A Zionist State at Any Cost

By: Samuel FarberApril 28, 2020

The foundation of Israel is tied up with David Ben-Gurion, its first prime minister. Through examining his life, we see how Israel’s creation was from its beginnings doomed to create an apartheid-like state maintained by an oppressor nation.

Review essay of Tom Segev, A State at Any Cost. The Life of David Ben-Gurion, translated by Haim Watzman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) was a key figure in the creation and building of the State of Israel, second in importance only to the founder of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, and central to the establishment of Zionism as the hegemonic politics and ideology of Jews everywhere. He was Israel’s first prime minister from its foundation in 1948 until he retired from political life in 1963 (with a brief hiatus from 1953 to 1955.)The Ben-Gurion that emerges from Tom Segev’s A State at Any Cost is a single-minded figure obsessively dedicated to the creation of the Jewish State in Palestine. He was not, Segev notes, a man of ideas interested in the development of Zionist theory, but a ruthless political and organization man willing to risk everything to accomplish his state-building goal.

He pursued this even if it meant sacrificing the lives of Jews, let alone those of the Palestinians. Segev cites him telling members of his MAPAI party in the late thirties: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second.”

Richly and comprehensively portrayed by Tom Segev, one of the “new historians” challenging Israel’s founding myths, this new biography of David Ben-Gurion presents the history of Zionism and the shaping of the state of Israel through the life and times of its most important founder and political leader. Segev’s critical biography exposes many of the most fundamental problems of Zionism from its beginning. The foundation of the Zionist state is tied up with Ben-Gurion; through examining his life, we see in stark relief how the creation of Israel was from its beginnings incompatible with the creation of a democratic binational state composed of Jews and Palestinians, and the project of Israeli state-building was always doomed to turn Israel into an oppressor nation.

Ben-Gurion’s Zionist Politics and Practice

According to Segev, Ben-Gurion (born David Yosef Gruen) was a Zionist since childhood. Born in Plonsk, a Polish town of 8,000 people with a strong Jewish presence, he grew up in a Jewish middle-class family. His father, a self-employed legal aide, was an early activist in the budding Zionist movement in Poland.

Ben-Gurion left for Palestine in 1906 at age twenty, but unwilling to devote himself to working the land, he left. First, to study at the University of Istanbul — although he never acquired a university degree there or anywhere else, a source of a profound sense of personal inferiority throughout his life — periodically visiting Poland, and then ending, with the onset of World War I, in the United States. Always and everywhere, he was involved in political organization work on behalf of the creation of the Jewish State, and he finally settled in Palestine in the early 1920s where he emerged as a preeminent leader of the Histadrut, a Zionist union that would also become a huge Zionist economic enterprise.

Within the Zionist context, Segev writes, Ben-Gurion considered himself a socialist of sorts, in the sense of aiming to construct a welfare state that assured a minimum standard of living for Jews. Like many of his Jewish contemporaries, he had been impacted by the Russian Revolution. Segev describes him as referring often to his attendance at the sixth anniversary of the Russian Revolution celebrated in Moscow’s Red Square on November 7, 1923 as a representative of the Histadrut.

Echoing the revolutionaries in early twentieth-century Russia who thought the Russian bourgeoisie unable to lead in the struggle to overthrow tsarism and establish a democratic republic, Ben-Gurion’s socialism held, along with many Zionist pioneers, that the Jewish bourgeoisie, driven by their individual, private interests, could not be trusted to build the strong Jewish state he was pursuing in Palestine. However, as Zeev Sternhell argues in his Founding Myths of Israel, Ben-Gurion was most of all a nationalist for whom socialism was a strategy for mobilization and nation-building. His admiration for Lenin did not stem from a substantive revolutionary politics but rather from his determination and iron will in pursuit of his political goals. (He also admired Churchill.)

As a committed “centrist” in the Zionist movement, Ben-Gurion ruthlessly fought against the Bund, the secular Jewish socialist labor movement, while in Poland, and against Communists and left-wing Zionists as well as against Jabotinsky’s and Begin’s right-wing Revisionists in Palestine. And he fought them, writes Segev, as the relentless ferocious political operator he was, ready to eliminate whoever he considered politically undesirable, leading Segev to brand him a “non-Communist Zionist Bolshevik.”

Ben-Gurion was combatively intolerant of disagreement with his own political associates, sometimes out of calculation and sometimes due to the loss of his self-control. “His manner of speech is simply inhuman.” Segev cites Moshe Sharett, a one-time Israeli prime minister and leading member of Ben-Gurion’s government, “If you agree with him eighty percent and differ twenty percent, or agree with his main point and argue a minor part, or agree in general but differ on a specific detail — he immediately focuses all his fervor on that twenty percent, that minor point, or that detail, and the altercation is so powerful that it is as if the dispute were over one hundred percent.” Sharett added that “you never manage to get out a complete sentence with him. He immediately interrupts, latches onto a word he doesn’t like, confronts and rages.”

Like all Zionists, Ben-Gurion’s Zionism was premised on the belief that antisemitism was a permanent and inevitable feature of the human condition, and that the only solution to this problem was to create a Jewish State in Palestine. He held on to this conception throughout his life, allowing only for one exemption: the United States. It is worth noting, though Segev does not explore this issue, that Ben-Gurion held on to this view — notwithstanding the fact that especially before World War II, antisemitism was rife within the United States.

And when American antisemitism substantially diminished after the end of the war, Ben-Gurion seems to have also ignored that fact, which would have forced him to consider the role that the postwar changes in the socioeconomic conditions of the American Jewry played in it. His disregard for these historically bound conditions was consistent with his Zionist view of antisemitism as an inevitable part of the human condition.

What Segev does note, however, is that for Ben-Gurion, as it had been for Herzl, antisemitism was perversely a great ally to Zionism, with every manifestation of antisemitism becoming a “boost” to Zionism. This did not mean that Zionist leaders actively encouraged antisemitism, but it did mean a certain degree of resignation to it as inevitable and a repeated willingness to make deals with antisemites, if Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders saw it as beneficial to the Zionist project.

As the hard Zionist he was, Ben-Gurion stood for the territorial expansion of a Jewish state. At the 1937 Zionist congress in Zurich, he declared that “our right to Palestine, all of it, is unassailable and eternal” and that he was “an enthusiastic advocate of a Jewish state within the historical boundaries of the Land of Israel.” Thus, as Segev notes, the proposal for the territorial extension of Israel beyond the Green Line (demarcating Israel’s boundaries before the 1967 War) was not the monopoly of the right-wing Revisionists, but was shared by both “right” and “left” Zionists, Ben-Gurion included. Thus, Ben-Gurion’s reputation as a “liberal” Zionist rests on his greater pragmatism than the more hawkish right wing led by Jabotinsky and Begin, the welfare state created under his rule, and his secularism, which however did not prevent him from making major concessions to the religious Jews at a time when they were far weaker than today.

Regarding Ben-Gurion’s expansionist views, Segev presents a detailed narrative of how in 1954, under the rule of Ben-Gurion’s Mapai (an earlier version of the Labor Party), the IDF General Staff’s Planning Department produced a study titled “Nevo,” upholding the need to expand Israel’s Green Line borders for various economic, social, and demographic reasons and presenting several alternatives for such expansion. The most ambitious proposal involved setting back Egypt’s border to the far end of the Sinai Desert, preferably on the bank of the Suez Canal; taking parts of Saudi Arabia in the South, and if possible allow Israel to control the Arabian oil fields; taking over Syrian lands; and setting the border with Jordan far east of the Jordan River, a proposal which, incidentally, would have covered a territory substantially larger than the one currently controlled by Israel.

Thus, “Nevo” demonstrates that while Israeli governments always attempted, with varying degrees of success, to justify territorial expansion in the context of grave moments of crisis, such plans had been prepared by the Isareli government long before the crises erupted.

No Future for Coexistence

At the same time, Segev notes, Ben-Gurion was a tough-minded realist well aware that, like the Zionist Jews, the Palestinians wanted their nation in Palestine too, and that they would not simply fold their hands and agree to give up their land to the Jews. From Ben-Gurion’s point of view, there could be no future for Arab-Israeli coexistence within the same territory. So, his plans sought to expand Israeli territory into areas populated by a minimum of Arabs in it.

This explains his initial opposition to Israel going to war in 1967, because it would mean ruling over lands entirely populated by Arabs and what he knew would be Arab hostility to the Zionist project. But as Segev indicates, Ben-Gurion was soon “swept up by that ecstasy produced by the victory and conquests” and began to advocate a clearly expansionist program, particularly when it argued for Israeli control of the Gaza Strip with its inhabitants being moved to the West Bank with Israeli assistance and supposedly with their consent, and negotiations with inhabitants of the West Bank to establish an autonomous entity tied to Israel economically, with an outlet to the sea through Israeli ports although with the presence of Israeli troops to “guarantee the West Bank’s independence from Jordan.”

His same notion of minimizing the Arab Palestinian presence also explains the central role he played, according to Segev, in the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their land in the 1948 war. It was the work of Segev and other Israeli “new historians” that exploded the Zionist myth, although Palestinians were of course already well aware of it, that on the eve of the declaration of the state of Israel Palestinian Arabs, had abandoned their homes, towns, and villages of their own free will heeding the calls and exhortations of their leaders.

In fact, as Segev has shown, most Palestinians were forcefully expelled by the Haganah (Jewish Israeli Army) or ran away terrorized and in fear for their lives due to the threats and actions of the Jewish forces. That included, in Segev’s long and detailed list of examples, the Palestinian neighborhoods in the lower part of the city of Haifa, where the Haganah “was bombarding them from the upper slope of Mount Carmel with mortar fire.” It also included the forceful expulsion by the Israeli Army of the Palestinians from their conquered town of Lod; the expulsion of Palestinians from the Christian village of Iqrit.

Segev shows that Ben-Gurion generally approved these actions, and that he also insisted, during a truce in the 1948 war, on restarting the hostilities as an opportunity to “clean” the Galilee of the 100,000 Palestinians who had sought refuge there.

In spite of its tendency to altogether avoid dealing with the existence of the Palestinians in Palestine, the Zionist movement had on occasion discussed the possibility of removing or “transferring” them out of the boundaries of the Jewish state. As early as June 1895, Herzl, in line with his diplomatic and “realpolitik” outlook, had come out in support of transferring, “discreetly and circumspectly,” the Arabs out of Palestine. Zionist leaders such as Aharon Zizling advocated in 1937 a transfer based on a “real population exchange” of Palestinians for the Jews of Iraq and other Arab countries.

Such proposals never considered why Palestinian Arabs would want or need to leave their land, even voluntarily. Prominent Zionist figures like Golda Meir and Berl Katznelson did not object in principle to the transfer notion but considered it unfeasible.

Whether Zionist leaders considered the transfer of Arabs practical or not, few considered the possibility of its leading to an Israeli-style apartheid system that we see today in Israel-Palestine. One exception was Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin who in 1941 explicitly argued that any attempt to create a Jewish state before there was a Jewish majority in Palestine would result in a Zionist apartheid.

Pointing out that in South Africa whites were only 20 percent of the population and that the remaining 80 percent were blacks who had no rights at all, he questioned whether the Zionist movement should stand for having the Jewish 20 percent of the total population ruling the whole of Palestine. He confronted Ben-Gurion’s call for the creation of a Jewish state as the first priority, and conferring equal rights to the Arabs, and transferring those voluntarily agreeing to it, arguing it was contradictory and unrealistic. As he put it, “it is impossible.”

Ussishkin insisted that Zionist goals in the proximate future had to focus on large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine instead of creating the Jewish state (Ussishkin was so fixated in avoiding the possibility of a South African–type apartheid system in Palestine that he never considered his own proposal could have led to an oppressor Zionist state close to the US model of white/black and particularly white / Native American power relations.)

Segev also documents how Ben-Gurion’s Zionism clearly and unambiguously precluded any possibility of turning Israel into a binational state, a free and independent state of Palestine/Israel or of Israel/Palestine, based on the coexistence of two equal peoples, with national and cultural rights and autonomy safeguarded for both. As in the case of the multinational state of Canada (comprising the indigenous nations, immigrants of various national origins, and the far more numerous French- and English-speaking Canadians), such a state would require a long process of struggle to ensure that the rights of the oppressed national groups are vindicated in deed as well as in the laws of the country.

Ben-Gurion concentrated his vitriol on the German Jewish liberals who supported binationalism, such as Martin Buber, whom he attacked by questioning his loyalty to Judaism and accusing him of having the psychology of a servant. Branding binationalism as treasonous, Ben-Gurion warned its advocates that by reaching “an agreement with the Arabs, you will be in Hitler’s camp.”

The binationalist proposals were intended to create a bridge to the Palestinian Arabs violently resisting a Zionist emigration to Palestine characterized, among other things, by the Jewish settlers’ poor treatment of Arab labor, the purchase of land that led to the ejection of Arab tenant farmers from their land (who Segev claims sometimes were paid compensation and sometimes not), the marginalization if not exclusion of Arab labor from the labor market in agriculture and industry through Zionist labor policies seeking to hire Jewish labor only, and the barring of those Arabs able to get work from joining the Histadrut, the Israeli labor federation, until 1959, and from voting in its elections until several years later.

To combat the Palestinian Arab resistance, Ben-Gurion had been advocating since the 1930s a policy of “aggressive self-defense” that included driving Arabs out of Palestine. Although at some point, in his position as defense minister, which he held simultaneously with his being prime minister, he stated that in pursuit of the goal of peace, the Israeli government had to “gain the hearts of the Arabs.” But he insisted that “there is only one way that we can teach them to respect us. If we don’t blow up Cairo, they will think that they can blow up Tel Aviv.”

Ben-Gurion’s Pragmatism

However, when it came to dealing with international forces, Ben-Gurion’s tough, uncompromising Zionist stance morphed into a totally pragmatic, nonconfrontational position aimed at wresting and negotiating whatever he could from the powers that be. It was this pragmatism, writes Segev, which led Ben-Gurion to take the long view and accept the relatively small piece of land that the United Nations had assigned to Israel in the 1947 Partition Plan.

From Ben-Gurion’s perspective, this was the “half a loaf” that could be made to rise and grow as future circumstances allowed. Thus, when Israel’s “Declaration of Independence” was drafted in 1948, he insisted and prevailed by a vote to five to four in the committee preparing the statement that the Declaration omit any reference to the country’s borders thus leaving the possibility of future expansion open without having to confront major foreign powers and international opinion.

His tactics worked: when in 1948 Israel conquered and annexed a much larger territory than what the United Nations had originally granted to the new Jewish state, the international powers accepted that expansion as an outcome of war — something they would not have been able to do so easily had Israel announced explicitly and in advance its expansionist intentions.

Ben-Gurion, observes Segev, kept his ear to the ground and followed very closely the international relations of forces, especially those involving Washington. He ended up paying a high price in those occasions when he mistakenly ignored or downplayed the pressures coming from those powers, as in 1956, when the Eisenhower administration forced Israel and its senior partners England and France to beat a retreat from their military adventure against Egypt to punish Nasser for nationalizing the Suez Canal.

His pragmatism explains much of the hypocritical dissembling he showed when questioned about delicate political issues that could cost international support for Zionism. At a dinner with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and the American diplomat William Bullitt, he piously responded to the diplomat’s 1942 proposal to expel all Arabs from Palestine in order to establish a Jewish state that there was no need to deport the Arabs, because Palestine was economically capable of supporting both Arabs and Jews.

While Segev does not elaborate on this exchange, Ben-Gurion must have known that to have publicly agreed to a plan to expel Arabs from Palestine in 1942 would have been a political and public relations disaster. It was precisely this cautious, diplomatic, and even virtuous discourse that characterized mainstream Zionist pronouncements for foreign consumption, particularly before the foundation of Israel and during the early years of its existence.

That is also what I believe motivated Ben-Gurion’s response, in 1931, to the small group of well-known professionals and intellectuals of Brit Shalom advocating for a binational state and critical of Ben-Gurion’s policies aimed at creating a Jewish majority, emphasizing his supposed concern about the Palestinians: “according to my moral outlook, we do not have the right to discriminate against even one Arab child, even if such discrimination would obtain for us all that we seek.”

Racial and Ethnic Horizons of Ben-Gurion’s European Zionism

Situated in a European context that regarded the Palestinian Arabs as socially and culturally alien, Zionist thought not only avoided discussing them, but even tended to negate their existence by talking about Palestine as an empty land, along the lines of Israel Zangwill’s 1901 motto “Palestine is a country without a people and the Jews are a people without a country,” an example of what social psychologist Leon Festinger called “cognitive dissonance” (an attempt to seek internal consistency by negating or distorting a reality that may create dissonance).

Far from trying to integrate itself in the Arab world, the Jewish state, according to Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, was to be “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” As Segev describes it, Ben-Gurion fully shared in Herzel’s racially charged Orientalism. The 1929 Arab revolt that, according to official figures, resulted in the death of 130 Jews and 100 Arabs, and in over 200 Arabs and 300 Jews wounded, reinforced his Orientalist tendencies leading him to state that the Arabs were “primitive” and that the Jews were facing “an outbreak of the worst instincts of savage masses — inflamed religious extremism, a compulsion for robbery and looting, and a thirst for blood.” For the Arab “son of the desert” looking at the Jew from his “shack,” warned Ben-Gurion, “even the Jews’ barn looked to him like a royal mansion.”

Ben-Gurion looked at the Oriental Jews through the same Orientalist, Eurocentric lens. His reaction to the 1959 riots of the Jews in Israel that had earlier arrived from Arab countries was not very different from his reaction to the Arab revolt of 1929. In a letter to the chairman of the commission of enquiry set up to investigate the events, he wrote “an Ashkenazi thug, thief, pimp or murderer would not be able to gain the sympathy of the Ashkenazi community (if there is indeed such a community), nor would such an idea come into his head. But in a primitive community [such as that of the Mizrahi or Oriental Jews] it can happen.” A few days later, he privately repeated his concern with the growing influence that the Jews from the Islamic world were having on Israeli society.

Like his view of antisemitism as an inherent part of the human condition, Ben-Gurion’s Orientalism made him view economic and sociocultural characteristics of ethnic and racial groups as stemming from their own “nature” instead of stemming from historically caused socioeconomic conditions. That is why he not only regarded as foreign and alien the poor, uneducated, immigrant Jews from the Arab world, but also the destitute and brutalized Holocaust survivors arriving in Israel. They were Jews, Ben-Gurion affirmed, “only in the sense that they were not non-Jews.”

In fact, Ben-Gurion had a Social Darwinist approach to European Jews, only a minority of whom were Zionists during the years preceding the Holocaust. Ben-Gurion made it clear that if it came to choosing between ten thousand Jews who would be beneficial to Palestine and the “rebirth” of Israel and a million Jews who would be a burden, the ten thousand should be saved. As Segev points out, Ben-Gurion conducted the rescue plans “as a realist of narrow horizons and little faith,” adding that the Zionist leader saw the awful significance of the Nazi slaughter not in terms of the enormous number of Jews who were massacred, but instead because that select part of the nation that alone was capable and equipped to build the state had been exterminated.

From Settlers to Oppressor Nation

In the end, Ben-Gurion did succeed in realizing his lifelong goal of creating a Zionist state based both on the exclusion and expulsion of Palestinian Arabs, and on the success of the international Zionist movement he led.

It is impossible to overstate the political hegemony that Zionism achieved over world Jewry in the wake of the Holocaust. It emerged from the political field where it had competed with other political ideologies in the pre-WWII Jewish Europe — principally Bundism and the religious parties — as the unchallengeable political “answer” to antisemitism, and reached its peak with the 1967 war, after which it became the pervasive ideology, politically and culturally, of world Jewry.

Of course, the great majority of Jews, especially in the United States, did not seriously consider emigrating to Israel. But chronic East European Jewish pessimism that often expressed itself as “insurance policy” Zionism (the idea essentially being “it is good to have Israel in case there is trouble and we have a place to go”) had substantial support among Jews outside the United States and Canada. In the 1940s and 1950s, most of the international left also supported Zionism and paid little if any attention to the fate of Palestinian Arabs.

The Bundist and other socialist perspectives that in certain periods such as the late 1930s had been the dominant political tendency of the Jewish community in Poland were thoroughly defeated by the tragic fate of the East European Jews, which dealt a crushing blow to Bundism and more generally to non-Zionist socialism for their position of staying and fighting for one’s rights wherever one lived instead of leaving. The Nazi ideology and its extermination practice won that political battle for Zionism, which could then turn and tell the Bundists and other Jewish internationalists “We told you so.” Political defeats have consequences, particularly for the Bund, whose social base had been wiped out by the Nazis, and to a lesser extent for the religious political parties.

And in fact, the Jewish community in Palestine, and later the Jewish state established by the triumphant Zionist movement led by Ben-Gurion, succeeded in creating a nation, Israel. It was a Jewish nation forged on the basis of a modernized Hebrew language that united Jews coming from many different parts of the world, the effective and thorough socialization of the Israeli Jews into Zionist values, the almost universal participation of Jewish women and men in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), and a sense of national superiority resulting from the several victorious clashes with the Palestinian and Arab enemies. These forces proved far stronger than the many that could have pulled apart Jews of widely different origins, cultures, and history, in addition to their class differences and ethnic and racial divisions. This was an entirely new Jewish nation. With the exception of the Yiddish-speaking Jews within the Pale of Settlement in the tsarist empire, Jews throughout the world had never constituted a nation before.

The Process of Building an Oppressor Nation

This reality and consciousness of nationhood developed in the course of a historic process that began with the first three (and especially the second and third) waves of ideologically driven settlers who, although relatively small in number, became the intellectual and political leaders of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine before the Israeli state was created in 1948), and later the state of Israel as it grew substantially through the influx of large numbers of Jewish immigrants and refugees. Only a minority of the latter could be properly considered settlers when they arrived in Palestine, either in ideological or sociological terms. But the great majority of this mass of Jewish immigrants and refugees sooner or later adopted the settler political ideology and followed the leadership of the founding settlers.

But it is important to recognize that, in contrast with the first three migratory waves, they arrived in Palestine (and then Israel) because they had nowhere else to go, not because of the settler-colonial ideological pull that distinguished the previous immigration. This newly formed nation, with its systematic oppression of Palestinian Arabs, became an oppressor nation, very much along the lines followed by the United States in its subordination of its Native American, African American and — after 1848 — Mexican population. The main difference is that the oppressed Palestinians have been better able to place into doubt the legitimacy of Zionist domination than were the Native Americans, black slaves and their oppressed descendants, and the conquered Mexicans with respect to white Anglo-Saxon domination in the North American continent.

Among the most important reasons for this difference has been the Palestinians’ existence within the broad Arab world, which has been the source of large-scale popular support for the Palestinians (as well as betrayals by the Arab ruling classes and government leaders), the Palestinian leaders’ limited but real success in using the Cold War to place their cause in the world’s agenda, and the foundation of Israel with United States and Western support (and also Soviet support in its first few years) in the postwar period as the colonial revolution opposing Western dominance, and its sympathy for the Palestinian cause, was rapidly rising in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

As Ben-Gurion himself recognized, by the turn of the twentieth century, only a minority of Jews in Poland and Eastern Europe considered themselves Zionists. Only a tiny minority of East European Jews, who then constituted by far the largest Jewish population in the world, had immigrated to Palestine by the early 1920s. As Zachary Lockman points out in his Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine 1906–1948, of the approximately 2.4 million Jews who left tsarist Russia and Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1914, 85 percent went to the United States, 12 percent went to other Western Hemisphere countries (mostly Canada and Argentina) to Western Europe and to South Africa. Less than 3 percent went to Palestine, and for a high proportion of these, it was a temporary stop on their road westward.

The Zionist movement — and it was a social and political movement with a differentiated left, right, and center, notwithstanding the top-down political orientation of the main Zionist leaders like Theodore Herzl to engage the ruling imperial powers in deal-making to achieve their nationalist goals — organized several migratory waves of Jews to Palestine, called aliyot (the plural of aliya, “ascend” in Hebrew, and also “pilgrimage,” according to the Jewish religious tradition commanding Jews to visit the Temple in Jerusalem three times a year). The First Aliyah took place between 1881 and 1903, consisting of some 25,000 to 35,000 Jews from Eastern Europe and Yemen.

As scholars Gershon Shafir in his book Land, Labor and the Origin of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 and Yoav Peled and Horit Herman Peled in The Religionization of Israeli Society have pointed out, the goal of this First Aliyah was to settle the land through privately owned, self-sustaining farms that hired experienced and cheap Palestinian agricultural labor. But this model failed because, at the time, the Zionist movement did not have the financial resources to acquire land for the newly arriving settlers, especially as the price of land skyrocketed due to Zionist demand, and because even the land already owned by the Zionists could have been legally sold to non-Jews.

The Second Aliyah took place between 1904 and 1914, with some 35,000 Eastern European Jews organizing collectives — the kibutz and the moshav — to work the land. Many of them left the land; according to Gershon Shafir, only around 10,000 of those Second Aliyah immigrants remained as agricultural workers. Yet this Aliyah left an important historical legacy by providing the elements of a solution to the quandary faced by the First Aliyah based on the notion of self-employing cooperative settlements on non-alienable, nationally owned land financed by public funds.

It was this new approach that also led to the “conquest of land” from the Palestinians, their exclusion from Jewish-owned and -controlled land. It also established the foundation for the “conquest of Jewish labor,” which minimized and downgraded when it could not totally eliminate the participation of Palestinians in the economy at large, a situation similar to the treatment of Native Americans in the United States. Such “conquests” were the source of the many ensuing frictions, conflicts, and hostilities it produced with Palestinians, a process that has been laid out in great detail in the earlier cited work by Zachary Lockman.

The Third Aliyah took place between 1919 and 1923, with some 40,000 Jews who settled the land following the collectivist approach of the Second Aliyah. This took place at a time when the Zionist leadership, encouraged by the United Kingdom’s Balfour Declaration in 1917, was much more committed to the purchase of land and settlement activity in Palestine, which made it possible for the overwhelming majority of the participants of the Third Aliyah to stay in the agricultural colonies and in Palestine.

These first three Aliyahs fit the classical model of settler colonies, with numerous difficulties mostly deriving from the urban background of the immigrants and the higher standard of living they had had in the countries of origin compared to the local Palestinian population in the predominant rural areas. It was from the Second and Third Aliyot that the main leaders of the Yishuv and later of the State of Israel came, like Ben-Gurion, who came in the Second Aliyah, and Golda Meier, who came with the Third Aliyah. They shaped the principal institutions of the budding nation.

Those three first aliyot were ideological: they were the result of a conscious choice to “solve” the “Jewish problem” of antisemitism in Europe by immigrating and settling in Palestine at a time when other alternatives existed, like emigrating to the United States – which was possible until the 1921 and 1924 legislation that sharply restricted immigration from Eastern Europe — or staying and fighting antisemitism in Europe itself by joining socialist organizations such as the Jewish Bund. The choice to settle in Palestine included Zionists who considered themselves socialists but who, in contrast with the Bund, decided not take on the fight for socialist society in Europe that would grant Jews full civil and political rights and cultural and political autonomy in the context of an emancipated Jewish and non-Jewish working class.

The situation of the subsequent so-called aliyot was different. For one thing, most of those later migrations did not involve a majority of ideologically driven settlers. And by the time they took place, the range of migration alternatives had substantively diminished and eventually disappeared, to the point that a very large number of Jewish survivors of World War II in Europe had to be relocated into the Displaced Persons camps after 1945, since no country wanted to allow them in.

From 1924 to 1965, US immigration was regulated by a quota system sharply limiting the number of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Eastern European Jews emigrated to many different countries outside of the United States. Not surprisingly, a substantial number of them — almost 50,000 — also emigrated to Palestine between 1924 and 1925, constituting the Fourth Aliyah, an aliyah of primarily nonideological immigrants rather than of Zionist colonial settlers. The Fifth Aliyah, between 1929 and 1939, had even less in common with the first three aliyot, as it took place in the context of the coming of Nazism to power and the continued closing of the United States to the emigration of Eastern European Jews (or anybody else for that matter).

It was an act of desperation, not ideological or political choice, with 35,000 Jewish refugees arriving in Palestine in 1933 (about three times as many as the previous year), over 45,000 arriving in 1934, and over 65, 000 arriving in 1935, according to Segev. This immigration to Palestine surpassed, for just those three years, the combined numbers of the first three ideological aliyot.

Ben-Gurion was strongly pragmatic, bordering on opportunistic, in the case of the German Jews wanting to leave Nazi Germany. The Yishuv leadership reached the Haavara agreement with the Nazi government in August 1933, allowing Jews to leave for Palestine. This agreement materially benefited Germany since it greatly facilitated the takeover of Jewish commercial and residential property, although German Jewish emigrants were allowed to take some of their property with them. It was also justifiably opposed by large number of Jews, including the right-wing Zionists led by Zeev Jabotinsky, as a violation of the international boycott of Germany. Nevertheless, approximately 60,000 German Jews emigrated to Palestine from 1933 to 1939.

Most important was the immigration to Palestine of the Jewish refugees that survived the Nazi onslaught, be it the several hundred thousand Polish Jews that survived the Holocaust, mostly in the USSR and Soviet-controlled territories, and those that made it to the Displaced Persons camps. For these survivors, it was inconceivable to think of returning to Poland, especially due to the wave of antisemitism and pogroms taking place there, whether during the war as in the case of Jedbwane in 1941 or after the war, as in the cases of Krakow on August 11, 1945, and of Rzeszow and especially Kielce in 1946. There was no other place that wanted them, so arriving in Palestine (or Israel after 1948) may have relieved them.

But as the Zionist leaders themselves knew, based on the reports they must have received from their agents promoting and organizing the emigration to Israel of Jewish refugees in the Displaced Persons camps, the great majority of those refugees would have much rather emigrated to the developed capitalist countries, especially the United States, had they been allowed to do so by the American and Western governments. (According to Segev, from the summer of 1945 to the British evacuation of Palestine in 1948, more than 70,000 of these Jewish refugees set out for Palestine on sixty-five crossings, although how many actually made it to Palestine is unknown as most of them were intercepted and sent to Cyprus. Nevertheless, in the course of 1948 more than 120,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine.

Ben-Gurion’s negative view of these new immigrants and refugees constituted a great paradox, as he depended on these Jews for the success of his Zionist nationalist enterprise. Without them, and without the Holocaust that they had managed to survive, there would not have been a state of Israel to begin with. Without it, the British 1917 Balfour Declaration promising the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, would have remained a useless document by an already declining world power. After all, Great Britain had been all too willing to backtrack on the Balfour’s Declaration’s promises, as seen in its 1939 White Paper that sharply restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine.

In terms of the massive emigration of Jews from Arab countries such as Morocco and Yemen of the 1950s, the bulk of it occurred after the establishment and consolidation of the state of Israel. This emigration generally had more to do with the “pull” forces organized by the Israeli state than the “push” factors in the Arab world, such as the anti-Jewish hostility that may have been fanned by Arab nationalist reaction to the Palestinian Nakba.

Lastly, it is important to note that the colonial settler component of Israeli nationhood has been reinforced by the new type of Jewish ideology and practice that developed after the Israeli victory in the 1967 war and its subsequent territorial expansion, particularly in the West Bank. But by the time that came into being, the Israeli nation had already crystallized, following a path not too different from the United States that started with a Puritan settler colony and evolved into a nation state pursuing a racist policy of expulsion of Native Americans.

Zionism Versus Democracy

The continued expansion and consolidation of Israeli rule as an oppressor nation in the West Bank has clearly made the “two-state solution” inoperable. The putative Palestinian state would have to be established in small, discontinuous parts of the West Bank — quite aside from the fact that this Palestinian “state” was never meant to be truly sovereign, since it would have no armed forces of its own and would be supervised by Israel. Last but not least, at present, any agreement with Israel to establish a Palestinian state would not recognize the right of Palestinian refugees to return to what is now Israel if they chose.

The current military control of the West Bank and Gaza has sharpened the perennial contradiction between democracy and Zionism, in Zionism’s efforts to maintain the ethnic and religious definition of Israel and thus to limit the number of Arabs — a desire explicitly manifested by David Ben-Gurion. In light of the practical demise of the two-state solution at the hands of Israel, the Zionist oppressor state by definition cannot accept the only remaining desirable alternative: a fully democratic and secular binational state comprising Green line Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza with full equality for Palestinian Arabs and Jews. Such a state could not be both democratic and Jewish, particularly when Palestinian Arabs are already or will soon become the majority inside that territory.

Such a binational state would recognize the equality of all existing national cultures and, while secular, also recognize the equality of all religions. The binational democratic state would also have a nondiscriminatory immigration policy hopefully giving preference to the victims of persecution, whether these are Arabs or Jews.

Although such a binational and secular democratic state would constitute huge progress from the current situation, it would be plagued by severe problems such as the major differences in economic development and living standards between Arabs and Jews that even the most generous reparations and compensation programs would have difficulty eliminating at least in the short term. Of course, any socialist development in that part of the world would considerably ease such difficulties.

Segev’s biography of David Ben-Gurion elicits a final reflection on the fate of Zionism. The movement that promised to solve the “Jewish Question” did succeed in creating an increasingly undemocratic modern Sparta in close alliance with the strongest imperialist power. But in fact, antisemitism is disturbingly growing again in Europe and the United States, and there is nothing that Israel has done to effectively combat it. In fact, it has even bolstered it as in the case of its government’s open sympathy for Viktor Orbán, the antisemitic leader of Hungary’s government. You cannot build an enlightened and democratic polity for all people under Israeli rule on the basis of the oppression of a Palestinian nation that has been made to pay the price of a Jewish Holocaust for which they bear no responsibility or involvement.

Reposted from Jacobin.

Left Politics after Sanders: Think Internationally, Historically and Dialectically

By: Peter DruckerApril 27, 2020

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Rally organizes by Brazil’s Party of Socialism & Liberty (PSOL)

I agree with most of key points in Charlie Post and Ashley Smith’s important New Politics article, “Facing Reality: The Socialist Left, the Sanders Campaign and Our Future.” In the wake of Sanders’ withdrawal from the race, I agree that the left (including DSA) “needs to put most of its energy into rebuilding mass resistance amidst the pandemic and engaging in electoral work when it advances organizing our power from below—something that is impossible within the Democratic Party.”

As Post and Smith underline, citing Kim Moody’s essential work, “the Democratic Party is a fundraising cabal, run by an unaccountable layer of elected officials who are the conduits for capitalist donations.” As they say, within this framework and in these times, since “the level of class and social struggle, despite the wave of teachers’ strikes, has remained very low,” “Sanders’ program, … while popular, seemed unattainable for the vast majority of working people.”

