Page 34 – New Politics

Trump, Sanders, and the Crisis of Neoliberalism (Part One)

By: Richard GreenblattJune 4, 2020

We continue to live in the shadow of the Great Recession of 2008. The protracted and partial economic recovery has led to a political and ideological crisis of neoliberalism. Understanding its causes and scope can give us insight into U.S. politics, both left, right, and center. In the first part of this article, I consider the neoliberal role in reshaping the postwar U.S. political economy. In part two, I will consider its current implications, as embodied especially in the politics of Trump and Sanders. along with the potential role that the Green Party might play.

Neoliberalism is based on an ideology of capitalist political economy that emphasizes the central role of so-called free markets both within nations and across national boundaries (identified with free trade, globalization, and multinationalism), and the primacy of traditional morality (especially traditionally-derived Christian morality), centered on individuals and family, while diminishing, or entirely denying, the role—and even the existence—of society.[1] The role of the state is seen as protecting the market from hostile forces on the outside and sometimes from itself, but only when absolutely necessary. Over the last several decades, it has become largely hegemonic in most of the capitalist world, with China arguably the most prominent exception.

The need for neoliberal reforms arose from the secular profitability decline following the postwar boom, illustrated in Fig. 1A. This was amplified in the 1970s both by stagflation and by the 1973 oil crisis. The initial steps of neoliberal policy implementation were taken under Democratic President Carter, most prominently through the deregulation of the airline industry in 1978 and the Volker shock of 1979 (a sharp increase in interest rates to reduce inflation). Prefigured by the rightward shift of the Carter administration in both domestic and foreign policy, the neoliberal drive to deregulate and privatize accelerated under Reagan, most notoriously through the so-called supply-side tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, and the destruction of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) following the defeat of their 1981 strike.

The further implementation of neoliberal policies continued as a bipartisan effort of both Republican and Democratic administrations. Among the most salient examples of this bipartisanship are Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, and Obama’s private-based Affordable Care Act of 2010. On the judicial level, it included the Citizens United vs. FEC case of 2010, in which the Supreme Court determined that money is a form of protected political speech. It was the adoption of these and other neoliberal policies by the Democratic Party, especially after the defeat of Mondale in the 1984 presidential election, that began a process leading to the defection of a significant section of its working-class and middle-class base.

Measured in narrow economic terms as profit, neoliberalism has been a success. Fig. 1A shows profits as a percentage of gross domestic income (GDI) for the U.S. economy as a whole from 1947 to 2019. From the end of World War II until about 1980, the period that includes the postwar boom, the profit share declined tendentially from historically high values immediately following the war. This tendency of declining profit share reversed during the Reagan years as neoliberal policies were put in place, and today has reached levels similar to those seen during the 1950s. In Marxian terms, and by most measures, the rate of profit declined during the 1950s through the 1970s, and then was restored, at least partially, during the subsequent decades.[2]

Profits up, wages down

There is no secret to the restoration of profit share. It has come directly from wages, as Fig. 1B shows. Employee compensation as a percentage of Gross Domestic Income (GDI, quantitatively equivalent to GDP) rose during the postwar boom as profits declined. From the 1980s onwards, employee compensation declined as a percentage of GDI, until it reached its current level, back to where it was in the early 1950s.

Profit share and employee compensation share show a similar, but inverted, pattern. Profits fell during the 1947-1980 period, then tended to rise following 1980. Employee compensation shows the obverse pattern, rising during the initial period, and then falling. In Marxian terms, neoliberalism succeeded by increasing the rate of exploitation.[3]

Profits have not risen as much as wages have fallen due to an increase in the cost of fixed capital (mainly machinery and facilities), especially during the late 1960s through the 1970s. Fixed capital rates increased during both periods, but at a smaller rate in the more recent years. Taxes on production tended to rise somewhat during the first period, then fall slightly, with a decline apparent from the early 1970s. Although taxes declined somewhat in the 1970s, this had only a small quantitative influence on profit share.

To understand the current conjuncture, it is helpful to look more deeply into the conditions that made profit share restoration possible. Key factors include sectoral shifts (including the rise of service and finance at the expense of manufacturing), foreign trade and globalization, the decline of union power, and the commodification of everyday life and social reproduction. These factors taken together underlie our understanding of the current political conjuncture, and most importantly, the rise in inequality.

Figure 1: A. Profit share (net operating surplus as percent of gross domestic income), 1947-2019.

Figure 1: B. Employee compensation as percent of gross domestic income, 1947-2019.

The 1970s were a turbulent time for capitalism, both in the United States and internationally. This was the period of the Vietnam War, the oil shock, stagnation, and the growing pressure of imports, especially from Germany and Japan, on the U.S. domestic production sector.[4] It also saw the growth of the service and financial sectors, and a decline in the manufacturing sector. Trade union density, especially in the private sector, continued its secular decline. The increase in wages that had previously characterized the postwar U.S. economy was reversed. At the same time, a decrease in the Federal tax rate had two effects. It facilitated the transfer of wealth to the already wealthy and it encouraged investment in rapidly developing automation, communication, and information technologies. Coupled with a downward pressure on wages, this new technology led to a systemic rise in profitability.

While the development of technology is often recognized as an important causal component in influencing historical development, it does not act in isolation from other forces, most importantly class. The last several decades have seen a significant increase in the use of temp workers, day laborers, contractors, management consultants, adjunct professors, and even military mercenaries. All these jobs and others like them have some things in common: they are temporary, insecure, and profitable to capital. The apparent freedom these jobs provide comes at the price of open-ended insecurity. Recently developed technology, like the Internet, the laptop computer, and the smartphone, simply facilitate these ongoing developments. That they make work precarious is a circumstance of capitalism, not of technology. It is easy to imagine a non-exploitative economy where the use of these technologies would help to transform work in a liberatory direction.

It is important to note that the share of profits going to the productive sector (principally manufacturing) declined by about 50 percent from 1947 to 2020. Although financial sector profits increased by about 90 percent during these years, this does not appear to be the principal sources of shifting sectoral profits away from the traditional productive sectors. The biggest change arose from the rapid growth of the services sector, whose profit share increased by over 1000 percent during that period. The service sector is now the second largest profit source in the economy. The share going to the trade sector remained largely unchanged.

Fictitious and real profits in the financial sector are based on loans to industry, loans to households, and speculative profits (bets on future earnings).[5] Financialization, amplified by neoliberal deregulation, clearly played a determinative role in precipitating the crisis of 2008.[6] However, econometric data suggest that over the postwar period, the decline in profit rate in the traditional productive sectors cannot be attributed principally to an increase in financial profits (either real or fictitious) at the expense of productive profits. Productive profits declined from about a 70 percent share of total profits to less than 40 percent from 1948-2017, about a 30 percent decline. In the same interval, financial profit share rose by somewhat over 5 percent. The largest shift is seen in the service sector, whose profit share rose from about 2 percent in 1948, to approximately 30 percent by the 2000s.

Globalization

Liberalization of capital flow across borders (but not liberalization of labor flow) has been a shared centerpiece of capitalist political economics since the end of World War II, with the establishment of Bretton Woods, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Globalization was also facilitated by several technological developments, including containerization, developed in the 1950s, and improved communications and information technologies.

By the 1970s, threats to U.S. economic hegemony came from Germany and Japan, and militarily from the Soviet Union. At present, the biggest threat to U.S. capital comes from China, both economically and militarily. The United States has responded to China’s expansion through the rise of multilateral trade deals like NAFTA (now the USMCA), CAFTA (later CAFTA-DR), and the TPP (now the CPTPP without U.S. participation). In a more recent reversal of conventional neoliberal policies, Trump has resorted to tariff protection, of which more later.

Capital flows to those regions that are able to maintain a comparative advantage. For the U.S. economy that meant that capital could take advantage of cheaper labor costs in foreign markets. The result was a downward pressure on U.S. wages which acted in parallel with the downward pressure on wages coming from the implementation of computer-based technologies.

Working-class organization

Both union density and the incidence of strikes have declined in the United States over the last several decades to historically low levels, although there has been a modest uptick in strikes in the last year or two. The decline in union density following WWII correlates well with the decline in the U.S. domestic manufacturing sector, which facilitated the ongoing attacks on organized labor. The shift from manufacturing to service meant that work had become more dispersed. The social ties of work became frayed. At one time you may have worked in a factory whose workers could be counted in the hundreds or thousands. Now you might work in a convenience store, seeing perhaps only one or two co-workers during the course of a day. As plants closed in the former industrial centers like Detroit and other Midwest factory cities and towns, the urban working-class communities were devastated. Plants closed in the heavily unionized Rust Belt, while new ones opened in union-hostile, often rural, areas in the South and elsewhere.

The changing sociology of work in the interests of profit realization accounts for only one thread in the story of diminished working-class organization and power. Workplace sociology is entangled with the class struggle, locally, nationally, and internationally. There were a number of additional factors, both objective and subjective, whose interaction first reversed, then later retarded the development of working-class consciousness in the postwar United States. The subjective factors all played out against a background itself dominated by two factors. First, the defeat of the Axis powers in WWII led directly to the Cold War between the two major international blocs, one led by the United States, the other by the Soviet Union. The second was the emergence of the United States as the principal beneficiary of the war, expanding its domination of the world’s capitalist economies that had already begun following World War I.

Anticommunism was the leading edge and public face of the assault against the working class. The Smith Act, passed in 1940, made illegal any activity with the revolutionary intent to overthrow the government. The Smith Act prosecutions of the 1940s and 1950s acted as a springboard for the ousting of thousands of Communists and other leftists from their jobs, both in industry and in the trade-union leadership.

The Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act, is perhaps the single most important (and lasting) legislative attack on workers’ rights that arose during this period. It had two principal goals. The first was to drive Communists out of the organized labor movement. Within two years of passage, all but two international unions had submitted to the provisions of the act, effectively driving most Communists and other leftists out of the union leadership.[7]

Second, Taft-Hartley went far beyond simple anticommunism to weaken fundamentally the entire organized labor movement. According the socialist historian and journalist Art Preis, the law was a compendium of many of the most onerous anti-labor proposals.[8] Among other features, it outlawed jurisdictional strikes, closed shops, and secondary boycotts and strikes. It also prohibited independent expenditures for federal elections, and allowed the U.S. President to intervene in strikes that supposedly endangered national security.[9] In the words of Preis, Taft-Hartley “thus sought to impose direct continuous governmental regulation over the unions in the selection of their officers, in their economic and organizational struggles and in their political activity.”[10] The union leadership attempted to push back against Taft-Hartley through their friends within the Democratic Party, but without success. President Truman vetoed the bill, knowing his veto would be overridden. Later, Truman used provisions of Taft-Hartley as a strike-breaking tool.[11] Taft-Hartley is a continuing frontal assault on organized labor that has largely succeeded.

The net result was and is a labor movement that has lost its power as an independent force and has largely come to depend on its diminishing influence within the Democratic Party. Attacks on the unions are attacks on both the trade union bureaucracy and the rank and file. Since these attacks are often carried out by Republicans, this has cemented the ties between the trade union bureaucracy and the post-FDR Democratic Party, that promises much but delivers little. In over 70 years, the Democrats have failed to repeal the notoriously anti-labor Taft-Hartley act, for example.

The commodification of everyday life

Capitalism is an economic system dominated by the production of commodities for sale at a profit. Neoliberal market fetishism leads naturally to the commodification of everyday life and social reproduction, including, among other examples, household functions like child-rearing and education, either directly through school privatization or indirectly by, for example, financing higher education through student debt. As everyday life deteriorated, mass incarceration increased the prison population. Seeing a profit source, many new inmates, disproportionately black, have been housed in private, for-profit prisons. More recently, undocumented migrants have shared a similar fate.

Facilitated by deregulation and a sympathetic judiciary, capital owns and controls the channels of mass communication, including social media and the Internet. Reagan’s repeal of the fairness doctrine, followed by broadcasting deregulation, has led to privatizing the public airways, and by extension, the Internet. The result has been a bifurcation between right-wing Trump media (e.g., Fox, Sinclair, talk radio, Breitbart) and mainstream centrism (Times, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC). While nominally non-profit, public broadcasting relies on corporate funding along with corporate party legislative support, which together exercise direct and indirect control over its ideological orientation.

The contemporary crisis of neoliberalism

The Great Recession of 2008, its aftermath, and now the COVID-19 pandemic, have called into question the fundamental assumption of neoliberalism that the market must be free to work out its trajectory, independent of state intervention. More importantly, the partial post-2008 recovery was a recovery of profitability, but not of wages or of living standards. U.S. hegemony has also been threatened by the failure of U.S. imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hindering Washington’s ability to take on economically and militarily the growing threat from China and, secondarily, Russia. And behind all of this is the looming climate crisis.

What we might identify as the current crisis of neoliberalism is principally a social and political crisis—a crisis of legitimacy. Capital will always hope that profit rates were higher, but, overall, profits and wealth have been growing over the last several decades, with rising inequality following it its wake.[12] The real fight, as always under capitalism, is over the division of the surplus. The political and social divisions are largely blowback from the (partial but real) success of neoliberalism in restoring the postwar profit rate at the expense of working-class income. This was amplified by the response to the economic crisis which began in 2008, in which the banks and large corporations were bailed out at the expense of the working class.

As Gramsci presciently observed in his Prison Notebooks: “At a certain point in their historical lives, social groups become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organization form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognized by the class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny.’”[13]

The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and now the COVID-19 pandemic have opened new forms of ideological competition, both between and within the principal social classes. On the plane of U.S. electoral politics, three responses have emerged to address this. First is the reactionary ethno-nationalism personified by Donald Trump. Second is the reformist and social democratic response identified with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The third tendency, personified currently by third-way centrist Democrat Joe Biden, doubles down on classical neoliberalism, including neoliberal globalization. The United States is not unique in this regard. Similar patterns have been playing out both in Europe and in south and west Asia.

In a curious way, all three of these tendencies echo the past, although in different ways. While the third-way Democrats objectively represent the present as the direct continuity of neoliberalism, Trump and Sanders look towards more distant models in U.S. political history, while adding somethings distinctively new to the debate.

To be continued…

[1] See, e.g., W. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

[2] Deepankar Basu and Ramaa Vasudevan, “Technology, distribution and the rate of profit in the U.S. economy: understanding the current crisis,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 37:1, 57-89 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bes035.

[3] https://www.academia.edu/38104234/Profit_Rate_and_Domestic_Income_Shares_in_the_US_Economy

[4] Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (New York: Verso, 2006).

[5] Costas Lapavitsas, “Financialization and Capitalist Accumulation,” Research on Money and Finance, Discussion Paper No. 16 (2010). Murray Smith and Jonah Butovsky, “Profitability and the Roots of the Global Crisis,” Historical Materialism, 20:4, 39-74 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341273.

[6] David McNally, Global Slump (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011). Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2012).

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act#Anti-communism

[8] Labor’s Giant Step (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), pp.314-15.

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

[10] Preis, p.315.

[11] Preis, Ch.28.

[12] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-billionaires-have-more-wealth-46-billionpeople

[13] David Forgacs, ed., The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935 (New York: NYU Press, 2000), pp.217-218.

Ecology, Democracy and Development: Capitalist Crises and Covid-19

By: Eren DuzgunJune 3, 2020

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For the past four months Covid-19 has revealed the contradictions and unsustainability of global capitalism perhaps in a manner that no other single phenomenon has ever done in history. The virus has become the latest and arguably the bleakest reminder that capitalism’s systemic dynamics and imperatives, i.e. its relentless drive for competitiveness and profitability, is bound to sooner or later disrupt the very foundations of human existence as a whole. Furthermore, the biological blitzkrieg activated by the coronavirus has arrived at a time when the global political economy has already been going through two other major crises – crisis of ‘development’ and crisis of democracy – which will be aggravated by the current pandemic. This short essay provides a synopsis of capitalism’s triple crisis, which is critical to develop a balanced assessment of what the post-pandemic world may look like.

Coronavirus: Beyond ‘Green Capitalism’

The link between capitalism, ecological crisis and Covid-19 has been amply documented. Very briefly, critical biologists and epidemiologists foreground industrial agriculture and global warming as the root causes of the emergence of new pathogens since the 1990s. Factory farming and extractive industries have now reached the last virgin forests and peasant lands in the world, subjecting them to the logic of capitalist markets. Under the invasive pressure of animal husbandry, monocrop production and resource extraction, huge tracts of forests have lost their ecological diversity. The damage on ecological complexity, combined with the disruptive impact of global warming, has forced or allowed previously boxed-in pathogens to leave their natural habitats and hosts. Hence our increasing interaction with and vulnerability to the pathogens for which we have no medical cure or immunity.

Covid-19 has epitomized the fundamental contradiction between the limitedness of our planet and the endlessness of capital accumulation. The ‘endless’ and ‘contradictory’ character of capital accumulation is rooted in the fact that capitalism institutionalizes a mode of life that needs to continuously expand, and while doing so, systematically subordinates the ‘natural and human substance of society’, i.e., land and labour, to the imperatives of the marketplace. That is, capitalism conditions people’s utilization of nature and enjoyment of life to their ability to increase market competitiveness, profitability and productivity. Therefore, it is characterized by a persistent drive to increasingly commodify land and labor, the living substance of the planet.

The result of capitalism’s competitive compulsions has been contradictory, to say the least. For, on the one hand, capitalism has enabled massive technological advancements in all spheres of life. This, in turn, has generated, above all, an unprecedented potential to feed, clothe, and accommodate an ever-increasing world population. Yet, on the other hand, as Ellen Meiksins Wood argues, by subordinating all other considerations to the imperatives of market competition, capitalism has also created environmental destruction and pandemics, alongside poverty and homelessness. Billions of people who could be fed and housed are subjected to immense doses of insecurity, living their lives under the constant threat of joblessness, homelessness, loss of status and starvation. In a similar fashion, the environment that could be protected is systematically destroyed for profit, and killer viruses that could be contained are unleashed.

In short, capitalism has had an inherent tendency to expand in a manner unlike any other socio-economic system. Undoubtedly, capitalism’s birth and expansion has been a conflict-ridden and often violent process, underlined by dramatic changes in social relations and a ‘metabolic rift’ in age-old patterns of human interaction with nature. Yet, capitalism has ultimately managed to turn society and nature (however fictitiously) into an ‘adjunct’ to the market, i.e. the market is no longer a space wherein surplus labor and surplus product are occasionally sold, as has been the case for millennia, but has turned into an imperative for social reproduction as a whole.

What ensues from this brief exposition is two-fold. First, Covid-19 is not an accidental or temporary phenomenon; the virus has not (and any of its future incarnations will not) emerge like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky but have been a constant possibility built into the very structure of market society. Second, Covid-19 has exposed in the starkest way the imminence of the ecological crisis brought about by capitalism’s global march. This, in turn, sheds further doubt on the liberal expectation that markets, if provided with right signals, can themselves fix the ecologically destructive impacts of market competition by means of eco-friendly innovations and technical changes. Put differently, it seems that we have neither the time nor resources to create a ‘green capitalism’. Even before Covid-19, there were several scholars confirming that even if we did everything ‘right’, from investments in more efficient to eco-friendly technologies to implementing a global carbon tax, it would still be impossible to run a successful global market economy without causing some form of ecological collapse. For example, ‘to keep global warming to only 2 °C simply by technical means, about 80 percent of all of the energy used in the world…would need to be replaced by CO2-neutral technologies’. Achieving this, as estimated by the entrepreneur and inventor Saul Griffith,

“would require building the equivalent of all the following: a hundred square metres of new solar cells, fifty square metres of new solar-thermal reflectors, and one Olympic swimming pool’s volume of genetically engineered algae (for biofuels) every second for the next twenty-five years; one three-hundred-foot-diameter wind turbine every five minutes; one hundred-megawatt geothermal powered steam turbine every eight hours; and one three-gigawatt nuclear power plant every week” (quoted in Magdoff and Bellamy-Foster 2015).

Therefore, the goal of keeping markets and economic growth intact while simultaneously decreasing their negative impact on the ecosystem looks unattainable. The immediacy and severity of the ecologically-induced health crisis forces us to think beyond the mere ‘greenwashing’ of the markets. Unless the very structure of the global political economy changes, unless we alter the political-economic relations and institutions as well as reorient our personal priorities and expectations in life, we should expect more environmental problems, hence more pandemics in the future.

This ecological barrier also provides the necessary background against which to analyze two other, yet interconnected crisis of global capitalism: crisis of ‘development’ and crisis of ‘democracy’, both of which have been exacerbated by the present crisis and are critical to develop a balanced assessment of what the post-pandemic world may look like.

Capitalism and the End of ‘Development’

The term ‘development’ has always been contentious, bearing different consequences and implying different legacies for the Global South and the Global North. Yet, regardless of the spatial and temporal differences that mark the North-South divide, it seems that capitalism has been hardly generating any form of ‘development’ in both milieu for a long time. The vast majority of the Global South, with the exception of a few countries that have managed to establish a manufacturing base, has been doomed to permanent underdevelopment due to, before everything else, the structure of the global political and economic system. In particular, the massive technological and infrastructural gap between the northern and southern countries, combined with continuing neo-imperialist and neo-colonial practices, have left only little space for capitalist ‘development’ in the Global South.

In the Global North the overwhelming majority of workers have been working longer hours for stagnating or declining real wages since the 1970s. The pressure of increased global economic competition and global capital mobility on the one hand, and decades of supply-side policies on the other have exhausted most of the economic and social rights the working classes previously obtained. The new reality of fiscal austerity, high unemployment, stagnant wages, deteriorating public services, long work hours, precarious jobs and lower social mobility has been concealed for a while by a debt-driven growth, the unsustainability of which has been bitterly testified by millions of people since the 2008 crisis. Unsurprisingly, since the financial crash the underlying problems of the world economy have not been remedied; to the contrary, global economic growth ‘has been lower than in any decade since World War II…while aggregate debt (the total debt of governments, corporations and households), already mountainous before the 2008, has more than doubled in size’. All in all, today market imperatives govern human lives almost worldwide, yet with no or little prospect of capitalist ‘development’ for a large majority of the world population.

Capitalism’s Worsening Democratic Deficit

The crisis of capitalist development is firmly connected to the crisis of liberal democracy. This is not only because the imperatives of competitive austerity have increasingly undermined the states’ fiscal ability to tackle socio-economic grievances, hence debilitating the legitimacy and usefulness of democratic institutions and actors. Equally important, decades of austerity have forced capitalism to go back to its ‘default’ settings in terms of its relation to democracy and mass politics. Let me explain.

Capitalism and democracy have always been strange bedfellows. For, capitalism owes its existence to its ability to continuously de-politicize very political issues. In other words, capitalism creates the fiction of ‘self-regulating’ markets by systematically cutting off essentially political issues (for ex. control of labor, production, property and nature) from the political arena, displacing them to a separate ‘economic’ sphere. Yet, the paradox is that it is precisely the de-democratization and privatization of the ‘economic’ sphere that may make thinkable a political arena in which subjects are formally equal despite their socioeconomic inequalities. In other words, as capitalism effectively denies any rights of participation in decisions related to the organization of production and nature, thereby shielding itself from any kind of democratic accountability at the workplace, it may also create and widen a narrowly understood ‘political’ space consisting of formally equal subjects.

Indeed, during the first three decades following World War II, that’s precisely what happened in the Global North. Massive productivity increases, alongside working-class struggles, allowed for steady increases in wages, job security, institutionalized wage bargaining, expansion of welfare state, improvements in the living conditions of the majority of the labouring masses as well as the expansion of civil and political liberties. Yet, this brief period of generalized prosperity and stability also facilitated the incorporation of the western working classes into capitalist institutions and ideology. The demands for higher wages were effectively separated from the demands for radical equality and political autonomy within the institutionalised mechanisms of wage bargaining. As Charlie Post argues, mere ‘reliance on routine collective bargaining, lobbying, and electing pro-labor candidates to office’ pacified, bureaucratized and depoliticised most of the radical elements within the western working classes, causing them to gradually give up and forget earlier forms of working class solidarity and protest such as massive and long-lasting strikes, occupations of workplaces and public spaces and street demonstrations. A hypercompetitive, consumerist and politically docile subjectivity, fortified and controlled by new technologies of surveillance and debt, has eventually prevailed among the working classes, rendering increasingly difficult to imagine a world beyond capitalism.

The implication is that when the economic downturn came in the 1970s, working classes were by and large demobilized, devoid of most of their earlier radicalism to resist the looming neoliberal turn in the global political economy. Forms of popular sovereignty and socio-economic rights that prevailed during the so-called ‘golden age’ of capitalism could now be sent to the neoliberal slaughterhouse without much outcry. Against this background, it is scarcely surprising that since the end of the 1970s capitalism has persistently removed the institutions of ‘economic’ decision-making from democratic scrutiny either by resorting to explicitly authoritarian measures or by creating technocratic institutions of governance. The remaining ‘democratic’ institutions have been unable to change anything substantial in the lives of ordinary people amidst growing social inequality, high unemployment and lower social mobility. As a result, especially since the new millennium, the masses, disappointed by ‘establishment’ political parties, have increasingly turned to right-wing and left-wing ‘populist’ movements for transformative politics.

On the left, populism has been structurally disadvantaged in carrying out the tasks it set out for itself. As evidenced by the retreat of the leftist ‘pink tide’ in Latin America and Syriza in Greece, the ability of 21^st century reformist left governments to deliver anti-neoliberal policies has been severely constrained by the structural requirements of globalized production and finance. The mobility of global capital and fluctuations in primary commodity prices, combined with capital’s ability to withhold investment and employment in the face of unfavorable government policies, renders a left reformist strategy to overcome neoliberalism very hard to implement on a sustainable basis. Right-wing populism too has been unable (if not utterly unwilling) to ‘reform’ neoliberalism. Despite the rise of a mercantilist discourse among some of its proponents, right-wing populism is equally subjected to the rules of competition in a globalized marketplace; hence compliance with, instead of defiance of neoliberalism has remained to be the norm. Yet, unlike populism on the left, right-wing populists have taken a xenophobic, sexist and nationalist stance. They have usually associated the negative outcomes of neoliberalism (e.g. chronically high unemployment, precarious jobs, decline of public services etc.) with immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and the intrusion of foreign and domestic ‘enemies’ (real or imaginary). Right-wing populisms have taken many forms, differing from country to country; yet all right-wing populisms have shared a reactionary, chauvinist and authoritarian way of doing politics.

What’s Next?: Socialism or the ‘Varieties of Fascism’

All in all, even before Covid-19, capitalism seems to have been leading the vast majority of the world to a future which is ecologically impossible, economically futile and politically catastrophic. The implication is that any meaningful attempt at solving the present, and future crises needs to take the bull by the horn. There is literally no choice to be made between ‘capitalism’ and ‘capitalism with a human face’. As long as the underlying dynamics of our lives remain the same, as long as we keep treating nature and human beings as commodities, no cosmetic surgery will do. To the contrary, historical experience suggests that such minimal interventions will sooner or later backfire, re-legitimizing capitalism pure and simple. The only way to ‘re-embed’ our economies and save our lives from ecological and social collapse is by intervening in the very heart of the beast: land and human beings need to be taken out of the market. The beast is not tame-able; it needs to be killed.

Obviously, such a decisive way out of this conundrum rests on the organizational ability of socialists to radicalize and internationalize societal demands for change. Imagining and realizing a non-capitalist future, albeit a herculean task, is the only feasible solution to the economic, political and ecological deadlock in which we have found ourselves. Undoubtedly, this requires a working-class strategy that seeks to challenge the limits of legality and transcending the dominant forms of individual subjectivity and national identity. Winning any significant and enduring gains will require massive resistance on a global scale, and the construction of a new mode of life that will nurture egalitarian, ecological, and internationalist modes of being and solidarity.

Should the socialist alternative fail to emerge, it is very likely that the pandemic will exacerbate the present deadlock in the global political economy, ultimately leading to further radicalization of already-existing far-right tendencies. As alluded to earlier, capitalism has always had an in-built tendency to undermine democracy. During the inter-war years, for example, fascism emerged not as a ‘political freeze of or simple reaction’ to capitalism as often argued, but was underlined by the aim of ‘rationalizing’ capitalism. Against what they conceived to be a ‘wasteful’, ‘egoistic’ and ‘rentier’ capitalism, devoid of social harmony and subject to cycles of boom and bust, fascist regimes aimed to reorient economic life on the basis of totalitarian ‘productivist’ ideologies. In the face of inflationary pressures and militant trade unions, fascisms aimed to deepen the commodification of labor, and while doing so, they obliterated or subordinated the potentially radical aspects of modernity (such as radical interpretations of ‘equality’, ‘democracy’ and ‘rule of law’) to capitalism.

In the contemporary context, it does not require great foresight to predict that capitalism will resort to increasingly authoritarian measures to pre-empt and suppress societal reactions (spontaneous or organized) to its unsolvable problems. Furthermore, most states, equipped with mass surveillance technologies and ‘extraordinary’ measures to rule for indefinite periods of time, are very likely to respond to societal reactions against global warming, economic woes and lack of democracy by sending the last crumbs of political liberalism to the dustbin of history. New security concerns, legitimized through medicalized discourses, are likely to gain prominence within and among polities, leading to the rise of fascist or fascist-like regimes around the world. These new forms of governance will seek to vindicate capitalism by ever more aggressively individualizing, externalizing and medicalizing the responsibility for capitalism’s failures. In the face of ‘careless’ citizens who do not pay enough attention to social-distancing instructions, as well as ‘invasive’ immigrants who steal domestic jobs and bring in new pathogens, civic universal ideas will be totally discarded to maintain the health of capitalism. Furthermore, one should not forget that this contemporary wave of fascism will ‘find itself better placed than historical fascism when trying to court the workers, the unemployed and the fearful lower-middle-class’. For, while in the 1920s and early ’30s ‘the Nazis found the unemployed, who had turned en masse to the Communists, almost unapproachable, today, the situation has clearly changed’. Therefore, unless a socialist alternative is immediately built, one can expect that the reactions to capitalism’s failures will usher in a new era of capitalist barbarism.

The American Working Class on Unfamiliar and Dangerous Terrain: A Fightback Begins

By: Dan La BotzJune 1, 2020

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This article is being published simultaneously in the Australian journal Marxist Left Review (MLR) and in the U.S. journal New Politics. The article is related to a talk that the author gave to the Socialist Alternative of Australia that publishes MLR.

The working class in the United States faces tremendous difficulties, but there are some hopeful signs of movement in workplaces and unions, in communities, and on the left. As this article was being edited, the national uprising against the police murder of George Floyd spread across the country, complicating in ways that remain uncertain both the coronavirus and the planned reopening of the country intended to end the depression. Clearly, however, all of these events taken together suggest that we are entering a new era in the struggle for democracy and socialism.

