Report: The China Question conference

By: February 19, 2020
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‘[T]here is a growing consensus,’ two Obama-era officials wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, ‘that the era of engagement with China has come to an unceremonious close.’ American intelligence chiefs now talk of the ‘existential threat’ that China poses to the US, while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been touring the globe lecturing nations on the risks of doing business with Beijing. There are, of course, the usual Trumpian contradictions. With his trade war arriving at an inconclusive phase-1 armistice, Donald Trump proclaimed in his State of the Union address that ‘we have the best relationship we’ve ever had with China.’ But the signs of brewing conflict across the Pacific are becoming more evident by the day.

While sections of the right have welcomed a return to the familiar rhythms of great power rivalry, progressives been slow to respond to the challenges that the new climate creates. In the US, the revival on the left-wing of the Democratic Party has been driven by domestic political issues, with much less debate on foreign policy and US imperialism. Where China has come into view, divides on the left have been obvious. Solidarity with the long-running mobilisations in Hong Kong, for example, has been far from unanimous, with some on the left siding with Beijing against a perceived Western conspiracy. The persistence, even revival, of campism—the logic that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’—is more than simply the inheritance of twentieth-century Stalinist or Maoist sympathies for ‘communist’ China. In America, where progressives face the task of reining in the violent US empire, anything that checks or hinders that violence—even repressive states like the PRC—can look to some people like a good thing. For those who hope to see a left capable of combatting US imperialism without compromising on internationalist solidarity with struggles elsewhere in the world, America’s turn to confrontation with China calls for debate, clarification, and organisation.

With this in mind, the last Saturday in January saw a gathering of activists and academics from across the US at the Verso loft in Brooklyn to discuss The China Question: Towards a Left Perspective on China. A rare forum of the left dedicated to US-China politics, some 150-160 participants spent the day not only listening and debating but building networks for the struggles that await us. Apart from Verso, the conference was co-sponsored by Haymarket, New Politics, Dissent, Made in China Journal, and International Committee of the DSA.

The China Question coincided with the publication of NYU historian Rebecca Karl’s new book, China’s Revolutions in the Modern World (Verso). Opening the conference, Rebecca read from her book’s conclusion:

‘‘China’s rise’… names a panic-inducing challenge to white global supremacy and Euro-American-controlled capitalism, one depicted as devious and distorted—unfair, even—because it is presided over by a ruthless Communist authoritarianism that has thwarted all predictions of its inevitable political demise. However, ‘China’s rise’ (Zhongguo jueqi) is not as popular a phrase in China as the now-ubiquitous Chinese term for the contemporary moment: the ‘years of ascendancy and prosperity’ (shengshi). This latter term is an entirely unironic echo of that used by the Kangxi Emperor in the eighteenth century to reflect on the achieved greatness of Qing territorial expansion—into Xinjiang, no less—and dynastic flourishing, which itself recalls much earlier versions of prosperity touted in the Han or Tang dynasties. ‘Ascendancy and prosperity’ is thus a designation that presents a cultural internality to China’s history, imagined as benign and peaceful, that can be posed as an alternative to the ‘China’s rise’ designation, with its reference to global antagonism and direct challenge to the hitherto-existing Euro-American-dominated world order. Yet, the ongoing popular uprisings in Hong Kong over the tightening of PRC control in that territory powerfully demonstrate that not all who might be subject to China’s ‘ascendancy and prosperity’ are interested in succumbing to its version of the world…’

The conference’s first session, on the US-China rivalry, brought out some of the key points of contention. David Harvey first offered his assessment of China’s remarkably rapid rise, highlighting its ability to ride out the 2007-8 financial crisis, but also pointing to the challenge it now confronts in shifting from labour-intensive to more capital-intensive industry. Ashley Smith provided a more explicitly political perspective on what he described as a growing inter-imperialist rivalry, requiring the left to advocate a distinct third position of ‘neither Washington nor Beijing,’ along with support for struggles against the Chinese state, e.g. in Hong Kong. He also highlighted what he saw as a confusion, even incoherence in the current US response to China, caught between decoupling from the Chinese economy or redoubling its efforts to prise it open for American profit-making. Abdullah Younus from the DSA took a more cautious position, positioning China as part of a series of non-Western experiments with socialism, though he voiced strong criticisms of its direction, e.g. on the Islamophobic repression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

As the discussion ensued, more questions emerged: could China be thought of as imperialist when its economy remained a source of so much surplus value for Western corporations? Were Beijing’s dealings with African nations exploitative in the same way that classical imperialism was? If war broke out, one participant queried, would the left not be obliged to support China against the US? Is China on an ever-upward development path, or should we be more attentive to the implications of its economic slowdown? Smith, in response, insisted on the need for concrete analysis of the new situation, in which imperial rivalries would not necessarily take the same form as the old. Karl took the same view: the left could not compromise its principles in the defence of states. Harvey, by contrast, dissented from the ‘plague on both your houses’ view being put forward. In concluding, he expressed a degree of hesitant admiration for Xi Jinping’s official Marxism, and his measures to reassert the CCP’s role in Chinese society.

The next sessions of the conference focused on specific issues on which the American left needs to educate itself and intervene. Yige Dong and Cuizi Liu discussed the state of feminist activism in the Chinese diaspora and inside China respectively, considering its relationship to various currents of Western feminism. Liu focused on online and offline mobilisations in support of victims of sexual assault. Dong pointed to the possibility of women’s rights and labour issues converging in struggles surrounding social reproduction and China’s feminised service industries. Moving to environmental questions, Matt Huber offered a sobering analysis both of China’s considerable efforts to tackle climate change and its massive, ongoing dependence on fossil fuels. Whether in China or the West, more pressure from below will be necessary to make the transition to renewable energy that the world so desperately needs. Kevin Lin then described the changing landscape of labour activism in China, from the strikes of the early 2000s to the much more constrained environment today, with direct repression intensifying since 2018. Lin also criticised the turn to economic nationalism in the US, arguing that ‘the rhetoric of Chinese workers stealing American jobs is both analytically problematic and enormously damaging to labour solidarity.’ Despite the difficulties of making contact with the Chinese working class, labour internationalism remains an indispensable principle for the left today.

The third session shifted focus to the unresolved political questions of China’s periphery: Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. David Brophy criticised China’s racist and Islamophobic repression of the Uyghurs, then went on to discuss the historical lessons of earlier, mostly ineffective Western human rights campaigns against China. The globalised nature of the War on Terror offers a strategically valuable entry point to this issue for the left to build an alternative response. Wilfred Chan, editor of Lausan, reflected on the complicity of Chinese and Western elites in Hong Kong’s hyper-capitalist dystopia. ‘[B]oth are far too heavily invested in using Hong Kong as an interface for global capital to ever support the actual freedom of Hong Kong people,’ he argued, calling on the US left to support Hong Kongers in imagining a future for the city not determined by its place in the shifting landscape of global capitalism. Brian Hioe, who edits New Bloom, examined Taiwan’s own geopolitical precarity and the influence it has on local politics. Analysing the decline of the KMT and the dominance of DPP, he emphasised the way the question of independence versus unification obscures left-right divisions. Despite the DPP often disappointing Taiwanese progressives, a form of ‘lesser-evilism’ has drawn activists from struggles such as the 2014 Sunflower Movement to work within it. At the same time, the unpopularity of Trump offers opportunities to shift the pro-independence camp away from its reliance on the US and in a more progressive direction.

The final session returned to the United States, and the challenges activists face confronting rising racism and xenophobia here. Zifeng Liu described the predicament of Chinese studying in the US, where their agency is constrained both by worries of Chinese surveillance, and Western liberalism that is quick to write them off as pawns of Beijing. Criticising the pretensions of this pedagogical paternalism and the obstacles it presents to genuine solidarity, he cautioned against ‘packaging racist and anti-immigrant sentiments in concerns about government wrongdoing in China.’ Drawing on his experiences at Cornell University, Eli Friedmann critiqued the corporate university and the compromises that its liberal administrations have made on principles of academic freedom in dealings with China. At the same time, he firmly rejected the encroachment of US intelligence agencies on university life, insisting that only a bottom-up response that democratises university decision-making could remedy this situation. Helena Wong described the landscape of Chinese-American politics, focusing in particular on the emergence of a Chinese-American right around Donald Trump and issues such as Affirmative Action in university admissions. Concluding the session, JS gave a first-hand perspective from the AI industry on the ideological shift to tech nationalism worldwide, citing examples of Amazon’s collaboration with the CIA, and Microsoft’s with the Department of Defence, to highlight the hypocrisy of America’s accusations against China. With a US-China tech war intensifying, the talk also gave us an inspiring case study of international organising between China and the US, in the 996 campaign to end hyper-exploitation in Chinese tech companies.

In concluding the conference, sociologist Ho-fung Hung offered an interesting preview of his ongoing research into the political economy of the US-China rivalry. Hung described the shift towards a more aggressive American stance on China as part of the fallout from the global financial crisis of 2007-8. In its wake, Beijing’s stimulus package helped domestic companies reduce American market share in China and establish a firmer platform from which to compete internationally. This change served to undermine the long-standing Beijing-Wall Street nexus and open the way for security hawks to gain the ascendancy in policy debate in Washington. Striking a different note to the day’s opening discussion, Hung identified features of the new rivalry which in his view were reminiscent of classical imperialism, particularly the competition to lend to the developing world.

The China Question will hopefully provide the impetus for a more confident response on the left to the challenge of what looms as a new Cold War. In wider progressive circles, of course, knowledge of China and consciousness of the strategic questions discussed here is mixed. In many ways, the debate is only just beginning. But the earlier we can lay down a set of common principles, the better. The left should reject calls to side with either the American or Chinese state in their rivalry and direct its critique to the capitalist system that has generated this conflict. In a place like the US, that requires opposition to Washington’s efforts to reassert its economic and military dominance in the face of the “threat” from China, and a readiness to combat the domestic scare campaigns and racism that these competitive dynamics give rise to. But we can and should do this without any illusions in China’s own brand of globalising state capitalism. Today’s trends towards heightened nationalism and militarism in both the US and China will only be disrupted and defused by a confident internationalism.

Most of the conference’s presentations were recorded and will be available on the We Are Many site. For those in North America, similar discussions are being organized for Historical Materialism in Montreal in May, and the Socialism 2020 conference in Chicago in July.

Reposted from www.rs21.org.uk.

Review: Zionist Betrayal of Jews, From Herzl to Netanyahu

By: February 18, 2020
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Stanley Heller’s new book may reveal no surprises to a few well-read scholars of the history of the Middle East. Many readers, however, who believe they know modern history will be surprised and disconcerted. To put it simply, Heller contends that Zionism has not been a good thing for the Jews and has, in fact, exacerbated Jewish suffering and especially antisemitism. And he backs up his claim with historical facts—many, many facts.

In his introduction Heller states that “…the assumption has been that while the Jewish state was bad for the Palestinians and for the Middle East, it has benefited the world’s Jews.” In fact, Heller asserts, “the Zionist political movement has been a disaster for Jews themselves” (p. 3).

