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  • Interested in "bad guys" – but not bad systems

    While researching a book on The Great Recession (or whatever we wind up calling this economic downturn) I noticed that I couldn’t find any unemployed bankers who had actually handled the “toxic assets” that supposedly caused the crisis. I started to look for them systematically and eventually discovered that they were still employed. Furthermore, their activity of creating and trading collateralized debt obligations and the SWAPS that insured them was, in fact, booming. I documented my search for the missing unemployed man in a short “detective” story that I published at Tomdispatch.com which is a very literate political site that usually covers the U.S. Empire abroad. I took a lot of space explaining exactly how these securities worked so that people would understand that this was a dead-end capitalism that was churning the same old stuff over and over because there was nothing productive to invest in. Given the nature of the article I was surprised when the little piece got picked up by big web sites like The Huffington Post, Common Dreams, Truthout, and many abroad. I got so many personal responses that it felt like the old days when on my walk to the Day Care Center people would tell me how much they enjoyed (or disagreed) with some article I wrote for the Village Voice. It was gratifying—at first—till I realized the profound misunderstanding. Most people cheered me for exposing that those rich SOBs still had their jobs and all that money. I was, of course, trying to explain that this form of speculation was booming because nothing had been done about the crisis in the real economy that resulted from forty years of stagnant or declining wages around the world. But people were only interested in bad guys, not bad systems. I’ve always prided myself in being able to get a message across without editorializing. But it’s so easy to be swung up onto the ban-the-bonuses bandwagon. I can almost understand why politicians do it. I’m sure I’m not telling New Politics readers anything new For this next book I may have to find a way to be more explicit within my usual story telling framework. You can check out the misunderstood piece at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175094/barbara_garson_where_did_those_traders_in_toxic_assets_go_

  • Can a New Public Option Be A Step to a Single Payer?

    These are my remarks in a debate/discussion on the topic “Can a New Public Option Be A Step to a Single Payer?” sponsored by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), July 22, 2009, at Bluestockings Bookstore, Manhattan. I was debating with Mark Hannay. Can a New Public Option Be A Step to a Single Payer? My answer is “no.”The movement for healthcare reform is facing a great opportunity

    • But today we see all the makings of a healthcare fiasco unfolding before our very eyes – in the name of “feasibility.”
    • We need to act quickly and clearly to rescue the opportunity for real reform, to prevent it from being squandered by misnamed “realists.”
    • We see the most politically “feasible” proposals before Congress that
      • Will keep millions uninsured (According to the Congressional Budget Office, the “public option” reform proposed in the House “tri-committee” bill might insure 10 million people and would leave 16 to 17 million people uninsured.
      • Will be expensive, unaffordable and unsustainable. To illustrate, the House bill HR 3200 (the misnamed America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009) says that:
        • a couple with family income of $35,000 would receive a subsidy and pay up to $2450 per year premium, with a cost sharing burden of 15% of medical costs with an out-of-pocket family limit of $10,000 per year. Total exposure: $12,450 of covered medical expenses.
        • a family of three, with family income of $72,000 would receive a subsidy and pay up to $7920 per year premium, with a cost sharing burden of up to 30% of medical costs with an out-of-pocket family limit of $10,000 per year. Total exposure: $17,920 of covered medical expenses.
      • Will not restore to patients the right to choose their own doctor and hospital – a right that has been largely taken from them by private insurance companies, who have their own networks and panels that they restrict patients to.
      • Is set to burden states with paying for millions of new Medicaid patients (states pay roughly one third of Medicaid costs)
      • Will mean that most people will continue to get their coverage through private insurance companies and will be forced to buy insurance of questionable value.
      • Will mean that employer-based insurance will continue unchanged, with employers free to change coverage at any time, insurers free to change their physician and hospital networks, and employees still locked into their jobs if they want to keep their coverage.
      • While the uninsured will be mandated by law to purchase health insurance, the Congressional bills place no limit on what the private insurance companies can charge for premiums, or how great their deductibles and co-pays can be.
      • Will cut Medicare – something I take pretty personally
      • May even tax health benefits for those who are today decently insured
      • In the wings, frightening talk about how we may have to stop paying for people in the last six months of their lives, since that is so expensive. (of course doctors tell us that you rarely know what the last six months are until after the fact of death.)
        • Truly chilling talk from President Obama, who seems willing to use his own grandmother as an example of how perhaps we are spending too much money on the dying
        • My own experience with my father, who was dying of prostate cancer in the last years of his life, makes me very bitter about this approach. I am not willing to sacrifice those precious, sweet years with him in order to feed the insurance companies and their profits and their waste. (ENDNOTE 1)
      • And finally, if there is a “public option” at all, the “feasible” bills before us will create a weak and ineffectual one – hardly a “gamechanger”
    • The net result: an unpopular system that threatens to discredit the whole idea of government responsibility for insuring universal health care
    • We need to do everything we can to figure out how to avoid this fiasco
    • But to do this, we need to understand how we came to such a pass.
    • The root of the problem lies in the trap of the false feasibility argument.
    • In the name of “feasibility,” leading healthcare reform proponents like Healthcare for America Now! (HCAN) decided not to fight to eliminate the insurance companies from any central role in our country’s health care system.
    • A single payer system would insure everyone, give people the right to choose their own doctor and hospital, and, by having a single insurer instead of the 1500 we have now, save $400 billion a year in administrative costs
    • That $400 billion would come from direct savings in dollars now spent on premiums, indirect in saving doctors, hospitals and other provider huge administrative costs.
    • Instead of working for single payer, though, reformers like HCAN introduced the idea of a “public option” to coexist with the mass of private insurance companies
    • By pursuing this road, they argued, we could get real health care reform without an unnecessary confrontation.
    • This idea was championed in one form or another by President Obama, and most leading Democratic Party politicians – not surprising given the Democratic Party’s overall accommodation to corporate power.
    • (We see a similar scenario in relation to the economic crisis, and in foreign policy, where the Democrats have subordinated their reforms to the logic and interests of Wall Street and the corporations.)
    • The health care reform movement, rather than challenging these politicians to do better, followed their lead and accepted the public option approach. They accepted the premise that we should seek health care reform without a fight to push the private insurers out of a pivotal place in our healthcare system.
    • This public option approach is, IMHO, like struggling to pin wings on a water buffalo in the hopes that then it will fly
    • For basic structural and systemic reasons, the public option can’t serve as a stepping stone to single payer or real healthcare reform because it is embedded in a system that
      • can save no more than one seventh of the amount that a single payer system would (public option or no public option)
      • leaves the private insurance companies in the drivers seat, where they can continue to do damage to real health care,
        • in relation to the public option, this damage would involve steering the sick into the public option by such methods as
          • overmarketing to the healthy
          • undermarketing to the sick
          • contouring benefits to make the program unattractive and unworkable for the very sick
          • using their clout to see that the public option is underfunded
          • then stigmatizing the public option as producing poor service, then trumpeting the idea this shows that the government can’t do anything right.
    • This $400 billion that single payer could save is crucial
      • It has been estimated that insuring the uninsured would cost $200-$300 billion a year.
      • If the money doesn’t come from single payer savings, where it is going to come from?
    • The scary proposals we are now seeing coming out of Washington is where.
    • I would ask every single person who is proposing health care reform without single payer to tell us where the money is going to come from.
    • The story of the evolution of the Public Option is very educational. I strongly recommend that people read Kip Sullivan’s essay “Bait and switch: How the ‘public option’ was sold.” You can find it on the Physicians for a National Health Program blog at www.pnhp.org
    • In my opinion, even a “robust” public option wouldn’t work.
    • But it is illustrative to see what happened to the strong public option that was proposed at the outset of the current debate by Jacob Hacker
      • According to Hacker, the Public Option had to be pre-populated with tens of millions of people, that is, it had to begin like Medicare did representing a large pool of people the day it commenced operations (Hacker proposed shifting all or most uninsured people as well as Medicaid and SCHIP enrollees into his public program)
      • Subsidies to individuals to buy insurance would be substantial, and in his original 2001 version, Hacker says that only Public Option enrollees could get special subsidies (people who chose to buy insurance from insurance companies could not get subsidies) (ENDNOTE 2)
    • Compare that to the current public option proposals, which leaders of HCAN (e.g., Roger Hickey) have described the public option in the current House Tri-Comm and Senate HELP bills as “robust,” in spite of the fact that
      1. only the uninsured can have access to it , i.e. if you have what is deemed to be adequate and affordable coverage from your employer you cannot enter the public option
      2. it has to follow the same financial rules (be self-financing with no government subsidy, same cost-sharing options, etc.) as private plans.
    • If this is a “robust” public option, what would “weak” one look like?
    • Kip’s title “Bait and Switch” may seem to suggest that it was a deliberate plot on the part of Roger Hickey and HCAN. I don’t think so, and neither does Kip.
    • I think it grew out of a sincere desire to curb the power of the insurance companies, but followed a natural logic, once the premise was accepted that you should sidestep an outright confrontation with the insurance companies.
    • So when Karen Ignani (representing America’s Health Insurance Plans) et al started complaining some weeks ago about how the public option would mean that there “no level playing field” and the private insurers would be threatened, the response from Democrats in Congress was to rush to water down Hacker’s original proposal. To keep it “feasible.” To my knowledge, there was no protest from HCAN and other proponents of the public option about this process of accommodation by the politicians.

