In this afternoon’s demonstrations in Havana, Frank García Hernández was arrested, among other members of the Cuban left. This afternoon the Cuban people took to the streets. A people that were not summoned by any organization but by the acute economic crisis facing Cuba and the government’s inability to handle the situation. Cuba took to the streets with the ill advised slogan “Homeland and life”, but they took to the streets for reasons that go beyond a slogan, they took to the streets to demand true socialism from the government. Those in the streets were not only artists and intellectuals, this time it was the people in its broadest heterogeneity.
This note by Comunistas blog does not seek to analyze the situation in Cuba. It seeks to denounce the violent detention of the demonstrators, to denounce that this time the repressive forces of the State put themselves in the opposite place, that they repressed Cubans, that they used pepper spray and all available resources. This note demands the freedom of all the detainees and especially of Frank García Hernández, Cuban historian and Marxist, arbitrarily detained. For Leonardo Romero Negrín, a young socialist student of Physics at the University of Havana. For Maykel González Vivero, director of Tremenda Nota, a marginal magazine. For Marcos Antonio Perez Fernandez, a minor, a student at the Pre-University. For all those violently detained on this black afternoon that Cuba will not forget.
Comunistas appeals to the solidarity of the international Marxist community and also to the conscience of the Cuban government. This time it is about a people that needs answers and dialogue. It is about a civil society that does not want annexation, but to participate and decide the destiny of their nation. Comunistas Blog condemns the repression and says to the bureaucracy: enough.
Yesterday, July 11, 2021, Cubans in several cities took to the streets to protest lack of health care, lack of food, and to demand freedom. Where should socialists stand on these protests and the Cuban government?
First, international socialists like myself, in a variety of organizations or independently, have always supported the right of the Cuban people to self-determination. We believe that the United States should, to use an old slogan, keep its hands off of Cuba.
We have opposed the U.S. embargo and its extension through the Helms-Burton Act because, even though food and medicine have not generally been included in the embargo, we recognize that the reduction in trade adversely affects the Cuban people.
Second, we stand opposed to any U.S. military intervention in Cuba or to any U.S.-subsidized operation by other states or actors.
Third, we have supported the right of Americans and Cubans to freely travel to each other’s countries and oppose restrictions on travel to Cuba.
Altogether, this constitutes an anti-imperialist position.
At the same time, as international socialists, we support the right of the Cuban people to engage in free speech, to assemble together to protest, and to demonstrate on any issue that they choose. Certainly, when the health system fails and when food is not available, we support their right to make demands on their government to rectify those situations, just as we could in any other country.
We also support the Cubans’ right to demand changes in their government. Cubans, we have always believed, should have the right if they wish to challenge the ruling Communist Party that has held power now for more than sixty years and to organize new political parties. We also support their right to organize independent labor unions of their own choice, unions not controlled by the Communist Party and the government.
We therefore oppose today the Cuban government’s repression of the demonstrations. We call for the release of those who have been taken prisoner. We also condemn Cuban President Díaz-Canel statement: “the order to battle is given: revolutionaries, take to the streets.,” which is a call for either vigilante violence or organized political attacks on protestors.
International socialists should support the Cuban people’s right to protest and oppose the Cuban government’s repression. We should attempt to identify within any new movement the genuinely democratic and socialist currents that wish to bring about a democratic socialist society, a democratic government overseeing a collectively owned and managed economy.
If we do identify democratic socialists in Cuba, we should support them and collaborate with them. But in any case, even if we can identify no democratic socialists within the movement at this point, we support the people’s right to make their voices heard.
Iraqi security forces firing tear gas and live rounds into a crowd of demonstrators during the 2019 Tishreen (October) uprising
The last decade has seen historic political upheavals across the Middle East and North Africa: a tsunami of popular uprisings that have brought down several dictators and led to momentous transformations in political consciousness, if not always to democratic outcomes. But the last decade has also seen a concomitant counter-revolutionary roll-back across the region: authoritarian regimes, entrenched elites, ruling classes, deep states, and reactionary forces have marshalled considerable resources to torpedo these movements from below.[1]
Saudi Arabia’s role as a counter-revolutionary force in the Middle East is widely understood and thoroughly documented. Historian Rosie Bsheer calls the Saudi kingdom “a counter-revolutionary state par excellence,” indeed one that was “consolidated as such.”[2] The Saudi monarchy has gone into counter-revolutionary overdrive since the onset of the Arab uprisings, scrambling to thwart popular movements and keep the region’s dictators in power — from Egypt and Bahrain to Yemen and Sudan (and beyond).[3]
What is less understood is the counter-revolutionary role that Iran plays in the region’s politics. This is poorly understood and under-examined because it flies in the face of the dominant narrative, that of Iran as a “revolutionary” state in the vanguard of a regional “Axis of Resistance” to US imperialism and its allies. This view is shared across the ideological spectrum, from neoconservatives and US foreign policy hawks (for whom Iran’s “revolutionary” policies are dangerous and must be contained/confronted) to large swaths of the “anti-imperialist” Left and antiwar movement (for whom Iran is merely defending itself and “resisting” US/Israeli/Saudi belligerence). While the two camps disagree about whether Iran’s “revolutionary” agenda is a good thing, they agree that it is “revolutionary.” This is also the official line of the Islamic Republic itself, whose self-image as a “revolutionary” state in the vanguard of an “Axis of Resistance” is central to its identity — and legitimacy.[4]
Here we have a classic instance of what the sociologist Ulrich Beck calls a zombie category. Zombie categories, he argues, “are dead but somehow go on living, making us blind to the realities” of the world.[5] The view of Iran as a “revolutionary” state has been dead for quite some time yet somehow stumbles along and blinds us to what is actually happening on the ground in the Middle East. A brief look at the role Iran has played over the last decade in three countries — Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria — reveals a very different picture: not one of a revolutionary but rather of a counter-revolutionary force.
Lebanon’s “October Revolution”
In October 2019, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across Lebanon in “the most comprehensive anti-government protests the country has seen at least since the civil war ended in 1990, in terms of numbers, geographic spread, and diversity of sects and class.”[6] While the proximate causes were the government’s inept response to the wildfires that engulfed the country and its announcement of a tax on WhatsApp voice calls, the uprising — which came to be known as Lebanon’s “October Revolution” — had deeper roots and gave expression to grievances that had been simmering for several years. The 2015 “You Stink” protests against the disfunction and mismanagement that led to a crisis of uncollected garbage, for instance, in many ways prefigured the 2019 uprising.[7] But the 2019 demonstrations were more far-reaching: people throughout the country — “not only in Beirut but in all major coastal cities and smaller inland ones” — took to the streets “in a show of solidarity never before seen.”[8] They were “rebelling against the socioeconomic violence…produced by the sectarian order” with its “rampant clientelism and corruption,” notes Lebanese political scientist Bassel Salloukh.[9] Along similar lines, Lebanese sociologist Rima Majed characterizes it as a revolt against “sectarian neoliberalism.”[10]
Mass demonstration in Beirut during Lebanon’s 2019 “October Revolution”
There were three distinct “streams” within the uprising, according to Majed. What she calls the “radical” stream “has been thinking intersectionally, centering class inequality, gender inequality…questions of citizenship, race, and refugees. It is mobilizing around all these issues and making links between them, and demanding an overhaul of the neoliberal economic system as well as the sectarian political system.”[11] Majed and Lana Salman note the centrality of a feminist politics in the uprising, one that aims to “dismantle interlinked manifestations of patriarchy, capitalism and sectarianism.”[12] Majed characterizes the second stream as essentially “liberal” and the third stream as “more ad hoc,” lacking a “clear political project or vision.” A spectrum of orientations was thus present in the Lebanese uprising, with a decidedly progressive center of gravity.
Close to a million people — a critical mass in a country of less than 7 million — participated in the demonstrations. An embodiment of what Yasser Munif calls “the politics of life”[13] or what Asef Bayat calls “the politics of fun,”[14] Jade Saab and Joey Ayoub describe the “carnival atmosphere” in Lebanon’s public squares, “with music, dancing, DJs and fireworks at night” and a vibrant intellectual scene with “daily public lectures on the economy, the constitution, history,” and other themes.[15]
“In these ‘classes’ you could see attempts at the creation of a new Lebanese identity,” Saab and Ayoub observe — one that rejects and transcends the “myths of sectarianism.” In the same vein, Salloukh sees Lebanon’s “October Revolution” as a “truly foundational moment” in which “people are redefining their subjectivity.”[16] The uprising, he notes, “has allowed for a reimagining of the Lebanese nation beyond top-down imposed narrow sectarian affiliations.” He detects
a shift in how people define themselves as agents: not as sectarian subjects in a political order cut along sectarian and religious lines, but rather as anti- and trans-sectarian citizens operating in a polyphonic and democratic civic space.…[17]
Counter-revolution
Where does Hezbollah, Iran’s key ally in Lebanon, figure in this picture?
The defining slogan of Lebanon’s uprising — “all of them means all of them” (kellon yani kellon) — called out the country’s entire ruling class, which includes Hezbollah. One pointed variation on the slogan was “All of them means all of them, and Nasrallah is one of them.”[18] Protesters chanting “the people want the downfall of the regime” (the defining slogan of the 2011 Arab uprisings) gathered outside the office of Mohammed Raad, the head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc.
Hezbollah returned the favor: after some initial hedging, the “Party of God” unleashed a mob on Beirut’s main protest site, beating unarmed activists at a peaceful sit-in and burning down their tents.[19] In the southern Lebanese town of Nabatiyeh, according to Human Rights Watch, several hundred Hezbollah supporters “attacked peaceful protesters, with sticks and sharp metal objects, including beating women, children, and older people indiscriminately.”[20] In response to that assault, protesters declared a “day of solidarity with Nabatiyeh” on October 24.[21] “Those who oppress Beirut don’t liberate Palestine,” read graffiti scrawled in downtown Beirut in a poignant critique of Hezbollah.[22]
A Hezbollah supporter (right) attacks a protester at Beirut’s main protest site amid Lebanon’s 2019 uprising. “Party of God” supporters burned down the tents at the encampment and attacked protesters in other Lebanese cities.
Hezbollah’s attacks on the demonstrators were not only physical but rhetorical, framing the popular revolt as part of a foreign plot against Hezbollah and its regional allies in the “Axis of Resistance” — accusations that were “met with ridicule, especially since it was being spearheaded by a party that openly flouts the fact that it is almost exclusively funded by Iran.”[23] Activists fired back with satire, “distributing free sandwiches with ‘funded by [name of foreign government]’ written on them.”[24] Nasrallah is “coming up with conspiracy theories just to get people to stop revolting,” a university student active in the protests, Ahmad Bshennaty, told Al Jazeera.[25] Tehran amplified this line, blaming the protests on “America and Western intelligence services” and warning of the “insecurity and turmoil” they portended.[26] Supreme leader Ali Khamenei invoked a highly revealing domestic comparison: in an apparent reference to the mass protests that rocked the Islamic Republic in late 2017 and early 2018, he said that foreign powers “had similar plans” for Iran, but “the armed forces were ready and that plot was neutralized.”[27]
This “campaign against the protests,” Salloukh notes, “backfired among the public, even inside the Shi‘a community, for it portrayed Hezbollah as the main defender of the sectarian system with all its corruption and distortions.”[28] Hezbollah is “now viewed by many demonstrators as part of the corrupt and morally bankrupt political establishment that must be replaced,” as Joseph Haboush observes.[29] Lebanese activist and podcaster Nizar Hassan characterizes Hezbollah’s role in the uprising as that of a “counter revolutionary guard.”[30]
Hezbollah’s aim was to “end the protest movement by proposing solutions that maintain the Lebanese sectarian and neoliberal framework, while continuing to use intimidation and sometimes violence against protesters,” writes Joseph Daher, author of a book on Hezbollah.[31] Although Hezbollah has been firmly entrenched in Lebanon’s power structure for over a decade — Lebanese author Elias Khoury calls it “the system’s staunchest supporter”[32] — the 2019 upheaval brought what Daher calls “the contradiction between Hezbollah’s proclaimed support for the ‘oppressed’ and its orientation favourable to Lebanese neoliberalism and the country’s elite class” into ever sharper focus.
The Lebanese writer and podcaster Joey Ayoub captures the Orwellian upside-down-ness of this ideological sleight of hand in his formulation “Hezbollah’s Resistance™ against resistance.”[33] Hezbollah, he shows, tries to have it both ways: on the one hand, defending the status quo and maintaining Lebanon’s “sectarian-capitalist structures,” while at the same time banking on its membership in the so-called “Axis of Resistance.” That is, posturing as a force for “resistance” — a zombie category amid Lebanon’s current political landscape — while attacking people engaged in actual resistance to the ruling system and undermining progressive social movements.
Iraq’s Tishreen uprising
The parallels between the Iraqi and Lebanese revolts are manifold, starting with their timing: mass protests engulfed both countries starting in October 2019. Iraqi and Lebanese protesters were conscious of the connections between their struggles: “in the different protest squares people are shouting: ‘One revolution, from Baghdad to Beirut,’” notes Sami Adnan, an activist in Baghdad with the group Workers Against Sectarianism.[34] It’s also important to see the two upheavals in their wider regional context, as part of the “second wave” of Arab uprisings that also included momentous popular movements in Algeria and Sudan — or, as some argue, the uprisings that have been ongoing across the Middle East and North Africa since December 2010.[35] Moreover, all four of these cases were part of a global wave of simultaneous mass protests in late 2019 — in Chile, Hong Kong, India, France, Ecuador, Guinea, Haiti, Colombia, Iran, Argentina, and beyond — which could be “the largest wave of nonviolent mass movements in world history.”[36]
The protests that erupted in Iraq in October 2019 were arguably the “biggest grassroots socio-political mobilization” in the country’s history.[37] At root, that mobilization was “about the poor, the disempowered and the marginalized demanding a new system,” notes the Iraqi sociologist Zahra Ali.[38] The Tishreen (October) uprising, as it came to be known, quickly spread to “cities and towns across central and southern Iraq”[39] and eventually “engulfed virtually the whole country (though they were most concentrated in Baghdad and the Shia-dominated southern governorates).”[40]
By no means did this upheaval come out of nowhere: Iraq has seen a steady stream of protests in recent years — in 2009, 2011, 2015, and 2018.[41] But the 2019 protests represented “the most serious challenge yet to the post-2003 political order,” the Iraq scholar Fanar Haddad observes.[42] The 2019 rebellion was “backboned” by those previous protests — it was the “culmination of a decade of mobilization”[43] — “but its identity was more radical and firmer,” notes Zeidon Alkinani.[44] “People were no longer asking for better job opportunities, electricity or water. They were calling to overhaul the system.”
Alkinani underscores that the movement “classified itself as a ‘revolution’ in terms of discourse, demands, and objectives.” “[E]ven if the current movement fails to achieve a political revolution,” Haddad argues, “and even if it is not a revolution, it is undoubtedly a revolutionary movement that has already achieved a cultural revolution.”[45]
An Iraqi activist being blanket-tossed into the air by fellow demonstrators in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, the site of what Fanar Haddad calls an “explosion of cultural, political and intellectual expression and creativity” (December 2019)
What were the protesters calling for? First and foremost, “eradicating the Muhasasa system,” Alkinani notes, referring to the ethno-sectarian scheme in which political representation and power are based on sub-national identities (Shi‘a/Sunni/Kurd).[46] This system — established under the US occupation following the 2003 invasion and sustained by both American and Iranian influence in the years since — became “the target of popular rage,” Haddad notes: “rage at the systemic failures, dysfunction and criminality that have marked the post-2003 order.” That order has created a massive chasm, Haddad observes, between “the ruling few and those with connections to them” on one hand and “the vast majority of impoverished and excluded Iraqis” on the other.[47] In 2019, those impoverished and excluded Iraqis rose up “demanding a whole new system,” Zahra Ali and Safaa Khalaf write.[48]
As in Lebanon, Asef Bayat’s “politics of fun” was on full display in Iraq, especially in the epicenter of the 2019 protest movement, Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, home to an “explosion of cultural, political and intellectual expression and creativity,” writes Haddad.
Amidst a forest of tents blaring everything from hip hop to poetry to Shia mourning recitations, reminders of why Iraqis have taken to the streets, and at what cost, abound in the form of pictures, murals, memorials, prayer meetings and other forms of commemoration dedicated to the young men who lost their lives over the course of the past two months of mass mobilisation.[49]
And like Lebanon, the uprising involved an intellectual component. “Tahrir Square in Baghdad today is a revolutionary zone,” says the aforementioned Baghdad-based activist Sami Adnan.
There are places for reading books in one tent, and a medical tent. Some tents represent specific regions of Iraq, or retired people, or professional groups, like unions of engineers, etc. … [People] discuss day-to-day things about what to do, but also questions of leadership, writing a new constitution, or putting on seminars about different political topics.[50]
“A new political awareness and culture have been formed” through the protests, Haddad writes.[51] Indeed, Alkinani argues, the uprising has “opened a new chapter in Iraq’s modern history.”[52] The Tishreen uprising has “opened the door to a new Iraqi identity and national consciousness,” proclaim the editors of Tuk Tuk, a newspaper that grew out of the revolt, on the front page of its second issue.[53]
Counter-revolution
As Berman, Clarke, and Majed note:
A movement demanding wholesale political change represented a real threat to the system of cronyism and rapaciousness that has enriched Iraq’s politicians over the last two decades, and these elites quickly mobilized an array of state and non-state security agents in an attempt to quash this challenge.[54]
Mohammad al Basri, a figure affiliated with Iraq’s paramilitary Popular Mobilization Units, expressed this mindset with rare bluntness: “Do they really think that we would hand over a state, an economy, one that we have built over 15 years? That they can just casually come and take it? Impossible! This is a state that was built with blood.”[55]
Those forces wasted no time in launching a “war against unarmed protesters” that left several hundred dead and several thousand wounded.[56] Amnesty International documented the use of “military-grade tear gas grenades, live ammunition and deadly sniper attacks”[57] in what the organization calls a “lethal campaign of repression against protesters” and an “ongoing wave of intimidation, arrests and torture” of Iraqi activists.[58] Whereas this bloodbath of repression against crowds of protesters has been perpetrated in broad daylight, an ominous chain of assassinations targeting activists connected to the uprising has been happening in the shadows, creating what protesters call “an atmosphere of terror.”[59]
Protest art in Baghdad depicting a demonstrator hit by a tear gas canister during the 2019 Tishreen (October) uprising. A striking array of murals, graffiti, and public art has sprung up within Iraq’s protest movement.
The uprising has been “profoundly shaped by the Iraqi security forces’ violent repression,” Ali and Khalaf observe.[60] Indeed, Haddad notes, the demands of the protesters were “only hardened by the violence that has been unleashed on them.”[61] “The more the political establishment cracked down on protests, the more outrage it triggered, resulting in fresh rounds of mobilization,” write Chantal Berman, Killian Clarke, and Rima Majed.[62]
Iran is deeply implicated in this counter-revolutionary repression — both indirectly, as the chief political ally and patron of the Iraqi government over the last 15 years, and directly, through the web of militias and paramilitary forces coordinated by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which have opened fire on protesters.[63] Those militias “committed bloody massacres against peaceful protesters” in multiple Iraqi cities, including Baghdad, Nasriyah, Basra and Najaf.”[64] “The authorities, paramilitary forces and militias connected to the political elite, backed by Iran, are those primarily responsible for killing, beating, threatening and intimidating demonstrators, civil society activists and journalists,” Zahra Ali notes.[65]
Tehran also intervened politically, maneuvering to keep Iraqi Prime Minister Abdel Abdul Mahdi in power in the face of demands from protesters that he step down.[66] (Mahdi eventually did resign, in late November 2019 — a major victory for the protest movement that Tehran endeavored to circumvent.)
Iraqi protesters weren’t just rebelling against Iran’s local allies, but against Iran itself. Protesters in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square smashed banners of Khamenei with their shoes.[67] Others put up a white banner with red Xs drawn through photographs of Khamenei and Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, the architect of Iran’s regional policy.[68] “Images of Ayatollah Khomeini were removed from cities like Najaf, and pro-Iran political parties with prominent militias that were involved in the violence against the protesters had their branch offices attacked and burned,” Alkinani notes.[69] Most spectacularly, protesters set fire to the Iranian consulate in Karbala and Najaf amid chants of “Iran out of Iraq”.[70]
Among the demands of the protesters, Adnan notes, are “an end to the rule of militias, and an end to corruption and foreign rule — especially Iranian rule, but also US rule.”[71] “Most Iraqis are increasingly outraged at the way their national sovereignty is constantly infringed” by both Washington and Tehran, notes Middle East scholar Gilbert Achcar.[72] Vividly illustrating this point, Haddad observes that in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square,
while gazing at a mural proclaiming ‘America go out of Iraq’ complete with a depiction of an American dagger bleeding Iraq dry, a looped recording of a voice chanting ‘Iraq is under Iranian occupation’ can be heard.[73]
The Associated Press reported that the very day after the protests began in Iraq in October 2019, Soleimani flew to Baghdad in a helicopter for an emergency meeting with high-ranking Iraqi security officials. According to two of those officials, Soleimani said to them in that meeting: “We in Iran know how to deal with protests. This happened in Iran and we got it under control.”[74]
Despite the many parallels between the Lebanese and Iraqi uprisings, there are two key differences: (1) the protests in Iraq were met with a staggering level of violence, in contrast to the largely nonviolent Lebanese case; (2) Iran played a much more direct role in the Iraqi counter-revolution than it did in Lebanon, where its key ally, Hezbollah, represents and reflects the stance of the Islamic Republic. But what both cases illuminate is this: in the face of popular uprisings expressing emancipatory demands, Iran sides not with the protesters but with the ruling establishments they’re protesting against. And the story is far from over: while the COVID pandemic dampened protests, the issues that gave rise to the uprisings remain unresolved, and activism in both countries continues.[75]
Syria’s forgotten revolution
Moving in reverse chronological order, I’ll now briefly examine Iran’s response to the Syrian uprising in 2011. I will not examine Iran’s role in the Syrian conflict writ large; rather, my focus will be on Iran’s response to the initial, nonviolent phase of the Syrian uprising, from the spring to the autumn of 2011.
With the colossal violence that has engulfed Syria over the last decade, it is often forgotten that it all began with peaceful protests expressing democratic demands. In March 2011, mass demonstrations broke out across the country — in provincial villages and urban areas alike. Syrians representing a cross-section of the country (Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Druze, Ismailis, Kurds, and others) took to the streets chanting slogans that echoed those of their counterparts in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere across the region, and expressing the same aspirations — for freedom, dignity, social justice, democratic rights, and an end to dictatorship. Because this history has been largely obscured by the calamity that befell Syria, buried under the rubble of the tragedy — in some cases it has been actively erased in the war of narratives over the conflict[76] — it’s critically important to take stock of the emancipatory, visionary, pluralistic, and radically democratic goals of the Syrian uprising. This is not the place for an in-depth discussion of that story, but I want to point to the rich literature on the subject, and to the vital archival and storytelling work of websites like SyriaUntold, Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, and 100 Faces of the Syrian Revolution.[77]
Iran’s official narrative is that its role in Syria is all about fighting terrorism — specifically Al Qaeda and ISIS. But this is a classic case of reading history backwards. In fact, Iran rushed to the defense of the Assad regime as soon as the uprising began — when there was no Al Qaeda or ISIS presence whatsoever (the only jihadists were the ones the regime intentionally let out of its prisons as part of its jihadization strategy).[78] “From the very moment Assad faced popular protests, the Quds Force and Tehran were ready to do all they could to save the rule of the Baath Party,” notes Arash Azizi. Indeed, the Islamic Republic’s emissaries “were pushing on Assad to suppress the uprising mercilessly.”[79] And that is precisely what the regime did. As I wrote in 2016:
The Assad regime’s response to those peaceful demonstrations across Syria in 2011 can be summed up in two words: live ammunition. The regime’s security forces fired on crowds of unarmed protestors for upward of six months. The Islamic Republic defended its staunch ally in Damascus, as the latter unleashed a bloodbath of repression against a popular and nonviolent democratic uprising.[80]
Sketch of one of many torture techniques used in the Assad regime’s dungeons (from the Human Rights Watch report Torture Archipelago: Arbitrary Arrests, Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Syria’s Underground Prisons since March 2011)
In his book The Battle for Syria, Christopher Phillips reports that Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s foreign minister at the time, “made numerous trips to Damascus to reassure Assad.” Tehran, Phillips notes, provided riot equipment to the Assad regime and dispatched hundreds of Quds Force operatives “to offer security advice.”[81] Jubin Goodarzi, author of Syria and Iran: Diplomatic Alliance and Power Politics in the Middle East, adds:
Iran provided technical support and expertise to neutralise the opposition; advice and equipment to the Syrian security forces to help them contain and disperse protests; and guidance and technical assistance on how to monitor and curtail the use of the internet and mobile phone networks by the opposition. Iran’s security forces had learned valuable lessons in these areas during the violent crackdown against the opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that followed the disputed presidential elections of June 2009.[82]
Iran expert Reza Marashi offers a similar analysis. The Islamic Republic’s “first reaction” to the demonstrations in Syria “was to open its own playbook and show Assad pages from the post-election protests in 2009,” he observes. “Decision-makers appear to have hoped that Assad would use enough brute force — arrests, beatings, and a limited amount of killings — to spread fear and quickly re-establish control.”[83]
This “security advice” was augmented by a narrative strategy: Iran helped flip the script and present the Syrian protests not as part of the wave of Arab uprisings — which it decidedly was — but as a foreign-inspired terrorist plot. This rhetorical framing was awkward for the Islamic Republic, which had voiced support for other Arab uprisings — those in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Libya. This put Tehran in a bind, praising the people of the region for rising up against the dictators that oppressed them but siding with the dictator in Syria.[84] Amin Saikal characterizes this Syrian exception as “an intervention that ran counter to Tehran’s declared rhetoric of supporting the downtrodden masses.”[85]
Ewan Stein notes that Iran (and its ally Hezbollah) committed to “denying the democratic aspects of the [Syrian] revolution and instead casting it as a terrorist insurgency.” “In so doing,” Stein observes, “they appropriated the discourse of the [Global War on Terror].”[86] This framing allowed Iran to present itself as being on the “right” side of the Syrian conflict: fighting extremists. The militarization and sectarianization of the conflict[87] — processes of which the Assad regime was the principal (though not exclusive) driver — were a godsend for Iran’s war on terror framing: a self-fulfilling prophesy that was very much by design.
