky’s life and ideas generally results in one being more profoundly and positively impressed than Service would have us be. Christopher Hitchens – breaking from Trotskyist and revolutionary perspectives, and tacking closer to the Hoover Institution’s conservative orientation – has not been able to stop himself from insisting, in a recent debate with Service, that Trotsky was “a person of immense moral and physical courage . . . who . . . wrote pamphlets and made speeches against the menace of Hitlerism, which are much better and were made much earlier than any of Winston Churchill's.” Irving Howe, an former Trotskyist who avoided tacking quite so far rightward, felt compelled to insist thirty years ago that Trotsky “must be regarded as one of the great writers of his time,” and went on to insist that “had Trotsky’s advice been followed … the world might have been spared some of the horrors of our century; at the very least, the German working class would have gone down in battle the than allowing the Nazi thugs to take power without resistance.” But this is not the story that Service wants to tell. There is a significant amount of anti-Trotsky editorializing in this book, especially concentrated in the introductory and concluding sections, but interlarded as sniping assertions, speculations, and projections throughout. The book’s purpose, Service insists, “is to dig up the buried life” of a man whose “self-serving account of Stalin and Stalinism deeply influenced the discourse of writers both left and right,” but who had himself demonstrated a “lust for dictatorship and terror,” and, in fact, positively “reveled in terror.” (The faint-hearted need not fear – the book never really presents such raw lust and reveling!) Trotsky’s character, according to Service, involved the following traits, to take some of those offered in the book’s index: alienating others, arrogance, aversion to sentimentality, bossiness, careless about people’s attitudes to him, dislike of losing at games, egotism, impatience with stupidity, insensitivity, perfectionism, prickliness, Puritanism, temper, vanity, self-centered, will to dominate. (4, 499, 497, 597) Nor is this all wrong. Isaac Deutscher also affirmed that Trotsky sometimes displayed a “prickly and overbearing character and a lack of talent for teamwork.” Trotsky’s Bolshevik comrade Anatoly Lunacharsky offered an acidly frank pen-portrait in 1923: “His colossal arrogance and an inability or unwillingness to show any human kindness or to be attentive to people, the absence of that charm which always surrounded Lenin, condemned Trotsky to a certain loneliness.” Others, including Service, indicate that Trotsky could indeed show kindness and great charm, and that over time he mellowed somewhat – and yet these less endearing characteristics never vanished. From the archives he digs out correspondence to Trotsky’s second wife Natalya from Lev Sedov, Trotsky’s capable revolutionary-activist son, complaining in 1936 “that all of Papa’s failings are getting worse with age: his intolerance, hot temper, teasing, even crudity and desire to offend,” and that “Papa never recognizes when he’s in the wrong. That’s why he can’t bear criticism. When something is said or written to him with which he disagrees he either ignores it entirely or gets back with a harsh reply.” (230, 431-432) Yet other qualities that Lunacharsky stressed also persisted – “the remarkable coherence and literary skill of his phrasing, the richness of imagery, scalding irony, his soaring pathos, his rigid logic, clear as polished steel,” and the fact that “there is not a drop of vanity in him, he is totally indifferent to any title or to the trappings of power.” And yet, Lunacharsky concluded, “Trotsky treasures his historical role and would probably make any personal sacrifice . . . in order to go down in human memory surrounded by the aureole of a genuine revolutionary leader.” (Some see this latter quality as a flaw, others as a strength.) While there is overlap between much of this and aspects of Service’s description, essential elements in his negative characterization (charges of hypocrisy, ingrained authoritarianism, “reveling in terror”) seem to flow from the author’s desire to turn people against a serious consideration of Trotsky’s orientation, not from the research he has done. It precedes that research and is rooted in his ideological and institutional commitments. While Service is not up-front about his own politics, in the first sentence of the book’s preface he forthrightly describes the Hoover Institution as his “base.” For many years it has been widely known for its conservative orientation, and Service enjoys the status of a highly esteemed Senior Fellow there. Service and the Hoover Institution The Hoover Institution’s mission statement affirms “the principles of individual, economic, and political freedom; private enterprise; and representative government were fundamental to the vision of the Institution's founder,” the conservative U.S. President Herbert Hoover, who believed deeply in laissez-faire capitalism. “By collecting knowledge, generating ideas, and disseminating both, the Institution seeks to secure and safeguard peace, improve the human condition, and limit government intrusion into the lives of individuals.” The influence on Service of this perspective was suggested during his Trotsky debate with Christopher Hitchens at the Hoover Institution itself. “With a centralized state-run economy,” he argued, even with “a somewhat more astute character such as Trotsky, . . . it was an absolute certainty that you couldn't . . . get the kind of results that you wanted for popular consumption such as you can have under a market economy.” Nonetheless, the power of the historical record compels Service to a tell us what Trotsky and other revolutionaries actually thought and attempted and accomplished. In describing the months leading up to the October/November Revolution of 1917, describing the process of convergence of the most committed revolutionaries into the Bolshevik party, he gives a true sense of the realities. He quotes the future Bolshevik Moisei Uritsky who was powerfully impressed (as were many) by Trotsky, freshly returned from exile and showing himself to be one of the most eloquent, passionate, brilliant mass orators: “Here’s a great revolutionary who’s arrived and one gets the feeling that Lenin, however clever he may be, is starting to fade next to the genius of Trotsky.” Service writes: Lenin felt no worry about having personal rivals on the political far left. He needed and wanted active, talented associates such as Trotsky. He and Trotsky agreed on a broad agenda for revolution in Russia. The Provisional Government had to be done away with and a “workers’ government” instituted. The era of European socialist revolution had arrived. The Great War would be terminated only when the far leftists came to power and repudiated capitalism, imperialism, nationalism and militarism. There had to be immediate basic reform in Russia. The peasantry should take over the land of the Imperial family, the state and the Orthodox Church. Workers should control the factories. . . . All spoke approvingly of the power of the masses. There was agreement that workers and peasants should be encouraged to remake life as they wanted. Factories, offices and farms ought to be reorganized. Differences remained among Bolsheviks – and they were about to be brought to the surface the moment the party seized power. But between February and October the disputes were containable. . . . [T]he Provisional Government [of pro-capitalist and moderate socialist politicians] had to be overthrown in favor of a revolutionary administration. Fundamental social and economic reform would then be implemented. The European war would be brought to an end. Revolution in Russia would be followed by the overturning of the ruling classes throughout Europe. Failure to act would be a disaster. The counter-revolutionary elements in the former Russian Empire were waiting for their opportunity to strike. (167-169) All of this gives a good sense of how things were – in the thinking of Lenin, Trotsky, and others who rallied to make the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The problem with this, from Service’s standpoint (and that of the Hoover Institution), is that the revolutionary socialist goals are simply impossible to achieve. Presumably, the only reasonable path involves supporting private enterprise and limiting government intrusion into our social life, as explained in the Hoover mission statement. Violation of such strictures results in chaos, and as a consequence would-be revolutionaries, still determined to force their ideals onto an unwilling society, inevitably construct a totalitarian order. This defines the story that Service feels he must tell. Contrary to the expectations of Lenin and Trotsky, and despite the upwelling of global insurgencies, socialist revolutions of the workers and peasants were not triumphant outside of Russia. The isolation of this vast but backward country in a hostile capitalist world, the brutalization of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the destructive impact of all these factors on the Russian economy combined with the revolutionaries’ own mistakes and managerial inexperience – the result being a horrendous crisis, dramatically eroding popular confidence in the revolutionary regime. A “temporary” Communist party dictatorship was consequently established to secure stability until the Soviet republic could be rescued by the “imminent” World Revolution that never quite materialized. Many revolutionaries died or de-radicalized in the five years after 1917, although both idealistic and opportunistic elements from the larger population flocked to the new party in power. In many cases, the surviving Communists and newer Communists – if they were not in the “rank-and-file” – became corrupted with their exclusive access to power and privilege. Lenin died in the midst of the crisis, in alliance with Trotsky pushing against the expanding, increasingly privileged party-and-state bureaucracy that ruled in the name of Communism. Lenin’s last struggle was too little, too late. It fell to Trotsky to become the primary spokesman and symbol of the Left Opposition. There were earlier left-wing oppositional currents which Trotsky and Lenin had short-sightedly helped vanquish. There would also be later ones – the more frightened and ineffectual “Right Opposition” led by Nikolai Bukharin, and the more militant yet hopeless stirrings associated with Mikhail Riutin. But Trotsky’s opposition – whatever its limitations and contradictions – represented the most impressive, consistent, persistent alternative to the bureaucratic tyranny and murderous policies that triumphed under Stalin. After its thoroughgoing defeat in the late 1920s, and particularly after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, Trotsky sought to build up a principled revolutionary current in the world Communist movement (the parties associated with the Communist International, or Third International). When he concluded that the bureaucratic dictatorship in the Soviet Union could be replaced by democratic soviets of the workers and peasants only through a revolutionary overthrow, he drew those from various countries who agreed with him into the small but uncompromising Fourth International, whose small parties and grouplets sought to provide “a stainless banner” to the workers and the oppressed, in hopes that the anticipated new wave of wars and revolutions would draw masses of workers and oppressed peoples to the revolutionary Marxist, Bolshevik-Leninist perspective that he and his comrades sought to preserve. Service’s attitude toward all of this is marked by utter contempt, asserting again and again that Trotsky “shared many of Stalin’s assumptions,” specifically: “He called for state economic planning and offered nothing that was essentially different from Soviet practices except the assurance that he would do things less violently and more democratically.” (357) It is obvious why a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution might be horrified over Trotsky’s commitment to state economic planning (this Trotsky certainly did share with Stalin), but one wonders at Service’s dismissive attitude toward making economic planning less violent and more democratic. Trotsky and NEP: Service’s Misinformation Unfortunately, one of the many bits of misinformation conveyed in this biography is Service’s assertion that Trotsky, “in his autobiography of 1930 would represent himself as a constant critic of the basic official measures introduced in the 1920s,” particularly the concessions to market economics represented by the New Economic Policy (NEP) which stretched from 1921 to 1928. Service correctly points out: “Trotsky never called for the NEP to be abandoned even while calling for certain features to be modified or removed. He accepted that the Soviet economy would require a private sector for the foreseeable future.” (349) The problem with what Service says is that Trotsky indicates the same in his 1930 autobiography. There he notes that Stalin and other critics in the Communist Party leadership “discovered that my stand at the time was one of ‘under-appreciation of the peasantry,’ and one almost hostile toward the New Economic Policy. This was really the basis of all the subsequent attacks on me. In point of fact, of course, the roots of the discussion were quite the opposite…” When Lenin “shaped the first and very guarded theses on the change to the New Economic Policy,” Trotsky continued (and Service documents), “I subscribed to them at once.” Lenin and Trotsky favored, for this period, a form of mixed economy under workers’ control (until new possibilities of socialist development would be opened by workers’ revolutions in more advanced industrial countries). At the same time, the two agreed to “a bloc against bureaucracy in general,” as Trotsky put it in his autobiography. This was to become a key pillar in the program of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, sustained when he joined with others (including Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, for a time Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krupskaya) in what came to be known as the United Opposition. “The Leningrad workers were aroused by the political trend in favor of the rich peasants – the so-called kulaks – and a policy aimed at one-country socialism.” This attitude was certainly embraced by the Opposition. But never was it advanced in opposition to the basic measures represented by NEP – nor does Trotsky seek to give this impression in his autobiography. Another key pillar of Trotsky’s program, while leading the Left Opposition and afterward, was continuing (in the spirit of Lenin’s Bolsheviks) to tie the fate of the Soviet Union to the spread of socialist revolutions to other countries. Service complains that in his revolutionary internationalism Trotsky “offered no analysis of how far he was willing to risk the existence of the Soviet state.” (357) Here again it is the biographer, not Trotsky, who seems to be at one with Stalin, who insisted that – regardless of what happened with the world revolution, the Communist regime could and should focus on building “socialism in one country.” Trotsky – like all Marxists up to the 1920s – understood that socialism could not be built in a single economically backward country. The ability of the workers and peasants of Russia to move forward to a better life, and to the thoroughgoing economic democracy that socialism was supposed to be, was dependent on their moving forward on the same path as, and receiving life-giving assistance from, the working classes making socialist revolutions in the more advanced industrial countries. Naturally, the anti-colonial revolutions in Asia and Africa would also be essential to bringing down global capitalism. Insurgencies in the “backward” regions would feed insurgencies in the “advanced” economic centers – which would then further assist the march of progress in the “backward regions. This had been the whole point of devoting so much time and energy and resources to building up the Communist International and its member parties. Revolutionary Internationalism: Too Difficult for Service to Grasp The fact that Service (along with many others) doesn’t quite “get it” is suggested in the way he discusses Trotsky’s revolutionary internationalism, especially in the post-1917 period. It is almost as if one were discussing fashion, rather like one’s taste for “political correctness” or one’s taste in ties: “Trotsky remained a vigorous internationalist. He wrote endlessly about the need for revolution in Europe and Asia. This too was hardly an unusual standpoint to take in the first years after the October revolution, but Trotsky held to it with remarkable firmness. . . . He remained averse to either extolling or deprecating the qualities of particular peoples and believed that this was the proper approach of a Marxist.” (207) This last comment is true but beside the point. Quite simply, without the triumph of revolutionary internationalism, the revolution in Russia would be defeated. In a later attempt to get it right, Service opines that the reason for building “a fresh global organization dedicated to bringing down capitalism and promoting revolution,” the Communist International, was rooted in the concern that “so long as they ruled the sole extreme-left European state they would remain a likely target for attack by a coalition of capitalist powers.” This conception was shared by Stalin and his temporary ally Nikolai Bukharin in the mid-to-late 1920s. But Trotsky responded: “The capitalist world shows us by its export and import figures that it has other instruments of persuasion than those of military intervention.” Against them he quoted Lenin: “So long as our Soviet Republic remains an isolated borderland surrounded by the entire capitalist world, so long will it be an absolutely ridiculous fantasy and utopianism to think of our complete economic independence and of the disappearance of any of our dangers.” Warning against the notion that “the USSR can perish from military intervention but never from its own economic backwardness,” he insisted that so long as the Soviet Union existed within a global capitalist economy, it would not be possible for it to achieve socialism. This had been a perspective shared by Lenin and the early Bolsheviks – but the new bureaucratic power elite crystallizing around Stalin, denying any break with Lenin’s thought, embraced the notion that it was possible to achieve “socialism in one country.” In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky deepened his analysis by referring to the perspective advanced by Karl Marx nine decades earlier: “A development of the productive forces is the absolutely necessary practical premise [of Communism], because without it want is generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive.” The reference to “all the old crap” is to brutal competition, inequality, exploitation, oppression – qualities that characterized Stalin’s version of “socialism” no less than capitalism. Trotsky elaborated: The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the Soviet bureaucracy. It “knows” who is to get something and who has to wait. None of this comes through in the dozen sentences that Service devotes to The Revolution Betrayed, the 1936 culmination of more than a decade of analytical effort and one of the keystones of Trotsky’s theoretical heritage. He remains remarkably dismissive of the passionate critique that the object of his biography advances through the 1930s. “The bureaucracy can no longer uphold its position in any other way than by undermining the foundations of economic and cultural progress,” according to Trotsky. “The struggle for totalitarian power resulted in the annihilation of the best men of the country by its most degraded scoundrels.” His proposal was for a political revolution initiating the following changes: “the establishment of the widest Soviet democracy and the legalization of the struggle of parties; the liquidation of the never-changing bureaucratic caste by electing all functionaries; the mapping out of all economic plans with the direct participation of the population itself and in its interests; the elimination of the crying and insulting gaps of inequality; the liquidation of ranks, orders, and all other distinctions of the new Soviet nobility; a radical change of external politics in the spirit of principled internationalism.” In the face of all this and more, Service shrugs: “He was no more likely than Stalin to create a society of humanitarian socialism even though he claimed and assumed he would. … His confident assaults on Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s distracted attention from the implausibility of his own alternative strategy.” (497) The reason for this, apparently, was the authoritarian role he had played in the crisis of civil war and economic collapse from 1918 to 1922. “The Bolshevik party had treated even workers and peasants savagely whenever they engaged in active opposition,” Service writes. “Trotsky’s earlier ideas about ‘proletarian’ self-liberation were like old coins that had dropped unnoticed out of his pocket.” (267) For seriously revolutionary-minded people, Trotsky’s trajectory in these years raises important questions – but for Service it slams all doors firmly shut. He seems to use what happened in this intense five-year period to dismiss everything that Trotsky thinks, says and does afterward, and to question all that went before. Contrasting Service and Deutscher This is in stark contrast to the interpretation offered by Deutscher, who comments that “in the first half of 1922 Trotsky still spoke primarily as the Bolshevik disciplinarian; in the second half he was already in conflict with the disciplinarians,” coming “closer to the Workers Opposition and kindred groups” – not accepting what he believed to be utopian, unrealistic aspects of their positions, but “acknowledging the rational side of their revulsion against authority. … He began to protest against the excesses of centralism as these made themselves felt. . . . He clashed with the party ‘apparatus’ as the apparatus grew independent of the party and subjected party and state to itself.” Deutscher emphasizes what he perceives as the growing cleavage between “the power and the dream” – and the deepening contradiction felt by the Bolsheviks who had created a machine of power to make the dream a reality. “They could not dispense with power if they were to strive for the fulfillment of their ideals; but now their power came to oppress and overshadow their ideals.” Deutscher added: “Nobody had in 1920-1 gone farther than Trotsky in demanding that every interest and aspiration should be wholly subordinated to the ‘iron dictatorship.’ Yet he was the first of the Bolshevik chiefs to turn against the machine of that dictatorship when it began to devour the dream.” Service will have none of this. But he does not succeed in providing a persuasive and coherent alternative perspective. Rejecting both the dream and the power, he can find no redeeming qualities in the subject to which he devotes more than 500 pages. 1. Max Eastman, Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth (New York: Greenberg, 1925), 26-27. 2.Nurit Schleifman, “Azef, Evno Fishelevich (1869-1918),” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution, ed. by Harold Shukman (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988), 303-304. 3.Trotsky Per Hitchens and Service,” July 28, 2009, http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uk/52383062.html.. 4. Irving Howe, Leon Trotsky (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 136, 140. The writings referred to here can be found in Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971). 5. Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, with an introduction by Isaac Deutscher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 21, 62, 65, 67, 68. Service chooses not to acknowledge Trotsky’s poignant description of his son, Leon Sedov – Son, Friend, Fighter, written on behalf of himself and Natalya upon a death clouded by mysterious circumstances, in which Trotsky says “he was our son, truthful, devoted, loving, . . . he had, as no one else on earth, become part of our life, entwined in all its roots, our co-thinker, our co-worker, our guard, our counselor, our friend.” (Leon Trotsky, Portraits Political and Personal [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977], 190.) 6. “Mission Statement,” Hoover Institution, http://www.hoover.org/about/mission; “Trotsky Per Hitchens and Service,” cited in note 3. 7. Leon Trotsky, My Life, An Attempt at an Autobiography (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 462, 466, 479, 521. 8. Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 47, 49, 48. 9. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), 56, 112. 10. “The Totalitarian Defeatist in the Kremlin,” Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1937-38 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976), 447; “Answers to the New York Herald-Tribune,” Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1936-37 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978), 413. 11. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1959), 51, 53, 54, 78.