    NEXT STEPS:

    • It is now obvious, as Kip Sullivan has said, that the Republicans will demonize any public option, no matter how skimpy, as an opening wedge to single payer
    • So let’s fight for single payer in the first place, the only really feasible way to have decent and universal health care.
    • This would have a critical educational impact at this time of intense interest
    • We need to address people’s fears and concerns about government insurance head on, not reinforce those fears by assuring them that they can “keep what they have now.”
    • Such “reassurances” accept the premise that government insurance is suspect and inferior. These reassurances are also a lie, since people have not been able to “keep what they have” for several years, as their private plans have been eroded again and again by higher co-pays, premiums and deductibles.
    • This education about the value and necessity of public insurance is essential to building the kind of movement we need to win real reform.
    • It will be difficult
    • But it can be done, but only if we try.
    • I invite public option people to join with us in building a civil rights movement for the 21st century, rather than steering people into a vain, illusory effort to make water buffalo fly. Such an effort will prove disheartening and disorienting.
    • We have going for us the well-earned distrust that most people in American have toward the insurance companies
    • We need to build on that, and tell people that if they exercise their power, they can see that “it doesn’t have to be this way.”

      POSTSCRIPT: In the discussion, Mark Hannay (the person I was debating that evening), said that he himself had been developing concerns about the health care reform bills as they were emerging from the House and Senate – which I was pleased to hear but which prompted me to wonder why he hadn’t aired those concerns in his original presentation. Mark then said that an important factor to consider in deciding how to approach the current bills is the fact that their defeat will be a setback for the Obama administration and for healthcare reform. To which I replied that it was imperative for us now to distinguish real healthcare reform from the House and Senate bills precisely to avert that interpretation. Moreover, as Len Mell pointed out from the audience, if those bills, or anything like them pass, they will have very bad consequences for millions of people, what with the mandates to buy inferior insurance, cuts to Medicare, etc. And this will have very bad consequences not only for the Democrats who passed those bills but also for those who identified with them. After the session Len Mel came up to me and made additional crucial points: 1) that a very dangerous retrograde methodology is being legitimized in this debate – that progressive reforms need to be “self-financing,” which of course undermines the prospects for positive social change, and 2) that we can build one public program (e.g. the Public Option) by undermining another (Medicare). He challenged Governor Howard Dean on this very point at a recent community meeting.   ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I am deeply grateful to all those who helped me prepare this presentation, either in conversation or through their writings: Len Rodberg, Oliver Fein, David Himmelstein, Steffie Woolhandler, Kip Sullivan, Andy Coates, Ida Hellander, Mark Dunlea, Laura Boylan, Nick Skala and Don McCanne. They are of course not responsible for any flaws or errors in my presentation.   ENDNOTE 1-The issue of making “hard choices” about expensive end-of-life care, which drives us to conclusions about letting people die for economic reasons, needs to be sharply distinguished from another issue with which it is frequently intertwined in public discussions – keeping people alive when they wish to die, or would wish to die if they were still conscious. It is pernicious to blend these two questions into one. ENDNOTE 2on Hacker’s original statement that only the public option would receive special public subsidies in his proposal: Private email from Kip Sullivan:

    I’ll quote from three sources: Hacker’s 2001 paper, 2007 paper, and the Lewin Group’s 2008 evaluation of Hacker’s 2007 paper (which Hacker loves to cite). Only in Hacker’s 2001 paper is it crystal clear non-PO enrollees won’t get subsidies. In his 2007 paper, and in Lewin’s 2008 paper, they merely assert that enrollees in the PO will get subsidies; they don’t go out of their way to say non-enrollees won’t. (By the way, I can’t actually find a version of Hacker’s paper with 2001 on it. The version I cite in “Bait and switch” has a 2003 date on it, but every time Hacker mentions that paper he says he wrote it in 2001. Moreover, the version that is available has no page numbers on it. I had to write my own page numbers on it.) From Hacker, “Medicare Plus: Increasing Health Coverage by Expanding Medicare,” 2001:

    “Second, this proposal limits new subsidies for coverage to those insured by Medicare Plus. Although the rationale for this feature is discussed in the next section, the important point to note is that it further reduces the budgetary costs of the plan.” P. 20 “Under this proposal, Americans with incomes below 300 percent of the poverty level would receive highly subsidized coverage if their employer elected to make payroll-based contributions to Medicare Plus, but only existing federal tax subsidies of they did not. Thus, a low-income worker whose employer sponsors coverage would receive significantly less in federal subsidies than a similarly situated worker enrolled in Medicare Plus. … “[P]roviding income-related subsidies to all workers would be complicated (would subsidy amounts vary by region, for example, or with the health characteristics?), and it could raise costs dramatically. It would also, of course, discourage employers with low-wage workers from enrolling in Medicare Plus by reducing the expense of providing employment-based coverage. This, in turn, would reduce the ability of Medicare Plus to pool risk and provide common protection to low-wageworkers. In addition, there would be no guarantee that subsidies would cover a reasonable portion of the coss of coverage, as there would be under Medicare Plus.” Pp. 21-22

    From Hacker, “Health Care for America…..” 2007:

    Footnote 2: This proposal builds on a plan developed in 2001 for the ‘Covering America’ project sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Although the key features of the proposal have not changed, a number of provisions have been altered or updated. Readers interested in the earlier proposal (‘Medicare Plus’) …. can find…..” p. 12. “The Health Care for America Plan would provide extensive assistance to enrollees to help them afford coverage. For those enrolled in the plan at their place of work, anyone whose income was below 200% of the poverty level would pay no additional premiums.” Hacker goes on to say subsidies would phase out by 300% of poverty.” P.4.

    From Lewin Group, 2008:

    “The Proposal would create Health Care for America (HCA) which would be a new national health insurance pool modeled after Medicare….. People who do not obtain coverage voluntarily would be automatically enrolled in Health Care for America. Low-income enrollees would receive subsidies to help pay their premiums on a sliding scale based on income.” P 3 “As described above, Health Care for America premiums would be lower than comparable private insurance due to lower provider payment rates, administrative costs and low-income subsidies.” P. 13. “Those enrolled in HCA are automatically enrolled in a fee-for-service insurance program modeled on Medicare called the public HCA plan. … [T]he program provides subsidies to low-income people for premiums and cost-sharing.” P. 20 “The low-income subsidies for people enrolled in Health care for America would be administered through the tax code. … We assume that the IRS administrative budget would be increased by 25 percent….” p 22

    Joanne Landy is the former Executive Director of Physicians for a National Health Program, NY Metro Chapter. She is Co-Director of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and a member of the editorial board of New Politics magazine.

  • Giving back – or rather, giving up

    GIVING BACK – OR RATHER, GIVING UP

    The Council of NJ State College Locals, CNJSCL ( http://www.cnjscl.org/ )
    which has the legal authority to  represent professionals in NJ’s state college system, has just asked members, including me, to approve a “memorandum of agreement” in which we accept a  “furlough” of 7 days. Faculty cannot take the “furlough” on days that we teach, so the “furlough” is a poorly disguised give-back of 7 days of our pay. In addition, we agree to “defer” our salary increase for 2009-2010. We receive no retroactive payment of the amount lost in the deferred salary increase. 

    CNJSCL is comprised of 11 locals. We are employees of the State of NJ and the union negotiates a state-wide contract about salary and benefits. In reality, little real negotiation goes on with the State, because CNJSCL officials argue that we must accept whatever the far larger union representing NJ public employees, Communications Workers of America (CWA), http://www.cwanj.org/facts.html wins for its members.  Although we share salary and benefits concerns with CWA members,  we also have many issues that are unique, like academic freedom and copyright protection of the courses we create for online classes.  Even in normal bargaining, CNJSCL surrenders before it enters the room with the State negotiators.

     Several activists from my local (AFT 1839, New Jersey City University)  have tried, unsuccessfully, since last Fall to persuade CNJSCL officials and representatives to the union’s state council  to prepare for the budget crisis.  We’ve introduced proposals for an emergency conference, a publicity campaign, and creation of a speaker’s bureau.  The ideas for mobilizing members have met with little interest from the delegates and even less from the officials. 

    We’ve also seen what could be done if CNJSCL were more pro-active.   We organized a teach-in on the budget crisis on our campus that attracted over 600 students, almost a third of the student body  http://www.freewebs.com/time2reformaft1839/thefiscalcrisis.htm .

    Students took the microphones in the open sessions and break-out sessions to describe how tuition hikes and cuts in financial aid are destroying their dreams of a college education. They expressed the urgency for activity – and leadership –  and they applauded when a student activist from another state college  introduced himself as a socialist.

    In contrast, CNJSCL has not organized a single activity to protest the budget cuts to higher education or the State’s demand that the public colleges cut expenditures to union members’ wages. (Administrative costs have been ignored. ) The union refused to issue a public statement opposing tuition hikes for students. (There is no longer a State Office of Higher Education that regulates tuition, so the administration on each campus sets tuition independently.) In April, despite the looming cuts, delegates at the state-wide council meeting elected the same slate of officers who have steadfastly denied the seriousness of our situation. They won re-election, virtually unopposed.

    CNJSCL has not just asked us to give back our wages to the State. It has given up as a union. In this it is no different from many other unions, in the private and public sectors, in academic and industrial unions.   Members are asking why we/they pay union dues.  The Left should be asking what’s happened to labor? What’s happening with this abject surrender of unions like mine – and the passive acceptance by union members of this situation? And how can it be changed?

    I can see, strategically, what we have to do about CNJSCL: Encourage union members on other NJ state college campuses to organize as we have, forming a caucus if necessary  http://www.freewebs.com/time2reformaft1839/ .  We’ve democratized our local, though several activists, especially those organizing adjunct faculty, have paid a high personal cost.  The website of Association for Union Democracy  http://www.uniondemocracy.com/ has been an invaluable aid, but it’s still been a long, painful struggle. Clearly  the same process has to occur on other campuses, so this year we have made connections to individuals who share our thinking about the need to empower members and democratize CNJSCL.