Iran has projected this framing backwards, as if fighting terrorists had always been its mission in Syria. But this sleight of hand leaves a fundamental question unanswered: why was the Islamic Republic on the side of the Assad regime when it was shooting, detaining, torturing, and disappearing peaceful demonstrators[88] whose demands and vision were decidedly democratic and emancipatory, well before any jihadist groups were present? And let’s be clear: the Islamic Republic intensified its support for the Assad regime in 2011 but its stalwart support for the dynastic dictatorship in Damascus goes back several decades — and while the Assad regime exponentially heightened its level of repression in 2011, violence has been at the very core of its rule throughout.[89]
The answer is that Iran’s rhetorical posturing aside, its response to the popular uprising in Syria revealed its increasingly counter-revolutionary role in the region — a development that would come into sharper focus with the Lebanese and Iraqi uprisings of 2019-2020.
Paradigms Lost: Time to Dispense with Zombie Categories
Azizi characterizes the contours of Iran’s post-2011 regional policy as follows:
Iran would orient itself to the Arab Spring not in the spirit of revolutionary fraternity but with cold calculation worthy of a scheming monarch. Despite the words that came out of his mouth, Khamenei was now more of a sultan than a revolutionary.[90]
The Islamic Republic is out “not to foster revolutions against dictators,” Azizi notes, but “to preserve its own regime and spread its influence by any means necessary.”[91] Along these lines, Borzou Daragahi observes, “[t]he ‘revolutionary’ slogans of Iran’s ‘resistance’ are empty rhetoric that merely back whatever policies benefit the corrupt ruling elite in Tehran.”[92] In the same vein, Stein argues that the so-called Axis of Resistance, “ostensibly dedicated to furthering the emancipatory aspirations of the Arab and Muslim masses,” has in reality “played a critical role in containing regional revolution and preventing the emergence of a more democratically oriented regional order.”[93]
Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
Indeed, for all the talk of Iran’s “disruptive” role in the region, what the cases of Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon reveal is instead an Islamic Republic hell-bent on keeping entrenched political establishments and ruling classes in power while helping them quell popular movements for social justice, democratic rights, and human dignity. In an insightful essay, Rami Khouri notes this growing disconnect between ideological rhetoric and political reality, in which “‘resistance’ troops try to beat down ‘revolutionary’ protests” across the Middle East.[94]
This development has yet to be properly theorized, but it has not gone unnoticed. Saikal, for example, notes “Iran’s growing shift towards being a middle power supportive of the status quo.”[95] The Islamic Republic “sounds more and more like those same sclerotic rulers it once railed against,” Daragahi observes — “suspicious of any new development that threatens the status quo it dominates.”[96] Even Edward Wastnidge, in a highly sympathetic account of the Islamic Republic’s regional policies, acknowledges that Tehran “is trying to maintain the post-2003 status quo, which has seen its influence in the region grow.”[97]
We need to revise our lexicon to reflect that post-2003 status quo. We need to retire zombie categories — like that of Iran as a “revolutionary” force in the Middle East, and the fiction of the “Axis of Resistance” (a term that should always appear in quotes or be qualified by “so-called,” if not dropped altogether) — that function as distorting mirrors and mystifications.
The idea that Iran is a revolutionary power while Saudi Arabia is a counter-revolutionary power in the region is a stale binary. Both the Islamic Republic and the Saudi Kingdom play counter-revolutionary roles in the Middle East. They are competing counter-revolutionary powers, each pursuing its counter-revolutionary agenda in its respective sphere of influence within the region.
Christopher Davidson speaks to this dynamic when he observes that “Saudi Arabia and Iran’s respective forms of authoritarian theocracy continue to serve as brakes on any prospects for meaningful reform in the wider Middle East.” Both the Saudi Kingdom and the Islamic Republic, Davidson argues, “have an equally vested interest in maintaining the counter-revolutionary status quo in the territories they now contest.”[98]
The counter-revolution confronting the Middle East today in this period of dramatic upheaval is not headquartered in a single capital. Riyadh and Tehran form what we might think of as a regional counter-revolutionary hydra. (Abu Dhabi also belongs in the regional counter-revolutionary discussion — a development worthy of more research than it has yet generated.) With signs now pointing to some sort of rapprochement between the Saudi Kingdom and the Islamic Republic,[99] Davidson’s argument about the counter-revolutionary roles of both states might become less counter-intuitive: the rivalry between the regional hegemons has obscured what the two states share in common.
Danny Postel is Assistant Director of the Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and a member of Internationalism from Below. He is the author of Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran (2006) and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (2010), The Syria Dilemma (2013), and Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (2017). Formerly Senior Editor of openDemocracy, his work has appeared in Boston Review, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Democratic Left, Dissent, The Guardian, In These Times, Middle East Report (MERIP), The Nation, New Politics, and The Progressive, among other publications.
[1] See Jean-Pierre Filiu, From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and its Jihadi Legacy (Hurst, 2015). Also see the interview with Filiu about the updated and expanded French edition of the book (Généraux, Gangsters et Jihadistes: Histoire de la Contre-Révolution Arabe), “Their Dirty Business,” Diwan, 21 May 2018.
[2] Rosie Bsheer, “A Counter-Revolutionary State: Popular Movements and the Making of Saudi Arabia,” Past & Present, Volume 238, Issue 1 (Feb. 2018), p. 240.
[3] See Toby Matthiesen, Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t (Stanford University Press, 2013); John M. Willis, “Operation Decisive Storm and the Expanding Counter-Revolution,” Middle East Report Online (MERIP), 30 Mar. 2015; and Madawi Al-Rasheed, “Sectarianism as Counter-Revolution: Saudi Responses to the Arab Spring,” in Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel (eds.), Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Hurst, 2017).
[4] See Shabnam J. Holliday, Defining Iran: Politics of Resistance (Routledge, 2011) and Ali Fathollah-Nejad, Iran in an Emerging New World Order: From Ahmadinejad to Rouhani (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), especially chap. 3 (“Iranian Geopolitical Imaginations: A Critical Account”).
[5] Ulrich Beck, “Goodbye to all that wage slavery,” New Statesman, 5 Mar. 1999. Also see Jonathan Rutherford’s interview with Beck, “Zombie Categories,” in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), The Art of Life (Lawrence & Wishart, 2000).
[8] Jade Saab and Joey Ayoub, “The Revolutionizing Nature of the Lebanese Uprising,” in Jade Saab (ed.), A Region in Revolt: Mapping the Recent Uprisings in North Africa and West Asia (Daraja Press, 2020), p. 119.
[9] Bassel F. Salloukh, “Here’s What the Protests in Lebanon and Iraq are Really About,” Monkey Cage (Washington Post), 19 Oct. 2019. For an elaboration of Salloukh’s analysis of Lebanon’s ruling system, see his co-authored volume The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (Pluto Press, 2015) and his chapter “The Architecture of Sectarianization in Lebanon” in Hashemi and Postel (eds.), Sectarianization.
[10] Rima Majed, “Sectarian Neoliberalism and the Uprising,” in Jeffrey G. Karam and Rima Majed (eds.), The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming).
[12] Rima Majed and Lana Salman, “Lebanon’s Thawra,” Middle East Report (MERIP) 292/3 (Fall/Winter 2019).
[13] Yasser Munif, The Syrian Revolution: Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death (Pluto Press, 2020).
[14] Asef Bayat, “The Politics of Fun,” chap. 6 of his book Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, Second Edition, 2013). Also see Bayat, “Iran: torch of fire, politics of fun,” openDemocracy, 24 Mar. 2010.
[15] Saab and Ayoub, “The Revolutionizing Nature of the Lebanese Uprising,” p. 122.
[16]Interview with Salloukh on the podcast of the Sectarianism, Proxies and De-sectarianisation (SEPAD) project, Richardson Institute, Lancaster University, 22 Oct. 2019.
[31] Joseph Daher, “Hezbollah and the Lebanese Popular Movement,” IEMed Focus 162, European Institute of the Mediterranean, Feb. 2020. For a trenchant leftist critique of Hezbollah, see Daher’s book Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God (Pluto Press, 2016).
[35] “The emergence of the 2019 wave of the uprisings in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon and Iraq showed that the Arab Spring did not die,” Asef Bayat observes. “It continued in other countries in the region with somewhat similar repertoires of collective action.” (Quoted in Hashem Osseiran, “‘The Arab Spring did not die’: A second wave of Mideast protests,” AFP, 29 Nov. 2020.) Also on this point, see Jillian Schwedler, “Thinking Critically About Regional Uprisings,” Middle East Report (MERIP) 292/3 (Fall/Winter 2019) and “The Arab Spring, a Decade Later” (interview with Gilbert Achcar, conducted by Jeff Goodwin), Catalyst Vol 4 No 3 (Fall 2020).
[41] On those earlier protests, see Ali Issa, Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq (Tadween Publishing, 2015); Renad Mansour, “Protests Reveal Iraq’s New Fault Line: The People vs. the Ruling Class,” World Politics Review, 20 July 2018; and Zahra Ali, “From Recognition to Redistribution? Protest Movements in Iraq in the Age of ‘New Civil Society,’” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding (2021).
[44] Zeidon Alkinani, “Iraq’s October uprising: Historical context, triggers, discourse, challenges and possibilities,” in Saab (ed.), A Region in Revolt, p. 87.
[77] See, for example: Afra Jalabi, “Anxiously Anticipating a New Dawn: Voices of Syrian Activists,” in Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel (eds.), The Syria Dilemma (MIT Press, 2013); Tamara al-Om, “Don’t ignore Syria’s nonviolent movement,” The Guardian, 7 June 2014; Malu Halasa, Nawara Mahfoud, and Zaher Omareen (eds.), Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline (Saqi Books, 2014); “Syria’s good guys — Inside a forgotten revolution,” special issue of the New Internationalist (Sept. 2015, Issue 485); Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (Pluto Press, 2016), especially chaps. 3 (“Revolution From Below”), 4 (“The Grassroots”), and 8 (“Culture Revolutionised”); Yassin al-Haj Saleh, The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (Hurst, 2017), especially chap. 1 (“Revolution of the Common People”); Leila Al-Shami, “The Legacy of Omar Aziz: Building autonomous, self-governing communes in Syria,” Fifth Estate # 397, Winter, 2017; Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti, “Toward an Alternative ‘Time of the Revolution’? Beyond State Contestation in the struggle for a new Syrian Everyday,” Middle East Critique Volume 27, Issue 3 (2018); Anand Gopal, “Syria’s Last Bastion of Freedom,” The New Yorker, 10 Dec. 2018; Wendy Pearlman, “Civil Action in the Syrian Conflict,” in Deborah Avant, Marie Berry, Erica Chenoweth, Rachel Epstein, Cullen Hendrix, Oliver Kaplan, and Timothy Sisk (eds.), Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence (Oxford University Press, 2019); Wendy Pearlman, “How the Syrian uprising began and why it matters,” The Conversation, 14 Mar. 2019; Yasser Munif, The Syrian Revolution: Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death (Pluto Press, 2020); Leila Al-Shami, “Building Alternative Futures in the Present: The Case of Syria’s Communes,” The Funambulist, Issue 34 (Mar.-Apr. 2021); Lewis Sanders IV, Birgitta Schülke-Gill, Wafaa Albadry, Julia Bayer, “Razan Zeitouneh – the missing face of Syria’s revolution,” Deutsche Welle (DW), 15 Mar. 2021; Charlotte Al-Khalili, “Rethinking the concept of revolution through the Syrian experience,” Al-Jumhuriya, 5 May 2021. Also see “The Syrian Revolution: A History from Below,” a series of webinars convened over the summer and fall of 2020.
[85] Amin Saikal, “Iran: Aspirations and Constraints,” in Adham Saouli (ed.), Unfulfilled Aspirations: Middle Power Politics in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 117.
[86] Ewan Stein, International Relations in the Middle East: Hegemonic Strategies and Regional Order (Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 196. On this point, also see Edward Wastnidge, “Iran’s Own ‘War on Terror’: Iranian Foreign Policy Towards Syria and Iraq During the Rouhani Era,” in Luciano Zaccara (ed.), Foreign Policy of Iran under President Hassan Rouhani’s First Term (2013–2017) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 107-129.
[87] See Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami, Burning Country, chaps. 5 (“Militarisation and Liberation”) and 6 (“Scorched Earth: The Rise of the Islamisms”); Charles R. Lister, The Syrian Jihad: The Evolution of an Insurgency, revised and updated edition (Hurst, 2017); and Paulo Gabriel Hilu Pinto, “The Shattered Nation: The Sectarianization of the Syrian Conflict,” in Hashemi and Postel (eds.), Sectarianization.
[89] See Salwa Ismail, The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria (Cambridge University Press, 2018), especially chaps. 1 (“Violence as a Modality of Government in Syria”) and 2 (“Authoritarian Government, the Shadow State and Political Subjectivities”); and Yassin al-Haj Saleh, The Impossible Revolution, especially chaps. 2 (“The Shabiha and their State”) and 5 (“The Roots of Syrian Fascism”).
This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist group in the United States, will hold its biennial national convention during the first week of August, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the convention will be a virtual Zoom event. At the center of the convention will be debates about electoral politics and international issues, and while the membership seems largely united around the first, it is divided about the second.
Attending will be 1,300 delegates representing some 91,000 members in 240 chapters. DSA’s separate and subordinate youth group Young Democratic Socialists of America, has some 130 chapters, but holds a separate convention. Without fear of Donald Trump and hope in Bernie Sanders, DSA seems to have lost some of its energy. There has been less membership participation in preparation for this convention. In my Central Brooklyn branch, only 15 percent of members voted for delegates, an accurate reflection of the small percentage of active members.
A few years ago, caucuses played little role in DSA, but today some ten national caucuses are dominant forces and will play a decisive role. Most of them already agree that DSA should continue its involvement in electoral politics by running candidates in the Democratic Party, but some only want to endorse DSA members and others to endorse only candidates who run as open socialists. A tiny minority in the leftwing argue that DSA should build an independent socialist party. While there is some debate about exactly how to do so, one can expect delegates to continue this strategy of endorsing and working for Democratic Party candidates.
In recent conventions DSA debated labor strategy though it is not a major item on the agenda at this convention. That discussion revolved around whether or not to adopt a rank-and-file strategy, that is, to concentrate on organizing rank-and-file workers to fight both labor bureaucrats and the bosses. That issue became blurrier, as work with rank-and-file workers, some argued, could be accompanied by work with leftwing unions, or simply with support for unions in general (without any analysis of the bureaucracy’s conservative role). Everyone agrees that DSA should become a more working-class organization, with more Black members, and more Latinos, and several resolutions propose ways to achieve that.
Most DSA members show little interest in international issues, yet they are likely to be the most contentious issue at this year’s convention. DSA’s International Committee has tended to adopt what has been called “campism,” that is, the notion that the world is divided into geopolitical camps, in one, the United States and its allies, in the other, the “anti-imperialist powers” such as Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela, which are not to be criticized. Others, like myself, emphasize internationalism from below, solidarity struggles for justice, democracy and socialism, everywhere, including places like Iran, China or Venezuela.
The DSA IC’s campist leadership seeks alliances with the mass leftwing parties of other countries: the Workers Party of Brazil, the Movement for Socialism of Bolivia, or the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, for example. On the eve of the convention, an official DSA delegation visited Venezuela where it met with President Nicolás Maduro, but the delegation failed to meet with the socialist opposition to the government. Support for authoritarian governments doesn’t speak well of DSA’s commitment to democratic socialism.
Many members feel that DSA’s National Political Committee hasn’t been very effective over the last four years, but it isn’t clear that the caucuses fighting for power at the convention can provide a clear path forward. Unfortunately, recent DSA conventions haven’t done very well at making democratic debate over issues possible. One expects that it will be even more difficult at this convention being held virtually over Zoom.
Thanks to Andrew Sernatinger for sharing his views.
In the last thirty years sanctions have become a common tool of geopolitics. Hundreds of unilateral and multilateral sanctions have been enacted to punish human rights abuses and violations of international law, or as part of the toolbox of international conflict. While they rarely have demonstrable effects on the behavior of regimes, they are an alternative to armed conflict or intervention, and can express international solidarity with victims of oppression. But they have also been criticized for harming ordinary citizens more than the responsible parties, and for reflecting the priorities of imperialist powers. Some suggest that the Left should oppose all sanctions even if we agree that targets of sanctions are egregious criminals.
The word “sanctions” is used to cover a lot of different things, however. In this essay we want to review the different kinds of sanctions, the Left’s support for them in cases like South African apartheid and BDS in Palestine, and the current debate over sanctions on the Myanmar military since their coup. We will propose four criteria for sanctions that are more morally and politically acceptable; that they are (a) multilateral, (b) have local, popular support, (c) that they are targeted, and (d) that they focus on the corporate and economic underpinnings of state behavior. On these grounds we then argue that the Left should support the sanctions proposed by the Coalition against Chevron in Myanmar in condemnation of the Burmese coup.
Unilateral vs Multilateral
Americans are probably most familiar with unilateral U.S. sanctions, designed to further U.S. geopolitical strategies and interests. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC“) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, in charge of enforcing U.S. sanctions, is mandated to administer
economic and trade sanctions based on US foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other threats to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.
Under this national security doctrine, the U.S. government has imposed a series of sanctions against foreign governments or individuals beginning in the early 1960s with the embargo against Cuba. Six decades later Washington continues to impose sanctions on Cuba despite almost unanimous opposition from the U.N. General Assembly.
Over the decades this list has grown to include other countries deemed as hostile to U.S. national interests: notably Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela. These broad economic sanctions cause serious harm to the populations of these countries without actually serving the interests of the American people or even changing the target’s behavior.
But there are also many cases of multilateral sanctions such as those imposed on Russia by the European Union and the United States for the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine. Multilateral sanctions are, of course, more effective than unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States. Multilateral sanctions on Russia have focused on travel bans and freezing foreign assets of the oligarchs close to Putin and companies profiting from Crimea’s annexation. After Russian insurgents shot down a Malaysian plane killing 298 civilians, the EU and the United States expanded sanctions to the Russian finance, oil, and defense technology sectors. Although Russia has not withdrawn from the Crimea, these sanctions have imposed significant burdens on the Russian economy and probably convinced Putin not to proceed with a military offensive in the Ukraine.
The United Nations Security Council has also imposed sanctions more than thirty times since 1966, using arms embargoes, travel bans, and restrictions on banking and trade to deter terrorism and dictatorship, protect human rights, and discourage the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. UN sanctions range from economic sanctions enacted in 1965 to censure the apartheid regime of Rhodesia to bans on Yugoslav teams participating in international events in the 1990s. In a 2016 review Ang and Peksen found these multilateral economic sanctions had been effective about a third of the time.
In short, multilateral sanctions regimes are not only more effective but also more politically defensible than unilateral U.S. sanctions.
Do They Have Local Support, as with Anti-Apartheid and BDS?
Another question around the acceptability of sanctions is whether they have the support of popular movements within the country being targeted. Sanctions can be an expression of international solidarity with movements for basic human rights against racist, oppressive and illegitimate governments. The classic example of such solidaristic sanctions is the campaign to isolate and undermine the apartheid regime in South Africa. That international campaign began in the UK in the early 1960s, and then gathered new momentum in the USA in the late 1980s. Throughout the campaign black South Africans and the African National Congress appealed for divestment from and sanctions on the apartheid regime.
Eventually the accumulated pressure from international economic sanctions resulted in large-scale capital flight from South Africa, a defection of its own business elite, and the dismantling of the apartheid regime. The De Klerk government was forced to recognize the legitimacy of the African National Congress and release Nelson Mandela from his 27-year-long imprisonment on Robbins Island. After his release Mandela toured the world, to thank supporters and insist that sanctions not be lifted before a legitimate multi-racial government was established. This led to the first free multi-racial elections and the establishment of an ANC government under Mandela in 1994.
The success of sanctions in fighting apartheid then directly inspired Palestinian activists. Meeting with anti-apartheid veterans at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in South Africa, Palestinian activists drafted what would become the Palestinian National Committee’s 2005 call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). BDS calls for sanctions on Israel to force an end to the illegal occupation of Arab lands, ensure the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and protect the rights of Arab citizens of Israel. The BDS movement for sanctions is similar to the anti-apartheid movement in that it is run by Palestinians themselves and broadly supported by the majority of occupied Palestine.
There are circumstances where international sanctions may be defensible even if there is no local, popular movement supporting them. The conditions of repression sometimes make it impossible for victims to organize, and gauging which voices have more local support can be impossible. Usually, however, local movements can be part of the conversation about the role of sanctions in supporting their struggles, and sanction regimes initiated by mass movements in the targeted countries are superior to those without such local support.
Broad vs Targeted: Can we minimize hurting ordinary people?
Many have argued that broad economic sanctions are immoral when they harm civilians. Gordon for instance argued that US sanctions on Iraq, after the invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War, violated just war theory by harming civilian noncombatants. In response to criticisms of the devastating impacts of the sanctions on Iraq, the European Union, the UN Security Council and the United States shifted to support more targeted sanctions, such as blocking the travel and foreign bank accounts of specific individuals and companies, or bans on specific goods or arms sales. Since 2012 the Magnitsky Act has authorized U.S. sanctions on specific individuals implicated in the violation of human rights and it has since been applied to more than a hundred political, economic, and military officials, from the killers of Jamal Khashoggi to the Burmese generals responsible for the Rohingya massacres.
While there is a broad consensus that sanctions targeted at specific individuals and companies cause less collateral damage than broader economic sanctions, they are also less effective in changing behavior. Bans on the travel of specific individuals, for instance, have mostly been an inconvenience which can be sidestepped with fake passports, and there is no clear precedent for arresting those found violating a travel ban. Bans on a whole airline, as with the sanctions on Libya for the Lockerbie bombing, have been more successful, but can be sidestepped as happened frequently for instance with the flight ban imposed on UNITA in Angola. Bans on commercial flight also impose significant burdens on ordinary people, preventing the importation of food, and medical and agricultural supplies. The ban on flights to and from Haiti in 1994 prevented hundreds of Haitians from receiving asylum in the United States.
Likewise the more targeted a trade sanction is the less likely it is to impact behavior. Bans on specific items can often be circumvented by disguising their origin, at least without stringent certification procedures like those adopted by the diamond industry to stop conflict diamonds.
Targeting the foreign assets of specific officials or companies is intuitively appealing, but difficult to enforce given banking secrecy. While the sanctions imposed on General Raoul Cedras of Haiti, UNITA officials in Angola, and Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević were relatively successful, Washington’s dramatic expansion of sanctions on groups and individuals suspected of terror ties after 9/11 were far more controversial, overly broad and difficult to enforce. In the absence of an international judicial process to handle appeals, targeted sanctions can violate rights of due process.
In sum, sanctions targeted at individuals or companies can often be sidestepped, can be overly broad, and often have a limited effect on the behavior of states. Nonetheless they are clearly superior on humanitarian grounds to broad sanctions.
Do the Sanctions Focus on Corporations and Exploitation?
Broad economic sanctions not only impose unacceptable collateral damage on civilians, they also reinforce the false impression that “the people” of the targeted country are culpable and that their regimes are subject to democratic pressure. Often the regimes being targeted are authoritarian and ruled by wealthy elites, which is why sanctions on powerful individuals are more appealing. Sanctions on individuals, however, can give the opposite impression, that bad state behavior is the result of a few bad apples rather than a predictable result of a system of exploitation. In between these two extremes, punishing “the people” or punishing individuals, a socialist approach might be sanctions targeted at the corporations and industries implicated in supporting dictatorships and oppression. The 1980s anti-apartheid movement, for instance, successfully convinced more than 155 colleges and universities to divest their endowments from South Africa. The EU/US sanctions on Russia were broadened from individual oligarchs to the industries that enrich them.
If the industry benefiting from a regime’s repression or conflict is central to the economic well-being of a country, as with a state dependent on oil revenues, then a successful ban on trade and investment could have unacceptable impacts on civilians. But when corporations directly benefit from trade with repressive regimes, then calling for sanctions targeted at them and their industry can help focus campaigns on the economic underpinnings of power rather than the malfeasance of whole countries or specific officials.
The Call for Sanctions on the Burmese Military
Following a brutal military coup in Myanmar in 1988 members of the Burmese student movement sought military training from the armed ethnic minorities that had fought the Burmese state for 40 years. Mostly unsuited to guerilla warfare, many Burmese ended up in exile in the USA, Europe or neighboring Asian countries. In the diaspora the Burmese democracy movement teamed up with veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle and began calling for boycotts, divestment and sanctions. Broad economic sanctions and arms embargoes were imposed on the dictatorship for the next thirty years, and were strengthened after mass demonstrations in 2007. (Co-author Paul Garver worked alongside future Burmese union leader Maung Maung and Western human rights activists like Simon Billenness in the early 1990s to successfully persuade Western companies like Pepsi to divest from Burma.)
However, no one in Myanmar, or in the Burmese diaspora, now favor the reimposition of broad sanctions that would add to the enormous suffering of the workers and people of Myanmar. Their three decades of sanctions had a dire impact on civilians, while the entrenched military elite was largely able to ignore them. Myanmar has one of the worst poverty rates, and lowest quality healthcare and education systems, in the region. Most of the national budget went into acquiring military equipment and supplies, buying up enterprises for the military and their families to run, or on luxury goods for top officials.
However, the Myanmar military wanted to buy expensive weapons systems from Russia, so it secured international investment to extract and transmit offshore natural gas. The joint venture was controlled and operated by the French-owned Total, together with American-owned Chevron [then Unocal], and the Thai power company PTT, in collaboration with the military-controlled Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE). Not only did MOGE receive a 15% share of the profits, but a wealth of taxes and transfer fees began flowing directly into military coffers. Between 2000 and 2009 nearly $5 billion accrued directly to the military through the natural gas joint venture, but less than 1% of this, some $30 million, was reported in the national budget. Little of it was spent on health or education or social services for the people, and certainly not for the ethnic minority areas through which the pipeline to Thailand passed. By 2008 the military regime had accumulated over $3.1 billion in foreign exchange reserves.
