Assessing the 2020 election: Where do we go from here?

By: , November 15, 2020
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A satirical headline from the day the presidential election was called, captures the feeling of much of the Left: “Jubilant Reaction to Trump’s Defeat Quickly Soured by News of Biden Win.”

We take as given that the defeat of Donald Trump—misogynist and white supremacist, fragile and pathological solipsist, would-be-authoritarian and con-man, and proximate destroyer of hundreds of thousands of lives—is cause for celebration. However, the political landscape that the Left is collectively entering after January 20 will be incredibly challenging, and some of the damage that we have sustained is to some extent self-inflicted.

The Results

Considering Trump’s historically low popularity ratings, his disastrous handling of COVID-19, the strong support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Democrats’ huge advantage in fundraising, this should have been a landslide for Biden. Instead, he squeaked by. Biden is ahead by about 3.4 percent of the popular vote, but Trump increased his vote count by more than 9 million over 2016. And the margins in the battleground states that Biden flipped—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and likely Arizona and Georgia—were wafer-thin.

Take the example of Wisconsin, in 2012 Obama won the state by about a quarter of a million votes. Trump’s 2016 margin was 23,000. Biden won by 20,000—hardly a resounding victory. The key to Clinton’s 2016 loss was that turnout in Milwaukee—particularly among African Americans—was low, and that remained true this year. In 2016, that could be partly blamed on misogyny and voter suppression, but the main factor was Clinton’s centrist politics that offered nothing to vote for.

That was even more true for Biden, who defined himself by a series of negatives. He was not for Medicare for All, not for a Green New Deal, not for defunding the police, not a socialist, and most importantly not Donald Trump. His main positive messages were technocratic and restorationist. In addition to promising competent management of the COVID-19 crisis, the Biden-Harris campaign was defined by the promise of (neoliberal) politics as usual and a return to imperial normalcy. Biden and his campaign built a coalition of so-called moderate Republicans, the national security state, the generals at the Pentagon, sections of big capital, and some of the more comfortable parts of the middle-class.

For voters for whom COVID-19 was the main issue, exit polls showed a preference for Biden by a large margin, but those counties which have suffered the most COVID-19 deaths overwhelmingly voted for Trump. A dynamic at play internationally was also in evidence in Trump’s support from a base of small-business owners, a precarious lower-middle class, who have faced an existential threat from the closure of the economy. Voters who said that the economy was the main issue preferred Trump. This was true despite living through a period of seven months in which the U.S. experienced economic contraction and unemployment rates only comparable to the Great Depression, and in some cases worse.

Biden’s campaign strategy was to stay out of sight, say as little as possible, lower expectations, and to depend on hatred for Trump. Given Biden’s notorious weaknesses as a candidate, this was arguably the optimal strategy for him, and it got him over the finish line, but only barely.

The Biden Democrats

In addition to the presidential race, the Democrats were expecting to increase their majority in the House and to flip the Senate. By way of comparison, Obama’s win in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis had come with a net increase of 28 House seats and 8 Senate seats. This time, instead, the Democrats have so far lost 5 net seats in the House. Flipping the Senate would require winning the two January special elections in Georgia, which seems unlikely.

Biden ran as the anti-Bernie Sanders, establishment candidate, and in his defeat of Sanders, he was able to pull the whole left-wing of the party behind him. The defeat of Sanders was a blow to illusions about reforming and realigning the Democratic Party. Despite the meager showing by Biden-Harris, their victory as a centrist national unity ticket appears to have hamstrung the left-wing of the party, whose room for maneuver in the context of divided government is limited.

Despite the near complete capitulation of the Left to Biden-Harris, the Democratic leadership has embarked on a campaign of attacking the left-wing of the party. South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and party strategist, James Carville, have all taken turns blaming the Left for the poor election results. A New York Times interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) offered little comfort. While properly defending the movement for Black lives, and decrying the hostile environment inside the Democratic Party, and the failures of its campaign strategies, AOC’s own pessimism was palpable. The corporate Democrats appear firmly in control of their party.

Between the election campaign and the current situation inside the Democratic Party, the likely make-up of Congress means that if policy expectations from a Biden administration were low before, they should be even lower now. Even the minor reforms that Biden does support—such as a slightly more progressive tax structure—are unlikely to get through the Senate.

Biden will rejoin the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. He will restore DACA, and reverse many of the executive orders and other symptoms of chaos which will be Trump’s gift as he leaves the White House. And given the demands of big business for more economic stimulus, there may be some modest immediate relief for the unemployed and another round of one-off direct payments. But in the absence of mass movements on the streets, that will be about as good as it gets.

Meanwhile, the economic fundamentals and the context of a continuing public health crisis, especially for nearly bankrupted state and local governments, bodes poorly for the medium and long term.

Trumpism, the Republican Party and the far right

One lasting reality is that Trump has successfully remade the Republican Party into a hard right organization. A recent study concluded that they are “more similar to autocratic ruling parties such as the Turkish [Justice and Development Party] and Fidesz in Hungary than to typical center-right governing parties in democracies such as the Conservatives in the U.K. or [the Christian Democratic Union] in Germany.” The study rated the Republican Party as well to the right of the current incarnation of the National Front in France.

Another reality is that Trump has encouraged the growth of the fascist Right on the streets. Their numbers are still relatively small, but they are a growing threat. This includes the active infiltration and ideological proclivities of local and state police forces, and the use of sections of the federal Homeland Security apparatus as presidential goon squads. Biden should not be expected to address any of this without an active movement forcing him to do so.

Finally, regardless of his countless foibles, Trump has a fanatical personal following. The coalition that elected him in 2016 largely stuck with him, and he even expanded it, picking up additional support from African Americans and Latinos.

It would be utterly reductive, and plain wrong, to write off more than 72 million Trump voters as all foot soldiers of fascism. But there is an absence of any real alternative from the Left. And the Democratic Party is seemingly committed to triangulation, avoiding any substantive confrontation with the core politics of the Right while remaining the hated party of the neoliberal establishment. The danger is that these voters will be pulled even more closely to the noxious, reactionary politics of Trumpism.

Trumpism is definitely not going away and, indeed, Trump himself may not be going away. The idea that he had the support to somehow steal this election was always more of a liberal fear tactic than a reality. But Trump can use his Twitter account and continued rallies to attack Biden and he will try to remain the leader of the Republicans once he is out of office. He is already floating the idea of another run for the White House in 2024.

Pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” protests in Pennsylvania.

The election took place against the backdrop of the crisis of neoliberalism, which has defined U.S. politics since the financial crash of 2008. It is an ongoing crisis for both the ruling class and the working class, but in very different ways. For the ruling class, the crisis is about how to restore profitability and maintain imperial dominance, particularly in an accelerating conflict with China. For the working class, it is a crisis of growing poverty, falling living standards, and increased state repression.

This, of course, is what is behind the polarization in politics not just in the U.S., but across much of the rest of the world. The bipartisan consensus which reigned for over 30 years does not work anymore. The Republicans have realized this and so they have shifted hard to the right.

Centrist Democrats like Biden, whose political career was shaped by the old consensus, think they can turn back the clock—that is a fantasy. The centrist Democrats have only succeeded in marginalizing the left-wing of their own party. If they continue down this path, their prospects in 2022 and 2024 are not bright. Without significant advances from the Left and the social movements, the Right is poised to advance.

The Left’s self-inflicted wounds; results and prospects

So what are the prospects for the Left and the social movements?

The multiracial Black Lives Matter protests of this past summer were historic both in size (over 23 million), and scope (2000 cities and towns in all fifty states, and five territories). The conditions giving rise to this uprising are not—unfortunately—disappearing. Nor is the experience of the last decade-plus—including the unfulfilled promises of the Obama-Biden administration—which brought so many into the streets, soon to be forgotten. Yet the decrease in activism in the months leading up to the election was notable, and the lack of significant national organization is a challenge that we will need to overcome.

Similarly, the craven silence of sections of the feminist movement during an election when both candidates were credibly accused of sexual assault, is part of what leaves this movement in a weakened state. This damage has been done just as feminism is in a global ascendence; and when the fight over bodily autonomy is about to face—with the right-wing Supreme Court—an incredible fight.

And the workers’ movement, both inside and outside the labor unions, has a contradictory appearance. We have seen an increase in worker militancy, going back to the teachers’ strikes and revolts, and the beginning of broader organizing efforts among the unemployed, the precarious, and the undocumented immigrant workforce. At the same time, close to forty percent of union voters supported Trump in key states. For their part, the leadership of the AFL-CIO seems committed to completing their apparent task of tailing the Democratic Party into effective oblivion.

As for the socialist Left, we need to look at where we stood in the run up to this election and where that leaves us. The dynamic in the U.S. Left over the past few years has been one of unprecedented numerical growth, with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) expanding from 6,000 members before 2016 to somewhere in the region of 80,000 members today. This is part of an international process of radicalization and political polarization which has roots, as noted earlier, that go back to 2008.

In the U.S., for understandable reasons, the political expression of the radicalization took shape in support for Bernie Sanders, AOC, and other electoral campaigns. But the reformist conclusions that many drew from this—that the strategic priority of the Left should be electoral, and that the Left can “build power” using the Democratic Party—are, in our view, mistaken. The pursuit of this strategy has left much of the socialist movement without a compass, and without a viable plan, heading into this next period.

But DSA is not a monolithic organization. There are debates within it about the role of the Democrats and the role of electoral politics more generally. Many DSA members agree that the working class needs its own political party. Some argue for something called a dirty break—using the Democratic Party ballot line to contest elections now with the goal of eventually creating an independent political party. The problem with this is that as the break has been pushed into the distant future, the approach has become indistinguishable from the hopeless task of trying to transform the Democratic Party itself.

Even more fundamental than an argument over the dirty break, however, is the question of the role of elections in bringing about social change. The historical record on this is quite clear. Radical progressive change always requires powerful social movements that make the cost of keeping things the way they are too high for the ruling class. In the 1930s, unemployment relief marches, bread riots, wildcat strikes, a mass anti-eviction movement, and other eruptions—often led by communists and socialists—pushed President Roosevelt and the Democrats into enacting the reforms of the New Deal. In the 1960s, the civil rights, Black liberation, anti-war, feminist, gay liberation, and environmental movements, won a new series of reforms, which continued even under the Nixon administration.

None of this means that elections are unimportant, but if our goal is to fundamentally change the nature of our world, electoral campaigns need to represent social movements with the goal of making them stronger. At the very least, they must promote and defend the demands raised by the social movements, such as the demand that emerged this summer to defund the police. Historically, DSA has not prioritized political struggle outside of the electoral arena. But a new generation of socialists recognizes that democracy is about much more than elections. When the Black Lives Matter protests erupted around the country this summer, many DSA members participated as individuals or as members of local chapters. The AfroSocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus played an especially important role. Unfortunately, the national leadership of DSA did not attempt to orient the entire organization to advance that struggle.

Of course, this is far from the end of the matter. The anti-racist struggle for abolition has not gone away, and movements provoked by a whole range of other issues are inevitable in the months and years ahead. Socialists both inside and outside DSA need to argue that there should be no support for the incoming Biden administration and that the Left must throw itself into political struggle on the streets and in workplaces. We are not organizing in conditions of our own choosing, but the potential for rebuilding a powerful Left has not disappeared and it is more urgent than ever that we realize it.

First posted at Tempest.

#EndSARS in Nigeria

By: November 13, 2020
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A movement against police brutality has swept across Nigeria. Mass protests have brought out tens of thousands of people in cities across the country. At the center of the fury is SARS, a notoriously brutal special unit of the police. On October 11, the Nigerian Police Force announced it was dissolving SARS, but, wary of prior unfulfilled promises and convinced more has to be done, protesters continued street demonstrations. On the evening of October 20, after the imposition of a 24 hour curfew, the army opened fire on peaceful, unarmed protesters in Lagos, killing at least a dozen in what has been called the Lekki Massacre. Despite the violent crackdown, the movement is not deterred and demands have widened to oppose all forms of repression and intimidation by the state.

The protests have tapped into deeply rooted social and economic issues. Nigeria has a sharp class divide, with one in every two workers unemployed or underemployed and lacking basic services despite the country’s massive oil wealth. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the crisis and fueled anti-government sentiment. Earlier this summer, trade unions and health care workers pressured the government to provide economic relief during the pandemic. The recent protests have renewed calls for unemployment assistance, access to free health care, and an end to food and fuel price increases.

Nigeria has not faced this level of upheaval in decades. The movement poses a significant challenge to the Nigerian ruling class and, by extension, those who support it. Military campaigns have strengthened the repressive arm of the Nigerian state, facilitated in part by foreign aid and training—including funds from the U.S.—in the name of the “war on terror” campaign against Boko Haram in Nigeria’s north. This dynamic has been on full display in the crackdown at Lekki and nationwide.

Emma Wilde Botta spoke with Kasope Aleshinloye, a Nigerian activist who has participated in the Lagos protests, about the development of the #EndSARS movement and the expression of Black Lives Matter globally.

***

EWB: Many people outside of Nigeria are hearing about SARS for the first time. Can you explain what it is, what it does, and its relationship to the Nigerian state’s repression?

KA: Established in 1992, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), sometimes referred to as F-SARS, was a branch of the Nigerian Police Force dedicated to tackling armed robbery, kidnapping and other violent crimes. As an elite unit with special privileges, its members typically operated in plainclothes, in order to blend in with the general population, so as not to arouse suspicion among the people they target.

More recently, within a wider culture of police brutality in Nigeria, SARS has been known for abduction, torture and extra-judicial killings. According to Amnesty International, the unit is notorious for targeting young Nigerians, often detaining them at random and framing them for crimes in a bid to extort money from them. In some instances, detained persons have disappeared in SARS custody even after their families have paid bribes to secure their release. There is no greater irony than SARS committing the very crimes—kidnapping and robbery—the unit was set up to investigate and tackle.

Young Nigerians have had enough. Photo courtesy of Aleshinloye.

EWB: What sparked the recent protests, and how have they developed? Who’s involved? What have been the most prominent demands?

KA: Although there were earlier iterations in 2017 and 2018, the current #EndSARS movement garnered massive support and participation largely through social media following the release of a video purportedly showing SARS officers fatally shooting a young man in Ughelli, a small city located in Delta State, before driving off in his vehicle.

The foremost demand of the protesters is an end to the rogue unit’s activities and, in the spirit of accountability, justice for victims and survivors of its brutality. Both of these are contained within the most widely circulated list of demands—the #5for5 agenda—although this does not necessarily speak to all of the protesters’ asks. Additionally, #EndSARS seems to be a precursor to a larger call for far-reaching political reforms in Nigerian society.

Protests are typically organized in real-time on Twitter to occupy strategic locations such as major interstate roads, seats of government, toll plazas, or other prominent landmarks. One of the earliest protests this October was a 72-hour occupation of the entrance to the Lagos State House of Assembly at Alausa. On occasion, when crowd numbers are low, protesters put out a call for reinforcements on Twitter, directing people on where to join the occupation or march as the case may be.

And while their colleagues occupy the streets, online cadres were hard at work keeping #EndSARS at the top of trending topics on an almost daily basis, garnering 301 billion impressions during the first three weeks of October 2020. Early in the life of the protests, these online activists were responsible for drawing international media attention to the protests and pressuring brands, entertainers, sportspeople and other celebrities to weigh in on the cause.

With the protests independently organized at multiple locations, the movement itself is decentralized and peculiar for its insistence on being leaderless, causing a somewhat bemused response from states and the federal government who do not know exactly who to engage with (or threaten).

The protests themselves have been overwhelmingly peaceful, in some instances, evoking a carnival-like atmosphere that brought together young people from a wide range of ethnic groups and social classes. There is a sense of being in a giant meeting room, where questions about protest strategy are debated and implemented in real time. I personally attended protests at three locations around Lagos—Airport Road Toll Plaza, Surulere (National Stadium), and the Ojodu Berger interchange—and they were all marked by a spirit of defiance. Nonetheless, it was particularly chilling to hear the names of individual SARS victims read out, reminding all in attendance that it could have been any one of us.

To sustain their momentum, revolutions must be fed, nursed, and documented. Thus, another key feature of the current #EndSARS movement is the mobilization of care for protesters. From the earliest days of the protests, independent organizers mobilized meals, legal assistance for detained protesters, emergency shelter, transportation for the stranded and even private security, when armed thugs threatened the protesters with violence in the absence of police protection. There was also a coordinated medical response in the form of ambulances, blood donations and dispatch, settling hospital bills for the injured, and mental health counselling. All of these mutual aid efforts culminated in the establishment of an #EndSARS helpline to support protesters’ online and offline. The most well-known of the organizing groups, the Feminist Coalition, served as a clearinghouse for donations for this mutual aid campaign, channelling funds to support more than 150 individual peaceful protests across 25 states in Nigeria.

One final note on the emergence of the protests. Although the movement has primarily been powered by digitally savvy millennials and Gen Zs via social media, protesters have gradually expanded their campaign messaging to include outdoor billboards, offline WhatsApp broadcasts & voice notes, downloadable Youtube/Instagram explainers and skits performed by protesters themselves, and finally, pamphlets and fliers in multiple local languages to broaden the #EndSARS appeal. This quest for inclusivity is designed to generate maximum public sympathy, particularly when considering the physical disruption (often to traffic) and economic slowdown the protests have caused, and to convey the importance of the cause to a wider audience, including the less educated and older generations.

EWB: What is the state of the movement outside of the major cities? Do you see the lockdowns widening beyond Lagos and Delta states?

KA: Due to incidents of vandalism and looting across the country during the week of October 19, local curfews have been instituted in at least 11 states, including Lagos and Delta, and, as of October 25, other states like Cross Rivers, Enugu, Kaduna and Adamawa have joined their counterparts to announce restrictions on movement. In particular, there have been several incidents across the country where warehouses holding COVID-19 food palliatives, which were donated by the private sector and meant for distribution to vulnerable populations, were looted, precipitating many of these curfew announcements.

EWB: How has President Muhammadu Buhari responded to the movement? How is his relationship to the military apparatus impacting the current situation?

KA: The President’s response to #EndSARS has been lacking, belated, and more focused on ending the protests than taking concrete action on ending SARS. Among the proposals floated is one to replace the functions previously carried out by SARS with a new Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) squad, which is problematic to say the least. Meanwhile, as the Commander-in-Chief of Nigeria’s Armed Forces, he has been curiously silent regarding the alleged killing of unarmed protesters at the Lekki Toll Plaza by military personnel, despite extensive open source video evidence documenting the incident.

Policing is federally regulated so deep structural reforms are required to implement effective responses to protesters’ demands. Even though the federal government has tentatively accepted the #5for5 list of demands and initially actioned some items on this agenda, it is instructive to note that SARS has already been reorganized (2017), overhauled (2018) and disbanded (2019) during President’s Buhari’s tenure alone. The non-implementation of these previous pronouncements has created a massive trust deficit between the Nigerian government and its citizens regarding police reform. Furthermore, there have been several reports indicating that SARS officers are still operating across the country. Thus, the absence of clear timelines and key priorities within this administration’s response to #EndSARS has sustained the 2020 protests, even though the unit has once again been scrapped.

Meanwhile, at the state level, some governors joined the physical protests and engaged with protesters. Furthermore, at least 27 states, including Lagos, have set up judicial panels of inquiry to investigate cases of police brutality but given recent Nigerian history with panels whose recommendations are never implemented, it remains to be seen what tangible action will result from these investigations.

EWB: What has been the response to the #EndSARS movement from other African leaders?

KA: Beyond a series of tweets from Ghana’s President Nana Akufo Addo and cursory statements from the ECOWAS and AU missions, not many other African leaders have joined the international community to acknowledge the protests as well as advise the Nigerian government to respect human rights and take action on police reform. This is not surprising. They don’t want to encourage local protests in their own countries,

On the other hand, it has been heartwarming to see the support from activists leading social movements across the continent (e.g. #ShutItAllDown on Namibia, #CongoIsBleeding in DRC, #AnglophoneCrisis in Cameroon, #ZimbabweanLivesMatter in Zimbabwe, #StopGBV in South Africa). These activists are also leveraging the popularity of #EndSARS to amplify their own domestic causes.

EWB: Earlier this summer, the police murder of George Floyd sparked sustained anti-police brutality protests across the U.S. You’ve lived in the U.S. and in Nigeria. Do you have any thoughts on why we’re seeing movements like this now?

KA: We can trace this climate of sustained protest that we’re seeing now in 2020 to earlier political and social movements within the last decade and a half. I see these international social movements as cyclical, and they often piggyback off each other to create this snowball effect at a certain period in time. To illustrate, during the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests, which both initially emerged as responses to economic inequality and anti-democratic regimes, I was in college in the U.S. This is the period within which I definitively associate my own personal political awakening and the spirit of these movements crossed international boundaries. In fact, Nigeria experienced its own Occupy moment in early 2012 with protests largely focused around a controversial fuel subsidy program.

Similarly, just as the Black Lives Matter movement emerged in the summer of 2013 following Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, we are living in another protest moment centered around police violence on marginalized communities. I remember speaking with friends from college about this in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor just as renewed Black Lives Matter demonstrations picked up steam in the U.S. Many Nigerians participated in global #BlackLivesMatter from the summer, by linking to local cases of police brutality. And we’re seeing similar solidarity from #EndSARS supporters in the U.S. and elsewhere. This is the expression of Black Lives Matter everywhere. It’s a very international movement.

A demonstration in front of police headquarters. Photo courtesy of Aleshinloye.

Moreover, we know what’s been happening in Thailand. Activists from Hong Kong have shared helpful tips for organizing sit-ins and marches in the face of riot police. Protesters are learning effective strategy from all of these movements and how best to articulate our demands for a Nigerian context.

The Nigerian diaspora has also made a big push on #EndSARS with protests across more than 100 cities continuing to this very day and intense campaigns targeted at foreign governments like the United Kingdom to put pressure on the Nigerian government to respect our rights to protest and not to be killed by police or other security forces.

