Biden to Remove U.S. Troops from Afghanistan

By: April 21, 2021
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U.S. Troops in Afghanistan 2001-2020

This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.

President Joseph Biden announced that the United States will remove its remaining 2,500 soldiers from Afghanistan on September 11, ending the nation’s longest war. The U.S.-Afghanistan War, which has lasted almost twenty years, has cost the United States 2,300 soldiers’ lives and two trillion dollars, while more than 100,000 Afghanis have been killed. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump had also said the U.S. would pull out of the country, though neither carried out the task while in office. Biden seems to be fully committed to ending the war in order to shift U.S. attention and resources to the more important contests with China and Russia.

How did it begin? President George W. Bush announced a “war on terror” after the al-Qaeda’s terrorist attack on the United States on September 11 2001 that killed almost 3,000 people. At the time the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic sect, held power over three quarters of Afghanistan and had given a safe haven to Osama in Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. When the Taliban refused to hand over Bin Laden, the United States launched an invasion that was subsequently joined by the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with more than 60 nations involved.

Today, for the U.S. government and the U.S. population, the war was no longer so important. The 800,000 U.S. servicemen and women who served in Afghanistan, represent just 0.25 percent of the total population. And although over 20,000 U.S. troops were wounded, that was a small number compared to the 58,000 Americans who died in the 14-year long Vietnam War. Most Americans could just forget the war—and they did. At the same time, no president wanted to end the war, because that would mean recognizing the U.S. military and political defeat in Afghanistan.

In 2003 the U.S. declared war on Iraq, which a had no role in the September 11 attack, an important anti-war movement developed, with demonstrations of more than 100,000 in several cities. With 170,000 U.S. troops in Iraq in 2007 and 90,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2011, the movement grew. Then, with the election of Obama in 2008, who ran as an anti-war candidate, followed by both the killing of Bin Laden and the end of the war in Iraq in 2011, the U.S. anti-war movement declined and became insignificant. After 2015, when the United States had succeeded in holding the Taliban in check and driving al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, troops there were drawn down from 100,000 to just a few thousand. Trump actually ran as an anti-war candidate, promising to end America’s endless wars and attempts at regime change in other countries. Trump even signed an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops by May 1 of this year, which Biden has now extended to September.

While Senator Bernie Sanders has backed Biden, a number of both Republican and Democratic party leaders are critical of Biden’s decision for a variety of reasons. First, they fear that the Afghan government, created by the United States, will quickly collapse and the Taliban will take power. Second, if the Taliban take power, critics fear the United States will be unable to monitor and fight Islamic extremism in the region. Third, others argue that a Taliban government will restrict women’s rights and persecute non-Pushtun peoples. There is also fear that these changes in Afghanistan might lead to a resurgence of militant Islam in Pakistan, destabilizing that nuclear power. More immediately, the Taliban say they will take military action against U.S. troops that remain after the May 1 date they agreed to with the Trump administration.

Since the United States became the world’s largest oil producer, thanks to fracking, and is now turning to non-carbon energy sources, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the entire Middle East are no longer quite as important to the American capitalist class. The U.S. ruling class now turns its attention to its greatest economic competitor: China.

Their anti-imperialism and ours

By: April 18, 2021
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The logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a recipe for empty cynicism.

[This article first appeared in The Nation, April 6, 2021.]

The last three decades have witnessed increasing political confusion about the meaning of anti-imperialism, a notion that, in and of itself, hadn’t previously been the topic of much debate. There are two main reasons for this confusion: the victorious end of most post–World War II anticolonial struggles and the USSR’s collapse. During the Cold War, the United States and allied colonial Western powers directly waged several wars against national liberation movements or regimes, along with more limited military interventions and wars by proxy. In most of these cases, Western powers confronted a local adversary supported by a large popular base. Standing against the imperialist intervention and in support of those whom it targeted seemed the obvious choice for progressives—the only discussion was whether the support ought to be critical or unreserved.

The main divide among anti-imperialists during the Cold War was rather caused by the attitude towards the USSR, which Communist Parties and their close allies regarded as the “fatherland of socialism”; they determined much of their own political positions by aligning with Moscow and the “socialist camp”—an attitude that was described as “campism.” This was facilitated by Moscow’s support for most struggles against Western imperialism in its global rivalry with Washington. As for Moscow’s intervention against workers’ and peoples’ revolts in its own European sphere of domination, the campists stood with the Kremlin, denigrating these revolts under the pretext that they were fomented by Washington.

Those who believed that the defense of democratic rights is the paramount principle of the left supported the struggles against Western imperialism as well as popular revolts in Soviet-dominated countries against local dictatorial rule and Moscow’s hegemony. A third category was formed by the Maoists, who, starting from the 1960s, labeled the USSR “social-fascist,” describing it as worse than US imperialism and going so far to side with Washington in some instances, such as Beijing’s stance in Southern Africa.

The pattern of exclusively Western imperialist wars waged against popularly based movements in the Global South started to change, however, with the first such war waged by the USSR since 1945: the war in Afghanistan (1979–89). And although they were not waged by states that were then described as “imperialist,” Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and China’s attack on Vietnam in 1979 brought widespread disorientation to the ranks of the global anti-imperialist left.

The next major complication was the 1991 US-led war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This wasn’t a popular albeit dictatorial regime but one of the Middle East’s most brutal and murderous regimes, one that had even used chemical weapons in massacring thousands of its country’s Kurdish population—with Western complicity, since this happened during Iraq’s war against Iran. A few figures, who until then belonged to the anti-imperialist left, shifted on this occasion to supporting the US-led war. But the vast majority of anti-imperialists opposed it, even though it was waged with a UN mandate approved by Moscow. They had little taste for the defense of the emir of Kuwait’s possession of his British-granted dominion, populated by a majority of rightless migrants. Most were no fans of Saddam Hussein either: They denounced him as a brutal dictator while opposing the US-led imperialist war against his country.

A further complication soon emerged. After US-led war operations ceased in February 1991, the George H.W. Bush administration—having deliberately spared Saddam Hussein’s elite force for fear of a regime collapse that might have benefited Iran—allowed the dictator to deploy it to crush a popular uprising in southern Iraq and the Kurdish insurgency in the mountainous north, letting him use helicopters in the latter case. This led to a massive wave of Kurdish refugees crossing the border into Turkey. To stop this and allow the refugees to return, Washington imposed a no-fly zone (NFZ) over northern Iraq. There was hardly any anti-imperialist campaign against this NFZ, since the only alternative would have been continued ruthless suppression of the Kurds.

NATO’s wars in the Balkans in the 1990s posed a similar dilemma. The Serbian forces loyal to Slobodan Milosevic’s regime were engaged in murderous actions against Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims. But other means to avoid massacres and impose a negotiated settlement in former Yugoslavia had been deliberately neglected by Washington, eager to mutate NATO from a defensive alliance into a “security organization” engaging in interventionist wars. The next step in this mutation consisted in involving NATO in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attacks, thus removing the limitation of the alliance’s originally restricted Atlantic zone. Then came the invasion of Iraq in 2003—the last US-led intervention that united all anti-imperialists on the terms of opposing it.

Meanwhile, Cold War “campism” was reemerging under a new guise: No longer defined by alignment behind the USSR but by direct or indirect support for any regime or force that is the object of Washington’s hostility. In other terms, there was a shift from a logic of “the enemy of my friend (the USSR) is my enemy” to one of “the enemy of my enemy (the USA) is my friend” (or someone I should spare from criticism at any rate). While the former led to some strange bedfellows, the latter logic is a recipe for empty cynicism: Focused exclusively on the hatred of the US government, it leads to knee-jerk opposition to whatever Washington undertakes in the global arena and to drifting into uncritical support for utterly reactionary and undemocratic regimes, such as Russia’s thuggish capitalist and imperialist government (imperialist by every definition of the term) or Iran’s theocratic regime, or the likes of Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.

To illustrate the complexity of the questions that progressive anti-imperialism faces today—a complexity that is unfathomable to the simplistic logic of neo-campism—let us consider two wars that arose out of the 2011 Arab Spring. When popular uprisings managed to get rid of the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011, the whole spectrum of self-proclaimed anti-imperialists applauded in unison, since both countries had Western-friendly regimes. But when the revolutionary shock wave reached Libya, as was inevitable for a country that shared borders with both Egypt and Tunisia, the neo-campists were far less enthusiastic. They remembered that Moammar El-Gadhafi’s supremely autocratic regime had been outlawed by Western states for decades—seemingly unaware that it had spectacularly shifted into cooperation with the United States and various European states since 2003.

True to type, Gadhafi bloodily repressed the protests. When the insurgents took over Libya’s second city, Benghazi, Gadhafi—after describing them as rats and drug addicts and famously vowing to “purify Libya inch by inch, house by house, home by home, street by street, person by person, until the country is clean of the dirt and impurities”—prepared an onslaught against the city, deploying the full spectrum of his armed forces. The likelihood of a massacre of massive proportion was very high. Ten days into the uprising, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution referring Libya to the International Criminal Court.

Benghazi’s population implored the world for protection, while emphasizing that they wanted no foreign boots on the ground. The League of Arab States supported this request. Accordingly, the UNSC adopted a resolution authorizing “the imposition of a NFZ” over Libya as well as “all necessary measures…to protect civilians…while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” Neither Moscow nor Beijing vetoed this resolution: Both abstained, unwilling to assume the responsibility for a massacre foretold.

Most Western anti-imperialists condemned the UNSC resolution as reminiscent of those which had authorized the onslaught on Iraq in 1991. In so doing, they overlooked the fact that the Libyan case had actually more in common with the NFZ imposed over northern Iraq than with the general onslaught on Iraq under the pretext of liberating Kuwait. The UNSC resolution was clearly flawed, wide open to interpretation in a way that would allow protracted interference of NATO powers in the Libyan civil war. Yet, in the absence of alternative means of preventing the impending massacre, the NFZ could hardly be opposed in its initial phase—for the same reasons that had led Moscow and Beijing to abstain.

It took very few days for NATO to deprive Gadhafi of much of his air force and tanks. The insurgents could have carried on without direct foreign involvement, provided they were given the weapons needed to counter Gadhafi’s remaining arsenal. NATO preferred to keep them dependent on its direct involvement in the hope that it could control them. In the end, they frustrated NATO’s plans by completely dismantling Gadhafi’s state, thus creating the current chaotic situation in Libya.

The second—even more complex—case is Syria. There, the Obama administration never intended to impose a NFZ. Because of inevitable Russian and Chinese vetoes at the UNSC, this would have required a violation of international legality like that committed by the George W. Bush administration in invading Iraq (an invasion Obama had opposed). Washington kept a low profile in the Syrian war, stepping up its involvement only after the so-called Islamic State surged and crossed the border into Iraq, and then restricting its direct intervention to the fight against ISIS.

Yet Washington’s most decisive influence on the Syrian war was not its direct involvement—which is paramount only in the eyes of neo-campists exclusively focused on Western imperialism—but rather its prohibition of delivery by its regional allies of anti-aircraft weapons to the Syrian insurgents, primarily due to opposition from Israel. The result was that the Assad regime enjoyed a monopoly in the air during the conflict and could even resort to extensive use of devastating barrel bombs dropped by helicopters. This situation also encouraged Moscow to directly engage its air force in the Syrian conflict starting in 2015.

Anti-imperialists were bitterly divided on Syria. Neo-campists—such as, in the United States, the United National Antiwar Coalition and the US Peace Council—focused exclusively on Western powers in the name of a peculiar one-sided “anti-imperialism,” while supporting or ignoring the incomparably more important intervention of Russian imperialism (or else timidly mentioning it, while refusing to campaign against it, as in the case of the Stop the War Coalition in the United Kingdom), let alone the intervention of Iran-sponsored Islamic fundamentalist forces. Progressive democratic anti-imperialists—this author included—condemned the murderous Assad regime and its foreign imperialist and reactionary backers, reproved Western imperialist powers’ indifference to the fate of the Syrian people while opposing their direct intervention in the conflict, and denounced the nefarious role of the Gulf monarchies and Turkey in promoting reactionary forces among the Syrian opposition.

The situation got further complicated, however, when a surging ISIS threatened the Syrian left-wing nationalist Kurdish movement, the only progressive armed force then active on Syrian territory. Washington fought ISIS through a combination of bombing and unembarrassed support to local forces that included Iran-aligned militias in Iraq and Kurdish left-wing forces in Syria. When ISIS threatened to take over the city of Kobanî, held by Kurdish forces, these were rescued by US bombing and weapons’ airdropping. No section of the anti-imperialists stood up significantly to condemn this blatant intervention by Washington—for the obvious reason that the alternative would have been the crushing of a force linked to a left-wing nationalist movement in Turkey that all the left had traditionally supported.

Later, Washington deployed troops on the ground in Syria’s northeast to back, arm, and train the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The only vehement opposition to this US role came from NATO member Turkey, the national oppressor of the largest section of the Kurdish people. Most anti-imperialists remained silent (the equivalent of abstention), in contrast to their 2011 stance on Libya—as if support of popular insurgencies by Washington could be tolerated only when these are led by left-wing forces. And when Donald Trump, under pressure from the Turkish president, announced his decision to pull US troops out of Syria, several prominent figures of the American left—including Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, the late David Graeber, and David Harvey—issued a statement demanding that the United States “continue military support for the SDF” (though without specifying that it should exclude direct intervention on the ground). Even among neo-campists, very few denounced this statement publicly.

From this brief survey of recent complications of anti-imperialism, three guiding principles emerge. First and most important: Truly progressive positions—unlike red-painted apologetics for dictators—are determined as a function of the best interests of the peoples’ right to democratic self-determination, not out of knee-jerk opposition to anything an imperialist power does under whatever circumstances; anti-imperialists must “learn to think.” Second: Progressive anti-imperialism requires opposing all imperialist states, not siding with some of them against others. Finally: Even in the exceptional cases when intervention by an imperialist power benefits an emancipatory popular movement—and even when it is the only option available to save such a movement from bloody suppression—progressive anti-imperialists must advocate complete distrust in the imperialist power and demand the restriction of its involvement to forms that limit its ability to impose its domination over those that it pretends to be rescuing.

Whatever discussion remains among progressive anti-imperialists who agree on the above principles is essentially about tactical matters. With the neo-campists, there is hardly any discussion possible: Invective and calumny are their usual modus operandi, in line with the tradition of their past century’s predecessors.

Postmortem on Bessemer Amazon Defeat

By: April 14, 2021
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First, we must recognize that the overwhelming vote against the union in Bessemer marks a decisive defeat, not to be under estimated. It will undoubtedly have a dampening effect on other workers, especially given its broad media attention, and the high expectations of many.

Yet, before dissecting what happened there, we need to recognize that this is a difficult period to organize for unions.

There is the pandemic and widespread unemployment, with the recognition that there are many other workers who are potential replacements. Threats by big companies, especially Amazon that they might just move a facility if it were unionized are widespread and credible. Unlike coal mines or ports, which are fixed in place, logistics facilities can indeed move. The vicious overwhelming nature of the anti-union campaign by management, has been well-documented (see, e.g., Alex Press’ recent article in Jacobin, which gives a fair amount of detail). The low level of unionization at present, especially in the private sector, below 6% nationally now presents workers with questions of support. And, the low level of confidence in general that a union would be able or willing to do much plays a role.

The logistics industry, however, is doing well, especially during the pandemic. It is central, not just to retail (as with Amazon and Walmart), but also more importantly to global, just in time, manufacturing. So, it is an important arena where workers, if they organized on a broad scale, could potentially have, a great deal of leverage, what I call in my recent book (The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s) structural power. The industry includes, not just warehouse workers, but truck drivers, air, railroad, but also shipping and port workers (who tend to be more unionized), and are pivotal to moving goods.

Given all this, it is important to look at the union’s strategy, comparing it to both other failed campaigns (especially of the UAW in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky), but also to a variety of mostly less publicized campaigns which were in fact successful. (An alternative argument, some of which runs parallel to mine is given by Jane McAlevey in an article in The Nation).

It is hard to know how well the union did or did not organize workers inside the facility. What we do know is that they had only a few workers as visible spokespeople. They seemed to rely on using other unionists to leaflet and talk to workers going in and out of the facility, and bringing in high profile people (including Sanders) to speak to supporters. While not as sclerotic as the various UAW campaigns, this was clearly not enough.

The recipes that give a union a greater chance of success are not necessarily that radical. Three successful campaigns are worth noting. Two are little known. The UAW, of course, failed abysmally at the Toyota TMMK plant. Yet construction unions in Kentucky were overwhelmingly successful. Toyota originally tried to hire non-union construction labor to build the plant and to do maintenance once the plant was built. The unions defeated these proposals and gained all union workers in both instances. They mobilized thousands of construction workers to demonstrate, including disrupting Toyota events, and exposing some of their detrimental practices. They formed alliances with construction unions in nearby states and nationally, to refuse aid to Toyota; these other unions’ aid was vital for support. The comparison to the UAW, which refused to engage in militant, disruptive, or mobilization tactics, in the illusory hopes that they could develop cooperative relations with the company, is documented in a wonderful dissertation by my former student Amy Bromsen, Condescending Saviors: Union Substitution At Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (tmmk).

West Virginia and other teachers mobilized their constituencies in massive demonstrations. In Oklahoma, thousands of teachers occupied the state house. The RWDSU held no mass rallies outside the facility involving the Amazon workers themselves. These rallies might have emboldened activists and more reticent workers and would have taken place outside the company’s control. As far as I know, they did not rent facilities in Bessemer or Birmingham for workers to hold large meetings. These were also problems with the UAW approaches.

So, their mobilization tactics were not adequate.

While I have no objection to the support of political figures or entertainers (Paul Robeson, Josh White, Pete Seeger, and Zilphia Horton were omnipresent at union events during the 1930s and 1940s), the union did not do a good job of mobilizing their most important allies, what I call associative power. They should have put pressure on largely Black politicians in Bessemer and Birmingham to come out actively in support. Black elected officials in Bessemer, a town over 70% Black, who had facilitated Amazon’s arrival, played no visible role in supporting the union. The successful organizing of, e.g., catfish farm workers in Mississippi emerged as civil rights struggles, mobilizing community members and forcing political leaders to actively support them. The appeal to Black Lives Matter sympathies, in contrast, seemed somewhat wooden. Contrary to media reports, Alabama is not that unorganized compared to other states in the South. With a bit under 10% unionization, compared to 3 or 4% in North Carolina and South Carolina, they have many potential allies. They could have set up picket lines outside the facility and encouraged unionized miners, food processing workers (which they did a tiny bit), and others to join them.

And there were not clear sets of public demands the union put forward, just dignity, etc. They should have said, if the union is certified, we will ask for $20 or so per hour (the striking miners at Warrior Met Coal company nearby rejected well over this amount), union safety and health committees, longer and more frequent breaks and lunch periods, less monitoring by computer and supervisor, no discussion of output and breaks without a union steward present, etc., demands that could have been developed at public meetings of workers, not to put in stone the examples that I have given.

The question of control of the workplace, pace of work, monitoring, etc. is ubiquitous across industries, something that needs to be formulated precisely for each type of work. In manufacturing, both time study and monitoring have over many decades become much more sophisticated and invasive. The health care system has become much more regulated. A bit of this is good, computerized checking to make sure the right patient is getting the right medicine, the correct body part is being operated on, etc. But, the overall view that whether a procedure should be allowed by an insurance company, or even whether an emergency room patient should be admitted, often decided upon by a non-medical person, or that doctors are on time study (7 minutes for this type of examination, etc.) is outrageous. In many cases, these types of intrusions have even led doctors at certain places to attempt to unionize. This control is far more intense in Amazon facilitation centers and needs to be addressed sharply.

Finally, while it is necessary to organize extensively inside the facility, even at times on a non-majority basis, this is not a permanent solution. Large companies can only be forced to bargain extensively, especially over wages and benefits, but general safety conditions as well, when the whole company is organized into a union. This increases workers’ leverage in a way syndicalist approaches do not. In more stable industries, even the IWW, e.g., among Philadelphia longshoremen, was forced to take this approach. And, we might note that unionized coal miners have a leverage that they would not have if they were not unionized. So, I have little sympathy for the syndicalist arguments, aside from their emphasis on workplace organizing and mobilization.

Union Organizing Drive at Amazon Fails—Why? What Next?

By: April 12, 2021
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This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France. 

In a major setback for the U.S. labor movement, last week the union organizing drive at the giant Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama defeated. Workers voted 1,798 against and 738 for the union in a union representation election in which only about half of the 5,876 eligible workers participated.

Officials of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union argued that Amazon had intimidated the workers, though long-time union activists also pointed to other problems with the campaign, particularly the failure to build a strong workplace organization before calling for an election.

In the United States workers can win recognition for a labor union from the employer in two ways: an election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board or a strike of the workers, though recognition strikes have become quite rare since the 1970s. If 30 percent of workers in a workplace sign cards or a petition saying they want a union, the NLRB will conduct an election. If a majority of workers vote for the union, it will be recognized by the U.S. government and the company must then bargain with the union on wages and conditions.

The biggest problem in the Bessemer case, of course, was the enormous power of Amazon and the sophistication of its anti-union campaign. Driven largely by the COVID pandemic, Amazon’s 2020 net sales were up 38 percent, to $386.1 billion and Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and chairman, has a fortune valued at $190 billion. With unlimited resources, Amazon held regular meetings with workers in the plant and sent text messages daily. The company pointed out that it was already paying workers an average of $16 an hour, twice the U.S. minimum wage and higher than other employers in the region. In a campaign called “Do It Without Dues,” the company pointed out that workers would actually lose money with a union, paying about $500 per year in dues. Amazon succeeded in creating a pro-company team spirit among some workers, convincing them to wear “Vote No” buttons on the job.

The RWDSU began its campaign during the height of the COVID pandemic and made a particular appeal to Black workers who make up an estimated 85 percent of the workforce. There was hope that the Black Lives Matter movement had created a new enthusiasm for workers’ power. The Democratic Party supported the campaign, with President Joseph Biden demanding that the company not intimidate the workers and Bernie Sanders going to the plant to speak at a rally. Yet neither BLM nor the Democrats seem to have little impact on the outcome.

The Bessemer facility only opened a year ago, part of a vast expansion of the Amazon company which hired 400,000 workers nationwide and now employees over a million. This meant that the workers in the warehouse did not know each other very well, especially given the high turnover rate, and did not have long-established relationship of mutual support and trust. When the union filed for the election in November 2020, it had not built up a strong shopfloor organization among the workers capable to taking action on its own. Nor did it do so later. As late as February the union had not contacted some workers. The RWDSU did much of its organizing at the plant gates, but made no house calls, claiming that it could not do so because of the COVID pandemic. Few workers attended union rallies.

What will happen now? In all likelihood, the RWDSU will file unfair labor practice complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, rightly claiming intimidation, and could win another election. Other unions and NGOs continue to support Amazon workers in other plants throughout the country. Some socialists have gotten jobs at Amazon to help organize on the shop floor. Despite the defeat, organizing efforts will continue. Union organizers have learned again that workers have to organize the union themselves, by building a strong movement that can take action on shop floor.

Heads up! Chins down! Resisting the New Bipartisan Neoliberal Project in Education

By: April 10, 2021
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[Editors’ note: This posting is adapted from invited remarks at the American Educational Research Association, April 11, 2021 joint session of the Special Interest Groups on Freire and Marxism.]

Teachers’ work and education are being transformed beneath our collective nose. We have missed an opportunity to combat the project in its earliest stages but we cannot delay in understanding and pushing back the new iteration of neoliberalism’s global project in education. In my remarks I sketch what’s at stake in the new neoliberal project in education and what we can do, now, to resist.

Much has changed since Mary Compton and I edited our collection fifteen years ago about the global assault on education. While some forms of the global project to transform education remain the same, we face a qualitative change, one that occurs simultaneously amidst “growth, change, rebellion” in formation of a new international working class,[1]  reflected in exciting developments in teachers’ labor activism,  strikes, walkouts, and creation of reform caucuses in unions, some of which have succeeded in winning and sustaining their leadership positions.

As critical friends of teachers organizing as workers, we support actions to protect the dignity of their labor, insisting this is both a human right and a social justice demand.  I think it’s important to start any discussion of what we hope or think teachers might do by acknowledging we ask a great deal  when we expect them to be labor activists, a task most higher education faculty decline though our work and workplaces are being undermined and altered by the same forces transforming K-12 schools. [2] Pre-K teaching, done mostly by women, is intense labor; union activity comes on top of that; and union reform activity is a third job. Family responsibilities, which women shoulder disproportionately, complicate and vie for time and energy the job and labor activism also demand. When teachers are involved in social justice movements apart from union work, as they often are, defending racial justice, reproductive freedom, immigrant rights, opposing destruction of the environment, they assume even more responsibility.