After the partial return to civilian government in 2014, government expenditures on health and education increased somewhat, and all international economic sanctions were lifted. But the reelection of the civilian government in November 2020 with an enormous majority of 83% caused the military leadership to panic. One of the first actions of the junta in February 2021 was to restore total control of MOGE into their own hands. This meant securing the largest revenue stream from the formal sector for exclusive military use, allowing it to simultaneously repress the urban insurgencies while waging a wider war against the armed ethnic minorities.
Since the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar, the United States, the E.U., the U.K., and Canada have again enacted sanctions, this time targeted at the generals, their families and associates, and the military-owned firms that enrich them. The United Nations has called for an arms embargo on Myanmar, and the E.U. has forbidden the sale and transfer of weapons to the country.
Notably absent so far are any sanctions on the state-owned MOGE, which is the source of the majority of the junta’s foreign exchange revenues. From the beginning the Burmese resistance has been united in the call for an end to the flow of revenues to the military through MOGE and their multinational natural gas pipeline. This is based on a widespread understanding that previous sanctions were ineffectual, precisely because they did not challenge the profit-taking of Total SA and Chevron and their enrichment of the military regime.
The broad Coalition against Chevron in Myanmar is campaigning to cut off that vital stream of revenue to Myanmar’s murderous military regime. The hope is to weaken the capacity of the coup leaders to suppress workers’ and people’s protests in the cities and to escalate their war against the several ethnic minority armies on the frontiers.
In a recent article in BeyondChron, one of the authors details the growing support for the demands of the Coalition against Chevron in Myanmar, from Burmese diaspora organizations, from the USW president who represents workers at Chevron refineries in the United States, from the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, and even within the U.S. Senate. Forty members of the French parliament have issued a statement supporting the call for Total to suspend payments to the junta. In late May Total and Chevron announced they were suspending payments from the pipeline portion of the joint venture with MOGE. Unfortunately this amounts to less than 10% of the total revenue from the entire natural gas joint venture, about $40 million out of $400 million annually.
Under persistent pressure in France, Total has offered a variety of pretexts for rejecting the demand for complete divestment. It claims that it would cause a humanitarian crisis in Burma, since natural gas from the joint venture generates half of the electricity used in the capital city Yangon. However a credible poll recently conducted in Burma with over 11,000 Facebook users revealed that 98% of those responding agreed that sanctions should be imposed on the natural gas joint venture, even if it would result in cuts to electric service.
Chevron has always successfully lobbied to prevent its natural gas joint venture from being included in earlier sanctions against the Burmese military. On this, as on general climate issues, the Biden administration fears taking on Big Carbon. But, just as Reagan’s veto of sanctions against apartheid in South Africa was overridden by the strength of the popular movement, so might we be able to overcome this corrupt alliance with capital.
In late June there was another global wave of protests against Chevron and Total. It remains unlikely that Chevron and Total will voluntarily go beyond their token gestures, unless they are compelled to do so by multilateral sanctions in the USA and EU. According to Myanmar Now international sanctions on MOGE seem increasingly likely.
In this particular struggle, the Left can choose to support the demands of a popular movement, for multilateral sanctions, targeted at a key but specific industry, and focused on the role that global fossil-fueled capital plays in supporting an authoritarian regime and their kleptocratic elites. The campaign for a ban on Chevron and Total’s ongoing financing for the Matamdaw regime is an ideal case of sanctions that the Left can and should support.
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden meets with union leaders outside at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Harrisburg, Pa., Monday, Sept. 7, 2020. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
This expands my remarks in a panel with Joe Burns, Donna Murch, and Paul Kirk-Davidoff, organized by Tempest, about class struggle unionism under Biden. Opening and closing remarks of the session on May 30, 2021 were recorded.
The history of our tendency (I say “our” because I identify Tempest as part of that family tree) offers powerful insights about this moment. In my remarks I look back at the tradition of the Third Camp, articulated in publications of and about the Workers Party (WP) and Independent Socialist League (ISL), as well as my involvement in Berkeley with the Independent Socialist Club (ISC) and the International Socialists when it first formed.
In jettisoning Trotsky’s theory of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state, and theorizing instead that Communist regimes represented a historically new social formation, the ISL explored questions about this new social formation that Trotskyists ignored, for example how the ruling class reproduced itself under conditions of nationalized property. The ISL restored and reinvigorated Marx’s theoretical frame that capitalism is a social system. I think this conceptual frame underlies all five volumes of Draper’s series “Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution” but Volume II, “The Politics of Social Classes,” best clarifies how understanding the state and the economy demands close analysis of social relations.
The concept of capitalism as a social system, inclusive of economic, political, and social relations, captures the current understanding of “racialized capitalism”: Social oppression has been “baked in” to capitalism’s development, and there is no turning back the clock to undo history. Understanding capitalism as a social system centers struggles for freedom, equality, and justice in our political interventions and principles, including work in unions. Thus our commitment to human emancipation as both process and product of the fight for “socialism from below” doesn’t have to be injected into union activity if we look closely at life at the workplace. Because social oppression is embedded in capitalism, all of its forms, including patriarchy, racism, xenophobia, ableism, configure the workplace and work. Social oppression is not external to work and workers’ organization, so struggles for social justice need not be imported as issues. We need only scrutinize manifestations already present and use these insights in organizing. I suggest formulating the dialectical relationship between working class agency and democracy, an idea in the Tempest principles, thus: The fight for the fullest democracy, on the job and in the society, informs working class self-activity, and vice-versa.
Industrialization and the Working Class: Who Counts?
I think Hal Draper’s explanation, in a 1970 class series, conducted in response to debates in the IS about activity in the unions, captures well what class struggle union work means . In Part I of “Marxism and the Trade Unions ” Draper observes
Marxism was and is the only kind of socialism that establishes an integral link between socialism and the struggle for social revolution and trade unionism..which sees the trade union movement as a revolutionary fact, even if and when the trade unions themselves are not revolutionary…It is revolutionaries whose agitation makes reform possible because the reformists give up. Time and again, class collaborationist unions give up the struggle for “more” and settle for less, in order to keep the boss in business, or agree, as in World War II, to no-strike pledges. Only a Marxist revolutionary can mean it consistently.
The struggle for more becomes revolutionary when it goes beyond the capabilities of the system to provide that “more.” That is the link between the Marxist fight for reforms and the revolutionary perspective. It depends on the root idea that the economic problems of the system cannot be solved by the system.. the struggle becomes, in the end, a revolutionary struggle. In the end; but not in the beginning.
In Part II, “Working class lifestyle and the radical sect,” Draper addresses the social and political challenges of industrializing, having students or those with the student “lifestyle” take jobs in unions to do political work. Drawing on the WP and ISL experiences, Draper, as usual, makes his points sharply, clarifying ideas in the question/answer period along with a contribution from Anne Draper. Two points especially relevant to current debates are what I would describe as the Drapers’ essentially uncritical view of industrialization per se and his defense of revolutionary socialists working as paid organizers for unions, which Anne reinforced. But a significant flaw in Hal’s presentation was his overview of women workers, which showed unexamined patriarchal assumptions about work and workers, contradicted by historical evidence as well as conditions of the day:
There is, in the working class, something equivalent to the temporary state of being a student. In the past, it has always been true that women workers, especially young women workers in offices, have been hard to organize because they viewed their jobs as temporary, a situation they pass through on the way to getting married. Whereas the worker who is working in a factory or the like looks upon the union in a totally different way. The union means something different to him than it means to those women workers, or to a certain sector of young workers today who may work for six months and then disappear for a while.
In fact, historically married Black women often worked outside the home whenever they could find paid labor. Despite their wishes, female teachers were forced to quit their jobs when they married, starting with creation of mass public education at the turn of the 20th century until the 1950s. Women worked in the fields organized by the United Farm Workers. And the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the union for which Anne Draper was an organizer, was involved in the unionization campaign and boycott at the Farah clothing company in the early 1970s in Texas, a campaign driven predominantly by Hispanic women.
In contrast to Drapers’ assessment of industrialization, Phyllis and Julie Jacobson, looking back on the political past they shared in the WP and ISL, [i] viewed the WP’s industrialization strategy more critically, relating its problems to the world view of the sect.
There were some things we did as the Workers Party which we never would have done operating as a league. For example, in the early years we had a policy of sending our members, mostly young people, into industry. And it was wrong, because a lot of people weren’t psychologically prepared for it.
People were talked into leaving white collar jobs, or college, to take jobs in shops…. One of the aims of the industrialization policy was to catch up with what the Communist Party had done much earlier. After all, the CP had been very successful in sending their people into the factories and helping to organize the CIO. We also told people that they had to leave New York and go to Cleveland, or Detroit, or Buffalo, which is what people did.”[ii]
Draper’s intervention about Marxists in the unions responded to debates in the IS in the 1970s about industrialization, the “turn to the working class.” During this time, the IS encouraged members who were in white collar unions, some with substantial reform caucuses led by socialists, to leave these jobs and take work in manufacturing, communications, and transportation. Though city teachers organized militant struggles for collective bargaining in the 1960s, frequently conducting illegal strikes that led to jailings, teachers unions (and other unionized occupations in which women dominated, like nursing and social work, often in the public sector) weren’t seen as valuable sites of struggle for revolutionary socialists. In fact, entering these occupations to organize could have cushioned an adjustment from the “student lifestyle” to the life of work, giving young members valuable union experience from which the Independent Socialist tendency and the labor movement could have benefited. And of course, unbeknownst to those advocating a wholesale shift to the Midwest was how this strategy would be affected by dramatic alterations in work globally, including outsourcing, concessions, and massive job loss. The IS industrialization strategy, based on a flawed assessment of the period and of what constitutes the working class, echoed the WP’s error, made in the expectation of a revolutionary upsurge following World War 2, as well as race and gender blinders about who and what constituted the working class and work.
This history suggests the need for a different approach when circumstances are ripe for socialists to be encouraged to find work that allows them to help build unions and be involved in workplace struggles. That process requires learning from our success and defeats; alertness to the ways social oppression is reflected in and reinforced by the way work is organized; as well as cultural and organizational norms of unions. “Fit” is essential as we support people to industrialize, with an understanding that work and the working class include public employment as well as cultural and knowledge work in the private sector. Moreover, when we value “democracy from below” and a “rank and file strategy,” organizing demands respect for the work’s value, one’s peers, and skills and knowledge needed to do the job well.
The “more” we demand as socialists in unions must include high quality services when we enter public employment. Often plans to send people into teachers unions for strategic reasons contain no explicit caveats about teachers being well-prepared for the jobs they will take. Yet, the most readily available jobs are in settings serving low-income communities of color, in schools that are “hard to staff” – meaning they can’t hold teachers – because the institutions are dysfunctional and the work exceptionally demanding. Taking seriously a union’s obligation to defend workers’ rights on the job means upholding high entry standards, no less for socialists than for others. Centering the needs of people we serve highlights policies and structures configured by injustice and inequality, products of social oppression.
Biden and the Challenges We Face
Having noted how incorrect assessments of the period led to errors in strategy, I’ll suggest a few ideas rather than make predictions. In education it seems we face the iteration of a new neoliberal project. Rhetoric (or more aptly, propaganda) about Biden being the most progressive President in modern history is based mostly on analysis unsupported by close attention to policy specifics, as well as failure to locate Biden’s policies in what has occurred in capitalism’s use of information technology, to alter work and social policy, globally, in particular for “development” in the global South.
For example, liberal accolades about Biden’s willingness to take on “big tech” are less persuasive when located in the World Bank’s 2021 World Development Report (WDR), “Data for Better Lives.” The report insists data and information technologies must be used for “better public policies, program design and service delivery, in addition to improved market efficiency and job creation through more private sector growth” (Concept Note, p. 1). Foreshadowing Biden’s initiatives, the WDR warns about “the accumulation of data by one actor, and the information asymmetries that this creates for other actors” which “leads to a concentration of power” economic and political (p. 5). Socialists should be pushing unions to scrutinize how Biden’s policies compare to the World Bank’s plan, publicizing and opposing measures that intensify privatization through public/private partnerships, especially through use of information technology to alter work and social surveillance. Few unions are ready to ask these questions and time is running out. More than a decade ago British Marxist Ursula Huws, who advised UK unions about how information technology was transforming work and supply chains, observed that by the time UK unions realized what was happening with outsourcing, all they could negotiate was terms of defeat. We see the same phenomenon in U.S. unions and Biden. Mesmerized by possibilities the PRO act will solve labor’s organizing failures, unions and socialist supporters, perhaps DSA most importantly, are missing the opportunity to intervene on policy specifics that are configuring the future of unions.
As Draper explained, class struggle unionism means fighting for “more” when we are told that is not possible. I add to Draper’s explanation of what distinguishes our work as revolutionary socialists that fighting for “more” includes demands that defend equality and justice for all workers. No one can predict how or when we will see a resurgence of workers’ self-activity or emergence of powerful social movements demanding human liberation. The only verity is they will occur.
[i] Worcester, Kent. “Third Camp Politics: An Interview with Phyllis and Julius Jacobson.” Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate 18.1 (2014). Reprinted in New Politics.
This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.
A year ago, 15 million people nationally participated in the Black Lives Matter protests against police racism and violence. Out of that movement came the demand to “defund the police,” variously interpreted from abolish police forces to redistribute police funds to other agencies. At the same time, last year American cities saw a 33% rise in homicides and increase as well in other violent crimes as well in the country’s 66 largest police jurisdictions. Both BLM and the rise in violent crime made policing the central issue of the New York City mayoral race, even though New York City has lost more jobs absolutely and proportionally than any other city in the country: 500,000 jobs, an almost 12 percent decline.
In New York City, where thirteen candidates ran for mayor, the two top vote-getters were both Black: the former police captain and Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams and the progressive attorney, legal counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, and television news commentator Maya Wiley. Adams won 31.7%, while Wiley got 23.3%. Adams and Wiley won every borough except wealthier, whiter Manhattan. Yet because for the first time New York is using ranked-choice voting the final results may not be available for weeks and it is possible that another candidate with more second, third, fourth, or fifth place votes could end up winning. If that happens, the other most likely possible winner is the moderate Kathryn Garcia, a white woman, who won 19.5%.
Still, it is clear that most New Yorkers voted for a Black mayor as their first choice. New York City has only had one other Black mayor, David Dinkins (1990-93) and it has never had a woman mayor. While these are only primary elections, in New York City 70% of registered voters are Democrats and the winner of the Democratic primary is almost sure to win the election.
Most of the New York mayoral candidates, including both leading Black candidates, avoided using the term “defund the police.” Adams appealed to Black homeowners, promising to improve police protection by getting rid of illegal guns, while Wylie, who has been very critical of the police, says she will redistribute funds from the police department to other agencies, such as mental health. Surprisingly in the Democratic Party primary, there more debate about policing than there was about the city’s economic crisis. While all of the candidates talked about reviving the economy and helping workers, those issues were second to policing.
The big surprise of the New York State election, was the victory of India B. Walton, a Black woman and a self-described socialist in the Democratic mayoral primary in Buffalo, New York, a poor city of 250,000 people, 37% Black. She would be the first socialist mayor of an American City in sixty years. Walton, who is 38 and a registered nurse, had a hard life. She had her first child at age 14 and premature twins at 19, an experience that led her to want to study nursing. She became a community activist, and though she had never run for public office, she defeated four-term incumbent Mayor Byron Brown, a former head of the state Democratic Party and an ally of Governor Andrew Cuomo, by 52 to 45%.
Walton first appealed to progressive white voters and won the backing of the progressive Working Families Party and of the Democratic Socialists of America. Then she took her case to the more conservative Black community and its churches and won their support. She did not talk about defunding the police, but about reallocating police funds for mental health, jobs, education, and housing. Brown, believing he would win, would not debate. Walton won in part because her well organized campaign had an advantage in the low voter turnout primary election—just 20 percent—much like Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election. In any case, New York State’s second biggest city is now likely to elect a socialist mayor in November.
Professional politicians are a relatively recent historical phenomenon and their lies are to a great extent a response to social structural imperatives that did not exist in precapitalist societies. Surely liberal capitalist democracy did not invent political lies. Neither did capitalism invent exploitation and oppression. However, as in the case of exploitation and oppression, political lies acquired new content and form under liberal democratic capitalism.
Professional politicians are expected to lie; that has been the accepted norm in the universe of US politics. Presidents, both Republican and Democratic, have lied as a matter of course. Democratic president Lyndon Baines Johnson lied about a supposed incident at the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a dramatic increase of American troops in Vietnam. Republican president George W. Bush lied to justify the military attack and destruction of Iraq.
However, it was only with Donald Trump that political lying began to be questioned and became an issue in and of itself. This was due to Trump’s shameless and brazen misrepresentation of facts, which brought political lying to previously unthought of levels, from his supposed personal talent as a highly successful capitalist investor, to the far more consequential Goebbels-like big lies such as his repeated and totally unsupported claim that massive fraud prevented his victory in the 2020 presidential elections, a claim that has become the keystone to the organization of a Trumpian movement after Trump’s defeat, and a phony excuse to limit voting rights throughout the United States.
Donald J. Trump may not really be, or perhaps has not yet become, a professional politician. Yet his chronic propensity to lie is a caricature-like replica of the long-standing tendency of professional politicians in capitalist democracies to lie as a “normal” feature of their daily political practice. By professional politicians I mean people who are fully dedicated to politics as a lifetime career. John F. Kennedy, for example, was a professional politician who, according to Richard Reeves in his President Kennedy: Profile of Power, explicitly defined himself as such–so much so that on one occasion, he explicitly identified himself with his avowed political enemy Marshal Tito, the head of Communist Yugoslavia, as a fellow practitioner of his chosen profession. Lying was part of the course of his Kennedy’s practice: as he told Walter Heller, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during his presidency, words could always be explained away. In the international arena that explaining away was undergirded by Kennedy’s awareness of the US as one of the most powerful actors in the world stage, which allowed him to feel he did not need to honor commitments he had made on behalf of the United States. The violation of those commitments could be justified as mere words addressed, for example, to the Communist enemy, as expedient tools for relations that had to be maintained, especially with peoples and countries that did not inhabit the same political and moral universe as the democratic capitalist United States and its allies.
Professional Politicians and their Lies—Structural Basis
In historical terms, the development of professional politicians is a relatively recent phenomenon: It arose only in the 19th century with the development of mass politics, particularly as working class and popular mobilization and struggle brought about the extension of the suffrage in the major capitalist countries to adult men, and later on to adult women in the first half of the twentieth century (with the egregious exception, in the case of the United States, of Black women and men.) The professional politicians that gradually came to dominate the political scene in the capitalist democracies were, for the most part, those who, as Max Weber identified a century ago in his Politics as a Vocation, lived “from politics” rather than “for politics.” Weber was positing two contrasting types of politicians of his time: the independently wealthy notables who could afford to live “for politics,” and the politicians who lived “from politics,” who were not independently wealthy and who turned to politics as a full-time occupation and a life-long career from which to secure their main income. Weber’s framework would have to be modified at least in the case of the United States, where substantial number of lawyers, most of them prosperous, and millionaires like the Kennedys and the Bushes, became professional politicians. Even so, the fact is, that regardless of their economic and social background, most contemporary politicians in the US, as in all capitalist democracies, have made politics into a career rather than an occasional pursuit as in the case of Weber’s notables. That includes also professional politicians hailing from working class social democratic and Communist parties, whose careers began within the organizational apparatus of those parties (and unions) before they “jumped over” to the democratic capitalist municipal, regional and national legislative and administrative bodies.
The lying by these professional politicians is directly associated with the increased competition for votes and for financial support arising from the advent of mass politics. In modern capitalism, the unrelenting pressures of competition and capital accumulation are built into the everyday workings of the system itself. This makes capital accumulation and expansion compulsory and a daily feature of the functioning of capitalists, rather than an option. Either they compete, accumulate capital and raise profits or they go under. Something similar happens in the world of modern politicians and parties in democratic capitalist countries: they cannot escape the pressures of electoral competition and political expansion—parties winning more elected offices—built into the system as the inescapable motor forces beyond the will of any individual professional politician. Not if they are to remain significant players in the political game. The level of electoral competition has escalated with the historic expansion of literacy, and more importantly with the development of increasingly powerful means of communication, which not only play a fundamental role in persuading the electorate, but even more so in manipulating it, thereby creating a sink or swim political universe with its own rules of the game, which are very far from honoring truthfulness.
In European pre-capitalist societies, politics was the exclusive arena of political elites many of whose members inherited by right their political positions. Except for the powerful and extensive slave revolts, the peasant revolts, and urban riots, the masses were excluded as such from politics, they did not play a direct role in the political arena. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince keenly illustrates those realities of precapitalist politics, where the masses are always in the background and remain a mostly irrelevant consideration in the Prince’s political strategy, even when it comes to, as it becomes clear towards the end of the book, attaining the unification of Italy, the issue undergirding Machiavelli’s treatise. It is true that in the context of that unification, Machiavelli does mention the gratitude from the masses with which the liberators of Italy would be met as a factor for the Prince to consider, and elsewhere in the text he advises the Prince of the importance of keeping “the people” satisfied and avoid their hatred and contempt to secure their loyalty and avoid playing into the hands of a hostile conspirator. But overall, the “people” are a peripheral concern: It is the deeds of the rulers and the relations between the political elites that shape the dynamics of the political game. Intrigue, double dealing—lying—are central to the political game of the Renaissance ruler, but they do not arise from the extremely competitive system of mass politics that characterizes capitalist modern democracies.
In the competitive system of mass politics, the political lie is primarily a product of institutional features that are specific to capitalist democracies. Chief among them is the separation between the economic and political spheres. Elected office holders in the legislative and executive bodies, and their appointees in agencies such as the Federal Reserve Board, have only a limited degree of influence over the conduct of the economy through monetary, fiscal and government spending policies. They do not command that economy; they do not control the dynamics of the capitalist system based on competition, accumulation and the rate of profit, the forces that shape capitalist economies. Professional politicians are aware of that reality, they know that their power over the economy is limited, but they rarely acknowledge publicly those limits (unless they are radicals and socialists challenging the system) as they are pressured into promising what they know they cannot deliver in order to win in the electoral game. By the same token, they will also criticize their opponents for economic failures for which they are generally only responsible to a limited degree—JFK and other Democratic politicians referring to the 1957 recession as the “Eisenhower’s recession,” for example. Or they will take credit for economic recoveries for which they may have been responsible to a limited degree.
False economic promises induced by political competition have come up not only in the context of macro-economic problems, national recessions and recoveries being the main example, but also in the context of regional and local issues. One very illustrative example involves the historically coal mining regions in West Virginia. What was once a predominantly Democratic state with a very militant and powerful miners’ union became a heavily Republican and conservative state due, to a substantial degree, to the massive decline and disappearance of coal mining, a result, for the most part, of powerful economic forces such as the competitive advantages and predominance of gas in recent years. Falsely attributing the mines closings to the evil machinations of environmentalists and liberal Democrats, former president Donald Trump demagogically and falsely promised to reopen them, thereby securing West Virginia’s vote for the Republicans in the 2016 and 2020 elections. For their part, the Biden Administration and the Democrats have offered band-aid piecemeal proposals that labor leaders have described as “tinkering around the edges of the real problem.” (Politico, April 18, 2021.) To appropriately address the real problem of unemployment and poverty in the region would require adopting measures–such as the lifetime preservation of miners’ historic salaries accompanied by a comprehensive retraining program for environmentally sound new jobs created by the state and federal governments—that would violate the principles of the capitalist “free” market economy, something they cannot afford to do given the Democratic party’s close ties to capital, even of its liberal wing. That is how the Democratic politicians have reinforced the effectiveness of the demagogic lies told by people like Donald Trump with promises they know will not solve the problems of West Virginia even if they were implemented. In fact, they often seem to have decided they will rather lose the state electorally than the much more powerful financial and electoral support of capital.
Political competition induces economic lying every day even regarding the most local issues. About five years ago one of the few remaining inexpensive supermarkets in my neighborhood in New York City closed due to a steep increase in rent—characteristic of what is going on in the area—it could not afford to pay. At a rally held in front of that supermarket to protest its announced closing, prominent liberal and progressive New York City officeholders addressed the crowd promising to carry various attempts to avert the closing of the supermarket. It was clear that none of the attempts they mentioned, like for example, calling the owners of the building that housed the supermarket to convince them to lower or delay the rent increase, had a chance of succeeding. The elected officers speaking there knew that, but nevertheless they kept mouthing their irrelevant and false promises. Not one of them mentioned proposals that could really make a difference, if not in the present instance, at least for the future such as, for example, establishing commercial rent control. Their mentioning such a proposal would have politically breached the wall separating the economy from the political sphere, thereby limiting the economic power of the real estate market and industry, one of the most politically powerful lobbies in the city and in the state. For these career politicians, breaching that wall would have meant endangering and even destroying their political career.
The fact that political representation is for the most part geographically based is another structural feature of capitalist democracy that reinforces the pressure to lie. This type of representation tends to include class, and other forms of social heterogeneity, particularly when involving sizable geographic areas. Founding father James Madison favored geographically large political units arguing they would contain large number of factions that would be more likely to balance each other politically than would be the case in small republics where, following his logic, one faction would be more likely to emerge dominant. Be that as it may, the social heterogeneity of the constituency of the professional politicians structurally pressures them to moderate their pronouncements and to lie by saying different things to the different constituents of their geographic districts in order to appeal for their support at the ballot box. Trump’s brazen lies and outrageous statements were based on the exact reverse of that same coin: they were aimed at concentrating on and appealing exclusively to his base, thus avoiding a dilution of his reactionary politics. That is why he was the first president in recent history that never obtained a fifty percent approval rating in public opinion polls. At the same time, that was a major reason why his base believed in him and did not waiver in their support for him. It is precisely for reasons such as these that Trump’s politics represent a break reflecting a crisis in liberal capitalist democracy.