EWB: What can activists outside of Nigeria do to support the #EndSARS movement?

KA: Activists can help amplify #EndSARS and engage with the issues in the form of explainers like this that show why #BlackLivesMatter is global. Write to your Congressperson. Donate if you’re able to. Above all, keep applying pressure. This is a marathon, not a sprint, so we’re in for the long haul.

Originally published by Tempest

Modest Proposals for a New Left

By: November 12, 2020
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The Biden/Harris election to the U.S. Presidency punctuates a morbid political cycle which has seen both of the big capitalist parties move even further to the right, working-class lives violently degraded by neoliberal capitalism, and the ancient American incantations of racism and xenophobia breathed new, pandemic life by an atavistic, ruling-class autocrat.

Leftists should celebrate Trump’s defeat but reject Biden’s victory. He brings to the office a record of betrayal of every constituency panicked into supporting him on election day: women, people of color, immigrants, the working-class. Biden will normalize U.S. imperial hegemony globally, renew in soft-focus fashion U.S. Cold War with China, stand firm with apartheid Israel, Back the Blue, demonize dissent, and seek a neoliberal restoration over Trump’s economic nationalism.

Yet of more immediate significance to this essay, the same period of Biden’s ascent to White House power (2008 to 2020) coincides with two intersecting but divergent stories of American Socialism: one the ascent of the Democratic Socialists of America to becoming the largest Socialist group in the U.S. since at least the 1960s, and the other the collapse of the largest revolutionary socialist group in the U.S., the International Socialist Organization (or ISO) last year.

If a newer, more robust and invigorated independent socialist Left is to emerge in the U.S. to confront the ‘Biden era,’ it must begin by confronting all of the above facts. The aspirations of millions of Americans to radicalize uncannily match the objective conditions of their deracinated lives in ways Socialists can best explain. Indeed, the Left mantra that ‘no one is going to save us but ourselves’ has been painfully understood by hundreds of thousands who have used direct action, creative resistance, self-organizing and fearless militancy—from the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter to the Women’s March to fighting fascism in the streets.

Here I offer some modest proposals for ways a new revolutionary Left could begin to inhabit these conditions, revitalize itself and create a new history from the ashes of contemporary political life. They are intended to begin a latent but necessary discussion of how to assemble the scattered pieces of revolutionary socialism from below into a recognizable structure for confronting capitalism and beating it:

  1. As soon as COVID will allow, a national assembly of revolutionary socialists organized in collaboration between leading radical political organizations and currents should take place. It should occur in a location where Black Lives Matter protests have been strong, like Oakland or Minneapolis. The assembly should include militant unions and radical queer, immigrant rights, and feminist organizations. Its charge would be how to build a unified, independent socialist organization.  Independent in this context would mean independent not just of the Democratic Party but of either academic, publishing, or mutual aid institutions. Each and all of these have contributed in the past to split-thinking within revolutionary organizations about function, purpose, politics and loyalty.
  2. The national assembly should foreground debate about the role of the revolutionary party and revolutionary organization in building a mass socialist movement. Prior to the collapse of the ISO, and in response in part to the rise of the DSA, this conversation was beginning. It is critical to resume. The strengths and weaknesses of both the Leninist democratic centralist model and now the dominant DSA model are well-known to the Left. There are many others relevant to our moment to consider, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the early 1960s. There is no shortage of critical tradition on the question to draw from. Motivating the discussion should be a singular objective: defining a party structure that best speaks to the objective conditions of our time, and building that structure.
  3. A public reckoning with the facts of the collapse of international socialism in the Anglospheric world is necessary. It is a public secret on the broad Left that both the Socialist Workers Party in the U.K. and the International Socialist Organization in the U.S. fell apart over cover-up and mishandling of rapes by members. It is less well-known that the ISO’s implosion included a never-completed assessment of how a racist organizational culture intimidated, discouraged and muzzled many of its best members. To step forward, and win back hundreds or thousands of people alienated from the international socialist tradition, the equivalent of a Truth and Reconciliation process should begin.  A national assembly would be a good place to start.
  4. A national on-line revolutionary socialist daily newspaper is needed for a new Left. It should rival Jacobin for its frequency of publication but function primarily as a documentary space for the living conditions of politically conscious working-class people. The new, emergent socialist organization to come should deploy the new paper as the primary site of its practical and theoretical activity. It should be mainly an organizing tool for bringing new people to revolutionary socialism.
  5. A new framework is needed for the relationship between revolutionary socialism and electoral politics. Both the International Socialist “lesser of two evils” line and the DSA’s porous electoralism have revealed weaknesses in helping to build a strong socialism from below movement. The inevitable contradictions between elections and mass organizing are only likely to deepen given the recent success of groups like the DSA and Socialist Alternative in electing people to local office. A coherent and unified strategy is essential.
  6. The revolutionary left needs a new perspective on fascism and how to fight it. In recent times a number of writers and organizers have begun a discussion about the differences between fascism now and in history. The global authoritarian turn has not been sufficiently diagnosed by the Left. Nor has a satisfying strategy for how to fight it. Both are needed.
  7. The revolutionary left needs a rural strategy. The ‘country-city’ political divide in the U.S. is emblematic of degraded material conditions in vast swaths of the U.S. where neither industry nor agriculture sustains life. 82 percent of people who voted for Trump, nearly all of them in rural areas, cited the economy as their primary reason. We need assessment, perspective and understanding of this, a revisit of radical agrarianism and populism, and a sustained effort to build socialist education in the country side. We can begin by confronting the material deprivations that have made so many working-class rural people vulnerable to racism and xenophobia.
  8. When successful in the past, Communist and Socialist movements have had elaborate campaigns to build youth movements. A new such movement is needed. Young Americans are the most ready to become socialist of any demographic, according to polls. High schools in America are hotbeds of environmental, queer, and antifascist politics.  The significant achievement of the DSA in building a Youth wing (YDSA) is one model for a new revitalized independent revolutionary Left focused on youth. Others are available.
  9. Political education is central to rebuilding a broader revolutionary Left. History is dense with examples of radical pedagogy and models to follow, from Worker Schools of the 1930s, to the Freedom Schools of the early 1960s, to DSA Night Schools today. The pandemic has forced us to rethink political education on-line. We need a national real-time and virtual Socialist Education Program organized around some of the questions above and others not yet articulated here.
  10. Finally, a new revolutionary Left must become an Abolitionist Left. In its focus on eliminating policing, Black Lives Matter has been the most important political movement in the U.S. since the anti-Vietnam War movement in raising political consciousness about the role of the state under capitalism. It has inaugurated the deepest challenge to state power in a generation. More than any political development in our time, BLM provides fertile ground and example for the gestation of a unified, multiracial working-class revolutionary socialist movement that can challenge the power of capital and win.

Using an Award Ceremony to Support the Syrian Struggle

By: November 12, 2020
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What can be done to show solidarity with Syrians, Syrians who have risen up against their tyrannical government and its bloody allies? We in Promoting Enduring Peace have wrestled with that question for years. We’ve held educational meetings, written to politicians, shown the work of Syrian artists, marched in demonstrations and the like, but we wanted to do something more.  So we thought a great gesture would be to give our Gandhi Peace Award to Syrians doing humanitarian work.

The Gandhi Peace Award has been presented since 1960. Its laureates include  Dorothy Day, Benjamin Spock, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Bill McKibben, Ralph Nader, Amy Goodman, Jackson Browne and many more.  The Award comes with a $5,000 prize and a medallion fashioned from the most valuable metal on earth, “peace bronze” made of metals extracted from retired nuclear weapons systems.

We especially wanted to honor the Syrian Civil Defense (better known in the West as the “White Helmets”). Those rescue workers are heroes who dig out survivors and bodies from under the rubble. They are often targeted themselves in “double-strikes” deliberate bombings of an area for a second time just when rescue workers arrive. The White Helmets were first informal groups of people who dug people out once it became clear that Assad government rescue workers were never going to help.  Later the White Helmets raised money for equipment from a variety of sources, including Western governments. The Assad regime has been most enraged not by their saving of lives, but by their making of videos, showing the devastation caused by Assad’s barrel bombs and his chemical attacks. They’ve been subjected to incredibly vile attacks in social media by Assad’s flunkies and the Western so-called “anti-imperialists”, who admire any dictator who seem to oppose the US.

Promoting Enduring Peace (PEP) will be holding the Gandhi Peace Award ceremony online this year at 1 p.m. Eastern on Sat. November 21 on Zoom.  The award is being given jointly to a Syrian-American and a Syrian, Dr. Zaher Sahloul of Chicago and White Helmet Mayson Almisri who is now exiled in Canada.  The public worldwide may view the ceremony without charge.  The link to register for the webinar is at the website PEPeace.org.

Honoree Dr. Zaher Sahloul is a co-founder and past president of the Syrian-American Medical Society, which has built and rebuilt hospitals in Syria under attack by Russian and Assad forces; some operating underground or in caves.  He’s now president of MedGlobal, which gives crucial help to victims in fourteen countries.  His day job is as pulmonary specialist in Chicago where his works includes treatment of patients suffering from the Covid-19 virus. He himself was inflicted with the disease for weeks this spring. He recently tweeted that “I will be dedicating the #GandhiPeaceAward to the doctors and nurses who were killed in #Syria while on duty including Dr. Hasan Alaaraj, Dr. Majed Bari Dr. Wasim Moaz and 930 other healthcare workers.”

The other honoree is Mayson Almisri.  She is from Deraa, Syria where the mass demonstrations began in 2011. I interviewed her this February.  In 2011 she was a journalist for SANA, the official government press agency. She knew one of the families whose son’s notorious torture led to the demonstrations, but she couldn’t write truthfully about it for SANA.  Almisri said she would work at SANA in the morning and go with her face covered to strikes in the afternoon.  In 2012 she “escaped”, as she put it, form SANA and worked fully with the uprising.  For years demonstrations went on at a fearful price.  Her own brother was shot dead by a government sniper. Almisri helped out with first-aid after attacks and preparing material for sympathetic media. In 2014 rescue worker leaders (including Almisri) from several areas met in Jordan and formally joined together as the Syrian Civil Defense. When Deraa surrendered to Assad forces she fled to other parts of Syria and eventually to Jordan.  In 2018 was allowed into Canada as a refugee. (Recall Trump banned all refugees from Syria three years ago.).

Artists and speakers will add to the ceremony.  Dr. Sahloul will be introduced by Linda Sarsour, noted Palestinian-American activist who co-chaired the 2017 and 2019 Women’s Marches and past executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. She’s probably the best-known Palestinian activist in the U.S. We hope her appearance will help heal the rift between certain segments of the Palestinian and Syrian left communities.

Ms. Almisri will be introduced by Orlando von Einsiedel, the director of the film “The White Helmets”, a segment of which will be shown as part of the program. In 2017 this film won the Academy Award for “Best Short Documentary”.  Von Einsiedel has also directed “Virunga” which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2017 and “Lost and Found” about the persecuted Rohingya.

Music will be provided by noted Syrian performer Wasfi Massarani and American musician Dylan Connor.  There will be narrated presentations of works by Akram Swedaan who opposes war by transforming ammunition remnants into canvases , Molly Crabapple, who illustrated the book about Syria “Brothers of the Gun”, Marc Nelson who updated Goya’s anti-war paintings into a Syrian context, and Adeebah Alnemar a Syrian refugee who arrived in the US on the day Trump was elected.

A lot of Syrian, Left and Muslim groups are “partnering” to publicize the event.  They include:  Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists, Central Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America, Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution, Heartland Alliance, Islamic Society of North America, MedGlobal, Middle East Crisis Committee (CT), Multi Aid Programs, MAPS, Muslim Public Affairs Council, Muslim Public Affairs Council, MPAC, New Politics magazine, Syria Faith Initiative, Syrian American Council, Syrian Association for Citizens Dignity, SACD, Syrian Community Network (SCN), Syrian Emergency Taskforce, Syrian Forum, Syrian Forum USA, The White Helmets, Transnational Solidarity Alliance, Tree of Life  Education Fund (CT), War Resisters League

We think it will be an impressive event.  Please honor Sahloul and Almisri by attending the webinar.  Register at PEPeace.org.

Say #ByeBetsy – and organize now to fight against Biden’s education policies

By: November 9, 2020
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Social media is abuzz about what teacher activists can expect from Biden’s education policy.  Alas, much of it is wishful thinking, on the order of hoping Jill Biden, a teacher, will shape her husband’s views on education. Other speculation has been about Biden’s likely choice for Secretary of Education. One candidate many liberals consider a progressive possibility, Linda Darling-Hammond, has said she doesn’t want the post.   We should expect and demand far better.

The fact that Darling-Hammond, who often collaborates with both national teachers unions, is considered an advocate by activists who have led resistance to charter schools, standardized testing’s stranglehold over curriculum and teacher performance, and marketization of public education shows a dangerous political blind spot about the Democrats. Darling-Hammond’s connections show her embrace of  “reformy” policies, in organizations like  New Classrooms Innovations Partners, which is funded by a “who’s who” of billionaire-funded foundations,  the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Bezos Family Foundation, and the New Schools Venture Fund.

While Trump’s election exploded the bipartisan consensus about how to privatize schools and control what was taught and how, the outline of what Biden expects to do is quite clear if we do not flinch from examining Biden and the Democrats critically, without blinders or wishful thinking.  The Center for American Progress (CAP) has endorsed the Trump/DeVos policy of  continuing standardized testing during the pandemic.  As a group of researchers noted in their analysis of CAP’s report “School closings and the ever-increasing number of deaths provide the backdrop” for CAP’s proposal  “to deny waivers of the federally mandated administration of standardized tests in spring 2021. Further, the federal government proposes to add to those assessments in ways that CAP argues would make the test results more useful… CAP sides with the Department of Education’s policy of denying such requests for waivers, and it calls for additional assessments [emphasis added] that ‘capture multiple aspects of student well-being, including social-emotional needs, engagement, and conditions for learning’ as well as supplementary gathering of student information.”

Biden’s victory now requires confronting his advocacy of disastrous education policies during the Obama administration, enacted under Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.  While we say #ByeBetsy with pleasure, there is little time to celebrate Biden’s victory if that means shutting our eyes to what is in store for us. In another article I’ll explain what that project is,  already begun under Trump, with Democrats’ support. The new privatization onslaught, rooted in Silicon Valley and Wall Street collaboration, is even more sinister than what preceded it.

The American People Turn Trump Out of Office

By: November 7, 2020
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This article was written on November 7 for publication on November 8 in Viento Sur, a left journal in the Spanish state.

In the most important American election in decades, the American people voted on November 3 to remove the authoritarian Republican Donald Trump from the presidency, a majority voting instead for Democrat Joseph Biden. While the electorate was deeply divided and the vote close in several states, still the election represents a rejection of Trump and his policies, a demonstration of confidence in democracy, and a deep desire to overcome the country’s several crises: the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment, and climate change producing violent weather.

Speaking late on the night of November 6, Joseph Biden virtually claimed victory, pointing out that he was leading in several states yet to declare a winner and that he had so far received 74 million votes—more than any candidate in U.S. history—4 million more than Trump. “What’s becoming clear each hour is that a record number of Americans of all races, faiths religions chose change over more of the same. They’ve given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism.”

On election day Trump had already falsely claimed victory based on the earliest reports on the voting. This was a delusion that he himself had caused. It resulted from the fact that despite the risk of coronavirus, Trump had encouraged his voters not to use mail-in ballots, but rather to vote in person on election day. But in most states mail-in ballot are counted after election-day votes, so it appeared on election night—when most U.S. elections have been decided—that Trump was winning the election. But as the extraordinary number of mail-in votes were counted Biden caught up and eventually passed Trump in key states like Georgia and Pennsylvania. Trump has claimed without evidence that the Democrats were adding additional ballots to steal the election.

While Trump continues to claim that the election has been stolen, Vice President Michael Pence failed to back that claim and several other important Republican politicians declined to rally to the president, though some other Republicans legislators did back repeat Trump’s false claims. To achieve a victory, Trump tried to stop vote counting in locations where he thought it would benefit him and to continue it in others for the same reason.

(As of this writing on the morning of November 7, Biden leads with 253 to 214 Electoral College votes, based on the states he is winning. The election does not become official until all of the popular votes are counted and the results certified, which may take weeks, and then not until the electors of the Electoral College vote on December 14 and their ballot are received by the senate on December 23. At this point it does not appear that there will be a political fight over rival slates of state electors who are approved by state legislatures and generally reflect the state’s certified popular vote.)

Many worried that Trump might try some sort of coup d’état, but, at least so far, he has not, and it becomes less likely and less possible with every passing day. The fear that Trump and Attorney General William Barr might use federal agents to intervene in polling places or counting locations and seize the ballots did not materialize, nor did the right wing’s armed militias interrupt the voting or counting process. While Trump supporters, some armed, did cause a commotion outside of a few locations where votes were being counted, far more important were the thousands of people in several cities who marched with the slogan, “Count all the Votes.”

Apparently losing the election, Trump sent an army of lawyers to four battleground states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia—in an attempt to challenge the process, the count, and the ballots. Many of the lawsuits being filed appear to be baseless and the courts have already rejected some, but the Democratic Party will respond to those that the courts take up. Trump hopes to push the lawsuits through the courts and up to the U.S. Supreme Court to be settled by its nine justices, six of them conservative and three more liberal, the last three conservatives appointed by Trump. So far there seems no basis for such a Supreme Court case.

An Extraordinary Election 

The election has taken place under the most extraordinary circumstances, amidst great suffering and social turmoil. There are officially 240,000 coronavirus deaths and perhaps in reality as many as 300,000. The virus is surging throughout much of the country, with over 100,000 cases per day and 1,000 deaths per day. Many of those affected have suffered serious and in some cases permanent damage to their lungs or kidneys or other organs.

The pandemic led to an economic depression that saw as many as 30 million unemployed, and today there are still at least 12 million unemployed and probably more because of uncounted discouraged workers. While some continue to receive state unemployment payments, the federal government’s assistance programs have ceased. With a total population of 330 million, it is estimated that 54 million do not have enough to eat. As many as 35 million families face the possibility of evictions when an eviction moratorium from the Department of Health and Human Services ends on December 31.

In addition, due to climate change, several states in the West have suffered tremendously destructive forest fires, while the Gulf States and Atlantic States have experienced disastrous hurricanes. Finally, though the enormous anti-racist demonstrations and marches of the spring and summer against police racism and violence involving about 20 million people have subsided, Philadelphia and other cities continue to see protests against police killings of Black men and women, often then violently repressed by the police. All of these developments from the pandemic to unemployment and from the fires and tropical storms to the violent police attacks on the anti-racist protests created great anxiety throughout the society as election day approached.

The Covid-19 pandemic meant that it was necessary to change the rules for the U.S. elections, rules that are set by each state. While absentee ballots, mail-in ballots, and early voting have existed in various states, those practices expanded enormously, with millions now voting early or by mail, or by new practices such as curbside voting. Over 100 million people voted early and it appears that 67 percent of all eligible voters voted, a record in modern U.S. history.

Trump’s Heyday

Had there not been a pandemic, Trump might have easily won the election. Before the arrival of Covid-19 in the United States in February and the first measures to control it in March, the American economy was booming. The Republican Party had passed and Trump had signed a two trillion dollar tax cut that principally benefited the capitalist class. The corporate tax rate has declined from 50 percent in the 1960s to 20 percent today. The GDP grew by only 2 to 3 percent, but that was enough. Unemployment fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest rate since the 1960s, and inflation was just 2 percent. Corporate profits grew as they were taxed less. Banks, corporations, smaller businesses, and most workers were happy with the situation, even if wages did not increase.

Economic success meant Trump enjoyed political support. Many of the wealthiest continued to support him, as did those with medium and small businesses. Many white people, and certainly Trump’s social base of 40 percent of the population, were also fine with Trump’s racist rhetoric, regulations, and social policies. Most white business people and white working people approved or at least accepted Trump’s promise to build the wall to keep out Latino immigrants, as well as his ban of Muslim immigrants, and they did not object to his forcing asylees to wait in Mexico for appointments months later with U.S immigration authorities, and while they may not have been enthusiastic about the separation of undocumented immigrant families and the caging of children, neither did they protest. Even the Evangelical Christians so key to Trump’s coalition, accepted all of this, as they had accepted his financial shenanigans, philandering and cavorting with prostitutes, as long as he was “pro-life” (that is, anti-abortion) and anti-LGBT. Other whites would accept anything he did as long as there were no new gun regulations.

The Tide Turns

Then came Covid with city and state shutdowns, business failures, profit losses, and a depression that brought unemployment to as high as 30 million. The collapse of the economy also brought about a fiscal crisis that in turn led to government budget cuts and the layoff of government employees. Trump’s incompetence in dealing with the pandemic and the resulting economic depression was the beginning of the end. He never organized a national response, failed at testing, tracing, isolation, and quarantine. He refused to take the advice of health experts, offered contrary advice, talked about phony cures, and became the primary source for misinformation nationally. He pushed for and Republican governors carried out the reopening of states long before the virus had been contained, leading to new outbreaks. His criminal negligence led to millions of cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

In addition to his poor policies, Trump very personally contributed to more sickness and death with super-spreader events held at the White House and then a score of campaign rallies of thousands, leading to thousands more cases and hundreds of deaths. He, his wife, and his young son all got Covid. Trump and his aides refuse to wear masks, ridiculed those who did, and encouraged their followers to ignore masks and social distancing.

Toward the end, Trump’s chief aide, who was just reported to have contracted Covid-19, declared that the administration was giving up on attempting to control the pandemic and would wait for a vaccine meanwhile administering therapeutics. Trump himself told his rallies—completely contrary to what government health experts were saying—that the virus was disappearing. He promised he would reopen the economy and return the country to prosperity tomorrow. Biden on the other hand refused to hold mass rallies, always appeared masked, promised to rely on the scientists and to come up with a national plan to stop the spread of Covid-19. He said that he too was for reopening the economy, but while bringing the pandemic under control.

