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  • The faux anti-imperialism of denying anti-Uighur atrocities

    The faux anti-imperialism of denying anti-Uighur atrocities

    As evidence of the Chinese government’s atrocities against Uighur and other Turkic Muslims continues to mount – satellite images of concentration camps; leaked state blueprints for mass exploitation and internment; survivor testimony of disappearances, torture, and sexual abuse – so too do the political contradictions in the international response.

    Not only do we have the United States and its allies decrying China’s human rights violations, and China and its allies denying such violations, and reminding the West of its own abuses of human rights, we now have a group of Western “anti-imperialists” siding with China simply because they feel whatever the US says is suspect, and therefore what China claims is not.

    World leaders usually regarded as strong advocates for oppressed Muslims, such as Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan, have also signed on to what might be called the “Uighur Exception,” in order to avoid offending the Chinese government and jeopardising the development dollars on which they depend.

    And so, the Uighurs are wronged four times over: by China’s oppression, by American imperialist cooptation, by left-wing denialism, and by Muslim leaders’ dereliction.

    For the Trump administration, the Uighur’s plight was yet another card to play in its China-bashing, along with Hong Kong and COVID-19. In a remarkable reversal, Trump went from lauding mass Uighur internment as the “right thing to do” to labelling it as genocide – all while implementing a Muslim ban and incarcerating thousands of migrants in a vast “concentration camp” system of the US’s own. Behind the facade of Trump’s transparently Sinophobic theatrics, US companies continued to deploy Chinese surveillance technology developed in the laboratory of Uighur repression.

    Current US President Joe Biden has maintained the bipartisan consensus in accusing China of genocide – having previously served as vice president in the Obama administration, a pioneer in the preemptive collective criminalisation of Muslim communities in the name of counter-radicalisation.

    Even one-time anti-Uighur agitators like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have joined the bandwagon of performative allyship with the Uighurs against China’s “modern genocide.” What a change in tune from 2009, when Gingrich denigrated the Uighurs as misogynists, “trained mass killers,” and “terrorists,” cheering their wrongful capture and torture by the US at Guantanamo Bay.

    In contrast to this fickle and self-serving “solidarity” from American political leaders, scholars and human rights organisations have long been consistent in exposing and opposing China’s persecutory policies against the Uighurs, even when conflicting with the American empire’s realpolitik.

    Amnesty International’s first report (PDF) on atrocities against the Uighurs is from 1992, documenting a “pattern of human rights violations [that] appears to have emerged in Xinjiang since 1989,” including secret detentions, extrajudicial executions, and suppression of religious expression.

    Human Rights Watch has been calling on the US government to press China on its treatment of the Uighurs since 1998, in the face of then-President Bill Clinton’s reticence for the sake of augmenting US-China trade.

    And in the midst of the “war on terror” mania in 2004, Georgetown University Xinjiang specialist James Millward authoritatively deconstructed China’s sensationalist and unsubstantiated projections of the Uighur “terrorist” threat – the basis of the US’s designation of the Uighur group East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a terrorist organisation in 2002 to woo the Chinese government’s support for the illegal invasion of Iraq.

    Yet some sections of the left continue to dismiss reports of China’s atrocities as an American imperialist ploy, concocting mountains of sand in which to bury their “anti-imperial” heads.

    The most steadfast bastion of denialism has been the Grayzone, which describes itself as “an independent news website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire.” Their modus operandi is to focus primarily on discrediting some prominent messengers calling attention to the Uighur’s persecution while leaving the vast body of evidence behind the message largely untouched.

    Much of this evidence emanates from within the Chinese state apparatus itself. This includes:

    • Census data showing the long-term demographic replacement of Indigenous Uighurs with the dominant Han ethnic group – encouraged by government incentives for Han migration and settlement.
    • Statistics revealing a precipitate decline in Xinjiang birth rates by 33 percent (from 15.88 percent to 10.69 percent), and population growth rates by 46 percent (from 11.40 percent to 6.13 percent), between 2017 and 2018 – misrepresented in the Grayzone as a decrease of only 5 percent, even as it excoriates its ideological opponents for “statistical malpractice” and “data abuse”.
    • Counterterrorism laws and “de-extremification” regulations targeting religious practices such as wearing a veil and growing a beard.
    • Leaked lists of detainees, such as the Aksu and Karakax lists, detailing the extrajudicial detention of Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims for such “offences” as studying the Quran, travelling abroad, or being “generally untrustworthy”.
    • Procurement and budget documents testifying to the prison-like securitisation and weaponisation of internment centres, publicly defended as “vocational training” facilities yet equipped with electric cattle prods, riot gear, tear gas, stun guns, specialised interrogation chairs, and spiked clubs.
    • A government-issued “telegram” specifying procedures for the operation and expansion of these internment centres, methods of political and psychological indoctrination, and instructions for maintaining “strict secrecy” and “preventing escapes”.
    • State “bulletins” indicating the scale of detention – with 15,683 people reportedly rounded up into camps from four prefectures over the course of one week in 2017 alone.
    • Official policies such as Physicals for All, mandating mass biometric and DNA collection, and Becoming Family, planting government officials to live with and monitor Uighurs in their homes.
    • Policy documents laying out plans for the mass institutionalisation of Uighur children in residential schools, and the mass sterilisation of Uighur women – otherwise known in Chinese state officialese as “baby-making machines”.
    • Official government-issued White Papers and other propaganda materials erasing Uighur peoplehood, indigeneity, and identity, and describing the large-scale transfer of Uighurs out of their indigenous territory for labour programs.
    • Statements by public officials ordering to “break [the Uighurs’] roots, break their lineage, break their connections, and break their origins,” and referring to Islam as a “malignant tumour,” a “virus,” and a “weed” – evidence of an intent to destroy the Uighur people as a people, defined as genocidal under international law.

    Rather than disavowing these practices, Chinese state outlets have attempted to justify them – “justifications” uncritically reproduced in analyses by Grayzone journalists. Mass internment is pitched as “countering terrorism and extremism.” Imprisoned Uighur academics are cast as alleged promoters of “separatism” and “violent militancy” – no proof provided. Forced labour programmes are explained away as “poverty reduction”. Evidence of coercive sterilisation is packaged as “family planning” and “free healthcare.” Child separation is chalked up to “abandonment” by “irresponsible parents”.

    When it comes to smearing Uighurs, temporal incoherence is no obstacle: For instance, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement is blamed in the Grayzone for “terrorist” attacks starting in 1990 – eight years before the group’s alleged founding. Some Xinjiang experts continue to doubt whether it ever existed as a cogent organisation at all.

    Political incoherence is likewise no bar: The Newlines Institute – which recently published a report arguing that the persecution of the Uighurs meets the international definition of genocide – is accused by the Grayzone of being in bed simultaneously with the unlikely threesome of the CIA, the Israel lobby, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Newlines genocide report was produced in consultation with eminent legal experts including Director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute Helena Kennedy, Director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre John Packer, and past President of the International Criminal Court Bar Association Charles Taku.

    While indicting those they criticise as American imperialist stooges, the Grayzone itself readily uses sources generated from within the very belly of the American empire, as long as they serve to prop up the story of the Uighur menace.

    The historically CIA-friendly Thai national police, for instance, and US government terrorist entity listings – infamous for also criminalising Palestine liberation movements – are cited as authoritative proof of the Uighur terrorist threat.

    Meanwhile, Uighurs supporting the victims of American counterterrorism – such as Rushan Abbas, whose work as an interpreter for Uighur Gitmo captives helped “mitigate the brutal effects of the ‘war on terror’,” in the words of critical investigative journalist Andy Worthington – are impugned.

    Channelling Newt Gingrich on the Uighurs circa 2009, yesterday’s imperialism is apparently today’s “anti-imperialism.”

    Even some of the Grayzone’s own selectively quoted sources seriously undermine its desired narrative. For example, an Associated Press story cited by the Grayzone to demonstrate the danger of Uighur militancy in fact describes such militancy as the “self-fulfilling prophecy” of “Chinese oppression”. The piece begins with an account of the torture of a Uighur man by Chinese police.

    Similarly, historian Linda Benson’s book on the Uighur Ili Rebellion of 1944-1949 – from which the Grayzone extracted an anecdote depicting Uighurs as misogynists  – clearly explicates in its introduction: “Chinese policies in Xinjiang served to increase local antipathy among Muslims towards the Han Chinese and, inadvertently, to foster [Uighur] nationalism … The core of Chinese policy continued to be military and political domination by the Han Chinese minority.”

    The current onslaught against the Uighurs is the continuation of a long history of settler colonisation, political domination, resource extraction, and geopolitical exploitation – now conducted, since 9/11, under the aegis of a “people’s war on terror.”

    Far from being a recently-manufactured artefact of American manipulation, as the Grayzone and other denialists suggest, Uighur opposition to Chinese state rule is as old as the imposition of this rule itself. Independent Uighur states were declared in 1865, 1933, and 1944.  By reducing the Uighurs to little more than Great Power pawns, with no autonomous politics or liberation aspirations of their own, some “anti-imperialists” reproduce the imperial hegemony they rail against.

    “The upheaval in Xinjiang,” Benson writes, “was similar to that of other colonial or ‘subject’ people who were contained within larger political entities … what are today referred to as national liberation struggles.” China’s very name for the Uighur homeland, Xinjiang, literally means “new frontier.”

    The narratives deployed to delegitimise the Uighurs’ struggle echo those of other settler-colonial regimes, from the Americas to Palestine to Kashmir: denying Indigenous history; dehumanising Indigenous peoples as “underdeveloped,” “uncivilised,” and “terrorists;” disguising settler sovereignty as benevolent, and demonising Indigenous resistance as the source of violence rather than the response.

    In its subjugation and assimilation of the Uighur homeland, China’s policies aren’t the antithesis of Western coloniality, but its mirror image. China’s own Foreign Minister has stated that its “war on terror” practices against the Uighurs “are no different from those in the UK, France and the US.” Many of the same corporate profiteers reaping the spoils of American imperialism – such as Haliburton, Exxon, McKinsey, Microsoft, Amazon, and Blackwater founder Erik Prince – have also profited from the Chinese version in Xinjiang.

    Trapped between China’s abusive assimilationism, American political opportunism, and left-wing denialism, it is the Uighurs who are suffering. Abandoning them is not anti-imperialism, but the imperial politics of disposability by another name.

    This article originally appeared in Al Jazeera on May 14, 2021. The views are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

     

  • American Progressives and France’s Surge to the Right

    American Progressives and France’s Surge to the Right

    Macron’s newest orders banning demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine reveal even more clearly the real nature of France’s anti-Muslim campaign, one that the U.S. and French Left have with few exceptions mostly ignored.

    Members of the French military have issued two recent letters threatening a military coup.   On April 29, twenty retired French generals, a hundred senior officers, and more than a thousand soldiers of the French military signed a statement threatening a civil war if the French government did not take action against “Islamists” and “suburban hordes” polluting French traditional values.  The language and intent of the statement were clearly to sow fear and hatred of the  racially and economically segregated “suburbs” that are home to many Muslim and Black French people. A second letter from active military personnel and some civilians was published in May.

    Although we might hope that those issuing the threats represent an irrelevant fringe group, in fact one of the two leading candidates for President, Marine Le Pen, agreed with them in public   And the current government of Emmanuel Macron is already carrying out many of the repressive actions against Muslims that those who threatened the coup have suggested. Some of these actions, a law forbidding the filming of police “with intention to identify them,” for example, affects all French people and has been protested by Amnesty International.

    Many of the actions target only Muslims and violate basic free speech rights.  Macron’s Interior Minister now requires that all Muslim clergy sign a pact that they will not criticize the French government, and the Ministry has closed down an organization which worked on anti-discrimination, the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), with no legal basis for doing so.  This is extremely rare. In addition to government repression, French Muslims live with routine televised insults and face physical harm. On the same day the military leaders threatened a coup, a white French man nearly killed an Arab French man and his family by ramming through their house with his car.

    The French Senate, dominated by the right-wing party, Les Republicans,  has passed additional provisions to a law originally proposed by Macron’s party, preventing Muslim women from going with their children on school field trips, if they wear a head scarf (a hijab);  banning an individual from  praying in a public university, and prohibiting foreign flags at a wedding.   There is a further step in the legislative process which requires Senate and Assembly to agree on a common version of the law, and some of the Senate provisions may not ultimately go into effect.  Macron’s move to the Right is widely interpreted as a desire to win over those who would otherwise vote for Le Pen. Given the absence of a viable candidate on the Left, Macron is betting more progressive voters will be forced to stick with him. Whatever his calculation, his anti-Muslim actions echo Donald Trump’s dream: removing free speech from U.S. citizens, which is exactly what Macron has done.

    The U.S. and French Left have often been vocal about the threat of “fascism.” Yet in a situation where fascist-minded members of the military are threatening a coup, and mainstream parties are taking away civil rights, opposition from the broader Left has been minimal. Muslim people seem isolated, on their own in organizing against these new discriminatory laws. An exception is the French National Student Union (UNEF), which has taken up the issue of racism in a serious way. In an action that reveals the extent of the normalization of repression, or at least the threats, the Senate has introduced a measure that would ban organizations like theirs,  if they allow Black or other oppressed groups to have meetings without whites.  One of the Left political parties, La France Insoumise, has disagreed on some points of the proposed ‘Security’ and “Secularism” laws. Yet the Left as a whole has been missing in organizing against the repression.

    Why So Little Attention from American Progressives?

    What explains the relative silence from the U.S. Left?  One reason is that though we love singing La Marseillaise, we have not come to grips with the extent of the racism in the country that produced the revolutionary tradition with which so many identify. We have much to admire in the stunning protests by French workers to defend pension rights, the Yellow Vest protests against increasing taxes, and the protests by high school students to stop required exams during the pandemic. Yet alongside this are other “French traditions,” like colonizing swaths of Africa and killing  more than half a million  Algerian people  fighting for their liberation. One long-term result of France’s colonial history, which many on the French and U.S. Left have yet to confront, is the marginalized population of Black and Brown people living in France.

    In discussing these issues with activists on the Left I’ve seen we in the U.S. Left are not immune from effects of propaganda that villainizes Muslims.  When I compared the new French laws against Muslims to the Nazi’s campaign of suppression of Jewish rights, a friend blurted, “But the Jews were peaceful.” This statement reflects how activists, either consciously or unconsciously, have been influenced to see anti-Muslim discrimination as justifiable.   Why are we not outraged about laws targeting all Muslims based on the well-publicized crimes of individual Muslims, who have, for the most part, represented no one but themselves?

    Another factor is the extent to which anti-Muslim forces have succeeded in casting as a defense of women’s equality the misogynist argument of French politicians that they have the right to regulate women’s dress, “saving” Muslim women.   The French effort to stop Muslim women from wearing a veil (including dress that non-Muslim women would call a scarf) has a long history dating back at least as far as the Algerian revolution.  The observation of anti-colonial revolutionary and psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, writing in 1959 rings true today: “Still today the dream of a total domestication of Algerian society by means of unveiled women aiding and abetting the occupier continues to haunt the colonial authorities.”  (Algeria Unveiled, p. 43)

    We need to listen to French Muslim women who are saying that their choice of dress is their business, not the government’s.  “Hands off my hijab” is a current slogan of activists, one of many statements by Muslim women pushing back on government repression.

    Muslim women are constantly discussed on the French news, but they are rarely invited to speak for themselves. The economic and social discrimination is horrendous and downplayed: Those wearing the headscarf cannot, by law, be teachers or hold any other form of public employment. Those who don’t wish to wear the scanty swim suits required by French authorities, cannot go to public pools.

    I think both solidarity and the danger to all humanity posed by the Right requires that we take action. U.S. women’s organizations need to mobilize on behalf of French Muslim women. The message of the Biden administration in regard to France should include opposition to the suppression of Muslim rights. Our events and protests should speak out against anti-Muslim racism and foster a deeper collaboration between the anti-racist movements in France and the U.S, which would benefit all of us.

  • India’s Covid Crisis: Can the Modi Regime Get India Out of It?

    India’s Covid Crisis: Can the Modi Regime Get India Out of It?