Political heterogeneity does not only include differences of class, gender and other social factors. It also includes different levels of political consciousness and awareness even within one single class and social grouping. Classical democratic theory assumes an informed and politically active citizenry, which as we know, contrasts sharply with the on-the-ground realities of capitalist democracies where political ignorance, apathy, and cynicism are in fact encouraged by daily life. That is why in stable capitalist democracies only a relatively small number of people become politicized in what are deeply depoliticized social contexts.
It is this heterogenous level of political awareness and consciousness among the electorate that becomes the breeding ground for the reputational lies manufactured by the career politicians, their supporters and the media to build their career. One example is the myth built around President John F. Kennedy and his Attorney General and brother Robert, as civil rights apostles, second only to Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, however, both Kennedys were at best indifferent to the civil rights movement from the beginning of their political careers and then for a considerable time afterwards. During the early part of his presidency, John Kennedy appointed openly racist judges to the federal bench in the South. And even when the movement grew in numbers and militancy, the Kennedy administration tried to tamper it through the pressures and promises made by RFK in his vigorous but unsuccessful lobbying of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) to stop their militant protests in exchange for his promise to get foundations to finance their voter registration activities. It was only the nationwide outbreak of Black protest, particularly in the summer of 1963, that forced the Kennedys to change course and promise some meaningful measures against racial segregation. That was what the Kennedys latched onto to canonize themselves, with the support of the media and liberal organizations, as major supporters of the movement. This reputational lie, which continues alive to this day, was not only bought wholesale by white liberals, but also by Black families (although certainly not by the great majority of Black civil rights militants) who placed pictures of JFK right next to Martin Luther King in their homes as if they were both equal in their commitment to civil rights. This was similar to the way in which many American Jews idolized Franklin D. Roosevelt even though he did nothing to rescue and offer asylum to Jewish victims of Nazism.
A similar reputational lie was manufactured when Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) became President after JFK was assassinated in November of 1963. Under LBJ the Black revolt became even more pronounced as urban insurrections began to take place after Harlem exploded in 1964 (followed by even bigger urban insurrections in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark and Cleveland among others). It was only the great disruption caused by the explosive mass militancy that accompanied the civil rights movement that successfully pressured LBJ to support truly meaningful civil and voting rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. In fact, this tremendous pressure was felt not only by President Johnson but also by Everett Dirksen, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, who agreed to join with the northern and western Democratic senators in preventing the success of the Southern Democratic filibuster of the 1964 civil rights bill.
Once more, white liberals, and many blacks embraced the lie of LBJ as a friend of Black equality propagated by the media and even some Black organizations. What remained unsaid was the fact that just a few years before becoming president, in his position as Democratic majority leader in the Senate from 1957 to 1961, LBJ had sabotaged the civil rights cause. For Robert A. Caro, in his Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, the main feature of LBJ’s political activity during those years was his strenuous efforts to become president of the United States by cultivating the support of both the Southern block of Democratic senators who were strongly committed to the defense of Jim Crow and racism, and the northern liberals who were trying to approve legislation supporting civil rights despite the repeated filibusters mounted by their Southern counterparts. What emerges from that effort in Caro’s account is an LBJ acting as a political chameleon ready to lie and say what senators on both sides wanted to hear while ruthlessly manipulating the situation to increase his personal political power. While portraying himself as the man responsible for civil rights legislation in the sixties, the fact is that just a few years earlier he had played a major role in diluting the 1957 Civil Rights bill so as to make it acceptable to the Southern Democratic racist senators. Once more, it was only the explosive and disruptive strength of the Black movement that years later forced the hand of LBJ, the Democratic Party and even that of the Republican senate minority to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.
Who is Lying to Whom and for What Purpose?
It would be a mistake to conclude from the above discussion that lying in politics is a problem in and by itself. To be precise, what matters is who is lying, to whom and for what purpose.
In this context, the agreement that JFK reached with Nikita Khrushchev to bring to an end the Cuba blockade crisis of October of 1962, that threatened to unleash a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR, is very illustrative. A central part of the agreement that persuaded the Soviet Union to agree to withdraw its missiles from Cuba was the United States government’s promise to withdraw its missiles from Turkey, which for the USSR represented a big threat given its geographic proximity. Both negotiating parties agreed to keep this part of the agreement secret, which in this context was another way of lying about the agreement’s contents. But from whom were they keeping it secret? Certainly not from the Communist signatories to both the public and secret parts of the agreement. The primary target of secrecy was in fact the American people who were only a few days from voting in the November 1962 midterm elections. Revealing the US concession to the USSR would have undermined President Kennedy’s image of a tough uncompromising leader with the possibly resulting loss of support for the Democratic candidates running for the upcoming election. Thus, JFK, with the complicity of the leaders of the USSR, deliberately lied to the American public effectively manipulating them for electoral purposes, instead of directly confronting the issue politically by explaining and persuading the American people of the reasons for the “concession” to the Soviets on the missiles in Turkey. That is what made this lie matter both politically and ethically: the manipulation of American voters, and of world opinion too, by hiding part of the truth.
In fact, there are situations where lying, or not telling the truth are ethical and political imperatives for people of democratic convictions. Like refusing to cooperate with, and if necessary to lie to, the FBI and other government intelligence agencies on the activities of those who are no more than exercising their democratic right to political opposition and dissent, or of people such as the Muslims in the U.S.A. exercising their right to religious freedom. This is even truer for people living under a dictatorship, especially in political systems such as Fascism, Stalinism and the variety of anti-democratic political regimes that it spawned in countries like China, Cuba and Vietnam. However, in those countries and systems the lies told by the professional party leaders are a response to structural imperatives that significantly differ from those in liberal democratic capitalist countries.
The systemic political lie in capitalist democracies, which is the subject of this writing, only helps to maintain the political status quo, and to consolidate the ruling ideology by fostering powerlessness and the pervasive notion that there is no alternative. It contributes to popular cynicism and apathy that often spills over from the justified suspicion of capitalist professional politicians to political people who are trying to promote a radical political agenda. Popular cynicism and apathy often fails to distinguish among different kind of political messages and messengers.
Systematic political lying constitutes a serious obstacle to achieving the greatest possible objective and truthful knowledge of political and economic relations in society. Capitalist competition and the division of labor lead to an extremely fragmented view of social reality that obscure those relations. This is particularly true of the perennial tendency to blame racial and ethnic minority groups as well as immigrants instead of the systemic impact of capitalism for the many problems facing working people. Georg Lukacs argued in his classic volume History and Class Consciousness, that “as the bourgeoisie has the intellectual, organizational and every other advantage, the superiority of the proletariat must lie exclusively in its ability to see society from the center, as a coherent whole” (69) leading him to conclude that the fate of the revolution will depend on the working class being able to achieve an understanding that lays bare the nature of society. For Lukacs, this understanding is not based on a process of isolated and reified academic education but on a process of active struggle leading to a fusion of theory and practice.
Inevitably, there will be more advanced sections among the working class and its popular allies that will have a fuller comprehension of the social and political reality, and the best possible strategy and tactics to face it. However, the gap between the more and the less conscious sections of the working class could curtail the participation and control by the whole working class and threaten the possibility of a post-revolutionary democratic transition, an issue that revolutionaries might not have sufficiently considered. That is why it is essential to require the fullest transparency of the policies and actions of the revolutionary political leadership, and the complete freedom of discussion and decision-making on all public matters indispensable to democratic control from below.
During the pandemic, hate crimes against Asian Americans have increased by 150 percent, ranging from people being pushed and spat on, to brutal physical attacks. The murder of several people in Atlanta, most of them Asian women, by a lone white gunman in March was the most extreme example of the hatred that many Asians, in particular East and Southeast Asians, have been facing. In fact, even as Covid-19 restrictions are being lifted, many Asian Americans plan on staying inside as much as possible, fearing being attacked if they’re too publicly visible.
Yet even with the increase in attention to anti-Asian racism, understanding of the problem is partial. “We must broaden the contours of what is anti-Asian violence to also include Asian workers being exploited, or Asian women being sexually attacked, a pattern of violence of misogyny and oppression linked to colonialism and white supremacy,” Scott Kurashige, professor of American and Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington Bothell explains.
We need to continue to develop campaigns based on political critique that recognizes the broad forms of oppression that the majority have been made to endure.
THE STATE OF ASIAN AMERICA
Janelle Wong, a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland who writes extensively on Asian American politics, race, and religion is also a senior researcher at AAPI-Data which gathers critical survey data on Asian an Pacific Islander Americans. Wong observes data paints a more accurate picture of Asian Americans, countering misperceptions. For instance, one could argue Asian Americans are too ethnically and linguistically diverse to work together. Instead, as surveys reveal, a growing number across Asian and Pacific Islander subgroups share similar political views, often leaning progressive on critical issues.
Wang explained “Despite all their differences, this group of diverse people is turning Democrat over time” and share “a remarkable level of consensus” about the government’s role in everyday life. The majority of Asian Americans, regardless of partisanship, endorse a pretty strong government role in terms of the environment, healthcare, gun control and to some extent, redistributive economic policies.”
One could connect this convergence on issues to the shared material conditions that many Asian and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. have been facing over the years, with a significant and growing number trapped in low-wage work, while also dealing with soaring costs of living. Many Asian and Pacific Islander arrive here with very little, to a country they find offers minimal opportunity for social mobility. The anxieties of living under neoliberal capitalism, in which the “entrepreneur” is elevated above the average worker in policy and narrative, has pushed many Asian and Pacific Islander Americans to support progressive politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Another shared reality among Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, regardless of subgroup/ethnicity, has been domestic violence and sexual assault. According to a report compiled by AAPI-DATA, domestic violence and sexual assault for all Asian women hover at around 20%, which is high considering how underreported domestic and sexual violence situations are. As high as 56% of Filipinas and 64% of Indian and Pakistani women have said they’ve experienced sexual violence from their intimate partners. Since the pandemic, rates of abuse have drastically increased, with many survivors left with no choice but to remain at home with their abusers.
So, what should this mean in light of the recent tragedy in Atlanta and the subsequent protests?
First, to address the various harm and injustices that most Asian and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. face, we need to develop campaigns that aren’t solely focused on hate crime legislation. If movements are truly interested in creating environments in which most Asians feel safe and able to push back against reactionary forces, they must fight for policies such as universal housing and healthcare, which would make it much easier for survivors to leave abusive relationships. They must fight for more protections for workers and for the right for workers to organize for what they need, including higher wages as well as the right to determine the conditions at their workplace. After all, the women who were murdered in Atlanta were workers themselves, caught in an industry that rarely thinks about their safety and concerns.
Alvina Yeh, Executive Director at the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), a constituency group under the AFL-CIO labor umbrella, observes “The issue is not just about hate” because it’s also about “misogyny, it’s about immigration, it’s about workplace status and workplace issues.”
More Asian and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. should be drawn into critical fights over power, alongside other racial and ethnic groups. This is not to say that most Asians now, given their positions as workers in a country that devalues working people and what we need, are budding socialists or even social democrats, or somehow, understand the connections between capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy. Crisis and deteriorating living and working conditions can, as Gramsci argued generations ago, push people to think differently about the status quo and about themselves. However, unless their anger and frustration are tapped in organizing, they can hold onto ideas and beliefs that are counterproductive, which we see with some Asian Americans clinging onto anti-Black racism and other forms of bigotry that contradict building the solidarity that is necessary to win power. Still, as evidenced in the data, growing numbers of Asian and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. can be organized to battle against business interests and those standing in the way of progressive and socialist change, if organizers and organizations are willing to do the work.
THE POLITICAL HORIZON
Founded in 1992, APALA was created in order for Asian and Pacific Islander workers to be heard above the din of anti-immigrant and anti-Asian sentiment in mainstream labor politics and as a vehicle for Asian and Pacific Islander workers in the U.S. to be able to fight for what they needed materially, which often do not get reflected in mainstream Asian American politics. Issues of class and gender are often left out of discussions about policy and interests of Asian Americans, as usually upwardly mobile Asian Americans, or political celebrities such as Andrew Yang, take up space at rallies and protests and consequently, restrict the discussion of what is needed for Asian Americans to such things as supporting Asian owned businesses, or the desire to support having more police in neighborhoods.
Asian and Pacific Islanders across the U.S. who are working face declining working and living conditions. Many who are women, like those murdered in Atlanta, work in occupations such as the massage parlor industry, that offer few workplace protections and overall, do not consider the well-being of its workers. According to a recent New York Times piece, one of the victims of the shooting worked long hours at the massage parlor, and according to their sons, barely had time to relax or have a life apart from working. We need a multi-level approach/strategy that no longer leaves behind the concerns and interests of women working in massage parlors, women working as home healthcare workers, and as domestic household labor. “You can’t treat any of these issues in a silo,” Yeh explained. “We have to be able to be nuanced and complex and talk about many issues al at the same time.”
Since the murders in Atlanta, the national leadership at APALA has been holding townhall discussions online for its membership across 20 chapters throughout the country on the issue of anti-Asian racism, as well as discussions over forging solidarity across communities of color, as well as providing toolkits for members to rely on when seeking to connect the fight for labor with the fight for racial justice at their own workplaces and unions. There are also other prominent Asian American and Asian organizations, like Communities Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) and Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), and 18MR, that seek to organize for what most Asians need, as well as cultivate solidarity and a broader understanding of politics among Asian Americans that pushes against the more conservative and even more liberal perspectives on how to address issues impacting Asian America.
What Asians need is systemic changes to how our economy functions in relation to working people as well as policies that address issues like anti-Asian racism, without providing police more resources. To achieve any of this, however, will require solidarity between Asian Americans and other communities of color. “That’s why we need unity, that if we don’t stop the neo-fascist elements, they’re going to take away and wipe out the imperfect forms of democratic representation we have now,” Kurashige warned. “If we want to create a better system than exists now, we need forms of solidarity that recognize unique forms of oppression that indigenous peoples and African Americans have faced, but that also find some way to see these systems of oppression as interconnected and therefore, if we want to overcome them, we need to make those critical connections across community, across these racial and ethnic boundaries.”
Another dimension of this struggle is confronting U.S. foreign policy and the rhetoric surrounding it. Currently, Biden has continued to lean into anti-China rhetoric that the Trump administration also helped spread, especially during Covid-19. U.S. foreign policy remains destructive for the rest of the world and often situates countries like China as an existential threat to the world. Such rhetoric contributes to painting large groups of people, especially Asians, as foreigners, regardless of their actual history in the U.S., and as pawns of the countries that the U.S. is now competing against or bombing.
As Tobita Chow, director of Justice is Global, argues ““When a non-white country is a supposed threat of enemy to the U.S., inevitably people from there or perceived to be from there are also perceived to be threats to American people.” The belligerent rhetoric against China reinforces the perspective among non-Asians and even among some Asians as well that the Chinese people are an international threat that must be stopped. The rhetoric parallels the increase in hate crimes, with examples of non-Asians literally yelling, “Fuck China” as they proceed to harass and intimidate East Asian Americans.
As APALA argues, more funding for police will not change the inequities and vulnerabilities that many Asians in the U.S. are facing, whether as workers, as women, as people lacking critical resources. Instead of more law enforcement patrolling, APALA believes in having a more transformative justice-oriented response, which includes training bystanders on how to intervene when people are being harassed as well as funding for mental health services and other resources that victims of hate crimes would need. Through its toolkits and townhalls and work on the ground that chapters are doing, such as mutual aid, APALA is pushing for people to identify how the problem in the U.S. of racism and exploitation is foundational.
“The violence of poverty, of deportation, of incarceration is all tied together. It is all related to a false sense of economic scarcity,” said Yeh, talking about how people are led to believe that there aren’t enough resources for everyone all the while major business are growing richer, and social programs remain lean.
Neoliberal politicians, corporate interests, celebrity capitalists like Yang, al want to promote an idea of Asian American politics that aligns with their own pro-capitalist, pro-American Dream narratives that refuse to tackle core economic and political issues. Instead, what we must have are campaigns seeking to fight against capital, to fight against patriarchy at the workplace and in the home, and that believe in the strategic and moral necessity of solidarity.
“We have to be willing to put in the work in, to have these conversations with other communities of color,” Yeh said.
Leaders of UNAMOS, the Left Opposition to President Daniel Ortega, who have been arrested by his government.
This article is written as a collaboration between New Politics and Solidarity/Against the Current.
Daniel Ortega, who is running for his fourth consecutive term as president of Nicaragua—his fifth altogether—is taking no chances on losing. Though he has held the presidency since 2007, for almost 14 years, and though he not only controls the executive but also dominates the National Assembly and the Supreme Court, and though he and his family and friends own most of the country’s news media, Ortega still felt it necessary to arrest five of the most prominent opposition presidential candidates and a number of other opposition leaders. Those arrested this month span the entire political spectrum from right to left, several being former comrades of Ortega’s party, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN). One has to be struck by the dictator’s fear of the Nicaraguan people.
While for decades there has been nothing progressive or democratic about Daniel Ortega and the FSLN, the current wave of arrests of his political opponents represents a new, even more authoritarian development. Since the 1990s Daniel Ortega had been moving to the right, engaging in corrupt deals with capitalist parties, forming alliances with both domestic capitalists and with the right wing of the Catholic Church, while protecting the interests of domestic and foreign capitalists. He changed the country’s constitution to make possible his continuance in power and to permit his wife Rosario Murillo to become his vice-president. There has been harassment of his opponents in the past, but never the complete repression of all opposition parties such as we now see.
The government argues that its opponents are trying to undermine the country’s sovereignty and are “inciting foreign interference in internal affairs, requesting military interventions and organizing with foreign financing.” Those arrested have been charged with various specious crimes. While there is no doubt that some of his opponents would like to see the United States bring enough pressure to drive out Ortega, the opposition parties are not working to bring about a military intervention. They wanted to oust Ortega through a fair election.
It is also true that the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID provide money to various Nicaraguan NGOs some of which may oppose Ortega’s policies, but it is not U.S. money that determines the opposition or even influences it very much. It is Ortega who has created his own opponents over the last 14 years and turned many, perhaps a majority, of the Nicaraguan people against him. Without the U.S. State Department and the CIA, the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie is quite capable of coming up with its own political program for change—though much of it is tied to Ortega—and similarly the Nicaraguan people proved in 2018 that they can create a mass movement of tremendous power without relying on anyone else.
Ortega and the Nicaraguan Crisis
Ortega’s crackdown on the opposition comes as Nicaragua experiences a series of economic, political and public health crises. In 2018 a national political rebellion took place involving hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans of all walks of life throughout the country who protested Ortega’s violent suppression earlier that year of demonstrations of the elderly and students opposed to a new retirement plan. To suppress the resulting rebellion, police and Ortega’s FSLN thugs murdered 300 people, wounded 2,000, arrested and tortured hundreds of others, and effectively prevented any opposition protests in the country. Opposition media was shut down and NGOs were harassed. All of this led some 100,000 Nicaraguans to flee the country.
Then in 2020 came the COVID pandemic crisis, with the Ortega government flagrantly flouting international health recommendations by ignoring social distancing and holding mass public events both out of doors and indoors. Some 700 Nicaraguan doctors signed a letter “urging the government to acknowledge that the virus was spreading in Nicaragua and to put in place preventive measures recommended by the World Health Organization to limit its further spread.” Based on a study of excess deaths, some media accused the Nicaraguan government of underestimating fatalities by more than 90 percent. Nicaragua has also failed to vaccinate its population. “Nicaragua has administered at least 167,500 doses of COVID vaccines so far. Assuming every person needs 2 doses, that’s enough to have vaccinated only about 1.3% of the country’s population. The country is now scheduled to receive enough vaccine through COVAX to cover 20 percent of its population.
As in other countries, the COVID pandemic also brought an economic crisis. In 2020 Nicaragua, already the second poorest country in the hemisphere (second only to Haiti) with a per capital GDP of under $2,000, saw its economy shrink by 4 percent. On top of the COVID pandemic, in November of 2020, hurricanes Eta and Iona with record winds devastated parts of the country. Nicaragua’s economic crisis also resulted in part, however, from the severe economic depression in Venezuela, which under presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro had been providing billions of dollars to the Nicaragua government. Facing its own desperate economic situation, Venezuela could no longer afford to be so generous.
Nicaragua has depended for decades upon foreign assistance from governments and NGOs in order to attempt to deal with the country’s widespread poverty and social problems. But after the 2018 national uprising against the Ortega government and the accompanying repression, several NGOs assisting with economic development or social services were either driven out of the country or because of harassment left of their own volition, adding to the country’s economic difficulties.
The Repression
Clearly Ortega fears that these various crises have created deep discontent that could lead to one of his challengers winning the election—so he has eliminated them from the contest. Among those candidates arrested by Ortega are some of the country’s most important political figures. Placed under house arrest in early June was Cristiana Chamorro, whose father Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, editor of the country’s leading newspaper La Prensa, was assassinated in 1978, presumably at the order of then president and dictator Anastasio Samoza. Her mother defeated president Daniel Ortega in the 1990 election, serving until 1997. No doubt Ortega feared that Cristiana Chamorro, wealthy, influential, and bearing the famous family name might defeat him in the presidential election. (See this Sept. 2019 interview with Chamorro.)
The Ortega government also detained other moderate or conservative presidential candidates: Arturo Cruz, Félix Maradiaga and Juan Sebastián Chamorro. Other conservative political figures arrested include: José Adán Aguerri, former president of the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (Cosep), Violeta Granera, and José Pellais.
On the left, the Ortega regime arrested several figures associated with the opposition party UNAMOS, a party created by FSLN dissidents. Two of those arrested are veritable heroes of the Sandinista Revolution of 1979: Dora María Téllez, 65, and Hugo Torres, 73, both of whom were once FSLN comandantes. Torres said in a recorded video message that was shared on social media, “These are desperate acts from a regime that can feel itself dying.” He continued, “Forty-six years ago I risked my life to get Daniel Ortega and other political prisoner comrades out of jail. And in 1978 I once again risked my life alongside Dora María Téllez to free about 60 other political prisoners. But that’s how life goes, those who once welcomed principles today have betrayed them.”
Other leftists arrested included another former leading activist of the revolutionary movement of the late 1970s, Victor Hugo Tinco, and two younger women, Suyen Barahona, president of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), and Ana Margarita Vigil, the group’s former president.
The U.S. Response
Throughout most of Ortega’s presidency in the 2000s, the United States and Nicaragua had amicable relations. The two countries cooperated in a number of areas, including the policing of international drug cartels. Ortega also accepted some U.S. military assistance as well as tolerating various U.S. agencies such as USAID. The reason for the U.S. toleration of the Ortega regime, and vice versa, was that it was good for U.S. business and for the Nicaraguan capitalist class. Sixty percent of Nicaraguan trade is with the United States. Ortega could be relied upon to facilitate such international trade and to prevent the organization of independent labor unions in the country’s maquiladoras.
Now, however, Nicaragua has become a problem. The United States prefers countries with at least a veneer of democratic institutions ad procedures and wants social peace. But since 2018, Ortega has been incapable of delivering either. So, it is not surprising that the United States government has taken strong measures against leading figures in the Ortega government. Following the violent repression of the national uprising in July of 2018, the U.S. government imposed sanctions on Daniel Ortega, his wife and vice-president Rosario Murillo, and on the country’s top police officials.
This month U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called upon Ortega to release the presidential candidates and other opposition leaders as he announced new sanctions against members of the Ortega government and family, including on the president’s daughter Camila Ortega Murillo. These U.S. Treasury Department sanctions affect only he thirty or so individuals who have been named and do not affect the Nicaraguan population as a whole.
“As these sanctions demonstrate, there are costs for those who support or carry out the Ortega regime’s repression,” said Blinken. “The United States will continue to use all diplomatic and economic tools at our disposal to support Nicaraguans’ calls for greater freedom and accountability as well as free and fair elections.”
We know the U.S. government is less interested in elections and democracy than it is in maintaining its role as the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere and that its real concern is that the Ortega government has created instability in a small but strategic corner of the empire. Such instability could lead either to popular rebellion and a left-of-center government or to great-power foreign involvement from Russia or China, neither of which does the United States want.
Since his election in 2007, Ortega has sought a counterweight to U.S. power by strengthening ties to Russia, supporting Russia’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in March of 2014 and hosting a visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin in July of that year. Russia has also been rearming Nicaragua and training the Nicaraguan military both in Russian military schools and in Nicaragua.
Then there is China, whose influence has waned. In 2013, Ortega pushed through the National Assembly a plan for a transoceanic canal to be built by the HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Group (HKND) headed by Chinese businessman Wang Jing. The canal, which was to begin operations last year, has been a total fiasco and some have called it a scam intended to boost the image of Ortega and to enrich him and his friends. It was farmers’ and environmentalists’ protests against the canal that led to some of the first large public protests against Ortega. The canal seems to have been abandoned in 2017.
In any case, it is clear that, as the editors of Against the Current recently wrote, with President Joseph Biden “Empire is Back,” and his administration may take advantage of the current Nicaraguan situation to assert greater influence. This would likely happen in alliance with the Nicaraguan capitalist class as represented by the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (Cosep) though it would also require brokering by the Catholic Church. No doubt the U.S. State Department and the CIA are already looking for Nicaraguan leaders that they can entice or suborn in order to create a safe capitalist opposition that might help to facilitate the fall of Ortega and his flight with his family to some friendly state.
What Should the Left Do?
We in the U.S. and the international left, while avoiding any ties to the U.S. government and demanding that it keep its hands off, should place ourselves on the side of the movements for democracy in Nicaragua. Unidad Nacional Azul y Blanco that was created in October 2018 has formed the broad umbrella organization of the opposition, but it has been dominated by conservative business elements. The somewhat more left-leaning and activist Articulación de Movimientos Sociales, which brought together students, peasants, social movements, feminists, the indigenous and business groups, proved unsuccessful in providing an alternative. Azul y Blanco has understandably been focused on the elections with the goal of ousting Ortega.
Nicaraguan working people—mostly agricultural workers and government employees, but also some miners and industrial workers, as well as the urban and rural poor–have not succeeded in creating their own political movement or party. The FSLN, which attempted from above to turn itself into such a party in the 1980s, became in the 1990s and 2000s simply an electoral machine. Without independent labor unions and facing severe repression since 2018, it has been virtually impossible to create a political presence for working people.