As a result of all of this, the election became a referendum on the candidates’ attitudes about Covid-19, though of course it was also a referendum on Trump himself. He was still running on his 2016 principles the center of whose politics was the slogan “Make America Great Again,” which he suggested and his followers understood meant, “Make America Great Again for White Men.” (Some critics mocked his slogan as “Make America White Again.”) Racism and misogyny are the glue that holds together Trump’s cross-class coalition of wealthy capitalists, small business people, farmers, white workers, and the rural poor.

Throughout his campaign, Trump also argued the election was about socialism. He claimed that Biden was controlled by Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and that once elected he would implement socialist programs that would fundamentally change America and lead to an economic disaster and violence. Trump had the support of the police unions and border patrol agents. He was backed by the QAnon conspiracy followers—perhaps millions—who believe that the Democrats and government generally are controlled by satanic pedophiles who traffic in children or drink their blood. Then too the militant white nationalist and neo-fascist groups support him.

Biden and his Backers

Biden was far from the ideal candidate for progressives. As a U.S. Senator from Delaware, he had supported conservative welfare reform laws that took support away from the poor, women, and children, backed reactionary reforms to the legal system that filled prisons with Blacks and Latinos, voted for tax cuts for the right and helped carry out the Democratic Party transition to neoliberalism. As President Barack Obama’s vice president, he shares responsibility for the weak response to the 2008 recession, serving the banks better than he did working people. Yet today he runs with the rhetoric of liberal principles: support for labor unions, for Black and Latino civil rights, or women’s equality, and gay rights. Still, though he is a neoliberal, to most of the broad left he appears as far superior to the authoritarianism, racism, and reaction of Trump.

After he won the Democratic Party primary election, the capitalist class began to make it clear that Biden was their candidate. More billionaires plumped for Biden than or Trump and in the last couple of months that group gave the Democrat more than twice as much money as they gave to his opponent. Renegade Republicans formed the Lincoln Project, criticized Trump and advertised in favor of Biden. Dozens of former high-level government officials, attorneys general, nearly 500 military generals, 70 Republican former FBI, CIA, and other national security officials, and many other in the highest reaches of the state came out against Trump and many made clear their support for Biden. The major media, which had often been critical of Trump, became more so, and in the last days of the election even Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News began to differ with the president.

Biden has had the support of weighty sectors of the capitalist class, like tech and entertainment, as well as pharmaceuticals and real estate. Many professional organizations of doctors, lawyer, and others endorsed him. Like all Democrats he has had the support the AFL-CIO and all of the major labor unions with few exceptions, as well as most Black and Latino, women’s and LGBT organizations. Trump, of course, still had much support from other sectors such as casinos and gambling, oil and gas, contractors and manufacturers and his own networks of professionals.

The election, as was to be expected, showed the country divided geographically along traditional lines, with the coasts going for Biden and the Midwest and South for Trump. Biden succeeded in flipping and winning two crucial states in the Great Lakes region, Wisconsin and Michigan, and he it appears he will win Pennsylvania. In the West, it also appears likely he will win Arizona and Nevada. And in a surprising development in the South he is poised to take Georgia. Almost everywhere, the Democrats won the cities and the Republicans the rural areas. Ninety percent of Black people and 65 percent of Latinos voted for Biden. Only in Florida, dominated by Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and other exiles with anti-Communist politics, did Biden do badly among Latinos. Biden won more women’s votes, especially suburban women. The working class is completely divided, Trump winning 55 percent of men without a college degree while Biden won 43 percent. The majority of white workers support Trump, the overwhelming majority of Black and Latino workers back Biden.

The broad left—liberals, progressives, and the small socialist left—had hoped for a “blue wave” repudiating Trump, that is for a massive vote for the Democratic Party and an overwhelming victory not only in the presidential election, but also winning the Senate and the House of Representatives. That, however, did not happen. Trump held on to has base and mobilized it; he also won a very small increase in support from Black men, and a larger increase in votes of Latino men, and some increase in LGBT voters. Biden succeeded in winning back some white working class voters, many suburban women, and young voters. Biden seems to be winning the presidential election, but it is unlikely the Democrats will win a majority of the Senate and the party has lost several seats in the House. Though the “squad,” the four new leftwing Representatives—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—were all reelected. The election was a defeat for Trump, but not for the Republican Party. Not only did the Republicans win more House seats and seem likely to retain the Senate, but they also maintained control in many state legislatures.

If he is finally elected and takes office, Biden will face a hostile Republican Senate, a reactionary Supreme Court dominated by Republicans, and will have a smaller majority in the House. The country will remain deeply divided. Trump’s rightwing block will remain, though whether it can retain its weight and coherence will depend on what he and others can do to maintain its political significance.

Trump now claims that the election has been stolen, suggesting he will attempt to remain in office. He does not have to cede the presidency to his successor until January 20, and he might still attempt in some way to hold on to the office, but he will face massive resistance. Hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country have pledged to defend the vote, the count, and democracy. Several demonstrations have already occurred and large marches are planned for Saturday, Nov. 7. Many labor unions have also vowed to defend democracy and some have talked about organizing a general strike, something that has never happened on a national scale in the United Sates and not in any city since the 1940s. The plan of the social movements and of the unions is for massive peaceful civic resistance.

The Left and the Election

The small socialist far left in the United States, a few thousand people in a handful of organization, have historically stood for the building of a revolutionary socialist party, a labor party, or a social democratic party or all three in some combination or another. Several small groups still have this perspective. Others have for the last couple of decades supported the Green Party, a leftist if not a socialist party, which this year ran former truck driver and open socialist Howie Hawkins for president. The party highest vote came in 2000 when consumer advocate Ralph Nader received 2.7 percent of the vote but was accused of having cost Democrat Al Gore the election. The Green Party usually gets about 1 percent of the vote. While we have no figures yet, it seems unlikely that the Green Party will do better in this election, as most on the left seemed more likely to back Biden for fear of contributing to the reelection of Trump.

Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign, when he ran as democratic socialist on the most progressive platform seen since the era of President Lyndon Johnson, revived the left in America, ending the post-war taboo on the discussion of socialism. Many young people rallied to Bernie and tens of thousands of them joined the Democratic Socialists of America, which supported his campaigns in 2016 and 2020. Sanders 2020 campaign proved to be weaker than his 2016 campaign because he no longer had Hillary Clinton as the embodiment of the Democratic establishment to campaign against and other progressives like Elizabeth Warren also put forward progressive platforms. There was also a fear among Democrats that a candidate who appeared to be as radical as Sanders could not defeat Trump. When Biden won South Carolina, all of the other 27 Democratic Party candidates lined up behind him. Sanders came to the conclusion that his staying in the race would not contribute to the defeat of Trump, and as promised Bernie endorsed Biden.

At its 2019 convention, DSA had voted to back Sanders but if he lost not to support any other candidate, though many DSA members did as individuals work on the Biden campaign. Biden and Sanders created a joint task force to work on the platform and the campaign, but in truth Sanders could have little real influence. DSA had hoped that it would be the leftwing of forces supporting President Bernie Sanders, the left of a rising tide of progressivism. Instead, DSA now finds itself looking forward to a Biden presidency, a neoliberal presiding over the economic and social catastrophe that is the United States today. Biden will likely have a presidency of what might be called “social liberalism,” that is, fundamentally neoliberal, pro-business policies with large-scale programs to address the immediate disaster. Whether his pledge to carry out “action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism” becomes a reality will depend on the social and labor movement. The left will have to look forward to long hard fights to achieve reforms and to build a movement for more fundamental change.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exhaustion of signifiers: the current political crisis in Bolivia

By: November 3, 2020
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“‘Pititas’, the wrong generation? They call the real vote fraud, they call democracy a dictatorship, they call dictatorship a democracy, they call the paramilitaries heroes, they call the patriots terrorists. They know nothing at all, but they believe they are superior.”

The above text, by an anonymous author, appears as a meme in some political discussions about the current Bolivian situation on social networks. “Pitita” is the name given to the political actors who took the streets of Bolivian cities to protest the supposed electoral fraud that the MAS would have forged in the October elections last year. They are called “pititas” (“pitita” means “thin cordon”) because days before his resignation, Evo Morales referred in that way to the cordons that were used in those protests to block vehicle passages. Obviously the term is derogatory. Morales was making fun of the fact that the blockers, mostly from the urban middle classes, didn’t even know how to make good barriers as a form of protest.

While the meme seems clear about its intention to show how wrong the “pititas” are, it shows, deep down, something more complex. It shows the struggle that is taking place in Bolivia in the field of political languages. Although the meme states that the “pititas” call things wrongly because “they know nothing at all”, it can be said that in reality what is at stake is the pertinence of calling things by a name when they have stopped being what they were. Moreover, the resounding nature of the meme lies in the fact that it sounds true. The State of MAS, which since its appearance has been considered by academics and politicians as one of the most democratic States in the history of the country, is, for the “pititas”, an example of an undemocratic State. The same happens with the mention of the “patriots”: for some, Evo Morales and various leaders of the MAS are considered incarnations of a project of national renewal without precedent, while for others they are simple bloodthirsty leftists who should be treated as drug traffickers and terrorists.

This debate about how things are named, however, is not just important because it shows us two such opposing visions of the political spectrum, but, on the contrary, because signifiers such as “democracy” or “nationhood” to use the two named examples, are employed by both sides for similar purposes. It seems to me that this exhaustion of signifiers is one of the characteristics of the political moment Bolivia is living, in which, apparently, everyone wants the same things, but conceives them in opposite ways.

Some leftists in Bolivia deny that MAS is a leftist party. The anarchist activist and artist María Galindo has gone so far as to say that in these last elections only different versions of the right were competing: a populist right (MAS), a liberal right (Comunidad Ciudadana) and the ultra-right (CREEMOS). While it seems to me that claiming that MAS is a right-wing party is exaggerated, it can be said that in terms of its economic policies, its cultural chauvinism or in terms of its policies on issues such as the environment and machismo, MAS is far from being a progressive party. But what seems undeniable to me is that in the spectrum of Bolivian political and social thought tradition, MAS still embodies the historical position of the left, which makes many left-wingers identify not necessarily with the party today, but with what it meant historically, at least in its beginnings.

The fact that MAS still represents the “popular” in the national political tradition of the left should not be taken lightly. When we read in the meme that the “pititas … know nothing at all,” we should not assume that this “not knowing” means only ignorance. It is also referring to the fact that the “pititas” do not know concretely about Bolivian history. As a historian, I assume that all historical narratives are fictional in the sense that their construction has a particular purpose. However, the complexity of contemporary Bolivian historical narratives, as in most Latin American cases, is that they have often been made from a left-populist vision that centers historical facts on concepts such as nation, people (“pueblo”), and more recently, the indigenous as a “subaltern” subject. In that sense, it is logical that the “pititas” are claimed to be ignorant of national history, given that that history based on the popular and indigenous subject is alien to the thousands of middle class people who took the streets to overthrow Evo Morales in October and November of last year. In other words, “national history,” as told by academia, intellectuals, and collective representations, is more likely to favor MAS and what it represents historically than its liberal opponents, who “know nothing at all” about that history.

What I have just said can be seen, for example, in the trend of current right-wing liberalism in Bolivia that claims that MAS has divided Bolivians in terms of class and race, a claim that denies the profound racism that persists in the Bolivian society. But while that discourse is spreading through the global right-wing liberalism and is typically conservative (don’t forget that the slogan of the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer was “peace, unity and work”), I don’t think this claim can be attributed solely to the right-wing tendencies of certain sectors. In fact, it seems to me that one of the mistakes of MAS and all the leftist-populist rhetoric with which it wrapped its chauvinism during its long time in government was to depoliticize the ethnic and class issues, turning both into just government slogans. That is why the new generations are incapable of rethinking those issues politically since they became “common sense” as Gramsci understood it. That is why many young people who grew up under the MAS government assume the claim of the liberal right as their own.

The “indigenous issue” in MAS is paradigmatic of what I have just noted. Although Evo Morales and a large number of MAS state officials are from popular and indigenous sectors, indigenous movements have been repressed throughout his administration. The most notorious case, which led many on the critical left to distance themselves from MAS, was the repression of indigenous and environmental leaders in Chaparina in 2011. This occurred when those leaders and activists were leading a march to protest the highway project in the protected territory of TIPNIS (Indigenous Territory and Isiboro Secure National Park). But the internal contradictions within MAS regarding the ethnic issue do not only refer to the facts. It seems to me that one of the levels where these contradictions have had the greatest impact is the symbolic level. The MAS’s State and its rhetoric regarding ethnicity has shown the limits of ethnicity as a political category. That is, it has been seen that political actions carried out on the basis of indigenous ethnic identity do not ensure cohesion of political views with respect to a “popular” or leftist horizon thought in terms of class, or in terms of environmental and gender demands. In other words, the years of MAS government have shown that there can be indigenous self-assumed political subjects who are, at the same time, conservative with respect to the agenda of the global left or, conversely, that many of the points of the global left’s agenda are incompatible with the self-assumed indigenous political subjectivity.

On the other hand, two recent acts that I consider much miscalculated on the part of MAS are sharpening a very marked polarization in the country. First, a judge annulled the arrest warrant against Evo Morales in order to let him return to the country to participate in the act of possession of Luis Arce. Second, some regulations of the legislative chambers were modified taking advantage of the fact that the MAS still had 2/3 of the senators and parliamentarians before the change of government. This changes were made in order to modify the requirement the 2/3 of the votes for certain chamber procedures. This is because in the next chamber composition, the MAS won’t have the 2/3 of the legislators, but it will have a simple majority. Although it is true that the order of apprehension of Morales was very arbitrary, given that he was blamed for terrorism (we return to the meme from the beginning), and although it is true that the chamber rules that MAS modified are more technical than legislative, both acts function as eloquent political gestures. Both gestures show that the MAS is returning to an exercise of power without concessions, which, in the face of the political crisis that the country recently experienced, gives the right-wing an opportunity to gain support among the undecided voters from the last election and among those who had hoped that the MAS had modified its authoritarian political inclinations.

But the most important thing about this new polarization, accentuated by the first acts of power of MAS, is that it shows once again the deep regional divergence of the country. Currently, the most reactionary right-wing has begun to make public calls in the different cities of the country to take the streets again and demand a military government, because, according to them, the recent elections were also fraudulent. These calls have had almost no echo in the Andean cities, but the city of Santa Cruz, in a more torrid zone, is currently in a general strike that shows the forcefulness of certain right-wing discourses among its population. This polarization is historical and is related, it seems to me, to this “not knowing at all” of national history. It is eloquent, for example, that in Santa Cruz, a city with more than two million inhabitants, there is not a single history undergraduate department and almost none in the field of the social sciences. In other words, the historical narrative on which the emergence of a party like MAS is based has little influence in this region. In addition, it is clear that this national historical narrative is profoundly Andean and centralist, which determines its little influence in Santa Cruz, even though a large part of the population that inhabits the region is of Andean migrant origin.

The MAS State has probably been the largest State in Bolivian history in terms of both its material structure and its influence on society. As I pointed out earlier, its emergence historically responds to a national narrative based on the popular and the “indigenous” that makes it being considered a leftist state until now. In this sense, it seems to me that the challenge for the Bolivian left today is to succeed in disassociating itself from MAS in order to offer a parallel version that takes into account both the emptying of political signifiers to which I referred and the limits to which certain identity policies have reached, especially those centered on ethnicity. I am not saying that ethnic political identity should be banished from the categorical repertoire of the left, but it seems to me that it should be repoliticized in new and creative ways. In this sense, a leftist political project in Bolivia cannot be understood without its links to the MAS State and the mark it is leaving on national history. I do not believe, as a certain culturalist left believes, that it is a matter of taking up the MAS project again from its origins back in 2005. To think that this is possible is to ignore the historical logic and is to not take into account that the mark left by the MAS State during its 15 years of government is today indelible. What is at stake, it seems to me, is to overcome MAS through the renewal of the social fabric on which it is based. And that will only be possible if the left begins to work now in view of future electoral processes, those of five years from now or even those of ten years from now.

The US Election and the Perils of Lesser Evilism

By: November 2, 2020
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In 2015, in the UK, Ed Miliband (Labour candidate) lost in a General Election to David Cameron (Conservative). Miliband’s politics were a form of rehashed centrism with the odd slightly more radical policy thrown in but he was very much a candidate of the establishment (in as much as he was prepared to continue the economic policies of austerity). In the weeks and months before the election, the majority of the people on the left used the lesser evil stratagem – that is to say, they argued that, despite his flaws, Miliband was better than Cameron (certainly true) and if we voted him into power we might be able to pull him more to the left (debatable). In the event Milliband lost because of his lukewarm politics, because he simply couldn’t provide any kind of credible or definitive alternative to the politics of the status-quo.

But in the wake of that defeat, the space was opened up for something which broke with the political consensus and austerity economics. The Corbyn movement. In his early days, Jeremy Corbyn was everything that Miliband was not. Miliband had been an awkward speaker, a distinctive nasal honk married to the type of glib soundbite which was enough to make you cringe. Corbyn, on the other hand, was slower and more deliberate, but his words carried the weight of raw feeling, rather than the sense of having been crafted by the mechanics of a Public Relations team.

And Corbyn could speak with pathos and authenticity, precisely because what he was bringing to light were genuine social truths; it was true that the bankers had ravaged the economy in wolfish and predatory fashion, and it was also true that the poorest and most vulnerable – the immigrants, the disabled, public-sector workers and those who eked out a living in the precarious economy – had been demonized and decimated, sacrificed at the altar of high-finance and the power of privilege. Corbyn for the first time, and on the back of a growing social movement, articulated a different political vision; one which was about recognizing the essential labor which was provided by those at the bottom, the importance of immigration both economically and culturally, and finally a sense that perhaps the real parasites were not those claiming benefits at the bottom, but those looting the economy at the top via the billions and billions which were being syphoned through tax-havens.

Corbyn’s movement was closed down, in ways which were both brutal and insidious. But I think that had Miliband attained victory in 2015, had the ‘lesser evil’ tactic had succeeded – then the Corbyn movement would have never have been born in the first place. Instead the left would have mounted their energies getting behind a center-ground candidate, and their radicalism would have been absorbed by the parliamentary machine, rather than being able to pose a significant challenge to business as usual. Would they have succeeded in pulling the Milliband administration radically to the left? If the five years of Milliband’s stewardship of the Labour Party were anything to go by, it seems unlikely to say the least.

And this brings us to the question of the upcoming US election. The argument against voting for Biden, against voting for ‘the lesser evil’ is not simply an argument in which the political differences between Trump and Biden are absolved, whereby one simply says that they are both establishment figures and therefore just as bad as each other. For what it’s worth, I think Trump is considerably worse than Biden – most significantly in as much as his presidency has helped mobilize far right groups across the US, groups such as the KKK and other fringe elements whose activities have spilled over into murderous violence on repeated occasions. But the argument against ‘lesser evilism’ does not depend on affirming some kind of moral equivalence between Trump and Biden. Rather it depends on showing that if we, on the left, push to channel our forces and our support into the Biden campaign, we simultaneously end up narrowing the horizons of the future; that is to say, we end up closing the space in which new forms of campaigning and political mobilizations can be created. We end up reducing the possibility of the type of genuine political alternative which might really challenge the Trumps of this world.

Of course, there is a sense in which the Democratic Party has always functioned this way. By situating itself as the only possible alternative to the worst corruptions of establishment power as represented by the Republican Party – it also became a conduit through which building social and political pressure in society at large could be diffused and the established order can be more effectively maintained. In the words of Malcolm X, this ostensible opposition between the two major parties allowed the ruling classes to show the voter a ‘growling wolf’ precisely so that ‘he flees into the open jaws of the smiling fox’.

Under the rubric of ‘moderation’, the Democratic Party was able to achieve the grisly honor of being the first political regime in history to have unleashed nuclear holocaust, bombing Japanese cities and annihilating the lives of hundreds of thousands. In that period too, the party was also responsible for organizing concentration camps to intern Japanese-US citizens on US soil. In addition, the same ‘moderate’ organization was responsible for escalating the conflict in Vietnam to a shrieking apex, while war in the time of Obama encompassed Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Lydia, Afghanistan and Iraq as the dronemeister extraordinaire brought smooth, automated death to thousands of men, women and children, courtesy of the latest sleek, gleaming military technology purring through the skies. When I talk to ardent Democrats who consider themselves progressives, who locate themselves to the left on the political spectrum, I am often tempted to ask them if there is any atrocity the Party could commit which might in some way stymie their loyalty to it. Based on its foreign policy record thus far, it is hard to imagine.

Somehow, then, the party has managed to maintain the façade of progressivism, and it is this – one feels – which allows it to absorb and annul the possibilities of developing more radical political alternatives. The Party is ‘radical’ enough to allow the presence of an AOC or a Bernie Sanders in its ranks, i.e. someone with a somewhat more progressive agenda – but at the same time, the grinding internal mechanics of the party bureaucracy means that if such a candidate gets close to the leadership of the party they will automatically be closed down from above – by the superdelegates at the top who have the ability to nominate candidates irrespective of the way voting patterns on the ground dictate. In practice, such an elite layer is naturally calibrated to secure the interests of the elite candidate over and against the political outsider; in 2016, for example, ‘many superdelegates came out early in support of Hillary Clinton, a fact that caused Sanders to claim that the Democratic Party powers-that-be were manipulating the system… Sanders and his supporters thought her early endorsements from so many superdelegates might have swayed primary voters.’

But it is not just the radicalism of individuals which the mechanics of the party machine have evolved to quash. In the depression era, the US Communist Party – no doubts driven by the same lesser evil stratagem – worked to weld the support of the most militant workers to the Democratic Party, and in so doing thwarted the development of an independent labor party which could have emerged on a mass basis and with genuine social roots in the working classes. A generation before, at the end of the nineteenth century, a radical party had indeed emerged (the Populist Party) with a left-wing agrarian program which clamored for a more democratic political system in and through the direct election of senators, restrictions on the railway barons through federal regulation, aid to small farmers and laborers along with legal measures to protect them from rapacious corporate interests. Ultimately, however, the growth of the party was stunted, first by its support for the Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan in the election of 1896, and then by its assimilation into the Democratic Party more broadly; a fusion which extinguished the radical flame of the party, and left its more militant members beached in terms of an isolated rump.

