Keep Your Eyes on the Prize of an Independent Party

By: July 13, 2020
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Detroiters demonstrate against the closing of a GM plant | Photo by Jim West

Many DSA members agree that the working class needs our own party. Not all are on board, but a lot. We debate how to get there: “Realign” (that is, reform) the Dems? A “dirty break,” where the goal is a new party but class-struggle candidates make use of the Democratic ballot line for now, while shunning the Democrats’ internal machinery? A few think we should be talking now about a Democratic Socialist Party, a “clean break.”

Some members speculate about a “party surrogate,” a membership organization that would function like a party without actually forming a new party, a strategy articulated most fully by Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella. They urge us to be agnostic about whether a new, or different, party will come about through realignment or a dirty break. They argue correctly that a new party “will only have a realistic chance of electoral success if the insurgents have made sufficient inroads within one of the major parties — and a significant section of the labor movement — to attract a large portion of its supporters.”

They emphasize that the Democratic Party is “oligarchic and impenetrable” and discuss the “hyperconcentration of power in the hands of party and economic elites,” resulting in “increased party discipline, which in turn has dramatically raised the cost of internal party dissent.” They are clear that the Democratic Party is not set up to allow insurgencies and counsel against attempts at local takeovers. Yet they hold open the possibility that after sufficient organizing by the Left, “the establishment may abandon the party, effectively producing realignment.”

But I’d like to suggest that whether you have one foot in the realignment-is-possible camp or your eyes are firmly on the prize of workers’ own party makes a difference in how you organize and on what you’ll do at crucial forks in the road. The Democratic establishment will fight back. What is our plan when they do?

Here’s an analogy: Consider a union leader who accepts capitalism as the way things will always be. She takes for granted management rights in the union contract; in the best case scenario, the union tries to nibble away as best it can. When the employer asserts its right to close a plant, what can she do? The usual response is to negotiate a soft landing for laid-off workers, maybe to file a suit that will be thrown out by a judge who also believes capital’s rights are sacrosanct. It’s their plant, after all.

Then consider a union leader who doesn’t think the owners have the right to own, who’s for the overthrow of capitalism. Yes, both leaders are constrained by members’ fears, by the laws, by capitalists’ actual power regardless of their right to that power, by all sorts of handcuffs. But the difference in outlook will color everything the two leaders do, from the shop floor up. A Marxist outlook produces different approaches to countless daily practical decisions as well as to big political strategy; the difference is not just far away and abstract.

Consider a real-life plant closing scenario. General Motors announced in November 2018 that it would shut its Poletown plant in Detroit. Local and national United Auto Workers officials barely peeped, and even shut down a Poletown member’s motion to create a fight-back committee (he was also a DSA member). Detroit DSA, not constrained by allegiance to GM’s profits, showed what class-struggle unionists might do, mounting a campaign, backed by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, to demand the city government take the plant over through eminent domain and use it for green manufacturing.

POLITICS MAKES THE DIFFERENCE

The contrast between the two outlooks is clear in Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge, new this year, about the Farm Equipment Workers union, the FE. (Gilpin is a DSA member in the Chicago chapter.) Gilpin shows how the socialist politics of FE leaders played out in practice, greatly to the benefit of FE members.

The FE represented workers in the agricultural implement industry from 1938 to 1955, when it was forced by McCarthyism to merge with its rival, the UAW. FE leaders, though they didn’t openly say so, were “profoundly influenced” by the Communist Party. That refusal to be overawed by the rights of capital made for a union that was significantly different from most others of its era.

Gilpin details how UAW officials, who backed McCarthyite purges of CP-affiliated labor leaders, bought the notion that increasing productivity (i.e., speedup) would produce a bigger pie for owners and workers to share. The UAW’s Walter Reuther signed a National Planning Association code that said union leaders should promote “employee practices which will increase productivity and improve the competitive position of the company.”

The FE, in contrast, resisted productivity pay and long contracts (long contracts meant fewer opportunities to fight the boss for a better one). “Through their Marxist lens,” says Gilpin, “they saw wage levels not as reflective of ‘objective’ realities but of relative power, and they maintained a conviction that profit, in fact, did represent the surplus value extracted from the workforce. For the FE leadership, the equation remained simple and unchanging: for workers to enjoy more, the corporations and the people who controlled them must get less.”

Between 1945 and 1954 International Harvester plants represented by the FE saw more than 1,000 work stoppages, compared to 200 at UAW IH plants. (Two hundred is still an astonishing number by today’s standards.) One reason was the high ratio of stewards to workers, about one to every 35 or 40. IH officials complained that these stewards continually tried to “promote unrest, stir up ill will, harass the company, and convince as many members as it can that labor relations with Harvester is and must be class warfare.” Damn straight.

The FE was also unusual in its insistence on complete equality at International Harvester’s Louisville, Kentucky local, where Black members were 15 percent of the membership. A united Louisville local won a 42-day strike against IH’s “Southern differential” — a third-tier pay scale in a city where most considered Black or white workers lucky to have such a job.

Famed civil rights activist Anne Braden, who lived in Louisville, said of the Harvester workers, “People really enjoyed getting up and going to work in the morning” because of the FE. “You knew there was going to be something interesting at the gate, there was going to be a leaflet, there was going to be people out about something, and there was a real esprit de corps that I think made it bearable to go to work.” Gilpin says the “fierce and sustained loyalty of the FE’s rank and file” was the result of “the precepts of proper trade unionism” as practiced by its socialist leaders.

As a former UAW member at GM and Chrysler, and as one who covered the UAW for decades at Labor Notes, I can also personally testify to the difference. When I was at GM in 1976 the shop committee instigated one of those wildcat strikes so rare today; the whole plant was down. Agreeing with management that stopping production was the worst of sins, the UAW International agreed to let management fire 10 rank and filers with no recourse to the grievance procedure. The letter informing me was signed by an international rep. “Dear Sister Slaughter…”

OUR PARTY AND THEIRS

What’s the connection to electoral politics as practiced by DSA members? It’s that idea of a guiding star — basing our practice on where we want to go.

Yes, it’s theoretically possible to imagine there being so many insurgents inside the Democratic Party that its bosses would leave (about as possible as imagining Trump will resign). But it is on the proponents of realignment and those who take a wait-and-see approach to explain why the world’s most powerful capitalist class would decide to give up control of one of its most powerful tools. Short of a breakdown of the state itself, in what situation would capitalists actually do this? Would the owners of GM just decide one day to abandon the company to members of the UAW? These both strike me as unrealistic scenarios.

If you think it is possible capitalists would abandon the Democratic Party under less extreme circumstances (how?), your guiding star is likely to become an internal takeover. Hey, turns out it’s easy to become a precinct delegate! Isn’t this what the Tea Party did? It worked for the Republicans. If we can get on Committee X we can change Rule Y, which will help Candidate Z. All this time we’re interfacing with party elites and their loyal activists, rather than with members of the working class we might win over.

And if you think that in the future the Democratic Party is going to become our party, your campaign speeches will tend toward “we have to improve this party which has a glorious history of fighting for workers and the poor” rather than “we need our own party; this one is owned by the machinery of capitalism.”

The wait-and-see approach rightly advocates that the Left build enough power to threaten the Democratic Party elites, but what then? Surely they will fight back before we’re strong enough to oust them; they already are. Think about how quickly Joe Biden became this year’s presidential nominee. If we’re doing our jobs, things will only escalate from here. Without a plan for forming a new party, and a base we’ve spent time organizing towards it, our forces will be thrown into disarray by the establishment’s attacks, right at the moment we should be most organized.

When we’ve built that power all of us agree we want, what happens when we come to the next fork in the road — say when a much larger labor movement and all the social movements have backed the next Bernie but the Democratic bosses have stolen the nomination? We don’t want to be shilly-shallying over “shall we stay or shall we go?” all over again.

Far better for us to decide from the start that our goal is workers’ own party, because that will color everything we do on our way there.

First published in The Call.

Puerto Rico Faces Crises: COVID, Hurricanes, Earthquakes, Drought

By: July 12, 2020
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This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France. 

The United States has suffered 135,000 deaths from COVID-19 and has tens of millions of unemployed and both crises continue now into the fifth month, but nowhere has the economic crisis been greater than in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico.

Governor Wanda Vázquez was the first governor in the United States to order businesses to close and to tell people to stay home, which helped to contain the virus. At present there are only 9,336 coronavirus cases and only 167 deaths out of a population of 3.2 million. But the economic shutdown has devastated the island. With a civilian workforce of 1.05 million, 300,000 have filed for unemployment compensation and the official unemployment rate is 23 percent.

Only last year Puerto Ricans rose and drove from office governor Ricardo Rosselló after it was learned that an Telegram app chat he had used misogynistic and homophobic language, joked about people who died in Hurricane María, and appeared to threaten the life of the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz. Demonstrations grew in numbers from tens of thousands to one million, forcing Rosselló to resign in August of 2019.

While the trigger of the uprising was Rosselló’s text message, there were other issues as well. Puerto Rico had an incredible $72 billion debt. The island had an unemployment rate then of 14.2 percent and a poverty rate of 45 percent. The U.S. government established a Financial Oversight and Management Board of Puerto Rico (FMOB) to run the economy. The financial problems resulted both from economic mismanagement and natural disasters.

Hurricane María with winds of 100 miles per hour, struck the island in September of 2017, leaving 3,057 dead and doing $90 billion in property damage. Many homes lost their roofs, leaving thousands living under tarps for a year or more; and some went without electric power, food, or water. U.S. President Donald J. Trump told advisors that, “he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico, because he thought the island was misusing the money and taking advantage of the government.” The Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to provide adequate assistance. Trump callously threw rolls of paper towels to Puerto Ricans storm survivors at a public event, infuriating many Puerto Ricans. Just a couple of days ago we learned that as the storm approached, Trump speculated to aides about selling the island.

Since the hurricane, 500,000 Puerto Ricans have left the island to live in the United States, most settling in Florida. A total of 5.8 million Puerto Ricans now live in the United States, most in New York and the Northeast but also in Chicago, California, Hawaii and elsewhere.

Disasters continue to strike the island. In late December 2019 and early January 2020 a series of earthquakes hit the island, the largest a 6.4 magnitude quake that badly damaged the city of Ponce. And now 60% of Puerto Rico suffers from drought and some areas do not have a daily water supply.

The FMOB allotted $13 billion for COVID-19 issues, and Governor Vazquez has announced a $787 stimulus package, with $350 for businesses to help pay workers. Many Puerto Ricans, however, labor in the informal economy and will not be entitled to unemployment insurance.

Puerto Rico, once a Spanish colony, was taken from Spain by the United States in the war of 1898. In 1917 the United States made Puerto Ricans U.S. Citizens and in 1947 the U.S. Congress gave Puerto Ricans the right to elect their own governor. But unlike other U.S. territories, Puerto Rico did not become a state and it has no representatives or senators in Congress, only a non-voting resident commissioner in the House of Representatives. As citizens, Puerto Ricans in the United States can vote in all local, state, and national elections.

We know from the people’s history that Puerto Ricans will continue to fight on the island and in the United States. Most Puerto Ricans can be expected to vote for Joe Biden in the national election.

Poland Chooses between Two Right-Wing Politicians

By: July 10, 2020
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Polish President Andrzej Duda (top) flashing V-signs after addressing supporters as exit poll results were announced during the presidential election in Lowicz, Poland, on June 28, 2020 and Candidate in Poland’s presidential election, Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski flashing V-signs to supporters as exit poll results were announced during the presidential election in Warsaw, Poland, on June 28, 2020. – Poland’s right-wing President Andrzej Duda topped round one of a presidential election on June 28, 2020, triggering a tight run-off with Warsaw’s liberal Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski on July 12, according to an Ipsos exit poll. (Photos by Wojtek RADWANSKI and JANEK SKARZYNSKI / AFP)

In less than few days there will be a second round of a presidential election in Poland that may affect not only the politics in Poland but also other regions of Europe. Poles are choosing between two right-wing politicians. What is the cause of this situation and what role does the left play in all of it?

It is easier to understand current situation in Poland if you are a Canadian or American than a European. Most of European countries got used to a power structure with at least several strong political parties, including a strong left. For more than 15 years in Poland two right-wing parties have been taking turns in charge: Law and Justice and Civic Platform. The first one – after having won the parliamentary election in 2015 – has thoroughly dominated almost the entire Polish political stage: they have had a president, a prime minister and a majority in the parliament. The opposition has been holding only the Senate and local governments in most of big cities, including the capitol. Both parties’ origin was in the Solidarity movement of the 1980s and a significant number of their members consider themselves conservative or right-wing.

Civic Platform is unambiguously pro-European and democratic and many politicians from this fraction have been holding main European offices such as the President of the European Parliament or the President of the European Council. Voters of Civic Platform come from big cities and the west of Poland, they are the ones – to put it simply – in a better economic situation, those whom the political transformation of 1989 treated quite well. On the other hand, people voting for Law and Justice defend Catholic or conservative values and live in the south and the east of the country.The  Law and Justice party got their support through numerous well-diagnosed and effectively-carried-out social reforms such as the 500+ Program ensuring parents with 500 PLN (equivalent of about 170 Canadian dollars) a month from national resources.

Polish politics has been dominated by a conflict between these two political formations for many years now. It escalated in 2015 when Law and Justice took full power and launched a series of reforms described as not democratic by both the opposition and a significant part of foreign observers and commentators. Also in 2015, the president, Andrzej Duda, vetoed the appointment of judges of the Constitutional Court that led to a crisis lasting many years and eventually made the Constitutional Court subordinate to the parliament. Two years later the government forced changes in the functioning of the National Council of the Judiciary to protect the independence of the courts and judges. As a consequence of these actions there were demonstrations in many cities and towns in Poland, gathering tens of thousands of protesters, and the decision of the government raised concerns from international bodies such as the Venice Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Simultaneously, many incidents happening during the last five years may point to authoritarian tendencies in the government and in Polish society. A great number of artistic events have been censored (in a soft or hard way) by the authorities and the public media has been turned into a tool of propaganda for the government. The authorities have also been stimulating xenophobic and homophobic sentiments within a large part of Poland. They have criticized a previous government (led by Civic Platform) for its willingness to help refugees from Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq. Many Law and Justice members have been speaking against the LGBT+ community. Local governments arising from this party symbolically announced their territories to be LGBT-free zones and just a few weeks ago president Andrzej Duda compared LGBT+ postulates to Soviet indoctrination.

In this year’s presidential election Law and Justice put Andrzej Duda in the running for the second time and – despite major criticism from the opposition – he still has strong social support. His main antagonist from the Civic Platform had initially been Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska, a former Marshall of the Polish government; however, due to disturbances caused by the epidemic of the SARS-CoV-2 virus the election was postponed and Civic Platform nominated a new candidate, Rafał Trzaskowski – a representative of a liberal part of this formation who won the election for the Mayor of Warsaw in a first round in 2018 gaining 56.67% of the vote.

Two weeks ago both parties proved to still be dominant on the Polish political stage – in the first round almost 3/4 of Poland’s electorate voted for their candidates. Duda obtained the highest score (43.50%) and Trzaskowski placed second (with 30.46%). Before the second round surveys showed that all bets were off – the difference between the results of both candidates remains in the limits of statistical error and the winner depends on the kind of poll.

This is why it is crucial for Duda and Trzaskowski to take votes from the rest of the candidates. The third place (13.87%) belonged to Szymon Hołownia – a celebrity, a host of the Polish edition of “Got Talent” who ran as an independent candidate. During the campaign Hołownia appeared as a moderate candidate in every way and his programme consisted of a populist mix of leftist and rightist demands. Undoubtedly he managed to convince those who felt sick and tired of the choice between Law And Justice and Civic Platform but at the same time he was distancing himself from the actions of the present authorities. His weeping over the Constitution – a new symbol of resistance to non-democratic decisions of the government – went viral on the Polish Internet.

The fourth result (6.78%) belonged to Krzysztof Bosak, a candidate of the extreme right with a nationalist programme and radically free-market views. Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, a member of the Polish People’s Party – a centrist party representing farmers and citizens from smaller towns co-ruling with “Civic Platform” in the past for many years – obtained less than 2.5% of the votes.

The result for Robert Biedroń, a candidate of the left trying to find their place in this polarized political stage, was even worse. How could this happen?

For many years the strongest left-wing party in Poland was Democratic Left Alliance. It originated from a Communist party, but, in contrast to a great number of European parties with similar backgrounds, Democratic Left Alliance managed to evolve into a social democratic party and its politicians succeeded in making Poland a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. At the turn of the century Democratic Left Alliance had support from the majority of Polish society. Over time this formation completely lost the ability to communicate with its supporting groups such as factory workers and miners and as a result its support began to decrease. Controversially – from the standpoint of the left-oriented supporters – decisions like overeager involvement in the war in Iraq and introducing a flat tax for companies didn’t help their case either.

At the same time over the years numerous political initiatives on the left wing have been emerging. Two of them seem to be the most crucial. The Together party (now Left Together) was established in 2015 by a group of young leftist activists as a protest against the entrenched Democratic Left Alliance. Left Together succeeded in “dusting off” Polish political discussion, injecting certain themes such as the struggle for workers’ rights and profound tax reform. On the other hand, in 2019, Robert Biedroń – one of the most important Polish LGBT+ activists and a former MP – formed the Spring party. Unlike Left Together, this formation was supposed to address the mainstream, moderate electorate by mixing leftist and liberal views together. In fact, Biedroń avoided using the word “leftist” and was replacing it with the word “progressive”.

It was about a year ago that all the three formations – Democratic Left Alliance, Together, and Spring – were in deep conflict. In May 2019, Spring and Together ran for the European Parliament elections separately, gaining 6.06% and 1.24% of the vote. Democratic Left Alliance ran in a coalition with a few other parties where Civic Platform played a leading role. The aim of this group – named “European Coalition” – was to keep Law And Justice from winning the election at all cost. The mission was a partial success because their result was decent (38,47%) but Law And Justice won the election anyway with support of more than 45%.

Less than six months later all three left-wing parties were standing together shoulder to shoulder in the parliament election and their collective result was 12.56% of the parliamentary vote. This was regarded as a success because in the previous term the left failed to bring its politicians to parliament. They formed a “club” together, uniting 49 members. Cooperation of these parties is pretty good, but they face numerous problems resulting from diversified expectations of their electorates. The leftism of the supporters of Democratic Left Alliance is significantly different than the leftism of Spring or Together. A large number of the Alliance’s voters don’t share an interest in matters like LGBT+ rights or environmentalism.

The three parties decided to nominate one candidate for the presidential election – the leader of the Spring party, Biedroń. A few years ago he seemed to be a natural political leader. Unfortunately, Spring’s result wasn’t what they expected. Additionally, Biedroń lost credibility due to an unfulfilled promise to give up the mandate of being a Member of the European Parliament. This was the reason that this nomination was not received with great enthusiasm.

During his campaign Biedroń had to face many unfavorable situations. It stands to reason that supporters of Democratic Left Alliance found it difficult to fully accept him as an openly gay LGBT+ activist. Meanwhile, he might have seemed unreliable for the general leftist electorate because of his tendency to soften his views and ideas. However, in the end, it was ideological supporters of the left who turned out to be the most loyal voters for Biedroń – mostly due to lack of a credible alternative.

Also, the left parties got stuck in a narrative trap. They stridently distanced themselves from the two similar conservative candidates. This kind of rhetoric is sadly confusing for much of the electorate even though it is based on substantive premises. For plenty of voters “right wing” is synonymous with Law And Justice and refers to particular issues such as disrespect for the rule of law, a commitment to Catholic values or skepticism towards the European Union. For most Polish people equating Law And Justice with Civic Platform is totally incomprehensible.

The election showed that this rhetoric wasn’t convincing for left-wing voters either – Biedroń obtained a score of only 2.22%. Over 300, 000 people supported the left in October 2019 while before last Sunday just over 430,000 voted for the candidate nominated by the left. As the exit poll shows, 44.1% of the left-wing voters from October chose Rafał Trzaskowski and only 21.2% cast their vote for Robert Biedroń. It is almost as much as left-wing electorate supporting Szymon Hołownia (19.8%). At the press conference after the first round of the election Biedroń expressed his strong support for Trzaskowski in the second round.