I’m afraid however that the article’s diagnosis of the left’s problems is stronger than the alternative they put forward. Yes of course, we should focus on “organizing and supporting the strikes and protests that have ripped out across the country,” and especially “promote the demands and actions of undocumented immigrants, people of color, and people in the global south.” (I would add women, whose organizing around social reproduction issues has been central to the resistance to Trump over the past four years, and trans people and other especially oppressed queers, who are experiencing violence and poverty that Black Lives Matter has insightfully linked to those facing people of color.)

But social struggles cannot in isolation capture and substitute for the excitement that Sanders’ political campaign generated. Saying that we need to debate “how we can build a new socialist party over the coming years” is too vague. It offers zero guidance about what to do this November, as the frightening prospect looms of Trump’s winning a second term, or more generally about what political action to take. Not many leftists need convincing that Biden is uninspiring; but you can’t effectively fight this year’s lesser evil with some misty vision of a better political alternative in some indefinite future.

I would argue that the radical left can offer a more credible alternative to lesser-evilism by adding in three dimensions. First, the US left needs to look beyond its own country’s frontiers, at countries where the left has done a better job over the past two decades at building parties to the left of social democracy. Second, it should look critically at the political legacy of past US radical upsurges, particularly at the 1930s/40s and 1960s/70s. Third, it needs to draw on the rich discussions among Marxists over the past half-century about the complex dialectic between social struggle and politics.

Obviously the US political system poses extreme challenges to the socialist left. On top of the barrier to left third parties posed by the first-past-the-post system (which also exists in, e.g., Britain and Canada), the US has the sad distinction of not having had any even nominally socialist party as a credible electoral contender over the past century. But the US Democratic Party’s complete surrender to neoliberalism and austerity over the past 40 years has not been unique. Not only the British Labour Party under Tony Blair but virtually every mass social democratic party in the world has a comparable sorry record – including responsibility for massive, catastrophic cutbacks to healthcare in the run-up to the Covid-19 pandemic.

And Sanders’ radical political response to the Democrats’ neoliberal sellout has not been unique either. Several new left parties in different countries have occupied the space opened up by social democracy’s rightward rush. In general, these parties have anti-capitalist programs that are far clearer and more radical than Sanders’ wishful admiration for Denmark as “socialist.” For me, the success of Brazil’s Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), Portugal’s Left Bloc, and Denmark’s Red-Green Alliance in growing into major political players have been particularly noteworthy.

Besides more democratic electoral systems, these new parties may benefit from the historical legacies of their countries’ past struggles, from the Resistance to the Portuguese Revolution to the fight against the Brazilian dictatorship. The US has a different history of struggles. But we should not exaggerate these parties’ continuity with the earlier history of their countries’ workers’ movements. In Portugal, for example, the SP has kept most of its popular base despite its betrayals and the CP despite its sectarianism.

In many other countries, where the traditional left has massively lost support because of its sellouts, embittered workers have turned more to the far right than the new left. (This is the case in Rotterdam, the city where I live.) The new left parties have much of their base in newer generations that were previously politically unorganized. Something similar might happen in the US.

Politics has its own dynamic

I would draw a couple of key lessons from these parties’ experience. First, the Left Bloc and Red-Green Alliance in particular have grown steadily over the years to win about 10% of the electorate without springing from stable, militant, mass social movements. So a period of relative social quiescence doesn’t have to be a period of political impotence for the anti-capitalist left.

Second, the issues that have catalyzed these parties’ breaks to the left have been diverse and unpredictable. Besides opposition to austerity, the Portuguese Left Bloc, for example, built itself partly through campaigns for abortion rights, immigrants’ rights and drug decriminalization – not exactly the traditional focuses of workers’ movements. In the US, important and inspiring as the Amazon and Target strikes are, the impetus for new political initiatives might come from activism that has more directly apparent political implications, for instance around climate change.

Third, as Post and Smith would probably expect, these three parties have all felt the tug of institutionalization and had a hard time keeping their centers of gravity outside the electoral arena; but so far they have not played the game of lesser-evil management of capitalism and have not joined capitalist governments.

Both in Portugal and Denmark, they have had periods when social democratic-led governments were dependent on their parliamentary support, which has enabled them to extract concessions. This has involved some tough tactical choices and compromises (which I would not necessarily always defend) and some fierce internal debates. It has not moved their countries any closer to breaking with capitalism or even with neoliberalism; but so far it has not led to large-scale disillusionment among their voters either, much less turned their parties into graveyards of social movements like the US Democrats.

The movements in their countries have stayed independent and critical, but at the same time capitalized on victories that these parties have helped wrest from the state by leveraging pressure from the movements. I would argue that this has done more for the movements than just turning their backs on politics would have – and that the US left could learn from these examples.

So periods without big social upsurges don’t have to be periods of political helplessness for adversaries of capitalism. Are periods with big social upsurges necessarily good for anti-capitalist politics? Unfortunately not. In the US, the 1934 citywide general strikes, the big CIO organizing drives and the 1946 strike wave led to a few promising independent initiatives, but in the end the labor movement was more tightly bound to the Democratic Party than before.

Again in the 1960s and ‘70s, the big battles against Jim Crow and the Vietnam War led to some promising initiatives like the Peace and Freedom Party, but not to a mass break from the two capitalist parties. Specifically political factors – like the Communist Party’s Popular Front and National Front strategies in the 1930s and ‘40s, and Maoist groups’ sectarianism and rapid rightward shifts in the 1960s and ‘70s – were key to this dismal outcome.

So building social movements isn’t enough; political arguments and organizing are vital too. The politics of the next upsurge is bound to be marked by an additional half-century of bureaucratization and reformist reflexes, on top of forty-plus years of atomization of the workers’ movement by neoliberalism. In these conditions, the complex organizational and tactical debates of recent decades will have to be dealt with and learned from, in detail and in depth – along with some new ones.

Luckily socialists can draw on a rich legacy of thinking about politics in the Marxist tradition, going back to Marx and Engels’ time, continuing through the mass and not-so-mass workers’ internationals (Antonio Gramsci’s work especially repays study), and including a period of rich theoretical development from the 1960s into the 1980s.

In the past, for example, Charlie Post has written about things to be learned from the Greek-French Marxist Nicos Poulantzas’ writings on the state. Poulantzas showed on the one hand that the working class and its allies cannot exercise any power of their own within the capitalist state, but on the other hand that social struggles can fuel conflicts within the state that work out to labor’s advantage. As he wrote in State, Power, Socialism, the state “bathes in struggles that constantly submerge it.”

Within the state, “various fractions of the power bloc often seek to enlist [the support of the popular masses] against the other fractions,” and these conflicts in the ruling class are “condensed in divisions and contradictions” inside the state. It is a mistake to imagine that the exploited and oppressed can win real power of their own through these conflicts; but equally a mistake to neglect the benefits that the exploited and oppressed can gain from them. New left parties have sometimes shown this in practice.

Don’t waste your vote!

Insights like these could be useful to the practice of anti-capitalist politics in the US. Socialists should talk more about how independent politics can be planned and practiced.

Kim Moody has pointed out that most of the biggest cities in the US are virtual Democratic Party one-party states, where the Republicans are barely serious contenders and the Democrats are the main instrument of local capitalist rule. In San Francisco, the Greens have at times replaced the Republicans as the city’s main opposition party. So why isn’t the radical left mounting more insurgent campaigns in these cities, especially when there are major strikes or other struggles to be built on? This would be a real contribution, now, to building the future socialist party that Post and Smith advocate.

And what about the national election this November? Leftists are understandably preoccupied with stopping Trump. But Biden is a terribly weak reed to lean on in the fight against the racist far right.

Particularly in the forty-odd states where either Trump doesn’t stand a chance (California, New York, Massachusetts) or Biden doesn’t stand a chance, a vote by leftists for Biden – up to his knees in the shit of the Iraq war, the destruction of welfare, the growth of mass incarceration, the power plays of Big Pharma and more – is a wasted vote if ever there was one. Especially when there is a clear alternative – presumptive Green candidate Howie Hawkins – who is himself a long-time stalwart of the socialist left.

Given the groundswell on the left toward a critical vote for Biden, independent-minded socialists may be tempted to soft-pedal this debate. I think that would be a mistake. Of course, we shouldn’t push the debate to the point of alienating our allies in the movements. But neither should we imagine that what people do for a couple of minutes in the privacy of a polling booth is harmless.

In times of polarization like these, people and especially activists usually don’t keep their voting plans secret. Their declarations that of course they’ll vote for Biden to stop Trump help keep broad social milieus in the Democratic Party’s orbit. Even more serious, movement organizations’ success in delivering votes to Biden will be the currency for years of their quid pro quos with the Democrats: some crumbs for my base, some jobs for my staff, in return for lasting political allegiance.

For all their imperfections – notably their shallow roots in social movements – the Greens, who explicitly declared themselves anti-capitalist in 2016, offer the clearest possible rebuke to this kind of lesser-evilism. A vote for them is a small but meaningful step in the direction of the future new socialist party. So let’s take and advocate that step.

Unity in Israel Means New Low for Palestinians

By: Jonah ben AvrahamApril 27, 2020

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When the dust settled after the March 2nd Israeli general election, the left found some reason for hope in the fact that once more, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s bloc, led by his Likud party, had fallen just short of a majority with 58 out of 120 seats. While the creation of a government without Netanyahu still seemed unlikely, the COVID-19 epidemic appeared to be shifting the political equation in the Knesset. On March 12, Netanyahu called for the formation of a temporary unity government to respond to the crisis, and opposition leader Benny Gantz of Kahol Lavan responded favorably, endorsing “A government defined as one that fights the virus that does not distinguish between right and left, between religious and secular, and between Jews and Arabs.” Beyond forestalling the disastrous “Deal of the Century,” it looked possible that for the first time ever, the majority-Arab Joint List, the third-largest faction in the Knesset, might be included in government.

The April 20 announcement of a Zionist-only unity government puts all of those hopes behind us. The Joint List is out. Likud is still in. And after three rounds of elections, the dissolution of three political coalitions, and a veritable constitutional crisis as yet unresolved, the same criminally indicted, authoritarian premier of the last decade will once again maintain his seat.

The technicalities of who “won” and “lost” the most recent election, however, will be seriously overshadowed by all of the other dramatic ramifications this most recent capitulation of the center is bound to have on the structure of Israeli politics, the legitimacy of Israel’s apartheid “democracy,” and most importantly of all, the lives of Palestinians.

In regards to the former, the partisan makeup of the Knesset is nearly unrecognizable from before the first round of 2019 elections. Kahol Lavan, a right-wing party masquerading as the representative of the political center, came into being in a meteoric rise to near-power since the beginning of 2019, before dissolving again in a dramatic split when it became clear that Gantz would not keep his promise to refrain from serving in government under an indicted Prime Minister. The far right has shuffled and reshuffled, eventually resulting in 6 seats for the new Yamina coalition without representation of the fascist Otzmah Yehudit in Knesset (though, with Otzmah Yehudit talking points being parotted by Likud members every time an election rolls around, the extent to which this can be considered a victory is limited). But far and away, the greatest impact in this regard will be the transformations on the left.

On the one hand, The Joint List built on its success in last year’s elections, jumping to 15 seats–an unprecedented representation of non-Zionist parties in the Knesset. Fully 87% of Arab voters cast votes for the Joint List, and Jewish votes for the Joint List more than doubled (though, don’t get too excited–in an Israel where opinion polls show nearly 80% of Jewish residents supporting “preferential treatment” for Jews over Arabs, a doubled Jewish vote for the coalition of Arab parties means around half of one percent of Jewish voters).

On the other hand, left-wing Zionism, once the hegemonic political force in Israeli politics, is now struggling for any Knesset representation whatsoever in a groundbreakingly right-wing Israel. The liberal and labor Zionist parties, reduced to a single electoral list in the Labor-Gesher-Meretz coalition so as to ensure representation, won only 7 seats in the most recent elections–down from 29 seats prior to 2019. Now, even this paltry showing has dissolved after Labor leader Amir Peretz–who in April 2019 shaved his mustache “so that all of Israel will understand exactly what I’m saying and will be able to read my lips: I won’t sit with Bibi [Netanyahu]”–joined the unity government to promises of a cabinet appointment from Bibi.

On the right, the institutional changes of this most recent election are largely cosmetic. The replacement of Netanyahu was truly the raison d’etre of the Kahol Lavan coalition; so no doubt, Gantz’s betrayal of that most basic of unifying principles will draw strong condemnations from the segments of his party who have now split off. But the electoral decision between Gantz and Netanyahu was never about choosing between substantively different visions for Israeli society; it was about one segment of an all-Jewish ruling class and its attempt to eject a particularly unseemly, undemocratic leader from another segment of that same ruling class. When all was said and done, a Gantz regime was always going to continue the rightward trajectory of Israeli civil society, deepen the Israeli military stranglehold over the Occupied Territories, and maintain boundaries around political power that disenfranchised Palestinians–in a word, a Gantz regime would fail to break substantively with Netanyahu’s policies. The April agreement on a unity government is simply an absurdist reminder of this fundamental truth: at the end of the day, even allowing for a future breakup of the government, Likud was amenable to trading legislative and administrative appointments to Kahol Lavan in exchange for judicial power (largely over Netanyahu’s trial) because Likud knew they had nothing to fear from a policy standpoint even under a Kahol Lavan-led government.

On the left, however, this series of elections marks a real turning point. Already, the statements from liberal, US Zionist institutions have begun flying off the presses, pairing optimistic welcoming of the unity government with cautious appeals to maintain the two-state solution by refraining from annexation of settlements. Such appeals are meaningless, however, when the unity agreement has already approved a path toward annexation starting as early as July 1st, and even the more principled anti-annexation forces have begun to defect to the pro-annexation government. Liberal Zionism in Israel is dead; in its place is a fervently pro-apartheid, genocidal center on the one hand, and on the other, the only hope there has ever been for a resolution to the Palestine problem: a progressive and radical grassroots movement led by Palestinians for the protection of their democratic and human rights.

The prospects of the latter are bleak. Any hope of a far-off, mythical two-state solution is scheduled to vanish on July 1st with the annexation of an unspecified amount of settled Palestinian land. When that happens, the terms that have defined the last 50 years of negotiations in Israel/Palestine will have been officially overturned: the promise of “land for peace” will have lost its basis. The peace process will have failed to make way for a Palestinian state. And the parliamentary route to anything resembling self-determination outside of bantustans has now, once again, been rejected by a Zionist political establishment that maintains an immovable red line around Arab participation in government, knowing that any ground given to independent Palestinian political activity is potential territory lost in the ongoing war on Palestinian lives, livelihoods, and land. In that context–with no hope of either a diplomatic or democratic road to Palestinian self-determination–mass disruption of life across historic Palestine will be not only the last resort for saving a set of politics; it will be the rational course of action for a people being threatened with genocide.

For some, this will mean a turn to armed resistance; indeed, the first apparent act of retaliation already transpired on Wednesday when a 25-year-old Palestinian man attacked an Israeli checkpoint outside of occupied East Jerusalem and was killed by Israeli police. No doubt, there will be others like him; the Israeli government has burned the proverbial ballot in Palestine, and left only plenty of bullets. The blood that is sure to be spilled in the coming months, both Palestinian and Israeli, will be on that government’s hands.

An Evil King Rules an Afflicted Land: Coronavirus and the Depression in America

By: Dan La BotzApril 26, 2020

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This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, la revue, the monthly journal of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.

We in America live in what resembles some medieval fairy tale. An evil and maniacal king rules the plague stricken land. The wicked lords in the corrupt parliament rob the public coffers to enrich their cronies. The tribunes of the people, mostly venal and foolish, are alternately deceived or suborned by the King and the lords. Meanwhile many people are sick and many dying. The bodies pile up. The soothsayers blame it on the foreigners and plan pogroms. The mills have stopped; the inns and taverns have closed. Peasants rebel here and there but the plague prevents a general rebellion. Word has it the situation is the same in neighboring kingdoms all around.

That’s a fairy tale of course. What’s the reality? The United States now has nearly one million coronavirus cases and 50,000 deaths, more of both than any country in the world. We have an unemployment rate of 20 percent, the highest since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The two together represent what is perhaps the greatest crisis in American history, an absolutely unprecedented event: a catastrophe. And it may only have just begun.

As the coronavirus has swept across the country bringing illness to hundreds of thousands and killing tens of thousands, Americans have been shocked by the failure of government, business, and the health system. As the number of sick mounted, there were not enough hospitals, not enough hospital beds, not enough ICUs, not enough ventilators. Hospital personnel have lacked gowns, masks, and respirators. As hospital workers fall sick or die there are not enough health workers to replace them. Some seven thousand elderly died in private nursing homes. The disease is now rampant in prisons. It is rife in meat packing plants, with 725 cases at the Smithfield plant in South Dakota. Twenty-six U.S. Navy ships have crews with coronavirus, including 850 sick on the huge 5,000-crewmember U.S.S. Roosevelt. Everywhere essential workers—bus drivers, garbage collectors, grocery cashiers, delivery workers—became sick and many have died, and neither business nor the governments that regulate these companies acted quickly to save them.

And as the health crisis made it necessary to close businesses, a Second Great Depression has ensued. Twenty-six million lost their jobs in four months. Then the state unemployment services failed. Tens of thousands have found it impossible to get their unemployment payments. And now the state unemployment trust funds are going broke. In cities across the country lines of cars miles long wait to get a box of groceries from a volunteer food bank. One third of renters in the country could not pay their rent last month. Schools closed, but distant learning proved difficult because only some families had computers, so education has also broken down for many. The United States gives the impression of a failing state and society, one that cannot protect or help its people. Anxiety has gripped much of the society and some, either in hazardous jobs or with no jobs and income, have fallen into despair.

State, county, and city governments, which are no longer getting taxes from the closed businesses, find themselves in a fiscal crisis and they will soon be forced to lay off public employees. Yet so far the federal government has not provided aid to the states. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has suggested that states should file for bankruptcy, a procedure that would be devastating for state workers’ pension plans.

There is now a widespread perception that the American government has putrefied, like the government’s emergency stores of ventilators that did not work, defective test kits, and rotten masks. Americans have been shocked to learn that other countries, like Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam proved more effective than the United States in containing the virus and preventing its spread. Americans were once proud to shout, “We’re number one.” Now we’re number one in coronavirus and economic collapse. The sense of governmental and business failure, still spreading with the virus across the country, must be having a significant impact on the American people’s consciousness, though it is still too early to know what this means for the future.

Everywhere capitalism and America’s conservative and corrupt political system have made it more difficult to fight the pandemic. In the United States, there is no national health care system and no national health insurance for all. There are federal health agencies, fifty state health departments, 900 health insurance companies, hundreds of pharmaceutical companies, more than 20,000 pharmacies, hundreds of hospital equipment manufacturers and supply companies. There are 6,000 hospitals, some for profit, some not-for-profit, some run by the government. Heads of regulatory agencies, usually former corporate executives, oversee the competition and the search for profits that dominate this vast industry. There is little coordination and consequently, there has been no unified response to the pandemic as the federal government provided only weak recommendations and state governors and hundreds of health corporations did whatever they wished, while individuals struggled with the multiple bureaucracies of the health system.

Trump: Guilty of Negligent Homicide

President Donald Trump’s delays, misinformation, and wild ravings contradicting epidemiologists and physicians have contributed to the health disaster and now threaten to unleash a second wave of infection. After coronavirus cases had been identified in China and other countries, Trump failed to take action, with the exception of the limited travel ban on China on January 31. He said at the end of January, “We have it completely under control.” In mid-February Trump said, “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” Even after what was then thought to be the first coronavirus death in the United States on February 17, Trump continued to minimize the epidemic, saying on February 19, “I think the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along.” He claimed falsely on February 26, “We’re going very substantially down, not up.” In early March he claimed that coronavirus would be much milder than the flu. And in April he continued to give misleading information about the disease, about ventilators, about treatments, and about the development of vaccines. For weeks Trump recommended contrary to medical evidence that hydroxychloroquine, a malaria treatment, could be used to treat Covid-19. Most recently Trump suggested an injection of disinfectant into the lungs, which would be fatal. Trump should be held responsible for manslaughter, for the tens of thousands of deaths that might have been prevented had it not been for his negligent homicide.

The pandemic was not a bolt out of the blue. U.S. intelligence agencies, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the out-going Obama administration, Trump’s own Department of Health and Human Services, and other government agencies had not only predicted that the country would experience a pandemic, they had practiced for it. A report on one pandemic practice described the mock response as “chaotic.” When the coronavirus became a pandemic, the American government was completely unprepared. Trump had cut the budgets of the CDC and of the National Institutes of Health. Most important, for 70 days Trump failed to take the kind of action that had been foreseen and advised: establishing social distancing policies, carrying out testing, and doing contact tracing. Having failed to stop the initial spread, mitigation came too late, leading New York City to become the international epicenter of the disease.

As the country fell to its knees, Trump’s administration through Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell and the Democratic Party leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, succeeded in getting the U.S. Congress to pass three relief measures totaling almost three trillion dollars offering loans and grants to businesses and hospitals, and payments to workers. The promise to help small businesses proved false as much of that money went to large, financially sound corporations and not to medium and small businesses. The government made the loans available through banks, which helped large companies with credit and connections while harming small, financially weak companies. There were also huge tax breaks for the rich in the relief packages.

The federal government’s assistance to workers will only tide them over for a few months. Most workers in addition to their unemployment checks are receiving a one-time payment of $1,200, with an additional $500 per child as well as $600 each week until July 31. Many workers will not be eligible, especially undocumented workers who do not quality for federal aid. The state of California is allocating $75 million for the undocumented immigrant who pay $3 billion in California state and local taxes every year.

The Situation of the Working Class

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 and professional employees, engineers, architects, professors and teachers. About 26 million workers or 20 percent of the American workforce has been laid off. Millions of essential workers continue to perform their duties often risking exposure to coronavirus from coworkers, the public, or passengers on public transportation.

Economic and racial inequality is also 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 health care 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 sixty days the government will issue no green cards, which grant immigrants permanent residency and the right to work in the United States.

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% of registered nurses and 71% 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 have engaged in protests and strikes in various industries across the United States. Nurses, demanding better protection, have held both local demonstrations and a coordinated national demonstration organized with the assistance of the labor education center Labor Notes on April 15. There have also been over 100 strikes at various workplaces from shipyards, to warehouses, to grocery stores. In Vermont University workers organized a petition campaign and a car caravan and fought successfully to prevent the closing of three out of four of the state’s college campuses. Amazon workers have organized a series of protests and walkouts.

The Drive to Reopen the Economy

While the United States coronavirus outbreak peaked two weeks ago, many states have not yet reached their peaks, yet some are considering ending social distancing and permitting the reopening of businesses. Republican governors in Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee have called for reopening their states within days. Public health experts argue that states should not attempt to reopen their economies until there is adequate testing, contact tracing, isolation and monitoring. At present no state has adequate testing and contract tracing is far beyond the capacity of state health departments. If states do reopen their economies, many health experts think that we can expect a second wave of the virus with more illness and deaths. And that would mean closing businesses again. No vaccine is likely to be discovered, tested, mass produced and distributed to tens of millions in less than 18 months. Covid-19 and the flu could wreak havoc in the fall. Some health experts say that social distancing will have to continue until 2022.

Thunder on the Right and Lightening on the Left

Far right groups in almost half of the fifty states have organized protests demanding that states reopen business. Those pushing for ending restrictions and reopening the society include businesspeople, Republican politicians, some Evangelical churches, anti-vaccination groups, and right-wing organizations from armed militias to political organizations such as Freedom Works, Tea Party Patriots, and Save Our Country, as well as white nationalists like the Proud Boys and The Patriot Front. Many of these groups have ties to the Republican Party, to the White House, and to the Trump campaign. Trump has tweeted support for the protests. Some of the demonstrations have violated state social distancing orders and others have included men carrying guns. Protesters wear “Make America Great Again” caps, carry American flags, hold up posters Trump’s name, or signs saying things like “Live Free or Die.” Some in these protests believe that the pandemic is a hoax, others think it was a plot by the Chinese, some claim to have the cure. Ironically those in the demonstrations stand close to one another without masks and may be endangering themselves and others. These demonstrations of hundreds or at most a few thousand do not represent more than the small minority of 12 percent of all Americans who, according to polls, want restrictions ended.

The American left has no political party and therefore little voice and less weight in Congress. The Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus pushes for more money for small business and workers, but does not have great impact. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of that caucus, whose district is in the “epicenter of the epicenter” and who is seen by many as the potential successor to Bernie Sanders, was the only Democrat to vote against the second stimulus bill with its gifts to business, and she is calling for a freeze on rents.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the country’s largest socialist organization with 60,000 members, had endorsed Sanders but will not endorse Joe Biden, though many can be expected to vote for him. DSA and others on the left are involved in mutual aid projects and in worker organizing as well as social movements. DSA has formed an alliance with Labor Notes and with the small United Electrical Workers Union (UE) and has been working with nurses, teachers, truck drivers and warehouse workers. The left is also engaged in work around immigrant rights. The struggle goes on.

Coronavirus, Crisis, and Socialist Perspectives

By: Ashley SmithApril 26, 2020

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Our world is drifting toward barbarism. We are faced with two interacting crises of the capitalist system—the global pandemic and global recession. The combination will have a devastating impact on the lives of workers and oppressed people, especially in the Global South.

At the same time, these crises are radicalizing people’s consciousness, splitting an already polarized society more deeply between an emerging socialist left and populist far right. On our side, essential workers have staged a wave of strikes and walkouts amidst the pandemic, and the desperate conditions we have been thrust into is storing up anger that will explode in even more radical struggles in the coming years.

On the other side, the right has staged a wave of reactionary protests, bankrolled by a small section of capitalists. The combination of these forces could morph into a fascist movement to put down an insurgent working class. Bloomberg News is so afraid of threats from the left and right that they are counseling the ruling classes of the world to grant some limited reforms to fend off both.

Otherwise, they warn, “behind the doors of quarantined households, in the lengthening lines of soup kitchens, in prisons and slums and refugee camps — wherever people were hungry, sick and worried even before the outbreak — tragedy and trauma are building up. One way or another, these pressures will erupt…. In time, these passions could become new populist or radical movements, intent on sweeping aside whatever ancien regime they define as the enemy.”

Capitalism has failed humanity. It cannot function today without risking the lives of workers in the short term and, amidst global climate change, threatening the habitability of whole sections of the planet in the long term. Socialist politics and organization are essential now more than ever before. If the socialist left does not build a practical alternative—based on struggle—the far right could be the big beneficiary of the crisis. We are thus in the fight of our lives and for our lives.

Mainstream Misdirection

Many mainstream commentators tell themselves a comforting fable about the crisis. They portray the virus as an “exogenous” cause of tipping an otherwise healthy global economy into recession. They are wrong for two reasons. First, capitalism created the conditions for the pandemic to begin with.

As Rob Wallace argues in Big Farms Make Big Flu, capitalist states and corporations internationalized agribusiness, establishing industrial farms in closer and closer proximity to previously isolated ecosystems. These farms enable viruses to jump from wild animals to poultry and pig farming and thereby into human society.

Moreover, as Kim Moody shows, global capitalism has so interconnected the world that it quickly transforms what previously would have been local outbreaks into global pandemics. The viruses travel the circuits of capitalist production, distribution, and consumption into every corner of the world.

Second, the mainstream commentators are wrong to claim that the pandemic caused the recession. In reality, the global economy was headed for a crisis well before the virus struck. The advanced capitalist economies were all slowing or stagnant from China to the US, EU and Japan. All these states had been intervening with increasing intensity to maintain their sputtering growth at the tail end of a long weak recovery from the Great Recession.

In the US, for example, Trump had cut taxes in the hopes of sustaining the expansion, and even that was failing to do the job. So, the Federal Reserve intervened at the end of last year, cutting interest rates three times to fend off fears of a new recession. Outside the developed world, the Global South was already in a crisis. Argentina’s economy, for example, was in free fall.

The giant stock market run of the last decade, which lulled politicians and the media into a false sense of economic security, proved to a be great speculative bubble completely out of all proportion with a stagnant real economy. Many economists even before the pandemic were, therefore, concerned that both US and world economies were at the end of the business cycle and a downturn was coming. The pandemic was thus the trigger, not the cause, of the global recession.

Roots of Global Slump

The roots of this crisis lie in the mechanisms used by the ruling class to get out of the last crisis—the financial crash of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. These were caused by problems built up during the long neoliberal boom from 1982 to 2007 that had tripled the size of the world economy.

The expansion produced a classic crisis of overproduction—too many factories were producing too many goods that capitalists could not sell at high enough profit rates. In search of more profitable outlets, capitalists turned to increasingly speculative investment, triggering the growth of a sequence of bubbles—most notably the dot com bubble at the end of the 1990s and then the fateful housing bubble in the 2000s.

When that popped in 2007 it triggered the financial crisis and recession. The ruling classes coordinated an international intervention by governments and state banks to stave off economic collapse. They bailed out the banks and corporations and cut interest rates to zero.

They poured trillions of dollars into the economy in the process. While they saved the system, their actions stored up new problems. They breathed life into unprofitable so-called “zombie corporations,” which are so in debt that they can only service their loans without any hope of ever paying them off. These comprise a whopping 13 percent of all companies.

And healthy companies did not use the loans to invest in new plant and machinery, which was not profitable. Instead they bought back their own stocks to drive up their share prices, passing the rewards on to the wealthy. Airlines, for example, spent $45 billion on buybacks—almost the same amount as the $50 billion offered to them in the new bailout from the Trump administration.

As a result, the real economy has been sluggish, trapped in what David McNally calls a long-term global slump, even as the stock markets soared to stratospheric heights. Even more worrisome, all of this was premised on massive state and corporate debt. Globally it exploded by $72 trillion over the last decade to an almost unbelievable $244 trillion, over three times the size of global GDP, and that was “achieved” before the pandemic, recession, and massive bailout packages.

Throughout the long weak recovery, the ruling classes imposed deep austerity measures on the working classes, leading in the US to a lost decade for workers of stagnant wages, credit card debt, and student debt. Predictably, the ruling classes and their states turned at the very same time to intense attacks on oppressed groups, from Muslims to women and especially migrants, to keep workers divided each from the other.

The Contradiction Between Capitalism and Life

The global economy was thus poised for crisis, but the pandemic has made it an even deeper one. Capitalist states have been forced to shut down their economies to stop the spread of the virus out of fear of sickening their own workforce and overwhelming their dilapidated healthcare systems.

Capitalism has proved itself incompatible with life. Nowhere is this clearer than in Haiti, a country impoverished by imperialism and where multinational capital exploits desperately poor people in sweatshops. The Haitian state and local bosses initially closed these after the pandemic struck, but under pressure from their global bosses, they have begun to reopen them.

Why? Because the bosses want their products and also workers are desperate for money to feed themselves, even if that means risking contracting the virus, sickening and dying. As one local boss put it, “the question was whether to die of hunger or coronavirus.”

Elsewhere capitalists and their states have been more cautious. They know that if they reopen their economies, they risk killing their own workers. But, if they keep them closed for too long, they risk the collapse of the economy. Their solution to this profound contradiction has been to keep only essential production and services open—some industrial production, agribusiness, logistics, grocery stores, and some private and government services.

But even this partial closure has devastated global production and consumption. It has also triggered financial crises and stock market crashes throughout the world. Their hope is to return to production carefully and with widespread testing.

States to the Rescue

In the meantime, capitalist states have been forced into immediate and dramatic action to confront these two intersecting crises. Most, including China, bungled their initial response to the virus, leading to mass unnecessary deaths throughout the world. The exceptions were a handful of states like South Korea and, of course, Cuba, which has again deployed its doctors and nurses throughout the world to respond to the catastrophe.

Trump catastrophically mishandled it in the US. Only Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Boris Johnson in Britain come even close to his callousness and incompetence. Trump and the CDC are responsible for the wave of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths throughout the country. Trump not only refused to listen to repeated warnings about the likelihood of a pandemic, but he also cut the program to prepare for one.

When faced with the coronavirus, he initially dismissed it as fake news. The CDC then botched the test which if rushed out properly could have enabled the government to contain its spread as in South Korea. And once the virus started ripping through the country, Trump proved completely incapable of organizing the government to respond coherently, balking at using the Defense Production Act, preferring to rely on corporations themselves to handle it, and when they didn’t, scapegoating everyone from the CDC to governors and the WHO instead of taking responsibility for the disaster and changing course.

As Trump staged reelection events masquerading as press briefings while over 40,000 bodies piled up in morgues, the Federal Reserve Bank swung into decisive action. They poured trillions of dollars into financial markets to prevent the collapse of the banking system and buoy the stock market. As the scale of the economic collapse and its skyrocketing unemployment became clear, Trump and Congress united behind a $2.2 trillion bailout of corporations with more packages to come.

While Bernie Sanders and other Democrats did slip in some important concessions for workers, such as emergency checks and increased unemployment, the vast bulk of the bailout was still slated for corporations. Yet again, the banks and corporations got bailed out, while we got sold out.

Record Debt and Deficit Guarantee Unprecedented Austerity

Trump, corporate executives, and some mainstream economists are hoping for a sharp recovery once the pandemic is over. There are two problems with their prediction. First, it is not at all clear when the pandemic will end and the states can open up their economies.

Until scientists come up with a vaccine, restarting business will risk a new round of outbreaks and shutdowns. We are likely therefore to have stops and starts of some distorted kind of “business as usual.”

Second, they wrongly assume that they had a healthy economy to restart, and they underestimate the damage the recession and shutdown has already done. Remember, the economy was on the precipice of a recession already because of its underlying problems.

The recession will only compound these problems in several ways. A wave of bankruptcies will wipe out many of the zombie corporations as well as many small businesses, especially restaurants, which survive on the slimmest of margins. Many are likely to go bankrupt and never reopen. Many colleges and universities are likely to shut down less lucrative parts of their operations, or go belly up.

But, because the advanced capitalist states intervened so decisively to save various big monopolies, they will prevent capitalist crisis from clearing out the over-accumulated means of production and unprofitable surplus production. So even when a recovery comes, which at some point it will, it is unlikely to bounce back sharply to even the weak growth before the crisis.

As a result, Michael Roberts argues, we are certainly not going to experience a “V” shaped recovery—a sharp drop followed by a quick restoration of growth. Rather, we are likely to see an “L” shaped one, with the economy managing only an extended period of growth even weaker than seen in the last decade.