    It’s hard to live in India these days, surrounded by death, fear and grief. We are inundated with heart-breaking TV reports of people begging for hospital beds and oxygen as their family members die on the pavement or in vehicles gasping for breath. Others die inside hospitals as they run out of oxygen. Equally disturbing are reports of crematorium and burial ground staff working 24/7 and still unable to get through the huge number of corpses, so that extra pyres have to be set up in parks and car parks; the massive discrepancy between those who are cremated or buried under Covid protocols and the official figures is explained by the fact that officials have been told not to write ‘Covid-19’ as the cause of death, suggesting to some experts that the real death toll may be 2 to 5 times higher than the reported figure.[1] Other medical experts say the death toll could be up to 10 times the official one.[2] Let’s spell this out, for the sake of clarity. Twice the official death count of over 250,000 would bring it to 500,000 deaths, five times would bring it to 1.25 million, while 10 times would bring it up to 2.5 million. And since the cases are similarly undercounted due to the lack of testing, they too are probably the highest in the world.

    These images from major cities have been flashed around the world, but what is happening in villages is even more terrifying. In the villages of Uttar Pradesh (UP), for example, cases and deaths have surged as a consequence of panchayat (village council) elections and ‘people are dropping dead like flies’. People with severe Covid symptoms are sent to district hospitals, where all too often they die because there is no oxygen; but they are not tested so these are not recorded as Covid deaths. Others die at home, untested, as hospitals ask patients to arrange for oxygen cylinders themselves. Hospitals and families desperately appealing for oxygen as well as social activists doing their best to respond to these appeals have been threatened by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister with confiscation of their property for spreading rumours because, he says, there is no oxygen shortage in UP.[3]

    How did this happen?

    There were, of course, long-term problems with India’s healthcare system, due to the failure of successive governments to invest more than around 1.25 percent of GDP in it. And the deadliness of the second wave, probably driven by new and more transmissible variants, has taken everyone by surprise. But there was a whole year since the lockdown of March 24, 2020, to prepare for this onslaught. Why wasn’t it used to minimise the scale of the second surge?

    One reason, clearly, was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s boast at the World Economic Forum in January 2021 that India ‘has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively,’ which he apparently believed.[4] As recently as March 2021, Health Minister Harsh Vardhan made the delusional claim that “We are in the end game of the Covid-19 pandemic in India.”[5]

    In a hard-hitting statement, Dr Navjot Dahiya, vice-president of the Indian Medical Association, called Modi a ‘super-spreader’ for holding political rallies ‘tossing all Covid-19 norms in the air,’ and for encouraging millions of pilgrims to attend the Kumbh Mela at Haridwar in Uttarakhand.[6] The criminal recklessness of Modi’s behaviour is magnified when we factor in the unprecedented prolongation of the Bengal elections to eight phases by the Election Commission, acting under Modi’s instructions, as most supposedly independent institutions now do. In fact, the Kumbh Mela was not even due until 2022, but was advanced to 2021 because of some astrological configuration; the BJP chief minister allowed devotees to crowd together without masks or physical distancing in the belief that the ‘flow and blessings of Ma Ganga [Mother Ganges] will ensure coronavirus doesn’t spread.’[7] The previous chief minister had been removed when he suggested subjecting the Kumbh Mela to restrictions in view of the Covid surge, illustrating the tendency whereby all power in the BJP is now concentrated in the PM; only those who fit in with his agenda can survive. The government at the centre and in BJP-ruled states is now synonymous with Modi.

    If we go back a little further, we can detect two massive mistakes that have led to the current holocaust. One, which has become very obvious now, is the failure to ramp up oxygen supplies. The need for doing this was flagged as long ago as April 1, 2020, in a meeting of government officials.[8] Yet nothing was done until October 21, when the Central Medical Services Society (CMSS), an institution under the central Health Ministry, floated tenders for 150 (later raised to 162) Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) oxygen plants for district hospitals across the country; six months later, only 33 of them had been installed, and only 5 were functioning. All 162 plants cost only Rs 2,015,800.[9] Meanwhile, inexplicably, India exported twice as much oxygen in the first ten months of fiscal 2020-2021 as it did in the entire previous financial year.[10] If ten times the number of PSA plants had been ordered in April 2020 and the CMSS had ensured they were installed and functioning by April 2021, if oxygen had been stockpiled instead of being exported, and if oxygen distribution had been streamlined, we would not be seeing the thousands of deaths per day that doctors tell us are entirely preventable.

    Vaccines too save lives and cut transmission of the disease. It is not true that India produces 60 percent of the world’s vaccines (it only supplies 60 percent of UNICEF’s vaccines), but it is home to the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, the Serum Institute of India (SII), which is one of the few which already had influenza vaccine-producing capacity which could easily be switched to producing Covid-19 vaccines.[11] It was therefore welcome news when SII CEO Adar Poonawalla announced in late December 2020 that he had already produced and stockpiled 40-50 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneka vaccine, called Covishield in India, which had completed its Phase 3 trials in other countries. He expected to expand production to 100 million doses per month in March 2021 and 300 million doses per month by July. While SII had an agreement to supply 200 million doses to COVAX, to be distributed to other developing countries, most of the rest would be made available in India, especially the initial batch.[12]

    One would have expected the government to start Phase 1 of the vaccination drive (for healthcare and hospital workers) at the beginning of January, but it started only on the 16th and even then very slowly. The reason for the delay seems to have been that the government wanted a simultaneous roll-out of Covaxin, indigenously developed by Bharat Biotech with funding from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), without waiting for it to complete its Phase 3 trials; health professionals who objected were told that if they were allotted Covaxin, they had to take it or not be vaccinated at all.[13] Even more reprehensible is the fact that unlike other countries, which provided advance funding to vaccine producers and tied up huge orders, the Indian government contributed nothing to the development or production of Covishield, and ordered only 11 million doses initially, along with 5.5 million doses of Covaxin, which is also a 2-dose vaccine.[14] By February, it ordered 10 million more doses of Covishield, still at the price of Rs 150 per dose which, according to Poonawalla, provided a small profit but not enough to reinvest in expanding production. When the government banned exports, he lost the income he had been counting on to increase production. In April he borrowed Rs 30 billion from banks, after which the Centre said it had authorised a loan of the same amount to SII and Rs 15 billion to Bharat Biotech to enable them to ramp up supplies; but due to the delay, 100 million doses per month would only be available after July, he said.[15]

    This is surely a monumental botch-up. Despite being home to the manufacturer of one of the cheapest Covid-19 vaccines in the world, the government of India did not invest in expanding production or securing vaccine supplies in advance of the second wave. Modi, who has been acclaimed by his supporters for being business-friendly, doesn’t seem to understand that businesses need investments and markets. The Centre placed an order for 110 million additional doses of Covishield in March, when cases were rising exponentially, but by April, vaccination centres were closing and people above 45 years were being turned away because vaccines had run out. In the midst of the vaccine crunch and knowing very well that it had pre-ordered the existing supply, the Centre announced that from May 1, 18-44-year-olds could get vaccinated, and while 50 percent of domestic vaccine production would go to the Centre, 50 percent would be sold to state governments at Rs 400 per dose for Covishield (later reduced to Rs 300), and Rs 600 per dose to private hospitals, with higher prices for Covaxin.

    This announcement was received with widespread criticism because it would result in states and private buyers competing with each other to buy 50 percent of the vaccines. The price differential between the Centre and the states is certainly unjustifiable, but a deeper problem with the whole vaccination drive has received less attention. The requirement for registration and the mode of registration – you need to have a computer or smart phone with access to the internet, and it’s a complicated process – makes it inaccessible to the poor. The vast majority of people queuing up to get vaccinated (except for hospital workers like cleaners) appear to be from the upper and middle classes, and this impression is confirmed by an India Today report by Preeti Choudhary, in which she found that not a single person in a Delhi slum had been vaccinated. The same is undoubtedly true for other slum-dwellers as well as villagers; the approximately 10 percent of the population which has received one dose of vaccine and 2 percent who have received two doses excludes the poor. Given the grossly unfair roll-out of the vaccination drive so far, it could actually be an improvement if state governments begin schemes to take (free) vaccines to slums and villages while employers pay for their employees (and in some cases their families too) to get vaccinated.[16]

    None of this was necessary. If the Centre had placed a massive order with SII at the beginning of January and paid enough in advance to enable the company to expand production, there would have been millions of doses more available for the over-45s by March; but you can’t scale up production overnight – you need to construct or convert specialised bio-safety level 3 (BSL3) facilities, buy Covid vaccine-manufacturing equipment and raw materials, recruit and train additional workers and pay them decent salaries. Since the government had complete confidence in the safety and efficacy of Covaxin, it could have done the same with Bharat Biotech, and in addition licensed public sector pharmaceutical units like the Haffkine Institute to produce it, as it has now started doing, since the ICMR is a government institution. It would then not have been left scrambling to buy more expensive vaccines at a time when vaccines are in short supply globally, and would eventually have had enough vaccines to supply to other developing countries.

    Was he sleeping?

    Instead of saving humanity from a disaster by containing Covid, India now threatens humanity with disaster by becoming a breeding-ground of lethal new strains of the virus, and more and more countries are understandably closing their borders to us. Modi’s slogan of aatmanirbhar (self-reliance) has quietly been buried as India becomes a recipient of aid from all over the world, including much poorer developing countries. How did this happen? Was he sleeping?

    On the contrary, he has been extremely busy implementing his core agenda of converting India into a Hindu Rashtra with himself as absolute ruler. Modi belongs to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), to which the BJP and thousands of other organisations are affiliated, forming what is known as the Sangh Parivar (Sangh family). Its ideology is Hindutva (not to be confused with the religion Hinduism), and goal is to convert India into a Hindu Rashtra, whose characteristics we will explore below. Modi has worked tirelessly to crown himself as the head of it. Early in the pandemic, he hosted Trump at a super-spreader event designed to promote Modi’s image in India. Before Trump left India, members of the Sangh Parivar organised an anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi facilitated by the Delhi police, which is controlled by the Centre.[17] No one was punished for those killings. Hindu Rashtra is a country in which Muslims can be murdered with impunity.

    In April and May 2020, peaceful protesters against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which discriminates against Muslims and ignited fears that Muslims would be deprived of their citizenship and voting rights, were arrested and jailed under a draconian anti-terror law. The accused included Safoora Zargar, a student of Jamia Millia Islamia University who was pregnant at the time, and Kalita Devangana and Natasha Narwal of Jawaharlal Nehru University, both activists of Pinjra Tod (Break the Cage), a women’s rights group.[18] These young women were among many more framed and jailed for defending the Indian Constitution, which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of religion.

    Among others arrested by the anti-terrorist National Investigation Agency (NIA) in this period and incarcerated in Covid-infested prisons were Dalit scholar and public intellectual Anand Teltumbde and civil rights activist Gautam Navlakha (arrested April 14); Delhi University associate professor and anti-caste crusader Hany Babu M.T. (arrested July 28); and 83-year-old Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest and tribal rights activist who suffers from multiple ailments including Parkinson’s disease (arrested October 8). They joined labour lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, English professor Shoma Sen, writer and Dalit rights activist Sudhir Dhawale, advocates Surendra Gadling and Vernon Gonsalves, social activist and researcher Mahesh Raut, journalist Arun Ferreira, political prisoners’ rights activist Rona Wilson, and writer Varavara Rao, all accused in the same case.[19] In February 2021, the Washington Post reported that American digital forensics company Arsenal Consulting, which had examined cloned copies of Rona Wilson’s hard disk and thumb drive, concluded that the letters used as key evidence to implicate him and the rest of the accused were in files planted using malware, and had not even been opened by him. Yet the NIA opposed bail and continued to pursue the cases against them.[20] Evidently human and democratic rights must be stamped out in Hindu Rashtra, and the rule of law will not be allowed to get in the way of that process.

    During this period, most BJP-ruled states passed love jihad laws which criminalise not just love and marriage but even friendship between Muslim men or boys and Hindu women or girls; the men and boys, if convicted, would be put behind bars, while the women or girls would be delivered into the custody of their parents or state-run homes.[21] While the intention to persecute Muslims is obvious, these laws also show that love and friendship as well as women’s agency have to be stamped out in Hindu Rashtra. So do science and rationality. The BJP’s assault on these values continued over 2020-2021, and had a direct impact on the response to Covid-19, with BJP leaders proclaiming that cow urine, cow dung and yoga could ward off the virus.[22] We saw above that the waters of the Ganges too were supposed to have that property. How can we fight Covid-19 if that is what India’s leaders believe?

    On September 22, 2020, three new labour codes were passed in parliament by voice vote after just three hours of discussion. All of them took away existing rights from workers. A code on wages had already been passed in 2019. The central trade unions burned copies of the four codes on April 1, 2021 – the day when they were scheduled to come into effect – and demanded their withdrawal.[23] They were perhaps taking a leaf out of the book of millions of farmers protesting against three farm laws, also passed in September 2020 in similar cricumstances, and demanding their repeal. The farmers argued that the laws would ruin 85 percent of farmers, deprive many of them of their land, and benefit only billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, both close to Modi, who were planning to go into agribusiness.[24] After months of intimidation and demonisation failed to disperse the farmers, the government barricaded the roads leading into Delhi with barbed wire, boulders, walls, and iron nails embedded in concrete to keep them – the people who grow the food we eat every day – out of the capital city of their own country![25]

    A major obstacle to realising Hindu Rashtra is the existence of states ruled by opposition parties; removing this obstacle has been an obsession of Modi and his right-hand man, Home Minister Amit Shah. One way of doing this was visible to all during the recent elections: numerous election rallies with high-pitched speeches full of bigotry and misogyny. Voters are bribed with promises: in recent elections, voters in Bihar and Bengal were told they would get Covid vaccines free if the BJP comes to power, implying that if the BJP loses they would be left to die. The BJP did come to power in Bihar amidst allegations of vote-rigging but Biharis are still dying in their thousands, showing how empty these promises are.

    Less visible are the machinations before, after and between elections. One is bribing or blackmailing opposition legislators to resign. The Congress government of Madhya Pradesh was brought down in March 2020 when 22 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) resigned, and the Congress-Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (DMK) government in Puducherry was brought down in February 2021 when 6 MLAs resigned. Often opposition representatives are bribed before elections, or, if they refuse to be bought, the Centre uses tools like the Income-Tax and Anti-Corruption authorities to harass them and their relatives. In the run-up to the Bengal elections, the BJP bought up dozens of MLAs from the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and other parties, but still lost the election. In Maharashtra, the BJP tried to topple the Maha Vikas Aghadi government after a policeman, who had been implicated in a supposed terror plot against Mukesh Ambani and the subsequent murder of his accomplice, made allegations of corruption against the state Home Minister; they forced him to resign just as the second Covid wave hit Maharashtra. The efforts to pull down the government are still ongoing, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has commended the way that Maharashtra has handled the Covid crisis. The BJP’s priorities are clear.

    Among countless photo-ops and homilies that keep Modi’s face and voice constantly before the public, two events stand out. On August 5, 2020, he laid the foundation stone for a grand Ram temple in Ayodhya. It is to be built on the site of the Babri Mosque, which was demolished on December 6, 1992, as part of a bloody anti-Muslim campaign in which Modi took part, and can be considered to be the heart of Hindu Rashtra. Then on December 10, 2020, Modi laid the foundation stone of the Central Vista Project in central Delhi, a vanity project which costs Rs 200,000,000,000 and includes a new palace for Modi. Work on the project has been classified as an ‘essential service,’ and continues even under lockdown. Ordinary citizens have made back-of-the-envelope calculations of how many hospitals, oxygen concentrators, oxygen cylinders, vaccines, Covid-19 tests, etc. could be produced or bought with this money,[26] but Modi’s priority is to concentrate power in his hands, not save lives. Concentration of power also entails censoring criticism that dents his image[27] and lying relentlessly about how everything is fine and there are no shortages of oxygen or vaccines, even as courageous reporters bring us stories of Covid deaths in every family in rural UP, and dead bodies being dumped in rivers in UP and Bihar as they run out of wood for pyres.

    These activities of the Modi regime over the past 15 months make it clear that in order to fight against Covid, we have to fight the regime at every level. We need to know exactly what is happening and where, but the regime covers up this information. We need science and rationality, but the regime actively undermines these values. We need money to be spent on life-saving oxygen, vaccines, etc., but instead the regime is spending stupendous sums of money on expanding and consolidating power. Above all we need humanity, but the regime has none.

    What can we do?