Since 2005 a first-round presidential election turnout has never exceeded 50%. This time, however, it was 64.51%. This proves the extraordinary engagement of Polish society in political matters. It also shows that the political fraction winning on July 12th will receive full and credible social legitimization. Though reigning unchallenged since 2015, Law And Justice has never received support from the majority of Polish society. Andrzej Duda won under completely different circumstances when a certain percentage of his voters were not aware of the consequences of their choice. Now, all cards are on the table and the next election probably will not be held until 2023. The winner of this presidential election will symbolically take over – even if they don’t possess actual power. And the left will gain some time to think to whom and how to address their message.

Pacifism by Every Other Name: The Political Ethic of the Anti-Racist Movement Against Systemic Violence

By: July 10, 2020
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Living through the current anti-racist, anti-police protests around the US and around the world now, we’re hearing a lot of talk about non-violence and non-violent protests, including invocations of the distorted, deradicalized, liberalized “legacy” of Martin Luther King, Jr. However, what we’re not hearing a lot about is pacifism. While pacifism has historically been interpreted as a political philosophy of non-violent resistance, what is more essential to the pacifist tradition is what it fights against, not necessarily its tactics. A genuine pacifist movement is a movement against systems of violence, and in that sense the on-going wave of anti-racist movements are decidedly pacifist—even including instances where protesters engage in looting, burning, and tactical violence in response to the direct state violence practiced by police forces globally.

From Non-Violence to Anti-Violence

Pacifism is always anti-violence, but not necessarily non-violent in tactics. And a crucial dimension of the distinction here is connected to a broader distinction between direct and structural, or systemic, violence—to say nothing for the difficulty of clearly analytically categorizing what counts as violence (which is also always a political determination). On this latter point, more specifically, some may consider private property destruction a kind of violence; the use of force in self-defense is also considered by some to be violent. These may be useful academic arguments to have at some point, but they are not the important debates at the moment.

Instead, by focusing on the anti-violence goal of these anti-racist movements, and other similarly radical movements, we can see the protest movement thinking and acting with a pacifist political ethic that avoids being hamstrung by any pacifism that is reducible to passivity in tactics or strategy.

Non-violence and pacifism are often used interchangeably, but they shouldn’t be. While non-violence can be thought of as a category of tactics for achieving political change without violence of any kind, pacifism is best understood as a political philosophy rooted in an ethico-political commitment to achieving a world without violence—usually with the caveat that the best way (or perhaps the only way) to achieve this transformation is through non-violent tactics. However, the determination of the most effective tactics is a strategic judgement not necessarily inherent to pacifism.

Pacifism is anti-violence, and because its proponent actively oppose violence it would make sense that they would want to avoid violence if at all possible. Does this mean pacifists don’t engage in active self-defense? Perhaps, but I am unaware of any strict form of pacifism that would prohibit such self-defense. The implication of all of these points taken together is that pacifism is often interpreted as prohibiting the tactical use of violence to achieve the abolition of violence. It also has further led to the reproduction of a rigidly individualized and direct conception of violence. That is, violence means when one person or group of people directly physically harm another (e.g., a stabbing, shooting, or beating)—and structural violences are ignored (e.g., policies that limit access to health care or laws that protect domestic abusers or protect killer cops from legal consequences—the latter two of which often overlap).


Anti-Racism that is Not Merely Anti-Racism

It should also be noted that direct violence and structural violence are analytically distinct categories, but only abstractly. In reality, structural violences are often the root causes of most direct violence. For example, laws that fund the military and empower unaccountable use of heinous, human rights violating warfare often, unsurprisingly, lead to the use of heinous, human rights violating acts of war by individual soldiers, bomber pilots, and drone operators. A more everyday example would be policies that deny people the right to a living wage lead people to engage in behaviors (like “side hustles” or joining gangs) that are considered illegal and can occasionally (though not as often as the media would have us believe) lead to interpersonal conflicts than can become violent. However, structural violence is violence, nonetheless. It is violence when a doctor “streets” a stable but still-unhealthy patient without insurance who then dies because of the lack of necessary further treatment. This is, as Engels called it, “social murder.” The doctor is following the rules, even engaging in legal or otherwise required behavior. In this case, the rules themselves are the violence. This is the structural violence of racist, cisheterosexist capitalism, which points us to another word that I hear a lot at these protests, though less so in the mainstream media, and that is (the need for) “socialism.”

It is absolutely no surprise at all that people, particularly people of color, are increasingly acting on their understanding that the capitalist order rests on deeply entrenched racism and white supremacy; that, as Malcolm X famous said, you can’t have capitalism without racism. While there remain real concerns about what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Cornel West have repeatedly criticized as “Black faces in high places” discourses, which suggest that what is really needed for equality and racial justice is to have more Black people in leadership positions within the existing system, I’ve not seen a lot of this kind of problematic symbolic rhetoric in the current wave of protests. Symbolic representation is important to achieve the deeper substantive representation that will be vital to the achievement of racial justice, but this approach (perhaps best represented by the presidency of Barack Obama) often functions to redirect, and indeed limit, the more transformative demands of the multi-racial working class—and the radical Black working class in particular.

What has heartened me from my experiences during these recent protests is the lack of this kind of approach (often referred pejoratively, and not without reason, as liberal identity politics). These protests are offering systemically-oriented demands that express a deep pacifist political ethic rooted in an increasing dissatisfaction with “Black faces in high places” and an overt acknowledgement that police violence, and white supremacist violence itself, is maintained and reproduced by other related systems of violence, but the capitalist system in particular. For many protesters, (democratic) socialism is being rearticulated, as it has always been at its best, as a direct critique—and alternative to—racism itself. This is not to suggest that any protesters (at least that I’ve come across) are of the belief that socialism, understood in its more reductive form, would somehow automatically abolish racism. Such fanciful thinking is more often an accusation that socialists have not historically taken racism seriously enough, and that is a fair critique. Pacifism then, at its strongest, requires that all systems of violence be opposed and struggled against—and that is exactly what we’re witnessing in our streets. These protests, the eventual outcomes of which are still unknown, are reflecting a development in radical activism: people are making a pacifist critique against all structures of violence with loud demands for systemic change aimed at a world without violence—which means, for many, a world without police and a world without capitalism.

These protests are more deeply pacifist though, because they reflect the knowledge that what is being struggled against is systematic; they are not primarily oriented towards ending direct violence as such. They are focused on the structural causes of direct violence; that is, they are primarily opposed to the structural violence of policing and the broader criminalization of black and brown skin and poverty. In this context, to be pacifist is not to be primarily concerned with whether a building is burned or a cop gets hit with a water bottle, but it means being hyper-focused on doing whatever is necessarily to achieve a world without violence—a world without racial capitalism and its badged enforcers.

Rising Systemic Consciousness

It is this radical opposition, combined with the visceral preference for, without a fetishization of, non-violence in tactics, and even with the occasional tactical use of property destruction and symbolic—albeit somewhat dangerous—physical force (what we might more casually refer to as “direct violence”) that makes these movements pacifist. On the one hand, tactics are important, but only insofar as they connect to a strategically delineated goal—and the goal of these protests is structural non-violence; that is to say, they are anti-violence.

The police and their defenders on the other hand know only violence. The social function of policing is entirely violent. It cannot be otherwise without ceasing to be what it is. Even in the moments when specific police officers aren’t engaged in direct violence (e.g., police brutality), their social function is a product of structural violence (the legal empowerment of armed defenders of capitalist property relations, patriarchy, and white supremacy, supported with resources that are otherwise desperately needed to keep people alive and living decent humane lives). The use of public resources for policing means poverty is increased and therefore “crime” is increased, which tautologically “justifies” the existence of policing.

Among the protesters, with whom I’ve spent countless hours over the past month, people understand this. Their slogans reflect this. The recent “addition” of “Defund the Police” to the Black Lives Matter street mural in Washington D.C, is just one example of the emergent pacifist consciousness within this movement. The dissatisfaction of cops taking a knee with protesters also reflects a deep awareness that this moment is not about individual behaviors, the direct violence, of police officers. It is about the structural violence that policing in America entails.

Austerity’s Future: Higher Education and COVID-19

By: July 9, 2020
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Don Tuski, President of the College for Creative Studies, Detroit

“Obviously, this week was not about collaboration, but moving forward, this has to be about collaboration.”

These were the words Don Tuski, President of the College for Creative Studies (CCS), chose to use at an end-of-semester meeting with faculty and staff after announcing a 5% reduction in workforce at the Detroit Fine Arts college.

CCS is a private college in Detroit offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts to its over 1,400 students. At a cost of $44,000 a year, CCS’ $55 million annual budget should have kept it financially stable as they finished the 2019-2020 school year. However, the result COVID-19 pandemic became an opportunity to enact an austerity-driven “restructuring.”

Since becoming president of the college in 2019, Tuski’s model for CCS has been driven by divide-and-conquer. Staff returned to campus for Fall classes that year to learn that they had been classified into one of three bands. These bands were in part based on job classification – managerial, staff, and faculty – but the sections within those bands were primarily salary-based. So, for instance, staff members in completely unrelated areas of the college could be placed in the same band on the basis of their pay scale, rather than their job description.

The challenge this presented became obvious when returning faculty and staff were told via email that they would be reporting to a Fall meeting. Meeting times were based on band, and thus, each member in the room knew the approximate salary of every other member there as well. The complicated process was the result of an outside firm that was hired to conduct a survey based on job performance and salary scale. While at this meeting, members of each band inquired about compensation and the process for getting placed into separate band categories for salary bonuses. One individual that was interviewed stated that, “it was a very uncomfortable time and many people were upset. Rather than opening this up to everyone so you could see what the salary scales were and the job requirements for each category, the administration asked people to come to the band meetings but were told nothing about the other bands, so we had to stitch together classifications from conversations.”

Frustrations at CCS continued throughout the school year, until COVID-19 forced the college to consider budget cuts. At the end of May, 19 individuals were notified with only thirty minutes’ notice that they had to attend a Zoom meeting with either the president, dean, or vice president as well as a member of Human Resources. At this meeting, they were calmly and coldly informed that their positions would be eliminated. One individual, who wished to remain anonymous, stated that the decision to eliminate these positions was “made at the top with Tuski and a few people – board members and such – but they never mentioned declining enrollment as a factor leading to that decision. It appeared to be retaliatory.”

Faculty and staff were unaware of these cuts until a final annual meeting on Friday, May 22nd. At the meeting, Tuski informed everyone that, “Transparency is the goal, but only where possible.” He had been irritated at a Detroit Free Press story which had inside information on the state of CCS’s budget, something which he believed could damage their reputation in the city. Given the state of CCS at the time, Tuski stated that the board of governors had endorsed a plan to reduce the college’s budget between 10-30 percent, or $18-24 million in total.

In addition to these cuts, Tuski relayed that no outside contracts would be given and that everything needed for transitioning to online education would be done by staff. However, at the same meeting, Tuski stated that Michigan Virtual, a K-12 online learning platform, would be responsible for the rollout of new course content, given that the online instructional designers had already been eliminated in the first round of budget cuts. Although no further cuts or reductions have been announced, Tuski stated that there may be future “tweaking” and “collaboration” in a desire for the college to remain “flexible” as it moved forward into Fall 2020. “Obviously, this week was not about collaboration,” Tuski stated at the meeting. “Moving forward, this has to be about collaboration.”

Mistrust of this conclusion is not misplaced, however. Towards the end of the meeting, Tuski only permitted handpicked, pre-submitted questions from faculty and staff. This prevented irate faculty from voicing their concerns in an online group setting where their power to collectively show their distrust could be mitigated.

At the moment, CCS has stated that the lowest paid professionals will not have a pay decrease and 403(b) contributions will continue, even as the college seeks to increase its financial performance with “outside partnerships” and a possible tuition decrease for incoming students.

Tuski’s model for running CCS is one that will become all too common in smaller, private colleges across the country. Neoliberal austerity measures to reduce staff sizes provide an ample opportunity to eliminate the positions of those deemed to be ‘troublemakers’ under the guise of low program enrollment and expectations of a smaller student population. Outside contractors with ties to for-profit online platforms can now capitalize on the desire for smaller colleges to make their Fall 2020 semesters accessible. Positions that would otherwise be reserved for in-house staff can be more readily eliminated while other staffing positions, such as custodial, maintenance, and book stores, are considered non-essential at present.

The history of Tuski’s tenure at CCS shows that the process of neoliberal reforms has been well-established long before COVID-19 hit the nation. The global pandemic has only further entrenched this model, and countless thousands of staff in smaller colleges throughout the U.S. will now suffer its ramifications.

The Whitney Took Down My Mural

By: July 9, 2020
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The Whitney Museum recently took down our murals. True enough, they never asked us to paint on the plywood barrier built to protect the building during the recent protests. But for a few nights we painted. Mine was a mural about police brutality toward protestors. Now the Whitney has taken them all down.

There is a certain irony here since the current exhibit is about the Mexican muralists and their influence on American painters. Diego Rivera is the most well known of those and there is a dramatic story of how John D. Rockefeller, Jr. took down Rivera’s mural “Man at the Crossroads.”

Now, I’m not comparing myself to Diego Rivera, except that both of us had murals removed. Rockefeller didn’t like Rivera’s politics. The Whitney just didn’t care about mine.

I was bicycling around one night when I saw people painting on the Whitney’s barriers and I joined them. At first I drew. The next day I brought house paint.

I’ve always loved politically motivated murals like the Mexican muralists. I hadn’t felt the political urgency to paint one until the Trump era. Police brutality existed before Trump, of course, but it never felt like part of my life before. That’s privilege.

I was thinking about the clearing out of Lafayette square, the tear gas and violence used on peaceful protesters. And I thought about my own recent experience at a demonstration here in New York at Columbus Circle. I was painting from those memories and feelings.

I wanted to paint something hopeful and horrifying in black and white but with some nuance. In the painting there’s one cop trying to hold back the others, but it doesn’t matter.

The security guards came by and took a look and liked what I was doing. Then the head of security came by and said, “It looks good. Just don’t make a mess.”

As we were painting, people would come up and talk. People in the neighborhood would return often to see our progress. Many were members of the Whitney who couldn’t see the art inside. They said they were glad to see art outside of the museum and to talk to the artists. It was an interactive exhibit—and free! I liked talking to people while painting.

I listened to James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” while staying up all night to finish it.

An engineer who worked at the museum came by and said to me, “This is illegal.” I told him I’d talked to David, the head of security. “Oh, okay,” he said. And he added, “I just don’t like the FTP,” referring to some graffiti tags around the building. “I don’t like those either,” I said.

My painting is in black and white, but I don’t see the police issue in black and white.

The police arrested me once during a protest. That was during Occupy Wall Street’s student debt day. I went to Cooper Square, climbed Cooper’s statue and made a speech and wouldn’t get down until the cops came with a cherry picker and took me down. I had just graduated from the Cooper Union art program and that year they began to charge tuition for the first time in 155 years. I thought that was wrong, so I protested, was arrested and spent a night in jail, was charged with four misdemeanors and did community service.

I also took the police exam last year and I’m currently on the list to be called up. I could become a cop. I’m the son of a New York firefighter and I used to think that maybe if I joined the police I could be a force for good, say, if I found myself working with a psychopath like the guy that murdered George Floyd. But in the last month I’ve realized maybe that’s not possible. The way the system is now, the bad police can’t be restrained by the good ones. So now, I don’t think I could become a cop, even if I were called.

I’m an artist. One of those artists influenced by Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralists whose paintings are in the current Whitney show. I painted my mural and if it didn’t get in the Whitney it got on the Whitney, appreciated by those who walked by, interested to see what I thought about the protests and the police. Meanwhile, the Whitney exhibit is still closed, locked up, and no one can see those muralists, while those of us who are painting murals have had ours taken down. Our murals trashed; so were Rivera’s. We’re in good company.

 

 

 

 

 

The Border’s COVID-19 Pandemic: Crisis Upon Crisis

By: July 8, 2020
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Ciudad Juarez has a long history of crises – foreign invasions, revolutions, economic recessions tied to the United States, the 9-11 border constriction and transnational gangland wars. Then there’s the perpetual crisis of putting food on the table in a high-priced, low-wage city while staying safe in a place where violence can surge at any moment.

Heaped atop the struggles of daily life, the Mexican city of an estimated 1.5 million residents bordering El Paso, Texas, now grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Longtime Juarez resident and activist Paula Flores knows the dynamic too well. As part of the wave of rural migrants who gravitated to the NAFTA boomtown in the last years of the 20th century, Flores’ family scrambled to make a living and build a home.

Her daughter, 17-year-old factory worker Sagrario, disappeared one day in 1998. Sagrario was later found murdered. Today’s pandemic, though, has left its own unique and ugly stamp on the city, Flores said in an interview.

After COVID-19 struck, Flores and her family nervously navigated a 10-day municipal curfew and a two-person-per vehicle limit during which police were reputed to detain and “fine” violators. They watched the economy contract, endured hours-long lines at supermarkets and felt the sting of rising living costs.

“All the food is expensive,” Flores said. “The only thing that’s gone down is gasoline. But many people don’t have cars, so what good is it?”

Keeping the children appropriately occupied since public schools closed has been another emergency task. The on-line lessons delivered by the schools last only so long and don’t reach many people without ready access to the Internet, Flores said. “(Government) doesn’t do anything about this, to make sure there is something for the children to do besides school work.”

Flores insists she hasn’t met anyone who contracted COVID-19 and blames the pandemic-driven business shutdowns and social restrictions for “killing people” by exacerbating emotional depression and creating joblessness.

Rising Violence against Women

The Juarez news site Laverdadjuarez.com recently reported that Juarez and the state of Chihuahua ranked first in Mexico for the number of emergency calls related to violence against women logged from January to the end of April this year.

Citing statistics from Mexico’s National Public Security System, the news publication reported that 753.3 such calls were made per 100,000 women in Chihuahua–a rate far above the national average of 136.2 calls per 100,000 women.

In another report, the official Chihuahua Women’s Institute informed that its statewide service centers had conducted 4,233 consultations and received 575 emergency calls from March 23 to June 7. Of the consultations, 924 were new cases, a 17 percent increase from the same period in 2019, according to the Institute.

“We had been expecting this,” said Institute Director Emma Saldana. “One of the impacts of confinement for girls, adolescents and women is that, the more time they’re exposed to their aggressors, the violence increases…”

According to Flores, the COVID-19 crisis undermined the broader effort to reduce gender violence in the area by suddenly consigning it to the back burner. The issue topped national discourse earlier this year, exemplified by the women’s movement that surged in Mexico prior to the pandemic and staged nationwide protests Mar. 8 and a strike Mar. 9.

Juarez activists were in the streets before the March events, protesting the February murder of Isabel Cabanillas, a young Juarez artist and member of the feminist organization Hijas de su Maquiladora Madre. Cabanillas’ murder remains unsolved.

COVID-19 prevented Flores and her allies from repainting the pink crosses on Juarez streets that call attention to the femicides that have taken the lives of so many Juarez women over the decades. The annual event had served as a reminder of the lack of justice.

Other forms of violence have also gone up with pandemic. A decade ago, Juarez acquired the moniker “Murder City” for the daily slaughter that ensued in the conflict between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels over control of the drug trade. The intervention of federal police and the Mexican army ostensibly to restore order actually paralleled a rise in killings and violence.

The so-called hyperviolence coincided with the Great Recession, when tens of thousands of Juarez factory workers lost their jobs and a large segment of the population fled the city.

From 2012 to 2016 violence subsided, but did not go away. The economy revved back up, people returned and workers began demanding better employment conditions.

Violence began to escalate again in 2016-17, with recent killings linked to an arguably messier competition over control of illegal street drugs, especially methamphetamine, now waged by several underworld groups instead of just the former two dominant organizations.

Official numbers cited in the local press reported 703 homicides from January to the end of May, a rate comparable to the period of hyperviolence a decade ago. But observers pointed out that the number was really 712 since the authorities did not include nine persons killed by police. The latest murder numbers reposition Juarez as the number-two city in the country for homicides, only behind Tijuana, another Mexican border city engulfed in illegal drug market violence.