    But I’m asking bigger,  harder questions here, that go beyond the immediate strategy.  Where are the activists who will do this work? How do we draw a new generation into this activity?  How will workers who have experienced unions that are conservative, apathetic and corrupt envision a union’s potential to be a progressive force?

  • Michael Harrington and the Twilight of Capitalism

    Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay — Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770)

    Michael Harrington is rarely taken seriously as a Marxist thinker — indeed, his Marxism is rarely taken seriously at all, by either his critics or sympathizers. In his biography of Harrington, The Other American, Maurice Isserman notes that Harrington “remained a Marxist to the end,” but the Marxist elements of his works often proved “too dilute for the true marxisantes among his audience and too abstruse for everyone else.” My aim is to challenge the idea that Harrington’s explicitly Marxist writings are either dilute or abstruse, and explain their importance. I believe that Harrington was one of the twentieth century’s best popularizers of Marx. Far from being rarefied, Harrington was capable of giving a very accessible version of Marx’s understanding of capitalism. As Isserman relates, Harrington explained capitalism as “a self-contradictory system that drew people together in productive enterprise and yet drove them apart through the unequal distribution of resources” — more specifically, a system where goods and services are produced collectively but the ownership and control of resources is owned “individually,” by a minority class of capitalists. The result is what Harrington called “an unsocial socialization,” one which was “subverting its most priceless accomplishment, the possibility of freedom and justice,” to use words from Harrington’s final book Socialism: Past and Future. To this Harrington counterpoised a truly social socialization — “a democratic, bottom-up control by the majority.” In the absence of a movement to make real this ideal, humanity will lack any positive, emancipatory alternative to what Harrington labeled “a ‘slow apocalypse,’ a transition to a new civilization that could occur before we are even aware of it.” Phrased differently, Harrington stressed the need for a socialist response to the decline of capitalism — or, to quote the title of his book of 1976, the twilight of capitalism. Harrington wrote in The Twilight of Capitalism:

    “…capitalism has collectivized its contradictions but not abolished them. In the process, it has unquestionably won time, like a patient restored to health, but by a miracle drug whose side effects will eventually kill him. One cannot set a date, or even a decade when the last scene will be played out or specify how long it will last. And it would be foolish to suggest that our heirs will necessarily inherit a millennium that will be socialist and humane. The successor to capitalism will be collectivist, of course. That has already been settled, and conservative Republican Presidents unwittingly promote this trend. But there are many possibilities within this tendency, the totalitarian, the authoritarian and the democratic-socialist among them. “…the welfare state is…an ambiguous and transitional phenomenon, the temporary salvation of the system, but also the portent of its end.”

    This aspect of Harrington’s thinking has been attacked as a “teleological” remnant of orthodox Marxism that Harrington should have cut out of this thinking. Dissent author Sheri Berman has labeled Harrington’s belief that “capitalism’s apparent triumphs were fictional and that the system was really on its way out” as “not merely…wrong, but also…counterproductive,” serving “to persuade the left that its chief task was not to reform and humanize capitalism but rather to press for its passing.” But besides Berman’s lack of understanding of how Marxists see the fight for reforms and for socialism as innately connected — that the way to achieve goals both near and far is to increase the self-organization, political consciousness, and capacity for collective action of the wage-dependent majority class — she fails to see the evidence around her of capitalism’s decline because she does not look at the system’s intrinsic social relations. Capitalist production continues to become more and more (unsocially) socialized and organized via the growth of monopoly firms; the growth of needs-based sectors such as health and education; the rise in unproductive labor; arms production; and other areas of state intervention. Such tendencies have endured despite conservatives’ (and mainstream social democrats’) mania for privatization; the most obvious example is the inevitable bailout of big banks by the Bush administration, which could not simply afford to let market logic take its course. However much pro-capitalist ideologues may hate it, the simple fact is that capitalism cannot reproduce itself without such interference with market forces; it cannot help but collectivize itself. Harrington thus saw capitalism as a declining system. This decline cannot be measured simply by the degeneration of capitalism’s productive forces. What is key is that capitalism has consistently underdeveloped the real potential of the productive forces; it has misusedthe surplus product extracted from the direct producers. Capitalist governments will even go so far as to impede the effects of (unsocial) socialization, to the point of deindustrialization, which was a deliberate strategy of the Thatcher government in Britain to smash the trade unions. Such governments will shift production towards useless sectors such as the military, which in Harrington’s words “has the marvelous quality of conferring subsidized profits on inefficient corporations which produce goods that do not…compete with the output of other firms in the consumer market.” But, as the Marxian economist Hillel Ticktin explains in his essay “The Epoch of Decline,”

    “…it is in the nature of the development of the forces of production that labour must be socialised and this cannot be changed, except through disaccumulation, i.e. capital ceasing to be capital. …This interpretation is basic to Marxism because it is Marx’s view that the fundamental contradiction of capitalism lies in the relationship between the increasing socialisation of labour and the ever fewer magnates of capital. The contradiction only ends with the demise of capitalism.”

    Harrington agreed, and was right to do so. Even as American socialists press for welfare-state reforms that will have the immediate effect of making capitalism more bearable, it is incumbent upon us to make clear that such measures can only, as Harrington said, “provide…limited concessions to the needs of the vast majority,” even in the best of times, and that the best of times — the Golden Age of the welfare state (1940-73) — have clearly passed. The socialist task is not to help people “adjust to capitalism,” as Berman would have it, but to ensure that the collectivism of the future is a socialist democracy.

  • Question & Answer on the Iran Crisis

    Campaign for Peace and Democracy July 7, 2009 Right after the June 12 elections in Iran, the Campaign for Peace and Democracy issued a statement expressing our strong support for the masses of Iranians protesting electoral fraud and our horror at the ferocious response of the government. Our statement concluded: “We express our deep concern for their well-being in the face of brutal repression and our fervent wishes for the strengthening and deepening of the movement for justice and democracy in Iran.” Since the elections, some on the left, and others as well, have questioned the legitimacy of and the need for solidarity with the anti-Ahmadinejad movement. The Campaign’s position of solidarity with the Iranian protesters has not changed, but we think those questions need to be squarely addressed. Below are the questions we take up. Questions three, four and five deal with the issue of electoral fraud; readers who are not interested in this rather technical discussion are invited to go on to question six. And we should say at the outset that our support for the protest movement is not determined by the technicalities of electoral manipulation, as important as they are. What is decisive is that huge masses of Iranians are convinced that the election was rigged and that they went into the streets, at great personal risk, to demand democracy and an end to theocratic repression. 1. Was the June 12, 2009 election fair?
    2. Isn’t it true that the Guardian Council is indirectly elected by the Iranian people?
    3. Was there fraud, and was it on a scale to alter the outcome?
    4. Didn’t a poll conducted by U.S.-based organizations conclude that Ahmadinejad won the election?
    5. Didn’t Ahmadinejad get lots of votes from conservative religious Iranians among the rural population and the urban poor? Might not these votes have been enough to overwhelm his opponents?
    6. Hasn’t the U.S. (and Israel) been interfering in Iran and promoting regime change, including by means of supporting all sorts of “pro-democracy” groups?
    7. Has the Western media been biased against the Iranian government?
    8. Is Mousavi a leftist? A neoliberal? What is the relation between Mousavi and the demonstrators in the streets?
    9. Is Ahmadinejad good for world anti-imperialism?
    10. Is Ahmadinejad more progressive than his opponents in terms of social and economic policy? Is he a champion of the Iranian poor?
    11. What do we want the U.S. government to do about the current situation in Iran?
    12. What should we do about the current situation in Iran?
    13. Is it right to advocate a different form of government in Iran? 1. Was the June 12, 2009 election fair?

    Even if every vote was counted fairly, this was not a fair election. 475 people wished to run for president, but the un-elected Guardian Council, which vets all candidates for supposed conformity to Islamic principles, rejected all but 4. Free elections also require free press, free expression, and freedom to organize, all of which have been severely curtailed.”[1]

    2. You call the Guardian Council un-elected, but isn’t it true that it is indirectly elected by the Iranian people?

    Every eight years the Assembly of Experts is popularly elected. Candidates must be clerics and must be approved by the Guardian Council. The Assembly of Experts then chooses a supreme leader, who rules for life (though he can be removed by the Assembly of Experts for un-Islamic behavior). The supreme leader appoints the head of the judiciary. The supreme leader chooses half of the 12 members of the Guardian Council and the judiciary nominates the other six, to be ratified by the Parliament. The Guardian Council then vets all future candidates for president, parliament, and the Assembly of Experts.[2] Thus, once this system was in place the possibilities of fundamentally changing it have been essentially nil. If 98 percent of the Iranian people decided tomorrow that they opposed an Islamic state, the rules would still enable the theocracy to continue in power forever — because the only people who could change things have themselves to be vetted by the theocratic rulers. Even amending the constitution requires the approval of the supreme leader. Iran is not a dictatorship of the Saudi Arabian sort, where there are no elections and where people have zero input. But the basic prerequisite of a democratic system — that the people can change their government — is missing.