And even then, it will be saddled with problems of sovereign and corporate debt. In the US, for example, the federal government will have record debts and deficits, and so will most states and cities, as a result of bailout and decreased tax revenue. That will compel them to ram through vicious austerity measures, guaranteeing high rates of unemployment, lower wages, and therefore weak consumer demand.

As a result, Edward Luce, argues in The Financial Times, “the US economy is already in depression. Nothing on this scale — and at this speed — has been seen since the Great Depression in the early 1930s. It took the second world war to dig the US out of that. It will take a vaccine, or a miracle prophylactic, to stop America’s first depression in almost a century.”

All the main centers of capital accumulation will suffer similar problems, including China. Its central government, provinces, banks and corporations were already shackled with debt before the economic crisis. As a result, Beijing will be reluctant to engage in massive deficit spending to invest internally as it did after the Great Recession, and its exports will be hammered by the drop of demand for products from the rest of the world.

We’re NOT in This Together

Not everyone will equally suffer the consequences of this global crisis. Contrary to the endless claims recycled by corporations and their media, we are NOT in this together. The ruling class in the US has insulated itself from the impact of the epidemic, fleeing to their second or third homes in the Hamptons, while the rest of us either are forced to continue working and dying, or huddle in overcrowded homes and apartments.

And within the working class, Black, Latinx, undocumented workers, and women suffer in disproportionate numbers. The disparities are shocking. For example, in Chicago, where African Americans comprise 30 percent of the population, they comprise 70 percent of the deaths from COVID-19.

The bosses are squeezing essential workers to work longer and harder, and in most cases for no more money and in life risking conditions. They often lack Personal Protective Equipment and do not receive paid overtime or hazard pay, while many lack health insurance.

The rest of the working class has been furloughed, forced to work from home, or laid off. The numbers are staggering: at latest count over 26 million have applied for unemployment, and some estimate that unemployment stands at 20 percent and could rise to 30 percent this summer.

Those that have lost their jobs have also lost their health insurance, if they ever had it. And they face bills they can’t afford, from rent to mortgages, homes student loans, and food. In a symbol of the catastrophe in working class life over 10,000 cars recently lined up in San Antonio to pick up groceries from a food bank.

The Trump checks and the increase in unemployment insurance may soften these blows at least temporarily. But not for undocumented workers, who have been excluded from all these benefits because they are only granted to citizens and documented migrants. That exclusion was upheld by both parties, including the ridiculously overpraised governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo.

Such conditions will likely persist if not worsen after the pandemic recedes and the states and corporations impose their austerity measures, shuttering some of their operations, cutting their workforces, ripping up union contracts, and forcing those who have jobs to work longer and harder for less money. We are thus faced with conditions not seen since the 1930s.

Catastrophe in the Global South

And that is the richest country in human history. In the Global South, workers and peasants face far more dire prospects. The US, other imperialist powers, and their international financial institutions have created socio-economic conditions that will make the impact of the pandemic and recession apocalyptic.

Over the last few decades, they imposed structural adjustment programs on underdeveloped states that pried them open to global capitalism while increasing their reliance on extractive and export industries as well as tourism, privatized national industries, flooded their markets with multinational agribusiness produce that undermined peasant farming, cut workers’ wages and benefits, and wrecked their welfare states, especially healthcare systems. All of this made untold numbers of workers and peasants “surplus” to capitalism, forcing them to live in the shantytowns so vividly described by Mike Davis in Planet of Slums.

The pandemic will devastate these societies. People in slums have no recourse to social distancing, lack basic healthcare, and don’t even have access to clean water to wash their hands. For example, Haiti, which has suffered a whole sequence of US-backed coups, occupations, and structural adjustment programs, has only 64 ventilators for a population of 11 million.

The recession will do great damage to the lives of those who survive the pandemic. The Global South faces what The Financial Times calls an impending economic calamity. Its export markets for products like textiles and raw materials have already dried up, tourism has ground to an abrupt halt, and international investors have fled in droves for the “safety” of the US markets, bonds, and the dollar.

Sharpening Conflict and Rivalries in the State System

As the twin crises wreak havoc within states around the world, it has also stoked up conflict between states, signaling a profound reshaping of the world order. Since the end of the Cold War the US has superintended the state system as an unrivaled power, using its unparalleled economic, military, and geopolitical power to enforce free trade globalization.

Even before the pandemic and recession hit, that neoliberal order was in jeopardy. The US had suffered relative decline, China had risen as a rival, and globalization had stalled. Now that order seems to have hit a terminal crisis. Unlike after the last Great Recession, faced with a new and even more profound crisis, the US is not compelling other states to implement a unified strategy.

Instead, we are witnessing spiraling conflicts between states, and corporations considering restructuring their supply chains in accordance with their home state’s alliance structures. Conflicts between imperialist powers, between imperialist powers and regional ones, and between imperialist powers and oppressed nations are multiplying.

Trump has doubled down on his new Cold War with China, trying to deflect blame for his complete mishandling of the crisis, whipping up anti-Asian racism and encouraging further decoupling of US multinationals from China. His secretary of state Mike Pompeo has dabbled in bizarre conspiracy theories alleging that a Chinese lab created the virus, leading some of Trump’s proto-fascist supporters to accuse China of unleashing the virus to weaken the US.

For its part, China also bungled its initial response to the virus. It at first suppressed information about the outbreak, but then used authoritarian means to effectively suppress the virus. After that success, it has tried to flip the script about its failure by deploying its massive economic capacity to send tests, masks, and ventilators to countries in need.

It aims to bolster its soft power in the world, presenting itself as an alternative to the US. All of this has intensified the rivalry between the US and China. In an ominous sign of possible conflicts ahead, Trump just ratcheted up the US naval presence in the South China Sea.

As The New York Times reports, “The America, an amphibious assault ship, and the Bunker Hill, a guided missile cruiser, entered contested waters off Malaysia. At the same time, a Chinese government ship in the area has for days been tailing a Malaysian state oil company ship carrying out exploratory drilling. Chinese and Australian warships have also powered into nearby waters, according to the defense experts.”

The economic crisis has similarly sharpened conflicts between other states, each angling to protect their slice of the world system. For example, the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia have been locked in a battle for dominance in the oil and natural gas industry.

Saudi Arabia took advantage of the crisis to try and bury their American and Russian competition by ramping up production and further driving down already low prices. While the states recently cut a deal, it was too little too late. They had overproduced oil that now amidst the pandemic and recession has no buyers and consumers, leading prices for oil futures in the US to drop below zero for the first time ever.

Finally, the US as well as other imperialist powers have intensified pressure against regional rivals and doubled down on attacks on oppressed nations and peoples. For instance, Trump has maintained lethal sanctions against Iran, denying the country medical supplies as deaths from COVID-19 spiraled out of control, and maintained similar sanctions against Venezuela. And the US and Israel continue to strangle occupied Palestine even amidst the pandemic.

Resistance Amidst the Pandemic

While our rulers scramble to save their system at our expense—including our very lives—workers and oppressed people have started to resist. These new shoots of struggle are developing after a year of mass strikes throughout the world system. People have risen up from the Middle East to Latin America and Hong Kong. Feminist strikes and climate strikes have shaken societies throughout the world.

In general, these mass actions may retreat during the pandemic, but they will likely surge again when its safe for people to return to protests, and they will grow more intense with any economic recovery. The international pattern will likely be the case in the US.

At the same time, though, the pandemic has actually triggered an unprecedented wave of workplace actions and strikes among essential workers, whether they are unionized or not. They have been forced to fight to protect their own health and that of their co-workers and families.

Teachers threatened a sick out in New York City to force Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the schools. Nurses have staged actions throughout the country demanding Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Workers at grocery stores, Amazon, and meat packing plants have also taken direct action demanding everything from PPE to paid overtime, hazard pay, and temporary closure of their facilities for cleaning.

Those furloughed or laid off have been stirred to form organizations to threaten rent strikes, demand suspension of their debts, and organize mutual aid to help their fellow workers survive. Already, some are talking about forming unemployed councils similar to those pioneered by the Communist Party in 1930s.

Oppressed people have also agitated for their rights against the discrimination intensified by the pandemic and recession. Women, who are disproportionately categorized as essential workers, have been at the forefront of on the job actions and have fought to protect their abortion rights threatened with suspension as non-essential healthcare amidst the crisis.

Undocumented workers have staged protests across for their rights and wages on the job as essential workers, while those who have lost their jobs have challenged their exclusion due to immigration status from unemployment and emergency checks granted other workers. And Black activists have called attention to the vicious racist disparities in contraction of COVID-19.

Evils at the Ballot Box and Polarization in Society

Tragically, in the presidential election we will have no one to vote for who represents these struggles and demands. The Democrats blocked the only candidate that would have trumpeted them—Bernie Sanders. The party’s capitalist donors, party establishment, and bourgeois media won the argument that his program was “unrealistic” and that he was “unelectable,” enabling Joe Biden—perhaps the weakest candidate in living memory—to easily defeat him.

As a result, we now face the classic dilemma of an election between lesser and greater evils—the capitalist establishment’s candidate, Biden, and bigot in chief Trump. Those of us in DSA have to uphold the “Bernie or Bust” resolution passed at the Convention, and, regardless of what anyone does in the ballot box, we should spend no time, money, or energy on campaigning for Biden.

We are going to have to fight whichever one of them wins the election. Both will be forced to impose austerity measures on workers and will deflect attention for that by scapegoating oppressed peoples. And both will be forced into sharper confrontations with other states in the world system.

Each evil presents different dangers. If Trump wins, he will double down on his white supremacist nationalist program with even more vicious attacks on workers and the oppressed, and if he enacts any reforms, such as an infrastructure jobs program, they will exclude undocumented workers.

If Biden wins, the danger is that the left, workers, and oppressed groups, relieved that Trump is gone and mistakenly believing that we have a friend we can rely on in the White House, will grant him a honeymoon. In that case, Biden and the Democrats will adapt to the Republican right, as Obama and Clinton did during their terms in office.

And if either does propose reforms that address the real problems workers and oppressed people face, instead of just supporting them uncritically, socialists should agitate for funding the expansion by taxing the rich and cutting military budgets. For example, any infrastructure jobs programs should be unionized, should include undocumented workers, and should be in accordance with the stipulations of the Green New Deal and not deepen the hold of fossil capitalism.

One thing is for certain, regardless of the outcome of the election: the far right will grow. With Trump in office they will get the green light for their bigoted program and organizing. Just as frightening, if Biden wins and the left hesitates to fight him, the right will seize the opening as the only critics of the Democrats in office, just as they did under Obama through the Tea Party mobilizations.

Amidst this new crisis, the far right could easily morph into a fascist movement in the US and internationally. The petty bourgeoisie of small business owners and middle management, which are the social base of fascism, will be driven into a frenzy by fears of bankruptcy and job losses.

So, while the initial demonstrations by these forces to open up the economy have been absurd in slogans (e.g. “Don’t Cancel My Golf Season” and “Give Me Liberty or Give Me COVID-19”) and small in size, no one on the left should underestimate their potential to grow, tap into unemployed workers’ fears, and redirect them into racism and xenophobia. The left will have to prepare to engage in more anti-fascist struggles in the coming period, directly confronting them in the streets and providing an alternative program to win people to progressive solutions.

Reorienting on Struggle and Independent Politics

Faced with pandemic and global recession, socialists must make a sharp reorientation toward building class and social struggle. As Andy Sernatinger has argued, DSA and indeed most socialists have subordinated such organizing to electoral campaigns especially Sanders’ run for the Democratic Party nomination.

Already socialists have begun this reorientation by organizing struggle amidst the pandemic and recession. The entire left—regardless of their positions on the Sanders campaign—should unite in these efforts as our top priority. These struggles are the necessary precondition for winning immediate defensive fights against life threatening conditions in workplaces, and corporate and government austerity measures.

They alone can provide the social and class power to force governments and corporations, which are shackled with debt and clamoring for austerity, to meet our demands. Without that power, elected officials will have little or no space to enact reforms.

Socialists should use elections, including down ballot ones, as a compliment to, not substitute for, organizing class and social struggle. When socialists do run for office, they should do so on our own ballot lines with the aim of challenging both parties of capitalist austerity.

Thus, we have to rebalance our priorities away from an overweening focus on elections toward building class and social struggles. Through this organizing we can expand the infrastructure of resistance—networks of socialist militants embedded in workplaces, unions, and social movement organizations—for the much large struggles to come.

We have been thrown into 1930s style conditions, and we must adopt mass struggle strategies and tactics that our forebears used during the Great Depression. Socialists should build fights for immediate defensive demands like for personal protective equipment for essential workers, connect those to systemic reforms like Medicare for All and The Green New Deal, and build the base within the struggles for much more radical socialists demands.

It is time to think big about how we want the economy reopened. We cannot return to the neoliberal status quo; it was already broken. The auto industry must be repurposed to produce Green New Deal infrastructure like high speed rail. We should propose classic socialist reforms, like nationalizing Amazon as a public utility to serve our needs rather than make profits for the parasite Jeff Bezos.

Throughout, we need to avoid the trap of “national solipsism” that Mike Davis has called attention to, and instead raise a host of internationalist demands. We should call for not only the inclusion of undocumented workers in the benefits package but their immediate and unconditional legalization.

We must push for an immediate end to US sanctions on Iran and Venezuela as well as the complete cancellation of third world debt. To pay for this, we should agitate for taxes on the rich, deep cuts in military spending, and abolition of boondoggle weapons of mass destruction like the F-35.

Through this leadership in struggle, we have to build socialist organization and we initiate discussions on the left about building a new socialist party to challenge the Democrats and Republicans and the capitalist class they represent. In the immediate struggles of the moment we have to keep our eyes on the prize—the goal of political and social revolution.

Capitalism is a failed system that offers more pandemics, more economic crisis, more climate disaster, more oppression, and more war. Our choice, as it was at the dawn of the 20^th century, is between such capitalist barbarism and socialism. This is the fight of our lives and for our planet’s future.

Thanks, Bernie!

By: Joanna MisnickApril 25, 2020

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Photo: Gage Skidmore

Since Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign, there has been a steady stream of articles assessing it. They range from more mainstream progressive political analysis citing his inability to compromise and soften his message, problems within the staff, etc. to some on the socialist left decrying Bernie’s contesting in the Democratic Party as a breach of principle and misleadership of the working class.

This discussion will continue for a time. Meanwhile, I suggest closing your eyes and visualizing what U.S. politics, electoral and social movement, would have looked like if Bernie Sanders, democratic socialist, had not launched his campaigns for President.

At the outset of the primary season, Bernie Sanders’ ratings and his substantial wins in Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire made his nomination seemed like a surprising, but distinct, possibility. His popularity had moved other progressive candidates to adopt some form of support or lip service for Medicare for all, fixing student debt, a fair tax system which makes the billionaires pay their fair share, an end to corporate and oligarchic campaign financing, ending the immoral income gap between rich and poor, raising the minimum wage to $15, immigration and criminal justice reform, and more.

Bernie revolutionized funding for campaigns, refused to take billionaire donations or money from corporate super-PACs[i]. He raised over 10 million from millions of small donations at an average $18.50[ii] per donation. This was unprecedented in big-dollar presidential campaigning. Message received: working people are in this and will band together to finance their political message. The wealthy do not monopolize our elections. Candidates will now forever be judged on how they are financed and by whom.

Centrist alarm

The popularity of Bernie’s platform alarmed corporate centrist Democratic Party leaders, who launched a campaign known as ABB – anybody but Bernie. Senator Elizabeth Warren was their first weapon – a radical progressive often allied with Sanders and a woman to appease the loss of Hillary Clinton felt so keenly among upper middle class suburban women, the sought after base of the Party. But Warren failed to attract voters away from Bernie. The back-up plan was flooding the contest with a clown car full of candidates, something for everybody, so as to take votes away from Bernie in the primaries.

And then there was Joe Biden, Obama’s Vice President who had traction among the Party’s Black voters that could deliver victories for a return to life before Trump, the Obama days. The appeal played on the abject fear that Donald Trump might be re-elected and the Democratic candidate had to be someone who could vanquish him. The Democratic leadership insisted the idea that Bernie’s democratic socialist program made him a long shot. That worked, and Bernie’s lead was pushed back, never to return, after a stunning Biden victory in South Carolina. Other candidates dropped out one by one, sheepishly endorsing Joe Biden, knowing that there was a real issue about his diminished capacities.

Medicare for All

One attack that backfired was the constant question during the debates and in interviews about Medicare for All: Sanders was accused of not having a plan to pay for Medicare for All. Workers really love the health coverage they get from their employers and they do not want to give it up; the government should not force them.

Again and again, Bernie explained how Medicare for All would save money, be more efficient and fulfil what is a human right for all. But it never stopped – until Covid 19. The life-threatening chaos of the botched response to this pandemic has made the case for Medicare for All. With 17 million and rising suddenly unemployed, the virtues of employer furnished health care have evaporated. As one author put it; “Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders.” Even before the pandemic, Medicare for All enjoyed majority support in most polling.

Bernie Is Not Just Running for President

Bernie ran for President to jumpstart and focus much-needed resistance in this country to the inhumane plunder by billionaires, the oligarchs that create obscene income inequality and exploitation. He railed against corporate greed, the seizure of our government by the corporations, the destruction of anything like a humane society that cares for everyone.

He gave hope to people ground down by the extreme individualism of neoliberalism, called out the profit system as the cause of this deep inequality and urged a political revolution, a movement to take back our society. To emphasize that he was not a savior candidate, Sanders popularized the phrases ‘Not Me, Us!’ and ‘A Movement, Not a Moment!’

He explained that even if he were elected, it would take this mass movement to bring about needed change. And it would take time, nothing overnight. This message was heard by millions of young people, anxious to fight for a vision of a just society on a planet that can sustain life.

Socialism was back in the U.S. lexicon, running ahead of capitalism in poll after poll – even if this was the socialism of post-war Europe, of catch-up with social measures in other capitalist societies our working class had been denied. The special urgency was the need to defeat the most dangerous President in the history of our country – Donald Trump had to go.

From the beginning, Sanders pledged to support the Democratic nominee and help beat Trump. The pandemic, social distancing and uncertainty about the election calendar, combined with Trump’ s utter inability to lead the response or even assemble the facts at hand must have been a factor in suspending his campaign and closing the Democratic Party ranks.

A Democratic Election in the Time of Pandemic?

April 7 was primary election day for Democrats in the state of Wisconsin. The voting took place the day that a record 1,200 Covid19 deaths occurred in a 24 hour period and 97% of the US population is officially under what is imaginatively called social distancing, or lockdown. The Democratic Governor of Wisconsin tried to postpone the primary but was overruled by Republican-dominated state legislature as well as a US Supreme Court ruling (strict partisan vote of 5 to 4) that will not allow any mail in ballots to be counted if postmarked after April 7.

The city of Milwaukee managed to open only five of its 180 polling places as poll workers, many elderly, opted not to risk it. Lines were intolerably and undemocratically long and severely dangerous.

More than 20 states and territories have yet to hold primary elections. Fifteen have already postponed them. And the Democratic Party has optimistically pushed its national nominating convention to mid-August from mid-July. In addition, social distancing severely restricts face to face campaigning, door to door neighborhood canvassing, and the mass rallies that gave the Sanders political revolution its reality and energy as a movement.

The recently-passed Congressional $2.2 trillion relief package number 3 contains a hard fought for $400 million for states to implement balloting by mail as opposed to in-person voting. But the United States is a federated system, not a federal one. And Republicans control a majority of state legislatures that have the power to accept or reject the “suggestion” of reliance on mail-in balloting. Prior to the pandemic, some Republican-controlled states had removed around one million voters from eligibility under various pretexts to damp down the Democratic voting base. Donald Trump tweeted his opposition to a national mail-in ballot because it would advantage a Democratic victory

From the beginning, Bernie Sanders has emphasized that in order to beat Trump there must be record-breaking voter turnout. This did not happen in the early primary contests; a disappointing 20 percent of young voters came out. The fight for mail-in balloting and funding to implement it continues in Congress. In the end, the pace and depth of the Covid 19 crisis and the economic collapse are decisive factors in the democratic conduct and timing of the US presidential election and its outcome.

The Cycle of Rebellion From Within

The Democratic Party leadership is adept at pushing renegade leftist nomination-seekers off a path to victory. The cycle of these attempts is about every 15 to 20 years, as social unrest rises to a pitch seeking “political”: power but does not look to the near unthinkable strategy of a third political party in an anti-parliamentary system. Thus far, the ruling class has been able to contain deep divisions within the duopoly.

Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign, under the slogan ‘Clean for Gene’ reflected deep opposition to the war in Vietnam and a general radicalization against the “system.” McCarthy’s nomination was defeated as thousands of young people demonstrating outside the Chicago convention were attacked in a police riot.

The next defiance came in 1984-88, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson, an aide to Martin Luther King at his side when King was assassinated, twice sought the nomination. Jackson surfaced the deep anger within the working class suffering from the recession of the 1980s, stagnant wages, and unemployment – the full reality of the end of the American dream.

Jackson ran in the social democratic spirit of Martin Luther King. Broad scale support to his campaign was multiracial and working class. In 1988 he came in second to Michael Dukakis, winning 13 primaries and 7 million votes. This was probably the final offensive struggle the Black civil rights movement waged within the national Democratic Party for equality and political inclusion of an MLK trajectory.

Jackson’s campaign vehicle, the Rainbow Coalition, basically disappeared after 1988. And the near unanimous loyalty of the Black vote since to the Democratic Party is a defensive one as neoliberalism ravages large sections of Black America.

The New Socialist Movement

Unlike the previous radical rebellions in Democratic presidential politics, the Bernie candidacy inspired the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). This organization now has some 56,000 members in 170 chapters spread all over the country. They were a boots on the ground army for Bernie, knocking on over one half million doors and making untold phone calls. Over the past several years, DSA has been studying Marxism, history of socialism, and has adopted a firm commitment to a rank and file strategy of building a working class movement from below. The group is a big tent, open to all radical points of view operating within a democratic framework.

DSA is overwhelmingly young. At the time of the last rebellion in the national Democratic Party in 1988 some were not yet born and others were in grade school[iii]. It was not surprising that many believed Bernie would win, underestimating the obstacles to his campaign not just in the corporate centrist Party leadership but the actual level of class consciousness and readiness for struggle, particularly with the acute weakening of the organized labor movement in the U.S and its inability to lead resistance as a national movement. Lesson learned.

A plurality, if not a majority, of the DSA holds a position of opposition to taking over the Democratic Party and supports an eventual building of an independent workers’ party. Various tactics attempt to cope with the failure of any left force to build a durable mass working class third party in this country. Propaganda for such a party combined with abstention from elections or running strictly symbolic campaigns is not an attractive strategy for most new socialists born of the Bernie effort.

Involvement in local struggles, building coalitions with other organizations fighting for a minimum wage, against police brutality, housing for all, rent control, decarceration[iv], immigrant rights and strike support have deepened the ability of the DSA to play a role in real time in the real world. Close to 100 DSA endorsed candidates, most members of the group, have won election to become tribunes of the people. In Chicago, DSA elected six members of the City Council, the first socialists in that body for over 100 years.

The eruption of the new socialist DSA and Bernie’s campaign has placed pressures on the small groups that remain from the deep decline of the 20^th Century revolutionary left. Even DSA, which voted as its convention not to endorse any Democratic nominee but Bernie, has some further thinking and discussion to conduct. Everyone understands the need to rid this country and the world stage of Donald Trump, the “most dangerous President ever”: as Bernie repeatedly said. (For the flavor, rent the 1990s film “The Madness of King George.”) The discussion of left strategy toward that end in the time of pandemic and looming economic depression is continuing – electronically of course.

[i] A PAC is an organization formed to contribute funds to influence the outcome of political elections in the United States

[ii] Around £15

[iii] Equivalent to Primary school here

[iv] Campaigning against the prison system – and particularly its disproportionate impact young Black men

This article first appeared on Socialist Resistance.

Self-Extinction of Neoliberalism? Don’t Bet on It.

By: Gilbert AchcarApril 24, 2020

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For the second time since the turn of the century, governments in North America and Europe are intervening massively with public funds and in conjunction with central banks to bail out entire sectors of the economy and prevent a general economic collapse. The ongoing rescue operations necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic has already reached a much higher scale than the one deployed against the 2007–08 financial crisis. These operations clash with the basic tenets of neoliberalism in that they constitute a massive regulatory intervention by the state in reining back the market, whereas deregulation and market “survival of the fittest” are central to neoliberal ideology.

They also clash with fiscal austerity, but the latter precept is not common to all neoliberal governments. It is a sacrosanct principle in Europe, where British neoclassical neoliberalism blended with German ordo-liberalism. But it is not part of a neoliberal consensus in the United States, where paradoxically the Democrats who used to be accused of Keynesian “tax and spend” by the Republicans have become the champions of fiscal discipline in the neoliberal age, while the latter have developed since Ronald Reagan an original policy of “cut taxes (for the rich) and increase (military) spending” that has resulted in huge federal deficits.

The fact remains though that Western neoliberal governments violated their own doctrines twice—the second time on a much-expanded scale—on the occasion of two successive crises of a magnitude warranting the label affixed to each of them, in turn, of being “the worst since the Great Depression” that began in the United States in 1929. The ongoing Great Lockdown, the nickname that the IMF adopted to designate the huge economic crisis resulting from the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, has already sunk to far lower depths than the Great Recession, the name that the IMF started using in 2009 for the previous crisis. The crucial question is now: when will the current crisis reach its bottom and how long after that will it take the world to recover from it?

The magnitude of the ongoing economic disaster is such that it has revived and boosted the hope that it will lead to a major global shift in economic policies and priorities. In this connection, Naomi Klein quotes from one of the main enemies of Keynesianism and key contributors to the neoliberal shift: Milton Friedman. At the beginning and end of a video that she recently produced on “Coronavirus Capitalism—and How to Beat It,” she uses the same quote from Friedman’s 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom that she already used twice in her book The Shock Doctrine (pp. 6, 140): “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

Whereas Klein had used that quote in the book as a clue to what she called the “shock doctrine,” she quotes it approvingly in the video, commenting that “Friedman, one of history’s most extreme free market economists, was wrong about a whole lot, but he was right about that. In times of crisis, seemingly impossible ideas suddenly become possible.” The notion that progressive views such as those advocated by Klein and Bernie Sanders have been vindicated by the crisis has become widespread indeed— even in the Financial Times where associate editor Janan Ganesh wrote a 18 March piece entitled “The Sanders worldview wins even as Bernie loses.” A day before, the British pro-Conservative magazine The Spectator was inviting Boris Johnson to “borrow from Corbyn’s playbook.”

For anyone who remembers the previous economic crisis, this must trigger a sense of déjà vu. The expectation then was quite stronger actually although the present crisis is much bigger, for the Great Recession was the first major global shock of the neoliberal age and the occasion for the first resort by neoliberal governments to massive state intervention in reining back the crisis. Newsweek came out in February 2009 with a cover proclaiming “We are all socialists now.” Rereading it today is quite amusing: it starts by quoting “Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, the chair of the House Republican Conference and a vociferous foe of President Obama’s nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill” and his host on Fox News, the epitome of truly fake news, who described the bill as “socialist.”

The Newsweek article commented that this accusation “seems strangely beside the point. The US government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries.” It went on cultivating the paradox: “History has a sense of humor, for the man who laid the foundations for the world Obama now rules is George W. Bush, who moved to bail out the financial sector last autumn with $700 billion. Bush brought the Age of Reagan to a close; now Obama has gone further, reversing Bill Clinton’s end of big government.”

That illusion was based on a confusion between a pragmatic and temporary borrowing from the Keynesian playbook, to paraphrase The Spectator, and a radical change in long-term economic and social policies. It didn’t last long at the time, as the FT’s Ganesh could not fail to note:

We are in the early stages of one of history’s periodic discontinuities in economic thought. The sharpest, perhaps, since the OPEC oil crises that elevated the free- marketeers in the 1970s. Readers will suggest the crash in 2008, after which a biography of John Maynard Keynes announced the “return of the master”. Well, it was fleeting. Before long, there were fiscal retrenchments around the western world. In the US, there was the Tea Party movement, the neutering of President Barack Obama by a Republican Congress, and his successor’s raid on the administrative state.

“This time feels different,” added Ganesh. But that itself is a recurrent feeling. The most recent instance occurred shortly before the outburst of the pandemic, when Joseph Stiglitz, the well-known former Chief Economist of the World Bank, heralded (after countless others) the “end of neoliberalism”. This time feels different, Stiglitz too could have written as he asserted that “if the 2008 financial crisis failed to make us realize that unfettered markets don’t work, the climate crisis certainly should: neoliberalism will literally bring an end to our civilization.”

Understandably, the higher acuteness of the ongoing Covid-19 economic crisis, although it is of much lesser historic significance than the climate crisis, has led to a lot of new obituaries of neoliberalism—all of them, alas, quite premature. A zealous neoliberal contributor to Forbes business magazine confused them with obituaries of capitalism in lamenting that “left-wing intellectuals are thrilled,” thus blaming them for what he believed to be Schadenfreude. He acknowledged nonetheless that the left critique of neoliberalism (capitalism tout court in his understanding) has gained ground over the years, calling fellow neoliberals to be “extra vigilant”:

Twelve years ago, anti-capitalists succeeded in reframing the financial crisis—wrongly—as a crisis of capitalism. The false narrative that the financial crisis is a result of market failure and deregulation has since become firmly established in the minds of the population at large. And now left-wing intellectuals are again doing their utmost to reframe the corona crisis to justify their calls for the all-powerful state. Unfortunately, the chances that they could succeed are very high indeed.

Was this fervent neoliberal over-pessimistic about the advent of the “all-powerful state”? Not quite in the view of David Harvey who concluded his long piece posted on Jacobin on 20 March with a rather surprising dystopian prospect—not the prospect of a socialist welfare state, but that of a Trumpian Behemoth:

the burden of exiting from the current economic crisis now shifts to the United States and here is the ultimate irony: the only policies that will work, both economically and politically, are far more socialistic than anything that Bernie Sanders might propose and these rescue programs will have to be initiated under the aegis of Donald Trump, presumably under the mask of Making America Great Again. All those Republicans who so viscerally opposed the 2008 bailout will have to eat crow or defy Donald Trump. The latter, if he is wise, will cancel the elections on an emergency basis and declare the origin of an imperial presidency to save capital and the world from “riot and revolution.”

A week later, Costas Lapavitsas followed in Harvey’s footsteps in contradicting unwarranted left-wing optimism, albeit with a less apocalyptic scenario and no illusions about the end of neoliberalism being in sight:

The shibboleths of the neoliberal ideology of the last four decades were rapidly swept aside, and the state emerged as the regulator of the economy commanding enormous power. It was not difficult for many on the Left to welcome such state action, thinking that it indicated the “return of Keynesianism” and the death knell of neoliberalism. But it would be rash to come to such conclusions.

For one thing, the nation-state has always been at the heart of neoliberal capitalism, guaranteeing the class rule of the dominant corporate and financial bloc through selective interventions at critical moments. Moreover, these interventions were accompanied by strongly authoritarian measures, shutting people inside their homes en masse and locking down enormous metropoles. … The colossal power of the state and its ability to intervene in both economy and society could result, for instance, in a more authoritarian form of controlled capitalism in which the interests of the corporate and financial elite would be paramount.

We stand again facing the two polar opposites of optimism and pessimism, utopia and dystopia, between which the radical left has traditionally swung. The truth is that these are primarily projections onto the future of individual and/or collective dispositions that themselves swing according to shifting political experiences. Thus, the mood among the US left certainly shifted considerably from the eve of Super Tuesday on 3 March to the following day, in the aftermath of Biden’s securement of victory in the Democratic primary—as did the mood among the British left between the eve of 12 December 2019 and the following day, in the aftermath of Boris Johnson’s electoral triumph.

Both utopia and dystopia are useful components of the left’s worldview, nonetheless, in that they sustain the magnetic poles of pessimism and optimism, caution and voluntarism, the anxiety of a resumption of the fascistic past and the hope of a truly democratic socialistic future, which motivate those who strive to change the world into a better and fairer place. The point at which the cursor eventually stands in the real world on the long range that separates utopia from dystopia is not determined by objective conditions though. These constitute only the parameters within which class and intersectional struggles must proceed. Major shifts in the realm of governmental politics are determined above all by social struggle in the context of the existing circumstances.

Here is indeed where Milton Friedman got it wrong. When crisis occurs, the actions that are taken do not “depend on the ideas that are lying around”. To be sure, the fight around ideas translated into concrete policy proposals is important. And the political-economic measures that end up being implemented are certainly related to the ideas that prevail—not in society at large, however, but among the social group that steers the helm of government. The analogy between the shift away from the postwar Keynesian consensus into neoliberalism and what Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm shift” terminates at this point. For, unlike scientific revolutions which are the result of advances in knowledge, paradigm shifts in the economy are not the product of some collective—theoretical or even merely pragmatic—intellectual decision.

As Ernest Mandel put it in 1980 (1^st edition; pp. 77–8 of 2^nd edition) at the onset of the neoliberal age, in his Long Waves of Capitalist Development:

The turnabout of academic economics toward the anti-Keynesian counterrevolution was not so much a belated recognition of the long-term threats of permanent inflation. These threats had been well known long before Keynesianism lost its hegemony among economic advisors of bourgeois and reformist governments. It wasn’t even essentially a product of the unavoidable acceleration of inflation… It was essentially a product of a basic switch in class struggle priorities of the capitalist class.

The monetarists’ “anti-Keynesian counterrevolution” in the realm of academic economics is nothing but the ideological expression of this changed priority. Without the long-term restoration of chronic structural unemployment, without the restoration of the “sense of individual responsibility” (i.e., without severe cutbacks in social security and social services), without generalized austerity policies (i.e., stagnation or decline in real wages), there can be no sharp rapid restoration of the rate of profit: That is the new economic wisdom. There is nothing very “scientific” about it, but there is a lot that corresponds to the immediate and long-term needs of the capitalist class, all references to objective science notwithstanding.

The neoliberal paradigm shift was enabled by a steady deterioration in the balance of class forces in Western countries in the course of the 1970s, with unemployment on the rise since the 1973-75 recession and the victorious onslaughts on the labor movement led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s. The degree to which the “anti-Keynesian counterrevolution” has been implemented since then in different countries depends not on intellectual differences, but on the balance of social forces in each country. For a timely illustration with regard to public health, it is sufficient to compare Britain and France, two countries with roughly equal populations and GDPs.