Criminal impunity is the constant in all manner of murders. The government ended p throwing one man in jail for Sagrario’s murder, but Flores has long maintained that others were involved. Nearly two years ago, she walked up to then-president elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) at a Juarez human rights forum and personally handed him information about Sagrario’s case. Flores said that no one from AMLO’s office ever contacted her to follow up.

A Hierarchy of Virus Victims

While violence revisits the streets of Juarez, the COVID-19 virus grinds away at the health and fabric of society in Juarez, in its sister city El Paso and other southern New Mexico cities. By mid-June, El Paso officially hit 100 deaths and almost 4,000 infections. Juarez, with approximately double the population of El Paso, reported slightly more than 1,800 infections and 388 deaths, according to a report in El Diario de Juarez based on state health department numbers.

Due to the testing shortfall and inadequate manner of tracking deaths, the Juarez numbers in particular are widely considered an undercount.

The disease has touched many Juarez families, including Mayor Armando Cabada, who tested positive for COVID-19. An early media narrative framed the pandemic as a health catastrophe that did not discriminate, but it soon became clear that segments of the population already at risk in “normal times”, including the poor, prisoners, the impoverished elderly, low income workers and migrants, were most vulnerable to a still incurable illness.

In 2018 and 2019, Juarez attracted thousands of people from Latin America and other parts of the world attempting to cross the border and seek U.S. political asylum. While waiting for their cases to be called up, many were forced to stay in Juarez by the Trump Administration’s Remain in Mexico policy, agreed to by AMLO’s administration

Asylum seekers, stranded in Juarez, crowded into hotels, apartments and privately or government-run migrant shelters. In May, El Diario reported that two workers and 12 Central and South American refugees had contracted the COVID-19 virus at the Leona Vicario Migrant Integration Center shelter operated by the Mexican federal government. Last December, the facility suffered a chickenpox outbreak that reportedly infected 180 people and led to weeks of quarantining. The center was built to house asylum seekers deported from the United States in large dormitory-style rooms.

Inaugurated in the summer of 2019, the new center was initially viewed by Mexican federal officials as a job recruitment center for the foreign-dominated maquiladora assembly plants and agricultural industries of northern Mexico, which had 50,000 open positions, according to the federal government.

“We are collaborating with the governments of Chihuahua and Ciudad Juarez and hope that many migrants collaborate in the economy of border cities,” Horacio Duarte, federal undersecretary of employment and labor productivity, was quoted in a press release.

In early April, New Mexico’s Congressional delegation sent a letter of concern to the acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency after at least one employee and one detainee at ICE’s Otero County Processing Center (OCPC) in nearby southern New Mexico had fallen ill from COVID-19. The OCPC, which detains migrants and asylum seekers, is operated for ICE by the for-profit, Utah-based company Management and Training Corporation.

In their letter, the elected representatives requested detailed information on how the federal agency was prepared to safeguard against the pandemic in the facility.

Prior to the pandemic, a 2018 report on the OCPC written for the Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee and Freedom for Immigrants documented over 200 complaints of unhealthy living conditions, abuse and exploitation, social isolation and mental anguish, and barriers to justice and legal access.

El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz and local immigrant advocacy organizations demanded that ICE release the inmates at OCPC and its other prisons to avert a health disaster. Despite the flurry of statements and demands, COVID-19 infections at the OCPC tracked by the New Mexico Department of Health soared from the original two cases to 146 as of June 21, according to the state government agency.

Disposable Workers

While migrants involuntarily languished in risky quarters on both sides of the Paso del Norte border, other “virus greenhouses,” in the words of Juarez labor advocate Elizabeth Flores, were sprouting in the maquiladoras that drive the border’s economy.

Between March and May, some but not all maquiladoras shut down, partly because of the closure of U.S. auto plants. Workers at scores of foreign-owned factories in Juarez and northern Mexico that were still up and running staged wildcat strikes demanding full stay-at-home pay, as encouraged by the Mexican federal government.

Arguing that their production met essential criteria, other corporations simply kept running their assembly lines. Word then began filtering out of sick and dead employees. Worker demands met with varied success, and conflicts mounted over the definitions of essential vs. non-essential business operations.

Intervening on the side of business, the Trump Administration, U.S. Congressional leaders and U.S. corporations with Mexican factories all wielded their clout to keep the factories rolling and producing for the NAFTA 2.0 economy.

As May progressed, mounting reports of dead and sick workers trickled out of Juarez and other Mexican border cities. Dr. Arturo Valenzuela, Chihuahua state health director for the northern zone, claimed that 25 maquiladora workers had perished from COVID-19. Labor advocates like attorney and activist Susana Prieto said the real number was upwards of 200 workers from factories in Juarez alone.

By June 1, most maquiladoras were reported back in operation, though at reduced capacity and with announced social distancing arrangements. As deaths continued to mount in the region, many factory workers were unconvinced that the plants were safe.

Maquiladora employees weren’t the only workers to speak out for their health and safety. In both Juarez and El Paso, health care workers staged protests demanding Personal Protective Equipment. Vital health workers made a public plea for face masks and gloves in the heart of a zone that unites Mexico, Canada and the U.S. in an economic bloc marketed as one of the world’s advanced industrial power houses.

Mexican seasonal farmworkers who live on both sides of the border in the Juarez-El Paso-Southern New Mexico borderlands have also taken a stand. Recruited to work the onion and chile fields of southern New Mexico, many are elderly, don’t collect Social Security despite years of working U.S. agriculture, and face difficult working conditions under extreme heat even during “normal times.”

Preexisting health problems like diabetes and hypertension expose the aging workers to much higher risks from COVID-19. Workers from El Paso and Juarez are crammed into vans that transport them to the adjacent New Mexico fields with no attempt at social distancing.

As the annual onion harvest loomed, veteran cross-border activist Carlos Marentes checked a couple of fields in southern New Mexico recently. He found that many had no bathrooms, water or hand-washing stations as mandated by New Mexico state law, an unsanitary omission in the best of times, but doubly deadly now.

Enforcement of the employment regulations was “very bad” before the crisis and has deteriorated into one of “total abandonment” on the part of authorities, Marentes said. Offices that receive complaints have been shuttered by the pandemic and, compounding the problem, some workers do not have Internet or phone access to contact officials and submit complaints, he said.

Like Juarez factories who questioned safety conditions as the pandemic spread, farmworkers were also told “if you don’t want to work, go home,” Marentes said.

The co-founder and longtime director of El Paso’s Border Agricultural Workers Center, Marentes said his agency closed the building at the outset of the pandemic to visitors while keeping it open as a shelter for farmworkers. For weeks, no known cases of COVID-19 appeared among the clients until one individual, a 76-year-old man known as Don Manuel, sickened in May, slipped into a “grave” condition and later died.

For Marentes, societal hypocrisy surrounds the lot of farmworkers who are exalted as heroic, essential workers while still exposed to potentially life-endangering risks. “The (farmworkers) aren’t so much essential as they are disposable,” the labor activist lamented.

Worker Health, Safety and Democracy on the Line

Especially for Mexican workers, the pandemic has presented a crucial test case for labor rights under the trinational successor accord to NAFTA, the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), set to go into effect on July 1.

Attorney Susana Prieto, who vociferously protested for the health and safety of maquiladora workers during the COVID-19 pandemic was arrested June 8 in Matamoros, Tamaulipas. The state government of conservative National Action Party Governor Francisco Cabeza de Vaca accused her of riot and other charges stemming from an incident at a state labor agency in March of this year. Prieto was transferred to the Tamaulipas capital Ciudad Victoria and imprisoned at the peak of the pandemic to await trial.

Although the state government maintains Prieto broke the law, supporters in Mexico and abroad assert the outspoken labor advocate’s arrest is a repressive act aimed at squashing independent worker movements. In early 2019, Prieto led the 20/32 wildcat strikes in Matamoros maquiladoras that resulted in some wage gains and the formation of a new union, the Sindicato Nacional Independiente de Trabajadores de Industrias y Servicios (SNITIS). The SNITIS emerged as an alternative to government and company-friendly unions.

The timing of Prieto’s arrest has fueled suspicions of political persecution. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread, the El Paso-Juarez based lawyer emerged as a leader of groups of maquiladora workers demanding the immediate closure of plants across the border region and full wage and benefit compensation for workers while they remained at home.

Her detention occurred only weeks before the activation of the USMCA, an economic accord proponents claim improves labor rights and the ability of Mexican workers to organize. The pact is seen by both Washington and Mexico City as essential in giving renewed impetus to an integrated North American economy.

In his June 12 morning press conference, the Mexican president disassociated his administration from the arrest, calling it a “local matter” of the Tamaulipas state government. He nonetheless pledged that federal officials, including the National Human Rights Commission, would review the case and lend their good offices to “conciliation.” AMLO denied that pressure from the United States government played a part in Prieto’s jailing, but skirted a question about the possible involvement of U.S. corporations.

Prieto’s jailing rapidly surpassed the confines of a localized legal dispute, synthesizing issues of worker health and safety, human rights, economic sovereignty and labor democracy. The case is now seen by many as a test for Mexican labor rights and the Mexican federal government’s obligations under the USMCA.

In a statement supporting Prieto’s immediate and unconditional release, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the lawyer-activist’s arrest on “trumped up charges of ‘inciting riots’”, an “outrage.”

The U.S. labor leader said “Prieto is a fierce advocate whose tireless advocacy on behalf of workers in Mexico’s maquiladoras has made her a thorn in the side of powerful companies and corrupt officials”. He concluded, “As we approach entry into enforcement of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Mexico must live up to its commitments to respect fundamental workers’ rights.”

In Mexico, scores of labor, left and popular organizations demanded Prieto’s freedom, as did prominent Mexican academics, writers and actors. Supporters in El Paso and across the globe also rallied on Prieto’s behalf. Even as international pressure mounted on the Mexican government, the labor health and safety issues that Prieto raised so forcefully shortly before her jailing remained unresolved. On June 22, hundreds of workers at the Erika medical equipment manufacturing maquiladora in the border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, staged a work stoppage and demanded sanitation of their work areas. The action came after COVID-19 infections and deaths were reported at the factory.

Prieto’s daughter, Maria Fernanda, posted on Facebook that the continued detention of her “warrior” mom would allow the governor of Tamaulipas and businessmen to proceed with “robbing, intimidating and abusing all those who don’t know their rights, specifically the right to struggle and to demand a dignified life.”

This article originally appeared on the page of the America Program.

Resources:

Report on Otero County Processing Center (English):

https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/report-on-otero

Susana Prieto Case (Spanish):

https://www.facebook.com/Lic-Susana-Prieto-Terrazas-308683619477612/?ref=py_c

SNITIS Union (Spanish, English)

https://www.facebook.com/SNITISM2032/

A Green Recovery and the Fight Ahead to Avoid a Return to Business-as-Usual 

By: July 7, 2020
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Even before healthcare systems, mainly in Europe and Asia, finally had a chance to breathe, we saw the emphasis of the pandemic response shift from health to economics. Post-COVID-19 recovery scenarios are now a matter of debate as long-term economic pain is likely to remain, unless stronger recovery plans are set on the table.

Neoliberal elites, financiers, corporate leaders and their lobbyists, are on the offensive to take control of the recovery ahead. The same elites that meet every year at Davos to continue pushing for the well-known recipe of deregulation, free trade and free capital movement and who want the decarbonization of the economy to be done at a snail pace, if at all, are back at it again. Their initial fear of higher taxes, in order to pay for the fiscal stimuli undertaken by governments across the world has however vanished as they see an opportunity to hijack the recovery that any future stimulus is meant to accomplish. They are, one must not forget, the same think tanks, politicians and business leaders who have successfully persuaded people that good governments are those that are limited in their responsibilities and starved of revenues. They now realize that hijacking the economic recovery is not only possible, but ideal, because it can come with the added benefit of ditching the emission targets set in the Paris Accords.

Yet, making sure that those targets remain can make the difference between recovery and dystopia. Keeping those targets in place can be the fastest way to end and revert the neoliberal route of the past four decades as well as to shift power back to governments. The leading role that governments take now against the current crisis, as well as in the achievement of the Paris Accords, is a steppingstone in dispelling the ideological core behind ineffective governing.

We know that greenhouse gas emissions must fall to net zero by mid-century to meet the goals of the Paris Accords. The Atlantic Council has already warned that the pandemic will weaken global investments in clean energy and, as result, the broader efforts to reduce emissions. European Union leaders have already come under pressure to abandon the block’s Green Deal initiative, to focus on shoring up airlines and in the US oil and gas companies. This scenario would send us down a path of greater emissions over the medium and long-term. The next three years will determine whether the decade will be lost and whether the 1.5°C target, set for the turn of the century, has any chance of being met.

The economic panic that has accompanied the pandemic, with hundreds of millions of jobs lost worldwide, has given corporate elites and alt-right movements a unique chance to leave their differences behind and work together to ensnare the economic recovery. Nationalism and nativism are common tropes of the alt-right which have, in the past, clashed with the globalizing mindset of the Davos’ elites and have kept the two groups at odds with each other. Today, however, they both see in active governments and the renewed interest in international cooperation a common enemy. Both groups detest the idea of fiscal stimuli strengthening investments in renewable energy and of governments having an active role in directing that investment. A prompt return to business as usual, either side has concluded, is their shared political objective.

We’ve already seen a return to business as usual become the rallying call of the alt-right’s denunciation of lockdowns as seemingly motivated by environmentalist forces. Such presentation of social conflict as an essential battle between traditional cultural values and progressive liberal values is certainly not new, but rather the continuation of the culture wars that have defined American politics for the past half a century. Yet, beyond that, what the rest of us must recognize is the stark choice we face. The business as usual response to the COVID-19 crisis presents a real risk of using the recovery to hurl us towards a truly dystopian form of inequality and asymmetry of power. At the same time the crisis, and this is what the elites and the alt-right fear, also presents a unique opportunity to use the recovery for setting a tangible path towards decarbonization and the demise of neoliberal capitalism.

One of the lessons of Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics was that unlike classical liberalism, Neoliberalism understands that creating a free-market society required both the transformation of physical markets, as well as the reconstruction of moral and cultural values that would be antithetical to its project. From think tanks to political movements Neoliberalism has been very successful in deploying a multilayered strategy to advance its interests, understood as the combination of Austro-libertarian economics, popular culture and technocracy.

The constant stream of Austro-libertarian economics channeled through think tanks and academic institutions, what Mirowski calls a thought collective, has granted authority to its ideology, but most importantly has created an revolving door between such think tanks and policy makers. The use of popular culture to present consumerism as essential to individual fulfillment lies at the core of the experience of capitalism of so called Millennials. Next to this, one of the consequences of consumer culture has been the reduction of citizens to consumers which, in turn, alienates citizens from political debate. Technocratic government has been Neoliberalism’s response to this separation of civic duty from politics, making up the third element of its layered deployment. Ganesh Sitaraman in The New Republic defines it as “an ideology that holds that the problems in the world are technical problems that require technical solutions”. The consequence of technocracy is the adoption of a mode of governance that presents itself as free of politics and the disappearance of political debate as a positive outcome; consumers can give up their duty as citizens by handing over government to an enlightened circle of supposedly benevolent and apolitical bureaucrats.

Neoliberalism’s approach to the present crisis is no different in this respect: it still uses those three elements to take control of the crisis and steer the policy response. What has changed is its alliance with alt-right movements and the inclusion of their tactics to form a consolidated front. In our current context, where a global economic depression is still a very likely scenario without strong government intervention, neoliberals and the alt-right will attempt to hijack the recovery, while burying the emission targets of the Paris Accords, by paying little more than lip service to those commitments. I will argue there are 3 phases to the strategies they are already deploying to achieve this: 1) Shifting gears on the assault on environmental science, 2) persuading the middle-class that green investments are inadequate amidst an economic depression and 3) presenting a return to business as usual as the only desirable form of recovery.

  1. Shifting gears on the assault on environmental science and the climate movement

Typical disinformation campaigns against climate science have been losing steam, pushing the right towards a change in tactics. They have moved from a typical defense of culture and tradition towards the adoption of postmodern rhetorical analysis and deconstruction as a way to sow doubt about the objective nature of climate science.

Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies argued that the new right or alt-right has coopted some of the transgressive tactics used by postmodern forms of critique against institutionalized authority. While in the past transgression has been associated with the left, with figures like Bataille or Debord, this same strategy is becoming appropriated by the alt-right today. Nagle argues that although seemingly successful in challenging moralism in the past, transgression was always a bargain with the devil. It was always a double edge sword, because making the case against economic inequality, among other forms of inequality, has always been essentially a moral stance. Today, she claims the alt-right has realized that it can use the same tools to excuse and present skepticism of science as transgressive and scientific production as ideologically motivated. In short, she argues the rise of people like Milo, Molyneux, McInnes and the alt- right is not a return of conservatism, but the “absolute hegemony of the culture of non- conformism, self- expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake– an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id”. Nagle has recently been highly criticized, and rightly so, in my view, for her anti-immigration stance. Notwithstanding, her understanding of alt-right tactics remains valid and her latest misstep should probably not be seen as a rapprochement with right-wing politics.

It is not difficult to find alt-right figures today fully embracing rhetoric and intertextuality as valid forms criticisms against climate science. In perfect postmodern guise they create a long prose focused on the terms and the language used to describe climate phenomena rather than on the actual science. For example, instead of challenging the methodology or conclusions from climate science they point out the supposed alarmism of terms like “climate emergency” and conclude, for instance, that an IPCC report uses language that is entirely subject to interpretation, while obscuring authoritarian motivations behind a thick curtain. In other words, their strategy is to sow doubt on the integrity of scientists rather than on the validity of their claims.

Self-described Marxist Libertarian and columnist to a variety of alt-right and conservative publications, Brandan O’Neill, states, along these lines, that there is something profoundly ugly in this headline from the Guardian: “Covid-19 is nature’s wake-up call to our complacent civilization”. It is ugly and violent, he continues, because its ultimate message is to somehow suggest that “disgusting mankind” needs to be punished.

Claims of misanthropy and symbolic violence have by now become almost tropes of the alt-right’s critique of climate science. In a separate article O’Neill uses the same logic to claim that what we must learn from the pandemic is that a world under lockdown, where most activities are restricted, is precisely the type of world that environmental activists dream of. He argues, “The truth is that if the Covid-19 crisis has shown us anything, it is how awful it would be to live in the kind of world greens dream about. Right now, courtesy of a horrible new virus, our societies look not dissimilar to the kind of societies Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, green parties and others have long been agitating for”.

Ultimately, O’Neill wants us to believe, that Monbiot, the Guardian and environmentalists are nothing more than Misanthropes in disguise: “It’s ideology masquerading as science, or rather using science as a cover for its seemingly unspeakable black heart; which is misanthropy, a feeling of disgust for modern human society and its psychologically immature inhabitants.”.

There is no longer even the slightest interest in actually criticizing the science. Instead, all efforts are redirected into what the alt-right has realized is probably a more effective way of breeding unfounded skepticism. It is an approach that allows them to be highly hyperbolic, going as far so as to state that organizations like the IPCC are nothing but a secular version of Iran’s Guardian Council.

It can be difficult to take such arguments seriously, but we must take them seriously, because whether it is about protesting the use of masks during Covid-19, the supposedly totalitarian nature of a modest program like Obamacare or the dismissal of Black Lives Matters as a movement funded by George Soros and the elites, this brew of transgressive counter culture, in the name of freedom, is highly effective at keeping their bases rallied. It is the effectiveness of such type of ad hominem criticism that allows them to claim, without raising any eyebrows, that the problem with the idea of a climate-crisis is that weather data does not support it.

They know that when a form of transgression, which reduces freedom to nonconformity and skepticism, becomes a political goal, actual political discourse goes out the window. They know too that by using this form of transgression that portrays all collective endeavors as essentially authoritarian and oppressive, then this opens the door towards opposing any economic recovery guided by collective concerns. In practice this means supporting even greater deregulation, opposing fiscal stimulus and policy coordination across borders. These practical implications are precisely what makes the alt-right a great ally of Neoliberalism.

  1. Persuading the middle-class that green investments are inadequate amidst a depression

Neoliberal elites realize, given the magnitude of the recession we face, that pushing for austerity could spell disaster. It would certainly generate immense political backlash but, most pressingly, austerity could throw the global economy into a lost decade, as was the case for much of the EU after the 2008 crisis. It is for this reason that this time around they see fiscal stimulus as inevitable and their goal is to capture it and shape it, rather than try to avoid it.