    3. OK, but was there fraud? And was it on a scale to alter the outcome?

    There was certainly fraud: The Iranian government acknowledges that in 50 cities there were more votes cast than registered voters. (In Iran, voters can cast their ballots in districts other than those in which they reside, but “many districts where the excess votes were recorded are small, remote places rarely visited by business travelers or tourists.”[3]) Moreover, the vote total also exceeded the number of registered voters in two provinces.[4] (Province-wide excess is more significant than city-wide, because people would be less likely to vote in another province than another city.) Perhaps the most damning indication of fraud was the fact that Mousavi’s observers, as well as those of the other opposition candidates, were frequently not allowed to be present when ballots were counted and the ballot boxes sealed — a flagrant violation of Iranian law.[5] Moreover, supporters of opposition candidates had planned to independently monitor the results by text messaging local vote tallies to a central location, but the government suddenly shut down text messaging, making this impossible. The question, though, is whether the extent of fraud was sufficient to change the results of the election. We can’t be fully sure. But there is very powerful evidence that either no one emerged with a majority, which would have required a run-off election, or that Mousavi won outright. According to an analysis by researchers at Chatham House, a British think tank, and the Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews:

    “In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, and all former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former Reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.”[6]

    Since Ahmadinejad’s victory in 2005, when many reformists boycotted the elections and questions of fraud were raised, the hardliners lost their control of local councils in 2007. So an Ahmadinejad sweep in 2009 — when reformist leaders, responding to a growing wave of discontent with the regime, were newly energized to challenge the President — is hard to credit. Ahmadinejad allegedly won in areas where other candidates had strong ties and support, including their home provinces. Some have suggested that this was a result of people not wanting to “waste” their votes on candidates unlikely to win.[7] But in Iran, elections are in two stages: if no candidate gets a majority in round one, then there is a run-off. So there was no reason for anyone to refrain from voting for her preferred candidate in the first round.

    4. Didn’t a poll conducted by U.S.-based organizations conclude that Ahmadinejad won the election?

    The poll, conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow and the New America Foundation, found that Ahmadinejad was favored over Mousavi by two to one. But the poll was conducted between May 11 and May 20, 2009, before the official beginning of the three-week election campaign, and before the (first-ever) televised presidential debates. These debates were a turning point: millions of Iranians saw displayed the deep divisions in the leadership of the Islamic Republic. They sensed that there was now an opportunity for real change. More importantly, however, Ahmadinejad received the support of only a third of the poll respondents, with almost half either refusing to answer or saying they hadn’t yet made up their minds:

    “At the stage of the campaign for President when our poll was taken, 34 percent of Iranians surveyed said they will vote for incumbent President Ahmadinejad. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s closest rival, Mir Hussein Moussavi, was the choice of 14 percent, with 27 percent stating that they still do not know who they will vote for. President Ahmadinejad’s other rivals, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai, were the choice of 2 percent and 1 percent, respectively. “A close examination of our survey results reveals that the race may actually be closer than a first look at the numbers would indicate. More than 60 percent of those who state they don’t know who they will vote for in the Presidential elections reflect individuals who favor political reform and change in the current system.”[8]

    When a government acts in secret, conducts an election lacking in transparency, and bars and restricts foreign journalists and the free flow of information, it makes sense not to accept its claims.

    5. But didn’t Ahmadinejad get lots of votes from conservative religious Iranians among the rural population and the urban poor? Might not these votes have been enough to overwhelm his opponents?

    Ahmadinejad’s support from ultraconservative voters was certainly not insignificant. In addition, his social welfare programs, funded from oil revenues, have undoubtedly induced many among the poor to give him their allegiance (see below). And then there are the members of the security apparatus — the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij, the pro-government religious paramilitary force — who, together with their families, number in the millions. But there is no evidence that these were enough to give him the huge majorities he claims. As for peasants and villagers, only 35 percent of Iranian voters live in rural areas. And in any event, there is good reason to believe that rural voters are not strongly pro-Ahmadinejad.[9] As Chatham House noted, “In 2005, as in 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates, and Ahmadinejad in particular, were markedly unpopular in rural areas. That the countryside always votes conservative is a myth. The claim that this year Ahmadinejad swept the board in more rural provinces flies in the face of these trends.”[10]

    6. Hasn’t the U.S. (and Israel) been interfering in Iran and promoting regime change, including by means of supporting all sorts of “pro-democracy” groups?

    In the 1950s and 60s, rightwingers charged that the U.S. civil rights movement was actually controlled by the Soviet Union, through the U.S. Communist Party. Of course Communists were involved in the civil rights movement and no doubt Moscow approved. But that’s a far cry from indicating that the Soviet Union was a decisive force in the civil rights movement, let alone that it controlled the movement. There is no doubt that U.S. agents, as well as those of other countries, are hard at work in Iran, as elsewhere. It is well known that Washington has meddled in the politics of Venezuela and Bolivia, as well as Georgia, Ukraine and Lebanon, to take only the most recent examples. Congress has even set up a special fund for “democracy promotion” in Iran. But foreign meddling does not prove foreign control. And foreign meddling does not automatically discredit mass movements or their goals; it depends on who is calling the shots. In any event, there is no evidence that the CIA or any other arm of U.S. intelligence — or Mossad — had anything to do with initiating or leading the protests in Iran. And it is absurd to see a parallel between the rightwing elements in Venezuela and Bolivia — who are not fighting for greater popular control over their governments — and the millions of protesters who have demanded democracy in Iran. In 1953 U.S. and British intelligence engineered a coup to oust the democratically-elected Mossadeq government in Iran. But that coup involved bribing street gangs and a treasonous military. There was nothing like the mass upsurge that we’ve recently seen in Iran, and there has been not a scrap of credible evidence that the millions of people in the streets these past few weeks were brought out by CIA money. On the contrary, for years now leading Iranian human rights activists, feminists, trade unionists — people like Shirin Ebadi and Akbar Ganji — have taken the position that Iranian dissidents should not accept U.S. financial support.[11] They have a consistent record of opposing U.S. bullying, sanctions and threats of war,[12] and they know that any hint of links to Washington would be the kiss of death in Iran. Recently, Iranian state television has broadcast footage of alleged rioters stating “We were under the influence of Voice of America Persia and the BBC” and some detainees — politicians, journalists, and others — are said to have confessed to all sorts of Western plots.[13] Surely, though, no one should take such claims, elicited under torture or duress, seriously.[14]

    7. Has the Western media been biased against the Iranian government?

    Mainstream Western media have clearly been more interested in pointing out electoral fraud and repression in Iran than in states that are closely allied with Washington. But this doesn’t mean that there has been no fraud or repression in Iran. For example, a video of the killing of Neda Agha Soltan spread widely on the internet and the media was quick to turn her death into a icon of the brutality of the Iranian government. We never saw a similar response to the many victims of government atrocities in Haiti or Egypt or Colombia. Nevertheless, the claim by some Iranian officials that she was killed by the CIA or by other demonstrators just to make the regime look bad[15] is totally lacking in credibility. Western media have always selectively publicized and often exaggerated the crimes of official enemies. But we shouldn’t conclude from this that crimes have not been committed. And in the case of Iran, there is no good evidence so far that Western news reports on the government’s electoral fraud and violent repression of dissent have been fundamentally inaccurate.

    8. Is Mousavi a leftist? A neoliberal? What is the relation between Mousavi and the demonstrators in the streets?

    Mousavi’s politics and economic program are not very clear. He is in many ways a pillar of the Establishment — approved as a candidate by the Guardian Council and a former prime minister who served under Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. He had a reputation for being one of the leaders more sympathetic to welfare state programs. Under his prime ministership many such programs were enacted, but also leftists were brutally repressed. With Washington’s assistance, using U.S. intelligence information, the Iranian government rounded up members of the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party and conducted mass executions, virtually eliminating the Tudeh in Iran and killing many other leftists as well.[16] It has been argued that the repression was carried out by the ministry of intelligence and the judiciary, and that these institutions were not in fact under his control even though he was prime minister. Whether or not this is the case, at a minimum Mousavi neither resigned nor publicly protested the violent repression that took place when he was prime minister, and thus he cannot be absolved of responsibility. More recently, he has been an ally of the powerful billionaire cleric and former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is close to major private business interests. Mousavi supports turning over many of the publicly-owned sectors of the Iranian economy to private hands, but so does Ahmadinejad, who boasts that he has privatized more public assets than his predecessors,[17] and in fact privatization has been going on for several years and is mandated by recently passed legislation.[18] In his campaign for the presidency, Mousavi called for loosening some of the Islamic Republic’s restrictions on personal liberties, especially as concern women’s rights. But Mousavi came to embody the aspirations of millions of Iranians for more than this — for an end to the terrorism of the Basijis and the Revolutionary Guards and for an even broader democratization of the Islamic Republic. Undoubtedly, some of them hoped — as do we — that the protests would be a first step towards dismantling the fundamentally anti-democratic system of clerical rule itself. During the weeks that followed the election, demonstrators protested voting fraud, but also called increasingly for equality and freedom — “down with dictatorship!” The marches may have been started mainly by students and liberal-minded middle class people, but they were quickly joined by growing numbers of workers, elderly people and women in conservative chadors. It seems that Mousavi’s electoral organization did not anticipate the massive outpouring of protest after the election and was unable (and perhaps unwilling, given Mousavi’s Establishment ties) to provide any organization or real leadership. The ferocious violence of the security forces has left the protesters, and the general public in Iran, stunned and understandably intimidated. However, their outrage is deep, and it will not go away. Protest may soon return to the streets and rooftops. And many are looking for other forms of protest. Mousavi, Khatami and Rafsanjani have not made their peace with Ahmadinejad, and the split in Iran’s clerical establishment deepens. The millions who have gone into the streets have already shown themselves capable of acting independently of Mousavi, and, as has often been the case in democratic struggles historically around the world, there is good reason to believe that the masses of protesters who have entered into the fight for limited demands can transcend the political, social and economic program of the movement’s initial leaders. In Iran, this is especially the case if trade unions are able to use the opening created by today’s challenges to Ahmadinejad to assert the interests of the poor and lend their organized strength to the movement.