WALNUT CREEK, CA – MARCH 23: Nurses line up to protest outside the Kaiser Permanente Walnut Creek Medical Center in Walnut Creek, Calif., on Sunday, March 22, 2020. California Nurses Association held a rally today to protest the lack of coronavirus supplies at the hospital. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)

The American working class today faces three enormous problems. First, the coronavirus that continues to spread across the United States bringing suffering and death. We have now had 104,000 deaths. We may see soon a second wave of the pandemic as a result of a hasty reopening of the American economy without proper attention to protecting the health of working people and the society in general.

Second, we find ourselves in an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions, a second Great Depression that may be worse than the first. We have 43 million unemployed, a rate of about of 25 percent. A recent study estimates that 42 percent of these layoffs may become permanent; that is, at the other end of this slump we may still have an unemployment rate of 15 percent!

Third, under President Donald Trump, we have a new kind of government in the United States, an authoritarian government, hostile to unions, workers, people of colour, women and LGBT people, that is violating many of the norms and customs of all previous administrations and has created what we might now call a permanent constitutional crisis. Trump not only conquered and disciplined the Republican Party, he has also maintained his hard core following of about 40 percent of the electorate, and mobilised far right movements that include neo-Nazis and armed militias.

The working class before the current crisis

To understand how the situation of the US working class we have to ask a number of questions. What is the starting point? That is, what was the situation of US workers before the pandemic? What is the situation at present? And what sort of worker resistance is taking place now?

The US working class has been in decline since about 1980; that is, for 40 years, two generations, unions shrunk in size and social weight, strikes virtually disappeared, and labour’s voice in the country’s social and political life became weaker. Before the pandemic only 10 percent of all workers in America belonged to unions, and only 6 percent in the private sector. Few union members attended union meetings and many did not vote in union elections for their officers. During those 40 years wages stagnated, and in many workplaces conditions worsened and benefits declined.

In February 2018 a teachers’ strike in West Virginia led to a series of education workers’ strikes that lasted through 2019 in Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, North Carolina, Colorado, Los Angeles and Oakland, California. In Chicago there was a 15-day strike by the Chicago Teachers Union and there was also a nine-day strike by the United Teachers of Los Angeles, both locals where more militant, rank-and-file caucuses had taken leadership of the union. The strikes involved about 500,000 teachers and other workers and in many cases won substantial gains. Yet the strikes did not spread to other public employees and seemed to have no impact on private sector workers.

There have also been dozens of strikes by nurses and other healthcare workers, some working for public, some for non-profit, and some for private hospitals. These strikes led by a variety of unions involved tens of thousands of workers, and all occurred before the current coronavirus pandemic.

There were several private sector strikes of note too in this same period of a few years before the coronavirus crisis. The Communications Workers of America led several of these strikes or followed its members when they led. On 13 April 2016 the Communication Workers of America (CWA) led a strike of 39,000 Verizon workers and after 45 days “they beat back company demands for concessions on job security and flexibility, won 1,300 additional union jobs, and achieved a first contract at seven Verizon Wireless stores.” The CWA also struck AT&T in 2016, Pacific Bell in 2017, and in 2018 9,500 CWA workers walked out at AT&T Midwest in a wildcat strike.

Service workers’ strikes grew in 2017-2019 as well. Seven UNITE HERE locals spread across seven time zones from Hawaii, San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, San Jose, Detroit, to Boston, raising the slogan “One Job Should Be Enough”, and struck Marriott (Marriott, Westin and Sheraton) Hotels for two months in 2018. They won higher wages, improved benefits, and greater job security.

The Stop & Shop strike should also be mentioned. Thirty-five thousand members of five United Food and Commercial Workers locals in the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut walked out on April 11 for better pay and to defend their healthcare plans. The strike, whose picket lines were honoured by the Teamsters, proved very effective, and the union demonstrated that it could successfully defend its members.

The United Auto Workers strike against General Motors in 2019 involved 48,000 workers at 50 plants across the United States and lasted from September 15 to October 16, but it failed to achieve what many workers thought should be its chief goal, the elimination of the many tiers – different pay rates – among GM workers. While each of these was a significant strike – one a success and the other not – they had little impact on the labour movement as a whole.

Taken together, all of the private sector strikes mentioned here demonstrated that labour unions were overcoming the myth of the 1980s to the 2000s that the strike was dead. The strike still lives.

Labour union activists often talk about the “labour movement”, but in reality, it is a misnomer. There are many labour union organisations, but for decades there has not been much movement. Why is that? During the entire post-war period, but particularly after the mid-1970s, American union leaders largely gave up the struggle against employers, against the capitalist class. Even before that, beginning in the late 1930s, the labour bureaucracy became a social caste in the working class, no longer working in the industry they came from, earning higher salaries, enjoying special health and retirement programs and perquisites such as cars and expense accounts, and often spending their working time with company and government officials. The union officials believed that their location in industrial relations and in society gave them a privileged position and that they better understood the choices facing the union than its members did.

The officials by and large adopted a philosophy of “partnership” with employers, working to protect the employers from government supervision or foreign competition, believing that the profitability of the corporations insured their members’ jobs and wages. Anxious to avoid confrontation to defend their members and enhance their situation, they turned to the Democratic Party to pass “labour law reform” that would make labour organising easier, though one Democratic Party president after another let them down year after year. All of this contributed to the decline in membership, the disappearance of the strike, and the stagnation of wages.

Other worker movements

While the labour unions – with the exception of the recent teacher strikes – have mostly been quiet for the last few decades, there have been other workers’ movements. The most important of these are the immigrant movement of 2006, the Occupy Wall Street Movement of 2011, and the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014.

Map above: Immigrant demonstrations at the peak in May 2006.

While the AFL-CIO and some unions offered token support for these movements, in truth organised labour failed to fully embrace them. The labour bureaucracy does not form alliances with such movements when they come along, it does not mobilise its members to support these movements, nor does it use its economic power – the power of the strike – to defend immigrants and Black workers when they face racist policies. When social movements occur, generally they do so on their own, and labour goes its own way. The two seldom converge except where rank-and-file workers or some local union officer decide to take up the movement issues – and that is rare.

Map above: Occupy Wall Street occupations and demonstrations in US in 2011.

The social movements, which are clearly workers’ movements, tend to be episodic. They sometimes arise in reaction to positive proposals from the government, as happened with the immigrant movement of 2006, which responded to Republican President George W. Bush’s proposal for immigration reform. Or more typically they respond to an adverse development, as Occupy Wall Street did to the 2008 recession and Black Lives Matter reacted to police racism and violence. In any case, these movements of working people tend not to form permanent organisations. A wide variety of immigrant groups, from the Washington, D.C.-based National Council of La Raza to local hometown clubs and soccer teams, created the immigrant reform movement, but never coalesced into a new national organisation.

Map above: Created by students, showing Black Lives Matter protests in 2014-15.

Occupy Wall Street drew in many individuals concerned about the issues of economic inequality and the role of money in politics, but when Barack Obama’s White House organised suppression through coordination with local police forces, with 8,000 arrests, it never recovered. Black Lives Matter never called a national convention to create a new group, and afterwards the philanthropic foundations, NGOs and the Democratic Party swooped down on it and drew off a number of its leaders. It ceased to be a movement, though some local protesters adopted its name and continue to do so. The Me Too movement against men’s sexual assaults on women began with wealthy and powerful women in high places, such as actors, but it also had a powerful influence among women in all social classes including the working class; however no new women’s organisation and movement arose.

The Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020

Bernie Sanders’ two campaigns for president clearly captured the energy of the Occupy Wall Street movement and adopted two of its principal ideas: America’s growing economic inequality and the inordinate role of money in politics. Sanders developed an economic program that spoke to the issues facing millions of Americans, with the emphasis on health insurance for all (Medicare for all), free higher education, higher wages of at least $15.00 per hour. He also called for labour union reforms that he argued would double the size and strength of labour. Sanders has had a reputation for years of supporting unions and their strikes, something he continued during his campaigns.

In 2016, most US labour organisations followed the historic pattern and endorsed Sanders’ opponent Hillary Clinton, the candidate of the Democratic Party establishment and of a very large section of the American bourgeoisie. Very few national labour unions endorsed Sanders in 2016 and/or in 2020. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), National Nurses United (NNU), the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), United Electrical Workers Union (UE) and the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) did endorse Sanders, and so too did dozens of state, regional, and local unions, and many, many individual union members supported him.

In 2020, with 29 Democratic Party candidates in the race at first, most unions delayed making endorsements, in part because they feared problems with their many members who personally supported Sanders in 2016. The presence in the primary of the progressive Elizabeth Warren in 2020 also complicated the situation and led some unions to hesitate. None of the candidates got very many union endorsements in 2020 until Joe Biden had won the South Carolina primary and the endorsement of his most significant opponents. Then in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic Sanders dropped out of the race and also endorsed Biden. Biden and Sanders then formed an alliance to work on policy issues, moving Biden a little to the left at least on paper, which made it clear that virtually all labour unions would endorse Biden for president.

There is no doubt that Bernie Sanders’ two campaigns had an enormous impact on popular consciousness and the working class. His campaign platform and his speeches popularised and legitimated the rights of labour unions and workers and working-class demands for a better work life and a better life in their communities. Sanders may indirectly have helped to inspire the teachers who went on strike in 2017, mostly in “red states” dominated by the Republican Party. Yet in the last five years of Sanders’ campaigns, apart from the teachers, we saw no significant uptick in union organising or strikes. Sanders changed consciousness, but, at least so far, that has not resulted in significant union action.

There appears to be an interest in independent political alternatives to the left of the Democratic Party among some Sanders followers. In Los Angeles in 2020, after his withdrawal, Sanders’ campaign organisation, Our Revolution, voted to leave the Democratic Party and explore an alliance with the People’s Party Movement; but it is small, not a political party, and is running no candidates in 2020, so it is not a genuine option.

There is no significant alternative to the left of the Democratic Party that can provide an option for the working class. The Green Party, which has never won more than 2.2 percent of the total vote for president, won only 1 percent in the last couple of elections. Its importance is that it has a national presence on state ballots. In New York State Howie Hawkins, a retired truck driver, an open socialist, and the 2020 presidential candidate, has been an indefatigable campaigner and won enough votes in his last race for governor (50,000) to keep the Green Party on the state ballot, but elsewhere the party is not very significant.

The effect of the coronavirus crisis on workers

American workers have been affected by the coronavirus in quite different ways. It is estimated that about 29 percent of all American workers have been able to work from home; this includes many technical employees, engineers, architects, professors and teachers and other white-collar professions. About 40 million workers, or 25 percent of the American workforce, has been laid off. Still, millions of essential workers continue to perform their duties, often risking exposure to coronavirus from co-workers, the public, or passengers on public transportation.

Economic and racial inequality is also quite evident. A higher proportion of Blacks and Latinos have become sick and died. In Chicago Black people make 32 percent of the population, but they make up 72 percent of the coronavirus deaths. In New York both Blacks and Latinos are dying at twice the rate of whites. This is largely due to underlying conditions – high blood pressure, diabetes and respiratory disease – but also to working in essential jobs, as well as lack of healthcare and overcrowded housing.

Racism appears everywhere in this crisis. Asian Americans have experienced verbal abuse and violent attacks as the bearers of what Trump called the “Chinese virus”. Trump closed the border to asylum seekers and has now ordered that for 60 days the government will issue no green cards, which grant immigrants permanent residency and the right to work in the United States.

While men die at higher rates, the pandemic also disproportionately affects women. Many are homecare workers, nursing home workers and other low-wage caregivers with less protection. Women make up 87 percent of registered nurses and 71 percent of cashiers. There is also concern that under stay-at-home orders women are experiencing more domestic violence. At the same time, conservative officials in Ohio, Mississippi and Texas have declared abortions to be “non-essential” and have suspended the procedure during the coronavirus pandemic. The courts have overruled some of those orders.

Workers take action

Throughout the pandemic, federal and state governments and public and private employers failed to protect workers’ health and their income. Essential workers who were forced to continue working without adequate safety and health protection either protested or walked off the job in hundreds of mostly small, brief, and localised wildcat strikes. Some of these, like a small walkout at an Amazon warehouse in New York, garnered publicity but failed to find a mass following. Others had a bigger impact.

Nurses and other hospital workers organised demonstrations to demand masks, gowns, and ventilators. Many nurses protested at their hospitals, but some from the National Nurses United went to the White House to demand that Trump invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) to order the production of masks, ventilators and coronavirus test kits. While there, in a moving tribute, they read the names of their co-workers killed by the virus. Federal and state governments and hospital managers responded by making greater efforts to provide supplies for workers.

Nurses were not alone. In mid-March, led by the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) teachers threatened a sickout to force the closure of the New York public schools when Mayor de Blasio and their own union, the United Federation of Teachers, failed to do so. In late April about 50 workers walked off the job at the Smithfield meatpacking plant in Nebraska over health and safety issues. The governor promised to bring testing and contact tracing to the plant. In Washington, where there is a long history of worker strikes, hundreds of fruit packers struck for safer working conditions and hazardous duty pay.

The protests are myriad: Truck drivers who own their own trucks have organised protests over their falling rates in several states, and Uber drivers in San Francisco organised a protest at a stockholder meeting against their attempt to repeal a law that protects Uber workers’ rights. Fast food workers in several states have walked off the job, some in strikes coordinated by the “Fight for $15” movement. Retail workers walked off their jobs at the American Apparel clothing plant in Selma, Alabama. The protests, while plentiful and diverse, still remain mostly small and brief and most have not had a significant impact on management, though some have won improvements in health protection or higher wages.

Payday Report “Strike Map” claims some 250 wildcat strikes in May 2020, but the claim is somewhat misleading since many of the actual events were not strikes at all but simply protests.

Some unions have provided leadership. The Amalgamated Transit Union has supported bus drivers who have struck over health concerns in Detroit, Birmingham, Richmond, and Greensboro. The Carpenters Union, which represents about 10,000 workers in Massachusetts, ordered its members to strike on April 5 over concerns about COVID-19 and did not end the strike until April 20. Many unions issued statements calling for employers and government to protect their members and provided helpful information. And unions have also lobbied Congress.

With the exception of the nurses’ unions, by and large most labour unions have provided little more leadership than government or business in this hybrid health and economic crisis. Many unions issued statements calling for employers and government to protect their members and provided helpful information. And unions have also lobbied Congress. But in general union leaders have not attempted to raise the level of class struggle to the extent that might be possible.

Some important unions capitulated to reopening factories and resuming production, even though it is clear that it may put their members’ health at risk. As early as May 5 the United Auto Workers conceded that the company had the contractual authority to resume production in May in the GM, Ford, and Fiat-Chrysler plants, without strong guarantees of health protections. Ford, after reopening, shut down two plants, one in Chicago and another in Dearborn, Michigan because of new COVID-19 cases.

Fearing the coronavirus, demobilised by the shutdown, then recalled to work without adequate protections, the crisis has further divided and demoralised much of the working class. As we write at the end of May, there has been no mass mobilisation of workers on an industrial, regional, or national scale. Though some in the left have that in mind.

The left organises

Labour Notes, the newspaper, website, and educational centre, represents the most important institution of the labour left in the United States. Its biannual conferences generally bring together a few thousand union activists, while hundreds attend its travelling schools held in different cities around the country. Its books provide useful tools for organisers and it has helped to bring together workers in the same industry so that they can build movements to revitalise their unions. Labour Notes, for example, helped to create the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators (UCORE), a network of caucuses in the teachers unions – in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York and Massachusetts, and other cities and states – is now also building a similar network for those in higher education.

The largest left organisation in the United States, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – with some 60,000 members in every state, in all major cities and many towns and rural areas – had been active before the current crisis among nurses and teachers. DSA has undertaken some new initiatives. It has joined forces with the small United Electrical Workers Union known as the UE, which organises in a variety of industries, and together they have created the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC). EWOC, adopting the “distributed organising” techniques of the Sanders campaign, is now training hundreds of volunteer organisers to help shop-floor activist organisers in their workplaces. DSA has also begun to organise a network of restaurant workers in several cities and towns. These new DSA initiatives raise the possibility of organising thousands of workers and helping them to take action, with or without a union, to solve their immediate problems. It also may make possible the recruitment of large numbers of workers to DSA.

And mutual aid?

Some on the left, especially the anarchist and anti-capitalist left, have also been engaged in organising what is called “mutual aid”, though their projects are few in number and small. While leftists sometimes talk about mutual aid as leading to “dual power” – a period in a revolutionary situation where there are two rival governments – there is no evidence of such projects representing any significant working class movement or any alternative to government on any level, admirable as the attempt to build solidarity may be. Far more important than left-led groups in that work are the thousands of mutual assistance projects across the country that have sprung up from block clubs and neighbourhood associations in local communities that involve bringing food to the hungry, checking in on the elderly and handicapped, providing health education, sharing books and educational materials, and myriad other good works. Those largely traditional community groups, however, seldom have a political dimension.

Latino immigrant communities, organising through their neighbourhood groups, workers’ centres and other advocacy organisations, represent some of the strongest and most genuine examples of real mutual assistance, and some of those centres engage as well in some lobbying for legislation for their communities. One of the largest and most important of them, Make the Road New York, a community organisation with around 25,000 dues-paying members, provides food pantries, takes part in efforts to organise Amazon warehouse workers and carwash workers, as well as domestic cleaners and others, does health and safety for essential workers, and advocates for legislation, including laws to provide undocumented immigrants with access to many of the benefits afforded to US citizens.

And rent strikes?

As we have noted, the class struggle takes place not only in the workplace but also in communities, and sometimes the fight isn’t against the boss but against the landlord or the bank. The shutdown that threw tens of millions out of work led to what we might call a de facto rent strike, as nearly one third of all renters were unable to pay the landlord on April 1. Others couldn’t rearrange their payments, though banks generally granted extensions. Without much prompting from below, various state governors, legislators, and supreme courts stopped evictions early on, generally to last until June 1 – though when the various orders to stop evictions end, tenants will still owe rent.

Signs at the entrance to a public park in the author’s neighbourhood in Brooklyn.

In any case, community organisers focused on housing saw an opportunity to organise a tenants’ rent strike. So organisations in New York State, Pennsylvania, and California called for a national rent strike on May 1, International Labour Day. In New York City organisers targeted the largest and wealthiest realty companies and some 12,000 people signed a pledge not to pay rent, but that’s a tiny number considering the city has over two million renters. The Los Angeles Tenants Union said that 8,000 of its members would not pay rent, but LA has 5.5 million renters. In New York and some other cities, tenants in some buildings, often buildings with a pre-existing tenants’ union, did strike their landlords. But no mass movement seems to have developed out of the May 1 strike call.

Resurgence of the movement against police violence

The racist police murder of George Floyd, strangled under the knee of a police officer for over eight minutes while gasping, “I can’t breathe,” led to immediate mass protests by thousands at the end of May. While the police chief fired the killer and three other officers who stood by and watched, no charges were brought against any of the officers and the Black community erupted in first in a day of peaceful protest demanding that the officers be charged. Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey asked, “I’ve wrestled with, more than anything else over the last 36 hours, one fundamental question: Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail. If you had done it, or I had done it, we would be behind bars right now.”

When the District Attorney failed to act, a second day of protests in Minneapolis involved riots, looting and arson. The Minnesota State Police (mostly white officers who live in suburban and rural areas) who had been sent into Minneapolis after the second day of rioting arrested a Black CNN reporter and his crew. On the third day, protesters burned down a police station. The governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, of the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party, called out the National Guard to suppress the violent protests. At the same time, despite the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, protests by thousands spread beyond Minneapolis to many major US cities: New York, Columbus, Memphis, Denver, Albuquerque, Portland, Oregon, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

The belated arrest on May 29 of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd, failed to appease protesters’ anger. Indeed, they expressed further outrage that the charge was only the lesser one of third-degree murder, and that none of the other police officers, who stood by and watched as Floyd died, have been charged with any offence.

George Floyd’s death followed two other recent murders of Black people. One was the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by a former police officer and his son. While Arbery, who was out jogging and unarmed, was shot and killed on February 23, the two white killers, one a former police officer, who were not arrested until May 7. The other was the police murder of Breonna Taylor on March 13, when police forcibly broke into her apartment to present a search warrant in a drug investigation and shot her eight times, killing her. No drugs were found in the apartment.

These most recent police murders of Black people resemble the notorious cases in the summer of 2014 of Eric Garner of New York, killed for selling untaxed cigarettes on the street, and Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, who was suspected of petty theft. In both cases the officers who murdered those men walked free. Those two murders ignited the Black Lives Matter movement of that year.

What often began as peaceful demonstrations became violent clashes between demonstrators and police in at least 75 cities where buildings and police cars burned, stores were looted, many people were injured, and at least four were killed. The protests are reminiscent of the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s and a more militant version of the Black Lives Matter movement of 2014. In response to the protests, mayors established curfews and called out the riot police, in some states governors called out the state police and the National Guard. President Donald Trump called the Minneapolis protestors, “thugs,” and tweeted that, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Everywhere the police have violent attacked demonstrators with tear gas and pepper spray, beatings protestors with their batons, and arresting hundreds, Curfews have been implemented in many major cities, yet thus far Black activists and their many white and Latino supporters defiantly assert their right to protest. In response to the protests over Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, President Trump tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”, encouraging further police violence. Trump has said he would declare Antifa to be a terrorist organisation, though there is no such organization and though he has no legal right to do so.

Though we are in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, infuriated by the racist police murders of Black people, a new multi-racial social movement against racism may be in the process of being born.. Regardless of what comes, the nation-wide rebellion has already left a mark on US politics.

The coronavirus crisis and its economic impact have revealed the enormous economic, racial and gender disparities in society. It has lifted the veil on the relentless exploitation that existed even before this crisis. So far we have not seen this change in consciousness lead to significant mass action, but we’re still early in the crisis, and attempts to reopen workplaces without adequate health protections or with changes in employment security and wages could spark new actions and perhaps on a larger scale. Taken all together, workers’ movements, the mutual aid projects, and the left represent a very small and not very weighty force in American society at this time.

Future prospects

For the next few years workers will face several major challenges. First, unemployment – now at 25 percent – will not improve rapidly and may take years to get down to 10 percent. GDP in the United States will fall by 30 percent according to the chair of the Federal Reserve Bank. Many of America’s largest corporations have been halted or at least stalled: airline manufacture and airlines, shipping companies, cruise lines and hotels. Production of durable goods – cars, stoves, refrigerators, washers and dryers – has already been cut back because unemployment means a lack of consumers for these goods, and likewise with computers. The same is true for wholesale and retail trade; no customers, no trade.

Various surveys suggest that between a third and a half of all small businesses will fail in the next several months. The retail business was already in the period from 2010 to 2019 undergoing what was called a “retail apocalypse,” that is the closing of dozens of major and minor brick and mortar companies with hundreds of stores that had been unable to compete with online stores and delivery services; and now the coronavirus crisis and the shutdown have added to the catastrophe, sweeping away companies like J. Crew and Neiman Marcus. Various other industries have also see large-scale business failures, from restaurants and food chains to cinemas and gymnasiums, some with hundreds of stores. Some 110,000 restaurants out of one million are expected to close permanently and three million restaurant workers have already lost their jobs so far. Small restaurants may simply not survive and big chains may move in and take over, but recovery and employment will still be a long way off.

Historically high unemployment, especially when it first develops, tends to inhibit working class resistance, since workers with jobs hesitate to risk losing the jobs they have by engaging in union organising or strikes. In the United States the Great Depression began with the crash of 1929 and high unemployment followed soon after, but the first big upheavals did not occur until 1933 and they did not culminate until 1937. The two recessions of the late twentieth century, 1973-75 and 1981-82, put a definitive end to the wave of working class activism of the early 1970s and started the nation’s labour movement on its long downward slide. After that union activism, with a few notable exceptions like the Teamsters’ strike against UPS in 1997, didn’t pick up again for almost 40 years, until the 2018 teachers’ strikes. Organising during a period of deep and long-term unemployment will require patience and persistence, waiting for the working class to assimilate the experience, take small steps of resistance, and reconstitute itself for struggle in the coming years.

The fiscal crisis of government at all levels

The government shutdown of the economy has meant that neither employers nor workers are paying taxes, at least not as they did before the crisis. Consequently governments at all levels – cities, counties, water, sewage, and school districts, and states – face an enormous fiscal crisis without the funds to continue to run government, to provide services and to pay workers. Forty-four of the 50 states have laws requiring them to present balanced annual budgets. Since states aren’t allowed to go bankrupt and don’t have the power to print money, only the federal government could actually possibly save the states, but the Republican Senate has refused to do so, at least so far.

As the crisis became clear over the first month or two, government officials announced that they would have to cut their budgets, which meant cutting virtually all services to the public, but particularly the big ticket items like health and education. So throughout the country virtually all state governors and legislators are now contemplating and planning cuts to public education in primary and secondary schools and in public colleges and universities. Many of these proposed cuts will be deep, resulting in layoffs of teachers and other staff.

The unions that represent government workers are some of the biggest in the country: the National Education Association (NEA) has 2.7 million members and its rival the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has just under one million; the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has 1.9 million members and its competitor the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has about 1.5 million. Some states limit their right to strike. A number of other unions, from the UAW to the CWA and the Teamsters, also organise public employees. The unions representing federal workers, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) with 670,000 members, and the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), with 150,000 members, are much weaker unions, forbidden by law from striking. While these unions are large, have great resources and are potentially powerful, they are extremely bureaucratic and the leadership by and large collaborates with management and avoids fights.

New York State faces a 13.3 billion loss in revenue and is demanding cuts from virtually all government agencies. At the enormous City University of New York, with 25 campuses serving 275,000 students, there are 7,800 full-time professors, more than 5,000 professional staff members, and some 12,000 adjuncts who make up the largest share of employees. The Gothamist reports that “A CUNY budget memo distributed to the PSC in April said up to $95.3 million could be cut from the system”. CUNY administrators plan to deal with the crisis with a mass layoff – through letters of non-reappointment – of adjuncts who teach an enormous number of classes. The CUNY union, the Professional Staff Council, says such layoffs are unacceptable, and has launched an ad campaign against the budget cuts, but so far no other action is planned. The situation is similar in the University of Massachusetts system. One non-tenure-track (fixed term) professor there suggests that capping salaries of all university employees at $100,000 or even $150,000 would save those jobs.

Governments at all levels are asking the unions to help them make the budget cuts through furloughs, pay cuts and service reductions, and few so far show signs of resisting. The United Caucuses of Rank–and-File Educators that brings together a number of teacher caucuses believes in principle that schools should only reopen when they are fully funded, without debt, and safe for teachers, staff and students. Yet it is not clear how teachers can convert that ideal into a strategy to stop the budget cuts and to protect the health of everyone who forms part of the educational community. The attack on public employees is playing out right now and so it may be just a little too early to see what’s developing. We may only see resistance movements when schools attempt to reopen in the fall.

What about unemployed organising?

Unemployed organising represented an important factor in the workers’ movement of the 1930s. The organisers of the Unemployed Councils came from the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, particularly the latter. In 1934 socialists organised the unemployed in Toledo to help win the Toledo Auto Lite Strike. The Communists in the unemployed movement fought evictions, restoring evicted tenants to their buildings, and in Minnesota, the Trotskyists cooperated with Farmers Holiday Association to resist foreclosures and the sale of farmers’ land. Usually the unemployed were organised in protest demonstrations and marches to demand relief from the city, state and federal government, so the movement had an inherently political character, making demands on politicians and elected officials. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” responded at the national level to the pressure from below, creating such programs as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration that created jobs for hundreds of thousands.

During the recessions of 1973-75 and 1981-2 the International Socialists (IS), as did other left groups (mostly Maoist then), undertook unemployed organising. In Chicago I was involved with other IS branch members in some attempts at unemployed organising. At that time, we leafleted unemployment offices where we met and talked with workers and invited them to come to meetings of the unemployed so that we could begin organising to make demands for jobs or greater assistance. We found that those who had lost their jobs proved very difficult to keep track of and to keep organised.

The lives of the unemployed are hard, and not just because of loss of income. The principal structure and discipline of their own lives had disappeared with the loss of their jobs and they were often at loose ends. Some unemployed people become depressed; they may turn to alcohol or drugs and self-medicate, they may engage in domestic abuse, taking our their frustrations on their families. Most unemployed workers spent time hustling jobs or doing work outside their usual trade, paid under the table. Our most successful unemployed organising took place among workers who maintained an attachment to their union. The union provided an institution with information – the workers’ names, addresses, and phone numbers – with resources such as meeting halls, and as fellow union members we had something in common. And workers felt they had a right to call upon the union to help them. Still, in truth, we were not very successful in our unemployed organising.

During the economic crisis of 2008, Occupy Wall Street provided a movement that the unemployed and many others in society could relate to. In many cities and towns Occupy Wall Street encampments provided a community and activities of all sorts, including protests to demand assistance for the unemployed. In some places Occupy Wall Street organised “Occupy the ’Hood,” an outreach to Black and Latino communities, and in many places OWS helped to fight evictions. In several cities OWS brought its members out to stay outside the homes of families facing foreclosure, gaining publicity and in a few cases preventing the eviction. Barack Obama’s administration coordinated the national repression of the movement – including the arrest of 8,000 protesters, with some accused of terrorism – effectively ending the movement.

All of those experiences of the 1930s, the 1970s and 80s, and the 2000s suggest that unemployed organising can be done, but it is difficult. History suggests it is most successful when connected to a left political party or to a labour union.

The Trump administration

Donald Trump’s administration is the most right-wing American government in modern history and it represents a dangerous threat to the labour movement. Trump is known for his racist, misogynist and xenophobic views and rhetoric, and for his political platform of “defending” America from Mexican and other Latino immigrants, from Arab and other Muslim “terrorists”, and from Chinese competition. Trump has praised and encouraged the armed white protesters carrying swastikas and Confederate flags who invaded the Michigan legislature demanding reopening. His administration has rounded up tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants and put them in private prisons, it has put children in cages, and was putting asylum seekers in concentration camps – that is until it closed the border to virtually all immigrants. Trump has pledged to make the Republican Party a “workers’ party” – meaning a defender of white men’s jobs against their competitors, Black, Latino, female and immigrant. He has courted the building trades and won the votes of tens of thousands of their members. Trump’s rhetoric and policies work to divide society and the working class.

While he began his career as simply as a racist and corrupt businessman with some racist and right-wing opinions, Trump has evolved in the last few years into a genuine far-right authoritarian figure who has taken control of the Republican Party and disciplined it to his will with the carrot of tax cuts and the stick of presidential condemnation at election time. The Republican Senate follows Trump’s lead and blocks legislation he rejects. Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court and to other federal courts have transformed the judiciary into something resembling tribunals of the Gilded Age, when rich old white men in black robes defended the interests of rich white men in top hats. Trump’s government is well poised to crush the labour movement, should it begin to act. Everything Trump does, from his trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the rich to his rush to reopen the economy, benefits the right and hurts working people.