One of the ways in which they are already mobilizing to do this is through their network of thinktanks like the CATO institute, Americans for Prosperity and The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). These think tanks use technocratic recipes and their seemingly scientific tone to erode support for the environmental movement. Their strategy is not to deny global warming, but to argue that the left is not serious about climate change. To accomplish this they argue, for instance, that if environmental movements are not open to nuclear energy or carbon capture it must be because they are more worried about political posturing than about climate change.

This accusation of insincerity is used, in particular, when creating a message for those in the political center. Those who, in the past, have been most susceptible to the façade of impartiality and presumed benevolence of technocratic jargon. A perfect example is Carbon Taxation, which even the Washington Post has in the past called a bipartisan solution to achieve a reduction of emissions. While it is true that carbon taxes are a commonsense first step to emission reduction, it is absolutely disingenuous, as the WaPo suggests, to say that it is a solution embraced by the right. Even its support by the center-right is doubtful as the fight for initiative 732 in Washington State has clearly shown. Yet more dishonest, however, is to see how these same thinktanks (CATO and GWFP) criticize environmental movements for supposedly not being open to carbon taxation, while also opposing recently passed carbon taxes in Canada.

Deploying technocratic arguments may be little more than a rhetorical tool meant to persuade those who believe in benevolent technocracies. It is, nonetheless, anything but harmless. It is still being used to effectively sow doubts on the sincerity of environmental movements and on the effectiveness of initiatives like the Green New Deal (GND). Take for instance the inflated assertion that the GND would cost almost 7 trillion a year (over 30% of the US economy), which is presented as an impartial technocratic concern, but is clearly intended to scare those who tend to carry the largest burden of taxation; namely the middle-classes.

This very same technocratic clout is already being used by Neoliberal thinktanks to argue that green investments are an inadequate tool to spark the type of economic recovery that is needed to overcome the pandemic recession. They claim that allocating future stimulus money to renewable energies is inadequate for the task of kickstarting the economy, because they are low productivity investments. They are investments that have a long-term return, rather than the short-term boost that is needed today. In other words, you have the same people that criticize Keynesian economic policies for being short-sighted, turning around and dismissing initiatives like the GND, because — as Keynes once put it — in the long run, we are all dead.

  1. Presenting a return to business as usual as the only desirable form of recovery

In the best-case scenario, Neoliberal elites would appear to concede that climate change is real, and it would be a good idea to prevent it. I say they only appear to do so, because they also argue that in order to kick-start the economy, we need cheap energy sources, namely coal, oil and gas. Turning away from these resources at these times, they continue, would risk prolonging the recession. This is of course a terrifying prospect for people who are already jobless, indebted or both. As the story goes, if we want to get the economy back up and running, we need to return to business as usual ASAP and double down on it, while we are at it. To do this, they claim after having received unprecedented bailouts, market forces need to be set free, entirely doing away with regulations. Deregulation has been the trojan horse of Neoliberalism since its inception, so it’s not surprising to see it entering the debate today. More worrying, however, is to see that their efforts have already succeeded in the US, where previously banned land has been open for fossil fuel drilling in Alaska and pollution standards have been watered down, next to an array of additional policies intended to increase fossil fuel production as well as mining and logging.

But deregulation alone will not do the trick. Using the horrific impact on healthcare providers to get their point across though seems to be now their preferred choice. They want us to willingly accept that we can either strengthen the economy and prepare for the next pandemic or keep the emission targets, but we cannot do both.

Rupert Darwall, senior fellow at the Real Clear Foundation and author of “Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex” recently stated that “resilience against the next pandemic is only possible if we put a hold on emission targets.” He argues that, if we take Singapore and South Korea as successful examples of how to best manage a pandemic, then we should consider that their responses were successful because they could afford to get prepared. It sounds obvious, yet this argument is a bizarre case of conflating causation with correlation. Darwall states that both countries have built very strong economies, whose strength is primarily measured apparently, by the ballooning size of its carbon emissions in the past thirty years. He claims, the only way in which a country can prepare itself for the next pandemic is by building equally carbon-intensive economies. The absurd conclusion he arrives at is that in order to prepare for the next pandemic a country must not just allow, but also encourage soaring greenhouse emissions. The higher its greenhouse gases the stronger its economy. Fool-proof logic. Even if one wanted his argument to hold, it is very much out in the open that the richest and very carbon-intensive US economy was grossly unprepared for the pandemic. Its soaring emissions in the past decades did absolutely nothing to create resilience against it.

Yet, there is not only stupidity behind a claim like this. There is the persistence of an ideology that dictates that economic growth is the unquestionable goal of modern societies, that such growth can only be achieved in the same way that it was achieved in the past century and, most absurdly, that the effects of climate change will not have a negative impact on future economic growth.

Peddling the need to return to business as usual, against all common sense, is becoming so transparent that even in the advertising industry a creative writer claimed, in an article that went viral, that “What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again.” He’s right, except this is not only true in America.

The path to progress is not closed and we must make our stand

Under the demands of social distancing, teenage activist Greta Thunberg shifted her growing climate movement online, where it has, to a great extent, dropped out of public sight. The UN ended up deciding to cancel this year’s COP meeting. Both things have certainly decreased the visibility that climate change has across mainstream media today.

On the policy front, Brussels has been feeling upward pressure to delay and even freeze green regulation. Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš has been a loud voice in this respect, telling reporters that the EU should scrap its €1 trillion plan to achieve a net-zero economy by 2050. His and other loud voices seem to be jointly shouting the same message: Europe should forget about its Green Deal and focus on the pandemic recovery.

Under such pressure and given the enormous imbalance of power it would seem that the cause is lost and all we can do is brace for the consequences. This is not an option.

There are glimmers of hope that should help us gather strength and refocus some of our attention. In the US support for the GND has increased and jobs and economic growth have become the main reasons behind such support, signaling it is not simply a key issue for environmentalists. The EU recently announced its interest in producing 1 million tons of clean hydrogen. Hydrogen is a source of energy with enormous application potential particularly in vehicles and the byproduct of its exploitation is uniquely clean: drinking water. Producing hydrogen is today possible, but it hasn’t been a carbon friendly alternative, because it is done through the gasification of coal or the reformation of methane. It is precisely the switch of this production towards water electrolysis what could truly make it a green alternative. Shifting gears to ensure that big electrolyzers, currently in short supply. and more plentiful supplies of renewable electricity become available through this initiative could be a steppingstone in the right direction.

Along these lines, the currently under discussion EU stimulus plan, set to be the block’s pandemic rescue plan, has been built around its Green Deal and its aim is to make the union carbon neutral by 2050.

Such policies, while imperfect, can be conducive to more decarbonization initiatives becoming viable, as well as helping us do away with the myth of government intervention being inherently bad, as mentioned earlier. Beyond that, being able to use green investments to directly tackle unemployment and precarious employment conditions (gig economy) will help us erode the support that far-right parties have amassed among the working poor. Without such support the uneasy alliance between the alt-right and Neoliberalism is unlikely to last

Opposition from the alt-right to the GND in the US was expected. In Europe coal producers like Poland on one side, as well as from the infamous frugal four on the other, are putting the spoke on the wheel. Yet the momentum is there and pressure by climate movements, as well as from green parties within the block, could make a difference.

The Green Block with ten percent of the European Parliament has already important leverage and the political gains by green parties in France, Germany and the Netherlands make them a force to reckon. As lockdowns ease, we must restart our efforts turn up the volume. We must restart our presence on the streets, solidifying movements like Extinction Rebellion, and we must not allow the Neoliberal elites and their alt-right allies to coopt the conversation around the economic recovery. We must keep in mind that their tactics are predictable, but ours are not. If there was ever a time to mobilize social discontent, it is now.

 

 

On the Attack on Robert Cuffy at the Mass March to Defund the NYPD

By: July 6, 2020
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Statement of Solidarity, 
Call for Information Accountability and Action 

Foley Square, New York, NY, 8:55 pm –

While leading Monday June 29th’s  Mass March to Defund the NYPD & Abolish the Police from Washington Square to Foley Square, Robert Cuffy was filming the march when he was blindsided and tackled by an unidentified man who then slammed Robert into another car, dislocating his shoulder. Prior to this moment Robert was straining his voice by calling out to marchers “We’re going to City Hall!” but he was not able to continue due to the severity of his injuries.

Police nearby observed the assault, and joked with the attacker before walking him to the Foley Square subway station, where they released the attacker without charges. The NYPD didn’t even document the attacker’s identifying information.

Robert is a well-known revolutionary socialist in NYC, and an effective organizer for Black Liberation. He is a member of the DSA Afrosocialist Caucus, a leader of the NYC Fight for Our Lives Coalition (which is part of People’s Strike, a National coalition organized by Cooperation Jackson), and a founder of the Socialist Workers Alliance of Guyana. He is also a leader of the DSA Labor Branch. This made him a target.

Robert was put into an ambulance, and was told that he would be taken to New York Presbyterian. Instead, he was driven a few blocks away where Robert waited over an hour inside the ambulance, which did not budge from its location at Spruce and Nassau Streets. Fearing for his own safety, Robert texted marchers to gather at the intersection for support and to enforce transparency. Robert was provided no pain control for his injury. This punitive and callous treatment of Black patients, especially of movement fighters, is all too common.

Robert had every reason to be afraid that medical neglect or overt violence at the hands of police could be life-threatening; from Ferguson to Baltimore to here in New York, incidents like this have ended with the deaths of far too many Black Liberation activists and of other working class people of color. Even when treatment is provided, individual EMTs who are aligned with police will often take activists and other Black patients past the closest hospitals, going out of their way to drop them off at the most overcrowded, underfunded, and dangerous facilities, as a particularly isolating and potentially lethal form of racist abuse and punishment. Robert was lucky to have a caring EMT named Nancy who kept him safe and even got Robert a blanket upon his request after arriving at the hospital

On the short ride to the hospital, his fear, horrifyingly, began to come true; he had been left without a seatbelt and was nearly subjected to a “rough ride” of the kind that notoriously ended the life of Freddie Gray in the back of an ambulance in 2015. Without the use of his arm, Robert (just as Gray, handcuffed) wouldn’t be able to physically protect himself from being slammed into hard, sharp metal surfaces inside the vehicle.

By responding quickly and collectively, activists can protect ourselves and each other from this treatment by disrupting that isolation. When dozens of  supporters mobilized and gathered outside the ambulance, the police were forced to take a statement from Robert, rather than ignore the attack, or worse—spuriously charge Robert, potentially making good on the continued threats spewed by his attacker immediately after the assault. That collective support gave force to Robert’s demand that his seatbelt be buckled.

Too often, and for too long, Black victims of violence have been routinely subjected to exactly this sort of revictimization by cops and vigilantes, even in death. It is impossible to forget that Trayvon Martin was branded a “thug” by his killer, or that Mike Brown, described there as “no angel,” was blamed for his own murder in the press.

The ambulance eventually transported him around the block to the hospital where his partner, mother, and other comrades were waiting for him. NYC Fight For Our Lives Coalition, Peoples Strike, and the DSA are SEEKING FOOTAGE AND DOCUMENTATION of the attack, the attacker, the license plate of his car, cars parked in that location, the ambulance, and its driver/EMT, as well as badge numbers and identification of the police involved. Any information, including witness statements, may be useful. 

The attack on Robert Cuffy was not an isolated incident. Police and far-right vigilantes are threatening coordinated attacks on protestors, particularly as the calendar nears July 4. As the #GeorgeFloyd Uprising continues to flourish, and as protests and rallies nationwide call to defund, dismantle, and disarm police, law enforcement and their backers have been stoking the fascist fire, encouraging lone-wolf attacks to terrorize supporters of the fight against police brutality.

This is a reminder that the movement will need to increase security measures and step up our game. We have to collectively prevent further attacks and protect ourselves as the movement grows, continues to win reforms, and pick up steam. Go out into the streets with your friends and comrades, use the buddy system, and coordinate security to protect the movement’s leaders as we continue this rebellion. Remember that we are all leaders in the fight to get free.

We call on the NYPD to identify and to immediately fire and hold accountable the officers who not only ignored this attack, but aided the attacker. 

If you have any relevant information, or to connect with and support the work that Robert has dedicated himself to, contact NYC Fight For Our Lives Coalition at: 

Phone: (347) 433-8652

Email: GeneralStrikeNYC2020@gmail.com

Twitter: @fight_nyc

Instagram: @fightforourlivesnyc

Hashtags: 

#FireAndThunder
#DefundNYPD
#DefundDisbandDisarm
#AbolishNYPD
#WeKeepUsSafe
#FireFranciscoGarcia
#ChargeVincentD’Andraia
#WeCantBreathe
#NoWorkNoRent
#BlackLivesMatter
#BlackLiberation
#BlackPower
#FightForOurLives
#PeoplesStrike
#GeneralStrike
#FreeThemAll
#StrikeForOurLives

Organization Endorsers in Solidarity:

NYC Fight For Our Lives Coalition

Peoples Strike 

DSA Afrosocialist Caucus 

Socialist Workers Alliance of Guyana

Cooperation Jackson 

Red Bloom Communist Collective

Amazonians United NYC

Spectre 

Emerge Caucus, DSA

DSA Racial Justice Working Group 

CounterPower /ContraPoder

Unity & Struggle 

May First Movement Technology 

Marxist Center 

Red Union 

Revolutionary Socialist Network 

Rank and File Action (PSC CUNY)

Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE )

Mid-Hudson Valley DSA 

Left Voice 

Cooperation Northfield

Denver Communists

SVPRESS

New Politics

Venezuelan Workers Solidarity

Solidarity Winnipeg

Queens Club, Communist Party of NY

Black Internationalist Unions (BIUs)

Syria Solidarity New York City

PoliFem

Working Class Heroes Collective

Global Prison Abolitionist Coalition

The Local Fightback Coalition

Solidarity, A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Organization

League for the Revolutionary Party

Resistance Studies Initiative

Socialist Resurgence

The Abolition Collective

Peace in Kurdistan Campaign

Resistance Studies Initiative

Jews for Palestinian Right of Return

Revive the Peace Movement (RPM)

Locust Review

Social Service Workers Uprising Now

Denver Communists

Communist Party of New York

Twin Cities DSA

Resistance in Brooklyn

The Abolition Collective

NYU Law Prison Reform and Education Project

Macalester College Young Democratic Socialists

SENS-UAW

Sixth Street Community Center

Worker’s Voice / La voz de l@s Trabajadores

To sign, and to see a full and updated list of signatories, click below.

 

 

 

Mexican President AMLO to Visit Trump, both Hope for a Boost Amid Crises

By: July 5, 2020
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This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France. 

Failing at home, Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) will visit U.S. President Donald Trump this week to celebrate the new North American trade pact. Each hopes to get a political boost from the visit. That seems unlikely, especially for AMLO. Most Mexicans and Mexican Americans loathe Trump who has called them “rapists and murderers” and wanted Mexico to pay for a wall to keep them out of the United States. Yet AMLO acts as accomplice to Trump’s anti-immigration policies.

Mexico today has over a quarter of a million COVID cases and has lost 30,000 lives, half of these in Mexico City. Like the United States, Mexico failed to take adequate measure to deal with the virus because its president didn’t take the virus seriously. In March he told the Mexican people not to be afraid of the virus. “Live life as usual,” he said. “If you’re able and have the means to do so, continue taking your family out to eat … because that strengthens the economy.” Cases appear to be peaking, but Mexico is not doing a great deal of testing and hundreds and possibly thousands of deaths from COVID-19 have gone unreported.

While the government’s policies have been ineffective, there was a shutdown between March and June and more than 12 million workers lost their jobs. The International Monetary Fund predicts that Mexico’s economy will shrink by ten percent this year, the biggest decline since the 1930s. Mexico’s stimulus program is quite weak, offering no support to large, medium, or small businesses and providing loans only to micro-businesses or the self-employed. AMLO’s programs have done little to staunch the economic bleeding.

Gang violence also remains out of control. On Wednesday, July 1, gangsters from a drug cartel stormed a drug rehabilitation center in Irapuato, killing 26 people. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón unleashed the government’s war on drugs in 2006, some 250,000 people have been killed and another 60,000 have disappeared, most of whom can be presumed to be dead. Such killings continue at the rate of about 3,000 per month. AMLO had originally talked about dealing with crime through social programs, but then decided to create a new militarized police force called the National Guard. Cooperating with Trump, AMLO has used the Guard to keep Central Americans and others from entering Mexico en route to the United States. During AMLO’s presidency the killings have not stopped.

Among the many murders in Mexico are the femicides, the murders of women. Mexico recorded 1,000 last year, only the latest among thousands of others over the last thirty years in states throughout Mexico. In February Mexicans were horrified to learn to learn of the brutal murders of two more. Twenty-five-year-old Ingrid Escamilla was knifed, skinned and disemboweled, and seven-year old Fátima Cecilia Aldrighett was kidnapped from her school, her body later found in a plastic bag. Women took up the issue of femicide on March 8, International Women’s Day. Yet April proved to be the deadliest month in the last five years with a record 267 women killed. AMLO has not seemed concerned with the issue of violence against women, which goes on unabated.

Mexicans are protesting all of these conditions. Health workers have protested in several states, demanding an increase in the government health budget. Doctors are threatening a national protest for August 1. The Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB), active both in Mexico and the United States, is organizing protests against AMLO’s visit to Trump. Often described as a leftist, AMLO, two years into a six-year term, has failed to defend the Mexican people against disease, unemployment, or crime. And he fawningly deferred to Trump on the immigration issue. Not surprising then today 58 percent of the people don’t support him. The Mexican left criticizes AMLO’s austerity policies and calls for taxing the rich to pay for the crisis.

 

The Movement for Black Lives Is Different This Time

By: July 4, 2020
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Daniel Del Toro

[This article is forthcoming in the Summer 2020 issue of New Politics.]

Late May and early June saw the biggest wave of mass rebellion in the United States since the 1960s. Protests erupted in every major city and in all fifty states, demanding an end to racist police brutality. The character of these uprisings has been less like protests and more like rebellions, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets, blocking highways, and burning and destroying police cars along with other symbols of economic and racial oppression. At the time of writing, in New York City alone 47 police cars have been damaged or burned.1 More than 11,000 people have been arrested across the country.2 And, in Washington DC, protests outside the White House temporarily forced Trump to flee to his bunker—allegedly to “inspect” it and not in abject fear of the riots.3

Meanwhile, the police, who already function as an occupying force in poor and Black neighborhoods, have responded as if they are at war, spraying tear gas and launching rubber bullets, even when confronted by peaceful protesters. In Dallas, a protester lost his eye after being hit by a “nonlethal” police projectile, as did a journalist in Minneapolis who was hit by a “foam” bullet and another one in Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was struck by a tear gas canister.4 In Louisville, police killed 53-year-old protester David McAtee, leading to the firing of the city’s chief of police.5 In Brooklyn, corrections officers at the Metropolitan Detention Center killed Jamel Floyd, who died after officers pepper-sprayed him in his cell.6 Cops regularly kill Black people with impunity even when there is no social unrest. There is little reason to believe they will stop unless we make them.

Police killings of Black people are the sharp edge of American racism. They are the starkest testament to how little Black life matters in a society that devalues Black people in every other arena. Thus, the immediate cause of this rebellion is the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. The viral video of Floyd’s death depicts an officer kneeling on his neck for nine minutes while Floyd repeatedly gasps, “I can’t breathe.” It is lost on no one that these are the same words Eric Garner uttered six years ago as a New York police officer choked him to death. Nothing has changed significantly in those six years to stop police from killing Black people, who are more likely to be viewed as a threat, even when unarmed.

In many ways, this rebellion feels like a repeat of 2014, during which nationwide protests were organized in response to the police murder of Michael Brown and the subsequent rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri. Then as now, a succession of similar deaths at the hands of police made it devastatingly clear that Black people acting in entirely ordinary ways are, nevertheless, treated as uniquely criminal and dangerous: Ahmaud Aubrey was followed and lynched by racist vigilantes while out jogging;7 Breonna Taylor was killed while sleeping in her apartment.8 George Floyd was killed for having allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill, a crime of poverty at a time when tens of millions have lost their jobs due to the pandemic and food lines around the country stretch for blocks.9 Meanwhile, Black people have been brutalized for violating social distancing orders and are more likely to face fines and arrest than their white counterparts.10 Pandemic aside, one could easily dust off a protest sign from six years ago without anyone batting an eye. It is damningly obvious that while large sectors of society were put on pause due to the health crisis, everyday racism was not.