    An effective fight against Covid-19 depends on our recognising that India is in an undeclared civil war between a Hindutva dictatorship and a secular democratic republic, and that the Hindutva dictatorship, currently in power at the Centre and in several states, has neither the will nor the competence to defeat the virus.

    Dr Anthony Fauci has recommended a national lockdown and the Congress Party has echoed him. With all due respect, I beg to disagree. Even the local lockdowns in Mumbai and Delhi sent migrant workers fleeing these cities; if they were not infected with Covid already, there was a good chance they would pick it up in crowded trains and buses and carry it to their villages. In any case, what does physical distancing mean in slums where a three-generation family or eight migrant workers live in one small room, and 300 people share a toilet and water-tap? For these people as well as the rural population, the only hope lies in getting vaccinated, but this is precisely what they are being deprived of.

    It is certainly necessary to demand transparency from the Centre regarding how many vaccine doses they have acquired and how they are being distributed, since the Centre is still supposed to be supplying free vaccines to the over-45s. The letter by 12 opposition parties to the PM proposing that the Centre divert money from the Central Vista Project and Modi’s opaque PMCares fund to procure enough vaccines for a free, universal vaccine campaign, oxygen and other medical supplies, as well as funding welfare measures and repealing the farm laws, makes excellent demands.[28] Unfortunately, Modi is not likely to take this advice, so the states need to take action too. One possibility is for opposition-ruled states to form a consortium and negotiate directly with Poonawalla, requesting that the price of vaccines for state governments, which are much poorer than the Centre, should not be higher. They could also ask him what is required for SII to expand production to 300 million doses per month by July, as he was originally intending? After all, at that level, SII could produce 1.8 billion doses in six months, enough to provide an additional 90 million Indians with two doses. If he says that a certain amount of investment is required, they could look for financing. They could do the same with Bharat Biotech’s Krishna Ella. This would be cheaper than individual states floating global tenders. As and when other vaccines become available, they could add them to speed up the vaccination drive.

    Ensuring that the vaccines reach slums and villages is also a priority. For vaccines supplied by the Centre, this would require a tech-savvy task force to go out and help these people to get registered, tell them where to go, and ensure that vaccines are available when they turn up at the designated centres. This would have to be done across the country, including BJP-ruled states. For vaccines supplied by the states, more flexible arrangements could be made, setting up vaccination centres close to where people live.

    Foreign medical aid is welcome, but countries sending it through the government should be aware that there is absolutely no transparency about how it is being distributed, and it is not reaching those who need it most, who continue to die in their thousands every day.[29] The only information given to us by the Health Ministry is that the aid has been sent to 38 elite institutions and hospitals run by the central government, in which no shortages of oxygen or other medical supplies has been reported. A targeted approach would be much more effective, but efforts by foreign donors to send aid directly to non-profits working on the ground have been sabotaged by the Modi regime’s amendment to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act in September 2020, at the height of the first surge, which ensures that “The organizations best placed to respond to community needs at the grass roots in a timely, agile manner are unable to access these donors.”[30] In other words, Modi is blocking life-saving foreign aid in order to consolidate his vice-like grip on power. Providing funds to vaccine producers in India to scale up production rapidly, in return for a commitment that they will provide vaccines at cost price to the central and state governments in India as well as COVAX for at least a year, would be of major importance. It would create a win-win situation, helping to end the Covid surge in India and other developing countries while allowing the companies to sell at a profit later.

    The international press and human rights organisations are on the whole clear about the nature of the Modi regime, but Western governments seem to be treating it as a democratic counterweight to Xi Jinping’s China! This makes no sense. Xi is erasing all traces of Muslims in China, and Modi is doing the same in India; Xi supports the genocidal Myanmar military, and so does Modi; Xi unleashed Covid-19 on the world by victimising doctors who warned of it, and Modi is spreading the virus. Modi is as brutal as Xi, and treating him as an ally will simply help him to crush the remaining vestiges of democracy in India and continue his disastrous Covid policy.

    Despite the ghastly situation in India, there are still brave journalists risking their lives to bring us the truth about what is happening across the country, and humane people putting their own lives on hold in order to save the lives of others. Truth, courage, humanity: that is what we need to get us out of this crisis.

    References

    [1] Gettleman, Jeffrey, Sameer Yasir, Hari Kumar and Suhasini Raj (2021) “As Covid-19 devastates India, deaths go undercounted,” The New York Times, April 24. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/world/asia/india-coronavirus-deaths.html

    [2] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMDQqIAWqcc

    [3] Saikia, Anurabh and Utpal Pathak (2021) “‘People are dropping dead like flies’: in Uttar Pradesh villages, Covid-19 turns silent killer,” Scroll.in, April 27. https://scroll.in/article/993462/people-are-dropping-dead-like-flies-covid-19-turns-silent-killer-in-uttar-pradesh-villages

    [4] Quoted by Arundhati Roy (2021) “‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe,” The Guardian, April 28. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/28/crime-against-humanity-arundhati-roy-india-covid-catastrophe

    [5] Hindustan Times (2021) “Harsh Vardhan says that India is in the endgame of Covid-19 pandemic,” March 7. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/harsh-vardhan-says-india-is-in-the-endgame-of-covid-19-pandemic-101615128329364.html

    [6] Scroll staff (2021) “Modi is a ‘super spreader’ of coronavirus, says IMA vice president,” Scroll.in, April 27. https://scroll.in/latest/993413/modi-is-a-super-spreader-of-coronavirus-says-ima-vice-president

    [7] Sirur, Simrin (2021) “‘Covid won’t affect sadhus”: At Kumbh, many shun masks and distancing, say faith will save them,” The Print, April 15. https://theprint.in/india/covid-wont-affect-sadhus-at-kumbh-mela-devotees-shun-masks-say-faith-will-save-them/640339/

    [8] Sharma, Harikishan (2021) “April, November last year: Officials, House panel flagged oxygen need, shortage,” The Indian Express, April 23. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/covid-19-oxygen-supply-warning-7285340/

    [9] Lalwani, Vijayta and Arunabh Saikia (2021) “India is running out of oxygen, Covid-19 patients are dying – because the government wasted time,” Scroll.in, April 18. https://scroll.in/article/992537/india-is-running-out-of-oxygen-covid-19-patients-are-dying-because-the-government-wasted-time

    [10] Business Today (2021) “Despite COVID-19 crisis at home, India doubled oxygen exports in FY21,” April 21. https://www.businesstoday.in/current/economy-politics/india-doubled-oxygen-exports-to-9301-mt-in-apr-jan-fy21-earned-rs-89-crore/story/437140.html

    [11] Sanghi, Neeta (2021) “How the Modi government overestimated India’s capacity to make Covid vaccines,” The Wire, April 22. https://science.thewire.in/health/narendra-modi-government-overestimated-india-covid-vaccine-manufacturing-capacity-shortage/

    [12] Dey, Sushmi (2020) “Covid-19: 40-50m shots stockpiled by SII, India to get most of it,” Times of India, December 29. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/covid-19-40-50m-shots-stockpiled-by-sii-india-to-get-most-of-it/articleshow/80001537.cms

    [13] Mudur, G.S. (2021) “Covid vaccine fissures among scientists,” The Telegraph, January 15. https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/covid-vaccine-fissures-among-scientists/cid/1803736

    [14] Mudur, G.S. (2021) “How India landed in Covid vaccine mess,” The Telegraph, April 19. https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/how-we-landed-in-covid-vaccine-mess/cid/1812969

    [15] Som, Vishnu (2021) “Believe Rs 3,000 crore will reach us, not waited, borrowed: Adar Poonawalla,” NDTV, April 21. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/coronavirus-siis-adar-poonawalla-says-we-believe-rs-3-000-crore-will-reach-not-waited-borrowed-2418591

    [16] Times of India (2021) “Covid-19: India Inc scrambles to get staff vaccinated,” April 22. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/india-inc-scrambles-to-get-staff-vaccinated/articleshow/82186574.cms

    [17] Withnall, Adam (2020) “Delhi riots: Violence that killed 53 in Indian capital ‘was anti-Muslim pogrom’, says top expert,” Independent, March 7. https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/world/delhi-riots-pogrom-violence-deaths-modi-bjp-india-police-a9384891.html

    [18] Lalwani, Vijayta (2021) “‘I kept feeling it was a nightmare’: Safoora Zargar on surviving 38 days in solitary confinement,” Scroll.in, March 8. https://scroll.in/article/988844/i-kept-feeling-it-was-a-nightmare-safoora-zargar-on-surviving-38-days-in-solitary-confinement

    [19] Goyal, Prateek (2021) “Bhima Koregaon case: Three years of legal and rights violations,” Newslaundry, January 2. https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/01/02/bhima-koregaon-case-three-years-of-legal-and-rights-violations

    [20] Hindustan Times (2021) “Evidence fabricated in Bhima Koregaon case? What prompted Rona Wilson’s plea,” February 11. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/evidence-fabricated-in-bhima-koregaon-case-what-prompted-rona-wilson-s-plea-101613019793074.html

    [21] Apoorvanand (2021) “India’s ‘love jihad’ laws: Another attempt to subjugate Muslims,” Al Jazeera, January 15. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/1/15/indias-love-jihad-laws-another-attempt-to-subjugate-muslims

    [22] Kaushik, Pitamber (2020) “India: Modi’s war on science,” Euroscientist, July 16. https://www.euroscientist.com/india-modis-war-on-science/

    [23] Chhabra, Ronak (2021) “Trade unions burn copies of labour codes in nationwide protest,” NEWSCLICK, April 1. https://www.newsclick.in/Trade-Unions-Burn-Copies-Labour-Codes-Nationwide-Protest

    [24] Sharma, Niharika (2020) “Why Indian farmers believe new laws are rigged to favour India’s richest man,” Quartz India, December 7. https://qz.com/india/1942448/indias-protesting-farmers-think-new-laws-benefit-ambani-adani/

    [25] There are pictures of this bizarre spectacle in BBC (2021) “India farmer protests: War-like fortification to protect Delhi,” February 3. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-55899754

    [26] Jena, Smrutisnat (2021) “10 things the govt. could have spent 20,000 crores on instead of the Central Vista Project,” ScoopWhoop, May 7. https://www.scoopwhoop.com/news/indian-govt-20000-crores-on-central-vista-project/  (1 crore = 10 million)

    [27] Friedrich, Pieter (2021) “Suffocating dissent: the Modi regime’s Covid strategy,” TwoCircles.net, April 28. http://twocircles.net/2021apr28/441983.html

    [28] Manoj CG (2021) “Get vaccines, make them free for all: 12 parties, 4 Oppn CMs write to PM Modi,” The Indian Express, May 13. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/12-oppn-leaders-write-to-pm-modi-demand-free-mass-vaccination-suspension-of-central-vista-project-7312541/

    [29] Yeung, Jessie, Manveena Suri and Swati (2021) “The world sent India millions in Covid aid. Why is it not reaching those who need it most?” CNN, May 5. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/05/india/india-covid-foreign-aid-distribution-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

    [30] Das, Anupreeta (2021) “India’s strict rules on foreign aid snarl Covid donations,” The New York Times, May 12. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/business/india-covid-donations.html

     

  • Progressives Break with Biden Over His Uncritical Support for Israel

    Progressives Break with Biden Over His Uncritical Support for Israel

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

    With the outbreak of renewed fighting between Israel and Hamas on May 10, leading to scores of deaths, including of children, President Joseph Biden, like all U.S. presidents before him, expressed his support for Israel, stating that Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas’ rockets. But he failed to even mention the plight of the Palestinians, fueling a growing opposition to his policy from Democratic Party progressives. Democratic congressional representatives and progressive NGOs have strongly criticized the Biden administration for its failure to recognize the Palestinians’ rights and to express sympathy with their situation. For the first time, the Democrats face a small but determined group within the party who demand a break from unconditional support for Israel and support for Palestinian rights.

    Joseph Biden is following a long-established pattern of virtually uncritical U.S. support for Israel, but today that position is being challenged. Palestinian Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, speaking in Congress declared, “To read the statements from President Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, General Lloyd Austin and leaders of both parties, you would hardly know Palestinians existed at all.” She went on, “There has been no recognition of the attack on Palestinian families being ripped from their homes right now. No mention of children being detained or murdered. No recognition of a sustained campaign of harassment and terror by Israeli police against worshippers kneeling down and praying and celebrating the holiest days in one of their holiest places, no mention of Al-Aqsa being surrounded by violence, tear gas, smoke, while people pray.”

    Tlaib added: “If our own State Department can’t even bring itself to acknowledge the killing of Palestinian children is wrong, well, I will say it for the millions of Americans who stand with me against the killing of innocent children, no matter their ethnicity, or faith,” she added.

    Twenty-five House Democrats signed a letter calling on Blinken to condemn the threatened evictions of Palestinians from homes in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood living on land claimed by Jewish nationalists, one of the issues that has sparked the recent violence in Palestine/Israel. Congresswoman Marie Newman, an author of the letter, stated, “Palestinian families have every right to live safely in their homes. That’s why I’ve led my colleagues in a letter calling on the State Department to immediately condemn these heinous actions by the Israeli government against Palestinian families in East Jerusalem. America must defend human rights everywhere.”

    Representative Betty McCollum has introduced a bill in the House that says that Israel may not use U.S. taxpayer funding for actions that violate the rights of Palestinians. “U.S. assistance intended for Israel’s security should foster peace and must never be used to violate the human rights of children, demolish the homes of Palestinian families, or to permanently annex Palestinian lands.”

    Senator Bernie Sanders wrote in a New York Times opinion piece, “…Israel remains the one sovereign authority in the land of Israel and Palestine, and rather than preparing for peace and justice, it has been entrenching its unequal and undemocratic control….Over more than a decade of his right-wing rule in Israel, Mr. Netanyahu has cultivated an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian type of racist nationalism….In the Middle East, where we provide nearly $4 billion a year in aid to Israel, we can no longer be apologists for the right-wing Netanyahu government and its undemocratic and racist behavior.”

    In addition to the politicians, 150 NGOs that deal with foreign policy but also with immigration, the environment, racism, and many other issues have also called upon Biden to change his position. The Democratic Socialists of America and other U.S left groups have long been supporters of Palestinian rights.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Israel’s Racism and the Misuse of Antisemitism

    Israel’s Racism and the Misuse of Antisemitism

    Ramle, May 10, 2021, Yossi Aloni/Flash90

    George Floyd was cold-bloodedly, albeit unintentionally, murdered in the course of “felony assault” in Minneapolis on May 25, almost exactly a year ago. The next day, once the news and video of his murder had gone viral, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area witnessed days of violent rioting and looting, resulting in “the second-most destructive period of local unrest in United States history, after the 1992 Los Angeles riots.”

    On 28 May, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told reporters that the protesters’ anger is “not only understandable, it’s right.” He added: “What we’ve seen over the last two days … is the result of so much built-up anger and sadness … that has been ingrained in our black community, not just because of five minutes of horror, but 400 years.” The riots led to the deployment of the National Guard in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. “It is time to rebuild. Rebuild the city, rebuild our justice system…. George Floyd’s death should lead to justice and systemic change, not more death and destruction”, said Minnesota Governor Tim Walz who ordered the deployment.

    Imagine that the Minneapolis Mayor had compared the Black people’s riots to the Nazis’ 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and that the Minnesota Governor too, instead of acknowledging the need for justice and systemic change, had described the riots as “pogroms” perpetrated by “an incited and bloodthirsty Black mob”. They would have been widely, vigorously, and rightly condemned for drawing outrageous defamatory analogies and making plainly racist statements, as well as for being completely blind to the reality of systemic racism and injustice in their city and state. Only white supremacist fans of Donald Trump would have enthusiastically condoned their statements.

    Consider now the recent flare-up of violence within the Israeli state in its pre-1967 borders on the backdrop of the mass protests in Jerusalem, followed by the conflagration between Gaza and Israel. In the city of Lod, Palestinian citizens of Israel, who constitute one third of the city’s inhabitants, staged protests like other “Arab Israelis” did in solidarity with their fellow Palestinians of Jerusalem. The latter were confronted by a new war crime planned by fanatical Zionist settlers wanting to evict eight Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in order to replace them. Musa Hasuna, a 30-year-old Palestinian resident of Lod, was shot dead on Monday May 10 by a Jewish resident: by accident said the latter’s Jewish neighbours, “at point-blank” said the victim’s father.