  • Dennis Brutus

    Dennis Brutus – celebrated poet, anti-apartheid fighter and lifelong socialist – died last week. As a student activist at the University of Pittsburgh in the mid-2000s, I was privileged to know Dennis in the short time before he departed for the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he spent his last years. Throughout the world and for a long time to come, Dennis’ outstanding contributions to peace and justice struggles will be recounted. In Pittsburgh, these included spearheading the Pittsburgh Social Forum, organizing with local Wobblies to oppose sweatshop manufacturing of Pirates apparel, and a great many more. Two in particular are prominent in my remembrance, revealing just what enabled him to so profoundly affect the lives of so many. The first was his involvement in Palestine solidarity work. Dennis made no secret of the parallels he saw between Israel’s system of oppression and the South Africa’s former regime. A member of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, he readily agreed to speak at an event launching Pitt Students for Justice in Palestine’s divestment campaign. This at a time when figures like Joseph Massad were under heavy attack from the Zionist Right, and state legislators were pushing for adoption of David Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights”. The Pitt News even refused to cover the event. Dennis appeared nevertheless, assuring all present that history was on their side (save, of course, for the inevitable heckler, effortlessly shrugged off). Around a year later, I was recruited on a few hours’ notice to stand in for someone on a panel on global justice issues. Dennis shared the panel. Also present some manner of Friedmanite from an area college who assured the (receptive!) audience that mainstream critics of neoliberalism – Stiglitz was named – were “angry” individuals and nothing more. Yet our therapist-cum-economist was himself visibly perturbed at Dennis’ presentation, which was thunderous and moralistic in the best sense of the word. (Later, in fact, the moderator informed me that the other panelist had expressed to her his concerns about Dennis even before everyone was seated.) My own brief and ill-prepared spiel passed without much notice. I had Dennis to thank for salvaging this one for our side. These both were fairly mundane undertakings. Certainly Dennis had participated in – and endured – things ultimately much greater. But he understood the need for patient, diligent movement building, the stuff that both made and was made from more spectacular events, good and bad. That he lived to embody this truth gave him an indisputable authority and even, I would venture, a certain intuitive grasp of humanity. “My art is my activism,” goes a popular cliché. Perhaps Dennis would have embraced it, but only out of modesty. His poetry is a gift to the oppressed, to be sure. But his whole life was the life of a revolutionary. He was a comrade to the last. May there be more like him.

  • Worth reading: “The Old Man” by Christopher Hitchens

    If you missed “The Old Man,” Christopher Hitchens’ review of Verso’s reissue of Isaac Deutscher’s trilogy about Leon Trotsky, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200407/hitchens do read it. The review describes Trotsky's accomplishments not generally known, for example, his activities as a brilliant war correspondent in the Balkans. But most important of all is the discussion of Trotsky’s polemics against the communist policy in pre-Hitler Germany. Trotsky warned that in communist policy the real enemy was not the Nazis but social democracy. Naming this as a catastrophic error, Trotsky called for a united front of social democrats and communists against the Nazis. If Trotsky’s policy had been followed we might have been spared the horrors of Nazism. Hitchens quotes Irving Howe as saying that these polemics by Trotsky were the greatest polemics of all time.