The range of health costs is similar in both countries, far from the extravagant costs that inflate US health expenditure. If we take average annual physician compensation as an indicator, it is currently in US dollars, 108,000 in France and 138,000 in the UK (compared to 313,000 in the US). Registered nurses in France and the UK get roughly equal annual salaries on average. Successive neoliberal governments in France have been criticized for trying to shift part of health expenditure onto the patients, and yet France remains in a much better position than the UK with regard to public health.

According to OECD data, health expenditure by government and compulsory schemes has fluctuated, during the past decade, between 8.5 and 9.5% of GDP in France compared to between 6.9 and 7.8% in Britain. From 2010 to 2017, France has dedicated 0.6 to 0.7% of its GDP to investment (gross capital formation) in its healthcare system every year as against 0.3 to 0.4% for the UK. It is thus not surprising that the number of hospitals in 2017 was over 3000 in France as against less than 2000 in the UK, with a total number of hospital beds nearing 400,000 in France compared to close to 168,000 in the UK. This number kept going down in the UK over the last decade under Tory-led governments. As for the number of physicians, it was more than 211,000 in France in 2017 as against 185,700 in the UK. There were 10.8 practicing nurses per one thousand inhabitants across the Channel compared with 7.8 in Britain.

These figures show how much it was hypocritical and deceitful for Boris Johnson’s Brexit campaign to use the NHS as its central argument and thus lay the blame for the poor state of the British health system at the EU’s door. Yet, the difference in the state of public health between France and the UK is not due to ideological differences between rulers on either side of the Channel. It is the much greater social resistance in France, and nothing else, that has prevented the country’s successive governments from going further down the neoliberal road.

In the UK, where wholesale privatization of public utilities—such as what the Conservatives managed to do in the sectors of energy and transport—was not possible for electoral or economic reasons, different tactics were used that were met with too little resistance. In public health, it was a reduction of public spending coupled with inducement of the richest layers of the population out of the public service into private health schemes, in order to put progressively in place a two-tier health system, like in the USA. In higher education, this resulted in managerial privatization (corporatization) by way of replacing public funding with a massive increase in tuition fees, thus creating down the road a generation that is entering professional life burdened by significant debt, again like in the USA.

The outcome of the present pandemic-related economic crisis will likewise be determined in every country by the balance of local social forces in the context of the global balance. The most likely immediate outcome will not be one of the two opposite alternatives of a spontaneous post-Keynesian abandonment of neoliberalism or a Trumpian Behemoth. It will rather be the attempt by neoliberal governments to shift the burden of the huge debt currently incurred onto the workers, as they did in the wake of the Great Recession, depressing the people’s purchasing power and propensity to spend, thus leading the world into a major aggravation of the current secular stagnation, as Adam Tooze warned.

The historian rightly concluded: “It makes sense to call instead for a more active, more visionary government to lead the way out of the crisis. But the question, of course, is what form that will take and which political forces will control it.” That is the question, indeed. With our lives shattered by the ongoing dual crisis and with the economic crisis likely to long outlast the pandemic, what is most immediately at stake is to determine who is going to pay for the huge human and economic cost of the crisis: those who are responsible in the first place for the amplitude of that cost, through decades of neoliberal dismantlement of public health and the welfare state and prioritization of financial profits, or the rest of us, i.e. the vast majority of the people?

We can safely predict that neoliberals will be unanimous in increasing public health expenditure, not without making sure to benefit their health-manufacturer friends. They will do so, not because of a sudden conversion to the virtues of the welfare state or because they care for the public, but because they dread the economic consequences of a new pandemic or a second round of the current one. The point is that they will be naturally inclined to do so at the expense of other aspects of the public interest, such as education, pensions, or unemployment benefits, while making the wage-earners pay—by measures such as a pay freeze or even pay cuts—the cost of getting the economies back to business as usual.

The most urgent struggle is therefore to prevent them from doing so in the way French workers stood against their neoliberal governments’ onslaught on their incomes and pension schemes in 1995 and 2019, i.e. by resorting to the general strike or the threat thereof. This fight will be crucial in preparing the ground for a defeat of the neoliberals at the hands of social and political forces such as those that have been standing behind the trade-union movement in France, the Labour Party in the UK, and the Sanders campaign in the US. It is only then that an enduring termination of neoliberalism will occur.

The Curious Case of the “Democratic Road to Socialism” That Wasn’t There

By: Gil SchaefferApril 24, 2020

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In an article last year (“Marxism, the Democratic Republic, and the Undemocratic U. S. Constitution,” New Politics, 7/30/2019) I argued that there are major political and historical blind spots and inconsistencies in current debates over socialist strategy. The main inconsistency is that all sides in this controversy continue to refer to the United States as a “capitalist democracy” at the same time they also grant that the U. S. has an “extremely undemocratic political system.” Running along with this equivocation regarding the nature of the U. S. political system is a parallel historical neglect of the central importance of the goal of a democratic republic in the political thinking of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Luxemburg. One reinforces the other: the inability to see the place of the democratic republic in the history and theory of Marxism is associated with an underestimation of the ideological and political importance of the struggle to make the U. S. a representative democracy.

One of the criticisms in this article was directed at Eric Blanc’s proposition that the central strategic question facing socialists today is “How can class rule be overcome in a capitalist democracy?” His answer, purportedly derived from the pre-1910 writings of Karl Kautsky, is that “the path to anticapitalist rupture in conditions of political democracy pass[es] through the election of a workers’ party to government.”[1] I said that this formulation made no sense because pre-WWI Germany was not a democracy and neither is the U. S. today. However, I did not question whether Blanc’s version of the pre-1910 Kautsky was accurate or not (I hadn’t read any Kautsky for decades), only that this formulation, whatever its source, was not a useful guide for current political activity in the U. S. I went on to say that the main problem facing the left today is not how to overcome class rule in a capitalist democracy but how to get democracy in the first place, citing Rosa Luxemburg’s support for the mass demonstrations demanding Prussian electoral reform and a democratic republic in 1910 as an example of a democratic tactic that differed from Kautsky’s opposition to these demonstrations in favor of focusing on the 1912 election within the undemocratic Prusso-German monarchical state.

Seeking to expand on this theme, I submitted a second article in December that was returned with the following comment by an editor: “The party that most of the much-derided ‘Jacobin socialists’ advocate building, ASAP, is a party that would follow a strategy essentially laid out by Kautsky in The Road to Power (1909). This was Lenin’s favorite work by Kautsky. This was the Kautsky who embraced the mass strike idea as articulated by Luxemburg. This isn’t the Kautsky who sold out to the German labor bureaucracy and hence the SPD parliamentary leadership. You are conflating the two Kautskys.” I found this comment puzzling because my main criticism was still directed at the content of Blanc’s strategy, not at what inspired it, and also because it seemed to imply that Lenin and Luxemburg were associated in some way with a strategy of first winning an electoral majority in the Reichstag. Clearly, I needed to read The Road to Power in order to sort out this puzzle.

Blanc says that Kautsky’s strategy of a “democratic road to socialism” means that “Without winning a democratic election, socialists won’t have the popular legitimacy and power necessary to effectively lead an anticapitalist rupture.”[2] The first problem with this formulation is that it is not in The Road to Power[3]or any of Kautsky’s other pre-1910 writings. Mike Taber pointed this out back in April,[4] and we will get to Blanc’s response to Taber shortly; but first it would be good to go through what The Road to Power actually says.

The first chapter of The Road to Power is titled “The Conquest of Political Power.” Here Kautsky summarizes the “fundamental principles laid down by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto” (p. 6). These principles are that “the Socialists, as the champions of the class interests of the proletariat, constitute a revolutionary party, because it is impossible to raise this class to a satisfactory existence within capitalist society…” (p. 5). The Socialists are also revolutionary because “They recognize that the power of the state is an instrument of class domination…and that the social revolution for which the proletariat strives cannot be realized until it shall have captured political power” (pp. 5-6). The strategic objective of conquering state power is what differentiates the political socialism of Marx and Engels from the Utopian Socialism of Owen and Fourier, the antipolitical theories of Proudhon and the anarchists, and the revisionist-reformist theory of a “growing into socialism” without a political transformation (p. 6). These are the ABC’s of orthodox Marxism on which Kautsky, Luxemburg, and Lenin agree. Then Kautsky meanders for forty pages on the problem of why the revolution hasn’t happened yet before turning to a discussion of current day strategy and tactics. He repeats that “The social transformation for which we are striving can be attained only through a political revolution, by means of the conquest of political power by the fighting proletariat. The only form of the state in which Socialism can be realized is that of a republic, and a democratic republic at that” (pp. 49-50). The democratic republic as the state form of working class rule (also called the dictatorship of the proletariat) was also taken straight from Marx and Engels.[5] However, Kautsky continues, even though we know that the proletariat’s “victory and the overthrow of capitalism is inevitable,…we are manifestly unable to say whether they will be bloody or not, whether physical force will play a decisive part, or whether they will be fought exclusively by means of economic, legislative and moral pressure” (p. 50). This distinction between the fundamental goals of the socialist movement, which are known with certainty, and the inherent uncertainty regarding the methods required to achieve those goals was standard orthodoxy, too. (Lenin, for example, writing from within Tsarist Russia in 1899, held that “the programme of ‘working-class socialism’ speaks of the winning of political power in general without defining the method, for the choice of method depends on a future which we cannot precisely determine.”[6] [Emphasis in original]) So, Blanc is right in his argument against certain Leninists that Kautsky at this point remained true to the fundamental principles of Marx and Engels[7]; but principles don’t implement themselves. The next question is what specific tactics did Kautsky propose to realize these fundamental principles.

Proceeding in his typical methodical style, Kautsky considers several possible political and tactical scenarios, without committing to any one in particular. Without question, Kautsky’s preference is for the slow, steady, legal, peaceful progress offered by participation in parliament (pp. 46-7, 50-4); and he does envision the possibility that the increasing electoral strength of the Socialists might trigger an attack on the existing political rights of the working class (pp. 47, 96), which would then lead to an escalation of extra-parliamentary conflict up to and including a mass strike (pp. 20, 95, 137). This hypothetical scenario is the closest approximation to Blanc’s “democratic road to socialism” in The Road to Power. But Kautsky also goes on to argue that the growth of the Socialists’ electoral strength within the existing German constitutional system has not resulted in any increase in power or influence for the Socialists because the Reichstag has no real power under the monarchy (pp. 97-8). Acknowledging this dilemma, Kautsky then argues that “Power must first be conquered for it [the Reichstag]. A genuine parliamentary regime must be established. The imperial government must be a committee of the Reichstag” (p. 98). Blanc does not mention this distinction between a parliament without legislative power and a genuine parliamentary regime with power, yet the tactics of socialists would have to differ depending on which type of regime they found themselves in. Kautsky himself gives some hint of how the tactics in a “battle for the ballot” differed from those in a “battle of the ballot” (p. 46). For example, inspired by the 1905 uprising in Russia, Kautsky relates how the German Socialists threw their “full force into the fight for suffrage, especially in Prussia, where it led to street demonstrations, in January, 1908, something that had not been seen in Berlin since 1848” (p. 20); and he fully expects similar battles for suffrage reform to come with increasing frequency “in which mass-strikes may be used as an effective weapon” (p.95). These battles for a “genuine parliamentary regime” would not be defensive battles within the existing parliamentary set-up but offensive battles seeking to expand democratic powers and establish a new regime. In 1909 such an offensive “battle for the ballot” was still a largely hypothetical scenario requiring no immediate practical commitment on Kautsky’s part; but just a year later, with the outbreak of mass demonstrations and strikes in Prussia by local Social Democrats demanding political reform because they had lost patience with the existing regime, a choice had to be made. Luxemburg chose to support these mass demands for a new parliamentary regime while Kautsky opposed them and followed the SPD leadership down the electoral road to a parliament lacking any real power.

That, in short, is the story of The Road to Power. It does not call for winning a majority in the Reichstag as the first step on the road to socialism, and it doesn’t look like such a strategy can be found in any of Kautsky’s other pre-1910 writings. As noted above, Mike Taber was the first to question Blanc on this issue; and Blanc responded with four citations in defense of his position.[8] The first is a quotation from Massimo Salvadori’s study of Kautsky; but Salvadori’s account is unreliable, attributing words to Kautsky’s commentary on the Erfurt Programme (“the need to win a majority in parliament,” “the conquest of a majority in parliament”) that are not in Kautsky’s text.[9] Blanc’s second example refers to a 1909 statement by Kautsky to the effect that if socialist electoral activity threatened the supremacy of the bourgeoisie, then the bourgeoisie would certainly seek to roll back voting rights and restrict the power of parliament. Like Kautsky’s similar scenario in The Road to Power, this was a statement of hypothetical possibility only. It was made in the course of a polemic with an advocate of pure-and-simple parliamentary reformism to justify the maintenance of extra-parliamentary working class pressure on the government, but it does not take up the substantive question of whether the existing parliamentary system actually is a threat to the bourgeoisie and does not propose that the primary aim of the Social Democrats should be the winning of an electoral majority under this regime. The third example is similarly ambiguous, Kautsky quoted as saying [in 1893] that “the hour is approaching where the proletariat…in Germany will conquer parliament with the aid of universal suffrage.”[10] While this statement could possibly be construed as a call for winning a majority in parliament, Kautsky also says in the same article that the existing parliament in the German bureaucratic-military state is a “mere shadow of a parliament, not a real one” and that the establishment of real democratic legislative power will require the overthrow of military absolutism first. Whether winning a majority in the existing parliament is a prerequisite to the overthrow of absolutism is not addressed directly. Lastly, Blanc appeals to Darren Rosso’s critique of Kautsky’s parliamentarism[11] as the clinching evidence that Kautsky obviously did advocate winning parliamentary elections. The problem with this reference is that Rosso doesn’t prove what Blanc thinks he proves because, one, Rosso also relies on Salvadori and, two, he mixes up the tactical question of how to participate in elections under an existing parliamentary regime with the separate question of whether a democratically elected parliament should be the institutional form of working class rule after the conquest of power, classifying both as expressions of a single undifferentiated parliamentarism. In contrast to these erroneous, hypothetical, ambiguous, confused, and/or obscure citations, we have Kautsky’s unambiguous 1912 statement in his polemic with Pannekoek that “The aim of our political struggle remains, as in the past, the conquest of state power by winning a majority in parliament and by raising parliament to the ranks of the master of the government.”[12] Why is it so hard to find an equally straightforward statement prior to 1910? It seems the answer is that it doesn’t exist. Oddly enough, Blanc himself seems to know this, having written back in 2016 that “in the years before 1910 he [Kautsky] did not generally posit that Marxists had to first win a majority in parliament before socialist transformation could be undertaken.”[13] What’s going on here? Why has Blanc reversed his appraisal of the content of Kautsky’s pre-1910 strategic thinking? The answer is Bernie Sanders. Blanc freely grants that it was the upsurge in interest in democratic socialism arising from Sanders’ 2016 campaign that has driven his search for a viable contemporary socialist strategy. But Blanc is too much of a Marxist to think that a straight electoral road to socialism is credible, hence the need to go back through Kautsky’s writings “when he was still a Marxist” to pull out a scenario where a tactic of first winning elections is combined with and backed up by the threat of extra-parliamentary mass action.

Now, many traditional Marxists have already protested that Blanc’s and Jacobin’s support for Sanders violates Marx’s basic teachings on the state, revolution, and the necessity of working class ideological and organizational independence. Those are not my criticisms, at least not in the form in which they have been made so far. My criticism is that Blanc’s narrowing of the full range of Kautsky’s pre-1910 strategic commentary blocks out the distinction Kautsky made between a parliament with power and one without. It’s not just that the purpose of elections, the level of institutional legitimacy, and the tactics of extra-parliamentary activity have to differ depending on what kind of regime one is confronting, but also that the very meaning of democracy is debased if this distinction is ignored. Under Blanc’s framework, any kind of electoral system at all qualifies as a democracy, an equation that Kautsky rejected “when he was a Marxist” because German legislative institutions were a transparent mockery of basic democratic representation. That is why Kautsky envisioned the possibility that a “battle for the ballot” might break out and upset the Party’s desire to confine its activities to a “battle of the ballot.”

In wanting to talk about the place of the democratic republic in the history of Marxism and its relevance for political strategy today, I did not expect I would first have to defend Kautsky against misrepresentations. Even though Kautsky at his best isn’t good enough, he couldn’t have played the role of chief custodian of Marxist doctrine for two decades if he had advocated from the beginning the strategy attributed to him by Blanc. Until 1910 Kautsky was engaged in a balancing act. On one hand he preserved in his doctrinal writings Marx and Engels’ warning that the German Social Democrats had to find some way to advance the legally forbidden demand for a democratic republic against the semi-absolutist German state and on the other he tolerated the Party’s concentration on elections to a powerless parliament. In 1910 this balance was upset by the eruption of mass demonstrations for real democracy. In reaction, Kautsky came down hard both theoretically and tactically on the side of the conservative party leaders while Rosa Luxemburg concluded that the time had finally arrived for the Party to make the long postponed demand for a democratic republic the center of its political activity. As noted in the first article, Blanc is silent on this 1910 dispute between Kautsky and Luxemburg. His exclusive focus is on differentiating his conception of a democratic road to socialism from what he calls Leninist insurrectionism. We can leave aside for now whether Blanc’s characterization of Leninism is accurate or not because Luxemburg’s advocacy of a democratic republic in 1910 is in a different political category altogether. Far from believing that Germany was on the verge of a revolutionary uprising, Luxemburg was merely trying to resurrect the traditional Marxist demand for full democracy that had been conspicuously missing from the SPD’s official Erfurt Programme for almost twenty years. If Blanc’s sidelining of this central demand of classical Marxism were just a personal idiosyncrasy, it wouldn’t need more comment; but Blanc’s and Jacobin’s promotion of the early Kautsky as the embodiment of the best of classical Marxism is part of a larger current of recent historical interpretation that has its source in the concept of “Erfurtianism” conjured up by Lars Lih in his Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context.[14]

Lih writes that “I have coined the term ‘Erfurtian’ to describe the bundle of beliefs, institutional models and political strategies that constituted orthodox Marx-based Social Democracy….An Erfurtian is someone who accepts the SPD as a model party, accepts the Erfurt Programme as an authoritative statement of the Social-Democratic mission, and accepts Karl Kautsky’s tremendously influential commentary the Erfurt Programme as an authoritative definition of Social Democracy. On all accounts, Lenin was a passionate Erfurtian.” (p. 6) Lih, echoing what Neil Harding established more than forty years ago[15], is right that Lenin was an orthodox Marx-based Social Democrat and that What Is to Be Done? has been misunderstood by Marxists and non-Marxists alike for the greater part of a century, but he is wrong to equate orthodox Marxism with Erfurtianism or to claim that Lenin was an Erfurtian. It is astonishing, first of all, that Lih would write a six hundred page book seeking to equate orthodox Marxism with the Erfurt Programme without once mentioning Engels’ criticism of that programme for failing to call for the overthrow of the Prusso-German military state and the establishment of a democratic republic. Lih fails to engage with this suppressed issue within German Social Democracy because he defines orthodoxy merely as allegiance to what Kautsky called the “merger formula,” i. e., “Social Democracy is the merger of socialism and the worker movement.” This formula sets the standard for orthodoxy too low because it does not take into account Marx and Engels’ equally important writings on the programmatic demands and political tactics needed to challenge and ultimately break through the restrictive legal barriers of an undemocratic political order. On the programmatic demand for the democratic republic, Engels was the voice of Marxist orthodoxy, not the Erfurt Programme.

On the question of whether Lenin was an Erfurtian, that can be settled by comparing the Erfurt Programme to the programme adopted by the Russian Social Democrats in 1903. The Russians, following Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov’s draft programmes of the mid-1880’s, declared that the Party “takes as its most immediate political task the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy and its replacement by a democratic republic, the constitution of which would ensure: 1. Sovereignty of the people—that is, concentration of supreme state power wholly in the hands of a legislative assembly consisting of representatives of the people [elected by universal, equal and direct suffrage] and forming a single chamber.” Lih doesn’t mention this foremost demand of the Russian programme in his book and argues instead that the goal of the Russian Social Democrats in overthrowing the autocracy was merely to obtain the “freedom” that the Germans enjoyed under their constitutional monarchy. (pp. 4, 6, 8-9) This definition of “freedom” substitutes the goal of Russian liberalism for that of the Social Democrats. For Lenin and the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Party, the definition of political freedom was the establishment of a democratic republic because they believed that anything less than full democracy did not constitute real political freedom but only a modified form of tyranny.

Once Lih gets away from trying to prove that Lenin was an Erfurtian rather than an orthodox follower of Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov, Lenin Rediscovered has some very important things to say about the theory and content of Lenin’s agitational writings, the arguments in What Is to Be Done?, and the difference between what Lih calls Lenin’s concept of a revolutionary democratic party vs. competing theories of a “class” party. Lih sums up Lenin’s political ideology and strategy with an epigram: “If you were willing to fight for political freedom, you were Lenin’s ally, even if you were hostile to socialism. If you downgraded the goal of political freedom in any way, you were Lenin’s foe, even if you were a committed socialist.” (p. 9) Lih’s conclusion is similar to Harding’s: “Lenin’s argument was that workers did not have to come to socialist consciousness in order to acquire political consciousness.” (vol. 1, p. 122) Both of these characterizations of Lenin are accurate as far as they go, but both can be made more precise by emphasizing that for Lenin the words “freedom” and “political” were equivalent in meaning to “democratic republic.”

Both Blanc and Lih are of the opinion that the history of Marxism in Russia isn’t much use in understanding the political dynamics of Western socialist and working class movements because Russia was an absolute monarchy without freedom of speech or parliamentary institutions. This conclusion also seems to be roughly consistent with Lenin’s own early acceptance of the formula that Russia was only at the stage of a democratic revolution whereas Western Europe had reached the socialist stage. On the level of the clandestine tactics required to circulate political literature within the Tsarist police state, there is nothing objectionable in this conclusion; but the programmatic demand for a democratic republic is another story. Marx, Engels, Kautsky in words, and then Luxemburg in deeds believed that the establishment of a democratic republic in Germany and in all the other countries of Western Europe was the political precondition for the transition to socialism. In Russia, Lenin also believed that the democratic republic was the precondition for, if not immediate socialist policies, policies that would lead toward socialism as quickly as possible. Programmatically, the goal of a democratic republic was a Marxist universal, equally applicable in any country with or without parliamentary institutions and regardless of the level of economic development. Although neither Harding nor Lih seems to be aware of it, their historical work explaining Lenin’s theory of political agitation and democratic consciousness has brought to light the fundamental elements of a political programme that is still fully applicable to the U. S. today. Our aim should be the same as Lenin’s: to pull together a political party whose most important immediate objective is to fight for a democratic constitution.

I’ll end with a few comments on how this analysis differs from the dozen or so other articles on Blanc and/or the Sanders campaign that have been published in New Politics since the beginning of the year. On the main point, only Lois Weiner raises the idea that “’In the present situation, one person one vote has become a radical demand.’” I agree, with the qualification that “the present situation” has been going on for more than two hundred years. The only reason we even have to debate whether to support Sanders or work within the Democratic Party is because we don’t have a system of equal proportional representation that would allow us to vote directly for a party that represents our views. Weiner and many other people recognize this dilemma. The question is what to do about it. Weiner jumps from a recognition of the need for one person one vote to the conclusion that our most pressing need is to build a “new electoral vehicle” to carry on Sanders’ policies and principles. On this I disagree. I think we should stay focused on the problem of one person one vote and that our most pressing ideological and political need is to form a party around the demand for full democracy. That party would not be primarily electoral.

A derivative tactical question about any new left party is whether it makes sense to operate within the Democratic Party. Charles Post and Ashley Smith argue strongly for complete separation. Kit Wainer and Mel Bienenfeld, Andrew Sernatinger, Natalia Tylim, and Daniel Johnson, although they do not argue explicitly for complete separation, all agree with the criticism that participation in the Sanders campaign has sucked energy away from the more important job of building independent mass working class struggles in workplaces and communities. Donna Cartwright, Robert Gabrielsky, Alan Maass, Danny Katch, Sophia in a comment on Post and Smith, and Todd Chretien push back against being lumped together with the winning-is-everything electoralists and hold that the Sanders campaign aided mass movements and helped expand the left. In this debate, I’m on the side that thinks Sanders did give a positive jolt to the movement and pushed it to think more deeply about the kind of party we need. Still, the Sanders supporters’ ideas about the program and tactics needed to move toward the formation of a new party can’t seem to get past overly general calls for socialist unity and an ill-defined expectation of a “dirty break” from the Democratic Party sometime in the future.

As for the advocates of building the mass independent class struggle of the working class in communities and workplaces, their politics verge on syndicalism. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Luxemburg’s definition of the highest form of class struggle was the political demand for a democratic republic, not for struggles in workplaces and communities or for general propaganda advocating socialism. Electoral campaigns that advocate full democracy in an undemocratic political system do not detract from the class struggle of the working class, they are an integral part of the class struggle of the working class for political power.

[1] Eric Blanc, “Why Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care),” jacobinmag.com,4/2/2019.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Karl Kautsky, The Road to Power, (Samuel A. Bloch: Chicago, 1909) searchable at archive.org.

[4] Mike Taber, “Kautsky, Lenin, and the transition to socialism: A reply to Eric Blanc,” johnriddell.com/2019/04/06.

[5] Hal Draper, “Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” New Politics, Vol. 1, No. 4, Summer 1962 (available at marxists.org).

[6] V. I. Lenin, “A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social-Democracy,” Collected Works, 4^th ed., vol. 4, p.276.

[7] In addition to “Why Kautsky Was Right…,” see especially Blanc’s “The roots of 1917: Kautsky, the state, and revolution in Imperial Russia,” 10/13/2016/johnriddell.com

[8] Eric Blanc, “The democratic road to socialism: A reply to Mike Taber,” johnriddell.com/2019/04/11.

[9] I reread the text of The Class Struggle at marxists.org and did word searches in several PDF’s without finding any such wording. The passage in question can be found in Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution: 1880-1938 (Verso Books: Brooklyn, NY, 1990) pp. 35-6.

[10] Blanc’s link does not connect with his quotation. The quotation is from the article, “Kautsky on referenda,” that originally appeared in Weekly Worker, Issue 1100, 03/31/2016. The link for a PDF of the full issue is at the bottom of the page.

[11] Darren Rosso, “Kautsky: the abyss beyond parliament,” Marxist Left Review, No. 14, Winter, 2017.

[12] Kautsky quoted by Lenin in The State and Revolution, Chapter VI, “Kautsky’s Controversy with Pannekoek.”

[13] See note 7 above, Blanc, “The roots of 1917…,”

[14] Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, (Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2008).

[15] Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, 2 vols., (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1977, 1981).

Thinking Out Loud about the End of Social Democracy

By: Barry FingerApril 23, 2020

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The Sanders challenge is over and the question for socialists is, where do we go from here? Up until recently this debate has ranged along familiar lines: the need for independent political action and the obstacles socialists face in recruiting that base from the Democratic Party. But these debates have been upended by the introduction of a new factor in society, an unmanageable pandemic. Unless this is conquered and the despoliation that capitalism has unleashed, which is the source of this and all future pandemics, is addressed, politics will not return to usual and new questions will need to be posed.

The challenge for socialists is to accept what modern social democracy actually is, how social democracy is mediated in the American context and why the American social democratic constituency (the liberal-labor alliance) cannot be enticed into independent political action while still retaining a social democratic consciousness.

But social democracy is also rooted in a specific historical context. And that context may be passing—and with it the viability of social democracy, as pandemia becomes a permanent factor in social life

It has been our traditional understanding that the mass oppositional forces that we look to as the basis of any future socialist movement reside in the Democratic Party. And yet, socialists have failed time and again to convince significant elements in the

Democratic Party to break with it and regroup with the fringe forces on their left in an independent party for radical change. We berate ourselves for not having the right message; or being too sectarian, too out of touch, or of employing language and historical references that are foreign and off-putting. If only we had the right formula, the inspiring leader, the correct message we could effectuate a break, a dirty break but a break nonetheless.

What we have failed to appreciate is that the left-leaning constituencies in the Democratic Party reside there, not as a result of a misunderstanding, but because the Democratic Party is a proper fit for their politics. It is true that they are corralled there by a well-defined legal structure that privileges and protects the two-party system as a public utility of the ruling class by shielding it from electoral competition. We are adept at identifying crucial deficiencies in the structure of the party system: that these two parties are not membership organizations and cannot be directly controlled or held accountable from below and ruled by majority. There is no collective deliberation over the program and priorities of the party. As a result, their programs and priorities are aspirational at best, ornamental at worst. We point out that the DP base, or factions of that base, can only discipline the party indirectly by threatening to withhold its electoral support, through transferring its allegiance outright to the Republicans—which is in a position to capitalize on that defection– or to a third party of the left, which can deprive the Democrats of either absolute victory or of effective governing power even in victory, but which is unlikely empower itself at the expense of the two capitalist parties.

While breakaway conservative Democratic constituencies such as Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats, George Wallace’s American Independence Party, the Reagan Democrats, and the Trump Democrats (Democrats who had previously favored Obama or even Sanders in the primaries) have empowered the Republicans, no DP breakaway constituency to the left has ever proved itself capable of sustained political viability. More important, this dynamic is asymmetric and reinforces a rightwing power drift. The moderate wing of the Republican Party—the Rockefeller wing, so ignobly sent packing by the Goldwater revolution—strengthened the pro-business wing of the Democrats, while the breakaway Democrats—either of the left (e.g., the anti-war Democrats of 1968) or right—only strengthened Republican reactionaries.

Both parties are coalitions—of their respective bases and their big money donors, party loyalists and those who have a foot in both parties with fluid loyalties that transcend party identity and which act to frame party conflict resolution within narrow parameters. Because the parties are not and cannot be ruled by majority, the constituent elements are organized as pressure groups governed by consensus and the ever-present tensions that the need to preserve consensus imposes.

In all cases where unanimity cannot be maintained, the DP cannot act decisively for fear of alienating either its base constituencies or its donors. The fear of driving a wedge between the base and corporate power, the unity of which is considered critical for mobilizing electoral advantage and the spoils of patronage that attends such advantages, acts as a brake on the radical aspirations that periodically bubble up from the DP’s base. It also conditions a section of the ruling class to partial accommodation with those aspirations, as long as these concessions do not exceed the capacity for capitalist self-preservation.

The very architecture of the system reinforces the belief, rooted in experience, that the assertion of class independence through independent political activity is both futile and diversionary. It confers few immediately attainable advantages in the form of actionable reforms that could not otherwise be attained through the DP. The lesson learned is that social importance within the capitalist system means availing constituencies of the given social processes to attain their goals.

It equally demonstrates precisely why the DP, as a container system for anti-capitalist grievances, can never serve the cause of fundamental social change.

But not all change is fundamental change. And as long as the DP is effective in keeping the level of system-wide grievances at a rolling simmer without boiling over—through strategic concessions or by playing one group against another and both wings against the middle– it fulfills its task of mollifying or neutralizing the outsized passions of its base.

The arguably most successful anti-capitalist party effort, such as the late 1920s SP, moved the New Deal DP to the left by forcing it to vie with the SP for votes. The Democratic Party prevailed by poaching, in bowdlerized form, the SP’s schedule of minimal demands for immediately implementable remediation: unemployment relief, social security, etc. But equally important, the DP then resold these same reforms back to the socialist leaning public by marketing itself as the only plausible electoral vehicle capable of enacting them. The DP in effect captured the Socialist Party, convincing significant sections of its activist trade union elements to form the American Labor Party, a tool for providing socialists with a third, nominally independent, ballot line to endorse FDR through the backdoor. The Working Families Party operates along the same lines today.

Both the ALP and the WFP were launched in the spirit of a “dirty break,” insofar as they also offered left-leaning liberals the nominal opportunity to vote for a noncapitalist party. Their only success was in their failure to never disappoint. Any break, dirty or otherwise, would demonstrate that the labor movement elements we look to as key to any future socialist party no longer wishes to take responsibility for capitalism and therefore are willing to topple the Democratic Party, one of central the pillars of the system. A break cannot be effected from on high by clever socialist engineering; it’s the political consciousness of the labor movement that needs to altered from below before a break presents itself as an organically logical next step.

But—and here ‘s the rub—there’s no material basis for a socialist consciousness as long as the potential for social democratic reforms still exists. Socialism only presents itself as a real alternative in society when the choice is civilizational: socialism or barbarism. That occurs very rarely in the life of nations. Socialist activity, until then, is always a dress rehearsal, to nourish the spirit of rebellion and to help awaken insurgent forces to their power in society. The role of socialists, in non-revolutionary as in revolutionary times, is in helping to ignite the creative forces in mass action and to integrate its own activities with the independent class struggle of workers. We do that in the clear understanding that, in the absence of possibly revolution-producing conditions, socialism is doomed to remain a “fringe goal.” The class that we seek to help has no use—yet—for our ideology.

The inescapable truth is this. The public that seeks supplemental social democratic reforms to complete the promise of the New Deal does not need an independent party of the left. Socialists do.

Social democracy—the impulse behind the modern welfare state—is only made possible by a class coalition in which labor commits itself as the junior partner. It is not reformist, in the historic sense of the term, because it does not seek the ultimate overthrow of capitalism through the steady drip of incremental change. It therefore does not exist on a continuum with revolutionary socialism. It is a separate political current, with roots in trade union politics. While not the enemy of socialism, neither is it socialism’s ally.

The Democratic Party is, in the American context, social democratic in the modern sense—charting the sort of politics, compromises and right-wing drift characteristic of most European parties. The difference is that European social democratic parties mostly govern in coalition with capitalist parties to preserve welfare-state capitalism. The Democratic Party is a coalition with capitalists committed to the welfare state that seeks to govern. When elements of that junior partnership get rebellious, the DP establishment encourages it to test the waters, knowing full well that it can defuse the insurgency by co-opting its issues, or it can let the insurgency defuse itself by sitting the election out and condemning it to electoral oblivion, as it did with the McGovern movement.

To fault the Sanders movement for running a social democratic campaign within the Democratic Party is therefore to miss the point.