    His funerals the next day turned into a riot ignited by clashes between Palestinians and the police—riots that were no different from those of Minneapolis, on a much smaller scale. What was the reaction of Israeli authorities? “This is Kristallnacht in Lod,” stated Lod Mayor Yair Revivo on television. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin went further, declaring: “The sight of the pogrom in Lod and the disturbances across the country by an incited and bloodthirsty Arab mob, injuring people, damaging property and even attacking sacred Jewish spaces is unforgiveable.”

    This huge difference between official reactions to Black riots in the United States and to Arab riots in Israel is very telling about the long distance that separates, on the one hand, the increasing acknowledgement by American society and state of the legacy of anti-Black racism on which they have been historically built and the mending process in which they have been engaged for a few decades, with a lot more still needing to be done, and on the other hand, the deliberate blindness of Jewish Israeli society and State to the legacy of anti-Arab racism on which they have been historically built. Not only are Israeli society and state in denial of this legacy, but they are aggravating it by the day as Jewish colonialism in Palestine, unlike white colonialism in North America, is itself an ongoing process.

    Thus, racism is an intrinsic built-in feature of the Israeli state, as French scholar Maxime Rodinson explained on the background of the 1967 Six-Day War: “Wanting to create a purely Jewish, or predominantly Jewish, state in an Arab Palestine in the twentieth century could not help but lead to a colonial-type situation and to the development (completely normal sociologically speaking) of a racist state of mind, and in the final analysis to a military confrontation between the two ethnic groups.”

    It is this same truth that Israeli writer David Grossman acknowledged, a few months after losing his son in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, at the memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin held on November 4 of that year, when he lamented

    “Israel’s quick descent into the heartless, essentially brutal treatment of its poor and suffering. This indifference to the fate of the hungry, the elderly, the sick and the disabled, all those who are weak, this equanimity of the State of Israel in the face of human trafficking or the appalling employment conditions of our foreign workers, which border on slavery, to the deeply ingrained institutionalised racism against the Arab minority.”

    And yet, Israel’s official discourse vehemently denies its “deeply ingrained institutionalized” anti-Arab racism and the settler-colonial nature of its state, although it is as blatant as could be and was even acknowledged by Zionism’s prominent historical figures. The ideological subterfuge for this denial has long been the invocation of Europe’s ghastly antisemitic legacy and the Holocaust, as if being the descendants of people who had fled persecution and massacre were a license to perpetrate the same against other people. All things considered, the structural conditions of violence in the Israeli context of Jewish supremacist domination make Jewish Israeli lynch mobs shouting “Death to the Arabs” incomparably more resemblant to pogroms than are Palestinian riots.

    Israel’s colonial racism is at work in the persecution of its Palestinian citizens as it is at work in the ongoing colonial dispossession of the Palestinians of the limited stretches of land on which they still live in historical Palestine, and in the cruel bombing of Gaza in the name of an utterly disproportionate “self-defence” akin to the “exterminate-all-the-brutes” colonial tradition. And it is this very same racism that Israel’s supporters want to prevent academics from denouncing by libelling it as “antisemitic” according to a flawed definition that depicts claims that “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” such as Rodinson’s above-quoted claim as “antisemitic.”

  • The Legacy of the Paris Commune: 1871-2021

    The Legacy of the Paris Commune: 1871-2021


    Online: eventbrite.com

    Thursday, June 3, 2021 at 2 PM EDT – 3:30 PM EDT

    Price: Free · Duration: 1 hr 30 min

    In March 1871, in the aftermath of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, ordinary Parisians rose up and took control of their city for themselves. The Paris Commune only lasted for a little over two months, but during that time the Communards enacted a remarkable number of far-reaching democratic measures.

    The Commune was eventually drowned in blood by the old regime, but it had an enormous impact on the international socialist and working-class movement. Marx wrote The Civil War in France praising the Commune’s achievements, which remained inspirational for generations of later socialists. On its 150th anniversary, join us for a discussion of the Commune’s accomplishments and weaknesses, and the lessons it holds for the radical left today.

    Speakers:

    Gilbert Achcar teaches at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of many books and a contributor to many publications. He wrote the chapter on the Paris Commune in Revolutions (Haymarket, 2020).

    Carolyn J. Eichner is a feminist historian at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and author of the forthcoming The Paris Commune: A Brief History (Rutgers, 2021) and Feminism’s Empire (Cornell, 2022). Her book, Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune (Indiana, 2004), has been translated as Franchir les barricades: les femmes dans la Commune de Paris (Editions de la Sorbonne, 2020).

    Phil Gasper is co-editor of New Politics and a member of the Tempest Collective. He is the editor of an annotated edition of The Communist Manifesto (Haymarket, 2005) and of Imperialism and War: Classic Writings by V.I. Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin (Haymarket, 2017).

    Sponsored by Tempest, Haymarket Books, New Politics, and the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice (UW-Madison).

    Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-legacy-of-the-paris-commune-1871-2021-tickets-153719448007.

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/190318196151649/.

  • Turning a Profit from Death

    Turning a Profit from Death

    Let us be clear from the outset: what is happening in India right now is mass murder.  And it is organized by a man who has practice in such matters.

    Two images bookend the current crisis and contain in them a trajectory of the crisis. The first is the image of the Indian police hosing down migrant workers with bleach last spring, during the first wave of the pandemic, and the grimmer, more recent one of cremation fires burning all over the country. The road between the 2 markers was expected, but the violence lies in the fact that it could have been avoided.

    When the infection rate fell after the first lockdown, the Modi regime declared victory over the virus.  Lacing his propaganda with Hindu mythology, in March the prime minister told the nation that while the Mahabharat [mythic battle of Hindu epics] war had been won in 18 days, he would win the corona battle in 21.

    Policy was shaped around these wild superstitions. The government’s coronavirus task force stopped meeting and the Health Minister declared that India was “in the endgame of the pandemic.” The government boasted that it had sold 55 million doses of vaccine to 62 different countries.

    It was an example of a perfect marriage between Hindutva and capitalism. Hindutva assured the government that the virus was over, while capitalist greed monetized a global pandemic.

    Vaccine Capitalism

    The lifesaving vaccine is available for free in almost all countries of the global North, in India it is not. The Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine maker, is currently the chief manufacturer of the vaccine in the country.  In January they sold the first 100 million doses of the vaccine  to the Indian government at a “special price” of 200 rupees ($2.74) per dose, after which they raised the price. On the private market the vaccine is being sold for 1,000 rupees ($13.68) per dose.

    SII is a private company headed by one of the richest men on the planet, Cyrus Poonawala whose net worth is about $13 billion. Poonawala made his fortune as a horse breeder and racer.  These superior gambling instincts guided his son, Adar Poonawala, to look at a devastating global pandemic last year and decide that it was his moment to make a killing.  In his interview with international media, Poonawala emphasized that he was going to “take the risk and become a front-runner.”

    The usual suspects jumped on this bandwagon of turning public health emergencies into private profit. The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation invested $150 million, while the vampiric firms of Goldman Sachs, Citi and Avendus Capital became SII’s chief advisors. Like all elites from the global south trained well in neoliberal speak, Poonawalla declared his lofty anticolonial goal to be the supply of “A majority of the vaccine, at least initially… to our countrymen before it goes abroad.”

    In reality, nearly 80 percent of SII’s went abroad for a steep profit, till the Indian government finally forced a ban on exports as the death count began to rise.

    The lineaments of this capitalist macabre soon revealed themselves. Cyrus Poonawalla’s wealth rose 85% in 5 months. And as the smoke from funeral pyres began to darken Indian skies, in late March, Adar Poonawalla signed a deal to rent a London mansion for a record $70,000 a week.

    Neoliberal Death-making

    The Modi regime is directly responsible for the current bloodshed. But the road here was paved by all who came before them, those who, since the 1980s, eagerly complied with the IMF’s structural adjustment programs and destroyed India’s life-making institutions and infrastructure. We apparently needed more cars, more dams, at the expense of food and healthcare.

    The Indian economy was formally liberalized in 1991 under a Congress government. The story that followed will be distressingly familiar.

    Reducing the fiscal deficit, the holy grail of neoliberalism, in reality opened up “a revenue deficit,” as the rich were relieved of taxation and the state, while increasing military expenditure, slashed public sector investment and social spending. I want to emphasize that not just the Congress or the BJP but every ruling coalition, at the state and federal level, followed this trajectory, including the Stalinists in power in my home state of West Bengal, whose most celebrated effort was to dispossess peasants from their land in order to build a car factory. More than 50 million Indians were dispossessed to make way for development projects like large dams in the first 50 years of independence to power capitalism’s productivist imperative. Research shows that over 50 percent of the dispossessed were adivasis or indigenous people living in hills and forested land where most of the dams and mines were built.

    While absent from any life-making work, such as healthcare or education, the state has been all too present in death-making, from the Gazafication of Kashmir to erecting detention camps for Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis.

    The healthcare sector told a similar story of predation.  According to the BMJ, today, India has just 0.8 doctors and 0.7 hospital beds per 1000 population and is the third largest military spender in the world, after the US and China. But not everyone was left without healthcare. The private healthcare industry exploded under neoliberalism, with the country ranking among the top 20 countries for its private healthcare spending, while being amongst the lowest for spending on public health.

    Austerity, as Ruthie Gilmore teaches us, is the “organized abandonment” of life and life-making paired with “organized violence.” The closing of schools and hospitals and the expansion of prisons and defense budgets hold a mirror to each other.

    Austerity, however, merely amplifies what is a key organizing principle of capitalism, the lowering of the value of human life. While capitalism strives to lower the value of labor power in order to increase surplus value, what this means concretely for the working class is, following Rosemary Hennessy’s concept of abjection, what we might call the manufacture of abjection. This mechanism goes beyond the economic effort of lowering wages. Indeed, wages are mostly effectively lowered when capital can successfully lower the parameters of social reproduction of life and labor power. Social oppressions such as race, gender, and caste are some of the key drivers for lowering social reproduction.

    We should be reminded of a dark passage in Capital where Marx describes how, during his time in Britain, women were “still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus-population is below all calculation.”  Michael Goldfield recently made a similar point about the role of slavery and racism in the US, showing how “both planters and northern industry benefitted from cheap labor whose lower limit was determined by racism” producing across time “a callous disregard for human dignity and the sanctity of human life.” To paraphrase Gilmore, where life is not precious, life is not precious.

    We are seeing this murderous logic – of capitalism devaluing life through austerity – playing out in India on such a scale that even the rich and powerful are not safe. A former ambassador died while waiting in the parking lot of a Delhi hospital. There are no hospital beds. There are no ambulances. In Surat, an industrial city in Gujarat, the grills used to burn bodies have been operating so relentlessly that the iron on some of them melted. Almost all the mortuary staff in crematoriums and burning ghats are from Dalit or Bahujan communities, whose average monthly pay is around $134. They are working round the clock, without any PPE, providing last rites, grief counselling and consolation to families who in life would have probably advocated for their continued ritual segregation from elite society. Bezwada Wilson, an organizer for the rights and welfare of sanitation workers, told VICE World News, “No one knows how many cremation workers have tested positive for this deadly disease and no one knows how many have died as a result. It is because government officials don’t see the cremation workers and sanitation workers as human.”

    But as the country gasps for oxygen, the stock of Linde India, a supplier of medical oxygen, has doubled. Adar Poonawalla has honorably done a Ted Cruz, fled India and sought refuge in his modest London mansion, as have the ultrarich in their private jets.

    Meanwhile the rest of India burns, as BJP leaders continue to peddle cow dung and cow urine as medical solutions to covid 19. As of Saturday, only 1.9 percent of India’s population has been fully vaccinated and over 400,000 new daily infections are confirmed by tests, the actual figure is surely far higher.

    Capitalist State against the People

    Narendra Modi, more than any Prime Minister since the 1980s, has brutally wielded the might of the Indian state to shape a polity safe for capital. Hindutva has been the ideological battering ram for this project. While absent from any life-making work, such as healthcare or education, the state has been all too present in death-making, from the Gazafication of Kashmir to erecting detention camps for Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis. Indeed, it’s not the state that is currently keeping the neoliberalism-ravaged health care system operational, but ordinary people. Teams of volunteers have set up mutual aid networks across the devasted landscape and are trying to reduce harm in ingenious and deeply loving ways. Gurudwaras and mosques are working tirelessly to provide food. The fascist Shiv Sena’s chief Uddhav Thackeray was forced to thank the Muslims of Ichalkaranji town of Maharashtra for donating Zakat money to fund a 10-bed ICU at a local hospital.  People have set up COVID helplines to reach the sick and the suffering and are setting up car pools to act as ambulances, while politicians in Maharashtra and Gujarat have been seen hoarding essential drugs and oxygen to sell at a hiked price on the market.

    The dead demand that mystical veils of inscrutability be ripped from history, for beneath them lie the banally obvious explanation for this carnage: capitalism.

    This murderous division of labor between the state and the people needs to be reversed and the state forced to act on their behalf. A number of steps can be taken immediately to stem the tide.

    1. First, the government needs to invoke the Essential Commodities Act to stop the hoarding of essential drugs, oxygen, and so forth by predatory businesses.
    2. Second, the state should commandeer spaces to set up field hospitals and open up hotels for the unhoused.
    3. Third, the government needs to invest money in vaccine production immediately and take steps to make vaccines free and universal. The differential pricing of these drugs, instituted by corporations like SII, needs to be scrapped and vaccines made free for all, and with distribution according to vulnerability, and not wallet size or ability to push to the front.
    4. Fourth, while Anthony Fauci has recommended a hard lockdown, in a country like India this step is neither humane nor effective without a stimulus payment from the state to families allowing them to be off work. Where there can and should be a hard lockdown is on religious and social gatherings, one of which in recent past, hailed by the government as safe, was undoubtedly been a superspreader.
    5. Fifth, public funds raised to deal with Covid-19 should be made immediately available in an open and transparent way. During the first wave last year the Modi government set up a Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund (PM-CARES) to deal with the crisis. More than 70% its funds have been donated by public sector units, but PM-CARES is set up to be unaccountable to government audits and hence the public. In reality no one knows how these funds are being spent.
    6. Finally, the international Left, especially in the global North, has a vital role to play: we need to pressure our own ruling classes to stop hoarding vaccines. Vaccine imperialism may work for the rich countries in the short term, but it allows the virus to mutate in the parts of the globe without the vaccine and eventually return to strike the hoarders. Internationalism in this case is not just a political principle, it is a public health necessity.
    In Bhopal, Javed, an auto-rickshaw driver, has converted his auto into a makeshift ambulance, ferrying patients to hospitals for free. Courtesy: ScoopWhoop Media

    My 13-year-old niece and nearly 80-year-old mother in Delhi are terrified to pick up the phone lest they hear of more losses.

    I feel the need to marshal more than language to convey the scale of the crisis. How to convey the feel of air saturated with the ashes of cremated bodies? How to translate into words the sound of the wailing mother who just lost her child? But we must use our words, more loudly now than ever.  The dead demand that mystical veils of inscrutability be ripped from history, for beneath them lie the banally obvious explanation for this carnage: capitalism.

    As we strive towards stabilizing life in India, we need to constantly remind ourselves that we can no longer afford to stabilize the system.

    First published by Spectre.

     

  • Republicans Pass State Laws to Restrict Voting Rights: A Return to Jim Crow

    Republicans Pass State Laws to Restrict Voting Rights: A Return to Jim Crow

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

    Trump, who now completely dominates the Republican Party, continues to claim that President Joseph Biden and the Democrats won in 2020 through election fraud. Election authorities of both major parties around the country have demonstrated that there was no significant voter fraud. Trump and the Republicans have attributed the fraud primarily to early voting and mail ballots—both common practices in the United States—so their new legislation is aimed principally at restricting those.

    Leading the charge are Republicans in Georgia, where two Democrats won the last Senate election, one the first black senator and the other the first Jew in the state’s history, securing the Democrats control of the Senate. So far, Republicans have proposed 250 new laws in 43 states, most of which would limit early voting and mail ballots, but some would introduce stricter identification requirements or shorten voting hours. Other laws would give more power to partisan poll watchers. These restrictive laws have the greatest impact on black, urban, working class, and elderly voters.