Neoliberalism’s project thus far and the harm it has done is well-documented by critical scholars, its policies to convert the commons to private property, seen so clearly in education being “marketized” through charter schools, “choice,” and  outsourcing of services, from teachers’ professional development to food services and  curriculum development. However, this research on education is seldom placed in the broader global picture of capitalism’s alteration of work, a context that explains, in part, what drives the policies. This broader scope illuminates the profound transformation of work and the economy, the altered political and economic terrain with which education is being synchronized and teachers’ work within it.

Observations about changes to teaching align with Ursula Huws’ analysis (2014) of how work globally has been altered, especially  labor of cultural and knowledge workers and those in public service: heightened intensification of labor; diminution of autonomy and creativity; standardization of work processes; and pressure to “perform according to the ever more stringent standards laid down from above, defined in terms of protocols, performance targets, and quality standards” (Huws, 2014, p. 40).[3]  The skills and attitudes Huws identifies employers want from workers read like a classified ad for teachers: being “digitally literate;” “self-motivated;”  “good team players;” and having a “commitment to lifelong learning.” Transnational corporations also want workers familiar with or able to master specific software packages and communicate with distant customers in a global market – as teachers have done in the shift to remote learning in the pandemic.  Teachers – and university faculty – are expected to have these skills and attitudes to transmit to students, without questioning the aims, which powerful elites have established, of protecting and expanding profit and solidifying existing power relations, in the guise of improving educational outcomes for all students, especially those historically most exploited – by capitalism itself.

I explore elsewhere how ideological assumptions about capitalism, labor, race, class, and gender configure the amount and nature of scholarship on teachers unions[4] and based on that analysis,  I suggest restoring the traditional Marxist understanding of capitalism as a social system,[5] which is often lost in the focus on its organization of economic relations.  Analyzing capitalism as a social system invites applying a range of theories about how diverse forms of social oppression developed within capitalism, simultaneously recognizing the unique location of workers organized as a class and the special salience(s) of social oppression.  The frame allows us to sidestep, while working to re-theorize, binaries often used to frame social and labor conflicts in education, for example race/class; gender/class; race/gender, binaries that miss the complexities of “deeply embedded hierarchies of power that have always existed, in some form, within the education system” in U.S. capitalism and capitalist society itself (Dyke & Muckian-Bates 2020, p. 2),[6] including occupational status, race, class, gender, sexuality, immigrant status, and geography. Moreover, examining education’s role in capitalism understood as a social system supports educational research about how schooling reflects and reinforces oppression in ways that are essential for teachers to recognize and resist in their pedagogical roles, pushing teachers to use their power as workers to influence what is taught, including insights from critical pedagogy.

Examining capitalism as a social system situates teachers as workers and their organizations in liberal capitalism, that is, bourgeois democracy, a location that helps explain unions’ contradictory role. Unions take the form of institutions and social movements workers form to protect their wages and working conditions, intermediaries between capital and labor. Union officials and the apparatus are caught between the demands of employers and workers.  As institutions embedded in capitalist economic and political relations, unions experience conservatizing pressures to insulate themselves and their resources. At the same time, unions occasionally have to call on members to provide the power needed to resist the employer’s pressure, including using labor’s most powerful weapon – the strike. The counter-pressure to conservatizing influences in unions’ contradictory role under capitalism comes from movements for social justice, the power of workers at the workplace, and internal struggles to make unions into “living democratic participatory organizations and cultures.”  [7]  Understanding unions’ placement in capitalism makes union democracy, often omitted in scholarship and discussions of teachers’ labor activism, including social justice unionism, not only an ideal. It’s a practical necessity.[8]

THE PANDEMIC, EDTECH, AND THE NEW LANDSCAPE OF TEACHERS’ LABOR ACTIVISM

The enormously complex, on-going struggles about schools and teaching during the pandemic are too huge a topic for me to explore in these remarks. The point I want to stress is that increasing attacks about teachers harming children by demanding safe reopenings is a recapitulation of the extravagantly funded, extraordinarily well-orchestrated assault on teachers and their unions launched fifteen years ago. It occurs now for the same reason the attack was organized before: Of all the potential opponents to the new iteration of capitalism’s project to transform education, teachers and their unions are the most formidable. [9] Most research about increased racial and economic educational inequality from the pandemic emerges from “global edtech solutionism,” as Williamson and Hogan (2020) explain in their analysis  for the Education International (EI) (cited below).  The seemingly progressive solutions of the global edtech movement deepen and extend the reach of data mining and privatization in private/public partnerships supported by both Democrats and Republicans and corporate elites in international finance organizations.[10]

We should understand the attacks teachers are experiencing are pushback to victories in teachers’ labor activism in the past decade, in “blue cities” and “red state” walkouts, as well as gains in educating teachers and parents about  the purposes of and harm done by standardized testing under NCLB. However, another more chilling development has occurred. Capitalism has used COVID and remote learning to reassert and expand the process begun with imposition of standardized testing and curricula two decades ago, intensifying the processes Huws describes in global alterations in work and  Raewyn Connell captures in education as “On-line templates and information systems, heavier and more detailed reporting requirements, standardized testing on a huge scale, quantitative targets and incentives,” and a shift to “control from a distance.” [11]

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

What has been missed in most analyses of teachers’ responses to the pandemic, including those sympathetic to teachers and well-informed about neoliberal reformers’ campaign to fan public outrage  against unions, [12] is how AFT and NEA, as well as the state affiliates, which most often follow the lead of the national unions, failed to mobilize members after schools were closed in early Spring 2020, when it was clear the pandemic would not disappear. At that point it fell to NEA and AFT to lead national campaigns for the “widespread and significant” federal money and support for needed for equitable reopenings. [13]  AFT and NEA should have mobilized members to highlight that teachers in public schools, especially those with the highest concentrations of low-income BIPOC children, needed what affluent private schools (and mostly white, wealthy suburban school districts) provided their teachers and students: practical high-quality professional development in shifting to online instruction; serious investment to make school buildings safe environments; mechanisms for parents, students, and teachers to identify resources they needed to succeed, like counselors, social workers, and nurses  – and  defund those that subvert academic and social success of low-income students of color, like police in schools and surveillance hardware. [14]

In the absence of national campaigns organized by the NEA and AFT, locals were left on their own to wage defensive struggles over safety and equity during the pandemic. While small groups of activists attempted to fuse demands about safe reopenings to a broader program that addressed how the pandemic was exacerbating pre-existing racial and economic inequalities in schools,[15] national and state teachers unions devoted resources to electoral politics. AFT’s policy of supporting local walkouts, won in the July 2020 national convention primarily due to efforts of union locals headed by reformers, was at best a mixed blessing because it accepted that struggles over reopening were local, absolving the national unions from their responsibility and isolating locals in defensive struggles against extremely well-organized opponents with national resources and a shared narrative.

Just as problematic and related to their failure to mobilize pro-actively for the kind of federal funding schools needed was NEA and AFT partnering with tech billionaires and the foundations they fund in “Education Reimagined,”[16] supporting the intensification of privatization with education technology. An EI report that focuses on Pearson illuminates the breathtaking scope of change being planned and enacted in teachers’ work.[17] Pearson “aims to lead the ‘next generation’ of teaching and learning by developing digital learning platforms, including Artificial Intelligence in education (AIEd). It is piloting new AI technologies that it hopes will enable virtual tutors to provide personalised learning to students, much like Siri or Alexa.”  In other words, teachers have been training their replacement with AI with the online assignments in software and platforms they have used during COVID. And while Pearson wants this technology to be integrated into a single platform, Google Classroom, it has a host of competitors who similarly intend to profit from transforming teachers’ work.  What seems paradoxical but is actually explained by unions’ contradictory role in capitalism is that this and other superb research on edtech has been published by the EI, the international confederation of teachers unions, which is dominated by the AFT and NEA.

We have increasing documentation by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) about dangers in “personalized learning,” digital platforms,[18] and proprietary software, like Summit Learning. [19]  Note that support for much of NEPC’s valuable research on educational technology comes from the Great Lakes Center on Education Research and Practice, a research foundation funded by the NEA and several of its state affiliates.[20] We also see new, chilling forms of surveillance identified by education activists that intensify the school-to-prison pipeline. Yet the cutting-edge work organizing against the surveillance [21]  comes from the Alliance for Educational Justice, which is funded by the Democracy Alliance, mostly a coterie of wealthy liberals, many of them ed tech entrepreneurs, as well as Mary Kay Henry, President of the Service Employees International Union, and the Center for American Progress, the Clinton/Biden center of the Democratic Party, with which both AFT and NEA have close political ties. [22]  Unbeknownst to most union members and activists, the pandemic recovery CARES act, which AFT and NEA supported and praised fulsomely,  pushes money away from “bricks and mortar” schools for remote learning software, controlled by the tech elite. [23] As teachers in their schools and local unions, correctly and courageously, fought for remote learning to protect their students and communities  from COVID, they missed the need to demand controls over software and platforms. [24] As one leading activist explained, teachers were  too “overwhelmed” in fighting for physical safety to absorb what adopting remote learning signified for schools, students, and teachers’ work post-pandemic.

THE NEW ITERATION OF THE BIPARTISAN PROJECT FOR TEACHING, TEACHERS, AND PUBLIC EDUCATION

Both Donald Trump’s 2016 election as President, which ushered in a period of profound social and political turmoil that provided the context for teachers’ subsequent labor activism, along with Biden’s 2020 victory configure what teachers and students will face as they begin a “regular” school year.  Trump’s rhetoric advanced ideas associated with the international growth of “authoritarian right-wing populism” (Önis and Kutlay, 2020, p. 14) in the name of protecting the interests of the working class .[25]  Trump’s and the GOP’s interruption of many policies associated with the bipartisan consensus about education’s centrality in alleviating inequality, accompanied by advocacy of racial superiority, theocracy, subversion of women’s rights, anti-immigrant sentiment, might appear to undercut what the architects of the global neoliberal project in education promoted as education’s role in promoting social inclusion, emphasized in the World Bank’s 2018 World Development Report on education. [26]  Yet as Önis & Kutlay (2020) explain, authoritarian leaders’ use religion, nationalism, and economic concerns “as a tool for managing capitalism in the face of pervasive inequalities in a new way” (p. 14), actually intensifying economic stratification and control of elites. Hence,  though Trump and the GOP were willing to jettison aspects of bourgeois democracy, they shared the goal of international finance organizations in education: maintaining capitalist social, political, and economic relations under the cover of ameliorating poverty and inequality.

Though Trump and the GOP interrupted key aspects of the bipartisan agreement about education reform by introducing neo-conservative policies, like funding for religious schools, they also pushed policies aligned with the previous bipartisan project, for example privatization through expansion of charter schools, including online charters.  We see a thread connecting the original neoliberal project and the new iteration in the unanimous approval by the GOP, Democrats, and even Sanders of Trump’s nominee for the Department of Education, Scott Stump, assistant secretary for career, technical, and adult education. Stump’s background in “workforce development and education” in community colleges using online learning[27]  continued and prefigured how  Democrats (and Republicans who will vote with them) will argue for linking education to the economy, insisting  workers’ access to good jobs requires more and different schooling, primarily online learning, with business titans determining what students and workers need to know.   The new bipartisan project will likely drop Trump’s and the GOP’s baggage of neo-conservativism and proto-fascism but will aim to replace the entire infrastructure and ethos of schooling with an alternative vision and creation of Silicon Valley technology companies supported by Wall Street.

Biden can’t resurrect the bipartisan project as it was, nor does the capitalist elite want an identical replication because the pandemic has created huge opportunities for profit and control.   MIT’s project on technology, work, and education, [28] funded by many of the biggest players on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, including JP Morgan Chase, and Google, along with liberal foundations, like the Ford Foundation, and labor officials, displays the not-so-new bipartisan plan to more closely link (privatized) public education to the economy: using educational technology “to link skills training to business demand.”  The wrinkle in this plan is, of course,  staggering unemployment heightened in the pandemic. This economic reality will not, cannot be changed with education of any sort.  And it remains to be seen how the Democrats’  intend to fund spending for the infrastructure and schools, primarily the extent to which it will rely on the model we saw in the CARES act, of privatization with public/private partnerships and imposition of edtech.

AFT and NEA are trying find ways to avoid fighting this new bipartisan project, though they seem to have learned they cannot wholeheartedly embrace it, as they did when they supported NCLB, standardized testing and allowing teachers’ pay and performance to be evaluated by student test scores, ostensibly to end inequality in education. Teachers are organizing against the Biden administration’s acceptance of  standardized testing during the pandemic, and we can anticipate AFT and NEA support of the new project will  alienate and anger a new stratum of classroom teachers, already exhausted and disheartened by the attacks on teachers and pressure to reopen schools, as they experience a deeper erosion to their professional autonomy and working conditions.  This situation creates an opportunity for teacher activists fighting for social justice, already pushing their unions to end segregation and equalize educational outcomes, to fuse these struggles with desires of teachers not heretofore “political” who see deterioration in teaching conditions that have occurred in the pandemic. The challenge is to connect activism in support of  social justice to the degradation of teachers’ work by explaining the shared origin of the problem in capitalism’s plan for education to serve business and profit in ways the ruling class dictates.

OUR ROLE AS CRITICAL RESEARCHERS

I see researchers having two critical (in both senses of the word) functions. First, we should help educate U.S. teachers about this new iteration of the neoliberal project globally,  helping them to create a different narrative, one grounded in anti-capitalist ideas, like putting students before profits. Second we should push the national unions to adopt strategies consistent with an anti-capitalist stance, like breaking from collaborations with edtech moguls and the non-profit, “non-partisan” think tanks they fund.  We need to urge reform locals to make the new neoliberal project part of their political education  and use it to drive organizing.

The British Columbia Teachers Federation has provided a valuable model because as we in the U.S.  focused on combating Trump, the BCTF has dealt with the Liberal Party’s embrace of the project we face under Biden, articulated most clearly by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).[29] The BCTF strategy  tapped members’ insights and dissatisfactions about their work (conditions that subvert students’ authentic learning), connecting these to critical research about the OECD’s aims. Their work suggests how we might connect theory about changes in capitalism’s transformation of work to teachers’ practice, shaping a narrative for unions and teacher activists to drive organizing.

We need to support ideas being advanced by reformers about “organizing for the common good” to make teachers unions adopt their historic – and often neglected – responsibility to advance the social movements on which labor has always depended. At the same time, critical scholars have a role in helping activists sharpen their analysis of why the contradictory role of unions in capitalism means even the best-intentioned reformers, thoroughly committed to support social movements, face conservatizing pressures when they assume leadership of unions.  A popular approach to reviving unions [30]  adopted by the two largest unions led by advocates of social justice unionism has, I think, disoriented the movement because its template for organizing is problematic when applied to  teachers’ work and their unions. One of the most powerful motivations we can tap comes from teachers’ occupational identity, their desire to maintain teaching as a career, their work and education respected and valued.  Here I should note Huws has a thorough analysis of how workers’ occupational identity can be problematic and/or progressive for organizing, which is germane to this discussion but takes me beyond my focus.  Any generic model for organizing that ignores the texture and conditions of teaching, as well as differences in school systems and geography, obscures specifics of work and related issues that fuel activism, especially in regard to power relations, perhaps evaluations most pointedly,  as well as matters of curriculum and instruction.

Another related concern I have about this  model being used in education unions is its reliance on research that consists of “data analytics,” for example evidence of members’ involvement in union campaigns. While this approach can support powerful interventions that resonate with mobilizing members on campaigns that are grounded in ideals of social justice, it can obscure the dialectical relationship between close scrutiny of teachers’ work by teachers themselves and critical research about capitalism’s global project, the tectonic shifts in work that are reflected in and reinforced by teachers’ labor. What we learn in this process should drive organizing at the workplace, in the school system, and in education nationally.  We need to ask questions that may be uncomfortable for unions with social justice leadership that are rightly proud of their accomplishments about why and how they missed the relationship between changes to teaching and the new global neoliberal project. This frank discussion among friends can help illuminate the strengths and drawbacks of any model adopted for organizing, especially as we recommend it to other unions.

The fact that we have been put on the defensive by the pandemic and have not seen what has happened to teachers’ work should not obscure the hopeful, positive developments in the past year.  A new stratum of teachers, those who bring a critical lens to their work and teaching, increasingly see the value of unions in both advancing social justice and protecting the dignity of their labor. The struggles waged about racism and reopening schools, in particular, have educated a new generation of teacher activists. When teachers return to fully opened schools, the “new normal,” I think  they will face a staggering deterioration in their work. Critical scholars have a significant responsibility in this new political landscape, not the least of which is connecting with the real existing movements to share what we know, in forms that are accessible to working teachers. They need our support, as we do theirs. In a word, we need solidarity.

[1] https://newpol.org/issue_post/workers-of-the-world-%e2%80%a8growth-change-and-rebellion/

[2] Ovetz, R. (2020). The Algorithmic University: On-Line Education, Learning Management Systems, and the Struggle over Academic Labor. Critical Sociology, 0896920520948931.

[3] Huws, U. (2014). Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age. New York: Monthly Review Press. (The book is available open-access, pdf on Google Scholar.)

[4] Weiner, L., & Asselin, C. (2020). Learning from Lacunae in Research: Making Sense of Teachers’ Labor         Activism. Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, 10(3), 226-270. (Article is available open- access: https://hipatiapress.com/hpjournals/index.php/remie/issue/view/393 )

[5] Wood, E. M. (1995). Democracy against capitalism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

[6] Dyke, E. & Muckian-Bates, B. (Forthcoming). Rank-and-File Rebels: Theories of Power and Change in the   2018 Education Strikes. https://press.colostate.edu/: Colorado State University Open Press. (This will be open-access.)

[7] Kim Moody, Nelson Lichtenstein, and I debate the relationship between union democracy, democracy in society, and socialism in exchanges in New Politics, beginning with my article in the Winter 2021 issue:          https://newpol.org/issue_post/unions-democracy-and-%e2%80%a8the-third-camp/

[8] Asselin, C. (2019). Tensions, dilemmas, and radical possibility in democratizing teacher unions: Stories of two social justice caucuses in New York City and Philadelphia.  Dissertation, available online: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3433/

[9] https://archive.newpol.org/issue38/weiner38.htm

[10] Saltman, K. J. (2009). Schooling in disaster capitalism: How the political right is using disaster to privatize public schooling. In Critical pedagogy in uncertain times (pp. 27-54). Palgrave Macmillan, New York. (Available in pdf, found in Google Scholar.)

[11] http://www.raewynconnell.net/2021/01/teachers-worth.html

[12] https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/neoliberal-education-reform-scapegoat-teachers-covid-19-reopening-school

[13] https://nepc.info/publications/podcast-saldana-scott

[14]  Ironically, AFT President Weingarten is now calling for many of these improvements, noting Jewish private schools provided them: https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-teachers-union-head-randi-weingarten-has-a-vision-to-get-kids-back-to-school/

[15] https://www.demandsafeschools.org/

[16] https://education-reimagined.org/about/

[17] https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2019_ei_gr_essay_pearson2025_eng_24

[18] https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/virtual-learning

[19] https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication-announcement/2020/06/summit-2020

[20] https://www.greatlakescenter.org/about/

[21] https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=337742697337266&ref=watch_permalink

[22] See LittleSis.org for the details: https://littlesis.org/org/47100-Democracy_Alliance

[23] Two activists debate the merits of “bargaining for the common good” and community schools in light of federal mandates about use of educational technology in their exchange in New Politics: https://newpol.org/symposium/community-schools-progressive-reform-or-privatization-trojan-horse/

[24] https://www.ei-ie.org/en/woe_homepage/woe_detail/16856/the-edtech-pandemic-shock-by-ben-williamson-anna-hogan

[25] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03932729.2020.1731168

[26] https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2018

[27][27] https://www2.ed.gov/news/staff/bios/stump.html

[28] https://workofthefuture.mit.edu/mission/#collaborators

[29] https://www.bctf.ca/publications/ResearchReports.aspx?id=55269

[30]  Moody, K. (Fall, 2020), Spectre. “Reversing the ‘model’: Thoughts on Jane McAlevey’s plan for union power.” https://spectrejournal.com/volume-1-issue-2-fall-2020/ (Only available to subscribers.)

On Gramsci’s Fall: A Review

By: April 9, 2021
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“My biggest weakness was not finding the mettle to remain alone… without any connections, attachments, relationships at all. That is the source of all the misery.” —Nora Bossong, Gramsci’s Fall.

In Nora Bossong’s latest novel, Gramsci’s Fall, we meet forty-six-year-old Anton Stöver whose marriage is falling apart with extra-marital affairs coming to a close and a career in a German university at a dead end. When he is offered an opportunity to research on one of Antonio Gramsci’s missing notebooks, he fights with his wife and readily agrees to join his friend in Rome in the hope to finally make a breakthrough with his childhood obsession. As he delves into Gramsci’s past, we find our narrator falling in love with a young woman, visiting his own past; a childhood he wishes to abandon, a marriage that was a bad decision, a career that never took off and then a child to fulfil his middle-class ideal life.

In alternating chapters, the book intrudes into their personal lives and provides us a picture of the troubled marriages and struggling lives Anton Stöver and Antonio Gramsci lead. On one hand, we find the professor drifting away willingly from his family and on the other we see Gramsci being torn apart reluctantly from his wife and children. They are fighting a battle; a battle to protect what’s closest and intimate to them. In this drama of struggle and conflict, the author guides us into their lives, their thirst for social change, the pursuit of knowledge, and their only wish; to be with the one they love.

I read Gramsci’s theories for a particular course in a semester. I can recall my fascination with his thought and the length it reached. A brief summary on his life made me inquisitive. I was motivated to know the kind of person he was, the life he led. It was this curiosity that pushed me in scooping this novel off a shelf in a bookstore. Needless to say, this book was what I had expected when I spotted it on the bookshelf. It was not a mere biography of Gramsci recounting his successes and losses through a character of the novel as is often the case when novelists try to explore the life of a thinker or a writer who is dead. It was a novel that had Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political thinker, as a character living his life when Mussolini and his fascist dictatorship was its zenith in Italy. In his 1984-acclaimed novel Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes tried to invoke the life of French novelist Gustave Flaubert’s life through his protagonist. However, Barnes failed to bring Flaubert alive in his work for the reader. Flaubert and his life remained an obsession of the protagonist written down in pages with no access for the readers but through the research materials on his life. It is here, I felt, Bossong stood apart with her novel. She brought Gramsci and his Italy to life before the reader and made us connect to him even though she may have used her agency as a writer to stitch independent facts from his life through tiny threads of her imagination.

In the face of it, the novel may appear a writing on the socio-political matters concerning with social thinkers. Whether it is the politics of socialism that Gramsci wishes to see conquer in Italy, or Anton Stöver’s ambitions to give the world another of Gramsci’s political insight; the stories flow along the lines of wider political struggles marring Russia and Italy back in 1920s and the location of the professor in Rome in the present times where only the memories, murals and tombs of its socialists are alive. Gramsci is at the cusp of his rising political presence traveling from Moscow to Italy in search for what socialism truly is in his eyes. He is aware of Marx, Engles and Lenin, at the same time he is also under the strong influence of Sorel, and the Anarchists such as Bakunin, Kroptkin, Proudhon. His conversations with his friend Piero Straffa, or Eugenia Schucht on communism, or socialism, in practice at that time, helps Gramsci make a breakthrough within the Marxist thoughts extracting it from its economic determinism. In doing so, Gramsci gave Marxism a newer meaning and a cultural way to understand fascism which Bossong tried to cultivate brilliantly throughout the story. Herein, we find the socio-political nature of the novel give way to something else, something more intimate, closer to ordinary human experience and that was the politics of love, which changed Gramsci’s life too.

The novelist, through a careful exploration of Gramsci and Anton Stöver’s personal life shows us the essence of love, the violence, its possession, the ferocity, the care and the protection attached to it. The book, despite all its socio-political nature, is a book on love and a life spent in loving. On the one hand, we find Anton Stöver be disloyal, sleep with as many women as he could back in Göttingen and fall for a young woman in Rome with no sense of fidelity toward his wife. We find him often justifying his infidelity by suggesting monogamy as the tool of capitalism that gives birth to the idea of private property and hence being non-monogamous entailing being true to his marxist principles. On the other hand, there is Gramsci, the man who was never attached to anyone or believed in building connections, drive himself crazy in love with his friend’s sister Giulia Schucht. The childhood that disfigured his body is needs, seeks companionship of Giulia and Giulia only. Even in his loneliest time, he only reminds himself of his commitment to her. His resolve to be monogamous is a sharp contrast to Stöver’s choice and raises the question whether monogamy really is a political exercise or simply a choice that’s outside political ideologies. At the end of the book, Bossong presents an extract from the Prison Notebooks wherein, Gramsci writes how loving one person precedes social love. Consequently, he presents his dilemma with what is better for a socialist society; the social love or the love for one single person. His answer to the question is beautifully and poignantly captured through the story of his life Nora Bossong has tried to tell us in her novel and the title that echoed in its pages. It was after a fall; a coming down and dismantling; both of Gramsci and Anton Stöver.