  • News update: Mexican government to meet with electrical workers, mediators

    The Mexican Secretary of the Interior will meet with the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) and a group of mediators tonight (December 16) some months since President Felipe Calderón liquidated the state-owned Light and Power Company, seized the facilities, and fired of the 44,000 workers. The union, which has sought in the courts the return of all workers to their jobs, has more modest goals for these negotiations, according to general secretary Martín Esparza. The union will focus on the return of personal belongings taken from the workers during the seizure of the plants, payments to a savings fund, and the payments of the Christmas bonus as guaranteed by contract and law. While it originally sought to win back all of the workers' jobs, with the government’s intransigence the union has been forced to change its strategy. The union now seeks mediation and negotiation with the government, asking that the Federal Electrical Commission (CFE), the state-owned successor company, hire 20,000 workers who have not accepted their termination and severance pay. The Latest Blow The latest blow against the union was the ruling on December 11 by Federal Judge Guillermina Coutiño Mata, which denied the Mexican Electrical Workers Union’s petition for an injunction (amparo) to stop the liquidation of the Light and Power Company. The judge declared that President Felipe Calderón had acted in accordance with the law when he liquidated the company because of what he said was its inefficiency and high cost, because in doing so he was putting the collective economic interests of all Mexicans ahead of the individual interests of the employees. Both parties have ten days to appeal the judge’s ruling, and the union plans to appeal to the next highest level, a collegiate tribunal where the case will be heard by a panel of judges. Union attorney Nestor de Buen says that from there he believes the case will go to the Mexican Supreme Court where he believes the matter will be decided. Judge Coutiño Mata did not rule on claims that the government had violated some labor laws, saying that those complaints would be heard by the proper authority, which is the Federal Labor Board (JFCA). Union leader Martín Esparza told workers that despite the ruling the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) would continue to engage in powerful peaceful actions. “We remain firm,” said Esparza. “We are a peaceful, citizens’ movement with great power, with clear demands, and with ingenuity. We will continue with our national and our international alliances.” International Labor Solidarity The SME has been strongly supported by several Mexican unions as well as by other unions from around the world. Last week a delegation of U.S. and Canadian labor union leaders visited Mexico to show their solidarity with fired electrical workers of the former Light and Power Company and to tell Mexican President Felipe Calderón it was not too late to negotiate a just resolution to this crisis. The delegation was led by Hasson Yussef, secretary treasurer of the Canadian Labor Confederation (CLC), and by Stanley Gacek, associate director of the International Department of the AFL-CIO. The group included the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP) of Canada, the Utility Workers Union, and the United Steel Workers (USW), which represents workers in both the Canada and the United States, and the independent United Electrical Workers Union which represents U.S. workers. The U.S.-Canadian trade union delegation expressed its solidarity with the SME members and their families and criticized the Mexican government for violating its own constitution and laws, for violating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and for failing to live up to the standards of the International Labor Organization (ILO), as well as criticizing human rights violations. While international labor solidarity raises the morale of Mexican workers, it has not been able to move the Mexican government. The Darkening Horizon The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) and its members certainly face a darkening horizon. Time alone has taken its toll. After two months, the government’s liquidation of the company appears to be a fait accompli. The Federal Electrical Commission (CFE) and its loyal Sole Union of Electrical Workers (SUTERM), supported by hundreds of military electricians, moved in, took over the facilities and have successfully operated them now for two months, providing electricity to Mexico City and several surrounding states with only some occasional blackouts in limited areas. Meanwhile some 62 percent of the 44,000 workers have accepted their terminations and severance pay and gone on to seek other jobs. At the same time the union’s legal strategy appears to have failed, at least so far, as has its political strategy of attempting to get the Mexican Legislature to challenge the president’s action as unconstitutional. While the union has led impressive mass demonstration and work stoppages, with the holiday season now beginning, it is unlikely that it will be able to carry out another mass action until the Christmas season ends on Three Kings Day, January 6. So the union will lose momentum. Finally, as if all of that were not enough, the Mexican Labor Board (JFCA) declared on December 2 that Martín Esparza was not the general secretary of the union because his election has been fraudulent. Esparza has called for new union elections without the participation of the 62% of the workers who have accepted their severance pay. While in the courts and in the legislature the Mexican Electrical Workers Union continues to call for a reversal of the government’s decision to liquidate the company, its new practical bargaining position represents a strategic retreat. The union now seeks to represent only 20,000 of the total of 44,000 former Light and Power workers and it does not seek to return them to their old jobs, but rather find them a place with the new employer, the Federal Electrical Commission (CFE). At the same time, it argues that the Mexican Electrical Workers Union should represent those workers in their dealings with the new employer. That demand will surely be rejected by the rival Sole Union of Electrical Workers (SUTERM) which now represents all workers in that company. Negotiations The negotiations that will take place tonight involve Mexican Electrical Workers Union is seeking to have a group of “notables,” that is, of prominent public persons, asked to mediate the discussions with the Calderón government. Among the mediators are: José Narro, rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); Enrique Villa, director of Mexico’s Polytechnic Institute; together with leaders of two of country’s major political parties, Carlos Navarrete of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and Gustavo Madero of the National Action Party (PAN). As part of its turn to mediation, the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) ended the hunger strike being carried out by 10 women and five men in front of the Federal Electrical Commission (CFE) on December 9. The 15 hunger strikers had taken water, honey and saline solution for 17 days in protest of the government actions. The union said, however, that while it was ending the hunger strike it was not ending its sit-in there. Chronology of conflict between the Mexican Government and the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) [Since October 11 there have been virtually continuous marches and demonstrations, many legal actions, and legislative discussions and proposals. We give here some of the most important dates.] September 10, 2009 – Felipe Calderón’s Secretary of Labor, Javier Lozano, declares that there have been irregularities in the Mexican Electrical Workers Union’s election process. September 28, 2009 – Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) warns that Felipe Calderón’s government has plans to seize the Light and Power Company electrical facilities. SME calls for support from other unions and movements. October 5, 2009 – Mexican Secretary of Labor Javier Lozano refuses to recognize Martín Esparza, general secretary, and other union officers of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), declaring their election invalid. Union is left without a legally recognized leadership. October 11, 2009 – Felipe Calderón government sends Federal police to seize Light and Power Company facilities, liquidates the company, and fires 44,000 workers, which effectively eliminates the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME). President Calderón states that the company is being eliminated because it is inefficient. October 15, 2009 – More than 150,000 Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) members and families, other labor unions and social movements march to protest government’s seizure of plants, liquidation of company, and rally in the Zócalo, the national plaza. October 31, 2009 – Federal Judge Guillermina Coutiño Mata temporarily suspends the dissolution of the Light and Power Company. Labor Secretary Javier Lozano says the judges decision will not stop the government from continuing to terminate workers and give them their severance pay. November 11, 2009 – Mexican Electrical Workers (SME) calls upon other unions and social movements to participate in a national work stoppage and unions and workers in many parts of the country stop work and engage in protests. December 2, 2009 – The Federal Board of Conciliation and Arbitration declared void Martín Esparza’s election as general secretary of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME). December 4, 2009 – Mexican Electrical Workers summons Mexican unions and social movements to a “symbolic taking of Mexico City” to protest the government’s action in seizing electrical facilities, liquidating the Light and Power Company and firing 44,000 workers. Tens of thousands of workers join in the “taking of Mexico City” with marches and a protest rally at the Monument of the Revolution. December 11, 2009 – Federal Judge Guillermina Coutiño Mata denies the Mexican Electrical Workers Union’s petition for an injunction to stop the liquidation of the Light and Power Company. December 14, 2009 – Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) celebrates its 95th anniversary with cultural events and continued protests. December 16, 2009 – Government agrees to meet with Mexican Electrical Workers Union and a group of mediators.

  • All the news that's fit to print?

    "All the news that's fit to print" is, of course, the slogan of the New York Times. But who determines what's "fit" and why? We read much liberal hand-wringing about what will become of democracy without daily newspapers and reporters who serve as watchdogs of government. We need an independent press, for sure. But we don't have one. Consider today's post on Doug Ireland's blog, about a young Honduran LGBT activist, Walter Trochez, who was assassinated. Ireland quotes Trochez's open letter describing the increase in "hate crimes and homophobia towards LGTB as a result of the civic-religious-military coup in Honduras.” http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2009/12/honduran-gay-activist-walte… What are the odds the NYT will cover this story? And compare the (infrequent) mish-mash the NYT dishes out about Honduras with Paul Street's description on Znet of the US role: "Obama has responded with pronounced imperial ambiguity toward the blatantly illegal coup, which was of course carried out by U.S.-trained and U.S. funded military forces and conducted with U.S.-supplied military equipment." http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21909 It's not just analysis that we don't receive in the mass media. We are also starved of information. Liberal lamentations about newspapers going out of business rarely get to this problem – and the reason people turn to the internet and alternative media. With our new website, New Politics provides information and analysis you won't find elsewhere. Subscriptions cover only a small portion of our costs, and we're in the midst of the annual fund drive that supports publication of the print edition (twice a year) and this website. If you have not already made your contribution, do donate now: http://newpol.org/donate Then feel free to wring your hands over the decline of the mass media.

  • Propaganda or reportage? The New York Times and education reform

    The New York Times provides a steady diet of glowing PR about the neoliberal policies implemented throughout the world to defund, privatize, and fragment public control of education. Two key projects are charter schools (designed to dismantle public school systems and replace them with individual schools or privately-owned and controlled networks) and “fast track” programs to eliminate traditional teacher education (deskilling teaching and allowing standardized tests to dictate what is taught.) Each country tweaks the neoliberal policies, but the project has been implemented in every country in the world (except for Finland and North Vietnam, I’m told by one researcher). Here in the US, “fast track” teacher certification is exemplified by Teach for America (TFA). Here’s how the NYT “covers” TFA: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/teac… As for charter schools, here’s the NYT’s “reportage”: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/charter_s… The NYT's coverage of education accepts, uncritically, the premise that these programs are grand because they allow richer, better educated people (like hedge fund managers) to help poor folks improve themselves. A short but powerful piece by Lars Dahlström, a Scandinavian educational researcher and activist who has worked in Namibia for many years, explains the “newspeak” of using the rhetoric of eliminating poverty to implement more of the same educational and economic policies that impoverish millions throughout the world. http://www.pedag.umu.se/forskning/projekt/globalsouthnetwork/bulletin/Th… Why don't we see this critique in the New York Times? Ever? This is something to consider amidst the hand-wringing about the decline of the daily newspaper. But that's another blog.

  • Obama Fudges History

    In his speech justifying his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama reminded us why the US was fighting there in the first place. After 9-11, he recalled, the United Nations Security Council "endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks." And then, "only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden," did the United States send its troops into Afghanistan. This account is doubly wrong. First, the UN Security Council did not endorse the use of all necessary steps. Rather, it expressed "its readiness to take all necessary steps to respond to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001" (UN SC Res. 1368, linked from here), which is not an endorsement of unilateral U.S. action, but an invitation to Washington to ask the UN for authorization for any military measures it might seek. The Bush administration pointedly did not ask the UN for any such authorization. Second, the Taliban didn't refuse to turn over bin Laden. Rather, they insisted that the United States first provide evidence that bin Laden was involved in the 9-11 attacks; this, the Bush administration refused to do. One doesn't know, of course, what the Taliban would have done had Washington presented them with evidence as is standard practice in extradition cases. But we do know that the Bush administration refused to present that evidence. "[W]e did make very clear to the Taliban which kept asking—publicly … about proof, that we didn't see this as a regime that was that concerned with western jurisprudence," declared National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in an Oct. 8, 2001 press briefing, showing her lack of concern for western jurisprudence. Told that the United States had presented evidence to U.S. allies, the Taliban ambassador remarked, "They haven't given it to us." (Laura King, AP, Oct. 2, 2001) When White House press secretary Ari Fleischer was asked how he responded to this Taliban complaint, Fleischer replied, "I don't respond to Taliban complaints." Indeed.

  • Middle East: Faint Glimmer of Hope

    There’s a glimmer – a very faint glimmer – of hope arising from recent developments in Palestine. I’m referring to the statement by Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) that he will not seek re-election as “president” of the Palestinian Authority (PA), in essence a statement of resignation. If Abu Mazen stands by his resignation, it will deliver a much-needed kick in the teeth to the Obama administration. President Obama’s performance in regard to Israel-Palestine has mirrored his stance on health care — where he promised universal care and then allowed the insurance lobby to draft the bill and the Catholic bishops to write amendments stripping away abortion rights. The U.S. president boldly announced a demand for Israel to halt settlement construction and then, when Israeli prime minister Netanyahu responded by announcing the construction of 3000 new settlement units to be followed by a “temporary partial freeze” that wouldn’t even include East Jerusalem, the Administration called for the Palestinians to enter negotiations anyway. The message was delivered to the PA by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who called Netanyahu’s acceptance of a “provisional Palestinian state” without defined borders an “historic step.” Clinton has done nothing to achieve Middle East peace, but she’s accomplished a miracle of comparable magnitude – she’s made us nostalgic for Condoleezza Rice. Abu Mazen responded in the only manner compatible with salvaging the last shred of his political and personal dignity – telling Obama and Clinton he’s finished. There are one too many knives stuck in his back, and American betrayals have destroyed his ability to lead. Remember that all this occurred after the U.S. administration coerced Abu Mazen into asking the United Nations to bury the Goldstone Report – a position he was forced to reverse due to Palestinian outrage, completing his humiliation and his (please forgive the expression) political castration. Obama and Clinton have assumed that President Abbas is their puppet. This premise in fact is false – he is a conservative, compromising and now deeply discredited nationalist, but a Palestinian nationalist nonetheless. His resignation, leaving the U.S. policy of capitulation to every Israeli dictate without a figleaf, is the final service he could give to the Palestinian cause. What next? I said there’s a faint glimmer of hope. This requires, first, that Abu Mazen sticks to his position in the face of massive pressure from the United States, Arab governments and the corrupt entrenched PA bureaucracy to rescind his resignation. It requires, second, an internal Palestinian political renovation that would coalesce around a leader capable of effectively waging both resistance and negotiation – the best candidate for which would be the imprisoned militant Marwan Barghouti. And it would require, third, that the growing international campaign of boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) force the United States to recognize the reality of Israel’s isolation and its declining value as a “strategic asset” so long as the Occupation continues. Under these circumstances, the logjam in the Israel-Palestine disaster might start to break. If not – in particular, if U.S. pressure coerces Mahmoud Abbas to come back after all, meaning that he is effectively converted to the puppet the Americans thought he was – then the current glimmer of hope will be lost and any possibility of a viable “two-state solution” can be buried once and for all

  • Machover on Collective Decision-Making

    Moshe Machover, one of the founders of the Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzpen) back in the 1960s, is a specialist in the mathematics of voting. He has recently written a very valuable paper on Collective Decision-Making and Supervision in a Communist Society.” He explains his use of the term “communist” as follows:

    “with the collapse of ‘official communism’, there has been a growing tendency to reclaim the former terms and use them in their older sense as in the Communist Manifesto and Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme. I am happy to go along with this semantic shift and actively promote it.”