The left in Nicaragua is extremely weak. The FSLN’s leftwing members resigned one after another during the 1990s and 2000s, forming opposition groups such as the MRS, the Sandinista Renovation Movement and the MPRS, Movement for the Rescue of Sandinismo. These groups, having rejected Ortega and the FSLN’s authoritarianism, tended to adopt social democratic policies, though there were some radicals within them. They failed, however, to establish a base among Nicaragua’s working people and the poor. Nevertheless, their leaders such as Dora María Téllez and Hugo Torres—now both arrested—kept alive both the struggle for democracy and for a more progressive society.
During the upheaval of 2018, some university students involved in the protests in support of the elderly concerned about a social security reform, and then after the initial police killings of students in the national protests, became interested in socialism in one form or another. So far, however, with some forced into exile and others facing the regime’s repression, they have been unable to create an independent party. No doubt the current struggles will create new opposition groups and some of them may become socialist.
We should reject the argument made by some on the left that we have to support the dictator Ortega and his government because the United States is now opposed to it. We on the left should be opposed to both the United States and to the Ortega dictatorship. We in the U.S. left, while supporting the general movement for political democracy and civil rights, should seek to identify and to work with emerging socialist groups in Nicaragua and with workers, feminists, LGBT activists, environmentalists and others. As international socialists, we stand with all movements for democracy, civil rights, and for socialism.
In his article on developments in the Democratic Socialists of America as the organization approaches its 2021 convention, Andrew Sernatinger states: “A priority campaign over immigration received overwhelming support from delegates [at the last convention, two years ago] but never materialized.”
In reality, coming out of the 2019 convention, the national Immigrants’ Rights Working Group (IRWG) spearheaded a national day of action. Planning calls brought in members from across country, culminating that October with actions in 27 cities to #CloseTheCamps, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Newark, and Atlanta just to name a few.
Take the example from Atlanta DSA. The chapter’s immigrants’ justice working group organized a #CloseTheCamps action alongside the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR), Project South, and Black Alliance for Just Immigration to name a few local partners with grassroots working class and undocumented base. Today, Atlanta DSA works with those partners as part of the Close the Jail Atl coalition.
A key component for this work is the sensitivity of organizing in immigrant and undocumented people’s communities. And that sometimes means our role is not in the spotlight. The 2019 mandate called for “immigrants and their communities to lead this struggle and determine its tactics.” This was reflected in the #CloseTheCamp coalitions. The relationship and trust building between bases takes time and showing up is just the start.
In addition, the 2019 convention mandate called for the IRWG to “coordinate activities listed in this resolution and develop a program of education on the history and political economy of immigration, as well as how to argue against right-wing positions and respond to provocations.” To fulfill this, the IRWG created a getting-started Immigrants’ Rights Organizing Guide for chapters and at-large members, this was updated and followed up with an Organizing Action toolkit, with resources that have been helpful for different chapter’s work.
Shifting into COVID, the IRWG focused on producing educational materials by recording webinars covering Immigrants’ Struggles in the Time of COVID featuring comrades in the struggle exposing human rights abuses at ICE detention centers, winning union contracts for indigenous migrant workers, dairy farm workers in Vermont calling on dairy companies to ensure respect for human rights in their supply chain, and the importance of workers’ centers as a place for workers to learn about their rights and organizing. We partnered up with AfroSOC and MiJente for the Eyes On ICE: Stories of Struggle and Resistance forum. And a tremendously successful all in Spanish webinar Quienes somos y qué queremos los Socialistas Democráticos. These resources were created to fulfill the mandate of convention and helped see a 47% growth in the IRWG.
Immigrants in the United States are living under apartheid conditions. Under the U.S. constitution, persons living in the U.S. are promised basic human rights; however, under the current legal framework migrants in the U.S. are disenfranchised from basic legal protections. The migrant working class constitutes at least 20% of the working class. Political projects that do not include a substantive and realistic analysis of the migrant working class fail to understand both race and class in the U.S. and thus fail to address our fundamental political tasks.
Resolution #1 , “On the Defense of Immigrants and Refugees,” reaffirms our commitment to building with working-class communities of color currently outside of DSA. According to the recent chapter survey from the Growth and Development Committee, at least 31 chapters have a formal immigrants rights group and 50 others are interested in forming one. This work, centering the communities impacted means DSA is not always the visible partner; and until the makeup of our base changes, we should not be expected to be leading, but continue to prioritize relationship building and learning to listen to these communities. The heart of these efforts is to educate, agitate, and organize. The best thing we can do now is continue to build on the lessons from the past two years.
Alexander Hernandez is a co-chair of the National Immigrant’s Rights Working Group of DSA and a member of Atlanta DSA.
The Republican Party has gone wacko! The evidence is overwhelming: Some of their members call the January 6th attack on the Capitol a tourist visit. They tolerate Marjorie Taylor Greene’s QAnon, anti-Semitism, space lasers etc. They are trying to re-run the 2020 election after it has been settled for 6 months. They are violating Federal law with re-audits etc. They are trying to suppress the voting rights of Black people and other people of color. Their grasp on reality is looser than the flat earthers.
But why is this? The media says that Congress people are afraid of Trump and the “Trump Base”. They are afraid to lose primaries to Trumpier candidates in the 2022 election. They say he has a magic hold on Republicans — with 53% of Republican voters thinking that Trump won the election. They imply that it is not primarily the ruling class, but a section of the population that is driving the Republicans to the Right and away from democracy.
The media explanation is false or at the very least incomplete. In the Senate, two thirds of Republicans are not even up for re-election in 2022, including Mitch McConnell.
In fact, the current political crisis and irrationalism reflects deeper causes. The Republican Party is divided between the large multi-national, billionaire wing and the smaller corporate capitalists. These smaller capitalists have suffered economically compared to the billionaires for years, but especially since COVID. The billionaires gained $1.3 trillion in new wealth between March 2020 and March 2021.
Most of the smaller capitalists, especially those forced to shut down during COVID have missed out. A disproportionate share of government aid has gone to the billionaire capitalists. The social and economic crisis of capitalism has radicalized sections of the middle class. It has also driven sections of smaller corporate capital in a more desperate right wing direction.
Many of the smaller capitalists supported Trump’s America First protectionism. They didn’t want to pay taxes to defend “American Global Leadership” (American Empire) that they saw as favoring the billionaires. They opposed the COVID shutdowns. In some ways, this division goes back to the isolationism of the 30s, as explained in Doug Henwood’s article in Jacobin.
The larger capitalists are divided. Most of them tend to be more ruling class conscious. They understand that to compete with China, they need to rebuild the infrastructure in the U.S. They are willing to sacrifice some profit in the short term to make the U.S. competitive in the long run. Biden has explicitly motivated his main proposals, the American Rescue Plan, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan on this basis.
Smaller capitalists have less of a secure profit margin which would allow them to think in the long term. They want immediate payoffs in terms of lower taxes and less regulation.
Another important factor for the small corporate capitalists is this: They tend to pay more taxes than the billionaire capitalists. They realize that raising the corporate tax rate is likely to hit them much harder than their bigger competitors. Jeff Bezos has declared he is willing to pay higher taxes to support Biden’s infrastructure plan. This is mighty generous of Bezos since Amazon had paid almost NO federal income tax in the last 3 years!
The largest capitalists tended to support Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. The smaller corporate capitalists tended to support Trump. They did not necessarily support all of Trump’s program. They often found him crude and incompetent. However, they especially liked his business tax cuts and deregulation.
There is a battle for the soul of the Republican Party going on. Historically, the Republicans have been the preferred party of the biggest businesses. However from the Tea Party on, the smaller capitalists have made a play for power within it. They saw Trump as their standard bearer, even with reservations. This is the real source of the radicalization of the Republican Party, not some hypnosis by Trump.
Does this mean that the smaller corporate capitalists support all of the radicalism and irrationality on display in the Republican Party? No — but they are willing to tolerate it for now. In general, they do not support overthrowing the basic institutions of American capitalism. They did not fully back the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. They still want to influence the government in a more conservative direction, not overthrow it. This is a crucial difference between the millionaires and middle class right wing revolutionaries who attacked the Capitol.
However, the millionaires are quite willing to use the “Trump Base” to shift politics to the Right. They will use the foot soldiers of QAnon etc. for their own purposes. As such, their representatives are loath to denounce the conspiracy theories, and post-election audits. They are quite willing to win elections by shrinking the electorate. They are not so much afraid of the Trump base as they see it as useful right now.
As with previous periods, they are not ready to hand power to the middle class right wing radicals but they are willing to use them for now. Just as capitalists in Germany kept the Nazis in reserve during the 20s, the smaller corporate capitalists are willing to tolerate the right-wing revolutionaries and even give them some support.
As always there is overlap but also a distinction between the small corporate capitalists, such as the “pillow guy” Mike Lindell, and the mostly petit bourgeois Trump base. Many workers have been pulled into voting for Trump. However, his most consistent base is the middle class: both the traditional petit bourgeoisie (shop keepers etc.) and its new layers (independent professionals, franchise owners, cops, managers etc.).
This is especially true of the extreme Right part of this base. The “Insurgent Supremacists” (so named by Matthew Lyons and Three Way Fight) are those who actually want to overthrow the government and institute a more right wing one that they feel will represent small property holders. Most of the known Capitol attackers were middle class.
The small scale corporate capitalists are currently allied with the Trump Base in their attempt to take control of the Republican Party from the billionaires. At this point, they seem to be winning. Whether they will continue to win is up in the air.
The billionaire oriented Republicans are extremely concerned by this development. They decry their opponents’ flirting with insurrection. They stress that the institutions of bourgeois democracy need to be respected. They believe that capitalist rule is best secured by stable norms and procedures that can win the trust of the vast majority. They accuse the small capitalist wing of being unpatriotic. Of course they present their position as in the interests of the whole population and American “democracy.” In fact they are concerned about capitalist stability.
The traditional Republicans remain resolutely conservative. Even though their politics on specific issues may be closer to their small corporate capitalist opponents than to the Democrats, they believe that institutional stability is more important than particular policies. For example, many of them also oppose raising the corporate tax rate. However, since they represent the more stable capitalists, they are less desperate to increase their immediate profit. They don’t see the need to even flirt with throwing out the whole system for immediate gain.
This puts these traditional Republicans in a dilemma. They don’t want to abandon their party to the small corporate capitalists. Yet they don’t want to give support to the small corporate capitalists by staying in a party they no longer fully control.
The future is unclear, but one likely outcome is traditional Republicans joining the Democrats either officially or de facto. Some may become independents who actually back the Democrats. The Lincoln Project and the other various anti-Trump Republican formations backed Biden in the 2020 election. This is very likely to create a conservative pull on the Democratic Party. It may become the preferred vehicle of the billionaires.
It seems unlikely that traditional Republicans will be able to create a viable third party. A large part of the potential base of such a party is with the Trump/ small corporate capitalist wing. There seems to be little appeal to the mass of Republican voters for the established wing of the Republican Party as long as there is a Trumpist alternative.
The real policy division in the ruling class is over a move away from neo-liberalism to a more government directed economy. Biden et al. see that the only way to compete with China is with more government intervention. They believe that the U.S. can’t leave the rebuilding of infrastructure to chance. Since private capital will not rebuild the roads, bridges, broad band etc. on its own, the government must. This strategy has nothing to do with socialism. It will give billions of dollars in contracts to private corporations. It is a strategy for the victory of American capitalism over its rivals. It is aimed at longer term capital competition and accumulation. Capital competitiveness as always will involve the reduction of labor’s share of the national income — no matter Biden’s pro-labor rhetoric.
Biden’s strategy is not a complete repudiation of neo-liberalism. Its plans are based on government money going to private corporations to perform work the government could do directly. It only wants to slightly raise corporate tax rates. It will not aim to return to the tax structure of the early 1970s or even to 2016 levels. As time goes on, it will likely reinforce and even increase existing austerity.
The right wing opposition to this is based on the immediate increased costs to small capitalist corporations. It is based on opposition to the regulation needed to carry it out. It is based on extreme short-termism. In mobilizing opposition to this plan, the small corporate capitalists and conservative billionaires raise the spectre of SOCIALISM. For them, socialism means government intervention in the economy — even if that is for capitalist purposes!
How should the Left relate to this conflict? We should oppose both sides! We need to realize that each policy reflects the interests and strategies of different wings of the ruling class, not working class interests. Biden’s plan could for example lead to increased conflict with China — even the possibility of war. We should critically assess any particular plans put forward and only support those that actually help ordinary people. Even this limited support should be critical. We should constantly push for more support to workers and the poor and a real path to environmental sanity. We have no interest in aiding the billionaires against the millionaires or vice versa. Instead, we should use this split in the ruling class to win people to a socialist strategy.
Obviously, we need to actively oppose any attack on voting rights. Instead, we should demand extension of voting rights to all immigrants, prisoners and felons. We should also confront the insurgent supremacists whenever and wherever they appear.
This conflict presents several lessons for us:
1) The ruling-class parties remain ruling class parties. The Trump wing is not attempting to take the Republicans away from capitalists in general. Instead one wing of capital is fighting another for control.
2) The Tea Party strategy is not a useful one for the Left to follow in relation to the Democrats. The TP was an insurgency backed by one wing of capital. It fell off when it shifted the Republicans rightward. It was not an outside takeover of the Republicans. Those who call for a socialist take over of the Democrats do not understand that the Democrats remain a resolutely capitalist party.
3) In fact the conflict within the Republicans is likely to strengthen the corporate domination over the Democrats as ex-Republicans join or at least support the Democrats. The pressure to win over the traditional Republican swing voters will intensify.
4) The current rabidity of the Republicans is the result of ruling class divisions, not the depravity of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.” The party system is dominated by the ruling class. The U.S. is undemocratic in several structural ways. These reinforce the normal capitalist domination of politics in all bourgeois democracies.
5) The “Trump Base” is dominated by the middle class. It is internally divided. Only a section of it is hopelessly reactionary and an even smaller section are revolutionary rightists. Large sections of this base especially workers can be won away by resolute Left politics — but not by tepid liberalism.
An effective strategy requires an accurate analysis of US politics. We should not be seduced by the media’s mystification and confusion about the source of the current Republican irrationality. Only with an accurate analysis can we chart our way forward — a way based on resolute working class independence from both wings of capitalism.
[On June 6, 2021, I spoke with two amazing women about uprisings against police brutality/mass incarceration in Myanmar/Burma, U.S., Iran & pathways to solidarity. Romarilyn Ralston is a prison abolitionist scholar and activist in the United States. Debbie Stothard is a Burmese human rights activist.
This one-hour dialogue delves into the similarities and differences between our struggles, and ways to create collaboration among activists from these countries. If there were any doubts about the urgency of addressing these connections, the latest statement of Michael Flynn, a Trump advisor about the need for a Myanmar style military coup in the U.S., shows that the Republicans are drawing connections between Myanmar and the U.S. for their own fascistic purposes.
The video supplements the analysis below, which I wrote two weeks earlier.]
Why is so little explicit connection being made by activists between the Black Lives Matter uprising in the U.S., the current mass uprising in Myanmar, and the ongoing struggles in Iran? Although located in different geographical locations, with different protagonists and histories, these three movements all confront issues of police brutality, mass incarceration, militarism and authoritarianism. In order to create links of global solidarity and to help all of them move forward, we need to understand their specific facts and then begin to draw out their similarities and differences. Finally, we need to look for ways to create collaboration among activists from these three movements.
Obstacles To Ending Police Brutality and Mass Incarceration in the U.S.
The conviction of police officer Derek Chauvin for his murder/lynching of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 was rare in a country in which the legal system has mostly sided with those who enslave, murder, and imprison Black, Brown and indigenous people. This conviction would not have happened without the powerful Black Lives Matter Movement that rocked the United States after the murder of Floyd.
Shortly before the announcement of the verdict however, MaKhia Bryant, a sixteen-year old Black woman was shot dead by a police officer in Columbus Ohio. Shortly thereafter Andrew Brown, a Black man was shot in the back of the head by the police in Pasquotank, North Carolina. According to the New York Times, during the first twenty days in the month of April alone, when the Chauvin trial was in progress, the U.S. police killed 64 people who were disproportionately Black and Latino.
White supremacist forces who carried on an attempted coup on January 6, 2021 with thousands displaying Confederate and Trump flags taking over the capitol building in Washington D.C. still have a strong base. They represent many of the 74 million who voted for Trump in 2020 and continue to deny the legitimacy of the Biden and Harris election and administration
Although, the Biden/Harris administration has made some efforts to challenge these moves, they are not able to pass any meaningful legislation concerning police brutality, voting rights or gun violence because several House and Senate Democrats would not vote for the above. Furthermore, while liberal Democrats support better training and more accountability for the police and have been passing city and state bills toward those aims , many do not support the idea of defunding the police (which requires giving a portion of the police budget to social services and counseling) or abolishing the prison system.
This complex reality cannot be faced by limiting the struggle against police brutality/mass incarceration to the United States. We need to have a global view. Toward that aim, let’s look at the struggles in Myanmar and Iran.
Myanmar’s Uprising Against the Military Continues Under Assault
The official prison population in Myanmar is 80,000 out of a general population of 54 million. That number is increasing on a daily basis because of mass arrests around the country by the army, raids on homes of protesters and leads from a massive network of government informers. The actual number of incarcerated people should also include the Rohingya Muslim population. Since 2017, the military has forcibly removed 700,000 to one million Rohingya from their homes. These refugees are now living in prison-like refugee camps in Bangladesh. Another 600,000 Rohingya remain inside the country. Indeed the United Nations has characterized the Burmese government’s assault on the Rohingya as a genocide. Shamefully, Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the National Democratic League, and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who was involved in a power-sharing government with the military from 2011 until the recent coup, has downplayed and justified the genocidal military assault on the Rohingya.
In contrast, many protesters in the uprising are now acknowledging that what their government has done to the Rohingya and to other ethnic minorities has been unjust. They are now more open to accepting a federalist alternative that recognizes the rights of historically oppressed minorities who constitute one-third of the population.
The Myanmar uprising however faces severe challenges. The military known as Tatmadaw is a cult-like institution with 500,000 troops. It trains soldiers from a young age to see anyone other than the Bamar ethnic majority as criminal and sub-human. The members of the armed forces live a privileged segregated life and are brainwashed with nationalism and Bamar ethnic chauvinism. The military is also a corporation controlling large investments in Burma and elsewhere. It has its own banks, schools, hospitals, and mobile network. In addition, this brutal military regime is supported by China, Russia and India which have investments in Myanmar. These states sell arms to the government and see the continuation of military rule as necessary for their own immediate and strategic interests in the region.
The combined might of the capitalist state-army promoting religious chauvinism-misogyny, and the important strategic role which Myanmar plays for various global powers, makes its military government very powerful. Thus the struggle in Myanmar cannot move forward without global grassroots solidarity to oppose the military government and to give voice to Myanmar women, striking labor activists and ethnic minorities.
In these respects, Myanmar and Iran have much in common.
Iran’s 2019 Uprising Crushed but Protests Continue
Iran has experienced three waves of mass protests in the last decade. The 2009 Green Movement against the fraudulent election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was mainly a reformist movement demanding that votes be counted. The 2017 and 2019 wave of popular protests had a mass working-class character and were led by unemployed youth, women, oppressed minorities, labor activists and students. In essence these were protests against religious fundamentalism, state exploitation, its domestic injustices and its regional imperialist interventions in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. After the 2019 uprising, at least 1500 people were killed by the Iranian regime and over 7000 mostly youth were arrested. Most of those who were arrested are still languishing in prison under horrible conditions. Several including Navid Afkari, a beloved young wrestler have been executed. Many are contracting COVID.
While labor protests and strikes continue around the country, it is the resistance of women and especially women political prisoners that has become a unique symbol of struggles in Iran. Most notable is Nasrin Sotoudeh, a brave feminist human rights attorney who was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes for having defended the Girls of Revolution Avenue (women who took off their headscarves in public and refused the compulsory hijab). She has been in and out of prison and on hunger strike multiple times since 2010 and has also contracted COVID. Another feminist political prisoner Narges Mohammadi was serving a long sentence for opposing the death penalty and defending the rights of children. She was recently released and has just published a book in Persian entitled, White Torture, which contains interviews with women political prisoners. Zeynab Jalalian, a Kurdish woman political prisoner, is among various Kurdish and Arab women who have been imprisoned for defending the rights of women and national minorities. Sepideh Gholian, a young woman journalist is serving a long sentence for covering and defending the strikes of sugar cane workers in Khuzestan. She continues to write from inside prison walls about the terrible situation of women prisoners from the Arab ethnic minority. There are so many other political prisoners including labor activists, leaders of the teachers’ union, environmentalists as well as social prisoners who are suffering under intolerable conditions in a country which and has the highest rate of executions after China.
Within the past few years there have been several new waves of mass arrests of Kurdish, Arab and most recently Balouchi activists and intellectuals. Various activists representing these national minorities have been executed. The Iranian regime also murders destitute Kurdish, and Balouch workers who daily cross the border to carry cargo including fuel on their backs in order to earn a meager living. These assaults and murders are further manifestation of a history of oppression of national minorities in Iran. Balouchistan, Khuzestan and Kurdistan are the poorest provinces in the country, the most neglected, the most environmentally damaged, while their labor and natural resources are exploited to promote the Iranian regime’s militarism and regional interventions. Khuzestan and Kurdistan were also the provinces that had the strongest participation during the 2017 and 2019 uprisings.
Although Iran is on the verge of economic collapse due to its military spending and also the U.S. sanctions, the Iranian regime has been trying to strengthen itself through economic, military and surveillance ties with China and Russia. Both China and Russia see Iran as important to their strategic interests in the Middle East where they have now become the new dominant global powers replacing the U.S. The U.S. continues to decrease its military presence in the region and focuses on the Pacific as the key site of its competition with China.
Given these complex realities, it is very important for those opposing police brutality and mass incarceration in the U.S., Myanmar and Iran to come together in solidarity.
How Can U.S. Black Lives Matter, Myanmar and Iran Struggles Help Each Other?
Activists in the U.S. have gained some breathing space after the defeat of the January 6, 2021 fascist-white supremacist coup attempt and with the coming into power of the Biden-Harris administration. However, we need to be fully aware that a scenario like Myanmar or Iran could still be our future. We need to address the global picture.
Discussing this global picture can help activists against police brutality and mass incarceration in the U.S., Myanmar and Iran engage in a productive conversation and move forward.
Each country’s struggles can also offer unique contributions:
*The past and present contributions of Abolitionism in the U.S. as a humanist struggle and body of thought and analysis demands serious engagement by all who call themselves abolitionists around the world. U.S. Abolitionism puts the emancipation of the human being at the center of our struggles and promotes transformative justice as the alternative to policing and mass incarceration. According to U.S. human rights attorney, Bryan Stevenson, emancipation begins with confronting the ideology of white supremacy in which a Black person is viewed as a criminal. The goal of Abolitionism is to challenge any form of dehumanizing or demonizing of the Other. Another unique feature of U.S. Abolitionism is that it has developed a rich body of economic and social analyses through the work of socialist feminist thinkers such as Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Beth Richie, Joy James and Mariame Kaba. They address the specificities of U.S. racialized carceral capitalism and restate the original connection between Abolitionism and feminism by addressing gender violence.
*In Myanmar, the current effort to challenge misogyny and the dehumanization of the ethnic minorities, especially the Rohingya Muslims is a very important development. If the opposition to the military regime really does succeed in working out a federalist alternative that recognizes the right to self-determination of ethnic minorities and also does away with the misogynist rules that dominate Burmese society, that would be a beacon of hope for the region and the world.
*In Iran, the feminist struggle has been resilient and creative. Women face discrimination, violence and second-class status as daughters, wives, mothers, students, employees, unemployed workers or part-timers, and face even more discrimination if they are members of an oppressed national or religious minority. However, they also represent 60% of university students. They have published a wide variety of novels, and when possible express themselves in blogs and websites, hold study groups, forums, and publish translations of works by international feminists. On March 8, 2021, International Women’s Day, women held small gatherings around the country, opposed new legislation which bans birth control, demanded abortion rights, opposed gender violence and femicide, demanded economic, political and social equality, and called for the release of political prisoners. Since the Fall of 2020, we have also seen a budding # Me Too Movement which has targeted artists, writers, academics, army leaders and members of the parliament as well as abusive fathers, uncles, brothers.
U.S., Myanmar and Iranian activists against police abuse and carceral capitalism need to have forums that bring these struggles in conversation with each other. We need such an effort as a pathway to reverse the current authoritarian capitalist wave around the world.
Here we are again: DSA convention time. As I did in 2019, I’ll go through the basics of the convention and then give an overview of the proposals and items for consideration.
Every two years, the Democratic Socialists of America convene for a national convention. The convention will elect a new sixteen (16) person leadership, the National Political Committee (NPC). Delegates will also vote on resolutions, which form new campaigns or working groups and commit DSA to a projects, policies, or courses of action; bylaw and constitution changes, which are the rules and structure for how DSA works; and for the first time this year delegates will vote on a national platform, stating DSA’s positions on a range of topics in the short, medium, and long-term. NPC elections are for the leadership that will direct DSA for the next two years, resolutions are commitments to do something, bylaw changes are about changing how DSA works internally, and the platform lays out our positions.
Convention Logistics
DSA National allocated 1300 delegates for the 2021 Convention, at a ratio of 1 delegate per 70 members. (Last convention was approximately 1100 delegates at a ratio of 1 per 50.) The convention will be held online in light of COVID-19, spread out over roughly eight days – most voting is not scheduled to begin until Thursday, August 5th.
This year, thirty-eight (38) resolutions and eight (8) bylaw changes have been submitted in the preconvention period. This is down significantly from 2019, where there were eighty-five (85) resolutions and thirty-three (33) submitted bylaw changes. (When you consider that the organization has nearly doubled, that’s even more stark.) Any DSA member (you don’t have to be a delegate) can try to amend the submitted proposals through Tuesday, June 15th, provided they have collected 100 signatures from DSA members in good standing. Likewise, amendments to the draft DSA platform can be submitted through Tuesday, July 15th with 250 signatures.