Even though the principle characters of the novel were two men, not for a second, I felt the presence of women wither into the background. The female characters in the novel are women who have facets that give the novel its strength. Whether it is Hedda, Anton Stöver’s grieving, disheartened wife, or Gramsci’s lonely, sad Giulia; they both have stories that bring out the happiness and exhaustion of marriage and love from a woman’s side. Alongside, we find the dominating presence of Ilsa, Anton Stöver’s mother whose strength and voice scares Anton, makes him hate her but also as someone who is responsible for his communist scholarship. Back to Gramsci’s life, we find him mostly surrounded by women; whether it is Eugenia, who stood as a symbol of a hope of a socialist society, or Tania, who gave up everything to be at his side when he was in pain. The female charters of Bossong aren’t just background props. They are women with stories strewn over their hands and eyes. They are living books that are opened to be read and understood as much as the male protagonists.

The author was unknown to me but that did not deter me in laying my faith on this book. I read the first chapter and realised this is going to be something I would love. There is a smoothness to her prose that flows from one page to another in an assembled manner. From one period to another, snippets from childhood to what’s unfolding at present, from politics in state and family to struggles in love; it all fits together and I could discern a pattern the author lent to her prose. Undeniably, the credit also goes to Alexander Booth, who perfectly translated the book from German to make it available to a worldwide audience. I sincerely hope Bossong’s other works are translated in English as well, and soon. I could feel the characters in book, their joys and apathies. I could see them come out from the pages whenever I opened the book and witness them getting on with their lives. I could hear her characters speak to me about the promises they kept and the many they couldn’t. She brought history to life through her novel.

*************

Gramsci’s Fall was published in German in 2015. It was first published in English by Seagull Books on 4th April, 2020.

As American Life Returns to Normal, Mass Shootings Resume

By: April 6, 2021
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Mass Shootings – 1982 – 2021 – from Mother Jones

This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France. 

In Atlanta, Georgia on March 16 a gunman killed eight people, in three spas, six of them Asian women. Then on March 22 in Boulder, Colorado, a man with a gun killed ten people. On March 31, 2021, in Orange, California, a gunman murdered four people, one a nine-year-old boy. Since the Atlanta shooting, there have been at least twenty mass shootings in the United States.

Since the late 1970s when they became common, mass shootings have occurred in every region of he country, in cities, towns, and rural areas. They take place in schools, at concerts, in churches, in office buildings and shopping centers. They occur at birthday parties and weddings.

The mass shooters are nearly all male, though they may be white, Black, Latino, or Arab. They may have known the victims or not. The motives may be personal or political, and many of the gunmen seem to suffer from mental illness. While shooters sometimes use handguns, very often the incidents involve assault rifles, high-powered automatic weapons that can hold 30 to 100 rounds.

Mass shootings, like shootings in general, arise generally speaking from social problems: poverty, crime, mental illness, and distressed families. But it is the ready availability of guns that makes such mass murder possible. In America, there are 330 million people and 400 million guns. One can buy a pistol or even an assault rifle for $500. Last year, in part because of the Black Lives Matter protests and the call to defund the police, Americans, mostly white but others as well, purchased another 40 million guns.

While mass shootings dominate the TV news, they are only part of the problem of gun violence in America. Last year almost 20,000 Americans were killed with guns in murders, suicides, and accidents. Many of those deaths result from fights between rival gangs. The City of Chicago had more than 760 murders last year, most by guns, and many gang related.

Most Americans, 60%, now favor stricter gun control laws, up by almost ten percent from a few years ago. At present felons and those certified to be mentally ill cannot buy guns, but, depending on state law, nearly any other adult can. If you cannot buy a gun in your state, you can often cross the state line and buy one.

Yet the U.S. government has proven unable to do anything about this problem. Why is that? Reformers call for licensing of all gun sales, universal background checks, for outlawing large clips, and for ending the sale of assault weapons, giving judges power to take guns from those who pose a danger to themselves or others.

The Republican Party has blocked nearly all gun reform legislation, arguing that it is unconstitutional because the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, which reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This is interpreted to mean, anyone can own a gun.

In many states there are large numbers of hunters and some target shooters who fear that the government will take their guns from them. The National Rifle Association, which once simply taught gun safety (as a boy I was a member), became a rightwing movement that supported ownership of guns of every sort. The manufacture and sale of guns is, of course, a multi-billion dollar business that lobbies to promote its industry.

Democrats, especially progressives, have in general supported gun control legislation. The Democratic Socialists of America has no official position, but articles in its journals suggest that DSA too supports gun control. Some American socialists, however, have organized gun clubs, arguing that the far right should not be allowed to control the country’s gun culture.

Despite the horror of continuing mass murder, gang killings, and gun violence of all sorts, with the U.S. Senate divided 51 Democratic votes to 50 Republican votes, it will remain difficult to to pass gun control laws.

Refusal Music

By: April 6, 2021
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It is truly remarkable that, after everything this world has seen over the past year, we still hear so much about “the power of positivity.” A pandemic continues to kill thousands each day, government after government bungling the roll-out of the vaccine. The Arctic melts, wildfires destroy whole countries. Heroes and friends are dead, enemies are in power.

And yet, to hear the speeches of self-help gurus and chipper morning show hosts, we needn’t fret. Movies and television shows present us with neat and symmetrical narratives, teaching us to ignore messiness and ambiguity. Well-meaning liberals proclaim the chaos over.

Four years ago, not long before Donald Trump’s inauguration, and a few days after hearing the much-mourned cultural critic Mark Fisher had died, I re-read an article he wrote in 2016 about the reissue of the Pop Group’s 1980 album For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? Fisher’s description of this magnificent piece of industrial punk-funk is prescient:

While dominant ideology sought to naturalise and neutralise drudgery, atrocities and exploitation, The Pop Group aimed to do the opposite: to bring suffering and systemic violence to the screaming forefront of consciousness. This wasn’t simply a matter of reciting facts, but of emotional engineering, a jolting out of the ideological trance that accepts injustice as inevitable. Mark Stewart’s vocals perform this maladjustment, this refusal to treat the excesses of global capitalism as anything but insane.

These were the earliest years of neoliberalism’s dominance. Thatcher had been elected the previous spring, and Reagan was well on his way to victory in the US. On top of their outward viciousness toward anything smacking of unions, social movements, or social welfare, their politics sought to atomize, isolate, to emotionally content working people with misery.

Music such as the Pop Group’s could never, as Fisher points out, simply recite facts. People knew the facts. The trick was to force the audience to psychologically come to grips with the possibility of refusal. “[T]he album is best seen,” he wrote, “as part of a struggle against the new ‘common sense’ that capital was seeking to impose in the early 1980s using techniques of reality- and libidinal-engineering (PR, branding and advertising).”

The Pop Group were far from the first in the punk milieu (including the “post” and “proto” varieties) to tap into this mode of expression. Contemporaries such as Gang of Four, Delta 5, Au Pairs each sought to struggle against the straitjacket of late capitalism in their own way. In fact, a simple map of associations and collaborations reveals “refusal” as not just a theme but a thorough structure of feeling for the era’s most original music.

After the Pop Group’s initial demise, Mark Stewart went onto several collaborations with producer Adrian Sherwood. The end results were a kind of dub music for the middle apocalypse: dark, manic, thick and jagged, like rebar in concrete. Sherwood’s own work with the tragically underrated TACK>>HEAD point to these experiments as not only seminal to what would come to be known as “industrial music” but its neglected cousin of “industrial hip-hop.” Groups like Consolidated, Beatnigs and Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy came to claim the mantle, mixing militant lyrics with razor-on-metal production. For a brief time, before the slowed-down R&B-influenced “west coast sound” became so hegemonic, artists toying with the sounds of industrial destruction – think Terminator X era Public Enemy – were at the vanguard of hip-hop.

Then there were the sound’s more obviously danceable iterations, taking over abandoned warehouses for all-night raves in Detroit, Chicago, Berlin, London and beyond. This act of reclamation was naturally rejected by the forces of the neoliberal city. When British ravers fought back against Thatcher’s attempts to quash their subculture, they weren’t just doing to because of their love of beats but because their vision of space was one that felt freer, saner, more equitable.

This is different than what we might blandly refer to as “protest music,” the use of song to decry this or that specific issue. There were plenty of those too, including from the artists above. But even those who focused on the single issue did so in a way that used it as synecdoche, one cog of many on a carriage careening off a cliff. In both content and form, these genres, artists, and songs sought to expose the deep-seated malfunction at society’s core. They sounded like the madness that was gripping daily life underneath its saccharine shell, centering decay while defiantly refusing to take the blame for it. Crossovers between punk and hip-hop, noise and dance, were not epiphenomenal to collective refusal. On the contrary, they were drawn together by a common utopian negation.

It would be glib to say that this kind of music was “revived” during the Trump years. What can be said is that the fact of apocalypse is now undeniable. In this context, music that seizes the madness is more prescient than it has been for some time. The noisier sides of hip-hop and spoken word – artists like clipping, Death Grips and Moor Mother – have gained critical acclaim. Electronic and indie artists are also, in their own way, tapping into the extreme unpredictability and isolation, evidenced in songs like Parquet Courts’ “Violence,” Squid’s “Houseplants.” Even the overdone aesthetics of vaporwave offer a refusal of sorts, tongue-in-cheek though they may be.

What remains to be seen is whether these genres and artists will recognize themselves in each other. For it’s this kind of polyvalent cultural expression – one that rejects isolation, alienation, and anodyne notions of artistic convention – that is needed to push back against the madness. Refusal, in the sense we mean it here, must be more than a collection of incidents. It needs to grow and flourish and morph into an unstoppable idea around which people can reimagine their lives. We likely won’t know what shape this can take until it is safe to go outside again, safe to gather in mass numbers for any kind of cultural expression. But the raw materials are there.

This article originally appeared in the German publication Melodie & Rhythmus.

One Hundred Years of the Russian NEP – Lessons for Cuba

By: April 3, 2021
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Author’s Note – This article originally appeared in Spanish in La Joven Cuba (Young Cuba), one of the most important critical blogs in the island, where the Internet remains the principal vehicle for critical opinion because the government has not yet succeeded in controlling it. The article elicited some strong reactions including that of a former government minister who called it a provocation.

The New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced by the revolutionary government in 1921 was in fact an attempt to reduce the widespread discontent among the Russian people with measures designed to increase production and popular access to consumer goods. Even though the Civil War (1918-1920) caused great hardship among the rural and urban populations, it was the politics of War Communism, introduced by the Bolshevik government during that period, that significantly worsened the situation. This led to a profound alienation among those who had been the pillars of the October Revolution in 1917: the industrial workers, and the peasantry that constituted 80 percent of the population.

In the countryside, the urban detachments, organized to confiscate from the peasantry their agricultural surplus to feed the cities, ended up also confiscating part of the already modest peasant diet in addition to the grain needed to sow the next crop. The situation worsened when under the same policy the government, based on an assumed class stratification in the countryside that had no basis in reality, created the poor peasant committees (kombedy) to reinforce the functions of the urban detachments. Given the arbitrary informal and formal methods that characterized the operations of the kombedy, these ended up being a source of corruption and abuse, frequently at the hands of criminal elements active in them, who ended up appropriating for their own use the grain and other kinds of goods they arbitrarily confiscated from the peasantry.

Moreover, during the fall of 1920, symptoms of famine began to appear in the Volga region. The situation became worse in 1921 after a severe drought ruined the crops, which also affected the southern Urals. Leon Trotsky had proposed in February 1920, to substitute the arbitrary confiscations of War Communism with a tax in kind paid by the peasantry as an incentive to have them grow more surplus grain. However, the party leadership rejected his proposal at that time.

The politics of War Communism was also applied to the urban and industrial economy through its total nationalization, although without the democratic control by the workers and the soviets, which the government abolished when the civil war began and replaced with the exclusive control from above by state administrators. Meantime, the workers were subjected to a regime of militarized compulsory labor. For the majority of the Communist leaders, including Lenin, the centralized and nationalized economy represented a great advance towards socialism. That is why for Lenin, the NEP was a significant step back. Apparently, in his conception of socialism, total nationalization played a more important role than the democratic control of production from below.

The elimination of workplace democracy was only one aspect of the more general clampdown on soviet democracy that the Bolshevik government launched in response to the bloody and destructive civil war. Based on the objective circumstances created by the war, and on the urgent need to resolve the problems they were facing, like economic and political sabotage, the Bolshevik leadership not only eliminated multiparty soviets of workers and peasants, but also union democracy and independence, and introduced very serious restrictions of  other political freedoms established at the beginning of the revolution.

The working class, decimated by the civil war—it had drastically shrunk to just one third of what it had been at the beginning of 1918–and profoundly affected by the scarcity of basic goods in the cities, did not have the strength to oppose the new top-down organization of work, and to try to restore the role it had played in the democratic direction of production. By the end of the civil war, the soviets and the unions were on their way to become mere transmission belts for the policies of the Communist Party. Later on, with the onset of the New Economic Policy, workers began to resist and engaged in a good number of strikes, but this came to an end by the late twenties, when Stalin began to consolidate his power.

The New Economic Policy (1921-1928)

The Bolshevik leadership promoted a series of market concessions to increase production and popular access to basic consumer goods. Thus, for example, it allowed the peasants to freely sell their products in exchange for their payment of a tax in kind. That was how the hated policy of the arbitrary confiscations of War Communism came to an end. The government also permitted the operation of national and international capital in the production and distribution of consumer goods.

The economic concessions of the government were accompanied by the liberalization and flourishing of cultural activities. This liberalization was restricted shortly afterwards in 1923, after Lenin retired from politics due to his precarious health, when the government imposed the censorship of books and other materials oriented to popular culture, especially those of a religious nature. Ironically, this censorship contradicted the only right mentioned as such in the revolutionary Constitution of 1918, establishing the right to the dissemination of atheist as well as religious propaganda.

As the Bolshevik government liberalized the economy and the cultural arena, it clamped down, at the same time, on the political rights of freedom of thought and organization. Lenin, along  with other party leaders, decided to counteract what for them was the NEP’s great retreat from socialism with the  hardening of the political control of the society by the party they led.

The suppression of political rights, which could have been considered as necessary under the objective conditions of the war, was not only maintained, but systematized and turned into political virtue. Thus, for example, the episodic tolerance that the Communist Party showed during the civil war to parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries by allowing them to function, came to an end at the beginning of the NEP when the Bolshevik leadership decided to permanently declare those organizations illegal. And the Tenth Communist Party Congress celebrated in March of 1921 – the same congress that established the NEP – banned the existence of permanent factions inside the party.

The persecution and jailing for opposition political activities increased, even when these were peaceful in nature. This included the suppression of the massive rebellion of the sailors in the Kronstadt naval base (near Petrograd) in March of 1921, who were demanding the return to soviet democracy and the adoption of economic reforms similar to those implemented by the NEP, which the Party congress approved shortly thereafter. It was this political hardening led by Lenin that undermined the political strength and culture that would have been necessary to resist the Stalinist totalitarianism that began at the end of the twenties.

In my book Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (Verso) I argue that the establishment of the NEP should have been accompanied by a New Political Policy (NPP) that would have reestablished the multiparty revolutionary system that existed at the beginning of the revolution. This would have involved the reestablishment of the freedom to organize political parties and groups committed to a peaceful functioning within the original framework of the soviet democracy that took power in October 1917. Such political system could have revitalized the political life and culture of the country and create the necessary organizational conditions to resist the Stalinist offensive. It is clear that for the Bolshevik leadership and the revolution itself, such a political opening would have represented a great risk given the desperate situation facing the USSR – the new name adopted by the country in 1922 – and the complete isolation of the Communist Party. But at that moment in time, there was no such thing as a risk-free policy that could promise positive results.

Even more important was the fact that in 1921 there was still a possibility for the USSR to have followed a more democratic political course. In spite of the dictatorial tendency that began to rear its ugly head among the revolutionary leadership during the civil war, and which was consolidated with the NEP, the memory of the Bolshevik democratic and pluralist traditions preceding the civil war was still alive. Only three years earlier, in 1918, a great polemic had gripped the whole country over the conditions under which a peace treaty with Germany should be signed. Several tendencies intervened in the discussion that took place inside and outside the Communist Party and actively and openly went out to promote popular support for their respective positions. This included the free circulation of newspapers and pamphlets published by different Party factions as well as by groups outside the party.

This was one of the many occasions when Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders could not count even with a majority, much less with the unanimous support of the party, and had to struggle very hard to defend their political positions. This shows the existence, at that time, of an open and egalitarian political climate in Russia. Lenin was not the “caudillo” who imposed his ideas; he was an authority, but within a group of equals; a primus inter pares. And even later, during the early years of NEP, there were various important tendencies inside the Communist Party still fighting for democratic reforms inside as well as outside the Party. Not for nothing Stalin had to physically eliminate the majority of the Party’s historic leadership in order to become who he wanted to be: the Vozhd, the chief of the USSR and of the world proletariat, in accordance with the cult of Stalin.

The Situation in Cuba

Since the decade of the nineties, and especially since Raúl Castro assumed the maximum leadership of the country in 2006 – formally in 2008 – economic reform has been one of the  central concerns of  the government. The logic of that economic reform points to the Sino-Vietnamese model – which combines an anti-democratic one-party state with a state capitalist system in the economy – and not to the compulsory collectivization of agriculture and the five-year plans brutally imposed on the USSR by Stalinist totalitarianism after the NEP. The Cuban government’s decision to authorize the creation of the PYMES (small and medium private enterprises), a decision frequently promised but not yet implemented, would constitute a very important step towards the establishment of state capitalism in the island. This state capitalism will very probably be headed by the current powerful political, and especially military, leaders who would become private capitalists.

Until now, the Cuban government has not specified the size that would define the small and especially the mid-size enterprises under the PYMES concept. But we know that several Latin American countries (like Chile and Costa Rica) have defined the size in terms of the number of workers. Chile, for example, defines the micro enterprises as those with less than 9 workers, the small-size with 10 to 25 workers, the medium-size with 25 to 200 workers, and the big size with more than 200 workers. Should Cuba adopt similar criteria, its mid-size enterprises would end up as capitalist firms ran by their corresponding administrative hierarchies. If that happens, it is certain that the official unions will end up “organizing” the workers in those medium size enterprises and, as in the case of Chinese state capitalism, do nothing to defend them from the new private owners.

Regarding political reform, there has been much less talk and nothing of great importance has been done. As in the case of the Russian NEP, the social and economic liberalization in Cuba has not been accompanied by political democratization but, instead, by the intensification of the regime’s political control over the island. Even when the government has adopted liberalizing measures in the economy, like the new rules increasing the number of work activities permitted in the self-employed sector, it continues to ban private activities such as the publication of books that could be used to develop criticism or opposition to the regime. This is how the government has consolidated its control over the major means of communication – radio, television, newspapers and magazines – although it has only partially accomplished that with the Internet.

The government is also using its own socially liberalizing measures to reinforce its political control. For example, at the same time that it liberalized the rules to travel abroad, it developed a list of “regulated” people who are forbidden to travel outside of the island based on arbitrary administrative decisions, without even allowing for the right of appeal to the judicial system it controls. Similar administrative practices lacking in means for judicial review control have been applied to other areas such as the missions organized to provide services abroad. Thus, the Cuban doctors who have decided not to return to the island once their service abroad has concluded, have been victims of administrative sanctions – eight years of compulsory exile – without any possibility of lodging a judicial appeal.

Still pending is the implementation of the arbitrary rules and the censorship of artistic activities of Decree 349, that allows the state to grant licenses and censor the activities of self-employed artists. The implementation of the decree has been postponed due to the numerous and strong protests that it provoked. All of these administrative practices highlight the fact that the much discussed rule of law proclaimed by the Constitution is but a lie. Let us not forget that the Soviet constitution that Stalin introduced in 1936 was very democratic … on the paper it was written. Even so, Cubans in the island should appeal to their constitutionally defined rights to support their protests and claims against the Cuban state whenever it is legally and politically opportune.

At the beginning of the Cuban revolutionary government there was a variety of political voices heard within the revolutionary camp. But that disappeared in the process of forming the united party of the revolution that established the basis for what Raúl Castro later called the “monolithic unity” of the party and country. That is the party and state model that emulates, along with China and Vietnam, the Stalinist system that was consolidated in the USSR at the end of the twenties, consecrating the “unanimity” dictated from above by the maximum leaders, and by so-called “democratic centralism” which in reality is a bureaucratic centralism.

The Cuban Communist Party (CCP) is a single party that does not allow the internal organization of tendencies or factions, and that extends its control over the whole society through its transmission belts with the so-called mass organizations (trade unions, women’s organization), institutions such as the universities, as well as with the mass media that follow the “orientations” they receive from the Department of Ideology of the Central Committee of the CCP. These are the ways in which the one-party state controls, not necessarily everything, but everything it considers important.

The ideological defenders of the Cuban regime insist in its autochthonous origins independent from Soviet Communism. It is true that Fidel Castro’s political origin is different, for example, from that of Raúl Castro, who was originally a member of the Socialist Youth associated with the PSP (Partido Socialista Popular), the party of the pro-Moscow orthodox Communists. But Fidel Castro developed his “caudillo” conceptions since very early on, perhaps as a reaction to the disorder and chaos he encountered in the Cayo Confites expedition in which he participated against the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1947, and with the so-called Bogotazo in Colombia in 1948.

In 1954, in a letter he wrote to his then good friend Luis Conte Aguero, Fidel Castro proclaimed three principles as necessary for the integration of a true civic movement: ideology, discipline and especially the power of the leadership. He also insisted in the necessity for a powerful and implacable propaganda and organizational apparatus to destroy the people involved in the creation of tendencies, splits and cliques or who rise against the movement. This was the ideological basis of the “elective affinity” (to paraphrase Goethe) that Fidel Castro showed later on for Soviet Communism.

So, what can we do? The recent demonstration of hundreds of Cubans in front of the Ministry of Culture to protest the abuses against the members of the San Isidro Movement and to advocate for artistic and civil liberties, marked a milestone in the history of the Cuban Revolution. There is plenty of room to reproduce this type of peaceful protest in the streets against police racism, against the tolerance of domestic violence, against the growing social inequality and against the absence of a politically transparent democracy open to all, without the privileges sanctioned by the Constitution for the CCP. At present, this seems to be the road to struggle for the democratization of Cuba from below, from the inside of society itself, and not from above or from the outside.

The lesson of the Russian NEP is that economic liberalization does not necessarily signify the democratization of a country, and that it may be accompanied by the elimination of democracy. In Cuba there has been economic and social liberalization but without any advance on the democratic front.

The Children at the Border and the Question of Immigration  

By: March 31, 2021
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This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France. 

How should the United States respond to the issue of immigration? It’s a question that divides Republicans from Democrats and progressives from socialists. Is an issue that fueled former President Donald Trump’s rise to power and also contributed to his fall. At the moment it’s a hot political issue, the center of President Joseph Biden’s first press conference and the motive for delegations of Republican congresspeople to the border. At the very center of the problem are the child migrants, unaccompanied minors, almost 10,000 of which arrived in the United States in February, with 18,000 in custody at present.

Trump virtually dismantled the U.S. immigration system while strengthening the Border Patrol and mobilizing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. He separated children from their families and caged them, shocking most Americans. But before him, President Barack Obama won the reputation of “Deporter-in-Chief” for deporting more immigrants than any president before. Democrats have generally supported a regulated immigration system, a guest worker program, and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Most Republican and Democratic politicians, including Sanders, argue that immigration must be restricted and regulated because immigrants compete for jobs and also lower wages. The Democratic Socialist of America (DSA), has called for “open borders,” though that demand finds little if any positive response in progressive circles.

No other nation has as large an immigrant influx. In 2018 the U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million, making up 13.7 percent of the total population, the highest since the 1880s. Some 77 percent of all immigrants are legal, most coming from Mexico, China, and India, though many come from Centra America. The 23 percent who have no documents may be subject to arrest and deportation. One million immigrants enter legally each year and about 400,000 are apprehended at the border each year, while tens of thousands of others enter without papers. There were 10.7 million undocumented immigrants in the United States in 2017, making up 3.2 percent of the population.

With Biden’s election as a candidate who had talked about “a more human” immigration policy, immigrants immediately flocked to the border. At present, because of the coronavirus pandemic, Biden has asked that migrants not come and they are not being admitted, but fleeing political or criminal violence and abject poverty, many feel that that they have no choice.