    9. Is Ahmadinejad good for world anti-imperialism?

    There is a foolish argument in some sectors of the left that holds that any state that is opposed by the U.S. government is therefore automatically playing a progressive, anti-imperialist role and should be supported. On these grounds, many such “leftists” have acted as apologists for murderous dictators like Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. The Campaign for Peace and Democracy has always argued that we can oppose U.S. imperial policy without thereby having necessarily to back the states against which it is directed. Ironically, despite their current rhetoric, some U.S. neoconservatives favored an Ahmadinejad victory.[19] They knew that on the main issues dividing the U.S. and Iran — Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear energy, its support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and its insistence on forcing Israel to withdraw completely from the Occupied Territories — Ahmadinejad’s position was no different from that of Mousavi or that of Iranian public opinion.[20] But Ahmadinejad, with his confrontational style and his outrageous “questioning” of the Holocaust, is a much easier leader to hate and fear; his continuing grip on power therefore serves the goals of neoconservative hawks and Israeli hardliners.[21] And they know that Iranian public opinion solidly supports the cause of Palestinian rights; and that Ahmadinejad’s anti-Jewish rhetoric has harmed, not helped, the Palestinians. Some of these “leftists” say that whatever Ahmadinejad’s faults, the mass upsurge in Iran plays into the hands of U.S. imperialism. On the contrary, a people’s pro-democracy movement is the worst fear of the many authoritarian regimes on which Washington relies to maintain its hegemony; such as the rulers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan and elsewhere. And not just among U.S. clients. It is significant that news of the demonstrations was heavily censored in China and Myanmar, and that the Russian government was one of the first to congratulate Ahmadinejad on his “victory.” Hugo Chavez too congratulated Ahmadinejad. As Reese Erlich, author of The Iran Agenda who frequently appears on Democracy Now!,has commented,

    “On a diplomatic level, Venezuela and Iran share some things in common. Both are under attack from the U.S., including past efforts at ‘regime change.’ Venezuela and other governments around the world will have to deal with Ahmadinejad as the de facto president, so questioning the election could cause diplomatic problems. “But that’s no excuse.”[22]

    10. Is Ahmadinejad more progressive than his opponents in terms of social and economic policy? Is he a champion of the Iranian poor?

    As leftists we are very familiar with rightwing politicians disingenuously claiming to care about the poor and the working class. The Islamic Republic has long included a social welfare component to help it maintain support. Ahmadinejad has undertaken some populist programs, utilizing some of the revenues generated by the sharply higher price of oil. But, even ignoring the fact that basic democratic rights and women’s rights are hardly the exclusive concern of the well-to-do, the Islamic Republic, and especially Ahmadinejad’s presidency, have not been good for the workers and the poor of Iran. Anyone purporting to support the working class has to back independent unions so that workers can defend their own interests both in the work place and in the society at large. However, Iran has still not ratified international labor conventions guaranteeing freedom of association and collective bargaining and abolishing child labor,[23] and unions in Iran have been subjected to horrendous repression. As the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran has reported[24]:

    “Iranian workers are still unable to form independent trade unions, a right denied both within Iran’s labor code and de facto repressed by the government in action. The government routinely arrests and prosecutes workers demanding their most basic rights, such as demands for wages unpaid, sometimes for periods as long as 36 months. Security forces often attack peaceful gatherings by workers, harass their families, and even kill them, as happened during a gathering by copper miners in Shahr Babak, near the city of Kerman, in 2004.”

    Under Ahmadinejad’s presidency, the situation has been especially grim:

    “Two leading trade unionists, Mansour Osanloo and Mahmoud Salehi, are currently in prison. Another one, Majid Hamidi, recently the target of an assassination attempt, is hospitalized. In addition to being imprisoned and fined, eleven other workers were flogged in February 2008 for the crime of participating in a peaceful gathering to commemorate International Labor Day, May 1st. “In January 2006, security forces arrested nearly a thousand members of the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company, attacked some of their homes, beat their families, and even detained the wives and children of the leading members, to prevent a planned strike. Since then, most members of the Syndicate’s central council have been targets of prosecution and imprisonment. The Syndicate’s leader, Mansour Osanloo, is currently serving a five- year sentence, while he suffers from eye injuries due to earlier beatings, and is in danger of going blind. Fifty-four members of the Syndicate have been fired from their jobs and are prosecuted in courts for their peaceful activities.”

    Teachers’ attempts to organize and collectively bargain have also met violent repression. Just this past May Day, the government beat participants in a peaceful labor event and arrested the leaders.[25] And in June, a committee of the International Labour Organization cited Iran for the “grave situation relating to freedom of association in the country.[26] What makes the need for unions in Iran so important is that large numbers of workers are forced to work under temporary contracts that permit even more exploitation of labor than usual. One common practice is for workers to be fired and then rehired every three months as a way to deny them pensions and other benefits.

    11. What do we want the U.S. government to do about the current situation in Iran?

    There is a great deal that the Administration can do. Obama should promise that the U.S. will never launch a military attack on Iran or support an Israeli attack. He should commit the United States not to support terrorism or sabotage operations in Iran, and immediately order the cessation of any such activities that may still be occurring. He should lift sanctions against Iran — certainly not as a reward to Ahmadinejad for stealing the election, but because the sanctions have a negative impact on the Iranian people and provide one of the main justifications for Ahmadinejad’s iron rule. He should take major initiatives toward disarmament of U.S. nuclear and conventional weapons, and he should withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Pakistan. And he should work to promote a nuclear-free Middle East, which includes Israel. By reducing these threats, Obama would thereby be removing one of the main rationalizations for Iranian repression (as well as for its nuclear program).

    12. What should we do about the current situation in Iran?

    We need to make it clear to the Iranian people that there is “another America,” one that is independent of the government and opposed to its oppressive and anti-democratic foreign policy. Our support comes with no strings attached and no hidden agenda. Iranians should be made aware that it is American progressives — not the U.S. government or the hypocrites of the right — who offer genuine solidarity.

    13. Is it right to advocate a different form of government in Iran?

    As leftists, the Campaign for Peace and Democracy supports radical change everywhere that people do not have full control over their political and economic lives. We advocate such change in the United States, in France, in Russia, in China. And we support it in Iran too. But we do not support the United States government — or Britain or Israel or any other country — imposing “regime change” outside its borders by force. What was wrong with Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not that the regime of Saddam Hussein was overthrown — his was a hideous regime and anyone concerned with human decency wanted it ended — but that Bush asserted that the United States had the right to invade. Political change imposed by a foreign army, or brought about by the covert operations of foreign intelligence agencies, is unacceptable, and it is especially unacceptable when the foreign power concerned has a long history of interventions for its own sordid motives: to impose its domination, to control oil resources, to establish military bases. But do we support the Iranian people if they act to end autocratic rule in Iran? Of course! This is a government that, in addition to its just-completed election fraud and vicious attacks on its own citizens, imprisons, tortures, publicly flogs and hangs political opponents, labor activists, gays, and “apostates,” and still prescribes execution by stoning as the penalty for adultery. The Head of the Judiciary declared a moratorium on executions by stoning in 2002, but at least five people are known to have been stoned to death since then, two of them on December 26, 2008.[27] Workers have no right to strike. A woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s and women have limited rights to divorce and child custody. The regime imposes gender apartheid, segregating women in many public places. Veiling is compulsory and enforced by threats, fines and imprisonment. We should support Iranians’ efforts to end these barbaric practices.

    Notes

    1. See, for example, Amnesty International, “Iran: Worsening repression of dissent as election approaches,” 1 February 2009, MDE 13/012/2009; Amnesty International, “Iran’s presidential election amid unrest and ongoing human rights violations,” 5 June 2009; Amnesty International, “Iran: Election amid repression of dissent and unrest,” 9 June 2009, MDE 13/053/2009.
    2. See BBC, “Iran: Who Holds the Power.”
    3. Michael Slackman, “Amid Crackdown, Iran Admits Voting Errors,” New York Times, June 23, 2009.
    4. Ali Ansari, ed., Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election, Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews, 21 June 2009.
    5. Kaveh Ehsani, Arang Keshavarzian and Norma Claire Moruzzi, “Tehran, June 2009,” Middle East Report Online, June 28, 2009.
    6. Ansari, op. cit.
    7. George Friedman, “The Iranian Election and the Revolution Test,” Stratfor, June 22, 2009; Esam Al-Amin, “A Hard Look at the Numbers: What Actually Happened in the Iranian Presidential Election?” CounterPunch, June 22, 2009.
    8. Terror-Free Tomorrow & New America Foundation, “Ahmadinejad Front Runner in Upcoming Presidential Elections; Iranians Continue to Back Compromise and Better Relations with US and West; Results of a New Nationwide Public Opinion Survey of Iran before the June 12, 2009 Presidential Elections,” June 2009.
    9. Eric Hoogland, “Iran’s Rural Vote and Election Fraud,” June 17, 2009, Agence Global.
    10. Ansari, op. cit.
    11. Karl Vick and David Finkel, “U.S. Push for Democracy Could Backfire Inside Iran,” Washington Post, March 14, 2006; Akbar Ganji, “Why Iran’s Democrats Shun Aid,” Washington Post, Oct. 26, 2007; Patrick Disney, “Iranian Civil Society Urges US to End ‘Democracy Fund,’ Ease Sanctions,” 16 July 2008.
    12. See, for example, “Iran’s Civil Society Movement Sets Up ‘National Peace Council’,” CASMII Press Release, 10 July 2008.
    13. AFP, “Iran shows footage of ‘rioters influenced by Western media’,” 23 June 2009; Michael Slackman, “Top Reformers Admitted Plot, Iran Declares,” New York Times, July 4, 2009; CNN, “Newsweek reporter in Iran reportedly ‘confesses’,” July 1, 2009.
    14. Of course, when similar torture was carried out by the U.S. government, U.S. media only referred to “harsh interrogation techniques.” See Glenn Greenwald, “The NYT calls Iranian interrogation tactics ‘torture’,” Salon, July 4, 2009.
    15. Thomas Erdbrink and William Branigin, “Iranian cleric says protesters wage war against God,” Boston Globe, June 27, 2009.
    16. The Tower Commission Report, President’s Special Review Board, New York: Bantam Books/Times Books, 1987, pp. 103-04.
    17. Ehsani, et al., op. cit.
    18. Billy Wharton, “Selling Iran: Ahmadinejad, Privatization and a Bus Driver Who Said No,” Dissident Voice, June 28th, 2009.
    19. Stephen Zunes, “Why U.S. Neocons Want Ahmadinejad to Win,” AlterNet, June 17, 2009.
    20. See Obama’s assessment of the lack of difference between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad; on public opinion, see Terror Free Tomorrow poll cited above.
    21. Joshua Mitnick, “Why Iran’s Ahmadinejad is preferred in Israel; The incumbent president will be easier to isolate than reformist leader Mr. Mousavi, say some leading Israeli policymakers,” Christian Science Monitor, June 21, 2009.
    22. Reese Erlich, “Iran and Leftist Confusion,” ZNet, June 29, 2009.
    23. See ILO, “Ratifications of the Fundamental human rights Conventions by country” (7/1/09).
    24. International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, “Workers’ Rights.”
    25. Amnesty International, “Iran: Prisoners of conscience / fear of torture or ill-treatment,” 10 June 2009, MDE 13/054/2009.
    26. International Labour Organization, “ILO Governing Body elects new Chairperson — Committee on Freedom of Association cites Myanmar, Cambodia and Islamic Republic of Iran,” Press release, 19 June 2009, ILO/09/41.
    27. Amnesty International, “Iran: New executions demonstrate need for unequivocal legal ban of stoning,” 15 January 2009, MDE 13/004/2009.