This year’s rules stipulate that the convention will only debate twenty (20) proposals, at least five (5) must be constitution/bylaw amendments, not including items in a “consent agenda” . Elected delegates will have to pick which of the forty-eight proposals submitted will be heard and voted on. A priority poll will be emailed to all delegates in advance of the convention (by July 19th) to rank and vote to determine what should be heard at the convention. The poll is also used to construct a “consent agenda”* – proposals that are popular enough among delegates that rather than individually debate them, they’re rolled together to be voted on as a package.
Report on the state of DSA
In the 164-page compendium of proposals, the first 11 pages begin with an appeal from the staff. In so many words, we’re broke. “Our annual budget currently has a projected deficit of $7,000 for 2021. This means we have <-$7,000> to spend on new work. It would thus be impossible to enact any new proposals without cutting other work!…After the 2019 convention, the NPC had to make hard decisions between cutting existing staff work and reallocating that time, or not carrying out some resolutions even though they passed in 2019.” This makes three years in a row that DSA National has budgeted for a deficit.
DSA has grown from 148 to 240 local chapters and 130 YDSA chapters. Staff has expanded from sixteen (16) full-time and one part-time staff at this point in 2019, to twenty-nine (29) full-time and two (2) part-time staff now in 2021. Seven of these full-time staff are considered field organizers: two for YDSA (which makes them responsible for 65 chapters each) and five regional DSA organizers (supporting 48 chapters each on average). Field organizers are also attached to specific areas of work (Labor, Green New Deal, etc.)
Players in the game
Since the first convention of the “new” DSA in 2017, caucusing has played an important role in the organization. Caucuses generally have two purposes: 1) getting together with others who have similar politics or objectives; 2) organizing to win your proposals and preferred candidates to leadership positions.
There’s nothing that makes any grouping an “official” caucus in DSA – the bylaws don’t recognize caucuses as part of the structure of the organization, you don’t register anywhere, and you get no official privileges or expectations for being in a caucus. Caucus is as caucus does: if you’re meeting with a group your comrades to influence the organization, you’re caucusing.
Every caucus has different internal culture, politics, and structure. The practice has proliferated in DSA because caucusing helps those who aspire to leadership to have a structure that can whip votes, share member or officials’ contacts, and have access to information about how DSA works and how to get what you want. For the average member, DSA can be a bureaucratic maze and there’s too much information to figure out how to get involved or get something started, so caucuses have an advantage.
2021 looks somewhat different because there are still a few major national caucuses, but there’s been a kind of fracturing where now there are many smaller groupings and local caucuses that make it a little harder to explain easily.
Socialist Majority (SMC): A second large caucus, SMC prizes “coalition work” and turning DSA into a genuinely multi-racial organization. Politically, they tend to be on the organization’s center-right as a more outright reformist grouping that historically argues for electing even mainstream Democrats.
Collective Power Network (CPN): What would have been the third major national caucus, CPN recently succumbed to bitter internal conflict that crashed their organization. CPN’s signature positions are in favor of an electoral “party surrogate”, disciplined campaigns, and support of the union officialdom (explicitly against a “rank and file strategy”). They largely draw on the Popular Front-era Communist Party as inspiration.
Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC): DSA’s libertarian socialists (including syndicalists, wobblies council communists, anarchists, cooperativists, and municipalists). They generally favor decentralization, localism, mutual aid, and direct action.
Reform & Revolution (R&R): A right-split from Socialist Alternative, R&R joined DSA 2020 in order to more openly support Sanders and efforts at a dirty break. They tend to prioritize elections.
Class Unity Caucus (CUC): Hard anti-identity politics, prioritizes a working class party.
Communist Caucus (Commie caucus): National grouping of communists interested in base-building and movements.
Marxist Unity: A group that runs the publication Cosmonaut, influenced by Kautsky and pre-war social democracy.
Tempest: A revolutionary socialist collective, emphasizing struggle from below. Many are former members of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) or Solidarity.
Local communist caucuses: Emerge (New York City): Red Caucus (Portland OR): Red Star (San Francisco).
Overview of Proposals
Of the thirty-eight (38) proposals, we can categorize them to see both what the priorities are and the political dynamics of the factions. If every proposal was passed with the pricing estimated by DSA national, it would cost $6.2 million, and add an additional 36 staff.
Just by the numbers, the hottest topics in DSA in 2021 are organizational/financial issues, electoral politics, and internationalism – together those make up 2/3’s of the submitted resolutions. This is similar to the interests in 2019, with some notable exceptions. Last convention, labor was a primary point of contention with seven (7) competing resolutions; this year there is only one labor proposal, authored by the sitting Democratic Socialist Labor Commission (DSLC) as a joint effort of B&R, CPN, and SMC. There’s an absence of resolutions on feminism/gender this year, and no proposals concerning fascism or the far right.
Internal caucuses or groups account for 27 of the 38 resolutions (71%), compared to 40% in 2019. B&R and CPN authored the most resolutions (6 each), followed by SMC. (Some resolutions are authored jointly by multiple caucuses, so the table numbers add up to more than 27.) Resolutions authored by national working groups account for most of the rest of the resolutions, so less than 10% of resolutions appear to be authored by unaffiliated rank and file members.
Only eight (8) constitution/bylaw changes were submitted in 2021, compared to thirty-three (33) in 2019. All of these are attached to caucuses or groups. These can be grouped into three categories: process issues (C1, C3, C7), structure changes (C2, C6), and transparency/accountability (C4, C5, C8).
Looking at the Proposals
Given how few proposals there are, and the limit on how many will even be heard, there’s not a whole lot to choose from. There are only four (4) so-called priority resolutions to focus on an area of work (electoral, labor, medicare for all, green new deal), which are the same as the previous two conventions. Proposals don’t offer choices of strategy for DSA, which is particularly striking considering that last year’s anti-racist protests after police murdered George Floyd brought millions into the streets in the largest demonstrations in US history.
There are only a few areas of contention: elections, internationalism, and organizational functioning and democracy.
Elections
The electoral resolutions come down to a basic question: keep doing the same thing, or time to change? They deal with what’s happened with DSA’s electoral work since 2019. How do members evaluate the “socialist slate” in New York, for instance? In Chicago, four city alders (including one backed by DSA) flipped and voted for Lori Lightfoot’s austerity budget, allowing it to pass. How does this inform DSA’s relationship to politicians we help elect?
Resolution #8 (“Toward a Mass Party in the United States”) is written by the National Electoral Committee (NEC), comprised largely of members from B&R and SMC, is the status quo: continue running as Democrats using the primary system, with no stipulations. The resolves are largely abstract (“Resolved that DSA commits to a strategy of using elections to win reforms that materially advance the interests of the working class and aim to democratize our economy and society”), but there isn’t a lot of meat to chew on in terms of defined positions or actions. The largest shift in in focusing on state legislatures.
Reform and Revolution (R&R) has three resolutions (R9, R10, R11) that generally agree with the existing practice but have specific ambitions: run ten independent partisan election campaigns in 2022 (R9); be open in distinguishing socialist candidates running as Democrats by expressly criticizing the Democratic Party when they run (R10); and take concrete steps towards establishing a “Democratic Socialist Party” in 2022 (R11).
Marxist Unity (MU) has two resolutions that focus more on the relationship between DSA and candidates the organization supports. “Tribunes of the People” (R6) proposes that candidates who want a DSA National endorsement must be a member of DSA, fight for DSA’s platform, meet with DSA leadership, and caucus and block together where there are concentrations in a legislature. MU’s second resolution (R7) proposes DSA run its own slate of candidates for the US House of Representatives.
Tempest (note: I’m a member and author of this resolution) proposed R38 (“A Socialist Horizon”), which takes language from 2019’s “Class Struggle Election” resolution but expands it with some specifics. It establishes that in order for a candidate to get a National endorsement, they would have to 1) openly identify as a socialist in their messaging and materials; 2) pledge to refuse to vote for any criminal or immigration law enforcement; 3) refuse support from fossil fuel, real estate, and law enforcement, among others; and 4) they have to get the endorsement from the DSA local chapter(s) they’d be representing before they could get a national endorsement. It adds teeth by saying that if they go back on their pledges, DSA would censure them and reserves the right to end their membership.
Internationalism
There are six (6) internationalist resolutions, and on the surface its not entirely clear what they mean. These are actually from two opposed groups on DSA’s International Committee (IC), disputing both policy and organizational form of the IC. In 2019, the IC was restructured.** The National Political Committee (NPC) appointed the leadership of the new IC, and membership to the IC was taken by application and selected by this appointed leadership.
The IC leadership politically aligned themselves with a politics of “anti-imperialist” geopolitical camps (such as the Latin American Pink Tide governments, Cuba, and even the Chinese state), while there were also volunteer members with an “anti-campist” or “international class solidarity” politics that oppose imperialism but do not specifically align with the governments or regimes of any country. The language here will be contentious, and either side view the other’s descriptions of each other pejoratively. (“Campists” call themselves “anti-imperialists” and call their opponents the “third camp” or hurl blanket accusations of racism; “anti-campists” call themselves “internationalists” and frequently accuse the other side of being Stalinists.)
Collective Power Network, Emerge, and Red Star tend to place themselves in the campist/anti-imperialist group; Bread & Roses, Internationalism from Below, and Tempest in the anti-campist/international solidarity group. Many DSA members aren’t particularly well versed in international politics, and international questions tend to get siloed off towards those most passionate about them. The difficulty for the convention will be going beyond surface attitudes (“They say they’re socialists, they must be good”) and straw man attacks.
You can already see how this is messy, but it is a central question of this convention: what is DSA’s international stance? R14 (“Committing to International Socialist Solidarity”) is written by the IC leadership (campist) – it specifies that DSA will 1) formalize relationships with “mass parties in other countries” (such as the MAS in Bolivia, the PSUV in Venezuela, and the PT in Brazil); 2) apply for membership in the São Paulo Forum (launched by the PT in Brazil); and 3) create exchange programs with said international parties. R18 (“International Committee and Mass Organizing”) is written by Emerge members also on the IC leadership, and generally focuses on the structure of the IC.
Internationalism from Below advanced three resolutions as anti-campists (R15, R16, and R17). R15 and R16 both concern the internal operation of the IC – they propose that the regional subcommittees (Africa, Latin America, Europe, Asia, etc.) would 1) elect their own co-chairs annually; and 2) have voting representatives on the IC Steering Committee. R17 articulates a political vision for DSA’s international work: in brief, critical support. “Critical support for left governments or other governments defending themselves from imperialism means conditional support, which implies being able to evaluate and analyze the dynamics on the ground.”
Organization
The last major area being debated in 2021 is DSA’s organization and democracy. Some of these are fairly innocuous: do more trainings; create communications and tech policy, etc. Some are questions that were taken up at last convention but haven’t seen movement: R35 (“Spanish Translation and Bilingual Organizing”) brings up that DSA should operate in English and Spanish – this was passed in 2019 but has not been accomplished. R32 deals with Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA): YDSA is subservient to DSA, and its structure has been neglected. R32 seeks to give YDSA more discretion over its own operations.
Constitution/bylaw changes are a mix of big and small changes. C1, C3, and C7 are process-related: striking regional requirements for national conventions set up long before DSA grew (C1); C3 adds NPC alternates in the event of an absence or resignation; C7 makes all elections held in DSA as only by single-transferrable vote.
C8 (“Defining the Role of DSA’s National Platform”) changes the definition of membership to be more specific, so that members must agree to fight for DSA’s adopted platform (as opposed to agreement with general principles). C4 (“Electing DSA’s National Director”) makes the National Director (it’s been Maria Svart for over a decade) into an elected position with a two-year term rather than a job hired by the NPC.
C6 creates a new body in DSA National called the “National Organizing Committee” (NOC), is a kind of “senate”. A version of this proposal was made in 2019 by the same authors, who are members of SMC. The NOC would be 100 members, proportional to number of members in a region (more members, more delegates). The proposal makes the NOC able to reverse NPC decisions, approve budgets, fill NPC vacancies, and change the bylaws of DSA.
C2 (“National Referendum”) and C5 (“For a National Leadership Elected by and Accountable to DSA members”) are democratic reforms to DSA proposed by Tempest (again, I am an author). C2 creates a binding referendum, which allows members to directly vote on questions to set policy, reverse NPC decisions, set a course of action, or vote on constitution/bylaw changes in between conventions. Any member would be able to submit a referendum, and if they meet the required signatures, it would be posed to the entire membership of DSA, one-person one-vote. The closest thing DSA has had to this was an advisory poll on whether to endorse Bernie Sanders, which was non-binding. C2 gives those votes teeth, and it allows the membership to vote on changes to DSA’s structure, where right now that can only be done at convention (and no structure changes have been made since at least 2015).
C5 handles a few different issues.
Allows NPC members to be recalled by the membership
Establishes that NPC vacancies will be filled by election done by popular vote, rather than NPC appointment.
All NPC votes will be roll-called (meaning every NPC member has to report how they voted on each question they take up), including online “Loomio” votes
All votes and minutes reported within three days of approval
Together you see that there are problems in DSA’s structure and that there are various proposals on what, if anything, to do. Some proposals create more intermediary bodies, others more direct governance mechanisms. It is a political question about who runs DSA and how.
Conclusions
There’s a whole lot of information, even in a summary. What’s noticeable is that there are few choices for delegates, and so it raises the issue that even if there are delegates with distinct politics, are they going to be able to express them if there aren’t proposals? Many of the questions of the last convention seem to be settled: there’s no more debate about centralization or decentralization; no question of “the rank-and-file strategy”; no immediate political questions DSA has to pick a side on.
Elections continue to be a central question, which makes sense because of the premium DSA puts on them. Internationalism is an unexpected conflict that is particularly sharp in 2021, though I think that this is serving as a proxy for a general vision of socialism in DSA: what’s the horizon? What do our opinions of other countries’ experiences relay about how we think the struggle for socialism will unfold?
A last, major question is about democracy. It should be a major red flag that the number of proposals has sunk compared to previous years, especially when we weight them by the size of the organization. A small minority of proposals are coming from rank-and-file members. Yes, as DSA grows it makes sense that more members will be plugged into caucuses or national working groups, but to have fallen to less than 10% of proposals is drastic. This suggests that many DSA members have withdrawn or simply stopped caring about what happens with national.
There’s good reason for this: in 2019, many proposals that “won” never ended up going anywhere. A priority campaign over immigration received overwhelming support from delegates, but never materialized. Spanish translation never happened. The anti-fascist working group only kind of got started at the beginning of 2021. The Democratic Socialist Labor Commission has been silent, and the two most visible labor efforts, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) and the PRO Act, came from the NPC rather than the DSA’s labor body.
This teaches members that the convention and the national organization doesn’t matter and isn’t worth the effort. Staff and the NPC may say they operated under constraints and couldn’t allocate staff to the things the convention mandated, but this falls flat when they invent campaigns while they ignore convention directives. For that reason, democracy in the organization becomes a central political question. If you don’t believe the organization will follow the will of the membership, you give up on organization.
Notes
* Convention rules originally stipulated that this would be ten resolutions and ten bylaw/constitution amendments. Only eight bylaw/constitution amendments were submitted, so they changed the interpretation to be a total of twenty with at least five bylaw changes. Per inquiry to convention committee, 6/9/21.
** The new IC followed a convention resolution. The particulars of how that was passed is a little shady, since it was bundled together with resolutions on Boycott, Divest, and Sanction, Decolonization, and Cuba work.
This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.
One hundred years ago, a white mob attacked the black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma and in two days killed hundreds of people, burned to the ground every building, and left ten thousand homeless. The event began when Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old who shined shoes for a living was accused of attempting to rape a 17-year-old girl elevator operator that he had bumped into. Roland was taken to jail, and the Tulsa Tribune newspaper ran sensational, rabble-rousing articles that encouraged hundreds of white men to gather at the jail with the intention of lynching the young black man. In response, some 75 armed black men went to the jail to prevent his lynching. When a shot was fired, a gunfight broke out leaving twelve dead, ten white and two black. With that the riot erupted.
The Tulsa sheriff deputized hundreds of white men who were told to go home and “get a gun and then get a nigger.” The white mob of a thousand men went through the black neighborhood, including the area called Black Wall Street, said to be the wealthiest black community in America, looting homes and then setting them on fire, while shooting and killing an estimated 300 black residents. When the whites proved incapable of subduing the armed blacks fighting in self-defense, private planes dropped fire bombs on the neighborhood and the National Guard was called in. When the smoke cleared, Greenwood, an area of 40 square blocks, had been completely erased. Some 1,000 black people set up tents outside their old neighborhood and lived there. The insurance companies paid whites, but rejected all black claims. The courts accused no white men, but 57 black men were indicted for causing the riot.
Why had the white riot and the massacre occurred? The accusation of a black man looking at, touching, or befriending a white woman was often the excuse for lynching or for the many white attacks on black neighborhoods. The real reason for the massacre and other similar events was the growing presence, increasing wealth, and assertiveness of black people in America. The economic boom that accompanied World War I had led many black people to move from the plantations of the South to the North in the First Great Migration. Some had started small businesses and most had earned higher wages than in the South. Black soldiers returning from the war, had learned how to use guns and were prepared to defend themselves. Tulsa was a special case because oil had been discovered in the state, some of it under black-owned ground, which led to the rise of a group of wealthy black people, the city’s famed Black Wall Street. The attacks on Greenwood and other black neighborhoods and cities were intended to enforce Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement in the South and the North, to prevent black people from accumulating wealth, and to strike fear into the hearts of the black working class.
Keeping the black working class down necessitated violence. Between 1900 and 1917, 1,100 black men were lynched. Equally serious was what African American historians John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. called a “pandemic of race riots” that started in 1895 and continued through the 1920s. The white race riots led not only to black armed self-defense, but also led W.E.B. DuBois and other black leaders and white allies to meet in Canada in 1905 to found the Niagara Movement, which later became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the country’s first national civil rights organization. Led by well-off blacks and white liberals, the NAACP used the courts in an attempt to stave off the lynchings and white mobs, but it would be another fifty years until the civil rights movement’s civil disobedience began to turn the tide. Racism remains endemic in America, and the struggle continues today with the Black Lives Matter movement that brought millions into the streets against police violence.
DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC) and International Committee (IC) recently announced that they will send a delegation to participate in an official event in Venezuela. On May 16 they launched a crowdfunding campaign to finance the travel of an eight-person delegation that will attend the Congreso Bicentenario de los Pueblos (Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples) in Caracas from June 21 to July 1. The event is described as “a massive international gathering of socialist organizations across the planet.”
According to the delegation’s announcement, the trip will consist of “two weeks participating in conferences and educational events meant to build solidarity, connections between organizations, and to illustrate Venezuela’s struggle against COVID and US sanctions… surplus funds raised will be used to purchase critical aid”. The International Committee described the trip as part of its activity on “the front of international solidarity.”
Indeed, the Venezuelan working people need internationalist solidarity more than ever. Venezuela is going through one of the worst economic and social crises in its history. The economy has contracted since 2013 by more than 75%. Around 5 million people, 15% of the population, have left the country fleeing hunger and repression, generating the third largest exodus of displaced people in recent decades, 15% of the world total, numbers topped only by Syria and the internally displaced population of Colombia.
We fundamentally disagree with the DSA IC’s characterization of the official event its delegation is attending. The Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples is not an autonomous body, but rather an assemblage of national and foreign supporters of the Venezuelan government that was launched by President Nicolás Maduro himself, in yet another transparent attempt to coat itself with a veneer of international support.
The Maduro government has made a great effort to present itself to the world as “socialist,” but the cruel reality of Venezuela is that it is a capitalist country with a corrupt and repressive government, which has destroyed trade unions and repressed the left. Dozens of union leaders are deprived of their freedom for defending workers’ rights. Some worker political prisoners have been imprisoned for years without even being tried. The longest-serving political prisoner in Venezuela, leftist worker Rodney Álvarez, has spent almost ten years kidnapped by the military regime without having been convicted of any crime. Leftist activist Alcedo Mora was a victim of forced disappearance after denouncing corruption in 2015—his relatives and comrades continue to denounce the government as responsible.
Although the government usually denies its responsibility in human rights violations, in a context of openings to the Biden Administration, it recently changed its official version and admitted after years-long cover-ups that three political opponents had been murdered by its repressive forces—Juan Pernalete, who police shot in the head with a tear gas canister in a demonstration, Fernando Albán, who was thrown down ten stories of a detention center by agents of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, and Rafael Acosta Arévalo, a navy officer who was tortured to death by Military Counter-Intelligence agents.
The Venezuelan government’s policies of allowing wages to stagnate in a context of hyper-inflation and devaluation have reduced the minimum wage to less than 3 dollars per month, and has generalized semi-slavery labor relations based on arbitrary and miserly ‘bonuses’ from employers, and inferior-quality foodstuffs distributed through clientelist networks, while informal labor, illicit economies and remittances from abroad provide more sustenance than waged employment. For example, oil workers at joint ventures between the Venezuelan state and big multinationals like Chevron, Repsol, Total or ENI, earn a wage of around two dollars a month and bonuses which amount to around 40 dollars a month. Meanwhile, at the upper end of the extreme social inequality are the capitalist sectors their government partners —with their luxury tourism developments, imported luxury cars and obscene consumption.
Indigenous peoples and peasant communities have also been repressed, while the government does business with transnational oil companies such as Chevron, Total, ENI, Statoil and Repsol. Following the guidelines of the “Plan of the Fatherland” of 2012, in the last few years an impressive wave of plundering and depredation has developed in the south of Venezuela. The government defined that a territory of 112 thousand square kilometers of vulnerable ecosystems and great biodiversity, the Orinoco Mining Arc, be destined to mining depredation, contributing to an accelerated deforestation and contributing to the phenomenon of global warming.
While the government claims to be “feminist,” abortion remains illegal and criminalized, with the only exception of those cases in which the woman’s life is in danger of death. People of the same sex cannot marry and it is common for government spokespersons to refer to opponents as homosexuals as an insult.
Losing its social base, the government has suspended constitutional guarantees and engaged in illegal maneuvers, such as removing the powers of the opposition-majority National Assembly during the 2016-2021 term—effectively a self-coup. In 2017, the regime crushed massive popular protests with police, military and paramilitary forces, in a similar way to the repression we now see in Colombia at the hands of the murderous Uribista regime headed by Duque.
The Donald Trump administration implemented financial and oil sanctions in 2017 and 2019 respectively, against a country already ruined by looting and corruption—a criminal policy not reversed by Biden. The Venezuelan government’s response to the deepening crisis has been to advance major neoliberal reforms, with attacks on labor and social rights, the opening up of territories to extractivism, and the re-privatization of the nationalized enterprises it bankrupted.
In its foreign policy, the Venezuelan government has not only supported genocidal dictatorships such as Assad‘s in Syria, but it has also been characterized by a zigzagging policy towards imperialism. In addition to guaranteeing transnational business in the oil industry, Maduro donated $500,000 for Trump’s 2017 inauguration ceremony through the Venezuelan state-owned company Citgo. Ironically, Maduro cultivated expectations in the Trump administration, considering that he represented a positive break with “neoliberalism” and going so far as to call him Comrade Trump.”
Embedded journalism and guided tours are not internationalist solidarity
The Venezuelan government frequently organizes international activities for foreign intellectuals and activists, who visit the country in carefully-controlled tourism packages, watched by government minders and taken on visits of potemkin communes—the misery they observe is explained away as an effect of the sanctions, while the opulence they see some enjoy is taken as a proof of resilience or recovery.
This type of tourism gives a bad name to the international left in Venezuela. A wall of mutual ignorance is being erected thanks to the work of these self-appointed “ambassadors” of Chavismo: a large part of international leftist activism supports the Venezuelan government based on half-truths and outright lies, while a large part of Venezuelan youth and workers develop prejudices against the international left for its blindness and complicity. A young Venezuelan worker who sees a U.S. or European leftist supporting a government that imposes $3 monthly wages will not suspect that the same activist is probably fighting in his or her country against essentially the same injustices, that are suffered in Venezuela, even if their forms and magnitudes are different: exploitation and oppression, racism, sexism and homophobia, environmental destruction, the dismantling of the commons and of social welfare, privatizations and pension cuts, etc.
Unfortunately, the decision to attend the Venezuelan government’s event is part of an orientation of a sector of the DSA that wants to affiliate the organization to the Sao Paulo Forum and that has invited parties such as PT (Brazil), FMLN (El Salvador), MAS-IPSP (Bolivia), UNES (Ecuador) and PS (Chile) to the 2021 DSA National Conference. All these ruling parties developed strategic alliances with the Venezuelan government marked by corruption and realpolitik, the promotion of national corporations such as Brazil’s Odebrecht in overpriced contracts, unfinished infrastructural projects, the creation of opaque investment funds and profiteering by political and business cronies.
We urge you to modify the purpose of your trip to Venezuela. Instead of attending the official event, meet with the relatives of Alcedo Mora, Rodney Alvarez and the indigenous leader Sabino Romero, murdered by police officers in the service of the landowners of Zulia state, a crime whose intellectual authorship was never investigated. Meet with the members of the campaign for the freedom of worker political prisoners. Meet with critical Chavistas of the PCV and the APR, and with left opposition Marxist organizations like PSL or LTS. Meet with human rights defenders, anti-extractivist and feminist activists, and independent trade unionists, and engage in conversations with them about the challenges they face in their struggles and in the difficult task of surviving amidst the chaos and destruction wrought by the government and aggravated by the sanctions. There are efforts currently underway by left activists in the diaspora like VWS, Venezuelanvoices.org and others, to amplify this perspective and navigate against the tide of hegemonic propaganda. With them, the DSA IC can also develop constructive conversations.
Naturally, a trip with these characteristics is a risky endeavor in a dictatorial regime. But if you do it, you will be complying with your political commitments, as stated in the International Committee’s website:
“As democratic socialists, we believe we must also be internationalists. We believe that working people around the world have more in common with each other than they do with the bosses in their own countries. We believe that struggles ranging from peace to climate justice, from anti-racism to women’s liberation, can only be won if we work together. We believe that we are engaged in a common international struggle, and are therefore concerned about what is happening to the working classes in other countries, about their human rights and workers’ rights, about their struggles for democracy, for justice, and for socialism.”