    His analysis should be of interest to all those concerned with imagining the political institutions of a good society. (Warning: the paper is heavy going, even apart from the technical appendix.) Among the views on political vision that Machover criticizes are mine (as I’ve spelled them out here and here). I think he makes some very good points and advances our thinking on these matters, but I think he goes awry in at least one important respect in his critique of nested councils (or “pyramidal councils,” as he calls them). This is not the place for a full response to him, but let me just briefly indicate where we disagree. Machover asks whether grass-roots councils (or cells) “ought to be determined geographically or functionally.” The only reasonable answer, he says,

    “is that both kinds are needed: geographically-based councils are essential for dealing with local issues, and functionally-based cells for self-management of production and of other sectorial functions that are not anchored in a person’s specific place of residence. So the council pyramid must consist – at least in its lower tiers – of two kinds of council. A person belonging to cells of both kinds will then have two votes, one in each cell. But a citizen who is not active in production (due to illness or old age), or who works alone or in a very small group, can only have one vote. This is inconsistent with the principle of equal suffrage.”

    But this objection seems to me misguided. Imagine an organization that has members of both sexes. Each member of the organization gets one vote. The women in the organization, however, establish a women’s caucus. Within the caucus, each woman gets a vote. But this doesn’t mean that women have twice the political power of men in the organization (because they get two votes each , while men get only one). The caucus may lobby and even make demands on the organization, but the women’s caucus is not the decision-making body for the organization. So there is no departure from the principle of equal suffrage. Consider as well the case of a public school teacher in the United States today. The teacher is a member of a union, and votes within the union; the union negotiates with the city government on the terms of its contract. The teacher also lives in the city and so gets a vote as a resident of the city. Does the teacher thus have two votes? The local soccer club — each of whose members get a vote in the club — asks the town government for a place to play. Are the soccer club members who are also residents of the town getting two votes? That seems a very misleading way of looking at things. Obviously matters would be different if we said that in some national legislature there would be X representatives representing people as citizens and Y representatives representing people as producers (or as playing some other functional role). In this case, different citizens would have different voting power. (Machover develops a technical definition of voting power, but here I am just using it in its intuitive sense.) But there is no extra vote involved when a worker is part of a workers’ council. Some of what the council does will be simply internal to the work place (like a vote on what color the wall should be painted). On such matters, only the people involved — those who work in the work place — should have any say. Some of what the council decides will involve the rest of society — as when the members of a work place determine how much they want to produce of a particular output. But they don’t decide the economic plan; they are only deciding what they want to propose to society (like the teachers voting on what they want to ask for in their contract or the women’s caucus voting on what demands they wish to make of the larger organization). Moreover, if having a vote both as a producer and as a citizen were really undemocratic, then Machover’s solution wouldn’t eliminate the problem. He proposes that alongside the council structure, there be a second legislative body, chosen on a national basis. But since everybody would have equal representation in this second body, the overall number of votes per person would still be unequal. (If X had two votes to Y’s one vote in the council structure, and X and Y each had one vote in the national legislature, then X would have three votes to Y’s two.) Let me re-emphasize, however, that despite my disagreements, I think Machover’s paper makes an important contribution to the discussion of decision-making in a good society and I highly recommend it.

  • What happened to the Mexican Electrical Workers Union?

    Worth listening to: In this podcast from a Canadian radio program, Dan LaBotz discusses the Calderon government's attack on the Mexican Electrical Workers Union, the government’s seizure of the Light and Power Company, the liquidation of the company, and the firing of more than 40,000 workers. Dan explains the political context and reasons for the assault on the union and its importance. To hear the interview, go to http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/37203 and click on the arrow in the red circle. The podcast should load.

  • Cultural relativism

    Are all cultures are equally valid and commendable? asks Peter Tatchell. I just received an email describing speeches Peter Tatchell has delivered on this subject. ( You can follow him with twitter at http://twitter.com/PeterTatchell or Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/cj9y6s ). Tatchell argues, correctly I think, that these rights are not a “western invention and imposition” and that they are under direct attack “ by tyrants and war-mongers” as well as being “under de facto attack by the exponents of cultural relativism and by those who ignore human rights violations by non-white dictators because they fear being branded racist, imperialist or Islamophobic.” Tatchell makes the case that Left should defend “multiculturalism and the right to be different” but that respect for diferent values and cultures can ellide into “collusion with the violation of human rights.” This means we should not “bow to demands for cultural sensitivity by tacitly accepting that some peoples and communities can be exempt from the norms of universal human rights when it comes to issues like women's rights and incitements to homophobic violence.” My own take on this matter of cultural relativism and defense of human rights is that Tatchell is right in attacking cultural relativism as a “shameless double standard” that “smacks of racism.” At the same time, his position does not take into account the much more powerful and pervasive double standard that exists in the West’s faulting other societies for lapses in human rights. Colonialism and imperialism have somehow (for some) morphed into a post-colonial consciousness that allows the West to forget the injustices committed in the name of “civilization.” Post-colonialism often means erasing the legacy of imperalism as well as the continuing double standard that allows the US to pontificate about human rights while employing drones that kill civilians. A case in point is the uncritical reception given to the Tarzan exhibit at the Musee du Quai Branly, Paris, which I saw in July. One aspect of the exhibit that was especially disturbing was that outside the museum, a tent was set up to allow visitors to record themselves doing the infamous Tarzan yell/yodel. One website that waxes on about the museum’s “post colonial splendor,” http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/07/last-week-i-went-t… ) describes the curator’s intent: "The idea is to tackle the imagery through which we westerners see our friends from Africa," explained curator Roger Boulay to The Guardian. "It's about exploding stereotypes and looking at how this big western Tarzan myth was created through an intellectual mish-mash of ideas. It's also about explaining the big ideas at the turn of the century from Darwinism to the enfant sauvage, the concept of nature and the King Kong myth of the giant ape kidnapping the white woman." Perhaps that was the curator’s intent, but that’s not the way the exhibit has been perceived. I thought (wrongly), it turns out, that the exhibit would be soundly trashed in US mainstream circles. But writing in the New York Times about the Tarzan show, Michael Kimmelman focused exclusively on France’s romance with cartoons, comic books, and popular culture. His review contained only one sentence suggesting Burrough's racism. His comments contained no critique of the exhibit, even about the yodeling. There's no mention of Burrough's racism in the websites I've seen. Says one typical description: “The exhibition allows the public to discover the legend of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ famous character in the collective images and representations he embodies, which are the cornerstones of some of the greatest legends of our age,” says Artknowledgenews.com (http://www.artknowledgenews.com/edgar-rice-burroughs-tarzan.html). In contrast to the positive take on the exhibit from Westerners is analysis of the museum and the exhibit's racism at www.modernghana.com: "Though it is housed in a new building, the museum inherited looted artifacts that had been in other French institutions such as Musée de l'Homme and the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens as well as the racist superiority complexes which underpinned colonialism and neo-colonialism. The museum and its officials also inherited the manifestations of arrogance and feelings of superiority which Westerners have demonstrated in their encounters with non-European cultures and peoples since the sixteenth century.” http://www.modernghana.com/news/243501/1/does-tarzan-still-rule-the-west… Given the West's pervasive embrace of Western superiority and amnesia about colonialism, I think a defense of universal human rights is more persuasive if it is contextualized in the West’s abuses, historic and present day.

  • Putting race on a bronze pedestal

    Planning a Columbus Day radio broadcast this year with Native American friends from across the hemisphere brought back a childhood memory. We were talking about that unfortunate human capacity to regard groups of strangers as "others," as qualitatively different, strange, threatening and of lesser worth, and about the town that succeeded in getting rid of its “illegal aliens” only to discover that its workforce, consumers and everything that sustained its economy had been eliminated. The “others” of my childhood recollection, however, weren’t flesh and blood people but statues, supposed racial types cast in bronze. The Columbus story itself contributed to my recovered memory, suggesting multiple links between metal and race. It was the Tainos’ lack of iron and unfamiliarity with iron-based weapons that partly prompted the Admiral’s thoughts on enslaving them. It was his (and his patrons’) obsession with gold that drove the horrors he inflicted. Race and metal are anyway associated in my mind from my experience as the first white to work in the previously all-black domain of the blast furnaces at Republic Steel in southside Chicago. Then, too, I remembered this passage from the Victor Serge novel I happened to be reading the morning of our meeting: All that could be seen of the two [Indian] men digging the trench was their bronze backs, gleaming with perspiration. Spadefuls of ferrous earth, as if ringed with blood, landed noiselessly at the horses’ feet. "Bronzed body" and "bronzed athlete" have become clichés, referring not only to sculpted muscles but to skin tone. The alloy has other associations, of time past and nostalgia. We speak of Homeric warriors and the "Bronze Age." Parents might bronze their baby’s shoes. But what should we now think of a twentieth century effort to cast race in bronze, defining and fixing racial characteristics for all eternity in a museum collection of metal statues? When I was a child, though long after my parents recycled my baby shoes to expectant relatives, my family moved to Chicago for a year. It was the aftermath of the Korean War. Steel had long ago supplanted iron as the successor to the Bronze Age. But in 1954 steel was momentarily scarce and in demand. A relative knew where there was a good supply, and so, for a brief period, my parents became steel brokers. That supply exhausted and the mills geared up again for domestic production, my parents returned to their secretarial and gas station jobs in Detroit, of course taking my brother and me with them. But that year in Chicago left lasting impressions, one of which came back abruptly as my friends and I planned. My recovered memory was a museum exhibit of a huge number of large statues of men and women, all in bronze, each designed to display a distinct racial type. The flashback prompted me to track down some reading on the "Races of Mankind" exhibition at Chicago's large and famous Field Museum of Natural History. From my research, I can tell you the display consisted of more than a hundred sculptures. I now know the story of how it came about and how it has been reorganized in response to protests and changing sensibilities. But I'd like to linger a moment first with my childhood impressions, with what stuck with me in the 55 years since my mother walked me through the museum. I already knew a bit about race; it was something I had thought about since I was little. 1954 was the year the Supreme Court decided in favor of school integration in the South. It was the era when professional sports teams integrated. But I knew little about the South and have no memories of the first black players on Detroit or Chicago teams. Integration at those levels just was not significant to me. I did know which families were moving, however, and which teachers were leaving, because they wanted to be in a whiter neighborhood. I knew which kids I'd have to fight on my way home from school because I was white; and which ones I'd have to fight because the teams I played ball on included friends who were black. This museum exhibit, though, went beyond my limited experience. It made distinctions that had never entered my world, distinctions reinforced by the solidity and clearcut lines of bronze. With 104 statues each claiming to portray a different racial type, the distinctions were minute indeed. These were lifesize statues set up on pedestals, so that even the different pygmies and representatives of other shorter peoples towered over me. With only one exception, they were all dressed in clothes supposedly typical of their group. With the same exception, they were all doing some task or activity or relating to some product specific to their way of life. I could look at them carefully because they were, after all, objects. When I studied people on the street in my effort to understand adults or figure out the puzzle of race, they asked for something in return. They wanted to meet my eye or make me look away. They demanded acknowledgement or maybe respect or some recognition of their subjectivity. Here, there was no danger in anyone catching me looking, in offending them by my curiosity, in violating my mother’s caution not to stare. This was a museum, and it brought the authority of science. According to the science of that exhibit, race meant some combination of biological and cultural attributes: physiognomy, anatomical structure, typical clothing and activities. People who looked different or lived differently were different in a fundamental way. It was a way of thinking about race and about creating categories of "others" that I later experienced most starkly in Guatemala. I remember before-and-after government posters, ostensibly promoting a campaign for hygienic products, soap or toothpaste. A Mayan family, photographed in traditional clothes, was labeled "Indio," a derisive term. Changed to Western-style dress, the same family in the "after" photo transformed their racial type and now were "Ladino." (It was the Spaniards, remember, not the natives, who never bathed.) The one statue in the exhibit that stood out was surrounded by no artifacts. Nor was it engaged in any task. It was all the more striking to a nine year-old because it had no clothes. It was naked, not only of accessories but of social context. It wasn't, however, just standing there passively, but was posed, reaching upward, triumphant or striving. This was "Nordic Man," the one familiar statue. When I could overcome my shame-tinged fascination with its nudity, it was the one statue I identified with. The others were curiosities, "others." This one was what I was supposed to be. Thinking back on it, having this statue stripped of any cultural attributes could only have been meant to universalize it. Nordic Man couldn't be defined by typical tasks or clothes. It was meant to represent endless possibilities. It was not only the statue the other ones led up to by how they were arranged, but the racial type intended as the culmination of history. My reading tells that this statue initially was named "American Man." Sometime in the early 1940s, perhaps with the mobilization for World War II, it apparently occurred to museum authorities that some Americans might not be of Northern European extraction. They changed the name but not the hierarchic layout. In the decades after my visit, protests forced additional changes. The exhibit was rearranged, its corporate sponsorship relinquished, the statues finally moved to a less prominent space. It is probably regarded now as an embarrassment. How our society thinks about race has changed. It is a concept that people still sometimes use to make sense of differences they see around them, but what it really means, or who fits in what category, is in constant flux. There is no inherent meaning nor scientifically valid underpinning to the concept. Our current gene-based biology finds greater genetic variation within so-called "races" than between individuals of different races. There are no boundaries that can be cast in bronze. The "Races of Mankind" exhibition is a product of an era that was fading even as the statues went up, but the aftereffects of which are with us still. It came out of colonialism and the sciences that were created to classify and rank the dominated peoples. Its roots were in public displays of exotic natives brought back to conquering countries and royal courts. It was part of early twentieth century racialism that tried to keep immigrants out of the country or in their preassigned social place, and that looked for racial or ethnic scapegoats in rough economic times. It was linked conceptually to eugenics and notions of racial purity and superiority. IQ tests were but the most familiar device this era spawned for measuring and stratifying people and justifying the elite's position to itself and any who might challenge it. The irony is that the science of the exhibit was so arrogant that its biases now appear blatant. It claimed to have used vast resources to scour the world and identify all the racial types: empirical research followed by hypothesis and then bronze. What really happened was something less ambitious but more revealing. The sculptor went off to places like Paris where individuals from various subjugated peoples worked in cafés or as personal servants to her friends, and used the leverage of her power and position to get them to pose. When she traveled to less cozy areas, she stayed with colonial authorities and Great White Hunter-types and relied on them to select subjects for her sculpting. Where the models didn't seem typical enough, she altered their features to fit the racial guidelines she'd been given. When she didn't find them with the clothing or artifacts she expected, she added what she thought they should possess to be "authentic." As a nine year-old, I was impressed more with the science than the esthetics. The exhibit reinforced the message I was getting from adults: be wary of "others." "Stick with your own kind," as the marvelous lyrics but ambiguous moral of West Side Story put it. Fortunately, I never bought that message in its entirety, though I could never deny that it had a narrowing influence. My life has been enriched by being close to people who look different from me and live very differently from what I was used to and how I was raised. I am confident our society is better in all kinds of ways for its diversity and its renewal through continued influx. Because it is such a widespread social category, race continues to be a puzzle. But I've learned over the years that the issue has more to do with our socially-shaped vision and understanding, including our vision for the future, than with any clear demarcations among people. As a species we have a capacity, perhaps even an inclination to stereotype groups we don't know well. Our stereotype affects not only how we see and act toward them, but then how they behave toward us. If the “color question” was key to twentieth century United States as DuBois thought, with a broadened palette of skin tones it is still fundamental. Indeed it permeates public policy, whether the issue is housing, jailing, welfare or access to healthcare. As we engage in these debates, let’s remember that race is a mental and social construct with real world (and historic New World) consequences. It is not at all fixed, as it were, in bronze. This article was adapted from a radio address.