Zionist organizations and individual Zionists, some of whose impacts have been all but forgotten by historians of the twenty-first century, are sought out and thoroughly investigated for their individual and collective impact on the status of Jews in the world of their times and of today. Heller does not neglect non-Jews either, such as Henry Ford and FDR, Anthony Eden and Harry Truman, all of whom played significant roles in the struggle for survival of Jews during and after WWII.  Relevant historical figures, European, Israeli and American, are all explored objectively and without compromise. Heller surprises the reader with every chapter. Who would have thought that Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, once believed he might lead a movement to convert Austrian Jews to Christianity? Or that Herzl, a journalist, did nothing to support Alfred Dreyfus during his trial or later, even though Herzl’s insistence on the necessity of a Jewish state was solidified by the Dreyfus experience?

Heller has a fascinating chapter in which he describes in detail the Zionist success in sabotaging and destroying the anti-Nazi boycott of the 1930s.  According to Heller, “the Zionists saw the Nazi rise (to power) as “an opportunity” (46). They regarded the expanding repressions against German Jews as something they could exploit to help their “Palestine project” (p. 19).   As detailed by Heller, the Transfer Agreement of 1933 was the final blow which finished off the boycott against Nazi Germany and ultimately provided the Zionist cause with both Jewish immigrants to Palestine and German goods purchased with money belonging to German Jews, goods that were ultimately re-sold to enrich the Israeli state.  As Heller so succinctly states, “The Zionists scabbed on the boycott and broke it” (p. 21).

Lenni Brenner and Edwin Black have both written about the Transfer Agreement from anti-Zionist (Brenner) and Zionist (Black) perspectives. Heller introduces the writers and their books, providing a thorough analysis of each.

Well known authors the likes of Tom Segev and Eli Wiesel go head-to-head in Heller’s book. He details the experience of Ken Livingstone, mayor of London from 2000 to 2008, in battling and eventually falling victim to clearly false accusations of antisemitism which lost him his place in Britain’s Labour Party. Avraham Stern (of the notorious Stern Gang) and his collaboration with the Nazis is followed by Yitzhak Shamir and Uri Avnery, both of the Irgun Zionist military group, form another eye-opening chapter. The names are very familiar, their back-stories, for the most part, are not.

Into the 21st century, with Heller, we read of the firm admiration of Benjamin Netanyahu for Viktor Orbán and his close relationship with Donald Trump, irrespective of Trump’s xenophobic rants and anti-Semitic dog whistles. Then Heller introduces us to Naftali Bennett, who was once sent by Netanyahu to defend Trump, and John Hagee, a “Christian Zionist” who believed that Hitler was a hunter sent by God to drive all the Jews home to Israel.

The final chapter in this book already filled with revelations should come as no surprise to the reader.  Heller calls flat-out for Jews to reject Zionism as a solution to antisemitism and instead embrace a universal and common effort to reject all racisms.

Heller’s book is definitely not a foray into rumor-mongering or conspiracy theory.  Quite the opposite: every assertion Heller makes is backed up by impeccable footnote documentation. Most of the 300-plus references are available on the internet.  In fact, his references comprise nearly one half of the total pages of the book.  In spite of the foot-noting, it is refreshing to find that Heller’s writing style is accessible, engaging, provocative and definitely not academic.

The book is brief, fewer than one hundred fifty pages plus references. Readers, however, will not be inclined to rush through it and put it aside. Time and a thorough reading (and sometimes re-reading) will be helpful to assimilate and integrate the information within.  This is primarily because this book contradicts, deconstructs and destroys the myths and propaganda about the Zionist political movement and the creation of Israel that most readers will have been inundated with throughout their lifetimes and are still being hammered with. The book should become a standard reference resource for those readers interested in having a solid knowledge of historical facts as well as recent events to help them explain to themselves and others the genesis of past and present world events and attitudes.

Heller’s book may be ordered from here.

Neither Washington nor Beijing – A backgrounder

By: February 17, 2020
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The western mainstream media tends to depict the situation of HK merely in a one dimensional manner, presenting Hong Kong a victim of Beijing’s tyranny while the US and the UK as supporters of Hong Kong’s autonomy and democracy. On the other hand, Beijing claims that it remains committed to Hong Kong’s autonomy and democracy but the latter is now under threat from “foreign intervention”. The two sides mirror each other in terms of their argument. The real picture is actually much more complicated.

A Historic Compromise

The first fact is that when London and Beijing signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 both sides had little interest in promoting the democratic rights of the Hong Kong people. Both governments never bothered to allow Hong Kong people to have a voice during and after their negotiation over the fate of Hong Kong, showing their contempt over Hong Kong people. The Declaration from Beijing only vaguely promised “election” for the Hong Kong legislature and executive head after the handover. The main purpose of the deal between the two governments is merely to advance their mutual interest of maintaining Hong Kong laissez faire capitalism and its British colonial law in exchange for UK’s commitment to hand back the island to China in 1997. In protecting Western interest in Hong Kong Beijing also see this as a great chance to use Hong Kong as a platform to pursue a complete re-integration into global capitalism and reap commercial benefits accordingly. Both sides get what they wanted. Beijing used Hong Kong to raise huge amount of capital for its corporations, so much so that today’s Chinese companies accounts for more than 60 percent of the market value of Hong Kong stock exchange, up from practically zero thirty years ago. Without Hong Kong China would not have risen so quickly. On the other hand, Western capital also uses Hong Kong as a medium to channel overseas investment into Mainland China: more than 70 percent of China inflow Foreign Direct Investment comes from Hong Kong.

Nowadays Beijing repeatedly warned of “foreign forces” intervening in Hong Kong. We HongKongers do hate these “foreign forces”. Since the outbreak of the current protests a British-born Hong Kong Police Force Chief Superintendent Rupert Dover became famous for leading many ferocious attacks on the protestors. In fact, there are hundreds of white police officers holding foreign passports in Hong Kong and cracking down on protestors as well.This lead us to one important issue: not only “foreign forces” are always here but also it is, first and foremost, Beijing who tacitly recognized the West, with UK and US as its head, as stake holders in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is not comparable with Ukraine. The so called “one country, two systems”, enshrined first in the Sino-British joint declaration and then in the 1997 Basic Law, was from the beginning a historic compromise by Beijing with the West. The Basic Law’s solemn promise of “the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years” is first and foremost to appease Western influence and business interests. That is also why the Basic Law recognizes English as Hong Kong official language, allows the local people to keep their British passport, allows Hong Kong to keep its own British law, that its courts are allowed to hire foreign judges (article 92) and even to the extent of allowing foreigners to be employed as public servants from low to high grades except the ministerial and Chief Executive level (article 101). It is this article which allows Rupert Dover to smash our skulls. The West, with the US and the UK at its lead, surely has been pleased with this arrangement and surely not in their interest to de-stabilize Hong Kong. On the contrary, they need to uphold a Hong Kong as defined by the Basic Law, remains valid until 2047. This is why the UK and US representatives told the Hong Kong pan-democrats that instead of voting no they should accept Beijing’s political reform package in 2014 prior to the outbreak of the Umbrella Movement, even if the package continues to allow Beijing to handpick Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, decorated with some form of popular vote.

The defenders of Beijing argue that there are too much colonial legacy in Hong Kong therefore what is needed is another wave of “de-colonisation”, by this they mean Hong Kong people are still pro-West, or that its streets still retain the colonial names etc. But obviously Beijing does not want to do away all kinds of “colonial legacy”. Actually it is very keen to keep those repressive aspects of all the colonial laws. The Basic Law basically copies the colonial political system which makes the executive overrides the legislature; its Article 8 stipulates that “the laws previously in force in Hong Kong . . . shall be maintained” which practically keep intact most of the repressive colonial laws, for instance the 1922 Emergency Regulation Ordinance, which the Hong Kong government invoke, on 4 October, to ban face mask altogether. Ironically the law was enacted by the then British colonial government to repress, unsuccessfully, the general strike led by the seaman’s union – then under the CCP leadership. This time the colonial act has been invoked again by a Chinese led Hong Kong government to crack down on its “fellow country folks”. Precisely because Beijing has kept most of the repressive colonial legacy one can argue that what it is practicing is precisely a kind of internal colonisation against the Hong Kong people.

The Forgotten People

In the Mao era, Hong Kong was already so essential to Beijing that it had to tolerate the colonial government in exchange so as to be able to use the free port to earn one third of its foreign currency during the midst of the Cold War. Beijing had enthusiastically supported the world anti-colonialism movement but its inconsistency over an important port within its territory was mocked by Moscow in the early 1960’s [1], leading China to request that the UN remove HK from the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories in 1972 after it was admitted to the UN a year earlier. But this had not actually abolished the British colonial rule and we were still colonised and suffered from this. Beijing by that time also became more accommodating towards the colonial government by telling their grass root supporters in Hong Kong not to fight against the British but should patiently wait for the liberation from Beijing in an unknown future. That is why when beginning in 1969 there was a new wave of radicalisation among a thin layer of young people who wanted to fight against colonialism they naturally looked to those left currents outside of the Maoists – Anarchists, Trotskyists, Liberal Leftists and social reformers etc. This generation of youth often described themselves as the “rootless generation”, as they strongly felt being left alone to face the ferocious colonial government, and neither Beijing nor Taipei was ready to give a hand to.

However this thin layer of left youth could not find a serious hearing among the horribly exploited working people. The latter were mostly being refugees or their descendents from Mainland China who preferred to focus on their job to make ends meet to revolt against the colonial order. That also explains why Hong Kong people had always been very moderate. Their voice for political participation under the colonial government had always been very small. In the 1980s when a change in sovereignty was in sight the voice now became slightly higher but still very moderate – in 1986 the pan democrats only dare to ask for partial direct election in the legislature but even this was rejected by the UK. Some small group of leftists demanded for self determination for Hong Kong people but absolutely no one bother to listen. They then tried to argue for universal suffrage for the legislature as a starting point of political empowerment for the local. The result was the same. The public were content with Beijing’s promise of gradual implementation of universal suffrage. “No need to rush” is the mainstream sentiment.

Six years after the handover in 1997 Beijing took a major move, instead of giving Hong Kong the long due universal suffrage it tried to impose its National Security Bill on the latter, which angered the people and who responded with 500,000 protestors taking to the street in 1st July, 2003. From retrospect, this was just the beginning of a long resistance to Beijing’s attempt in finishing off Hong Kong’s autonomy altogether. When the Hong Kong people, after waiting for nearly two decades, began to launch a big occupation in 2014 to demand Beijing to honour its promise of universal suffrage for Hong Kong, the latter decided to do the contrary by rolling back Hong Kong’s autonomy. The Hong Kong people have always been denied the right to run their own affairs, be it under British or Beijing’s rule. But gradually Beijing proves to Hong Kong people that they are worse than the British. Years before the China Extradition bill, Beijing already tried to impose its chauvinist version of “Chinese identity” on Hong Kong which the British had not done: it tried to make the Hong Kong government to replace Cantonese with Mandarin as medium of teaching. On top of it Beijing began to enforce the “National Education curriculum” followed by the “National Anthem bill” which prosecutes anyone who does not sing properly in accordance to the official version. These enraged the Hong Kong public who started to protest. Therefore, when the China Extradition Bill was tabled the Hong Kong people knew very well that a complete show down with Beijing was now inevitable.

Hong Kong as Beijing’s leverage

For a long time the Hong Kong people have fought alone. This only began to change when Beijing under Xi was becoming even more aggressive in pushing for its new Hong Kong and global agenda.