  • Welfare "Reform"

    With the Obama election, many of us are wondering how far we can push the new Administration in a progressive direction. As Frances Fox Piven says, he won’t go left unless there is a powerful movement pushing him in that direction. Piven compares him to FDR, under whose Administration many liberal programs, including Social Security, were enacted. FDR began as a centrist but was pushed to the left by protest movements. There has been a steady drum roll of pundits proclaiming that welfare reform is a success. In the face of all this opposition, what chance do we have of achieving anything progressive on the welfare issue? Is it futile to even try, considering the current economic situation? It is certainly a formidable challenge, but what does it gain us if we succumb to hopelessness and give up our vision of a better world? Paul Krugman expressed it well:

    Some people say that our economic problems are structural, with no quick cure available; but I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.

    These are the “mind forg’d manacles” that William Blake wrote about in his poem “London” (in A. J. M. Smith, Seven Centuries of Verse. New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1967, p. 285):

    In every cry of every Man,
    In every Infant’s cry of fear,
    In every voice, in every ban,
    The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

    We may not get to the promised land of a compassionate system that takes collective responsibility for people’s welfare, but we need a vision of what such a system would look like in order to even begin the journey toward our goal. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act is due to be reauthorized by Congress in 2010. The financial meltdown and rising unemployment will force policy makers to take a fresh look at the work requirements and the time limits of TANF. It may even be an opportune time to introduce a completely new approach to helping parents to care for their children. The middle class has fallen into the ranks of the poor, and is beginning to understand the need for welfare. When middle class people are affected, then we can begin to talk about universal, not means-tested, benefits. Barbara Ehrenreich says it best:

    If that sounds politically unfeasible, consider this: When Clinton was cutting welfare and food stamps in the 90s, the poor were still an easily marginalized group, subjected to the nastiest sorts of racial and gender stereotyping. They were lazy, promiscuous, addicted, deadbeats, as whole choruses of conservative experts announced. Thanks to the recession, however — and I knew there had to be a bright side — the ranks of the poor are swelling every day with failed business owners, office workers, salespeople, and long-time homeowners. Stereotype that! As the poor and the formerly middle class Nouveau Poor become the American majority, they will finally have the clout to get their needs met.

    With the “audacity of hope,” some Boston area activists formed a group called the “Care Caucus” to talk about improvements or alternatives to welfare, to clarify our thinking about policies, and to try to influence legislation. There are 14 people in the group, and it is open to others. It meets monthly. It is coordinated by Betty Reid Mandell, who wrote an article about care work to provide a basis for discussion. She can be contacted at mmandell@curry.edu if anyone would like to see the article, or would like to ask questions about the group. At their first meeting in January, the group drafted the following position paper:

    Why the Care Caucus

    • Instead of offering universal support, recognition and guidance for the necessary and valuable work of parenting, PRWORA has provided sanctions, inadequate assistance and stigma to recipients.
    • As reauthorization nears and the economy deteriorates, it is time to call for a system that will replace TANF.
    • This needs to be centered around the idea of care giving and its value

    Some problems with TANF

    There are objections to TANF from a number of perspectives

    • Feminist (see also economic rights)
      • Women are punished for being outside the nuclear family model
      • Care giving is an important societal service and should be valued
    • Human/universal rights
      • Recipients are stripped of their choices: e.g. child-cap
      • Recipients cannot raise their children but must use day care
    • Race and class
      • Black households, disproportionately represented, are stigmatized
      • Implicit scorn of African-American realities, e.g. household structure
    • Economic rights
      • Model of 2-parent family reinforced in many ways: child support, e.g.
      • Why widows, divorcees, and spouses’ entitlements under OASDI?

    PRWORA makes many assumptions that should not be accepted; some follow.

    • Regarding social norms and social responsibility: Work fosters character, respect, self-government, as well as self-esteem and societal value. Parents show responsibility and care for their families through work – and this is only work if wages are earned
    • Regarding the social contract: Recipients are only entitled to receive the care of a welfare state if they participate in wage-labor. In this view, child care workers participate in “productive” activity, but a mother does not.
    • Regarding social control: Recipients are deprived self-determination, believed to have limited capacities for prudent decision making. It is decided on their behalf that any job will be better for the family than the care the recipient provides at home. If child care is needed, children are removed from a parent’s care and placed in a setting that is supposed to be better for the child.

    None of the above recognize the value of dependent care to a family and to society. None of the above acknowledge that the choice to provide care to a dependent may be an important one; one that should be respected; one that should be “counted”. Further, the welfare system assumes that jobs are available, family sustaining jobs can be achieved within a reasonable period, and that the system of work supports in place is enough to get families out of poverty. We know these assumptions are not true, particularly today – as the economy sours, the effects on current recipients and applicant households will be profound.

    What should replace TANF

    A new system that offers a benefit to care work that is:

    • Universal
    • A cash benefit
    • Provides flexibility to the recipient to pursue a job, education, other opportunities as well as care provision

    A quick try at a vision statement:

    • “Every person responsible for the care of another should be entitled to a cash benefit which, in combination with existing and applicable social support programs, will provide recipients with a stable and secure foundation from which they can enrich their families, communities, and society and realize their potential and opportunity to contribute through care giving, education, employment and other valuable contributions.”

  • Obama's panacea for education: charter schools

    The NY Times reported on June 23 that Arne Duncan, Education Secretary, warned that inferior charter schools are ruining the reputation of the entire charter school project, endangering the administration’s initiative to make charter schools the focal point of school reform. Each charter school is essentially its own miniscule school district (a “local education authority,” in educational policy-speak). Each school decides what and how it teaches and establishes its own operating procedures, including hiring and firing of employees. In the US, the state government decides the ground rules for creating and operating charter schools. Obama is pushing for the states to increase the number of charter schools and decrease regulations on how they operate. Duncan’s admonishment to charter schools to get rid of the bad apples is a call for self-regulation. But as we saw in the financial meltdown, self-regulation is no regulation at all. Charter schools go by different names in different countries, but like the rest of the neoliberal school reforms, they are now almost universal. (When I said “universal” in a recent speech, UK researcher Stephen Ball corrected me: Finland and North Korea are the holdouts.) The World Bank has forced developing countries to accept neoliberal restructuring of their educational systems as a pre-requisite for loans. In Europe and North America, the concept has been sold as the panacea for academic underachievement of poor and working class students, as we see in Obama’s rhetoric. What’s not often said by (neo)liberals defending charter schools is that in lieu of governmental oversight, schooling will be controlled by standardized testing. Also, one of the key regulatory elements that goes out the window with charter schools is the protection of a union contract. (See “Neoliberalism, Teachers, and Teaching: Understanding the Assault” in New Politics, Vol.XII, no. 1)  The charter school scam relies on the premise that all we need to improve schools is old-fashioned entrepreneurship, more individual effort – teacher and principal effort. Missing in this project is attention to any of the other conditions that schools serving wealthy parents make sure they provide, like support services (psychologists, social workers), professional development, and, of course, high(er) salaries that increase with education and experience, to induce experienced teachers to remain on the job. The Obama/Duncan formula: All we need to improve schools for poor kids is charter schools, “hero” principals, and a quarter-million “great teachers.” Those teachers don’t stay very long under the conditions many charter schools enforce, including 80 hour work weeks. Charter schools create a few options in neighborhoods that have poor public schools, but they cannot be the primary lever for improving education for most of the kids who need better schools. In the UK, charter schools are called “academies,” and a vigorous opposition to them is being waged by the Anti Academy Alliance, organized with assistance from the National Union of Teachers, (NUT). We need a similar response from the NEA and AFT, but with the state of bureaucratization and mentality of fearful acquiescence in both unions, we are unlikely to see the present officials provide it. So what we really need is for teachers to take back their unions. We’ve seen one such victory, in Los Angeles and a new, promising group is starting in New York City.  Activist teachers in Washington, DC and Chicago are also mounting challenges to leaders who refuse to lead. Their effort will depend, in part, on their ability to see beyond US borders, to see neoliberalism’s global picture. Lois Weiner teaches education at New Jersey City University and is on the editorial board of New Politics. She is the co-editor with Mary Compton of “The global assault on teachers, teaching, and their unions. Stories for resistance,” Palgrave Macmillan. See more about teacher union struggles throughout the world.