Trump ignored many early warnings of the COVID-19 pandemic from a variety of government agencies, from the Centers for Disease Control to the National Security Council. His policies are responsible for the needless death of tens of thousands of Americans in the first few months of the plague; one study suggest that 36,000 lives might have been saved had the government acted quickly and correctly. Now he has lifted the federal shutdown and encouraged state governors to reopen the economy, even though the states don’t meet the guidelines of falling cases and don’t have adequate testing and contact tracing. His reopening order threatens the health and the very lives of workers returning to their jobs at schools, stores and factories.

There is little doubt that as workplaces reopen, fights over the protection of workers’ health will be at the center of class struggle, as they already are in some places. The pandemic and the shutdown have taken a toll, but they now provide an opportunity to rebuild the American labour movement from the bottom up. While the challenges will be great, working-class resistance is growing, and socialists with a rank-and-file strategy and a class struggle perspective are involved in the fight.

Socialists Must Fight to Defund the Police

By: Emma CaterineMay 31, 2020

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Credit: Kerem Yucel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Nearly six years ago in Staten Island, New York, Eric Garner was murdered by the New York Police Department. As gruesome as this murder was, liberals who advocated police reform thought it might be a turning point on the issue of police use of force in the United States. After all, Fox News and similar racist defenders of the police did their best to pick apart the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri to give every possible justification to his murderer. With Garner, what made the murder so gruesome also seemed to make it so powerfully undeniable. It was on video. The violence was clearly one-sided. And most heartbreakingly, Eric Garner was telling the police officers “I can’t breathe” seconds before they killed him.

Five years have passed. Despite the video, the seemingly undeniable evidence, a Richmond County grand jury decided not to indict the cop who killed Garner, Daniel Pantaleo. And on May 25, 2020, yet another police murder of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, was captured on video, once again pleading with the police officers “I can’t breathe” before he was killed. Sadly those who organize against police murder and violence knew that video footage was not going to change anything. Decades before George Floyd and Eric Garner, Adolph Lyons was choked by the LAPD until he passed out. While he survived, his lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles revealed that sixteen people–twelve African-American–had been killed by chokeholds by LAPD officers. His lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court where, in 1983, the Court held that he did not have standing to challenge the LAPD’s chokehold policy.

What happens in reaction to the seemingly unstoppable nature of police murder in the United States is rage. As Black liberation fighter George Jackson wrote in one of his many letters compiled in the book Soledad Brother:

“When the peasant revolts, the student demonstrates, the slum dweller riots, the robber robs, he is reacting to a feeling of insecurity, an atavistic throwback to the territorial imperative, a reaction to the fact that he has lost control of the circumstances surrounding his life.”

And thus the city of Minneapolis went into open revolt against the police that murdered George Floyd. There are two common reactions on the Left to these kinds of uprisings and both could be seen in reaction to the one in Minneapolis. One seeks to totally disavow the revolts as part of a revolutionary socialist project, the other seeks to define the revolts as revolution. This discourse lasts for a few days, and then dissipates until the next revolt.

Socialists are not spectators. It is not our job to provide commentary on revolts that happen in reaction to police murder. Rather, the question we should seek to answer is what to do after the revolts are over. How can the cycle of police murders be broken? What are the steps we must take to end racist police violence?

The answers of liberals have been varying degrees of dysfunctional and feckless. Because the details of the murder of Michael Brown were so hotly debated, requiring body cams on police was often held up as the solution. But police violence has been captured on video for decades now and nothing has happened. Thus liberals have fallen back on the vague promises of so-called “community policing” (a euphemism for increasing the number of police officers occupying neighborhoods) and implicit bias trainings. These misunderstand the problem entirely–the problem is not merely the quality of police interventions but the quantity of police interventions.

The modern police force is treated as a general emergency response force though it is trained to arrest and kill. In addition to targeting Black communities and other communities of color, people with mental health problems are also often the victims of police violence. Police are the proverbial hammer that sees everything as a nail; they do not protect and serve, they assault, detain, and murder.

Thus an increasing number of socialists see that the solution to the problem of police violence is the end of modern policing itself, not its reform. There are still some segments of the Left that view this goal of police abolition as “maximalist” or “utopian,” and indeed dismantling one of the most powerful armed forces in human history (which with “Blue Lives Matter” flags and Punisher tattoos becomes more and more like a kind of nationalist gang) is no small task. But the road to this supposed utopia is fairly straightforward, and the decarceration platform of a DSA candidate shows the steps we should take down this road.

While all of New York City DSA’s candidates are running on a decarceration platform, I am going to focus particularly on Phara Souffrant Forrest and the goal of defunding the police. Defunding the police may seem like an underwhelming solution to police violence, but it is a great platform for socialists to campaign on because it is a concrete demand that can be made by both our electeds and membership generally and it is a demand that fits nicely into our broader orientation of class struggle, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

New York City is haunted by the memory of its near bankruptcy in October of 1975, a major political moment in U.S. history where neoliberalism won a major victory by forcing the City to adopt a range of austerity cuts to social services in return for being bailed out. And that fear is not irrational – just like President Gerald Ford told New York City in 1975 to drop dead (contrary to popular belief, not literally), Mitch McConnell is insisting that the federal government tell local governments in need of bailouts to also drop dead. With this in mind, the City government under Mayor Bill de Blasio is looking at several cuts to social services, such as not opening public pools, eliminating the Summer Youth Program, and so forth.

What has not been on the chopping block is the budget of the New York Police Department. This is neoliberalism at its essence, a recognition that, to protect the status quo from the rage of desperation described by George Jackson in reaction to police violence and to capitalist immiseration in general, a large police force is needed. The NYPD budget has steadily grown over the years, including with the express approval of the NYC City Council, despite crime in the City decreasing.

Thus the debate over the budget embodies how racist police violence is situated in class struggle. At the time when working people need support more than ever just to survive, particularly Black workers who are disproportionately in “essential services” and disproportionately dying of COVID-19, that funding is instead going towards brutalizing them. The Policing & Social Justice Project has proposed a $1 billion cut to the NYPD over four years. Phara helpfully connects her platform of Medicare for All, cancelling rent, and a Green New Deal to the goal of defunding the police. As her platform says, police budget cuts can redirect funding to community investment, healthcare, housing, and jobs. Those budget cuts can be supported with other demands of decarceration aimed at reducing the number of police interventions, such as decriminalizing simple drug possession and sex work. The so-called War on Drugs (in reality a war on Black America in response to the Black Panthers and others terrifying the ruling class) expanded police department budgets to create the monstrous militaristic departments we have today–defunding the police can deflate them and thus save lives while redirecting money to better our communities.

One of the most foolish actions of the NYPD in its history was their quasi-strike in late 2014 and 2015 in response to what they saw as insufficient support from Mayor de Blasio against the backlash from the murder of Eric Garner. They perhaps bought too much into their own lies that they are the only thing standing between “good citizens” and inhuman “criminals.” Rather than showing the public how important the police were, the slowdown resulted in a decrease of major criminal complaints and showed that less policing actually made communities safer.

A major decrease in police budgets can show working people that the police have been harmful to our communities rather than protectors. To prevent more racist murders by the police, to stop austerity, and to support social programs, socialists must work to defund the police.

Originally posted at The Organizer.

The New Deal Against the Environmentalists

By: Benjamin Y. FongMay 31, 2020

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A Review of Neil Maher’s Nature’s New Deal (Oxford University Press, 2008)

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was one of the most popular and successful of the New Deal programs. Between 1933 and 1942, it put more than 3 million men to work, planted 3 billion trees, protected 20 million acres from soil erosion, helped establish 800 state parks, and installed 5000 miles of water lines. These are just a handful of the many infrastructural improvements accomplished by the Corps. In addition, it was an extremely popular program: in 1936, its approval rating stood at 82% (not coincidentally, Roosevelt won re-election that year with the second largest popular vote in U.S. history). Three years later, it rose to 84%.

As Neil Maher argues in Nature’s New Deal, the CCC was also philosophically opposed to and ultimately undermined by the forces that would coalesce into post-war environmentalism. For proponents of the Green New Deal, this fact should be a curious one: not only was the “greenest” of the original New Deal programs not established by nascent environmentalists, it was also internally fractured by their influence.

A Tale of Two Dams

In 1913, Congress decided to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park to provide water for San Francisco. Cheering the decision was Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the United States Forest Service and mouthpiece of the conservation movement. For Pinchot, conservation meant “the development and use of the earth and all its resources for the enduring good of men” (25). The underlying assumption of Progressive-era conservation was that nature is there for us: the reason it is imperative that we maintain natural resources such as timber, soil, and water is simply that human beings need these things to flourish. Damming the Hetch Hetchy made perfect sense to Pinchot. Cities need water, and the valley was there to hold it.

In fierce opposition to the dam were John Muir and the Sierra Club, who “believed in preserving nature’s beauty for its own sake as well as for the spiritual sake of humankind” (26). According to Muir and the preservationists, human beings were interlopers amongst “terrestrial manifestations of God,” stains on the ideal order of nature (26). Hetch Hetchy was a temple, its damming a sacrilege. Less than a year after the decision to build the dam, so the story goes, Muir “died of a broken heart.”

The preservationists might have lost the battle, but they would eventually win the war. In the late 1940s, a plan was hatched to build a similar dam in the Echo Park section of Dinosaur National Monument. The same foes faced off once again, but this time their fortunes were reversed: after much protest, the project was abandoned in 1955, a moment that, “many argue, unleashed modern environmentalism in the United States” (220).

For Maher, it is impossible to understand this tale of two dams without looking to the fates of the competing visions that animated and undermined the CCC. At its inception, the Corps was the fruit of Pinchot’s utilitarian conservationism, its early work of combatting “timber famine” and soil erosion carried out in the name of greater economic productivity. Around 1935, another strand of Progressive ideology, represented in the writing of Frederick Law Olmsted, began to shape the CCC’s work: that of “the belief in the rejuvenative power of the countryside” to cure the nervous ills of “overcivilized man, who [had] lost the great fighting, masterful virtues” (32-33). To promote outdoor recreation, the CCC increasingly turned to national and state park development, and their work paid dividends. In 1933, less than 3.5 million people visited national parks; by 1941 that number jumped to 21 million (73). The purview of Pinchot’s “simple conservation” was thus expanded to include not just trees, soil, and water, but parks as well.

Olmsted’s thinking was a natural fit for a project that understood itself more broadly as about the rejuvenation of men in the wake of the Depression. According to the Corps’ second director, James McEntee, CCC enrollees came “almost entirely from that third of the population which President Roosevelt has described as ‘ill fed, ill housed, and ill clothed’” (83). The Corps aimed not only to alleviate this impoverishment but also to harden the bodies and minds of the young men it employed. Indeed, the CCC’s first director, Robert Fechner, understood “the central role played by this labor” to be the source of the program’s success: “I believe that the general popularity of the Corps is due in large measure to the belief of the general public that it has not been conducted as a welfare organization but has engaged in useful worthwhile work” (84).

It’s worth noting that neither Fechner nor McEntee came from the conservation movement. The CCC was originally opposed by organized labor and the Socialist and Communist parties, and the appointments of Fechner and McEntee, two machinists’ union organizers, to direct the Corps were necessary for FDR to overcome this initial hostility. Such was the birth of the CCC: two machinists re-virilizing the nation’s young men to make efficient use of America’s natural resources.

Paved Paradise, Put Up a Parking Lot

In 1934 Aldo Leopold, an early CCC booster who had grown critical of its projects, gave a speech to the University of Wisconsin’s Taylor-Hibbard Economics Club. In it he described Corps crews as brash and destructive, chopping down eagles’ nests in the name of “timber stand improvement,” ruining the natural habitats of many species of migratory waterfowl, and generally as suffering from a lack of “ecological” understanding (165-166).

At that point the term “ecology” was unfamiliar to most Americans. Leopold meant by it a kind of systems-level thinking interested in “harmonious balance” that transcended the blinkered views of CCC farming, forestry, game cropping, and soil erosion experts (167). His “ecological critique of the CCC and its conservation work… migrated from the Midwest eastward and took root in the academic halls of Cambridge, Massachusetts,” where it unsurprisingly took on an even more paternalistic tone (167). Harvard botany professor Merritt Fernald dismissed CCC enrollees as “misguided and enthusiastic young men” (168), and the national media soon jumped at the chance to chastise a working-class institution for being “ecologically irresponsible” (168).

This academic critique added fuel to the preservationist fire, and soon the Corps was being attacked on many sides for “destroying the ‘primitive’ quality of America’s public lands” (176). To rehabilitate the CCC’s image in the face of these attacks, in the late 30s Roosevelt attempted to bring all conservation work under a centralized authority that would embody the spirit of “true conservation,” i.e. the enlightened “ecological” thinking of academics and preservationists. Pinchot allied with labor to defeat the proposed reorganization plan in 1938, which many historians have argued “marked a turning point for Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and an early step in a half-century-long rollback of New Deal liberalism” (183).

In one sense this was a victory for Pinchot’s “simple conservation,” but the vehicle for its enactment emerged badly bruised. In addition, the ecologists and preservationists were not to be deterred: in 1940 a new conservation organization called Friends of the Land was created to carry forth their interests. It was to be the first of many special interest groups to take up the torch of “total conservation,” and these are the precise groups that would eventually tip the balance in favor of the preservationists at Echo Park in 1955.

In Maher’s telling, modern environmentalism is thus something like a parasite, infecting and destroying the body of its Corps host in order to spawn NGO babies. Perhaps critics are right that many other “historical forces beyond Roosevelt and the federal government” are responsible for the genesis of post-war environmentalism, but from this reviewer’s perspective, Maher’s book is less about environmentalism itself than about its hand in the undermining of the CCC.

An Ecological Politics for the Working Class?

Proponents of the Green New Deal are quick to tell you that “jobs vs. the environment” is a false dichotomy, an invention of the Right perhaps, but Fechner and McEntee might not have been so quick to agree. The preservationists and ecologically-minded academics of the New Deal era not only had no hand in the genesis of the largest green jobs program in American history, but they also did a good deal to undercut it. The CCC was a success not because but in spite of the nascent environmental movement.

Though Maher does not delve too deeply into this aspect of his story, it is difficult to read Nature’s New Deal and not be struck by the class character of its inner tension. The young men employed by the Corps were poor and working-class, and their knowledge and skills were acquired practically in the course of transforming America’s landscape. The Corps’ critics were academics and wilderness enthusiasts, who framed their complaints in terms of science and morals. It’s true that Pinchot was, much like FDR, an aristocrat, and thus that “simple conservation” had Progressive technocratic rather than working-class roots, but the CCC itself was a working-class program and the paternalistic criticisms of it reflect that fact.

There is of course no need to unduly romanticize the CCC: enrollee salaries weren’t great, though they were often lifelines to their families. It was organized as a paramilitary unit, and to the end of inculcating the “great fighting, masterful virtues.” And it suffered from discriminatory and segregating hiring practices, even if it also opened new vistas for black enrollees, who comprised approximately 8% of the Corps.

But for all its shortcomings, there are many important lessons to be taken from the CCC experience, perhaps none more important than that regarding the strategy needed to achieve such a popular and transformative public works project. Green New Deal programs will be won by catering to and empowering organized labor to lead the efforts of green infrastructural projects, and they will be won in the name not of treading lightly on the earth or respecting divine nature, but rather of developing and using our natural resources for the enduring good of human beings.

In the tradition of Pinchot’s conservationism, Christian Parenti has argued against the “implicit Malthusianism” of modern environmentalism, which “casts humans as intruders upon a harmonious and static thing called ‘nature.’” For Parenti, “we cannot retreat from our role as environment makers,” an imperative that would have well-suited the architects of the CCC.

Looking at the history of America’s greatest green jobs program, it is clear that the environment-making nature of human beings is not simply a philosophical question. The lamentations of environmentalists past and present about the intrusions of human beings on pristine nature are often thinly-veiled reservations about the ability of working people to shape and benefit from the earth. If we’re to take history as our guide, we will win large-scale green infrastructural projects not with but against the tireless moralizing of environmentalists.

Racist Police Murder of George Floyd Leads to National Rebellion

By: Dan La BotzMay 31, 2020

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

The video recording of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, a black man strangled to death by a white police officer who kneeled on his throat for nine minutes until he was dead, sparked anger and outrage and has led to a full-scale national rebellion against police racism and violence as protests spread across the United States. What often began as peaceful demonstrations became violent clashes between demonstrators and police in at least 75 cities where buildings and police cars burned, stores were looted, many people were injured, and at least four were killed. The protests are reminiscent of the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s and a more militant version of the Black Lives Matter movement of 2014.

The upheaval takes place in the midst of the continuing spread of the coronavirus that has taken the lives of 105,000 people nationwide and where a national shutdown in response to the virus had brought about an economic depression with 43 million unemployed. Yet thousands decided that protesting Floyd’s murder was more important than maintaining social distance to stop spread of the virus.

Floyd’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” were the same as those of Eric Garner, murdered by police in New York in 2014, one of the incidents that ignited the Black Lives Matter movement. And only a short time before Floyd’s murder, on February 23, Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black man out jogging, was videotaped as he was shot and murdered by a former police officers and his son in Georgia. Floyd’s death was simply the latest among dozens of unjustified police killing of black men and women over the last decade, and hundreds more over the last century, these killings the most vicious expression of the profound racism that pervades American society in every area of life, from health care and education to jobs and housing. In America, black people are three times as likely as white to be killed by police.

Floyd’s murder was the last straw. The protests initially erupted in Minneapolis because though the four police officers involved in his killing were all fired, no one was indicted for murder. Then the state indicted only the officer who had actually killed Floyd, letting the other three who had been accessories go free. Within a week protests—first peaceful and then turning violent—occurred in one city after another, sometimes cities where police had recently killed other black people, as in Louisville, Kentucky where police had broken into the home of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year old medical technician, and shot her eight times, killing her. Black people have been at the front of these protests, but everywhere white, Latinos, and Asians have also joined.

Everywhere some businesses were burned, but the response of one businessman in Minneapolis was remarkable. Ruhel Islam, a restaurant owner who immigrated from Bangladesh 24 years ago to escape state violence, saw his business burn to the ground. He told the press, “Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served and those officers need to be put in jail.”

In response to the protests, mayors established curfews and called out the riot police, in some states governors called out the state police and the National Guard. President Donald Trump called the Minneapolis protestors, “thugs,” and tweeted that, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” When protestors appeared in front of the White House, Trump tweeted that they would be received with “vicious dogs and ominous weapons” and said that, “many Secret Service agents (who guard the president) are just waiting for action.” At the same time, Trump told the press at the same time that, “MAGA loves the black people.” MAGA is his slogan, “Make America Great Again.” As the protests spread across the country, Trump and his vice-president Mike Pence flew to Cape Canaveral, Florida to watch the launch of the Space-X capsule where Trump said prepoterously, “As we usher in a new era of space exploration, we are reminded that America is always in the process of transcending great challenges.”

Trump blamed the rebellion on “Antifa,” the leftist anti-fascist movement, on the Democrats and called for “liberal mayors and governors” to “get much tougher” on protestors, and he threatened to call out the military. He also suggested that maybe there should be “MAGA night at the White House,” which would surely lead to conflicts between his supporters and protestors. Attorney General William Barr said that the demonstrations had been hijacked by “far left extremist groups.” He promised to use 1960s anti-riot laws that prohibit crossing state lines to riot. At the same time, there were several unconfirmed reports that armed white men wearing symbols of far-right groups, such as the Three Percenters, had infiltrated some of the demonstrations.

Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, stated that, “Protesting such brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response….Violence that endangers lives is not.” Bernie Sanders, former presidential contender now supporting Biden, tweeted, “George Floyd’s murder is not only an outrage. It is the latest manifestation of a system that callously devalues the lives of Black people.”

Labor and the Left have been involved as well, with union members participating in many demonstrations. The Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents bus drivers throughout the country, called upon its members to refused to transport prisoners for the police. Nurses showed up at protests in Brooklyn with signs about the lack of equipment that had also meant Covid-19 patients couldn’t breathe. The Democratic Socialists of America issued a statement condemning the racist police killing of Floyd, but the speed, size, and scope of the current protests go far beyond the capacity of the left to play a significant role.

In Honor of George Floyd – Thoughts in the Aftermath of the Brooklyn Protest

By: Keegan O'BrienMay 31, 2020

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A few scattered, partial thoughts on tonight’s rally in Brooklyn and the overall political moment….

The turn out was incredible, easily around 10,000 people on less than 24 hours notice. Very multi-racial, mostly young and lots of people with homemade signs and unaffiliated to any kind of political organization or group. It seems like for many of the people I talked to this wasn’t there first protest. It’s clear that there is a new generation of people who have become politicized in the era of Trump, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s Marches, Climate Strikes, and for whom the idea that people need to take to the streets – protest, demonstrate, shut things down, sit-in etc. – to accomplish any kind of meaningful change is common sense. The question of how to concretely begin organizing and moving in that direction, people are not clear on.

The sense of visceral rage and pent up class anger was palpable. People yelled and screamed at the police, throwing things. I saw young Black men yelling in outrage over friends and family members who’ve been incarcerated or brutalized. Later in the night protests surrounded a police precinct in a predominantly black neighborhood and burned a police van. At one point, residents were coming out of the housing projects and joining the demonstration. There was a very raw sense that for a lot of people, this wasn’t just some “abstract” issue, but a question of brutality and violence that they face in their day to day lives. The police in New York, especially in working class Black and Brown neighborhoods, have come to symbolize the sharpest and most brutal edge of an entire edifice of poverty, oppression and governmental abandonment that is rotten to its core.

I think it’s very clear that we have entered a new moment in American politics. The landscape is extremely volatile and polarized; working class uprisings against racism and police killings on the one hand, armed demonstrations of fascists and the petit-bourgeoisie to force open the economy for capital on the other. These recent actions are not simply protests. What’s unfolding in Minneapolis and has now spread to cities across the country can only be described as a rebellion, spearheaded by Black workers and youth and on a scale and magnitude potentially even larger than what we saw in Ferguson or Baltimore. This is a collective uprising, catalyzed by yet another police murder, but in response to something much deeper; a cataclysmic failure of the system to offer even the most basic standard of living or sense of dignity to the working class—Black and white. The coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated the economic devastation in urban Black communities. Decades of government neglect and financial disinvestment, extreme poverty, depression levels of unemployment, hyper segregation, all backed up and enforced by a brutal militarized police state that has been able to terrorize and murder Black people with complete and total impunity-these are the ingredients of the unfolding rebellion in Black America.

I don’t think it can be underscored enough–the Black liberation struggle is once again ripping open the pandora’s box of American capitalism. This rebellion is exposing the brutal, sick and twisted priorities of American capitalism to the entire world. The hideous underbelly of American racism is being laid bare. Far from “distracting” from the “real” economic issues and demands of the working class, the Black struggle is highlighting the centrality of racism and Black oppression as the lynchpin that holds American capitalism together. The unfolding rebellion has the potential to serve as an entryway to the entire working class into a larger struggle for social transformation and the possibility to put forward an alternative vision of multi-racial working class solidarity as opposed to the bankrupt politics on offer from both parties of American capital.

Our side has to get more organized, period. Outbursts of spontaneous anger will only get the struggle so far. From the front of the rally today, there was no clear political leadership or organizational direction put forward. Instead, people rallied and stood around while the police penned us in and then ultimately separated and hunted us down, using brutal levels of force. Tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets. At one point, they used riot shields and bicycles to smash people onto the sidewalks, arresting anyone who came in their way; mothers, teenagers, young women, the elderly. If people have to worry about being vulnerable to that level of violence and repression any time they come to a protest, that’s a problem. Our power is in our numbers. Imagine, if instead of getting caught up in isolated and reckless games of cat and mouse with the cops, ten thousand people took over the streets and shut down the Brooklyn Bridge or occupied the police precinct. Or if all of the demonstrations across the city converged in one unified action. We need democratically organized, centrally coordinated and disciplined mass actions of militant direct action and social disruption that are welcoming and inviting to new people, including those who can’t get arrested—the undocumented, formerly incarcerated, parents with childcare responsibilities etc. The police are only going to get more organized and repressive, we have to prepare and account for that by taking steps on our side to become more organized and take seriously the defense of our movement. The refusal of the Transit Workers Union to transport police and those who’ve been arrested gives a small glimpse into the power of the organized working class. We have to begin thinking about how we can expand and build on that.

Some thoughts on the participation of the Democratic Socialists of America (“DSA”) in the action. I say this as someone who is new to DSA, but not new to the socialist movement, as someone who only wants to see the socialist movement grow and become a more rooted and influential force in working class life and politics. I offer these suggestions in the spirit of solidarity and debate. DSA’s orientation to the rallies in New York were completely insufficient. Yes, at the local and national level the organization put out some solid statements and promoted actions on their social media, but that can not operate as a substitute to a real, substantive organizational and political orientation. There was no organized, visible DSA contingent or presence. There was no effort to think through: how are we trying to project and build DSA as an independent force? How are we trying to organize, sustain and deepen the movement? What are the concrete next steps that need to come from this to advance the struggle to the next level? DSA is the largest socialist organization in the country. It is a disservice not only to DSA and the socialist movement, but to the struggle for Black liberation and the continuation of this new movement to not begin seriously thinking through the organization’s role in this process. It’s a major problem, in my opinion, that the only organized forces from DSA that I saw at the rally were from the Afro Socialist Caucus. Our Black comrades should not be forced to shoulder this responsibility on their own. People may disagree, but I think DSA is overly oriented on electoral campaigns to the detriment of on-the-ground social movement organizing. The uprising in Minneapolis and the trajectory of this newly emerging movement has far more importance than the outcome of the upcoming primaries or the presidential election. I hope this a wake-up call to comrades and our organization; there needs be a hard reorientation towards social movement organizing, specifically anti-racist struggles, and thinking through how we can begin to fuse and integrate this with other areas of work.

Cornel West: America Is A Failed Social Experiment

By: Cornel WestMay 30, 2020

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Dr. Cornel West said on Friday we are witnessing the failed social experiment that is the United States of America in the protests and riots that have followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. West told CNN host Anderson Cooper that what is going on is rebellion against a failed capitalist economy that does not protect the people. West, a professor, denounced the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party that is all about “black faces in high places” but not actual change. The professor remarked even those black faces often lose legitimacy because they ingratiate themselves into the establishment neoliberal Democratic Party.

“I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment,” West said. “What I mean by that is that the history of black people for over 200 and some years in America has been looking at America’s failure, its capitalist economy could not generate and deliver in such a way people can live lives of decency. The nation-state, its criminal justice system, its legal system could not generate protection of rights and liberties.”

From commentary delivered on CNN Friday night:

DR. CORNEL WEST: And now our culture so market-driven, everybody for sale, everything for sale, you can’t deliver the kind of really real nourishment for soul, for meaning, for purpose. So when you get this perfect storm of all these multiple failures at these different levels of the American empire, and Martin King already told us about that…

The system cannot reform itself. We’ve tried black faces in high places. Too often our black politicians, professional class, middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state, too accommodated to the market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that means so much to so many fellow citizens.

And what happens is we have a neofascist gangster in the White House who doesn’t care for the most part. You’ve got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is now in the driver’s seat with the collapse of brother Bernie and they really don’t know what to do because all they want to do is show more black faces — show more black faces. But often times those black faces are losing legitimacy too because the Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security [Secretary] and they couldn’t deliver. So when you talk about the masses of black people, the precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color, they’re the ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless, then you get rebellion.

We’ve reached a point now a choice between nonviolent revolution — and by revolution what I mean is the democratic sharing of power, resources, wealth and respect. If we don’t get that kind of sharing, you’re going to get more violent explosions. Now the sad thing is in the neofascist movement in the White House, you have some neofascist brothers and sisters out there who are already armed. They show up at U.S. capitol and they don’t get arrested, they don’t get put down. The president praises them. See what I mean? …

White supremacy is going to be around for a long, long, long time, don’t be surprised when this happens again. Try again, fail again, fail better. That’s the blues line of our Irish brothers. But the question is we must fight. Even in the moment where we have a failed social experiment, we must fight. We must have an antifascist coalition against the White House-Republican party. We have to tell the truth about the milquetoast cowardly activity too often we see too often in the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Originally posted by Ian Schwartz at https://www.realclearpolitics.com. Cornel West is a sponsor of New Politics.

Cuban Doctors Abroad – Appearances and Realities

By: Samuel FarberMay 30, 2020

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That Cuban doctors are being sent abroad by their government to help with the current COVID-19 health crisis is obviously a welcome thing. To those on the receiving end, it is undoubtedly a priceless, life-saving gift. For many people it is one more expression of the Cuban state’s progressive character. Yet, it is important to bring out lesser known aspects of this Cuban doctors abroad program, including the financial benefits obtained by the government, and the conditions under which its doctors labor on the island and abroad that expose the Cuban state’s undemocratic character and the impact that this has on the Cuban people.

According to the Cuban government, it charges its medical clients abroad on a sliding scale according to the economic possibilities of each country, and in certain cases it provides the medical services of its doctors free of charge. It is not that well known however, that the Cuban government’s export of those medical services is, in fact, the state’s biggest business and source of profit. In 2018, the Cuban state earned $6.2 billion from the export of medical services, constituting its largest source of foreign exchange (The Guardian, May 6, 2020), amounting to twice as much as its hard currency income from remittances from Cubans abroad, its second biggest earner, and also greater than tourism which is its third-ranking hard currency earner. The following year, in 2019, medical services accounted for 46 percent of Cuban exports and 6 percent of the island’s GDP.

Towards the end of 2018, Cuban medical operations abroad involved the export of 28, 000 doctors and other medical personnel to 67 countries, a reduction from the high point of 50,000 in 2015, before Cuban doctors were expelled from countries like Brazil, Bolivia, El Salvador and Ecuador as their respective governments turned to the right, and far right, as in the case of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

Cuban doctors receive only about 25 percent of what foreign governments pay to the Cuban authorities for their services (most host countries also provide free housing to the Cuban doctors although of widely varying quality.) These doctors have no way of negotiating their share with the Cuban government since they have no right to organize independent unions to press for their demands. Unions in Cuba are state-controlled, and function as one of the principal transmission belts for the Cuban Communist Party’s policies and decisions. And doctors abroad are subject to a series of governmental rules limiting and attempting to prevent their mobility and desertion abroad, like for example having their compensation, or part of it, deposited by the state in Cuba itself, and having to leave their spouses and/or children behind on the island. Moreover, Cuban doctors must hand over their passports to their supervisors as soon as they arrive in the foreign country where they are going to practice. Desertion is heavily punished by barring the deserters from visiting Cuba for eight years, even though they are Cuban citizens.