Sanders was clear about completing the New Deal/Great Society, with implementable reforms commensurate with the problems and economic capacity of modern capitalism and offered the social democracies of Europe as proof of their feasibility. He raged against greedy billionaires and profiteers, championing the interests of the 99 percent. What he didn’t do and what he had no grassroots activist mandate to do is to challenge the fundamental basis on which society is organized. He raised the class issue in a populist, not a socialist manner; laboring to rectify the rotten bargain facing workers neglected by the Democratic Party, not to upend a system rooted in exploitation. None of his proposals for decommodifying basic public goods, a green jobs program and industrial policy, salutary as they are, challenged capitalist control over the economy. Sanders’ politics were firmly rooted in the outer reaches of mass oppositional consciousness. His political revolution was about renegotiating the class agreement within the Democratic Party. Had his vision prevailed capitalism would have enjoyed a welcome and profound civilizational upgrade. But it still would have been capitalism.

What neither Sanders, nor anyone else could anticipate, however, is the game changing straightjacket that the novel coronavirus may now quite possibly inflict on capitalism. The maintenance of a private-property system in prolonged shutdown mode will increasingly become incompatible with profit making, the central regulator of capitalist dynamics. This will prove especially so if an ever-morphing virus eludes efforts to discover a universally effective vaccine or treatment and assumes a more permanent feature in social life. The last gasp of the Sanders movement may coincide with the end of welfare-state capitalism as we have come to know it.

To put it in other words, capitalism without accumulation is unsustainable. If the system is unable to resolve its problems by normal methods because it is unable to quell the viral threat—and this is the big if—it will begin to shutdown and disintegrate from within. The preservation of society will no longer be compatible with the preservation of capitalism. Capitalism has yet to raise against itself the challenge of a revolutionary working class that can put an end to the system. It will nevertheless be compelled to save capitalists by anti-capitalist measures, expedients that, in contrast to socialism, will not permit the working masses themselves any new power or participation in the life of society and may well narrow their already truncated scope of participation.

Whether the vehicle for this transformation is a section of the capitalist class, or a third force—the state bureaucracy—this much is clear. Should the pandemic resist effective management, and this scenario come fully into play and not merely as a time-limited interregnum, vast sections of private property will be subject to emergency management administered not by shareholder factions but by ad hoc state trusteeships. Economic quarantine will lead to a fragmentation of the global economy and the intensification of nationalist ferment, the raw materials of autarky. At first, economic sectors essential to social reproduction will be reopened by state decree and according to regional plans. No longer reliant on market signals, fundamental economic decisions will increasingly give way to centralized bureaucratic coordination and planning at the federal level, with the states and localities delegated with the details of implementation and enforcement.

A privileged new social force will be recruited from society for these tasks and raised above it. The structures of bureaucratically nationalized industries—public trusteeships—is such as to give impulse to the merger of the managerial class under capitalism and the elite levels of the civil service. Shares may be transformed into annuities with shareholders pensioned off. While collectivist in form, this new statified property will be anti-socialist, class-driven and reactionary in content. If this time-sensitive emergency endures, the prospect of private business resumption along familiar lines will gradually shed its practicality and these ad hoc organs of coordination will gradually overwhelm capitalism and implant themselves in society.

What will ensue will be an anti-capitalist revolution, peaceful in all likelihood, for having maintained the privileged position of capitalists and capitalist managers, no longer able to maintain their privileges by traditional capitalist methods. The longer the crisis endures, the deeper these roots will sink and the more difficult it will be for the economy to be returned to private hands, should the health challenge eventually be overcome.

The re-emergence of bureaucratic collectivism as a social force rests on two central conditions: the degeneration of capitalism and the failure of the working class to mount a successful alternative. The emergence of Stalinism was only one form of this tendency. The Stalinist counterrevolution was conditioned by the fact that it succeeded the revolutionary overthrow and destruction of Russian capitalism, and faced only weak resistance from the revolutionary class whose ranks had been depleted and whose vitality was exhausted by the experience of prolonged war and deprivation.

But there have been other, disparate, forms of bureaucratic collectivist economies—such as the MAPAI/Histadrut led social democracy in Israel’s first decades with different historical and cultural roots. Because capitalism was too poor in Israel’s early years to develop society, it was dependent on foreign assistance. And because this assistance was distributed by the MAPAI led government and channeled into state and semi-state undertakings, a labor bureaucracy emerged as a pivotal force in society. One small group of leaders controlled the main political party “of the workers,” the trade union federation, the state owned industries and through a coalition government—the state itself. In any workplace grievance, David Ben-Gurion’s party would reliably refuse to authorize strike activity against the industries his government controlled, and would, if need be, call in the army to break all unsanctioned, wildcat, strikes. The trade union bureaucracy would then try striking workers in labor tribunals controlled by MAPAI and ban the errant strikers from employment in the dominant state/semi-state sectors. Were it not for the presence of oppositional parties and freedom for minority opinion, early Israel might be seen as a replica of Stalinist Russia.

It is true that the state collectivism that Stalinist Russia and social-democratic Israel claimed was under the banner of socialism. That does not mean that state collectivism always needs to shield itself under the noble mantle of socialism—which, in the absence of workers’ power, turns it into socialism’s antithesis. Had fascism proved victorious it too may have developed into bureaucratic collectivism. It would have then touted itself not as the self-proclaimed defender of class interest and international solidarity, but more likely as the defender of national and race interest.

State collectivism arises when capitalism is too weak to thrive, either at its birth, or at its impending death. In the past it has seemingly solved the contradictions of capitalism insofar as it mobilized and employed the resources—human, technological, industrial and agricultural—that capitalism could not put to profitable use. It then shielded its economy from external disruption. It may not have done these efficiently, but it did it thoroughly. This time is different.

Unlike other experiences with bureaucratic collectivism, this transformed system will not have at its disposal the prerogative of maintaining social peace through full employment. It will not be able to fully mobilize the existing economic capacity for fear of reigniting pandemic contagion and stressing the system to outright collapse. The working class will remain an exploited class, but the fruits of exploitation will serve the purposes less of accumulation than of securing the infrastructure of a working economy and maintaining society’s new overlords in privilege and comfort. And insofar as the expansion of production and employment will be narrowed in scope, the pressure to intensify the level of exploitation and restrict working class consumption will mount. The system will face unique difficulties in maintaining social equilibrium for having a very narrow latitude to simultaneously raise the living standards of both the exploited and the privileged. But then neither, under autarky, will the working class face international wage competition.

While the emerging ruling class may offer workers basic forms of economic security such as a minimal universal basic income and health care—necessary for the reproduction of the working class—it will also be moved to curtail the existing, if paltry, rights that make working class resistance legally possible. And more so, since struggles over bureaucratic rationing, including the rationing of jobs will be a constant source of friction. It is for obvious reasons always more acceptable for the purported guardians of society to defend the “public’s” property against the assertion of workers’ power, than it is to defend any private interest (capitalist) against the assertion of another private interest (the employee). This means that independent trade union activity will be under intensified scrutiny.

The end of the Sanders campaign may, by the evil ruse of history, also be a harbinger of the end of social democracy. For social democracy is the outcome of a class compromise rooted in capitalism. The Republican base, for their part, may welcome the statification of the corporate property of the “globalists,” as long as small business is left in private hands. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, has been the specific conduit through which the social democratic arrangement was negotiated and re-mediated. In a new context, it is most likely that the Democratic Party will act to recruit sections of the old trade union bureaucracy to a national front needed to police and regulate labor relations in the “public interest.” (The old Israeli experience under Ben-Gurion may be suggestive.) If this occurs, new vehicles of working class struggle will be summoned forth—independent of the Democratic Party and the old trade union structures.

Of course, this is all thinking out loud. Socialism is the “shock therapy” of the left. But it is well to recall that the rise of all previous revolutionary socialist movements was precipitated by profoundly catastrophic, life altering events in the history of nations—the rank barbarism of early industrialization, the ravages of war, social dislocation or total economic collapse.

Old SDSers, New DSAers, and Trump vs. Biden

By: Michael AlbertApril 22, 2020

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In a recent letter a group of old SDSers hoped to engage some young critics of the Democratic Party and Joe Biden. Those critics actually ought to be mightily commended for many of their analyses, insights, actions, intuitions, and feelings.

For example, the critics are correct that Biden is a tribune of power and wealth and of the current socio-economic system, not a friend of the poor, the disenfranchised, those doing rote and tedious work, those reviled and repressed by police, those living under occupations and bombs, those suffering the many diseases of our times.

The critics are also correct that Biden, Obama, the Clintons, and the establishment Democratic Party power brokers reject fundamental and even just substantial change and that many feared Sanders reducing their influence more than they feared Trump retaining the Presidency. Masters of war. Masters of impoverishment. Misanthropes of morality.

They are correct that U.S. elections don’t question underlying social and economic relations, and that the electoral college makes a mockery of democracy.

They are correct that even when rhetorically caring and humane, Democratic Party elites, like all the many TV ads now celebrating frontline workers to try to sell automobiles, are ultimately about business as usual.

The critics are also correct that as bad as Covid-19 is, multi-dimensional ecological collapse via global warming as well as death by starvation, inequality, and militarism are even greater threats to human survival. The young militant’s leadership on global warming and their observations that Biden and his overseers offer far, far less than we all ecologically need are also correct.

The critics would also be right if they pointed out that many old SDSers haven’t been very visibly active in a very long time, save for periodically supporting some Democratic candidate and that Old SDSers haven’t offered much inspiring vision and haven’t fully followed through on delivering a world worthy of young people’s on-going habitation.

Hell, the Biden critics would also be right to point out that Boomers writ large overwhelmingly exited “our generation” writ radical, and at a crucial historical moment became anything but Sanders supporters. They could reasonably ask those of us still radical why we didn’t do better reaching our own peers and how we could think we ever really knew much less that we still know how to reach out and organize? They could also reasonably wonder how come the old SDSers had barely a word to say about young leftists’ merits or about older leftists’ failings.

The young left has also been right that while Sanders didn’t voice all their desires and didn’t legitimate all their feelings, his was a brilliant campaign, program, and project that deserved their whole-hearted support. And they have been right to assert that the program, beliefs, and commitments of both DSA and the Green Party are monumentally superior to those of the mainstream Democratic Party.

Like the letter signers, I was in SDS and the broader left of the sixties but I don’t write this reply to the old SDSers based on my past membership. Like many of them, I have remained active since, in a myriad of ways, but I don’t write this based on that, either. Like many of them, I have been and remain a militant advocate of fundamentally changing the racial, sexual, gender, political, economic, and ecological contours of contemporary life, right down to the roots, and I do hope that maybe that will weigh just a little bit positively on what follows, especially since what follows seeks to be heard not by old-timers like myself, but by young people looking around at crushing chaos and escalating pain and trying to find an effective path forward.

I write this seeing that because of their above views and many more besides young militants are the hope of the future. And because I want more than anything that they should have the room to pursue their own better world successfully.

But there is another dimension to address, because for all the many points that young radicals are rightly pursuing, one widely held stance many of them share is understandable but appears to me, as it did to the old SDSers, nonetheless ill-conceived.

And it isn’t that the young left are speaking from privilege because many aren’t in jail, or in detention camps, or looking up at drones, or starving…that is no more legitimate a criticism now than when my generation’s then elders, fifty years ago, threw such charges at us as we fought for civil rights and Black Power, for Women’s Liberation, for the Vietnamese, for the poor, dispossessed, shackled, and sickened in all lands. We old-timers should remember how we reacted hearing from older leftists – who did have insights worth hearing – that our form of militance was sometimes suicidal, that our analyses were sometimes misguided, that our anger and beliefs were sometimes the folly of immaturity? We wrote them off and didn’t look for the nuggets of wisdom they did indeed have to offer. And now, here we go again, except this time we are the old-timers undercutting our own chance to contribute usefully.

Here is the thing, young militants. I believe you are wrong about just one set of interrelated beliefs. And while in confused times like these that is a remarkably small debit, the problem is that that one set of interrelated beliefs matters a whole lot.

Trump winning in 2020 would not be less than a world historic disaster for all else you believe, feel, and think. Biden winning would be vastly better (albeit, of course, abysmally short of) all else you believe, feel, and think. Not voting or voting other than for Biden against Trump, at least in swing states, would not somehow strategically do more to uproot the two party system, to defend Democracy, to expand equity, to reverse racism, or to slay sexism, than would beating Trump while simultaneously working on all those and many other agendas as well. And finally, your choices in these regards do matter. Not only might the election hinge on fewer votes than you can swing, but who is better informed to talk successfully with working class Trump voters from 2016?

You have acknowledged Sanders’ intelligence, commitment, and courage. How comes it then that you so easily dismiss his choosing to keep fighting for his whole program, which is in large degree your current program, but also, and as part of that, to fight for Trump’s defeat via Biden’s election?

You believe in fundamental change. Me too. I have spent a lifetime trying to give it wings rooted in clarity. You passionately hate those who purvey business as usual over the bodies of countless corpses and uncountable diminished souls. Me too. “Hey hey LBJ?, how many kids did you kill today?”

You feel that supporting Biden against Trump is signing on to preserving the existing abominable system with, at most, some modest mitigating policies. And that feels to you like a direct route to being what you oppose. And I understand that feeling too. And to an extent, I think you are right. Slip sliding into being what we hate, or contributing to others doing so, is not only possible, it is oftentimes rather likely – unless we are very clear in our motives and actions.

But the good news is that the needed clarity is easily in everyone’s reach. Why not advocate voting for Biden in swing states where doing so could matter to beating Trump, on the undeniable grounds that Trump winning again also involves a slip slide – into hellish days well beyond those already endured, if not worse still. Do it not based on Biden’s non existent merits but because Trump winning would accelerate the race to destroy the environment that sustains organized human life, maybe even reaching irreversible tipping points, with mounting and hideous catastrophes along the way primarily among the poor abroad and at home. Why not do it because Trump winning would increase the risk of terminal nuclear war, which is transparent, and because his winning would pack the judiciary with young ultra-right justices who, for at least a generation, would persevere to block any even mildly progressive legislation. And why not do it because Trump winning would mean further gutting the remaining structures of popular participation reducing democracy beneath even its current abysmal state. Of course this litany of reasons could go on, but let me just add why elderly passions are high, even as leftists who oppose supporting Biden and leftists who advocate supporting Biden in swing states agree on so much else.

As old as sixties SDSers are, we have elders too. And I hear them tell me how the Nazi plague engulfed Germany and ravaged the world in large part because the huge German Communist party refused to join with others to stop Hitler because they saw those others as “social fascists” and, they felt, Hitler wasn’t really all that bad a guy. And so when I and others my age hear them say they came into the world seeing that mistake wreak havoc, and they now fear leaving the world seeing that same mistake wreak havoc again, it adds to my sense of urgency. Do we really want to risk that for our kids, for the planet, for humanity, because we see Biden as bad to the bone and feel Trump isn’t really all that bad a guy?

So the SDS-ers’ point is, it is indeed possible to urge voting for Biden, and to do so in swing states, and to simultaneously retain radical commitments, beliefs, and integrity because we want to prevent the obvious known ills of Trumpism, not to mention the extrapolated even greater ills of resurgent fascism. It is possible to do it and not become what we hate. And not only will our doing it not contribute to solidifying existing social relations and not contribute to entrenching existing obstacles to change, it will help prevent those two dynamics and prepare for fighting on. Isn’t that what Sanders is doing? And if he can do it, can’t his supporters, and even people to his left also do it — without an iota of compromise, without an iota of hypocrisy?

But yes, I know some who reject voting for Biden will have followed this line of reasoning to this point but then decided that Sanders is selling out. He seemed good, great even, but he has shown himself a horrible shill for the mainstream power brokers.

I will admit I don’t know how to address those of you taking that path. Those decrying Sanders, and no doubt jettisoning the views of Chomsky, Ehrehreich and so many folks we have previously appreciated and perhaps even learned from, indeed perhaps even learned the views that we now think require us to reject voting for Biden – for example that the two parties are two wings of one corporate party.

But we know that Sanders, Chomsky, Ehrenreich and other such advocates of Biden over Trump — hell, of the nearest lamppost over Trump, if need be — including the old SDSers, are not dumb. We know their position isn’t due to their being unable to draw logical conclusions. But we also can’t shake nor should we shake that we feel it is transparently obvious that Biden favors system maintenance. For sure, he does, but the question is, does that recognition mean we can legitimately conclude that anyone smart and informed who favors voting for Biden must also be for system maintenance? That anyone who says we can be radical, revolutionary, and true to our values and aspirations, and simultaneously so realize the necessity to beat Trump that we advocate voting Biden – must want system maintenance? That people wanting Biden to beat Trump and willing to help in that task must actually like Biden’s beliefs and motives? That they must have sold out? Is it warranted for us to decide Sanders is a sellout, and so too for so many others?

Or, if we call those we disagree with our enemies rather than considering that they might be just as radical, just as revolutionary as they always were, and might differ from us because they see something we are missing, wouldn’t that be doing that which we would ordinarily ridicule and decry — being leftists who accuse everyone who disagrees with us of being an enemy of change despite the fully visible contrary evidence of the their words and deeds?

So if this debate has to happen — and I have seen it surging up online already — can we all, on every side, at the very least, agree to remove the personal denigrations, and agree to stick to the issues, so that the issues might be resolved and we might in the end agree on what is true and what is not true – on what is doable and what is not doable — and thus on where we can usefully act and where our actions, or lack thereof, may do irreparable harm even against our intentions.

This article first appeared on ZNet.

Where to Begin? Growing Seeds of Liberation in a World Torn Asunder

By: Kevin B. Anderson, Peter Hudis, Jens Johansson, Karel Ludenhoff, Lilia MonzoApril 20, 2020

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Authored by Peter Hudis, with Kevin B. Anderson, Karel Ludenhoff, Lilia D. Monzo, and Jens Johansson as part of the pre-Convention discussion of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.

It never fails that, at momentous world historic turning points, it is very difficult to tell the difference between two types of twilight—whether one is first plunging into utter darkness or whether one has reached the end of a long night and is just at the moment before the dawn of a new day. In either case, the challenge to find the meaning—what Hegel called “the undefined foreboding of something unknown”—becomes a compulsion to dig for new beginnings, for a philosophy that would try to answer the question, “where to begin”?

—Raya Dunayevskaya, “Why Hegel’s Phenomenology? Why Now?” (May 1987)

I.

The shock that has been delivered to global politics and economics by the spread of the coronavirus clearly places us on the edge of a precipice. The economic “recovery” that was touted only months ago in the U.S. and elsewhere has been rendered hollow by a contraction in the global economy greater than in a century, while the political instability that has defined world politics for the last decade is becoming increasingly acute. The Chinese government’s effort to conceal the extent of the virus is matched only by the willful ignorance and inhumanity of the Trump administration, which has shown itself to be more intent on blaming “foreigners”—and everyone but itself—for the illness than providing adequate testing and treatment. The breakdown in commerce, schooling, international travel and social interaction of all kinds in the face of efforts to contain the contagion may prove to be temporary expedients, but they also reveal the fragility of the social and human connections that are supposed to bind us together.

A striking sign of this is the lack of international coordination in combating the pandemic, despite the fact that fifteen years ago the World Health Organization (WHO) revised its International Health Regulations by creating a series of regulations aimed at responding to exactly the kind of pandemic now facing us. Although almost every country in the world signed onto the new regulations, few have followed them—including the U.S., which ignored the requirement to inform the WHO before imposing quarantines and travel bans. The “globally interconnected world” promised by neoliberal capitalism is increasingly illusory.

Most importantly, the pandemic is expanding the divide between the “two worlds” within each country, between rulers and ruled, haves and have-nots, the privileged and the dispossessed. Tens of millions who have lost their jobs due to quarantines and physical distancing are without the means to pay rent, purchase food, or obtain the healthcare needed to deal the crisis. In the U.S., the most vulnerable include undocumented immigrants, among them two-and-a-half million agricultural laborers, who are denied access to government assistance; prisoners, whose infection rates are skyrocketing; and those confined to nursing homes and assisted living facilities. The pandemic is amplifying not only the class but also racial divide that has long defined capitalist societies; 70% of those who have so far died from COVID-19 in Chicago are African American.

U.S. healthcare workers are being subjected to serious risks—both medical and social. Utah’s largest medical provider, Intermountain Health Care, is cutting salaries of doctors and nurses on grounds that it needs “flexibility” in dealing with the crisis. The corporate bottom line always matters more than human life. Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars have been pumped into international financial markets by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank to aid corporations that spent the last decade handsomely rewarding their shareholders with stock buybacks. To give but one of many such examples, thousands of workers at airports on the East Coast were told without warning by their employer, OTG, that they were being terminated on the spot in March without severance pay and had to leave the premises immediately. Some had worked for OTG for thirty years. When the workers complained of their callous mistreatment, they were told to ask for assistance from local governments. Yet this very same OTG will be on the receiving end of billions of dollars now being doled out by the federal government’s $2 trillion-plus “economic stabilization plan” that became law on March 26.

That plan does provide for an extension of unemployment benefits and a modest cash payment of $1,200 for individuals making less than $75,000 a year. But the vast bulk of the money will be used to enable the Federal Reserve to buy up U.S. Treasury and other bonds as a way to prevent a collapse of the international financial system. This sounds like a repeat of 2007-2008, when trillions were spent propping up the banks while virtually nothing was done for homeowners facing foreclosure and workers being laid off. Yet the current bailout is in many respects even more egregious, since “The Fed will effectively lend money directly to large corporations, something it has never done before.”[1]

Meanwhile, Trump has been reluctant to issue national guidelines requiring social distancing—the only known way of controlling the spread of the virus—since he apparently views the careening stock market as a greater danger than tens of thousands of deaths. Small wonder that on February 10, almost a month after the first case of coronavirus was reported in the U.S., he submitted a 2021 budget that called for a $693 million reduction in funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—a cut of 9%. Clearly, the crisis surrounding the coronavirus has laid bare the social contradictions that define American and world capitalism.

This crisis is not only political and economic, but also ideological. And it impacts leftists as well. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, seen by some as a successor to Michel Foucault, recently criticized what he calls “the frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded emergency measures adopted against an alleged epidemic of coronavirus.” He asks, “Why do the media and the authorities do their utmost to spread a state of panic, thus provoking an authentic state of exception with serious limitations on movement and a suspension of daily life in entire regions?” He condemns the measures to combat the virus as “once again manifesting the tendency to use a state of exception as a normal paradigm for government…the disproportionate reaction to something not too different from the normal flus that affect us every year is quite blatant. It is almost as if with terrorism exhausted as a cause for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic offered the ideal pretext for scaling them up beyond any limitation.”[2] Trump would have us die for the sake of the stock market; Agamben would so do for the sale of his theory of “the state of exemption.” Such is the ideological pollution of our times.

II.

Of course, the roots of our current crisis long predate the coronavirus. Thrown into disarray by the 2008 global financial meltdown, neoliberalism is increasingly being disavowed around the world—including by some of the agents of capital, who have decided to drop the veneer of “democracy” and “civil society” by openly embracing xenophobic nationalism, protectionism, and unabashed authoritarianism. This is seen from the rise of the neo-fascist Right in Europe and the fascistic policies of Modi in India, to Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan, and China’s Xi Jinping’s grab for permanent one-man rule and the racist and misogynist rule of Brazil’s Bolsonaro. The more social relations become indirect and frayed by capitalist alienation, the greater is the drive by state powers to impose direct social control over recalcitrant parts of the populace. This is becoming even further accentuated by rulers worldwide who are using the restrictions needed to contain COVID-19 to further cement unilateral, authoritarian rule—by closing borders, increasing government surveillance, restricting free expression, etc.

Yet as dire as all this is, we must not lose sight of the fact that the past year has experienced a remarkable upsurge in mass protests and revolts. They include spontaneous movements in Sudan, Algeria, and Lebanon, the first of which brought down its government; large protests and strikes against economic austerity in France, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Iran, Iraq, Zimbabwe, and Indonesia; and a massive pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong that involved up to two million at a time. The movement in Chile typifies what characterizes many of them. It began with high school students jumping turnstiles in response to a hike in subway fares, and was soon followed by hundreds of thousands pouring into the streets to support them. When President Sebastian Piñera tried to suppress the protests, people responded by creating citizen assemblies. Dozens of these decentralized, highly democratic forums have sprung up in Santiago and elsewhere in the country, involving men and women, workers and the unemployed, gays and straights, Mapuche Indians as well as immigrants from Brazil, Haiti, and elsewhere. They have maintained these assemblies for months in pressing for a fundamental change of society.

One report stated, “Just as during Argentina’s crisis in 2001, neighbors are meeting to comment about their reality and take concrete measures against the repressive model” embodied by the government. One participant in the assemblies explained the moment as follows: “We are living a total break with the everyday life to which we were subjected. That’s why the atmosphere is very special, invigorating and very joyful. We are recovering a sense of humanity from the rebellion, the appropriation of spaces in our communities.”[3] Identical sentiments can be heard from many other movements of the past year. What drives them is anxiety over mounting personal debt, growing social inequality, environmental destruction, and a sense that everyday life is losing any connection to a common space in which to share ideas and values. As Carne Ross, the author of The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century, states, these revolts “all represent a crisis of agency—of people who feel unrepresented. For that reason, philosophically, they tend to not be top-down movements. If people want their own voice, they’re not happy if someone stands up and says they represent you. ‘We represent ourselves’ is a common feature of these protests.”[4]

Virtually all of these struggles have been halted for now by the restrictions imposed to stem the spread of the coronavirus. But that does not mean they are ancient history. This crisis is so rapidly tearing the veil from illusions that capitalism is a viable system that it is implausible to believe that things will return to “normal” once the epidemic recede. Consciousness of the need to supplant this system by a totally different one is bound to grow and develop, for which the struggles and movements of the past year have already planted many seeds.

No such mass revolts have occurred recently in the U.S., although the same seeds of radical self-organized liberation have grown within numerous grassroots movements, from Standing Rock to tenant organizing and mutual-aid during the COVID-19 crisis. Yet something no less important has emerged—growing interest, especially among youth, in the idea of socialism. The roots of this remarkable burst of interest lie in the Occupy Movement of 2011, but it gained a powerful impetus with the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. More people in the U.S. today openly identify with socialism than in many decades. To be sure, much of this interest is superficial and undeveloped; when it comes to Sanders, it is largely defined by the call for a “New Deal Workers’ Bill of Rights” that Roosevelt championed in his last inaugural address in 1944.[5] But that is not the crucial issue. The crucial issue is that the idea of socialism is at least becoming part of public discourse, which makes it possible to develop an open, ongoing discussion and debate that takes the idea further than presently articulated.

This was precisely the development that scared the Democratic Party establishment into rallying around Biden—one of the weakest candidates in the field and much further to the Right than not only Sanders but also Elizabeth Warren. Nothing is more alarming for those who imagine that the neoliberal order that dominated the last 40 years can readily be restored than the growing attraction of socialist ideas. At the same time, the primaries show that there is a long way to go before even the moderate socialism of Sanders is widely accepted, as seen in the lack of a high turnout for him, especially among women and Black voters—due at least in part to Sanders’ lack of a sufficiently close engagement with those sectors.

Nevertheless, despite his limitations, Sanders won a plurality of the under-35 vote in every demographic—Black, Latinx and white, women and men, working class and middle class. This did not translate into many primary victories, largely because there wasn’t a high turnout of young voters and the over-50 vote went overwhelmingly for Biden. But even the low turnout among youth is reflective in some cases of a radicalized social consciousness: as Deonte Washington, a Black youth who served 18 months in Florida (including part in solitary confinement)—and then had his voting rights restored by the 2018 referendum—put it, “I’m not going to vote, I don’t care about this government and this government doesn’t care about me.”[6]

Revolutionary opponents of capitalism clearly have their work cut out for them. But as the young Marx wrote, we do not confront today’s realities “in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.”[7]

Marxist-Humanism contains critical historical and theoretical resources that can illuminate both the logic of capital and the content of a socialist alternative that transcends the failed variants which dominated in the past. Integral to this is its view that racism and sexism are not secondary features of class society but are integral to capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself in ever more nefarious forms.

III.

The effort to develop an alternative to capitalism always begins with the question, what is the specific nature of capitalism as it presents to us most immediately today?

The irrational exuberance with which Trump touted the economic “recovery” prior to the coronavirus crisis was expressed in a speech on December 16, 2017 which stated, “The economy now has hit 3% [growth per year]. Nobody thought we’d be anywhere close. I think we can go to 4, 5, and maybe even 6%.” Yet as Michael Roberts writes, “Trump’s boast turned to dust in 2019. U.S. GDP grew by 2.3% in 2019, well below President Trump’s promise of 3% and more growth. The most recent GDP number proved that the tax cuts championed by Trump had no sustained impact on U.S. growth… Actually, cumulative growth under Trump has been lower than under both Obama and Bush Jr.”[8]

The lack of significant improvement in living standards helps explain the 2019 strikes at General Motors, as well as the Chicago and Los Angeles teachers strikes that won strong community support—which focused not only on stagnant wages, but also conditions of labor and the need for better services for students. The economic growth that occurred prior to COVID-19 clearly was insufficient to reverse growing social inequality. According to recent report by OXFAM, “The world’s richest 1% have more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people. Nearly half of the world’s population—3.4 billion people—is living on less than $5.50 a day. Every year, 100 million people worldwide are pushed into poverty because they have to pay out-of-pocket for healthcare. Today 258 million children—1 out of every 5—will not be allowed to go to school. Globally, women earn 24% less than men and own 50% less wealth.”[9]

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Capital and Ideology confirm this tendency, but a confirmation is not an explanation. To explain it, we have to turn to the mechanism of capitalist production. Profit is generated in the process of production through the creation of surplus value, which must be realized in money. In order to realize more profit, the production process must grow, and this cannot happen unless investment grows. However, long before the coronavirus capital investment was falling in the U.S. and elsewhere. The reason is not “changes in interest rates” or in “business confidence,” as many mainstream economists argue. Those are usually the consequence, not the cause of, low demand. The fundamental cause is profitability and the movement of corporate profits. Evidence for that is in abundance. As Roberts writes, “the U.S. rate of profit on productive capital remains well below where it was in the late 1990s. It was hardly boosted by the depreciation of assets in the 2008-2009 recession.” This also applies to real GDP growth. “Growth is much lower than Trump hoped for because businesses have not invested productively but used the extra cash from tax cuts to pay larger dividends to shareholders; or buy back their own shares to boost the price; or to shift profits abroad into tax havens. They have not invested as much in new structures, equipment etc. in the U.S. because the profitability of such investments is still too low historically; and especially relative to investment in the ‘fictitious capital’ of the stock and bond markets, where prices have reached all-time highs.”[10] Non-financial sector profits have fallen 25% since 2014! Although Trump’s corporate tax cuts boosted post-tax profits, pre-tax profits continue to fall.

Low profitability in productive investments and the flight to fictitious capital is a global phenomenon. As Angela Klein writes, the global economic situation is akin to “dancing atop the volcano.” She adds, “anything can happen in the current situation of declining production [in terms of] world trade and the financial markets; all it takes is a spark for the hut to burn again. This can easily be triggered by political decisions.” Or by a virus? She writes, “The main problem is: there are no reserves left. This is all the more so since fundamental problems that led to the 2008 financial crisis have not been solved: global debt has reached a historic high—namely $250 trillion, which is three times as much as is produced in the world; according to the IMF, corporate debt, fueled by low interest rate policies, is higher than ever and surpasses the peaks of 2008-2009, 2001 and 1990, all of which were accompanied by recessions. The debts are held in the form of bonds on the capital market. If they have to be repaid at a higher interest rate in coming years, it will be expensive.”[11]

This afflicts even the most “successful” capitalist enterprises, such as Amazon and Uber, which actually have yet to earn significant profits but get those with excess cash to throw money at them with promises of future rates of return. As Ross Douthat put it, “It has done all this using the awesome power of free money, building a company that would collapse into bankruptcy if that money were withdrawn…The dearth of corporate investment also means that the steady climb of the stock market has boosted the wealth of a rentier class—basically, already rich investors getting richer off of dividends—rather than reflecting rising prosperity in general.”[12] In a word, stagnation rules the day. This did not result from the coronavirus; that was instead its proximate cause. Capitalism has been producing a lot of rotten fruit that was just waiting to fall.

As a result, a sizeable section of the global ruling class is losing confidence that it can oversee a substantial improvement in the productive power of capital. Faced with internal barriers to increasing the size and rate of growth of capital accumulation, the elites are increasingly interested in looting the system of its assets so as to line their pockets before the next deluge. This is starkly expressed by such personages as Israel’s Netanyahu, Britain’s Boris Johnson, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, and Trump. The lines that separate personal acquisitiveness from government have long been fuzzy, but at no time are they being erased at such a prodigious pace by an array of narcissistic politicians that are often labeled “rightwing populists.”

Since today’s growing inequality manifests what Marx called the law of the tendential fall of the rate of profit, the only solution is to create a human society that ends production based on value and surplus value. For that reason, the notion shared by both Piketty and socialists who focus on redistributing value can, at best, only bring some temporary improvement in the living conditions of working people but cannot end exploitation, alienation and dehumanization.

IV.

Creating a new society requires masses of people aspiring to create one, which involves first of all listening to and learning from new developments coming from below. We are certainly not without such developments in the recent period.

The Middle East and North Africa have entered a new era in comparison with even a couple of years ago. As the organizers of a recent forum on “The Second Arab Spring” wrote, “in December 2018, a new uprising in Sudan inaugurated what has taken in 2019 the shape of a second revolutionary shockwave engulfing Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon, along with an outburst in Iran and tremors in Egypt. The second wave confirmed that the Arab Spring was but the first ‘season’ in a long-term revolutionary process.”[13] Contrast this to even a couple years ago, when Egypt’s military and the Saudi monarchy were riding high.

In Algeria, the Hirak movement immobilized the country for over a year, also bringing millions onto the streets. The Hirak put the regime on the defensive, but without achieving any major victories up to now. By the fall of 2019, the mass revolt had spread to Iraq and Lebanon, though not on the scale of Sudan or Algeria, with similar results to those in Algeria. Further east, Iran experienced a serious mass revolt in late 2019, which was ruthlessly repressed, after which the Trump administration threw the regime a lifeline by its illegal and reckless assassination of the popular military leader Qasem Soleimani.

A progressive development that inspired leftwing movements worldwide concerns the Kurdish forces of the People’s Protection Units (YPG). The gender equality in the Kurdish forces, where women could be officers in mixed-gender units, not only helped defeat ISIS and laid the ground for the creation for the Kurdish Rojava enclave, but also freed thousands of Yazidi women from enslavement by ISIS at a time when the rest of the world stood by and did nothing. In their battle against ISIS, the YPG was backed by limited air support from U.S. forces. This gave Rojava and the Kurds a degree of protection from the Turkish regime, which views all struggles for Kurdish autonomy as “terrorism.” Yet Trump allowed Erdogan to send in troops to push the Kurds out of much of Rojava.