But there is yet another way in which the ‘lesser evilism’ argument in favor of a vote for the Democrats is problematic. It posits a rather mechanical opposition between the Biden-led Democratic Party and Trump’s Republicans – the only expedient and realistic way to defeat the latter is to back the former. But in so doing, such an argument fails to stress the symbiotic connection which exists between the two political parties. Trump did not win in 2016 because he came to power on the back of a broad right-wing social movement which was then translated into a vast hike in the number of votes in the electoral ballet. In actual fact, in as much as Trump ‘won’ at all (he didn’t, let us remember, gain the greatest amount of votes) he did only marginally better than McCain – the Republican nominee – had done almost a decade before. Trump won 46.1% percent of the popular vote, while McCain, for his part, had won 45.7% in 2008. The real difference was on the side of the Democrats themselves: in 2008 Obama had won 52.9% of the popular vote, while in 2016 Clinton only managed to procure 48.2%. In other words, the Democrat’s vote share had fallen by almost four million votes (and that is before we take into account the increase in population between 2008 and 2016).

To say the same – Trump won because the Democrats ended up hemorrhaging votes. And the reason for this is little difficult to surmise. The eight years of Democrat administration which preceded the Trump victory were the years in which Obama’s abstract and facile exhortations toward ‘hope’ and ‘change’ were extinguished in the fiery wastelands of the battle-scarred Middle East, while at home Obama had time and time again confirmed himself as Wall Street’s man and a fervent friend to big business – whether it meant shoring up the commitment to bail out the banks, or a very public PR stunt in which he took a sip from a (filtered) glass of Flint water in an attempt to advertise the benevolence of the private company that had been poisoning Flint’s water supply through the lead contamination which was leaking out of substandard piping. The sheer, sleek corporate quality to Obama’s neoliberalism and its utter indifference to the lives of the poor now left a bitter taste in the mouth, the type of which Flint’s population were all too familiar with.

More broadly speaking, however, the political system itself has narrowed down; the ability of the party in opposition to offer up a genuine economic alternative to the economics of neoliberalism is almost non-existent, such has the Democratic political machine been saturated by the campaign donations of big business. Indeed Biden himself, at the halfway point of 2020, boasted 106 billionaire donors to Trump’s 93. As absurd as it is, Trump is able to advertise himself as a political outsider, as an anti-establishment figure for precisely this reason – precisely because the Democrats are more and more seen to have been bought and paid for by Wall Street. Trump’s own rapacious brand of neoliberalism is packaged in a right-wing authoritarianism promoting the politics of the ‘strong leader’ and a state which draws upon the more antiquated and organic values of a religious nationalism which nostalgically looks back to the spirit of a ‘founding people’ (read white Protestants). This, in turn, acts as a dog-whistle to mobilize the more rabid and racist sections of the lower-middle classes along with considerable sections of the financial elite who appreciate the more prosaic economic motivations of Trumpism in terms of tax relief for the most wealthy. In the words of the philosopher Katie Terezakis, Trumpism represents a form of ‘romantic anti-capitalist ideology’ which, in reality, ‘only further privileges the capitalist elite it degrades in oratory alone.’

A similar trajectory has been achieved elsewhere; the most infamous examples being Bolsonaro in Brazil and Orbán in Hungary. In these cases too, we are made witness to a creeping authoritarianism which is registered in and through the appeal to a religious-nationalism with a pronounced racial inflection, one which privileges white skin at the expense of the ‘outsider’. And in these cases too, the right wing administration has come into power – not on the back of a powerful far-right social movement which developed along fascist lines (despite ideological pretensions to the contrary) – but rather by having stepped into the void left by the previous administration, the so called ‘left’ or ‘alternative’ major party in the Democrat mold which had nevertheless signed up to years of neoliberal, austerity economics.

What has been termed the ‘mounting tide of authoritarian neoliberalism’, then, is only conceivable in as much as the mainstream parties of ‘the left’ or ‘center-ground’ – the alternative which parliamentary democracy has come to pose – have rendered themselves almost completely defunct in terms of providing any kind of political or economic program which helps facilitate the interests of the poor majority. When one insists on a voting tactic which consistently privileges the ‘lesser evil’ at a time when liberal democracy on a world scale appears to be entering into a terminal crisis – one fails to go to the root of the matter; i.e. to understand that the rise of a figure like Trump is symbiotically connected to the failure of the Democrats to provide any type of credible opposition in the context of the crisis of parliamentary democracy which has played out against the backdrop of a global neoliberalism.

Or to put it in another way – trying to get the left to marshal its forces behind the Democrats and Biden, not only narrows the prospects of developing genuinely left forms of political organization – moreover, such a strategy actively works to create the perfect conditions in which Trumpism itself can metastasize. Yes, Biden can prevent Trump from gaining a second term, but in so doing he merely prepares the ground for next time – another Trump, Trump mark II, a more effective, younger model. Ultimately, there is little to be gained for the left in encouraging the vote for the late-Joe Biden and his zombified brand of corporate politics, his stale empty slogans, the stench of blood and oil wafting in from distant, decimated lands. You needn’t attach yourself to these kinds of politics and policies – however indirectly, however much you are holding your nose. To paraphrase a great revolutionist, isn’t it time we let the dead bury the dead?

American Election Amidst Turmoil and Travail

By: November 2, 2020
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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. presidential election is taking place in unprecedented conditions. There is a surge of coronavirus overwhelming hospitals in several states; protests against police violence in others; and intimidation of voters by armed men in a few. In the country’s large cities department stores have boarded up their windows and hired security guards to prevent looting and arson. The Republican Party has brought dozens of lawsuits in the states (each of which has different voting laws) to try to suppress the vote, since large numbers of voters generally favor the Democrats.

While the final day of the election is November 3, because of an enormous increase in early voting, mail-in voting, and drive through voting, it may take days to count the vote. If the vote is close, there is also the possibility of the election going to the courts and ending up in the Supreme Court, now with six conservative justices to three liberals.

The contest itself between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic Party challenger Joseph Biden has become a referendum on the coronavirus, now in the midst of the greatest upsurge so far. The United States now has about ten million total cases, 100,000 new cases each day, and 1,000 deaths per day. President Trump’s top aide announced, “We’re not going to control the virus.” He promised instead to quickly develop a vaccine and therapies and medicines to treat the disease.

Trump has been holding massive packed and mostly unmasked rallies in several key states where he tells his followers that the virus is disappearing. A Stanford University Study found that 18 Trump rallies had led to 30,000 COVID infections and 700 deaths. Trump has called public health officials “idiots” and he claims that doctors are reporting deaths due to coronavirus in order to increase their salaries. On the other hand, Biden promises that if elected he will work with the scientists to bring the pandemic under control.

Protests against police racism and violence have also become a campaign issue. Trump has condemned Black Lives Mattes as a violent movement, calling for law and order and support for the police. When on October 26 Philadelphia police were called because of a domestic dispute, they found Walter Wallace Jr., a mentally ill man, wielding a knife. When he moved toward the police, they shot him several times, killing him. Thousands of Black people came out to protest in what became violent conflicts between the police and the community, accompanied by riots and looting. Trump declared the protests “the most recent consequence of the Liberal Democrats war against the police.” Biden has recognized the racism present in the society and in police departments and has called for reform, though he opposes “defunding the police,” the principal demand of the recent anti-racist demonstrations.

Voting is taking place not only amidst the virus, but also during the continuing economic depression with an official unemployment rate of 7.9 percent (in reality higher because of uncounted discouraged workers), that is, some 12.5 million jobless. Nevertheless, to avoid COVID and to ensure that their votes are cast and counted, thousands line up to vote early in cities around the country, wearing masks and keeping social distance. Some 95 million have already voted and more than 150 million are expected to vote, a record turnout. My wife, my children, and I voted at the Brooklyn Museum in a line of thousands that circled the enormous building three times to wait from two to four hours to make their voices heard. When night fell at the museum, volunteers distributed pizza and drinks were to the patient voters waiting in line.

The count may go on for days or even weeks, and between November 3 and January 20 when the next president takes office, we expect widespread protests and fear violence will erupt. Pro-Trump militias are mobilizing to ensure his election. The social movements and labor unions are organizing to defend the vote and democracy and to continue the fight for social justice.

 

 

 

The Red Herring of Liberal Representational Feminism

By: November 1, 2020
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From the appointment of Justice Barrett, to the silencing of Malala Yousafzai’s socialism, and women’s leadership in the military industrial complex, individualistic, representational feminism proves both inaccurate and dangerous.

The Appointment of Amy Coney Barrett

Since Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in as Supreme Court Justice, another wave of disagreement over the goalposts of feminism has emerged. Some recognize her appointment as a victory for women, some view it as an assault on women. This debate has focused largely on Justice Barrett herself, and whether she can or should be considered a feminist. It is worth examining, however, the general celebration of representational feminism because it so often obfuscates the true material and relational issues at hand.

One of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s most poignant and memorable quotes addresses the lack of women in governance: “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made.” She’s right, of course, women do indeed belong where decisions are being made, not least in part because political decisions that impact women or women’s bodies are all too often made by men. This quote should always come with the context of Justice Ginsburg’s record of defending women’s rights. On its own, it suggests a representational feminism that would recognize any woman in leadership as an inherent victory. It should perhaps come as no surprise that following the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, conservatives hailed the moment as a win for women, and decried those who did not. Liberals have displayed a similar perspective, as seen in the individualistic feminism of Hillary Clinton.

Additionally, many responses to the first presidential debate suggested that the debate demonstrated a need for women in politics. Among these takes were jokes that two female candidates would spend time complimenting each other’s clothes and hair or would incessantly apologize back and forth if there were confusion over who was meant to speak first. It’s clearly condescending to say two women presidential candidates would use debate time to discuss their outfits, but those sorts of lines were at least intended to be humorous. The problem really goes beyond sexist jokes; it seems like some people really believe two women would inherently have a friendlier, smoother debate.

To treat an entire gender as monolithically humble and nurturing is both patronizing and inaccurate, and we should not conflate the need for women in power with the idea that women in power would be an inherent improvement. We certainly do see some female politicians, like New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, successfully empowering values that are traditionally associated with femininity – compassion, patience, emotion – but she is also assertive, strong, and bold. Additionally, there’s no reason why men couldn’t be compassionate, patient, and emotional; these traits are certainly societally stigmatized for men, but one way to counter that would be to encourage our male elected leaders to demonstrate values like empathy and generosity. So, the problem here isn’t that typically feminine traits are demeaning – masculine traits such as aggression, competitiveness, and toughness are clearly given too much credence in our politics. The problem is the underlying assumption that ‘women’ is a homogeneous category from which any candidate would be sensitive and kind. The reality is that some women would, and some wouldn’t. The same holds true for men. It is worth noting, however, that given their hierarchical status, white men certainly have greater latitude in terms of acceptable demeanors. Women, particularly women of color, face oppressive and demeaning criticism when they display almost any kind of personality. The recent racist commentary on Senator Kamala Harris by Peggy Noonan is only one example of the litany of assaults Senator Harris faces as a woman of color. Certainly, more diverse representation is needed to help break down these barriers – but pure representation cannot do it alone. It is simultaneously true that women in leadership positions should not be subject to criticism on the basis of their gender or skin color and that representational feminism is insufficient as a metric of success.

The distinction between ‘we need more women in politics’ and ‘we need more traits traditionally associated with femininity in politics,’ may seem trivial, but the implications here are neither innocuous nor pedantic. It’s a dangerous mistake to assume that American politics would inherently improve if we had two female presidential candidates; likewise, it’s a dangerous mistake to assume Justice Barrett’s appointment will improve the Supreme Court. These assumptions play into a broader pattern of uncritically celebrating women’s achievements in male-dominated circles, when the better approach would be a nuanced recognition that it’s good to have more diverse leadership in all sectors, but it’s equally if not more important to implement systemic improvements for marginalized groups, including women.

Promoting Liberal Feminism

In October 2012, Malala Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban because she vocalized support for the right for girls to be educated. Since then, she has, rightfully, become a global inspiration. Through her synthesis of intelligence, compassion, and bravery, she has become perhaps the most recognized advocate for girls’ education, and the youngest ever Nobel Prize laureate. What is less recognized in America is her advocacy for socialism in Pakistan; in a message sent to Pakistan’s International Marxist Tendency, she wrote “I am convinced socialism is the only answer, and I urge all comrades to struggle to a victorious conclusion. Only this will free us from the chains of bigotry and exploitation.” Yet the selective publicity about Malala in both the U.S. and the U.K. would have her appear as a beacon for liberal feminism and foreign intervention. Malala also powerfully advised then-President Obama to end drone strikes: “I also expressed my concerns that drone strikes are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this part of the meeting was omitted in the corresponding White House statement.

If our government were thoroughly committed to helping other women and girls like Malala, it certainly would not launch destabilizing and lethal military interventions to the very obvious detriment of the safety of women, who suffer disproportionately in destabilized, violent circumstances. This would not mean ignoring global gender issues; Malala has said herself that the driving cause of inequalities and violation of human rights is poverty. If the U.S. government wanted to, it could take substantial steps to decrease global poverty through, for example, foreign debt cancellation, investigating illicit trade, and more ambitiously capping carbon emissions that have directly harmful payoff elsewhere in the world. But it is far more convenient instead to select individual examples of successful women in America as signs that we’re achieving gender equality, and to associate the struggle for the rights of women on the global scale with the political system of American liberalism. While Malala’s socialism has thus far not been a driving focus of her activism or writing, ending global poverty certainly has been, and the selective coverage of her ideas has silenced this component of her voice.

Liberal, individualistic feminism is often employed as an excuse for U.S. imperialist aggression. This brand of feminism is cast as a value of democracy, apparently free from the procedures of democracy, as unbridled executive war powers allow our government to launch military campaigns without consulting the people whom it represents. Of course, war zones, and their concomitant instability and impoverishment, do not implement systemic improvements for women.

Women in the Military Industrial Complex

The military industrial complex presents another example of uncritically celebrating representational feminism. Raytheon Technologies Corp., the third largest U.S. defense contractor by revenue, has partnered with Girl Scouts of the USA to encourage girls “to explore computer science careers and realize their potential to help make the world a better, safer place.” Earlier this year, Raytheon proposed to expand its manufacturing of weapons in Saudi Arabia as part of a $500 million sale of precision-guided munitions. The weapons would foreseeably be used by the Saudi-led coalition in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

Currently, four of America’s five biggest defense contractors, which include weapons manufacturers, are led by women. A Politico article celebrating women in this a win for women in leadership and women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). In the article, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson attributes the growing number of women in military leadership to their status as mothers, saying “If I ask everyone in this room to think about the most protective person you know in your life, someone who would do anything to keep you safe, half the people in this room would think about their moms. We are the protectors; that’s what the military does. We serve to protect the rest of you, and that’s a very natural place for a woman to be.” Of course, according to Francis Fukuyama, motherhood is also a reason why women would be more peaceful and cooperative. Women should be able to succeed without being associated with motherhood. That association is a needless promulgation of restrictive gender roles: we can applaud women as mothers, and people of any gender as parents, without assuming that all women everywhere embody motherly traits at all times. Yet it is seemingly all too easy to collapse women into stereotypical categories. The fact that ‘motherhood’ is a malleable enough rhetorical tool that it has been used as an explanation for women being tough and women being soft speaks for itself.

Moreover, the US military continues to use and sell weapons that devastate communities, disproportionately destabilizing the lives of women in foreign countries, including Yemen; in other words, there has been neither normative nor empirical changes in our defense industry now that more women are in power. It’s a painful and tragic irony that Raytheon encourages girls in America to explore computer science while enabling a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of children in Yemen.

Feminism under Capitalism

The values of capitalism implicitly promulgate this reductive, representational feminism through treating people as atomistic individuals in competition with one another. Instead of viewing rights of women as a purely procedural concern, wherein a woman’s ability to be a Supreme Court Justice is inherently empowering to all women, we ought to employ a relational and substantive lens. We must recognize that our relations with one another are constitutive of our personal rights, and that our rights and freedoms therefore require substantive equality. In that sense, socialism does not run counter to liberty, but rather in tandem with it.

Crucially, the takeaways from this complicated issue should not include the idea that women and non-binary people ought to be subject to more scrutiny than their male counterparts. We can expect and demand better representation from men in leadership positions. In the weeks since the passing of Justice Ginsburg, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey has been a vocal advocate for reproductive rights and women’s health, standing in stark juxtaposition to Justice Barrett. While he is not the only man with a feminist platform, this kind of advocacy should be far more commonplace.

What do the framing of Malala and women in the military industrial complex have to do with the appointment of Justice Barrett? The fact that the appointment of Justice Barrett is not a win for women should be seen as part of a wider constellation of unduly narrow, capitalist, representative feminism. Likewise, the 2018 appointment Gina Haspel, former chief of a torture black site in Thailand, as Director of the CIA was not a win for women. It was a win for Gina Haspel. And we should not limit out understanding of women, or of feminism, to blindly applauding individualistic triumphs of individual women. To do so not only reduces a vastly diverse range of personalities to one trope but also paves the way for an oversimplified vision of feminism.

If we want leaders and decision makers who embody stereotypically feminine traits, we should elect people based on their values and irrespective of their gender. If we want to tackle women’s rights on both the domestic and global scale, we should consider a radical overhaul of patriarchal capitalism.

To quote Cynthia Enloe, “feminism is the pursuit of deep, deep justice for women in ways that change the behaviors of both women and men, and really change our notions of what justice looks like.”

QAnon and On and On

By: October 31, 2020
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Let me venture a prediction about next week that also applies to the months and years to follow: At no point will Donald J. Trump order the arrest of an elitist network of cannibalistic pedophile Satanists.

These are parlous times; any unqualified declaration about the course of events to come verges on recklessness. Still, categorically and for the record: no elite cannibalistic pedophile Satanists will be detained, much less prosecuted. Not one!

People in the QAnon movement have been waiting for the president to do so for a while now, of course. His supposed commitment to take down the sinister network was first announced on conspiracy theory message boards in late 2017. And were Trump to see it through now, his entire campaign staff would be deliriously happy, whatever the scheduling difficulties. No more impressive October surprise can be imagined. It would push COVID out of the news cycle for a long time. It’s hard to see a downside, really. But it’s not going to happen.

Perhaps “the Storm” — as the day of reckoning has been dubbed by the mysterious Trump loyalist known only as Q — is on the agenda for the president’s second term? That seems imprudent, especially given how tight the race is in some places. Fulfilling the Q scenario would mean Trump could lose both the popular and the Electoral College votes and still remain in office for about as long as he wanted, pretty much by popular acclaim. Putting a bunch of Satanic pedophile cannibals behind bars would be the ultimate game changer.

But — sorry to belabor the point — it is not going to happen. Tom Hanks, Lady Gaga and Bill Gates do not, in fact, quaff an elixir prepared using the adrenal secretions of children tortured to death for their gratification. No video was found on the laptop of an aide to Hillary Clinton showing them tearing the flesh off a girl’s face and using it as a mask. No one will be arrested for these atrocities, because they do not happen and there is nobody to arrest. But as an old principle in American social science has it, when people “define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” The bloody fantasies about demonic “elitists” have already crept into the delirium of American political life.

At least one open QAnon-ist is all but certain to take a seat in the next Congress. A recent survey found about half of Trump supporters interviewed agreed “that Democrats run an elite child sex-trafficking ‘cabal’ and that President Trump is making efforts to dismantle it” — although not all of them had heard of QAnon. An article in the July issue of CTC Sentinel, published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, states, “QAnon is arguably no longer simply a fringe conspiracy theory but an ideology that has demonstrated its capacity to radicalize to violence individuals at an alarming speed.” (The article includes five case studies.)

At the same time, Donald J. Trump will never meet the QAnon movement’s expectations of him, as even some fervent QAnon adherents must suspect by now. (Rare is the apocalyptic mentality that cannot work around cognitive dissonance.) No matter who is sworn in on Inauguration Day, a sizable cohort of American citizens will continue spending a lot of time vividly picturing horrendous depravities and building up violent hatred at the thought of how much the sinister elites are enjoying themselves.

It is a political community dedicated to speaking about the unspeakable and to imagining the unimaginable — an effort that often becomes addictive and amounts to very bad mental hygiene at the least. Efforts to debunk QAnon as a deranged revival of anti-Semitic fantasies (which, in turn, resemble the horror stories that culturally conservative Romans once circulated about the early Christians) will do only so much good. You can’t talk an addict out of an addiction or a paranoid out of the dangerous place his mind has taken him. I don’t know what “hitting bottom” might look like for the QAnon movement, but I suspect it has a long way yet to fall.

Joshua Gunn’s strange and insightful book Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering (University of Chicago Press) manages to be very pertinent to the phenomenon without ever mentioning it. The author is an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Texas at Austin; his approach to the mass-mediated politics of the last few years combines classical rhetorical analysis (he identifies the standard Trump tropes in terms that Quintilian cataloged in Rome not quite 2,000 years ago) with Lacanian discourse analysis and an occasional borrowing from the not-particularly-trendy cultural theorist Paul Virilio. The chances of Gunn serving as a talking head on MSNBC are approximately nil, but he approaches the Trump phenomenon from angles much more interesting than yet another reminder of how well the characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder apply.

The angles Gunn plays are oblique, but here’s a rough overview of his approach. Traditionally the field of rhetoric focused on analyzing the conditions of, and cultivating the skills required for, persuasive oratory: establishing the speaker’s authority or credibility in presenting a given message to the public; finding language suitable for a given audience; framing an argument or a narrative (or both) in ways likely to elicit assent, interest, an urge to take action, etc. Rhetorical studies now encompass every form of communication, and the stock of theories and methods is much expanded. But some of the concepts and categories originally pertinent to, say, giving a speech to an ancient jury remain applicable to a culture of total media saturation.