  • Mexican Electrical Workers Union Fights For Its Life

    The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), made up of approximately 43,000 active and 22,000 retired workers in Mexico City and surrounding states, is fighting for its life. The union's struggle has rallied allies in the labor movement and on the left in Mexico and solidarity from throughout the country and around the world, but, if it is to survive, the union and its supporters have to take stronger actions than they have so far, and time is not on their side. On the night of October 10, President Calderón ordered federal police to seize the power plants, while he simultaneously liquidated the state-owned Light and Power Company, fired the entire workforce, and thus did away with the legal existence of the union. The Mexican president's attack on the Electrical Workers Union might be compared to Ronald Regan's firing of more than 11,500 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO) in 1981 or to Margaret Thatcher's smashing of the National Union of Minerworkers (NUM) in 1984 in which over 11,000 miners were arrested and the union defeated. Changing the Balance of Force Calderón's move to destroy this union represents an important turning point in modern Mexican labor history, a decisive step to break the back of the unions once and for all. Following up on his three-year war on the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union (SNTMM), Calderón has now decided to take on the leading union in Mexico City. But, even more important, it is, as one Mexican political leader noted, it is an act intended "to change the balance of forces," so that they favor the government.

    "After its electoral defeat and out of fear of social protest which the [economic] crisis is provoking, the government wants to give a demonstration of its power which everybody will understand: the left, the social movements, the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party], the unions, the Congress, the businessmen and the media. The logic is the same that was used in the [Salinas government's] attack on La Quina [head of the Mexican Petroleum Workers Union] in 1989: if you can do it the strongest, then you can do it to the weakest. If the most combative union can be defeated, then so can any other force."[1]