Yet, Cuban doctors are more than willing to practice abroad under the sponsorship of their government. Aside from the humanitarian sentiments that may motivate them, the highly reduced 25 percent of the pay they receive for their services abroad is far better than what they would normally earn in Cuba. As Ernesto Londoño pointed out in a New York Times article on Sept. 29, 2017, about Cuban doctors in Brazil—by that time 18,000 Cuban doctors had already served in that country—the agreement of the Cuban and Brazilian authorities in 2013, allowed each Cuban doctor to receive, after their own government took its own very large slice, 2,900 reais a month, worth $1,400 in 2013 and $908 in 2017, a truly extraordinary amount when compared with, after the big salary increase in Cuba in March of 2014, 1,500 pesos, or $60 a month (at the prevailing exchange of approximately 25 Cuban national pesos or CUP to the dollar) that they would have earned at home (Havana Times, March 21, 2014). Besides making far more money than on the island, Cuban doctors in Brazil, as in many other countries they have worked, also gained access to a wide range of consumer goods unavailable at home, which they can take home when they return, an issue not mentioned by Londoño. This is another instance of people voluntarily submitting to exploitative conditions for lack of an alternative.

The Cuban government, and its defenders abroad, has often justified taking its 75 percent cut from their doctors’ work pay abroad by pointing out that this was a fair way to reimburse the state for the public expenses incurred in educating these doctors for free. In fact, however, by the government’s own reckoning, Cuban doctors are considered to have “paid back” their free education upon having completed their “social service”—contributing, immediately upon graduation, their newly acquired skills for a two year-long period, (three years for males when combined with their military service) on a full time basis, wherever the government assigns them. (A similar one year-long program has existed in Mexico, where medical education is free, for more than eighty years.) It is only after having completed their social service that doctors are free to apply to fill vacancies in their desired localities and/or according to what they consider, in relative terms, the most favorable working conditions. Yet, from the time they do their social service, they are considered state employees (private practice is illegal) and are subject to the orders and conditions unilaterally dictated by the Cuban state. That is why this system should be described as statist medicine as against socialized medicine. The latter would allow, in a democratic and socialist system, for doctors to choose to work either for non-state social organizations—like independent unions, neighborhood associations, workers councils, municipal governments-—or for the state, as part of a universal, fully comprehensive service totally financed from the public purse.

Not surprisingly, many Cuban doctors opt to desert once they are serving abroad, in spite of the difficulties and obstacles involved. Organizing independent unions to challenge Cuba’s one-party system is very risky; most people on the island —doctors included—probably don’t even consider it or believe it is a real option. Many of them deserted and obtained asylum in the United States under the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program established by George W. Bush in 2006.This program allowed Cuban doctors stationed in other countries to obtain permanent residency in the United States and facilitated their legal practice after they had arrived in this country. By the time the program was abolished by Obama at the end of his presidency in January 2017, some 7,000 Cuban doctors had taken advantage of it. It goes without saying that—as it has been the case with the criminal U.S. economic blockade of Cuba established in 1960—the program was not created to promote the welfare of the Cuban people or to reestablish “democracy” in the island, but to attack the Cuban economy, in this case through the exacerbation of the island’s “brain drain,” in order to punish a regime that does not obey Washington’s rules of the game.

It is also worth noting that even though Trump has eliminated many of Obama’s measures to soften the blockade, he has done nothing to reestablish Bush’s medical program, evidence that his anti-immigrant sentiments and policies are stronger than his anti-Communism. Absent the escape provided by the U.S. sponsored Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, at least 150 Cuban doctors in Brazil filed lawsuits in that country before Bolsonaro came into office, challenging the Cuba-Brazil agreement, and demanding to be treated as independent contractors entitled to earn full salaries, and not as employees of the Cuban state. The lawsuits became moot after Bolsonaro came to power, and Cuba withdrew its medical personnel (approximately 8,000 people) from that country. As of June 2019, there were several hundred Cuban doctors originally brought to work in Brazil that refused to return to Cuba. They remained in Brazil in a state of limbo, working in any job they could find just to survive, since they are ineligible to practice there unless they pass an exam that has not been offered since 2017. Just recently, however, the Brazilian government hired and licensed 157 Cuban doctors to help with the Coronavirus crisis that has exploded in that country under the criminally negligent policies of Bolsonaro’s government (Al Jazeera, May 19, 2020).

Meanwhile, the people in Cuba have been paying their own share for the export of doctors. In a study of the Cuban economy between 2007 and 2017 (“Social Welfare and Structural Reform in Cuba, 2006-2017,” Cuba in Transition, vol. 27, 2017), the prominent Cuban economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago indicated that while on the one hand Cuba’s universal and free health system had achieved major improvements—such as a further decrease in infant mortality, the reduction of the number of inhabitants per dentist [which although important, is however only part of the serious problems of dental care in Cuba], and an increase in vaccinations resulting in the elimination or reduction of most communicable diseases—on the other hand, maternal mortality had increased, the number of polyclinics and hospitals had declined, including rural hospitals and rural/urban health centers which were shut down in 2001, with patients being then referred to regional hospitals, with the resulting increase in time and transportation costs, and higher risks in emergency cases. He also found that the number of available hospital beds had also shrunk and expensive diagnostic and testing procedures had been cut while physical plants and equipment had continued to deteriorate. Besides a severe shortage of medicines, Mesa-Lago reported, hospital patients had to provide their own supply of sheets, pillows, and similar items.

As they specifically relate to Cuba’s export of medical personnel abroad, Mesa-Lago’s findings indicated that while the number of doctors for the 2007-2017 period increased by 21 percent, setting a new record in 2016 with 90,161 new doctors, once the 40,000 doctors abroad in 2017 were subtracted from that number this significantly lowered the number of doctors working on the island to 224 inhabitants per doctor, almost to the level of 1993, the worst year of the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The shrinkage was worse for specialists, a high proportion of which left to work abroad. (The author is personally familiar with the case of a woman friend whose colonoscopy was botched by a technician assigned to replace a specialist who had been sent abroad.) Mesa Lago added that the export of doctors has had a particular bad effect on the family doctor program, a very successful program created by the government in the 1980s, which was considerably reduced by 59 percent in the 2007-2017 period of his study. Compounding the serious problems affecting the Cuban health system caused by the falling number of doctors left inside Cuba was a 22 percent fall (not necessarily associated with the doctors’ export program) of other medical personnel—technicians and nurses—found by Mesa Lago in that same study.

Recently, Covid-19 hit Cuba as it did virtually the whole world. According to Granma, the official Communist Party newspaper, 1,963 people had been reported as having been infected (Granma, May 26) and 79 people had died (Granma, May 19). As of May 25, 434 patients were hospitalized (Granma, May 26) and 3281 were under observation in health centers (Granma, May 19), but quite surprisingly, only 434 a week later (Granma, May 26), while 1, 823 were being followed at home (Granma, May 26.) While the Cuban government took drastic measures to stop contagion such as closing the country to tourists and halting public transportation, it is too early to tell, since there has been very little independent information so far, on how Cuba’s health system has fared in overall terms in treating its COVID-19 patients and even the accuracy of the statistics reported above.

Many in the broad left attribute the serious problems affecting the Cuban health system, including those specifically resulting from the export of Cuban doctors, to the U.S. economic blockade. It is unquestionable that since its establishment in 1960, this blockade has been significantly impacting the Cuban economy. Although softened by Obama in his second term, most of his positive changes were then cancelled by Trump: limiting U.S. travel to the island, limiting remittances, and reaffirming the closure of the U.S. market to Cuban goods and the ban on U.S. investment in Cuba. This ban was in fact reinforced by Trump, who froze new foreign investment in Cuba when he enforced for the first time Title III of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act that forbids any economic dealings involving any land or installations that were confiscated from U.S. firms by the Cuban government in the early 1960s, and increased sanctions on international banks that do transactions with Cuba. Although the still intact U.S. Trade Sanctions and Export Enhancement Act of 2000 authorizes the sale of food and most medicines to Cuba, it imposes so many difficulties for the commercial transactions involved in the sale of those products to the island, such as demanding cash payments in advance (no bank credits accepted) and obtaining so many licenses that it subverts the purportedly liberalizing purpose of that Act.

It must be noted, however, that it is only the United States that has been boycotting Cuba, and that many other capitalist countries, especially Canada, Spain (including Franco’s Spain), and many countries in what became the European Union, have maintained economic relations with the island providing it with a wide range of economic opportunities since the very beginning of the blockade. Therefore, the US blockade explains Cuba’s problems only to a limited degree. Much more important has been the role of the undemocratic bureaucratic Cuban political economy ran by a one-party state.

In all its essentials, Cuba is a replica of the Soviet socio-economic and political model, where a bureaucratic class runs the economy without any institutional input or constraints by independent unions or any other popular organizations. It is only on the Internet to which only a minority in the island has access mostly because of its very high cost relative to existing wages, and which the government has not yet been able to totally control, that one can find many Cuban critical voices including those expressed in the nascent independent civil society associations that are completely shut out by the state controlled mass media (newspapers, television stations and radio). Thus, there is no transparency and open, public discussion of Cuba’s problems–whether political, social or economic—unless the regime chooses to publicize them for its own purposes, and as long as it controls them. Information about the economy is systematically distorted, and the transmission of the clear signals necessary for the proper functioning of the economy are continually blocked: authentic feedback, accurate information, and independent initiatives from below are systematically discouraged lest they might pry loose the control of the one-party state. In the absence of an open, democratic public life citizens lack the power to bring accountability to planners. The lack of an open press and any independent means for mass communication has facilitated system-wide cover-ups, corruption and inefficiency. The lack of democracy also promotes apathy and cynicism among working people who have no significant independent input, much less control over what happens in their workplace.

This inefficiency and corruption have been reflected in every sector of Cuba’s society, including the health sector. Ten years ago, Uruguayan Fernando Ravsberg, a critical journalist by no means hostile to the Cuban system, writing about hospitals in Cuba lamented the waste of expensive ophthalmology equipment left abandoned, unused, in various warehouses; of the waste of the new burn unit in the well known Calixto Garcia Hospital next to the University of Havana’s main campus, which had not been used for a single day since it had been inaugurated two years earlier. The facilities there were unusable anyway, noted Ravsberg: the roof had fallen on several occasions, and the very expensive bathtubs for burned people could not be used because of low water pressure. Similarly, the new state-of-the-art operating room in that hospital was unusable due to extensive leaks in the water pipes and a roof that leaked whenever it rained. The tiles there kept coming off the walls, due to the lack of sufficient cement, which had likely been stolen during construction, as had happened with the Almejeiras hospital, in Central Havana (“Los Recursos de Salud,” Cartas desde Cuba, April 29, 2010).

While conceding that the Cuban regime is undemocratic, even economically inefficient and “sometimes” repressive, many people on the left, besides, as they should, opposing U.S. intervention in Cuba, regard the Cuban regime as progressive and deserving of their support because of its focus on lifting the Cuban people out of poverty and its attempts to do so through its public education system all the way up to and including professional training, and a guaranteed system of health care. This position implies an arithmetic calculation of gains and losses where social welfare-gains more than compensate for the loss of democracy and political freedom. Yet, the welfare of a people is intrinsically connected to the presence or absence of democracy. What has happened with the health system is one example of that. The impact that the export of doctors has had in worsening the existing problems in that sector is a more specific one.

There is a loss that cannot be condoned when it comes to thinking about whether a particular regime should be politically supported: the loss of class, group (whether defined by race, gender or sexual orientation) and individual political autonomy, and the loss of freedom to organize independently to defend class and other group interests, along with the associated civil and political freedoms to make such organizational independence possible and viable.

On the World Economic Crisis

Eric Toussaint interviewed by Dan La Botz

By: Eric ToussaintMay 29, 2020

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The Covid-19 pandemic and the worldwide lockdown have triggered a depression as great as that of the 1930s. The causes of this crisis, the character of government policies, and the programs put forward by working class groups are of concern to all of us. So, to look into these questions, we spoke with Eric Toussaint, a leading analyst of these matters.

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège. He is the spokesperson of CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France.

CADTM is the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt, an international network of activists and local committees from across Europe and Latin America, Africa and Asia, founded in Belgium on March 15, 1990. CADTM campaigns for the cancellation of “illegitimate, illegal, odious, and unsustainable” debt in developing countries and for “the creation of a world respectful of people’s fundamental rights, needs and liberties.”

ATTAC is the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens) founded in France in December 1998 and one of the leading organizations of the anti-globalization movement.

The interview was conducted on May 26, 2020, by Dan La Botz, a co-editor of New Politics.

From Detroit to Minneapolis: Police Brutality is Key to Containing Revolutionary Possibilities

An exclusive excerpt from A People's History of Detroit.

By: Mark Jay, Philip ConklinMay 29, 2020

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[Introduction by Mark Jay and Philip Conklin] In 1965, the correctional population in the U.S., including all those in jail or prison, or on probation or parole, was less than 800,000. At present, the number is around seven million. As a result of this historically unprecedented rise—commonly known as “mass incarceration”—approximately one-third of U.S. adults, disproportionately African Americans and Latinos, have some kind of criminal record.

For years the origins of mass incarceration have been a subject of heated debate, both within academia and within the American left more broadly. The terms of this debate were largely set by Michelle Alexander’s 2010 work The New Jim Crow, which presents the carceral boom as a “racial caste system” installed by white elites to control people of color and reverse the gains of the civil rights movement. In recent years, however, Alexander’s “racial backlash” thesis has been increasingly challenged by an array of scholars and activists who have emphasized aspects of mass incarceration that Alexander downplayed, including the economic context for the punitive turn, African Americans’ support for harsh anti-crime laws, and the extent to which mass incarceration has targeted poor people of all races. This debate has mapped onto the often hostile “class vs. race” debate that continues to divide and animate the U.S. left.

The following excerpt—which gives an in depth political-economic analysis of Detroit from the late 1960s to early 1970s, when Detroit elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young—can be seen as an intervention into this debate. Our book, A People’s History of Detroit, analyzes the past century of the city’s history from a Marxist perspective. What this history reveals is a struggle between capitalists on the one hand, seeking to make the city a profitable place to invest, and workers, vying to build a city that would meet the basic needs of its residents, on the other. This particular period was a crucial point in this struggle, as these groups jostled over the fate of the city in the wake of the Great Rebellion of 1967, at the time the largest and bloodiest civil uprising since the Civil War. It was out of this paroxysm that two radical groups in Detroit formed: the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party. It is in the context of the repression of groups like these, we argue, that mass incarceration must be understood. While the LRBW and the BPP challenged the hegemony of capitalism in the city, elites sought to resolve the crisis through corporate investment and aggressive policing. Simply put, locking up underemployed workers in the wake of deindustrialization served the double purpose of containing the political threat posed by these workers, and of obfuscating the political-economic causes of social unrest by refracting it through the prism of “crime.” While this process was thoroughly racialized, to reduce the issue to racial animus on the part of Detroit’s white residents and leaders is to paper over the complexities of the problem. This period was also a time when black politicians were increasingly taking over the administrations of major U.S. cities, and despite their desire to redress racial inequalities, black urban regimes tended to support and even intensify anti-crime measures as a solution to the growing “urban crisis.” Indeed, in 1974 Detroit’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, launched his own “war on crime,” with the support of civil rights activists across the city.

It is worth reflecting on this history, especially as the “war on crime” that Young launched nearly fifty years ago continues to this day (it is now led by a black police chief, James Craig). Even as the city experiences a so-called “revitalization,” Detroit elites continue to regard poverty, unemployment, and political protest primarily as security issues, to be dealt with by increasingly militarized private and public police forces. And while there were, and still are, many racist politicians and police officers, mass incarceration is more than a racial problem: simply put, criminalization is a cheap way of managing poverty. Unfortunately, policing the poor has proven more politically expedient than taxing the rich and using the money to fund broad poverty-alleviating social programs. As Detroit activist James Boggs suggested more than a half-century ago, the problem is not only the money-hungry capitalists and corrupt politicians, but also all those people who “resent the continued cost to them of maintaining these expendables but who are determined to maintain the system that creates and multiplies the number of expendables.”

***

Controlling “Revolutionary Attitudes”

I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me. For the first four years, I studied nothing but economics and military ideas. I met black guerrillas, George “Big Jake” Lewis, and James Carr, W. L. Nolen, Bill Christmas, Torry Gibson, and many, many others. We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality. As a result, each of us has been subjected to years of the most vicious reactionary violence by the state. Our mortality rate is almost what you would expect to find in a history of Dachau. —GEORGE JACKSON, Soledad Brother, 1970

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, as governments violently cracked down on radical movements throughout the United States, the rate at which new inmates were thrown into prison increased more rapidly than at any time in the twentieth century, eclipsing even the rate during the penal crisis of the Great Depression.¹¹⁷ Loïc Wacquant, a prominent sociologist at UC Berkeley, expressed a common myth when he wrote that the prison boom that has occurred in the United States in the past fifty years was “contrary to all expectations.” In fact, as the state accelerated its violent crackdown of radical organizations, many within these organizations foresaw the imminence of mass incarceration. At the same time that the French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his widely celebrated Discipline and Punish, wrote that the “widespread, badly integrated confinement of the classical age” was coming to an end and that “the specificity of the role of the prison and its role as link are losing something of their purpose,” Black Panther leader Assata Shakur accurately predicted the exact opposite: “In the next five years, something like three hundred prisons are in the planning stages. This government has the intention of throwing more and more people in prison.”¹¹⁸

As underemployed blacks were thrown in prison en masse, leaders like George Jackson of the BPP organized prisoners as part of the Panthers’ general strategy of turning the lumpenproletariat into a revolutionary force. The number of prison uprisings increased from five in 1968 to forty-eight in 1971.¹¹⁹ Jackson wrote at the time, “Only the prison movement has shown any promise of cutting across the ideological, racial and cultural barricades that have blocked the natural coalition of left-wing forces at all times in the past.” Indeed although the majority of rebelling prisoners were black, Jackson insisted on the uprisings’ socialist character: “If a man wants to relate to my blackness, fine, but I would prefer he relate to me on the basis of my status as a soldier in the world revolution.”¹²⁰ The state’s response to the increasing number of prisoner uprisings was to turn prisons into sites of “low-intensity warfare.”¹²¹

The most famous uprising was in Attica, the maximum-security prison in New York where the most recalcitrant prisoners were sent. On September 19, 1971, a couple weeks after Jackson had been assassinated in San Quentin Prison, 1,300 prisoners took control of Attica. On national television, the prisoners made demands such as “adequate food, water, and shelter,” “effective drug treatment,” an “inmate education system,” and “amnesty from physical, mental, and legal reprisals.” In response, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered police and National Guardsmen to quash the uprising, which they did, but only after killing twenty-nine prisoners and ten of the guards who had been taken hostage.¹²²

The national media initially blamed the deaths on the Attica rebels. The New York Times suggested that “the deaths of these persons by knives . . . reflect a barbarism wholly alien to civilized society. Prisoners slashed the throats of utterly helpless unarmed guards.”¹²³ But days later an autopsy revealed that the prisoners had not killed a single person; the raiding officers had killed all thirty-nine men.¹²⁴

Soon after the uprising, Rockefeller allocated $4 million to Attica to enhance the security apparatuses at the prison and search out new sites for a “maxi-maxi prison” to place militant prisoners.¹²⁵ The narrative was clear: Attica had not been a political uprising but a riot by lawless criminals and communist agitators. As Dan Berger has shown, this narrative legitimated the state’s authoritarian response: this is when supermax prisons were built to lock up the country’s most recalcitrant prisoners, keeping them in solitary confinement for twenty-two to twenty-three hours a day.¹²⁶

As the prison warden of Marion, the nation’s first supermax prison, explained in 1973, “The purpose of the Marion control unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in society at large.”¹²⁷ In the mid1960s Marion was the only supermax prison in the country; by 1997 there were more than fifty-five.¹²⁸ The Marion model of “indefinite lockdown and limited access to the outside, brutal segregation and random attacks . . . has become the dominant model of prison in America.”¹²⁹

In these supermax prisons, which cost between $30 million and 75 million to construct, “physical contact is limited to being touched through security doors by correctional officers while being put in restraints or having restraints removed. Most verbal communication occurs through intercom systems.”¹³⁰ These prisons offer “virtually no educational” programs, and the books available for reading are extremely limited. Supermaxes are set up so that never again will a prisoner like George Jackson have the chance to be “redeemed” by revolutionary literature.¹³¹ Had he served his prison sentence in a supermax, Malcolm X would surely not have been a member of a prison debate team that beat MIT’s debate team.¹³²

Law and Order

In Detroit and around this country, the authoritarian response inside prisons paralleled an authoritarian response outside. Police funding offers one barometer of this process: between 1962 and 1977 local government spending on police increased from around $2 billion to $9 billion. In 1970 there was one paramilitary police unit in the United States; five years later there were five hundred, and Detroit and most major cities had their own paramilitary unit.¹³³ To understand this shift, let us take a closer look at the way political elites managed and mythologized social turmoil in the late 1960s.

As Marxist criminologists Morton Wenger and Thomas Bonomo observe, “The loss of confidence in the ability of a particular form of the capitalist state to handle its own social contradictions can as easily lead to a shift of allegiance by the socially insecure masses to a more proactive and brutal capitalist regime.”¹³⁴ This is precisely what happened in the late 1960s. Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential election with an appeal that included the claim that the “crime problem” would be solved “not [by] quadrupling the funds for ‘any governmental war on poverty,’ but convicting more criminals.” The counterrevolution that James Boggs had predicted just a few years earlier was taking shape. The liberal War on Poverty had already demonstrated that it was unable to restore corporate profitability and quell widespread dissent—and so the War on Crime was ratcheted up.¹³⁵

In Detroit, liberal elites were under attack for their inability to restore law and order. Predating the contemporary “New Detroit” revitalization efforts by almost fifty years, in the wake of the Rebellion, liberal elites had assembled the New Detroit Committee (NDC), a coalition of union higher-ups, community leaders, political elites, members of the black middle class, and corporate CEOs. The NDC, the “backbone of any liberal attempt to improve conditions in the Motor City and regain political legitimacy after 1967,” sought to quell the city’s tensions via urban renewal and racial redistribution, promising to invest millions in downtown development and community programs. As Judge Crockett recalls, NDC’s primary concern was “to sort of quiet things down” after the Rebellion.¹³⁶ The historian and Detroit native Heather Ann Thompson writes that, at the outset, the NDC operated under the assumption that “black militants were relatively minor figures” who “posed a long-term threat” only if civil rights issues continued to be ignored by the state.¹³⁷ The NDC therefore was prepared to “listen to, and even to fund, black radicals.” New Deal funding was thus channeled to radical programs that included the Community Patrol Corps, which emulated the Black Panthers’ famous police patrols. Teens in “all-black uniforms” patrolled the city and monitored instances of police brutality.¹³⁸ By supporting such programs, liberals signaled their attempts to fund, and thereby politically integrate and co-opt, local dissidents.¹³⁹ This incorporation strategy didn’t always work, as, for example, when Detroit’s Federation for Self-Determination, an organization made up of local activists such as Cockrel, Grace Lee Boggs, and Reverend Cleage, turned down a $100,000 NDC grant which stipulated that the money was not to be used for “political” purposes. Rejecting the money, Cleage said, “We will not accept white supervision and control.”¹⁴⁰

Whereas activists complained that NDC proposals were both inadequate and mostly about co-optation, many conservative elites feared that NDC’s contacts with local militants would facilitate a revolution. Heather Ann Thompson points out that in the span of a couple of years, “‘marginal’ black radicals had managed to take over the media of key liberal institutions such as Wayne State University, and were encouraging black students to take over the very schools that liberal School Board members were trying to integrate. Worse yet, black radicals had joined with whites in the call for an all-out urban revolution.”¹⁴¹

In 1969 Wayne County Sheriff Roman Gribbs stepped in to mediate this situation with an iron fist. Gribbs was elected mayor of Detroit having run a campaign that centered on the promise to end liberal permissiveness, create an elite police unit to deal with civil disturbances, and wage an “all-out fight against crime in the streets.”¹⁴²

As we have seen, the crime panic of the late 1960s did have important roots in reality—the reality of increasing crime rates. Nationally, reported street crime quadrupled between 1959 and 1971, and rates of violent crime and homicide doubled between the early 1960s and early 1970s.¹⁴³ Detroit’s population decreased by 300,000 between 1950 and 1970; during these years the white population nearly halved, while the black population more than doubled. (These two racial groups made up 98 percent of Detroit’s population in 1970.)¹⁴⁴ In 1970, the year that Gribbs took office, there were more than twenty-three thousand reported robberies. The city’s homicide rate more than tripled between 1960 and 1970.¹⁴⁵ As many as two-thirds of these murders were linked to the drug trade.¹⁴⁶ This was the time of a devastating heroin epidemic, one with roots in the Vietnam War: 30 percent of U.S. soldiers used heroin during their time in Vietnam, and heroin was imported into the country at cheap rates during and after the war.¹⁴⁷ “One journalist cited as many as fifty thousand heroin addicts on [Detroit’s] streets, spending over a million dollars a day to feed their habits.”¹⁴⁸ By the time Gribbs took office “an army of drug addicts lived in the remains of 15,000 inner-city houses abandoned for an urban renewal project which never materialized.”¹⁴⁹

When one considers the problems of deindustrialization, along with Detroit’s dramatic demographic shifts, racial tensions, and widespread unemployment, the rising crime rate is a tragic and foreseeable outcome.¹⁵⁰ Liberal critics of mass incarceration tend to obscure the reality of crime, arguing that rising crime rates were an invention white elites used to justify a regressive program of racial discrimination. There is truth to these sentiments, as racial disparities in the criminal justice system more than attest to. To deny the reality of violent crime, however, shifts the focus away from the political-economic causes of crime like deindustrialization and the gutting of the welfare state, issues that also disproportionately affect minority populations. Such interpretive moves make invisible the support of poor people and minorities for anticrime measures, as, for example, the black activists in New York City who campaigned for Governor Rockefeller’s draconian drug laws in the late 1960s.¹⁵¹

Both the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Black Panthers developed alternative strategies to explain and combat the country’s crime issue. While League leaders acknowledged that crime and heroin addiction were real problems, they viewed the country’s moral panic as an elite-driven strategy to obfuscate the class struggle. As Watson says in Finally Got the News:

There’s a lot of confusion amongst white people in this country, amongst white workers in this country, about who the enemy is. The same contradictions of overproduction . . . are prevalent within the white working class, but because of the immense resources of propaganda, publicity . . . white people tend to get a little bit confused about who the enemy is. You take a look at white workers in Flint for instance, in the automobile industry, who are pretty hard pressed because the Buick plant up there is whipping their ass. . . . But who do they think the enemy is? . . . Crime on the streets is the problem.

BPP founder Huey Newton said that most criminals were simply “illegitimate capitalists”; like Watson, he understood that although white workers and black workers occupied similar “objective” positions in the economic structure, the racialized, law-and-order narrative of urban crisis made it so that white workers would “feel more and more that it’s a race contradiction rather than a class contradiction.” The Panthers’ “survival programs” sought to address the roots of crime and immiseration by providing impoverished residents with food, shelter, health care, and political education.¹⁵²

When police harassment made sales of the Black Panther a less tenable source of income, Panthers began robbing Detroit’s drug houses, both to earn money and as an attempt to address the interrelated problems of drugs and violent crime. BPP member Ahmad Rahman recalls, “Drug-related crime began to wreak havoc in Black neighborhoods nationwide, diluting calls for community control as citizens turned to the police for relief. Many black people began to shift to the political ‘right.’ . . . Calls for community control of police, became calls for the police—and more prisons.”¹⁵³

After a botched raid on a “drug den” that resulted in one death, Rahman was captured by police.