  • Afghan Rules of Engagement

    There’s an AP story today that the U.S. commander in Afghanistan “will soon order U.S. and NATO forces to break away from fights with militants hiding among villagers.” The order is expected to reduce “the use of air strikes, mortars and artillery in villages.” There are three points to note here: 1. The order does not prohibit U.S. troops from using massive force when civilians are nearby if the troops are in “imminent danger,” and indeed, the order allows massive force if necessary to avoid “undue danger” to the troops. So it is still the case that soldiers lives are valued more than those of Afghan civilians, the people who are supposedly being protected. 2. It is clear that what has driven this change in policy is not morality but military advantage. That is, the outrage expressed by Afghan public opinion by U.S. attacks on civilians — 829 were killed last year according to the UN — jeopardizes the entire U.S./NATO military operation. Even President Hamid Karzai, who owes his office to the United States, has denounced Washington’s cavalier attitude toward Afghan civilian lives. 3. If these are to be the new rules of engagement, then that means that until this point it was approved policy that led to killing Afghan civilians in situations where U.S. troops were not in imminent danger and could have withdrawn without any “undue danger.” By any reasonable standard these were war crimes approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The reason for U.S. disregard of Afghan civilian lives has not been random evil. It follows from the fact that U.S. officials have wanted to minimize U.S. casualties (so as to make the war acceptable at home) in a conflict that at its roots is political and hence not ultimately susceptible to a military solution. All the U.S. troops in the world can’t protect a regime without popular backing.

  • Hubert Harrison

    Late last year, Columbia University Press published Jeffrey B. Perry’s Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, the first of a promised two-volume study of a great, forgotten figure from the early Socialist Party. Given the unabashed racism so common within the movement, Harrison ended up leaving it to build a black nationalist group that antedated Marcus Garvey’s efforts. (Indeed, though Harrison later wrote for and edited the Garveyite press, the flow of influence actually ran the other way: Garvey was, in effect, the charismatic figure who built an organization around Harrison’s conception of “the New Negro.”) As Perry puts it, Harrison was the most race-conscious of the class radicals and the most class-conscious of the race radicals. But after he died in 1927, he disappeared almost completely from the historical record. Having read Perry’s edition of Harrison’s selected writings from a few years ago, I was eager to see the biography and wasted no time in writing about it for The Barnes and Noble Review as well as doing a long profile of the author (a retired postal worker) for Inside Higher Ed And since Harrison appears to have been the first black book critic to make a profession of it, I published a short essay on that side of his work last month at the website of Columbia Journalism Review. Over the weekend, Perry spoke (with PowerPoint slides) to a packed room at the Socialism 2009 conference in Chicago, where he held the audience rapt for more than an hour. He has been touring with this talk and I think he said he’s given it 70 times now at libraries and schools, and to unions and community groups, among others. The book, published seven months ago, is now in its third printing. For a good introduction to Harrison, see Perry’s article now available at the Socialism and Democracy website.

  • STUNNING VICTORY FOR CZECH OPPONENTS OF U.S. RADAR BASE

    For immediate release
    Contact: Joanne Landy, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, jlandy@igc.org

    NEW YORK, March 18, 2009

    In a major setback for Pentagon plans to install a U.S. military radar base in the Czech Republic, the Czech government yesterday withdrew, at least for now (and possibly for good), its proposal to ratify an agreement on the base. Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek halted the ratification process when it appeared that the Chamber of Deputies was likely to vote to reject the agreement. According to Jana Glivicka, a leader of the grassroots No Bases Initiative that has been active in opposing the radar for more than two years, this was a very significant retreat, since the radar has been promoted as one of the key accomplishments of the current government.

    Two thirds of Czechs have consistently opposed the radar ever since it was first proposed in 2006. Anti-radar activists have repeatedly called for a referendum on the issue, but have been rebuffed. Meanwhile, in 2008 the Czech government signed the agreement with the United States to proceed with the installation of the radar, and the Czech Senate approved the accord. However the agreement could not be implemented until the Czech Chamber of Deputies ratified it. Thanks to the tireless activities of anti radar groups in the country, the No Bases Initiative and the Nonviolence Movement, popular opinion remained strongly mobilized against the radar. This public opposition culminated in a likely no vote in the Chamber.

    The anti-radar movement has drawn support from around the world from people alarmed by the dangerous military escalation of the proposed European missile defense program of the Czech radar and its companion Interceptor missiles in Poland. In the United States, the Campaign for Peace and Democracy has since November 2007 supported the movement with public statements, letters published in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, visits to the Czech Mission to the United Nations, demonstrations, a hunger strike, and, over the past weekend, an open letter to members of the Czech Chamber of Deputies signed by more than 550 people in less than 48 hours.

    The CPD open letter was sent on Monday March 16 to all 200 members of the Chamber of Deputies. A member of the Chamber planned to read the letter aloud from the floor of the Chamber if the ratification had come up for a vote, Signers included public figures such as Noam Chomsky, Katha Pollitt and Ariel Dorfman, and leaders of many major U.S. peace organizations. Most signatories were from the U.S., but there were some international signers including the Polish intellectual Adam Chmielewski, Iranian human rights activists, and a number of individuals from the United Kingdom, Japan and other countries. The text of the letter and list of signers are available at the CPD website, www.cpdweb.org

    Czech Prime Minister Topolanek said that the government has not abandoned its plan for the radar. “This does not mean we would give up on the ratification process,” Topolanek said in a live television address. “We will return to this issue after talks with the U.S. administration and after the NATO summit in Strasbourg and Kehl.” (This information is from a Reuters story. Up until now there has been no significant U.S. media coverage of the withdrawal of the Czech government proposal.) It is by no means clear that the government will in fact reintroduce the radar for a vote after the NATO summit in early April. In any event, anti-radar activists in the Czech Republic and their international supporters are committed to continuing their campaign until such time as the proposal to install the radar is decisively and permanently withdrawn.

    THE CAMPAIGN FOR PEACE AND DEMOCRACY (CPD) advocates a new, progressive and non-militaristic U.S. foreign policy — one that encourages democracy, justice and social change. Founded in 1982, the Campaign opposed the Cold War by promoting “detente from below.” It engaged Western peace activists in the defense of the rights of democratic dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and enlisted East-bloc human rights activists against anti-democratic U.S. policies in countries like Nicaragua and Chile. The Campaign sees movements for peace, social justice and democratic rights, taken together, as the embryo of an alternative to great power politics and to the domination of society by privileged elites.

  • Cast Lead

    I just read a particularly silly piece by Shlomo Avineri, the Israeli political theorist who has written some interesting things on Marxism.

    For quite a while Avineri has been flakking for the Israeli government. Now he tells us that Israel’s big problem is that it chooses the names for its military operations without enough thought. So, he says, the name “Operation Cast Lead” caused many outside of Israel to think of the lead in bullets and other weapons of war, when in fact the name had been carelessly taken from a children’s Hannukah song by Bialik about a dreydl made of Cast Lead. (The attack came on the last day of Hannukah.)

    Well, the only dreydl song I learned as a kid went: dreydl, dreydl, dreydl, I made it out of clay, and when it’s dry and ready, then dreydl I shall play.

    I wonder why they didn’t choose to call it Operation Wet Clay?

    The lyrics to Bialik’s song go like this:

    Father lit the candles for me
    The shamash shone so bright
    The shamash shone so bright
    Oh, do you know what it is for?
    Do you know what it is for?
    Do you know what it is for?
    It’s for Chanukah.
    Mother made me latkes
    A latke warm and sweet
    A latke warm and sweet
    Oh, do you know what it is for?
    Do you know what it is for?
    Do you know what it is for?
    It’s for Chanukah.
    My teacher gave me a dreydl
    A dreydl of cast lead
    A dreydl of cast lead
    Oh, do you know what it is for?
    Do you know what it is for?
    Do you know what it is for?
    It’s for Chanukah

    Now if the murderous assault on Gaza had been code-named Operation Warm Latkes, then I could believe that it was a thoughtless oversight. But I can’t believe that Cast Lead was chosen without awareness of what else lead might be used for.

  • The Two Deaths of Max Shachtman

    The Two Deaths of Max Shachtman

    Note: This article is from the 1st series of New Politics, published from 1961-1978.

    January 1973 (New Politics, Vol. X No. 2, Whole Number 38)

    How we admired and respected Max! The “we” was small in number of course, for how many revolutionary socialists were there in the Thirties in this country? Only a handful of Trotskyists and not all of them had that special feeling for Max shared by “my crowd,” some barely teenagers, others in their late teens or twenties and a few oldsters crowding thirty.

    We respected James P. Cannon, too. But we knew him as Cannon. Shachtman was Max. We could joke and banter with him. And when Max spoke at a “big meeting” at Irving Plaza or Webster Hall we were always there. It was not merely that we were entertained by his razor-sharp wit, his polemical skills, his sense of irony, his robust humor but primarily because we were clearly in the presence of an exceptional political intelligence. Even back then, in his ability to integrate Marxist theory, political history and specific events, he had few peers in the American socialist movement.