One of Trump’s preferred rhetorical moves is occultatio: introducing a topic by announcing you will not discuss it. Examples “are not difficult to come by,” Gunn writes, “because they are apparently compulsively manufactured. For example, after a debate in which a Fox News moderator questioned him about his misogynistic sensibilities, Trump tweeted, ‘I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead, I will only call her a lightweight reporter!’”

This sort of thing counts as eloquent only by the standards of a 12-year-old bully, but Gunn finds Trump relying on occultatio as more than a reliable weapon in his arsenal of zingers. Disavowal is something like the standard template for his entire political approach: “a patterned disposition toward others” representing “an above-the-law sovereignty” that expresses both aggression and “an incessant denial of responsibility.” Every rally, press conference, and tweet from Trump carries an embedded message that Gunn paraphrases: “I am not going to speak about the reality I affirm by denying it, or I know what I am doing is bad, but I am going to do it anyway.”

What looks like a trope proves really to be a set of mind games. The ancient rhetorical theorists made fine distinctions among the subspecies of occultatio, which has given their field a reputation for dry taxonomy. But the question of how and why a message is persuasive with a given audience is in large part a matter of social psychology — of how “a patterned disposition toward others” connects the speaker, the listener and the larger public.

Trump’s political career is too often understood as the successful application of the art of the grift to a much larger market than real estate. Gunn instead returns to the venerable question of how an effective rhetorical performance implies complex affinities between speaker, audience and occasion. His tools for making this analysis draw heavily on Lacanian psychological categories (requiring, among other things, diagrams to explain) and his approach to the idiom is somewhat playful — meaning that quotation here would be asking for trouble. But aspects of Gunn’s argument are familiar from the work of other cultural critics.

To wit: in both style and content, Trump’s rhetoric is congruent with a couple of trends or dynamics in effect throughout the industrialized world, namely: 1) the weakening or effective disappearance of widely acknowledged and implicitly legitimated forms of authority and 2) a need for speed — i.e. the tendency for communication, transportation, economic transactions and so forth to accelerate. The effect of either process (the distribution of costs and benefits) is not uniform — and calling the result “polarization” underestimates the layers of strain involved, both psychic and social.

That sounds grim. But human beings are, in Freud’s terms, polymorphously perverse: able to derive all sorts of pleasures (not just erotic) from the most diverse and improbable stimuli, and prone to inventing new ones all the time. (An effort to which Silicon Valley, for one, applies itself constantly.) The bully’s enjoyment of his power to terrify is matched only by the various pleasure available to his friends at seeing him do so.

Seen from a certain angle, then, Donald J. Trump looks like the consummation of all these trends: always ready to denounce expertise and established authority while no less frequently claiming to embody both; able to rev up the news cycle to insane speeds while spending most of his time watching television; able to cultivate an adoring public by mostly avoiding everyone else. Add to that a political career based on expressing racist sentiments while claiming to be the least racist person around, and you have the makings of a rhetorical genius of sorts.

To be clear, QAnon was not one of his brainstorms. In a way, it is a form of Trump fan fiction: a way for part of his base to sustain a nonexistent but emotionally intense connection with him while: 1) imagining scenes worthy of the Marquis de Sade and 2) enjoying the pleasures of violent indignation. I was surprised that QAnon went unmentioned in the book, so I asked Joshua Gunn about it. The short answer is that QAnon only came to his attention after he finished writing the book. But it’s been on his mind since then, as we discussed in an email exchange, quoted here by permission.

“QAnon is really the newest iteration of a centuries-old, blood-libel fantasy used to discriminate against, and ultimately harm, Jewish people,” he wrote. The resemblance has been much discussed, though by no means are QAnon supporters all aware of it. “What’s different in our time is the media infrastructure and speed of communication, which makes the space and time for reflection harder,” Gunn continued. “Wired and wifi life is geared toward reaction and stimulation — hyper cognition — not deep thought or deliberation: click and read this, react to that video (film yourself reacting and post it), follow this link into the rabbit hole, and so on. Images, sounds and words are reduced to an almost phatic core.”

The term “phatic” applies to forms of communication which acknowledge a connection between people — saying “hey” or giving a nod of recognition, for example. The spread of QAnon materials may owe as much to the phatic pleasures of sharing than to firm belief. “For many who support Trump and/or QAnon conspiracy,” Gunn told me, “there is a kind of detachment from consensus reality and an obliviousness toward consequences. It seems to me QAnon and anti-masking activism are of a piece, both reflect a kind of death defying investment (as if there are two more lives to play [in a video game]).”

As for Trump’s nods and winks of support to the QAnon milieu while denying any knowledge of the theory, Gunn sees it as likely a variant on the mode of disavowal embodied in the occultatio trope. “There’s evidence to suggest he does not believe it yet references it anyway,” Gunn wrote. “Doing or believing something you know is wrong, not allowed, against the rules, and so on, is the decision rule for perversity. If anons knew the conspiracy was silly yet promoted it anyway, that would be structurally perverse.”

Gunn’s use of the term “perversion,” while ultimately deriving from Freud, is overlaid with Lacanian connotations that I have (however perversely) avoided discussing here, though it is in fact central to the book. Maybe that will inspire some readers to look for it.

As for the history and future of QAnon — which, in an accelerated and viral culture, can only be expected to mutate sooner or later — Gunn sums it up well: “The only perversion I can sense so far is Trump’s handling of it.”

 

This essay was originally published by Inside Higher Ed and is reprinted by permission.

Fighting for teachers unions that speak back to power, defend students and social justice

By: October 30, 2020
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Steve Zeluck, in New Politics, Winter 1968

The fears, hardships, and dangers students, teachers, parents, and community have experienced in decisions made about school reopenings in the pandemic, in the shadow of continuing anti-racism protests,  have illuminated  the prescience of Steve Zeluck’s analysis about  the need for “self-mobilization of teachers, students and community to bring about serious, constructive changes in the educational system.”

Writing in 1968 in New Politics about the brutal strikes of the United Federation of Teachers, representing New York City teachers, over community control and the “disruptive child,”  Zeluck criticized the UFT’s actions as “a blow against teacher unionism,” pitting teachers against the Black movement “determined to win a measure of the power so long denied it.” Zeluck observed the UFT (and AFT, the national union it controls)  had two choices: Aligning with the Black community, demanding justice, entering into “genuine and close cooperation with the insurgent forces of the ghetto around a wide range of issues, forging an alliance against the establishment whose interest in educational improvement or the welfare of the ghetto is minimal” – or forming “an unacknowledged bloc with the status quo and the educational bureaucracy against the ghetto community (and ultimately against the students).”

Zeluck’s article contains too much to summarize, too much from which we can learn at this moment, as school reopenings have become a point of political conflict on a national level, as parent, student, and teachers’ rights to have healthy, safe, equitable schools have been subordinated to the bipartisan consensus to put the economy and profit over human need.  However, his conclusions are even truer today than they were in 1968: Teachers unions need to “not only face the facts of the monstrous conditions in the schools” but take the “lead in exposing them and placing responsibility for them where it belongs, with the real decision makers and wielders of power—those who determine the allocation of resources in our society.”  Unions need to consult “with the community in drawing up contract demands and in planning joint campaigns and united actions,”  and to “stop temporizing with the AFL-CIO and demand that the Federation launch a real campaign against racism within and without its ranks.”

Here’s a special pitch because we are in the last weeks of our annual fund appeal:  Zeluck’s analysis is more pressing than ever for teachers unions throughout this country. His article deserves to be more easily available to readers. Towards that end the all-volunteer New Politics editorial board is working towards adding the journal’s earliest issues to our website. Those issues contain a priceless trove of material about labor and politics in the 1960s and 1970s, about the inseparability of democracy and socialism in the past and present. To augment our online archive, as well as to publish our print issue and maintain our website, we need your financial support.  You can make a tax-deductible contribution by clicking here.  Subscriptions also provide us with continuing support. Do both, knowing you will find analysis here you won’t elsewhere.

 

Why Isn’t Sexual Violence Being Talked About in This Election?

By: October 29, 2020
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With allegations of sexual harassment against both Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden, and President Donald Trump, with 26 alleged victims of sexual violence having come forward, this is an obvious topic that needs a ton of light shed upon it.  For every 1,000 sexual assaults on women, 995 of those predators will walk free. So, why is it that this topic has been completely avoided during the election? Why is it that, in the year 2020, women still do not feel safe in the United States?

As a female, I can personally attest to the many times I have been at the end of inappropriate comments, unwanted touching, and work place sexual harassment, beginning at the age of 14 years old. In particular, I can relate to why so many are passionate about this subject, as I’ve been sexually assaulted myself. It was something I kept to myself  for two years. I did not speak of it to a soul. I told myself, like many victims, it didn’t really matter. I tried to downplay the entire experience, but carrying it alone took a toll on me. The shame was insurmountable. I felt so exposed, emotionally raw, and terribly embarrassed. I worried I would be looked at differently. I worried people would judge me for not coming forward sooner, which is why it is so common that survivors often do not come forward  until years later.

Society taught me that men assaulting women wasn’t a big deal, and nothing would be done. After all, our current President, former Presidents and lawmakers have been oppressing and violating women for years. They are the leaders and role models for not only our country, but the entire world. We are setting a dangerous global precedent. Complacency is not okay and enables rape culture.

One would think that with the Women’s Rights and #MeToo movements, sexual crimes would lessen. One would also assume that our government would pass legislation and criminal justice reform surrounding sexual violence. However, this has not happened. This predator mentality is now trickling from the top of society down into our school systems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 7.4% of high school students had been physically forced to have sex when they did not want to. My own teen daughter and her female friends, who themselves have had to combat unwanted sexual advances from classmates, think it’s funny to shame and harass girls. The statistics almost double for college, where 11.2% of all undergraduate and graduate students have been the victim of rape or sexual assault.

How can we be shocked when kids are subjected to a desensitized world, where congressman, senators and even Presidents, literally get away with rape and sexual harassment? Since 2017, over 90 allegations have been brought against state legislators.

To unravel a culture, you must first start at the top. Sexual predators come in the form of Republican, Democrat and all colors of the political rainbow.  Below are some accounts of state legislators’ sexual transgressions in the past few years.

  1. Hawaiian Representative Joseph Souki, a Democrat. He was a part of a settlement in 2018, for unwanted touching, kissing and sexual language towards several women. His slap on the wrist was a $5,000 fine to the state and a public apology. He also had to wait two years before seeking public office again. He is again eligible for office.
  2. Republican Idaho Representative, Brandon Hixon. He resigned in 2017, and then killed himself in 2018, for being caught molesting two girls, including a young female family member
  3. Matt Manweller, a Washington state representative and a Republican. He resigned in January 2019 for having a relationship with a high school student in the 1990s and for being fired from Central Washington University in August 2018, for sexual harassment.
  4. Brian Ellis, Republican representative for Pennsylvania. He drugged a staffer’s drink while at a hotel bar, and then sexually assaulted her. The Dauphin County District Attorney at the time, despite admitting a crime was committed, decided not to press charges.
  5. Ruben Kihuen, a representative from  Nevada and a Democrat. It was proven that he groped women, put his hand up their skirts and kissed them against their will. He stated it was not rape so it was not a big deal. Despite this, he was still permitted to run for a city council seat in Las Vegas in 2019.
  6. Alcee Hastings, U.S. representative from  Florida and a Democrat. In 2012, Hastings was investigated for sexual harassment and employment retaliation. The House Committee on Ethics determined there was not enough evidence to remove Hastings from his seat. However, in 2014, a $220,000 settlement was paid, with taxpayer money, to the victim. Hastings is still in office and is up for re-election this year.

These are just six examples out of numerous accounts, though there are many more.

Between 1997 and 2017, $17 million dollars of taxpayers’ money went to settlements to keep legislators out of court and out of jail. The American people have been paying for the cover-ups of politicians for years. It is absolutely disgusting to think that the women who have been raped are paying their hard earnings in taxes to help government officials assault women without consequence. Currently, our Justice Department is spending American tax dollars to try and get Donald Trump out of a defamation law suit, concerning an Apprentice contestant he sexually assaulted.

Twenty five other women have also accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, including assault. This is in addition to his “on the record” public interviews demoralizing women, and minimizing rape, since the 1970s. Not only has President Trump never apologized or admitted guilt, he has called all his victims “liars.” He consistently defends himself with sexist comments, saying that the women that came forward were not attractive enough for him to consider assaulting. In a video that was released in 2016 by Access Hollywood,  Trump was interviewed and bragged about grabbing women’s genitals in 2005. In his exact words, he told anchorman Billy Bush, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything… grab them by the pussy.” When Trump was confronted, he denied all accusations, saying during his presidential campaign that he was going to sue everyone who accused him. To date, he has not tried to sue any of the women, and on the contrary, two of the women are suing him. As soon as he leaves office, these legal battles are waiting for him.

Here are but a few examples from the public records of Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct, prior to the 2016 election.

  1. Jessica Leeds: Came forward about Trump putting his hand up her skirt and groping her during a flight in the 1970s. She states she never came forward, as sexual harassment was common in those times. Just three years after the incident, she ran into Trump at a Gala in New York, where he approached her and called her a “c*nt.”
  2. Ivana Trump: Was recorded in a 1990 divorce deposition stating that Trump attacked and raped her in 1989, after a medical procedure she recommended to him, did not go according to plan. She later issued a statement saying she did not want any criminal charges pressed against him, and did not mean to construe it as rape.
  3. Kristin Anderson: Says that Trump grabbed her vagina under her skirt, in a club in the 1990’s in New York, without her consent.
  4. Jill Harth: States that in the 1990’s Donald Trump shoved her against a wall and put his hand up her skirt at the Mar-a-Lago resort. She sued him in 1997 for the assault and backing out of a business deal..
  5. Lisa Boyne: A health food business entrepreneur, told the Huffington Post that she attended a 1996 dinner with Trump and modeling agent John Casablancas during which several other women in attendance were forced to walk across a table in order to leave. As the women walked on the table, Boyne says that Trump looked up their skirts and commented on their underwear and genitals. Trump allegedly asked Boyne for her opinion on which of the women he should sleep with.
  6. Maria Billado and Victoria Hughs: Both participants in one of Trump’s teen pageants, recall Trump walking into the room while the teen girls were getting dressed. He did not walk back out but said, “Don’t worry, I’ve seen it all.” He later bragged on the Howard Stern show and was directly quoted saying: “I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant,” he said. “You know they’re standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”
  7. E. Jean Carroll: Carroll recounts Trump pushing her in a dressing room in the 1990s and raping her. Her head hit the wall hard and before she could fight, his pants were unzipped and his fingers and penis went inside her.
  8. Samantha Holvey: She recounted being a part of Trump’s pageant in 2006 and all the girls having to line up for Trump to inspect and ogle them. After this incident, the 20 year old, Southern Baptist college student said she had no interest in winning and felt the “dirtiest” she ever felt in her life.
  9. Summer Zervos: She was a contestant on The Apprentice and currently has a defamation lawsuit against Trump, as he says she lied about an alleged sexual assault. In 2007, while having a meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Zervos recounts: “He then grabbed my shoulder and began kissing me again very aggressively and placed his hand on my breast.” “I pulled back and walked to another part of the room. He then walked up, grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the bedroom. I walked out.” Zervos added that Trump thrust himself on her before she left the room.
  10. Alva Johnson: A former campaign staffer of Trump, has filed a federal lawsuit against the President for kissing her without permission at a Tampa Bay Rally in 2016.

It is hard enough to read these accounts, let alone fathom that they were committed by the Commander-in-Chief of the United State of America. These women are coming out and sharing their sensitive stories, despite knowing the backlash they will receive. They know money and power make President Trump and other politicians immune to the laws of our country.

To be fair, Joe Biden is no saint himself in the sexual allegations department. Most notably, Tara Reade has recounted her experience with Biden in 1993:“He’s talking to me and his hands are everywhere and everything is happening very quickly she recalled. “He was kissing me and he said, very low, “do you want to go somewhere else?” Reade said Biden penetrated her with his fingers before she was able to pull away. When she did, she says he appeared confused. ‘He looked at me kind of almost puzzled or shocked,” Reade told the New York Times.

For those who ask, “why did it take the victims so long to come forward?” To put it frankly, this country glorifies sexual assault. Even when these women did the hardest thing possible and spoke their truth, an accused rapist still became president. These women are someone’s daughters, wives, grandmothers, etc., not just statistics. They are real people who have experienced soul-crushing violence.

Will we remain silent as our society continues to perpetuate this cycle and send the message that a man has more rights over a woman’s body than she does herself? Political biases must be put aside. This has nothing to do with being Democrat or Republican or otherwise. It is about basic human rights and equal protection under the law. We the people should do what’s right and just for all. We the people must put basic human rights, and specifically a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, before politics. We the people must never be silent while injustice exists and our government does nothing. Our right to vote this year has never been more important. Together, our voices can be heard by exercising our constitutional rights and removing the corrupt from office. Together, we can create a safer future for our daughters and send a message to countries all over the planet. Women’s rights are human rights, and the oppression must stop now.

Sources: 

“90 State Lawmakers Accused of Sexual Misconduct Since 2017.” The Associated Press, 2 February 2019, https://apnews.com/a3377d14856e4f4fb584509963a7a223.

Arnold, Amanda and Lampen, Claire. “All the Women Who Have Spoken Out Against Joe Biden.” The Cut, 12 April, 2020, https://www.thecut.com/2020/04/joe-biden-accuser-accusations-allegations.html.

Associated Press. “Pa. prosecutor won’t charge ex-Rep. Brian Ellis over sex assault claim.” TribLiv, 26 August 2019, https://triblive.com/local/regional/prosecutor-wont-charge-ex-pa-lawmaker-over-sex-assault-claim/.

“Campus Sexual Violence: Statistics.” RAINN, 5 May 2020, https://www.rainn.org/statistics/campus-sexual-violence.

Connolly, Griffin. “Disgraced Rep. Ruben Kihuen tries to alter his sexual harassment record.” Roll Call, 26 February, 2019, https://www.rollcall.com/2019/02/26/disgraced-rep-ruben-kihuen-tries-to-alter-his-sexual-harassment-record/.

Filipovic, Jill. “Our President Has Always Degraded Women — And We’ve Always Let Him.” Time, 5 December 2017, https://time.com/5047771/donald-trump-comments-billy-bush/.

Lee, MJ, et al. “Congress paid out $17 million in settlements. Here’s why we know so little about that money.” CNN Politics, 16, November, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/16/politics/settlements-congress-sexual-harassment/index.html.

Relman, Eliza. “The 25 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct.” Business Insider, 1 May, 2020, https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/women-accused-trump-sexual-misconduct-list-2017-12%3famp

“Rep Alcee Hastings.” GovTrack, 13 May, 2020, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/alcee_hastings/400170

Salcedo, Andrea. “She Was Raped by a Classmate. She Still Had to go to School with Him.” The New York Times, 3 October, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/nyregion/niagara-wheatfield-rape.html.

“The Criminal Justice System.” RAINN, 5 May 2020,  https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system.

Lesser-Evilism in the 2020 U.S. Elections

By: October 26, 2020
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If there is one proposition that most anti-Stalinist socialists should agree on it is this: capitalism does not need democracy and democracy does not require capitalism. Only socialism does.

Socialists in every struggle are the left-wing, the revolutionary wing of democracy. This is what distinguishes us from the left-wing of capitalism and why, in comparison to the small gaps that separate the conservative from the liberal wing of capitalist democracy, we as socialists stand a mile apart from both in irreconcilable opposition.

Or to put it concisely, as long in the contest is between the left and the right wing of capitalist democracy, socialists have proclaimed and will continue to proclaim our unwillingness to leap over a mile for the sake of an inch.

This is the crux of our refusal to capitulate to lesser-evil politics. For whatever wing of capitalist democracy prevails electorally, the working class and the oppressed are the losers. That is why we reject the blandishments of cooptation, of subordinating our organizations and our perspective to advance the cause of an enlightened, liberal capitalism.

Socialism, in its drive to extend and empower democracy, is ultimately compelled to destroy the economic and social base of capitalist power; capitalist democracy is a contest about the minimal level of concessions the state can or must provide to maintain social peace while preserving the interests of the ruling class.

And if this election were no different than most others, we would be foolish to advocate a vote for the Democrats. Whatever pressure we can place on the system to grant concessions can be waged more effectively from the outside, through mass mobilizations. But whether we sit out such “normal” elections or vote in protest for a “third” party, we should be clear. Such votes as we cast are not votes for independent politics. Only a mass working class party has the coherency to propel independent politics.

The Green Party and previous movement oriented parties are cross class, issue oriented alliances, no different than the movements from which they arose. Votes for such parties are a vote of no confidence in the system. And nothing more. [1]

But this election is like no other election and the insistence on a formulaic response based on past assumptions is woefully inadequate. Modern Republicans have always rooted their power in the institutional arrangements that are most hostile to democracy: voter suppression, gerrymandering, the unrepresentative Senate, the electoral college and the unelected federal judiciary. And this is true of the Trumpian Republican Party as well.

But a Trump victory takes this miles further and is the harbinger of a post-democratic America. The pre-Trumpian Republicans availed themselves of the built-in constitutional holes in American democracy. Even they, however, drew a line at undermining the institutional safeguards of accountability. They released their taxes, turned their business interests over to blind trusts and acceded to the conventional norms of transparency. They were weak democrats, but democrats nonetheless, who never renounced the peaceful and orderly transition of power.

I have no interest in navigating the competing claims that Trump is a fascist or a bonapartist. His authoritarianism has different roots. Trump’s narrow world view, if you can dignify it as such, was probably shaped more by the organized crime milieu that is a fixture of New York City real estate development scene and by his mentor, Roy Cohn – of Joe McCarthy fame, who guided him through the strong-arm labyrinths of that world – than it is by any past European dictator.