When desperate families reach the border, they sometimes send their children across the line alone, knowing that they cannot be deported and will be sent to live with relatives in the United States. This has led to the large increase in unaccompanied minors from infants and toddlers to teenagers being detained at the border where they are being held in overcrowded facilities not appropriate for children. Republicans then claim that Biden has caused an immigrant invasion.

Many of these migrants are coming from Central America and Mexico, the former region devastated by the U.S. support for rightwing governments in civil wars of the 1980s and early 1990s, and the latter still suffering from the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 that transformed the Mexican economy without providing adequate employment. In both regions, drug cartels and criminal gangs have made life unbearable for many. And now climate change has brought new problems for farmers there.

Last week at Biden’s urging, the House of Representatives passed two bills, one establishes paths to citizenship, while the other offers legal status for millions of undocumented immigrants. These may not pass in the Senate. While these reforms deserve critical support, they do not stop the inequalities of capitalism or the violence of imperialism that drives migration, nor do they liberate the immigrants from exploitation.

The Only Treatment is Freedom: Mumia Abu-Jamal and COVID

By: March 30, 2021
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Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernández. (Photo: Courtesy of Johanna Fernández)

History is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally in the present in all that we do. –James Baldwin

Three weeks ago, on Friday, February 26, 2021 Mumia Abu-Jamal called Pam Africa, the person largely responsible for keeping alive the movement to save and free him for 40 years. Mumia told her that he was certain he had COVID-19; that he was having difficulty breathing as well as chest pressure and pain.

Within two hours of that call, the movement to free Mumia mobilized hundreds of supporters to call the prison and the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office to demand immediate medical care for Mumia and his immediate release.

Tried and true, the call-to-action worked. The next day guards entered the imprisoned radio journalist’s cell and without notice, escorted him to the prison infirmary. On Monday, Mumia’s attorneys inquired about their client’s health with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections attorney who reported that Mumia had been tested for COVID over the weekend and the results were negative. None of us had heard from Mumia directly, however.

Amid tension, worry and stress (Pam Africa’s blood pressure shot up near the 200s), the movement issued a press release and prepared for a press conference in front of the DA’s office that Wednesday, March 3. We emphasized that Mumia reported serious COVID symptoms including chest pain— despite the negative test results reported by the prison. Near the end of the press conference, which was being streamed-live on YouTube, Mumia‘s attorney Bob Boyle phoned saying that the PA DOC attorney reported that a fourth test came back positive. Mumia had COVID 19.

But the PA DOC attorney failed to paint a full picture of the situation to Mumia’s attorneys. A clear sense of what happened emerged minutes after the conclusion of the dramatic press conference. Mumia happened to call from the prison infirmary as we were breaking down our impromptu stage; and there —in front of the Philadelphia DA’s office —he shared what actually happened: the day after he spoke with Pam Africa, guards came to Mumia’s cell and escorted him first to the infirmary and then to the hospital where doctors determined that he had water in his lungs and throughout his body. During four-days of hospitalization, the doctors informed him that he had COVID and Congestive Heart Failure and that ten pounds of fluid had been drawn from his lungs and body. As he was painting a picture of what he underwent, I thought of connecting him to his chosen doctor, who asked if he felt that he had been treated compassionately in the hospital. Mumia responded with a rote yes, said that he felt better, but emphasized that the most sobering challenge before him was to have to once again attempt to get a handle on the other crisis, the Job-like skin condition of biblical proportion that disfigured his entire body with open sores everywhere five years ago and that was back.

On another call, days later, Mumia’s breath was labored. When the imprisoned Black Panther called, I asked if he thought he was having a COVID relapse. He said, “nah, I think it’s my skin, it feels like my entire body is on fire.” When I suggested that he might need to be hospitalized to address this intractable, severe and debilitating chronic skin condition, the tension in Mumia’s famously calm voice jumped a few notches. He said that he couldn’t go back to the hospital. Mumia’s reaction resembled that of Complex-PTSD. I moved slowly in the conversation to try to understand what was going on. I suggested that he might have to be re-hospitalized for his skin condition. It was then that Mumia recoiled, saying that he couldn’t go back to the hospital. Recognizing from the sound of his voice that I was entering sensitive territory, I probed. Mumia had spoken to his wife, to Pam and to me numerous times in two weeks, but it took a trigger to reveal a situation that was hard to hear.

In the approximately five minutes remaining of this timed, monitored and frequently interrupted prison call, I learned that per Department of Correction protocol, this sixty-six-year-old man diagnosed with COVID and Congestive Heart Failure, undergoing diareses and with an infernal skin condition, was shackled to the bed for four days during his recent hospitalization. He explained that while he had wounds all over his body, the bloody wound of his lower leg — captured in the photo taken by the nurse at the prison infirmary upon his discharge— he got from the shackles that dug into his already raw skin during the entirety of his four day stay in the hospital. He added that the nurse missed the ones on his other leg and the ones on his lower arms.

The movement decided to release photographs taken of Mumia upon his arrival at the prison infirmary from the hospital. The photo of the bloody wound on Mumia’s lower leg caused by the shackling and another showing Mumia with bloodshot eyes, noticeably gaunt —he had lost 30LBS — looking at the camera with gut-wrenching vulnerability.

The practice of shackling incarcerated people is commonplace across the United States. In fact, it is ordained by politicians and corrections “professionals” of all stripes who’ve been riding the coattails of Black Lives Matters denouncing White Supremacy in the public square but enforcing it in the daily practices of their institutions. Recall that Jacob Blake was shackled to a hospital bed after police in Kenosha had shot and paralyzed him from the waist down. Police unshackled him only after protesters exposed the gross injustice. In each of these cases, authorities cynically justify their inhumanity with a supposed concern for safety. But, if safety is the measure of their actions, why do they insist on holding old men and women who pose no threat to society in their COVID infected prisons? Safety is camouflage and pretext for the practice of authoritarian control that daily erodes standards of freedom for everybody in society.

Loud and clear are the echoes of slavery, which —as Eric Williams shows in Capitalism and Slavery — for the first time in human history produced the global distribution and mass use of handcuffs, shackles and fetters because after all, enslaved Africans had to be brought to heel.

The inhumanity of the COVID crisis —and its spread in the prisons, which are now death traps — is eye-opening for those in close proximity to it. And Mumia is not alone in his suffering. When 77-year-old Russell Maroon Shoatz, a Pennsylvania political prisoner with stage-four colon cancer, was diagnosed with COVID, medical staff sent him to a small, cold, dank prison gymnasium where others with COVID were being quarantined under inhumane conditions. When Maroon arrived, he was greeted by 29 other senior prisoners who said to him: “Welcome, we’ve been waiting for you, we figured it wasn’t long before you got it too.” In these already cramped quarters, 30 elderly men with COVID had access to one bathroom stall. In a phone call with his daughter, Theresa Shoatz, Maroon reported that because his corner of the gym had no light, he had to go to the bathroom on himself because under his condition he couldn’t risk getting up and falling. As Dr. Ricardo Alvarez stated, for Mumia, Maroon and many others, “the only treatment is freedom.”

The decision of most governors to hold prisoners captive under these conditions, and their refusal to decarcerate even during a pandemic, is a crime against humanity. They underscore America’s entrenched commitment to racist barbarity. In the last 40 years, US incarcerated people have grown old serving life or decades-long terms in an indefensible system committed to excessive and draconian sentencing. Today’s reality has turned US prisons into cruel, old people’s homes for poor Black and Brown workers warehoused at the height of urban deindustrialization in the 1980s and 1990s, when American capitalism could not employ large swaths of city dwellers.

But these tortuous conditions aren’t the only problem. It’s about Americans’ right to know how society’s most powerless are treated, for in the end that’s a barometer of how we are all going to be treated. Arbitrary, whimsical, and sometimes deliberately deadly decisions are made daily by prison officials and corrections officers. Like so much in government bureaucracy, decisions that carry enormous weight in how we act as a society are vested in the hands of a few who are ill-equipped to decide public policy but are all too eager to wield their limited power to inflict cruelty on the prisoners they view as less than human.

That’s why at the very least, prison reform organizers and abolitionists are demanding the release of aging people in prison (RAPP) over the age of 50 or with pre-existing conditions, who face premature death if they contract the flu, cancer, hepatitis, pneumonia, COVID-19 or congestive heart disease, as in Abu-Jamal’s case. The only humane recourse is to let elderly and vulnerable prisoners go home. Ultimately, we want a society in which social problems are not solved with carceral repression.

The inextricable link between incarceration and standards of democracy in a country led the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky to observe that, “The degree of civilization in society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

Mumia spent 28.5 years in the absolute isolation of death row, without the ability to touch another person. In 2011, a federal court overturned that sentence arguing that it was unconstitutionally imposed on Mumia. In 2018, six boxes of new evidence in his case emerged. One of those boxes contained a letter penned by Robert Chobert, the original prosecutor’s star witness in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. In that letter, Robert Chobert asks then Assistant District Attorney Joe McGill, where’s my money and what do you need me to sign for me to get it. This suggests what we’ve known all along—that Robert Chobert—like other witnesses—was bribed by the prosecutor to finger then award-winning radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal as the shooter of a white police officer in Philadelphia. This year marks the 40th year of his incarceration. It’s time to bring Mumia, and all sixties-era political prisoners, home.

First posted on the Verso blog.

The New Cold War With China

The West’s Greatest Folly

By: March 27, 2021
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The new US president Joe Biden recently announced his intention to convene a “Summit for Democracy” with the aim of reuniting the West—this time, above all against China. The European Commission, for its part, already classified China as a “systemic rival” in 2019. These moves represent active efforts to re-establish the fundamental liberal anti-communist consensus as the West’s common creed. This anti-communism constitutes the core of the West’s hubris, as was recently so sharply criticized by Antje Vollmer in the pages of the Berliner Zeitung.

Let us begin by looking back on history. It was anti-communism that served as legitimization for the German bourgeoisie to throw itself into Hitler’s arms. Anti-communism was also cited as the pretext to abandon the Spanish Republic to Franco’s alliance with German and Italian fascism, while the “democracies” stood by and watched the slaughter and Stalin turned on and butchered left-wing forces in Spain. Soon thereafter, it was anti-communism that prevented a French and British alliance with the Soviet Union to prevent the German invasion of Poland before that ill-fated date of 23 August 1939.

Anti-communism could not prevent the establishment of a Bolshevik dictatorship and the Red Terror in the Civil War of 1918–22 led by Lenin and Trotsky. Nor could it stop so-called “collectivization” and the Great Terror of the Stalinist regime to which many millions of people fell victim, despite the fact that the terror Stalinism unleashed provided anti-communism with illustrative material and threatened to completely destroy the European Left. After all, by equating socialism with Stalinism, all left-wing politics were subjected to the suspicion of totalitarianism.

While anti-communism failed to prevent the crimes committed in the name of Communism, it instead made possible the great crimes of Nazism and fascism as well as World War II by preventing the West from engaging in timely resistance to Hitler. As a result of the war, Hitler’s Germany, with its policy of exterminating Jewry and Communism and enslaving the Slavic peoples, was defeated, but a whole series of states of East-Central and Southeast Europe came under the control of the Soviet Union for 40 years.

Thomas Mann, who went into exile as early as February 1933, described the fear of communism in a speech in Washington in October 1943 as “one of the greatest follies of our epoch”—a folly extending all the way back to the nineteenth century. He expressed little more than a fact when he stated that “in the eyes of Western conservative capitalism, fascism was simply the bulwark against Bolshevism and against everything which was understood by the word”. It was the “frightening word by means of which Hitler made his conquests”.

Since 1933 and especially following World War II, Thomas Mann had come to understand that the defense of freedom was only possible if it allied itself with equality, social justice, and all that was forward-looking in Communism. The future, Thomas Mann argued, belonged to communism at least “in as much as the world that will be when we are gone, whose outlines are beginning to emerge and in which our children and grandchildren will live, can scarcely be imagined without certain communistic traits—that means, without the fundamental idea of common rights of ownership and enjoyment of earthly good, without a progressive equalization of class differences, without the right to work and the duty to work for all.” Freedom and equality would have to find “a new equilibrium”.

Mann’s epochal experience had been that when freedom does not ally itself with equality, it prepares the ground for the enemies of freedom. This complements another—no less significant—epochal experience emerging from the legacy of Bolshevism and Stalinism: namely, that equality in turn is not sustainable without freedom, as it otherwise leads to injustice and stagnation. The Soviet Union proved to be a historical dead end, as finally became evident in 1989–91. A socialism that truly seeks to overcome capitalism must preserve and develop the viability of communism as well as liberalism.

Repeating the Same Mistake?

In 1989–90, the West missed the great opportunity to build a “common European home” as called for by Mikhail Gorbachev, to initiate an ecological transition in time (what the Club of Rome called the “first global revolution”), and to launch an active peace policy. Instead, the “Westernization of the world” was pursued in the name of anti-communism. Efforts were immediately made to create a new “American century” via means of new wars, systematic destabilization of states, and a policy of continuous marketization and global competition.

The final results are appalling. In ecological terms, 30 years have been wasted. The US has spent 7 trillion dollars (!) on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. There are more refugees than at any time in the last 70 years. The capacity for global cooperation, as the pandemic shows, has shrunken to almost nil. Meanwhile, the US and what purports to be the “free West” are confronted with a global challenger the likes of which was never seen in the twentieth century—the People’s Republic of China.

Once again, anti-communism is being used to stage a new Cold War. China is viewed as a systemic rival that should be denied access to technology and hampered in its access to markets. The goal is military containment and encirclement. China is accused of having no respect for human rights, allowing no democratic participation for its population, and denying freedom to its citizens. Yet these are the same Chinese citizens who, before the pandemic, met us in their millions as tourists in Rome, Paris, or Berlin, only to elatedly disappear back home into their alleged national “prison”—a prison that Western tourists in China, for their part, experience as a haven of growing prosperity and liberal lifestyles. Meanwhile, China’s success in fighting poverty is historically unprecedented.

Anti-communism is used to construct an extreme opposition between the differences of the “West” and China’s political, economic, and cultural system (and that of other states): an “Us” versus a “Them”, an opposition between “democracy” and “autocracy”, between “freedom” and “unfreedom”, “right” and “wrong”. Raising reasonable doubts about figures published in the West concerning the extent of political repression in China or Russia is treated as complicity in their crimes. The freedom to form one’s own opinion thus becomes impossible. In the name of anti-communism, a fundamentalist conformism is being enforced in a way that is no longer subtle but brutal, according to the motto of “Whoever is not for us is against us!” Such anti-communism is itself totalitarian.

One should also be allowed to think about the unspeakable: Abraham Lincoln once described democracy as government “of the people, by the people”, and “for the people”. If one compares the political systems of the United States, Brazil, India, and the People’s Republic of China, it must be possible to ask whether the system in which a single party has been in charge for decades does not also have important democratic characteristics, in that it works for the people and encourages their participation in “non-Western” ways. And, conversely, to ask whether governments that emerge from free elections cannot also be oligarchic and authoritarian or act against their own people.

But what is even worse: the real dangers facing humanity and the free life of people now and in the future lie in the foreseeable climate catastrophe, in the continued destruction of states that turns many millions into refugees, in global and domestic social division, in the uncontrolled accumulation of financial assets, the crisis of which can then drag the global economy into ruin as in the late 1920s, and in the rise of fascist regimes. These dangers lie in the build-up of military confrontation. The omen posed by the mob on the steps of the US Capitol, the “citadel of freedom”, should not be forgotten.

Criticism, of course, is warranted—criticism of anti-social policies in Germany as well as of the (in)justice system in the US, which puts millions of black people in prison, criticism of the restriction of political freedoms in China or the environmental destruction being unleashed in Brazil. The list is long. But all this cannot and must not be a reason to turn it into another fundamentalist Cold War in the name of anti-communism. The attempt to start this war alone is criminal. It is foolish, as Thomas Mann said, to follow blindly those who commit such a crime.

Another German poet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, referred to the ring parable in his tragedy Nathan the Wise: a father hands over to each of his three sons a ring that supposedly gives its wearer the power to be pleasing to God and fellow men. Yet only one of the three rings was expected to have this power. Since none of the sons knew which was the “true” ring, from now on there was only one way to prove it—by their own exemplary actions. If competition between states has to be, then not in the destructive form of fighting against each other, but in cooperation for the best and fastest contribution to preventing the climate catastrophe and stopping ecological destruction, to eliminating global poverty, to reducing military tensions, to expanding the real possibilities of each and every person and of all peoples for a self-determined life in security and dignity.

Erasing People through Disinformation: Syria and the “Anti-Imperialism” of Fools

By: March 27, 2021
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Disreputable writers and outlets, often operating under the aegis of “independent journalism” with purportedly “leftwing” views, are spreading corrosive propaganda and disinformation that aims to strip Syrians of political agency

[The following Open Letter was a collaborative effort of a group of Syrian writers and intellectuals and others who stand in solidarity with them. It is signed by activists, writers, artists, and academics from Syria and more than forty other countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, Oceania, and South America, and appears in multiple languages: English, Arabic, French, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese.]

Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising ten years ago, and especially since Russia intervened in Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, there has been a curious and malign development: the emergence of pro-Assad allegiances in the name of “anti-imperialism” among some who otherwise generally identify as progressive or “left,” and the consequent spread of manipulative disinformation that routinely deflects attention away from the well-documented abuses of Assad and his allies. Portraying themselves as “opponents” of imperialism, they routinely exhibit a highly selective attention to matters of “intervention” and human rights violations that often aligns with the governments of Russia and China; those who disagree with their highly-policed views are frequently (and falsely) branded as “regime change enthusiasts” or dupes of western political interests.

The divisive and sectarianizing role played by this group is unmistakable: in their simplistic view, all pro-democracy and pro-dignity movements that go against Russian or Chinese state interests are routinely portrayed as the top-down work of Western interference: none are autochthonous, none are of a piece with decades of independent domestic struggle against brutal dictatorship (as in Syria), and none truly represent the desires of people demanding the right to lives of dignity rather than oppression and abuse. What unites them is a refusal to contend with the crimes of the Assad regime, or even to acknowledge that a brutally repressed popular uprising against Assad took place.

These writers and outlets have mushroomed in recent years, and have often positioned Syria at the forefront of their criticisms of imperialism and interventionism, which they characteristically restrict to the west; Russian and Iranian involvement is generally ignored. In doing so, they have sought to align themselves with a long and venerable tradition of internal domestic opposition to the abuses of imperial power abroad, not only but quite often issuing from the left.

But they do not rightfully belong in that company. No one who explicitly or implicitly aligns themselves with the malignant Assad government does. No one who selectively and opportunistically deploys charges of “imperialism” for reasons of their particular version of “left” politics rather than opposing it consistently in principle across the globe — thereby acknowledging the imperialist interventionism of Russia, Iran, and China — does.

Often under the guise of practicing “independent journalism,” these various writers and outlets have functioned as chief sources of misinformation and propaganda about the ongoing global disaster that Syria has become. Their reactionary, inverted Realpolitik is as fixated on top-down, anti-democratic “power politics” as that of Henry Kissinger or Samuel Huntington, just with the valence reversed. But this maddeningly oversimplifying rhetorical move (“flipping the script” as one of them once put it), as appealing as it might be to those eager to identify who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are at any given place on the planet, is really an instrument of tailored flattery for their audiences about the “true workings of power” that serves to reinforce a dysfunctional status quo and impede the development of a truly progressive and international approach to global politics, one that we so desperately need, given the planetary challenges of responding to global warming.

The evidence that US power has itself been appallingly destructive, especially during the Cold War, is overwhelming: all across the globe, from Vietnam to Indonesia to Iran to Congo to South and Central America and beyond, the record of massive human rights abuses accumulated in the name of fighting Communism is clear. And in the post-Cold War period of the so-called “War on Terror,” American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have done nothing to suggest a fundamental national change of heart.

But, America is not central to what has happened in Syria, despite what these people claim. The idea that it somehow is, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, is a by-product of a provincial political culture which insists on both the centrality of US power globally as well as the imperialist right to identify who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are in any given context.

The ideological alignment of rightwing admirers of Assad with this kind of authoritarian-friendly “leftism” is symptomatic of this, and indicates that the very real and very serious problem lies elsewhere: what to do when a people is as abused by their government as the Syrian people have been, held captive by those who think nothing of torturing, disappearing, and murdering people for even the slightest hint of political opposition to their authority? As many countries move closer and closer to authoritarianism and away from democracy, this seems to us a profoundly urgent political question to which there is yet no answer; and because there is no answer, all across the globe there is growing impunity on the part of the powerful, and growing vulnerability for the powerless.

About this, these “anti-imperialists” have no helpful words. About the profound political violence visited upon the Syrian people by the Assads, the Iranians, the Russians? No words. Forgive us for pointing out that such erasure of Syrian lives and experiences embodies the very essence of imperialist (and racist) privilege. These writers and bloggers have shown no awareness of the Syrians, including signatories to this letter, who risked their lives opposing the regime, who have been incarcerated in the Assads’ torture prisons (some for many years), lost loved ones, had friends and family forcibly disappeared, fled their country – even though many Syrians have been writing and speaking about these experiences for many years.

Collectively, Syrian experiences from the Revolution to the present pose a fundamental challenge to the world as it appears to these people. Syrians who directly opposed the Assad regime, often at great cost, did not do so because of some Western imperialist plot, but because decades of abuse, brutality, and corruption were and remain intolerable. To insist otherwise, and support Assad, is to attempt to strip Syrians of all political agency and endorse the Assads’ longstanding policy of domestic politicide, which has deprived Syrians of any meaningful say in their government and circumstances.

We Syrians and supporters of the Syrian people’s struggle for democracy and human rights take these attempts to “disappear” Syrians from the world of politics, solidarity, and partnership as quite consistent with the character of the regimes these people so evidently admire. This is the “anti-imperialism” and “leftism” of the unprincipled, of the lazy, and of fools, and only reinforces the dysfunctional international gridlock exhibited in the UN Security Council. We hope that readers of this piece will join us in opposing it.