Thirty years ago when Beijing drafted the Basic Law it would not have expected China would rise to the status of being the second largest economy in the world in so short a time. When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 he now become the most assertive Chinese leader on the global platform of nations. Increasingly he finds it more and more tempting to not only refusing to honour its promise of universal suffrage in the Basic Law, but also to use Hong Kong as a leverage in its global contest with the US in general and in the Huawei case in particular. Hence the attempt to table the China Extradition Bill.

Up until before the tabling of the bill the US government continued to produce a yearly positive appreciation of Hong Kong autonomy in accordance to the Hong Kong Policy Act 1992, which is essential for the US government to continue to recognise Hong Kong as a separate custom territory. It is Beijing’s unilateral change of its Hong Kong policy which now also antagonised the US and the West in general as well by tabling the China Extradition Bill.

It is a fantasy to argue that the Bill’s sole purpose is to send those wealthy mainland Chinese who are wanted for corruption back to Mainland to be properly prosecuted. The word used in the bill is “anyone” in Hong Kong, not just corrupted Mainland rich people. And it is the time when the Causeway Bay Bookshop Five incident was still fresh in the mind of many. Between October and December 2015, five owners / staff of Causeway Bay Bookshop went missing. In February 2016 Guangdong authorities confirmed that all five had been taken into custody for an old traffic accident involving Gui Minhai, one of the owners. Hardly anyone outside the Chinese government believed the explanation. It is widely believed that the five were arrested for publishing books about the private life of Xi. [2] What is alarming is not only that this violates the one country two systems principle, but also that two of the arrests were obviously extra-judicial arrests. That is why people from all walks of life, from Hong Kong politician and wealthy class to European and US expatriates here, fear of the Bill and wish it goes away.

Hong Kong has extradition agreements with twenty countries, including the UK and the US, but not with mainland China. The pro-Beijing camp, here in Hong Kong and overseas, argues that since Hong Kong has extradition agreements with the West, why can’t it have an agreement with mainland China? It is because no one trusts Chinese legal system. China is not only disdainful of basic due process but also of judicial independence. This distrust is actually recognized by Beijing as well and then codified in the aforementioned article 8 of the Basic Law which stipulates that “the laws previously in force in Hong Kong . . . shall be maintained,” which means that Hong Kong is insulated from China’s legal system. Without this insulation there is neither Hong Kong autonomy nor “one country two systems”. If China’s legal system improved significantly then it would be possible to discuss an extradition agreement with China. But in reality it has gone from bad to worse.

In the final analysis, we do not have a version of “one country two systems” as defined by Beijing, namely one remains socialist and the other remains capitalist. Rather the reality is merely two systems of capitalism: in Mainland a bureaucratic capitalism which combines the coercive power of the state and the power of capital, and a Hong Kong laissez faire capitalism. The latter is surely very problematic for working people there, but this capitalism, as defined by the Basic Law, also provides protection on basic human rights which allows the growth of a social movement. Actually, it is this Hong Kong feature which increasingly worries Beijing. Since the turn of the century, more and more people in the Mainland have begun to imitate Hong Kong’s social movement and started organizing, informally or through NGOs. This was the price Beijing had to pay for making use of Hong Kong to help build China’s new capitalism. Increasingly Beijing has found the price too high, and since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, Beijing must have thought that it had become strong enough to tear apart the Hong Kong autonomy altogether. Therefore the Hong Kong working people’s way of forward is, in the short and medium term, defend and extend our rights so as to prepare for a long term struggle to replace this laissez faire capitalism with a genuinely equal and democratic society.

U.S. promoting Hong Kong’s democracy?

Surely the U.S. is also using Hong Kong to target Beijing. It has been on a path of containing China since 2012. The passed Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act (HKHRD) is hailed in Hong Kong as a mean to save its freedom. Actually the bill’s name is rather misleading. First, in Section 3, the bill is very clear with its aim: it is the U.S. national interests in Hong Kong that matters. Section 5.a.6 demands an assessment of whether Hong Kong sufficiently enforces U.S. sanctions on certain nations or individuals. Reasons for sanctions include punishing countries or individuals involved in “international terrorism, international narcotics trafficking, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or that otherwise present a threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” This is clearly aimed at protecting U.S. national interests, not defending human rights and democracy for Hongkongers. This tying of Hong Kong human rights to U.S. foreign policy is in itself a mockery of human rights. The definition of what constitutes as U.S. national interest will always fall on the U.S. government. Accordingly, this bill also includes mandating the Hong Kong government to sanction North Korea and Iran. Even many countries in Europe are refusing to follow the United States’ move to abandon the nuclear agreement with Iran, since this is clearly Trump’s attempt at being provocative.

Neither the defence of US foreign policy, nor its trade war against China, nor its global contest, is our battle. In general, the big contest for global dominance between China and the US is just a fight to divide up the spoils. Yet one should not denies that in terms of the present defence of Hong Kong autonomy in general and the China Extradition Bill in particular there is a narrowly defined common interest between Hong Kong people and the Western countries, given that Hong Kong is such an internationalised city and the West’s interest is to a certain extent institutionalised under the Basic Law. We should not be scared of defending our rights or making Beijing to honour its promise of universal suffrage because the US and the UK is also asking for similar thing. Although one must add that the Hong Kong movement needs to conduct their struggle independently. The left should also be aware of the fact that the historic interest of the Hong Kong working people lies not defending the whole status quo as defined by the Basic Law, but rather to go beyond that by extending their rights beyond the Basic Law and not be afraid of colliding with both Chinese and Western corporate interest here when they have built a strong enough movement. But the extension of their rights cannot be expected if the working people here cannot even defend what they are enjoying now.

Protest because of social inequality / HK identity

The 2 million participants on the 16 June march showed that the movement enjoys majority support. The movement is not demanding independence, as Beijing claims. Like all former colonial people, the Hong Kong people are also entitled to the right to self-determination, including the option of independence. However, the Hong Kong movement is unified under the very moderate “five demands”. There is a small and loose current that aspires for independence, but it has no influence in the movement.

Unlike the previous generations, young people do yearn for a Hong Kong identity, but this does not necessarily imply wanting independence. It is also precisely a reaction to Beijing’s increasingly nationalist and chauvinist policies. China, under the CCP, has today evolved into a repressive society that few in Hong Kong want to associate with, hence the aspiration for a “free Hong Kong”. The rise of a “Hong Kong identity” is not an isolated event either.
Nativists

A recent survey showed that nearly 40 per cent of students claim to be “localist”, but how the radical youth interprets this varies among themselves. Long before this movement the nativist interpretation had the largest influence amongst those who claimed to be “localist”. However, when this movement evolved into a huge mobilization it necessarily displayed multiple and conflicting tendencies. While there is a nativist current exhibiting anti-Mainland immigrant sentiment, there was also a much bigger demonstration trying to win over Mainland Chinese visitors. The left’s responsibility is to join the struggle and convince the youth with its democratic and inclusive position rather than standing outside of it.

The third component is the xenophobic localists, who predate the Umbrella Movement of 2014. This current has been weakened since 2016. The Western media love these people, but their organisations are small, not more than two or three dozens, or at most below a hundred. But their politics are still dangerous because Hong Kong society has always been right wing, and people can take up the idea that mainlanders are the problem and should be expelled.

What is interesting to note is that they were so discredited that they lost in the 2016 election and were hence marginalised. There are a few very small nativist organisations founded by young people but they are so small that they do not have any institutional muscle to enforce their agenda within the movement. If they do have some ideological influence it is only because, firstly, Hong Kong is always conservative within a context of a so called laissez-faire society; secondly, there already exists a crowd who, maddened by Beijing’s repression, mistakenly see all Chinese people as responsible and therefore take an undifferentiated hostility towards Chinese people in general. But this nativist current is very small. In general, the self-claimed localists could garner slightly more than 10 percent of the vote but we must bear in mind that not all localists are nativists.

This paper was written for the German website LUXEMBOURG with the title WEDER WASHINGTON NOCH PEKING – SELBSTBESTIMMUNG FÜR DIE MENSCHEN IN HONGKONG.

The English translation appeared at the website Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.

Strike statistics for 2019 are out. Is the strike wave continuing?

By: , February 14, 2020
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The 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike and the 2016 Verizon strike—the largest public sector and the largest private sector strikes in years, respectively—were warning shots.

After a short decline in strike activity in 2017, strike actions exploded in 2018 driven by West Virginia educators—teachers, paraprofessionals, bus drivers, and other support staff—who walked out in a dramatic statewide strike. They were followed by educators in Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and other states as teachers and support staff fed up with years of cuts and demands to do more with less finally drew a line in the sand.

With a sense of continued momentum—2019 began with the Los Angeles teachers’ strike, and closed with the first major auto sector strike in over a decade and a long Chicago education strike—unionists feel that the strike wave is continuing. But is it? We turned to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, released yesterday, to answer that important question: was 2018 a fluke?

Superficially, there’s a dip. The overall number of employees involved in work stoppages declined slightly in absolute numbers compared to 2018, though the number of large strikes (25, vs. 20 in 2018) and days idle (in other words, total days that workers were out on strike) increased. But raw numbers only tell part of the story.

By analyzing detailed quarterly strike data since 1993 (the first year it’s on record from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) one thing is immediately apparent: the trend for strikes is on the upward swing in both the public and private sectors, and the upward trend continued through 2019.

In fact, public sector strikes show interesting trends dating back to closer to 2012 when Chicago teachers struck; given the slow recovery from post-Recession austerity measures and increasing right-wing attacks on public sector bargaining rights, increased militancy shouldn’t be a surprise. Although the increase in strike activity has been driven largely by public sector workers, especially teachers, that’s not the whole story. Private sector strike activity has recently signalled a levelling out, and potentially a slow trend upward like the public sector showed around 2012—one which, like public sector activity, may be followed by a sharp increase.

But the economy is much more complicated than the public sector/private sector divide, and where strikes happen is crucial for understanding the state of worker organization and power. To look at that, we broke out strikes since 1993 according to their North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) designated sector.

Looking at the past decade shows a clear pattern: education, healthcare, and to a lesser extent the information sector (usually in telecommunications) strikes made up a large majority of strike activity. This is a significant difference from 1993-2000; manufacturing and transportation and warehousing sector strikes made up the majority of strike activity.

Comparing 2018 to 2019 shows good signs. Manufacturing sector strikes spiked dramatically in 2019, led by the UAW and the General Motors strike. Retail—particularly the Stop & Shop strike, a rare major strike action against the New England grocer—also spiked dramatically. Although strike activity in 2018 was overwhelmingly healthcare and education, and although both were big shares of 2019, strike activity in both sectors declined while increasing elsewhere. That’s a good sign: strike activity almost exclusively concentrated in two sectors of the economy is unsustainable; the fact that it’s spreading shows that the strike wave has staying power.

So what were the major strikes in 2019, and what can those tell us?

The biggest work stoppage in 2019 in terms of workers involved was where you’d least expect it: North Carolina, a right-to-work state with under 5% union density, and where public sector collective bargaining is banned. The North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), an affiliate of the NEA, staged a one-day work stoppage involving over 90,000 workers. It wasn’t a fluke: they did the same thing in 2018 with over 100,000 workers, representing the two largest work stoppages by number of workers involved since before the 2008 crash. This sends a clear signal: there’s room to organize in the South, particularly in gerrymandered and right-wing dominated states like North Carolina where basic norms of democracy are dead and buried.