When his case went to trial Rahman discovered that the Panther Party superior he and the other young comrades took orders from was an FBI informant and the dope house break-in was part of a COINTELPRO designed to capture “the four most active and productive Panthers in the area—Rahman and his three co-defendants.” Rahman, who was nowhere near the murder when it occurred, pled not guilty. The other three pled guilty [and] were found guilty of felony murder. The shooter in the case served only 12 years and was set free, but for Rahman, who fought to prove his innocence, it would be more than two decades before Gov. John Engler commuted his sentence.¹⁵⁴

There are two points worth stressing here. First, it was only after radical working-class groups like the Panthers and the League were brought down that the punitive strategy of mass incarceration could be implemented in poor neighborhoods without meeting violent resistance. The second, related point, is that the war on crime was actually part and parcel of the repression of these radical groups (the very groups that were attempting to combat the causes of crime). During these years crime operated as a signifier that demonized political resistance and collapsed the social causes of the urban crisis into an individualized, moral problem—a perfect example of the process of mythologization. Law and order, rather than progressive social change, could then “resolve” the crisis.¹⁵⁵

As already mentioned the Kerner Report called for more “training, planning, adequate intelligence systems, and knowledge of the ghetto community.”¹⁵⁶ The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 dedicated $1 billion per year to bolstering U.S. police forces with “computers, helicopters, body armor, military-grade weapons, swat teams, shoulder radios, and paramilitary training.”¹⁵⁷ Many of the strategies that police adopted to control working-class militancy at home had their precedents in counterinsurgency tactics used by U.S. forces to quell communist movements abroad. During the Cold War, the Office of Public Safety had worked closely with the cia to train police in South Vietnam, Iran, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil. As scholar-activist Alex Vitale writes, upon their return to the United States, imperial officers “moved into law enforcement, including the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), FBI, and numerous local and state police forces.” The director of the Office of Public Safety, Byron Engle, testified before the Kerner Commission, “In working with the police in various countries we have acquired a great deal of experience in dealing with violence ranging from demonstrations and riots to guerilla warfare.”¹⁵⁸

By January 1971 the new, highly militarized police unit that Gribbs promised was instituted; it was called Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS). STRESS was a local—and particularly brutal—iteration of a national trend to bolster police departments against the threat of “guerilla warfare.”¹⁵⁹ According to the Detroit News article unveiling the program, in a tactic borrowed from police in New York City and the Bay Area, “decoy units” would be sent undercover in “high-crime” areas to play-act as vulnerable citizens, resembling

old women, old men, businessmen, grocery clerks and gas station attendants. . . . They will be prime bait for robbers who prey on such people. And they will be armed and ready. . . . The disguised men will work in teams so that the one being used as a decoy will never be out of sight of one or more of his buddies. . . . “We are going to look like people who live and work in Detroit,” said [District Inspector] Smith. “We are going to make ourselves the victims of crime, rather than other members of the community.”¹⁶⁰

In 1971 police murdered an unarmed black Detroiter named Clarence Manning Jr. As part of a decoy operation, a STRESS officer disguised as an intoxicated hippie had provoked Manning, and when Manning approached him, several STRESS officers jumped out of their hiding spots and killed him.¹⁶¹ This murderous behavior was all too common. Within six months of its unveiling, STRESS, which was composed of one hundred officers, most of them white, made forty-six arrests daily using this entrapment technique. In this period, STRESS fatally shot fifteen citizens, thirteen of them black.¹⁶² These STRESS killings were the primary reason why DPD had the highest rate of per capita civilian killings of all U.S. police departments in 1971—four times the rate in New York City.¹⁶³

In September 1971 five thousand protesters marched in Detroit demanding an end to STRESS and condemning the murders of the Attica rebels. Cockrel announced, “STRESS will be abolished. We’re going to show them discipline the man never knew existed in the black community.”¹⁶⁴ He and radical groups like From the Ground Up presented STRESS as a “tool of those in power” used to intimidate and terrorize impoverished black Detroiters, and decried the increasing “utilization in the domestic law enforcement scene of new terminology, operating techniques, weaponry and equipment produced from the ‘test fields’ of counter-insurgency activity abroad.” From the Ground Up insisted, “We, the people of Detroit, need to confront the divisions brought about by the unjust and criminal distribution of wealth and control of life resources.”¹⁶⁵

A 1973 poll found that 65 percent of black Detroiters disapproved and 78 percent of white Detroiters approved of STRESS.¹⁶⁶ Many wealthier members of the black community, however, supported STRESS—signaling a growing class cleavage within the black community. Days after the 1971 protest, the Detroit News published an article titled “Black Leaders Support STRESS.”¹⁶⁷ Black business organizations and black homeowners’ associations threw their support behind STRESS. The city’s main black newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, published an article titled “STRESS Protest Shows Blacks Short on Foresight”:

The biggest issue in Detroit for the past four years has been crime in the streets. In recent months more aggressive enforcement, plus participation by citizens, has lessened the problem somewhat. . . . The civil disturbances of 1967 should remind black people not to attempt to destroy something they can’t replace. There is no merit in biting the hand that feeds you. It is understandable that many blacks harbor resentment against police because of past atrocities. But when one of these idle, nonproductive, soap box pork choppers calls a policeman “pig” while at the same time sucking on a barbecue bone, his thinking faculties are not together.¹⁶⁸

This support persisted in spite of the fact that in their first thirty months of operation, STRESS units launched an estimated five hundred raids without search warrants. During one of these raids in 1972, STRESS officers murdered a Wayne County sheriff ’s deputy in what was believed to be an inner-police-department battle over control of the city’s drug trafficking. As Surkin and Georgakas write, after a fatal shootout involving three black militants,

“Commissioner Nichols went on television describing [the three men] as ‘mad-dog killers.’ In the weeks which followed, STRESS put the black neighborhoods under martial law in the most massive and ruthless police manhunt in Detroit history. Hundreds of black families had their doors literally broken down and their lives threatened by groups of white men in plain clothes who had no search warrants and often did not bother to identify themselves. Eventually, 56 fully documented cases of illegal procedure were brought against the department. One totally innocent man, Durwood Forshee, could make no complaint because he was dead.”¹⁶⁹

It was not until the city’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, came into office in 1974 that the rogue police unit responsible for the deaths of at least twenty Detroit citizens was finally retired. But the demise of STRESS—which Young described as an “execution squad”—did not spell the end of aggressive anticrime measures. In fact the opposite was true: criminalization would only intensify as black liberals took control of Detroit’s political establishment.¹⁷⁰

Race, Crime, and the 1973 Mayoral Election

Already the big question in cities like Detroit is whether a way can be found for these outsiders to live before they kill off those of us who are still working. How long can we leave them hanging out in the streets ready to knock the brains out of those still working in order to get a little spending money?—JAMES BOGGS, American Revolution, 1963

A long record of community activism, buoyed by a string of remarkable legal victories, led many to believe that Kenneth Cockrel was a viable candidate in the 1973 mayoral elections. But after considering a run, Cockrel decided against it, on the grounds the time was not yet ripe to seek revolutionary struggle inside mainstream political institutions (though by the late 1970s Cockrel changed his mind and successfully ran for city council).¹⁷¹

With Cockrel on the sidelines, the election pitted John Nichols, the city’s hard-nosed white police commissioner, against Coleman Young, a black state senator with a long history of labor organizing.¹⁷² Nichols ran on a straightforward law-and-order platform. But, as Stauch Jr. has documented, Young “made a powerful case as a more viable law-and-order candidate than the city’s own Police Commissioner.” In a speech one month before the election, Young declared Detroit to be the nation’s “murder capital” and claimed that Nichols had allowed the city’s crime problem to accelerate during his tenure as police commissioner. Young distributed campaign flyers that read, “Can you live with Detroit’s Crime Rates?” and “JOHN NICHOLS DID NOT DO THE JOB!”¹⁷³

Young proposed a program of “law and order, with justice.” He said he would integrate and reform the police department, making it a “people’s police department,” while at the same time launching a broad initiative to stamp out criminals and defend the rights of crime victims. Rather than perpetuate the dragnet approach, which had drawn the ire of many in the black community, Young promised a “community policing” approach that would allow citizens to work closely with police in order to more precisely target criminals. In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, Young promised to launch “more intensive undercover investigations” and to institute harsher laws for drug traffickers.¹⁷⁴ He would help actualize Henry Ford II’s goal of making Downtown Detroit a “safe spot” to invest in. The black state senator further ingratiated himself with business leaders by insisting that the black community would stand behind his administration, whereas if Nichols was elected mayor, it would only fuel racial polarization and social unrest. “Who better than a black mayor,” Young asked, “can deal with the dudes on Dexter, on Livernois, and start turning things around?”¹⁷⁵

Race proved central to the election. In an incredibly close final tally, Young eventually triumphed by securing 92 percent of the black vote, whereas Nichols took 91 percent of the white vote. In his famous inaugural address, Young declared:

I recognize the economic problem as a basic one, but there is also the problem of crime, which is not unrelated to poverty and unemployment, and so I say that we must attack both of these problems vigorously at the same time. The Police Department alone cannot rid this city of crime. The police must have the respect and cooperation of our citizens. But they must earn that respect by extending to our citizens cooperation and respect. We must build a new people-oriented Police Department, and then you and they can help us to drive the criminals from the streets. I issue a forward warning now to all dope pushers, to all ripoff artists, to all muggers: It’s time to leave Detroit; hit Eight Mile Road. And I don’t give a damn if they are black or white, or if they wear Superfly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges: Hit the Road.¹⁷⁶

At Young’s inaugural celebration, black leaders shared the platform with the new mayor and supported him in his crusade against crime. U.S. District Court judge Damon Keith, for example, a former civil rights activist, challenged Young to “lead a revolt of the people of this community for justice and against crime” by “ridding this city, root and branch, of the criminals who are committing murders, rapes, and assaults on the people of this city.”¹⁷⁷ One Detroit News reporter wrote, “The best-intentioned, strongest civil libertarian, most white mayor of Detroit . . . would have felt uncomfortable saying what Young and Keith said about crime.”¹⁷⁸

The support for Young’s law-and-order campaign highlights the dialectic of repression and integration taking shape at the time. In the context of systematic violence against poor black Americans—from pervasive unemployment to state brutality and the systematic repression of dissident movements—a better regime of racial representation would be necessary if capitalism was going to legitimate itself in urban America. But as we will see in the next chapter, the integration of many middle-class black Americans into the political establishment occurred alongside, and was inextricably linked to, a deterioration in living standards among the poorer segments of the working class—a deterioration that continues to this day.

Notes

117 Richard Vogel, “Capitalism and Incarceration Revisited,” Monthly Review, September 1, 2003.

118 Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, 114; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books, 1995, 297, 306; Julia Felsenthal, “Ava Duvernay’s 13th Is a Shocking, Necessary Look at the Link between Slavery and Mass Incarceration,” Vogue, October 6, 2016.

119 George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994, 14; Jordan Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016, 71–72.

120 Quoted in Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014, 159, 100.

121 Berger, Captive Nation, 129.

122 Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007, 127.

123 Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012, 378.

124 Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis, 71.

125 Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis, 82.

126 Berger, Captive Nation; Jesenia Pizarro and Vanja M. K. Stenius, “Supermax Prisons: Their Rise, Current Practices, and Effect on Inmates,” Prison Journal 84, no. 2 (2004), 251.

127 Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis, 88.

128 Pizarro and Stenius, “Supermax Prisons,” 251.

129 Dan Berger, “Social Movements and Mass Incarceration: What Is to Be Done?” Souls 15, nos. 1–2 (2015), 9.

130 Berger, “Social Movements and Mass Incarceration,” 9; Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis, 88.

131 Jackson, Soledad Brother.

132 Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, London: Verso, 2003, xxii.

133 Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Boston: South End Press, 1983, 124.

134 Morton Wenger and Thomas Bonomo. “Crime, the Crisis of Capitalism, and Social Revolution,” In Crime and Capitalism: Readings in Marxist Criminology, ed. David F. Greenberg. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993, 685.

135 James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017, 76, 20.

136 Robert H. Mast, Detroit Lives, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994, 172.

137 Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001, 73; The coalition helped win support for the City of Detroit Fair Housing ordinance, an attempt to ameliorate some of the housing discrimination that had galvanized activists before and after the rebellion. Abayomi Azikiwe, “Lessons from the Detroit July 1967 Rebellion and Prospects for Social Transformation: Part 1 and 2,” 21st Century, July 28, 2017.

138 Michael Stauch Jr., “Wildcat of the Streets: Race, Class and the Punitive Turn in 1970s Detroit,” Unpublished dissertation, 2015. Cite Seer x; Stauch, “Wildcat of the Streets,” 179–83.

139 In one striking example of this dynamic, in Chicago there were myriad efforts to “incorporate gangs into the legitimate local power structure” in order to quell dissidence and violence among black youth to leverage more community development funding. In 1967 a $957,000 Office of Economic Opportunity grant “used the Woodlawn area’s existing gang structure—the Blackstone Rangers and the Devil’s Disciples—as the basis of a program to provide remedial education, recreation, vocational training, and job placement services to youths.” Also in 1967 the Vice Lords gang registered as a corporation and the next year received a $15,000 grant for an urban renewal campaign. Andrew J. Diamond, Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017, 196.

140 David Goldberg, David, “From Landless to Landlords: Black Power, Black Capitalism, and the Co-optation of Detroit’s Tenants’ Rights Movement, 1964–1969,” in The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America, ed. Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012, 170; Azikiwe, “Lessons from the Detroit July 1967 Rebellion.”

141 Thompson, Whose Detroit?, 85–88, 92, 101.

142 Thompson, Whose Detroit?, 80.

143 Heather Ann Thompson, “Unmaking the Motor City in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Law and Society 15 (December 2014), 46; Adaner Usmani, “Did Liberals Give Us Mass Incarceration?” Catalyst 1, no. 3, 2017.

144 Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States, Working Paper 56. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, September 2002, “Table 23. Michigan—Race and Hispanic Origin for Selected Large Cities and Other Places: Earliest Census to 1990.”

145 George Hunter, “Dec. Surge Dims Hopes for Dip in Detroit Murders,” Detroit News, December 28, 2015; Usmani, “Did Liberals Give Us Mass Incarceration,” 174.

146 Stauch, “Wildcat of the Streets,” 355.

147 Stauch, “Wildcat of the Streets,” 372.

148 Stauch, “Wildcat of the Streets,” 355.

149 Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998, 167. When considering the scope of the city’s crime problem, we have no choice but to disagree with Heather Ann Thompson. In “Unmaking the Motor City in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” she argues that rising crime reflected little more than the dubious nature of crime statistics. She also seeks to downplay the scope of the city’s homicide problem. “Despite the fact that the national homicide rate had risen from 5.5 per 100,000 people in 1965 to 7.3 in 1968, the nation’s citizenry—be it in the Delta or in Detroit—was not in fact suffering a record-setting crime wave. The murder rate had been far higher in the 1930s—as high as 9.7 per 100,000. Indeed, if one looks at the entire 20th century, it is remarkable how much safer the 1960s were compared to previous decades. Not only was a U.S. citizen less likely to be murdered in the early to mid-1960s than they were at other points in the 20th century, but their risk of meeting a violent death actually went up after the nation began a war on crime” (44). To be sure, the crime problem was exaggerated by political elites, but to deny the reality of a devastating crime problem is highly misleading.

150 Even the dissident group From the Ground Up (which was formed from the Motor City Labor League) wrote in the early 1970s, “One cannot speak of ‘high crime areas’ in Detroit. The entire city is such an area, though sections of the center city, riddled with poverty, police complicity in drug traffic, and double high rates of unemployment, are, to be sure, the ‘highest crime areas’” (Kathleen Schultz, Detroit under STRESS, Detroit: From the Ground Up, 1973., 9).

151 James Forman Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” New York University Law Review 87 (2012), 114.

152 Huey P. Newton, The Huey Newton Reader, edited by David Hillard and Donald Weise, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002,156; Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016; John Narayan, “The Wages of Whiteness in the Absence of Wages: Racial Capitalism, Reactionary Intercommunalism and the Rise of Trumpism,” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 11 (2017): 2482–500.

153 Amilcar Shabazz, “Ahmad A. Rahman’s Making of Black ‘Solutionaries.’” Journal of Pan African Studies 8, no. 9 (2015). Shabazz adds, “Long before Michelle Alexander’s book about mass incarceration and the ‘New Jim Crow,’ Rahman saw what was coming and attempted to counter it.”

154 Shabazz, “Ahmad A. Rahman’s Making of Black ‘Solutionaries.’”

155 Mark Jay, “Cages and Crises,” Historical Materialism 29, no. 1 (2019): 182–223.

156 Alex Vitale, The End of Policing, New York: Verso, 2017, 14.

157 Christian Parenti, “The Making of the American Police State,” Jacobin, July 28, 2015.

158 Vitale, End of Policing, 50.

159 Elizabeth Hinton quoted in Scott Kurashige, The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017, 27.

160 Robert Pavich, “The Little Lady May Be a Cop: Disguised Policeman to Fight Detroit Street Crime,” Detroit News, January 13, 1971. Jerome Scott remembers seeing suspicious things like drunken white guys walking around black neighborhoods with money falling out of their pocket. Author interview. March 5, 2019.

161 Schultz, Detroit under STRESS, 15.

162 Joe T. Darden and Richard W. Thomas, Detroit: Race Riots, Racial Conflicts and Efforts to Bridge the Racial Divide. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013, 50; Pavich, “The Little Lady May Be a Cop.”

163 Schultz, Detroit under STRESS, 4.

164 Stephen Cain, “4,000 Join in Orderly Protest against STRESS Killing,” Detroit News, September 14, 1971.

165 Schultz, Detroit under STRESS, 43, 57.

166 Schultz, Detroit under STRESS, x.

167 “Black Leaders Support S.T.R.E.S.S.,” Detroit News, September 24, 1971.

168 “Stress Protest Shows Blacks Short on Foresight: Slayton,” Michigan Chronicle, November 17, 1971.

169 Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit, 168, 171, 169–70. In another remarkable legal victory, Cockrel won a full acquittal for Hayward Brown, the militant accused in the shootout with police, not by claiming that Brown did not kill the police, but rather that STRESS was an illegitimate institution. Thompson, Whose Detroit?, 149–51, 194.

170 Schultz, Detroit under STRESS, 51.

171 Thompson, Whose Detroit?, 149–51, 194; Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit, 220.

172 William K. Stevens, “Mayoral Primary Heed in Detroit,” New York Times, September 12, 1973.

173 Stauch, “Wildcat of the Streets,” 70, 78–79.

174 Stauch, “Wildcat of the Streets,” 81; Thompson, Whose Detroit?, 198.

175 Robert Pisor, “Young—A Student of the Streets; New Mayor Shares Crime Victims’ Concerns,” Detroit News, November 7, 1973.

176 Inaugural Speech, 1974, in Coleman A. Young Collection, part II, box 106, folders 4–5, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

177 Stauch, “Wildcat of the Streets,” 91–92.

178 Quoted in Stauch, “Wildcat of the Streets,” 93–94.

Excerpted with permission from Mark Jay and Philip Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit, copyright Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 183-94, 272-75.

To Make Our Cities Green, We Must First Paint Them Red

By: Harry ZehnerMay 29, 2020

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There’s a famous book by the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre called Le Droit à la ville, which translates to The Right to the City. Written in 1968, Lefebvre was critical of the increasing sway that capitalism had over the city, and the resulting commodification of urban life and decline of the collective urban experience. In response, Lefebvre envisioned “the right to the city.” He did not picture the right to the city as a rigid legal right, but rather as a continual right of the urban working class to democratically and collectively change the city. Lefebvre imagined cities in which all urban dwellers could shape and reshape the city, to both contribute to its rich fabric and benefit from its cultural and material production. The right to the city, as the geographer David Harvey writes, is: “ … a right to change ourselves by changing the city … the freedom to make and remake our cities.”

In the age of ecological collapse and climate change, the right to the city could hardly be more important. The city has become the most critical geography for both climate change mitigation and adaptation. As the sociologist Daniel Aldana Cohen wrote recently, “Nothing will shape urban life in this century more than carbon — efforts to abolish it, and the consequences of its pollution.” It’s not an exaggeration to say that all urban issues are now also climate issues. The ways we provide and arrange housing, transit, food, water, education and energy are inextricably linked to the carbon output of cities.

In this respect, American cities are equal parts frustrating and tantalizing. On one hand, a century of government-subsidized, racially motivated, sprawling development has created a suburban monstrosity. The car is the dominant, if not only, mode of transportation in the suburbs. As a result, America emits more carbon through transportation than any other sector.

On the other hand, cities offer immense potential for zero-carbon living. When designed correctly, they can be compact, walkable and public transit-rich. Grocery stores, jobs, schools and all the necessities of daily life can be situated within a metro stop, a bike ride or short walk. The car doesn’t have to be dominant, or relevant at all.

These three factors — the looming threat of climate change, the history of poor American urban planning and the potential of the low-carbon city — have led to the emergence of a new urban design consensus. Since the 1990s, everyone from local city planning departments to the United Nations have embraced “well designed, compact, walkable cities with good public transport” as a key part of the solution to climate change.

There’s no question that the city will be dramatically reshaped in the coming years. Now we must ask, in the Lefebvrian tradition: Does everyone share in the benefits of this reshaping? Does the urban working class control the process?

The answer, as of now, is no. I argue here that the ideas of sustainable urbanism, and their lack of an anti-capitalist foundation, will necessarily lead to gentrification, displacement and ultimately, green cities for the rich, and the rich only.

In most American contexts, sustainable urbanism is thought of as a technocratic, politically neutral means of reducing carbon emissions. Proponents generally wish to project their ideas onto the economic, social and geographic landscape without regard for existing inequalities or power structures. By refusing to take an anti-capitalist stand, the mainstream advocates for sustainable urbanism effectively cede power to those who already hold power — landlords, developers and the capitalist urban planning regime. There can be no right to the city when the power to reshape the city is in their hands, rather than the urban majority.

It’s important to understand, briefly, how capitalist urban planning works. Capitalist states claim they are impartial actors. This is a lie. Urban planners have always worked hand in hand with landlords, developers and industrialists. The enforcement of strict legal property rights privilege the property-owning class over the rest. Landlords rely on the police powers of the state to enforce evictions and keep order amongst tenants.

The state frequently uses eminent domain to destroy poor communities and put land to its “highest and best use,” which is usually code for handing it off to a developer. The state spends a huge amount of taxpayer money maintaining roads, sewers, public transit and other social infrastructure, the benefits of which are largely captured by private landowners. Developers rely on planners to create the appearance of democratic consent to planning decisions (public comment periods on new zoning laws or community design sessions for new developments are common examples of this).

Urban planning has also served to further state goals of racial segregation. Zoning laws have historically sited industrial districts near poor black neighborhoods, exposing these populations to toxic waste. State planners have enforced practices like redlining and urban renewal which segregated and displaced working class communities of color.

The trend of deferral to and subsidization of the private market has only worsened since the 1970s and the dawn of the neoliberal era. Consider low-income housing, for instance, which is now a publicly subsidized, private enterprise. The state’s primary methods of low-income housing provision are housing vouchers to low-income families (like the Section 8 program) and tax credits to developers (like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit). These policies effectively subsidize landlords and developers, rather than simply building and maintaining social housing.

This is not to say that the state always acts in the interest of capitalists. At certain points in American history, reformers have succeeded in using the state to empower the working class, if only marginally. However, the state’s primary function under capitalism will always be to protect private interests.

Under this regime, the right to the city is denied, time and time again. Most city residents have little say in the reshaping of their city, and those who do not own property have almost no collective stake in its prosperity. They are ruled not only by their government, but by the powerful landlords and developers who pull the strings.

Under this arrangement, sustainable urbanism has been, and will continue to be, co-opted by private interests. This co-option takes two primary forms: intentional, and unintentional.

The first relationship, that I’ve laid out above, is intentional. The state engages in a myriad of planning and enforcement practices to actively enrich landlords and developers. In the context of sustainable urbanism, this usually takes the form of “smart growth” or “smart city” initiatives, in which cities and opportunistic developers co-opt sustainable urbanism to spur development. The hallmarks of state-planned sustainable urbanism — transit expansion, mixed-use zoning, densification, bike infrastructure — are almost always sold as development opportunities, rather than simply going green for the sake of going green.

In cities like Austin, planning for density has become a key part of the city’s development strategy, as they try to attract the talents of young, educated professionals. In Seattle, Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s headquarters have been supplemented with a variety of investments in public transit, densification and walkability, with a similar goal of attracting young, educated professionals. In Brooklyn, the development of a waterfront park only took place once a public-private partnership with luxury developers was struck. In other cases, smart growth governance results in the construction of “green” luxury developments — which, ironically, still tend to be carbon-intensive.

This pattern of development has sent housing prices skyrocketing and led to the displacement of low-income communities of color. Regardless of the method, smart growth governance is united by a common thread: the state pays lip service to environmentalism, while using its planning tools to enable and subsidize private development and profit.

The second relationship is murkier and less intentional. Under American capitalism, land is generally privately owned. It is a commodity good that can be speculated on. One day, a parcel of land can be worth one figure, and the next, due to any number of physical, cultural, social or economic factors, it can be worth more or less. As long as we can speculate on land, any action the state takes to improve the city will be absorbed by these private owners, in the form of increased rents or property values.

The intentions of the urban planner don’t matter. Because of this, well-intentioned planning often leads to gentrification. As Samuel Stein writes in his book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, there is “a close link between good planning and gentrification, since private property owners [can] capitalize on the value the state adds to land … any good that planners do is filtered through a system that dispossesses those who cannot pay.”

The process of gentrification follows a simple economic logic. First, a landlord or developer realizes there is a gap between the actual rents they are extracting from their property and the potential rents they could be extracting from their property. Then, they go about changing the property to attract the new rents — whether that means evicting tenants or demolishing and constructing a new building. When enough landlords and developers in an area exploit the rent gap, a whole neighborhood can rapidly gentrify. This theory, the rent gap theory, shows that gentrification is premised on the ability of private landowners to both control the rents they are extracting from tenants and evict, demolish or otherwise alter their land. More simply, gentrification happens when land, and by extension housing, is under private, rather than social, ownership.

The rent gap theory helps explain why policies like rent control can help slow gentrification; the less power the landlords and developers have to evict and price gouge their tenants, the slower the gentrification will be. It’s also important to note that in the United States, gentrification is almost always racialized. Low-income black and hispanic communities who lived through decades of austerity and disinvestment are often the first displaced by a wave of reinvestment.

Gentrification can and does occur when sustainable urbanism is co-opted — intentionally or unintentionally — by private market forces. Empirical evidence for this phenomenon has been building since 2009, when Sarah Dooling coined the phrase “environmental gentrification” to describe the process of homeless camps being cleared to make way for parks. One study found that the Atlanta Beltline — a 22 mile urban park and mass transit project — drastically increased nearby housing prices. In Vancouver, researchers found that efforts to densify certain areas of the city — a noble ecological goal — were closely linked to rising housing costs and gentrification. In Lower Manhattan, the creation of the famous High Line park led to the rapid displacement of a working class community.

Of course, gentrification is a complex phenomenon that is unevenly distributed across space and time. Many poor cities and communities are still suffering from the wave of disinvestment that characterized the 1970’s and 80’s. But, as Samuel Stein elucidates, these communities are also faced with a cruel and impossible choice: “Many want the benefits of good planning—safe streets, clean air, decent housing—but not the catastrophic tide of capital it summons. In these places, residents will often reject planners’ interventions out of a well-founded fear that they will be kicked out of their neighborhoods before they ever enjoy the promised improvements.”

If the end goal of the sustainable urbanism project is to save the world, we must ask: who are we saving the world for?

Are we saving the world for the landlords, developers and wealthy minority? Or are we committed to a radical climate agenda that refuses to privilege any life above another?

The mainstream current of sustainable urbanism seems more interested in selling itself as a luxury product than being a blueprint for an egalitarian and ecologically friendly society. As long as land and housing are commodified and smart growth governance is promoted, displacement and gentrification will be inseparable from sustainable urbanism. Smart urban design will continue to be a vehicle for private profit accumulation, rather than liberatory sustainability. If we do not seize the right to the city, our urban spaces will soon be separated into privatized luxury enclaves and decrepit slums. We will enter a new stage of eco-apartheid.

The logical next question is: how do we claim this right?

The only way to seize the right to the city is to ensure that the urban working class can both control the urban planning process and enjoy the fruits of urban improvement, which necessarily means ending gentrification and displacement.

So, revolution. We can’t socialize land and democratize planning without overthrowing capitalism. It’s naive to think the $217 trillion real estate industry and the capitalist state will be defeated with a thousand paper cut reforms.

But we are also far from the brink of revolution.

So in lieu of large scale upheaval, there are certain reforms that can help reduce harm to working class communities and give tenants the space to organize. First and foremost, socialists should support measures to decommodify housing wherever possible. Any measures that take housing stock off of the market, like the construction of social housing or housing co-ops, are helpful. Community Land Trusts can accomplish similar goals by placing ownership of community land under community control. Every housing unit that is not on the private market is a small barricade against the tidal wave of gentrification.

Second, socialists should support reforms which tilt the balance of power in favor of tenants. Reforms like just cause eviction laws, right-to-counsel laws and rent control take power from landlords and give it to tenants. We should also support Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Acts (TOPAs), which allow tenants first right of refusal to buy their building when it goes up for sale and run it as a housing co-op. One consequence of the neoliberal era has been a decrease in militant working class movements, in large part due to anti-union and anti-organizing laws. Pro-tenant reforms can create a more stable base on which to organize tenant unions and build power.

Third, socialists should support democratic reforms to city planning processes. A good place to start is the establishment of democratically controlled planning commissions. As Samuel Stein points out in Capital City, the New York planning commission “is made up of four members with backgrounds in commercial real estate promotion, two luxury developers, two development consultants, a realtor, a nonprofit developer, a corporate lawyer, a business improvement district president and the building engineer behind Trump Tower.” Planning commissions are presumed to be politically neutral, but they often have a clear bias towards real estate interests. Democratizing these bodies, and electing tenants and housing activists onto them, is a small but important step in the right direction. Municipalities can also be pressured to implement participatory budgeting, which allows all residents to shape the city’s spending. Community-run democratic institutions like community land banks allow neighborhoods to decide what is done with vacant land.

These reforms — and ultimately, revolution — can only be won with militant social movements at their back. In Oakland, homeless families in the Moms 4 Housing collective occupied vacant homes, and as a result, are on the brink of winning TOPA legislation. Their actions have inspired similar groups, like Reclaiming Our Homes in Los Angeles, to occupy vacant homes. In New York, tenant organizing won the largest slate of reforms in decades, including strong rent stabilization laws. Historically, tenants have been at the forefront of every city-wide struggle. From the New York City rent strikes of the early 20th century to the urban eruptions of summer 1968, transformation of the city has always happened with the wind of labor and tenant organizing at its back.

Militant organizing is the only path. Capital will never give an inch without a fight.

Climate change is the greatest threat facing the world, and it is already wreaking havoc in marginalized communities. It is critical that our response is grounded in a sound analysis of capitalism and its machinations. Sustainable urbanism must be for everyone, not just gentrifiers, landlords, developers and the ruling class. We must claim the right to the city for all people.

To make our cities green, we must first paint them red.

Ten Aphorisms on Capitalism, Covid-19, and the Climate Crisis

By: Robert Jackson WoodMay 27, 2020

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The end is also a continuation. Even as the coronavirus crisis cuts the feet out from under capitalism while exposing and embodying its horrors, capitalism finds its lifeline in further extraction. Not the extraction of value from workers or of oil from the earth, but of the political conditions of its own perpetuation. Capitalism relies on egalitarian public powers to legitimize exploitative private norms. Ideally, the public political sphere would be a place where those who create the social surplus—workers—could debate how it should be spent. Yet corporate bailouts such as the CARES Act—arranged by bought politicians and passed despite public opposition—ensure that actual control of that surplus remains within the private confines of the market. Political power is again siphoned out of the commons, and just when it is needed there the most.

The extent of capitalism’s integration into daily life is also a measure of its self-dependence. It is well known that industrial agriculture, for example, is required to fully exploit labor since it produces cheap food that allows employers to keep wages down and still ensure that workers do not starve. Yet capitalism’s internal dependence also extends to its climate-related externalities; cheap food can be cheap in part because capitalism doesn’t have to include the methane produced by cows or the carbon sinks cleared for farmland on its balance sheets. This is what makes both Big Macs and melting ice caps not just unfortunate consequences of the system but structurally essential to it as well.

Climate change, in other words, is not something that capitalism is only indirectly responsible for. It is prefigured by capitalism as a logical end result of the latter’s refusal to adequately pay the social costs of its private gains. The climate crisis—as something that is now beginning to affect those corporate balance sheets—is, as Jason W. Moore has written, the reality of those unpaid costs finally coming due. The coronavirus crisis represents a similar reality. Like climate change, it was largely caused by capitalism—industrial agriculture-induced habitat loss spreading disease, undersupplied for-profit hospitals leaving patients vulnerable. But it is also contributing to capitalism’s diminishing returns by making it harder to reproduce the work force, maintain supply chains, and ensure effective demand for products and services. This is why, despite the fact that the COVID-19 crisis was enabled in part by climate change, it can also be seen as a metaphor for it.

The most common image of capitalism in the popular imagination—factory workers toiling away for a pittance, factory owners reaping the rewards—does as much to conceal as reveal the true extent of capitalism’s horrors. What is not shown in these images is what capitalism itself disavows: the deeper yet equally essential forms of exploitation that it can’t acknowledge because the theft involved is outright rather than merely contractual (waged workers “agreeing” to be underpaid, etc.). These include the unpaid care work of (largely) women, essential to reproducing the “official” paid workforce; the securing of laws that ensure the private economic control of the public surplus; the pillaging of raw materials from non-human nature; and the entire history of what Marx called primitive accumulation— the seizure of land through enclosures, the seizure of human labor in colonial servitude—upon which present-day capitalism continues to build its gated palaces. To paraphrase Moore, behind the textile workers of Manchester lay the cotton pickers of Mississippi.