Yet, these protests are not just about police brutality. They are also a reaction to the utter failure of state governments and the Trump administration to respond to the horrific death toll and economic devastation caused by the pandemic. There is now a bipartisan push to reopen the economy, even as deaths due to COVID-19 continue to rise in a third of U.S. states.11 Virtually every medical expert has made clear that if we rush to reopen, many more people will die, and the ruling class has decided that this is a price they are willing to pay.

That price is not being felt equally. There is ample evidence that the pandemic is disproportionately impacting Black communities around the country, with one study finding that Black people are dying from COVID-19 at a rate nearly three times higher than whites.12 This is no coincidence. The United States’ historic and ongoing forms of anti-Black racism ensure that Black people are concentrated in low-wage jobs, are less able to work from home, and are denied access to adequate health care.13 And on top of all this, racist police brutality has continued unabated. Black people cannot catch a break, not even at a moment when the whole country should be focused on how to protect our collective well-being and safety. This is nothing new.

What is new is that today’s protests have been more militant and have spread more rapidly than those that occurred at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, and they are occurring in defiance of curfews and stay-in-place orders imposed by mayors and governors. Today’s protests appear to be more multiracial, although most are decisively being led by young Black people and not by any existing organizations. What’s more, police repression has failed to dampen the turnout or win public sympathy. Instead, the protests are widely seen as justified, with one Reuters poll showing 64 percent of Americans support them.14 If the previous upsurge of anti-racist struggle helped expose the systemic racism of policing and the criminal “justice” system, then today’s protests are delegitimizing the economic and political actors who enable and abet those systems. After all, when the government responds this quickly to quell mass protest but cannot find the will or resources to fight a mass pandemic, it is clear that our health and safety are not its priority.

As with other aspects of the pandemic, demands that were once confined to small pockets of anti-racist activists and the radical left are suddenly on the table. The call to #defundthepolice has become a central demand of the protests, as many draw the connection between bloated police budgets and the drive to cut back resources for health care, education, and adequate housing. There is a greater willingness to question the notion that armed agents of the state are the best response to a wide range of social problems, from mental illness to poverty and crime, or that police are necessary to keep us safe.15 In a move that would have seemed inconceivable two weeks earlier, on June 2 the Minneapolis Public School Board voted unanimously to terminate its contract with the city’s police department.16 Portland, Oregon, followed.17 On June 7 the Minneapolis City Council vowed to disband the police force entirely.18 We are not in a revolutionary situation in the United States, and we are far from a point where demands to abolish the police altogether are commonplace. But perhaps we’re not as far as one might think. None of this would have happened without the rebellion.

Some on the left have argued that the political radicalization of the last few years is primarily attributable to the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders.19 This same cohort tends to downplay the role of social movements in shifting consciousness, locating the main expression of this radicalization in Sanders’ campaign as a socialist and the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America. But this latest wave of anti-racist protest suggests that the radicalization goes much deeper than either the Sanders campaign or the DSA alone. If anything, the immediate, national response and the composition of these protests point to the significance of the Black Lives Matter movement in changing consciousness about the role of the police and the need for transformative, radical change. One sign of this growing consciousness is that 74 percent of Americans view Floyd’s death as an issue of racial injustice—a 30-point increase over how Americans responded following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.20 Today, militant protests against police brutality have fundamentally changed the terrain of struggle and revived mass action as the way to win social change. The speed with which prosecutors charged all four officers involved in George Floyd’s murder, as compared to the months it took before Ahmed Aubrey’s killers were even arrested,21 can be attributed to this fact: Minneapolis fought back.

That said, there are significant challenges to realizing the radical potential of this moment that we need to think through collectively. First, how can we make protests safer during a pandemic? The entire logic of protest runs counter to the requirements of social distancing, given that our power and safety lies in numbers. We will need to continue to build on creative methods of protest, like car caravans and virtual rallies, to amplify our physical presence in the streets and to navigate the danger of a possible resurgence of COVID-19 in the fall.

Daniel Del Toro

Second, Trump has doubled down on positioning himself as the president of law and order. He has given a green light for cops to use the utmost force, calling for looters to be shot22—a power he may not have, but which nevertheless puts a target on our backs.23 For now, the Pentagon has bucked Trump’s orders to send in the army. However, there is another danger that Trump has created with the charge of “outside agitators.” This effort to separate the “good” protesters from the “bad” protesters—such as Antifa, which Trump has threatened to designate as a terrorist group—is in fact designed to condemn us all. We should reject any such attempts to divide the movement. At the same time, it is unlikely that we will be able to sustain the current level of open rebellion without creating space for more of us to come out in large numbers, including those who are undocumented or otherwise cannot risk arrest. Strength in numbers helps us to better stand our ground, while greater preparation and coordination can be among our best safety measures against police violence.24 There is a lot to be learned from international struggles, as evidenced by the militants from Hong Kong, who have tweeted out from their own pro-democracy struggle advice on how to resist teargas and out-maneuver police.25 We must share their lessons, too.

Finally, despite the nascent grass-roots organizations that have formed since 2014, there remains a vacuum of spaces where new layers of activists—particularly the Black youth leading these struggles—can contribute to developing long-term strategy through the ebbs and flows of protests. We will need to develop networks and infrastructure that can better coordinate national actions, campaigns, and demands, as well as share the lessons of our successes and failures across the country. There have been many inspiring examples of the role that organized labor can play in this fight. In Minneapolis and New York City, bus drivers and their unions refused to transport arrested protesters to COVID-filled jails.26 Rank and file educators, parents, students, and racial justice advocates are challenging the United Federation of Teachers, which refused to demand cops out of schools or to criticize liberal politicians for their complicity.27 Ultimately, activists and labor militants must find ways to connect labor actions against racism to the fight against a reopening that will only result in more deaths. Instead, we must insist on a humane response to the pandemic that addresses the communities most impacted by COVID-19, while taking power and funding away from the police. This goes hand-in-hand with the demand to make the real looters pay: We must tax the rich and insist that this country, founded on genocide and slavery, finally pay its due in reparations. While mainstream media have fixated on incidents of “looting” and property destruction, the wealthiest Americans became $400 billion richer during the pandemic.28 At a time when 40 million people are unemployed, this only serves to highlight the fact that this capitalist society puts a greater value on profit than on human life. The rebellion against racist police brutality has exposed these deadly priorities like no other force. All of us participating with rage and hope must take this struggle as far as it can go.

Notes

  1. New York Times, May 31st, 2020
  2. Buzzfeed, June 2nd, 2020
  3. CNN, June 3rd, 2020
  4. CBS, June 4th, 2020, New Republic, June 4th, 2020, The Hill, June 1st, 2020
  5. CBS, June 2nd, 2020
  6. ABC, June 4th, 2020
  7. New York Times, June 4th, 2020
  8. Mother Jones, May 20th, 2020
  9. Vox, May 9th, 2020
  10. Vox, May 8th, 2020
  11. New York Times, June 6th, 2020
  12. Guardian, May 20th, 2020
  13. Economic Policy Institute, March 19th, 2020
  14. Reuters, June 2nd, 2020
  15. New York Times, June 5th, 2020
  16. Guardian, June 1st, 2020
  17. The Oregonian, June 4th, 2020
  18. Guardian, June 7th, 2020
  19. Jacobin, April 12th, 2020
  20. ABC, June 5th, 2020
  21. New York Times, June 4th, 2020
  22. TIME, May 29th, 2020
  23. Democracy Now, June 5th, 2020
  24. New Politics, May 31st, 2020
  25. GQ, June 4th, 2020
  26. Business Insider, June 1st, 2020
  27. New York Daily News, June 6th, 2020
  28. Forbes, May 21st, 2020

Defend the Hong Kong Democracy Movement!

By: July 3, 2020
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Protesters vs. police in Hong Kong in May. (Photo: Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times)

In an act of retribution to the Hong Kong movement beginning last year, which has seen prolonged street clashes between the police and protestors, China has decided to unilaterally impose new national security laws to Hong Kong.

These laws severely circumvent the city’s existing autonomy, mandating the establishment of Beijing-appointed security bureaus and more police to clamp down on individuals suspected of breaching ‘national security’ — defined very broadly and up to Beijing’s authority. The laws even threaten to target Hong Kong permanent residents living outside of Hong Kong.

The details of these laws were scant to Hongkongers until after the bill was officially passed on Tuesday, including to Hong Kong’s highest officials: even the Chief Executive and Secretary of Justice have no say in the process to shape the bill.

Many legal experts and activists have noted that these laws effectively spell the end of the “One Country, Two Systems” as the city knows it. These laws reflect Beijing’s eagerness to prioritize authoritarian state control at the expense of its constituencies’ right to determine their own political future. It is no coincidence that devotees of Nazi statecraft, like Jiang Shigong, have been increasingly appointed to influential positions in Beijing’s policymaking structures for Hong Kong.

International socialists must stand with the people of Hong Kong’s struggle against Beijing’s state repression. The movement is extremely diverse, containing a number of different ideological elements, including pro-U.S. and left-wing factions. We condemn the Chinese government’s efforts to stoke up nationalist divisions to neutralize Hong Kong’s attempts at building links of solidarity with people in the Mainland and beyond. We also strongly oppose the xenophobia some in the movement exhibit toward Mainland Chinese people.

Hong Kong’s movement is not one of national independence — a position that remains a minority in the movement — though undoubtedly one for self-determination, trying to stake its own voice in the inter-imperial rivalry between the U.S. and China.

This new Cold War dynamic between Washington and Beijing covers up the real division of power in today’s world: between the capitalist state elites and the international working-class. China’s miraculous economic growth in the past decades has depended on super-exploiting its own working-class, and perpetuating the extraction of resources from the global South to provide low-cost commodities to the global North.

Beijing’s accusation of Hong Kong protestors being backed by “foreign interference” is also hypocritical. It falsely generalizes the movement’s association with U.S. regime-change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), while pro-Beijing groups have long had their own NED connections. The regime is more than happy to court U.S. surveillance and riot control technology firms — many of the same ones used to assist the murder of Black people and protestors against police brutality in the United States today — to assist its repressive campaigns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

U.S. political elites’ response has been ineffectual and self-serving: the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act offered no substantial support for the movement, while insidiously implicating the movement in support of the U.S.’s inhuman sanctions on Iran and North Korea. On the other hand, the “Protect Hong Kong Act,” which would have prevented some U.S. firms from supplying teargas and other weaponry to the Hong Kong Police Force, has been stalled in the Senate.

In addition, the Trump administration has shown that even the smallest gestural support for dissidents in Hong Kong, the Mainland, and Xinjiang takes a backseat to the interests of economic elites in the volatile U.S.-China trade relationship. With the interdependence of the U.S. and Chinese markets, Hong Kong would only be trapped in a vicious geopolitical bond; finding a third way is the city’s own chance of liberation.

We condemn the U.S. political establishment from intervening in Hong Kong’s affairs for its own imperial designs. But we also recognize that links between the United States and a small minority of protestors do not delegitimate an entire mass movement’s fight against one of the most exploitative governments today. As Lenin writes, “the fact that the struggle for national liberation against one imperialist power may, under certain circumstances, be utilized by another ‘Great’ Power in its equally imperialist interests should have no more weight in inducing Social Democracy to renounce its recognition of the right of nations to self-determination than the numerous case of the bourgeoisie utilizing republican slogans for the purpose of political deception and financial robbery.”

As the Hong Kong people enter an even darker phase of the struggle with these security laws, we call for other socialists to continue forging lines of support from below to support and empower the progressive elements of the movement.

One immediate obstacle for solidarity comes directly from elements from the Western left, those who have spread disinformation to whitewash the Chinese government’s crimes in the name of “anti-imperialism.” These efforts are especially shocking in the midst of a global movement against policing, just as China continues to quietly learn from and adopt U.S. counter-insurgency and policing methods. The left must vigilantly combat these narratives to truly build an effective mass movement against all imperialisms.

Lastly, we invite unions, community organizations, and other mass movement organizations to show Hongkongers that there are practical alternatives to lobbying the U.S. government for support. Just as anti-democratic governments from the U.S. to China continue to work in tandem to suppress people’s voices and rights for capitalist profit, mass movements must reach beyond national borders toward building a democratic, revolutionary and socialist future.

Originally posted here.

A Review of Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen, An American Lyric’

By: July 2, 2020
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Claudia Rankine’s provocative and polyphonic work, Citizen: An American Lyric, has spurred much-needed conversations around race and racism both in academia as well as in more informal discourse. In the wake of the recent protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, this book—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the PEN Open Book Award—finds itself all the more relevant and also unnervingly prescient. Black Americans, to this day, Rankine reminds us, continue to be sidelined and deprived through residential isolation and through diminished access to housing, education, healthcare, and structural facilities. They are regularly subjected to racism and colorism, at times when they least expect to be—while driving to work, taking the subway, meeting a real-estate agent, or visiting a therapist, among other mundane routines—and such prejudices can be confounding, destabilizing, and painfully hard to make sense of. These violations settle in black bodies and are passed on as generational trauma, a trauma largely repressed but occasionally finding vent as hurt, embarrassment, horror, and rage, the kind now sweeping America.

Through a recounting of her own experiences as well as reflections on the injustices meted out to other black Americans, especially black women like her, Rankine lays bare the systemic as well as interpersonal, intimate racisms that have led to a continual othering of black Americans. She explores racism’s myriad manifestations, never losing sight of its historical roots, highlighting how it affects not only entire communities collectively but also their individual members, in different, physically and psychologically scarring ways. She suggests that racial discriminations exist as a variegated spectrum: Some take the form of blatant aggressions, like hate crimes, state-sanctioned infractions, and controversial laws (like “Stand Your Ground” and voter-registration laws), many of which function like de facto Jim Crow laws. Other discriminations, however, are more cloaked and covert in nature, and manifest as insidious microaggressions, as indirect and quotidian indignities ranging from averted gazes at traffic stops, casual slurs at coffeehouses, misunderstandings and misconceptions between friends and colleagues, to careless, stray remarks like “I didn’t know black women could get cancer,” discriminations that are harder to spot because they’re often unintentional, sometimes even well-meaning, that appear innocuous on the surface but are just as detrimental and denigrating as more egregious forms of harassment and hostility.

Rankine’s pastiche intersperses hybrid prose-poems with excerpts from news and pop culture and with visual images—photographs, artwork, a YouTube screen grab—that examine the social and cultural representations of the black body. Some visuals (like Kate Clark’s sculpture Little Girl) highlight the dehumanization and animalization experienced by black bodies; others (like J. M. W. Turner’s oil painting The Slave Ship and an altered photograph of the 1930 lynching) depict the horrors that the black body has been subjected to throughout America’s tumultuous history. Rankine examines black bodies in white-perceived, white-dominated spaces—spaces that reinforce a normative sensibility, that range from tennis courts, recreation centers, neighborhood drugstores, to the hallowed halls of prestigious universities—echoing Zora Neale Hurston’s words: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” Blackness is not an essential category, she reminds us, but rather an encounter emergent through specific experiential and discursive conditions that are constantly constructed through interactions with whiteness.

On the one hand, these constant and relentless negations of blackness have led to the invisibility of the black body, the black body as being treated as safely disattendable, as being erased, devalued, and dismissed. Ironically, and on the other hand, the hyperscrutiny trained on racialized bodies—such as on unarmed black youth like Trayvon Martin by the police, or on black women like Serena Williams by critics and sporting organizations—hints at hypervisibility and violent stereotyping, at the black body as being deemed sinister, threatening, volatile, and demonic and demanding surveillance and control. “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description,” Rankine writes, recounting an interaction with the police that is one among a litany of police abuses including profiling and unwarranted searches. The hood on the book’s cover, a reference to Rodney King, could also refer to Michael Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Stephon Clark, Elijah McClain, or De’Von Bailey—all victims of race-motivated shootings, beatings, and other brutalities often also followed by compromised justice. “Because white men can’t police their imagination,” Rankine laments, “black men are dying.”

Post-racial America is a myth, and colorblindness counterproductive. Racism—both at the institutional and individual levels—is pervasive, its grip on contemporary society tenacious and bruising. We are born into systemic racism and many of us, the racially entitled ones, frolic about our lives without ever bumping up against it or getting tripped up by it the way that black Americans inescapably do. We assimilate into American culture, a culture inseparable with racism, and we advance this racism often without acknowledging our knee-deep complicity. We—nonblack liberals—are dismayed by the recent deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Sterling Higgins, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Riah Milton, and Dominique “Rem’Mie” Fells, but is expressing shock enough or do we, as beneficiaries of race, class, and/or heterosexual privilege, need to do more? “why and why and why should i call a white man brother?” asks Lucille Clifton in her poem “jasper texas 1998, bearing witness to James Byrd’s murder by three white supremacists. “who is the human in this place, the thing that is dragged or the dragger?”

Citizen can help us make sense of and better grapple with the grief that we are now experiencing. George Floyd’s death didn’t come out of nowhere; racism is fundamental to America through the institutionally racist ideologies, policies, and practices that this country was built upon and is undergirded by even today. His death was not a wound but rather a rupture—the wound has always been there. The inflammatory tweets and speeches of state leaders aren’t created in a vacuum but are informed by and stem from a complicated history. To be born black in America is to be born disadvantaged due to the historicized structures of hegemony enacted through systems of colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy. “The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.” Racism then, Rankine suggests, needs to be reframed and redrafted not as a black American issue but rather an American issue. We cannot afford to regard Floyd’s death as a one-off incident but must see it for what it is—the culmination of decades of oppression by the state, an oppression that traces its roots to slavery and enforced segregation, an oppression that white Americans are inescapably imbricated and tangled in.

Ultimately, Rankine challenges the assumptions that we—the citizens of America, white Americans in particular—harbor and heightens our awareness of our implicit, ingrained biases. She urges us to speak out against the hurtful slights and affronts that black Americans have been swallowing all these years, and also to, just as importantly, address our blind spots and remove our blindfolds. She nudges us to consider and empathize with the struggles of those with peripheral citizenships and marginalized belongings (as norms of citizenship have often been a cover for privilege and a means of reinforcing that privilege). Her language—in particular her use of the universalizing second person—evokes a strong emotional response, as it includes us readers in the text, urging us to consider black experiences and thereby confront the plight of dispossessed and disempowered bodies. She shifts the burden of the racialized experience onto politically entitled Americans, onto those who assign blackness through the exercise of labelling and observing others, and her self-reflexive mode of inquiry appears grounded in Toni Morrison’s assertion that the critical gaze needs to be averted from the racialized object to the racializing subject, “from the described and imagined to the describers and the imaginers,” in the words of Morrison.

We are invited to situate ourselves in positions different from our own, to try and imagine different possible “yous.” We are encouraged to recognize our problematic socialization and also self-critique our participation in the maintenance of discriminatory hierarchies, our perpetuations of structural injustices. “How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning?” Rankine asks us, exposing our collective ignorance and indifference, questioning the silence, invisibility, and normalcy of whiteness. “How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another?” Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?” Are we responsible for the failure of America’s policing system? Are we, as citizens, failing one another? How do we bridge the spaces between white and nonwhite bodies? How do we forge a path toward a shared community, humanity, and citizenship? — These are some of the unspoken, unanswered questions that this book leaves us with.

Another Martyr and a Call for Mass Rallies to Inspire the CT Legislature

By: July 1, 2020
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George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, are names made famous in their martyrdom, blacks killed this year by police. Another name should be added, a young black man named Mubarak Soulemane. The 19-year-old was shot dead in West Haven, Connecticut on January 15 by a state trooper. Soulemane’s name should be better known because the killing was an outrage.

He allegedly hijacked a car at knifepoint in Norwalk, CT and was chased by state police thirty miles along I-95 until he exited in West Haven, a small city next to New Haven. We know what happened next because of body cams of the state police.   There the car he was in was surrounded by state and city police vehicles within a minute of him leaving the highway.