Importantly, however, the most intense strike was the showdown between the UAW and General Motors. The UAW made significant contractual gains—uncapping profit sharing was a major win—after a grueling forty day strike which cost the “Big Three” automaker over $4 billion. The reason that’s important: large-scale strike action in the private sector is crucial to both make sure record profits end up in the pockets of workers, and to make sure that the strike wave continues to build labor militancy and power.

Conclusions

We saw some troubling signs in the Bureau of Labor Statistics union membership data released last month, though we made the case that they were far better than unionists expected in the wake of Janus v. AFSCME. But if there were troubling signs there, the strike statistics give unionists reason to smile.

Another key dimension separates these strikes from the large scale strikes of the 1990s: whereas those were largely defensive actions fought in manufacturing sectors under attack by offshoring and technological change, these strikes are clearly offensive actions. A manufacturing strike in the 1990s was, more often than not, fought to hold the line and avoid (often unsuccessfully) concessions and plant closures. Now, workers are using the strike weapon to advance and make gains. In an economy where profits are booming, but workers’ wallets are not, there’s no reason to believe increase labor militancy will decline in the coming year. The upward trend is clear.

What this data should tell unionists is simpler: we’re still on the upward swing, and now is the time to press our advantage. Strike waves can’t last forever; at a certain point, worker fatigue will set in and public opinion may shift. When this one starts to crest—a point which may well be years in the future, if labor presses its advantage now—where do we want our movement to be? If we use our power now, we can both build power and raise expectations for what the movement can and should achieve.

 

Reposted from Strikewave.

Why we should be wary of blaming ‘overpopulation’ for the climate crisis

By: February 13, 2020
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The annual World Economic Forum in Davos brought together representatives from government and business to deliberate how to solve the worsening climate and ecological crisis. The meeting came just as devastating bush fires were abating in Australia. These fires are thought to have killed up to one billion animals and generated a new wave of climate refugees. Yet, as with the COP25 climate talks in Madrid, a sense of urgency, ambition and consensus on what to do next were largely absent in Davos.

But an important debate did surface – that is, the question of who, or what, is to blame for the crisis. Famed primatologist Dr Jane Goodall remarked at the event that human population growth is responsible, and that most environmental problems wouldn’t exist if our numbers were at the levels they were 500 years ago.

This might seem fairly innocuous, but its an argument that has grim implications and is based on a misreading of the underlying causes of the current crises. As these escalate, people must be prepared to challenge and reject the overpopulation argument.

A dangerous distraction

Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and Donella Meadows’ The Limits to Growth in the late 1960s and early 1970s ignited concerns over the world’s burgeoning human population, and its consequences for natural resources.

The idea that there were simply too many people being born – most of them in the developing world where population growth rates had started to take off – filtered into the arguments of radical environmental groups such as Earth First! Certain factions within the group became notorious for remarks about extreme hunger in regions with burgeoning populations such as Africa – which, though regrettable, could confer environmental benefits through a reduction in human numbers.

In reality, the global human population is not increasing exponentially, but is in fact slowing and predicted to stabilise at around 11 billion by 2100. More importantly, focusing on human numbers obscures the true driver of many of our ecological woes. That is, the waste and inequality generated by modern capitalism and its focus on endless growth and profit accumulation.

The industrial revolution that first married economic growth with burning fossil fuels occurred in 18th-century Britain. The explosion of economic activity that marked the post-war period known as the “Great Acceleration” caused emissions to soar, and it largely took place in the Global North. That’s why richer countries such as the US and UK, which industrialised earlier, bear a bigger burden of responsibility for historical emissions.

In 2018 the planet’s top emitters – North America and China – accounted for nearly half of global CO₂ emissions. In fact, the comparatively high rates of consumption in these regions generate so much more CO₂ than their counterparts in low-income countries that an additional three to four billion people in the latter would hardly make a dent on global emissions.

There’s also the disproportionate impact of corporations to consider. It is suggested that just 20 fossil fuel companies have contributed to one-third of all modern CO₂ emissions, despite industry executives knowing about the science of climate change as early as 1977.

Inequalities in power, wealth and access to resources – not mere numbers – are key drivers of environmental degradation. The consumption of the world’s wealthiest 10% produces up to 50% of the planet’s consumption-based CO₂ emissions, while the poorest half of humanity contributes only 10%. With a mere 26 billionaires now in possession of more wealth than half the world, this trend is likely to continue.

Issues of ecological and social justice cannot be separated from one another. Blaming human population growth – often in poorer regions – risks fueling a racist backlash and displaces blame from the powerful industries that continue to pollute the atmosphere. Developing regions in Africa, Asia and Latin America often bear the brunt of climate and ecological catastrophes, despite having contributed the least to them.

The problem is extreme inequality, the excessive consumption of the world’s ultra-rich, and a system that prioritises profits over social and ecological well-being. This is where where we should be devoting our attention.

Originally posted at The Conversation.

What is New About State Capitalism in the 21st Century?

By: February 12, 2020
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Joshua Kurlantzick, State Capitalism: How the Return of Statism Transformed the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

For much of the left, since the 1980s, neoliberalism has been an all-encompassing term to identify the character of contemporary capitalism. Neoliberalism has been defined as the privatization of public property and services, deregulation, free market trade and globalization. Since the 2008 economic crisis, however, with the collapse of the neoliberal model or Washington Consensus, some leftist as well as liberal analysts have argued that this concept is not adequate for defining the current character of global capitalism.(1) It does not explain the statist character of the emerging economies and, most recently, the rise of authoritarian statism in Western countries.

The author of the book under review argues that “a new-era state capitalism” is on the rise all over the world (pp. 3, 7). He offers some important facts and analyses on the direction of the global economy, enumerates the features that are new in this new type of state capitalism, and argues that it is more resilient to capitalist crises. Although he writes from the vantage point of a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, he can give socialist readers some insights about the current direction of global capitalism.

  1. What is the “new type of state capitalism”? How is it different from pre-20th century forms of state intervention as well as 20th century forms of state capitalism that existed in the former USSR, Maoist China or the East Asia development model or western welfare states and mixed economies?

Kurlantzick defines state capitalism as state ownership or significant influence over more than one third of the 500 largest companies (by revenue) in a country. This state ownership or control is not limited to sectors such as energy, defense and communications. It is not based on isolation from the world market but is open to global trade and technological innovation. It also uses modern management techniques similar to any multinational giant, and fires managers who do not promote profitability.

Based on Kurlantzick’s definition, China is the most prominent state capitalist country in the world.  However, in order of efficiency, from the most to the least efficient, the following states fall into this category:  Singapore, Norway, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, China, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Algeria.

Kurlantzick argues that although states have interfered in their economies for centuries, state intervention has become far more extensive on a global scale in the past two decades since the late 1990s. This intervention is not limited to state spending and work projects, protecting domestic industries (through tariffs and subsidies) and controlling strategic industries. It is not an emergency measure such as the 2008 bailout of bankrupt companies in the U.S. and state ownership of General Motors.  It is also not aimed at autarky or creating a pure state-owned economy. Instead, this new state capitalism combines statist strategies with aspects of free-market strategies used by multinational companies. “Thus it may have a better chance of surviving over the long term compared to strategies pursued by Maoist China, The Soviet Union and even a more democratic state capitalism in the 20th century like France” (p. 22).

This state capitalism is also not monolithic but is better understood as a continuum (p. 7). With the exception of Norway, it includes mostly authoritarian and nominally democratic states. Within this continuum, Kurlantzick concentrates on China and the emerging economies.

2. What factors have brought about this new type of state capitalism since the late 1990s?

The two most important factors in the author’s estimation are the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2008 financial and economic crisis.

In the 1990s, the former states of the collapsed USSR as well as India, African and Latin American countries that had followed the centrally planned import substitution and autarky model, experimented with the prescription of the Washington Consensus (proposed by economist John Williamson for Latin America in the 1980s). According to Joseph Stiglitz, however, the Washington Consensus which aimed to reduce government intervention and state spending and promote private domestic and foreign investment as well as trade liberalization, failed to promote significant growth in most nations” (p. 54).

Kurlantzick acknowledges that the neoliberal model in the 1990s in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and East Asia pushed people into poverty, increased unemployment for the majority of the laboring populations of emerging countries and also led to increasing speculation and bubbles which in turn led to the 1997 Asian financial crisis: “By contrast, Malaysia and China which shunned IMF advice and kept their currencies pegged and protected, and many of their banks and large companies in state hands, survived the crisis far stronger initially than Thailand or Indonesia” (p. 75). They did not face an upsurge of poverty, capital flight and speculation. Their debts increased but their economies grew. Kurlantzick concludes: “The moral of the Asian financial crisis of 1997 was that only countries that had not given in to liberal economic reforms had survived without a heavy dose of pain” (p. 75).

Following the model of state intervention, after the 2008 economic and financial crisis, the U.S. government also bailed out banks and companies that were “too big to fail.” Western observers began to argue that a more centralized model as practiced in China or Singapore might avoid the short-term profit orientation that created the maze of gambling type derivatives and mortgage investments that sparked the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Kurlantzick argues that rapid economic decision making of the Chinese leadership that did not have to deal with the impediments of the legislative and judicial branches or a free media seemed more effective. He also cites Thomas Friedman, one of the strongest advocates of neoliberalism, praising the process of economic decision making in China: “One party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people as in China today, it can also have great advantages. One party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a country forward” (p. 77).  Even John Williamson, author of the Washington Consensus, was asking: “Is the Beijing Consensus Now Dominant?” and arguing that “China’s economic strategy had proven far more effective” (p. 77).

By 2011, India reversed some of the neoliberal reforms of the early 1990s and early 2000s. Narendra Modi, governor of Gujarat and leader of the extreme nationalist BJP became president in 2014 and partially owed his support to his advocacy of a return to more state intervention.

In Russia, the utter poverty experienced by the majority of the population following the introduction of neoliberal measures in the 1990s, created the condition for the rise to power of Vladimir Putin in 2000. Putin also partially owed his support to his advocacy of more state ownership and control as the basis for “making Russia great again.”

In Brazil and South African, the increasing poverty and hardships which the masses experienced after the introduction of the neoliberal measures in the 1990s led to the rise of more state interventionist governments such as those of Lula da Silva in Brazil in 2003 and Jacob Zuma in South Africa in 2009.

In the wake of the 2008 economic and financial crisis, China further increased its emphasis on state ownership and state intervention. The Chinese Communist Party relied heavily on nationalism as a unifying ideology. Xi Jinping who became the chairman of the CPC in 2013 launched a Maoist style campaign against neoliberalism and liberal democracy (p. 82). China also gained an important role as a lender of capital at a time when the 2008 economic crisis led to a sudden drop in international capital flows to developing nations.

3. How has this new type of state capitalism proved to be “more resilient” in China?

The main point argued in this book is that the new state capitalism, especially as it is practiced in China and Singapore, can perform better than neoliberalism in terms of productivity, profitability, employment and efficiency. It is also more resilient to economic crises. China’s experience since the late 1990s is cited as proof.