Crises like COVID-19 and the disasters associated with climate change will only occur more frequently throughout the century. From the perspective of capitalism, which is inherently crisis-prone precisely because it doesn’t adequately pay for the work it demands, nothing about this should be surprising. It is the predictable result of a system whose ability to exploit new frontiers is rapidly closing in part because the costs that it could formerly externalize (carbon in the atmosphere, species displacement) are now folding back to affect the system itself. The repressed has returned.

Yet this is not to endorse the Malthusian claim that we are the virus and that COVID-19 and climate change are both here to cleanse the earth of humans, which are the real problem. Assigning agency and intent in this undialectical way to non-human nature is more a projection of misplaced self-loathing than it is a clarifying act. If we do concede that the virus and climate change have something to say about human hubris, it is only the hubris of those humans who knowingly perpetuate the violence of capital and the continued profit-driven enclosure of the earth.

Climate should not be thought of as something separate from capital but as something always already internalized by it; crop choices and diets, for example, are entirely contingent on long-term weather conditions that we tend to take for granted. To this extent, we might say that we have immunity to the so-called normal climate, just as we have immunity to many diseases, which are invisible to us as such but that also exist as things folded into capital in this way. What we call the adaptation to new diseases and new climates is also the cultural and political internalization of them. What we call “nature” is our ideological way of forgetting this.

The enmeshment of capitalism, climate, and disease is nothing new. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a nascent capitalism brought colonizers to the Americas, who brought disease to the indigenous population, whose deaths contributed indirectly to a changed climate that affected the entire globe. In the 150 years after Columbus’s arrival, disease and colonial violence killed so many indigenous people—95% by recent estimates—that vast swaths of land re-greened to become a carbon sink, contributing to a period of global cooling that drastically affected agricultural yields. Today, we can see the variables as rearranged: green habitat has been cleared for the sake of capital-driven agriculture, which, along with changing the temperature of the planet, is enabling the propagation of disease. Yet the only meaningful entry point into these webs of interdependence is capitalism itself, whose compulsion to seek out and exploit new frontiers is what sets these processes in motion.

COVID-19 is a biological wildfire that, even with much of the connective underbrush cleared, has proven difficult to contain. And just as a spark matters less than the drought that makes it a blaze, so does disease matter less than the habitat loss and species displacements that put it in proximity to humans. Capital-driven climate change is responsible for this drought and this displacement. But if a blaze mostly propagates radially from a single node, COVID-19 radiates from multiple nodes along the vectors of globalization as victims fly the flames to one another. From there, it propagates along the contours of political disenfranchisement—the kindling of crowds and immobility found in our prisons, warehouses, and slums.

The climate crisis, and by extension, the COVID-19 crisis, is a prolonged act of violence perpetrated on the 99% by capitalism’s accumulation for accumulation’s sake. This is not a democratic crisis; it is largely workers being thrown to the wolves. But if there is hope here, it is in the fact that these crises are also Earthly insurrections of a sort, provoked by decades if not centuries of ecological exploitation, in which the disenfranchised multitude can find perverse inspiration for reclaiming their own share of what is owed. This would be to align the vectors of planetary and public revolt in a way that acknowledged capitalism’s assaults on human and non-human nature alike. It would also emphasize the connectivity of labor and other fights at their most provincial with ecological struggle at its most universal and existential. Only on these ecosocialist grounds will we be able to understand and adequately fend off the coming catastrophe.

Can We Save the Postal Service?

By: Alexandra BradburyMay 24, 2020

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Supporters held a Save the Postal Service car caravan in front of the Detroit Main Post Office. Photo: Jim West / jimwestphoto.com, cropped from original.

The U.S. Postal Service is in deep trouble. The postal Board of Governors has asked Congress for $75 billion to keep the agency afloat; without it, the outgoing Postmaster General said, USPS could “run out of cash” by September.

A big drop in letters during the emergency shutdown has intensified the budget crunch, but the underlying crisis predates the pandemic. The good news is, the problem is mostly artificial—Congress created it with the stroke of a pen, and could fix it the same way. If it wanted to.

A 2006 law requires USPS to prefund its retiree medical benefits 75 years in advance—meaning it has to set aside money for the old-age care of future employees who haven’t even been born yet. This onerous requirement makes it look like the postal service is in the red. That was the point: to create an excuse to cut service, eroding support for this very popular public service, and let corporate vultures swoop in and privatize the juiciest parts.

Since then, postal workers and the customers who love them have fought several waves of closures of mail plants and post offices; they won some and lost some. The mail got slower. But so far the service as a whole, with its guarantee of universal service at universal rates, still stands.

Now we have foxes in charge of the henhouse: an openly hostile president and postal Board of Governors, and a ghoulish incoming Postmaster General from the private logistics industry. They’ll happily offer cuts, outsourcing, and union-busting in exchange for the quick infusion of cash the agency needs. The Letter Carriers (NALC) are especially vulnerable—their contract expired last fall and the next one is in front of an arbitrator right now.

Even the latest stimulus bill proposed by Democrats in the House [only] included $25 billion for the postal service—just one-third of what the agency requested. “That’s their starting position, from which they will compromise and bargain down,” said Alex Fields, a rural letter carrier in Knoxville, Tennessee. “The Democrats wouldn’t give us nearly enough, even if they could have everything they wanted. We have to fight for our own future.”

Why Postal Jobs Matter

Who benefits from postal privatization? Plenty of logistics companies would love to get their paws on the postal service’s proprietary data, with routes sequenced to reach every address in the U.S. every day. Developers want the great real estate that’s sitting under post offices in certain zip codes. And if you think UPS and FedEx prices are high now, wait till you see ’em without public competition.

But the public will suffer. No private company wants to deliver a letter for 55 cents, or cheaply ferry prescriptions to rural addresses, or guarantee the integrity of a vote-by-mail election for free.

Privatization would be a huge loss for labor. There are nearly a half-million postal workers; it’s the largest union workforce in the U.S. It’s an important source of decent jobs—located in every neighborhood of this country—for Black workers (21 percent of the postal workforce), veterans (18 percent), and women (40 percent, compared to 20 percent at UPS).

Not to romanticize; these jobs aren’t great. Under financial pressure, all four postal unions have accepted a tier of permatemp “non-career” jobs. New hires sign on for substantially lower pay and lesser benefits. Meanwhile the workload has steadily intensified. Turnover among the permatemps is high.

But what would replace these union jobs is much worse—more low-wage, nonunion, Amazon-type jobs. Or worse, “independent contractor” gigs. Or worst, especially in rural areas: nothing at all.

Pandemic Conditions

Ironically, while letters are down, the postal workload is anything but slow. Packages are way up, with a pandemic surge in online buying.

For postal workers pressed into overtime, it’s like the Christmas season all over again—but without a peak-season pay boost, with summer temperatures and no air conditioning in the ancient delivery vehicles (the fleet is overdue to be replaced, but budget troubles keep delaying it), and with some co-workers out on coronavirus-related leave.

Postal management fumbled the early weeks of the pandemic. Safety talks about personal precautions were distributed to supervisors, but in many places, never read aloud. The Postal Workers (APWU) got management to agree that gloves, sanitizer, and masks would be provided at all stations—but that wasn’t the reality for weeks afterward. Management was cagey about who had come down sick and who might be at risk.

People were mad, and worried. Some facilities saw informal sickouts. Fields started an online petition for safety precautions, hazard pay, and administrative leave with full pay for anyone at high risk. He hoped to use it to build a network of rank and filers in his region—but the petition took off. Within a day it had tens of thousands of signatures from all over the country.

The effort congealed into a 20,000-member Facebook group and a series of organizing calls and webinars where members of the four U.S. (and one Canadian) postal unions exchanged information and tactics. As workplace conditions stabilized somewhat, the core group shifted its emphasis to the fight to save the postal service. See here for how you can help.

Print Out a Free Poster

These posters are designed to be printed out and posted in the window of your home, store, or vehicle. There are seven designs showing a variety of postal jobs. Posters by Mary Matthews, drawingdailyusa.com. Click here to view the full set.

Reposted from Labor Notes.

Trump Forever? He May Try

By: Dan La BotzMay 24, 2020

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

In the midst of the worst pandemic in U.S. history and what may be a Second Great Depression worse than the first, President Donald J. Trump’s chief concern is reelection to the presidency in November. He is now using the coronavirus crisis and the economic collapse of the economy to rev up his campaign and rouse his base with a reopening of the economy that jeopardizes the health and the economic well being of millions. So we are heading for a second wave of infections and for what will be, as one health expert put it, “the darkest winter in modern history.”

With 40 million unemployed and nearly 100,00 dead, Trump praises himself and his administration and blames China, the World Health Organization, Barack Obama, and the Democrats for the virus. Racism and xenophobia remain at the heart of Trump’s white nationalist vision. He hints that China may have spread the virus intentionally and his aides talk of Chinese travelers sent to “seed the virus” in Europe and America. He is closing the U.S. borders to all immigrants indefinitely, supposedly to keep out the virus. It was of course Trump’s failure to take swift action that has led to tens of thousands of needless deaths and economic collapse.

In the midst of the pandemic, Trump has focused on strengthening his control and eliminating his critics. He has in the last few months fired four of the inspector generals who oversee and prevent corruption in the spending of trillions by the Departments of State, Health and Human Services, Intelligence, and Transportation.

Trump’s current slogan is “Transition to Greatness” through the rapid reopening of the American economy without regard for workers’ health. Trump ended the federal shutdown, established health guidelines for reopening, and turned responsibility over to the governors. They in turn allowed business to resume, even though their states didn’t meet the White House health guidelines. Trump, with no authority to do so and ignoring health experts, also ordered all places of worship to open, to please his evangelical Christian base. Today all states have reopened some activities, and with this push to return to normal, many people have given up social distancing and masks.

Trump’s sons have joined their father in launching what will be a vicious election campaign. Donald Trump, Jr. launched an Instagram and Twitter barrage accusing Joe Biden of being a pedophile, a groundless accusation. Eric Trump suggested to Fox News that the Democratic Party wants to keep the country locked down to prevent his father from holding his massive campaign rallies. Ignoring completely the issue of health, Eric Trump said, “They think they’re taking away Donald Trump’s greatest tool…. And guess what, after November 3rd, coronavirus will magically, all of the sudden, go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.”

Trump uses his office to campaign, visiting a Ford factory in Michigan, as Biden holds video meetings from his home. While the Democrats hesitate to call a national party nominating convention for fear of exposing their delegates to coronavirus and accelerating its spread, the Republicans plan to hold a full-scale convention, despite the risks to their delegates and to public health. Venomous ads paid for by “dark money” from unknown donors begin to appear everywhere.

Health conditions will make holding the November election difficult, but Trump has opposed mail ballots on the ground that they will promote election fraud and has threatened to cut off federal funds to states that use them. The United States has virtually no election fraud and mail ballots have not been associated with fraud, but Trump wants to keep down the Democratic Party vote. His son-in-law Jared Kushner has suggested the election should be postponed. All of this may be preparation for Trump to claim if he loses in November that the election was invalid and to try to remain in the presidency illegally, that is, to make himself a dictator.

Image from The Daily Beast

Where Do We Stand? Reasons for Optimism

By: Steve LeighMay 23, 2020

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The Corona Crisis has been compared to the Great Depression in economic terms. As of May 21, the official unemployment rate was nearly 15%. This is the highest official rate since 1939—surpassing all the economic crises since then including the Great Recession of 2008-9. Since March, almost 40 milion people have applied for Unemployment Insurance. This of course goes along with the highest death rates of any disease since the “Spanish” Flu of 1918-19, with 94,000 plus as of mid-day May 22.

There are of course many differences between the current economic crisis and the Great Depression. One is that the economic crisis has come on much quicker. It took years for the unemployment rate to reach its height during the Great Depression. Today, the unemployment rate hit its current high in less than three months.

There is another important difference as well. Going into the Great Depression, the public had very little expectation of action by the Federal government. Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932 on vague promises but also on a conservative platform of cutting the Federal budget! Laissez faire dominated economic thinking even at the grass roots level.

Why was this? U.S. politics before the 1930s was dominated by ruling class anti-reformism. The U.S. ruling class was committed to the pursuit of profit to the exclusion of everything else. Its response to the class struggle was repression. The U.S. has one of the most violent histories of labor strife among Northern industrial countries. Between the carrot and the stick, the U.S. rulers chose the stick.

There was some private reformism. The National Civic Federation tried to negotiate with the AFL on the basis of some gains for craft workers. The AFL itself was largely against social programs. Part of its logic was that workers would not join unions if the government provided benefits to them.

There were some reforms at the local and state level. Many were struck down by the courts, which generally followed the laissez-faire line.

Class struggle was vigorous. However, given the stance of the ruling class, the most militant struggle tended to be sectional. The Industrial Workers of the World waged militant strikes, but generally not for political ends. Instead the goals were economic. There was often significant solidarity, but for the most part with other economic sectional struggles.

The laissez faire approach to economics even applied at the state and local level. The general idea was that economic distress should be handled by private charity. There was some local economic relief but this was very limited.

World War I moderated this picture a bit. For nearly two years, 1917-18, the Federal Government intervened heavily in the economy to win the war. It allowed maintenance of membership agreements with the AFL unions to be sure production continued. Wages increased, but after World War I ended, so did these agreements.

As a result of war time inflation, and the strong position workers were in, 1919 was a year of massive class struggle. In Seattle, workers had a general solidarity strike. The massive steel strike led by William Z. Foster nearly succeeded in unionizing the steel industry. Overall, 1919 was one of the biggest strike years in U.S. history.

But these strikes did not break through. The Seattle General strike ended in a stalemate. The unionization of steel failed. Employers instituted the open shop. The Federal Government organized a massive Red Scare, driving out radicals, communists, anarchists and socialists. Many were deported.

This successful campaign laid the basis for the full return of laissez faire economics. By 1929, the expectation of no general economic support from the Federal government had fully returned.

From 1929 on, communists, socialists and anarchists campaigned on the idea that it was the responsibility of the capitalist class and its government to ensure the maintenance of the working class. They demanded economic relief, ending evictions, jobs programs, and social benefits. This at first cut against the dominant political grain. These fights often became violent in the face of intransigence by the ruling class.

What finally broke the log jam was the rise in labor struggles in 1934 led by various radical tendencies: Trotskyists in Minneapolis, Musteites in Toledo, Communists in San Francisco. These, along with earlier struggles for relief and against eviction, triggered further labor organizing resulting in the rise of the CIO.

The high level of struggle and the continued economic collapse led Roosevelt to create the National Recovery Administration. This in turn gave a small opening for union organizing, further raising the level of class struggle. This pushed the Roosevelt administration to implement the New Deal. The Federal Government for the first time implemented the 40 hour work week with overtime pay, unemployment compensation, aid to families with dependent children, and Social Security for the old and disabled along with jobs programs such as the Works Progress Administration. The racism of the time was reflected in the limitations of these programs, but they still constituted a break through.

The Federal programs broke the back of laissez faire economics. From that point on, people expected Federal intervention in the economy and support for reforms. There was of course conservative ruling class opposition, but the dominant ruling class position was a form of liberal reformism.

This was so strong that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s accepted the New Deal programs and noted that any party that opposed them would be consigned to irrelevance. He presided over a top marginal income tax rate of 90+% . The struggles of the 60s and 70s brought yet new reforms both economically and on issues of oppression: The Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action, Abortion Rights, Medicare etc.

Several factors began to undermine this consensus. In the early ’70s, the U.S. faced renewed economic competition from Germany, Japan and other powers; the rate of profit fell; the level of working class struggle that forced the New Deal reforms had declined. This was due to McCarthyism, bureaucratization of unions and rising living standards.

In the face of these changes, the ruling class groped toward a new strategy. It felt it could get away with attacks on social programs. By the late 70s, initially under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, it pushed neo-liberalism. It cut tax rates on the rich, de-regulated parts of the economy, increased privatization and cut social programs.

Along with this political program came a strong ideological offensive. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher said “There is no society” and “There is no alternative” to capitalist economics. Reagan said “Government is the problem.” A new precarity in employment was packaged as everyone becoming their own entrepreneur. We were entering the “ownership society”.

The ideological offensive worked to a degree. Support for unions declined, though it has recently come back. Conservatism which was smashed in the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 rebounded with the Moral Majority, the New Right and even the rise of militia movements from the ’80s on. All of these were based on petit-bourgeois mentality, and often the petit bourgeoisie itself. They identified the domination of the large corporations with the domination of the government over the economy. This supposed Federal domination included liberal programs which raised labor costs and increased regulations which cut into profit.

However, these ideological shifts never reversed the popular support for New Deal programs and government intervention in the economy. Social Security and Medicare for example remain tremendously popular. Even during the height of Reaganism, the public opposed key aspects of Reagan’s program—including increased militarism. The Democratic Party’s shift to the Right was due to its accommodation to capital, not to public opinion shifting rightward.

Because no major political party was willing to forthrightly challenge the ruling class shift to the Right, many in the public thought they had no choice but to go along with it. Yet from the demise of Reaganism, there has been a marked polarization in U.S. politics. This has intensified after the Great Recession, with the rise of Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, the Climate Justice movement etc.

Ruling class open and soft support for conservative and even right-wing politics has not won over a majority. As Michael Moore often says “We live in a liberal country.” Since the Great Recession, a majority of those under 30 have supported “socialism” with significant portions of older people agreeing.

This is explained by Marx’s analysis of working class consciousness. Marx said “the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class.” Yet, he also said that “social being determines consciousness.”

The first statement often leads radicals to pessimistic conclusions. Marx did not say that the only ideas of an age are the ideas of the ruling class. Social being is contradictory. Workers must accept ruling class ideas to a degree just to get along in society. However, the oppression and exploitation they face compels opposition. Often this opposition breaks out in struggle. Class struggle in turn can push ideas to the left. One aspect of today’s social being is the long term existence of federal social programs, which most people now see as part of the permanent fabric of life in the U.S.

Finally, there was another important factor in current popular consciousness. The ruling class found that it could at least temporarily get out of severe economic crisis by “Keynesian” methods. In 2008-9, it bailed out the banks that were “too big to fail.” The Federal Reserve used quantitative easing to flood the economy with liquidity. This method was repeated on an even more massive scale at the start of the Corona Crisis. This shift away from neoliberal orthodoxy in both cases undermined arguments against Federal economic intervention and support for social programs.

People wanted to know why they couldn’t be supported if the government supported big business with the tax payers’ money. In 2008-9 a common slogan was “The banks got bailed out. We got sold out!” This populist attitude has persisted since then and re-emerged even more strongly in this Crisis.

This was the situation we faced as the Corona Crisis broke. Unlike the 1930s, the vast majority of the public expected the Federal Government to step in to address the resulting economic crisis. The fact that Congress voted $1,200 to each U.S. citizen adult shows this clearly. So does the enhanced unemployment compensation it also passed. Even conservatives understood that without Federal economic aid, they would face de-legitimization and unrest.

Obviously, this stimulus program is completely inadequate. It was slow. It excluded non-citizens. The bail out bill mainly helps large corporations. The paucity of the relief will create tragic choices for millions — work and risk dying or stay home and risk starving. It will also increase support for the right wing pseudo-solution of “re-opening.”

The genie cannot be put back in the bottle. A full economic re-opening will still leave the economy in severe crisis. We will never “return to normal.” In fact a dialectical understanding of history shows that there have never been a full return to normal in any period. History is one of constant change. As Marx said “All that’s solid melts into air.”

Further, we should not want to return to the normal of institutional racism and sexism, ecological destruction, concentration of wealth, military intervention around the world, inadequate medical care and extreme exploitation and homelessness. We should not normalize capitalist depravity.

However, in spite of set-backs, in spite of the recent rise of the Right, in spite of Trump’s daily tantrums of incompetence and cruelty, we have ground for hope!

Our historical comrades in the 1930s were fighting against a stronger tide of public opinion than we are. Ironically, they started out in a better organizational position than we do. We need to make good that organizational difference as quickly as possible. To do that, we need to build coalitions around specific demands, just as they did while clearly explaining the revolutionary socialist alternative to this crisis. We need to stress both a united front approach and the need to build revolutionary organization.

We need to soberly assess the current political situation. As Antonio Gramsci said, we need “optimism of the will.” However, in this situation, a sober evaluation says that a dash of optimism of the intellect is also useful!

Debating Green Electoral Strategy

By: Howie Hawkins, Michael AlbertMay 22, 2020

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[This is a verbatim transcript of Episode 73 of the podcast titled RevolutionZ.]

Hello, this is Michael Albert and I’m the host of the podcast titled RevolutionZ. This is Episode 73 and today we have as our guest, Howie Hawkins to discuss Green Election Strategy.

Howie was the first US electoral candidate to campaign for a Green New Deal. He was one of the original Greens in the United States, having participated in the first national meeting to organize a US Green Party in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1984. Howie became active in the movement for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as a teenager in San Francisco.

Since then, Howie has been a constant organizer and peace, justice, union and environmental campaigns, and has in fact been involved in organizations, campaigns and movements literally too numerous to list. From the start, Howie was committed to independent working class politics for a democratic socialist and ecological society. Howie has been the Green Party’s candidate for governor of New York among other posts and is currently seeking to become Green Party candidate for President in 2020.

Albert: So, Howie, welcome to the podcast RevolutionZ.

Hawkins: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Albert: Before we get into the current situation we now all face, perhaps you could tell us your view of the Green Party writ large. For example, how would you summarize its long term aims?

Hawkins: Well, I think our long term aim is to become a major force in American politics. And with this Coronavirus, health, and economic crisis, with an inept President Trump and invisible Biden who does have a megaphone, I think we have an opportunity to really advance in this election. And the way we’re going to do it, though, really is not out of a presidential campaign. We have got to build it from the bottom up. We’ve got to elect thousands of greens to local office or local districts of state legislators in Congress as we go into the 2020s. And that’s how we get the credibility in the minds of the people that ‘Yeah, the greens can actually be elected.’

We do have 129 elected officials around the country, hardly anybody knows that. And while that’s just a drop in the bucket, because there’s about 500,000 elected officers in this country, it’s more than any party on the left has had since the heyday of the Socialist Party, you know, going back to the 30s. And before that.

Albert: How then would you say that Greens view, again writ sort of large, the relative importance of winning elections, as compared to running in elections they’re obviously not yet ready to win? And in each case, what are the hoped for benefits?

Hawkins: Well, in every case, it’s advancing issues that the major parties won’t deal with. And that’s been the historic role of third parties going back to the working men’s party in 1830, and the Liberty Party against slavery in the 1840s, and so forth, and without taking power except the Republicans which was a descendant of Liberty Party, Free Soil party, then the Republican Party come into power in the late 1850s. And then Lincoln got elected president. The third parties haven’t taken power, but they have put issues that became policy, like the Socialist Party’s reforms regarding social insurance were picked up by Roosevelt in the New Deal. So we always do that. And I can give you examples where, you know, we’ve succeeded in doing that. I’ll give you one example.

I ran for governor in 2014. In New York, I got 5% of the vote. And Governor Cuomo had wanted to run up the vote to get ready to run for president. He wanted to get more than his father Mario Cuomo ever got, get more than he got in 2010 when he was first elected, but he got less. And he had to look at what we were saying. He couldn’t take us for granted. And he came around on three key demands that he hadn’t supported before, after he was elected, a ban on fracking, paid family leave, and a $15 minimum wage. So we always want to influence the process by putting these issues forward and not being taken for granted. But that’s what we can do in every election. Now, every election, it depends on what you’re running for and what the circumstances are. I mean, I’m running for president, you know, and I’m in the six figures financially. And, you know, Biden, and Trump are in the seven or eight figures. I mean, right there, there’s a big disadvantage. So I know I’m a long shot. But when you get down to the local level, we’re knocking on doors and getting to know people and having a record in the community as an activist that people know and trust. We have a good chance of getting elected in local races and actually you look at the the percentage of races Greens run in and win at the local level and it’s pretty high. And we just have to get more people who are socialists and progressives running for these local offices. So we can begin to build a counter force from the bottom up.

Albert: That makes perfectly good sense to me. I’m fine with the idea that running to raise consciousness is good, running to put pressure on others is good, and running to win is good. Where a question arises for me, however, which you and I have discussed in print a bit, is in the details of presidential elections, in particular the one that you’re about to, hopefully from your point of view and mine too, actually run in as the Green Party candidate. So I think your running in 2020 and advocating a program way to the left of the Democrats, and even well to the left of Sanders is fine and even excellent to raise consciousness and to raise issues and put on pressure, in, I guess in about 40 safe states where there is simply no doubt that Trump or Biden, supposing Biden runs, will win. I live in one of those safe states, Massachusetts, and I could and would vote for you there. But I think it is not good in swing states and this is what I’d like to discuss with you. That is in states where it is unclear who will win, like Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and so on, you perhaps should tell – in my view, you should tell – your supporters that since humanity’s future, and thus also, of course, Green politics and Green program would be most benefited by Trump losing, and would be most obstructed by Trump winning, each far, far more so than by you getting more or less votes in those swing states, to vote for Biden for the 10 minutes that it takes and then return to their Green and other activism.

Now instead, and please correct me if I have this wrong, I think you feel you should urge them to vote Green, for you or for whoever might be running if it isn’t you, in swing states just like in safe states, because your getting their votes will be more beneficial for what they and you and I believe in and desire then if those votes went to Biden, even if the number of votes you get would have won for Biden, whereas without those votes for Biden Trump would win. So if that’s your view, can you please tell us the essence of the supporting logic? And if it isn’t your view, of course, please correct me.

Hawkins: No, we’re running in every state to get votes in every state. And I’m not scolding people who make the calculation that they want to vote for the lesser evil in a battleground state. But for the Greens, every state is a battleground. One thing we got to get out of the election is ballot lines. And in about 40 of the states, how many votes we get determines whether we have a ballot line going forward, which enables us to run local candidates. In most states it’s, well it runs between a half a percent like in New Mexico, most states are 1, 2, or 3%, a few are 5%, Alabama is 20% so that’s going to be tough. But that’s, you know, one crucial objective of our campaign and then you know, if we don’t support ourselves in some states I mean, why should anybody else, so I think that just creates the wrong message. But like I said, I’m not gonna scold or shame people that, you know, make that lesser evil calculation, but I will say in some of these battleground states, I mean, the Democrats are on the other side. Just take the, you know, one of those existential issues, the climate crisis and the need to stop fracking and new fossil fuel infrastructure. So in Pennsylvania, they’re fracking the hell out of the state. They’re building pipelines that funnel toward either gas fired plants in the northeast, or this petrochemical plastics complex they’re building in the Ohio Valley Appalachia area, which you know, is going to produce massive amounts of non biodegradable plastic so a huge environmental problem in itself. And even the elected officials in Pennsylvania that supported Bernie Sanders won’t touch that issue. Or go up to Michigan. You know, the Democrats won’t take…

Albert: Howie, I don’t disagree with you about any of this. You’re pushing an open door here. I just want to make clear that I have nothing good to say about the Democratic Party, but the issue isn’t are they bad, either in specific instances like those you mention, or across the board. The issue is what to do in certain circumstances. So I’m trying to understand your reason for not foreswearing running in contested states, which is what I would suggest, or to run there, and literally, say vote for Biden as lesser evil and vote for Greens all up and down the rest of the ballot and then go home and fight against Biden when he’s president. Your reason for not doing that is to build the Green Party, to not send the wrong message and cause people to feel Greens are irrelevant or not worth supporting. But I think the approach might be having the opposite effect.

I know that’s weird for me to say to somebody who’s in the Greens and is as prominently active as you are. But in 2000 Ralph Nader got 2.7% of the vote on the Green Party line, and 16 years later, Jill Stein got 1% of the vote. In 2004, there were a total about 230, Green Party members in local offices around the country. But now I heard a quote from you saying there are 130 in office. So it doesn’t seem to me that this strategy of, you know, voting in contested states when it becomes contentious and when later there’s a sense of blame, is actually in fact building the Green Party. Do you think it is?

Hawkins: Yeah, because we’ve got ballot lines where we’ve been able to run. You mentioned we’ve declined in the number of local elected officials. I didn’t get the year but, you know, movements ebb and flow and we’re in a situation where people are scared to death of Trump. I mean, I had people saying they had to vote for Andrew Cuomo when I ran for governor in 2018, who had gave me money and made phone calls for me, because they wanted to send a message to Trump. You know, I guess support the Democratic Party. Which I think was, you know, Trump wasn’t even on the ballot. It just didn’t make a lot of sense. But that’s what the mentality is. So, you know, I understand we’re in a difficult situation. But, you know, it’s not a time for us to fold up our tents.

I was, you know, about to talk to Michigan, I was invited to speak up there against this oil pipeline that they want to expand, which the environmentalists and American Indians up there want to shut down. And I was invited by the Democratic caucus of the Anishinaabe Indians, and they invited me up there because they said, we can’t get the Democrats, maybe you can help us get their attention. So that’s the kind of thing we can do, by you know, being in every state and, you know, the Democrats aren’t being any help in stopping that pipeline up there in Michigan. And we can go through all kinds of issues, affordable housing everywhere, because the Democratic machines are totally tied up with real estate. And the Greens always find themselves fighting the Democrats when they’re fighting for affordable housing. So like I said, we’re getting ballot lines so we can continue these fights.

Albert: But you can get the ballot lines other ways also, right? You can get them by doing petitions. Is that right?

Hawkins: Well, yeah, you can do a petition, which is huge. And if you don’t have a ballot line, the numbers we got to get are much higher than for major party candidates in their primaries.

Albert: Yeah, but that’s a reality. And Jill Stein got only 1% of the vote. So there’s a lot of states that you have to get petitions in.

Hawkins: Like in New York having a ballot line meant our statewide candidates were automatically on the ballot.

Albert: You could work to be on the ballot as compared to being automatically on the ballot.

Hawkins: You can always be working on that for six weeks in July and August when you should be doing other things for the campaign. Then you file your petition and the Democrats challenge it even if it’s frivolous, and they delay it until October and then they say we can’t have you in debate because you’re not on a ballot. And finally, you know, the board of election or the court says, no, they should be on the ballot and it’s like, you know, four weeks till the election. It’s a lot of nonsense. If we’re on the ballot, we can…

Albert: I don’t doubt it…

Hawkins: And they just made it worse. The Democrats just made it worse in New York, they tripled the number of signatures. Instead of 15,000 in six weeks, we have to get 45,000 so we got to triple the number of votes to get in this coming election to keep our ballot line. And that was done by the Governor under the cover of the Coronavirus crisis.