Although the least discussed, Sudan experienced a most notable revolt with the overthrow Omar al-Bashir, in power since 1989. Bashir is now in prison, some of the most egregious forms of state oppression of women in the name of religion have stopped, and negotiations are underway with the Darfuris and other oppressed African minorities. Given its location at the southern borders of the Arab world, Sudan’s revolt also resonated with unrest outside the Arab world, especially with the ferment in neighboring Ethiopia, underway for several years. Since the Bashir regime combined authoritarian Islamism with nationalist military rule, both military nationalism and Islamism emerged totally discredited, unlike in Egypt after 2011. A space for the left may have opened up. But at the same time, the new civilian leaders, who enjoy considerable popular support, have in no way crossed beyond the horizons of neoliberal capitalism, let alone capitalism itself. This is the agenda of a self-limiting revolution, one that stops at the political sphere. Positive change in the conditions of life and labor will occur only with the development of a radical class politics independent of the current civilian leadership, let alone the holdovers from Bashir who still control a major part of the state.

We have also witnessed social ferment in Europe, especially in France. A massive and persistent strike wave halted transport and many other state functions for nearly two months in December and January. Hundreds of thousands shut down their workplaces and joined street demonstrations week after week in the face of the neoliberal Macron government’s proposal to cut pensions. France has one of the highest levels of life expectancy in the world, in large part because of the hard-fought struggles by working people after the 1944 liberation from Nazi occupation to make sure that many high-stress jobs allowed for earlier retirement without severe poverty, along with universal healthcare. The mass workers struggle of 2019-20 was preceded the year before by the militant Yellow Vests movement in more rural parts of the country, some of whose energies spilled into the recent strikes. 2019-20 has led in turn to the creation of militant leftwing networks not only among the youth, but also among transport workers. For now, the strike wave of 2019-20 has been defeated in the sense that the government may have outlasted them and has enacted its retrogressive new pension plan. Two possible reasons for this defeat stand out: One is that organized labor has not been able to tap into the vast reservoir of class and anti-racist anger that permeates the African and Arab communities in the big urban areas. A second is that French labor was left to struggle alone, with no other Europeans joining in with mass labor struggles of their own. However, in Ireland, a different sort of opening occurred in February, when the left-of-center Sinn Fein Party came out about even with the two big conservative parties, a breakthrough based upon anger over housing and medical costs.

The case of India is especially significant, because the Modi government has moved in an openly fascist direction and the resistance movement has been so massive and succeeded in breaking down some religious and caste divisions among the oppressed classes. In the past year, Modi removed all autonomy from Kashmir and placed it under lockdown; enacted an immigration law that excludes Muslims, who are 14% of the population; and developed a draconian law that would remove tens of millions from the citizenship rolls, mostly Muslims and members of the poorest and most oppressed parts of the working classes. At the same time, the resistance of Indian women, workers, students and intellectuals, and elements of the Muslim community has reached proportions not seen in decades. One of the most important actions was the occupation since December 16 of a major road in New Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh neighborhood by women from the local Muslim community, who have received support from many sectors of the population. Significantly, they were joined by the young Dalit leader Chandrashekhar Azad, who underlined, “This is not only a political agitation” but one that gets to the core of what India will be as a country. Elderly Muslim women stood for weeks in the cold at the frontlines of the Shaheen Bagh occupation, with one of them declaring: “Let the police come, let them use their lathis [long batons], we will not budge until we have obtained justice.”[14]

As our Indian comrades wrote recently, in the face of harsh repression against the protesters, “it is Muslim women who are at the forefront of the protests. They have not only shown extraordinary courage to come out of their houses challenging the extremely patriarchal society to which they belong, but have also shown enough maturity to continue their protest tenaciously as well as peacefully in spite of several provocations. As a consequence, they have succeeded in gaining support from different quarters of society besides students. One shining example is opening of Langars (free kitchens) for the protesting women by poor Sikh peasants from around Delhi… The unique feature of these protests lies in the fact that they are neither led by any political party nor by any charismatic leader but by the collective leadership of the women and students. Similar protests are being held at several other places of Delhi along with the protests at Calcutta, Lucknow, Patna, Gaya, Bhopal, Raipur, Nagpur, Allahabad, Bombay, Jaipur, Chennai and countless other cities as well as villages.”[15] Modi’s total ban on all public gatherings and transport at the end of March is surely seen by him as a way to put an end to all that, but anger at the government’s complete mismanagement of the coronavirus, which it initially ignored for months, may lead to a different result.

Meanwhile, the global environmental movement is surely not going away. Although it includes tendencies from anti-humanists who advocate drastically reducing the number of people on the planet to those who argue for a green capitalism, a deepening radicalization within it is evident. For example, on her recent trip to the U.S., 17-year old climate activist Greta Thunberg and her friends spoke with Native American activists at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North and South Dakota to get inspiration for how a society without emissions could be organized. In the talk delivered to the UN Climate Summit in New York, just after her trip to Standing Rock, she said, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying; entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

For many, the Trump presidency is not only evidence of a failed democracy but also a frightening indication that the evils we knew existed in the U.S. would intensify and become acceptable. This has led to an increase in hate crimes, misogyny, displays of white supremacy (as in the horrific scenes in Charlottesville), nationalist policies such as the hyper-persecution of the undocumented, Muslim travel bans, and the separation and caging of families seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.[16] The separation of migrant children from their parents and the conditions under which they were jailed is an especially disturbing display of inhumanity that stands out even amidst a sea of unconscionable acts of violence. It shows once more that some forms of inhumanity cannot be justified for any reason and bring people together to fight across class, gender, race, and other markers of difference.

A similar example is the growing indignation and resistance of women. The misogyny evidenced by Trump during his campaign led to the Women’s March, which brought women across the country in the hundreds of thousands and was supported by women across the world. In addition, the #MeToo movement gained significant appeal, beginning with the drive to end college rapes, followed by the move to denounce sexual assault and harassment in the workplace and the conviction of powerful, high-profile rapists such as Harvey Weinstein. Yet an important concern that continues to haunt these women’s movements is the lack of attention and incorporation of these issues as they affect women of color.[17] For example, the contradictions that sometimes come between the interests of white women and women of color were evidenced in the Women’s March. Originally organized by Black women, it was subsequently taken up and popularized by white women who proceeded to seek assistance and support of the police to maintain safety and “order.” For women of color these images remind us of the very different ways in which the police interact with us.[18] Similar problems persisted in the #MeToo movement, which was initially organized by Tarana Burke, a Black woman, seeking to develop a project of healing for Women of Color. With little initial attention to this foundation, #MeToo was appropriated by predominantly white professional women and public figures. While there is no doubt that women publicly “coming out” to curtail the power of men who use their status, money, and positions to intimidate, harass, and assault women is not only commendable but necessary to challenge existing patriarchal relations, this does not change the fact that it was done without initial acknowledgment of Burke. Nor did they do enough to seek out the voices and insights – or Reason—of women of color or working-class women.

V.

Although a complete breakdown of the global economic and political order cannot be ruled out today, that does not mean a new society will arise to take its place. The truly critical question is this: Once the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, will the social distancing, break-down in fac-to-face communication, and increased atomization that define the current reality become the new norm that defines the future? Or will movements arise that put an end to the abstract and indirect character of human relations under capitalism? For a positive outcome to take place, the system has to be brought down, through a conscious movement of masses of people. Socialism is the first form of society that arises from the conscious, purposeful activity of living subjects of revolution. It is not brought into existence by some blind force operating behind people’s backs.

The objective, material condition for socialism remains the inherent non-viability of capitalism; the subjective, material condition for socialism is the struggles of masses of people against racism, sexism, class domination, and environmental destruction—of which many new manifestations are bound to emerge. But there is also an immaterial condition for socialism—the availability of a cogent conception of what life can be like without the domination of capital. Ideas matter; there can be no forward movement to freedom without them. And ideas are as immanent in the historical process as any material factor, as we can see by the unexpected resurgence of interest in socialism in the capitalist-imperialist heartland, the U.S. This provides a vital foundation for Marxist-Humanists to engage in today’s discussions of socialism, as part of the effort to develop a viable alternative to capitalism that transcends the dead-ends of the past. To this end, we are working to publish a new edition of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.

In doing so, it is vital to pay heed to Marx’s notion that “the transcendence of self- alienation follows the course of self- alienation.” It is impossible to get to the absolute like a shot out of a pistol. Subjects of revolution first come to consciousness by battling the most immediate forms of oppression facing them. One of the most important of these is today’s glaring social inequalities, which explains why the default option for most radical theoreticians remains advocating one or another form of “fairly” redistributing value. This should not be simply dismissed out of hand, since there is a need for a thoroughgoing redistribution of wealth. At issue is whether it can be achieved and sustained so long as we remain prisoners of a system based on augmenting value, or wealth in monetary form, as an end in itself.

As Martin Hägglund puts it in This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, “It does not make much sense to argue that the problem is capitalism and at the same time argue that the solution is the redistribution of capital wealth. Yet this argument is routinely made on the Left today. The form of the argument is a contradiction in terms: it asserts that the problem is capitalism and that the solution is capitalism. The contradictory form of the argument is covered over by a sleight of hand, whereby capitalism is tacitly defined as neoliberalism and redistribution is tacitly defined as an alternative to capitalism…Redistributive reforms can certainly be a helpful means for political change under capitalism. But even in order to understand the substantial challenges that our redistributive reforms will encounter…we need to grasp the contradictions that are inherent in the capitalist production of wealth.”[19]

Such a perspective is not utopian, since many in today’s movements oppose all sorts of economic inequality without stopping there, since they aim to recover a sense of humanity from the rebellion, the appropriation of spaces in their communities. New organizational forms have arisen that create community and shared responsibility in the face of an increasingly atomized and alienated world. In doing so, they are reaching to reconnect with the essence of what it means to be human—the capacity for conscious, purposeful, collectively driven activity.

For decades an assortment of theorists of the postmodern mode have held that separation and loss of unity is to be celebrated. Différance was upheld in opposition to abstract universals imposed by racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes and structures. But lost sight of in this was the notion of a shared human project, without which any of our other projects, be they around class, race, or gender, ultimately fail to realize their potential. Marx referred to this as a “positive humanism”; Frantz Fanon called it a “new humanism.” The quest for a new humanism continues to show itself today, even if many remain under the ideological thrall of the celebration of difference over universality. We must distinguish the abstract, oppressive universals that claim to be emancipatory (such as liberalism) from the concrete universalism expressive of what Marx called our species-being. To be sure, many claims to “universality” continue to exclude those who do not fit the default model of a white, male-dominated world. But we can hardly challenge the increasingly fragmented and alienated character of modern life by assuming away the need to recapture the communal. Only then can what Marx called “the realm of free individuality” arise. Our tasks center on articulating and developing a conception of new human relations opposed to the false universals of capitalism-racism-patriarchy. This is just as important as theorizing the transcendence of the capitalist law of value; in fact, one depends upon the other.

Footnotes

[1] Jeanna Smialek, “The Fed Plans to Do Whatever It Takes, and More than It Ever Has,” The New York Times, March 24, 2020, pp. B4-5.

[2] Giorgio Agamben, “The Invention of an Epidemic,” in Quodlibet, Feb. 26, 2020 (https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia).

[3] Quoted in Juan Manuel Boccacci, “Citizen Assemblies Are Challenging the Neoliberal Model in Chile,” Orinoco Tribune, Feb. 3, 2020.

[4] Robin Wright, “The Story of 2019: Protests in Every Corner of the Globe,” The New Yorker, Dec. 30, 2019.

[5] Sanders addresses his debt to FDR’s speech in “What Democratic Socialism Means Today,” in An Inheritance for Our Times: The Principles and Politics of Democratic Socialism, edited by Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson (New York and London: OR Books, 2020).

[6] Richard Casey, “Does Florida Really Want Ex-Felons to Vote?” in The New York Times, March 17, 2020.

[7] Karl Marx, “Letter to Arnold Ruge” (September 1843), in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 144.

[8] Michael Roberts, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/02/04/trumps-trickle-dries-up/

[9] https://www.oxfam.org/en/what-we-do/issues/extreme-inequality-and-essential-services.

[10] Roberts, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/02/04/trumps-trickle-dries-up.

[11] See Angela Klein, Sozialistische Zeitung, No. 4, 2019.

[12] Ross Douthat, “The Age of Decadence,” The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2020.

[13] See “Special Panel Event: The Second Arab Spring: Seasons of Revolution, University of London,” featuring Janan Aljabiri (Iraq), Rima Majed (Lebanon), and Gilbert Achcar (SOAS University of London) (https://www.soas.ac.uk/development/events/devstudseminars/21jan2020-special-panel-event-the-second-arab-spring-seasons-of-revolution.html).

[14] Quoted in Le Monde, January 19, 2020.

[15] https://imhojournal.org/articles/citizenship-amendment-act-caa-and-national-register-for-citizens-nrc-are-violent-attacks-against-the-working-and-oppressed-masses-of-india/

[16] Monzó, L.D. & McLaren, P. “Red love: Toward racial, economic and social justice,” Truthout, Dec. 18, 2017 (http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/28072-red-love-toward-racial-economic-and-social-justice)

[17] “Women of Color Assess the Impact of The Women’s March,” Here & Now, March 24, 2017 (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/01/24/women-of-color-march).

[18] Chen, Tanya. “People Have Strong Feelings About Cops High-Fiving People in the Women’s March in Atlanta,” BuzzFeed News, Jan. 23, 2017 (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tanyachen/cops-highfived-womens-marchers).

[19] Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 2020), p. 383.

A slightly different version of this essay appeared in The International Marxist-Humanist, April 10, 2020, here: https://imhojournal.org/articles/where-to-begin-growing-seeds-of-liberation-in-a-world-torn-asunder/

Political Struggle Amidst the Pandemic in the United States

By: Dan La BotzApril 19, 2020

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Doctor’s Costume during the Black Plague of the Fourteenth Century. The mask may have helped protect the doctors.

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

Following over a month with large parts of the United States shutdown, the coronavirus hospitalization rate peaked last week, and the principal debate now is over when and how to restart the economy. A fight has broken out between the President and state governors, while rightwing groups have held armed protests demanding a reopening of the economy, and workers have protested and struck over health issues.

Hospitalizations in the United States peaked last week, but the disease continues to spread. The country had 728,094 cases and 34,726 deaths as of April 19. The disease is rampant in nursing homes, prisons, immigrant detention centers and meat packing plants. In response governments have released some prisoners and immigrants. The country’s biggest cluster—640 cases—appeared in the Smithfield pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota with other outbreaks at plants in Iowa and Colorado. All of those plants have been shutdown.

The national lockdown has continued. There are now officially more than 22 million unemployed; some economists estimate an unemployment rate of 20 percent, indicating that the country is plunging into a Second Great Depression.

The CARES Act[1] provides for a one-time-only payment of $1,200. Some 80 million should get their government relief checks this week by direct deposit to their bank accounts, but 60 million, mostly low income people who do not used direct deposit, will have to wait longer to get a check in the mail. The Act’s small business loan program is already out of money after spending $349 billion, and many small businesses remain in crisis.

While some workers are receiving relief, others are coming under attack. The Trump administration has proposed to aid growers by cutting farmworkers’ wages, already among the lowest. Trump has also proposed cutting the United States Postal Service’s worker benefits package. Congress has so far failed to refinance the USPS, which could go broke and be forced to close in June.

The pandemic has disproportionately affected women. Many are homecare workers, nursing home workers and other low-wage caregivers that have less protection. Women make up 87% of registered nurses and 71% of cashiers. Retail sales has virtually collapsed, throwing many women out of work. There is 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.

Trump continues to hamper efforts to solve the health crisis by giving false informtion. Last week he declared—contrary to the Constitution–that he had “total authority” to order the nation to return to normal. When several governors said that they would ignore him, Trump backed down. Then, when rightwing organizations such as the Freedom Foundation organized protests—some of them armed—in Michigan, Kentucky, Texas, Oregon and Washington to demand the immediate reopening of those states, Trump tweeted support.

The central political struggle now is largely between those who want to follow the guidance of health experts to prevent triggering a second wave of Covid cases, and the President, many Republicans, and business owners, who want to reopen the economy as early as May 1. Tens of thousands of lives hang in the balance. Health experts say testing is critical to reopening, but so far the United States has tested only one percent of the population. The experts also say that social distancing may be necessary until 2022.

Social struggle goes on too with at least 100 wildcat strikes since the pandemic struck. Las week hundreds of workers at McDonald’s, Burger King, Domino’s, and other restaurants walked off the job to demand health protection. The struggle continues.

[1] Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act

An “All Hands on Deck” Moment: Sixty-Six Old New Leftists Urge Support for Joe Biden

By: Paul Le BlancApril 18, 2020

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Anti-war march on Washington, D.C. on November 27, 1965

When I heard that a large group of people who had been prominent in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had written an open letter about the importance of supporting Joe Biden, I immediately wanted to read it, because long ago that was my organization. SDS, along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had been in the vanguard of the new left in the 1960s, and some of these oldsters now want to challenge a position taken by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), currently the foremost organization on the left today. They tell us “this is an all hands on deck moment,” and that supporting Joe Biden in order to defeat Donald Trump “is our high moral and political responsibility.”

Some of those who don’t like what is said in the letter accuse the sixty-six of some crime called “shaming” – and I don’t quite get that. When someone disagrees with me and argues urgently for a different course of action than the one I am taking, I think that’s okay. Whether they happen to be older or younger or the same age as me doesn’t matter either (although that may be because I am old). Frank, open, democratic discussion is necessary if we are to build a vibrant Left. And it is clear to me that the sense of urgency to oppose and defeat the vicious policies and dynamics of Donald Trump and his right-wing administration is admirable – and it is shared by both sides in this little flare-up.

Given that, what explains this confrontation of “old new left” with “new new left”? Part of the answer may be found in differences between SDS and DSA. While many of its members were socialists, SDS was not an explicitly socialist organization. Also, in the last sections of its foundational document, The Port Huron Statement, there was a commitment to working in the Democratic Party to make it a progressive force. Neither of these things is true of DSA as it currently exists.

DSA is an explicitly socialist organization, and it does not have the kind of commitment to the Democratic Party that was reflected in The Port Huron Statement. It supports certain Democrats sometimes, but its “Where We Stand” statement says something that could never have found its way into the old Port Huron Statement: “Democratic socialists reject an either-or approach to electoral coalition building, focused solely on a new party or on realignment within the Democratic Party. … Electoral tactics are only a means for democratic socialists; the building of a powerful anti-corporate coalition is the end. Where third party or non-partisan candidates mobilize such coalitions, democratic socialists will build such organizations and candidacies.”

Such differences may contribute to an explanation of the difference that has cropped up between the old SDS veterans and the younger DSA activists.

Memories of SDS

The letter of the sixty-six appeals to the lessons of history, which I think is always a good idea. What they do with history, however, strikes me as selective and superficial. The actualities of history undermine the case they make. After following my old friends down the pathways of the past, I will want to return to what seems to me to make sense in the present moment.

I have never regretted being part of SDS. We were not a perfect organization and never claimed to be, but we did the best we could to struggle for social and economic justice and a genuinely democratic society. We did some good things and learned from our experience. I read the letter with interest. Among the sixty-six signers are people I knew as comrades long ago, when I was a member of SDS from 1965 to 1969. It stirred memories.

Even before I joined, I was close to the organization, and I was influenced by the support that many of these signers (and SDS as a whole) were giving to liberal Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1964 election campaign against conservative Republican Barry Goldwater, with the slogan “Part of the Way With LBJ.” I organized as best I could other students in my high school to campaign for Johnson.

I was young and naïve (perhaps the same could be said, in those long-ago times, for the signers of the letter). I did not assume that Johnson was preparing the dramatic escalation of an imperialist war in Vietnam. In the face of that escalating horror, many of the signers played important roles in helping to build the anti-war opposition (as did I), going so far as to refuse to support Hubert Humphrey’s pro-war Presidential candidacy in 1968 (as did I) – although now they regret doing that (unlike me).

One of my most profound educational experiences in SDS was engaging with the incredible speech by Carl Oglesby (at the time the organization’s President) at a 1965 anti-war march on Washington. It contrasted “humanist liberals” and “corporate liberals.” Humanist liberals are those who take to heart the writings of Tom Paine, the opening passages of the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address. Corporate liberals are those who represent the interests of the powerful business corporations that dominate our economy, our society, our government, our foreign policy – to enhance their profits and power, at the expense of the rest of us in the United States and throughout the world. Oglesby urged humanist liberals to join with radicals in breaking from the corporate liberals, in order to overturn the system they dominate, replacing it with a genuinely democratic and humanistic social, economic, and political order, “in the name of plain human hope.”

I see the future society that Oglesby was describing, and that I have been fighting for since I joined SDS, as socialism.

Max Weber or Rosa Luxemburg

While inclined to touch on aspects of the history of the new left, the open letter leaves out any reference to what at the time was the influential perspective so eloquently articulated by this one-time leader of SDS. It does something similar when it refers to a couple of moments in German history. When I saw the letter mentioning the stormy year of 1919, I thought there would surely be reference to the great socialist Rosa Luxemburg. But no, she never comes up. Instead there is reference to the presumed wisdom of an anti-socialist, the liberal academic Max Weber, who warned left-wing students that “the best politics should be painfully aware of the consequences of action, not just intentions.”

This political mentor of the letter-writers had enthusiastically supported the German war effort during World War I, which he saw as necessary if Germany was to function as a leading world power. He had denounced revolutionary socialists as engaged in “dirt, muck, dung, and horse-play—nothing else.” He singled out Rosa Luxemburg (who had spent time in prison for opposing the war) as someone who should be confined to a zoo. Soon after, it is true, he expressed regret when she was brutally murdered in early 1919 by right-wing death squads, but he also suggested she had brought this on herself. Her criminal “horseplay” involved believing that humanity’s choices were either going forward to socialism or sliding down into barbarism. (See: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/; also Paul Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott, eds., Socialism or Barbarism: Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg [London: Pluto Press, 2010].) In the wake of her murder, the moderate leaders of the socialist movement engineered a compromised democracy, with capitalism, militarism, and the fake “populism” of right-wing nationalism intact.

Barbarism would come, of course, in the form of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement that grew through the 1920s (in an atmosphere of corporate liberalism, pragmatic centrism, and growing crises) and took power in 1933. The open letter correctly notes that the moderate Social Democrats and the militant Communists might have prevented this had they joined together in a united front against Hitler. Instead they denounced each other, with the Communists engaging is ultra-left street fighting and the Social Democrats supporting the “lesser evil” in the elections of 1932 by helping to re-elect the old conservative nationalist Paul von Hindenberg as the most practical way to block Hitler. Of course, Hindenberg and those conservatives around him decided it would be most practical for them to adapt to the Nazis, and they brought Hitler into their government in 1933, after which he transformed it into his government. This important information, too, is missing from the open letter.

The Here-and-Now: Sanders and Biden

One historical lesson: neither ultra-left street fighting nor settling for a “lesser evil” in the electoral arena will necessarily bring about the results we intend. Instead, it makes sense to build a united front of revolutionary socialists, moderate socialists, and others to fight against lesser and greater evils – in our communities, in our workplaces, in the streets. And where we can elect our own people to public office, backed up by dynamic social movements, that makes sense too.

Another historical lesson: a failure for the working-class majority to move forward to socialism could result in the dynamics of capitalism generating a downward slide into barbarism.

A third historical lesson: it makes sense to grasp the difference between humanist liberals (potentially allies of socialists) and corporate liberals (without a doubt, opponents of socialists and humanist liberals).

I think it makes sense to keep such things in mind as we attempt to navigate the complexities of our own time.

First of all, although some on the left have argued that Bernie Sanders is more a humanist liberal than an actual socialist (I disagree, seeing him as a moderate socialist), there is certainly no question that Joe Biden’s entire political history is that of a corporate liberal. When push comes to shove, there is no question – Biden is not on our side, he is on the side of the capitalist corporations. One could argue that Donald Trump is no better, and that in fact he is much worse. I think that is true. It doesn’t take away the fact that Joe Biden is a corporate liberal.

Second, the Sanders campaign helped to advance the cause of socialism. The campaign identified the power structures and policies dominant in the United States as being controlled by the small class of billionaires, designed to preserve their power and expand their wealth at the expense of the rest of us. It put forward radical reform proposals that challenged the perspectives and power of the billionaires while making sense for our diverse working-class majority, including: Medicare for all; a $15 an hour minimum wage; guaranteed employment and income for all; and a Green New Deal that combines protecting the environment with protecting the working conditions and living standards of the working-class. There is also the insistence that to pay for all of these things we need, we must tax billionaires and corporate profits, not the working class. The word “socialism” was positively associated with these understandings and proposals, inserting that into the popular consciousness and mainstream political discourse.

Third, DSA took a position early on that it would endorse Sanders as a socialist candidate running on the Democratic Party ballot-line, but it would not endorse any other Presidential candidate. This does not prevent any member, or group of members, in DSA from voting for another candidate (such as Biden). One could make a case that people should vote for Biden because he is not Trump, that he has a decent chance to defeat Trump, and that it is very important to defeat Trump. No DSA member who is a voter (and no voter who is not a DSA member) will be prevented in any way from acting on such a conviction.

Fourth, at the same time, the decision would seem to prevent DSA as an organization from doing what SDS did in regard to another corporate liberal in 1964 – campaigning for Lyndon Baines Johnson. There is a logic to this, given the nature of DSA as an explicitly socialist organization. As a corporate liberal, Biden is an anti-socialist, pro-capitalist, pro-billionaire enemy of what Sanders and his supporters were fighting for. While there was much that DSA could campaign for in supporting Sanders, since Sanders’ program was basically consistent with DSA’s socialist program, the same is far from true in relation to Biden. One might vote for him because he is not Trump, but beyond that, there does not seem to be much an explicitly socialist organization would be able to campaign for in what Biden offers.

Biden offers a return to “the good old days” of corporate capitalist America, before Donald Trump assumed the Presidency. Of course, those good old days were not so good, were increasingly problematical and crisis-ridden (in part because of the “pragmatic” policies championed by Joe Biden and other corporate liberals), generating the growing discontent that discredited “mainstream” politicians like Biden and paved the way for Donald Trump. A good dose of what Biden and those around him have to offer, should he win the Presidency, will set us up for the “solutions” offered by forces more disciplined and sinister than what Trump represents.

What Sanders represented was better than that, and in the opinion of many of us, was worth supporting. Sanders has now been defeated, and he – like the sixty-six – is urging us to support Biden in order to defeat Trump. Given who and what he is, Biden may not win, but if he does win, he will offer no solutions, and graver problems will be coming down on us in rapid order.

I have decided to support eco-socialist Howie Hawkins, Green Party candidate, so that I will be able to campaign for something I believe in during the upcoming electoral season. Others may think other choices make sense. But for me, this divergence is not the “bottom-line.”

The Bottom Line

Now more than ever, this definitely is an all hands on deck moment, and for more than one reason. The crises of capitalism are deepening in our country, and an increasingly desperate population is polarizing.

We all know of the remarkable (and well-financed) phenomenon of right-wing “populism” that has fueled the “Tea Party” movement and worse, and that has provided the base for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaigns and policies. Coming out of the shadows are elements prepared to defend old racist monuments of the Confederacy, shoot down young black men wearing hoodies, enter synagogues to slaughter Jews, and rally to state capitals, guns in hand, to push for an end to coronavirus restrictions – in order to “get the economy going again,” so that Big Business can retrieve its profits, even if significant numbers of “lesser people” have to die.

On the other side of the spectrum, thanks to various mass insurgencies that included the “Occupy Wall Street” and “Black Lives Matter” movements, and that found expression in the Sanders campaigns, there are statistics that offer hope. Those in the United States today inclined to identify positively with the notion of socialism include 43 percent of all U.S. citizens, 51 percent of young people (ages 18-29), and 57 percent of Democrats. There is clearly the basis, in the foreseeable future, for a mass socialist movement in the United States. And with it, there will be the possibility of waging coherent struggles on multiple levels that will be capable of moving our society to a transition from the tyrannies of capitalism to the economic democracy of socialism.

The urgency goes well beyond the 2020 elections. Now is a time that requires discussion, debate, planning, and the beginnings of efforts to help us prepare for what we must do in the decade that has just begun. How can we build a powerful and effective mass socialist movement? What is the strategic orientation that can help ensure the triumph of such a movement? This is what we need in order to shake the future, and shape the future, as Carl Oglesby once put it, “in the name of plain human hope.”

An Appeal for Dialectical Polemics: A Reply to Post and Smith

By: Todd ChretienApril 18, 2020

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In their recent article for New Politics, Charlie Post and Ashley Smith lay out what is a serious point of view within the socialist movement. I particularly agree with their insistence that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) can play a critical role in supporting strikes and protests against pandemic conditions, even if they phrase it in such a way that one might believe this isn’t already happening. Regardless, what matters most is to identify the point of commonality that can serve to foster joint work among socialist trends and this is one very important area that is an especially salient one at the moment.

As a polemic, the piece would have been more effective if they had engaged with a wider layer of the really-existing DSA or if they had narrowed their focus to Dustin Guastella’s articles in Jacobin. Instead, they use Dustin as a straw man to paint “many socialists” with a broad brush and counterpose their own point of view to this ill-defined “many.”

They argue it was a mistake to have endorsed Bernie Sanders, both because he never had any chance of winning (less important in their eyes) and because doing so will drag the socialist movement into a trap within the Democratic Party (more important). Nate Silver aside, their first point is a counterfactual that can’t be proven (what would have happened without the coronavirus?), while there is truth to the danger they point to in their second point. But rather than engaging with potentials, they inappropriately pose absolutes.

In doing so, they avoid the central questions related to their polemic: Did Bernie’s 2016 and 2020 campaign build the left? Did his popularization of socialism and class politics help shift consciousness to the left? Did a socialist winning over the plurality of a whole new generation to anti-capitalist ideas and language make strikes more likely and contribute to the wildcat strike wave we see today? Yes or no?

If the answer is yes, then they should concede a point to their opponents. If the answer is no, then they should begin by saying “we did not endorse Sanders and DSA was wrong to do so, as it was wrong to endorse AOC, Tlaib, etc. in 2018. DSA should retract its endorsement for them in 2020.” By ducking that question, they open themselves to obvious lines of attack at the level of polemics.

Leaving the structure of their argument aside, once those questions are answered, there can be a comradely debate about limitations, unintended consequences, real obstacles, etc. And Charlie and Ashley are not wrong to stress the traps and obstacles facing our movement. But to avoid those questions and dismiss the last few years of socialist electoral challenges as “exceptions” weakens their argument. Of course they are exceptions, given our starting point. But what incredible exceptions they are, and what can we make of them? Those are the live questions we all face.

They conclude their piece by suggesting that DSA should adopt “the revolutionary left’s call for a working-class party independent of the Democrats.” I agree, but they leave aside the fact that most of the active base of DSA also supports building such a party. Again, they differentiate themselves at the level of self-definition as opposed to assessing the empirical question of what is working and what is not working.

Dirty Break

There is a genuine argument about how and when and with whom this party can be built. That is what political organizational questions will be about in the coming 1-5-10 years over a whole range of opinion and strategy. This is a live debate, the conclusions to which really can lead either towards a new party or back into the Democratic Party.

But rather than seizing on the common goal of building a new party and then offering real proposals for how to lay a basis for it, they dismiss one approach to getting such a party (the dirty break) as “utopian.” This set ups a polemical sleight of hand in which they argue that the ballot line strategy has “led many back to the old realignment strategy that they initially rejected.” Their evidence? Dustin Guastalla’s articles in Jacobin and a single tweet from Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara. I will let comrades who are actively building DSA decide for themselves if this is a fair judgement.

I will concede the point that the dirty break has undoubtedly led some people back to realignment (or to realignment for the first time more likely), if Charlie and Ashley will concede that the dirty break approach (we can argue if it is a strategy or a tactic) has led many more people to see the need for a new party. And if I’m right about the some and the more, shouldn’t we conclude that the more is what we want if we are to accumulate the human material for a new party?

I respect Charlie and Ashley tremendously and they will continue to play important roles in building a socialist movement capable of winning over millions of workers to fight for their own freedom. However, I would appeal to them to shift the terrain of their arguments (not stifle or hide or soften them) from polarizing a debate over whether one should attempt to build a new party outside the Democratic Party or whether the dirty break is part of the solution (as I believe it is for the conditions we face today). Frankly, that horse has left the barn.

Why not instead focus on putting forward practical proposals for how their political current can work with others to contribute to getting the party we all want? If I’m not wrong, I believe their answer centers on building struggle from below and exclusively running independent candidates where possible. This outlook provides ample room for joint work and common assessments of successes, failures, and misfires.

In terms of how to conduct debates, to the degree that there is a polemic to be had over realignment and other questions, they ought to sharpen their focus and more closely define their polemical targets. Setting up straw men (Dustin stands in for “many”) and relying on the “logical conclusion” (“dirty break has led many back”) method rarely win over anyone who isn’t already convinced.

I know for a fact that I have failed more than once to heed my own advice about carefully and generously approaching polemics among comrades, and no one should get too bent out of shape about a single polemic. However, I believe the movement will benefit from looking for the best in each other’s arguments in this period (a period in which we will all face challenges for which we are not prepared) while raising the theoretical level of our real disagreements to the level of practice.

Against False Dichotomies

By: Daniel JohnsonApril 17, 2020

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Bernie Sanders Suspends his Campaign

In the aftermath of Bernie Sanders’s suspension of his presidential campaign, analysis of what went wrong and possible ways forward will be essential, if painful, for the American Left. Understandably, those who went “all in” for Bernie will feel compelled to defend this position from those who pointed to the limitations of the Democratic Party and the electoral road to social transformation. Sanders laudably moved American political discourse to the left, and the popularity of his progressive agenda among young people should be a source of optimism and hope. At the same time, honest assessments of Sanders’s primary loss will be vital to the advancement of any left political project in the future.

While defenses of unreserved support for Bernie’s political revolution are understandable, especially from those who worked for his campaign, if they are wrong they must be challenged. A recent piece from Paul Heideman in Jacobin aims to foreclose discussion of left strategy by misleadingly opposing what he calls “mass politics” to “movementism.” While a short piece possibly not given adequate reflection in the wake of Sanders’s campaign suspension, it proposes a false dichotomy that puts the cart before the horse and fails to confront the central issue—why Sanders could not win the Democratic primary.