As I write, the government of the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region (SAR) has banned the annual candlelight vigil to remember the 1989 democracy movement in China for the second consecutive year. Every June 4th since 1990 a vigil has been held in Hong Kong, and each year hundreds of thousands of people have poured into the city’s Victoria Park to remember the victims of the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square and keep alive the hope for a democratic China.
If last year’s ban had any credible pretense of public health concerns under the pandemic, this year the ban is simply a blunt political intervention to stop mass gathering — Hong Kong has not recorded any community transmission of Covid for over a month. Despite the ban last year, tens of thousands still showed up. For defying the ban, organizers of last year’s vigil and prominent participants have been prosecuted. If the message is still not clear, Hong Kong’s Security Bureau has threatened anyone attending this year’s vigil with up to five years in prison, and one year for simply promoting the event.
Under the threat of a sweeping national security law that has criminalized a wide range of acts of dissent and with many of the organizers of the annual vigil and opposition party leadership in prison or held awaiting trials, this may be the first time that there will not be any mass gathering to publicly remember the 1989 democracy movement in any Chinese territory. As many feared, the government’s suppression of opposition activists ranging from the most radical protesters to moderate democrats for their role in the 2019 protest movement and beyond has enveloped other areas of political life in Hong Kong.
June 4th held a special meaning to a generation of young and idealistic Chinese from the 1980s who dared to imagine a different political future for the country. The total and bloody clampdown on the protest movement on June 4, 1989, extinguished that hope not only for one generation but for many others who came after too. It has become more and more unimaginable that an event like the 1989 democracy movement could ever recur or indeed has actually occurred at all. For this reason alone, not even mentioning of the unacknowledged victims of the suppression, it needs to be remembered.
But it is easy and indeed very comforting to romanticize the 1989 movement, as many do with justification. This was the last truly mass movement in mainland China with progressive ideals: a student-led movement, participated in by tens of millions not just in Beijing but across the country, including organized contingents of supportive workers (at the time mostly state-sector employees prior to the wholesale privatization of the 1990s) and ordinary citizens (many of whom put their bodies on the line to stop the tanks from rolling into the square). The moral authority of the students and their aspirations for a more just society made the movement all the more righteous and beyond controversy.
The event is all the more important because no movement since in China has matched such a scale or had such a political and emotional impact on the participants and observers for decades. And despite censorship of the event in mainland China, its memory has served to politicize later generations of young Chinese, albeit a very small minority, including myself, who discovered this event as a key moment of their own politicization.
In mainland China, such remembrance can only be confined to small pockets, which will be harshly dealt with if found out by the authorities. Nowhere has such a mass remembrance been taking place year after year as in Hong Kong. The student protests of 1989 found reverberations among Hong Kongers, young and old, in 1989, too, who demonstrated in the tens of thousands and donated in the millions to support the protesters. The subsequent crushing of the movement disillusioned many in Hong Kong who might have hoped to live under a more democratic system after the handover of the territory to Chinese rule in 1997. Out of the disappointment and disillusionment, an annual public vigil has been organized for over three decades.
But even without the bans and threats of criminal charges, some in Hong Kong have been turning away from the annual vigil. New generations of Hong Kongers are fighting their own battles against the city’s erosion of freedom and waves of political prosecutions. Many are asserting their local and localist identities, and feeling much less affinity with mainland students from two generations ago or their counterparts today. Why remember June 4th when the city is burning? It feels irrelevant at best, and a political distraction from Hong Kong’s own movement at worst. Do they have a point?
I admit that years ago I too had my misgivings about such remembrance for not entirely dissimilar reasons. Had the annual vigil become too ritualized and divorced from any actual movements on the ground? After all, in mainland China there have been no movements explicitly drawing inspiration from and seeing themselves as a continuation of the 1989 democracy movement. Even apart from the state censorship of June 4th commemorations, does the event resonate at all with young Chinese today, or Hong Kong youth for that matter? I was not sure it would, and I am still not sure now.
My own ambivalence arises out of a sense of frustration with the too comfortable way of remembering June 4th. It’s been talked about and commemorated year after year, in pretty much the same ways and often by the same former student leaders who for the most part had not been able to build new movements, to the point of mythologizing. I feel less and less a connection to a remembrance stripped of much of its content and incapable of critical self-reflection. It has too often morphed into an ossified simple story of “student-led protests crushed by authoritarian government.”
Is a different kind of remembering possible?
I think it is, but it has to start with recognizing the movement for what it was, with all its mistakes and limits, and remembering and honoring it by transcending it. There is much that was problematic within the movement, none of which is surprising to any observer. The movement leadership’s refusal to align with the masses of workers who came out again and again to support the students – until the very last days when they realized they would need their support against a strong state refusing to back down – deprived the movement of a truly mass base and source of social power.
Factionalism and disunity within the student leadership weakened the movement well before the clearing of the square on June 4th. Failure to consolidate the movement outside of the square, not only in the universities but in the workplaces, made the movement dependent on continuing student occupation of the square, but not much else as an additional and alternative basis of its power.
It was also a movement limited by a vision for a rule-based capitalist transition. It aimed to bring about a more politically plural capitalist society by curtailing some of its excesses and official corruption, but it was not a challenge to the development of capitalism itself. And, as an indictment of their political judgments, much of the student leadership, many of whom were exiled or self-exiled in the years since, later aligned themselves with questionable and right-wing politics out of steps with progressive movements.
None of this is to negate the mass movement in 1989 itself, and one may well read these criticisms as unfair to the at the time extremely young student leadership who had little political experience up to that point. But to make the remembrance relevant, and more than just a comforting moment, it has to go beyond the romanticization. The remembrance, either in Hong Kong or elsewhere outside China, cannot be simply a retelling of the heroics and a condemnation of the government for its brutality, as true as we find them.
It should also not stop at the recognition of mistakes and limits. How to avoid their repetition and find better ways to build mass movements is the real goal. The social movements in China, be they labor, feminist, LGBTQ, environmental, or rural, in their current forms have largely emerged only after 1989, and later generations of youth have played important roles in these movements. Decades of deepening capitalism, accelerated particularly after 1989, means that today’s movements for a more just society in China are different from that of 1989. The issues animating the student protesters in 1989, abuse of political power and lack of accountability, are surely still alive today. But if the movement of 1989 had presented an image of a uniform movement with unified demands which in practice subordinate diverse interests (e.g. peasants, workers) to that of the students, today’s pluralistic social movements represent aspirations more sensitive to the needs of varying social groups and classes.
Capitalist exploitation and commodification have been driving young people, rural migrant workers, and urban white-collar employees alike, into physical and mental exhaustion against which they have resorted to rebellion. Patriarchal structures and attitudes are awakening youth to take a public stance and confront violence against women and discriminations. Youth are at the center of many of these movements; they are just as young as in the past but in many ways more politically seasoned. Only by becoming connected to them and their movements can any remembrance of a past movement stand a chance of continuing to renew itself and inspire new generations for social change.
This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.
Years of education, protest, and lobbying seem to be finally having an effect on U.S. environmental policies, though not without constant Republican resistance and Democratic vacillation—and so far, neither fast enough nor strong enough for the change we need. The oil and coal companies’ relentless drive for profits and their political power represent the great obstacle to lowering CO2 emissions and saving the planet and the human race from climate change’s devastating effects. But beyond that, the entire culture’s emphasis on growth—companies, unions, or consumers—represents a barrier to change.
Joseph Biden ran for president as an environmental candidate, pledging to address global warming. On day one as president, he blocked all new gas and oil leases on federal lands and water, stopped the Keystone XL pipeline, and took the United States back into the Paris Climate Agreement. Now he is proposing a 2022 budget with $36 billion ($14 billion more than last year) for clean energy, improved water infrastructure, and more research. He also proposes to spend $174 million to develop electric vehicle infrastructure—though the Republican Party wants only a small fraction of that.
Environmental groups like the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, and Sunrise, spent some $1.5 million in the 2020 elections mostly for Biden and other Democrats. Yet, in the last few months the Biden administration has given the go-ahead to various projects either on federal land or necessitating federal approval: the Willow project, a large oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, oil and leases in Wyoming, and the continued use of the Dakota Access pipeline. All of these projects were approved by Donald Trump’s administration and fiercely opposed by environmental organizations. As Gregory Stewart, a leader of the Alaska chapter of the Sierra Club, said of the Alaska project, “They are opening up a lane for the oil and gas industry to cause irreparable harm to Arctic communities’ public health and wildlife habitats.”
Since the COVID pandemic, the environmental movement—unlike the racial justice movement’s spectacular demonstrations—has not been very visible. While local environmental protests continue, there is no large, active national movement. Environmental activists have focused on support for the Green New Deal legislation sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey.
“We’re going to transition to a 100 percent carbon free-economy, that is more unionized, more just, more dignified and guarantees more health care and housing than we ever have before,” Ocasio-Cortez says. “Do we intend on sending a message to the Biden administration that we need to go bigger and bolder? The answer is absolutely yes.” The Democratic Socialists of America says of the Green New Deal proposals, “they are conversation starters—not complete and adequate blueprints.” While the GND calls for a transition to a more sustainable economy and a more just society, it does not take on the oil and gas companies directly.
The more radical wing of the U.S. environmental movement challenges the culture of growth and argues that carbon emissions can only be reduced by virtually stopping oil drilling and coal mining and closing down and drastically retrenching the industries that drive them: steel, auto, and plastics, among others. To do that, one would have to nationalize the energy industries and bring them under the control of a genuinely democratic government. That is, one needs to fight for socialism as the solution to the climate crisis. As the group System Change not Climate changes states, “The current ecological crisis results from the capitalist system, which values profits for a global ruling elite over people and the planet. It must therefore be confronted through an international mass movement of working people around the world.”
[Editors’ note: This article will appear in the Summer 2021 issue of New Politics, which will be sent to subscribers shortly.]
Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon and has lived and taught in Paris, Berlin, and London. He is currently professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, University of London. His many books include The Clash of Barbarisms (2002, 2006); Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky (2007); The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (2010); Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (2013); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013); and Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (2016). He was interviewed by Stephen R. Shalom for New Politics on May 5, 2021.
New Politics: Gilbert, you’ve recently published a much-discussed article in The Nation on anti-imperialism.[1] I wonder if we could begin with you telling us why you wrote the article and briefly summarizing your argument.
Gilbert Achcar: Thank you, Steve. I wrote this article because of the big confusion that exists nowadays on the left on the meaning of “anti-imperialism.” I believe that this confusion is primarily a result of the sea change in the global situation that followed the collapse of the USSR. There has also been a change in the type of wars waged in the global South. Imperialist wars against national liberation movements or regimes are no longer the predominant type, as in the first decades after the Second World War. Since the 1990s we have seen imperialist wars against oppressive regimes such as in Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. The situation got yet more complicated with what has been called the Arab Spring in 2011. Western imperialist powers — Barack Obama’s United States in the first place — appeared as if supportive of the popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes.
So, what does it mean to be an anti-imperialist in this new international environment? That’s the issue I tackle in the article, as a result of my long personal involvement in such debates, starting most crucially from 2011 on the issue of Libya, and then later on Syria. My original title was “Their anti-imperialism and ours.”[2] I formulated three basic principles of what constitutes truly progressive anti-imperialism in my view, principles that ought to be rather elementary for anyone on the left, whatever their ideological orientation, Marxist, anarchist, or whatever, provided they adhere to the most elementary principle of a true left, which is democracy. People who agree on these principles can discuss anti-imperialist tactics. Some, however, discard them. I call these people “neo-campists” because they are no longer systematically aligned behind a single specific state or “socialist camp” as were the campists of the time of the USSR, but determine their positions negatively, through kneejerk opposition to anything the US or UK governments do and sympathy for whoever the two governments oppose, including despotic regimes and Russia’s rival imperialism. The neo-campists are most often incapable of engaging in discussion without resorting to invective and calumny. I concluded my article with this observation, and indeed, no sooner was it out than various neo-campists rushed to confirm it.
Now, what are the three principles? The first relates to that most elementary democratic principle that I already mentioned. When it comes to international politics, to be on the left means, first of all, to support the peoples’ right to self-determination. That should be the starting point in defining a truly progressive anti-imperialism. Crucially, this starting point is not opposition per se to this or that imperialist state. It is rather the defense of the people’s right to self-determination: it is because imperialist states, by definition, trample upon this right that they must be countered.
The second principle is that anti-imperialism requires opposition to all imperialist states, not standing with one against the others, or ignoring one and its victims and only focusing on the other, whichever it is. On the left in Western countries, there are neo-campists who only focus on U.S. and British imperialism, or Western imperialism in general, and ignore, at best, or even support, other imperialist states, such as Russia. You may find the reverse in Russia: progressives who are very hostile to what their government does abroad and remain silent on, if not supportive of, what Western governments do. Once one rises above the Western-centrism of much of the Western left, one understands that a truly internationalist anti-imperialist perspective is one that opposes imperialism whatever its nationality or its geographical location, West or East.
The third principle addresses exceptional cases. There might be exceptional circumstances where intervention by an imperialist power is crucial in preventing a massacre or genocide, or in preventing a popular democratic uprising from being bloodily suppressed by a dictatorship. We have seen such cases in recent years. But even then, anti-imperialists should dispel any illusions, and advocate zero trust, in the imperialist country. And they should demand that its intervention remain limited to forms, and bound by legal constraints when they exist, that do not enable the imperialist power to impose its will or determine the course of action.
This third principle explains why, in the cases of Libya and Syria, even though Western governments pretended to be on the side of democratic change against the dictatorial reactionary regime, I have been opposed to direct intervention. The only exception was at the very beginning of the UN-authorized No-Fly Zone over Libya, when I explained that, for the sake of preventing a foretold massacre, I could not oppose the intervention in its initial phase. I explained a thousand times that I never said that I supported the intervention—but, as we know, there are none so deaf as those who will not hear. All I said is that I couldn’t oppose it, which is not the same as saying I favored it, except to those who don’t know the difference between abstaining and supporting, or who prefer to deliberately ignore it because their only way of arguing is by distorting the views of those they disagree with.
The population of the second city in Libya, Benghazi—legitimately fearing for their lives, with the Libyan regime moving its far superior forces toward the city, and the dictator, Gaddafi, vowing to crush them—implored the UN for protection. Even Moscow and Beijing could not oppose this: they both abstained at the UN Security Council. But once the immediate danger was over, I stood against the continuation of NATO bombing, which went far beyond the UN mandate. My attitude became the same as the one I have held on Syria from the very start, which is to support the delivery of defensive weapons to the insurgents in order to protect the population. I would not support the delivery of weapons to an organization such as ISIS, of course, since it is as oppressive as the regime, if not more so, but I certainly support the delivery of weapons to the Kurdish forces in Syria or what used to be the Free Syrian Army before it fell under full Turkish control starting from 2016.
I am opposed to the presence of U.S. troops on the ground, even in Kurdish-dominated northeast Syria, which is where they are stationed at present. I am actually opposed to all five occupations in Syria—in chronological order: Israel, Iran and its proxies, Russia, Turkey, and the United States. Five states have troops on Syrian soil. I oppose all these occupations and support the right of the Syrian people to democratic self-determination, not the right of the murderous regime to bring in accomplices to help it massacre its own people, which is what some neo-campists support.
NP: Let me explore the three principles a little more. Critics may say something like: But what about regime change? Doesn’t the United States have a program of regime change around the world—in Ukraine, in the Balkans, in the South China Sea, and Xinjiang province? Shouldn’t we be opposed to that regime change program?
GA: “Regime change” is a phrase that was used by the Bush administration. As far as I know, it hasn’t been used since then. The phrase used by the Obama administration in the face of the Arab Spring was “orderly transition.” And that’s very different from “regime change” à la Bush. The latter means occupation of a country in order to change its type of government, usually under the pretext of bringing democracy. This is typical colonial-like domination that must be resolutely opposed—even if it were about North Korea, an appallingly totalitarian state. But “regime change” wasn’t the Obama administration’s line. Some on the left lag behind reality, always fighting the last war. U.S. imperialism’s methods and doctrine did change in the light of the Iraqi debacle, as they had previously changed after Vietnam.
“Orderly transition” might be regarded as the true Obama doctrine: it meant that no existing state should be dismantled. The state apparatus should be kept intact, instead of allowing the kind of dismantlement that the U.S. occupation implemented in Iraq, which has come to be regarded in Washington as the main reason for the subsequent debacle of the U.S. occupation. What Obama favored everywhere in the Middle East and North Africa was a compromise between the old regime and the opposition, opening the way for a transition that preserved the state’s continuity. He put pressure on Egypt’s military in 2011 for this kind of transition. He tried to steer Libyan events in that direction, but failed completely, as the state there got completely dismantled. He sponsored the Gulf monarchies’ mediation to obtain that outcome in Yemen. And that’s what he advocated for Syria, openly stating in 2012 that he supported “the Yemen solution” for that country. What was this “Yemen solution”? It was a compromise between the head of the regime and the opposition, mediated by the Gulf monarchies: The Yemeni President stepped down, handed the presidency to the Vice President, but remained in control of major levers of power in the country. That’s the “solution” that Obama favored in Syria.
Now, what has been the most important intervention of the Obama administration in Syria? To answer this question, let us compare its attitude toward the Syrian opposition to the way the United States dealt with the mujahideen who fought the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. Washington supported the Afghan mujahideen, along with the Saudi kingdom and the Pakistani military. It is well known that it armed them with anti-aircraft missiles, Stinger missiles. Compare that to Syria. Not only did the United States not deliver any such weapons to the Syrian uprising—even in 2012, when it was still dominated by what could be described as a democratic opposition. But it even forbade all its regional allies from delivering such weapons to the Syrian insurgents. Turkey produces Stinger missiles under U.S. license, but it wasn’t allowed to deliver a single one of them to the Syrian opposition—nor were the Gulf monarchies. That was the crucial intervention of the United States in the Syrian conflict. And that is what allowed Bashar al-Assad’s regime to remain in place. It allowed him to maintain a monopoly of air power, which enabled his regime to even drop barrel-bombs from helicopters—a most indiscriminate and devastating type of bombing. Helicopters are an easy target for anti-aircraft weapons, and yet, how many helicopters have you seen shot down by the opposition in Syria? Hardly any. The reason for this U.S. intervention was, first, Israel’s opposition to the delivery of anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian opposition, and second, Obama’s fear of creating the conditions for a rout of the Syrian regime’s forces that would have led to state collapse in the manner of what happened in Libya.
Thus, the Obama administration in fact helped Bashar al-Assad much more than it did the Syrian opposition. Iran understood this and upgraded its intervention in Syria through its proxies starting from 2013, confident that Obama wouldn’t do anything serious to prevent it or to step up qualitatively his support to the opposition. Obama confirmed this in 2013 in the way he backtracked on the famous chemical weapon “red line.” Then in 2015, Russia intervened massively in its turn. So, you have two reactionary states, Iran and Russia, intervening in the Syrian conflict on a much more massive scale than any Western power. There is no way anyone could claim the contrary, lest they completely distort the facts. Add to this that the main armed U.S. intervention in Syria, including deployment of troops on the ground, was actually on the side of the only leftwing force engaged in the Syrian conflict, which is the Kurdish movement. That’s something that neo-campism cannot fathom.
NP: Russia is a lesser imperialist power. But somebody might tell you: If there is a lesser imperialist power and a greater one, doesn’t it make sense to focus our attention on stopping the greater imperialist power?
GA: Well, that’s the logic of the lesser evil, the object of a long history of debates. However, let us consider what one means when speaking of a lesser evil. Not that it is lesser in size, but that it’s less dangerous, less vicious, less “evil” than the other. Thus, a dominant liberal capitalist force could be construed as a lesser evil than a weaker fascist one. In that light, I really don’t think that Russia is in any way a “lesser evil” than the United States. Russia crushed the Chechen people within its own territory between 1994 and 2009 in ways that are certainly no less brutal, if not more brutal, than what the United States did to Iraq during that same period. Both were huge crimes. Moreover, the Russian government is far more authoritarian and undemocratic than the U.S. government. U.S. imperialism can be stopped by mass action. Russian imperialism doesn’t allow any mass opposition to build up. So, there are several issues that make the characterization of Russia as the “lesser evil” void of meaning. And even though the Russian economy is dwarfed by those of the United States, and China for that matter, the Russian military is a much bigger part of the global military balance than the Russian economy is of the global economy, and it is increasingly aggressive in projecting its power abroad.
Look at what Russia is doing today in my part of the world—excuse me again for turning it to my part of the world and not looking at everything from the perspective of New York or London. What is Russia doing today in the Middle East and North Africa? It has played and is still playing a key role in shoring up the Syrian regime, one of the most murderous dictatorships in the region, and it is itself responsible for a good deal of the destruction and killings and carnage that have occurred in that poor country. The Russian intervention consisted mainly in aerial and missile bombing and when you know what such bombing can do—in the name of fighting ISIS, U.S. bombing in limited parts of Syria led to terrible devastation, especially in the city of Raqqa—you can imagine what was done by Russian bombing on a much larger scale, over all the territories that were under opposition control when Russia began its direct intervention in 2015, up to the present.
Since then, Russia has also been intervening in Libya, along with the Egyptian regime of Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, and the United Arab Emirates, the region’s most reactionary states with the Saudi kingdom. Russian Wagner troops—which are even less “private” than their U.S. equivalent, the former Blackwater—have been intervening in Libya to support former CIA asset Khalifa Haftar, who has grouped around him forces ranging from remnants of the old regime to Salafists to combat the reconciliation government backed by the United Nations. Vladimir Putin has also been fully supportive of Egypt’s Marshal Sisi, from the very moment that he organized his coup, long before Trump named him his “favorite dictator.”
So, if we look at the role of Russia in my part of the world, it is certainly no better than that of the United States. In Syria, it’s definitely much worse: there, the main actions of the United States by order of importance have been fighting ISIS, supporting the Kurdish movement for that purpose, and supporting sections of the Syrian opposition, whereas the main action of Russia has been fighting the Syrian opposition to shore up the Assad regime.
NP: Let’s go back to the Libyan case. How would you describe the opposition to Gaddafi at the beginning of the uprising? Was it a jihadist opposition?
GA: Definitely not. It was a motley group of people with a wide range of ideological orientations. Keep in mind that Gaddafi seized power in 1969 and that the uprising against his rule occurred in 2011. That makes more than 40 years in power! The government in Libya was brutally repressive, no opposition whatsoever was tolerated. In 2003, it shifted abruptly into collaboration with Washington and its “war on terror.” In that context, it engaged in “extraordinary rendition” arrangements with Western governments, under which they would hand over to the Libyan government jihadi oppositionists that they held. Among those was one of the figures that would emerge later on in the uprising, a man who sued the British government for having rendered him to the Libyan government.[3] So, there were indeed some jihadists, who had been fighting the government and were regarded by Washington and its allies as terrorists. But they were only one component of a vast conglomerate of oppositionists that included different kinds of people: democrats, liberals, Muslim Brothers, and even a few leftists – the same mix that occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo, but with less dominance of Islamic forces than in Egypt.
The first election that took place after the fall of Gaddafi in 2012 was characterized by a high participation rate, a true one since people weren’t compelled to vote as in the sham elections of the past. And the big surprise was that Islamic forces received only a minority of the votes. The majority was dominated by liberals. This proves that the 2011 uprising was not dominated by jihadists. In fact, one of the key early figures of the uprising was Abdel Fattah Younes, who had been one of Gaddafi’s close companions since 1969 and was regarded as Libya’s number two. He sided with the uprising when the fighting started and got assassinated a few weeks later. The other prominent figure, a man who emerged as the chairperson of the Transitional National Council, was the minister of Justice, judge Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a man who may be described as liberal Muslim. But the opposition was very heterogeneous, of course. In an uprising against a long-standing dictatorship, it is only normal to see the full spectrum of opposition currents uniting against the regime. This is what happened in Libya, as elsewhere.
NP: Some people say that Libya was better off under Gaddafi. How do you respond to that?
GA: If things had been so good under Gaddafi, there wouldn’t have been a popular uprising. The claim that Libya was better off under Gaddafi ignores the fact that it is a country with limited population and a high oil and gas income, with a GDP per capita of 12,000 USD in 2010, with oil and gas representing two thirds of the economy and almost the totality of exports—the clearest indication of the regime’s massive failure to develop the country. The Libyan population should have been far better off than it was in 2011 when the uprising exploded. Libya is a country where you had huge regional disparities. The regime was privileging some parts of the country, those to which its own loyal constituencies belonged, and neglecting others. It squandered a lot of the country’s income in crazy weapons purchases (mainly from Western countries from 2004 on) and military adventures.
Now there are indeed some people who bring up figures such as per capita GDP, literacy rates, life expectancy and Human Development Index, to tell you that Libya was better than other African countries. But this is a very specious comparison. Why not compare Libya to the Gulf monarchies, which have similarly small populations and huge oil and gas income? Some of them achieved better figures than Libya. Let me read to you from this 2011 report by the International Crisis Group entitled “Making Sense of Libya”:
Given a population of a mere six million, many Libyans believe their country ought to resemble Dubai. Yet, years of poor planning, insufficient and piecemeal development and pervasive corruption (coming atop the crippling effects of prolonged international sanctions), have left parts of the country in a state of considerable neglect. Resentment at this is particularly strong among easterners, who rightly or wrongly believe the government has favoured other parts of the country and deliberately disadvantaged their region. Despite the country’s economic wealth, many Libyans work at least two jobs in order to survive (of which one typically is in the state sector, where wages for the most part remain pitiful). Housing shortages are acute, with an estimated 540,000 additional units needed. As public opinion generally has seen it, most of the economic opportunities that have opened up since 2003 … have remained in the hands of a narrow elite. In particular, they have been seized by Gaddafi’s own children and extended family, all of whom have accrued large fortunes across a range of businesses from the health, construction, hotel and energy sectors. These popular perceptions were recently reinforced by the disclosure of Western diplomatic assessments. According to U.S. diplomatic cables as released by WikiLeaks, Gaddafi’s children routinely benefited from the country’s wealth; one noted that it had “become common practice” for government funds to be used to promote companies controlled by his children and indicated that their companies had benefited from “considerable government financing and political backing”. In this sense, Libya has been akin to a large pressure cooker waiting to explode.[4]
Another argument that I often hear is that had NATO intervened in Syria, the country would have been like Libya today. Well, I can tell you this: There is not a single Syrian who would not wish and pray night and day for their country to be like Libya today. I mean, Libya’s situation is nothing compared to what happened in Syria: the scale of the massacres, the devastation, the displacement, etc., are incomparably more horrendous in Syria. After two years of newly acquired political freedom, Libya fell into a new civil war starting in 2014, fueled by rival foreign interventions, but it remained a low-intensity war compared to those of Syria and Yemen.