    All of this is crucial for the November 8, 2022 election in which all 435 House seats and a third of Senate seats are up for election. Democrats at present have a narrow majority of six votes in the House, 218 to 212, while the Senate is tied 50-50, with Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris having the deciding vote, though Senate votes usually require a 60-40 majority because of long-standing conservative rules.

    Only 25 percent of voters say they’re Republican, compared to 31 percent who identify as Democrats and 41 percent who consider themselves independents. Yet, Republicans have a good chance to taking over the U.S. Congress in the mid-term elections. How is that?

    First, Republicans can compensate for their low level of support by making it harder for others to vote, which is why we have the blizzard of new election laws.

    Second, every ten years the United States conducts a census, after which representatives are reapportioned, with states whose population grew getting more representatives and states whose population stagnated or shrank getting fewer. In 2020, the states that gained seats, like Texas, Florida, Montana and North Carolina, were mostly Republican, while Democratic states like New York and California lost seats. So Republican are likely to win more House seats in the next Congress.

    Third, also related to the census, following reapportionment, state governments redraw their electoral districts. In most states, that means that the ruling party redraws the districts in ways that will enhance its strength and diminish that of its rival, for example by cutting up a Democratic area into quarters and attaching each quarter to a larger Republican area.

    The Democrats are filing court cases against the new state laws and writing a federal law to protect voter rights. Many companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet (Google), ViacomCBS, American Express and Home Depot have also condemned Georgia’s new law.

    The Atlanta, Georgia chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, which is actively involved in opposing the Republican assault on voting rights in that state, says that the new law: “…is indefensible; it restricts voting methods, adds complicated and inaccessible hoops, allows the state to intervene in county elections processes, and bans voters taking care of each other while waiting for hours in lines.”

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Struggle Against Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem

    The Struggle Against Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem

    Israeli forces near Al-AqsaToufic Haddad writes: Below is unedited text of a short post I composed late last night regarding events in Jerusalem and in general. The post was doing very well with apparently several hundred shares, but within a few hours it was taken down by Facebook, and I was informed it was “Hate Speech”. I contest(ed) that accusation, but what is even more disturbing than this act of censorship, is that while I was informed by Facebook that it was ‘hate speech’, they told my audience who had reposted it that I changed the settings on it or it was deleted – with no mention of hate speech, and implying it was me who deleted it.

    HELP BOOMERANG THE ATTEMPT AT CENSORSHIP BY SHARING AND REPOSTING ON YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA. AND THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR SUPPORT.

    ***

    For anyone following developments in Jerusalem the past month, it was evident that today (Monday) was going to be determinative: the Israeli High Court was to meet in a special session to rule on evicting Sheikh Jarrah families, and thousands of Zionist thugs were to march on the Al-Aqsa compound in a racist display of ‘unified Jerusalem,” all under hundreds of armed guards.

    What a difference an intifada makes!

    The Israeli Attorney General was forced to intervene over the weekend to delay the Court’s ruling on the evictions for a month (fearing international outcry).

    The march of racists was stopped in its tracks – initially because Israel’s intelligence agencies and army said it would ignite a powder keg – not just local but possibly regional and international.

    Regarding the latter, we witnessed an astonishing series of retreats today – first pulling back from allowing the march to enter the Al-Aqsa compound this morning after hundreds of Palestinians defended the compound starting at 8 am. Then by 2:30 pm, the occupiers retreated on the route once again, preventing access through Damascus gate. By 6 pm, once the rally had begun – with notably far fewer numbers than expected – it was forced to abruptly end under the sound of sirens from Gaza’s rockets, and without even entering the Old City.

    Israel is in a corner, traditionally preferring to pocket its achievements below the radar.

    But resistance and solidarity work and today is a testament to that.

    Of course the battle is long and by no means over.

    They will try with the evictions again in a month. They will go back to their plotting on how to take over Al-Aqsa and other parts of the Old City. Twenty people have been massacred in Gaza, many of whom are children, and the shelling still continues as I write this.

    But it’s also important to recognize the huge achievements we are witnessing.

    Israel displays no control over East Jerusalem except through sheer force, and that too is also not enough. Its soldiers on the streets – despite their arms, armor, horses, cameras, drones, blimps and stink water – appear confused and clumsy, as street smart middle schoolers goad them, and Ramadan fasters fearlessly break bread in front of armed settlers.

    Israel’s allies (the overt and the covert) beg Israel not to escalate – some, so as not to blow their complicity in its crimes; others because they never supported Israel for some freak Messianic concept to begin with.

    And an Intifada has broken out across the entirety of historic Palestine now.

    The latter promises to draw attention not only to ‘the problem of Jerusalem’, but also to the complete failure/sham of the ‘peace process’ and the glaring apartheid that has indisputably emerged here as a result of it.

    If things persist in this fashion, there is a possibility that the contagion of ‘people power’ can spread across the Arab regional theater (and beyond?), reigniting the revolutionary fires that the counter revolutionary forces (both East and West) thought they had extinguished these past few years.

    Before one gets ahead of oneself, let us absorb these moments and their lessons and prepare accordingly.

    I close with two images of the magnificent solidarity demonstrations witnessed this evening in Jenin and Nazareth – two sides of the Green Line, one struggle – for a free Palestine and free Jerusalem. Bless.

    T.H. – Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem

    Al Quds News Network
  • Prospects of Joint Class Struggle

    Prospects of Joint Class Struggle

    “Workers’ Power – in Unity” (front page of Matzpen , Feb. 1972)

    The issues raised by brian bean (‘No common struggle with settler colonialism’ NP, May 4) are not new. The debate around them has been going on for years. I have been involved in it and have spilled gigabytes of electronic ink in polemics around it.

    Instead of tediously repeating myself in responding to comrade bean,  let me summarize my position, and provide some links to articles in which I have set it out in detail, and which readers are invited to consult.

    Let me start by agreeing with comrade bean regarding the present characterization of the Hebrew (‘Israeli-Jewish’) working class: its politics on Zionist colonization are largely reactionary, as it is complicit in it and has no immediate interest in combating it.

    Therefore talk of mass ‘joint struggle’ against the Zionist regime in the present circumstances is facile. Of course, this by no means excludes the possibility of winning over small numbers of Hebrew workers to a revolutionary socialist, hence anti-Zionist, position. Our experience in Matzpen is proof of this.

    Having said this, let me also point out that there are lots of cases of joint struggle and solidarity of Israeli workers of both national groups on direct class issues, in strikes etc. There is, for example, a relatively new but very active, successful and growing trade union organisation, Workers’ Power  which is explicitly internationalist. This is something positive to build on.

    I am sure comrade bean and I agree that a necessary condition for a benign resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, between colonisers and colonised, is the overthrow of the Zionist regime. Can this be achieved without the support – let alone against a determined opposition – of the Hebrew working class?

    In my article ‘Belling the cat’ I argue that the answer to this question is No! Indeed, the idea that a benign resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian colonial conflict can be imposed by force on the Hebrew working class and generally on the Hebrew masses is an extremely dangerous illusion, and socialists should not condone, let alone advocate it.

    But is the Hebrew working class going to support the Zionist regime forever? Are there any circumstances in which it may take a class position against this regime?

    In that article I argue that there is a scenario in which the Hebrew working class would turn against the Zionist regime. I elaborate this further in ’The decolonisation of Palestine’ (see in particular the final part of this article). I also point out manifestations of Hebrew solidarity with the Egyptian and Syrian workers.

    The question of Hebrew self-determination should be viewed in this context, as I explain in ‘Class struggle or national war?’

    One essential point that emerges from all this is that it is a mistake to think of this conflict and its possible resolution in a rigid static way, and within the ‘box’ of Israel/Palestine. It is essential to think of it dialectically and within a regional context.

    It also requires long-term strategizing and organizational preparation. We must on no account give up in advance on the prospect of joint struggle.

     

  • Ruger and the Far-Right NRA

    Ruger and the Far-Right NRA

    The U.S. company that has sells the most guns is Sturm Ruger. It’s sometimes in the news after a massacre by one of its semi-automatic guns. For instance, its AR-556 pistol was used in the 2017 church massacre in Texas, and the 2021 massacres in Boulder, Colorado and Indianapolis, Indiana. Concern for its sales of its 10/20 model to Israel, which uses them to shoot .22 caliber bullets in Palestinians as a way of “crowd control”, led to the creation of the coalition called “No Rugers to Israel”. There’s less attention paid to the enormous support Ruger gives to the far-right organization called the National Rifle Association (NRA), a group that helped create the climate in which the January 6 attempted insurrection was a sudden storm.

    The NRA was started after the Civil War by two Union soldiers who wanted to improve marksmanship. The group testified in support of the first federal gun law in 1934, which cracked down on the machine guns beloved by Bonnie and Clyde and other bank robbers. For many decades it was a club of hunters and sportsmen, but that was long ago. Now it’s intensely political led by men hysterically afraid of regulation which they consider socialism and tyranny.

    Back in 2018 the New York Times Magazine took a look at the covers of “The American Rifleman” which is given away free to NRA members. For the magazine’s first 50 years (since its founding in 1923) covers would be about hunting, marksmanship and gun safety, but in 1977 a man who had been the first head of the U.S. Border Patrol, Harlon Bronson Carter, took over the group. Then the organization became heavily political. “American Rifleman” covers changed. Politicians to love or to hate were frequently on the cover. The Rifleman started hammering away about “freedom” and the sanctity of the second amendment and the supposed terrifying threat of crime. Harlon Carter was fiercely against gun control. When asked by a member of Congress if he was so against a screening process would he accept “convicted violent felons, mentally deranged people, violently addicted to narcotics people to have guns”? He replied it was the “price of freedom”.

    But Harlon Carter was a cupcake compare to Wayne LaPierre who became the chief exec of the NRA in 1991. In 1992 he predicted President Clinton’s Administration would be a “gun-grabbing goon squad”. Covers of “The American Rifleman” grew more and more hysterical. In 1994 it had a “Stop the Rape of Liberty” with a man grabbing the Statue of Liberty and pulling at her clothing. LaPierre brought up a new theme in his first book, published in 1994. In it he talked about insurrection. “[T]he people have a right…to take whatever measures necessary, including force, to abolish oppressive government.” That year after a gun control measures passed his article in a “Special Report” in the Rifleman was called, “The Final War Has Begun“.

    In 1995 LaPierre signed a fund-raising letter asserting that President Clinton’s ban on assault weapons “gives jackbooted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property and even injure and kill us.” This just added to the radical-right rhetoric that was influencing unhinged minds in those days who armed themselves to the hilt and formed groups called “militias”. A week after LaPierre’s letter four-year NRA member Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and killed 141 people. The NRA was widely criticized in the media and LaPierre made a concession that his rhetoric was sometimes “overblown”.

    That was just a hiccup, however, In 1997 a cover featuring Charlton Heston talked about a “crusade” to defend the Second Amendment. A couple of years later it featured a now Alzheimer-diminished Heston challenging Al Gore to take away his rifle from “his cold dead hands”. In 2015 the cover was apocalyptic, the words “Are you prepared for the 700 most dangerous days American has ever faced?” over some fanciful red death ray.

    Days after seventeen students were killed by a gunman in Parkland Fl, on Valentine’s Day in 2018 one of the NRA’s TV stars said, “mainstream media loves mass shootings”. A week later LaPierre spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference and ranted on about socialism in the U.S. and Europe and how socialists were smearing gun rights advocates. At the end of that bloody month LaPierre called NY Gov Andrew Cuomo a “communist” because of NY gun laws. In November the Rifleman cover featured a huge wave hitting the Statue of Liberty along with the message “Your Vote is All that’s Prevents the Socialist Wave on 11/6.”

    When Philando Castile, who had a permit to carry a gun and who was Black, was shot by a police officer during a traffic stop, the NRA was silent. The Baltimore Sun editorial board commented with a piece entitled “Gun Rights for Whites Only”. Ironically (sickeningly?), the NRA on twitter describes itself as “America’s Longest-Standing Civil Rights Organization.”

    The NRA supported the radical-right Donald Trump and associates in the 2016 election to the tune of $50 million. An article on Salon summed up the NRA’s right-wing extremism nicely. It was entitled “NRA laid the groundwork for deadly Capitol riot for years, say gun control advocates” The article also notes, “After the January 6 attempted putsch the NRA waited nine days to comment in a tweet that we should all ‘respect the rule of law’”. Did it learn its lesson? Of course not. On April 14 it tweeted about Biden that “Joe couldn’t care less about his Oath of Office. He wants to light our Constitution on fire.”

    It seems plain, even obvious that the “social welfare” organization called the NRA is a Radical-Right outfit.

    Ruger donations to the NRA

    Sturm Ruger and Co. has its headquarters in Fairfield, CT. It sells more rifles, revolvers and pistols than any other U.S. company. Its connections to the NRA are deep.

    First there is the money. Let’s go to 2011. Ruger pledged to give $1 to the NRA for every Ruger weapon sold. By August $279,000 had be raised. The CEO at that time, Mike Fifer, said Ruger was well on its way to send the NRA $1 million. When the campaign ended in 2012 Ruger had sold 1,200,000 guns and so gave the NRA $1.2 million. The Fairfield [CT] Citizen reported on this on January 5, 2012, three weeks after a gunman used a (non-Ruger) semi-automatic weapon to kill 20 children and 6 teachers in nearby Newtown. Here’s a proud NRA video of Fifer presenting LaPierre with a giant check.

    That was only the beginning. Ruger sweetened its pledge and promised to give the NRA $2 for every gun sold. After one year of this the new CEO of Ruger, Chris Killoy, gave the NRA a check for $4 million. The New York Times wrote that Ruger “directed $10 million to the N.R.A. in 2015 and 2016.” You recall that 2016 was that special year when $50 million of NRA money went to elect Donald Trump and friends. Once Trump was in donations in 2017 and 2018 declined to $1.5 million.

    It’s not clear how much Ruger gave to the NRA in recent years. It was listed as an elite “Defender” rank donor to the NRA legislative arm in media releases in 2019 and 2020. How many millions in donations get you to “Defender” level is not apparent.

    There’s also the money Ruger spends on advertising with the NRA. For instance in 2016 Ruger paid the NRA $8.4 million. All in all, Ruger has sent tons of money to the NRA dwarfing contributions from gun-maker Smith and Wesson.

    Other Ruger-NRA Connections

    It’s not just money, though. There’s interlocking staff and Board members. Sandra Froman who is on the board director of Sturm, Ruger is a past president of the NRA and a paid consultant for the NRA. She is also a member of the NRA board of directors. was also a former President of the NRA Foundation’s board of trustees. Then there’s the National Shooting Sports Foundation. It’s the firearm trade association whose members are all in the gun industry. It’s based in Newtown Connecticut. Its president and CEO is Steve Sanetti. From 1980 to 2008 Sanetti held various position in Ruger, including President, Vice Chairman, and Chief Operating Officer. Chris Killoy, Ruger’s current CEO, sits on its Board of Governors. Before Killoy Ruger’s Mike Fifer was on the board. Relations between the NRA and NSSF are shall we say, warm. The NSSF proclaims that the NRA and the NSSF are “generally aligned on policy issues.”

    One illustration highlights the tight connection between Ruger and the extremist NRA. It’s a picture of the Ruger ~ Mark II William B Ruger Endowment Special NRA Edition on the site of the Cabelas company. It shows a blue-steel receiver with handsome ivory-covered grips. The Ruger’s site tells us that its original (2003) price was $334. We’re told its shipped in a “red Ruger commemorative case with Special Ruger/NRA crest logo.”

    If Sturm Ruger ever criticized the NRA publicly, it’s not obvious. It didn’t denounce its ally, not for its hysteria before the Oklahoma bombing, not for using senile Charlton Heston to whip up frenzy, not for its massive support for ultra-right politicians in 2016 and not for “laying the groundwork” for January’s attempt to overthrow US elected government.

    Ruger and the NRA seem to be joined at the hip.

    Ruger doesn’t propagandize about “freedom” and “tyranny” on its own websites. It leaves that to the NRA. Ruger’s goal is to sell guns and make money. Fear of crime sells guns. Fear of a “gun-grabbing government” sells guns. The NRA creates the hysteria. Ruger rakes in the cash.

    I wrote to CEO Killoy by email and postal letter asking for possible corrections or comments, but have not received any reply.