    I and a number of my comrades continued to share these special feelings for Max for more than twenty years. It is not that we were political sycophants (though some were) or that we were unaware or indifferent to his personal-political foibles. He was not a candid man nor was he a generous man. Indeed, in politics he was possessed of a sort of vindictiveness belied by his surface bonhomie. When he felt “crossed,” even on a relatively minor issue, he often retaliated with a kind of meanness that could shock his closest supporters. He was a combination of callous bureaucrat and sentimentalist. Despite these personal flaws—perhaps, in part, in some perverse way because of them, since they gave him a more earthbound and human dimension—we remained Shachtmanites in a political and personal sense.

    Shachtman, born in Poland nearly 70 years ago and brought to this country as a child, was active in revolutionary politics before he was out of his teens. In his twenties he had already achieved a degree of prominence in the Communist youth movement as an editor, writer and speaker.

    The American Communist Party was one of the first sections of the Communist International to be Stalinized. Yet, in 1928, a tiny number of activists and leaders did possess the courage to rebel openly against the Party’s long established tradition of bending in whatever direction was favored by Moscow’s shifting ideological winds. Max Shachtman was one of them. When James P. Cannon, old-time IWW organizer and a founding member of the Communist movement here, returned from Moscow in 1928, where he had been a delegate to the Communist International’s Sixth World Congress, he managed to smuggle out of the “workers fatherland” a truncated version of a manuscript by Leon Trotsky that would later appear, in its proper form, as The Third International After Lenin. Even in its abbreviated and somewhat mangled form, Trotsky’s ritique of the Comintern made an enormous impression on both Shachtman and Cannon. The two of them plus another leading Party person, Martin Abern (and Maurice Spector in Canada), emerged as the leaders of the Trotskyist current. Needless to say, they were branded “counterrevolutionaries” and promptly expelled from the Party by fiat. Shachtman was 25 years old at the time.

    Following their expulsion, Shachtman, Cannon, Abern and their few co-thinkers regrouped as the Communist League of America which soon had its weekly organ, The Militant. Five years went by before the CLA had the resources to publish a monthly theoretical journal, The New International. For students of socialist theory and history both publications should be required reading.

    The Trotskyist movement grew, but slowly. It received a significant infusion late in 1934 when the CLA merged with the American Workers Party led by A. J. Muste to form the Workers Party. The radical group led by Muste was as deeply concerned with American problems as the CLA was absorbed with the “international question.” Joining Shachtman as an editor of The New International, now the journal of the united party, was James Burnham who had been a leading theoretician of the Muste organization.

    Several years later, the Trotskyists dissolved their organization when they were accepted into membership of the leftward moving Socialist Party. Inside the Socialist Party, the Trotskyists had their largest audience yet. They were soon organized as a well-knit faction within the SP—the Appeal Group—making enormous headway, above all in the Party’s youth section, the Young Peoples Socialist League. By far, the most effective Trotskyist spokesman, whether in factional debate or public rally, was Shachtman.

    Two years after entering the Socialist Party, the Trotskyists left. Actually, they had sought to split, mistakenly, in my opinion. Had the Trotskyists remained in the Socialist Party and conducted themselves in a more flexible and less sectarian manner quite possibly the Socialist Party would have evolved into the revolutionary movement anticipated by the Trotskyists on their entry.

    Now outside the Socialist Party, in 1938, the Trotskyists regrouped as the Socialist Workers Party with a membership several times that of two years earlier and with a youth section of approximately one thousand members.

    Shachtman and Cannon continued as the two leading figures of the movement. Max was the theoretician, the writer, the one with greater appeal to the young and the intellectuals within the Party and its periphery; Cannon was the organizational man, the proletarian oriented leader and magnificent orator. Of the two, Shachtman was clearly the more thoughtful and independent personality. He would not permit himself to remain rigidly encased in dogma, never to review the validity of old assumptions and conceptions, even those he had vigorously defended Above all, there was the “Russian Question.”

    It was the Trotskyist view that Russia was a “degenerated workers state.” It was a workers state by virtue of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the nationalization of the means of production. These were the achievements of the proletarian revolution of October 1917, the “social conquests” of a revolution that were threatened by the reactionary political and economic policies of the ruling Communist Party. It was a view that was often challenged within the Trotskyist movement but never effectively. Never, that is, until Max Shachtman and a number of his associates rebelled at Trotsky’s notion that, despite the Stalinist terror that sacrificed the lives of literally millions and the complete extirpation of democratic rights and institutions, socialists must come to “the unconditional defense of the Soviet Union,” at the time that Russian invaded

    Finland in 1939. Trotsky insisted that all affiliates of the recently organized Fourth International hold fast to the traditional defencist view. Shachtman objected. For him, the invasion of Finland was a gross example of imperialism. Soon everything about Russia as a degenerated workers state was called into question and eventually repudiated by Shachtman.

    In the initial debates in the SWP between the Shachtmanites and Cannonites there was simply no contest. Cannon and his associates could not measure up in debate to Shachtman, Burnham and their co-thinkers in the Party. A large minority of the Party and a majority of the youth section lined up with Shachtman’s faction. Despairing of his leading American disciples, Trotsky personally rushed into the breach. It is a tribute to Max Shachtman that he was ready to cross swords with the “Old Man” whom he loved, respected and feared. Trotsky was one of the intellectual giants of this century, truly a renaissance man, and without question the most brilliant Marxist theoretician at the time that the 36 year old Shachtman engaged him in political combat. Shachtman proved to be not only courageous but he even bested Trotsky in the debate.

    Inevitably the Socialist Workers Party split. The Shachtmanites, with about 40 per cent of the members of the SWP and virtually its entire youth section, reorganized as the Workers Party; its youth section called the Young Peoples Socialist League. It was during the Forties and Fifties, in the Workers Party, that Shachtman reached the peak of his intellectual powers and made significant contributions to Marxist thought. Above all, in his writings on the nature of the Russian state and Stalinism. The view that Russia was not a workers state, not even a degenerated one, but a society dominated by a new, oppressive counterrevolutionary ruling class, did not originate with Shachtman. But it was Shachtman more than anyone else who, within the framework of Marxist thought, developed and continually refined the theory of a new, ruling “bureaucratic collectivist” class in Russia with such detail, depth and logic that his work had unique and singular importance. During this period—the Forties and early Fifties— Shachtman’s—and our—hatred for Stalinism did not move him or the movement he led to compromise their fundamental revolutionary opposition to Western capitalism and imperialism. We were a movement, sectarian in size but not in outlook, dedicated to the Third Camp of socialism, the camp opposed to both capitalist and Stalinist social systems.

    The Workers Party managed to hold its own through the Forties. During the war it gained considerable respect—and members—among militant trade unionists. No small part of these gains was due to the struggle we waged in our press and directly in the unions against the wartime no-strike pledge promoted by the Roosevelt Administration, by conservative trade unionists and, most vociferously, by the Communist Party. Some of the best labor coverage in the nation was offered in the pages of Labor Action and The New International (the latter a continuation of the publication founded in 1934).

    Following the post-war years, however, the Workers Party, later called the Independent Socialist League, went into a more or less steady decline. It could not withstand the combined effects of McCarthyism and the demoralization that threatens any sect unable to break out of its isolation. There was not only a decline in membership but a gradual erosion of the movement’s revolutionary ideological perspective.

    Max Shachtman, alas, was no exception. In truth, Max died two deaths. A finite physical death on November 4, 1972 and an earlier moral and political death that has no recordable day or even year.

    All we know is that in the middle Fifties there were visible signs of a fundamental shift to the right in his thinking. He sought, as he put it, “an opening to the right.” By “the right” he meant, at that time, more progressive tendencies in the trade union movement and the American equivalents of European social democracy. Leading the Independent Socialist League into the Socialist Party in 1958 was part of this grand strategy. The “opening to the right” turned out at first to be a growing accommodation to it. But once this rightward shift was under way it knew no limits. In less than a decade, Shachtman and his followers had moved far to the right of American social democracy. Having entered the Democratic Party to “reform” it, they allied themselves with its more reactionary wing and became vituperative opponents of the reform movement. By the time of his death, Shachtman had become an apologist for American imperialism’s filthy war in Vietnam, aligned himself with the ugliest elements in the unions, rationalized the racist practices of the construction unions. His followers supported Henry Jackson in the 1972 Democratic primaries; in the election, he led the tendency in the so-called Socialist Party that gave tacit support to Richard Nixon.

    I tremble to use the word, renegade. But what term better describes a man who reneged on his earlier, most fundamental commitment to social justice? Io say that he died, in any sense at all, a socialist, is to denude the word of all meaning, to deny the relevance and seriousness of what he taught us about socialism in years past.

    Shachtman’s political degeneration, his rapid rush toward accommodation with the Establishment coincided with the explosive disaffection of a whole generation of young people. Had he been able to make contact with the young, who were fresh and receptive to new ideas, might he not have been able to guide some into the camp of revolutionary socialism? To move them out of the path that led so many into the pseudo-Stalinist posture that predominates in what remains of the New Left today, be it rapturous approval of the Maoist horrors euphemistically called the Cultural Revolution or the totalitarianism of societies led by a Castro, a Ho or a Kim II Sung? But why should any of these young people have cocked an attentive ear to Shachtman’s revelations about Stalinism when they were accompanied by apologies for the American bombing of Vietnam and plaudits for some of the most reactionary elements in the trade unions and the Democratic Party?

    How different radical politics might have been today had Shachtman and his followers remained loyal to the revolution and thereby have been able to make contact with and educate the young. It is this thought that mixes bitterness with nostalgia and sorrow at the two deaths of Max Shachtman.