We have already seen in terrifying embryonic form what a post-democratic America would look like. The justice department, intended as an independent agency, has been converted into Trump’s personal consigliore. Government has become a means for enriching his family. His emissaries are sent abroad to invent scandals made to discredit opponents. His crowds routinely demand that enemies be locked up. Bureaucrats unwilling to tow the line and whistle blowers are summarily fired, deprived of pensions and black listed. White nationalism and Qanon conspiracies gin up an ever roiled base, who are conditioned to see Trump as their knight on horseback defending them against real and invented threats from evil, Democratic pederasts who unleash Antifa to maraud cities and terrify its occupants. He has winked at the KKK, the Proud Boys and race war accelerationists such as the Boogaloo Bois.

We have seen the Center for Disease Control and the National Institute for Health being strangled as reliable sources of scientific data and guidance. Environmental regulations are being torn up. And bureaucracies are warned not to collect data that contradict business interests. Democratic cities, with large minority populations, are being starved of federal assistance. Trump incites private armed goons to “open” the economy and intimidate elected officials of states run by the opposition party.

Trump had administration officials employ military helicopters and military police clear a path through unthreatening BLM protesters for a Presidential photo-op.

And he has dusted off the 1807 Insurrection Act, which permits the armed forces to suppress civil disorder when law enforcement is unable to. It was a law used to suppress the Pullman railroad strike in 1894, a strike led by Eugene Debs. Of course it has been used many other times as well. But rarely so ominously.

Barr has deployed the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice against demonstrators under the pretext of “protecting” federal property against demonstrators, who may have black bloc anarchists, looters or agent provocateurs in their midst. Federal intervention initiated by “operation Diligent Valor” unleashed hundreds of agents to the streets of Portland. 225 federal agents were sent to Kansas City, Missouri and over two dozen sent to Albuquerque, Chicago, Cleveland Detroit and Milwaukee. For personnel, Trump has drawn on the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration Enforcement, the US Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Federal Protective Service. They have been deployed in unmarked vehicles, wearing combat fatigues and with insignia of their affiliations obscured to pluck people off the street.

In other words, Trump has created a veritable praetorian guard and provided us with a clear demonstration of what life will look like for the left in a Trumpian future. Are we paying attention?

And as far as challenging the election results, he has pre-loaded the courts with compliant reactionaries, stated brazenly that he may not accept results that depend on mail-in ballots and is ready to deploy an army of election intimidators in contested districts to challenge minority voters and make sure that every vote does not count. He has made it clear that he will tie up the election in the courts in the hope of throwing the elections into the hands of state governments where Republicans outnumber Democrats. And he has hinted that he sees no reason for him to restrict himself to only two terms.

So comrades, the question is whether you can make common cause with all other small-d democrats – the trade unionists, minorities, environmentalists, anti-militarists, alarmed citizens of all classes- who flock to the Democratic Party as a means to defend their and our hard won rights?

Or are you going to insist that the defense of democracy is simply a lesser evil to authoritarianism and therefore not worth making common cause as the left wing of democracy with other democrats through the only electoral vehicle that can effectively mount that challenge within the next two weeks?

[1] This is not to deny that they also have the potential for leveraging movement power by threatening the Democrats to take seriously pressing social issues such as climate change, Black lives, and LGBTQ+ rights or risk defection and possible electoral debacle. They are, in this sense, a form of pressure politics – an external faction of liberal politics – that willingly faces piecemeal dissolution to bolster the Democratic Party when the DP signals its willingness to accommodate their concerns. That is the fundamental reason why protest politics rarely gain traction. They can be picked apart by the Democrats, who privilege one movement against the other, until a leadership devoid of its base is all that remains.

And, when unwilling to make concessions, they become the playthings of the two capitalist parties – Democrats who seek to deprive them of their ballot lines; and Republicans who seek to advantage themselves by cynically promoting the Greens through back door arrangements aimed at splitting the Democratic vote.

Worse, socialists ourselves are often delusional about what hard-core Green members want. Along side the Howie Hawkins class-struggle wing is this sentiment, from Steve Welzer who predates Hawkins as a longtime Green activist.

It’s not a question of socialism finally (after almost two hundred years!) gaining traction. Instead, we need to recognize that the movement for actual socialism is fading away (“actual socialism” being: generalized social rather than private ownership of the means of production, with the idea that the working class will be the agency of social change).

Green politics has a growing degree of resonance worldwide due to the obvious ecological imperative to scale down and live more lightly. Old-paradigm leftists react to that with angst about “austerity.” But the gradual greening of society will be a source of liberation. Our current lifeways are stressful on both people and the planet.

We don’t need “workers’ councils.” We need to rejuvenate local community life. The idea of working class revolution is delusional. The endeavor to (finally) create “a labor party that struggles for a working class government” is chimerical. The left needs to let go of its retrograde Red-worldview thinking. Green analyses and prescriptions are very different. The fate of the left depends upon shifting the paradigm.”

So, if you think the Green Party has an educational role to play for socialism, perhaps this statement is worth mulling over. 

The article above was originally published in Workers Liberty.

Correction: The text has been changed to reflect the correction on the railroad strike led by Debs, as noted by Bennett Muraskin.

Once More on the Greater Evil

By: October 25, 2020
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Ashley Smith and Charlie Post have replied to my critique of their piece on lesser evil voting. I continue to find their argument unconvincing.

Smith and Post write that the defense of lesser evil voting in the current election is “oddly timed” because Trump’s poll numbers have been declining. But of course the defenses that they have criticized were written earlier, and even now, while Trump is a strong favorite to lose if poll numbers translate into actual votes counted, it is by no means a sure thing. My odds are high of surviving Covid if I contract it, but when the costs if things go wrong are dire, one doesn’t want to take chances. Trump’s odds of winning as I write today are low, only 1 in 8. That’s the odds of being dealt a pair of jacks or better in poker. Low, but not out of the game. Given the stakes, I’m still worried.

Much of Smith and Post’s article evades the fundamental question. Adding to the list of ways that Biden is an inadequate candidate or that Democrats have failed us or that Republicans have sometimes responded to the pressure of social movements does not address the choices actually before us.

The question is not whether “electing the lesser evil will defeat the far-right.” The question is whether electing the lesser evil will give us a better chance of defeating the far right than would an electoral victory by the far right. Likewise, the question is not whether changes invariably come when Democrats are in office. Nor is the question whether change is impossible under rightwing leaders. The question is whether there is a meaningful difference in progressive and movement possibilities to effect changes under the two different sets of leaders. (See Bob Master’s excellent article on whether Biden can be pushed left.)

Is it a meaningful difference that movement pressure was able to get Obama to stop the Keystone and the Standing Rock pipelines, while despite massive environmental protests Trump re-started both? Some left commentators say these were “token” gestures, but if so, then we are dismissing the value of much environmental activism, which mobilized around these issues. Is it important that Obama enacted hundreds of environmental regulations and joined the Paris Climate Agreement while Trump has been undermining both? Or that Biden calls for rejoining the Paris Agreement? The question is not whether Obama or Biden are eco-socialists. It is whether we have a better chance to gain ourselves and our species the time we need to avert climate catastrophe.

Of course, Smith and Post are right that a mass socialist movement is what we need to decisively defeat the far right in the long term and build a just society. But in the next week we’re not going to have that movement. Likewise, Scott McClarty of the Green Party says that what’s missing from the “Dump Trump, then Fight Biden” approach is that it doesn’t push for Ranked Choice Voting. But leftists who call for dumping Trump don’t oppose RCV. They support that and a thousand other improvements in our very flawed democratic institutions. But none of these are on the ballot next week.

Some leftists – like six members of the New Politics editorial board – explicitly tell people not to vote for Biden (“we reject the … call for leftists to vote for Biden as a lesser evil”) and they tell us to reject voting for Biden not just in safe states, but “in any state.” How do they respond to the possibility that this advice might lead to the withholding of enough votes from Biden so that Trump wins re-election? They don’t. Their article makes zero reference to the constraints of the electoral college or the first-past-the-post voting system or the danger that their position might lead to what they say they oppose, Trump’s victory. I posed this question as a comment on their article; one author replied – and never actually addressed it, saying only that to urge a vote for Biden is to lie to the American people. But why is it lying to say that Biden is evil, but a much less-evil evil than Trump and that the difference is worth caring about?

Smith and Post tell us that their argument is not about how people should vote in the privacy of the voting booth, but whether one should campaign for Biden. But what does it mean to “campaign for Biden”? Does it mean publicly urging people to vote for Biden? But how is that different from what Smith and Post have done urging people to vote for Hawkins (“we advocate voting for Howie Hawkins, despite the problems of the Green Party, as a protest vote”). And in what other situation does the left tell people that their political decisions are private matters, that shouldn’t be publicly discussed and challenged?

And is it campaigning for Biden to tell people – as the letter from 55 activists (including me) does – that it is essential to defeat Trump? Right now, this week, there is simply no other way to defeat Trump than by voting for Biden. Recognizing this reality requires no illusions about Biden. Biden’s many failings and limitations are beside the point because the only way to stop the much greater evil, Trump, is to cast a vote for the lesser evil. This is not lying to people. What is wishful thinking is suggesting that there will be any lasting impact from voting for the Green Party in swing states, a party that will be lucky to get “more than a sliver of one percent” of the vote.

Does urging people to vote for Biden undermine movement organizing? I think the opposite is the case. The left won’t be taken seriously by social movements if it seems to them that we don’t care about their issues. Those who are most heavily involved in the environmental struggle understand that defeating Trump is a necessary though not sufficient condition for preventing climate disaster. Those involved in struggles for $15-an-hour know that their chances of achieving their goal is much greater under Biden than Trump. And what does it do for our credibility with Black Lives Matter activists that we are not doing all we can to prevent the re-election of a white supremist. Will those whose lived experience of racism is made worse admire our courage in refusing to cast the deciding vote against Trump in a swing state? Will reproductive rights or LGBTQ+ activists consider us allies if our votes are what permit Trump to add a seventh justice to the Supreme Court? Will those fighting to defend basic democratic rights commend our refusal to unseat the greatest threat to American democracy in many decades?

A Biden administration will have to be fought from day one. The left should never subordinate itself to Biden. But voting for Biden in a swing state, and calling on others to do the same, involves no subordination. It’s a recognition of the realities we face and of the fact that a Trump victory would have incalculable consequences for the left, for all Americans, and for our planet.

Backing Biden Will Not Stop Trumpism

By: , October 24, 2020
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Much of the United States Left is in the midst of an oddly-timed embrace of lesser evilism. They are calling for socialists to support Biden at the very moment Trump’s campaign seems in crisis and headed for defeat.

Trump ranted through a disastrous debate performance, contracted COVID along with a few dozen other Republicans, and after being dosed with an unproven cocktail of drugs and steroids, has become even more unstable than usual. Not surprisingly, his poll numbers have tanked nationally, particularly in battleground states, so that now Republicans fear losing both the presidency and the Senate.

Nevertheless, key figures on the U.S. Left, including long-time supporters of independent politics, are pushing the new socialist movement not just to vote for Biden, but to actively campaign for him. Stephen Shalom’s recent article, “The greater evil,” is perhaps the most reasoned intervention so far.

Responding to our piece, ”The lesser evil trap,” Shalom challenges both the logic and evidence of our case against campaigning for Biden. Against us, he contends that the “lesser-evil strategy” has actually succeeded in stopping the greater evil, and that electing Democrats has created more favorable conditions for working class and popular struggles.

Against campaigning for the lesser evil

To be clear, our argument is not about what comrades do during the time it takes to cast a ballot, as Shalom claims. What we oppose is the new socialist Left, especially the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), spending its time, money, and energy, campaigning for Biden.

We also oppose social movements and unions working for a candidate that stands against all our demands, from defunding the police, to Medicare for All, and the Green New Deal. We should not front for “the lesser of two rapists,” who promises to restore the norms of the Obama administration—wars, austerity, privatization, hostility to unions, mass deportations, and continued violence against people of color.

Unlike Shalom, we do not believe that the past eighty years provide support for the claim that electing the lesser evil will defeat the far right. In election after election, each “the most important of our lifetime,” the Left has repeatedly surrendered its political independence to campaign for one or another Democrat to stop a clearly more right-wing Republican.

We have stopped organizing mass struggle, ceased educating activists about the need for political independence, and moderated our demands to promote a capitalist party. Once in power, that same party reneges on its promises of reform, launching new attacks on the working class and oppressed.

Even worse, once we have subordinated ourselves to the Democrats, we have left a political vacuum for the Republicans, who are not scared to fight for their politics. They take advantage of disappointment with Democrats to reelect Republicans, moving the government further to the right.

Falling into this disastrous cycle today would be catastrophic, as the Trumpite Republican Party, especially it’s far right base, is more radical, more nationalist, and far more dangerous than ever before.

Lesser evilism fails to stop fascism and dictatorship

Shalom counters our argument against lesser-evilism by dismissing two of the most important historical cases—in the 1930s when the strategy failed to stop fascism in Germany and military dictatorship in Spain. We believe he is mistaken to disregard the brutal lessons of this history.

In Germany, the Social Democratic Party sacrificed its class independence in order to support General Paul Von Hindenburg in the 1932 election. The Social Democrats backed Hindenburg to stop Hitler from winning the presidency, only to see Hindenburg turn around and appoint Hitler Chancellor. Lesser evilism paved the way to the greatest defeat for working people in history.

Shalom recognizes these facts but contends that there was no other viable strategy. However, as even he concedes, the working class parties—the Social Democratic and the Communist parties—could have formed a united front, electorally and in the streets, to challenge both Hindenburg and Hitler. In other words, if they had rejected lesser evilism they might have stopped both the lesser and greater evil.

In Spain, the Communist Party abandoned class independence and the fight for revolution to support a popular front with bourgeois parties, in order to defend the republic against Franco’s military uprising. Then, in order to keep the peace with their capitalist allies, the popular front government rejected demands for land reform, workers control of production, and Moroccan independence.

These policies demoralized the forces that had defeated Franco’s troops in the first months of the civil war, paving the way for Franco’s victory, and bloody repression of the working class and peasantry. Confronted with this failure of lesser evilism, Shalom claims that it is an “inappropriate” precedent because we do not have a surging workers movement in the U.S. today.

Even worse, he contends a revolution in Spain could not have won anyway, implicitly giving support to the failed popular front strategy of the Communist Party. Today, amidst a growing far right, a rise in class struggle, and the emergence of a new socialist movement, the lesson that lesser evilism will not stop fascism and dictatorship is more important than ever.

The myth of lesser evils providing favorable conditions

Shalom argues that supporting the Democrats has created favorable conditions for the social and labor movements, and the Left. But, when the cases that he presents are examined closely, they demonstrate the exact opposite.

Let’s start with the Black Lives Matter uprising of this spring and summer. It is true that the movement has not achieved its most radical demands—the defunding of the police and their eventual abolition. Yet, contrary to Shalom’s claim that it has won only symbolic victories, the movement has caused significant cuts to the Seattle Police Department budget. And it forced the expulsion of the Seattle Police Officers Guild from the King County Labor Council. The movement has also forced the expulsion of police from schools in several cities.

These victories were not aided by Democrats in power, but were won by challenging them. In fact, the movement was born out of the frustration with the failure of Democrats to stop police violence, including the murder of Black and Brown people. To build on these victories and win more radical demands like defunding, the movement will have to stage even more militant mass actions against Democratic city officials.

Distorting the role of the Democrats in the civil rights movement

Shalom also claims that the Democrats were pivotal to the dismantling of Jim Crow by the civil rights movement. He points to President Johnson signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and deploying federal troops to protect the march from Selma to Montgomery, contending that if Barry Goldwater had been president, neither would have occurred.

The actual history does not support this narrative. The civil rights movement in the South, and later, in the big cities of the north, directly confronted the Democratic Party. The Dixicrats not only ruled the South before 1968, they had imposed the old Jim Crow in the 1890s. Their slogan was, in the words of Democratic Alabama Governor, George Wallace, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

When Martin Luther King Jr. led the movement north, they fought urban machines of the Democratic Party, like that of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who oversaw de facto segregation in everything from housing to employment. Far from creating favorable conditions, the Democratic Party was the problem.

The mass movement forced Johnson, who had long cut deals with the Dixiecrats and the Daleys, to sign the Civil Rights Act. Moreover, when Johnson sent federal troops into the South he did so to neutralize the movement, not fulfill its demands. (The Republican Eisenhower did the same against Democrat Orval Faubus in Arkansas, who had been blocking the desegregation of Little Rock schools in 1957.)

Attorney General Robert Kennedy summed up the Democratic Party approach when he met with Congress of Racial Equality leaders and tried to buy them off. “Why don’t you guys cut all that shit, freedom riding and sitting-in shit, and concentrate on voter registration. If you do that, I’ll get you tax-free status,” Kennedy said to them.

Throughout the 1960s, Democrats tried to shift the focus among movement activists away from demands for universal social programs and desegregating schools and housing, to an exclusive focus on rewinning the right to vote. The movement did not cooperate and instead staged escalating protests to win the substantial reforms of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Once activists abandoned “protest for politics” to become part of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in the mid-1970s, the Black freedom struggle won no new victories. It has suffered the steady roll-back of past gains under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

The Democrats and the labor movement: a barren marriage

Shalom also misrepresents the relationship of the insurgent industrial unions with the Democratic Party in the 1930s. He claims that Democratic Governor of Michigan Frank Murphy played a key role in preventing the use of the National Guard to physically remove sit-down strikers from General Motors (GM) Flint plants in January 1937.

The historical record contradicts Shalom’s argument. The sit-down strikes posed a particular challenge to capital; while conventional picket lines could be broken by the police and National Guard, physical force against sit-down strikers risked the destruction of expensive machinery in the plants.

It was this danger that led not only Governor Murphy, but the top executives at General Motors as well, to seek a peaceful solution to the Flint strike. The seizure of Chevrolet Plant 4, where key equipment was housed, further raised the cost of disruption for General Motors, and led to their capitulation to the United Automobile Workers.

Militant tactics that directly challenged capitalist control of the workplace led to the success of the new industrial unions—not the presence of Democrats in office. This was made clear by the defeat of the Little Steel strike in the spring of 1937.

The Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee expected the Roosevelt administration and the Democratic Governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania to pressure the smaller steel corporations into recognizing their union. As a result, they opted for a completely conventional and legal strike strategy.

With no threat to capitalist property, the Democratic Governors and Chicago mayor dispatched the police and National Guard to attack picket lines. They killed several and wounded dozens more in the Memorial Day Massacre, helping to defeat the strike.

Examples of Democratic strike breaking and betrayal of promises to unions have filled volumes. This actual history affirms Mike Davis’ argument that the relationship of the labor movement with the Democratic Party has been a “barren marriage.”

Democrats against reform

Shalom leaves out the countless examples of when Democrats have coopted and repressed social struggles. Here are just a few.

In 1964, Johnson portrayed Goldwater as an irresponsible war-monger, ready to escalate the war in Vietnam—which Johnson himself did with a vengeance after his election. His ally, Daley, the Democratic mayor in Chicago, had no problem unleashing a police riot against anti-war demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

On the presidential campaign trail, Bill Clinton promised to block the North American Free Trade Act, which garnered him the endorsement of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. Once in office, Clinton signed NAFTA, undermining unions and working conditions in both the U.S. and Mexico.

Barack Obama promised progressive immigration reform during his first presidential campaign, winning him the support of immigrant rights activists who had just organized nationwide strikes and demonstrations on “the day without an immigrant.” As president, Obama became the “Deporter-in-chief,” expelling more immigrants than any other president in U.S. history.

Victories can be won under Republicans

The flip side of Shalom’s mistaken claim that Democrats create favorable conditions is the equally mistaken implication that victories cannot be won under Republicans. The historical record again proves the opposite.

Richard Nixon, the archetype of the anti-Communist, reactionary Republican, granted major reforms when confronted with mass struggle. The surging social movements and strike wave of the early 1970s forced him to end the Vietnam War, dramatically increase social welfare spending, establish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Mass struggle has also scored victories from the Supreme Court, even when it was stacked with Republican appointees. Perhaps the best example is Roe v. Wade. This ruling was a response to a burgeoning movement for “free abortion on demand” that forced Republican California Governor, Ronald Reagan, to decriminalize abortion in 1967.

We should also not forget that the most “liberal” Supreme Court of the twentieth century was led by a San Francisco District Attorney, Earl Warren, who tried to jail longshore strikers in 1934. Warren oversaw the internment of the Japanese during World War II and ran as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate in 1948, promising to use Taft-Hartley against unions, and to outlaw the Communist Party. The mass civil rights movement and the struggles it inspired over the next three decades transformed Warren from a reactionary Republican into a liberal icon.

Democrats to blame for the rise of Trump

Independent mass struggles are decisive for winning reforms regardless of who is in office. They are also the main vehicle to defeat the Right. Supporting the Democrats as a lesser evil, however, has compromised those struggles in the past and will do so again today, creating space for the growth of the far right.

Why? Because the Democrats and their policies have been the petri dish for the growth of the Trumpite Right. For the past three decades, the Democrats worked with the Republicans to push through the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism, generating class and social inequalities not seen since the Robber Baron era.

Obama’s response to the Great Recession made those conditions worse; he bailed out banks and corporations, and imposed austerity on workers and the poor, leading to an epidemic of diseases of despair like opioid addiction. The neoliberalism of the Democrats alienated workers, oppressed people, and downwardly mobile sections of the middle class—opening the door not only for the socialist Left, but also the nationalist far right.

Trump bolted through that door; combining opposition to the establishment with racism, xenophobia, and misogyny; offering reactionary solutions to real problems. He galvanized mostly the middle class, but also a section of desperate workers, to ride to victory in the slaveholder’s Electoral College.

Backing Biden will not stop Trumpism

The left will not defeat Trump or Trumpism by supporting Biden and the Democratic Party. The Right will grow no matter what the outcome of the election. If Trump wins, which looks increasingly unlikely, he will embolden the Right as he has done throughout his term.