     

  • No Joint Struggle With Settler Colonialism

    No Joint Struggle With Settler Colonialism

    “One hand in craft, the other with the dagger”, 1954 Poster of the Histadrut, the Zionist labor organization that carried out settlement and formed the backbone of the Haganah militia that perpetrated the ethnic cleansing of the 1948 Nakba.

    New Politics editor’s note: brian bean, co-editor of the anthology Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, responds to Daniel Fischer’s “In Support of Joint Struggle.” Both articles refer to the anthology’s chapter “Not an Ally” by Daphna Thier. A summary of this and other chapters can be found in Steve Leigh’s review.

    For Marx, the working class was the revolutionary class, the only class for whose self-liberation would mean the liberation of all. In Daphna Thier’s chapter “Not An Ally” she argues that the Israeli working class is an exception to this rule. The reason for this is that the class character reflects the settler colonial nature of the Zionist state. The very class formation of the Israeli working class came with the ethnic cleansing and forced appropriation of Palestinian land and replacing Palestinian society with Israeli one. Zionist labor and labor parties both were essential actors and thus guilty parties. This Zionist welfare state served as the cocoon that gave birth to Israeli capitalism. She argues that Israeli workers are bestowed direct benefits at the expense of Palestinians and that a political economy constructed around the continued war and occupation of the Palestinians has more integrated the Israeli working class into the Zionist project. The result of this is that class struggle against Israeli capital is subordinated to the struggle for the Zionist national project. Deeper than the false consciousness of nationalism which exists as a strain within workers generally, Zionist settle-colonialism shapes the class character to prevent class solidarity with Palestinians.

    Therefore, the Israeli working class is a settler-colonial, active collaborator with Israeli capitalism in the continued ethnic cleansing and occupation project of Israeli apartheid. Despite the actions of some individuals of conscience, the class character and relationship to the state means that as a class Israeli workers are not allies in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, for democratic rights for all, and for the right of return for the generations of Palestinian forced into the diaspora. This is an unfortunate reality that we wish were different. However, it is folly to base our political strategy on this wish. Unfortunately, Daniel Fischer asks us to make that very mistake in his criticism of Thier’s argument in the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction edited by Sumaya Awad and myself. (He also singles out Steve Leigh for a favorable review of our book, whose company I am happy to share.)

    Fischer’s main assertion is that we discount the “revolutionary potential” of the Israeli working class and he argues that rather than being incentivized to support Zionism, Zionism is antithetical to the self-interest of Israeli workers and that it is only “false consciousness” that it is supported by the near totality of Israeli Jews.  Zionism—according to Fischer—has made Israel “hell for Jews.”  He argues that changing this and winning a shared country will come about with “joint mass struggle from below, cemented by common national-revolutionary aims and common social interests” between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.

    In making his argument he relies on one of the writings of American socialist Hal Draper arguing the majority position of the American Trotskyist organization the Workers Party / International Socialist League. In doing so he resuscitates a doctrinaire debate in the international Trotskyist movement from mid-20th century. The majority position of the WP/ISL in this debate was quite mistaken in its approach to Israel. On this ground, he makes a series of cases of struggle by Israeli Jews that are overblown—sometimes with misleading sources—and confuses activity against the excesses of the occupation or “for peace” with that of a clear anti-Zionist position. He makes some of the same mistakes that Draper and company made about the nature of the Israeli state and colonialism—mistakes our new socialist movement needs to reject. In the rest of this essay I will go through each of these in turn.

    Soldiers of the Haganah militia

    Out of Joint

    On this shaky theoretical ground, Fischer makes his case by citing the existence of sporadic protests in Israel carried out by the Israeli peace movement against things like the apartheid wall and annexation, the existence of Israeli military resisters, and the Israeli Black Panther movement of the early 1970s. In many of these examples Fischer dramatically overstates the breadth or effect of these small struggles on Israeli society.  He downplays what Awad and Thier emphasize in their excellent recent Jacobin piece; that the existence of Zionism prevents solidarity, and the settler-colonialism is the underlying obstacle not just—and most importantly—for ending the suffering of Palestinians, but to create the condition for the growth of any sort of internationalism among the Israeli working class.

    We don’t deny that there exists a small peace movement in Israel that protests the more egregious “overreaches” of Zionist occupation. This activity is welcome and positive. But the Israeli peace movement has not only been marginal in Israeli politics, and Israeli politics on the level of working class organizations and political parties has lurched rightward. This is an obvious point and the Israeli elections last month are more proof. Additionally, as Awad and Thier point out in their Jacobin piece, the actions of the peace movement might oppose the occupation, but they should not be confused as being anti-Zionist and are at best uneven and confused on the right of return of Palestinian refugees—one of the most basic demands for justice in Palestine. Fischer overstates its reach and the impact of the small handful of examples he provides.

    The sarvanim (refusenik or military resister) movement similarly while important has been small and isolated, averaging roughly 5-15 resisters a year, fewer than one percent of total conscripts. Additionally, the politics of many of the sarvanim groups, while noble in acting against the occupation, fall short of calling for an end to Zionism.  Yesh Gvul (There is a Limit) still holds to an idea of a Zionist state albeit within the Green Line (the armistice line established in 1948) as its boundary.  Ometz La’Sarev (Courage to Refuse) couches its motivation to refuse duty as a Zionist act to “preserve Israel’s safety.” Fischer insinuates that the fact that there has been an increase in people dodging the draft because of mental health exemptions is out of solidarity with the plight of Palestinians. And yet the article he cites says nothing about that. Relatedly, he cites that the suicide rate for Israeli Jews is higher for that of Palestinians. The problem is that the piece he cites doesn’t include figures on Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank or Gaza and it also cites that the rate has decreased for Israeli Jews over the past ten years, not the case for Palestinian citizens of Israel.

    Similarly, he overstates the impact of the Israeli Black Panthers. The Israeli Black Panthers were a group who organized against anti-Mizrahi racism in the 1970s and connected with the Palestinian resistance movement. They were an important and remarkable occurrence as Thier states in her chapter. However as Moshe Machover and E’hud Ein-Gil  who were members of  Matzpen (another group of revolutionary anti-Zionists that Fischer strangely doesn’t mention) that worked with and influenced the Israeli Panthers mention that the group is the “only partial exception” to the general thesis on the Israeli working class. Indeed in the instance of the Israeli Panthers, as Panther founder Reuvin Abergel states in the piece cited by Fischer, “ultimately Israel was successful in using Palestinians as a tool to force the Mizrahim into identifying with their Jewish over Arab identities.” The harsh crack-down on the Panthers was one reason for the collapse of the organization but the other piece of the puzzle is that the trend in Mizrahi politics

    in the roughly 50 years since has shifted right as Thier describes in her chapter and Otman Aitlkaboud states in his excellent two-part piece on the legacy of the group. The Black Panthers being an exception does not disprove the rule. And even the fate of the Israeli Black Panthers seems to confirm the powerful force that settler colonialism plays to dampen class conflict and oppression within the Israeli working class.

    Fischer’s examples aren’t really about current working class activity. And that’s at the heart of the issue. Because if we believe that the force for revolutionary change is the working class, then it’s their activity as a class that we look to. As another example, if you look at his citing of the letter against the Nation State Law, it is a list of 60 academics, journalists, or lawyers. Not exactly the base of the working class.

    Fischer seems to be aware of some of these general trends in Israeli politics as he notes several times in his essay how prevalent anti-Arab racism is among Israeli Jews and the complete lack of support for either BDS or for a democratic shared country. So while all the examples that he mentions to prove his point are legit and positive, he overstates their breadth and impact and is unable to explain why movements like the Panthers and these others have continually, for the entirety of the existence of the state of Israel not resonated with the Israeli working class and why the Israeli left has played a role supporting politically and carrying out the occupation.  Fischer barely engages with Thier’s careful materialist analysis explaining “why” demonstrating how Israeli capitalism was built through investment of Israeli working class and socialist institutions, unions, and parties in a Zionist state. Simple descriptions of false consciousness are not sufficient and is akin to the errors made by Draper of misunderstanding and downplaying Israeli settler-colonialism.

    One final consequence of this is his handling of Hamas. Skewed similarly to Draper’s emphasis on “defense of Israel” which I will describe later, Fischer describes Hamas as simply a “far-right group that intentionally kills Israeli civilians.” Socialists should chafe at this simple description.  While I certainly have criticisms of Hamas, any criticism has to be balanced with the fact that they were democratically elected by Palestinians in 2006.  Also, independent of any opinion about the effectiveness of the armed struggle against the occupation is the fact that armed resistance to occupation is legal under international law of Geneva treaties and United Nations resolutions. And it bears to mention that this is in contradistinction to Israeli occupation and its multiple human rights resolutions. It should be a simple socialist maxim to say we defend occupied peoples’ rights to resist in whatever way they see fit even if we have an opinion on its effectiveness. When Israel is continually blockading Gaza, bombing one of the most densely populated places on earth, and flattening neighborhoods, Hamas should be defended against the political attacks used to justify these war crimes.  Unfortunately, Hamas being “a far-right group that intentionally kills Israeli civilians” is essentially the political attack that we need to defend against. However Fischer, again, and similar to Draper, downplays making a clear defense of resistance and being able to push back against a frankly Islamophobic characterizations of Hamas that uses the fantasy of “joint struggle” and the need to “make Israeli Jews invited” as justification.

    What about US workers?

    As Fischer points out, I am aware that the United States also was born out of a settler colonial context. He accuses my comrades and myself of “lacking consistency” because we don’t argue that the working class of the United States is the same as the working class of Israel. It is the case that in a book on Palestine we don’t articulate our views on the US working class and its relationship to the country’s settler-colonial origins. That question is essential and rich and it is unfortunate that Fischer’s critique here feels a bit disingenuous as he engages in an argument we don’t make in the book. Additionally, he expresses no disagreement with what he thinks our position is on the US working class but just on our inconsistency.  On this point there deserves a fuller description.

    Briefly however, the notion that the fact that settler colonialism, the Zionist state, and the working class of Israel are the same as that of the United States seems a stretch. From the beginning of this country through around the turn of the 20th century—as Brian Ward points out in “Are You a Settler”—settler colonialism was expressed in the very overt drive for the non-Native population displacing Indigenous folks and directly benefiting from that appropriation. In this time period, analogues between sections of the US working class and what we are saying about the Israeli working class is probably more apt. But, settler colonialism, as Nick Estes—the founder of Red Nation—points out in his book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance has shifted throughout US history. One of the features of this is that the primary beneficiaries of settler colonialism have shifted. Estes points out that while there are still settlers and descendants of settlers in the conventional sense, it is large corporations—especially in the extractive sector who play this role. This feature—of US settler colonialism largely being driven by Capital is different than the current settler colonial project of Israel which still seeks to displace indigenous Palestinian people to make landowners of individual and collective Jewish workers.

    There is certainly a much work to be done towards liberation in this so-called country and fights around struggles like the Red Deal, honoring treaties, for #LandBack and re-matriation are essential. But still this is just different from the immediacy of the contemporary project of Zionism.  Unlike Zionism, one can point out how class struggle against the US capital in these issues can be waged and cross-class unity against Indigenous folks is not as central a feature in the general class character.  As Jewish workers occupy the privileged status of never having to compete for jobs with Palestinians it means that they don’t need solidarity with Palestinian workers. This need to fight the ability for the bosses to divide worker against worker is what drove the important labor struggles for interracial unions in the United States.  These traits and others about what makes Zionism different are the very arguments that Thier makes. The validity of this argument stands independent of what one thinks or does not think about the current nature of settler colonialism in the United States.

    Old Debates

    Responding to Fischer’s central use of Draper and the WP/ISL’s doctrinaire and misinformed approach to Palestine means a bit getting into the weeds of old debates to explore the context.  But as Fischer uses the Draper article as his critique’s central argument, and as I do sometimes enjoy the musty corridors of Marxist history, I will proceed.

    The debate in question occurred mostly between that of Max Shachtman’s Workers Party / International Socialist League and that of the more “orthodox” Trotskyism of the Fourth International(FI) who expelled them from the US organization in 1940. It is important that this debate was not just between groups but also within the groups themselves.  Also importantly, unlike Stalinism, Trotskyists have almost always held to anti-Zionism.  With that, in the post-war period the debate emerged first around the question of Jewish immigration to Palestine (which began in the late 1800s), then on the United Nations-driven partition plan, then on the Nakba itself.¹

    The general majority position in this debate advanced by the FI that the WP/ISL polemicized against was opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine. In the wake of the genocide of the Holocaust in Germany they advocated for solidarity to get other countries to allow the entry of Jews but argued that immigration to Palestine was a “terrible trap” according to Ernest Mandel in 1947 as “the Arab masses must necessarily look upon the arrival of new immigrants as the arrival of enemy soldiers; and this point of view is confirmed, moreover, by the way in which the Jewish masses look upon this immigration.” Mandel argued that the basis for the question of Jewish immigration must “start from “the sovereignty of the Arab population.” The insightful work of Palestinian-born Tony Cliff was influential to the FI position. While one could criticize the FI for having too much of a neutral stance towards Arab resistance to the Nakba, the general approach to the nature of the Zionism and its relationship to Zionist settlers and class formation can be seen as loosely corresponding with a description of the settler-colonial nature of the Israeli state.²

    The WP/ISL sharply criticized this position. Albert Glotzer, in his 1947 reply to Mandel in The New International, leans the entirety of his critique on the position that “the fate of the Jews are sealed.” The “existence of bourgeois society” for Glotzer, would mean the complete extermination of Jewish people in every country in the world and that literally nothing could be done about it. While the pessimism of this position is connected to the recent events of the Holocaust, it is a prediction that—though antisemitism is still a real threat—has certainly been proven incorrect in the dire way motivating Glotzer’s claims.³ Thus, he argues that the self-determination of world Jewry demands that the “only correct, democratic, socialist slogan” would be for the free immigration of Jews to Palestine and furthermore that socialists should adopt it “despite the opposition” of Palestinians.

    Practically this meant that despite Palestinian resistance—most notably the three years of mass struggle of the Great Arab Revolt at the end of the 1930’s— to what was seen correctly by Palestinians as a project of colonization backed by British imperialism, the WP/ISL campaigned on behalf of colonization.⁴ Draper himself penned an open letter in 1946 arguing for the building of a united front against Britain’s refusal at the time to ease restrictions on immigration and in support of 18 members of the Irgun—the Zionist militia that would go on to carry out terror and massacres against Palestinians during the Nakba—who were arrested by the British.

    While the WP/ISL opposed the 1947 UN-sponsored partition plan, their misreading of the situation, elevation of self-determination as sacrosanct principle beyond all context, and bungled failure to understand the colonial dynamics at play meant that their writings at the time on the establishment of the state of Israel should make one cringe. Hal Draper wrote the editorial for the WP/ISL’s newspaper Labor Action on May 24th in response to Israel’s declaration of its statehood and after about 6 weeks of the organized “Plan Dalet” campaign of ethnic cleansing and massacres carried out by Zionist militia.⁵ Entitled “War of Independence or Expansion” Draper argues that the events of ethnic cleansing were merely self-defense against a “reactionary war of invasion” and calls for lifting of embargos on sending arms to the Zionist militias. Socialists are “required” to defend Zionists right to “defend their choice of separate national existence against any and all reactionary attempts to deprive them of that right.”

    Palestinians in Draper’s piece literally do not exist as all resistance is described as entirely the domain of the “reactionary feudal Arab ruling class.” This a tragic erasure of the agency of Palestinians, suffering and resisting their forced expulsion from their home. While he calls for unity between Jews and Arabs and the furtherance of a socialist state with equal rights etc, he argues that Arabs are unfit for this task because “it is the Jews who are the most advanced socially and culturally, because it is they who claim to be socialists.” He argued this again in 1956 that because of “superior cultural and technical resources” Israel could be a “beneficent leader and guide” to the Arab people. This is a heinous position to take by a political current distinguished by campaigning against the idea that socialism can be brought from above or without.