A few seconds later a trooper got out of his car, drew his gun and demanded that Soulemane get out of the car. Soulemane remained in the driver’s seat with the windows up. Within a half-minute the trooper told someone on the other side of the car to shoot the 19-year-old with a taser. An officer (likely a West Haven policeman) broke the passenger side window and a taser was shot. Then seconds later Soulemane was shot from the driver’s side seven times with live fire by State Trooper Brian North.

If the facts alleged are true, Soulemane committed offenses, but by the time the car had been surrounded he was helpless. He had nowhere to go. Why the haste to get him out of the car? Why not let him sit for some minutes until he realized his position and gave up? Why not speak to him from a distance and offer to have him speak to a parent or member of the clergy? Why rush to bust a window and then almost immediately shoot him dead?

In Connecticut an investigation by a state attorney has been ongoing since January. That shouldn’t give anyone much comfort. Of the 76 police killings in CT since 2001 only one resulted in a criminal charge and that officer was acquitted. Police have “qualified immunity” according to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Since 1967 their killings are improper only if they knowingly violate “clearly established” law. Good luck with that.

In Minneapolis to his credit the mayor, Jacob Frey, took no time in condemning what he saw on video. He connected it up with race and said, “Being black in America should not be a death sentence.” The policeman who killed Floyd and the three other police officers who assisted him were all fired.   The mayor called for the arrest of Chauvin, the officer whose knee terminated Floyd George’s life.

In CT there has been silence by public officials. Governor Ned Lamont has said nothing. The local mayor, Nancy Rossi, has only expressed sympathy to the family. 

Neither the governor of the mayor has criticized any member of the police or state troopers. Whatever investigation West Haven police made about the incident has not been made public. The West Haven City Council has made no resolution about the matter and launched no investigation. City police refuse to say whether proper procedure was followed or even what proper procedure is in this kind of case. We don’t know if any member of either police force has been disciplined. We don’t know the names of the other troopers or local police involved in the incident. The minutes of the West Haven Board of Police Commissioners do not show that the commissioners even had a discussion of the homicide.

The family is suing the state police and the city of West Haven for its potential liability in the incident. On June 10, Mark Arons, the attorney for the family, told the New Haven Register that he had not received any responses to his requests for information from the West Haven police. The paper reported that the corporation counsel for the city, Lee Tiernan made the only statement about the attitude of the city about the homicide.  He stated, “At present I have no information or data to suggest that any member of the West Haven Police Department has engaged in any action that would create any legal liability by the City of West Haven or Police department concerning any Connecticut State Police shooting of any individual.” 

The public has demonstrated. In the winter scores of people marched from the killing site to the local police station. Smaller rallies took place in New Haven, where Soulemane lived.  After the Floyd killing several hundred at a Soulemane rally took over city streets.  In West Haven that day the Register reported 1,000 people marched in a Black Lives Matter rally that was addressed on the local city green by Soulemane’s mother.  On June 24, a date that would have been Soulemane’s 20th birthday, members of his family and several score people held an event on the West Haven Green to honor “Mubi,” as his friends called him.

Perhaps solutions for this kind of killing can come at the state level. After many protests in CT cities and even in CT small towns and capped by an eleven-day morning to night fast by a group of Connecticut clergy the governor was persuaded to hold a Special Session of the legislature to deal with police brutality issues. You can be sure the politicians will make the agenda as narrow as possible.  But if, say, 10,000 Connecticut residents demonstrated daily outside the Capitol during the session, the pols might make more of an effort. 

Here are some measures worth considering:

*** Defund the CT State Police. It appears the base pay for troopers is $100,000 with some making another $250,000 in overtime pay. It seems there’s room here for cutbacks. The Society for Professional Journalists has criticized the CT state police for “blatant disregard” for Freedom of Information Laws. Some legislation or firings of top brass might help in this regard.

*** Take guns away from police. Only allow a certain number of highly trained squads around the state to have firearms. Follow the British model.  The fewer deadly weapons police have the more they’ll work to deescalate matters.

*** Require that all positions on local police commissions be elected.  Have a procedure for replacement of incompetent police commissioners.

*** Deal with the issue of mass incarceration. End the racist “War on Drugs,” at least in the state. Free those in prison for drug possession or sales.  Don’t dump ex-prisoners on a community. Find or build suitable housing, provide social services and create state jobs for the former offenders.  Amnesty prisoners who have served decades in prisons for crimes that took place when they were teenagers or young adults.

*** Ban any municipality from taking part in police exchange training programs with Israel. Being trained by a notorious human rights offender only trains police in how to militarize their forces and to see all minorities as suspected enemies.

*** Expend funds to create model public safety programs that could replace policing.

*** Create 100,000 useful state jobs to deal with the soon-to-be catastrophic jobless situation once federal emergency programs run out. These workers could deal with the other emergency, the rapidly closing window to limit greenhouse gas emissions. They could build the housing we need for a low carbon, but disease-ridden world and labor in the industries that would clean-up and replace plastics.

Go big. Ignore the stifling rules of “the practical.” Rise up and seize the day.

Rethinking Socialism From Below in the Age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter

By: , June 30, 2020
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On April 9, the day after Bernie Sanders announced he would suspend his campaign for the U.S. presidency, the newly formed Greater Lafayette Indiana chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) held its biweekly Zoom meeting. The chapter had come to life in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, made up of long-time local radicals and activists, and an upstart contingent of college students who had built a vital and dynamic YDSA (Young DSA) on the local college campus. The Zoom call that night was dedicated mainly to figuring out how to raise money to buy plastic bottles for an environmentally safe hand sanitizer created by one of the members. The plan was to distribute the bottles in public places to raise consciousness and public health standards during the pandemic. No one on the call talked at all about Sanders’ withdrawal, except to note that the local student group backing Sanders had decided in the wake of his campaign suspension to cast its support for the new YDSA group.

Fast forward to June 6, the day of a second Black Lives Matter protests in Lafayette, Indiana. About 300 local people turned out at the local courthouse to agitate and demand for police abolition and defunding. More than 30 members of the same local DSA contingent were present, almost all of them white. They had come to march, and had brought water bottles, medical supplies, surplus masks and snacks to distribute to a teeming crowd on a sweltering summer afternoon.

We begin with these two anecdotes because they complicate and challenge recent discursive analysis on the U.S. left about the shape of class-conscious politics in our time. Facebook hot takes and articles written for publications like Left Voice have floated a tenuous thesis that DSA as an organization has been hijacked by Berniecrats and “class reductionists,” narrowing the group’s political perspective in dangerous ways. Similarly, arguments have been floated that DSA, especially its sometimes mouthpiece Jacobin, have class-first politics that have kept the organization from full-throated support for the massive rebellions against racist police violence that have energized and thrilled so many of us. We are not interested here in defending DSA as an organization, or Jacobin as a publication from these criticisms. Yet we are interested in how they emblematize a running problem, or challenge, to members of the U.S. revolutionary Left. That challenge is both to make peace with, and make sense of, something of far more political significance than the plight of DSA or Jacobin: namely, the messy and unruly shape of socialism in our time as a political theory and lived practice.

Our thesis, simply put, is that conventional assessments of what constitutes socialism and socialism from below in the U.S. in this historical moment need to begin with participatory observation of how in fact socialism is being conceived of, thought of, debated, and most importantly practiced by a new, radicalized generation. As evident from our opening anecdotes, careful attention to the granular detail of political practice in the U.S. on the broad socialist Left indicates a vast variety of creative, exuberant political meaning-making that has exceeded easy explanatory frameworks of how anti-capitalist and anti-racist politics work. Indeed, if we have learned anything from the past few months, it is that political consciousness is, as Walter Benjamin reminded us, quite capable of self-actualizing “leaps” that both synthesize our experience of capitalist history, and rupture our “concept” of what that history can mean.

This brings us to our second, fundamental thesis on the urgency of the task before us: namely, that since 2011, the major revolutionary socialist groups in the global north—a vast swath of human political activism—have splintered and fragmented into a near state of institutional insignificance (or disappearance) just as socialism as an idea has enjoyed the greatest fluorescence of the past 100 years for working-class people, people or color, LGBTQ, trans, immigrant and other people. Put another way, revolutionary socialist organizations—especially those in the tradition coming down to us from the International Socialist Tendency—have sped down one train track of history, while radical history has gone in a different direction altogether.

Here we wish to think more on why this is so, and how, in the name of a stronger, more vital and more expansive revolutionary socialism, we can help converge these moments. We think doing so begins with an appreciation of where this new revolutionary consciousness of which we speak comes from, and where it does not. We will pose this difference, for the sake of argument, as a difference between an idealized theory and version of socialism and socialism from below, and one rooted in a materialist account of how the current moment of socialism in the U.S. has arrived.

We think that the current socialist radicalization has roots in places underappreciated by the revolutionary Left. The first is the 2007-2008 financial meltdown. That generational event disrupted and displaced the lives of many young people born just before or around the turn of the 21st century who now constitute a wide swath of those in the American streets and in groups like DSA. For the sake of argument and convenience, let’s call them Generation TV (Teen Vogue). They are, like the generation that experienced 2007-2008, multiracial and multi-gendered, but welded together as a political class partly by the experience of permanent downward mobility, and a profoundly lowered ceiling and horizon of expectations. Note that this generation has been crucial to both the swelling of the Occupy Movement in 2011-2012 (about which more in a moment), to the Black Lives Matter movement of 2014-216, and to the surge of DSA membership from 2016-2018.

We argue for this generation as fundamental to the current uprisings because the uprising itself shares the political shape, even tactics, of all of those prior movements and moments. The vast, spontaneous scope of the George Floyd protests across big and small-town America, for example, looks a lot more like the shape of Occupy protests from 2011, than the BLM protests of 2014. Put another way, the geographical scope (and racial diversity) of these recent protests represents a kind of fusion of the politics of Occupy and Black Lives Matter: fundamentally “horizontal,” but deeply informed by a simultaneous appreciation of the conjuncture of anti-racist with anti-capitalist politics. It’s as if the recent abolitionist movement has helped give full shape and totality to the political consciousness of both of those earlier moments.

Significantly, too, socialists of a wide stripe have participated in both of these movements, and been made by them. They have in turn made the protests more radical, more racially diverse, and most importantly more confident about their prospects. Thus, to stigmatize or scold this generation or its prospects as either too beholden or not beholden enough to anti-racism, or to Jacobin, is to miss the more important political point: consciousness is shaping itself in and through historical experience into a new, massive, radicalized class force.

The centrality of Black Lives Matter leadership to the current wider radicalization cannot be underestimated and should be contextualized with the current remaking of socialist consciousness. An entire generation of Black political activists and leaders has been trained in this country since 2014. Their “sudden” reappearance in the minutes and moments after the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis is the proof in this pudding. Much like Rosa Parks’s Highlander training inspired her “spontaneous” sit-down strike in Montgomery, BLM activists were already prepared for a history in waiting that appeared in the shape of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd’s murders. Here, to return to Benjamin, the concept of history is not linear, but citational: images of a radical past—from the Tulsa race riots of 1921, to the Rodney King riots of 1992, to the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown riots of 2014-2015—were seeds of history coming to full flower in an instant of historical cognition prepared by history itself. That Black leadership so rapidly pulled millions in its wake speaks to the altered consciousness described in the preceding paragraph by events like Occupy.

Yet two interpretations of the BLM leadership tendered by some quarters of the Left on the current moment will not suffice, we think: either that it is a moment of independent Black self-determination politics as described by thinkers like C.L.R. James, or it is within the socialist Left still a “belated” moment of recognition or appreciation. Both the size, diversity and scope of these protests—and the massive presence of socialists within them—challenge these analyses. Rather, the conjuncture is a synthesis at a higher level of two mutual but mutually-informing lines of dissent in the post-2000 political generation: both anti-racist and anti-capitalist. Put another way, the conjuncture reveals that consciousness has shaped itself through recent struggle into a stronger, tempered and tested fighting tool. While publications such as Left Voice and Jacobin have a role to play, they cannot alone capture, or contain, the complexity of this consciousness.

Indeed, we think that some of the restrictive thinking about contemporary political consciousness owes to normative ways contemporary socialists sometimes understand “class” as an organizational principle, as something static and abstract, as a “noun and not an adjective” as one Marxist thinker put it. As socialists, we have a class focus in the broadest sense: we recognize that capitalism is unequal and violent, and that inequality and violence stems from, is in a complex relationship with, the fact that most are forced to sell their labor to survive in such a system. Yet, as New Left theorist Louis Althusser argued against the tendencies of economism and determinism, moments of upsurge are constituted by a “fusion” of “overdetermined contradictions.” Despite a common experience working for wages, the end of the 20th century has witnessed a crisis of capitalism along multiple, intersecting fronts:  the biosphere, the racialized state, the national border, the predatory logic of financialized capitalism, and sexual violence.

What is increasingly clear to both members of DSA as well as the masses of most young people on the street is how their fates are intertwined. While white people are far, far less likely to face murder at the hands of police, witnessing a capitalist state defund colleges, enforce student debt, violently shut down Occupy Wall Street, let nurses and food service workers die in a pandemic, and do nothing while the planet burns, prepared this new working class to see George Floyd’s life, unemployed, already a survivor of COVID-19, as not reducible to but nonetheless wrapped up in the dispossessions of their own. It would be shockingly dishonest to fail to see that the many white people in the streets to protest Floyd’s murder were there not because they fear death from the police so much as because they had come to see the police as the emblem of a predatory state preying on them, too.

Indeed, one of the problems with the recent discursive critiques of class/race debate within DSA is how narrowly they articulate both. As an example from Chicago DSA: when the newly formed South Side Branch’s steering committee after the 2016 explosion in membership, we asked: what is a largely white organization going to do in Chicago, especially on the South Side? We knew that we could not organize on our own without being seen as interlopers, and so we built bridges with two working-class South Side organizations, the Kenwood Oaklawn Community Organization (KOCO) and Pilsen Alliance, by working on their newly launched rent-control campaign. Rent control is at once a working class demand and yet it is also a demand that focuses on the one of the primary engines of a racialized capitalism, real-estate markets, gentrification, and urban segregation. To some socialists that may have appeared as a demand for the working class; to many members of these community organizations, rent control was the front line against gentrification. And it was through these connections, complexly articulated around class and race, that Chicago DSA was able to also to participate in the coalitions that elected six socialist aldermen, who it should be noted, are all but one people of color, with strong ties to their communities. We argue that this is a case of electoral politics in a complex articulation within and without a socialist movement, rather than a political co-optation of a mass movement which is determined to function independently of the former.

The current revolutionary upsurge should cause further reflection on the recent demise of revolutionary organizations. While we do not gloat or wish to dump ashes on the International Socialist Organization, until 2019 the largest revolutionary socialist group in the U.S. (and to which one of the authors here was a ten-year member) we have to acknowledge the organization made a number of egregious misreadings of political history that were in fact idealizations of its own “socialism from below” politics. The most significant one was its dismissal of the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and its failure to productively engage with Sanders supporters turning rapidly towards Socialism. The ISO’s rigid rejection of electoral politics tethered to the two-party system made it appear increasingly irrelevant and tone deaf to a generation of rising radicals. To return to our example of Chicago above, we have to acknowledge in a moment of crisis, electoral politics both absorbs revolutionary movements and also becomes their expressions simultaneously. A crisis, as Antonio Gramsci notes, occurs when political parties and the people they represent are “detached” from one another, when “the men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognized by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression.”  While Sanders did not win, he, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Kshama Sawant, Ilhan Omar, Lee Carter and the six aldermen elected to the Chicago city council have all widened these rifts and expanded the affective and political horizons of radical politics.

Thus, today’s socialism’s relative independence from “orthodoxy” (including within DSA) of any kind has emancipated people to jump on the revolutionary bus whenever and wherever they want. This comes with its own problems—comrades have joked that DSA is the first large-scale organization with too few reading groups—but it also comes with the surge of creative meaning-making and self-activity described at the start of this piece. In addition, the new radical conjuncture is decidedly not led by bureaucratic political elites, or whites, especially white men. Rather, the new movement’s politics of identity, if we may put it this way, are as yet unknown to us: constituted by numerous crisscrossing strands of gender non-conformity, multiracialism, anti-imperialism (Palestine solidarity and its rise in the U.S. is yet another coordinate of this new radicalism), reproductive rights feminism, radical queer and trans politics, new proletarianization and new lumpenproletarianization. Rather than fretting over the Leninist thesis on national self-determination struggle or the legacy of Stalinism—now far too far in the rear view mirror of history for Gen TV—this new generation is making socialism anew in its own image. We should be grateful, and show our appreciation by organizing on the ground with and alongside these new social movement theorists.

Finally, the new socialist movement has for the moment put questions of organizational form secondary to building a movement. This is historically appropriate. The Bolshevik Party, after all, came after the idea of Bolshevism. We will not be so bold as to declare the next Comintern is right around the corner, but we should appreciate the fact that the form of the new socialist upsurge is for the moment happily secondary to the project of actually tearing the head off of the state.

The new socialist movement is centered in the workplace and on the streets, not the University. This is a good thing, and a sign of its vitality. Too clearly, the revolutionary socialist current that dominated the Anglosphere since 2000 had disproportionate representation, both theoretically and politically, in University settings. This helped to foster the growing gap between theory and practice (or, in terms of this essay, idealism and meaning-making). As it drifted further into self-preservation, the revolutionary Left also drifted away from organizational practice, especially in the labor movement and working-class communities. A form of substitutionism crept into the revolutionary Left’s historic role. This moment has been exploded. It is quite clear that Generation TV’s revolutionary apparatus, which includes Tik Tok, Teen Vogue, K-Pop and hip-hop have become their own theoretical tools of social change. The revolutionary Left should be humbled by this disjuncture, and give mad effort to understanding how to learn from it.

Finally, about the working-class: if self-emancipation of the working-class is its historic task, according to the revolutionary Left, then the latter’s task is to study and understand the shifting composition of class and class relations since 2000. This is a manifold project, encompassing rethinking again the decline of union power; the logistics economy; the economic meltdowns of 2007-2008, and the global recession fostered by the global pandemic. It will also require further comprehension of the upsurge in wildcat strikes, teacher walkouts, organizing in the informal sector, the super exploitation of Black, immigrant, and women workers in the care economy; virtually, everything. What is clear about this new working-class formation is its sudden new potential for reinvention. The move by the Seattle King City Labor Council to expel a police union; the meaning-making new tactics of labor solidarity around the Dakota Pipeline, Palestine, and BLM; the bold vitality of nurses and teachers not just striking but taking on the far right—all indicate a nascent attempt to build from the ashes of the old labor world a new moment. As important to a sturdy new class analysis on the revolutionary Left is the fate of the sudden new massively displaced unemployed, more than 30 million strong in the U.S. since the pandemic. This group historically is positioned to move either right or left in expressing its social dislocation. Thus far it must be said that Round One goes to our side: it is impossible to quantify how many newly proletarianized and unemployed people were in the streets during and after Minneapolis, but we know that they were many. Harnessing this group into permanent political alliance through campaigns against police violence, but also for expanded social provisioning, for redistributive justice, and for an end to capitalism should be a first stop in the revolutionary Left’s reconstruction.

Yet what will also be needed first before that step is still more serious reckoning with the question we posed at the start: why and how did the organized revolutionary Left essentially fail within the single most incendiary political decade (2010-2020) since the 1960s (or the 1930s) depending on your point of view. We think the answer is more than a victory of “reformism.” Reform versus revolution does not adequately capture the dialectics of the current moment, any more than class and race as binary oppositions. Even the Bread and Roses Caucus, the supposed “class reductionist” vanguard of DSA, placed defunding the police as a top campaign demand, and Chicago DSA is currently coordinating with prison and police abolitionist networks to create a program for the city. The hardest thing, as C.L.R. James writes in his Notes on Dialectics, is to capture the nature of a thing in motion, in the moment of its change. This is harder than even knowing if a moment is revolutionary or a movement has legs—neither of which we can know. But we do know we are in a moment of transition, and all the old paradigms are falling away.

Protests Against Racism; LBGTQ Pride; Continuing Crisis; Trump’s Decline

By: June 28, 2020
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This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France. 