Kurlantzick argues that China was able to avert an economic collapse in 2013 and a stock market collapse in 2015. In 2015 its production of goods and services grew by 6% (p. 18) and its state firms still represented 89 of 500 slots in Fortune’s 2015 annual ranking of largest revenue (p. 96). In his opinion, the key to the success of state capitalism as practiced in China is the following:

  1. Full ownership or ownership of a majority share or voting class share, or control through party and army appointment of board and CEOs of strategic industries such as energy, communications, transportation, automobile and auto parts production, all heavy industry and banking.
  2. Tax breaks, low-interest or no interest loans and no rent for state owned companies if they maintain standards of profitability and efficiency. Closing companies that do not produce profitability and punishing their managers.
  3. Allowing the private sector to enter industries that are not deemed strategic, such as light industry or the service sector. In many cases, nominally private companies are subsidiaries of state companies. Even private companies are highly dependent on the state for tax breaks, loans, government contracts, and have army and party members on their boards.
  4. Introduction of international technologies through allowing foreign multinational corporations to participate in joint ventures which help Chinese partners become more technologically advanced. Buying western companies and using their patents or stealing patents.
  5. Funding research and development through collaboration between universities, industry and state.
  6. Controlling the export of capital and requiring that ordinary people deposit their savings in state banks which in turn use the cash to invest in infrastructure, manufacturing and as seed capital for new investment ideas that might be profitable to the state in the long range but may not receive private capitalist funding in the short range.
  7. Using economies of scale to compete with other large firms on a global scale, especially in auto manufacture and aviation.
  8. No large dependence on natural resource extraction (pp. 104-105).
  9. Minimal welfare state benefits.

Thus, “what makes China competitive now is no longer only cheap labor but technology, skilled labor, efficiency and precision manufacturing.” China is competing with the U.S. in Artificial Intelligence, self-driving cars and the aerospace industry (p. 106). It will soon be the largest economy in term of gross domestic product (p. 17). It is also boosting its military budget and building its influence in other countries through its loans, investments and infrastructure building project.

According to Kurlantzick, the Chinese government has also been able to co-opt eighty percent of the urban middle class which currently support the state because they are satisfied to see that the bulk of the large profits made are going back into infrastructure development and manufacturing, and thus producing capitalist development and employment. The rural population however, is very dissatisfied and is organizing tens of thousands of protests per year (pp. 30, 188). China’s income inequality level, is not higher than the U.S. but similar (p. 181).

In general, Kurlantzic believes that “this new type of state capitalism—though not without flaws—has proven more resilient, complex, and multifaceted than many previous challenges to the free-market economics model…because of its adaptability today, because it has combined traditional state economic planning with elements of free-market competition…Modern state capitalism has genuine strengths that earlier challenges to free-market economics did not contain” (p. 22).

4. What are the dangers of this new type of state capitalism?

The main dangers, Kurlantzick argues, arise from the fact that the concentration and centralization of capital in the hands of the states would allow states to threaten democracy, use state companies to destroy labor and environmental regulations and declare actual shooting wars on other states.

For instance, he cites Russia’s denial of heating gas to Ukraine when Ukraine sought to join the European Union, or China’s military actions and use of state companies to set up oil rigs in the South and East China Sea and to claim islands and economic zones (pp. 204-207). While not mentioning China’s One Belt, One Road project, the author does discuss the ways in which China’s building of infrastructure for countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America with loans from its state companies is allowing it to practically own these countries and shut them down if they challenge it (p. 213). Furthermore, he points out that, as of 2016, the largest recipients of Chinese overseas investments were Australia, U.S., Canada, U.K. and Brazil.

Kurlantzick also points out that “evidence calls into question the theory that economic freedom and affluence will bring political freedom. Indeed, the Chinese government may be able to survive indefinitely without opening up its political system” (p. 187). In general, he concludes, “a country can have relatively efficient state capitalist economics and some degree of political freedom or it can have real political freedom and only some degree of economic efficiency. But it cannot have both” (p. 134).

The arguments that he offers about the concentration of money and power allowing leaders and states to buy and purge or repress critics, or act as imperialist powers and start wars, are also true about free-market capitalism.  He does admit that western liberal democratic states have also used their capital to violate labor, environmental and human rights. He has also written a book on the U.S. war in Laos and the role of the CIA. However, in general, Kurlantzick is far less critical of western capitalism (p. 219). He does not address the rise of authoritarian statism in the West and specifically in the U.S. in this book.  In a different book, Democracy in Retreat (2014), he has addressed the global decline of democracy, but with a focus on emerging economies.

5. What is missing in this book?

The author seems to think that politics can inhabit a realm over and above economics in order to prevent the concentration and centralization of capital from leading to authoritarianism. Thus, he argues that if we only had free elections and independent political institutions and media, we could make state capitalism democratic. With the exception of Norway, and Brazil under Lula and Rousseff which suffered from major corruption problems however, the examples of democratic state capitalism which he offers are not so democratic: Indonesia and Singapore (p. 151). Indeed, he does not address the ways in which the logic of capital itself thwarts genuine democracy.

Although Kurlantzick implicitly admits that capitalism moves in the direction of the concentration and centralization of capital in fewer hands, his work suffers from any engagement with Marx’s Capital. For Marx, the logic of capital is the accumulation of capital as an end in itself. It is the result of the capitalist mode of production: Labor which is alienated not only from its products, but its process, from other human beings and from the human potential for free and conscious activity. (2) Whether capital is owned privately or by the state, its logic is the same. It leads to crises and wars.

Marx discussion of capitalist accumulation had predicted that within different capitalist states operating in the context of the world market, the means of production could become concentrated in the hands of a single capitalist or a single capitalist corporation in order to increase the rate of extraction of surplus value from living labor.(3) Nevertheless, he argued that capitalism’s own tendency toward the concentration and centralization of capital in fewer hands leads to crises mainly in the form of the tendency toward a decline in the rate of profit.

This tendency toward crisis Marx argued, could be periodically but not entirely overcome through countervailing factors such as increasing the rate of exploitation of labor (including the use of slave labor), decreasing the value of the means of production, or the outright destructive effects of war. (4)

Kurlantzick does not see crises as organic to the capitalist mode of production itself but thinks that greater state intervention if not isolated from world trade and technological innovation, can largely avert crises.

Thus, he does not address the fact that China’s growth continues to rely to a large extent on the high rate of exploitation of labor, including the use of slave labor in prisons. (Note the existence of a million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps in Xinxiang.)  He also does not address the ways that China’s “efficient” capitalism’s destroys human lives and nature.

Kurlantzic would have also benefited from consulting various Marxist theories of state capitalism such as those developed by Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James and Tony Cliff which, though not alike, and concerned with a different period, still offer important questions for us to consider in analyzing state capitalism today. (5)

6. Lessons for Socialists

Despite Kurlantzick’s lack of any serious critique of capitalism, his assessment of the new features of state capitalism today need to be examined by socialists. He thinks that these new features can allow for a more resilient capitalism. In fact, like many others, he argues that the era of neoliberalism has ended. This new type of state capitalism is the wave of the future. It is not democratic but is efficient and can provide growth. It does not have most of the social benefits that welfare states offered but guarantees that the bulk of profits go back into the production of infrastructure and more advanced technology for the state and not private gain.

That is precisely how Marx defined the accumulation of capital: an increasing portion of the profits go back into the production of the means of production at the expense of humanity and nature. Efficient capitalism is about production for the sake of production. (6)

Indeed this “efficiency” is being tested now as China faces the spread of a new coronavirus in epidemic proportions. Despite its current 6% annual economic growth rate, China does not have a functioning primary care system. The spread of the virus could have been avoided if authoritarian capitalist practices were not in place. The Chinese government’s current quarantining of 56 million people in Hubei province also promises to have disastrous consequences. (7)

Either we develop a humanist alternative to capitalism—private and state—or we are doomed to live under this new “efficient” state capitalism.

 

Endnotes

  1. Bill Dunn, “Against Neoliberalism as a Concept,” Capital & Class (Vol. 41, Issue 3, Oct. 2017), 435-454; “State Capitalism’s Global Reach: New Masters of the Universe,” The Economist, January 21, 2012; Jamil Khader, “Trump’s Popularity and the Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism,” Truthout,March 23, 2016.
  2. See Marx’s essay on “Estranged Labor,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm.
  3. Marx concludes that “In any given branch of industry, centralization would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested there were fused into a single capital. In a given society this limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.” Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Vintage Edition, 1976 [1867]), p. 779.
  4. Michael Roberts, The Long Depression (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2016); Edward L. Tapia, “The Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Decline—and Why It Matters,” New Politics, Summer 2019; Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Depression (London: Pluto Press, 2011).
  5. Raya Dunayevskaya, The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State Capitalism (Detroit: News & Letters, 1992); C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs, State Capitalism and World Revolution (Charles H. Kerr, 2013 [1950]); Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia (London: Pluto Press, 1974).
  6. Marx argues that in expanded reproduction or accumulation of capital proper, an increasing portion of the surplus value extracted from workers goes back into purchasing or producing means of production (machinery or buildings) at the expense of wages and in order to extract more surplus value from workers. The bulk of the surplus value extracted goes back into obtaining means of production to increase the productivity of workers to produce more surplus value to expand value as an end in itself. That is the logic of capital.  Capital, Vol, 1, pp. 735-737.
  7. Steven Lee Meyers and Chris Buckley. “Novel Virus Tests China’s Authoritarian Bargain,” New York Times, January 27, 2020; Sui-Lee Wee. “Feeble Health System in China Strains to Combat Deadly Virus,” New York Times. January 28, 2020; Li Yuan. “China’s Rifts Laid Bare by Outbreak,” New York Times, Jan. 29, 2020; Li Yuan. “In China, Virus Spurred Rush of Blame Shifting,” New York Times, Feb. 4, 2020.

 

Nine Years Against Assad

By: February 10, 2020
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As Bashar al-Assad brutally crushes the last areas not under his control, Joseph Daher, Syrian socialist activist, gave this wide-ranging interview to the UK-based journal Socialist Resistance.

Socialist Resistance — The movement for democracy which erupted in 2011 in Syria, alongside others in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), gave hope that the Syrian people could overthrow the Assad dictatorship. After nine years, there are over 5 million refugees and 500,000 dead. Assad now seems to be on the verge of winning, but what will be left of the country? Can the regime survive?

JOSEPH DAHER – The country has suffered vast damage and widespread destruction, because of Damascus’ war machine, backed by its allies Russia and Iran. Of course other foreign actors contributed to the displacement of the populations and destruction in the country — particularly the military interventions of the US and Turkey and, to a lesser extent, the armed opposition as well as hardline Islamist and jihadist militias.

Additionally, six million Syrians are internally displaced. Around 90 percent of the population live under the poverty line, and more than 11 million people are in need of humanitarian aid inside the country. The cost of reconstruction has been estimated at around$400 billion.

The regime can however survive in the short and mid term with the assistance of Moscow and Teheran. Its resilience does not mean however the end of its contradictions or of dissent, especially in areas held by opposition forces. Despite engaging in repression, the regime still faces challenges, as the reasons that led to the uprising are more than ever present. These include the absence of democracy, and profound socio-economic injustice and inequalities.