    The piece concludes with Draper saying that without a socialist program the “sacrifices of the Jewish people and the military victories of the Haganah will not be able to make of Palestine anything but a deathtrap.” So therefore colonialism—and the “victory” of ethnic cleansing that the Haganah were responsible for—could be socialist and could be a simple expression of the principle of self-determination. In a piece written a few months later called “How to Defend Israel” he argues not that the colonial project is flawed but that the error is that what is needed is the giving of the “victory a social meaning.” By not viewing the events of the creation of the state of Israel as the expression the project of settler colonialism, Draper gives socialist colors to a violent colonial project, denies Palestinian agency, and makes arguments quite congruent with the many of the liberal (and racist) justifications for Zionism (only democracy in the “backwards” Middle East, land without a people for people without a land, etc.). This is the key, ghastly error of Draper and his co-thinkers.

    These positions were formalized by a resolution passed by the International Socialist League in 1951. The resolution articulates these same arguments and distill a key argument they make which is that socialists should be for the abstract right of self-determination of peoples independent of the advisability of the exercise of that right by separation, i.e. new states, organizations etc. In the abstract, this formulation this is largely correct and draws on Lenin’s important work on national self-determination. But as Tony Cliff argued before the Nakba: “only the greatest superficiality can drive one to the conclusion that this slogan holds good at all times and under all conditions.” In the case of Palestine, its abstraction floats obliviously above the fact that there was no idea of the Jewish nation state in Palestine that was not Zionist.

    This resolution was critiqued by Clovis Maksoud, a member of the Progressive Socialist Party of Lebanon which was associated with the country’s Druze minority.⁶ It was Maksoud’s piece—published in Labor Action in 1954—critical of WP/ISL position that was the target of the Draper’s polemic quoted by Fischer.

    Many of Maksoud’s points have been proven largely correct by the decades since. Maksoud argues that the WP/ISL “made a fundamental error” by identifying the resistance to Israel as only the domain of the Arab ruling class who try to “pervert it to their selfish ends.” Rather, resistance to Israel was also a part of a “much broader fight” of the struggle against imperialism. It is actually the state of Israel—argued Maksoud—that’s presence in the region “acts a deterrent to the revolutionary aspirations of the Arab masses.” Because of this he argues that Western socialists who “continue their one-sided support for Israel” they will “contribute to the perpetuation of reaction in the area.” Maksoud also takes the WP/ISL to task for embracing the “widely held Zionist-theory that Arabs are incapable of developing their own areas.” And lastly he skewers the WP/ISL focus on an abstract notion of self-determination as being the main issue.  He argues that their position: “Disregards the means by which this right is to be executed, and it denies the interests of the people in Palestine their sovereign right to admit or refuse these claims. In other words, what is claimed by the resolution to be an act of Jewish ‘self-determination’ is dependent for its fruition on an act of aggression and imposition.”

    Maksoud isn’t all right, but on several on his main points he is dead on and the analysis of Israel’s role in the region and the connection of the struggle to Palestine to anti-imperialism has—unlike the socialist vanguard fantasy advanced by the Draper—proved completely correct and the chapter in our book by Shireen Akram-Boshar demonstrates this expertly. His conclusion is that what is needed is the end (emasculation as he calls it) to an explicitly Zionist state and the right of return to Palestinian refugees.⁷

    It was in response to Maksoud’s arguments that Draper wrote the polemic “Mistakes of the Arab Socialists” that Fischer uses in his piece. In it Draper lays out an opposition to Zionism, the general need for joint struggle from below regionally, and the need for a democratic state. But the argument of the need for “joint struggle” that Fischer focuses on is used by Draper to buttress the main point of his piece which is polemicizing against the overthrow of the Zionist state. Draper states he is not “for” a Zionist state but expresses the need to assert the need to defend its current existence. Its confused contradictions are the product of the complete absence of any analysis of Zionism being a colonial project. He dreams of an Israel that “overcomes its Zionist illusions and policies.” Israel and “self-determination” are rendered power-neutral, seen only question is that of two “nations”, just figuring out “how people in the region can live together.”

    This abstract take on self-determination also means that in the same piece he bizarrely argues that white South Africans should be supported (even if we disagree with them) if they chose to establish a white-only separatist state in South Africa. But as the South African Trotskyist Hosea Jaffe said: “We cannot consider the shell of a slogan without its substance.”

    Considering this substance, Draper’s emphasis on joint struggle is expressed as a counter-position to arguments about the need to end the Zionist state, its role as vanguard of regional reaction, and the need for a right of return. It is easy to talk about joint struggle if you skip over the analysis of the settler-colonial situation and its effect on class formation. It is easy to, as Draper did two years later lay out an extensive ten-point program (which includes the right-of-return) for how Israel can “win support” of the Arab masses “against their own reactionary rulers” and think that the Zionist state has any interest in dissolving its foundations as a settler colonial ethnostate and abandon the imperial sponsorship that makes the whole endeavor possible. Colonialism never happened, only “self-determination.” Socialists should be clear, we don’t support the self-determination for colonial settlers who are a part of imperialist occupation projects.

    Of all this Fischer says that what “Draper contended in 1954 is still true today.” Fischer’s use of Draper here—which feels like a “gotcha” because he makes a point that we quote Draper’s writings on Marxism but “unfortunately” don’t talk about his earlier espousal of the WP/ISL position on Israel—is actually the choice less fortunate. In doing so he resuscitates this debate in the international Trotskyist movement and the doctrinaire, mistaken approach of  WP/ISL on Israel. This position on Palestine held by the WP/ISL, by now mostly a historical curio of the left, should remain that way as the argument in its wooden estimation of Lenin’s approach to the national question comes dangerously close to ignoring Israel’s perpetration of the Nakba on Palestinians, ignores Palestinians agency and right of return. It lacks an analysis of the settler-colonial nature of the Zionists state and have been shown to be wrong in the sixty years since they were made.

    None of this is to say that the politics of socialism from below or of Draper are corrupted. Indeed I revere his work generally, and myself and the people named in Fischer’s critique consider themselves in his loose tradition. Additionally it is a marker of his political strength that in the 1950s he argued for the right of return, for de-Zionisation of Israel, for one state, etc.  But in his handling of the nature of the Zionist state and class character of the Israeli working class he was wrong. There are some signs that his position might have shifted some as after the piece that Fischer quoted some of his criticism of Israel become sharper and his tone in the last thing he wrote on the subject, ten years later, as the Six-Day War was beginning actually talks about Nakba, still has the “conflict between two sides” context that is a product of his misunderstanding of the colonial nature, but is less Panglossian about the progessive potential of Israel. Was Draper’s position shifting as he viewed more the trajectory of Zionism? This is uncertain.⁸  But what is certain is that it is one thing for Draper to make a political error in the 1940s & 1950s, or to have hope for the Israeli Black Panthers in the 1970s; it is another to double down on this wrong position having witnessed the past forty years of the political development of Zionism.

    With this as the base, Fischer’s argument against the position argued by Thier and others is flawed. To justify this he overstates the breadth and potential of the examples that he uses and misses the overarching and underlying structures that have informed developments in Israeli political economy. There is difference between instances and trends that are important to political strategy. For example, I think that in the course of the struggle for socialism it is likely that there may be some billionaires who may be won to the side of socialism.  However to organize your political strategy for the expropriation of billionaires on winning them over as a class is a dead-end folly. I do have hope for the Israeli working class but the main driver, and focus of our strategy is changing the situation on the ground, the colonial reality and upsetting the Zionist blockage to solidarity will come about primarily not from the Israeli working class but through the regional uprising of the Arab working class and from Palestinians themselves.  They are who we should look to. That, I think, is what it means to be consistent in your approach to liberation in Palestine.

    Notes

    1 Of course the term Nakba is not used by any of the pieces I am discussing here.

    2 It is notable that though the FI statement on the Nakba at the time does seek to straddle the divide with its “against all chauvinism” thrust, it does—unlike the position of the WP/ISL, which I will describe later—include the important demand:“For the right of the Arab masses to determine their own future.”

    3 US immigration restrictions affecting Jewish immigrants from Europe that were criminally narrow during the Holocaust were lifted in 1948.

    4 For more on Palestinian resistance pre-1948 see pg 55 in Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

    5 For more on Plan Dalet see Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (Oxford, Oneworld; 2006)

    6 It is also important to note that it is a testament to the WP/ISL’s attention to democracy and political debate that they printed a two-part criticism of their politics from someone not in their organization in their paper. It is also interesting to note Maksoud’s political trajectory to becoming a prominent Arab League diplomat and ambassador to the United States.

    7 One point of debate between Maksoud and Draper that I will not take up here but flag is the question of what kind of “national rights” would there be in a single democratic state.

    8 An astute reader could respond to this question and point to the preface right before his death where he says that his line on Israel/Palestine has been proven right because it is carried by the PLO in 1990. This is a highly ambiguous and uncharastically imprecise for Draper.  Which part of the line? Its criticism of Zionism? The bi-national state? Class character of Israeli working class? Also is the fact that the PLO advocates it necessarily mean it is correct, especially on the dawn of Oslo?

  • Will Biden Be Another Roosevelt?

    Will Biden Be Another Roosevelt?

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

    Perhaps the most frequently discussed question lately is: Will President Joseph Biden be another Franklin D. Roosevelt? FDR’s presidency, from 1933 to 1945, transformed the United States with its New Deal, a collection of social welfare programs that rewrote the nation’s social contract. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, with banks collapsing, corporations contracting, small businesses failing, and 25 percent unemployment, FDR created massive jobs programs, expanded government relief, and most important created Social Security retirement program and passed the National Labor Relations Act, giving unions the right to organize. Roosevelt also built the New Deal Coalition, made up of labor unions, Black Americans, and corporations that produced consumer goods, which became the base of the Democratic Party for the next 75 years.

    Now, many ask, with the United States facing another crisis, the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying economic depression, will Biden succeed in carrying out a similar transformation? He would not be the first to do so. In the 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson carried out a similar national reconstruction, passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts that enfranchised southern Blacks, and to help the poor created his War on Poverty his Great Society health and education programs, especially Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.

    FDR and LBJ both acted in response to tremendous social pressure. The labor upheaval of the 1930s with waves of strikes that included mass picket lines, factory seizures, and confrontations with police and national guard led FDR to take action, while LBJ acted under the pressure of the Black civil rights movement with its boycotts, sit-ins, and mass protests. Today, Biden faces no pressure from the social movements but instead has had to deal with the unique issue of the coronavirus pandemic. Can progressive social legislation be passed without popular and working-class agitation?

    What is Biden trying to do? He is trying to get Congress to pass legislation that will cost $6 trillion dollar—paid for by taxing the rich and corporations—and establish many new programs for the economy, racial justice, and the environment. He is motivating his package by arguing that the United States must remain competitive with other nations, China above all. That is, the progressive domestic policy is motivated by a desire to rebuild America so as to reestablish the global hegemony of American imperialism.

    So far, only the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to deal with COVID has passed. Two other plans remain: the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan and the $1.8 trillion American Family Plan. With the Senate divided 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans it will be difficult to get these through Congress, especially with antiquated rules that usually requires 60 votes to pass a bill.

    The debate has been framed in terms of a program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. The Republicans define infrastructure as roads, bridges, railroads, and perhaps broadband communications, while Biden and the Democrats argue that things such as childcare, expanded health insurance, and two years free college education must be included. Biden’s plan to deal with climate change by expanding renewable energy sources is opposed by the Republicans and the oil companies, but it is also criticized by environmental groups that argue that it is not big enough. Progressive Democrat Alexandria Ocasio Cortez says it should be four times larger.

    The Democratic Socialists of America backed Senator Bernie Sanders, but Biden has, in effect, adopted Sanders’ program, which was also the program of DSA. Perhaps DSA members believe they have been successful in moving the Democrats. We should remember that the same thing happened in the 1930s when FDR pragmatically adopted much of the program of the Socialist Party of America, leading that party to dwindle as socialists became Democrats.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • In Memoriam: Kai Nielsen (1926-2021)

    In Memoriam: Kai Nielsen (1926-2021)

    The Marxist philosopher Kai Nielsen, for many years a sponsor of New Politics, passed away on March 29 in Montreal, only a few weeks away from what would have been his 95th birthday.

    Kai was born in Michigan and grew up in northern Illinois. Many years later he wrote that growing up during the Great Depression “marked me very deeply. It is not that I suffered personally. My parents were comfortably off. But it was what I saw around me. I went sometimes to play at the homes of my school chums, many of whom lived in ramshackle houses practically bare of furniture and barely heated. Their mothers were there with faces pinched with hunger… I concluded at a very early age that there must be something terribly wrong and even irrational in what we call the developed world for it to be like that… So socialism came early to me and remained like water to ducks.”

    After school, Kai served in the Merchant Marine in the Pacific at the end of World War Two, before studying at St. Ambrose College in Iowa and the University of North Carolina. He was a graduate student at Duke University and was awarded his Ph.D. in 1959 for a thesis on moral reasoning.

    In those days, Kai later reminisced, academic jobs were easy to find, and he became an assistant professor first at Hamilton College in upstate New York and shortly afterwards in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Amherst College in Massachusetts. But Kai was a convinced atheist, which did not go down well with his department chair. So, when Sidney Hook paid a visit to Amherst and offered Kai a job at New York University, he gladly accepted.

    Kai was a prolific writer. In the 1950s and 1960s he published a stream of articles on ethics, philosophy of religion (especially on the case for atheism), and the nature of philosophy itself (a topic known as meta-philosophy). These were issues that continued to fascinate him for the rest of his life, but as the sixties progressed, Kai’s attention was increasingly drawn to social and political questions, and to Marxism.

    He described his politics when he went to NYU as “Deweyan social democracy. I thought that if we would hold on to our brains and be patient, we in North America, and eventually in the world, could in time end up like Sweden. The Vietnam War changed that. It was an eye-opener for me. In being part at that time of the internal resistance in the United States, I became convinced that such liberal reformist measures would never work, and slowly I became a Marxist, or, as I would now prefer to call it, a Marxian.”

    By the end of the 1960s Kai was a full professor and chair of the NYU Philosophy Department, but he was also frustrated by the continuing Vietnam War and disillusioned with politics in the United States. When he was given the opportunity to move to the University of Calgary in Canada at the beginning of the 1970s, he took it.

    By this time, Kai was writing on topics such as civil disobedience, the ethics of revolution, and US foreign policy. In 1975, he published “Class Conflict, Marxism, and the Good-Reasons Approach,” the first of many articles on Marxist philosophy. As Kai summarized the article, he examined “a central problem about Marxism and morality. Marx, on the one hand, exposes moralism and exhibits the ideological functions of morality and, on the other, requires objectively true moral norms for his critique of capitalism and defense of socialism. I set forth a way of looking at Marx and Marxism which shows how two apparently conflicting elements in Marxism form a coherent whole.” Fourteen years later, in his book Marxism and the Moral Point of View: Morality, Ideology, and Historical Materialism, Kai gave his longest and most detailed answers to these questions.

    I met Kai when I was a philosophy graduate student at Calgary in the early 1980s. In fact, he was the first person with whom I studied Marx. On my first day in the department, I walked into his seminar on “Marx and Morality” in which, in addition to Marx, we read a collection of papers that were soon to be published in a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, which Kai was editing. It was a wonderful introduction to Marxism and to serious philosophical discussion. Kai came prepared each week with a long commentary on the readings. After he had read that aloud, the debate would begin, with Kai inviting—and relishing the chance to respond to—disagreements.

    During my time at Calgary, I grew to know Kai as a warm and generous person, who often held informal department gatherings and discussion groups at his home. Kai was also always engaged with contemporary political issues. I remember him bringing the Canadian journalist Stan Persky, who had just returned from Poland and was writing a book on the Solidarność trade union movement’s challenge to the regime, to speak on campus shortly after the Polish government had declared martial law.

    Kai continued to teach at Calgary until his retirement in the 1990s, at which point he moved to Montreal. But soon he was teaching again part-time at Concordia University. Kai also remained politically active. After initially being skeptical, he became a strong supporter of Quebec sovereignty. And his commitment to socialism never wavered. A younger colleague recalls accompanying Kai to the April 2001 global justice protests in Quebec City against the Free Trade Area of the Americas:

    “We were tear gassed a couple of times and I did my best to keep Kai from getting crushed by the crowds (he was in his seventies). During a parade that was part of the protest we stood on the edge of the road and Kai raised his fist in the air in solidarity as the labor union and Marxist banners went by, his eyes full of tears, memories, and hopes for a better world.”

    Kai continued to write well into his nineties. By the time he died, he had published 21 books (and edited several more) and over 400 professional articles. He also left behind several unpublished book manuscripts and dozens of unpublished articles, including many on socialism, Marxism, and contemporary politics. Much of this work is collected on his website.