Throughout June hundreds of thousands of Americans in hundreds of cities and towns protested the killing of George Floyd who had been murdered by police in Minneapolis. But there were also LGBTQ Pride Marches in support of the protests against racism. There were large Black Pride marches in New York and Los Angeles and in other cities, some for Black trans people who are often victims of police violence. Many in the LBGTQ movement pointed out the common origins of both civil rights movements—of Black and LGBTQ people—in resistance to discrimination and police violence.

The rainbow banners flew this year in the midst of signs saying “defund the police.” The Pride marches began in June of 1970, but over the years as the LGBTQ movement became more successful, corporations began to sponsor the marches, which often cooperated with the police. This year, with the Reclaim Pride movement, LGBTQ spokespeople talked of breaking with corporate sponsorship going back to the roots of the movement that began with the fight at the Stonewall bar against police harassment.

While the protests over racial injustice have largely subsided, many activists turned their attention to taking down statues of generals and politicians of the Confederacy, the government of the states that seceded to support slavery during the American Civil War. Many statues have been either taken down by state and local government or torn down by protestors. In response, Trump signed an executive order to protect monuments emphasizing that those who do tear them down could face ten years in prison.

All of this took place in the midst of the continuing pandemic and economic crisis. The United States has suffered 125,000 COVID-19 deaths and tens of millions remain unemployed. After three months of a national lockdown from March to May, President Donald Trump and Republican governors in several Sunbelt states—arguing that the pandemic was all but over—had rushed to reopen the economy, leading to a resurgence of the virus and forcing Texas and Florida and many counties in California to close down again, while eight other states paused their re-openings.

In the meantime, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as Obamacare, which would leave 23 million Americans without health insurance. Because most Americans get their health insurance through their employers, the economic crisis has already stripped millions of their health coverage and 450,000 have sought insurance through the ACA since the crisis began. While health insurance under Obamacare remains in the hands of private enterprise and for profit, Trump and the Republicans argue that it is a first step to government control and socialism.

The Cares Act signed on March 27, which provided the jobless with an additional $600 per week in unemployment benefits will end on July 26, though tens of millions remain unemployed and the U.S. economy is predicted by the International Monetary Fund to shrink by 8 percent. This would leave most of the unemployed with an average of only $378 per week, not enough to support most workers. The Republicans have opposed an extension of the unemployment supplement on the ground that it will encourage workers to stay home rather than going back to work. Many workers fear going back to work, as long as the pandemic persists.

With the pandemic and the economic depression continuing, and the movement against racism having shifted American opinion on that issue to the left, Donald Trump’s support has dramatically eroded. In six key contested states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina—Biden now leads by between 7 and 11 percentage points. Trump’s support has eroded among older voters, among voters without a college education, and in some states among white voters. He looks likely to lose, but it is five months until the election.

 

 

 

 

 

Adjudicating the Chomsky-Greenwald Dispute on Lesser-Evil Voting

By: June 28, 2020
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The rituals of the political left are as predictable as they are puzzling. It’s an election year, so we leftists have a sworn duty to reignite, for the 10,000th time, the debate about “lesser-evil voting.” Glenn Greenwald recently made some comments on the matter, as did Noam Chomsky, and Bruce Levine weighed in in a Counterpunch column on June 19th, and other corners of the facebooking, tweeting, youtubing, altogether self-flogging left have delved into the dull topic, so I can’t resist inserting my two cents too. In accord with my self-identification as #1 Fan of the Great Man, I want to defend the Chomskyan point of view.

I won’t summarize everything Greenwald, Chomsky, and Levine (who links to the relevant videos) say. What I want to do is just to implore those on the left to heed the suffocating nausea in their gut when, say, watching some such performance as Trump’s in Tulsa on June 20th, and vote against the Infant Beast on November 3. Please. For the sake of the climate that Trump is passionate about destroying, and the children he is passionate about torturing, the immigrants he is passionate about excluding (including “legal” immigrants whom Obama and Biden never persecuted), the working class he is passionate about punishing, the public lands he is passionate about privatizing, the elementary decency he is passionate about violating—for the sake of all that is still worth salvaging in this broken world of ours, please vote against him. Vote to oust him. Which, by inescapable logic, means vote for Biden.

Are the two political parties the same? No. Are they even approximately the same? No. They’re growing farther and farther apart, thanks to, on the one hand, the neofascism of the right, and on the other hand, the “democratic socialist” insurgency that has already elected leftists to Congress. The political center cannot hold; the momentum is on the right and the left, and the left has begun to drag even the most debased corporatists (Pelosi, Schumer, et al.) at least symbolically in its direction. Hence the ludicrous sight of capitalist minions draped in kente cloth kneeling on the floor of the Capitol. Hence Biden’s relatively progressive policy platform. Hence the progressive bills the House passed in 2019, even before the left-populist wave became as visible as it has been in 2020.

The Democratic Party belongs to business, but there are different sectors of business. Just read Thomas Ferguson. There is “liberal” business and there is fascist business. Liberal business funded Franklin Roosevelt even after he had signed the Wagner and Social Security Acts in 1935 (in fact, it helped write them)—two legislative achievements that leftists have celebrated ever since. Liberal business supported the Great Society. If you look at history, every law that has significantly benefited the population was—of necessity—supported by some segment of the business community. Otherwise it wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. It would be nice if we didn’t need assistance or at least acquiescence from the liberal side of the ruling class in order to enact desperately needed reforms, but we’re not remotely close to that point yet.

Biden is an obscenity, but he isn’t a neofascist. That consideration alone should be decisive. He’s done terrible things (so has Sanders, by the way), but the political context is changing. The Democrats of the 2020s will not be the Democrats of the 1990s. They won’t be socialists either (except in rare cases), but we have to live in the real world. We have to oust the aspiring fascists before we can make really constructive changes. At the absolute least, we have to prevent things from getting drastically worse—which they will if Trump is reelected, and if Republicans hold the Senate.

What about Greenwald’s argument that regularly voting for Democrats causes you to lose any leverage you might have over them? It is a powerful argument, and it is a major reason the Democratic Party has been able to virtually ignore organized labor for decades. But, again, in a time of a newly energized left, there are other ways to pressure politicians than by not voting for them on election day. For one thing, you can try to remove them in the primaries. Or you can—here’s an idea—protest in the streets. (I wonder if that might have some success…) Or you can mob their offices or picket their homes or vandalize their neighborhoods or strike workplaces or flood their offices with phone calls or air negative advertisements or hire more lobbyists, etc. In the coming era of social crisis, the left will not lack for means of pressuring elected representatives.

What about the argument one always hears that lesser-evil voting has enabled the rightward drift of the Democratic Party over the last generation? First of all, a few hundred thousand or more votes here and there for a third party wouldn’t have changed that, wouldn’t have accomplished anything except electing Republicans—as it sometimes did (I find it bewildering that Ralph Nader can sleep at night). Which itself contributed to the rightward drift of politics. So there goes that argument. The overwhelming cause of Democrats’ “rightward drift” hasn’t been lesser evilism but the business community’s massive mobilization since the 1970s against liberal policies. Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of propaganda, of institution-building and -dismantling, of investment in armies of lobbyists, has moved the whole political system to the right. You think a little non-lesser-evil voting (among the tiny minority of conscious leftists) would have changed all that?

Here are just a few of the almost certain consequences of a Trump re-election: the judiciary will become ultra-reactionary for at least a generation; global warming and ecological destruction will accelerate, and may pass a point of no return; nationalism will triumph and the immigration system will be remade such that its sole purpose is to destroy as many lives as possible; higher education will become even more expensive and people will remain debilitated by debt their entire lives; in general, every social policy will veer into the domain of hyper-misanthropy. If you live in a swing state and you don’t vote for Biden, even if you don’t want any of these things to happen, you are increasing their likelihood.

I know it’s appalling to contemplate submitting a ballot on which you’ve indicated support for a sexist, racist, imperialistic, business-loving fiend like Biden. But if you want to live in a world of moral purity, take a one-way trip on the SpaceX Starship.

Bruce Levine, using a common talking point on the left, decries “fear-based decision-making.” Lesser-evil voting is fear-based decision-making. Horror of horrors. Personally, I think fear is rational when we’re faced with aspiring neofascism and the end of civilization in three generations. I freely admit I’m afraid of what Trump and the Republicans might do in the next four years. But I also have hope: I hope a leftist insurgency can pressure the Biden administration to make things better for a lot of people, and even to lay the groundwork for substantive action on global warming. As Chomsky is fond of saying, one can’t predict the specifics of what the future will bring. Institutions change and are susceptible to popular pressure.

Levine’s praise of the “integrity” of Briahna Joy Gray, among others, for denouncing Biden after Sanders had endorsed him is misplaced. Nothing is easier than to denounce someone like Biden. Look how easy it is: I revile Joe Biden. See? That was easy. It requires more courage to buck the tide of popular opinion (on the left) and plead with people to vote for someone as unappealing as that corrupt old corporatist. There is no loss of “integrity” in doing so, if one of your principles is that you care about the predictable consequences of your actions.

Chomsky’s position is vastly more reasonable than Greenwald’s.

“Gene Debs, Ralph Nader, and Briahna Joy Gray,” Levine writes, “weren’t ready to grovel in the dust, and those of us who have any energy should consider expending it supporting courageous people like them, as well as maintaining our own integrity and helping one another from becoming too broken to fight.” What on earth is he talking about? Is it “groveling in the dust” to spend a few minutes voting for Biden and other Democrats on November 3? Does doing so make one too broken to fight? Maybe that’s not what he meant. But I don’t see why it arouses so much cognitive dissonance in so many people when you say: fight like hell all the time but vote to keep out the neofascists. There’s nothing remotely inconsistent in that imperative.

There are, at long last, so many newly awakened leftists in this country that in the aggregate they can have a tangible effect on the elections. I hope they’re able to swallow their understandable revulsion for Biden—and other corporate Democrats—and vote to kick out the fascists, making possible progressive legislation in the future.

Socialists and the Uprising Against Racism – Sunday, July 5, 4-6 PM (EDT)

By: June 27, 2020
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https://www.facebook.com/events/697015624426618/

Sunday, July 5, 2020 at 4 PM – 6 PM EDT

The mass protests in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis constitute the biggest popular uprising in the US since the 1960s. What relationship have socialist organizations, including the Democratic Socialists of America, had to this movement? Join us for an online discussion of the opportunities and challenges that exist to making socialist politics relevant to the new rebellion against racism.

Register for this call here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrdOqtpjIvEtHohE9FulZWYl63j19Q7SUg

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

SPEAKERS

Cinzia Arruzza teaches philosophy at the New School for Social Research and is the co-author of Feminism for the 99%. A Manifesto. She is a member of the Viewpoint Editorial Collective and of the editorial board of Spectre. She is an activist in DSA NYC-Emerge.

Justin Charles is a member of DSA in New York City and active in the Emerge caucus.

Michael Esealuka (she/her) serves on the steering committee of DSA’s national Labor Commission and is the former co-chair of New Orleans DSA. A decade plus veteran of the restaurant industry, she now works as an environmental and labor organizer in south Louisiana, uplifting frontline communities and petrochemical workers in their fight for clean air, soil, water and a sustainable green economy that works for workers.

Haley Pessin is a writer for the forthcoming socialist magazine, Tempest. She is a member of the Afrosocialist and Socialists of Color Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America and a rank-and-file member of 1199 SEIU. She organizes with the group Legal Workers Rank & File in New York City.

SPONSORS

DSA-Emerge Caucus (NYC), DSA-Madison, New Politics, Red Bloom, Rampant Magazine, Tempest magazine

Building the Party Through Struggle: A Response to French and Gong

By: , June 26, 2020
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The Black-led multiracial working-class uprising has radically changed US and global politics. It has become the outlet for all the rage built up by years of racist police violence, institutional racism, and the impoverishment of working people. These mass militant protests, which have swept through big cities and small towns in every corner of the country and stirred similar actions throughout the world, have won more victories in a short space of time than years of electoral campaigns for politicians inside the Democratic Party.

The movement has cohered around the demand, pioneered by Black abolitionists, to defund the police and reinvest in communities of color, social services, education, healthcare and jobs. It has forced both capitalist parties, and the capitalist class as a whole, on to the defensive, forcing them to tear down statues of slave holders and conquistadors, cut the budgets of police departments, and in the case of Minneapolis go so far as to promise to disband the entire force. Black and white militants in the labor movement have seized the opportunity to stage solidarity strikes, demand that unions and union federations expel the so-called police unions from their midst, and King County Labor Council just voted to do so.

This new political context frames our response to Nick French and Jeremy Gong’s article, “Why We Need a Political Party.” Written before the uprising, it defends the “Dirty Break” strategy—preparing for an independent worker’s party primarily by running socialist candidates inside Democratic Party. We believe that this strategy was mistaken before the uprising and is now out completely out of step with the new political period we have entered. Against this perspective, we argue that a new working-class party will be built primarily through mass struggles like the current uprising and the strikes and workplace demonstrations that took place amidst the pandemic, and through running candidates locally on independent ballot lines as a complement to, not substitute for, these struggles from below.

Points of Convergence

Despite our sharp differences, we find common ground with French and Gong. We agree that Bernie Sanders’ campaign had an enormous impact on mass consciousness. We also agree that the campaign ended disastrously with Sanders capitulating to the establishment and according to French and Wong, “destroying much of the organization and momentum his campaign built.”

We share French and Gong’s rejection of the realignment strategy to transform the Democratic Party into a new workers party. History has demonstrated, time and again, that is a dead end. The Democratic Party is entirely controlled by its corporate donors, party bureaucracy, and elected officials—not its unorganized members. We too think that we need to build a new party, a mass workers party, whose purpose is to lead struggle, run candidates on its own ballot line, politically educate worker activists, and fight for socialism. Finally, we support their argument that DSA is the primary vehicle to advance that project, and their call for DSA to spearhead discussions among socialists and workers organization about forming a new workers party.

The Dynamics of Radicalization

However, we disagree with French and Gong over the fundamental question of how working-class and oppressed people radicalize. As admirers of pre-1914 socialism, French and Gong appear to believe that class consciousness is shaped, “from the outside” by a party whose main activity is electoral campaigns. They are quite explicit that the Sanders’ campaigns of 2016 and 2020 generated a new radicalization in US society.

There are two problems with this contention—one theoretical and the other historical. First, we do not believe that workers and oppressed people primarily move to the left through parties and elections that provide them a program from above. Rather, popular radicalism is the product of mass, disruptive and often illegal class struggle and social movements. In the course of struggle, workers and oppressed people create their own organizations to fight for change, build new solidarities amongst themselves, challenge capitalist “common sense,” win reforms, gain confidence to fight for increasingly left-wing demands, and become a “class for itself.”

The Civil Rights Movement is a case in point. It began over the moderate demand for integration and radicalized to challenge the racist foundations of US capitalism and imperialism. Today’s uprising started over protesting the racist police murder of George Floyd but rapidly adopted the abolitionist demand to defund the police.

Electoral campaigns whose sole aim is to win office have a very different and more conservative logic. To win, all that a campaign needs to do is get out 50 percent plus one. No risks have to be taken, no new coalitions have to be built and more radical demands are actually counter-productive. These campaigns and their candidates usually adopt the “lowest common denominator” positions – those that are palatable to the largest, passive electoral constituencies.

While mass social struggles can transform consciousness on a mass scale, politicians and their campaigns tail behind them, rather than lead on their issues. For example, Sanders opposes the uprising’s demand to defund the police, opposes their abolition, and has merely offered the standard liberal program for police reform with slightly more radical rhetoric. Sanders’ position highlights the dramatic contrast between moderating nature of electoral campaigns, especially ones inside a capitalist party, and the radicalizing nature of mass movements from below.

Sanders as an Expression not Cause of the Radicalization

The second problem with French and Gong’s position is historical – their contention that Sanders was the source of the mass radicalization. We believe this gets cause and effect backwards. Sanders’ two presidential campaigns were in fact the product of far deeper dynamics. They were made possible by the combination of nearly four decades of neoliberal attacks on workers and oppressed people, compounded by the Great Recession of 2008.

These conditions led to the surge in the popularity of socialism well before Bernie Sanders ran for President. In the aftermath of the financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama, Newsweek announced on their cover in February 2009, “We’re All Socialists Now.” Of course, all it meant by “socialism” was the state bailout of failing corporations and the stimulus plan, but it nevertheless is an indicator of socialism’s new-found popularity, which has held steady at about 50 percent of young people since 2010.

Even more important to shaping this leftward shift was the wave of struggles in the aftermath of the Great Recession. These have shaped the world view of an entire generation. The Arab Spring set an example of popular revolution; the Madison Uprising provided us a glimpse of class struggle in the US; Occupy gave us the popular language of class with its slogan of the 99 percent against the 1 percent; the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) reversed the decades of union retreats and blazed the path of social justice unionism with its 2012 strike against “apartheid schools”; and Black Lives Matter protests swept the country in 2014. Combined with widespread disappointment with the Obama administration’s promise of change, these militant struggles from below fertilized the ground from which Sanders’ sudden popularity and his presidential campaign of 2016 grew.

Moreover, these ongoing struggles forced Sanders far to the left in 2016. A longtime supporter of police unions, the movement for Black lives forced him to adopt and voice positions against racism and police brutality. Similar pressures from below compelled him to foreground women’s rights and demands of LGBTQ folks, shifting him to connect the fight against oppression to his “broad class” demands like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

Sanders adoption of these so-called “fringe demands” did not undercut his popularity as Dustin Guastella has argued. Instead, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out, Sanders was not aggressive enough in putting them forward, especially those against racism and police brutality, for fear of alienating more conservative voters. This is not a mistake, but the unfortunate logic of top-down election campaigns, especially those conducted in a capitalist party, whose main goal is winning office.

Mis-crediting Sanders for Generating Class and Social Struggle Since 2016

French and Gong double down on these claims about Sanders role when they “attribute the historically small but still-significant rise in class struggle in the United States from 2015-2020 to the fact that Sanders essentially ran a permanent campaign during those years.” In making this case, they tend to ignore the independent initiative of workers, the long term organizing that lay behind the upsurges, and the labor organizations, radical networks, and deep traditions that were as, if not more important than the Sanders campaign.

French and Gong’s analysis of the red state teachers strikes hinges on the role of the Sanders 2016 campaign. While some of the militants in West Virginia and Arizona may have been brought together by the 2016 Sanders campaign, their organizing was far more deeply rooted. In all the states, teacher militants had built up networks through a variety of efforts over years of work– networks were far more important for the strikes than the Sanders campaign. These networks relied on support and training not from the Sanders campaign, but from Labor Notes and militant trade unionists.

In the case of Arizona, its leaders drew on the experience and lessons of the CTU strike of 2012, in which one of their leaders, Rebecca Garelli, had participated as a teacher in Chicago. These militants learned to defy the union officialdom and take minority actions to build confidence from these organizers, examples, and traditions, not the Sanders campaign.

A similar case can be made for the Emergency Workers Organizing Collective (EWOC). Again, some activists may have met one another in the Bernie 2020 campaign, but the precondition of this project was the decades of independent organizing by the United Electrical Workers (UE). The UE has been training workplace militants in “non-majority” unionism—collective action in the workplace in the absence of formal recognition of National Labor Relations Board elections—for decades. And, again, the politics and organizational skills necessary for this organizing to succeed, especially building a self-confident layer of workplace activists who democratically control their own organizations, were not and will not be learned in top-down electoral campaigns like that of Sanders.

Finally, the claim that Educators of Bernie led the organizing for a wild-cat strike to shut down the NYC public schools at the start of pandemic in March is simply not true. While many activist teachers involved in that effort had participated in Educators for Bernie, it was not the main organization behind this activity. That was the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) inside the UFT, which includes many militants who did not participate in Educators for Bernie and who were workplace organizers for years before either of Sanders’ presidential campaigns. MORE owes its militant strategy and tactics (and even its name) to the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) that transformed the CTU from the bottom up and led its historic strikes in 2012 and 2019.

Unfortunately, electoral campaigns with radical speeches and large rallies are not enough to spur people into struggle or prepare them to lead it. Jesse Jackson staged similar radical rallies in his presidential campaigns during the 1980s. But far from stimulating a rise in struggle, the campaign coincided with a radical downturn in strikes and social movements. There’s a big difference between “inspiring” people to question the existing order, and the political and organizational tools and confidence necessary to build mass struggles that win.