If Biden wins, he will not stop the Right. Despite Bernie Sander’s claims, Biden is not promising progressive reforms that would rip up the roots of the Right. Instead, he intends to create a government of national unity that restores the neoliberal consensus and rehabilitates U.S. imperialism to project its power throughout the world, especially against China.

Those policies will enflame grievances that Trump—or even more reactionary figures—will exploit, to build right wing electoral campaigns and armed fascist gangs. Already, the Republican Right are plotting subterfuge to paralyze an incoming Biden administration.

The main danger in such a situation is that the Left will not only give Biden a honeymoon, but defend him against Republican attacks, further marginalizing itself as an alternative to the two capitalist parties. That will leave the Right as the only opposition to a neoliberal regime.

For independence, struggle for reform, and fighting the Right

The tragic dynamic of this long election cycle underscores the importance of opposing lesser evilism. The Left began with unrealistic expectations that Sanders could win the nomination and push the Democrats in a progressive direction.

Predictably, the capitalist establishment united to defeat Sanders more easily than it did in 2016, and held him to his pledge to campaign for the Democratic nominee. Most of the Left have followed him to support Biden.

It is particularly tragic to see DSA leaders issue a statement calling for members to campaign against Trump (i.e. for Biden), in violation of the “Bernie or Bust” resolution passed at our last convention. While their organizing for Biden will have no impact on the election, it will encourage a new generation of socialists to adopt the self-defeating politics of lesser evilism.

They and others on the Left justify their decision on the basis that Trump is a fascist who poses a unique danger to democracy. They argue in this “exceptional case” that the Left should abandon its opposition to the Democrats to defeat a potential autocrat in the White House.

Trump may aspire to be a Mussolini and rule without the usual limits of capitalist democracy. However, most Republican elected officials, the state bureaucracy, Pentagon, CIA, FBI, as well as the majority of the capitalist class, do not support the imposition of a dictatorship.

The real fascist danger is in the streets. While the far right and fascist militias are a growing threat—as the plot by a Michigan militia plot to kidnap the state governor proves—fortunately, they are still internally divided and relatively small in number.

After an all-out national mobilization to Portland, Oregon, the Proud Boys managed to assemble only 200 people. We can defeat their ilk not by relying on Biden’s deployment of the FBI—which has always targeted the Left—but by building mass mobilizations to confront them and drive them off the streets.

In order for the new socialist Left to survive, grow, and build a real alternative to the two parties of capital, we need to break with the disastrous legacy of lesser evilism. We encourage socialists not to waste their time campaigning for Biden and his party, no matter what they do at the voting booth, or on their ballot.

We must prioritize building class and social struggles, beginning by defending the right to vote and the election outcome by taking to the streets—something Democrats will oppose, urging reliance on the courts and Congress, instead. And we need to prepare now to confront the continued capitalist offensive that a Biden administration will lead in the coming months and years.

First published by Tempest.

Indonesia: Mass Strikes Show Intersection of Class, Gender, and Ecology

By: October 22, 2020
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Over a million people have taken to the streets in Indonesia to protest a neoliberal law that would roll back labor protections, especially for working women, while also opening the road toward greater environmental destruction. Even Amnesty International, which usually concentrates on political rights rather than class issues, calls the new law “catastrophic.” The protests and strikes have covered most cities across this vast country, in one of the largest actions of its kind in decades. In the capital, Jakarta, police used the ban on public gatherings due to COVID-19 to arrest 800 people.

The widely opposed new law, passed by parliament on October 5, is very likely to be signed by President Joko Widodo, who has moved to the right in recent years after first being elected on a left-of-center basis in 2014. During and after his re-election in 2019, Widodo embraced his old rivals in the corporate and military elites. Most shockingly, he named as Defense Minister the man whom he defeated in both 2014 and 2019, Prabowo Subianto, an utterly reactionary former military officer involved in some of the worst repression under the Suharto dictatorship (1967-98). Although it was before Subianto’s time, that dictatorship was installed with crucial aid from the CIA, which also helped in the targeting and assassination of 500,000 leftists, working with both the military and Islamists.  (Mao Zedong’s role in misdirecting — in an utterly subjectivist manner — the massive Communist Party of Indonesia, which was destroyed by the repression of 1965-66, cannot be addressed here.) That repressive legacy, still in force today albeit in weakened form, means that socialist and Marxist discourse remains very restricted if not banned.

Widodo has also cozied up to big capital by allowing a major loosening of anti-corruption laws. In addition, he threw to the wolves a close colleague, the mayor of Jakarta, after he was attacked without proof for “blasphemy” by Muslim fundamentalists and eventually jailed. Widodo does on occasion continue to support more democratic politics, as when he refused to sign a 2019 law that would have severely cracked down individual freedoms by criminalizing sexual relations outside of marriage. Such a law would have criminalized the entire LGBTQ community. But he has mainly moved rightward, as seen in this outrageous new law. As veteran journalist Bruno Philip concludes concerning Widodo, “The ‘man of the people’ seems fully and well to have become the man of ‘business’” (“En Indonésie, une vague de colère contre une réforme ultralibérale,” Le Monde 10/9/20).

The 2020 law would give capital greater ability to cut workers’ pay, to move from a five to a six-day workweek, and to replace permanent workers with temporary ones with far fewer rights. Eligibility for unemployment compensation would be reduced from 32 to 19 months. The new measure would also go a long way toward eliminating minimum wage laws.

In addition to the above, working women would face further diminution of their rights, as paid maternity and menstrual leave would be eliminated. Ermawati, a leader of the Indonesia Metal Workers Federation, stated after speaking at a rally of striking cannery workers: “When they listened to my speech, all of them cried. The most burdensome is the omission of menstruation and maternity leave. As a woman, it also brings me to tears” (Dera Menra Sjabat and Richard C. Paddock, “Protests Erupt Across Indonesia as Workers Strike over Jobs Law, “NY Times 10/9/20).

The new law would also eliminate many environmental regulations, making logging even less restricted than it already is, and would remove regulatory obstacles for many other extractive industries, among them the mining of copper, gold, and tin.

The dominant classes and the political elites — as well as international capital — are justifying the law as a path out of mass unemployment. The recession precipitated by COVID-19 has raised the total number of officially unemployed from 7 to 13 million at a time when 3 million young people are entering the labor market every year.  They claim that outside investment will surge and get the economy moving upward.

While the political elites seem to be won over completely to neoliberalism, the large Muslim association, Nahdlatul Ulema, considered moderate rather than fundamentalist, has taken a markedly different stance. Its leader, Said Aqil Siroj, stated that the law would benefit “capitalists, investors, and conglomerates” and would run the danger of “destroying” the people of Indonesia (Bruno Philip, “En Indonésie,” cited above). The fact that a fairly conservative religious organization would be one of the most prominent voices opposing capitalism also illustrates the tragic legacy of the destruction of the left and its inability to rebuild up to now.

A new chapter in twenty-first century class struggle is being written in Indonesia today. The  importance of such a mass labor upheaval in the world’s fourth most populous country, one that also contains the world’s largest Muslim population, is obvious. But it also needs to be noted, here at a conceptual level, that these new struggles also show — not in academic theorizing but in the  lived experience of working people —  what should rightly be called the intersectionality of class, gender, and ecology in the twenty-first century battle against capitalism.

First posted by International Marxist-Humanist.

Socialism as Progressivism

By: October 21, 2020
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Book Review

John B. Judis, The Socialist Awakening: What’s Different Now about the Left. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2020. 139 pages. Notes.

John Judis sees America today awakening to socialism, but he fears that orthodox Marxism and Trotskyism may keep the movement from achieving its potential to bring about reforms that could create something like Scandinavian social democracy. Visions of profound social change and radical cultural views about gender, open borders, and calls to abolish the police will have to be abandoned. And, he thinks, it may not be socialists who carry forward the fight for socialism but rather progressives and even moderates who will be driven to change the system by the current combination of health, economic, and environmental crises. Maybe, he suggests, following Erik Olin Wright, even the word “socialism” should be abandoned. Looking into the future Judis sees the past: the New Deal and Scandinavian social democracy.

Judis, who has been an editor at The New Republic, The National Journal, and Talking Points Memo, has lately been devoting his time to writing short books aimed at explaining the contemporary political experience: The Populist Explosion, The Nationalist Revival, and now The Socialist Awakening. Responding to the Bernie Sanders campaign and the spectacular growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, Judis asks, what are the prospects for socialism in America? (While there is a chapter about “British Socialism and Nationalism” this is really a book about socialism in the United States.) He attempts to answer this question both by looking at the history of the socialist movement and the contemporary context to explain the recent interest in socialism. He refers to some of the classic literature on American socialism—from Werner Sombart to Daniel Bell—and discusses those he sees as the movement’s major figures from Eugene V. Debs and Victor Berger to Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. He also looks at the Democratic Socialists of America and fears that it has already veered off track.

Judis’s thesis, and he puts it simply, is that orthodox Marxism is the problem. Following Daniel Bell, he sees Marxism as religious, chiliastic, apocalyptic and therefore not political and out of touch with practical realities. In America, Marxism dooms any political group to failure. The author begins with an appreciation of Bernie Sanders and Sanders’ idol, the turn of the last century socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. But then Judis drops Debs because “the Socialist Party, Debs insisted, would not cooperate to pursue immediate reforms with the two capitalist parties.” Finding Debs too radical, Judis turns to Victor Berger, the Milwaukee socialist of the early 1900s. Acknowledging that Berger was a racist, Judis nevertheless admires his ability to build a reformist urban political machine. Berger was not a romantic revolutionary but a practical politician, and he is the real forerunner of Bernie Sanders, says Judis.

Judis supports Sanders’ progressive program, but sees it advancing through the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. He believes, correctly I think, that there are few socialist politicians of any significance beyond Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. With Sanders destined to fade from the scene and AOC one of the few remaining standard bearers, Judis places his hopes in figures like Elizabeth Warren—“She’s really a democratic socialist”—and other progressives who may be able to carry the movement forward.

Judis on DSA

Sanders’ campaign, of course, led to the enormous growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), today with some 70,000 members. According to Judis, this expansion of DSA was all right at first, “By backing Sanders, the DSA embraced a post-Marxist democratic socialism.” But then the Marxist fly got in the social democratic ointment. How did that happen?

Well, writes Judis, it all began back at the University of Chicago when Bernie Sanders was a student there and joined the Young People’s Socialist League. Michael Harrington in New York was the leading intellectual of YPSL and the inspiration for what eventually became DSA, but there were two figures in Chicago to whom Judis traces all of the problems to come: Joel Geier and Mike Parker. While Harrington wanted to work in the Democratic Party, the dangerous Marxists Geier and Parker were interested in building a labor party. That wasn’t on the agenda, but eventually they would hook up with “Marxist theorist” Hal Draper and together the three—in what is too complicated a story to go into either for Judis in his book or for me here—they contributed to the creation of three little organizations—the International Socialists (IS), Solidarity, and the International Socialist Organization—some of whose members are active today in DSA.

So, as Judis sees it, there is today a struggle within DSA between the wholesome Berniecrats who want social democracy and those Marxists, who he calls “latter-day Trotskyists,” with apocalyptic visions of radical change. He writes, “Some young DSA members became convinced by reading and discussion that Marxist socialism made sense.” (Watch out for those study groups!) He continues:

These orthodox Marxists made up a large part of DSA’s most active core. Many of them function through organized caucuses that take positions and run slates for national leadership. Bread & Roses [caucus] has attracted these organized Marxists.

He believes that the former members of the IS, Solidarity, and the ISO who have joined DSA and hooked up with caucuses like Bread & Roses threaten to drive the organization into the ditch. I found it surprising to find myself named as the “elder statesman of these groups,” which only reveals how little Judis understands DSA.

Before the explosion of 2016, DSA’s politics were left social democratic. The intellectual leader of the group was Joseph Schwartz who shaped the broad contours of the group’s ideology in the 2000s. Schwartz saw Marx as one of the central figures of democratic socialism, but he wanted to “blend” Marxism with anti-racism, feminism, environmentalism. He also often cited André Gorz’s notion of “non-reformist reforms” as the key concept in the contemporary struggle for socialism.

It was within this framework—in a DSA where most members were in their sixties—that a handful of younger thirty-something DSA members and a network of members of the Young Democratic Socialists (YDS) emerged around 2015, leaning a little further left. They formed first a “Left Caucus,” then a group called “Momentum” (after the Jeremy Corbyn supporters in the British Labour Party), and then created Bread & Roses. But the leaders of that caucus rejected revolutionary socialism, which they defined as “insurrectionism,”

Judis’ vision of DSA as having been taken over by the “latter-day Trotskyists” who threaten to poison the well of wholesome, reformist Berniecrats is simply wrong. The tremendous expansion of DSA in the 2010s and the weakness of other left groups, including the complete collapse of the ISO, made DSA enormously attractive to other leftists. Less than 100 members of Solidarity, with no coordination or common strategy, gradually drifted into DSA starting in 2016. I was among the first. Since 2019, dozens of ISO members have also joined. Once in DSA, many but not all Solidarity members joined Bread & Roses, though I was not one of them.

DSA also attracted many other left organizations, including several orthodox Trotskyist groups and a neo-Stalinist organization. The many young radials being attracted to DSA also generated several other caucuses that defined themselves as revolutionary Marxist or even anarchist. Today Marxism forms the framework for much of the discussion within DSA, certainly among its more active members.  DSA’s National Political Committee is made up of people from various caucuses who, beyond DSA’s big-tent democratic socialism, do not share a common leftist ideology.

Ultimately, John Judis’ The Socialist Awakening is disappointing. He has rediscovered liberalism or progressivism, which were in some form always his politics. He puts his hopes in progressive think-tanks and publications: the Economic Policy Institute, the Nation, the New Republic, the American Prospect, N+1, In These Times, Mother Jones, and the Intercept. He looks to a host of NGOs, particularly the youth groups such the Sunrise Movement and United We Dream Action. He believes that Elizabeth Warren, whom he considers a socialist, and other Democrats like Senator Sherrod Brown represent the future of the left. But then for Judis, “Many elected Democrats are socialist in all but name.”

Judis has nothing to say about the questions facing the socialist movement today. He has no discussion of how to rebuild the labor movement, nor of how to unite the labor and social movements, and, of course, he rejects the idea of trying to construct a political party that would represent working people and all of the oppressed. He doesn’t touch on discussions about racism and identity politics or gender issues—except to warn against them. There are no new ideas in this book and one cannot imagine it having much of an effect on radicalizing young people interested in socialism.

After the tragedy of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine: anger, solidarity, and rejecting Islamophobia in France

By: October 20, 2020
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Crédit Photo: DR.

In the wake of the horrific murder of a French high school teacher, President Emmanuel Macron is playing the Islamophobia card in hopes of distracting the country from his catastrophic failure to stem the tide of newly resurgent Covid-19.

According to The Guardian, “Macron, who visited the site near a school in a Paris suburb, said the victim had been ‘assassinated’ and that his killer sought to ‘attack the republic and its values.’ ‘This is our battle and it is existential. They [terrorists] will not succeed … They will not divide us.’”

This following statement was released by the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (New Anticapitalist Party) of France (NPA).

On Friday, October 16, the NPA received the news of the decapitation of a high school teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine with shock and horror. All our thoughts are with his family, his friends, his students, and his colleagues as well as all people in the larger education community, which has been shaken by this atrocious crime.

The NPA condemns this disgraceful act. Whatever the conclusions of the investigation, nothing can justify such an assassination. We stand by our unwavering attachment to freedom of expression and educational freedom for teachers.

Since the tragedy, President Emmanuel Macron and Minister of National Educaton Jean-Michel Blanquer have been playing the game, repeating declarations of love for teachers, for whom they have nothing but contempt at all other times, and praising the essential role of schools, which they have continuously attacked in recent years.

It is difficult not to feel indignant at Blanquer’s hypocritical defense teachers’ freedom of expression when we know to what extent the hunt for dissenters is organized by the Ministry Education as demonstrated by the image of four teachers in Melle being sanctioned for mobilizing against the reform of “le bac” (high school graduation qualifications that divide students into professional, technical, and general categories).

Moreover, the government is participating in an escalation of Islamophobia, trying to make a link between the tragedy in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine and its legislative bill on “separatism,” the logic of which is to further strengthen the supposed connections between Muslims, fundamentalists, and terrorists.

Far from opposing the outburst of Islamophobic hatred that we have witnessed since last night, the powers that be are contributing to it, reinforcing the fractures along which the hate-mongers, lethal ideologies and religious fanaticisms, and enemies of all workers and peoples thrive.

We express our total solidarity with Samuel Paty’s relatives, friends, and colleagues, and more generally with all educators who have been impacted by this assassination. The NPA will join initiatives to express our mourning, our anger, and our solidarity in the wake of this tragedy, while refusing to support the logic of national unity with the false-friends of teachers and those who support a repressive headlong rush into an increased stigmatization of Muslims.

Originally released in French on October 17. Translated by No Borders.

Cuba’s New Economic Turn

By: October 18, 2020
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A series of recent developments in Cuba have struck the already faltering economy of the island leading the government to adopt a series of economic policies that point towards a greater opening to capital while maintaining the political controls of the one-party state.

First in the list of the latest disasters that have befallen the island is the Covid-19 pandemic. Compared to other Caribbean countries, Cuba did better due to a public health system, which, however much it declined in the last thirty years, is still able to organize an adequate response to collective disasters such as the pandemic. Thus, to stop the contagion, the Cuban government adopted drastic measures such as shutting public transport in its entirety, and in response to a rebound of the infection beginning in late August, it restored similarly drastic measures in many locations, including the Havana metropolitan area, although in early October the government reduced the restrictions in most of these places.

The tourist industry, the third most important earner of foreign exchange after the export of medical personnel and foreign remittances from Cubans abroad, was also shut down, as were many other commercial and industrial establishments. Cuba’s intake of foreign exchange—badly needed to buy essential imports, including 70 percent of the food it consumes—had already been seriously curtailed before the pandemic by the cancellation of its export of medical personnel to countries such as Brazil and Bolivia where hard right governments had recently come into power. In addition, the oil shipments that the island was receiving from Venezuela (in exchange for the export of medical personnel to that country), crucial for the functioning of the island’s economy, were cut down as a result of the political and economic crises under Maduro’s government.

To make matters considerably worse, Donald Trump escalated in a decidedly aggressive fashion the US criminal blockade of Cuba, in part motivated by the latter’s support of the Maduro regime, by reducing, or in some cases cancelling, some of the concessions that Obama had granted to Cuba during his second period at the White House. Among other hostile measures, Trump limited the remittances by Cuban-Americans to their relatives in the island, sharply reduced travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens who are not Cuban-Americans, prohibited U.S. visitors to Cuba from staying in hotels owned by the Cuban government, and engaged in a campaign to discourage foreign investment in the island through his invocation, for the first time ever, of Title III of the 1996 Helms-Burton law (approved by Congress and signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton) that punishes foreign firms that utilize American property confiscated by the Cuban government in the early 1960s. The Trump administration also suspended licenses authorizing U.S. economic activities in the island, such as the one granted by the Obama administration to the Marriott Corporation to operate hotels in Cuba.

Will Washington’s policy change under a possible Biden administration? The Democratic presidential candidate promised to follow in the footsteps of President Barack Obama, moving towards a normalization of political and economic relations with Cuba. The extent to which a Biden administration will do so depends on a variety of factors ranging from the electoral results in Florida to relations with Venezuela. Although the latter was not very important in relation to Cuba policy during the Obama years, it became a major consideration for Trump who, following the advice of Senator Marco Rubio and the then National Security Adviser John Bolton, made Cuba’s support for Nicolás Maduro a major issue and used it to justify the tightening of sanctions against the island. The fact that both Biden and congressional Democrats have supported Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s claim to be the legitimate president of Venezuela does not augur well in terms of a Democratic administration normalizing relations with the island.

Powerful corporate interests such as major agribusiness firms and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have for a long time been in favor of full economic relations with Cuba, although it is hard to predict how much political capital they are willing to invest to bring about that objective. In any case, a complete normalization of economic and political relations with the island would require a congressional repeal of the 1996 Helms-Burton law. This is a dubious prospect considering the likely composition of both houses of Congress following next month’s election, despite the fact that a significant number of Republican congresspeople have supported, on behalf of agricultural and other business interests, the normalization of relations with Cuba. Nevertheless, the president of the United States has considerable discretion in improving relations with Cuba even if Helms-Burton remains the law of the land.

Meanwhile, all of these events have considerably exacerbated the problems of an already weak Cuban economy suffering low growth for several years (0.5% in 2019), low industrial and agricultural productivity, and a very low ratio of capital replacement needed to maintain an economy at least at its existing level of production and standard of living, let alone any significant economic growth and improved living conditions. To make matters worse, this situation has been developing in the context of an increasingly aging population, a demographic process that began in the late seventies and that will lead to a number of serious problems, such as a shrinking labor force having to support an expanding number of retirees.

In response to the pressures created by the recent deepening of the economic crisis, the Cuban government recently announced a series of economic measures that will bring the country an important step closer to the Sino-Vietnamese model, which combines an authoritarian one-party state with a growing role for private capitalist enterprise. These new measures represent the Cuban government’s decision to relinquish a part of its economic control in an effort to acquire hard currency, import capital, and promote greater dynamism and growth of the Cuban economy.