 

Signatories [Affiliations for identification purposes only]

Syrians

Ahmad Aisha, journalist and translator (Turkey)

Ali Akil, Founder & Spokesperson, Syrian Solidarity New Zealand (Aotearoa/New Zealand)

Amina Masri, Activist/Educator (USA)

Amr al-Azam, Professor of Middle East History and Anthropology, Shawnee State University (USA)

Asmae Dachan, Syrian-Italian Journalist (Italy)

Ayaat Yassin-Kassab, Student, University of Oxford (UK)

Aziz Al-Azmeh, University Professor Emeritus, Central European University (Austria)

Bakr Sidki, translator and columnist (Turkey)

Banah el Ghadbanah, University of California, San Diego (USA)

Bisher Ghazal-Aswad, Doctor, NHS (UK)

Bushra A., Syria Solidarity New York City (USA)

Dellair Yousef, writer and director, Berlin (Germany)

Dr. Mohammed Zaher Sahloul, President, MedGlobal & Founder, American Relief Coalition for Syria (USA)

Faraj Bayrakdar, poet (Sweden)

Farouk Mardam-Bey, publisher and writer, Paris (France)

Fouad M. Fouad, Professor, American University of Beirut (Lebanon)

Fouad Roueiha, Activist (Italy)

Ghayath Almadhoun, poet (Germany)

Haian Dukhan, Associate Research Fellow, Centre for Syrian Studies, University of St. Andrews (UK)

Haid Haid, Senior Research Fellow, Chatham House (UK)

Hala Alabdalla, Filmmaker (France)

Hassan Nifi, writer (Turkey)

Irène Labeyrie Chaya, Architect & Former Teacher at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Qalamun, Deir Atiya, Syria

Joseph Daher, Syrian/Swiss Academic, University of Lausanne/European University Institute (Switzerland)

Karam Nachar, academic and writer

Karam Shaar, Senior Analyst, New Zealand Treasury (New Zealand)

Karim Al-Afnan, Journalist (UK)

Lara el Kateb, Member of the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists

Leila Al-Shami, Writer/Activist (Scotland)

Lubayed Aljundi, PhD Candidate, SOAS, University of London (UK)

Mahmoud el Wahb, writer (Turkey)

Marcelle Shehwaro, New York NY (USA)

Marcus Halaby, British-Syrian Writer and Labour Party Member (UK)

Marwa Daoudy, Associate Professor, Georgetown University (USA)

Mayson Almisri, Syria Civil Defence – White Helmets, co-winner of the Gandhi Peace Award 2021 (Canada)

Miream Salameh, Syrian Artist (Australia)

Mohamed Al Rashi, Actor (France)

Mohamed Samawi, Homs, PR

Mohamed T. Khairullah, Mayor, Borough of Prospect Park, New Jersey (USA)

Mohammad Al Attar, Writer, Playwright, Berlin (Germany)

Mohja Kahf, Professor (USA)

Najwa Affash, President of the Hani Association, Paris (France)

Nidal Betare, Journalist (USA)

Nisrine Al Zahre, academic and writer (France)

Noor Ghazal Aswad, Doctoral Candidate, University of Memphis (USA)

Odai Al Zoubi, Writer (Sweden)

Omar Abbas, University of California Riverside (USA)

Omar Qaddour, novelist and journalist (France)

Orwa Khalifa, writer (Turkey)

Osama Alomar, Writer (USA)

Rahaf Aldoughli, Lecturer in Middle East and North Africa Studies, Lancaster University (UK)

Ramah Kudaimi, organizer, Washington (USA)

Ramzi Choukair, Actor and Director, Kawalisse Theatre Company (France)

Sadek Abd Alrahman, writer (Turkey)

Salam Abbara, Doctor and Activist, Paris (France)

Salam Said, Academic (Germany)

Saleem Albeik, Writer/Journalist, Palestinian/Syrian (France)

Samar Yazbek, novelist (France)

Sami Haddad, Activist (Italy)

Sherifa Zuhur

Shiyam Galyon, War Resisters League (USA)

Taha Bali, physician and writer (USA)

Touhama Ma’roof, dentist (Turkey)

Victorios Bayan Shams, Journalist (Brazil)

Wael Khouli, Physician Executive – B E Smith, Michigan (USA)

Yasmine Merei, Writer & Journalist and Head of Women for Common Space, Berlin (Germany)

Yasser Khanger, Poet from the occupied Golan

Yasser Munif, Emerson College (USA)

Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Writer, Former Political Prisoner (Germany)

Yassin Swehat, Journalist and Editor (Germany-Spain)

Yazan Badran, PhD student, Vrije Universiteit and SyriaUntold (Belgium)

Others

A Hak (UK)

Abdelrahman Elbanna, Lyndhurst, NJ (USA)

Abdullsh Hayed, Paris (France)

Abdulrahman Hallak, Kuwait (Kuwait)

Abdul-Wahab Kayyali, Researcher, Princeton University (Canada)

abraham Weizfeld PhD, Direct Democracy Movement

Adam Sabra, Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)

Adam Shatz, Writer, Brooklyn (USA)

Aditya Sarkar, University of Warwick (UK)

Adnan Salim, Idoo Madrid (Spain)

Agnes Favier, Part Time Professor, European University Institute

Agostino Soldini, trade union secretary (Switzerland)

Ahlam Zeineddine, Beirut (Lebanon)

Ahmad Matar, chef (Palestinian, Germany)

Ahmed Sakkal, Baltimore, MD (USA)

Aidan Geboers, Financial Professional (UK)

Akram Aboud, Riyadh (Saudi Arabia)

Al Hammood, Centreville, VA (USA)

Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan (USA)

Alberto Savioli, archaeologist and writer

Aldo Cordeiro Sauda, Editora Contrabando, São Paulo (Brazil)

Aldo Garzia, journalist (Italy)

Alessandra Mezzadri, Senior Lecturer, SOAS, University of London (UK)

Alessia Bleve, Social Space Zei Aps – Circolo arci Lecce (Italy)

Alex De Jong, Co-Director, International Institute for Research and Education (Netherlands)

Alex Johnson, Syria Solidarity Australia (Australia)

Ali Bakeer, Senior Researcher, Ibn Khaldun Center (Turkey)

Ali Fathollah-Nejad, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany)

Ali Moravej, Manchester, CT (USA)

Ali Samadi Ahadi, Filmmaker (Germany)

Aliaa Tabbaa,, Hellin ((Spain)

Alicia Fdez Gómez, Oviedo (Spain)

Al-Sheik Hussein, Helsinki (Finland)

Amahl Bishara, Tufts University (USA)

Amal Mouhamad, Berlin (Germany)

Amal Sakkal, Charleston, WV (USA)

Aman Doughan, Beirut (Lebanon)

Amina A., Syria Solidarity New York City (USA)

Ammar Al-Ghabban, Independent educator (UK)

Anahita Razmi, Visual Artist (Germany)

Andrea Love, Educator (USA)

Andrew Berman, Committee in Solidarity with the People of Syria — CISPOS (USA)

Andy Heintz, Ames, IA (USA)

Anette Laszkiewitz (Germany)

Angelica Lepori, member of the cantonal parliament

Ani White, Melbourne (Australia)

Anis Mansouri, Special Education Teacher & Coordinator, Tunisian Internationalists in Switzerland (Switzerland)

Anja Matar, travel agent (Germany)

Ann Eveleth, Anti-War Activist, Washington DC (USA)

Ann Morgen, Dundas (Canada)

Anna Alboth, Civil March For Aleppo (Germany/Poland)

Anna Ferris, Philadelphia, PA (USA)

Anna Sailer, University of Goettingen (Germany)

Anne Michel, feminist and trade unionist (Switzerland)

Anne-Kathryn Bathe, Berlin (Germany)

Anne-Marie McManus, Berlin (Germany)

Ansar Jasim, political researcher, Berlin (Germany)

Anthony Ratcliff, California State University, Los Angeles (USA)

Antonio Moscato, former professor at the University of Salento (Italy)

Anya Briy, PhD student, Binghamton University (USA)

Arash Azizi, PhD Candidate, New York University (USA)

Arianna Parisato (Italy)

Ariel Dorfman, Writer & former advisor to the government of Salvador Allende (Chile/USA)

Art Young, solidarity activist (Canada)

Arthur Esparza, Everett, WA (USA)

Ashley Smith, Member of DSA and the Tempest Collective (USA)

Athena Moss, Journalist (Greece)

Au Loong-Yu, global justice and labour campaigner (Hong Kong)

Austin G Mackell (Australia)

Avanzata Proletaria – http://www.avanzataproletaria.it (Italy)

Barbara Blaudzun, MA Student, Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany)

Barbara Epstein, Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz (USA)

Basem Kan, Göteborg (Sweden)

Bashir Abu-Manneh, Reader, University of Kent (UK)

Becky Carroll, Co-Founder, Stand With Aleppo Campaign (USA)

Ben Manski, Assistant Professor of Sociology, George Mason University (USA)

Bernard Dreano, Activist (France)

Bilal Ansari, Faculty Associate & Director of the Islamic Chaplaincy Program, Hartford Seminary (USA)

Bill Fletcher, Jr., Past President of the TransAfrica Forum (USA)

Bill Mullen, West Lafayette, IN (USA)

Bill Weinberg, Journalist and Author (USA)

Birgitte Jensen, Vejle (Denmark)

Boris Thiolay Paris (France)

Brett Ogaard, Seattle, WA (USA)

Brian Aboud, Montréal, Quebec (Canada)

brian bean, organizer/journalist, Rampant Magazine, Tempest Socialist Collective (USA)

Brigitte Herremans, Gentbrugge (Belgium)

Bruno Buonomo, researcher, ecosocialist activist (Italy)

Camila Pastor, Research Professor, History Dept., Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (Mexico)

Carol Akhras, Bridgeview, IL (USA)

Carol Murchie, Newport, RI (USA)

Caroline Gilbert, Retired HELP Center Counselor, University of Minnesota (USA)

Caterina Coppola, Activist (Italy)

Catherine Coquio (France)

Catherine Estrade, Singer (France)

Catherine Samary, Economist, Member of the Scientific Council of ATTAC (France)

Cedric Beidatsch, Retired Cook (Australia)

Cesare Quinto, photographer (Italy)

Charles Post, Brooklyn, NY (USA)

Charles-André Udry, Economist, Editor, alencontre.org (Switzerland)

Chaza Charafeddine, Beirut (Lebanon)

Cheryl Zuur, former President, AFSCME Local 444 (USA)

Chris Keulemans, writer and journalist (Netherlands)

Christian Dandrès, Member of Parliament (Conseil National) (Switzerland)

Christian Shaughnessy, Democratic Socialists of America, Inland Empire Chapter (USA)

Christian Varin, Civil Servant & Member of the International Commission of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (France)

Christin Lüttich, Expert on Syria, German–Syrian Solidarity Initiative “Adopt a Revolution” (Germany)

Christoph Reuter, journalist and author, Berlin (Germany)

Cinzia Nachira, Researcher, University of Florence (Italy)

Claire Martenot, feminist and trade unionist (Switzerland)

Claire Nolan, Dublin (Ireland)

Claude Marill, Retired Educator & Trade Unionist, Syndicat National des personnels de l’éducation et du social (France)

Claude Szatan, activist (France)

Clay Claiborne, Director, Vietnam: American Holocaust, Linux Beach Productions (USA)

Colette Morrow, Professor of English, Purdue University Northwest (USA)

Colleen Keyes, Adjunct Faculty, Hartford Seminary (USA)

Cory Strachan, Manistee, MI (USA)

Craig Larkin, Senior Lecturer, King’s College London (UK)

Cristèle Jonnart, Ohain (Belgium)

Cristina Cardeño, Mexico City (Mexico)

Dan Buckley, International Marxist-Humanist Organization (USA)

Dan Cahill, Local Union 18, IUPAT, New Jersey (USA)

Dan La Botz, New Politics Journal (USA)

Dana Mohseni, Göteborg (Sweden)

Daniel Fischer, Food Not Bombs (USA)

Daniel Ford, Denver, CO (USA)

Daniela Vitkova, Sofia (Bulgaria)

Daniele Rugo, London, England (UK)

Danilo Milinin, Beograd, Beograd (Serbia)

Danny Postel, Writer, Member, Internationalism from Below (USA)

Dario Brandi, documenter (Italy)

Dario Lopreno, Geographer (Switzerland)

Darren Fenwick, Silver Spring MD (USA)

David Bedggood, Syria Solidarity Discussion and Strategy Group (Aotearoa/New Zealand)

David Brophy, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Sydney (Australia)

David L. William, Peregrine Forum of Wisconsin (USA)

David Letwin, South Orange, NJ (USA)

David McNally, Cullen Distinguished Professor of History, University of Houston (USA)

David N. Smith, Professor of Sociology, University of Kansas (USA)

David Turpin, Anti-War Activist (USA)

David Wearing, Senior Teaching Fellow, SOAS, University of London (UK)

David Westman, Communist Voice Organization, USA

Diane Michellini, Dallas, TX (USA)

Diego Giachetti, retired teacher (Italy)

Dilip Simeon, Teacher (India)

Dina Matar, Reader, SOAS, University of London (UK)

Donya Alinejad, Lecturer & Postdoctoral Researcher, Universities of Amsterdam & Utrecht (Netherlands)

Dora Manna, Activist (Italy)

Dylan Connor, singer-songwriter and human rights activist, Connecticut (USA)

Dylan Terpstra, Randolph, NJ (USA)

Ed Sutton, Media Activist and Mutual Aid Organizer (USA)

Edin Hajdarpasic, Associate Professor of History, Loyola University Chicago (USA)

Eileen Boyle, Dublin (Ireland)

Elena De Piccoli, Activist (Italy)

Eleni Varikas, Emerita Professor of Political Science, Université de Paris 8 (France)

Elias Khoury, novelist (Lebanon)

Elizabeth Bard, Little Rock AR (USA)

Elizabeth Lalasz, Chicago, IL (USA)

Elsa Wiehe, Boston University (USA)

ELza Mardirossian Matouk, Dollard-Des Ormeaux (Canada)

Emma Wilde Botta, New Politics Journal (USA)

Emran Feroz, Journalist (Germany)

Enrico De Angelis, independent researcher, Berlin (Germany)

Enrico Pulieri MPhil / PhD SOAS University of London (UK)

Enrico Semprini, Sicobas activist (Italy)

Enzo Traverso, Historian, Cornell University (USA)

Eric G., Seattle, WA (USA)

Eric Toussaint, Member of the International Council of the World Social Forum (Belgium)

Estella Carpi, University College London, Istanbul (Turkey)

Eugene Zaikonnikov, Nesttun (Norway)

Eylaf Bader Eddin, Philipps-Universität Marburg \ Post-doc (Germany)

Fabio Alberti, Rome (Italy)

Fabio Bosco, CSP-Conlutas (Brazil)

Fabrizio Gigliani, Trade Union Delegate USB Public Employment (Italy)

Fadi Dayoub, Castelnau Le Lez (France)

Farah Baba, Feminist activist (Lebanon)

Farhad Mirza, Berlin (Germany)

Farizah JAHJAH, Reims (France)

Fatemeh Masjedi, Research Associate, Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin (Germany)

Fatma Alhaji, Helsingborg (Sweden)

Fazlur Rahmat (Indonesia)

Fiorella Sarti, Activist and Translator (Italy)

Firas Aljanadi Leeds (UK)

Firoze Manji, Publisher, Daraja Press (Canada)

Francesca Burns, New York, NY (USA)

Francesca Giura, Activist (Italy)

Francesca Scalinci, Translator and Writer (Italy)

Francis Sitel, Member of the National Animation Team of ENSEMBLE! (France)

Franco Casagrande (Italy)

Franco Turigliatto, former Senator, Anticapitalist Left (Italy)

Françoise Clement, Chatou ((France)

Frankie Hill, Self-Employed (New Zealand)

Frieda Afary, Producer of Iranian Progressives in Translation (USA)

Gabriel Huland, PhD candidate & teaching assistant, SOAS, University of London (UK)

Gail Vignola, South Orange NJ (USA)

Gareth Kenny, Dublin (Ireland)

Gaya Nagahawatta, Translator, (Sri Lanka)

Gennaro Gervasio, Associate Professor in History and Politics of the Middle East, Roma Tre University (Italy)

George De Stefano, Brooklyn NY (USA)

George Monbiot, Author, Journalist & Environmental Activist (UK)

George Wilmers, mathematician, University of Manchester, (retired) (UK)

Gerard Lauton, academic, member of association For a Free and Democratic Syria (France)

Germano Monti, internationalist activist (Italy)

Ghaith Almahayni, Istanbul (Turkey)

Gilbert Achcar, Professor, SOAS, University of London (UK)

Gilberto Conde, Research Professor, El Colegio de México (Mexico)

Giovanna De Luca, Translator-Activist (Italy)

Giovanna Vertova, economist at the University of Bergamo (Italy)

Giuseppe Cossuto, Historian (Italy)

Giuseppe Visconti, Salerno (Italy)

Golineh Atai, TV Journalist (Germany)

Graciela Monteagudo, University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA)

Grant Padgham, Ashford, England (UK)

Günther Orth, Translator (Germany)

Gustavo Gozzi, professor at the University of Bologna (Italy)

Habib Nassar, activist/lawyer (Netherlands)

Hadrien Buclin, Academic & Deputy Ensemble à Gauche in the Parliament of the Governorate of Vaud (Switzerland)

Haideh Moghissi, Emerita Professor, York University (Canada)

Haley Wilson, Westerville, OH (USA)

Halimah El Azem, Berlin (Germany)

Hannu Reime, Helsinki (Finland)

Harald Etzbach, Journalist (Germany)

Harout Akdedian, Senior Fellow, Striking from the Margins Project, Central European University (USA)

Harsh Kapoor, Independent researcher and editor, (India/France)

Hassan KRAYEM, Amman (Jordan)

Hayfaa Tahan, Milton (Canada)

Hazar Tahan, Beirut (Lebanon)

Heather A. Brown, Associate Professor of Sociology, Westfield State University (USA)

Helen Lackner, Research Associate, SOAS, University of London (UK)

Helen Scott, Burlington, VT (USA)

Hilary Austin, Chicago, IL (USA)

Hilary Oxley, Palmerston North (New Zealand)

Hiroki Okazaki, University lecturer (Japan)

Howard Brick, Louis Evans Professor of History, University of Michigan, USA

Howie Hawkins, 2020 Green Party Candidate for President (USA)

Huda Tahan, Beirut (Lebanon)

Hussam Alshabi, Dubai (UAE)

Ibrahim Chahoud, Berlin (Germany)

Idrees Ahmad, Lecturer in Digital Journalism, University of Stirling (UK)

Ikram Abdelfattah, Beirut (Lebanon)

iris aulbach (Germany)

Isabelle Peillen-Debs Beirut (Lebanon)

Isabelle THIEULEUX, PARIS (France)

Ismail ElAchkar, Khobar, (Saudi Arabia)

Ivan Handler, Retired CIO from Illinois Medicaid & the Health Information Exchange (USA)

Izzat Darwazeh, Professor, University College London (UK)

Jack McGinn, London (UK)

jacob Miller Brampton (Canada)

Jacques Raillane, Paris (France)

Jaime Pastor, Professor of Political Science, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Spain)

Jairus Banaji, SOAS, University of London (UK)

James Dickert, Retired Computer Engineer (USA)

James Dickins, Prof. of Arabic, University of Leeds (UK)

James Hamill Leicester (UK)

James Mullally, Human Rights Activist, British Columbia (Canada)

James Smith, Dallas, TX (USA)

Jamie Mayerfeld, Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle (USA)

Jan Malewski, Editor, Inprecor (France)

Jan Toporowski, SOAS University of London (UK)

Jane England, Writer (Aotearoa/New Zealand)

Janet Afary, Mellichamp Chair in Global Religion and Modernity, University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)

Janet Robin Bogle, Grandmother (Aotearoa/New Zealand)

Janette Corcelius, Lorton, VA (USA)

Janick Schaufelbuehl, Associate Professor, University of Lausanne (Switzerland)

Jason Schulman, Lehman College, City University of New York (USA)

Javier Sethness, Los Angeles CA (USA)

Jean Batou, Historian and Deputy in the Parliament of the Governorate of Geneva (Switzerland)

Jean-Michel Dolivo, Lawyer & Former Deputy, Ensemble à Gauche, Parliament of the Governorate of Vaud (Switzerland)

Jeff Weintraub, Bryn Mawr College, PA  (USA)

Jen MacLennan, Independent Media, Syria Solidarity Activist, London (UK)

Jenna Mushin, Coventry, CT (USA)

Jenny Morgan, film-maker (UK)

Jens Hanssen, University of Toronto (Canada)

Jens Lerche, Reader, SOAS, University of London (UK)

Jens-Matin Rode, Berlin (Germany)

Jessy Nassar, PhD candidate, King’s College London (Lebanon)

Joachim Haberlen, University of Warwick, (UK)

Joan Connelly, Secretary, Retired USA

Joanne Demchok, Bethesda, MD (USA)

Joanne Roberts (Australia)

Joel Beinin, Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus, Stanford University (USA)

Joël Jovet, Paris (France)

Joey Ayoub, Assoc. Doctoral Researcher, Univ. of Zurich, founder of ‘The Fire These Times’, writer/journalist (Switzerland)

John A Imani (USA)

John Clarke, Packer Visitor in Social Justice, York University, Toronto (Canada)

John Dunn, former striking coal miner & branch committee member, National Miners Union, Darbyshire Branch (UK)

John Feffer, Director, Foreign Policy In Focus, Institute for Policy Studies (USA)

John Kahler, MD, FAAP (Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics) (USA)

John Reimann, former recording secretary, Carpenters Union Local 713, Editor, Oakland Socialist (USA)

John Treat, New York NY (USA)

Jonas Ecke, Berlin (Germany)

Joseph Green, Communist Voice Organization (USA)

Joseph Halevi, Macquarie University, Sydney; International University College of Turin

Josepha Ivanka (Joshka) Wessels, Senior Lecturer, Malmö University (Sweden)

Joshua Cohen, Editor, Boston Review; Distinguished Senior Fellow, UC Berkeley; faculty, Apple Univ. (USA)

Joshua Evangelista, journalist (Italy)

Judith Deutsch, psychoanalyst, Toronto (Canada)

Julia Bar-Tal, farmer, Berlin (Germany)

Julien Salingue, Director of the newspaper and website l’Anticapitaliste, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (France)

Juliette Harkin, Writer (UK)

Julnar Tahan, Halba north (Lebanon)

Kaori Hizume, TV producer, Tokyo (Japan)

kawabata erkin (Japan)

Kay Brainerd, Belleville, MI (USA)

Kelly Grotke, PhD, writer, greater Boston (USA)

Ken Hiebert, Palestine Solidarity Activist (Canada)

Kevin B. Anderson, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)

Kevork Assadourian, Yerevan (Armenia)

Khaled Ghannam Warehouse Manager (Australia)

Khaled Mansour, writer (Egypt)

Khaled Saghieh, journalist and writer, Beirut (Lebanon)

Konstantin Rintelmann, PhD candidate, University of Edinburgh (UK)

kris Juhl, Mckinleyville, CA (USA)

L R, Bern (Switzerland)

Lauren Langman, Professor of Sociology, Loyola University of Chicago (USA)

laurent soubise, Lyon (France)

Laurie King, Associate Professor of Teaching, Department of Anthropology, Georgetown University (USA)

Leah Wild, Cheltenham, England (UK)

Lee Wengraf, Queens, NY (USA)

Leonie O. Dowd, Dublin (Ireland)

Leyla Dakhli, Researcher, CNRS (France)

Lilia Marsali, Paris (France)

linda mattes, Jbail (Lebanon)

Lisa Albrecht, Retired University of Minnesota Professor, Social Justice (USA)

Lisa Morton, Newton, NJ (USA)

Lisa Perrine (France)

Lisa Wedeen, Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College, University of Chicago (USA)

Lisbeth Gouin (France)

Livia Wick, Associate Professor, American University of Beirut (Lebanon)

Liz Elkind, Edinburgh (UK)

Lois Weiner, Professor Emerita, New Jersey City University (USA)

Lorenzo Declich, Islamologist

Loretta Facchinetti, Activist (Italy)

Louay Ojjeh, Neuilly-sur-seine (France)

Lucia Sorbera, Sydney (Australia)

Luciano Nuzzo, Professor of Sociology of Law, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

Luke Alexander, Leumeah (Australia)

Lydia Beattie, Committee in Solidarity with the People of Syria – CISPOS (USA)

Mahdi Ghodsi, Economist, Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (Austria)

Maher Barotchi, Sheffield (UK)

Mahvish Ahmad, Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics, London School of Economics (LSE) (UK)

Mai Taha, Goldsmiths, University of London (UK)

Maire Kelly, Activist, Berlin (Germany)

Majd A Bukit, Mertajam (Malaysia)

Mamoun DIB, Avrillé (France)

Marese Hegarty, Community Development Worker, Irish Syria Solidarity Movement (Ireland)

Margo Harkin Derry (UK)

Maria Van innis, Namur (Belgium)

Mariana Morena, Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Mariluz Secilla Souto (Spain)

marina caruso, paris (France)

Marina Centonze, Activist (Italy)

Mark Boothroyd, London (UK)

Mark Goudkamp, ESL and History Teacher, Syria Solidarity Australia (Australia)

Mark LeVine, Irvine, CA (USA)

Markus Bickel, Tel Aviv (Israel)

Marta Tawil-Kuri, Research Professor, El Colegio de México (Mexico)

Martti Koskenniemi, Prof. of International Law, University of Helsinki (Finland)

Mary Ellen Davis, Montréal, Quebec (Canada)

Mary Killian, Pianist/Music Teacher, Berlin (Germany)

Mary Lynn Murphy, Committee in Solidarity with the People of Syria — CISPOS (USA)

Mary Rizzo, Translator-Activist (Italy)

Matilde Bei Clementi, activist (Italy)

Matteo Pronzini, member of the cantonal parliament (Switzerland)

Max Weiss, Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University (USA)

Mayssoun Sukarieh, Senior Lecturer, King’s College London (UK)

Mazen Halabi, Activist (USA)

Meghan Keane, Co-Director of Emergent Horizons (USA)

Meredith Tax, New York, NY  (USA)

Michael Albert, ZNet (USA)

Michael Fuller, Mapper, Social Scientist, British Columbia (Canada)

Michael Hirsch, NYC Democratic Socialists of America (USA)

Michael Karadjis, Western Sydney University, Syria Solidarity Australia (Australia)

Michael Kulbat, Lisbon, Santarém (Portugal)

Michael Letwin, Brooklyn, NY (USA)

Michael Löwy, Emeritus Research Director, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) (France)

Michael Pröbsting, Author, Editor of www.thecommunists.net (Austria)

Michael Santos, Antiwar Activist (USA)

Michel Morziere, activist, member of association For a Free and Democratic Syria (France)

Michelle Cantat, Paris (France)

Michelle Dean, Bristol (UK)

Miguel Urbán, Member of the European Parliament (GUE/NGL) (Spain)

Mike Kurpinski, Tomice (Poland)

Minnie Berman, New York, NY (USA)

Miriam Pickens, Southfield, MI (USA)

Mirko Medenica, Beograd (Serbia)

Miro Sandev, Sydney (Australia)