These conditions do not necessarily directly translate into political opportunities. No viable organized opposition has appeared. The failures of the opposition in exile and armed opposition groups have left many people who had sympathized with the uprising feeling frustrated and bitter. The absence of a structured, independent, democratic, and inclusive Syrian political opposition, which would have appealed to the poorer classes and social activists, has made it difficult for various sectors of the population to unite and challenge the regime on a national scale.

The latest demonstrations in Sweida against the economic situation and difficult living conditions, an often repeated criticism in many other areas of the country, and the continued protests and clashes in Daraa against the regime’s forces, demonstrate this situation: regional protests without coordination between them.

SR – How did Assad win? For a while he only controlled a small part of the country, the rest being controlled by the democratic forces and ISIS/Daesh. What remains of these democratic forces and of any left progressive movements? What discussion has there been amongst these forces about the course they adopted since 2011?

JD – It was first of all the foreign assistance provided by Iran and Russia (in addition to Hezbollah and other foreign sectarian militias) that has enabled Assad to survive. Then the regime prioritized violence and prevented any opening up to include sections of the opposition or meet demands of the protest movement. In tandem with repression, it mobilized its popular base through sectarian, tribal, regional, and clientelist connections; while portraying the protesters as extremist terrorists or armed gangs seeking to destabilize the country to scare sectors of the society.

Peaceful, non-sectarian, and democratic activists were the main targets of the regime. At the same time, the regime freed significant numbers of Islamic fundamentalist and jihadist personalities with previous military experience from Iraq and other countries, and let them proliferate to realize its own characterization of an uprising led by religious extremists.

The regime also adapted its strategies and tools of repression according to regional variations in sectarian and ethnic composition. The aim of the regime’s high officials was nevertheless consistent: to suppress the protests, divide people according to primordial identities, and instil fear and distrust among them to break the inclusive spirit of the movement. In this perspective, the instrumentalization of sectarian and ethnic differences by the regime was used to divide the popular movement.

The financial assistance given by the regime’s allies, Iran and Russia, allowed it to maintain state institutions and provisions. The state remained the leading employee and provider of resources and services throughout the war. The catastrophic humanitarian and socio-economic situation in Syria, therefore, reinforced the role of the state.

Similarly, the opposition in exile, first represented by the Syrian National Council (SNC) and then by the Coalition, failed to constitute a credible alternative. In both cases, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), other religious fundamentalists, and sectarian groups and personalities dominated. The players within the SNC and the Coalition believed that the end justified the means, but the end is determined by the means used. This resulted in the absence of an organized democratic or progressive pole on a national level within or outside the country during these years, while letting reactionary Islamic groups occupy the political and military space. This led to a situation where the rhetorical commitments of the opposition in exile to inclusive democracy were not credible enough to persuade large sections of the population to abandon the regime and join the uprising. Further, they were not able to develop any solid and inclusive alternative institutions to the state.

The growth of reactionary Islamic fundamentalist and jihadist forces further reduced the capacities of the protest movement to provide an inclusive and democratic message, including to those who were not involved directly in the events but who sympathized with the uprising’s initial goals. The rise of those Islamic movements had various causes, including the regime’s initial facilitation of their expansion, the repression of the protest movement leading to radicalization among some elements, better organization and discipline, and finally support from foreign countries.

These reactionary forces constituted the second wing of the counterrevolution after the Assad regime. They did not have the same destructive capacities as Assad’s state apparatus, but their outlook on society and the future of Syria stood in complete opposition to the initial objectives of the uprising and its inclusive message for democracy, social justice, and equality. Their policies were equally repulsive to the most conscious sections of the protest movement and threatened religious minorities, women, and many Sunnis who feared their ascension to power because they did not share their view of society and religion. Their ideology, political program, and practices proved to be violent not only against the regime’s forces, but also against democratic and progressive groups, both civilian and armed, and ethnic and religious minorities.

The democratic and progressive forces have been repressed severely in Syria. With the exception of the PYD (Democratic Union Party – Kurdish democratic confederalist political party),which still remains in Syria, most of the groups and activists have been pushed into exile, if not killed and imprisoned.

There has been some discussion looking back at the protest movement among democratic and progressive forces, but it is limited.

One factor that could play a role in shaping future events is the unprecedented documentation of the uprising, including video recordings, testimonials, and other evidence. In the 1970s, Syria saw strong popular and democratic resistance, with significant strikes and demonstrations throughout the country, but this history was not well known by the new generation of protesters in 2011. The revolutionary uprising of 2011, however, with its vast documentary archive, will remain in the popular memory and be a crucial resource for those who resist in the future.

SR – Despite the public knowledge that the people of Syria were confronted with the barbarisms of Assad and ISIS, why was so little, if any, practical support given to the democratic forces?

JD – Indeed, much more could have been done in terms of international solidarity, and the reasons it wasn’t is due to a generalized crisis of the Left. If it used to raise its internationalist flag very high, but you now have sections that are much more nationalistic, taking sides with this or that camp. That’s a direct result of the weakening of class consciousness. And yet all our destinies are linked. Yet the Occupy movement came out of Tahrir Square. And look at the refugee issue and how it is influencing European states — including through the rise of authoritarian and even fascistic parties.

At the same time, you have sections of the Left focusing only on Western imperialism, without trying to learn from popular struggles from the Middle East. They point to their limitations alone, without noticing that these uprisings have shaken the world. In addition to this, some sections of the left refuse to denounce some regional despotic regimes

I however think among small sections of the left, internationalism is still important. Not only in a rhetorical sense, but as a means to learn from certain experiences abroad. This is without forgetting the large participation of progressive and democratic groups and individuals initially in the Syrian uprising, especially in its first years.

SR – What has been the role of the intervention of various foreign countries: Russia and Iran, but also western imperialism? Many on the left opposed western imperialist intervention but were silent on the military support of Russia to Assad. Some even supported him. Why?

JD – The main dynamics of international imperialist and regional interventions were initially motivated by geopolitical considerations rather than economic objectives. Syria was at the centre of many geopolitical games in the region, and its overthrow could change the balance of forces in significant ways. Assad’s regime benefited from these divisions and the assistance given by its allies to This was undoubtedly the most important factor in the resilience of the regime.

Without Russian and Iranian assistance — including Hezbollah and other sectarian militias — the regime would not have been able to sustain itself politically, militarily, and economically. This intervention was key. Even though Russia’s official massive intervention started in 2015, it had troops on the ground before that were aiding the security services. Iranian-backed forces — Hezbollah and others — played a role from 2012.

Today, both countries are interested in benefiting from the spoils of war. Russian companies have been the most successful in this regard.

Iranian and Russian possibilities in Syria were also related to the weakening of US imperialism in the region, especially following its defeat in Iraq, the international financial crisis in 2008, and the uprisings which started at the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011.

Western imperialism, did not want to see a radical change in the status quo vis-à-vis the Syrian regime. This was reflected by the absence of any kind of large, organized, and decisive military assistance by the United States, Western states or both, to the Syrian armed opposition groups. Western governments provided only “nonlethal” support and humanitarian assistance while resisting pleas to arm opposition forces or establish safe zones or no-fly zones.

In addition, the United States opposed supplying various FSA forces with antiaircraft missiles (Manpads) capable of taking down warplanes, which would have curtailed to some extent the murderous and destructive air strikes, particularly at low altitudes. In July 2012, the United States halted the provision of at least 18 Manpads sourced from Libya

The rise of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and the establishment of its caliphate in June 2014 following the conquest of Mosul in Iraq pushed Washington to re-engage its forces more deeply in the region. In September 2014, President Obama announced the establishment of a broad international coalition composed of nearly 60 states at its peak, to defeat the jihadist group. However, only a few participated effectively in the campaign in Syria (five states) and Iraq (eight), as the United States conducted approximately 85 percent of its total combat missions in Syria and Iraq in 2015. Washington developed a strategy of “IS first,” with the objective of defeating the group.

This is when in the framework of the strategy of “IS first,” and following the complete failure to assist FSA forces in northern areas, the United States increasingly supported the YPG (People’s Protection Units – Kurdish militia) forces through the coalition known as the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces), in which the PYD played the leading and dominant role. Washington considered the SDF the most effective fighting force in Syria against IS, although it was not ready to support Kurdish national rights in Syria and elsewhere.

The election of Trump did not change the strategic positioning of Washington over Syria (the priority was still the war on terror and maintaining the structures of the regime), despite a more aggressive and firm policy toward the Assad regime to make it respect the boundaries set by the US administration. Iran’s influence in some regions of Syria was also checked. Washington did not hesitate to bomb the Syrian regime’s military bases or forces on several occasions

Despite the confusion over Trump’s strategy in Syria, US policy did not radically change towards the Assad regime throughout Obama’s and Trump’s early mandates, focusing on a political transition favouring stability and the maintenance of the regime’s structures, as well as the war on terror. The major difference was Trump’s focus on opposition to Iran and seeing its influence diminished in Syria.

Gulf monarchies, led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar on one side, and Turkey on the other, adopted a more hostile position toward the Assad regime at the end of the summer 2011 after seeking a form of understanding with Damascus and some superficial reforms. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and private networks from the Gulf monarchies funded and backed military and political groups, particularly Islamic fundamentalist and some jihadist movements, as a means of promoting forces on the ground that served their interests.

Riyadh’s main objective was to weaken Iran, seen as its main enemy in the region. Overthrowing the Assad regime, the main ally of Tehran in the region, was in Riyadh’s interest to strengthen a Sunni axis led by Saudi Arabia against Iran. On its side, Qatar saw the uprising as an opportunity to increase its own regional influence, notably through the MB and other Islamic fundamentalist actors. The Gulf monarchies feared the establishment of a form of democracy in Syria, which would threaten their own interests if democratic ideas and activities expanded in the MENA region. From this perspective, they preferred a sectarian war and encouraged a sectarian narrative through their media and funding.

Similarly, Turkey initially supported the overthrow of Assad’s regime after failing to convince Damascus in the first months of the conflict to accept the integration of opposition forces close to Ankara in a unity government and superficial reforms. This objective was progressively abandoned, however, and the Turkish priority increasingly became the defeat of the Kurdish PYD and the cleansing of its forces at the borders. Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups and Islamic fundamentalist groups under Turkish influence were used as proxies in Ankara’s war against the Kurds. The policies of Gulf monarchies and Turkey promoted jihadist forces while dividing the FSA units through selective sponsoring. This situation amplified the sectarian effects of Iranian and Hezbollah interventions. This contributed to the Islamization of the armed opposition and the deepening of sectarian and Kurdish-Arab tensions. Demonstration, London, 28 December 2019 (photo: Steve Eason)

Many left-wing figures and groups, often from Stalinist, third worldist and campist frameworks, have analyzed the Syrian revolutionary process using a “top-down” approach or a war of blocs of countries, in which people need to choose a side. They characterize the popular Syrian uprising in Manichean terms as an opposition between two camps: the Western states, the Gulf monarchies, and Turkey (the “aggressors”) on one side, and Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah (the “resistance”) on the other. In doing so, they ignored the popular political and socio-economic dynamics at the grassroots . Moreover, they often focus disproportionately on the dangers of ISIS and other salafists and jihadist organizations while ignoring the role the Assad regime played in their rise. These discrepancies must be addressed within leftist circles and movements.