Confusing Sanders Campaign with Movement and Working-Class Party

French and Gong also blur the lines between the Sanders campaign, class and social movements, and a working-class party. They contend that the campaign “brought countless workers into struggle on the basis of a shared working-class identity…. By mobilizing millions around demands like Medicare For All and debt forgiveness, Sanders convinced many that a better world was possible—and that there was a movement willing to fight for it.”

We believe this fundamentally confuses distinct political logics. Attending an election rally and voting for a candidate are not the same as a participating in a strike or disruptive protest. In electoral campaigns, especially those with no democratic organization, working-class participants are reduced to the position of a passive spectator.

Most do not attend rallies, those that do at most listen, and only a minority get involved in the ins and outs of campaigning. Such campaigning work is directed from above. That is dramatically different from an actual movement when people come together in meetings to decide on demands, develop strategy and tactics, and plan actions. That’s why we cannot call the Sanders campaigns movements.

Nor can we agree with French and Gong’s claim that the Sanders campaign functioned like a worker’s party. Of course, the campaign got many workers to donate to it and Sanders did “espouse open struggle with capitalists.” But workers and their unions have been a source of funding for the Democratic Party since the 1930s, and left-wing Democrats then and Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 supported strikes and demonstrations.  Unfortunately, these campaigns, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, derailed promising labor and social movements from launching an independent, mass working-class party and lured socialists and militants back into the Democratic Party.

Finally, Sander’s campaign lacked the key characteristic necessary for the formation of a new workers party—democracy. Sanders, his staff, and hand-picked allies decided on the program, planning, and electoral strategy. There was no election of leaders, no open debates on platform and activity, and no democratic accountability of the candidate himself. The much vaunted infrastructure—finances, media and organizing apparatus—was not under the control of campaign and social movement activists, but the professional bureaucrats who ran the campaign and Sanders who had final veto power over everything. That’s why, unlike a mass party, it was dissolved over night at the whim of the candidate.

Using our Enemy’s Ballot Line: Dirty Break or Dead End?

Despite these realities, French and Gong persist in making the case that the Sanders’ campaigns provide a model to be emulated. They and their comrades in DSA’s Bread and Roses Caucus advocate a “dirty break” strategy in which DSA and other socialists use the Democratic Party ballot line to run candidates, win elected office, and build up a party inside the Democratic Party. Only when the time appears ripe, would they support a left break to form a new workers party. This strategy is based on a mistaken reading of the Minnesota Farmer Labor Party (MFLP), it underestimates the real and present danger of cooptation, and threatens to trap yet another generation of the left inside the Democratic Party.

In his article, “’Dirty Break’ for Independent Political Action or A Way to Stay Stuck in the Mud,” Kim Moody questions  Eric Blanc’s use of the MFLP as a historical precedent for Bread and Roses’ strategy of using the Democratic Party ballot line. Moody points out the MFLP was part of a national movement to form a labor party. Where the “dirty break” was successful in getting candidates elected inside the Republican and Democratic parties, for example by Non-Partisan League (NPL) in North Dakota, the break never came, and no Farmer Labor Party (FLP) was ever formed. In other words, “had the Minnesota NPL been more successful in this strategy there might never have been a FLP in that state.”

In fact, the successful FLPs were launched not through a dirty break strategy, but a clean break organized by socialists in a period of sharp social struggle. Moody therefore argues that “there has to be a significant pole fighting for a clean break if those attempting to work (in any way, with or without illusions) within the Democratic Party framework are to be drawn to a political break with that party. The social, economic, and political forces within the Democratic Party today, and the national spoiler effect to which they are so attuned, make a sui generis internally-based split a virtual impossibility.”

Today, there is a real risk is that the “dirty break” strategy will lead, in practice, to a new realignment strategy, like that advocated by Sanders and AOC. They have no desire to launch a new party now or in the future, and instead call for socialists to take over the Democratic Party by contesting both national and “down-ballot” primaries. Most if not all of DSA’s candidates share this strategy and either reject or are indifferent to a future “dirty break.”

Meagan Day admits in a recent tweet that the “dirty break” and realignment strategies seem indistinguishable in practice. After laying out three socialist strategies in relationship to the Democratic Party—1) realignment; 2) clean break; and 3) dirty break—she admits that “1 and 3 are going to look similar up to a certain point.”

The Democrats will take advantage of this confusion to absorb leftists who work inside the party. While it is a capitalist party, the Democrats presents themselves as a broad tent, open to the left, workers, and oppressed people—but at the price of disorganizing our struggles and organizations.

They are experts at using both the stick and the carrot. So, they will do everything they can to prevent socialists from winning or getting reelected. But if socialists do win, they work hard to absorb and coopt them. It offers them appointments, the illusion of influencing its policies, and even will trot them out to market the party as a broad party to unions and social movements.

The Sanders campaigns are paradigmatic examples of how the Democrats neutralize and entrap the left. In both of his presidential runs, the establishment ensured that one of theirs won the nomination, first Clinton in 2016 and then Biden in 2020. In the second campaign, despite all the hullabaloo about the possibility of Sanders winning, Barack Obama and the rest of the establishment anointed Biden after South Carolina, cleared away all his mainstream competitors, and backed him in a crushing defeat of Sanders.

Worse, in a tragic repetition of what the left always does inside the Democratic Party, when Sanders ended his campaigns in defeat, he rallied his supporters to support the neo-liberal, corporate establishment’s candidates–first Hillary Clinton and now Biden. This year Sanders has worked especially hard to co-opt and discipline a left that is growing in numbers and self-confidence in the midst of the current uprising. He drafted AOC and other leftists into joint task forces with Biden’s team, threatened to rescind the credentials of any delegate to the Democratic National Convention who engages in criticism of Biden, and chided those who refuse to support the “lesser of two rapists” as being irresponsible.

In this context, it hard to see any real space for the “dirty break” strategy. Almost no DSA candidates support it, and most if not all DSA elected officials will follow Sanders in voting and campaigning for Biden. Given these realities, we fear that more and more advocates of the  “dirty break” will end up acting like “realigners”—contesting more and more “down-ballot” elections and being dragged further into the trap of Democratic Party politics.

Missing the Moment

French and Gong’s perspective and strategy could lead Bread and Roses and DSA to miss the enormous opportunities for socialists to play a role organizing and leading in class and social struggles as well as election campaigns. The Black-led multiracial working-class uprising should be the basis of a sharp reorientation for the entire left. This is our Civil Rights movement and it should become the primary focus of all socialist activity

Rather than shifting to this focus, though, French and Gong’s perspective and strategy continues to prioritize electoral work as the main vehicle to build the new party. This leads them to adopt a conservative timeline, projecting a 10-year slog through the Democratic Party to launch “a workers’ party by, say 2030.” We believe their priority is mistaken, we should instead focus on struggle especially the uprising, and our timeline for building the party must be radically accelerated.

Truth be told, independent working-class parties were never built through a slow accumulation of forces within a capitalist party. They have, historically, become possible during leaps in consciousness produced in the thick of struggles, often illegal, that challenge the existing order. It is in these struggles that socialists can cohere the militant minority of radical workers and oppressed people into parties that can challenge the capitalist parties and the system as a whole.

The overwhelming emphasis on electoral activity within the Democratic Party in DSA helps explain why it has been, as an organization, caught so flat footed by the uprising. Individual members, the Afrosocialist and Socialists of Color Caucus, and some chapters have responded. However, DSA as an organization has not shifted as rapidly as it must.

Why? We in DSA are still saddled with an organizational structure and political culture that is not set up to participate in and lead struggle from below. Our meetings are too infrequent to assess and participate in dynamic movements; we are fragmented into separate working groups; and most members only become active through electoral campaigns.

DSA today is facing the same challenge SDS did in the mid-1960s.  In 1965, SDS faced the choice of continuing to follow the path laid out at its founding—the original realignment strategy of Michael Harrington—or to break with Harrington, the AFL-CIO officials, and the Democratic Party liberals and organize a mass demonstration demanding immediate and unconditional withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam. They choose the latter, and SDS became the main organization for a generation of radical young people.

DSA today needs to make a similar choice—a continued focus on Democratic party election campaigns or active participation in the new movement, alongside the new generation of multi-racial radicals leading the uprising. If we don’t shift, and we believe that we can, DSA will no longer be the main organization of the new radicalization.  A new socialist organization—a new socialist party—can only be built in the middle of this uprising, debating its issues, strategies and tactics.

An Alternative Perspective and Strategy for Party Building

Prioritizing struggle does not mean adopting an ultra-left or anarchist position of abstention from electoral politics on principle. Such a position leaves the capitalist class unchallenged on the political terrain. However, the key task in electoral work is ensuring the political independence of the working class, even if in primitive form. Thus, in place of  a “dirty break” strategy, we should run our own “clean break” candidates in local elections on our own socialist or labor ballot line.

We have no illusions that the human material—a significant minority of working and oppressed people that is ready to “waste” their vote on an independent party that gives a political profile to their struggle—exists today. However, in the context of an insurgent mass movement, there is more space than before to run independent socialist campaigns. This is especially true in single party municipalities controlled by the Democrats, where there will be no danger of being scapegoated for “spoiling” the elections. At the same time, we should back independent socialist campaigns like that of Howie Hawkins as a “place holder” for a national independent party of working people. We should do this with no fear of the spoiler charge.

Local and state level campaigns, and especially any candidates elected, should be accountable to DSA and other socialist organizations. And they need to use their position in office to trumpet the demands of the movement and not adapt them to those of the capitalist parties. They need to resist the siren song of legislative “log-rolling” to get the least worst bill possible, and instead be advocates of our struggles and movement, supporting and advancing their demands in city councils, state houses, and federal government.

The new socialist left in the US that has emerged in the last five years needs to seize this opportunity and adopt this alternative perspective and strategy. If we do not, we risk being bypassed by the surging struggle from below to the detriment of building what we agree we need—a new mass party of workers and oppressed peoples.

Punched in the Face: Minneapolis Labor and the Fight for #JusticeforGeorgeFloyd

By: June 23, 2020
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A protest for George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Source: Wikicommons

On the second day of what would eventually become the Minneapolis uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd, Adam Birch, a bus driver, got a message over his intercom that Metro Transit, the public transportation authority of the Twin Cities, needed volunteers at the 3rd Precinct. When Birch heard the message, he knew exactly what the request meant.

“They potentially wanted people to transport cops and to transport arrested protesters to jail,” Birch told me. Back in 2016, before becoming a bus driver, he’d been arrested at a demonstration protesting the death of Philando Castille, a Black man killed by police outside of St. Paul. Birch was taken to jail on a Metro Transit bus. So, after his shift ended, he stuck around the garage to talk his coworkers out of volunteering to help the Minneapolis Police Department. “I said ‘hey, do you really want to be put in a dangerous situation for a police department that, you know, kills people?’” he recalled.

Many of Birch’s coworkers—members of Local 1005 of the Amalgamated Transit Union—were uncomfortable with the idea and went home for the day. By the time the cops came to ask for assistance, the garage was almost empty. “One driver in particular was called up to the dispatch window. They said ‘we need somebody to take cops from here to here.’ And she was like, ‘No, I’m not gonna do that’ and she’s sat back down,” said Birch.

A day after the 3rd Precinct burned to the ground, Birch created a petition called “Union Members for #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd” and organized a small rally of union members before joining the protest outside the 5th Precinct. “We are willing to talk to our co-workers about why the labor movement needs to take a stand against racist police violence of our brothers, sisters, and siblings,” the petition reads. ATU Local 1005 supported Birch’s action and also released a statement expressing support for the uprisings and criticizing the MPD’s request for drivers to help them move about the city.

Minnesota unions and labor activists from different industries launched similar endeavors. Members of AFSCME Local 2822, which represents Hennepin County Clerical Workers, were out marching in the streets everyday. Minnesota Workers United, a grassroots labor organization that brings together workers from a variety of sectors, organized a protest outside of Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman’s home. The Minnesota AFL-CIO demanded that Bob Kroll, President of the Minneapolis Police Union and a known Trump supporter, step down.

“Minneapolis Police Union President, Bob Kroll, has failed the Labor Movement and the residents of Minneapolis,” their statement read. “Bob Kroll has a long history of bigoted remarks and complaints of violence made against him. As union President, he antagonizes and disparages members of the Black community. He advocates for military-style police tactics making communities less safe and the police force more deadly.”

When the University of Minnesota announced it would cut ties with the MPD, Robert Panning-Miller, former president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, was reminded that there had been a contentious debate in Minneapolis three years earlier over whether Student Resource Officers should remain in public schools. “I went and looked and I realized that the contract is expiring this August and so I started putting out word that this is something we need to make sure is not renewed,” Panning-Miller told me. “What do the SROs do besides facilitate the school-to-prison pipeline?”

After some quick research and a few Facebook posts, his call to end the relationship between Minneapolis public schools and the MPD became an uproar, amplified by other members of the MFT. On June 2nd, Panning-Miller and the union, along with parents and students, rallied outside the Davis Center in support of the new legislation. That same day, a unanimous vote by the school board terminated the $1.1 million contract.

While much of the labor movement in Minneapolis has embedded itself in the city’s struggle against police brutality, union leadership at the national level has shied away from demands that it clean house. As criticism of the presence of police unions within the AFL-CIO grows, powerful leaders like Richard Trumka have hesitated, offering platitudes over concrete policy. “The short answer is not to disengage and just condemn. The answer is to totally re-engage and educate,” Trumka said during a press call on June 3rd. Likewise, AFSCME president Lee Saunders defended police officers’ right to unionize, while also arguing that collective bargaining shouldn’t “be construed as a shield for misconduct or criminal behavior.”

In fact, shielding members from accountability is what police unions do. The strong collective bargaining agreements formulated by police union organizers have weaponized the philosophy of the union movement to protect officers from being fired for extrajudicially murdering people of color. For example, many police unions inked contracts with cities that prevent government agencies from immediately interviewing officers who brutalize suspects or engage in sexual misconduct with arrestees. These protections, enforced by police unions, play a vital role allowing police officers to enforce the racial stratification that permeates every aspect of American society; a phenomenon that unions have both fought against and been complicit in.

The labor movement has long struggled with its own internal history of racial injustice and segregation. While Black workers make up the largest racial group within America’s rank-and-file and the decline of union membership in general has contributed to the racial wealth gap, the fact remains that modern labor institutions were shaped by racial prejudice; the influential Wagner Act, which granted private sectors right to organize unions, explicitly exempted farm hands and domestic workers—a tactic to keep Black workers from participating in collective bargaining. Throughout the 20th century and into the present, many white workers (even union workers) have viewed workers of color, especially Black workers, as a threat to their wages and privilege.

Robin Kelley, an academic who focuses on the political and cultural aspects of Black history, cites the growing inclusion of Black workers into unions during the 50s and 60s as a key example of this phenomenon. Even unions like the United Steelworkers, which was integrated, fought changes that would have given more economic power to Black workers, Kelley told me. “They really become robust in terms of trying to keep so-called ‘unskilled workers’ from moving up the ladder,” he said. And despite the growing alliance between labor activists and civil rights organizers, union leaders failed to stop industrialists and racist bosses from utilizing racial tension to sow division. “They dropped this threat: ‘If you let these negros organize, they’re going to take your jobs. If they organize and take your jobs, you don’t think that those need to take less wages than you? You’re a skilled steelworker,’” Kelley explained.

“For the vast majority of workers,” Kelley said, “including white workers, racial justice issues are the sort of fulcrum that gives capital even more weight, because they’re able to not just divide workers but create structural forms of racism that put downward pressure on all wages and all working conditions.”

When labor organizations have placed a premium on racial equality and solidarity, they’ve often made huge strides in both workers rights and social justice. Toni Gilpin, a labor historian and author, points to the United Farm Equipment Workers of America as a key example of this: “The FE in Louisville, which was majority white, carried out a constant campaign to press for interracial solidarity in a town where segregation and white racism was endemic.”

Throughout the 40s, the FE fought for racial solidarity in tangent with meaningful economic gains that didn’t benefit members based on race. Gilpin describes this being achieved through active inclusion of Black workers in leadership positions. “They had African Americans in top positions of leadership. And this was a period after WWII when that was not the norm. So they had two executive board members, one executive board member, one vice president who were African American at a time when most unions had no Blacks in such top leadership positions,” Gilpin said. “It also meant that they pressed for contract terms and negotiations with these powerful companies that specifically work to the advantage of African American workers. So for example, they push for plant wide seniority.”

In Minneapolis, standing on the edge of a demonstration near the 5th Precinct, Doni Jones, the president of ATU Local 1005’s Black Caucus, said that Black bus drivers still deal with racist hiring practices and internal comportment aimed explicitly at Black bus drivers. “We’re still the last hired, first fired at Metro Transit,” he told me. “We’re suspended faster. Our punishment is harsher.”

When white drivers are assaulted by passengers and defend themselves, Jones said, they usually keep their jobs; Black drivers, however, are usually fired. Metro Transit did not respond to a request for comment. Since 2016, there have been 200 assaults on Metro Transit bus drivers, and last year there were 46 incidents of spitting.

Rather than provide all its drivers with better safety protocols, Jones said, Metro Transit punishes Black workers and lets white workers off the hook. “They say ‘it was overkill’ or ‘it was out of retaliation,” he continued. “How is it retaliation if someone punches you in the face?”

Originally posted at The Strikewave.

Trump Rallies for Reopening as Biden Strengthens His Position

By: June 21, 2020
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This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France. 

President Donald Trump held his first campaign rally in months on June 20 in an indoor arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma where speaking to a smaller than expected crowd of only 6,000 he minimized the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic still spreading across the country and failed to address the police racism and violence that have led to protests by hundreds of thousands nationwide. He talked about reopening the economy and a return to American greatness, as long as the Democrats and anarchists don’t take over.

Speaking to the nearly all-white crowd, almost none of whom were wearing the recommended masks or keeping social distance, he did not talk about Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the end of slavery in America, nor did he mention the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 when whites attacked a black neighborhood, burning it and and killing 300 black people. And he did not did say the name of George Floyd whose murder at the hands of police spurred the recent protests. Instead he talked about the “left-wing mobs” who have been pulling down statues of Confederate generals who fought to preserve slavery. Trump suggested that if elected Joseph Biden and the Democrats would allow anarchists and rioters to run wild. Trump remarkably ignored the 122,000 who have died in the pandemic and new predictions that 200,000 may be dead by October, and he did not allude to the 40 million unemployed.

Recent polls show Biden ahead of Trump by 11 points and the likely winner of the 2020 election in November. Trump has been on the defensive not only because of the coronavirus pandemic, the economic crisis, and the national protest movement over police racism and violence, but he has also recently lost two Supreme Court decisions. In the first, the court voted 6 to 3 that the 1964 Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination based on sex also applies to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, a major victory for the LGBTQ movement. In the second temporary decision based on procedure, the court voted 5 to 4 against a Trump administration attempt to overturn DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order that protects from deportation 700,000 young immigrants brought by their parents to the United States when they were infants or small children. Trump promises to make another attempt to overturn DACA and may be successful.

Joseph Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has not been holding any rallies and only attended one small public event near his home in Delaware a month ago when he placed a wreath on a monument at a ceremony on Memorial Day. Biden has promised to choose a woman as his vice-presidential running mate, and because of the recent protests he is under pressure to choose a woman of color. In May Biden for the first time raised more money, $80 million, than Trump’s $74 million.

Biden has said that he would make DACA permanent on “day one” of his presidency. But while the new Black Lives Matter movement has demanded the “defunding” of police, Biden has said he does not support defunding. He calls instead for more money for police to carry out reforms, such as “community policing,” that is, police working closely with local neighborhoods. Biden is for reopening the U.S. economy, but wants to do so more gradually and carefully than Trump, who is for reopening now. Biden has assembled a team of economic advisors, many of whom are neoliberals from the Barack Obama administration, while others are said to be more progressive.

Meanwhile, a month since Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, the movement in the street continues, signaling a new era of demands for reform. The protest demonstrations have become celebratory, rejoicing in a newfound solidarity. Yet so far the proposals of both Republicans and Democrats are shallow and do not represent the demand for profound structural changes that the movement wants.

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