Mitchell Plitnick, President, ReThinking Foreign Policy, Maryland (USA)

Mo Tabba, Brossard (Canada)

Mohamad Khouli, Committee in Solidarity with the People of Syria — CISPOS (USA)

Mohamed Abdi Nour, General Secretary, Somali Public Trade Union (Somalia)

Molly Crabapple, Artist and Writer (USA)

Mouhab Ibraheem, (Germany)

Mounzer Itani, Berlin (Germany)

Mudassir Nadeem (India)

Muhammed Abbas, Antalya (Turkey)

Mustafa Aljarf, (France)

Myriam Kendsi, Grenoble (France)

Na’eem Jeenah, Executive Director, Afro–Middle East Centre (South Africa)

Nader Hashemi, Director, Center for Middle East Studies, University of Denver (USA/Canada)

Nadia Leïla Aïssaoui, Sociologist (Algeria/France)

Nadia NAFFAKH, Malakoff (France)

Nadia Salam, Troyes (France)

Nadia Samour, Lawyer, Berlin (Germany)

Nadje Al-Ali, Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies, Brown University (USA)

Nael Georges, Annemasse (France)

Nagao Koh, Ichikawa (Japan)

Nancy Holmstrom, Professor Emerita, Rutgers University (USA)

Nancy Ko, PhD Student, Columbia University, New York (USA)

Nassim Mehran, Berlin (Germany)

Natasha Hazrati, San Carlos (Nicaragua)

Nathalie Robisco, Bastia (France)

nathan Hutchinson, Boulder, CO (USA)

Navtej Purewal, Professor, SOAS, University of London (UK)

Nazan Üstündağ, Independent Scholar (Germany)

Nick Riemer, University of Sydney (Australia)

Nicola Gandolfi (Spain)

Nicolas Walder, Member of the Federal Parliament, Green Party (Switzerland)

Nigel Gibson, Emerson College (USA)

Nils de Dardel, Lawyer, Former Member of Parliament (Switzerland)

Nizar Flihsn (Kuwait)

noah zweig, (Ecuador)

Noam Chomsky, University of Arizona (USA)

nurlana khalilova (Italy)

Odile Brunet, Lauris (France)

Ofer Neiman, Student, Jerusalem

Olfa Lamloum,, Tunis (Tunisia)

Olivia Hudis, Boulder, CO (USA)

Omar Dewachi, Anthropologist, Rutgers University (USA)

Osama Alhomse, Jeddah (Saudi Arabia)

Ozlem Goner, Brooklyn, NY (USA)

Pam Bromley, independent member, Rossendale Borough City Council (UK)

Paola Rivetti, Dublin (Ireland)

Paolo Gilardi, anti-militarist and historian (Switzerland)

Parvathi Menon, Researcher/Adjunct Lecturer, University of Helsinki (Finland)

Pascale TENANT, Mouettes (France)

Patrick Bond, Professor, University of the Western Cape (South Africa)

Patrick J. O’Dea, Electrician & Trade Unionist (New Zealand)

Paul Fletcher, Crawley, England (UK)

Paula Manthey (Germany)

Payam Ghalehdar, University of Göttingen (Germany)

Penelope Duggan, Editor, International Viewpoint (France)

Pete Brown, Communist Voice Organization (USA)

Pete Klosterman, Human Rights Activist, New York City (USA)

Peter Bohmer, Faculty Emeritus, Evergreen State College (USA)

Peter Chambers, Castle Donington, England (UK)

Peter Hudis, Professor of Philosophy, Oakton Community College (USA)

Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, Chapman University (USA)

Peter Saxtrup Nielsen, Aarhus C, (Denmark)

Phil Gasper, Professor Emeritus, Notre Dame de Namur University (USA)

Piero Maestri, Activist, Milan (Italy)

Pierre Conscience, Communal Deputy, City Council of Lausanne, Ensemble à Gauche – solidaritéS Vaud (Switzerland)

Pierre Vandevoorde (France)

Pina Piccolo, San Jose (Italy)

Polly Kellogg, Retired Professor of Human Relations, St. Cloud State University, Minnesota (USA)

Prabhu Mohapatra, University of Delhi (India)

Pritam Singh, Oxford Brookes University (UK)

Qutaiba Alhusein, Kirke-hyllinge Denmark

Raghu Krishnan, translator and interpreter, Toronto (Canada)

Rahim Laban, Cardiff (UK)

Rajan Hoole, Writer and human rights defender (Sri Lanka)

Rana Issa, American University of Beirut (AUB) (Lebanon/Norway)

Rana Kabbani, Fulham (UK)

Raouia Ben abd El ouahab Casablanca (Morocco)

Rasha Anayah, Baltimore, MD (USA)

Rashad Ali, Resident Senior Fellow, Institute for Strategic Dialogue (UK)

Rashmi Varma, University of Warwick (UK)

Rebecca Lesses, Ithaca, NY (USA)

Rebekka Rexhausen, Project Assistant, Alsharq Reise (Germany)

Rev. Dr. Rachael Keefe, Clergy, Living Table United Church of Christ (USA)

Rev. Gregory Seal Livingston, Syria Faith Initiative, NYC (USA)

Riccardo Bella, Theater Technician, Milan (Italy)

Riccardo Bellofiore, former professor of political economy, University of Bergamo (Italy)

Riccardo Cristiano, President of the Association of Journalists, friends of Father Dall’Oglio (Italy)

Richard Atkinson Chester (UK)

Richard Greeman, Victor Serge Foundation (France)

Richard Kuper, activist/educator, London (UK)

Richard Wood, Retired Chair, Sociology Department, DeAnza College (USA)

Rima Anabtawi, M.A. Groves, TX (USA)

Rima Majed, Assistant Professor, American University of Beirut (Lebanon)

Roane Carey, Senior Editor, The Nation (USA)

Robert Brenner, Center for Social Theory and Comparative History, UCLA (USA)

Robert Day, Southfield, MI (USA)

Robert Evans, Erie, PA (USA)

Robert Green, Hackney (UK)

Robert J. Pechacek, Woodstock, IL (USA)

Roberto Andervill, Social Worker & Activist (Italy)

Roger Silverman, former candidate, British Labour Party National Executive Committee (UK)

Rohini Hensman, Writer and Independent Scholar (India)

Roland Merieux, Member of the National Animation Team of ENSEMBLE! (France)

Romolo Molo, Lawyer (Switzerland)

Ronald Souza, Dallas, US (USA)

Ronnie Herbolzheimer, Leibnitz (Austria)

Rosanne S, Durban (South Africa)

Roseline Vachetta, former European MEP, New Anti-Capitalist Party (France)

Rosita Di Peri, professor at the University of Turin (Italy)

Ruairi Nolan, Exeter (UK)

Rupert Read, Philosopher, University of East Anglia (UK)

Ruth Riegler Glasgow (UK)

S Ghazal, Baildon (UK)

Saajeda Bayat, Businesswoman (South Africa)

Sadri Khiari, designer (Tunisia)

Saeb Shoufi, Fort Worth TX (USA)

Saffo Papantonopoulou, Tucson, AZ (USA)

sagawa toshiaki, Japan

Salim Sendiane, Angers (France)

Salima Bey, Paris (France)

Salwa Ismail, Professor of Politics, SOAS, University of London (UK)

Sam Friedman, Poet and AIDS researcher (USA)

Sam Hamad, Writer & Researcher, University of Glasgow (Scotland)

Samantha Falciatori, Web Author (Italy)

Samia Akkad, Rome (Italy)

Samuel Farber, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Brooklyn College of CUNY (USA)

Sandra Bender, researcher & human rights activist (USA)

Sandra Hetzl, Translator and Curator (Germany)

Sara Abbas, PhD Candidate, Freie Universität, Berlin (Germany)

Sara Lucaroni, journalist (Italy)

Sascha Ruppert-Karakas, Munich (Germany)

Saskia Sassen, Professor, Columbia University, New York City (USA)

Scott Lucas, Editor, EA WorldView & Emeritus Professor, University of Birmingham (UK)

Scott Tokaryk, Berlin (Germany)

Sébastien Guex, Professor, University of Lausanne & Former Member, City Council of Lausanne (Switzerland)

Seda Altuğ, Academic, Istanbul (Turkey)

Sergio Bellavita, trade unionist (Italy)

Sergio Viña, Valencia (Spain)

Sevgi Dogan, Professor, Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy)

Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science & Philosophy Emerita, Yale University (USA)

Shafie Chkair, Kuwait (Kuwait)

Shakuntala Banaji, LSE, University of London, (UK)

Shayna Silverstein, Chicago, IL (USA)

Sheriff Tabba, Montréal (Canada)

Sherry Wolf, author/trade unionist, member, Tempest Collective, New York City (USA)

Shintaro Mori, translator (Japan)

Shireen Akram-Boshar, Democratic Socialists of America (USA)

Shirin Hakim, PhD Candidate at Imperial College London (UK)

Silvia Carenzi, PhD Candidate, Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy)

silvia carneiro Garcia, Lima (Peru)

Simon Assaf, Editor, al-Manshour, London/Beirut (UK/Lebanon)

Simon Pearson, Anti*Capitalist Resistance (UK)

Simona Arigoni, member of the cantonal parliament (Switzerland)

Simone Jeger (Switzerland)

Sina Zekavat, Global Prison Abolition Coalition (USA)

Siobhan O’Brien, Dublin (Ireland)

Sonali Kolhatkar, Multimedia Journalist (USA)

Songül Deniz (Germany)

Soraya Misleh, Journalist (Brazil)

Souad Labbize,, Toulouse ((France)

Stacy Brown, Director, Refugees Forward (USA)

Staffan Olofsson (Sweden)

Stanley Heller, Host, The Struggle Video News (USA)

Stefan Zgliczyński, Author and Publisher (Poland)

Stéfanie Prezioso, Academic, University of Lausanne & Member of the Swiss Parliament, Ensemble à Gauche (Switzerland)

Stephen Donahue, Toronto (Canada)

Stephen Hastings-King, PhD, writer, greater Boston (USA)

Stephen R. Shalom, William Paterson University, New Jersey (USA)

Stephen Soldz, Coalition for an Ethical Psychology (USA)

Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Studies, University of San Francisco (USA)

Steven Heydemann, Director, Program in Middle East Studies, Smith College (USA)

Subir Sinha, Senior Lecturer, SOAS, University of London (UK)

Sue Dalot, Bronx, NY (USA)

Sue Sparks, Unite (UK)

suha sibany, Paris (France)

Sukla Sen, Peace activist, (India)

Sumit Sarkar, Historian, (India)

Susan Nussbaum, Writer (USA)

Susan Smith, Muslim Peace Fellowship, Stony Point, NY (USA)

Susanna Sillanpää, Helsinki (Finland)

Suzi Weissman, Professor of Politics, Saint Mary’s College of California (USA)

Swati Birla, University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA)

Sylvia Arnstein, Champaign, IL (USA)

Tachibana Sara, Osaka-shi (Japan)

Talib Al Ali, Mississauga (Canada)

Tanika Sarkar, Historian, (India)

Tanya Monforte, DCL Candidate, McGill University (Canada)

Tasnim Sammak,, Palestinian, PhD Candidate, Melbourne ((Australia))

Tassos Anastassiadis, Journalist (Greece)

Terry Burke, Committee in Solidarity with the People of Syria — CISPOS (USA)

The Rev. David W. Good, Minister Emeritus, The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, Connecticut (USA)

Theo Horesh, author and freelance journalist (USA)

Therese Rickman Bull, Independent Human Rights Upholder/Defender (USA)

Thomas Harrison, editorial board member, New Politics (USA)

Thomas Mansheim, Associate Professor Emeritus, St. Peter’s University (USA)

Tim Bates, Vinton, VA (USA)

Tim Hall, Communist Voice Organization USA)

Tim Leadbeater, Teacher (Aotearoa/New Zealand)

Timothy Gibran, Stockholm (Sweden)

Tory Whall, Salt Lake City, UT (USA)

Toufic Haddad, Academic and Author (Palestine)

Tristan Sloughter, Democratic Socialists of America, Larkspur, Colorado (USA)

Trond Revheim, Asker (Norway)

Vahid Yücesoy, PhD Candidate, University of Montreal (Canada)

Valerio Mattei, researcher and journalist (Italy)

Valerio Torre, lawyer, Revolutionary Marxist Collective “Assalto al cielo” (Italy)

Vicken Cheterian, University Lecturer in History & IR, University of Geneva, Webster University Geneva (Switzerland)

Vincent Bircher, trade union activist (Switzerland)

Vincent Commaret, Songwriter (France)

Vivek Sundara, Social activist, (India)

Vivian O’Dell, Research Scientist, University of Wisconsin Particle Astrophysics Center (USA)

Viviana Ferreras Lohe, Zamora (Spain)

W. J. T. Mitchell, Senior Editor, Critical Inquiry, Chicago (USA)

Walter Baldo C., Rproject.it (Italy)

Wasim Khalili Göteborg (Sweden)

Wayne Heimbach, Evanston, IL (USA)

Wendy Pearlman, Professor, Northwestern University (USA)

William Flesch, Waltham, MA (USA)

Yamazaki Hideki, Tokyo, Japan

Yasmin Fedda, filmmaker and artist (UK)

Yossi Bartal, Writer (Germany)

Younes Ajarrai, Caen (Morocco)

Zeenat Adam, International Relations Strategist, Stop the Bombing Campaign (South Africa)

Zhaleh Sahand, Houston, TX (USA)

Ziad Elmarsafy, Professor of Comparative Literature, King’s College London (UK)

Ziad Majed, Associate Professor, the American University of Paris (Lebanon/France)

Zulekha Dinath, Author (South Africa)

[list updated 19 April 2021]

To add your signature, send name, affiliation (for identification purposes only), country, and whether you are Syrian, with the subject line “Add name” here.

 

Biden’s Plan to Revamp American Imperialism

By: March 23, 2021
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Some of the U.S. military bases around the world in 2015. Today there are 800.

This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France. 

Joseph Biden has stated that his presidential foreign policy goal is to “place the United States back at the head of the table” in the councils of world affairs. While trying to reestablish ties to European allies, he has already increased tensions with the country’s enemies.

The United States dominated world capitalism from 1945 until 1991, and then with the fall of the Soviet Union, it became the world’s sole superpower, its hegemony based upon foreign investment, its 800 military bases around the world, armed intervention, and actual warfare. By the 2000s, the United States had begun to wane as an imperial power. The 2008 Great Recession was a turning point as the U.S. economy ground to a halt while China’s economy continued to soar. As American power declined, Russia took advantage of the opportunity and seized the Crimea in 2014, the first such imperialist seizure of territory in Europe since World War II.

Today, Biden faces a host of challenges. Trump, arguing that China engaged in money manipulation and unfair competition, took strong measures against the U.S. rival, including tariffs, economic sanctions, and visa restrictions. Biden has kept Trump’s measures in place while in recent bilateral talks held in Anchorage, Alaska, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken accused China of human rights violations in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, the home province of the Uyghurs. Chinese Communist Party foreign affairs Zhao Lijian in turn accused the United States of having its own human rights issues, a reference to the suppression of the Black Lives Matter protests last year. Zhao said the talks had a “strong smell of gun powder.” The accusations of both governments about the other’s human rights violations are, of course, true, but the mutual recriminations about human rights only serve to cover up the underlying struggle for power.

Biden’s war of words with the Chinese makes it hard for him to get China to pressure North Korea on nuclear arms. And as Kim Yo Jong—sister and aide to dictator Kim Jong Un—recently stated, “We take this opportunity to warn the new U.S. administration trying hard to give off powder smell in our land.”

Relations with Russia are also tense after Biden called dictator Vladimir Putin “a killer.” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated, “These are very bad statements by the President of the United States. He definitely does not want to improve relations with us, and we will continue to proceed from this.” Putin himself said he would like public “open and direct discussions” with Biden. While Biden’s remark was certainly true, it increases the friction between the two countries.

Regarding Iran, Biden would like to return to the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump left in 2018, but Iran is demanding an end to the devastating economic sanctions—stopping the sale of Iranian oil—while it continues to develop its nuclear program. And its surrogate the Houthis in Yemen fire missiles at oil fields in Saudi Arabia. Biden, who fears looking weak, has kept Trump’s sanctions in place, but he will probably have to make concessions to draw Iran into the treaty once again.

Trump promised that the United States would by May 1 withdraw its last 2,500 troops from Afghanistan, where the United States has been at war for almost twenty years. Biden is now demanding that, before the U.S. withdraws, Afghanistan form a new government that includes the Taliban.

We are entering a period that resembles the early twentieth century, when the rival great powers challenged the hegemony of Great Britain, leading to World War I. Today, rival powers challenge the United States, and American socialists face the task of opposing American imperialism while showing internationalist solidarity with struggles for democracy, social reforms, and socialism in countries around the world.

Union Democracy and “The Final Goal”

By: March 20, 2021
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Lois Weiner [1] has done a great service both in reminding us of the important work of Herman Benson and the Association for Union Democracy (AUD), its roots on the Third Camp socialist tradition, but also the limits Benson accepted by his rejection of the “the final goal”; i.e. socialist democracy. As Lois points out, the importance of union democracy lies not only in creating more effective unions, but as part of the process of building workers’ self-activity and confidence as well as a broader social outlook in the movement toward that final goal. For those of us in the broad Third Camp or “socialism from below” tendency democracy is a central part of building the power of working class people on the job, in the union, and in broader society as Lois argues. When the vision of socialism and its possibility is lost, the notion of workers’ democracy tends to be reduced to the institutions of formal democracy, while the fight for these relies primarily on legal strategies, often with reduced emphasis on the self-organization and action of the union members themselves in favor of the courts. For many of us who were aware of the work of Benson and AUD and saw it as valuable, this, nonetheless, seemed a severe limitation.

Since we are dealing with aspects of the history of the Third Camp tendency and Benson’s place in it, I have to take issue with Lois’s assessment that “ Benson mentored student activists from the 1960s and 1970s who identified with the independent socialist tradition…,” including those who later helped organize TDU and Labor Notes. At that time, the major mentors for those of us in the Independent Socialist Clubs (ISC) and later the International Socialist (IS) on matters of trade union politics were above all Hal Draper and particularly Stan Weir. More than any others, they helped shape our views on union democracy and rank and file organization from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s.  Few of us had any contact with Benson until much later. In my case, the older “Third Camp” people I knew in New York in that period aside from the ISC/IS members were precisely Julius and Phyllis Jacobson, Bert Hall, and others around New Politics, for which I occasionally wrote. When several of us in the IS ran into legal problems during the long strike against N.Y. Telephone by the Communications Workers in 1971-72 in which we were active, it was Bert Hall we turned to. So, I share Lois’s regard for these comrades.

Other mentors at that time included the older socialists in the UAW in Detroit such as Art and Edie Fox, and Pete Kelly who were leaders of the United National Caucus, and somewhat later Erwin Bauer. For them and for us, Benson’s attachment to the UAW’s Public Review Board as a means of securing members’ rights was incomprehensible. Interestingly, Benson was forced to back track on seeing the UAW as a model of democracy somewhat when in the 1980s Victor Reuther broke with the UAW’s Administrative Caucus “family” to side with the New Directions opposition caucus. Since that time, AUD has generally adopted a broader view of things than the original focus on the legal rights of union members contained in the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. In part, this was due to the influence of TDU, New Directions, and Labor Notes, as well as to the broader perspectives of newer AUD staff members. I think even Benson took on a broader view of things over time. When I was on a panel with him commemorating the life and work of Stan Weir several years ago his presentation, while still sceptical about the “final goal”, was quite broad ranging about what he called “injustice” and the social movements.

Lois is right, of course, to point to the problems of trying to use or influence the state or courts in union work. Yet, I think Nelson Lichtenstein, in his reply to Lois,  is also right that the problem is not solved by simple rejection. I agree that direct action is best, but it is not always possible and, indeed, sometimes using legal channels is the only way to fight victimization. There is more to this question, of course. For example, was TDU correct to have pushed for direct elections of union leaders in 1989-90 as an alternative to the government’s “trusteeship,” in what proved a prolonged government oversight? I think so. This same question has come up again in the case of the UAW where a rank and file caucus has won the right to a referendum of the direct vote, which is reported on by Nelson  in Labor Notes. While, as he points out in his comments on Lois’s New Politics article, the direct vote is not a panacea, it is nevertheless a significant opening for changing a union long in decline. It seems to me it would have been irresponsible in both cases for the rank and file dissidents and reformers not to intervene in the state’s efforts to control or reshape the union in order to achieve the most democratic outcome possible.

The fact is the question of the state and the unions is a dilemma that won’t go away and for which there is no simple answer. The modern capitalist state exists to protect, advance, and mediate conflicts within capitalism and within the capitalist class as well as to keep the masses as passive as possible. But it is also a complex, multi-layered, ubiquitous, and contradictory phenomenon in which, as Nelson argues, social movements including labor can at times intervene in one way or another to undo past injustices and win social and economic gains sometimes through legislation. It just doesn’t work to separate the unions from other social movements in this matter because the state works similarly to penetrate, influence, divert, or supress all such movements. Look at the “liberal” state’s involvement in the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the COINTELPRO penetration of the anti-war movement.

Finally, I completely agree with Lois’s critique of Nelson’s suggestion that union democracy can be put on the back burner due to the “hard slog” that is union organizing today and the massive power of big business to resist unionization. As I have argued elsewhere [2] organizing the millions in these new industries and corporations, not to mention auto, steel, and other old industries where hundreds of thousands of workers remain unorganized, cannot be done with current bureaucratic organizing techniques no matter how refined, going from one NLRB election or “neutrality” card check to the next. There are not enough staff organizers in all the unions together to take on even Amazon alone.

As I write, the 5,800 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama fulfilment center are voting to win recognition by the Retail, Whole, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), an affiliate of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which Nelson has covered in Labor Notes. Their victory is obviously crucial and can be a key to the future. But as of March 2021, Amazon has 819 facilities in the United States, up from 359 two years ago with an additional 286 facilities planned for the future. Its workforce is approaching 850,000 full-time and part-time workers in the US up from 500,000 in 2019 with more to come. It should be fairly clear that the RWDSU or the UFCW are not going to organize this monster by themselves or by the usual slogging through NLRB or card check campaigns even with a better NLRB and if Congress passes the Pro-Act sometime in the next year or so to make it easier.

Organizing Amazon and for that matter Google, Walmart, non-union hospital systems, unorganized warehouses, auto parts firms and “transplants,” etc. is going to take the kind of mass mobilizations and confrontations that have characterized previous leaps in union membership. Occupations, sit-down strikes, active strikes, mass picketing, the closing of geographically strategic facilities in the supply chain, etc. will be needed. The activization of union members or at least of the activist layer in Metro areas where they are concentrated and where most of today’s Amazon, logistics, and even manufacturing facilities are located and clustered to reach out to unorganized workers is simply a necessity. Responding to workers when they call for help and not just sticking to yesterday’s neatly worked out plan because we don’t do “hot shops” should also be common practice. How many of the cries for help from Amazon workers during the pandemic have been ignored by unions in the past year? The fact that there are only two official organizing drives at Amazon’s hundreds of  facilities, that in Alabama and a Teamster drive in Iowa recently announced, and that such help as has been available elsewhere has come from the resource-strapped UE allied with local DSA chapters through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee or from Amazon workers themselves answers that question.

It also has to be recognized that the old industrial lines, including those between goods and service production, have been altered, obscured, and overlapped by criss-crossing supply chains, private equity deals, mergers, expansions, and increased interdependency. Amazon is itself an example of this. It is a retailer in almost every line of goods; a land and air “first mile”, intermediate, and “last mile” transport firm; logistics network organizer; user and supplier of data and communications services to just about every industry in the US and beyond; a manufacturer; a major financial player, and of course a political operator many of whose executives and managers give heavily to the Democratic Party.

For the most part, (there are always exceptions) today’s bureaucratic unions are poorly suited to deal with this situation precisely because they have encouraged a passive membership and rely too heavily on staff resources or worse on Democratic administrations over the years. Union democracy or more accurately the transformation of major unions into living democratic participatory organizations and cultures is a necessity precisely because of the corporations’ massive powers of resistance. I’m not suggesting we wait until such transformations have taken place, but that the fight for such changes be part of what socialists and other activists do as they work to push their unions to organize in new ways today—or, perhaps, support new democratic unions where necessary. Just as living union democracy is degraded to formalisms by legalistic approaches when we lose sight of the “final goal”, so if we surrender the transformation of today’s unions and those that arise anew as workers find current unions inadequate to the tasks of today, so we will see organizing degraded to routine, even if improved, NLRB elections and lost opportunities.