Development of Small and Medium Private Enterprise

One economic proposal that has been brought back to life is the establishment of private “Pequeñas y Medianas Empresas” or PYMES (Small and Medium Enterprises in English). For over a decade, the Cuban government under Raúl Castro’s rule has allowed the existence of very small private enterprises that by now employ approximately 30 percent of the labor force. This includes about one quarter of a million private farmers who work the land in usufruct, meaning that they rent it from the government for renewable twenty-year periods, as well as some 600,000 people who own or work for small businesses in urban areas. Most of these micro enterprises are primarily concentrated in the areas of food services (restaurants and cafeterias), transportation (taxis and trucks), and the renting of usually renovated rooms and apartments to tourists, probably the most lucrative small enterprise of all. Then, in 2014, in an important official document entitled Conceptualización del Modelo Económico y Social Cubano de Desarrollo Socialista (Conceptualization of the Cuban Social and Economic Model of Socialist Development), the Cuban government announced that it would allow the creation of small and medium private enterprises. This notion has recently been revived and being discussed by, for example, President Díaz-Canel, stating that it is necessary to “unblock” (destrabar) the PYMES and cooperatives in Cuba.

Few details have been given on what these enterprises may encompass in terms of size and other characteristics. Most likely that will remain under wraps until the government enacts the new law, which is scheduled for April 2022, regarding both state and private enterprises, although deputies to the official parliament have indicated that regulations concerning PYMES will be formulated as early as this year. Still, one can get an approximate idea of what those medium-size enterprises will comprise by looking at how they have been defined in other Latin American countries. In Costa Rica, for example, where PYMES are widespread and play an important role in the economy, medium enterprises refer to those that employ between 31 and 100 employees; micro enterprises to those that employ less than five workers (the largest group-size in present day Cuba), and small enterprises to those hiring from 6 to 30 workers. Chile approved a law officially defining the size of enterprises along the following numerical criteria: Micro, up to 9 employees; Small, from 10 to 25 employees; Medium, from 25 to 200 employees; and big, more than 200 employees.

Based on those definitions, it is clear that given their size, private medium-size firms are regular capitalist enterprises unlikely to be managed solely by their owners, and will need some kind of hierarchical administration to run the business in terms of its economic planning, administration and production. The establishment of these medium-size firms will likely go along with the official state unions moving in to “organize” the workers in those firms, as they have already done with the much smaller “cuenta propistas” (self-employed people) and their few employees. As in China, the official unions in Cuba will do nothing to truly represent the workers in their relations with the employers.

Cuba’s 2014 Labor Code

In this context it is very important to consider the Labor Code (Código Laboral) that has been in force since it was approved by the Cuban government in 2014. This Code eliminates the requirement to compensate workers whose place of employment has been closed, and allows private employers, as matter of their right as proprietors, to fire workers without cause. In the case of state employees, the government also fires workers by declaring them unsuitable (no idóneos) for their jobs, with little recourse for the affected workers. The new code also relaxes the 8-hour day allowing employers to stretch it to nine hours without extra compensation. As a matter of fact, there are already many workers in the private sector working 10 and even twelve hour shifts per day without overtime pay. (They do it anyway because their base pay is higher than in the state sector.) The Code also permits private employers to only grant a minimum of seven days of annual paid vacation instead of the thirty-day paid annual vacations that state employers are entitled to. It also abolishes release time for the continuing education (superación) of all workers, so currently it has to take place during the workers’ earned free time, like accumulated vacation time. This Labor Code is expected to also apply to the PYMES sector of the economy.

Modifying the State’s Monopoly of Foreign Trade

Along with widening the door to private enterprise, the Cuban regime has very recently relaxed its monopoly of foreign trade, that is, the exclusive control that, until now, it has had over all business import and export activities in the island. A short time ago, Rodrigo Malmierca, the Minister of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment (Mincex), announced that thirty-six state enterprises specializing in foreign trade were preparing themselves to offer their helping services to private importers and exporters to process and smooth out their foreign operations. As an added incentive to stimulate these (hard currency) private export activities, the government has offered to apply a discount to the tax on profits of state, cooperative and private enterprises if they show an increase in sales of products and services compared to the previous year.

In 1959, the first year of the revolution, when most of the economy was still in private hands, the revolutionary government, faced with a sharp decline in its hard currency foreign reserves, required Cuban private firms importing from abroad to get the permission from Cuba’s national bank to obtain the hard foreign currency (usually dollars) they needed for their transactions. This was how the government was trying to carry out its plan to use its scarce hard foreign currency on imports that were key to the country’s economic development rather than in, for example, luxury goods for personal use. It is not yet known what kind of say the government will now have in the import/export initiatives put forward by the private sector.

Rationalizing the Monetary System

The new rules governing export, and especially import, activities will be closely related and undoubtedly affected by the monetary difficulties currently facing Cuba, particularly those regarding the scarcity of hard currency. That scarcity is also playing a key role in the government’s ongoing discussion of monetary unification, an issue over which much ink has been spilled for many years in Cuba and that is increasingly becoming center stage in the new economic policies, and which may finally occur during the next few months. As the Cuban government attempts to increasingly integrate its economy into the international economy, the more it will need to regularize the exchange rate between its domestic currency and foreign currencies used by foreign capital for its transactions. This would allow a more rational arrangement for, among other things, establishing a system of prices and economic incentives, and measuring economic data.

For many years, Cuba has had a simultaneously existing double monetary system operating domestically, one in dollars and another in Cuban pesos. Until recently, that double system took the form of the Cuban peso and the CUC–-a non-convertible Cuban currency roughly equivalent to the dollar—which for a long time was pegged at approximately 24 or 25 Cuban pesos to one CUC. But the CUC lost its value and is in the process of disappearing due to the lack of hard currency to support it. Meanwhile, the Cuban economy has become directly dollarized: Cubans now get access to goods in special dollar stores selling a wide variety of goods, including food supplies that have been getting very hard to obtain with Cuban pesos elsewhere. Products in those dollar stores are bought with plastic cards issued by the government in order to prevent informal black-market speculation in dollar bills. They are the only form of currency accepted by those stores and are based on dollar deposits made in Cuban banks, most of these originating from remittances from abroad. However, with the disappearance of the CUC, we can no longer speak about currency unification but rather about the rationalization of Cuban monetary policy, particularly the exchange rate between the peso and the dollar. As the Cuban economist Pedro Monreal has pointed out monetary changes will have to be part of a broader package involving adjustments in prices, subsidies, salaries and pensions.

The monetary regularization of the exchange between the Cuban peso and the dollar now being discussed in the island poses to the government a series of complications that will be very difficult to solve. They primarilystem from the fact that while the general population has been exchanging 24 to 25 pesos for one dollar, state enterprises have enjoyed the economically distorting exchange rate of one peso for one dollar (a rate that has clearly favored the import of foreign goods, but has hurt the export of Cuban goods). The regularization of the currency in this context means that the government will have to square various circles in order to both prevent the closing of many state firms that used to benefit from the import subsidy they enjoyed at the special one-to-one exchange, and block an increase in inflation. Because of internal political pressure and popular expectations, the government might be forced to grant an exchange rate favorable to the peso. If that favorable exchange rate is not matched by increased availability of goods and services, it could lead to inflation. Compounding problems, a lack of independent trade unions will leave Cuban workers unprotected from their government’s monetary policies.

Especially important is the major policy change that the Cuban Minister of Labor and Social Security Marta Elena Feitó first announced on August 6 (and was later confirmed on October 13 by Alejandro Gil, the Minister of Economy and Planning), which will substantially increase the number and kind of urban occupations that Cubans can engage in the private sector. As part of his early economic reforms, Raúl Castro allowed the opening to private self-employment and the hiring of others of a limited number of occupations that eventually increased to over two hundred, which were then reorganized into 123 occupational groups. (It is worth noting that this increase was far from a linear process, and on more than one occasion the government retrenched and diminished the number of permissible occupations in the private sector.) As per Ministers Feitó and Gil, that list of permissible private occupations will be eliminated, and presumably a new one will be prepared listing only those occupations that Cubans will not be allowed to practice on a private basis, such as, for example, the private practice of medicine. Neither minister has yet set a date when these changes will go into effect.

Finally, to facilitate the operations of both the rural and urban private sectors, the government announced that it would increase the number of wholesale markets to allow small and medium private entrepreneurs to purchase food and other goods in bulk at lower prices. The lack of access to wholesale markets has been a big problem that has seriously affected the viability of both rural and urban private ventures. In order to improve matters, the government very recently announced that starting in September wholesale markets will start functioning in growing numbers in the provincial capitals, although the transactions will be exclusively conducted in hard currencies, which has been clearly the principal impulse for this and other announced economic changes.

Should the Cuban government carry out all of its announced changes, the economy of the island will have travelled a long way from the highly nationalized economy of the late eighties— more nationalized than the economies of the USSR and Eastern Europe–to a fundamentally mixed economy thus moving ever closer towards the Sino-Vietnamese model. It remains to be seen to what extent the proposed changes will improve the mediocre performance of the present Cuban economy where low economic growth and low productivity have characterized both the urban and rural economies for a long time. It is worth noting, however, that in spite of a generalized low agricultural productivity, private farms have already surpassed the state farms in the production of several staples, as was the case in Eastern Europe under Communist rule. In only a little after one decade since a substantial amount of land was distributed to private farmers, and in spite of the great difficulties in their obtaining access to credit and wholesale trade, agricultural tools and other implements, private farmers, who still own less arable land than the government, already produce 83.3 percent of fruits, 83.1 percent of corn, and 77.9 percent of beans in the island. This, however, is not so much a testimony to the wonders of private enterprise, but rather to the disaster that bureaucratic state agriculture ran from the top in a centralized fashion has been for Cuba (and for several countries that used to be part of the Soviet bloc). In such bureaucratic systems, the people involved at the point of production lack both material incentives, such as greater purchasing power, and political incentives, such as self-management and democratic control of their workplaces, whose absence has historically led to widespread apathy, negligence, irresponsibility and what Thorstein Veblen called “withdrawal of efficiency.” It is this lived experience, and not capitalist propaganda, that has increasingly made the capitalist model attractive to Cubans.

The Political Context

A critical issue arising from this discussion is the nature and composition of the Cuban political leadership that is facing the current crisis and presiding over the above-mentioned proposals fifteen years after Fidel Castro withdrew, for health reasons, from his direct command of the country and was succeeded by his younger brother Raúl, the head of the Cuban armed forces and heir apparent since the very early days of the revolutionary government. Upon taking power, Raúl introduced a series of economic reforms opening up the system, to a modest degree, to usually very small size private enterprise, and promoted a significant degree of liberalization like, for example, changing in 2012, the rules controlling foreign travel to permit Cubans to travel abroad. But this liberalization was not accompanied by any kind of political democratization. Just the opposite. Thus, the repression of dissidence has continued. So, for example, while liberalizing travel abroad for most Cubans, the government has either placed traveling obstacles to many dissidents either delaying their timely appearances in conferences abroad or making it impossible for them to travel abroad for which purpose it has elaborated a list of “regulados” (regulated people) of some 150 dissident Cubans not allowed to leave the country. It is worth noting that, like in so many other repressive measures adopted by the Cuban government, this continues to be, as in Fidel Castro’s times, a political and administrative decision outside of even the regime’s own judicial system. The same applies to the thousands of short-term arrests that Raul’s government has carried out every year, especially to prevent public demonstrations not controlled by the government.

The one-party system continues to function as under Fidel Castro, with its enormous social, economic and political control implemented through its transmission belts in the mass organizations (e.g., labor unions and women’s organizations) and other institutions such as those in the educational system. The mass media (radio, television and newspapers) continues under the control of the Cuban government following in its coverage in its coverage the “orientations” of the Ideology Department of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. The sole important exception is the internal publications of the Catholic Church, which, however, exercises extreme political caution, and limits the distribution of its publications to its parishes and other Catholic institutions. The Internet, which the government has yet been unable to bring under its complete control, remains the principal vehicle for critical and dissident voices.

Meanwhile, an important generational change has been taking place inside the Cuban leadership that poses questions about the Cuban system’s future. The new president of the Cuban republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermudez, was born in 1960, a year after the revolutionary victory. The occupant of the newly created position of prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz, a man with long years of experience in the tourist business, was born in 1963. These two men could be seen as being under a sort of probationary apprenticeship under Raúl Castro, who at his 89 years of age, is still the First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, although he will officially retire in 2021. There are other “historic” leaders still at the top of the political hierarchy as well. José Ramón Machado Ventura, a medical doctor who for a time was number three after Fidel and Raúl Castro, and is a member of the Political Bureau, will be ninety years old on October 26. Ramiro Valdés, another “histórico” who occupied many top positions during more than sixty years of the revolutionary government, including Minister of the Interior, now a member of the Political Bureau, is 88 years old. Several top generals in high positions also belong to the older generation. General Ramón Espinosa Martín, member of the Political Bureau of the CPP, is 81 years old. In comparison, General Álvaro López Miera, also a member of the Political Bureau is a youngster at a mere 76 years of age. General Leopoldo Cintra Frias, the Minister of the FAR (Revolutionary Armed Forces) is 79 years old.

Yet, there are younger people, less visible than Díaz-Canel Bermudez and Marrero Cruz, who now sit in critical governmental positions and whose power will likely increase in the context of a transition after the old “históricos” are gone from the scene. One of them is sixty-year old General Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, a former son in law of Raúl Castro, who is the head of GAESA, the huge business conglomerate of the Armed Forces, which includes Gaviota, the principal tourist enterprise in Cuba. Various active and retired high Army officers currently hold leading positions in other key areas of the Cuban economy. The Cuban Army has formed technical and business cadres who, together with a group of civilian technicians and managers, have for some time played a major role in the Cuban economy. Many of them have become international businesspeople acting on behalf of the Cuban state and have developed extensive connections with international banks and other international capitalist institutions. To them we must add the managers of state-owned industry, who have just been granted more autonomy by the government. All of these functionaries may end up benefiting from the announced establishment of PYMES by using their business contacts to obtain the capital necessary to create their own medium size enterprises in the island. They constitute the kernel of a developing Cuban capitalist bourgeoisie that is emerging from within the Communist apparatus itself.

Opposition, Disaffiliation and Discontent

There is political opposition and Cuba, principally but not exclusively on the center and right of the political spectrum. However, it has been politically marginalized by government repression, and by the Plattist (after the Platt Amendment imposed by the U.S. on Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century curtailing Cuban independence) practice adopted by sections of that opposition, which instead of organizing and raising funds among the close to two million people of Cuban descent in the U.S. and other countries abroad–just as José Martí did among Cuban tobacco workers in Florida to support Cuban independence in the 1890s–has instead relied on U.S. government handouts to survive the Cuban government’s persecution.

While the government might have successfully marginalized the active dissidence in the island, it has not been able to stem the considerable political disaffiliation from the regime, particularly among the younger generations that grew up since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the Soviet bloc in the late eighties and early nineties. It is worth noting that almost as much time has elapsed between 1990 and the present as it did between the revolutionary victory in 1959 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc. This collapse – and the major withdrawal of economic assistance to Cuba that accompanied it–produced a catastrophic economic crisis and a considerable erosion of the legitimacy of the Cuban regime. Since then, public and private corruption has markedly increased, a phenomenon that was even denounced by Fidel Castro in a famous speech at the University of Havana in November of 2005, when he warned that it could destroy the revolution from within and thus accomplish what US imperialism had failed to bring about for many decades.

The current economic crisis, considerably aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic, has added to the already widespread discontent stemming from the shortage of consumer goods. Much of this discontent has become focused on the “coleros” (from “cola,” a queue or line of people waiting), a term currently used for people who regularly monopolize the first places in the now ubiquitous lines forming everywhere to get increasingly scarce basic goods or in order to sell those places to latecomers; and for people who taking advantage of their holding, in one way or another, the first places in the line buy up as much as there is in stock in order to resell it at exorbitant prices. The government has used to its advantage the understandable popular indignation aroused by the “coleros” by denouncing and arresting them, but avoids focusing on the economic causes of the “colero” phenomenon, namely, the scarcity of basic goods due to insufficient domestic production and/or importation. The fact is, however, that given the shortage of agricultural production due to the existing economic and political regime in the island, there does not seem to be any practical alternative to this problem. Even rationing the hard currency goods bought by the “coleros” by incorporating them into the already existing peso-denominated rationing system is not likely to work as there may not be a sufficient amount of them to provide for everybody.

It is difficult to tell whether the circumstances under which the current disaffiliation and discontent may translate into a political alternative, let alone a democratic and progressive one, to the existent undemocratic one-party state regime. It is true that Obama’s shutting off the road of Cuban emigration to the United States in the final days of his administration eliminated an important safety valve for Cuban opposition and discontent. (It is worth noting that Trump did not repeal this particular measure by Obama, proof that his opposition to Communism is far weaker than his xenophobia and racism). Nevertheless, the shutting off of emigration to the United States has not so far appeared sufficient to ignite any major significant political development in the island.

What is clear is that the adoption of the new economic measures discussed above, particularly the legalization of the so-called medium-size enterprises, may considerably extend and deepen Cuba’s double exploitation and oppression: the one exercised, for a long time, by the highly authoritarian one-party state, and the other one, exercised by the future medium-size private businesses helped along by the false protection afforded to the workers by the state unions that will in fact function as company unions in the PYMES context. The Labor Code approved in 2014 already offers a glimmer of what is to come.

The new economic distribution of power that sooner or later will develop in Cuba will further demonstrate the urgency of truly free trade unions, and the need to replace the undemocratic one-party state that by its nature makes independent unions impossible, with a truly socialist and democratic republic in Cuba.

Capitalism Made Women of Color More Vulnerable to the COVID Recession

By: October 14, 2020
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Migreldi Lara, a single mother of three who is out of work as a hair stylist due to the pandemic, stands with her daughters during a protest outside the Berks County Services Building in Reading, Pennsylvania, on September 1, 2020.
Ben Hasty / MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images

First posted at Truthout.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly jobs report for September proves with numbers what we have all known anecdotally and experientially: This pandemic-laced recession has been disastrous for women, especially women of color.

Between August and September, 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce, a rate four times higher than that for men. One in 9 Black women, and 1 in 9 Latinas, aged 20 and over, respectively at rates of 11 percent and 11 percent, became unemployed in September. Compare this to white men who have an unemployment rate of 6.5 percent and white women who have a rate of 6.9 percent.

These figures are not very different from the spring, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics report in April told us that women accounted for 55 percent of the 20.5 million job losses. The unemployment rate for adult women then was 15 percent, as compared to the 13 percent unemployment rate for adult men.

From the start of the pandemic, job losses for women have been so much greater than for men that some feminist policy makers have called this a “shecession,” in contrast with 2008. And “she” is most certainly a woman of color.

Sometimes numbers — percentages and charts — can obscure social wounds. We can see the 11 percent job loss figure for Black women, but we don’t necessarily associate that number with the impacts on people like Kyaira Jackson, a seventh grader in my daughter’s class, whose mother, the sole earner for her family, just lost her job at Walmart. Her mother, Jazmine Pinckney, asked me if I could help return some of Kyaira’s school things as the family would be moving soon. As is the case for most Americans, Jazmine’s family’s health care, as well as her ability to pay rent and buy food, were solely and relentlessly dependent on her wage. She would now move back to her childhood home in Atlanta, back to the house she left to make her way in the world, this time with her two young children.

Jazmine’s life, like the lives of so many Black women in this pandemic, is like Ariadne’s thread, leading us through the maze of capitalist social relations. It helps illuminate the monsters behind the inequality that existed long before the virus was even heard of. The first step to understanding the devastation caused by the virus in the lives of women and people of color, is to understand that it was merely the spark; the kindling was there all along.

Let us begin with the wage, since its tyranny shapes not just our working lives but crucially, our lives outside of the workplace.

Well before the pandemic, women in this country earned 82 cents to the dollar that a man earned, while Black women earned 62 cents on the dollar, and Latina women earned 54 cents on the dollar. Often it is difficult to determine cause and effect for gendered wages. It is because women earn less than men that they tend to work part-time and spend their unwaged time doing care work in the home, as both child care and elder care remain exorbitant in the U.S. But it is also true that certain jobs become less prestigious and lower paid when women become the ones primarily performing them. Teaching was treated with much respect and remunerated better in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when it was mostly men who became teachers; now, K-12 teachers are mostly women, and they are neither as well paid nor well respected.

Waged work remains inextricably braided with unwaged work. Lack of access to quality child care and elder care forces women to consider quitting waged work before their male partners since their jobs were less paying to begin with. This in turn ensures that women are pushed into, or remain locked into, lower-paid work due to “lack of experience” or for having taken “career breaks.” Just under a third of single mothers were already living below the poverty line; since the pandemic, over a million of them have lost their jobs.

When schools and child care centers closed in the spring, and as they continue to offer partial services through the fall, many women, particularly white women, decided to leave the work force. As Stefania Albanesi put it in The New York Times, “white families tend to have higher wealth and higher average income so they can afford to reduce labor supply, compared to most African-American households, where earnings are quite low.”

If our analysis stops at the doors of the workplace, and only pays attention to the wage gap or unemployment figures, it will fail to see the multiple ways in which waged work orchestrates the unwaged slices of our lives. Ecologists use the term “cascade effect” as a concept to understand how primary extinction of a species can trigger multiple secondary extinctions. The tyranny of the wage has a similar cascade effect on our life-making.

Consider the health of Black women and Latinas during this pandemic. Low wages certainly determine the kind of health care these women have or whether they have it at all. But we should not only be concerned about low wages in the here and now. Historically, Black communities have been forced to live in neighborhoods that have poor air quality and/or contaminated water. They are 75 percent more likely to live near polluting industries that produces hazardous waste.

Schools that predominantly serve Black and Brown communities are chronically underfunded and the first ones to close during a financial crisis. Consistent redlining through the years have ensured that these neighborhoods are also more likely to be what the federal government calls “food deserts” or “areas in which residents are hard-pressed to find affordable, healthy food.”

When a virus with no apparent cure comes into the lives of people in these communities, who, then, shall we blame for the disproportionately high death rates? It is not simply the pandemic or the recession that is driving the disproportionate harm experienced by women of color in this moment. It is an economic system stacked against them.

For all the women who have lost their jobs during this pandemic, for Black women and Latinas who have performed the bulk of the essential work during lockdown and borne the brunt of the recession, for all the Black and Brown elders who have lost their lives during this crisis, it is capitalism that has been their preexisting condition.

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

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