Heideman’s argument is that Sanders’s loss in the Democratic primary “has the potential to be one of the most productive defeats the Left has endured in decades, if we learn the right lessons from it.” Well, possibly, but Heideman never explains what these lessons might be. Evidently they have nothing to do with trying to win the Democratic Party nomination, Sanders’s weaknesses as a candidate, or his campaign’s unsuccessful attempt to get traditional nonvoters to the polls. These are issues that have to be confronted head-on for any honest reckoning of what went wrong and where to go from here.

Instead, Heideman claims that in the wake of the defeat “there is going to be a strong temptation to retreat to the politics that were hegemonic on the Left before Sanders’s first run: anti-electoral movementism and the embrace of left politics as a subculture.” Heideman is correct that the anarchist horizontalism of the 1990s and early 2000s was a dead end; the likelihood of there being a “strong temptation” to return to this kind of politics is more debatable. Leaving that aside, the association between an ill-defined “movementism” and the adoption of some kind of subcultural left identity is deceptive, at best.

Heideman further claims that without “institutions capable of sustaining and directing mass mobilization,” social movements fade, with participants falling back into an “embrace of marginality.” An historical example of an institution that sustained and directed mass mobilization along the lines Heideman is thinking would have been helpful here.

What immediately comes to my mind are the Populists of the late nineteenth century and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s—two successful grassroots organizations coopted and effectively destroyed as radical forces by moderate leaders and the Democratic Party. Instead Heideman points to the Sanders campaign’s mobilization of hundreds of thousands of volunteers who tried to convince people their desire to improve their lives would best be helped by a socialist president. This, he claims, “is the very essence of mass politics.”

Mass Politics

One can admire the legions of Sanders supporters who tirelessly canvassed for him while also finding this argument problematic. One could convincingly argue that direct action in the form of strikes, sit-ins, boycotts, and other forms of public demonstration better constitute “mass politics” than large-scale canvassing efforts.

Also unclear is what Heideman means by the “achievements” of the Sanders campaign. Though lacking a sufficiently internationalist perspective Bernie’s platform was undoubtedly worth fighting for, and as noted mainstream discussions of healthcare, the environment, labor, and education have moved to the left as a result of his visibility. Yet none of our goals have been realized, and shifting the terms of political debate, while important, is not enough.

But despite not actually winning Heideman insists on the correctness of the electoral approach. While acknowledging that electoral politics in the U.S. are institutionally biased against socialists (or in fact anyone not on a Democratic or Republican ticket), and that the Democratic Party whose nomination Sanders sought is run by an anti-socialist corporate establishment, Heideman writes that “it doesn’t follow from this that electoral politics are uniquely hostile to the Left.” It doesn’t? Then what, one wonders, does follow from it? It is in fact difficult to imagine an electoral system more hostile to fundamental social transformation than that of the U.S.

Not only is there no logical relationship between mass politics and elections on the one hand, and social movements and marginality on the other, but this conceptualization denies history—what should be an essential guide to left strategy today. Bernie himself repeatedly emphasized that real social change comes from movements, not politicians. For me this recognition was always the most attractive thing about him. Sanders knows that it was movements—abolition, labor, women’s rights, civil rights—that brought about real change in American history.

At best, politicians implement demands that come from society. Moreover, without the radical transformation of society as well as culture—the way people relate to each other as well as how they see the world—that comes from grassroots social struggle, legislative changes are easily rolled back when reactionary governments come to power.

I am emphatically not arguing that the Left should refrain from elections and retreat to some fascination with spontaneous direct action. Yet the fundamental question Bernie supporters have to address is why the gamble on traditional nonvoters in Democratic primaries failed. This is a difficult question that will require serious reflection and honest debate—in good faith. It could very well be that despite Bernie’s best efforts most working-class people still do not see elections as a realistic way to improve their lives. And are they wrong?

Yes, executive orders and the bully pulpit of his office would have been tools Sanders could have wielded as president. But would these really have given us Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, workplace democracy, racial justice, and free education? And if they wouldn’t, we must recognize that strategic rethinking is in order. And we might even conclude that elections can only ever be one part of a much broader strategy that must have roots in our communities and workplaces.

Building Class Power, Not Electoralism, Is the Future of the Left

By: Natalia TylimApril 16, 2020

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In his recent piece “Mass Politics, Not Movementism, Is the Future of the Left,” Paul Heideman aims to convince the Left that a strategy built primarily around “mass politics” (by which he implicitly means national electoral activity) is still the road forward, even though Bernie has ended his campaign. Both Heideman and Jacobin have argued for an “all in for Bernie” strategy, and here Heideman burns straw men rather than engaging in the live debate about what strategy the socialist Left should advance at this impasse.

“Mass Politics, Not Movementism” falsely counter-poses this “all in for Bernie” strategy to a “retreat to…anti-electoral movementism and the embrace of left politics as a subculture.” If anyone is making this argument, then it is a minority position I have not encountered. There is a general consensus on the Left about the need to engage in electoral activity (even if there are sharp disagreements about how), and also on the need for socialists to root themselves in workplace and community struggles.

Heideman suggests that the cause of the Left’s isolation for the last four decades was a “fetishism” of building movements, but he says nothing about the political context that opened up the possibilities for broad Left parties and Left electoral campaigns internationally in the last decade (e.g. Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn, Sanders). These openings did not exist in the same way before the crisis that began in 2008-2009.

I agree that in the aftermath of Bernie Sanders’ announcement that he is ending his campaign, endorsing Joe Biden and handing over his lists, staff and other resources, the Left needs to think about the relationship between movements and elections. Unfortunately, Heideman’s article emphasizes what we should not be doing and says very little about what to do at a moment when there are new openings for building a qualitatively stronger socialist Left in the United States.

What options for mass national politics are available to us now that the Bernie campaign is over? Is all of the Sanders campaign infrastructure going to become something independent that we can build around? Wasn’t that an expectation going in? Will DSA become the vehicle for this activity now that the Sanders campaign has ended? Is it the 2020 congressional elections that provide a next door to “mass politics?” Is anyone raising questions about this simply written off as pining for “drum circles” and “dumpster diving” while not engaging with the opportunities of the moment?

Insisting, as Heideman does, that we must focus on the national political arena and not “retreat” to small movements avoids one of the main strategic problems of the Sanders experience. Namely, that there was no political breakthrough because the forces of movements were too weak to make the Sanders platform seem viable.

While Bernie’s program remains very popular, the Sanders campaign hit the limit of what the Left can expect to win through an electoral vehicle alone, built primarily around ideological appeals for reforms. However popular these demands are, without class organization, and mass movements behind them giving credibility and successfully struggling and winning things, such demands will seem out of reach and can easily be brushed aside by more conservative narratives about being “realistic” and the threat of Trump being too great to risk a polarizing candidate.

In avoiding any assessment of this very recent experience, Heideman falls back on an electoralist argument that insists elections are the only arena of “mass politics” and the main way radical consciousness is developed and reforms are won. This is no more helpful than the “movementism” Heidemen describes in his piece, when activists reject electoral activity altogether because they see movements as being the primary source of change. Many credit Bernie with opening up possibilities for the socialist Left that have never existed before. And yet, by focusing exclusively on the “mass politics” side of things, we directed our resources away from building independent movements around these very openings.

Balance of Class Forces

Nor can we ignore the fact that the balance of class forces has changed very little since the Sanders’ campaign began. Though millions campaigned for Sanders, we are not yet close to winning his platform, and we are no closer organizationally to the goal of establishing a vehicle for independent working-class politics. Raising popular demands is not the same as sustained vehicles for working-class struggle and conflating electoral campaigns with rebuilding ‘infrastructures of resistance” will not help us develop a mass Left politics in the U.S.

It is admirable that so many jumped into a Bernie Sanders campaign. But somewhere along the line, the idea that Bernie could win ended up taking primacy over the necessity of independent organizing. While what it might mean to win deserves its own critical assessment, the argument for a dirty break—in which socialists make use of the campaign in order to prepare to bring people with them into an independent formation—has disappeared from the discussion entirely.

The lesson we should draw from this experience is not that campaigning harder next time, or contesting more local elections through the Democratic Party, will build our forces towards victory. The defeats of both Sanders and Corbyn in Britain demonstrate that an electoral campaign on its own, disconnected from strikes and social struggle, is incapable of transforming the balance of class forces.

Heideman ends his article, “…electoral politics are [not] uniquely hostile to the Left. After all, if there is anywhere employers have more power than the Democratic Party, it is surely the workplace, and the Left isn’t about to write off struggle in that field.” This is a false comparison. In the workplace, workers have the potential power to disrupt production and profits. What comparable power do we have in Democratic primaries, where corporate funding and lowest-common-denominator appeals to “get out the vote” inevitably win? It is only in the midst of, and acting as the voice of such struggles in workplaces and communities that election campaigns—organized independently of the Democratic Party—can build a new socialist Left.

Heideman anticipates this argument for emphasizing activism by noting the inherently episodic nature of struggles. He writes: “Without institutions capable of sustaining and directing mass mobilization, the movements inevitably faded.” This is why the primacy must be on social struggle, with an electoral strategy that compliments our primary task of building ‘infrastructures of dissent’ that can build beyond individual protests or strikes.

This means membership organizations composed initially of activists who attempt to promote struggle even during lulls of national activity, that are accountable to and run by those who support them in a way the Democratic Party is not and never will be; it means rank and file groups in workplaces; ongoing organizations of tenants, women, people of color, immigrants and queer folks; it means putting the power of decisions and action into the hands of as many of the oppressed and exploited as possible; it means organizing the “us” that Bernie so inspiringly speaks to.

Elections can be a component part of this strategy, but they are a tactic for building our own power, not a means of winning reforms or achieving socialism. Again and again in the past hundred years we have seen that it is mass, disruptive and often illegal struggles that win gains, build popular radicalism and the Left. These are the activities that will put the question of independent electoral organization on the political agenda.

The economic recession and the COVID-19 pandemic have revealed again how capitalism produces social and economic catastrophes. Despite the pandemic, social isolation and skyrocketing unemployment, we are seeing wild-cat strikes and protests in workplaces around the world, and an overall deepening of the radicalization that began after 2008. The same day that Heideman’s article appeared, Bloomberg ran a piece from a member of its editorial board arguing that COVID-19 will lead to social revolutions.

Whether the defensive strikes and struggles against the treatment of essential workers and the unnecessary deaths, disproportionately black and brown, served up by an unplanned and chaotic capitalist economy will translate into ongoing organizing (let alone revolutions!) remains to be seen. The outcome of the pandemic and crisis—whether it will deepen hostility to capitalism or promote an even more vicious right-wing, nationalist populism, will depend, among other things, on whether DSA members, working-class radicals, and others, are projecting a politics of struggle and a method of building capacity and organization.

This training is, arguably, very different from the training required for campaigning for Sanders in a primary election. If we sow the soil and develop such a strategy, including its electoral component, we could get closer to the active working class base that could finally provide the composite parts of a future working class party in the U.S. There is ample evidence that this is possible now, even if our movement is not as strong as we aim to build it.

Organizing working-class resistance will mean developing a robust strategy that includes both building movements and independent electoral campaigns. We can organize many thousands to exert the class power that can start to win things, which is the most enduring basis for working class and socialist organization and consciousness.

COVID-19 in the Age of Bolsonaro

By: Camila Valle, Aldo Cordeiro SaudaApril 16, 2020

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As of April 14, 2020, Brazil has had 23,955 cases of COVID-19, including 1,361 deaths and rising daily mortality rates.¹ And that is with only around 11 percent of total cases diagnosed, estimates the Center for Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases of the London School of Tropical Medicine.² Going further than even Donald Trump in the United States, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has downplayed the threat of the virus and the scale of the global pandemic, flippantly calling it a “little flu” and saying that “we’re all going to die one day.” With an added dose of sexism, he went so far as to tell supporters to confront the virus “like a man, not a boy.”³ Even Twitter, followed the next day by Facebook and Instagram, took down two of Bolsonaro’s posts in which he questioned quarantine measures. In a statement, Twitter explained that it had broadened its definition of harm in its global rules in order to “address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.”⁴

In one of the deleted tweets—a video showing Bolsonaro proudly flouting his own government’s social distancing guidelines by mixing with supporters in an open market in Brasília—a street vendor tells the president that people are worried that if they “don’t die of the disease, [they] will die of hunger.” Most people’s reality is clearly encapsulated in this sentiment: people can’t stay safe if they have to go to work, but they can’t survive if they don’t. The only government response that makes sense is to guarantee every person the conditions under which they can feasibly stay home: access to food, clean water, shelter, and healthcare. Essential workers like healthcare and food industry workers should be given everything possible to ensure their health, such as adequate protective equipment, like masks; a clean work space; free, accessible, and quick testing; paid sick leave; hazard pay; and more. Bolsonaro’s takeaway, however, was the complete opposite: “What I have been hearing from people is that they want to work.”

While the senate, against Bolsonaro’s wishes, has approved a monthly emergency R$600 for low-income people for three months, this will do little to alleviate people’s needs, especially given that eligibility for the money has various stipulations, including not being formally employed and not receiving social security, assistance benefits, unemployment insurance, or federal income transfer payments.⁵ In a victory for the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) and the Democratic Labor Party (PDT) during the negotiation of the emergency payment in the Chamber of Deputies, single working mothers will be able to receive a monthly payment of R$1200 for each of the three months.⁶

Under the slogan Brazil Cannot Stop, Bolsonaro has prioritized the increasingly anthropomorphized “economy” over workers’ lives, often in contradiction to the statements of other Brazilian officials, whom Bolsonaro has attacked accordingly. For example, his government’s own health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta has emphasized the importance of containment as a means of mitigating the virus. The governors of the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, former Boslonaro supporters in the country’s virus hotspots, have banned public gatherings, closed schools and businesses, and called for strict social distancing. Twenty-five of the country’s twenty-seven governors signed a joint letter demanding Bolsonaro support the safety measures.⁷ At a time in which the usual forms of protests such as rallies and demonstrations are impossible, self-isolating Brazilians in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro nevertheless drew on the great Latin American tradition of the cacerolazo, or panelaço in Portuguese, and banged on pots and pans from their windows on many nights to protest Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic.

While Bolsonaro’s direct response to the COVID-19 crisis has been critical, even putting his government at risk of impeachment, so have the structural conditions he helped set in place that have rendered the Brazilian healthcare system—the largest government-run public healthcare system in the world—less rather than more equipped to deal with the current pandemic, as well as any future ones. In 2019 alone, for example, Bolsonaro took away almost R$10 billion meant for the country’s healthcare system.⁸ That same year, he also vetoed a bill that guaranteed all patients the availability of blood, medicines, and other necessary resources for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of their illnesses.⁹ In another attack on the healthcare system, Bolsonaro gutted the Mais Médicos program established in 2013 that sent doctors to work in small villages, indigenous lands, maroon communities, and the poorest, most under-resourced neighborhoods of Brazil. Around half of the Mais Médicos doctors came from Cuba and were sent back to the island after Bolsonaro became president. As a consequence, twenty-eight million people in Brazil have seen their right to medical attention waived.¹⁰

As public health was under assault, agribusiness—one of the main sectors responsible for the election of Bolsonaro in the first place—boomed. One of the world’s largest producers and exporters of coffee, sugar, orange juice, soybean, corn, ethanol, pork, beef, and poultry, Brazil has been wiping out small family farms to make room for highly capitalized, export-oriented, large-scale commodity growers, which occupy 75.7 percent of the nation’s agricultural land and make up 62 percent of total agricultural output. To put it in starker terms, the top 1.5 percent of rural landowners take up 53 percent of all agricultural land.¹¹ As Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves, and Rodrick Wallace explain:

However unintended, the entirety of the production line is organized around practices that accelerate the evolution of pathogen virulence and subsequent transmission. Growing genetic monocultures—food animals and plants with nearly identical genomes—removes immune firebreaks that in more diverse populations slow down transmission. Pathogens now can just quickly evolve around the commonplace host immune genotypes. Meanwhile, crowded conditions depress immune response. Larger farm animal population sizes and densities of factory farms facilitate greater transmission and recurrent infection. High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles at barn, farm, and regional levels, removing the cap on the evolution of pathogen deadliness. Housing a lot of animals together rewards those strains that can burn through them best. Decreasing the age of slaughter—to six weeks in chickens—is likely to select for pathogens able to survive more robust immune systems. Lengthening the geographic extent of live animal trade and export has increased the diversity of genomic segments that their associated pathogens exchange, increasing the rate at which disease agents explore their evolutionary possibilities.¹²

As he dismantled environmental protections and advanced the destruction of the Amazon, Bolsonaro exceedingly catered to the industrial agribusiness model, where monoculture and profits dominate. The world market, imperialism, ecology, indigenous land, workers’ rights, and the legacy of slavery and land reform have thus come together to render Brazil particularly vulnerable to the spread of disease. As Wallace et al. so succinctly put it: “Agribusiness is at war with public health. And public health is losing.”¹³

Like all capitalist crises, the repercussions of Bolsonaro’s approach to the pandemic (or lack thereof) will not be felt equally among all Brazilians. A research study by Central Única das Favelas and Instituto Locomotiva has shown that favelas, where 13.6 million Brazilians, the majority indigenous and/or Afro-Brazilian, currently live, will be particularly hit hard.

The study shows that COVID-19 has hurt the jobs of 86 percent of workers in the periphery, the ability to acquire food and other basic necessities of 86 percent, and the family income of 84 percent. On top of the lack of food, the pandemic has worsened the quality of food for almost 60 percent of residents and, of these, 80 percent of parents say they are very scared about not having food to give their kids. Despite this, 71 percent disagree with the president, who is insisting that informal workers would like to go back to work, about ending their quarantines. As Renato Meirelles, president of Instituto Locomotiva, described:

We have heard the narrative that the epidemic is democratic, that it affects the rich and the poor equally. But the research makes it clear that this is not the case, that there is a section of society that doesn’t have savings, that doesn’t have the resources to maintain their way of life if they can’t work. It’s much easier to be quarantined with a full fridge in a comfortable house than it is when you live in a favela where the fridge is empty, there is no water, and five people live in a space of 20 square meters.¹⁴

In an attempt to prevent and address the effects of the crisis on favelas and the periphery, the left-wing PSOL has come out with an emergency plan. The plan includes proposals for a basic emergency income to families, supply of necessary items, distribution of hygiene products such as hand sanitizer and soap, provision of water, and use of hotel and inn rooms for sheltering people in isolation.¹⁵

Indigenous communities are also preparing themselves in the face of the government’s carelessness toward human life. “Coronavirus could wipe us out,” explained Ianucula Kaiabi, an indigenous leader in Brazil’s Xingu national park on the southern edges of the Amazon, home to about six thousand people from sixteen different tribes, and head of the Xingu Indigenous Land Association. From influenza to smallpox, highly infectious diseases, almost always brought by white, well-to-do travelers, have a long history of devastating indigenous communities and are a particular threat to Brazil’s more than one hundred isolated groups.

Given indigenous groups’ communal ways of life, the effects of the virus would be nothing short of genocide. For now, indigenous communities’ main objective is to prevent COVID-19 from reaching them in the first place. In Brazil as well as across Latin America, indigenous people are sealing off roads into and out of the reserves, blockading their lands, and urging people to leave only in cases of emergencies.¹⁶ Despite this, there have been at least seven reported COVID-19 cases among the country’s indigenous population, including one death—that of Yanomami teenager Alvanei Xirixan. In response, the Hutukara Yanomami Association is asking the federal police, the army, and the National Indian Foundation to immediately withdraw mineral prospectors from indigenous land in order to prevent new transmissions of the virus.¹⁷

Kaiabi noted that Brazil’s specialized indigenous health system has faced dramatic cuts under Bolsonaro and that he feared it was “totally unequipped” to deal with the looming catastrophe. Questions of how to quarantine on reserves, as well as regarding the distribution of food, medicine, protective equipment, hygiene products, and more remain unanswered.¹⁸

Similarly bearing the brunt of the current crisis, quilombolas, or maroons, descendants of African slaves who formed their own communities away from slavery, are being devastated during this period. In a federal resolution published on March 27, in the midst of the pandemic, the government announced that it would forcibly (and illegally) remove quilombola communities of Alcântara, in the state of Maranhão, from their lands in order to expand the Alcântara Launch Center, a satellite launching facility of the Brazilian Space Agency, per an agreement between Bolsonaro and the United States. According to the National Coordinating Committee of the Black Rural Quilombola Communities, the removal will harm approximately eight hundred families, communities who have occupied that land since the seventeenth century. The Landless Workers’ Movement, the Alcântara Association of Quilombola Territory, the Movement of Women Workers of Alcântara, among others, have condemned the move.¹⁹

As in all over the world, violence against women has also been drastically exarcerbated by the pandemic in Brazil. According to São Paulo state’s office of the prosecution, restraining orders against male aggressors have gone up by 30 percent.²⁰ This comes following cuts to the government program promoting women’s autonomy and against violence (Políticas para as Mulheres: Promoção da Autonomia e Enfrentamento à Violência). In 2019, the amount invested in the program was the lowest it has ever been since its establishment in 2012. At its peak in 2015, the program received R$290.6 million, compared to 2019’s R$48.2 million—a slashing by almost 84 percent.²¹

Unsurprisingly, Bolsonaro’s appalling treatment of the pandemic has united political figures and activists across parties and tendencies, spanning from the center-left to the revolutionaries. On the morning of Monday, March 30, along with other prominent opponents of Bolsonaro, Fernando Haddad (Workers’ Party), Ciro Gomes (Democratic Labor Party), Guilherme Boulos (PSOL), and Manuela Davila (Communist Party of Brazil)—who all ran against Bolsonaro in 2018—published a manifesto entitled “Brazil Cannot Be Destroyed by Bolsonaro,” calling for the president to step down due to his handling of the COVID-19 crisis:

In our country, the emergency is exacerbated by an irresponsible president.… Even before the arrival of the virus, public services and the Brazilian economy were already dramatically weakened by the neoliberal agenda that has been imposed on the country. In this moment, we need to mobilize, without restraint, all the public resources necessary to save lives.

Bolsonaro is in no position to keep governing Brazil and to face this crisis, which compromises public health and the economy.… He should resign.… He needs to be urgently contained and must answer for the crimes he is committing against our people.²²

The demand for Bolsonaro’s resignation has become a galvanizing force, with calls for impeachment picking up steam. The latter included three PSOL congresspeople, Fernanda Melchionna, Sâmia Bomfim, and David Miranda, filing an impeachment request against Bolsonaro in the Chamber of Deputies on March 18. The request was signed by various members of civil society and a petition of support has accrued over one million signatures. Like all political decisions taken by the left, however, the impeachment filing has opened up an important debate about strategy in this moment, with some, including within PSOL, saying that a political and juridical process such as impeachment should not be the main priority.²³

While other far-right governments around the world, like India’s Narendra Modi and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, have used quarantine measures as an opportunity to restrict civil liberties, Bolsonaro’s approach, based on denying the seriousness of the pandemic and sabotaging social distancing measures, is tied to the legitimacy crisis that has marked his government since taking office in January 2019. Elected on an anticorruption platform, Bolsonaro has permanently clashed with Congress and the Senate as part of a rejection of “old politics”—what he claims was a method of building consensus among different political elites that led Brazil to the moral crisis it was in before he took over.

While Bolsonaro riled up many of his supporters on the ground, an important part of his right-wing base, especially in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, defected. According to recent polls by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics, one of the country’s biggest polling agencies, Bolsonaro’s support in São Paulo has collapsed. Having won the second round of the 2018 presidential elections in the city with 60 percent of the vote, those who now describe his government as good or excellent amount to a mere 25 percent, with 8 percent describing his government as bad and 40 percent as terrible.²⁴ Even before the impeachment initiative by PSOL representatives, former government supporters like conservative parliamentarians Alexandre Frota and Janaina Pascoal have been openly calling for the president’s impeachment.²⁵ They were joined on March 15 by the governor of Goiás state, Ronaldo Caiado, a physician and one of Bolsonaro’s earliest supporters, who now claims that the federal government has lost authority in his state.

Isolated from the political establishment and within his own government by continued declarations undermining COVID-19, Bolsonaro has narrowed his support to a core base of Christian fundamentalists and far-right militants. Important sectors of capital also seem to be abandoning him, siding with the governors and Congress. Both of the country’s main newspapers, Folha de São Paulo and Globo, for example, have put forward editorials calling on him to resign.²⁶

The spiraling crisis between Bolsonaro and the Supreme Court, Congress, and most of the country’s governors over federal government attempts to sabotage curfew initiatives, has led to increased power of the country’s military. There is even growing talk of an army takeover, led by the vice president, retired army general Hamilton Mourão, who would have the support of the unprecedented number of generals named by Bolsonaro as government ministers.²⁷ It is improbable, however, that Bolsonaro will be toppled by maneuvers from above without substantial pressure from below. While there might be little excitement for the president, himself a former army captain, among the top hierarchy of the military, it was he who returned the military to the forefront of Brazilian politics.

As the left seeks the best strategies to unite against Bolsonaro and prevent mass loss of life, the president’s treatment of the pandemic seems to be fracturing the alliance between Brazil’s traditional conservative elite, responsible for toppling Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party government in 2016, and Bolsonaro’s eclectic political coalition, made up of rebellious noncommissioned military officers, fanatical evangelicals, agribusiness, and businesspeople from the service industry, particularly the retail sector.²⁸ While the political, economic, and public health future of Brazil is uncertain, one thing is clear: Bolsonaro and the system that spawned him have blood on their hands.

1 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/brazil/

2 Renato Santino, “Estatísticas oficiais estariam distorcidas por um número muito maior de pessoas assintomáticas ou com sintomas leves,” Olhar Digital, March 23, 2020.

3 Associated Press, “Brazil’s Bolsonaro Downplays Coronavirus Risks: ‘We’re All Going to Die One Day,’” MarketWatch, March 29, 2020.

4 Vijaya Gadde and Matt Derella, “An Update on Our Continuity Strategy During COVID-19,” Twitter blog, March 16, 2020, updated March 27, 2020.

5 Simone Kafruni, “Senado aprova auxílio emergencial de R$ 600 a pessoas de baixa renda,” Correio Braziliense March 30, 2020.

6 Giulliana Bianconi, “Mães solo têm lugar central na inédita renda emergencial,” Azmina, March 28, 2020.

7 David Biller, “Brazil’s Bolsonaro Makes Life-or-Death Coronavirus Gamble,” AP News, March 28, 2020.

8 “‘Bolsonaro retirou R$ 10 bilhões do SUS e deixou o Brasil vulnerável ao coronavírus,’ diz Humberto Costa,” Brasil 247, March 12, 2020.

9 Augusto Fernandes, “Bolsonaro veta pacientes do SUS a acessarem medicamentos,” Correio Braziliense, December 27, 2019.

10 Shasta Darlington and Leticia Casado, “Veintiocho millones de pacientes afectados: Bolsonaro fracasa en el remplazo de médicos cubanos,” New York Times, June 11, 2019.

11 Anna Sophie Gross, “As Brazilian Agribusiness Booms, Family Farms Feed the Nation,” Mongabay, January 17, 2019.

12 Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves, and Rodrick Wallace, “COVID-19 and the Circuits of Capital,” Monthly Review, April 1, 2020.

13 Wallace, Liebman, Chaves, and Wallace, “COVID-19 and the Circuits of Capital.”

14 Felipe Betim, “Sem ações específicas, 86% dos moradores de favelas vão passar fome por causa do coronavírus,” El País, March 28, 2020; Nicole Froio, “Brazil’s Vulnerable Left Behind in the Pandemic,” NACLA, March 31, 2020; Fernando Canzian, “Com comida no fim, moradores de favela contestam Bolsonaro,” Folha de São Paulo, April 8, 2020.

15 “PSOL quer obrigar governo a fornecer água, sabão e álcool em gel para favelas e comunidades,” PSOL, March 24, 2020.

16 Dan Collyns, Sam Cowie, Joe Parkin Daniels, Tom Phillips, “‘Coronavirus Could Wipe Us Out’: Indigenous South Americans Blockade Villages,” Guardian, March 30, 2020.

17 Conrad Duncan, “Coronavirus: Remote Amazon Tribe Records First Covid-19 Death as Experts Fear Indigenous People Could Be ‘Wiped Out’ by Virus,” Independent, April 10, 2020; Carlos Madeiro, “Após morte, indígenas apelam que PF, Funai e Exército expulsem garimpeiros,” UOL, April 11, 2020.

18 Collyns, Cowie, Parkin Daniels, Phillips, “‘Coronavirus Could Wipe Us Out’: Indigenous South Americans Blockade Villages.”

19 Igor Carvalho, “Em meio à pandemia da covid-19, governo anuncia remoção de quilombolas no Maranhão,” Brasil de Fato, March 28, 2020.

20“Violência contra mulher aumenta na pandemia, diz nota do CAOCrim e Núcleo de Gênero,” Ministério Público de São Paulo, April 13, 2020.

21 Mariana Ribeiro and Marlla Sabino, “Orçamento do programa de proteção à mulher em 2019 é o menor da série,” Poder 360, March 8, 2019.

22 Mônica Bergamo, “Ciro Gomes, Haddad, Boulos e Dino pedem renúnica de Bolsonaro em manifesto,” Folha de São Paulo, March 30, 2020.

23 Vladimir Safatle, “A única saída é o impeachment,” El País, March 20, 2020; “Tirar Bolsonaro para salvar o país! Impeachment já!,” Sâmia Bomfim, March 2020; “Nota do PSOL sobre pedido de impeachment de Jair Bolsonaro,” PSOL, March 18, 2020.

24 “Resultados para Presidente em São Paulo em São Paulo (SP),” Gazeta do Povo, October 7, 2018; “Governo Bolsonaro tem aprovação de 25% e reprovação de 48% na cidade de São Paulo, diz Ibope,” G1, March 23, 2020.

25 Carolina Freitas and Marcelo Ribeiro, “Ex-aliados agora pedem impeachment,” Valor Econômico, March 17, 2020.

26 Editorial “Presidente, retire-se” Folha de São Paulo, March 26, 2020. Editorial “Bolsonaro atenta contra a constituição,” O Globo, March, 26,2020.

27Demian Mello, “A tutela militar ao governo Bolsonaro,” Esquerda Online,April 3, 2020.

28 The rift with agribusiness is becoming particularly pronounced as China is one of the main importers of Brazilian agricultural products.

Facing Reality: The Socialist Left, the Sanders Campaign and Our Future

By: Charles Post, Ashley SmithApril 14, 2020

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A little over a month ago, many on the new socialist left expected Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic Party nomination, defeat Donald Trump in the general election, and enact a program of social democratic reform as President of the United States.

These expectations hit the shoals of reality. Sanders ran a heroic campaign, championing key demands from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal, raising the profile of socialism even higher than in 2016. Despite widespread sympathy for these demands, Sanders was unable to overcome the Democratic Party establishment’s support for Biden. Sanders not only suspended his campaign, but has endorsed Biden and offered him all of the resources of his campaign—staff, funds, contact lists, access to tens of thousands of volunteers, and his enormous moral capital among young working people.

Now we face the most unappealing general election in recent memory, pitting Biden against Trump amidst a spiraling pandemic and deepening global recession. Socialists must come to grips with a hard lesson: the Democratic Party remains under the control of the capitalist class and can neither be realigned nor used to prepare for independent politics.

The Democratic Socialists of the America (DSA) faces many challenges in implementing our commitment to “Bernie or Bust”—the convention resolution pledging that, as an organization, we spend no time, money or energy on supporting any other Democratic candidate for the presidency. DSA needs to put most of its energy into rebuilding mass resistance amidst the pandemic and engaging in electoral work when it advances organizing our power from below—something that is impossible within the Democratic Party.

Coming to Grips with Electoral Defeat

Many socialists predicted Sanders would win the Democratic Party’s nomination this year and threw themselves heart and soul into the campaign. Now after the dust has settled, we need to face the fact that Sanders was more decisively defeated this time than in 2016.

Sanders never won more than 30 percent of the Democratic primary voters. His victories came because the establishment vote was split. He consistently failed to win over older Black voters, or turn out new, young voters.

Fearing that Sanders would run roughshod over a divided centrist establishment, Obama and others in the Democratic establishment worked behind the scenes to pressure the other centrists to drop out and line up behind Biden after South Carolina. Biden then swept the Super Tuesday primaries, building an insuperable lead in the delegate race.

The pandemic and recession only deepened support for Biden. He built double digit leads over Sanders in most of the upcoming primaries, including Wisconsin, which he won by over 30 percentage points.

Misreading the 2016 Campaign

The socialist left needs to understand the real reasons for this defeat, if we are to avoid worse ones in the future. Many comrades fundamentally misread Sanders’ limited success in the 2016 primaries, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “Squad’s” victories in 2018 elections—hoping that a surging majority in the Democratic electorate would sweep Sanders to victory in 2020.

In 2016, Sanders benefited from the widespread hatred of Hillary Clinton’s record of right-wing neoliberal policies, especially in the rust belt, as well as from the fact that he was the only serious candidate running against her.

Clinton’s arrogance systematically underestimated and dismissed all of her opponents. She was first caught by surprise by Sanders and then defeated by Trump in the Electoral College (although she won the popular vote), largely because she ignored the key battle grounds states in the Midwest.

Confusing the Exception with the Norm in 2018

Many also misread the insurgent victories of AOC and others as further confirmation of the left’s electoral opportunities inside the Democratic Party. These victories should be celebrated, and they have dramatically helped project socialist positions on many issues, but like Sanders in 2016 they benefited from catching the establishment by surprise and from exploiting its divisions.

However, most of the Democrats elected in the midterms were neither progressives nor socialists, but centrists, many bankrolled by none other than former Republican and Democratic Party pretender for the nomination, Mike Bloomberg. Failing to grasp these facts, many believed the left could be swept to power through the Democratic Party in 2020.

Faced with Sanders’ defeat, many on left are casting about for explanations. Some argue that the Democratic again stole the nomination from Sanders with dirty tricks like they used in 2016. But there is little to no evidence to support that claim.

Others point to the pandemic, assuming that voters fled in fear to the supposedly safe choice of Joe Biden. But the turning points were the South Carolina and Super Tuesday primaries, well before COVID 19 changed the terrain of politics and everyday life.