    Mexico City, where this blow has been delivered, is heart of the political opposition to Calderón and the base of support for left-wing leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador who claims to have won the last election. Mexico City is also the base of Marcelo Ebrard, the mayor of the metropolis, who some see as another possible presidential contender in 2012. So this attack on the union is also an attack on the left at its strongest point. And, at least at this moment — and while we still hope to see the Mexican workers take the strong measures needed — it seems as if the government can and has defeated the strongest, and can now turn its attention to the weaker. A Turning Point This is a turning point because it allows Mexico's capitalist class to resume the neoliberal project begun under Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1988 but interrupted by a series of unforeseen events: the creation of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1989, the Chiapas Rebellion led by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in 1994, president Ernesto Zedillo's precipitation of the economic crisis of 1994-96, and finally the end of the old one-party state under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its replacement by National Action Party (PAN). Salinas had succeeded in privatizing the Mexican Telephone Company (TELMEX), the railroads, and the Cananea Copper Company, but he failed to finish the job, with the energy sector, petroleum and electric power generation still state owned. Now, after a twenty year interruption, Calderón has under taken to finish the job. The Origin of an Independent Union The full significance of these events can only be appreciated when one sees them in the light of both their history and the current political context. The Calderón administration has chosen to attack one of Mexico's oldest, most militant and most democratic union. The Mexican Electrical Workers Union was born in the great Mexican Revolution of 1910-1940, a tumultuous upheaval from below by the country's workers, farmers and peasants, swept away the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and replaced it with a new order, if not exactly the order that the underdogs had been hoping for. In 1911, a group of electrical workers at the Light and Power Company organized the League of Electrical Workers. Then in 1914 they founded the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas). The newly created Electrical Workers participated in the general strike of 1916 to defend the right of independent unions to exist. In 1917 the union negotiated its first contract, laying the basis for what would become one of the strongest collective bargaining agreements in the country. Less radical than some other unions and more independent than many, the Electrical Workers survived the labor wars of the 1920s that pitted corrupt, government-backed unions against revolutionary anarchists and Communists. The Union in the Cárdenas Period When the popular nationalist and leftist General Lázaro Cárdenas became president, he brought most of the Mexican labor unions into his orbit and under his influence. The Electrical Workers general secretary Francisco Breña Alvirez, however, guided the union along its own independent path. In June of 1936, the Electrical Workers Union faced a conflict over wages with the British-Canadian Mexican Light, which then owned the central electrical companies for which their members worked. The Cárdenas government would have liked to avoid a strike and proposed arbitration, but the union rejected any form of arbitration and struck. The strike by the union's 3,000 members shut off power in Mexico City — except to hospitals and other essential services — paralyzed the streetcars and brought management to the table. The union successfully defended the right to strike, eschewed arbitration, defeated the company, and maintained its independence form the government. Between Scylla and Charybdis During the late 1940s and 1950s, Mexico experienced its own wave of anti-Communism and its own version of McCarthyism, as the government deposed independent union leaders and replaced them with government-backed gangster leaders, the so-called charros. The Mexican Electrical Workers succeeded in avoiding the worst of that era, allowing it to emerge in the 1960s and to continue in the 1970s as an ally of the "worker insurgency" then taking place and as friend to the new independent unions that were then emerging. During the 1980s, the Electrical Workers Union once again found itself in conflict with the government-employer. In 1987, as students also struck the university, the union shut off power to Mexico City once again as it had 50 years before. Throughout the the years of the Carlos Salinas presidency (1988-1994), the union maneuvered between the Scylla of government domination and the Charybdis of the president's program of privatization. The Electrical Workers veered toward the privatizing president to protect its own interests, but simultaneously strove to escape the sirens of patronage. That period was not its most heroic, yet, despite its compromises with Salinas, the Electrical Workers Union did not completely forfeit its independence and emerged in the 1990s and 2000s to lead coalitions to defend national electric power companies, Light and Power and the Federal Electric Commission, and the Mexican Petroleum Company (PEMEX) from privatization. Fighting Privatization The union was outspoken and active in its opposition to President Vicente Fox, his National Action Party (PAN), and its rightwing agenda. The Electrical Workers Union organized around it self a coalition of other unions, peasant leagues, and urban poor people to create the National Front Against Privatization. When Felipe Calderón became president in 2006, the Electrical Workers continued their struggle against privatization, joining with the National Union of Workers (the UNT), Mexico's independent labor federation, to build a massive national coalition dedicated to changing the direction of the country. For almost a decade the Electrical Workers and its allies have successfully stopped first Vicente Fox and then Felipe Calderón from selling off the national patrimony. Most recently, the Electrical Workers and its Mexican Union Front (FSM), have brought together other labor unions, peasant leagues and organizations of the urban poor. The FSM in turn united with the independent National Union of Workers (UNT) to create the frentote — a gigantic coalition of virtually all of Mexico's organized working people. The SME, thus, stood squarely in the path of President Felipe Calderón and his National Action Party. The Union and its Contract The Mexican Electrical Workers Union had developed over the years into a powerful institution. The union's total members reached 43,000 working members and 22,000 retirees represented by between 700 and 840 full-time, paid delegates. The union contract, first negotiated in 1917, had evolved into a complex document describing 2,800 job categories and 92 wage scales for the various jobs. This contract protected the rights and privileges of union members, with SME union members having wages, benefits, and working conditions far superior to those of workers in many other unions and especially to unorganized workers. The contract also gave the union power vis-à-vis the company in matters of financing, development and new technology. It required management to inform the union of the annual budget, building plans, investment and acquisitions, and current finances. The contract forbad the company from out-sourcing work even in non-electrical areas such as auto shops, construction and carpentry. The union had virtual control over all hiring and firing, and the union ran a technical school with more than 1,200 students preparing to become Light and Power employees. The union contract also required the company to provide the union with 75 million pesos (7.5 million dollars) for contracting expenses, cultural activities, for retirees, and in advances for union dues in June so that union members could buy school supplies. While critics called this the "dictatorship of the proletariat," in was in reality a strong union contract, not so different than those found two decades ago in every industrial country in the world, providing its members with job security, economic security, and in general with social well-being. Calderón has swept away the union and torn its contract to bits. Union Conflict Precipitates Crisis Calderón may have been encouraged to make his bold move to eliminate both company and union by the development earlier this year of an internal union conflict. The Mexican Electrical Workers Union is a notoriously democratic union which has often seen rival factions struggle for leadership of the union. The June 2009 union elections saw Martín Esparza, the incumbent general secretary heading up the Green Slate of the Unity and Union Democracy caucus and Alejandro Muñoz, the union's treasurer, heading up the Orange Slate of the Union Transparency caucus. Muñoz accused Esparza of having used his union office to line his own pockets, and Esparza made similar accusations against Muñoz. Esparza also accused Muñoz of colluding with César Nava, a PAN leader who previously served as Calderón's closest aide (secretario particular). Muñoz denied the accusations that he was close to Nava. Muñoz accused the union of irregularities in the electoral proceeding, but was convinced to await the results of the June election, which he lost to Esparza. A month later, Muñoz filed charges with the Federal Board of Conciliation and Arbitration. This opened the door for the government to intervene in the union. Subsequently, on September 10, Secretary of Labor Javier Lozano, declared that there had been irregularities in the election, and on October 5 he refused to recognize Martín Esparza as general secretary, effectively decapitating the union by declaring that it had no legally recognized leadership. The Mexican government has broad powers to withhold recognition (known as toma de nota) from union leaders. This government interference violates the International Labor Organization's Convention 87 which says workers have the right to organize and run unions of their own choosing. Five days after Lozano refused to recognize the union leaders, Calderón sent the police and army to seize the plants. It is hard to tell exactly how the internal conflict affected the union and its leaders, but in the crucial days before the government carried out its coup, the leadership failed to mobilize the union and its allies to defend their workplaces and union. Though the union had told the press a week before that it believed the government was preparing to seize the company facilities, it apparently took no steps to advise its members to resist the police and hold the plants. For example, on October 10 group of just 30 police officers seized the Systems Operation center which controls the electrical substations of the entire country — and amazingly the famously militant union did nothing to attempt to stop that takeover of that crucial facility or any others. At the same time the police also took over the union hall and its radio station, also without resistance.[2] The Political and Labor Union Context Today Calderón and his National Action Party, controlling the executive branch of government, have led this attack, but they have had the support of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which dominates the legislative branch. The government's attack on the Mexican Electrical Workers Union has been opposed by the parties of the left: the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Workers Party (PT), and Convergence. The PAN and the PRI together control more than two-thirds of the representatives and senators. The PRI's support has been important not only in the legislature but also in the organized labor movement. The PRI, the former ruling party of Mexico, controls the Congress of Labor, the Confederation of Mexican Workers and other confederations and industrial unions, such as the Petroleum Workers Union. So, though the Mexican Electrical Workers Union is party of the Congress of Labor, none of the other union leaders in that umbrella organization of the official labor movement have said a word in defense of the electrical workers, and none of those unions have come to is aid. While the PRI controls most industrial unions, the head of the largest public employee unions Elba Esther Gordillo of the 1.5 million member Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) and Valdemar Gutiérrez Fragoso of the 300,000 member Mexican Social Security Workers Union (SNTSS) have been allied with the Calderón and the PAN. Gordillo joined Calderón in creating a new Alliance for Quality Education (ACE), which many critics see as opening the door privatization in that area. Gutiérrez Fragoso, in addition to his duties as head of his union is also a PAN legislator. Neither the Teachers Union nor the Social Security Workers Union have spoken out against the government attack nor acted in solidarity with the Electrical Workers Union. Massive Protest March Still, the Electrical Workers Union has many allies. Labor unions and social movements, and opposition political parties organized a huge protest march on Friday, October 16 which was estimated at between 150,000 and 300,000 participants. The march began at 4:00 p.m. at the Angel of Independence on Reforma Avenue and marched to the Zócalo, Mexico national plaza, the last marchers arriving at 8:00 p.m. University workers, nuclear workers, miners, the teachers union opposition, telephone workers and many others hiked through Mexico to show their solidarity. While the march was a strong show of support, it was not a show of force, never attempting to retake any of the facilities. Early last week Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who, arguing that the won the 2006 election, calls himself the "Legitimate President of Mexico," convened a mass meeting of tens of thousands of his supporters and turned the platform over to Martín Esparza, general secretary of the Electrical Workers Union. Both Esparza and López Obrador called the government's action unconstitutional and illegal and both called for resistance. López Obrador called upon the legislature to create a commission to investigate the situation. No such investigation is likely to take place, given that the government party and its allies control the congress. Since the police seized the power plants there have been daily rallies and demonstrations by thousands of Electrical Workers in Mexico City. Neither speaker proposed a plan of resistance through mass action aimed at the government bur rather inclined toward legal strategies. The mass march pressure the government into holding a negotiating session with the union, but that session soon reached an impasse. Secretary of the Interior Fernando Gómez Mont said that the government's decision was "irreversible." Secretary of Labor also commented calling the liquidation of the company a "consummated fact." The Mexican Electrical Workers also refused to compromise on its demands that the police be removed from the workplace, that the liquidation of the company be revoked, and that the government negotiate the issues with the union. Further progress in any negotiations seems unlikely, and become less likely with every passing day. As that incident demonstrates, mass marches will not be able to force the government to reverse its decision, though it remains possible that a national response, a national civic uprising such as the local uprising in Oaxaca three years ago, might be capable of stopping the government. Still, if the union is not prepared to take the necessary action in Mexico City, it cannot expect others to come to the rescue. The union must lead or be swept away. Solidarity from Mexico and Abroad Throughout Mexico workers, students, and communities, labor unions and left parties rallied and marched to support the Mexican Electrical Workers Union. En Cuernavaca, Moreles some 3,500 marched. In Oaxaca the Union of Workers and Employees of the Benito Juárez Autonomous University shut down the university in protest and solidarity. In San Luis Potosi the Potosi Union Front carried protested the development at the State Legislature and expressed their solidarity with the electrical workers. Divers organizations — the National Union of General Tire Workers, the Board Popular Front (FAP), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution expressed support at the national, state and local levels. Expression of international solidarity arrived from the United States and Canada, from Holland Germany, and even from workers in Iraq. Unions from around the world condemned the Mexican government and gave voice to their solidarity with the Mexican Electrical Workers Union. While such expressions of solidarity help to give heart to the struggle electrical workers of Mexico, unlike in industries such as shipping where dockworkers solidarity can have a direct impact, those foreign unions can have little leverage on a nationalized power company in another country — though the CFE does import coal, and coal miners, railroad workers, and marine workers might be able to interrupt those shipments. Union's Legal and Legislative Strategy While marching in the streets, the Electrical Workers Union is also pursuing a legal strategy, having hired Néstor de Buen, the country's leading labor lawyer, to argue that the Calderón government seizures of the company was unconstitutional and illegal. The union also plans to have its members file individual lawsuits called amparos, something like injunctions, arguing that their individual rights have been violated. While other unions have used the individual lawsuits as a mechanism to delay government actions, they would seem to be a weak tool in this case. The union says it will also pursue a legislative strategy, pressuring the Mexican Legislature to present a "constitutional controversy," arguing in effect that the executive branch of the government overstepped its constitutional authority. Such a legislative strategy appears to have little hope of success given the alliance between President Calderón's National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which together control a very large majority of both houses of congress. The union's legal strategy is premised on the argument that since Light and Power was created by the legislative decree it cannot be eradicated by executive decrees. The union and its supporters have also argued that the president's action violates both Mexican labor law and international labor standards. Police, Army Still Occupy Plants At this moment, 5,000 federal police, backed up by at least 10,000 police reserves, and 3,000 military officers still hold over 100 facilities. The plants are being operated by management and by 3,000 electrical workers brought in from the other state-owned power company, the Federal Electrical Commission (CFE), and another 800 engineers and technicians provided by the military. Workers at the CFE are members of the Sole Union of Electrical Workers of Mexico (SUTERM), a union historically controlled by the PRI whose leaders are eager to collude with the government in the hopes of sharing in the booty of jobs, union dues, and political influence. Since the police took control of the plants there have been many localized blackouts that have shut off power for hours to Mexico City neighborhoods, to other cities and towns, and to industry, with hundreds of factories idled in the nearby State of Mexico. The government has blamed the blackouts on the union, while the union attributes the blackouts to the incompetence of the government and the workers brought into run the plants. Future of the Light and Power The Calderón government has said that, having extinguished the Light and Power Company, it will now turn its facilities over to a new company which it plans to merge with the Federal Electrical Commission in the near future. The government says it plans to hire 10,000 former Light and Power workers to work for the new company under new terms of employment. The 45,000 union workers have been told that they must collect their severance pay by mid-November to be eligible to be hired by the new company. So far about 1,400 workers have collected their severance pay. There have also been 11,700 payments to the 22,000 retirees. As an added inducement to workers, the Secretary of Labor has thrown in scholarships to study English for workers who file for their severance soon. The government has set aside 20 billion pesos (about 200 million dollars) for the costs of the liquidation of the company labor force. Each worker is being paid the severance to which they are entitled under Mexican law, 300,000 to 400,000 pesos or about U.S.$30,000-40,000 each. The Economic Argument Felipe Calderón's decision to liquidate the Light and Power Company did not result out of any contract negotiation or strike, but rather out of a political decision to do away with the nationalized company and the union which stands at the center of the Mexican left and in the path of the president's privatizing agenda. The Calderón government, however, argues that this was a purely economic decision based on the economic and productive inefficiencies of Light and Power. There is, however, no clear cut economic case to be made; the issues are complex. The government argues that the Light and Power Company had an annual deficit of 44 billion pesos (400 million US dollars). Georgina Kessel Martínez, Secretary of Energy, asserts that Light and Powers expenses were almost always double its sales, requiring enormous government subsidies. In reality that "deficit" was largely the result of transferring electric power from the Federal Electric Commission (CFE) to Light and Power (LyF), both government owned companies. Calderón in his speech to the nation justified eliminating the company because it was "losing one third of the electricity it distributed because of theft, technical failures, corruption, or inefficiencies." That the CFE was more productive than LyF seems beyond doubt, but many things explain that: Mexico City, the Federal District and Central Mexico, which Light and Power served, represent the most difficult geographic, demographic, and economic area of the country. While rural areas present special challenges, the complex and constantly expanding and evolving megapolis of 20 million people and millions of others in surrounding central states is even more so. The residents and businesses of Mexico City reputedly "steal" electrical energy from the system through illegal connections. I put "steal" in quotes because it is after all a national system which exists to provide electricity to the Mexican people at a reasonable cost. Government agencies, for example Los Pinos, the Mexican presidential residence and office, did not pay for their electricity. For reasons that are unclear, the government company also failed to charge some Mexican businesses such as hotels for their electricity. The union argues that for the last 20 years the government declined to invest in the company, allowing the plant and distribution system to deteriorate, in order to create an economic crisis. The Question of Wages, Benefits, Pensions The Calderón administration has suggested that at the center of Light and Power's economic problems was the high cost of workers wages, benefits and pensions which threatened to bankrupt the system. The government says that 160 billion pesos out of its 240 billion peso wage bill went toward pensions for 20,000 retired workers. Without a doubt, the Mexican Electrical Workers Union had succeeded in its 95-year history in winning for its members a labor union contract which might be the envy of workers throughout the country. Unlike most Mexican workers, Light and Power workers earned about 6,000 pesos (600 US dollars) per month, something approximating a living wage. Retired workers enjoyed very generous pensions equal to or greater than their work wages. But the alleged financial crisis of the company may not have been the real motive behind Calderón's aggressive action. The Real Economic Motive? Martín Esparza, the union's leader, argues that the real economic motive for the government's action is the desire of private industry to get its hands on the 100 kilometer network of fiber optic cable which was the property of Light and Power. The fiber optic cable system which can be used for telecommunications was licensed in 1999 to WL Comunicaciones S.A. de C.V., a Spanish company. A year later the company, whose majority partners are two former Secretaries of Energy, Fernando Canales Clariond and Ernesto Martens, gained the right to operate the fiber optic network for 30 years, with the possibility of further extensions. Secretary of Labor Javier Lozano has also been as a consultant, assisting WL Comunicaciones in winning its concssions.[3] The Impact: Business Thrilled Mexican and foreign capital is thrilled at Calderón's action. The Business Coordinating Council (CCE), the Confederation of Mexican Employers (COPARMEX), the Federation of Industrial Chambers (CONCAMIN), the National Chamber of the Manufacturing Industry (CANACINTRA), and the Mexican Council of Businessmen (CMHN) all praised Calderón and encouraged him to see the attack on the electrical workers as just a first step. The Mexican capitalist class has had a taste of blood, likes it, and wants more. Investors.com, speaking for and to international capital, in an article titled "Mexico Knocks a Union's Lights Out" called it, "one of the best things to happen to Mexico." Business Week, while less euphoric, speculated that Calderón might now take on the Mexican Teachers Union and the PEMEX, the state oil company, and the Petroleum Workers Union, and Carlos Slim's TELMEX with its high telephone costs. A More Authoritarian State Senator Rosario Ibarra, Mexico's first woman candidate for president in 1982 and longtime human rights activist, expresses her alarm at a whole series of recent developments — including the government's seizure of Light and Power — which suggest that the Mexican government has become more authoritarian.[4] José Narro Robles, the rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), suggests that the government's seizure of the power plants and elimination of the company and the union will aggravate an already difficult situation for the country's majority of working and poor people. Warning of possible social unrest, he says, "Our country is living in a very delicate moment. Nobody can deny it. No one can deny it when we have such a large number of millions of Mexicans in inadequate conditions, in poverty or in extreme poverty." Narro fears social unrest, and his fear is understandable, but it seems that if the Mexican Electrical Workers Union and the labor movement are to survive, it will take social unrest of a well organized and massive sort to stop the Calderón government. If such forces began to move, they might even push that government aside, though so far, there are no signs of such a development on the scale needed. Notes 1. Manuel Camacho Solís, "SME: las verdaderas razones," El Universal, October 12, 2009. Solís is a member of the leadership of the Broad Progressive Front (FAP). 2. Silvia Otero and Alberto Morales, "'Apagan' LyFC; liquidan empleados," El Universal, October 11, 2009. 3. Rosalia Vergara, "Calderón y el SME: La guerra por la fibra óptica," Proceso, October 17, 2009. 4. Rosario Ibarra, "Alarma ante la situación de los derechos humanos," a statement distributed by the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT), on October 17, 2009.