Albert: I’m not surprised…

Hawkins: So that’s, that’s what we’re up against. And you know, the Greens in those battleground states. They don’t want us to abandon them. They got fights going on…

Albert: Why is it abandoning? That’s the thing I don’t get. Explain this to me. So in 40 states, there’s no issue. So in a swing state, you go in and you say, I’m going to campaign up and down, same as I would in a safe state for Green candidates in the state. I’m also going to campaign for the Green program. But I’m going to say to folks, I think people should vote for Biden in this swing state for president, but the rest of the Green Party slate down the whole ticket, because of the undeniable fact that I see — I being you in this case, I would hope — that Trump winning again would usher in hellish days well beyond those already endured, if not worse, still. So, Trump winning is a very, very, very serious problem. And as annoying and damaging as it is for us not to get votes for president in this swing state, it’s much more annoying for Trump to win here, win the electoral college here, and win the election as a result, and I won’t risk that. So I’m campaigning for the Green program. I’m campaigning for socialism. I’m campaigning for the Green Party up and down the line, but I’m campaigning to stop Trump at the presidential level. Why is your saying that selling out the Green Party? Why is it folding up your tent. I don’t get that.

Hawkins: Well, I mean, how do you campaign for a Green New Deal and socialism and say vote for Biden? I mean, he’s not gonna do those things. He’s opposed to those things. If we got life or death issues, you know, the climate crisis, the Coronavirus crisis, inequality is killing us, working class living standards are going down…

Albert: All true…

Hawkins: And we got a new nuclear arms race too, and they’re not talking about it. And so for us to fold up our tents in the battleground states takes the pressure off Biden, if he’s going to move at all. And look Biden should landslide Trump. Trump is so damn inept, his own people are seeing it. And you know, they got the money. They got the lead in enrollment and to blame us for not beating Trump, Trump is like the most unpopular unfavorably, you know, the polls say he’s the highest unfavorable for anybody ever running for president. I mean, why put it on us to beat Trump when the Democrats ought the landslide them?

Albert: I don’t get the argument. The issue isn’t what should happen ideally. Ideally, of course, Trump should get annihilated. Ideally, Sanders should have destroyed him. All true. The issue is what happens if it comes down to it, and it’s close in the contested or swing or I think you called them battleground states. If it comes to that situation, then there’s a real issue. It shouldn’t be an issue. I agree with you. But there is an issue. And if there’s an issue, again, well, here’s a different version of it.

Why not advocate voting for Biden in swing states and the rest of the Green Party’s slate down the ticket and supporting the party program and supporting the Green New Deal, not based on Biden’s non existent merits, there are none. But because Trump winning would accelerate the race to destroy the environment that sustains organized life. It might even reach irreversible tipping points in one four year span. And there would be mounting and hideous catastrophes along the way primarily for the poor, abroad and at home. So why not say to your constituency we need to stop that, and the way to stop that, given how close it is, is to hold our nose and vote for Biden and after the 10 minutes of voting for Biden to put on our working shoes and oppose his administration, hopefully on all the grounds that you know, you know, so well. I don’t see how that’s folding up tents. And the word isn’t pragmatic here. The word isn’t conservative. The word is aggressive about accomplishing the most possible for the constituencies that are at stake. How is that wrong?

Hawkins: Well, Trump may call climate change a hoax. But Biden acts as if it’s a hoax. The status quo is not going to advance. And for us to not, you know, compete for that vote is to take away our political leverage. And these are the people that you look, the Democrats, we talked about voter suppression. And the Republicans do a lot of it. We know how they do it, you know, voter ID and not enough polling places in certain communities and all that nonsense. The Democrats suppressed the vote by keeping the Green Party off the vote. I mean, I go back to New York. We had our congressional candidates file petitions right before the lockdown, and then the DNC with that law firm that’s close to Clinton. I forget their name. They filed in court saying we’re filing challenges to the signatures. But we don’t want the board of election to review the challenges because of the Coronavirus and therefore just keep the Green Party off the ballot. I mean, that’s the kind of nonsense we get from them.

Albert: I am not surprised.

Hawkins: Yeah. And so look, there’s another issue here, this spoiler problem, which we’re talking about right now. There’s a solution to that, which the Green Party has been giving to the democrats for 20 years. It’s a non partisan, proven solution. And that’s get rid of the electoral college and have a rank choice national popular vote for president.

Albert: Absolutely.

Hawkins: And if we aren’t in the race, and putting that pressure on Biden to maybe get behind it, it’s not even gonna be raised.

Albert: Howie, you can’t really believe that. I agree with you and I think it’s worse than you’re even saying because you’re a really nice guy. I can see Democrats sitting around and saying, fuck the Greens, screw the Greens. Who cares about the Greens? I can easily understand that. Okay, so we don’t have to keep repeating that they have problems? Of course they do. The issue is, is there a gap a very, very substantial human, just humanly destructive gap between them and Trump, between them and the emergence of fascist movements in the United States. That’s something I’ve never said in my whole life, but it is real now. Right? These things are real. And to, you know, make believe that as bad as he is, Biden and given the constituencies he appeals to, isn’t better than Trump, less dangerous than Trump, less of a possibility of terminal nuclear war and global warming and all the rest of it than Trump, makes no sense to me. But there’s another thing. Leverage? Howie, you don’t have any leverage at the national level. No one does with Trump. With Biden, there is real leverage. It’s not as big as we want by any means. Because we don’t even want the system. But it’s there. Trump, if Trump wins, your leverage is zero. The leverage of the global warming, you know, the climate change movement is zero. The amount of activism that would be necessary to accomplish the most meager thing given the Supreme Court and all of the other courts, if Trump wins, is enormous, but the potential for pushing Biden is real. The leverage argument doesn’t doesn’t do much for me either. You know, maybe I’m dense here, but I don’t get it.

Hawkins: Well, we’ll definitely have more leverage over Biden, if we get a substantial vote, than over Trump, no doubt about that. But look, whoever’s in there, we got to have mass movements that aren’t tied to either party. I mean, I go back to the anti Vietnam War movement, and contrast it with the anti Iraq war movement. In the 60s, we were saying out now, we are saying that to Kennedy and McCarthy who were talking about negotiations, we said it to Humphrey and Nixon. And we later learned that, you know, the massive demonstrations in the fall of 69 convinced Nixon and Kissinger that their secret plan to end the war, which involved tactical nukes in North Vietnam, would lead to, if not only his, he couldn’t get reelected, maybe even a revolution. That’s what they were afraid of, because they saw so many people out in the streets.

Albert: I agree.

Hawkins: So that’s what we got a mount now. What the mistake I think was made in the anti Iraq war movement is, you know, the broad coalition United for Peace and Justice came out with a slogan that year of against the Bush agenda, which was implicitly saying get behind Kerry, who was pro war. Kerry was saying I can fight it better than Bush. The movement lost its independent message. And then, you know, when Obama got elected, they figured, well, the Democrats are in there so we can go home. And Obama continued all these wars.

Albert: I don’t have any argument with any of that. I agree with you. But I’m not saying that, and neither are the people who, you know, Chomsky isn’t saying that, people who are for fundamental change in the United States, for the same kinds of changes that you’re for, are able to say, and we don’t understand why some others aren’t, that there is a circumstance under which it makes sense to vote Biden, or to vote for the Democrat against the Republican.

So let me ask you a different kind of question and maybe we’ll move this off the spot we’re on. Suppose Trump, this is not gonna happen. But suppose for the sake of discussion, that Trump said the first thing I’m going to do in my second term is declare war on Iran. And the second thing I’m going to do is declare war on any country that in any way, aids or trades with or deals with Iran. Now, under those circumstances, I assume that you would vote for Biden or anybody. Am I right?

Hawkins: Well, you’re assuming the Democrats would fight Trump on that. I mean, look at Venezuela. You know, Trump is trying to take them out. And you know, Biden is with him. Schumer’s with him. I think we can’t rely on the democrats to fight for our right.

Albert: Why is it relying on them to say I’d rather have Biden in office than Trump, by a ton, BUT, I have to devote myself to fighting Biden if he’s in office. That’s not relying on them.

Hawkins: Yeah, I would rather have Biden than Trump, but, as the Green Party presidential candidate it’s not my role to campaign for Biden. You know, the people that nominate me want me to campaign for our party, get our ballot lines, fight for our issues, they want to advance the Green Party, to advance our issues and make whoever’s in office have to deal with, you know, our movement.

Albert: And I agree with that as an agenda. But what I’m trying to suggest is that a lot of people think that advancing Green Party issues, advancing Green Party program, even advancing the Green Party itself, right, depends upon beating Trump far more than it depends upon getting some more votes in 10 battleground states. I’m saying I think it doesn’t make sense not just from the point of view of the future of the country, but even from the point of view of the future of the Green Party. I don’t see why you can’t go into a state and say, fight, fight, fight for the Green program, right, and part of that fight is stopping Trump, and the next part of that fight is going to be pushing as hard as we can with those mass movements, like from the 60s that you mentioned, against Biden. How is that selling out the Green Party?

Hawkins: Well, if you’re fighting for the Green program and saying vote for Biden, you’re contradicting yourself. So just…

Albert: No you are not.

Hawkins: Biden said he would veto Medicare For All if it came across his desk.

Albert: Okay.

Hawkins: You got so many people that can’t get treatment when they needed a to make a choice between rent and going to the doctor.

Albert: Exactly.

Hawkins: The guy that lived downstairs from me had to pay his utility built into March last year. He’s on Medicaid. He’s supposed to get kidney medicine. He didn’t get it that month. And his kidneys failed. He died. That’s happening all over the place.

Albert: Exactly.

Hawkins: And the Democrats oppose a public healthcare system that everybody has access to, and for us to say vote for the guy that is opposed to that is a total hypocrisy on our part. How can we go around saying that?

Albert: Why? Why can’t you say — I’m really trying to understand Howie — why can’t you say Biden is a criminal. Biden is a supporter and a maintainer of and then you can list all the things that we agree on, right? But stopping Trump is absolutely essential to moving forward as a first step. And so in 40 states, I’m running for Green Party votes, Howie Hawkins votes, etc. But in 10 states, or whatever it turns out to be, I’m running for Green Party advance. I’m running for the Green Party candidates. I’m running for the Green Party program. But I think people no matter how much we hate the Democratic Party and Biden should vote for them, but with the intent of, after the 10 minutes voting going out in the street, and demonstrating for four years against their administration to get as much as we can possibly win. There is nothing confusing about it. Nobody would see that and say, ah, Howie is for Biden. Who’s gonna say that? When Howie is in the street opposing Biden…

Hawkins: But saying in that state vote for him?

Albert: Yes….

Hawkins: Yeah…

Albert: In order to stop Trump from winning…

Hawkins: There are lots of people like you that are going to be making that argument and voters on the left are going to know what the arguments are. It’s not my role as the Green Party candidate, a nominee, the people that nominated me to go out and say vote for the Democratic candidate where whether we have a ballot line going forward depends on the vote we get.

Albert: So you’re saying the ballot line is more important – and I agree that it’s important – but you’re saying it’s more important than Biden beating Trump in the election because in that state not beating him might swing the election, and so my getting the ballot line for the Greens is more important than our all together stopping Trump. I can’t — do you, do you really feel that?

Hawkins: Yeah, because you’re assuming we are the margin of difference, which is a big assumption. In the meantime, we got issues. We got issues with the Democrats that we’re fighting as well as the Republicans in these States. And people want a ballot line so they can run against them in the next election. And that’s what the people in those states are focused on. You know, whether it’s fighting pipelines, affordable housing, the regressive, I mean, we got a tax system now where labor income gets taxed higher than capital income. And the Democrats, you know, they voted enthusiastically for the Reagan tax cuts and started the whole thing back in 86. That was bipartisan. I mean, everywhere we turn, it’s bipartisan. It is bipartisan foreign policy, bipartisan economic neoliberalism that’s killing us.

Albert: I agree. In other words, you’re arguing a position and points which I agree with, right? And which Chomsky agrees with, you know, everybody who takes the view that in swing states, one should vote for the lesser evil in this case, with a gigantic evilness gap, so to speak. Everybody who, who, who is saying that, that I respect and agree with, agrees with you about all this other stuff, we just don’t understand how it leads to an act which could, could, just could elect Trump. I mean, last time around the reality is that in a few swing states, if Jill Stein had done what I’m suggesting, and if, and these are all ifs, I agree with you, and if the people who voted for Jill Stein, as a result voted for Hillary Clinton, holding their nose, furious, nauseous, going home and vomiting, nonetheless, it would have meant that Trump lost. It was enough votes. It’s just a fact. The numbers are there, right?

Hawkins: But you’re assuming her voters would have voted for Clinton in the absence of Stein? If they did, okay, but the fact is, we bring people to the polls who won’t vote for either party. 61% of Stein’s voters according to the exit polls would have stayed home if she wasn’t on the ballot. Others would have voted for somebody besides Clinton or Trump.

Albert: And if Howie Hawkins in those states, right, was using his considerable talents to explain, to consciousness raise, to explain to those Green Party supporters and Howie Hawkins supporters, that the current context is one in which doing that, doing what you’re saying Stein’s voters would have done, is a mistake, is a horrible, horrible mistake that would lead to tremendous dislocation and harm, if not total disaster, if Howie Hawkins was making that point, and Stein certainly wasn’t, I think he would be heard by those voters. The whole point is you, you’re able to bring them out. In other words, they respect you. They’re listening. They’re hearing. You can communicate with them. Howie, it seems to me, honestly, that in your life, there’s never going to be a moment at which you have more capacity, personally, as an individual, to impact history, then in this election in the manner I’m talking about. That’s how big the choice seems to me to be. Now it might be that we get to August and there’s no choice at all. It’s obvious, because Biden is destroying Trump or because vice versa. But if it’s close Your potential for doing something historic is immense. And you’re saying you don’t want to do that because you’ll lose a ballot line for the Green Party which you can get by a petition anyway. I can’t follow it.

Hawkins: Well, to the extent people have, you know, respect for what I’m saying it’s because I’m saying we need an alternative to these two capitalist parties.

Albert: Agreed.

Hawkins: So, if I stopped saying that, I lose some respect, I won’t have the influence I had.

Albert: But you don’t need to stop saying that.

Hawkins: Yeah. But if I’m saying vote for one of those parties, that’s an obvious contradiction.

Albert: Is it? Do you think Noam Chomsky lost the respect of leftists who don’t support either party because he said, you know…

Hawkins: Some people, yes.

Albert: They’re crazy. You know, somebody who would, who would lose their respect for you on these grounds. Good, Lord.

Hawkins: Well, you know, I think he’s lost some influence with some people. People who think, you know, going with that lesser evil strategy is wrong. And, you know…

Albert: And that’s why they quote him when they explain why they don’t support either of the two parties, which they do.

Hawkins: The people against the lesser evil quote him on that question.

Albert: Yeah, they quote him on, you know, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The two parties are two branches of one corporate party. Sure they would. I guess the bottom line is we have to agree to disagree, although I continue to have trouble understanding why, I really do.

Hawkins: Yeah, well, I know, no loss of friendship or disrespect. I mean, we’ve been debating this since 2004. So, you know, the thing I keep emphasizing when this comes up is we are going to demand that, and this is a demand on the Democratic Party because they could make this an issue. Get rid of the Electoral College, and go to a national popular vote…

Albert: Couldn’t agree more.

Hawkins: And, you know, the only time it came up a little bit was when Elizabeth Warren said we should abolish the electoral college about a year ago. And, you know, nobody’s picked it up. Not even Bernie Sanders. So, you know, the fact that people are focused on me, like you are on this question, gives me an opportunity to say, Well, okay, you want to solve this problem for good? Let’s have a national popular vote using ranked choice voting. That that’s something that, you know, Biden can avoid.

Albert: I agree. I mean, I absolutely agree. I just don’t think that what I’m suggesting, prevents that. I don’t even think it reduces …

Hawkins: I’ll grant you that a lot of people, if it is close in November, are going to accept your argument in swing states. And, but that’s not my role as candidate of the Green Party. You know, That’s not why they nominated me. So I’m not going to shame or scold people that make that choice when it comes to that. Although right now, I mean, Trump is hanging himself with this inept response to the Coronavirus crisis.

Albert: Have you seen his most recent polls?

Hawkins: The last ones I’ve seen is he’s losing the battleground states to Biden. And his favorables went up for a minute like people rallied around the president and then they saw what he was doing, and he went back down.

Albert: And it went back up yesterday or the day before it was back up to high forties again. It’s incredible. But I think there’s a reason for it. I mean, maybe we can talk about something different because I wonder how you think about this. I think that Trump is not an idiot. He’s almost a genius at the limited thing that he does, which is to lie and you know, all the rest of it in order to win. Just to win. And I think what he’s doing now, and I wonder what you think about this, because you travel around and you know, is that the reality is lots and lots of people are much more scared of unemployment, of hunger, of other diseases, of literally starvation, of the indignity of it all, than they are of the virus. And understandably, so I have a lot of sympathy for that. And Trump is trying to take advantage of that. And to put himself on the side of that. Of course, later, if it leads to a gigantic fiasco, he’ll say that he never supported it at all. But you know, he’s doing a reasonably good job of that. You pointed out a lot of things that the liberals should be saying, would you agree that they should be emphasizing really strongly that the economy collapsing is a serious issue, that the economy denying people income is a serious issue, it’s a world, you know, an incredibly important issue and therefore, the demand for raising unemployment insurance, the demand for giving people income while they’re out of work and all the other good demands have to be elevated far more strongly than they are. And that they should be appealing to those exact same crowds of people who are now asking, you know, to go back, to shut off the shut off, to open up the country. They should be appealing to those people saying you shouldn’t have to risk your life to get an income, you shouldn’t have to risk your life, you know, to get health care, those things should be provided and the obstacle is Donald Trump.

Hawkins: Well, where’s Biden? I mean, he’s not making those demands that there’s such an opportunity. I mean, Trump is telling people to go out and die for the Dow. And you know, the progressive Democrats have some good bills in there like cancel rent and mortgage payments. Cancel utility shut offs. Have the federal government pay those so that the small business sector doesn’t all go bankrupt, which is where half the jobs are, just like they’re doing that in Europe, where the hell is Biden? I mean, you got the platform. And he’s not saying that. He’s not supporting Sanders, you know, $2,000 per adult, and $500 per child. He’s not saying everybody needs COVID treatment, get covered by Medicare. That treatment is $35,000 If you go to hospital and up to $85,000, if you get on one of those ventilators. Where the hell is Biden? I mean, that’s – you are right – Trump, if that’s why he got a rebound, it’s because there’s no counter narrative.

Albert: I agree, and and therefore pushing on this, you, me, everybody, makes sense as well as on other things. I agree. But I am really scared that the left liberal and radical left is making almost exactly the same mistake as in 2016 when it says Trump should get annihilated, you know, Trumps should get annihilated, he’s gonna lose easily. It’s just not recognizing what he is appealing to, and how effectively he manages to do it. I know that sounds weird, but it is true.

Hawkins: Well, he lost the popular vote by 3 million in 2016. Let’s not forget that. And he had a unique situation with the electoral college which gave him the victory. There are a whole lot of factors. Black voter suppression was huge. And the Democrats haven’t been all that vigorous on that. And the electoral college. Those are the things – you know, to say we gotta support Biden in the swing states when they haven’t even fought for their own interests on those questions, you know, it’s not my responsibility.

Albert: Well I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree. I think your role is to advance the well being of the population and the world. I think we would agree on that. And your role is to, in that context, since you believe in the Green Party, which seems perfectly reasonable to me, to also advance Green Party policy and Green Party aims. I agree on that. What we disagree on is that I think stopping Trump is central to all those agendas. Far more so than your getting some more votes in swing states.

Hawkins: Yes, well, I have been saying the Democrats should impeach Trump a long time ago – and he has a mile long rap sheet – and they finally at the end chose the Ukraine extortion, abuse of power, and obstruction of Congress. But then when they presented the case it was more a national security issue about the proxy war in the Ukraine then Trump’s obstruction, and abuse of power. They gave him a get out of jail card.

Albert: Yes, it is insane. And now what’s Biden doing. He’s making believe that he is tougher on China than Trump. Okay. All insane. All disgusting. I mean how much worse can it be? How much more hypocritical, how much more decrepit – I mean I agree with you. I do Howie. But there is still a gigantic gap between a Trump second term in which he is just totally empowered, and we can see what he is willing to do to get a third term – and a Biden first term.

I guess one thing we have to hope for is that maybe Biden will pick Warren as Vice President, or maybe someone will impose on Biden Warren as Vice Presidential choice. I doubt it, but it is possible. She now leads all the polls. She very substantially leads all the other potential Vice Presidential candidates.

Hawkins: Yeah, that’s not surprising. The base of the Democratic Party is way more progressive than the leadership. That’s why Bernie Sanders,you know, people say he created this movement and in a way he gave voice to sentiments that were already there, like Medicare for all. I mean the polls have shown the people have wanted that in a majority going back to Truman. And Bernie was able to give voice to that and scare the hell out of the Democratic establishment, twice.

Albert: Yes, and its an incredible loss that he’s not the nominee. And it is very disturbing how that happened. I agree with you. Alright, well Howie, unless there is something else you want to add, something that we haven’t addressed or covered, and I admit, I apologize for focusing in on one main issue – but if there is something else you’d like to talk about now before we close it out, go right ahead.

Hawkins: I would just say, you know this Coronavirus – people don’t realize what a dangerous situation we are in. This is out of a family of viruses that includes the common cold for which we have never developed long-term immunity. So you can get infected but it is not clear you will have immunity for the long term, and we have no vaccine for. So we are in for a whole new world which means we gotta change how we work. OSHA should have personal protection equipment standard, emergency and then long term, so people can go back to work with some safety. And what that means for the economy – I mean this is a much more serious crisis than I think some people realize because they kind of think this is going to pass. That’s Trump’s gamble. He is sending people back to work and if this thing ramps up again – and it really hasn’t ramped down – it could blow up in his face. Worst is the number of people that are going to be made sick and die. And so, you know, I think we need to really think about how we are going to get out of this situation, or what it means for the way we gotta change not just how we live, but the system. I think we can’t go with the system we got where with the virus SARS 1, they stopped working on the vaccine when they suppressed that epidemic – and had they continued, that would have helped with developing a vaccine here. So, I am just saying we are in a very serious situation.

Albert: I think you are absolutely right. I have been far more afraid of this, I guess you might say, I don’t know what words to use – than a lot of folks. And I think you pinpoint the issue. The issue is the extent to which when you get the virus and you overcome it, you then have immunity. And we don’t know that that is the case, so that is a huge issue. And then the idea that we are going to have a vaccine in a year or a year and a half – I think the last successful vaccine took many many years – I heard forty. AIDS still doesn’t have a vaccine. So it’s not obvious that this won’t be with us in the same way the seasonal flu is with us, except that it is more virulent, it spreads faster, and it obviously is more damaging in the sense of killing people. So, I agree with you that it is worrisome, and then just ask yourself what it would be like, or I ask the audience to ask yourself, what it would be like to have Trump in office again, plus Corona returning, and him ridiculing science, ridiculing public safety, and, I don’t know, hunkering down in the basement of the White House or whatever he is going to do.

Hawkins: Yeah, and pitting every state against the rest instead of having a unified response. And pitting our nation against every other nation. I mean you couldn’t have a worse response.

Albert: Yes, it’s hard to imagine. Alright, Howie, thank you a whole lot for coming on. I really appreciate it and maybe we can do it again sometime later in the summer when things, I don’t know, hopefully shake out for the better. I guess we will see.

Hawkins: Yes, we will see and I would love to come back on and talk about it all some more.

Albert: Okay. That said, then, this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for RevolutionZ.

[Originally posted on ZNet. RevolutionZ is available on all the usual podcast hosting venues – Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, etc. It is also featured on ZNet where there is an archive of all past episodes as well as instructions for diverse means of access. RevolutionZ is also on Patreon and on its Patreon Page one can not only access episodes, but also contribute much needed support to the project. RevolutionZ focuses on vision for a new society and on strategies for winning change, so the archive’s early entries are just as relevant now as when initially recorded. Please give RevolutionZ a listen, make it known, and if you can, give us some support.]

“The situation is very disgraceful for all” – An Interview with Omar Vázquez Heredia

By: Omar Vázquez HerediaMay 22, 2020

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Omar Vázquez Heredia is a member of the Partido Socialismo y Libertad in Venezuela, and a professor at the Central University of Venezuela. He is the author of the book ‘La Cuestión Chavista. Estado Extractivista y Nación Petrolera’, the result of his PhD studies, where he presents a critical historical account of Chavismo regarding labor, agrarian, gender, settler-colonial and international relations issues.

This interview by members of Venezuelan Workers Solidarity was carried out in writing in the week of April 27th. An abridged version was requested by Momentum UK, but ultimately its leadership decided not to publish it.

What is happening with the quarantine in Venezuela?

Social distancing and home confinement measures were established as a collective national quarantine on March 17th. At the beginning they were applied with great levels of precision and strictness. However, because a majority of the Venezuelan population depends on informal sources of income, the government had to de facto, progressively, relax the quarantine and allow people to carry out commercial activities.

The quarantine has been a military and police rather than public health measure. Military and police presence had already taken on a much greater dimension over the last few years in Venezuela, but it increased even more with the declaration of a state of alert on March 17th. For instance, military and police agents on loudspeakers are the ones giving out day-to-day information in the streets and public spaces about the need to respect the rules and recommendations of social distancing and confinement at home, and who go around demanding the closure of businesses at 2 PM. This generates tension, because the Venezuelan military and police bodies, like the greater part of Latin American repressive bodies, have a long tally of violations of democratic freedoms and human rights.

On March 22nd, the government announced a set of compensative economic measures to accompany the national quarantine [that revolved around coverage of wages, cancellation of rents due, and direct assistance funds], but these are mostly rhetorical and insufficient, given their non-enforcement and the absence of funding for them.

The government’s payment of wages for workers in the private sector only guarantees coverage of the minimum wage; the prohibition on lay-offs is not enforced, and firings continue; rent is still charged; hyper-inflation had already put an end to financial credits so there are no banking debts due; the cancellation of public service charges is meaningless because these are already enormously subsidized; and finally, the distribution of direct aid funds and of CLAP food boxes is still arbitrary, sporadic and rationed.

How can we understand the intense precarity Venezuelans are living?

Well, the acute day-to-day Venezuelan precarity can be explained by the destruction of wages, the insufficient provision of public services, and the difficulties to buy imported medicines. For example, today, the minimum monthly wage and the food supplement decreed by the Maduro government amount to US $4.57 per the official exchange rate. However, the government also set the prices for 27 food staples that are part of the basic food basket, and those add up to $32.65. This is shameless. Even more obscenely, the monthly basic food basket as a whole is really priced at $199, as per the black market exchange rate that most Venezuelans actually employ.

[The destruction of the wage] is the reason for mass emigration and for the daily resignations of workers from their jobs, since working for wages in Bolívares does not allow one to afford the basic food basket. Many are abandoning formal employment for informal jobs that pay directly in US dollars. Some bosses are now handing out bonuses in dollars, sometimes of $20, $50 a week to keep those employees essential to their businesses. But these bonuses do not factor into the calculation of the legally required benefits beyond the wage, such as paid leaves and vacations, payments to social security, among others.

The Maduro government, under the Memorandum 2792 of October of 2018, has furthermore created a commission of control and tracking of collective bargaining agreements, to re-calculate the wages bargained between unions and bosses according to the State-decreed minimum wage.

At the same time, the government has legitimized the use of dollars for the sale of products and services between private agents in the market. And through the Petro [a crypto-currency used for State benefits schemes], it is now effectively valuing in dollars the fees required for State administrative services, such as the issuing of passports or fiscal registration of companies.

The situation of public services is very serious throughout the country, but it is much worse in regions more distant from Caracas. This is due to lack of maintenance, corruption, and the pauperized labor conditions that have emptied the public sector of qualified workforce.

I live in Caracas, and we only get running water at home two days a week. We store it because it sometimes comes with little or no pressure and does not go into or fill the water tank, and we ration it by using the water that comes from the washing machine to flush the toilet. We also have to save on using domestic gas from the cylinder, because when it runs out we have to wait until the next delivery from the local communal council. Garbage trucks no longer pass by our home as they used to, and trash piles up for days on the streets since there are less trucks circulating and their schedules and routes have been cut. Sometimes there are unscheduled rationing of electricity for several hours, especially outside the capital––alternating four hours with and without power.

The lack of access to medical treatments, imported medicines and surgical operations is very grave and despair-inducing. On social media, we constantly see fund-raising campaigns to ask for help for ill relatives who cannot cover medicines, or medical or surgical treatment. The situation is extremely exhausting, particularly for people with chronic ailments, and it is very disgraceful for all.

About two weeks ago [April 23], we saw the looting of food stores in cities in the peripheries of the country, such as Cumanacoa in Sucre state, and Upata in Bolívar, along with protests over food and gasoline throughout different regions. These events have not surprised me, but they do worry me. The quarantine has sharpened the hunger ailing the Venezuelan people, as evidenced by the latest report of the UN World Food Program, and this has produced food riots. This is troubling because it further shows the despair of the working class over the level of misery it is enduring.

Tuberculosis clinic at the Hospital Dr. José Ignacio Baldó, Caracas. Credit: Meridith Kohut for *The New York Times*, 2018

How and why did the public health system collapse in Venezuela, after so many years of praise to its reform and expansion of access to it through the famed Misiones? How does this collapse manifest?

The Chávez government established free healthcare initiatives by buying medical services from the Cuban state and creating a network of institutions that ran parallel to the public health system. But the State investment on the Misiones was never matched for the pre-existent system and hospitals, creating disparities and a discoordinated public healthcare system, which was left exposed to corruption due to the rise of clientelistic networks that distributed resources based on loyalty, without planning criteria based on empirical data on needs.

In the past few years, the Maduro government has de-funded the entire public health system, and reduced the number of Cuban medical doctors in the country. Those left have been concentrated in the Integral Diagnoses Centers [primary care], thus closing down the vast majority of the Barrio Adentro [medical outreach and community care] modules or reducing the activity of those left open.

We hear government spokespeople claiming budget increases for healthcare, but these are always tailing the enormous inflation rates. So in real and per capita terms, there has been a gigantic contraction of public investment in healthcare. We see hospitals without access to basic public services like water and electricity, with disabled surgery rooms and intensive care units, with broken medical equipment, without basic sanitary material or cleaning products. On top of this, there is a scarcity of qualified medical personnel; many of them have migrated because of the destroyed wages.

With a public health system in these conditions, the State has responded to the appearance of COVID cases in the country by subsuming healthcare centers into its national security, military and police politics. The government has arrested doctors, nurses and bioanalysts for whistle-blowing on the precarious situation of their workplaces. We can list a few cases: Rubén Duarte, nurse in Táchira state; José Molino, doctor in Monagas; Andrea Sayago, bio-analyst in Trujillo; Emily Márquez, nurse in Miranda state; and Yolimar and Carolina Alemán in Carabobo. The government has presented itself as the only agent authorized to present information on the COVID epidemic in the country, and its spokespeople have given out data that is not transparent.