ISIS’s expansion is a fundamental element of the counter-revolution in the Middle East that emerged as the result of authoritarian regimes crushing popular movements linked to the 2011 Arab Spring. The interventions of regional and international states have contributed to ISIS’s development as well. Finally, neoliberal policies that have impoverished the popular class, together with the repression of democratic and trade union forces, have been key in helping ISIS and Islamic fundamentalist forces grow.

Only by ridding the region of the conditions that allowed them to develop can we resolve the crisis. Empowering those on the ground who are fighting to overthrow authoritarian regime and face reactionary groups is part and parcel of this approach.

The initial popular resistance and self organization from below has also been the most neglected aspect of the Syrian uprising. Since the revolution began, some sections of the left and anti-war movements, especially in the UK and the United States, have refused to act in solidarity with the Syrian uprising under the pretext that “the main enemy is at home.” In other words, it is more important to defeat the imperialists and bourgeoisie in our own societies, even if that means implicitly supporting the Assad regime or Russian state.

These sections of the left frequently cite communist thinker Karl Liebknecht He is famous for his 1915 declaration that “the enemy is at home,” a statement made in condemnation of imperialist aggression against Russia led by his native Austria–Germany. In quoting him, many have decontextualized his views. From his perspective, fighting against the enemy at home did not mean ignoring foreign regimes repressing their own people or failing to show solidarity with the oppressed. Indeed, Liebknecht believed we must oppose our own ruling class’s push for war by “cooperating with the proletariat of other countries whose struggle is against their own imperialists.”

As leftists, our support must go to the revolutionary people struggling for freedom and emancipation. As Liebknecht said: “Ally yourselves to the international class struggle against the conspiracies of secret diplomacy, against imperialism, against war, for peace within the socialist spirit.” We can exclude none of these elements from our struggle to build a progressive leftist platform on Syria and everywhere else.

In the face of geopolitical tensions instrumentalized by the imperialist power of the US and regional powers such as Iran, the struggling popular classes should remain the lodestar of progressives and internationalists around the world

SR – What has been the relationship of the Kurds in Northern Syria with the Assad regime?

JD – Historically speaking, the Assad regime continued the discriminatory policies of previous Syrian governments toward the Kurds and maintained an institutionalized racist system against Kurdish populations in Syria. Between 1972 -1977, a policy of colonization was implemented in predominantly Kurdish regions of Syria as part of the Arab Belt plan. Around 25,000 “Arab” peasants, whose lands were flooded by the construction of the Tabqa Dam, were sent to the High Jazirah, where the Syrian regime established “modern villages” adjacent to Kurdish villages.

Meanwhile, the regime developed a policy of co-opting certain segments of Kurdish society — especially with the mounting opposition in the country at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, and to serve foreign policy objectives. Some Kurdish elites participated in the regime’s system, such as Kurdish leaders from the religious brotherhoods like Muhammad Sa’id Ramadan al-Buti and official sheikhs such as Ahmad Kuftaro, mufti of the republic between 1964 and 2004. Several Kurds held positions of local authority, while others reached high-ranking ones, such as Prime Minister Mahmud Ayyubi (1972–76), or Hikmat Shikaki, chief of military intelligence (1970– 74) and chief of staff (1974–98). However, this was on the condition that they not demonstrate any particular Kurdish ethnic consciousness in their rhetoric or political strategy. Some Kurds were also absorbed at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s into elite divisions of the army or linked to specific military groups serving the regime. Another form of co-optation was the complicity of local security services with certain families of active Kurdish smugglers in the Jazirah on the Syria/Turkey and Syria/Iraq frontiers.

This policy of co-optation included some Kurdish political parties as well. The Assad regime established a sort of alliance with the PKK, and the Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan became an official guest of the regime at the beginning of the 1980s as Syrian and Turkish tensions flared up. The PKK was authorized to recruit members and fighters, reaching between 5,000 and 10,000 persons in the 1990s and launching military operations from Syria against the Turkish army. The PKK had offices in Damascus and several northern cities. PKK militants took de facto control over small portions of Syrian territory, particularly in Afrin. Other Kurdish political parties also collaborated with the Syrian regime. Among these were the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)led by Jalal Talabani, who had been in Syria since 1972, and later in 1979, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), affiliated with the Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani.

The condition sine qua non of support from the Syrian regime was the abstention of the Kurdish movements of Iraq and Turkey from any attempt at mobilizing Syrian Kurds against Assad. Damascus was able to instrumentalize these Kurdish groups by using them as a foreign policy tool to achieve some regional ambitions and, at the national level, by diverting the Kurdish issue away from Syria and toward Iraq and Turkey.

Relations between the Kurdish political parties and the Syrian regime increasingly worsened through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s. An improvement in Turkish/Syrian relations prompted Syrian security forces to launch several waves of repression against the remaining PKK elements in Syria. Following the exile of Öcalan in 1998 and the imprisonment of many PKK members, the party’s activists tried to establish new parties, with the double objective of evading state repression and providing social support for its thousands of members and sympathizers. The PYD was created in 2003 as a successor to the PKK in Syria, part of the party’s regional strategy to establish local branches in neighbouring countries. Relations were similarly weakening with KDP and PUK from 2000 as Damascus was trying to normalize relations with Baghdad, which meant an end to its interference in Iraqi Kurdish affairs.

In 2004, the Kurdish uprising began in the town of Qamishli and spread through the predominantly Kurdish-inhabited regions of the country — Jazirah, Afrin, but also in Aleppo and Damascus, where demonstrations were severely repressed by the security forces. The regime appealed for the collaboration of some Arab tribes of the northeast that had historical ties to the regime. Around 2,000 protesters were arrested and 36 killed, while others were forced to leave the country. The Kurdish Intifada, as well as developments in Iraqi Kurdistan that saw increased autonomy and the raising of Kurdish flags and symbols, boosted Syrian Kurdish people’s morale and confidence in mobilizing for their rights and strengthened the nationalist consciousness of the youth and their will for change.

The Kurdish Youth Movement in Syria (known by its Kurdish acronym, TCK) was clandestinely established in March 2005, the year after the repression of the Kurdish uprising, and became the largest of the political youth groups after 2004. It would go on to be one of the key actors in the 2011 protests in Kurdish-majority areas.

Kurds continued to assert themselves by organizing events celebrating their ethnic identity and protesting against anti-Kurdish policies of the regime. Kurdish students of various political groups were also very active throughout the years on university campuses, particularly in Damascus and Aleppo.

Today, Bashar al-Assad and other officials have accused the PYD of being a “US stooge” and “tool” and have said they will “crush it,” considering Raqqa (former Da’esh capital, now PYD-held) to be occupied territory. In Afrin, for instance, the Russians pushed the PYD to make a deal with the regime, saying “if you remove all your heavy weapons and give in to the regime, Turkey will not come in and invade this area.” The PYD refused, and the result was the Turkish occupation of Afrin in 2018.

Even if there are now negotiations, the regime has refused any kind of conditions put by the PYD for federalism or decentralization. It’s wrong to say therefore has claimed that they’re allies, even if at some points there have been understandings between them.

SR – For a while Rojava was a source of hope with its local self-organisation and the positive role played by women. After Turkey’s invasion of the area, where is this movement now?

JD – Faced with regional and international pressures on the one hand, more especially of Turkey, and by the regime’s increasing willingness to reconquer all of Syria on the other, PYD officials more and more sought a form of reconciliation with Damascus to maintain its institutions and preserve its organizational structure within the country. Having seen the situation change in favour of the regime, some PYD officials had already declared their readiness to dialogue with the regime by the end of 2017. However, as SDF officials themselves recognized, major challenges stand in the way of future talks — notably the continuous absence of recognition of Kurdish rights and a federal political system.

Despite continuing talks, regime officials did not accept any of the conditions of the PYD, while state officials and the media continue to attack the Kurdish Party. The PYD has been seeking Russian mediation for talks with Damascus in order to prevent any invasion of Turkish forces against the regions they controlled, without much success. Russia has declared on numerous occasions that the Syrian regime must take control of the country’s northern provinces, notably to regain control of Syria’s oil reserves.

As I have said on many occasions, just as the rise of the uprising in Syria had pushed the regime to seek occasional and temporal agreements with the PYD, this threat was increasingly disappearing as its position strengthened and it recovered new territories with the assistance of its allies. The regime, therefore, could once more turn its forces against Kurdish inhabited regions or increasingly undermine its autonomy, especially with international actors, Russia and the United States, progressively abandoning the Kurdish group as their objectives differed from the latter after periods of collaborations. Turkey’s latest invasion in October 2019 reduced even more the PYD’s control.

As we have seen, the destiny of the Kurdish people in Syria was inextricably linked to the causes and conditions of the Syrian uprising. Therefore, their future is in danger and facing multiple threats, similar to the rest of the protest movement.

SR – Paradoxically, as Assad is about to win, new movements for democracy and against corruption erupt around Syria in Lebanon, Iraq and even Iran. What are the dynamics of these movements and what hope do they give?

JD – In Lebanon and Iraq, popular protest movements have been radically challenging the sectarian and neoliberal system, explicitly denouncing all the political parties ruling both countries as responsible for the deterioration of socio-economic conditions, corruption and sectarian tensions. Sectarianism in these two countries is, in fact, one of the main instruments used by the ruling parties to strengthen control over the working classes. Sectarianism must be understood as a tool of the Lebanese and Iraqi political elites to intervene ideologically in the class struggle, strengthen their control over the popular classes and keep them in a position of subordination in relation to their sectarian leaders. In the past, the ruling elites have succeeded in stopping or crushing protest movements not only by repression but by playing on sectarian and ethnic divisions. While large segments of the population sank into poverty, the dominant sectarian parties and various groups of the economic elite took advantage of the privatization processes, neoliberal policies, and the control of public prosecutors to develop powerful networks of patronage, patronage and corruption. Sectarianism must be seen as a constitutive and active element of current forms of state and class power in Lebanon and Iraq.

The demonstrators in Iraq also protested against Iran’s role in the country, chanting “Iran, Iran, outside, outside”. Tehran has had massive political and economic influence in Iraq since the US occupation in 2003, through its support for Islamic Shia fundamentalist movements and its armed militias.

In Iran, new mass demonstrations have taken place since the Iranian government acknowledged and initially denied responsibility for the crash of a Ukrainian plane over Tehran. Demonstrators in Tehran and many cities across the country expressed solidarity with the grieving families of the passengers and crew, and also launched hostile slogans against the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Revolutionary Guard Corps (Pasdaran), including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, to the cries of “Death to the Dictator”.

Faced with the demonstrations against the regime, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, responded with a strong speech against the United States and European states, and against the popular protest, while praising the role of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and General Soleimani in maintaining security in the region and the country.

In Iraq, Iran and its allies in the country are still trying to hijack the popular protest movement by limiting their demand to the departure of US troops, without any change in the Iraqi confessional and neo-liberal political system. In particular, the Shia Islamic fundamentalist leader Moqtada Sadr has called for a massive demonstration to denounce the US presence in Iraq.

In Lebanon, the popular revolt against the confessional and neo-liberal ruling class has entered its fourth month of struggle, with a clear tendency towards radicalization, as evidenced by the almost daily attacks against the headquarters of the Bank of Lebanon and other private banks, and the increasingly violent altercations with the forces of law and order.