The establishment, flush with victory, are presenting false explanation for Sanders’ defeat. They claim voters do not support his social democratic program. Actually, his proposals for social reform like Medicare for All are wildly popular and have been for years even before his campaigns for the presidency.

The Real Reasons for Defeat

If Sanders’ program is such broad and deep support, why did he lose so badly to perhaps the worst candidate the Democrats have put forward since the forgettable Michael Dukakis?

First, the establishment, despite the emergence of the “Squad,” has a hammer hold on the Democratic Party. As Kim Moody points out, the Democratic Party is a fundraising cabal, run by an unaccountable layer of elected officials who are the conduits for capitalist donations. They ensure that outsiders like Sanders and the “Squad” are dismissed as “unrealistic” on MSNBC (their Fox News) and marginalized in the party.

Even more importantly, socialists need to recognize that the level of class and social struggle, despite the wave of teachers’ strikes, has remained very low. Sanders’ program, like former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s in Britain, while popular, seemed unattainable for the vast majority of working people. In the absence of fighting and winning through strikes and disruptive street demonstrations, most working people will tend to accept the status quo.

Mark Fischer called this “capitalism realism”—the widespread acceptance of Thatcher’s proclamation “there is no alternative” to capitalism. The bulk of workers and oppressed people were convinced that however much they liked Sanders’ program, it was “unrealistic”—and that the tepid neo-liberalism of Biden is the only alternative to Trumpism.

Biden’s claim that he and not Sanders was more electable against Trump thus found purchase in the existing Democratic Party electorate. Sanders was unable to mobilize new young and working-class voters. Instead, increased voter turn-out in the Democratic primaries was among older, middle class layers who supported Biden and other ‘centrists.’

Can We Use the Democrats to Launch a New Party?

What does Sanders’ defeat tell us about Seth Ackerman and Eric Blanc’s “dirty break” strategy, as an alternative to both the reformist strategy of realignment/turning the Democrats into social democratic party; and the revolutionary left’s call for a working-class party independent of the Democrats? They argued that the Democratic Party was not a party but a ballot line that socialists could use to run candidates, build a membership organization, and prepare for a new party in the future. The success of Sanders in 2016 and the Squad in 2018 were proof of the viability of this strategy.

Unfortunately, these breakthroughs were exceptional events. The Democrats are a bureaucratic machine without a pretense of membership accountability, under the control of capital which commands the unflinching loyalty of the officialdom of the unions and various NGOs that claim to speak for the oppressed.

The Democrats differ from the Republicans in their relation to the left, working and oppressed people. The Democrats use carrots as well as sticks to integrate socialists and neutralize our movements. They managed to get much more powerful forces in the 1930s and 1960s to obey their commands, throwing them some bones and whipping them when necessary.

The Democrats, having faced no internal left challenges since Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign, were caught with their pants down in 2016 and 2018. However, they regained the initiative by 2020, securing the nomination for Biden. They are even better prepared to meet any left challenges in Congressional and local elections.

Retreating from Dirty Break to Realignment?

The utopianism of the dirty break strategy has led many back to the old realignment strategy that they initially rejected.

Dustin Guastella’s article “After the Nevada Blowout, It’s Bernie’s Party Now” was among the first of the new generation of socialists to slip toward the realignment strategy. Bhaskar Sunkara, who has built Jacobin into the premier venue for socialist discussion and debate for a new generation, criticized Seattle socialist council person Kshama Sawant’s speech at a Sanders’ rally arguing that working people need their own party.

He tweeted, “I love Kshama, but not sure someone invited to speak at an event for a candidate for a party’s nomination should go off message and talk about the need for a new party.” Even worse, after Sanders’ defeat became clear, Guastella penned, “Where Do We Go After Last Night’s Defeat” that upped the attacks on those who advocate independent politics.

Guastella pooh-poohed leftists calling for a third-party challenge to Biden, dismissed the idea of protests at the Democratic Party National Convention, and shockingly chocked up Sanders’ defeat to in part advocating the “fringe demands” of oppressed groups. In essence, he argued for socialists to move to the right to win inside the Democratic Party.

Fortunately, many on the left reject such a perspective, especially its dismissal of demands for oppressed groups in today’s multi-racial, multi-gendered, and international working class. But many others embrace Guastella’s argument to hunker down for another long and pointless fight to transform the Democratic Party.

Bernie Sanders, unfortunately, embraces this perspective. Despite his official status as an “Independent,” Sanders has not supported third parties runs in decades, has caucused with the Democrats in the Senate, and promoted efforts like his NGO “Our Revolution” whose aim, reiterated in Sanders’ concession speech, is to “rebuild the Democratic Party from the bottom up.”

The Siren Song of Lesser Evilism

Faced with unbearably bad “choice” between the Biden and the execrable white supremacist Donald Trump, there will be tremendous pressure on the new socialist movement to follow Sanders’ lead and campaign for Biden.

Instead of giving the Democrats that pound of flesh, DSA members need to maintain their “Bernie or Bust” commitments. We should not repeat the mistakes of earlier generations of socialists—in the Communist Party USA and the New Left—of abandoning independent politics and leading social movements to die in the graveyard of the Democratic Party.

The pressures toward “lesser-evilism” will only escalate as liberal Democrats, union officials, and the NGOs spending tens of millions of dollars and countless volunteer hours, which could be used to build class and social struggles, to ensure the Democrat’s restoration of business as usual.

That will not work to defeat the right. As Sanders rightly argued that the Democratic Party establishment is primarily responsible for Trump’s rise to power to begin with. Their bailouts of corporations, their austerity measures, and their vicious scapegoating combined to alienate working class and oppressed people.

“Lesser-evilism” facilitates this process. If the left folds its tent and campaigns for Biden, it would be forced to downplay our radical alternative to neoliberalism. And should Biden win, he will continue capital’s attacks on working and oppressed people, and then the main voice attacking the “establishment” will not be the socialist left, but forces that will make Trump look like a moderate.

Socialist Electoral Strategy versus Electoralism

Another danger facing the new socialist movement after Sanders’ defeat is “electoralism”—doubling down on the predominantly electoral turn DSA has taken since AOC’s victory in mid-2018.

Many in DSA took seriously Sanders’ rhetoric about “Not me, but us,” and being the “organizer-in-chief.” Those hopes have been dashed as Sanders, over the objection of his former press secretary, not only endorsed Biden, but has given all of his campaign resources to the neoliberal stalwart. Calls to give his resources to “Our Revolution” will further mire socialists in the Democratic Party. Nor has DSA made major organizational and political gains from their involvement in the campaign. As Andy Sernatinger has demonstrated, DSA has spent the bulk of its time, money and energy on electoral campaigns to the detriment of organizing class and social struggle.

The Sanders campaign, for all of its claims to be a social movement, has intensified electoralism. In his concession speech, Sanders argued that the key battle was “to elect strong progressives at every level of government—from Congress to school board.”

In reality, decisive social change has rarely if ever come through the elections. In the 1930s and 1960s, big social reforms were driven by waves of disruptive, often illegal strikes and mass demonstrations that extracted reforms from the two capitalist parties and capitalist state.

As the great socialist historian Howard Zinn argued, “the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in—in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating—those are thing things that determine what happens.”

Clearly socialists can and have used elections as a compliment to, rather than a substitute for, building movements from below. A “movement-building” election campaign would prioritize educating and generalizing the demands of mass struggles, encourage participation in disruptive actions and building independent organizations—the real source of popular power and radicalism.

Such campaigns cannot be run within the Democratic Party. The Democrats are an electoral machine with one aim—winning office at all costs. While an occasional Democratic candidate may walk picket lines or even give limited support to struggles, they inevitably exert pressures to downplay radical demands and contain struggles within the bounds of legality. It is only election campaigns independent of the Democrats that can promote and be held accountable to organizations and struggles.

Sharp Shift to Organizing Struggle and Building a Party of Our Own

DSA and all socialists should center our activity to organizing and supporting the strikes and protests that have ripped out across the country amidst the pandemic. In particular, we need to promote the demands and actions of undocumented immigrants, people of color, and people in the global south who have and will bear the brunt of the healthcare and economic crises.

We have been thrust into 1930s conditions, and we have to adopt the approach of radicals and revolutionaries in that era—promoting immediate struggles and building the infrastructure of resistance for the even larger battles to come when the economy recovers. Our enemies are preparing—Bloomberg News is warning that if the ruling class does not grant workers reforms, they will face the radical challenges from below.

We must start the process of building toward a new socialist party precisely to lead that radical challenge. The brutal lesson of the Sanders’ campaign is the Democratic Party is not ours, but theirs—and they don’t share. We need to organize meetings, discussions, and debates with all the forces on the left about how we can build a new socialist party over the coming years.

While the forces that could begin organizing a new socialist party will disagree on many strategic and tactical issues, we can agree that we fight for reforms that advance the interests of working class and oppressed people—not as an end in themselves, but a means to building our side’s confidence, consciousness, and organization.

Our goal is not a kinder gentler capitalism, but international socialism. Today, in the midst of apocalyptic crisis—unprecedented in modern history—we face nothing less than a global choice between socialism and barbarism.

Protecting Nature in a Conservation Revolution

By: Dan FischerApril 14, 2020

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Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher, The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2020.

In a welcome contribution to discussions of radical green vision, Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher propose an intriguing concept called “convivial conservation.” Influenced by scholarship of the degrowth and eco-Marxist movements, the two Wageningen University sociology professors suggest shrinking and redistributing global economic resources and building sustainable landscapes of human-nonhuman cohabitation. Because convivial conservation is such a worthy idea, it’s a shame that Büscher and Fletcher try to attach it to several aspects of the deeply anthropocentric and anti-wilderness “new conservation” movement. In particular, they make an unconvincing case against a popular proposal to protect at least half of the planet’s surface from intensive impact.

The titular “Conservation Revolution” could not be more crucial, and not only because of the intersecting ecological and climate breakdowns and nuclear threat that conservationists have so far failed to halt. A need to overhaul conservation is equally evident in last year’s disturbing reports that the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) employs guards who have torture d and killed people at wilderness parks around Africa and Asia. Far from an anomaly, the news pointed to a violent side of the conservation movement that has historically displaced millions of indigenous and rural residents to establish and maintain protected areas. Today, the WWF, Nature Conservancy, and Conservation International have extensive and compromising ties to fossil fuels and other destructive industries, and rely on ineffective market-based instruments, such as carbon offsets, that Büscher and Fletcher aptly call “fictitious conservation” (23).

This context makes Büscher and Fletcher’s use of Ivan Illich’s radically anti-industrialist philosophy so pertinent. “T he road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Illich famously scolded 1968’s American volunteers for “pretentiously imposing” their lifestyle on rural Mexican villages, and the same advice applies to many well-meaning supporters of today’s frankly colonialist large conservation groups. Büscher and Fletcher cautiously endorse Illich’s call in Tools for Conviviality (Harper & Row, 1973) for society to frugally limit itself to “convivial” (non-compulsory, user-friendly, sustainable) technologies and institutions. Illich praised buses but warned that cars disrupted the mobility of pedestrians and bikers. He praised stationary telephones but would likely detest today’s smartphones that distract and de–skill users. Büscher and Fletcher’s emphasis on conviviality marks a welcome departure from their publisher Verso’s recent books—by Alex Williams, Nick Srnicek, Aaron Bastani, and Peter Frase—offering ecologically dubious visions of a fully automated society.

To make conservation convivial, Büscher and Fletcher propose a democratized structure that gives decision-making power to local residents while compiling resources to target top-level industrial threats to biodiversity (186). They turn to conviviality’s etymological roots of con (with) and vivire (living) to advocate that humans live peaceably with nonhuman surroundings. This vision focuses on five elements: “promoted areas” that “promote nature for, to and by humans”; “celebrating nature” rather than charitably “saving” it; accessible slow-paced travel as opposed to elite, voyeuristic ecotourism; “everyday environmentalism” grounded mainly in immediate surroundings rather than distant landscapes; and “common democratic engagement” instead of “privatized expert technocracy” (163-174).

To these ends, they helpfully propose specific policies including historic reparations and a “conservation basic income” that enables communities to forgo destructive forms of revenue. They call for expanding and strengthening the existing strategies of community-based-conservation and Indigenous and community conserved areas. Such a bottom-up approach could be effective from a decolonial standpoint. Scientists report that indigenous peoples’ territories, only a quarter of the world’s terrestrial surface, contain 40% of “ecologically intact land” and 80% of “the planet’s biodiversity.”

Humbly, the authors position their proposal among “many confluent streams contributing to a much larger river” that includes buen vivir (living well), the right to the city, bioregionalism, ecosocialism and other “transition discourses” (147). An excellent introduction to this “larger river” is the anthology Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary (Tulika Books, 2019), whose foreword describes Illich as a spiritus mentor.

Since I hope it is clear at this point that I recommend The Conservation Revolution, and especially its overview of “convivial conservation” (in chapter five), I devote the rest of this review to a critique. Büscher and Fletcher borrow potentially destructive ideas from the neoliberal “new conservationist” movement and make unconvincing claims against the “half earth” solution.

Gardening and Developing the Earth?

Troubling ambiguities emerge when Büscher and Fletcher reject the concepts of “protected areas” and “wilderness.” The authors suggest that their preferred “promoted areas” would allow “extractive and destructive types of enterprise” as long as these activities were not communally deemed “unnecessary or excessive” (164). Although industrial and agricultural impacts are unavoidable in densely populated regions, more stringent protection would be necessary in many places to preserve large carnivores and rare species. Moreover, the book’s theoretical focus leaves somewhat vague how Büscher and Fletcher’s proposed “alternative” development would differ in practice from the capitalist development they condemn as unsustainable (144). My concerns heighten when the authors sympathetically discuss a group of Franken-world promoters, known as “new conservationists,” who want humans to manage the whole planet like a domestic garden. Given the deep anthropocentrism and questionable science of the new protectionists, it is alarming to read Büscher and Fletcher conclude, “we have a lot of sympathy for the new conservation project to break through nature-culture dichotomies” (117).

	Nature/culture dichotomies	Beyond N/C dichotomies
Capitalist	Mainstream conservation	New conservation
Beyond-capitalist	Neoprotectionism	Convivial conservation

Four main positions in conservation, according to The Conservation Revolution (7)

The new conservationists’ opening salvo, “Conservation in the Anthropocene,” was published in 2012 by the staunchly pro-market, pro-fracking, pro-nuclear, and pro-biotechnology Breakthrough Institute. Co-written by scientist Peter Karevia, the manifesto insisted that “conservationists should partner with corporations” rather than “scolding capitalism.” Dismissing the idea of “pursuing biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake,” it proposed an explicitly anthropocentric aim “to benefit the widest number of people.” Kareiva and co-authors continued, “Nature could be a garden […] used for food production, mineral extraction, and urban life.” Most dangerously, they claimed, “Nature is so resilient that it can recover rapidly from even the most powerful human disturbances.”

New conservationists’ scientific claims were immediately rejected by mainstream conservationists and, more forcefully, by wilderness-loving researchers whom Büscher and Fletcher call “neoprotectionists.” Writing in biology journals, Michael Soulé and Brian Miller warned that new conservation “rests more on delusion and faith than on evidence” and “if implemented, would hasten ecological collapse globally.” E.O. Wilson charged the new conservationists with holding “the most dangerous worldview” (30). Kierán Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity, argued that Kareiva and co-authors “misrepresent, ignore, or obfuscate the science.” For example, while Kareiva optimistically pointed to a resurgence of coyotes in downtown Chicago, Suckling noted that the coyotes’ presence is a symptom of habitat loss and removal of larger predators such as wolves, with “cascading negative changes in the food web.”

To be sure, Büscher and Fletcher raise important critiques of the neoprotectionists, some of whom vastly overemphasize so-called “overpopulation” and pay insufficient attention to poverty and injustice (164, 202). In fact, I would go further and condemn the prominent neoprotectionist group Nature Needs Half’s partnership with the xenophobic Weeden Foundation.

Still, checking The New Conservation’s footnotes led me to reject the premise that neoprotectionists as a whole oppose community-based and socially-just approaches to conservation. I frequently found neoprotectionists declaring that conservation and rewilding “should be done with the consent and active engagement of the people who live on and benefit the land” (Monbiot) while “respecting rights, improving livelihoods, and sharing decisionmaking” (Dinerstein et al.). I also found them expressing support for non-wilderness issues such as “urban pollution concerns” and “organic and urban agriculture” (Meine). Even Büscher and Fletcher acknowledge that it’s common for neoprotectionists to view wilderness “as a relative rather than absolute concept” and accept “that humans are part of nature” (57, 64).

Amidst an even-handed critique of both new conservationists and neoprotectionists (39-40), The Conservation Revolution obscures the fact that neoprotectionists have a firmer grounding in scientific evidence. According to a 2019 report by the IPBES (the UN’s biodiversity equivalent of the IPCC), it is “well established” that expanding protected areas “is important for safeguarding biodiversity.”

Had Büscher and Fletcher ventured outside of conservation biology discussions and engaged more deeply with grassroots histories, they would have found numerous ways to integrate human and nonhuman nature, and to integrate ecological and social justice struggles, without embracing the new conservationists’ Franken-world. Various indigenous nations, on their own initiative, protect large areas of their lands as explicit “wilderness,” as detailed in Protecting Wild Nature on Native Lands (Fulcrum Publishing, 2008). The ecofeminist Val Plumwood, acknowledging human presence in wild areas, sought to define wilderness not by an absence of people but by the presence of a free and self-willed ecosystem. Earth First! has advocated that rewilding jobs be given to laid-off timber workers and in the 1990s formed a coalition with timber workers to protect northern California’s wild redwood forests. Environmental Justice founder Robert Bullard and social ecologist Murray Bookchin each made clear that their focus on social issues was complementary to, not opposed to, the protection of wild areas. Given these nuanced approaches that assign humanity a sustainable place in wilderness and non-wilderness areas, it is not necessary for Büscher and Fletcher to turn to new conservationists to transcend human-nature dichotomies.

At Least Half the Earth for Wild Nature

During its often reasonable critique of neoprotectionism, The Conservation Revolution most strongly opposes a popular vision, among neoprotectionists and the public, of protecting at least half of the world’s lands and oceans as wild areas. Although E. O. Wilson popularized this plan in his book Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (Liveright, 2016), earlier precedents include the journal Wild Earth’s 1991 proposal to protect half of North America and the Decheo First Nations’ proposal since 2006 to protect half of their territory in northwestern Canada. Büscher and Fletcher charge that the half-earth solution “ignores what humans are supposed to do in ‘their’ side of earth” and would require massive dispossessions of human beings (94-96). While the authors are likely correct about the pitfalls of implementing the plan through capitalist institutions, the half-earth solution remains an important science-based goal and could be part of the ecosocialist transition that Büscher and Fletcher endorse.

Acknowledging the half-earth goal’s basis in scientific literature, Büscher and Fletcher quote a landmark 2012 Conservation Biology editorial: “[S]cientific studies and reviews suggest that some 25-75% of a typical region must be managed with conservation of nature as a primary objective to meet goals for conserving biodiversity […] 50 per cent—slightly above the mid point of recent evidence-based estimates—is scientifically defensible as a global target.” They also quote Wilson’s estimation, “[O]nly by setting aside half the planet in reserve, or more, can we save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival.” Rather than directly refuting these claims, The Conservation Revolution oddly refers readers to an allegedly “excellent response” that, in naive terms, rejects the “conflation of values and science” and urges scientists to offer only “objective” and “policy-neutral” analyses(33-34). But human survival is hardly a controversial value, and Büscher and Fletcher themselves acknowledge that science is “already political” (48). In fact, they endorse the neoprotectionists’ main normative commitment, to nature’s intrinsic value (41,144-5, 195).

Perhaps the reason Büscher and Fletcher accuse half-earth supporters of neglecting social issues (202) is precisely because, in their focus on scientific literature, they neglect more grassroots venues where there’s no pressure to be “objective” or “policy-neutral.” “Missing Pathways to 1.5°C,” commissioned by the Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance and written by Kate Dooley and Doreen Stabinsky, advocates half-earthing as part of a larger strategy for protecting the climate, biodiversity, and “indigenous and community land rights.” Troy Vettese’s 2018 New Left Review article “To Freeze the Thames” promotes half-earthing as part of a broader eco-Marxist plan modeled on some of Cuba’s policies after the USSR’s collapse. Eileen Crist’s Abundant Earth (University of Chicago Press, 2019) calls for half-earthing as part of a bioregionalist “ecological civilization” close to eco-Anarchism. All three proposals belong to the above-mentioned “river” of transition discourses and could have been usefully discussed by The Conservation Revolution.

Most unfairly, Büscher and Fletcher malign the half-earth solution as tantamount to “herding half the world’s human population onto half of the earth’s surface” (206). Human beings are not nearly as evenly dispersed as the authors imply. In fact, some 95% of humans live on just 10% of the world’s land. Moreover, in the less-densely populated areas, local residents can contribute to protecting wild nature by staying where they are. The IUCN’s widely-used definition of protected areas, for example, allows on-site and nearby habitation in several of its categories. Even implementing park refugees’ right of return, a moral necessity, would be compatible with protecting these areas. Mark Dowie wrote in Conservation Refugees (MIT Press, 2009) that most displaced people he interviewed would be willing to return to the parks as protectors of wildlife and to restrict harvesting to non-commercial subsistence needs, as long as they didn’t have to live in poverty. Büscher and Fletcher’s proposal for a conservation basic income would be relevant here.

For a just half-earth solution, the only necessary eviction would be of livestock. It is unfortunate that The Conservation Revolution wholly ignores animal agriculture, since it’s a bit like a book on climate policy ignoring fossil fuels. Highly inefficient with land and other resources compared to vegetable farming, animal agriculture is the leading cause of wild habitat loss, by far the largest contributor to tropical deforestation and, according to a 2015 journal article, “likely the leading cause of modern species extinctions.” Shifts toward a more plant-based diet could be made by securing a just transition for hyper-exploited slaughterhouse workers, starting community gardens and vegetable farms in urban and rural food deserts, and eliminating obscene government subsidies to the meat and dairy industries. A hypothetical vegan world would require 76% less farmland, liberating some 37% of Earth’s ice-free land.

Adding the 28% of ice-free land that only exhibits minimal human impact, there would already be enough space to surpass the half-earth solution. Other methods could bring the total available land even above 75%. These include ha lving food waste (5%), eliminating biofuels (2%), reducing wood harvest and improving forestry practices (3%), and agroecological methods that a UN study says would double agricultural yields in regions of the Global South. In the context of a degrowth-based and ecosocialist transition, a majority of the Earth could therefore be protected without dispossessing people.

In addition to reversing the biodiversity crisis, a half-earth plan would help reverse climate breakdown. In 2018, Troy Vettese convincingly demonstrated that reforesting parts of current pasture lands, in a largely vegan and 100%-renewable-energy world, could bring down atmospheric carbon dioxide to nearly pre-industrial levels. Since then, the claim has found further substantiation in the scientific literature, with high estimates of potential carbon-sequestration from restoring wild fores ts, grasslands, and ocean s.

In summary, a more effective vision for convivial conservation would shed new conservation’s anthropocentric and anti-wilderness leanings. Without dispossessing any human beings, it would rewild half the Earth or more, and garden the rest. While guaranteeing comfortable living standards, it would trade in the Global North’s consumerism for increased leisure time, local and organic plant-based food, and a healthy planet to live in and enjoy. Despite certain problems, The Conservation Revolution offers many promising ideas for how to re-green the world.

Bernie Sanders, Coronavirus, and the Class Struggle Within the Democratic Party

By: George FishApril 13, 2020

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Presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden replied testily to Bernie Sanders during their last debate, saying that the immediate need was to defeat the coronavirus pandemic, that Bernie’s vaunted Revolution could wait. But then Biden went MIA for the next two weeks, and when he did emerge, he made embarrassing gaffes before the media, gaffes so major and embarrassing he even went so far as to cancel a previously scheduled press conference! (Consider what he said in response to the interrogator from “The View,” who asked Biden his response to Trump’s then pending “reopening” of the U.S. economy, saying that “The cure can’t be worse than the problem.” Biden responded with this incomprehensible statement, “We have to take care of the cure. That will make the problem worse, no matter what. No matter what.”) Biden’s official campaign website (https://joebiden.com) combines ambitious sounding programs with generalized platitudes, and his proposals for dealing with COVID-19, though indeed ambitious sounding, are irrelevant at present, as he is not in any office now with authority to implement or forcefully propose any of them, and won’t be unless he wins in November; then he can begin to act on COVID-19 in January 2021, ten months from the time I originally started writing this article (March 31, 2020)!

Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, has not only proposed several measures to help working families cope with the coronavirus pandemic and the attendant massive layoffs, but as a Senator in office can actually propose them to his colleagues for action in the here and now; indeed, did so during the debate on the recent coronavirus stimulus legislation, when he took to the floor to chide Republican Senators for not supporting provisions that directly helped working people, but favored corporations and businesses instead. He helped make sure such provisions were in the stimulus bill, which did pass 96-0. He’s also asked campaign donors to help finance nonprofits on the front lines of combating coronavirus, and has held four coronavirus virtual town halls. He has acted consistently like what we would want in a President, notably in contrast to Joe Biden, who seems more hapless every time he makes a public appearance.

Yet Biden is the Democratic Presidential front-runner, presumably because he is “safe” and is known, as well as a staunch centrist. But of all the Democratic centrist Presidential candidates, he is the least distinguished and most inept of the lot; and does indeed noticeably pale in comparison to Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and even Pete Buttigieg. This despite being Obama’s Vice President, despite being a U.S. Senator for over three decades. Yet the “never Bernie” forces have coalesced around him as supposedly the most “electable” opponent to run against Donald Trump, presumably because his winning six states in the Super Tuesday primaries, especially South Carolina’s, supposedly clinched it for him, and for his backers.

Make no mistake about it: this coalescing of the “never Bernie” forces within the Democratic Party around the hapless but “known” and safely centrist Joe Biden is class warfare within the Democratic Party itself. Arrayed against Bernie Sanders are not only the DNC (which never did warm to Bernie, despite his drawing palpable, enthusiastic support at the grassroots, particularly among young activists), his obvious drawing power, and his appeal even to the disaffected voters of all races and ethnicities who either voted for Trump, sat out, or else voted third-party, rather than cast their votes for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election—from which the Democrats are still reeling. This carries down from the DNC to Democratic pols in office and Party stalwarts, fretting about the “down-ticket” anguish a Bernie Sanders at the head of the ticket would supposedly cause. And it certainly agitates the big-money Democratic donors, who would seemingly prefer another four years of Trump in office rather than risk their fortunes (literally) at the hands of a man who has forcefully called for a “democratic socialist” Political Revolution consistently for forty years!

Despite the immense popularity among ordinary working people and the young for signature Bernie Sanders programmatic proposals such as Medicare for All, free college at state universities for all who wish to enter, and the abolition of the enormous student debt load that saddles so many of the young for life, these are far too “radical” for those at the top, most notably Bernie’s clarion call for the “rich to pay their fair share” of the tax burden. No, they’d rather keep their money, their influence, and their power, thank you, even if that risks four more years of Donald Trump. They’d rather trust in a safe, platitudinous “tinkerer” such as Joe Biden to shield them from such “excesses” as Bernie proposes, even if what Bernie does propose is, in fact, but an extension for the 21^st Century of the New Deal and the social welfare provisions of the Great Society.

They, the top echelons of the Democratic Establishment, respected “moderate” voices within Corporate America, have grown fat and content with decades of neoliberalism, whether Democratic or Republican; they are clearly in the top 1%, and not at all in the 99% beneath them (to invoke terms made famous by Occupy); and they want to keep it that way. They do, in their own constricted way, truly loathe Donald Trump, but know that another four years of Trump would enable them to keep their money, and much of their power and influence. They want no part of a “democratic socialist” Political Revolution that would upend this, that would upend a tolerable, if not all that comfortable, or comforting, status quo. Sadly, many ordinary people, people really of the 99%, feel similarly; especially older persons who do bother to vote, in contrast to the young, who may really like Bernie but don’t bother going to the polls to show that support. More proof, unfortunately, of the correctness of Abraham Lincoln’s “You can fool some of the people all of the time…”

All this is given support by an article in the April 1, 2020 New York Times by Astead W. Herndon, ”How ‘Never Bernie’ Voters Threw In With Biden and Changed the Primary” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/us/politics/biden-sanders-democratic-voters.html). In this article, Herndon writes:

“Rarely has political momentum flipped as quickly as it did in the first half of March, as Mr. Sanders lost serious ground to Mr. Biden before the coronavirus slowed their race. There are well-known reasons for the shift: Moderate candidates like Mr. Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota rallied around Mr. Biden. He enjoyed demographic advantages, particularly with black voters. And turnout among young voters and liberal nonvoters did not surge, failing to reshape the electorate as Mr. Sanders had hoped.

But beyond ideology, race and turnout, a chief reason for Mr. Biden’s success has little to do with his candidacy. He became a vehicle for Democrats like Ms. King [a self-identified “progressive” financial investor in Boston, one of the “never Bernie” Democrats interviewed for this article—GF] who were supporting other candidates but found the prospect of Mr. Sanders and his calls for political revolution so distasteful that they put aside misgivings about Mr. Biden and backed him instead.

In phone interviews, dozens of Democrats, mostly aged 50 and over, who live in key March primary states like Massachusetts, Virginia, Michigan and Florida, said that Mr. Biden’s appeal went beyond his case for beating President Trump. It was his chances of overtaking Mr. Sanders, the only candidate in the vast Democratic field they found objectionable for reasons personal and political.”

In this, the members of the Democratic Establishment, these studied “moderates” and “centrists,” these big donors heavy on “diversity” and “social liberalism,” show an outright affinity with such reactionaries as William F. Buckley, Jr. and Frederick Hayek. Buckley is, of course, notorious for his expressed views that the “freedom to shop” is really the ultimate freedom, and once wrote that he would gladly give up his voting franchise (which he claimed was diluted to the point of adulteration anyway) for the “right” to have complete control of his money! Hayek once praised the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile, quipping that “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.” (Hayek is using “liberal” here in the European sense; what we in the U.S. would call “neoliberal” or “free market-oriented.”)

The “socially liberal” but “fiscally conservative” “moderates” of the top echelons of the Democratic Establishment have really more of a lover’s quarrel with a Buckley or a Hayek than not, even though, notably during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, Buckley openly supported segregation. (During his February 18, 1965 debate with James Baldwin at Cambridge University, England, Buckley upheld “the right guaranteed to an American entrepreneur to refuse to do business with whomever he likes.”) But the Democratic Establishment doesn’t really want full racial, gender and social equality for all; it prefers “diversity,” “equitable representation” of blacks, Latinos, women, gays, and other “marginalized groups” in the “meritocracy,” an “equal playing field” for all “able” to enter Harvard or work for Goldman Sachs! That is why for them it really is “never Bernie,” why they are willing to coalesce behind even a Joe Biden, why they are willing to risk giving even a Donald Trump four more years to wreak havoc—as he has notably done so far! “But don’t talk about revolution/That’s going a little bit too far,” sang Phil Ochs in his acerbic “Love Me I’m A Liberal.” That certainly extends to the “democratic socialist” Political Revolution of Bernie Sanders, even if, as Bernie himself says, it owes more to FDR than to V.I. Lenin. But that is part and parcel of the class struggle today, which is taking place in the Democratic Party as much as it is elsewhere.

In the Tempest of Coronavirus: Racism and Class Struggle

By: Dan La BotzApril 12, 2020

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

COVID-19 is now in all U.S. states with 530,026 cases and 20,614 deaths (as of April 12). Statistics suggest that the virus has peaked for now. The debate today revolves around how to restart the economy without triggering a second wave. Electoral politics are on hold. Class struggle is beginning to grow.

The virus shows the economic and social inequalities in racial disparities. In Chicago black people make 32 percent of the population, but they make up 72 percent of the coronavirus deaths, and statistics are similar in several other cities. 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 lack of health care and overcrowded housing.

American racism appears everywhere in this crisis. The United States has virtually closed the southern border to migrants and Latin American refugees seeking asylum in the United States have not been admitted and find themselves waiting in overcrowded camps in Mexico where the coronavirus is spreading. Asian Americans have experienced verbal abuse and violent attacks as the bearers of what Trump called the “Chinese virus.”

There are now officially 17 million unemployed—more than the Great Recession’s peak of 14.7 million in June 2009. While the jobless will receive state unemployment payments plus $600 until July 31, in the United States the unemployed also generally lose also their health insurance. Many of the unemployed have no food and have turned to food banks. Throughout the country there are lines of cars miles long where desperate families wait to get a box or two of groceries.

President Trump, the Republican Party, and some businesses want to get workers back on the job, even it means putting their health at risk. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), speaking at the White House, said last week that essential employees–janitors, housekeeping workers, workers in food and agriculture, critical manufacturing, information technology, transportation, energy, and government facilities–who had been exposed to confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19 could return to work if they were not experiencing symptoms. Some health professionals criticized the directive saying that it violated the CDC’s own standards and would endanger workers.

The deep economic recession has led to a fiscal crisis, since closed businesses don’t pay taxes to city and state governments. Already many U.S. states and cities have begun to propose budget cuts, ironically often cuts to sanitation, health, transportation, and education. New York City plans to cut 1.3 billion, some $264 million of that from education. The state of Colorado plans to cut $3 billion. The cuts in city and state budgets will lead to the layoff of tens of thousands more workers.

The working class response to the crisis has become more serious. Workers have carried out 70 wildcat strikes in a variety of industries in several states and cities. Unions such as the Service Employees (SEIU) and the New York Nurses (NYSNA) among others have become involved in organizing workplaces protests over health and safety. Labor Notes, the labor education center, has called for a National Health Care Day of Action on April 15 to encourage such protests. The United Electrical Workers Union (UE) called on the labor movement to take responsibility to organize workers and lead the fight.

Coronavirus led state governments to close down election rallies and even postpone the elections themselves. Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist,” seeing no way to win, withdrew from the Democratic Party primary election. Joe Biden, a neoliberal, who won most delegates, now becomes the party’s presumptive nominee. In an attempt to appeal to Sanders’ supporters he is adopting reforms such as lowering Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60 and forgiving college debt of students from low-income and middle families.

The Democratic Socialists of America, which had been heavily involved in the Sanders’ campaign, has pledged to continue to fight for Sanders program: a Green New Deal, Medicare for all, and free college education. DSA says it is running state and local candidates and will be involved in all aspects of the labor and social movements fighting for public health and economic justice in the midst of the crisis.

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