How is it possible to undergo a quarantine in a setting of scarcities of water, electricity, gasoline, and medical materials and personnel?

The fulfillment of the so-called national collective quarantine as decreed by the Maduro government is unsustainable. The precarious state of public services forces people to crowd around irregular water sources, and in stores where drinking water is sold. Faced with the insufficient supply of water, people have enormous difficulties in maintaining personal hygiene and that of their homes.

The scarcity of sanitary equipment, such as face-masks, forces people to use their items well beyond their actual protective capacities; for instance, to use a disposable mask several times. Cotton and fabric materials are not washed with the needed frequency because of the water shortages; in many areas, water also runs with irregular smells and coloration.

The destroyed wages and the lack of efficient distribution of food and basic supplies make the quarantine unfulfillable. Members of the popular classes do not have savings or incomes to stay at home; they have to work in informal commerce or end up carrying out protests and riots for food, because they cannot cover their most basic needs with the minimum wage, which is the only wage being paid given the economic paralysis and the end of the system of dollar bonuses in private businesses.

April 24th Protests over food in Cumanacoa, Sucre State. Photo: Robert Alcalá

How do you characterize the crisis that began in 2014? How exactly do the sanctions of 2017 and 2019 worsen this crisis?

When he died, Chávez bequeathed his successor an economy with a foreign debt of over $250 billion, if we add the debts of the Government to those of the state oil company PDVSA. This amount would not include debts over the Joint Funds with China, or Russian financing for military weaponry and advisors. This foreign debt was mostly acquired between 2006 to 2012, and originates from several factors: financing capital flight [through uncontrolled subsidies to capital, mostly through the State currency exchange system], corruption, unsustainable or unplanned universal social policies, and high levels of private and State imports.

Pressed by this financial situation, Maduro took as his main priority the repayment of debt maturities and interests, cutting down the funding in dollars assigned to cover imports, and directing funds to pay foreign creditors. This, of course, is aggravated by the collapse of oil prices in 2015. The abrupt, unilateral reduction in imports, both of material for production, and of finished goods, created the ideal conditions for a contraction of the GDP, and, beginning in 2014, an inflationary spiral that eroded and destroyed the purchasing power of working class wages, becoming a hyper-inflation vortex in November of 2017.

After paying over $80 billion in foreign debt between 2013 and 2018, the Maduro government began an attempt to carry out a macro-economic adjustment program in August of 2018, the so-called Program of Economic Recovery, Growth and Prosperity, that involved tax exemptions for the [state and private capital] oil industry, waivers of customs’ taxes for imports, officializing the massive devaluation of the currency by pegging it again closer to the dollar, and a de facto elimination of price controls.

In the field of labor relations, it imposed the above-mentioned Memorandum 2792, which destroyed collective bargaining agreements and imposed new wage-scales, further intensifying the destruction of the purchasing power of working-class wages.

Sanctions have worsened the economic crisis, and amplified the negative effects of the austerity adjustments applied by the Maduro government. The financial sanctions of August of 2017 blocked any chance of restructuring foreign debt maturities or payment schedules, but they also increased the financial costs of State imports by limiting its access to international markets. To carry out purchases abroad, the State must carry out triangulations and assign contracts to the few agents still willing to do business with it despite possible sanctions.

The oil sanctions closed off the most important oil market for Venezuela, that of the U.S., and confiscated properties abroad that were sources of income to the State, such as the U.S. based CITGO oil refinery and distribution subsidiary of PDVSA. While exports to the U.S. were paid in cash, China takes exports as payment in kind of old debt acquired by Venezuela.

The oil embargo also pushes the State to export oil through Russia as an intermediary, which charges a commission for assuming the risk of sanctions. Costs of production also increase, since to access Asian markets, it is lighter oil, with a greater API gravity, that must be exported [meaning that the extra-heavy crude must be further refined].

Both types of sanctions increase the murkiness of financial and oil operations, facilitating greater corruption of the military and bureaucratic hierarchs of Chavismo.

How does the situation in Caracas differ from other regions in the country?

Unlike Chávez, Maduro and his government have not been able to build an active consensus around the dominant order and the State apparatus. Maduro and the military high command hold on to State power through repression exercised by military and police bodies, while shoring up social contention through the sporadic and rationed distribution of boxes of food through the Local Committees of Production and Supply, the CLAP.

They have organized their rule of the country as a series of concentric rings of security that have as their center the Presidential Palace in Miraflores and extend to the regions of the country. The closest you are to the center in Caracas, where the central offices of State institutions are located, the higher possibilities you have of accessing public services and CLAP boxes, although you are also subject to a more aggressive repression and permanent political control, because protests there are more dangerous in the government’s eyes.

On the other hand, when you live far from Caracas you have lower chances of accessing public services and CLAP boxes. In Margarita island, many receive running water once a month, experience daily power cuts, and only get one CLAP box every three months.

This has aggravated the internal colonialism characteristic of Venezuela, where Caracas has always consumed much more of the State oil income to the detriment of actual oil regions such as Zulia, Anzoátegui and Monagas. Maduro and the military high command, with their vision of national security and their parcelling of the country into strategic operations theaters, have deepened the historical breach between the caraqueño center and the regions understood as peripheries.

How is the crisis affecting the most oppressed sectors of Venezuelan society? Does it have any differential effect by gender, race, or ethnic origin?

This question would take up an entire interview, but trying to be brief, I can say that the most affected are the working class following the destruction of their wages and working conditions, along with the indigenous peoples that suffer the expansion of the extractive frontier with mega-projects such as the Orinoco Mining Arc and the exploitation of coal in the Perijá highlands, in which transnational capitals, irregular armed organizations, and military and civilian chavista hierarchs are entwined . These mining mega-projects seek to generate income in foreign currency to repay foreign debts and to purchase the loyalty of internal and international allies.

However, within the working class, it is the working woman in the popular sectors who is most affected. This is because of the immense increase in free labor she must provide for her family and home. Women are cutting down their food intake to keep the men and children fed. They migrate in precarious conditions to help their nuclear and extended families with remittances. The economic precarity facilitates the sexual commodification of their bodies. At the same time, their capacity to exercise choice over their bodies is lost, as contraceptives are inaccessible out of scarcity and high prices.

Economic difficulties deteriorate women’s’ right to education, and consolidate motherhood as the only life-horizon. The crisis intensifies the role of men as providers of material goods that reaffirm their patriarchal power over sexualized, maternalized female bodies. The decay of public services forces women to labor much harder to carry out caregiving at their homes and jobs.

How are capitalists and bureaucrats living the crisis?

I don’t live in an area close to capitalists and bureaucrats, but I am sure that they saved up dollars to buy and consume basic necessity goods, in quantity and quality, and in an opportune and adequate way. Capitalists can pay for electric generators or water trucks, live in neighborhoods with direct provision of cooking gas, and can bribe National Guards to get their gasoline tanks filled.

Bureaucrats have the State machinery at their disposal and enjoy it to access public services, gasoline, and food, along with dollars from import businesses and resource extraction. I think the bureaucrats only suffer from a fear of popular mobilization and protest whenever there are food riots and hunger protests. They only care if their continued control over the State is affected.

A nurse holds a placard reading “Worthy Salary” during a protest for the lack of medicines, medical supplies and poor conditions in hospitals, in Caracas on June 26, 2018. Credit: Federico Parra

What public policies are the main political poles proposing to confront the crisis?

At the beginning of the national collective quarantine, the government tried to acquire more foreign debt to cover the necessary investments and expenses to combat the pandemic, requesting $5,000 million from the International Monetary Fund. This was blocked by the United States and the right-wing Opposition.

Now, backed into a corner, it goes back to rehashing measures from before 2018, applying price controls for 27 basic necessities ––even though for the first time, it set prices in dollars–– in an attempt to distract and decompress the pressure of the food riots and protests. This is headed straight to failure, because without increases in the supply of products, reducing inflation is impossible.

The right-wing Opposition, subordinated to the U.S., follows the directions of the Trump government, and promotes the transition plans presented by State Secretary Mike Pompeo. It proposes a transition government without Maduro or Guaidó that, once legitimized, can request more foreign debt to supposedly cover investments and expenses of combating the pandemic, conserving social distancing, and staying at home.

From the left opposition, where the Socialism and Freedom Party [Partido Socialismo y Libertad, PSL] locates itself, we propose a national plan of imports of inputs of production and finished goods to increase the supply of products and achieve increases on the real wage, so that it really covers the basic basket. At the same time, we demand that State resources be directed to the public health system for purchasing basic sanitary material, as well as tests, ventilators, and other equipment necessary to confront the pandemic, along with the rehabilitation of ICUs and wage increases for healthcare workers.

The program we propose would be financed by confiscating the capital and wealth of corrupt bureaucrats and capitalists, eliminating the State’s expenses on repression and privileges, fully taking over the oil industry, applying a progressive tax reform, and suspending and repudiating re-payment of the foreign debt.

Class Struggle and Social Protest in the Coronavirus Pandemic

By: Dan La BotzMay 18, 2020

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

The United States has during the shutdown of the last two months suffered 90,000 deaths while 36 million workers have filed for unemployment, nearly 25 percent of the workforce. President Donald Trump now wants to restart the economy because he fears losing the November election if this Second Great Depression continues. Businesses are also anxious to make profits, and many unemployed workers want to earn wages—but they fear putting themselves and their families in danger. The fight for safe workplaces will become the driving force of activism in the coming weeks.

Throughout the pandemic, federal and state governments and public and private employers failed to protect workers’ health and their income. Essential workers who were forced to continue working without adequate safety and health protection either protested or walked off the job in hundred of mostly small, brief, and localized wildcat strikes. Some of these, like a small walkout at Amazon warehouse in New York, garnered publicity but failed to find a mass following. Others had a bigger impact.

Nurses and other hospital workers organized demonstrations to demand masks, gowns, and ventilators. Many nurses protested at their hospitals, but some from the National Nurses United went to the White House to demand that Trump invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) to order the production of masks, ventilators and coronavirus test kits. While there, in a moving tribute, they read the names of their coworkers killed by the virus. Federal and state governments and hospital managers responded by making greater efforts to provide supplies for workers.

Nurses were not alone. In mid March teachers threatened a sickout to force the closure of the New York Public Schools when Mayor de Blasio and and their own union, the United Federation of Teachers failed to do so,. In late April about 50 workers walked off the job at the Smithfield meatpacking plant in Nebraska over health and safety issues. The governor promised to bring testing and contact tracing to the plant. In Washington where there is a long history of worker strikes, hundreds of fruit packers struck for safer working conditions and hazardous duty pay.

Some unions have provided leadership. The Amalgamated Transit Union has supported bus drivers who have struck over health in Detroit, Birmingham, Richmond, and Greensboro. The Carpenters Union, which represents about 10,000 workers in Massachusetts, ordered its members to strike on April 5 over concerns about Covid-19 and did not end the strike until April 20.

Many unions issued statements calling for employers and government to protect their members and provided helpful information. And unions have also lobbied Congress. But in general they have not attempted to raise the level of class struggle as might be possible.

Some unions capitulated to reopening factories and resuming production, even though it is clear that it may put their members’ health at risk. As early as May 5 the United Auto Workers conceded that the company had the contractual authority to resume production in May in the GM, Ford, and Fiat-Chrysler plants, without strong guarantees of health protections.

The largest left organization, the Democratic Socialist of America, already active among nurses and teachers unions, joined forces with the United Electrical Workers Union known as the UE, and together they have created the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. EWOC is training hundreds of volunteer organizers to help workplace activists organize. DSA has also begun to organize a network of restaurant workers in several cities.

The pandemic and the shutdown have taken a toll, but they now provide an opportunity to rebuild the American labor movement from the bottom up. While the challenges will be great, working class resistance is growing and socialists with a rank-and-file strategy and class struggle perspective are involved in the fight.

A Mon Valley Memoir: Lessons From The Last Stand Of Steelworkers in Homestead

By: Steve EarlyMay 18, 2020

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Many younger radicals today are trying to figure out how to relate, personally and collectively, to the labor movement.

Should they seek union staff jobs and become agents of workplace change that way? Or should they organize “on the shop-floor” itself— as a teacher, nurse, or UPS driver—and then seek elected, rather than appointed, union leadership roles? Members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) discussed this latter strategy at DSA’s 2019 convention, narrowly passing a resolution in favor of it.

Other progressives, further down the rank-and-file road, are debating how they can hold union reformers accountable to the insurgent members who elected them. In some affiliates of the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association, left-led reform caucuses have continued to function, even after they helped oust old guard officials and replace them with new leaders more committed to membership mobilization and strike activity.

Fifty years ago, campus and community radicals who came of age in the 1960s grappled with the same strategy questions during their initial challenges to the labor bureaucracy. Some had the foresight to transition into rank-and-file activism in the education, healthcare, and service sectors, where college backgrounds were useful and job security good.

Under the guidance of left-wing parties and sects, other student radicals got jobs in steel mills, auto plants or coal mines, at the phone company or in the trucking industry. Unfortunately, in the late 1970s and 1980s, de-regulation, de-industrialization, and global capitalist restructuring produced enormous job losses. Many who made a “turn toward industry” lost any blue-collar union foothold they had briefly been able to attain.

As we learn in Homestead Steel Mill—the Final Ten Years (PM Press, 2020), ex-steel worker Mike Stout journeyed down the same path but it didn’t become a personal or political dead end. The author transitioned from labor to community organizing and then operated a cooperative print shop for more than twenty-five years.

He remains an active Pittsburgh-area environmentalist and, as a singer-songwriter with eighteen albums, has often used his music to promote social and economic justice. In his lively new memoir, Stout argues that younger activists still have much to learn from past rank-and-file struggles in blue-collar industries even if they are now entering workplaces in “a neo-liberal world where technology, globalization, and deregulation have fundamentally changed and reduced our industrial and manufacturing base.”

A Known Troublemaker

Stout found his way to the shop floor at a time when few unions were adding known trouble-makers to their payroll. He dropped out of the University of Kentucky in 1968 and joined anti-war protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later that year. He then become a singer-song-writer in Greenwich Village and a peace movement organizer. His brief “flirtation with a U.S. communist organization” turned out to be “short and sour,” but it did produce a solid job lead in western Pennsylvania.

In 1977, U.S. Steel was on a hiring spree at its massive Homestead Works, a hallowed labor history site ever since Andrew Carnegie deployed the Pinkertons to violently crush a strike there by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers in 1892. Ignoring Stout’s unusual (and probably sanitized) resume, the company made him a utility crane operator and dues payer in United Steel Workers Local 1397, already one of the most restive USW affiliates in the Monongahela Valley.

It was a decision that Homestead Works managers would later regret. Over the next decade, Stout helped turn his 7,000-member local into a key regional center for working-class resistance against the abuses of corporate power, by U.S. Steel and other firms. Through non-stop agitation, education and membership mobilization, Local 1397 also became a thorn in the side of top USW officials, located just a few miles away in the union’s national headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh.

As Stout’s memoir makes clear, the Homestead Works was not full of like-minded activists, all sharing the same high level of “working class consciousness.” His fellow “mill hunks” could be ornery, suspicious of outsiders, and, by contemporary standards, quite politically incorrect. Yet Stout was able to build lasting personal relationships with many of his co-workers that enabled him, over time, to earn their confidence, respect, and much-needed votes when he ran for union office.

Steel Workers FightBack

The reform struggle in Local 1397 got a big boost, even before Stout was hired at Homestead, from Ed Sadlowski’s national campaign for the USW presidency in 1976-77. Based in Chicago, Sadlowski was the reform-minded leader of USW District 31, which then represented about one tenth of the union’s 1.4 million members. Only thirty-nine years old at the time, Sadlowski broke with his older, more conservative colleagues on the USW executive board because of their overly-cozy relationships with the steel industry.

Sadlowski’s Steel Workers Fightback platform called for greater union democracy, shop floor militancy, protection of black workers’ rights, and the right to strike. Stout recalls how Local 1397 dissidents favored much of this program—and wanted to rid themselves of local officials “who took our dues money, refused to file legitimate grievances, and were nothing but lackey yes-man for management.” After Sadlowski’s defeat in February, 1977, his Homestead supporters formed a “Rank-and-File Caucus” to win control over the USW’s third largest “basic steel” local.

According to Pittsburgh labor educator Charlie McCollester, their shop floor newsletter (which is well illustrated in Stout’s book) became “a powerful expression of workplace democracy.” With poetry, songs, satirical cartoons, and muck-raking news articles, the dissident rag “unleashed the intellectual and artistic side of those who got their hands dirty” working around the open hearths of Homestead.

Homestead reformers were led by Ronnie Weisen, an always combative former boxer. In 1979, they won a landslide victory over long-time incumbents, overcoming vicious red-baiting and other international union efforts to discredit them. Under Weisen’s colorful but volatile leadership, the Homestead local became “a fighting organization on behalf of the members,” with much help from Stout.

Enforcing the Contract

Local 1397’s more combative stance took multiple forms. Inside the mill, Stout reports, “workers demonstrated a hundred different ways you could oppose unsafe working conditions and unjust management treatment on the shop floor, with or without a grievance procedure.” In the past, Local 1397 officials had not been aggressive enforcers of the contract. In fact, when “workers filed hundreds of grievances and complaints, mainly about local working conditions and discipline, most grievances would make it to the third step…and then just disappear.”

After Stout became an elected “griever,” that quickly changed, thanks in no small part to work by members themselves. Much to the chagrin of Homestead supervisors, rank-and-filers were welcomed into labor-management meetings for the first time. They played an active role in gathering evidence necessary to win grievance and arbitration cases—and they were empowered to argue these cases on their own behalf. More than anything else, Stout’s creative use of the grievance system restored confidence in the union and produced concrete results, in the form of back pay and other financial settlements worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But such militancy from below could only go so far. Just as 1397 was flexing its new union muscles, U.S. Steel’s corporate re-structuring and downsizing put enormous pressure on USW headquarters to save jobs by making industry-wide contract concessions. In contrast, Local 1397 leaders felt that job cuts and give-backs could only be countered by building new community-labor alliances away from the shop-floor.

Steelworkers from Homestead helped form the Tri-State Conference on Steel, an “ecumenical coalition” that spawned the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, which provided direct aid to displaced workers. They also backed the Steel Valley Authority (SVA), which tried to get municipalities, in Ohio and Pennsylvania, to use their power of eminent domain to arrest capital flight and maintain local manufacturing under public ownership.

Community-Labor Campaign

The ensuing campaign utilized not only litigation, but also militant protests, press conferences, grassroots fund-raising, bank boycotts, and political action, which included Stout’s own nearly successful run for the state legislature. But it was no easy task trying to work effectively with a sprawling and often contentious network of community leaders, state and local elected officials, sympathetic academics, clergy members and laid off workers.

In the end, Stout and his comrades were up against external forces too powerful to overcome. Nearly a century after Andrew Carnegie broke the original craft union at Homestead, the same mill closed for good, putting its industrial union successor out of business. “In the Mon Valley alone,” Stout writes, “over 27,000 U.S. Steel employees lost their jobs.” While the company was scaling down at home, it ramped up steel production abroad. It also shifted investment into oil extraction and real estate.

Mill modernization under “worker-community ownership” would only have become more economically viable, as an alternative, with large scale federal funding, as part of a comprehensive national industrial policy. As Youngstown labor lawyer Staughton Lynd notes in his Afterword to Homestead Steel Mill, this was definitely not part of President Jimmy Carter’s agenda. It was even less likely to happen after Carter was defeated by conservative Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, with the help of votes from more than a few disillusioned USW members.

Instead, Mon Valley towns like Homestead got decimated, and many steel worker families were uprooted or impoverished. According to Charlie McCollester, this experience of “collective suffering and governmental failure engendered a deep working-class bitterness that haunts our politics to this day,” particularly during a 2020 presidential election in which the “rust belt” remains contested terrain.

Stout concludes his memoir with an important message for younger activists about the need to “radically restructure unions to meet the challenges of today.” He warns that, “without democracy and the direct day to day involvement of their members, unions will not survive the current right-wing, corporate onslaught that aims to dismantle and destroy them.”

The dynamics of late-twentieth century capitalism may have rendered the project of labor radicals like Mike Stout impossible at the time, but their socialist vision remains highly relevant to modern-day efforts to re-build working class power. Hopefully, readers of Stout’s book who have picked up that torch will be able to write a happier ending to their own generation’s labor organizing story.

Socialist Organizing in the Era of COVID-19

By: Jessica Hansen-WeaverMay 17, 2020

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This is the transcript of a talk originally given on April 4, 2020 as part of an online meeting titled “Coronavirus, Crisis and Class Struggle,” co-sponsored by New Politics.

I work in public health in San Francisco, providing specialty mental healthcare to people living in public housing. My employer is UCSF, which is the largest healthcare provider in the Bay Area and is currently the primary provider for COVID-19 patients in the city. The people that I work with are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19 and survive on Social Security and disability benefits in what is the most expensive city for rent.

I want to start by talking a bit about the mental health impacts of the pandemic and the economic crisis by saying, first, that we should expect a rapid increase in people experiencing depression and anxiety and trauma. More than ten million people filed for unemployment in the last two weeks of March in the United States. This figure will continue to grow and we will see a whole set of public sector layoffs coming after the new budgets are passed. Not knowing how you will pay rent or how you will afford food is very traumatic, and we’re having to cope with this new normal while physically distancing ourselves from the people we care most about.

Human connection is just as important as food, water, and shelter, and when people are increasingly living alone, and now sheltering in place, this lack of connection contributes to a variety of potential diseases and mental-health conditions. Depression is the leading cause of disability globally, and we should expect this trend to continue as more people’s lives are spent alone and afraid. I think that what is required is physical distancing, not social isolation, and I think you really have to find ways to reach out and stay connected to people.

Those of us deemed essential workers must go through a daily risk assessment every time we leave our homes. Many of us will already have had coworkers die, family members infected and sick, and have little time to mourn their losses before we have to get back to work.

All of these factors are likely to increase suicide rates that were already at a high point in the United States before the pandemic. With no clear end point in sight, we’re trapped in a state of hyper-vigilance, trying to prepare for the worst while not knowing what is going to happen next. Needless to say, this is all very bad for our health, and we will all have to work very hard to take care of our mental health.

While it is certainly true that COVID-19 as a virus does not discriminate, the impacts of COVID-19 do, as other speakers have said. Those who are most vulnerable, marginalized, and oppressed, will bear the greatest burden of disease. People who experience systematic racism, poverty, and mental illness, are more likely to have compromised immune systems, be exposed to air pollution, and find themselves in institutions due to the lack of a social safety-net that has left them isolated, marginalized, and disenfranchised.

Right-wing politicians have suggested that either we save the economy, or we save human beings. Under capitalism, people who aren’t able to sell their labor power are considered surplus because capitalists cannot find a way to exploit them profitably. Millions of people fall into this category, whether it’s due to aging, disability, incarceration, etc. And these institutional sites are now hotspots for COVID-19 mortality and spread.

Just as an example, my aunt is an occupational therapist at a skilled-nursing facility here in the Bay Area, where ten other occupational therapists have tested positive. At many of these sites, the infection rates are upward of 50 percent among patients, and her employer actually asked her and others to return to work within a week of testing positive. So, there’s very little regulation and poor workplace safety requirements.

The pandemic is putting a magnifying glass on how incompatible the capitalist system is with providing for human needs. The U.S. government has shown that it is capable of printing trillions of dollars out of thin air to bail out corporations, yet for the past 50 years we’ve been told that funding for social welfare, public housing, and public education must be cut because they’re a drain on our resources. As long as healthcare, housing, and food are commodities rather than universal rights, social inequality will continue to define who lives and who dies.

Even countries with more robust social-welfare states have struggled to respond to COVID-19, largely due to neoliberal cuts to welfare spending and a basic lack of planning or preparation for a pandemic. The manufactured scarcity of ventilators, safety equipment, and testing has led to nightmare situations across the globe, where overwhelmed doctors are tasked with the ethics of rationing life-saving care.

The Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care developed formal guidelines on the ethics of rationing care. Informed by the principle of maximizing benefits for the largest number, the authors suggest “the allocation criteria need to guarantee that those patients with the highest chance of therapeutic success will retain access to intensive care.” This means that those who need the most care will receive the least, and those who have experienced more hardship in their lives are deemed less likely to respond well to treatment.

Disability rights groups have challenged rationing guidelines in states like Alabama, Kansas, Tennessee, and Washington that actually allow doctors to withhold care from people with disabilities. Alabama’s emergency operation plan, for example, says that “persons with severe or profound mental retardation … are unlikely candidates” for life-saving care if there is a shortage of supplies like ventilators.

As some of the other speakers have said, it’s going to be a very, very hard crisis. The silver lining to all this is that without struggle there is no progress. People are being forced into struggle by this crisis. People are organizing rent strikes for the first time. We have already seen a number of successful wildcat strikes. People are finding creative ways to maintain their humanity amidst the pandemic by reclaiming their labor power to fight for demands like sick leave, hazard pay, workplace safety, which are demands that strengthen the entire working class.

Class tensions have been sharpened since the last economic crisis, and I think we can say that we’re in a better position as a left today that we were in 2008-9. The subsequent mass revolts have radicalized and organized millions of people, so we’re not starting from scratch. A socialist movement is being revived, and people are watching in real time how the capitalist system drives their lives into chaos again and again. Not to mention that there is an entire generation of zoomers—Generation Z—who will be further radicalized by the way capitalism is shaping their horizons.

So, what are some of the immediate questions and demands that are presented by this pandemic? Obviously, what people mentioned, there are immediate demands around redistribution of resources that need to be implemented to stem the spread of COVID and hopefully prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

People may have seen General Electric workers walked out and protested to demand that their idle factories be used to produce ventilators.

In San Francisco, socialist supervisor Dean Preston started housing homeless people in vacant hotel rooms out of his own pocket, but then put pressure on the Board of Supervisors to now contract with hotels to house healthcare workers and homeless people who have tested positive and need to quarantine. We should be demanding that local governments expand this and house all people who need to shelter in place.

There are a ton of important legislative reforms that we need to win that people have mentioned, including sick leave; moratoriums on evictions, foreclosures, utility cutoffs; debt forgiveness; the suspension of ICE and CBP enforcement; permanent protections for Medicare and Social Security.

All of this, I think, puts the question of labor strategy at the forefront. Many of these reforms will be won within unionized workforces that can push for class-wide demands like hazard pay, sick leave, workplace protections.

But our labor organizing is going to have to be focused also on organizing the unorganized. As we’ve seen with Amazon and Instacart workers, there is a genuine desire to fight and to get organized. Many of these workers will want to form unions. Many of them will need to continue to break the rules, challenge the authoritarianism of their bosses, and many of them will want to join a socialist movement.

With shelter-in-place orders and physical-distancing enforcement, we have to get creative in our tactics. But that doesn’t mean that we can abandon in-person protests altogether. We have seen the successful press conferences organized by nurses and hospital workers, who are able to get their voices out into national news and put pressure on politicians to respond. We’ve seen neighborhoods around hospitals showing solidarity with nurses and hospital workers.

I think we have to think about if there’s a way to connect the car-honking protest with the workplace actions, with neighborhood support. What happens when schools start in the fall? How do we build solidarity between those on the frontlines and those who are staying home?

There’s also the question of who will pay for the pandemic. Unfortunately, the stimulus bill—dubbed by Jeremy Scahill as a “Reverse Robin Hood”—provides very little for the 99 percent and gives trillions to corporations, which will contribute to greater inequality. So, we’re going to have to fight for a people’s bailout in opposition to this corporate giveaway, focusing on providing relief to those who need it most.

As I mentioned, in July we’re likely to see a lot of layoffs in the public sector. Budgets will be looking to reduce their workforces to only the most essential and productive, so we’ll continue to see austerity in many cities.

And we also have a presidential election in November. I think most people have accepted that the DNC has been successful in making sure that Bernie will not be the presidential nominee, and I think the pandemic will contribute to demoralization and lesser-evilism, as Bernie will likely support Biden against Trump, like the rest of the Democratic Party. However, we should still demand safe voting practices to allow the greatest participation possible. And we should not let lesser-evilism undermine the independent organizing efforts that will be necessary to survive this pandemic.

In the Bay Area, some of the local election campaigns have shown a real opening for left politics. These are opportunities to get explicitly socialist programs into mass politics and build a link between formal politics and the social struggles and movements. I think the DSA is positioned to be able to take advantage of these opportunities in many cities.

I think we also have to say that social reproduction will be a key site of struggle for the future. In California, Gavin Newsom is pumping public funds into recruiting nurses and med students into a statewide health corps. As people have mentioned, the struggle around healthcare will have lasting effects on our ability to get Medicare For All and determine how prepared we are for the next crisis.

The restaurant industry has been effectively shut down and forced to transform itself to survive COVID. And, just an example, in San Francisco there’s been what’s called a San Francisco New Deal, where the tech industry is funding restaurants to provide free meals to the most vulnerable in San Francisco. Again, this shows what is possible—that it’s possible to organize food differently to meet human needs.

We’re already seeing drastic cuts in public transit due to shelter-in-place orders, and politicians will use this as an excuse to lay off workers, no doubt. And we have to continue to fight for the right to the city.

In the fall, families and students are going to have to fight around the normalization of distance learning and online education as replacements for social pedagogy. We’ve already seen the impact that teachers have had on mass consciousness and we’re likely to see that wave continue through the healthcare and other public sectors.

Capitalism has been exposed once again as a system that benefits the one percent at the expense of the rest of us and the planet. There are many links between climate change and the pandemic. State-subsidized agribusiness and factory farms, and the encroachment of urbanization and industry into the wild, create greater opportunities for viruses to develop and spread from animals to humans.

Rosa Luxemburg popularized the slogan “Socialism or Barbarism” to describe the challenge for revolutionaries in a period of world war, colonization, and expansion of the extractive industries. Today this slogan is still relevant for those who believe another world is possible and who want to be a part of dismantling the capitalist system.

Lastly, I would just say that the first step right now is to get organized, whether that’s in your local DSA chapters, unions, neighborhood councils. I just joined the DSA in San Francisco because of the national response that DSA had around COVID-19. The DSA is a national organization but it needs to be democratized, diversified, and to expand the bulk of its activities beyond the ballot box. But I think we have a real chance to get serious about mobilizing the people that are organized, organizing the unorganized, and fighting for a better future.

The working class before the current crisis

Other worker movements

The Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020

The effect of the coronavirus crisis on workers

Workers take action

The left organises

And mutual aid?

And rent strikes?

Resurgence of the movement against police violence

Future prospects

The fiscal crisis of government at all levels

What about unemployed organising?

The Trump administration

Why Postal Jobs Matter

Pandemic Conditions

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