NP: Let me go back to one of your initial principles, the one about the exceptional case when massacre is impending. Is this an argument for humanitarian intervention?
GA: The concept of “humanitarian intervention” is flawed. Nobody would oppose a truly “humanitarian” intervention, such as sending troops to help after a massive earthquake. No anti-imperialist could oppose such an intervention because that would be completely absurd. I never used the phrase “humanitarian intervention” except to criticize it as a hypocritical pretext for imperialist interventions. When imperialism intervenes in a conflict, it’s never for humanitarian reasons and I’ve never ever subscribed to any illusion about that, but have consistently denounced what Noam Chomsky has called the “new military humanism.”[5]
The exceptional cases I’m talking about are when, for reasons of their own, imperialist powers sides with a popular uprising against a despotic regime, the latest such instance being the uprising against the military takeover in Myanmar. In such cases, if the popular movement decides to bear arms to defend itself from an ongoing slaughter, I support their right to get defensive weapons from wherever they can get them, even if only from imperialist powers. I even support demanding that Western governments provide such weapons. But I do not support direct intervention, be it by bombing or by dispatching troops to be deployed on the ground, all the less when this is done in violation of international law. However, if there is no other alternative to prevent an imminent large-scale massacre, I must abstain until the threat is eliminated. Abstaining means that I wouldn’t demonstrate against the intervention, as a few people did on March 19, 2011 in New York and Washington while the population in Benghazi was joyfully applauding what they perceived as their rescue. But nor would I demonstrate in support of the intervention: I would rather warn those who are rescued against having any illusions about the real intentions and designs of their momentary rescuers. That is what I did in 2011 when the intervention started in Libya. The city of Benghazi was threatened by the regime, the population of Benghazi implored the United Nations for intervention, the Security Council voted on a resolution authorizing this intervention, and Moscow and Beijing consented, albeit by abstaining rather than voting yes. That is what I explained in the March 19 interview[6] that you did with me, and nothing else. And yet, all hell broke loose in some circles of the anti-imperialist left in the U.S. and the UK, from the usual neo-campists to even some radicals who were yet to “learn to think.”[7]
For me, the original side to this debate was that it revealed the Western ethnocentrism of most of my detractors. They simply could not put themselves in the shoes of the people of Benghazi or of any part of the Arab region shaken by the 2011 revolutionary shockwave. They saw everything from the vantage point of the U.S. or its British poodle and were only interested in countering whatever their government did regardless of what was happening on the receiving end. They attacked me because they couldn’t fathom that I react politically more in unison with the Arab part of the world to which I belong (when it is directly concerned, that is) than with Britain where I happen to reside and work—my work being focused on the Middle East and North Africa. To give you but one example, on March 19, 2011, the very same day that we held our interview, the Lebanese Hezbollah—which is not exactly known to be a great friend of the United States—was holding a mass meeting in Beirut’s southern suburb, in solidarity with the Arab peoples. That was before the Syrian uprising shifted Hezbollah’s position. Here is what the party’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said about Libya in his long speech:
In Libya, people rose up as they did in Tunisia and Egypt. A group of young people started in Benghazi and were met with bullets and killing. People came to their support and the revolution spread from city to city, with demonstrations and civil disobedience. They were countered with bullets, planes, and tanks. War was imposed on the peaceful and civilian popular revolution. … Like you all, we saw on television planes, and tanks, and canons, andKatyusha multiple rocket launchers, aligned in a way that reminds us in Lebanon of the 1982 invasion and all Israeli wars. This war that is launched today by the Gaddafi regime on the Libyan people is the same type of war as those launched by Israel on Lebanon and Gaza. … Whoever can provide help of whatever sort to this insurgent people must provide help so that they stand up and resist in the face of destruction and massacres.
Our revolutionary brothers in Libya and our Arab peoples must know that America and the West have given the Libyan regime enough time to crush the revolution, a lot of time spent in talks and meetings. But the Libyans were steadfast, they resisted and fought, and embarrassed the world by their steadfastness and resilience. … To be sure, the situation in Libya has become very complicated with the start of the international intervention that might involve Libya in the game of nations, and this requires from the revolutionaries that they deploy their vigilance and patriotism in which we have high confidence.[8]
Note that Nasrallah actually blamed “America and the West” not for intervening, but for having been late in intervening! He was much less critical than I had been on the same day when you interviewed me. Shortly after, once the threat was over, which was achieved after a few days of intervention destroying much of Gaddafi’s planes and tanks, I clearly stated that I was against the continuation of bombing because it was obviously no longer needed to rescue any population, but had become merely an attempt by NATO to interfere in the Libyan situation and take control of it. Here is what I explained on March 31:
Opposing the no-fly zone while offering non-plausible alternatives, as many groups of the sane and true left did with the best of intentions, was unconvincing. It put the left in a weak position in the eyes of public opinion. Opposing the no-fly zone while showing no concern about the civilians, as some fringe groups did, was immoral — not to mention the attitude of those reconstructed or unreconstructed Stalinists who are upholding Gaddafi as a progressive anti-imperialist and dismissing the uprising as a US-led or al-Qaeda-led conspiracy (while resorting to Stalinist-style slanders in discussing the position of those on the left who sympathized with the Libyan uprising’s request for protection).
The no-fly zone request by the uprising should not have been opposed. Instead, we should have expressed our strong reservations on UNSC resolution 1973, and warned of any attempt to seize it as a pretext in order to further imperialist agendas. As I said the day after resolution 1973 was adopted, “without coming out against the no-fly zone, we must express defiance and advocate full vigilance in monitoring the actions of those states carrying it out, to make sure that they don’t go beyond protecting civilians as mandated by the UNSC resolution.” Our usual presumption against military interventions of imperialist states was overruled in the emergency circumstances of massacre impending, but these emergency circumstances are no longer there at present, and protecting the uprising can now be achieved in a much better way by supplying it with weapons.[9]
The other case similar to that of Libya in 2011 is when you had the surge of ISIS in 2014, crossing the border into Iraq and spreading over a huge territory on which they carried out horrible crimes, including the genocide of Yazidis in Iraq and an attempt to do the same to Kurds in both Iraq and Syria. The Kurdish-controlled city of Kobani in northeast Syria got threatened by ISIS. Washington intervened and started bombing the self-proclaimed “Islamic State.” Should anti-imperialists have been marching in Washington and London chanting “Stop U.S. intervention in Syria”? The United States was airdropping weapons to the Kurdish forces. Should anti-imperialists have opposed this? I don’t believe so. At the time of most urgent necessity to prevent a Kurdish defeat that would have opened the way for ISIS to invade Kurdish-controlled territories in Syria, one couldn’t oppose the bombing. Once the immediate danger was over, the continuation of the bombing should have been opposed, combined with the demand to provide the needed weapons to those who were fighting ISIS, especially the Kurdish and allied forces in both Syria and Iraq.
To sum up, under exceptional circumstances when there is no available alternative to prevent a large-scale massacre, intervention by imperialist powers may be a “lesser evil” as long and as far as needed to eliminate the threat. Arming a democratic uprising against a much better-equipped despotic enemy is a necessity from a truly leftist internationalist perspective. Internationalists should demand that their governments, even imperialist governments, deliver defensive weapons to the progressive side in a civil war (remember the Spanish civil war![10]). At the same time, we should advocate to those who require such aid complete mistrust in the United States and any imperialist government whatsoever. And we should oppose any form of intervention that would tie their hands and subordinate them to Washington, Moscow, or anyone else.
NP: But if I were part of a group that was facing massacre and I were offered aid and the aid came with strings, I might say these strings are rotten, but I’d rather succumb to these rotten demands and impositions than get massacred.
GA: And I would completely understand that. But my role from the outside would be to tell you: I understand your position, I understand that you are left with no choice, but I warn you of the real aims and goals of those who are providing you with what you badly need, and I urge you to do your utmost in order to maintain and preserve your full autonomy.
[10] Andreu Espasa, “Roosevelt and the Spanish Civil War,” The Volunteer, Dec. 15, 2019, https://albavolunteer.org/2019/12/roosevelt-and-the-lessons-from-the-spanish-civil-war/.
[Editor’s note: This is an original translation into English of an interview conducted with the Lausan Collective that appeared in German in IZ3W, a left German publication.]
Q: A critique of colonialism is not an uncommon argument in Chinese official commentaries on politics in Hong Kong. “戀殖” , “殖民遺毒” or “去中國化” were often perceived as roots of the evil of social unrest in Hong Kong and “去殖民化” as the panacea. How different is this “去殖民化” from “decolonization”, as Lausan is understanding the term? [Editor’s note: “戀殖” is “colonial nostalgia”; “殖民遺毒” is “the colonial legacy”; and “去中國化” is “de-Sinicization”.]
LC: Despite the CCP’s weaponization of ‘anti-colonial’ critique, we believe that Hong Kong has never fully been decolonized, and that the CCP itself has perpetuated these dynamics even since before the Handover. The Sino-British Joint Declaration, in a sense, is an exemplar of how inter-imperial collaboration actually blocks Hongkongers’ genuine democratic self-determination. In the following years, the CCP and its sympathizers – including much of the city’s business elites – actively lobbied the colonial regime against the expansion of democratic mechanisms, like direct elections to the Legislative Council. In other words, the change in sovereignty has caused little to no change in the city’s actual material conditions. Beijing has in fact retained much of the infrastructure, both material and ideological, of the British colonizers because they are well-suited for capitalist accumulation.
That said, it is undoubtedly apparent that the protest movement embodies its own form of colonial nostalgia. But colonialism is not a unified phenomenon that can be easily pinned on the legacy of British rule or the reality of Chinese authoritarianism. Just as the CCP builds its key instruments of oppression from an existing infrastructure of Western colonialism, protestors without state power can also appropriate the ideological frameworks of Western colonialism. Colonialism functions structurally – as a condition of a people’s material existence under forms of political and economic oppression. Colonialism can also exist as psychological vestiges, and in the form of various colonial actors taking advantage of these people’s self-determination movement as a bargaining chip against one another.
Calling for decolonization in its most authentic sense means grappling with these contradictions, and struggling alongside those oppressed and without state power toward more liberatory paths, and in solidarity with other oppressed peoples.
Q: After all, was colonial rule all bad? Isn’t the bare fact that Hongkongers nowadays courageously fight against state repression just showing us the strong liberal tradition left by Britain, with all its institutions including liberal universities and a highly independent justice system, as long as China does not interfere?
LC: It would be inaccurate to cite the city’s “strong liberal tradition” as the determining factor for the 2019-20 struggle. Hong Kong’s liberties were won by activists over the years in struggles against colonial authorities. The limited democracy we had in the Legislative Council before last year was the result of the organizing of early pro-democracy leaders in the 80s and 90s, and other expansions of democratic rights. Governor Chris Patten’s electoral reforms in 1994 were conspicuously fragile gains (Beijing undid many of the reforms upon assuming sovereignty of Hong Kong) and are in reality, merely tactical maneuvers between colonial state elites, without buy-in from Hongkongers themselves.
If anything, we can now clearly see the limitations of Hongkongers’ general trust in the liberal tradition . The relative absence of structural critique may have catalyzed a powerful and contingent alliance in the anti-extradition bill protests, but it has also obscured effective strategies in many instances: focusing on lobbying various state elites for gestural support; damaging sanctions, or “human rights” acts has come at the expense of grassroots and civil society alliances; and a failure to consolidate around the power of workers (e.g. new unions, the general strike, etc) as a central vector of struggle – like Myanmar is right now.
Q: Awareness of the importance of decolonization and the fight against racism was raised worldwide after the brutal murder of the U.S. citizen George Floyd by police became public. In the U.S. and in Europe, activists smeared or toppled monuments and relics that commemorate (glorify) the colonial past. Conservatives accused them of violent iconoclasm. Looking back to Hong Kong, a seemingly strange case appeared during the 2006/7 protests against the demolishing of Star Ferry Pier and Queen’s Pier, where “localist” activists argued for preserving iconic buildings from colonial time as a way to emancipate from colonialism. Wasn’t it simply colonial nostalgic? How can this seeming paradox be solved?
LC: In the article “The forgotten road of progressive localism: New Preservation Movement in Hong Kong,” Yun-chung Chen and Mirana M. Szeto explore this localist preservation movement in great detail. They argue that this movement exemplified a progressive strand of localism, as preservation activists advocated anti-neoliberal values, centered the voices and experiences of marginalized communities, cultivated cross-class coalition, and advocated for decolonization of commodified public culture and discourse.
During the preservation movement of Queen’s Pier, pro-Beijing newspapers in Hong Kong were quick to denounce such activism as colonial nostalgia. However, looking beyond their names, it is important to note that the Star Ferry Pier and the Queen’s Pier did not just signify British colonialism. Rather, they were integral to Hongkongers’ collective memories of public space across generations. Situated in Central, the Queen’s Pier served as a gathering space for grassroots local and migrant workers. These two piers were also key sites of the Hong Kong labor and anti-corruption movements. Under the banner “Farewell to the Colonial Mindset, Reclaim Our City,” the assembly organized by the activist group Local Action at Queen’ Pier drew participants who were new immigrants, grassroots advocacy groups, and Hongkongers who opposed state-led urban renewal that was most often property developers enriching “white elephant” projects. The concept and action of reclaiming was key here, as participants of the rally and Local Action activists made use of political and discursive agency to imbue colonial monuments with hybridized local meanings that complicated rather than cemented the colonial past.
Q: The very popular slogan “我哋真係好撚鍾意香港” (“We really fucking love Hong Kong”) highlights how important a role the sense of belonging and the Hongkonger identity played in the recent protest movements. From the early “localist” discourse in the 2000s to the current day, diverse narratives about what HK (Hong Kong) and HKer (Hong Konger) identity have evolved. Putting them into the context of the city’s colonial past, what (whom) do these narratives choose to remember or to forget, with what kind of positive or problematic implications respectively?
LC: It is important to interrogate who is included, who is categorically excluded, and who is only selectively or tactically included as Hongkongers. For instance, during large-scale social movements, such as the Umbrella Movement and the 2019 protest, mainstream Hong Kong protesters were quick to perform acts of solidarity with ethnic minorities, even though deep-seated structural racism remained unchallenged. In this case, the inclusion of ethnic minorities as Hongkongers was only temporary, and only insofar as the inclusion served the interests of the broader movement, led by mainstream Hongkongers. In addition to ethnic minorities, mainland Chinese immigrants are often excluded from the narrative of a local Hong Kong identity. The 2019 movement and the passage of the National Security Law have heightened skepticism among Hongkongers as they worry that they will be reported to the authorities by those around them. When such skepticism is coupled with xenophobia against mainland Chinese people, they become automatic suspects. Mainland Chinese immigrants who seek inclusion, hence, are expected by mainstream Hongkongers to repeatedly demonstrate and perform their allegiance to the Hong Kong movement or the politico-ethnic categorical construct of the “Hongkonger”.
As Yun-chung Chen and Mirana M. Szeto point out in their research on progressive localism, articulating a local cultural identity could be deployed as a tactic and tool of grassroots resistance and community building. As a mobilization tool, Hong Kong identity can be used to encourage people to engage in community-based participatory projects and networks that center on building collectives from the ground up. Hong Kong identity, in other words, is not inherently tethered to nativism or other right-wing localist ideologies. Defining Hong Kong identity as categorically and necessarily anti-China is limiting because it re-centers the CCP Party-State as the arbiter of Chineseness, as a fixed category that they alone can commodify and deploy. These assumptions foreclose the deliberative space for Hongkongers from different positionalities to grapple with the different connotations and tensions of identity itself.
Q: Left and internationalist voices were very much marginalized in recent movements which claimed to be leaderless and non-ideological. Progressive positions are often accused of unrealistic idealism and intellectual aloofness. How would Lausan react to such criticism and what is its strategy of activism for the future (also considering the high pressure from the National Security Law (NSL)?
LC: In a city in which the oppressors have long monopolized left discourse, it is always going to be an uphill battle for the democratically-minded left to gain traction, especially since such traditions have been thoroughly sidelined and marginalized by the UK and the CCP. Liberals had been easily co-opted or neutralized by each sovereign, just as right-wing nativists often directly gave ample ammunition for the CCP to smear the movement as wholly exclusionary and foreign-backed, alienating us from countless allies under the banner of ‘Hong Kong First’. It was no different in Hong Kong: As academic and pro-democracy politician Helena Wong Pik-wan documented, radical leftists in Hong Kong were some of the first to sound the alarm to resist the CCP and support its dissidents since the late 70s, before anyone else cared. Leftists from April Fifth Action were beaten and charged for protesting Xinhua News Agency’s celebration in September 1989 – as liberal-centrist pro-democracy leaders like Martin Lee stood squarely on the side of the police. And today, many of our leftist allies have been on the frontlines of the anti-extradition bill protests. Where is the idealism and aloofness here?
Perhaps the more pertinent question is “What is the price of the uncritical ‘pragmatism’ that has always characterized Hong Kong’s opposition camp, from the early pro-democracy liberals’ compromises with colonial officials to contemporary localists’ refusal to think critically about who we include as allies in our ranks in the name of ‘unity’?” Have these methods worked against Beijing, and have Hongkongers genuinely considered what left-wing perspectives have to offer in practice?
While some left discourses can tend toward abstraction, many advance precise, concrete solutions. Advocating for solidarity with mainland Chinese and other ethnic minorities is no idealism: We need all the allies we can get in a mass movement against authoritarianism. There is actually no choice going forward but to do the difficult work of reaching across the border—both political and cultural—to build the networks that can in the future ensure mutual freedom from repression. Talking about labor power is no distraction from the struggle against the CCP: Studies show that organizing a mass movement on the basis of the working-class has long been a particularly effective strategy to win democratic rights. One effective mode through which the CCP maintains its hegemony is precisely through its control over Hong Kong’s neoliberal system, in partnership with local and mainland capitalists.
In terms of the future, we must continue to support the new unions – one of the few remaining concrete lines of struggle left after the NSL – along with other grassroots struggles locally and in the mainland. With an ever-increasing diaspora especially in the wake of the NSL, there is a greater need to organize them in support of immediate campaigns against the CCP’s reach, and also to plant seeds – connecting them with other mass movements and traditions as invaluable political education, in preparation for Hong Kong’s future struggles.
Mark Levitan in his final days as an Adjunct Professor at Hunter College’s Dept. of Urban Affairs and Planning.
Even at 70 plus years of age, Mark Levitan was still climbing mountains, a diversion he cherished. Now at 73 he is gone. My dear friend and comrade died May 20 after losing a year-long battle with leukemia. His life’s trajectory was perhaps unpredictable but it was by any measure wholly remarkable. Beginning as a radical college student, Mark went on become a trade union militant until the mass layoffs in the auto industry laid him low. On the rebound, he trained as an economist working first for unions, then as a researcher at a leading New York City antipoverty agency. Later, he became instrumental in the way the city recalibrated, for the better, how poverty and unemployment were measured. His was a life worth living.
Working for the city meant being a researcher for the Bloomberg administration, a bizarre pairing at least, and one that the Times’ obit writer, Sam Roberts, commented on, characterizing Levitan as “an improbable recruit by the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Working for an unapologetic capitalist, he took a job in which he managed to practice some of what he had been preaching for most of his career as a socialist organizer and outside critic.”
Mark had another quality too often rare among those engaged in social change; he knew how to listen and ask pertinent questions. That was a quality British Marxist and coal miner Ken Coates, writing in an early issue of Socialist Register, believed was a prerequisite for being an effective organizer. As Coates put it, a radical “needs to know how to talk to a shepherd about sheep.” Just as important, “he [or she] has to know how to listen.” Mark excelled at both. He was also the first person I ever heard use the German/Yiddish expression Bolshevik Sitzfleisch (literally “butt meat” but figuratively “endurance” or “perseverance”) as a guiding principle.
The August 1972 issue of Workers’ Power, then a socialist biweekly focused in part on trade union democracy and labor rank and file upsurges, contains a statement Mark and I wrote—titled Two Radical America Editors Join the I.S. [International Socialists]. The statement, which refers to the then extant left history periodical, is redolent of what many radicals came to believe, that as good as the magazine and similar journalistic and propagating efforts were, they wouldn’t likely build a movement. As our statement read in part “the decision to take on an affiliated identity for people who have been politically autonomous is a difficult one. It means not being [solely, I would add today] satisfied with local organizing or theoretical work simply because it is safe. It means building an organization for class-wide struggle today.”
Like others around Radical America, we were influenced by the work of such non-orthodox Marxists as C.L.R James, James and Grace Boggs, and Martin Glaberman (the latter who once sent Mark and me into paroxysms of appreciative laughter when he defined “spontaneity,” a movement often upbraided as insufficient by Leninists, as “when someone else does the organizing”). But the lure of organizing workers under the direction of an organization centered on galvanizing blue-color workers who could take the fight to capital was too strong, and Mark left Boston for Detroit, where he soon was hired at the historic Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck, a Detroit suburb. I wouldn’t “industrialize” until 1977, five years after Mark, and into steel. We both lost jobs in the mass layoffs of the early ‘80s, but never regretted what the experience taught us. Neither of us joined another socialist organization until DSA. And long after it was formed in the early 1980s.
So what went wrong with the strategy of putting labor radicals, mainly former students, on the shop floor? It was the massive layoffs in heavy industry following the early 1980s economic crash. Mark’s terminal layoffs in auto and mine in steel put paid to our hopes. He became an economist of the first rank. After another stint as a graduate sociology student and picking up a journalism degree, I worked for unions as a staff writer. We both remained life-long critics of labor-management cooperation schemes and remained devotees of rank-and-file insurgencies. “Socialism from Below” was always our linchpin, a perspective currently articulated in the monthly Labor Notes, by numerous contributors to Jacobin and in left journals such as New Politics and Against the Current. The tricky part was and remains not so much affirming that vision as securing it, especially when capital starts the game with a winning hand and a dirty deal.
In late 2007, less than a year after taking his post as the Bloomberg administration’s director of poverty research for the city’s new Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO), Mark assumed responsibility for coordinating and writing up the Center’s efforts to track poverty in a way that measured the poverty rate fully and fairly. Interviewed in a Q & A about his work by City Limits, then as now one of New York’s savviest periodicals and web sites, the interview focused on how Levitan and his crew “track poverty and indicators of well-being among the CEO’s target populations,” and demonstrating how previous poverty estimates seriously understated both financial deprivation levels and misread the laggard range of public benefits. New measures of “poverty and well-being” were drastically called for.
As Mark told the interviewer, “If you conceive of poverty as being a measure of income adequacy, then there are two things you need to pay attention to. One is, what’s your definition of resources – what counts as income? Second, what’s the yardstick that you’re measuring income against? And we feel that the official measure is flawed in both respects.”
Mark and his team made history, rescaling poverty calculations and marking perhaps the only thing Bloomberg’s administration in three terms in office did right.
Readers may wonder what a labor radical with a doctorate in Marxian economics from the left-of-center economics department at the New School for Social Research could accomplish being posted in the neoliberal “stop and frisk,” rich-man Bloomberg administration. The answer is he succeeded brilliantly and did it graciously. The reform policies he advocated, which recalibrated poverty to the benefit of the poor, are city policy today.
On reflection, it would have been interesting if Mark had gone a step farther in writing the kind of participant-observer expose that would bring alive what it was like succeeding at doing good in a bureaucracy and for the likes of a Bloomberg, no less. Was it all without pitfalls and regrets? He can no longer tell us.
As I write, Mark’s family is doubtlessly busy with final preparations, and it may be an impertinence I think to ask them to fact check my memory, addled as it is by my own cluttered life. I haven’t seen his now grown son since he was a mischievous pre-teen. His wife Gay Semel, Mark’s 44-year-long partner, is another erstwhile comrade I would see only at the occasional DSA meeting in a New York City chapter broken into eight distinct branches claiming thousands of members. Add the coronavirus threat that made hunkering down at home required and seeing a dear friend in the flesh impossible. Now he is gone, and there really can only be closure in remembering the good times. And there were many good times.
So here is one old insurgent with a host of his own illnesses making sense of the loss of an old comrade of the revolutionary road who avoided Covid only to succumb to cancer, the great killer before which even the coronavirus pales.
No matter. Mark took his skills and put them to work for people who needed them most. The memory of Mark Levitan and his impact will always be for those who knew him as someone who was always “presente.” That presence is already missed.
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July 11, 2021
Yesterday, July 11, 2021, Cubans in several cities took to the streets to protest lack of health care, lack of food, and to demand freedom. Where should socialists stand on these protests and the Cuban government?
This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.
Professional politicians are a relatively recent historical phenomenon and their lies are to a great extent a response to social structural imperatives that did not exist in precapitalist societies. Surely liberal capitalist democracy did not invent political lies. Neither did capitalism invent exploitation and oppression. However, as in the case of exploitation and oppression, political lies acquired new content and form under liberal democratic capitalism.
During the pandemic, hate crimes against Asian Americans have 
Here we are again: DSA convention time. As I did 
OPEN LETTER BY 
As I write, the government of the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region (SAR) has banned the annual candlelight vigil to remember the 1989 democracy movement in China for the second consecutive year. Every June 4th since 1990 a vigil has been held in Hong Kong, and each year hundreds of thousands of people have poured into the city’s Victoria Park to remember the victims of the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square and keep alive the hope for a democratic China.
This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.
[Editors’ note: This article will appear in the Summer 2021 issue of New Politics, which will be sent to subscribers shortly.]
[Editor’s note: This is an original translation into English of an interview conducted with the 