While Nelson is right that you don’t necessarily have to be a revolutionary socialist or Third Camper to appreciate the importance of democracy in social movements, it is nonetheless suggestive that all of the major surviving organizations directly concerned with union democracy and rank and file organization from that earlier period—AUD, Labor Notes, and TDU—have their roots in that socialist tradition. Or that the best single handbook on union democracy, Democracy is Power by Mike Parker and Martha Gruelle from Labor Notes, was written by veterans of that tradition. Thanks again to Lois for reminding us of the importance of that tradition.

 

[1] Since the three of us have known each other for  a long time, I have adopted Lois’s practice of using first names.

[2] Kim Moody, “Reversing the “Model”: Thoughts on Jane McAlevey’s Plan for Union Power” Spectre, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (Fall 2020), 61- 75.

 

When Your Enemy’s Enemy is Not a Friend

By: March 19, 2021
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In a world based on exploitation and oppression, resistance is ever present. Most of the time it simmers below the surface but sometimes it takes the form of huge social explosions. It would seem natural for those on the left to wish for such mass resistance to occur on a truly global scale. There is, however, a complicating factor. A section of the left has embraced a ‘campist’ view, in some ways a hangover from the Cold War period, that sees global politics primarily in terms of a conflict between a US led predatory group of countries and another ‘anti-imperialist camp.’ That we should hate and oppose US imperialism, with it’s agenda of global domination, is certainly not in dispute. However, there are practical results that flow from the campist position that stand in the way of international working class solidarity and that need to be challenged.

The US and its junior partners compete with their major rivals and pose a terrible threat to the poor and oppressed countries they seek to dominate and exploit. However, we can’t forget that those countries are themselves class divided societies and that not all the exploitation and oppression that their populations face comes out of Washington. Domestic capitalists are also the enemy and the governments of those countries, even where they clash with US objectives, still represent the interests of these home grown exploiters.

The problem with the campist perspective is that it so fixates on the role of imperialism and places so much emphasis on its ‘anti-imperialist camp’ that it ends up taking a very forgiving view of oppressive regimes. Moreover, when local working class populations challenge that oppression on the streets, campists find such struggles decidedly inconvenient. Indeed, they are often ready to hurl accusations that such movements of resistance, however real their grievances, are simply the product of Western manipulation. The material put out by The Grayzone is a particularly glaring and crude example of just this approach.

There is an equally serious and related difference on the left over the question of China, clearly the main global rival of the US. In that case, disagreements over supporting social resistance are compounded by the insistence of some that China is no mere component of an anti-imperialist camp but a socialist society. It is suggested that, under the leadership of the Communist Party, a ‘socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics’ is being developed. In advancing the perspective that hostility to US led imperialism shouldn’t prevent solidarity with working class struggle in every part of the earth, the nature of Chinese society will have to be taken up in more detail. However, I’ll first look at the changing US agenda of global domination because it is necessary to properly acknowledge the very large grain of truth that contributes to the political disorientation of campism.

The Main Enemy

The Trump administration certainly pushed an agenda of global rivalry but its strategies and methods were crude and erratic. Biden represents a restoration of ‘US global leadership’ that seeks to put a ‘human rights’ face on an agenda that will be even more brutal but significantly more efficient and credible. For Biden, containing the growing economic power of China will be the prime consideration. Certainly, rivalry with Russia will still be pursued, the effort to contain the regional ambitions of Iran will continue and there will be ongoing initiatives to advance the US capacity to exploit on a global scale. However, the immediate period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when US hegemony seemed much more secure, is long gone and it is China that poses the greatest threat by far. The World Economic Forum breaks down key ‘global sectors and industries’ and shows that the US still holds the dominant position but ‘China is coming up very fast.’

The US, then, remains the main enemy and it brings along with it a grouping of lesser imperial powers, including Canada. Those of us who live in these countries have a particular duty to oppose and challenge their ongoing robbery with violence. When they try to impose client regimes on poor and oppressed countries, we must do all we can to expose and disrupt their plans. We can give no support to their rivalry with other major powers. When they express selective moral outrage at the ‘human rights abuses’ of those rivals, we should denounce their hypocrisy and challenge them on the crimes they are party to. Yet, none of this means that oppression is not occurring within the ‘anti-imperialist camp’ and neither does it mean that we should regard challenges to that oppression with disdain or hostility.

The Role of China

I recently saw a comment on Facebook from someone who viewed China as a socialist society. He suggested that the working class is in power and, while there are sometimes problems with capitalists, the state invariably takes the side of the workers. This view is simply at odds with ample and readily available evidence to the contrary.

I have already pointed to the huge growth of the Chinese economy in the last several decades. It has emerged as an economic powerhouse that has a central role in the global supply chain that has developed during the neoliberal decades. In 2020, it replaced the US as the EU’s top trading partner. At the same time, it has also overtaken the US as the world’s ‘top destination for new foreign direct investment.’ Example after example can be drawn on to show conclusively that China is becoming ever more powerful at the expense of the US to a degree that threatens its hegemonic position.

However, the supposedly socialist political leadership that has overseen this incorporation into the global capitalist marketplace has strikingly failed to to prevent many of the things that could be expected from a capitalist regime. Income inequality now rivals that of the US. ‘The share of public property in national wealth has declined from about 70 per cent in 1978 to about 30 per cent in 2015. More than 95 per cent of the housing stock is now owned by private households, as compared to about 50 per cent in 1978.’ Last year, China had 389 billionaires, second only to the US and this is enormously telling. That so many people have such a massive control of the wealth of the country speaks to a situation that is beyond a question of inequality and additional privileges. With such massive wealth comes great power and influence that even a ‘socialist political regime’ would have to reckon with.

The working class that has grown so enormously during this period of economic expansion, has emerged as part of the reordered global workforce of the neoliberal era. That growth and vulnerability to exploitation has been created by way of level of internal migration from rural areas that is historic in scale. By 2009, there were 145 million rural-urban migrants in China, comprising 11% of the population. In that same year, the number of factory workers in the country was reckoned at 99 million. The largest employer was the notorious Foxconn, employing 1.3 million workers. The terrible working conditions faced by these workers have given rise to the term ‘Foxconn suicide.’

Foxconn’s Longhua plant, on the outskirts of Shenzhen, has a sign posted outside its gates that reads, ‘This factory area is legally established with state approval. Unauthorised trespassing is prohibited. Offenders will be sent to police for prosecution!’ One former worker summed up the conditions in the plant with the observation that, ‘It’s not a good place for human beings.’ He and another man tell of ‘a high-pressure working environment where exploitation is routine and where depression and suicide have become normalised.’ These suicides are described in an article in the Guardian.

“In 2010, Longhua assembly-line workers began killing themselves. Worker after worker threw themselves off the towering dorm buildings, sometimes in broad daylight, in tragic displays of desperation – and in protest at the work conditions inside. There were 18 reported suicide attempts that year alone and 14 confirmed deaths. Twenty more workers were talked down by Foxconn officials.”

The political leadership and state agencies in China can’t seriously be presented as socialists overseeing a process of accumulation that has made some necessary concessions to capitalist methods. Efforts of workers and communities to challenge injustices and demand their rights are met with repression. Union organizing is an activity fraught with risk and major consequences. Examples of efforts to crush working class resistance are easy to find. In 2018, workers at the welding-equipment manufacturer Shenzhen Jasic Technology tried to form a union. Their key issues were arbitrary fines imposed on them by the company and its failure to make proper payments into a government fund to meet their housing costs. Six workers who were involved in forming a union were fired and taken to the police station when they showed up for work. Twenty others who marched to the station in support were also arrested. One of the protesting workers told the police, “When the boss says we’re making trouble, you, the cops, trust them and rush to the factory, beat us up and take us to the police station… In your eyes we are just like tiny bugs waiting to be stepped on.”

Community based protests are also very common in China and the authorities employ an adroit combination of concessions and repression to contain them. In 2019, thousands of people took to the streets for several days in Wuhan to challenge plans to build a toxic waste incineration plant in their community until riot police crushed the community action. The threat of social unrest and the ongoing effort to contain it are preoccupations for those who govern China.

The Uyghurs are one of a number of national minorities and they undoubtedly face a large scale migration of majority Han Chinese settlers into their homeland, along with a ‘resource colonialism’ that is very much part of the incorporation of China into the global order of neoliberal capitalism. It is worth noting that, in their efforts to pose as noble defenders of the human rights of the Uyghurs, the Tories who put forward the motion in the Canadian parliament had nothing to say about the involvement of this country’s mining companies in the process of oppression and exploitation unfolding in Xinjiang.

It must be acknowledged that Chinese economic activity on the international stage is also lacking in socialist credentials. Chinese companies are operating across the globe and their track record is very little different to the kind of exploitation and abuse we would associate with Western corporations. Last year, two workers in Zimbabwe, employed by a Chinese mining company, who complained over unpaid wages, were shot and wounded. The Zimbabwe Environmental Lawyers Association (ZELA) issued a statement that read in part, “The problem of ill-treatment of workers is systematic and widespread and what that shooting did was to expose the rampant abuse of workers. Wages are often very low and in many cases are not paid on time.”

There is no doubt that, relative to the model of a capitalist society that exists in the West, the state sector in China is much larger and the capacity of the governing authorities to intervene in the economy greater. The recent marshaling of resources, albeit after a costly delay, to deal with the public health crisis of the pandemic shows this, as do the measures taken to ensure a more rapid economic recovery than was possible in the West. However, the restoration of private capitalism has occurred on an enormous scale. I mentioned already that China now has the second largest number of billionaires in the world (and is producing more of them at an unrivalled rate) with much larger numbers of lesser capitalists. It would be absurd to suggest that this social class, with its vast wealth, doesn’t possess enormous political power. The evidence clearly suggests otherwise.

In 2001, the rules of the Communist Party were changed to allow capitalists to become members, thereby ‘attracting the people who have the social status and the economic clout to govern.’ By 2011, some 90% of the thousand richest capitalists in China were members or officials of the Communist Party. In 2017, roughly 100 of the delegates to the Chinese parliament were billionaires and the 209 richest delegates had an average wealth of $300 million. Together this group were worth $500 billion, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Belgium.

Without doubt, the authoritarian Chinese regime intervenes far more vigorously in economic affairs than is the case in the West and individual capitalists have very much less room to move. However, linked in their business dealings, in political life and socially to the grandees of the state structure, the Chinese capitalist class is decisively influential. Given the existence of this class, the enormous role of foreign investment, the place within the neoliberal supply chain and the predatory role on a global scale, I feel that China must be viewed as a capitalist society. In my opinion, even with state owned enterprises still holding 48.1% of the stock of capital employed in industry, as of 2017, the subservience of this component to the needs of a market economy and private capital creates a very different reality to that which led to the characterization of the Soviet Union as either a deformed workers’ state or as state capitalist.

However, the view that present day China represents some kind of transitional society would not undermine the inescapable conclusion that the working class in that country faces exploitation at the hands of an oppressive regime. From this it flows that resistance in the face of that oppression is not only permissible but essential and that the path to socialism will not be found in an alliance between a state bureaucracy and several hundred billionaires but through working class revolution.

Internationalism

If we take the side of Chinese workers and oppressed minorities and reject the notion that the repressive regime in Beijing is defending socialism, we must also support working class resistance and popular struggles throughout the ‘anti-imperialist camp.’ We must reject the notion that we can build a global movement with one list of countries where we celebrate the class struggle and another where it is frowned upon. I would suggest that there are some basic considerations that must inform a valid concept of international solidarity.

First of all, I’d repeat and emphasize that the campists have it right when they present US led imperialism as the main enemy and the defeat of that enemy on its home turf is always our main focus and responsibility.

Secondly, we must never be embarrassed by the class struggle. If working class people take to the streets in a country that US led imperialism has it’s boot firmly planted on, as is happening in Haiti at the moment, we do all we can to support their struggle. However, with just as much enthusiasm and, with a spirit of working class independence, we back resistance in countries that are major rivals to the US. We also support social resistance in countries where the US seeks to tighten its oppressive grip, such as Iran. We do all we can to create an awareness and a sense of solidarity with working class struggle wherever it is being waged.

Thirdly, we don’t shy away from the complications and contradictions that exist in the context of global rivalry and imperialist domination. The campists are not wrong that the US State Department and Western intelligence agencies look to gain influence over movements of resistance in countries with governments they are at odds with. In Hong Kong, some two million people have taken to the streets to protect democratic rights. They know that their limited and hard pressed freedoms are vital if they are to resist the neoliberal hell that the Beijing regime and local capitalists are imposing on them. Yet, supporters of that regime on the left will ignore this mass expression of popular sentiment and gleefully point to someone in the crowd waving the Stars and Stripes. The left in Hong Kong is well aware of the role that ‘right wing localists’ play and of their links to reactionary Western politicians. Unfortunately, we can’t order up an antiseptic class struggle in the messy realities of global capitalism.

Finally, we need to understand that the pandemic triggered crisis and its aftermath will unleash huge and explosive struggles on a truly international scale. In such a context, building a much stronger sense of global solidarity will be essential and we can’t operate with a campist double set of books. The class struggle will be waged and must be fully supported on every part of this earth.

Originally posted at John Clarke’s blog.

Does Biden’s American Rescue Plan Open a New Era of Reform?

By: March 16, 2021
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This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France. 

The U.S. Congress has passed and President Joseph Biden has signed his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) to address the twin issues of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis. Not only is this the largest such relief measure in the country’s history, but some of the bill’s programs should lift millions out of poverty. While the bill passed both houses of Congress, all Republicans voted against it, even though 70 percent of Americans support it, including 45 percent of Republicans. Today across the political spectrum people are asking: Is this the end of neoliberal austerity? Is this the beginning of a new era of American reform? Does this represent the start of a genuine social democratic welfare state for America?

The ARP provides billions to deal with the pandemic, relief for the unemployed and workers, aid to state and local governments, and support for various industries from restaurants to airlines. There are funds for childcare, education, an expansion of affordable health care, including mental health, an expansion of food programs, housing assistance and help for the homeless, as well as aid to public transportation. While the primary function of the bill is to relieve the crisis of the last year, many believe that it will lead to permanent programs that represent the country’s third great American social reform in the last 100 years.

The United States’ first modern era of social reform came in the 1930s when President Roosevelt achieved his New Deal legislation. In the depth of the Great Depression, as unemployment reached 25%, Roosevelt created jobs programs that employed millions. More important, FDR passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) that for the first time gave workers the right to organize unions and the Social Security Act that created government pensions. These two reforms represented America’s social welfare state, a less comprehensive version than Europe would later create. FDR’s New Deal set the standard for meaningful, structural reform in America.

Thirty years later, in the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Democratic administration created the Great Society reforms. Johnson’s pushed Congress to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, which together ended Jim Crow disfranchisement and segregation in the South. He also won Medicare, national health insurance for people over 65; Medicaid, health care assistance for those with low incomes; and the food stamp program offering nutrition assistance. Johnsons’ “War on Poverty” also created the Office of Economic Opportunity, which managed jobs programs, early childhood education, and community assistance programs. Republican Ronald Reagan dismantled the Great Society programs in the 1980s and under Democrat Bill Clinton neoliberalism and austerity followed.

Democrats claim that Biden’s ARP continues the work of Roosevelt and Johnson and that it will transform America. Yet, while these reforms are much needed, none of the programs begins to transform the fundamental structures of American capitalism, a system that generates an economy and a society among the most unequal in the world. The ARP programs fall far short of any social democratic welfare state. We still have no national healthcare system, relatively little public housing, and a public education system that fails millions. Biden’s ARP does, however, suggest that in the face of the multiple crises of our society, neoliberal austerity is being attenuated.

With the ARP, Biden may have unified many Democratic and Republican working people in support of government aid, but passively in the absence of a workers’ movement. Most important there are no controls on capital, no regulation, no socialization. Biden’s reforms are a far cry from the democratic socialist society that we need to address our social problems, one that can only be built by a working-class movement that undertakes to socialize finance and industry.

 

 

 

 

 

In Support of Joint Struggle

By: March 15, 2021
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Israeli Jews and Palestinians protest apartheid in Tel Aviv. (Oren Ziv, +972 Mag)

More than six thousand Israeli Jews and Palestinians assemble in Tel Aviv, waving Palestinian flags and denouncing Israeli policy as apartheid. Thousands of young Ethiopian-Israelis march against police brutality, blocking highways, even throwing stones at police, and some chanting, “Free Palestine.” Mizrahi Jews petition Israel’s High Court to reject the Nation-State Law as anti-Arab and therefore both anti-Palestinian and anti-Mizrahi. An increase in draft-dodging leads Israel’s army to lament a “decreased motivation to serve” among the population.

Such incidents from the last couple years remain absent from Haymarket’s anthology Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, published in December 2020, and from Steve Leigh’s review published late last month in New Politics. The book’s section titled “Workers of the World Unite” does not invite masses of Israeli Jewish workers to join the Palestinian liberation struggle. In fact, one of the book’s contributors, Daphna Thier, even declares the Israeli working class “Not an Ally.” Likewise, Leigh insists that “the Israeli working class is not a potential revolutionary force.”

Thier, Leigh, and the Haymarket book’s editors Sumaya Awad and brian bean [spelled lower-case], all based in the United States like myself, come from a position I share, that of supporting the Boycott Divest Sanctions (BDS) movement as one component of democratizing the Middle East from below. Backed by 86% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, BDS has been called a “strategic threat” by the Israeli establishment which has spent millions combating it. The anthology’s contributors, editors, and reviewer are right to insist that Israeli Jews’ present opposition to BDS is not sufficient reason for the world’s Left to stop supporting the movement and its demands for social equality. However, when they appear to altogether discount Israeli workers’ revolutionary potential, they overlook the importance of joint mass struggle between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

Common Revolutionary Aims

Thier begins the chapter “Not an Ally” by summarizing the Marxist theorist Hal Draper’s argument that the working class generally has the “interest and ability to overthrow capitalism.” Nonetheless, Thier argues that the Israeli Jewish working class is “an exception to this rule” and is “incapable of solidarizing with Palestinians” due to “their material conditions.” It is unfortunate that the chapter does not mention what Draper wrote specifically about Israel. In 1954, Draper argued that Zionism went against ordinary Israeli Jews’ material self-interest and well-being.

A Zionist state “will be a hell for the Jews,” Draper argued, “as long as it insists on being a Jewish ghetto in an Arab world.” Therefore, Draper proposed that Jews and Arabs could engage in “joint struggle from below, cemented by common national-revolutionary aims and common social interests.” What Draper contended in 1954 is still true today; the reality is that the Zionist state has been a disaster for Israel’s Jews.

Zionism has enriched Israeli elites, but it has not liberated Israeli Jewry from financial precarity. Some 18% of Israeli Jews live below the poverty line. Despite the Israeli government’s frequent invocations of Holocaust history, even a quarter of Israel’s Holocaust survivors live in poverty. This impoverishment is connected to Israeli militarism. As Israeli refuseniks—who choose jail time over performing their mandatory military service—point out in their 2021 open letter, Israel’s high military and police spending takes away from funding on “welfare, education, and health.”

“The Occupation Causes Terrorism” graffiti (pictured in the documentary Anarchists Against the Wall of Israel by It’s All Lies Production)

Although Thier claims that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been “beneficial to the Israeli capitalists, state, and workers,” the occupation has been the main cause of terrorist violence against ordinary Israelis. The West Bank settlements, consistently expanded throughout decades of Left and Right Zionist administrations alike, have been a common complaint in Hamas’s public statements. The repeated bombings of Gaza, also supported across Israel’s political establishment, have actually boosted popular Palestinian support for Hamas.

Overall, Zionism has failed to provide a situation of safety and well-being for Israeli Jews, creating instead what Draper called a “hell for the Jews.” The refuseniks’ letter declares that “Zionist policy” is “poisoning Israeli society–it is violent, militaristic, oppressive, and chauvinistic.” The endlessly militarized atmosphere has been a cause of major distress for Israeli teenagers, some 73% of whom report mental health problems. Increasing numbers of Israelis are discharged from the army due to mental illness. The age-adjusted suicide rate for Israeli Jews is 2.4 times higher than it is for Israeli-Palestinians.

Israel’s Mizrahi (ethnically Middle Eastern) Jews, who have faced persistent racism from Ashkenazi (ethnically European) Jews throughout Zionism’s history, have even more reason to support revolutionary change. Israeli Mizrahi scholar Smadar Lavie has gone so far as to describe “intra-Jewish apartheid” within Israel. Most infamously, Israeli authorities in the 1950s kidnapped Mizrahi children and gave at least some of them to Ashkenazi Jewish families to raise. As the New York Times reports, this horrific episode of Israeli history has been corroborated by DNA tests and acknowledged by an Israeli cabinet member.

Israeli Black Panthers hold a sign telling Prime Minister Golda Meir, “Fly away / We’ve had enough of you” (Electronic Intifada)

In downplaying Mizrahi Jews’ potential to turn against Zionism, Thier minimizes the powerful legacy of the Mizrahis’ 1970s group the Israeli Black Panthers. Thier writes that “they too subordinated the question of Zionism to the economic issues they faced.” In fact, as Jaclyn Ashly reports in Electronic Intifada, the Israeli Black Panthers “took a clear stand against Zionism.” Protesting the 1972 World Zionist Congress, the group believed that the “Zionist movement was the cause of their socioeconomic conditions in Israel.” They were the first Israelis to meet with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“The Nature of a Settler Working Class”

In arguing that Israeli Jewish workers form a necessarily reactionary class, Thier and Leigh point out characteristics that also apply to U.S. non-Indigenous workers. Thier writes, “[I]t is the nature of a settler working class and its unique relationship to the state that distinguishes the Israeli proletariat from other working classes.” Leigh describes “the overwhelming privilege of the Israeli working class in relation to the Palestinians.” As these authors surely know, the U.S. working class is also settler-colonial and has overwhelming privilege in relation to Native Americans.

Sadly, despite the editors’ location in the United States, Native Americans are barely mentioned in Palestine: A Socialist Introduction and appear only twice in the index. One of these mentions correctly points out, “the Nakba [displacement of Palestinians] is reminiscent of the United States’ dispossession and erasure of indigenous Americans.” The United States has been more successful so far at eliminating the native population than Israel has, but does that somehow give U.S. workers more potential to be revolutionary?

Shrinking Indigenous lands in USA and Palestine (US Campaign for Palestinian Rights)

Leigh, Thier, Awad, and bean lack consistency when they deny the revolutionary potential of Israeli Jewish workers but advocate revolutionary class struggle here in the United States. In a previous New Politics article, Leigh wrote that Americans “need to stress both a united front approach and the need to build revolutionary organization.” Awad and bean title the book’s conclusion “Revolution Until Victory,” and they center U.S. workers in their proposed revolution. They even propose organizing American “workers involved directly or indirectly in the military industrial complex.” But when it comes to Israel, Thier writes, “Israeli workers are now rewarded through the arms economy.” If U.S. workers in the military-industrial complex can be revolutionaries, then why can’t Israeli Jewish workers in the military-industrial complex? And while Thier is right to criticize Israel’s 2011 tent protests for ignoring Palestinian rights, perhaps opposing it outright is a step too far. Didn’t our own Occupy Wall Street also fail, at least initially, to advance a decolonial platform? Didn’t the very name gloss over the fact that Wall Street existed on stolen Lenape territory? Living in somewhat of a glass house, U.S. leftists should be careful not to apply a standard to Israelis that we wouldn’t apply also to ourselves. Perhaps with a leftist intervention of critical support rather than dismissal, Israelis’ protests against elites could have developed robust demands for Palestinian freedom.

Draper wisely distinguished between anti-Zionism, which opposes a regime, and anti-Israelism, which opposes a country and its people. He compared being anti-Zionist to being anti-Soviet or anti-Nazi, whereas being anti-Israel is like being anti-Russia or anti-Germany. Unfortunately, some in the Palestine solidarity movement conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism. Anti-Israelism is Roger Waters conjuring up a false story about Israeli concert attendees failing to applaud his call for regional peace. Anti-Israelism is the now-defunct Socialist Worker (then affiliated with Haymarket) declaring “unconditional” support for Hamas, a far-right group that intentionally kills Israeli civilians. Anti-Israelism is Judith Butler bizarrely remarking, “Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.” Maybe more Israeli Jews would join the global Left if they felt as invited as their theocratic enemies are.

Joint Struggle Against False Consciousness

To be fair, the Haymarket anthology is correct that Israeli Jews presently exhibit shockingly high levels of anti-Arab racism. Polls report that about 90% of Israeli Jews would be disturbed if their child befriended an Arab of the opposite sex, and about 80% think Jews should get preferential treatment over non-Jews. In both the Israeli and U.S. cases, racist nationalism can be a powerful form of false consciousness. “Since we can remember, we have been brainwashed with hatred and fear of our Palestinian neighbors,” the Israeli group Anarchists Against the Wall declared in 2004. Similar mechanisms have taken place in the United States, with Indigenous people denigrated as “savages” and “red—ns” and demeaned through sports logos and mascots across the country. Although opinions are shifting, there continues to be widespread support among U.S. workers for celebrating Columbus Day and for building dirty energy projects that further encroach on Indigenous communities’ lands.