    In his own words, Kai attempted to articulate a conception of a “meaningful and desirable life” for everyone and to show that this conception is compatible with reality. “I speak here of a conception of a flourishing world for all where there will be no poor. I want such a world. I seek again and again in various ways to clearly … articulate what this world would be like and how it could be achieved.”

    Elsewhere he wrote: “Am I optimistic or pessimistic? Well, I am a fallibilist and I don’t think it is very important whether you are optimistic or pessimistic. The thing is to struggle for a better world, and to oppose the pigsty we have.”

    New Politics has lost a friend and the world is a poorer place without him.

  • The Unions Our Educators & Communities Deserve

    The Unions Our Educators & Communities Deserve

    This action dialogue will focus on the many roles of unions during these increasingly complex times for educators, learners, families, and communities.

    May 03, 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM EST

    Zoom

    _____________________________________________________________________

    Eric Blanc

    A former high school teacher, Eric Blanc is a doctoral candidate at NYU Sociology and the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics. During the West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Denver, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Chicago public education strikes, Blanc was Jacobin’s on-the-ground correspondent.

    Red State Revolt
    _________________________________________________________________________________________
    Dr. Lois Weiner

    A former career teacher, now Professor Emerita of New Jersey City University, currently on the editorial board of New Politics,  Dr. Lois Weiner, researches and writes about teachers’ work, urban education, and labor, focusing on teacher unionism. She is currently finishing a new book about challenges teachers and education activists face in the chilling new neoliberal education project, accelerated and intensified by the pandemic, which she describes in her recent New Politics article.

     Website
    _________________________________________________________________________________________
    Bill Fletcher Jr.

    Bill Fletcher Jr has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labor movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO.

    Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.

    Website
    _________________________________________________________________________________________
    Cecily Myart-Cruz

    Cecily Myart-Cruz is a teacher, activist, and the Vice President of the United Teachers Los Angeles/NEA. She has taught for 24 years, at both elementary and middle school levels, most recently at Angeles Mesa Elementary. She has been recognized for her work in the classroom, including as UTLA/NEA WHO award winner, and she is trained in the AFT’s Education Research & Dissemination (ER&D) framework. She has helped shape Racial Justice within the work of the Union through critical dialogue, forums, all the while making sure student voices are front and center. Lastly, Cecily has continued to build strength and power for UTLA through a strong relationship with the state and national affiliates. She is also a member of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.

    UTLA
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    Chelsea Acosta

    Chelsie is an educator in Salt Lake City, Utah. She currently serves as the ACLU of Utah’s Equity Officer and oversees the EDIB (Equity Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging) Committee as a proud board member. Chelsie serves locally and nationally the National Education Association currently as a member of the NEA SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Committee and recently as the NEA Hispanic Secretary and the NEA EMAC (Ethnic Minority Affairs) Committee. In 2017, she was a finalist for the NEA Social Justice Activist Educator of the Year. She also served as the coordinator for the Save the Kids National Week Against School Pushout and the National Week of Action Against Incarcerating Youth. Chelsie is currently a graduate student at the University of Utah in the Department of Education, Culture and Society. Her activism is centered, but not limited to; racial justice, the School to Prison Pipeline and the intersectionality of LGBTQIA+ within racial and social justice.

    NEA EdJustice
    _________________________________________________________________________________________
    Mike Foster

    Mike spent 20 years working in a poultry plant in Alabama. He became active in the RWDSU union and soon became Vice President of that union. He continues to be VP of his local, negotiating the contracts every 3 years.

    He has organized other poultry plants in Alabama. Mike was promoted to be lead organizer (on the ground) for the Amazon campaign, and currently now works for  RWDSU.

    Vox Article
    _________________________________________________________________________________________

    In addition to these panelists, rank and file educators from across the United States will be speaking.

    Please RSVP by clicking the link below.

  • Political lessons the left should learn from Donald Trump

    Political lessons the left should learn from Donald Trump

    The surreal presidency of Donald Trump was filled with confusion, contradictions, anxiety, and missed opportunities. His rhetoric inflamed political tensions in every facet of American life, from football to COVID-19. Corporate media split along party lines as never before and accentuated all the ugliest aspects of American society. It seemed like anything was possible, up to and including civil war.

    With Trump out of office and silenced on social media, a false sense of calm has settled in over much of the country. But the issues that gave rise to Trump still exist, and so far, they aren’t being adequately addressed by the Biden administration. Meanwhile, the Trump wing continues its domination of the Republican Party. The country is still deep in the woods.

    There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this remarkable era. It pulled back the already badly eroded veneer of respectability that had long covered up the darkness at the core of American politics. We witnessed the depths that our politicians, businessmen, media, and fellow citizens could sink to. But we also saw a nation desperate for change. The left should be more confident than ever that they have the answers the country needs.

    Republicans will go as far as they can get away with

    As outrageous as Trump the spectacle was, his policies were fairly typical of most far-right Republicans. He slashed taxes for the wealthy and tore up government regulations on climate change, pollution, and labor. He passed enormous military budgets, expanded our overseas wars, continued domestic surveillance, and further militarized the police. Because Trump delivered on these issues and had such a close connection to the right-wing base, most Republicans shrugged off his more outlandish behavior.

    When Trump incited a violent mob and turned it loose on the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, it seemed to be a turning point. Most of the public opposed the revolution Trump seemingly tried to foment. Donors threatened to abandon the party. But it didn’t take long for Trump and the Republican establishment to repair their relationship. The party quickly acquitted Trump of impeachment charges and he recently headlined their biggest annual event.

    Democracy, the Constitution, basic norms, and human rights are simply irrelevant to the GOP. Enriching big business is their only serious objective. If overturning an election is the best way to do it, they may try. Trump never attempted to seize dictatorial control as some feared, but it’s not clear what mechanisms would have stopped him if he had. Far-right propagandists and politicians defended Trump’s every move, including through the January 6 riots. Trump led Republicans into uncharted terrain. Given the opportunity, they could very well go even further.

    People despise the ruling class of this country

    After Trump won in 2016, analysts struggled to understand his political success. Much of the analysis ultimately blamed the people Hillary Clinton termed the “deplorables” – antisocial elements of the GOP base, including racists, chauvinists, religious extremists, gun nuts, and conspiracy theorists. But these people do not account for all 74 million of the votes Trump got in 2020. Another, perhaps much more significant, driver of Trump’s political success was his anti-establishment rhetoric.

    For generations, the American people have been sold out by business leaders, both political parties, and a mainstream media that caters to an elite viewpoint. Trump called this out, and made a tempting offer. He promised Americans he’d smash the ruling-class grip over the country’s politics and restore the long-since sold-out American dream. No other major party presidential nominee made that pitch to voters, and for a country grown desperate by decreasing wages, increasing hours, worse benefits, and crumbling infrastructure, Trump seemed like a risk worth taking.

    The left must not simply credit all of Trump’s success to racism. Trump’s message, filled with lies though it was, attracted former Obama voters in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Joe Biden’s victory seemed only to have reassured Democrats that people want the status quo. But the status quo is rigged against American workers, and more of it could inspire another Trumpian backlash.

    Democrats need more than anti-Trumpism to run on

    Both in 2016 and 2020, the central message of the Democratic presidential candidate was, “Donald Trump is a terrible person, and I am not him.” In 2020, after five years of non-stop Trump on TV and with coronavirus ravaging the nation, that message was enough – but just barely. Joe Biden won the popular vote handily, but he came within narrow margins in key battleground states. Even with all his issues, Trump won the second-most votes of any candidate in history.

    Trump is every bit as terrible as his worst critics say, and often worse. Democrats are right to stand against the racism, xenophobia, and transphobia that makes up so much of the modern Republican platform. The outlandish terribleness of Trump and the modern Republican Party has allowed the Democrats to essentially hold the left hostage. With the threat of Trump and fascism ever on the horizon, Democrats have presented themselves as the only moral choice. But that isn’t enough on its own.

    The Biden Administration has taken several promising steps. Biden signed a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package that paid most Americans $1,400, extended unemployment benefits, and ramped up the nation’s testing and vaccination programs. More recently, Biden unveiled a $2 trillion infrastructure program that calls for improvements to the nation’s roads and water systems, nationwide access to high-speed broadband internet, investments in housing and manufacturing, and more help for elderly Americans and their caretakers. The plan emphasizes green energy and is largely paid for by increasing taxes on corporations.

    On the other hand, Biden reduced the amount of his COVID stimulus checks and backed off, at least for now, on raising the minimum wage. He seems torn on whether to forgive $50,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers and opposes full legalization of marijuana. Biden’s loftiest ambitions are in big plans that award expensive government contracts. Many of these plans are good, but when it comes to direct relief through things like debt forgiveness, universal health coverage, or stimulus payments, Biden is still much more conservative.

    Biden knows he must deliver something tangible to the American people. Over the last several generations, Democrats have largely abandoned the working class, and are now funded by many of the same corporate donors as the Republicans. There have been some positive developments in Biden’s few months in office, but there have also been worrisome ones, such as his defense budget increase. If Biden and the Democrats don’t deliver material improvements to people’s lives while they’re in power, another MAGA win is likely.

    Populist leftism is the best way to defeat Trumpism

    Trump voters often talk about wanting to throw a bomb in the system. People know they are getting screwed. An amoral conman like Trump can tap into that anger for his own benefit and burn the country down around him. But that underlying anger is justified, and in the right hands it can also be harnessed into a serious, productive political movement.

    Bernie Sanders combined anti-establishment rage with honest, class-conscious politics. Sanders is often dismissed by corporate media and establishment Democrats as too radical to be elected. But his platform is widely popular. A majority of Americans – including, in some polls, a majority of Republicans – support the central pillars of Sanders’s platform: student debt forgiveness, Medicare for All, and raising the minimum wage. In both 2016 and 2020, Sanders was the only candidate on the left to generate the kind of stadium-filling enthusiasm that Trump did on the right.

    The Democratic Party is stuck in a tug-of-war between Sanders-inspired leftists and older, wealthier, more conservative party elites. The establishment doesn’t agree with Sanders on the issues, and they don’t like his manners. Corporate media often compares Sanders, unfairly, to Trump. The two couldn’t be less alike in character or policy, but they do share one commonality: they aren’t afraid to offend their party’s establishment.

    Some of Trump’s more vulgar tendencies, which so offended establishment Republicans, were exactly what endeared him to voters. Trump called politicians crooks and told people he had the answers. Liberals scoffed at Trump’s voters, called them rubes, and wrote them off. Progressives should know better. Voters in conservative Florida gave Trump their votes for reelection, but also voted to raise the state’s minimum wage. Respondents to a 2020 FOX News exit poll overwhelmingly favored a public health option. If progressives can speak honestly about our political situation and persuade people that progressive policies will help, they can get votes.

    This means going beyond the big infrastructure and relief plans of the Biden administration. While these have many good ideas inherent in them, the largest beneficiaries will likely be the corporations who are awarded the contracts. If better roads are being used to get to jobs that pay poverty wages, workers will still be hurting. The American people need a guaranteed standard of living that includes healthcare, education, and a livable wage. We have the means to secure a healthier, happier, more just nation. We only need the political will.

    At this point, the genie is out of the bottle. America’s corrupt political establishment has been exposed beyond any reasonable person’s shadow of a doubt. The days of status quo politics are numbered. Aggressive, honest, class-oriented politics are the way forward. Even after five bitter, painful years of Trump, our divisions are more superficial than we realize. We must learn from this national reckoning and build a political movement that inspires voters, speaks to them honestly, and fights to improve their lives. If we don’t, the next Trump could capitalize on people’s desperation and con the nation into full-blown fascism.

  • Chauvin’s Conviction and the Future of Policing

    Chauvin’s Conviction and the Future of Policing

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

    In a decision that led to celebration in Minneapolis and throughout America, a jury of twelve black and white men and women on April 20 convicted white police officer Derek Chauvin of two counts of murder in the case of George Floyd, a black man. Seldom are police officers charged and tried and it is extremely rare that they are found guilty of murder. Three other officers who have been charged with aiding in Floyd’s murder will also be tried soon.

    Three things brought about Chauvin’s conviction. First, Darnella Frazier, a courageous girl of 17, used her cellphone to videotape Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd. The video showed Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes as Floyd repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe.” Her video became the key evidence in the trial, the prosecution telling jurors, “Believe your eyes.”

    Second, the Chauvin’s murder of Floyd on May 25, 2020 set off national protests that grew throughout the spring and summer of 2020 with at least 15 million Americans demonstrating and marching from coast to coast. The Black Lives Matter protests led to demands for police reform and change public attitudes.

    Third, the mixed-race jury broke with the usual practice of police impunity and brought a conviction of murder. Chauvin has not yet been sentenced, but he could go to prison for over forty years.

    President Joseph Biden commented on the verdict: “It was a murder in the full light of day, and it ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism…that is a stain our nation’s soul; the knee on the neck of justice for Black Americans; the profound fear and trauma, the pain, the exhaustion that Black and brown Americans experience every single day.”

    Yet even as Chauvin was being tried, in a Minneapolis suburb a white woman police officer shot and killed Duante Wright during a stop for an expired car registration. The officer claimed that she mistook her gun for her Taser. Black people are two and a half times more likely to be killed by the police than are white people. Already in 2021 police have shot and killed 241 Black people nationally, compared to 235 in 2020. Most of those killed are black men, though some are women and others are children.

    While Black Americans and progressives celebrated Chauvin’s conviction, and some see it as a possible turning point, others are skeptical. In the United States, states and cities generally control policing and there are 49 state police agencies and 17,985 local police departments. Democrats drafted the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that would give greater power to the U.S. Justice Department to investigate police misconduct issues, create independent state agencies to investigate excessive use of force, establish a federal registry of complaints, reduce the qualified immunity that police enjoy, require body cameras, end chokeholds, and abolish “no-knock” warrants. Republicans, who have a reputation as the party of law and order and generally support the police, will oppose the bill, saying they want more moderate changes.

    During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Black people and progressives called for “defunding the police,” meaning the transfer of funds for policing to other areas such a mental health programs. The far left, including the Democratic Socialists of America, advocate abolishing the police. But only a handful of cities reduced their police budgets and no city has abolished the police. A majority of Black voters oppose drastic budget cuts or abolition of the police, since many live in high crime neighborhoods. Nor do progressives support abolition of the police.

    The Chauvin conviction was momentous, and could be a turning point, but police reform ultimately depends on building a popular movement for reform in education, health, housing, as well as ending police racism and violence. We need to end inequality in wealth and power, and ultimately we must abolish capitalism.

  • Biden, Borders and the Fight for Migrant Rights

    Biden, Borders and the Fight for Migrant Rights

    Join us for this online event on Sunday, April 25, 2pm ET/1pm CT/12pm MT/11am PT
    The Biden administration’s policies have precipitated a humanitarian crisis on the US/ Mexico border. While it repealed some of Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant orders, the administration has maintained a closed border, expelled over 170,000 people, thrown over 19,000 children into detention centers, and pressured Mexico to bar migrants on its southern border. This panel will discuss Biden’s betrayal of his campaign promises and what the movement must do to win migrant justice.

    Speakers:

    • Justin Akers Chacón, educator and union activist in the San Diego-Tijuana border region, member of the Puntorojo editorial collective, and author of No One is Illegal (with Mike Davis), Radicals in the Barrio, and The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border (forthcoming)
    • An anonymous Tejana, who will give an eyewitness account of the conditions of children being held in migrant detention prisons
    • Luis Rangel Rojas, a member of the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores in Mexico
    • Ashley Smith, a member of DSA in Burlington, Vermont and of the Tempest Collective. He has written in numerous publications including Spectre, Truthout, Jacobin, and New Politics
    Sponsored by: New Politics, puntorojo, Rampant, and Tempest
  • Biden to Remove U.S. Troops from Afghanistan

    Biden to Remove U.S. Troops from Afghanistan

    U.S. Troops in Afghanistan 2001-2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Their anti-imperialism and ours

    Their anti-imperialism and ours

    The logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a recipe for empty cynicism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Postmortem on Bessemer Amazon Defeat

    Postmortem on Bessemer Amazon Defeat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    So, their mobilization tactics were not adequate.

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

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

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

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