  • Nobel Ironies – The “Not George Bush” Prize

    It seems doubly ironic that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has given its 2009 award to Barack Obama — just a few months after Arizona State University declined to award him the customary, symbolic honorary degree as its commencement speaker. The ASU decision, on the grounds that president Obama “had not yet accomplished enough,” was fully understandable in view of the reputation which that esteemed University is committed to uphold. You don’t command a degree from ASU on academic credentials alone, or just from a decade of teaching at elite law schools. At the well-known leading party school of the Great American Southwest, participation in a requisite number of alcohol-soaked frat binges, football riots or other forms of creative anti-social behavior is de rigeur. Nothing in Barack Obama’s documentary or police record indicates that he met these essential conditions of Arizona State University honors. On the other hand, it’s difficult to see how president Obama has yet reached the stature of a Nobel Peace Prize winner either. For the most part, that award goes to figures who have either accomplished some tangible gains for human rights, or disarmament, or something – or else, as in the case of Henry Kissinger, attained the status of a truly world-class war criminal. President Obama’s Nobel award, if we can interpret the committee’s language, would seem to be mainly a “He’s Not George W. Bush Prize.” Beyond that, given that his appeal for an Israeli settlement freeze has been met with open derision, and that he’s getting ready to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan for the next two or three decades, the label of “peacemaker” doesn’t quite fit – not yet, at least. Miracles can happen, I guess. Let president Obama go on television and use his executive authority to order a ban on the importation of all products from Israeli settlements, the full disclosure of secret rendition and torture from the Clinton and GW Bush administrations, the long-overdue release of Leonard Peltier and Sami al-Arian, and for good measure the closure of Guantanamo as he promised – then we’ll have a Nobel Peace Prize winner we can believe in. David Finkel

  • Mexican Government Seizes Power Plants, Liquidates Company, Fires Workers, Union in Jeopardy

    October 11, 2009 — Mexican Federal Police last night and early this morning seized the plants of the Central Light and Power Company of Mexico (LyF) which provides electricity to Mexico City and several states in central Mexico. The government of President Felipe Calderón also announced the liquidation of the company, the termination of the workers, and thereby the elimination of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) which has opposed the government's policies. [See call for Solidarity with Mexican Electrical Workers Union at end of this article.] The government's action has two goals, one political and the other economic. First, the government wants to eliminate the Mexican Electrical Workers Union which has been the leading force in organizing to oppose the Calderón government's economic policies, and in particular its plan to privatize the electrical industry. Second, the government plans to actually eliminate the Central Light and Power Company, possibly to merge its facilities with the Federal Electrical Commission (CFE), and eventually to sell the facilities to a corporation. Pivotal Moment While we have become accustomed to the Calderón government's attacks on labor unions such as the Mexican Miners and Metalworkers Union, and on its massive use of police and military force, this is not just one more incident. This is a turning point. The Mexican government's attack on the Mexican Electrical Workers Union — a union central to resisting government policies and to building labor and social movement coalitions, and located in Mexico City which is the center of political opposition to the government — may well be turn out to be a watershed event in the country's recent history. As Mexican journalist Luis Hernandez Navarro wrote in the Mexico City daily La Jornada, "The police and military attack against the electrical workers represents a serious setback in the precarious democratic life of the country. It provokes a huge short circuit. It establishes and unfortunate precedent. By attempting to use violence to solve a conflict created by the government itself, it takes us back to the darkest stages of authoritarianism." The Union Response Martín Esparza, Mexican Electrical Workers Union general secretary, called Calderón's action "unconstitutional." He called upon its 65,000 active and retired members to remain calm and to resist provocation. At the same time a union statement said its members would defend the nationalized electrical industry, their union, and their constitutional rights. Members gathered in front of the SME union hall and also at the Monument of the Revolution in Mexico City and rallied in defense of their state-owned company, their jobs, and their union. A union statement issued early Sunday morning said, "They have declared war on us and we are going to respond, always exercising our Constitutional rights and guarantees, of that there is no doubt." Humberto Montes de Oca, a union spokesman said the union had three demands:

    1. The revocation of the government decree liquidating the company.
    2. The immediate evacuation of the Federal Police from the plants.
    3. Discussions between the government and the union about financial and administrative issues.

    The Mexican Electrical Workers Union has called upon Mexican unions and unions of other countries to rally to their support. The union said that with the military having occupied the power plants, it was no longer in a position to insure the delivery of electrical power in the region. Some SME union members were reportedly calling upon the union to declare a general strike, which would shut off power to Mexico City and surrounding states, affected tens of millions of people. So far the union has not decided to take any such action. No Surprise While the Calderón government moved suddenly last night and this morning to seize the plants, its actions were no surprise. [See the government decree here.] The Calderón government and its predecessors have often expressed their desire to merge the Central Light and Power Company with the Federal Electrical Commission which provides power to the rest of the country, and to privatize electrical power generation. Secretary of Labor Javier Lozano declared in September that the Mexican Electrical Workers Union elections were invalid and that general secretary Martín Esparza and other union officers would not be recognized by the government. Without legally recognized union officials, the union could not engage in contract negotiations or other activities. Members of a dissident group in the union, tacitly supported by the government, had also carried out an armed attack on the union hall and robbed union documents and checks. And last month there were already rumors of the government plan to use the police to seize the facilities. The government justified its actions by arguing that the Light and Power Company was both inefficient and exorbitantly expensive. The government said it was prepared spend $20 billion pesos (about US$2 billion) to pay workers severance and retirement. Long History of State Violence At the moment 500 Federal police officers have taken control of over 100 Light and Power plants, reportedly roughing up some workers in the process. While so far there has been no serious violence, in the event of union resistance, the police — possibly backed up by the army — will use force to suppress the union. In past instances of government-union conflict in Mexico, such repression has led to deaths and beatings, while the government has then indicted union leaders, resulting in convictions and long jail terms. Federal police have been used in the last three years to attempt to break strikes of miners and steelworkers as well as to try to crush popular social movements, resulting in deaths, rape, and beatings. Mexican police have been used repeatedly in the past to occupy the facilities of telephone workers and others to break strikes. The Mexican government used the police or army to crush militant movements of workers in 1959, of students in 1968, and of electrical workers in 1975. Solidarity with the Electrical Workers The Mexican Electrical Workers Union has asked for international solidarity in resisting the government liquidation of the company, the termination of the workers, and thus the destruction of the union. If you wish to protest this action, you should write to President Felipe Calderón at felipe.calderon@presidencia.gob.mx. If you wish to show your solidarity with the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) you should copy your protest email to sinmexel@sme.org.mx.

  • War in Afghanistan and Pakistan: A critical moment to voice your opposition

    The President and Congress are reviewing U.S. policy on the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is a critical moment. This may be a turning point for the expanding U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a time when speaking out clearly and unambiguously against war can make a crucial difference. We urge you to sign the Campaign for Peace and Democracy emergency statement calling for an end to military intervention in both countries. The statement declares us firmly against military escalation in the region and for the withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Pakistan now. Your support can make a real difference: it will add to the impact of the statement at a time when public opposition to these disastrous wars is building. A list of the initial signers and the text of the statement are at the CPD website, www.cpdweb.org. We aim to collect a large number of signatures very quickly, and then publish the statement and list of signers as widely as possible, both in this country and internationally. If for any reason you have difficulty at the website, send an email to cpd@igc.org. We urge you to circulate the statement to your colleagues and friends. Joanne Landy and Tom Harrison Co-Directors, Campaign for Peace and Democracy

  • The tsunami in education – not an act of nature

    A colleague involved in progressive struggles in education since the Civil Rights movement commented to me that changes in education in the past eight years make her feel like she’s standing on the beach at water’s edge and experiencing the sand being sucked out from under her feet. Standardized tests now control the curriculum in schools serving working class and poor kids. Teachers must often follow scripts – or be fired. Services previously provided by school districts, like transportation, meals, screening and hiring teachers, and professional development, are now outsourced to for-profit corporations. Funding has been cut. And cut. And cut. State legislatures have created charter schools and “quicky” methods of obtaining teaching certification (including a standardized test, with multiple choice questions) with the rationale that these alterations provide minority children with better schools and teachers. What is most chilling about this wave, really a tsunami, is that it is global. But let’s be clear it is no act of nature. It has been methodically planned by networks of right-wing think tanks, transnational corporations, and the politicians who do their bidding. A school reform in Illinois, California, or New Jersey has often been borrowed from a policy tested in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. In nations that depend on World Bank funding, neoliberal policies are imposed as the price for loans. In more affluent countries, the neoliberal project (privatization, cuts to funding, and curricular control via standardized testing) is enacted with bipartisan consensus, under the banner of improving educational opportunity – and saving taxpayer money. Education is the last service that is still mostly public – and unionized. Teacher unions are the most stable, potentially powerful foe of the neoliberal project and are therefore frequently and viciously attacked as impeding school improvement. In late August I was interviewed about this global transformation of education by Equal Time Radio, which broadcasts live in Vermont on WDEV 96.1FM/550AM, from 1-2pm Mondays through Thursday. My interviewer confirmed that my explanation about neoliberalism’s global agenda “ rings true in Vermont.” The podcast can be found at http://equaltimeradio.com/?q=node/173 WDEV has interesting shows in its archives, enlightening for those of us who live quite far from Vermont. You can hear them at http://equaltimeradio.com/?q=audio

  • Mexican Government Prepares to Seize Mexico City Power Plants to Break Power of Electrical Workers Union