“Return Serve,” a photograph by Hamde Abu Rahma, from a 2013 art show benefiting Anarchists Against the Wall (Crimethinc)

Whether in the United States or Israel, the best way to break through false consciousness is, as Draper suggested, through “joint struggle from below.” During years of high-profile Indigenous-led joint direct action against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, between 2012 and 2017, the percentage of Americans opposing these pipelines doubled, from 23 to 48 percent. Starting in 2003, there were militant joint Palestinian and Israeli direct actions blocking construction of the Separation Barrier. In the first three years of these protests, Israeli opposition to the wall in principle (not just to the wall’s route) also roughly doubled, from 7 to 13 percent. While that growth may not seem like much, it was large in proportion to the number of Israelis who took part in the protests, and it pointed a powerful strategic path forward. Joint struggle proved sufficiently impactful, Israeli activist Uri Gordon explains, that even more moderate Israeli peace groups began adopting the strategy and seeking out Palestinian partners.

If Thier is right that the anti-Zionist Israeli Black Panthers were “more brutally and violently suppressed than any other social justice movement in Israeli history,” then it demonstrates how much of a threat Israel considered joint struggle to be. Chicago’s Black Panthers also faced swift repression, including assassinations, after they tried building a Rainbow Coalition with Indigenous, Puerto Rican, and white radicals. By disrupting elites’ divide-and-conquer tactics, coalitions between the Israeli Panthers and the PLO, and between the U.S. Panthers and the American Indian Movement among other groups, posed a significant threat to the status quo.

Although the current number of Israeli Jewish BDS supporters is apparently only a couple hundred, and although Israeli Jewish support for a shared, democratic country is shrinking, down from 19% in 2018 to 10% in 2020, this could change. Anarchists Against the Wall activist Yossi Bartal explains that, “In such a blatantly racist atmosphere, the most radical act is to break this separation by demonstrating together with Palestinians, living together, talking to each other, loving and caring for each other–even making love with each other.” Jointly organized direct action helps tear down walls, physical and mental, between the two populations. By struggling together, the two groups can demonstrate—to each other, themselves, the world—a capacity to share a country.

Thomas Piketty and Karl Marx: Two totally different visions of Capital

By: March 13, 2021
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In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, [1] Thomas Piketty has gathered his data meticulously and provided a useful analysis of the unequal distribution of wealth and income, yet some of his definitions are somewhat confusing and even questionable. Consider, for instance, his definition of capital: “In all civilizations, capital has served two great economic functions: on the one hand to provide dwellings (that is to say, to produce “housing services,” the value of which is measured in terms of the rental value of the dwellings: this is the value of well-being of having a roof over one’s head as opposed to being outside); and, on the other hand, as a factor of production for producing other goods and services.” He continues: “Historically, the early forms of capitalistic accumulation seem to concern tools (from flint, etc.), agricultural infrastructure (fences, irrigation, draining, etc.), and rudimentary dwellings, before evolving into more sophisticated forms, such as industrial and professional capital and increasingly elaborate dwellings. [2] Piketty proposes a scenario that suggests capital has been present from the origins of humanity and that revenue from a savings account held by a limited-income retired person is the same as revenue derived from capital.

Capital according to Thomas Piketty

This major confusion is present in the heart of his analysis he develops in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. For Piketty, an apartment worth €80,000 or €2,000 on a savings account [3] may be defined as capital, in the same way as a factory or commercial premises worth €125 million. The ordinary citizen who owns an apartment, has some reserves in a savings account and a life insurance policy worth, say, €10,000 will readily agree with Piketty’s definition, which corresponds with those found in standard economic textbooks and repeated by their bank manager. However, they are wrong, because capital in our capitalist society is much more complex than these simple definitions. Capital is a social relationship that enables a minority (the richest 1%), to get richer by exploiting the labor of others (see below).

Yet when Piketty talks of a progressive tax on capital, he makes no distinction between the kind of “wealth” represented by a €1,000 savings account and the fortune of a Jeff Bezos, a Bill Gates or an Elon Musk.

The same confusion is to be found in his analysis of income: Piketty considers that the income from renting out an €80,000 apartment is a capital gain of the same kind as the income Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, derives from his empire.

As far as wages are concerned, Piketty considers that all income declared as wages is wages, whether this means the €3 million salary package of the CEO of a banking group (an amount that is in fact revenue from capital and not a wage or salary [4]) or the €30,000 salary of a bank employee.

Capital according to Karl Marx

We should question the meaning Piketty gives to words like “capital” and define revenue from capital and revenue from labor differently. Piketty presents capital as something that exists in all civilizations and that has necessarily always existed. In this he is in tune with the political economy of the 18th and early 19th century, as found in the writings of Adam Smith in particular, before Karl Marx threw light on what Capital (and wages) really are and developed his critique of the political economy of his time.

Karl Marx has ironical comments on contemporary writers who, like Piketty does, considered the first silex tools to be the original form of capital or just capital: “By a wonderful feat of logical acumen, Colonel Torrens has discovered, in this stone of the savage the origin of capital. “In the first stone which he [the savage] flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another, and thus discover the origin of capital.” (R. Torrens: “An Essay on the Production of Wealth” &c., pp. 70-71.)» [5]

In his Capital, he states: “We know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the laborer.” [6] Marx explains that an artisan who owns his/her own tools and works for her/himself does not own capital and does not receive a wage. During the centuries that preceded the victory of the capitalist class over the old order, the overwhelming majority of producers worked for themselves, both in towns and in the country. Artisans organized into corporations and peasant families made up the majority of producers, who owned their tools of production, and in the countryside the majority of peasant families owned land, and in addition could make use of communal lands to feed their livestock or glean firewood. Between the end of the 15th century and the end of the 18th century in Western Europe, the developing capitalist class needed the support of the State to dispossess this mass of producers of their tools and/or their land [7] and force them to submit to becoming wage-workers in order to survive. The capitalist class needed to take organized action in order to impoverish and dispossess the working classes and thus force them to accept being wage-workers. That process did not take place all by itself. Karl Marx analyzes the methods that enabled the primitive accumulation of capital in a detailed and rigorous way. In Volume One of Capital, he reviews all the methods used to dispossess producers of the means of production, and thus of their means of subsistence. [8]

Marx draws an anecdote from a book by Edward Gibbon Wakefield (20 March 1796 – 16 May 1862) to illustrate the idea: “Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, ’Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’” [9] Marx comments ironically: “Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!” This is because in Australia at the time there was a profusion of land available and the workers were able to find a patch of land on which to set themselves up. Marx, through his comment regarding this fiasco experienced by the capitalist Peel, wants to show that as long as producers have access to the means of subsistence — in this case land —, they are not forced to submit to serving a capitalist. [10]

Marx concludes “So long, therefore, as the laborer can accumulate for himself — and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production — capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible. The class of wage laborers, essential to these, is wanting.“(…)”the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.”

He adds: “the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.”

Karl Marx writes: “property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will.”

We should also point out that Marx, in the same section of Capital dedicated to primitive accumulation, vehemently denounced the extermination or forcible subjugation of the indigenous peoples of North America and the other regions that fell victim to colonial domination and the primitive accumulation of capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”

Consequences of Thomas Piketty’s definition of capital

To return to Piketty, the definition of capital he gives introduces complete confusion. Let’s look at his definition again: “In all civilizations, capital has served two great economic functions: on the one hand to provide dwellings (…) and, on the other hand, as a factor of production for producing other goods and services.” So, for Piketty, Capital has existed in all civilizations; he goes all the way back to prehistory when he writes: “Historically, the early forms of capitalistic accumulation [11] seem to concern tools (from flint, etc.) (…) and rudimentary dwellings, before evolving into more sophisticated forms, such as industrial and professional capital and increasingly elaborate dwellings.“ For Piketty, a prehistoric flint tool, a cave, and a computer assembly plant are all capital. If we believe him, “capitalistic” [sic] accumulation goes back as far as the first assembly of a few pieces of flint that had been chipped and shaped. That definition throws no light on the historic specificity of capital, its genesis, how it is reproduced and accumulated, to which class it belongs, or the social and property relations to which it corresponds. The list of examples of capital Thomas Piketty gives resembles a supermarket catalogue; in a way it’s an inventory like the one in Jacques Prévert’s poem”Inventory“… with only the raccoons missing. [12]

Speaking of capitalist accumulation today, Piketty limits the discussion almost exclusively to the role of inheritance and fiscal policies that are favorable to capitalists; but in reality these factors, though they play a tangible role in transmitting and strengthening capital, are not what create it. Historically, for the capital held by the capitalist to begin a process of enormous accumulation, it was necessary to forcibly dispossess producers of their tools and their means of subsistence and exploit their labor power. The accumulation of capital as it continues today requires the continuing exploitation of working people and of Nature. Capital plays no useful role for society; on the contrary, continuing the accumulation of capital and the activities that generate it is literally deadly. Piketty’s failure to acknowledge that leads him to make a statement such as this: “If capital plays a useful role in the production process it is natural that it earns a return.” [13]

Piketty’s confusion is undoubtedly the result of his fundamental convictions: “I am not interested in denouncing inequalities or capitalism as such (…) social inequalities are not a problem in themselves if they may be justified, that is to say for the common good. (…)” [14]

My critique of Piketty’s definitions in no way minimizes the interest of the monumental portrait his research has drawn of the wealth and income inequalities that have developed over the last two centuries. And, putting aside undeniable fundamental disagreements regarding the notion of capital, it is important, if anti-neoliberal fiscal reform is to be achieved, that we endeavour to bring together a broad spectrum of movements and individuals ranging from Thomas Piketty to movements of the anticapitalist Left. And if it is also possible to come together to demand cancellation of the public debts held by the European Central Bank (for a total amount of over 2,500 billion euros), it must be done. I do not regret having co-signed the call for the cancellation of sovereign debts held by the ECB [15] in February 2021 along with Thomas Piketty. But like the other members of the CADTM who signed that text, I consider that more must be done — beginning, for example, with levying a large CoViD tax on wealthy individuals and major corporations. The CADTM feels that cancellation of public debts must be accompanied by a series of anticapitalist measures, and it is not certain that Thomas Piketty would support all of them.

Thanks to Anne-Sophie Bouvy, Christine Pagnoulle, Brigitte Ponet, Claude Quémar and Patrick Saurin for their readings.

Translated by Snake Arbusto

First published by the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CATDM).


To find out more:

Footnotes

[1] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2013.

[2] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, p. 337.

[3] Note that according to Piketty, the amounts held in France in savings accounts, check-book accounts, etc. account for only 5% of (private) assets!

[4] It’s very convenient for capitalists to include the very high revenues of a corporation’s executives, which also include dividends and stock options, in calculating total payroll.

[5] Source: Note 9 to Capital, Book One: The process of production of capital. Part VII, Part III: The Production of absolute surplus-value, Chapter 7: The Labor-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value, available on the Internet: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm. Also available in audiobook form, see next note. In the German original and the French translation, Marx jokingly adds a note of wild etymology, suggesting that stock as a reference to capital derives from the German word for stick.

[6] Karl Marx, Capital – Book One: The process of production of capital. Part VIII: Primitive accumulation. Chapter Thirty-Three: The Modern Theory of Colonization. The text from which the excerpts quoted in this article is available on the Internet: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm ; it is available in audiobook form at https://www.marxists.org/audiobooks/archive/marx-engels/capital-vol1/index.htm

[7] Confiscation of land by capitalists began in England in the 15th century with what is known as the “Enclosure Movement,” which consisted in ending the traditional right of use of the land and the commons via the Enclosure Acts and turning them over as private property to wealthy aristocrats and bourgeois. Read Chapter 27 of Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population From the Land: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm, available as audio – http://www.archive.org/download/capital_vol1_0810_librivox/capitalvol1_75_marx.mp3

[8] The section of Capital in which Marx details the various sources of primitive accumulation of capital is Book One: The Process of Production of Capital –Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation (First English edition of 1887, translated: Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels). There is an audiobook version of Part Eight (see link in earlier note).

[9] E. G. Wakefield: England and America, vol. Il, p. 33. Cited by Karl Marx.

[10] Writing of the specific situation of North American and Australia in the early 19th century, Marx explains that the possibility for colonists from Europe to become owners of land or begin working for themselves enables “The wage-worker of to-day [to become] to-morrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself.” In North America, Australia and other regions colonized by Europe, the situation gradually changed over the course of the 19th century and the early 20th century, and the great mass of independent producers whose ancestors had emigrated from Europe were also dispossessed of their means of production.

[11] Author’s bold.

[12] Excerpt from the poem”Inventaire“(”Inventory”) by Jacques Prévert (published 1946):
“A stone
two houses
three ruins
four gravediggers
a garden
flowers

a raccoon (…)”
https://coonytanuki.tumblr.com/post/4270990517/inventaire-par-jacques-pr%C3%A9vert

[13] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, p. 674

[14] Idem, p. 62

Can Amazon Be Organized? In Alabama They’re Trying

By: Dan La BotzMarch 9, 2021
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This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France. 

Can little David beat Goliath? That’s the question in Bessemer, Alabama, where 5,800 warehouse workers will vote this month on whether or not they want a union at the Amazon facility there. If they vote to unionize, it will be the first successful union campaign at Amazon in the United States. For the union, the vote will be a real contest, since unionization rates are low in the South and only 8% of Alabama’s workers have a union. A network of workers’ organizations is calling for solidarity demonstrations around the country on March 24.

Amazon e-commerce, Amazon Prime Video, and its Whole Foods grocery stores have made the company enormously wealthy, powerful, and influential. Driven largely by the COVID pandemic, Amazon’s 2020 net sales were up 38 percent, to $386.1 billion and Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO, has a fortune valued at $190 billion.

The pandemic led millions during this last year to order clothing and household goods through Amazon, to buy food delivered by Whole Foods, and to stay home and watch movies on Amazon Prime. To meet this demand, the company hired 427,300 employees during the period from January to October, bringing its global employment to 1.2 million. These new workers—1,400 per day—represented a 50% expansion of its workforce. In addition, Amazon employs another 500,000 contract employees.

In the United States workers may win recognition of their union through an election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board. First the union, in this case the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, had to prove the workers’ interest, which it did by convincing 2,000 workers to sign cards saying they wanted an election. Now workers are voting, a process that will continue until the end of March. Meanwhile union organizers distribute literature at the plant and the company holds meetings with the workers where it tells them that the union will cost them too much money in dues.

The Amazon union drive has captured national attention. President Joseph Biden released a video in which he expressed solidarity with the workers, saying, “There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda.” And actor Danny Glover has visited the union picket lines at the company to show his solidarity and offer encouragement.

Amazon employees in the warehouse—some of whom must scan up to 300 items per hour—make $15.00 per hour, more than they would make in retail work, but less than most warehouse workers make. Workers also receive health benefits and 401(k) pension plans, though rapid labor turnover means many will never collect such benefits. Amazon workers complain of musculoskeletal problems from repetitive lifting and bending together with miles of hiking on concrete floors.

Over the last few years two different groups have been organizing Amazon workers, one, a coalition of unions and Black and Latino groups called Amazonians United, and another called Athena, made up of workers, communities, and consumers. These two have organized some small walkouts at Amazon in various states. RWDSU, the union organizing the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, represents retail workers at Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and is part of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. RWDSU has been successful organizing poultry plants in the region. Workers’ concerns about health during the COVID crisis have helped to fuel workers interest in this Amazon union campaign.

Amazon is the latest in a string of high profile, high stakes union organizing campaigns at auto plants and at Walmart stores over the last several years. Those campaigns failed largely for three reasons. First, the South, once the home of slavery and Jim Crow, remains a largely union free, low-wage region. Second, in the South the anti-union Republican Party dominates government at all levels. Third, many workers have been indoctrinated over the years in rightwing ideas, including opposition to unions.

If the union is to win this time, workers will have to overcome all of that in the fight for dignity. We believe they can, but it will not be easy.

150 Years of Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg and the ‘Young Socialist’ of Ceylon (Sri Lanka)

By: March 5, 2021
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Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born revolutionary of Jewish heritage who was born 150 years ago on March 5th this year, had no reason in her frenetic political, intellectual and literary activism to attend to an inconsequential island in the Indian Ocean.

However, decades after her murder in Berlin on 15th January 1919, Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka in 1972) would become “a chief outlet, for a little while, of Luxemburg’s pamphlets in the English language”, as Paul Buhle observes in his Afterword to Kate Evans’ marvelous graphic biography Red Rosa.

Rosa Luxemburg’s polemics on socialist transformation in conditions of capitalist development, militarism and imperialism, and the institutionalization of trade unions and political parties of the working class – in debate with leading personalities of the European socialist movement including Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky and V. I. Lenin – were originally written in German between 1898 and 1918.

As Norman Geras commented: “The diagnosis of the tendencies of capitalist development and the articulation to it of a strategy for socialism; the nature of revolutions outside the advanced capitalist countries and the relationship of democratic to socialist tasks; the place of extra-parliamentary, mass struggle in the battle for socialism; the nature of socialist democracy …” are questions she opened.  

After her tragic death at 47 years of age, the authority of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), victorious unlike its German comrades in the overthrow of the old order and endowed with state power, contributed to the suppression of the circulation of her writings, particularly where critical of Bolshevik viewpoints.

Later, Joseph Stalin’s pronouncement in 1931 that Rosa Luxemburg was a co-author of the “utopian … schema of the permanent revolution” – diametrically opposed to his perspective of constructing socialism in one country, beginning with the Soviet Union – signaled to Communists everywhere that she was an implacable foe.

It was up to independent Marxists and dissident Communists, who did not enjoy the resources and patronage extended to the Moscow-based Progress Publishers and Foreign Languages Publishing House that published Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin, in many languages, to translate, print and distribute her writings in constrained circumstances. 

The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky admired Rosa Luxemburg, and defended her against political slander by Stalin. His supporters in New York began carrying translations of her articles in their journals, the New International succeeded by The Fourth International. These publications traveled, sometimes as contraband during the Second World War, wherever there were contacts with other Trotskyists. 

Odd corners

One of the “oddest” of the “odd corners”, as Buhle justifiably remarks, which publicized Rosa Luxemburg to Anglophone Marxists in the 1960s and 1970s, was Ceylon.

In the mid-1930s in a British imperial possession, a group of young radical men and women formed the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), subsequently an affiliate of Trotsky’s ‘World Party of Socialist Revolution’, the Fourth International. 

It campaigned for workers and peasants’ rights and against colonialism and imperialism, amidst repression and imprisonment by the colonial state, investing a small party with societal respect and trade union support disproportionate to size (never more than 1000 before 1970). 

From 1950 onwards, the LSSP had an active publications program printing pamphlets and short books by Leon Trotsky; in contest with the Ceylon Communist Party (CCP) for hegemony on the Left in the workers’ movement and electoral politics. 

However, all the quotes from Trotsky were no defense to the LSSP’s embrace of reformism. To borrow from Luxemburg (writing in 1904 with reference to the German Social Democratic Party—SPD): the “…tendency in the party to regard parliamentary tactics as the immutable and specific tactics of socialist activity” became pre-eminent.

The LSSP adapted to the long-standing perspective of the CCP on the need for an alliance between the Left and the ‘progressive national capitalist’ Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) against the ‘reactionary comprador capitalist’ United National Party and imperialism (symbolized by the presence of British military bases and US oil companies). In 1960, the LSSP and the CP separately entered into no-contest and mutual support pacts with the SLFP. Four years later, both Left Parties joined a popular front government led by the SLFP. Once described as a tactic by the leadership of the ‘Old Left’, it is to the present day their staunch strategy, except now only as pitiful leftovers from the past.

By 1961, some on the LSSP Left began publishing a non-party journal called Young Socialist, its name inspired no doubt by the newly formed youth organizations of the US Socialist Workers Party and the British Labour Party (in which the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League was active). They assumed their audience to be the Youth Leagues of the LSSP, which is how sympathizers and candidate members of the Party were organized.

Its first editorial explained that there was much talk of socialism in Ceylon but no clarity on what it meant. “ … what are the essential foundations and features of such a [socialist] society and how can they be laid and developed? Indeed, what precisely is the nature and organization of the society in which we live and which we seek to change?” 

The co-editors were May Wickremasuriya and Sydney Wanasinghe, occasionally joined by Osmund Jayaratne, R. S. Baghavan and Wilfred Pereira. The journal folded in 1970 as its supporters went their separate ways. A revival in 1980 only managed to put out two issues. Rosa Luxemburg’s essay on The Progress and Stagnation of Marxism (1903), translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, was to appear in its pages in 1967.

The animator of the Young Socialist was the indefatigable Sydney Wanasinghe. In addition to the magazine, he issued pamphlets by Trotsky including the out-of-print English translation of The War and The International (1915/1971). Wanasinghe was also the local distributor of Pioneer Press, Monthly Review Press and Merlin Press books. He founded the Suriya Bookshop in 1964, which he ran until near his death in 2007, mostly out of his home. 

Among the titles sold by him was Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1913/1951), subtitled ‘A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism’ and translated by Agnes Schwarzschild; with an introduction by the British left-wing economist Joan Robinson who visited Ceylon in 1958 to advise the government’s Planning Secretariat.

Dissemination

However, Wanasinghe’s main involvement in the dissemination of Rosa Luxemburg’s writing outside of Sri Lanka, was to publish what remain her best-known writings in the portable pamphlet form.  

Socialism and the Churches (1905) was issued in 1964, based on the translation by Socialist Review (Birmingham, England). The Mass Strike, The Political Party and The Trade Unions (1906) appeared in 1964, as translated by Patrick Lavin. Social Reform or Revolution (1900) was released in 1966, from the translation by the anonymous Integer. Spartacus (1918) appeared in 1966, as translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. ‘The Crisis in the German Social Democracy’ better known as ‘The Junius Pamphlet’ (1915) followed in 1967, based on the translation by the New York-based Socialist Publication Society. What is Economics? (1954) was released in 1968, as translated by Theodore Edwards (pseudonym of Edmond Kovacs).  

What is missing from this list are two of her important contributions to revolutionary theory: Organizational Question of Social Democracy (1904) and The Russian Revolution (1918). Neither of these texts were published by the US Trotskyists who were the primary source of the English-language translations relied upon by Sydney Wanasinghe, until 1970. Both articles were under copyright having been published by the University of Michigan Press in 1961, as The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?, based on Bertram D. Wolfe’s 1940 translation in the Workers Age newspaper.  

Nevertheless, both in the US and Ceylon, there must have been discomfort in Luxemburg’s critique of the Bolshevik organizational model valorized by Trotskyists; and on the first steps of the Russian Revolution under Lenin’s leadership. In her estimation, and affected by the 1905 revolution in Russia, it was not the leaders and leading bodies of socialist parties, but the “great, creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward” that rightly shaped the policy of the socialist movement.  

Her prescient warning to the Bolsheviks on the dangers of an ultra-centralized party (conditioned of course by illegality and tsarist persecution), which she argued concentrated power in the ‘intellectuals’ staffing its highest administrative structures haunt us still. “Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee”.

Years later in 1918, writing from a German prison cell, Luxemburg hailed the party of Lenin as the only one which by its demand – ‘All power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry’ – took the Russian revolutionary movement forward towards socialism. Welcoming the October 1917 uprising, she nonetheless cautioned the Bolsheviks against counter-posing the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ with ‘democracy’. 

Socialist democracy

“Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat”. 

She insisted that, “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently … Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, and becomes a mere semblance of life in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.”

The intention here is not to disown Lenin in order to deify Luxemburg. It is instead, as she demonstrated by example, to have a critical appreciation of socialist theory and praxis. Any renewal of the socialist project in the 21st century must assimilate her insights on democracy and freedom as both means and end.

Through her experiences in the class struggle and socialist movement, her theorization explain why and how the individual event or isolated fact must be interpreted in relation to the social whole of (capitalist) development. We learn from her that to be opposed to reformism, is not the same as being opposed to social and democratic reforms. She explained that the economic crises of capitalism are no guarantee that the alternative will not be an even more horrific barbarism, without the conscious actions of the exploited and oppressed for a better world. 

So much for the role of the Young Socialist in the production and dissemination of Rosa Luxemburg’s writings in English, in a genuinely internationalist undertaking. What of their reception in Ceylon/Sri Lanka? That tale must wait another time. For now, on this 150th anniversary of her birth, it is enough to apply her epitaph on the lost revolution in Germany to herself: “I was, I am, I shall be!”

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