    The Mexican Preventive Police (PFP) are preparing to occupy the facilities of the Central Light and Power Company in Mexico City in an attempt to break the militant Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), according to a union press release. The union warns that the quasi-military occupation of the plants could come within a week. The PFP have been used in the last three years to attempt to break strikes of miners and steelworkers as well as to try to crush popular social movements. Mexican police have previously been used to occupy the facilities of telephone workers and others to break strikes. The Mexican government used the police or army to crush militant movements of workers in 1959, of students in 1968, and of electrical workers in 1975. Government Attack on Electrical Workers This current threat is the latest in a series of attacks on the union by the government of Felipe Calderón. The Felipe Calderón administration, having spent three years trying to destroy the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union (SNTMMRM), has now opened a new front in its war on the working class. In September the government launched a multifaceted attack intended to destroy the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) which has been at the center of resistance to its neoliberal programs. The government's attack has several elements. First, the government is supporting a small dissident faction within the union, using that as an opportunity to meddle in the union's internal life with the goal of breaking its militant leadership. Second, the government, which is also the employer, has reduced the budget for the state-owned Central Light and Power Company (LFC). Third, the government is also calling for a change in company management and for the complete restructuring of the company. The "Union Transparency" Dissidents The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), has a long history as a rarity in the Mexican labor movement: a union which is both independent and democratic. Historically, union elections have often been contested, rival factions argue out their differences within the union, and then later they come together to fight the company and the government which stands behind it. All of this changed earlier this year when, after a contested union election won by incumbent Martín Esparza Flores, the dissident group which calls itself Union Transparency led by Alejandro Muñoz Reséndiz took its complaints to the Secretary of Labor (STPS), opening the door to government involvement in the union. The Secretary of Labor, Javier Lozano Alarcón who has led the attack on the Miners union, has now, through a procedure known as "toma de nota" (taking note) refused to recognize Esparza Flores as head of the union. The Secretary of Labor through the toma de nota procedure may not only refuse to recognize the union's officers, but may also declare the election invalid. In practice, these administrative procedures (which are nowhere found in Mexican labor law) are used against independent or democratic unions or against unions opposing government policies, and almost never against government backed, employer controlled or gangster-run unions. Without government approved and recognized officers, the union officials cannot engage in collective bargaining or other union activities, leaving the union officially leaderless. Violent Attack on the Union by Dissidents On September 23, according to the elected SME leadership, Muñoz Reséndiz and between 20 and 30 other Union Transparency members, together with about 150 other persons who were not members of the union, some of them armed, attacked the union headquarters in Mexico City. The attackers robbed the union, taking money, checkbooks, and records. A union press release on that date declared Union Transparency to be a pro-government group backed by Secretary of Labor Javier Lozano Alarcón. The union leadership pledged to defend the union hall and called upon other union groups, social movements and political parties to take note of these developments. In a press conference held a couple of days later, Esparza showed security camera videos of the attack. The union also filed legal charges against Muñoz Reséndiz and others involved. Afterwards at a union meeting that lasted several hours, members voted to remove Muñoz Reséndiz from the office of union treasurer and to expel him from the union. Cutting the Budget, Restructuring LFC The Calderón government proposes to gradually reduce the Central Light and Power Company (LFC) budget, with 641.7 million pesos for 2010; 486.2 million in 2011; 464.3 million in 2012; 162.9 in 2013; and 164.7 million in 2014. The SME leadership argues that this will gradually starve the LFC, leading to blackouts in the region it serves: the Federal District (Mexico City), and the states of Mexico, Morelos, Puebla and Hidalgo. During the later years of the Institutional Revolutionary Party governments, from 1980 to 2000, there were constant battles over the budget and over the reorganization of the country's nationalized electric power industry. The PRI presidents would have liked at times to have combined the LFC with the Mexican Electrical Commission (CME), the company which serves the rest of Mexico. That would have forced the independent SME to merge with the government-controlled Sole Union of Mexican Electrical Workers (SUTERM). Now, the issue is somewhat different, though the process could also lead to the dissolution Light and Power and its merger with the Mexican Electrical Commission. Calderón's administration has two motives in its attack on the SME. First, it wants to break the SME because it has been the center of so many movements resisting the Calderón government, its neoliberal policies, and particularly its plans to privatize the petroleum and electric power industries. Second, Calderón wants specifically to privatize the electrical industry, including the Central Light and Power Company, and to do so it must break the power of the SME. An Attack on SME is an Attack on the Labor Movement The government's attack on the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) represents an attack on the entire labor movement, because it is an attack on one of the labor movement's strongest pillars. The SME created the National Front Against Privatization. The SME joined with the National Union of Workers (UNT) and other worker, peasant and social organizations to former broader front, including the so-called Frentote that brought together virtually all progressive organizations. The SME, at times working with the UNT, took positions on legislative issues before the Congress. One could argue that SME has represented an important part of the vanguard of Mexican labor, a catalyst for broader coalitions, a union that fought not only over its trade union issue, but also over social and political issues of concern to many other unions and to the working class and the Mexican people as a whole. Only a few other union organizations — such as the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), the National Coordinating Committee of the Teachers Union (CNTE) — have played such a role. The breaking of the back of the SME would be a tragedy for the entire workers' movement, for the social movements, and for the left. Clearly, this represents one more step in rightward and authoritarian direction in which the Mexican state is moving. When seen in the context of the militarization that has accompanied the war on drugs, the attempt to destroy the Miners Union, the current budget and tax proposal, and the appointment of Arturo Chávez Chávez to the office of Interior Secretary, one has to recognize that the Mexican state has moved far toward becoming a kind of neoliberal authoritarian state. The Calderón administration, having spent three years trying to destroy the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union (SNTMMRM), has now opened a new front in its war on the working class. In September the government launched a multifaceted attack intended to destroy the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) which has been at the center of resistance to its neoliberal programs. The government's attack has several elements. First, the government is supporting a small dissident faction within the union, using that as an opportunity to meddle in the union's internal life with the goal of break its militant leadership. Second, the government, which is also the employer, has reduced the budget for the state-owned Central Light and Power Company (LFC). Third, the government is also calling for a change in company management and for the complete restructuring of the company. The "Union Transparency" Dissidents The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), has a long history as a rarity in the Mexican labor movement: a union which is both independent and democratic. Historically, union elections have often been contested, rival factions argue out their differences within the union, and then later they come together to fight the company and the government which stands behind it. All of this changed earlier this year when, after a contested union election won by incumbent Martín Esparza Flores, the dissident group which calls itself Union Transparency led by Alejandro Muñoz Reséndiz took its complaints to the Secretary of Labor (STPS), opening the door to government involvement in the union. The Secretary of Labor, Javier Lozano Alarcón who has led the attack on the Miners union, has now, through a procedure known as "toma de nota" (taking note) refused to recognize Esparza Flores as head of the union. The Secretary of Labor through the toma de nota procedure may not only refuse to recognize the union's officers, but may also declare the election invalid. In practice, these administrative procedures (which are nowhere found in Mexican labor law) are used against independent or democratic unions or against unions opposing government policies, and almost never against government backed, employer controlled or gangster-run unions. Without government approved and recognized officers, the union officials cannot engage in collective bargaining or other union activities, leaving the union officially leaderless. Violent Attack on the Union by Dissidents On September 23, according to the elected SME leadership, Muñoz Reséndiz and between 20 and 30 other Union Transparency members, together with about 150 other persons who were not members of the union, some of them armed, attacked the union headquarters in Mexico City. The attackers robbed the union, taking money, checkbooks, and records. A union press release on that date declared Union Transparency to be a pro-government group backed by Secretary of Labor Javier Lozano Alarcó. The union leadership pledged to defend the union hall and called upon other union groups, social movements and political parties to take note of these developments. In a press conference held a couple of days later, Esparza showed security camera videos of the attack. The union also filed legal charges against Muñoz Reséndiz and others involved. Afterwards at a union meeting that lasted several hours, members voted to remove Muñoz Reséndiz from the office of union treasurer and to expel him from the union. Cutting the Budget, Restructuring LFC The Calderón government proposes to gradually reduced the LFC budget, with 641.7 million pesos for 2010; 486.2 million in 2011; 464.3 million in 2012; 162.9 in 2013; and 164.7 million in 2014. The SME leadership argues that this will gradually starve the Central Light and Power Company (LFC) leading to blackouts in the region it serves: the Federal District (Mexico City), and the states of Mexico, Morelos, Puebla and Hildago. During the later years of the Institutional Revolutionary Party governments, from 1980 to 2000, there were constant battles over the budget and over the reorganization of the country's nationalized electric power industry. The PRI presidents would have liked at times to have combined the Central Light and Power Company (LFC) with the Mexican Electrical Commission (CME), the company which serves the rest of Mexico. That would have forced the independent SME to merge with the government-controlled Sole Union of Mexican Electrical Workers (SUTERM). Now, the issue is somewhat different, though the process could also lead to the dissolution Light and Power and its merger with the Mexican Electrical Commission. Calderón's administration has two motives in its attack on the SME. First, it wants to break the SME because it has been the center of so many movements resisting the Calderón government, its neoliberal policies, and particularly its plans to privatize the petroleum and energy policies. Second, Calderón wants specifically to privatize the electrical industry, including the Central Light and Power Company, and to do so it must break the power of the SME. An Attack on SME is an Attack on the Labor Movement The government's attack on the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) represents an attack on the entire labor movement, because it is an attack on one of the labor movement's strongest pillars. The SME created the National Front Against Privatization. The SME joined with the National Union of Workers (UNT) and other worker, peasant and social organizations to former broader front, including the so-called Frentote that brought together virtually all progressive organizations. The SME, often working with the UNT, took positions on legislative issues before the Congress. One could argue that SME has represented an important part of the vanguard of Mexican labor, the catalyst for broader coalitions, the union that fought not only over its trade union issue, but also over social and political issues of concern to many other unions and to the working class and the Mexican people as a whole. Only a few other union organizations — such as the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), the National Coordinating Committee of the Teachers Union (CNTE) — have played such a role. The breaking of the back of the SME would be a tragedy for the entire workers' movement, for the social movements, and for the left. Clearly, this represents one more step in rightward and authoritarian direction in which the Mexican state is moving. When seen in the context of the militarization that has accompanied the war on drugs, the attempt to destroy the Miners Union, the current budget and tax proposal, and the appointment of Arturo Chávez Chávez to the office of Attorney General, one has to recognize that the Mexican state has moved far toward becoming a kind of neoliberal authoritarian state. Below find an English translation and the Spanish original of the Electrical Workers Union's Press Release: PRESS RELEASE [Received September 29, 2009] To all union, social and political organizations, To public opinion, To the media, To the people of Mexico: Boletín de prensa We have information from reliable sources that detachments of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) have been dispatched with the objective of occupying Central Light and Power (LyFC) this week. The pretext for federal forces occupying our facilities, according to the heads of the PFP, is that we electrical workers plan to seize these same facilities in order to provoke a giant black-out in the Central Area of Control (ACC), which is the affected zone represented by our union organization. All of this would take place should [the government] fail to recognize our union leadership, the recognition of which is our legal right. We DISASSOCIATE OURSELVES CLEARLY AND DECISIVELY from an action of this sort. We do so with the GREAT RESPONSIBILITY handed down to us from the now almost 95 years of existence of our Mexican Electrical Workers Union [SME] and with an absolute commitment to the users [customers], who are, in the last analysis the real beneficiaries of the Nationalization of the Electrical Industry, which just yesterday, September 27, we commemorated with a march from the Monument of the Revolution to the Zócalo [central plaza] and a rally here in this city [Mexico City]. We are informing public opinion that the Mexican Electrical Workers Union has not filed the legal papers for a strike, so there is no legal motive for the PFP to seize our facilities. We categorically deny that the SME has any intention to affect the electric energy supply in the zone where we work. For our part, as electrical workers, we are perfectly clear about the rights that protect and shield the workers which are clearly stated in the Political Constitution of the United States of Mexico in Articles 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 16, 39 y 123, as well as in the Federal Labor Law. The struggle that we continue for our Autonomy and Union Independence is Constitutional and Legal, and nothing will make us give up that framework. Unlike those in the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Public Security, who are responsible for respecting our rights, the Rule of Law, WE WILL NOT FALL INTO THEIR PROVOCATION. We denounce — to the unions, social movements, and political organizations, to public opinion, to the people of Mexico, and to the media — the attempt of the federal Authorities to attack and to assault our company and our union, with the intention of forcing us to negotiate what is not negotiable, and what we will not accept under any conditions. We will be in every possible place to denounce these nefarious intentions. The government provocations will not work!!! Respect the Autonomy and independence of the unions!!! Long live the Mexican Electrical Workers Union!!! Fraternally, "For the Rights and Justice of the Worker"

  • Lowering the age of consent: Sexual rights are human rights

    Law professor John Spencer, of Cambridge University, has created a huge controversy in the UK by suggesting a reduction in the current age of sexual consent of 16. His proposals, broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Iconoclasts programme, with my support as a co-advocate, have been savaged by The Sun and the Daily Mail.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mrd9g

    Much of the criticism has been sensationalist and has misrepresented the case for a lower age of consent. Whether we like it or not, many teenagers have their first sexual experience before the lawful age of consent. They should not be branded criminals, akin to paedophiles.

    Sexual rights are human rights. They are not the exclusive prerogative of adults. Young people should be free to have sex and to experiment, providing it is consenting and no one is harmed.

    As I explain in an article in the Guardian newspaper online,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/sep/24/sex-u…
    the best way to protect young people from peer pressure and sex abusers is not by threatening them with arrest, but by giving them honest, good quality sex and relationship education from an early age – including empowering them with the skills, knowledge and confidence to say no to unwanted sexual advances and to report sex abusers.

    Criminalisation inhibits young people from seeking safer sex advice and condoms. It makes some afraid to report abusive relationships. They fear getting into trouble because they have broken the law. Education, not criminalisation, is the way forward.

    Learn more about this issue and my other work on human rights on Twitter at http://twitter.com/PeterTatchell . Or join the Peter Tatchell Human Rights Campaign Facebook group at
    http://tinyurl.com/cj9y6s