I believe some lessons can learned from the experiences of Sudan and Tunisia, which are both in a less bad situation in comparison with other countries that witnessed popular uprising in the region. The main characteristic of the popular protest movement in Sudan and in Tunisia is the presence of democratic and progressive political and social actors with capacities of mobilisations and organisation, and more especially rooted in two pillars which until today play a central role in these two countries:

– A mass organized labour movement. The Sudanese Professional Associations, and UGTT trade union in Tunisia.

– Mass organized women’s and feminist movements. Women have played an essential role in the protest in Sudan and Tunisia. They also play a key role in workers’ organizations, including the Sudanese Professionals Association and the UGTT.

In the face of geopolitical tensions instrumentalized by the imperialist power of the US and regional powers such as Iran, the struggling popular classes remain the lodestar of progressives and internationalists around the world.

Reposted from No Borders News.

A Brief on the Metal Workers’ Strike in Turkey

By: February 9, 2020
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Dear Friends,

Dear Comrades,

First of all, let us thank you at the beginning and once again, for your show of solidarity with the metal workers of Turkey.

The bargaining process which covered more than a hundred thousand workers was a candidate to become an important turning point for the current political situation in the country. The despotic regime of Erdoğan and his government had openly sided with bosses in the previous years’ collective bargaining and the same would happen in this one also. It was almost certain that Erdoğan would ban the strike. This objectively meant that the workers’ struggle with plain economic demands was moving towards a head on confrontation with the regime. This would obviously bring about a situation where working class would act like the driving force of the whole countries’ struggle for freedom against the despotism or even might undertake the lead of it. This was explicit in the enthusiasm, massiveness and resoluteness of the workers during the union meetings, demonstrations and alert actions like short hourly work stoppages etc. This would potentially create a situation where the struggle for bread and freedom (two main branches of struggle in Turkey flowing from separate roads) would be united strong and change the whole scene.

Under these conditions, international solidarity was extremely precious…

The international statement of solidarity was published on RedMed and Gerçek in English and that the call for the solidarity has been translated, apart from Turkish, into 6 languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, Persian and Bulgarian) and was widely distributed internationally. As a result of this, more than 200 signatures from across 22 countries (Argentina, Greece, Russian Federation, France, Cuba, Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Iran, India, Lebanon, Canada, USA, Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Brazil, Peru, Italy, Spain, Austria and Sweden) were collected just within days. In addition, there were numerous messages of solidarity directed to the workers which have all been conveyed to their addressees together with the international statement in an earlier stage.

Just days before the workers were about to launch their strike, there came a blow to their struggle from the trade union bureaucracies. First, the largest trade union (Turkish Metal Workers Union) signed an agreement with the bosses days before the strike was due to start, also taking the union ranking third in the industry with it, the one that is close to the government party. Then the left-wing United Metal Workers Union was called to a meeting with the bosses at midnight which they conformed to. It seems that, in this meeting the administration of the United Metal Workers Union, too, accepted the same terms with the others. But this was rejected next day where majority of the factories and workers denounced the conditions of the deal. The decision was eventually taken after an hours long discussion of union representatives of all the factories and by the workers chanting the slogans echoing the catchwords of our international call of solidarity: strike, occupy, resist!

But only several days after this meeting, deliberately, United Metal signed the very same deal -which was rejected earlier by the workers- under great pressure from the government and the bosses. Despite their disappointment, the majority of the workers, understood that they were on favorable ground feeling the strength of their long-awaited unity enough to reclaim the unofficially proscribed right to strike and whose fervent will of continuing the fight was still alive but were betrayed by their leaders, were not organized enough to overcome the limiting conditions and de facto carry out the strike and launch occupations. Yet the combative spirit that came alive made possible gains. The sheer strength of the workers’ movement which forced the bosses to triple their initial proposal on the wage increases and more importantly to cast aside the longer contract terms that they tried to impose which was pretty disadvantageous for the workers.

The entire process, including the international solidarity shown, undoubtedly added to the experience of the workers, especially the most class-conscious ones. DIP, the Revolutionary Workers’ Party, was very active during the whole struggle both in the factories or within the trade unions and also in the bosom of the sections of society that leaned to develop concrete acts of solidarity.

Long live international proletarian solidarity!

Strike, occupy, resist!

What are the Lessons of the UK Election?

By: February 7, 2020
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There have been many articles attempting to explain the crushing defeat of the Labour Party in the UK election of 12 December 2019. Some of them are very insightful, and list reasons that undoubtedly played a part in that defeat. However, I have not come across any which highlight two factors that are important, namely insufficient internationalism and a failure to uphold democracy strongly enough. Let me explain – but first, a brief summary of other viewpoints.

Reasons for defeat

Kim Moody’s excellent analysis of the UK election results suggests that the most mistaken conclusion to draw from Labour’s defeat is Joe Biden’s allegation that Jeremy Corbyn failed because he went too far to the left. As Moody points out, the centrists in the election fared even worse, and this has been true not just in Britain but in many other countries, where voters have deserted centrist parties to vote for parties further to the left or the right. In such a scenario, for a party challenging the far right in the UK or elsewhere, moving to the centre sounds like a recipe for defeat. Moody and other commentators also point out that most of the individual items in the Labour Party manifesto were popular; it was the haphazard presentation of them that made it look as if the party was promising new freebies every day without properly costing them, leading to scepticism that they could deliver on their promises.[1]

Another major reason for defeat, according to Moody and many others, was Corbyn himself, and this is supported by anecdotes from Labour campaigners who were told by prospective voters that they could not vote for the party while it was headed by him. Corbyn supporters counter that he faced a concerted campaign of vilification from the media and his opponents within and outside the party, and this is certainly true. Surveys showed that as a result of repeated allegations of antisemitism, many people thought that a third or more of Labour Party members were accused of antisemitic remarks or attacks when in fact it was fewer than 1 per cent. As Rivkah Brown observed, selective targeting of the Labour Party for antisemitism, when all evidence points to antisemitism being far more prevalent on the far right, left Jewish leaders bewildered when, soon after Johnson’s victory, which they clearly favoured, South Hampstead Synagogue and several shops in the locality were daubed with antisemitic graffiti by neo-Nazis.[2]

However, Corbyn’s failure to respond adequately to the media campaign against him even when he had a chance to do so on TV interviews was also part of the problem. Moreover, Moody points out that the decline in Labour votes in the constituencies of the North and Midlands that went over to the Tories had been going on for a long time, partly due to a decline in local grassroots organising. In addition, it is likely that Corbyn’s Brexit policy – crafted not by the party as a whole, not even by the shadow cabinet, but by a group of advisors and officials around him – played an important role in the Labour defeat. Weaknesses in foreign policy also contributed.

The Brexit debacle

An internationalist position on Brexit would require explaining to working-class voters in deindustrialised regions that the cause of their misery was not the EU or immigrants, as the far right had been telling them, but British government policies (including attacks on employment conditions, privatisation of utilities, and running down of public services), and changes in global capitalism, including technological changes.[3] This is of course a much more complex message than the anti-immigrant message presented by the far right, but conveying it is crucial to finding realistic solutions to the problems being experienced. Given the changes capitalism has gone through since the latter part of the 20th century, even a social-democratic programme cannot be achieved in one country: ‘The world is more globalised, more integrated and joined up than ever before. There is no going back. There are no national solutions to our economic and social problems.’[4]

This is exactly what Jeremy Corbyn argued in a thoroughly internationalist speech during the run-up to the 2016 referendum: ‘In the coming century, we face huge challenges, as a people, as a continent and as a global community.  How to deal with climate change. How to address the overweening power of global corporations and ensure they pay fair taxes. How to tackle cyber-crime and terrorism. How to ensure we trade fairly and protect jobs and pay in an era of globalisation… All these issues are serious and pressing, and self-evidently require international co-operation. Collective international action through the European Union is clearly going to be vital to meeting these challenges. Britain will be stronger if we co-operate with our neighbours in facing them together… Over the years I have been critical of many decisions taken by the EU, and I remain critical of its shortcomings… Europe needs to change. But that change can only come from working with our allies in the EU.’[5] He reiterated this conviction as late as October 2017, which shows that his personal stance was unchanged even if the party position had shifted,[6] and this undoubtedly played a major role in winning enough votes and seats for Labour to eliminate Theresa May’s majority in the 2017 election.

However, a factor underemphasised by Corbyn was the racist underpinnings of Brexit. According to Moody, ‘The primary motivations for many of those who voted in favour of leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum were informed by English nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment, but in 2019 these were reinforced by the argument that a democratic decision had been made, the people had decided.’ While anti-immigrant sentiment was ostensibly directed against EU citizens, in practice it also extended to Black and Asian immigrants, especially Muslims, as the significant rise in racist attacks since the referendum shows.[7] Hostility to refugees was revealed in a UKIP poster, which had an eerie resemblance to a Nazi poster, depicting thousands of Syrian and other refugees whom Britain would allegedly be compelled to admit if it remained part of the EU.[8] Anti-Muslim bigotry was stirred up, for example by allegations that Turkey was about to be admitted to the EU, and millions of Muslims from that country would then migrate to Britain.[9]

These were the themes hammered out 24/7 by the far right, but this hate campaign was not counteracted strongly enough except by a few Labour MPs like Jo Cox, who opposed Brexit, supported immigrants and refugees, took action in solidarity with democracy activists and humanitarian workers in Syria, and was murdered by a neo-Nazi.[10] If Labour had launched a powerful anti-racist campaign depicting immigrants as friends and neighbours, teachers, doctors, nurses and care workers, people whose work benefits society and whose tax and National Insurance payments contribute to Britain’s economy, if it had promoted compassion for refugees and attempts to help them in their home countries, it might have been able to attract many of those who had not voted in the referendum as well as new young voters, and perhaps even Leave supporters who were not hardcore English nationalists.

Instead, as in earlier avatars of the party, anti-immigrant sentiment was appeased rather than being combated. Even if one concedes that in current circumstances it would be suicidal for a party seeking to be elected to power to take a fully internationalist position supporting open borders, there is absolutely no excuse for seeking to close borders that are already open, or take away rights that immigrants already have, which is precisely what Brexit entails. For anyone who claims to be an internationalist, that should be a red line: a line that was crossed by Corbyn when he refused to make a commitment to campaigning for Remain in any future referendum.

By 2019, the Labour Party’s Brexit position seemed designed to alienate Leavers and Remainers alike. Corbyn’s proposal for a soft Brexit encountered the criticism that although creating less economic disruption than a hard Brexit, it would leave the UK subject to EU rules in which it would no longer have any say, thus resulting in a loss, not gain, of control. In addition, Labour Leavers impatient to get Brexit over and done with were offered the prospect of yet another period of negotiations with an uncertain outcome. On the other side, the position offered nothing to Labour Remainers. The debacle was amplified by Labour MPs who voted in parliament for the Tory Brexit deals, leaving Labour Remainers in their constituencies – probably the majority of Labour voters even in predominantly Leave constituencies – with no one to vote for.

Then there were Corbyn’s advisors who opposed a confirmatory referendum or People’s Vote on the grounds that the result of the 2016 referendum embodied ‘the people’s will’. It is entirely in accordance with the politics of the far right that they would represent the result of the 2016 referendum as embodying ‘the will of the people’. What is astonishing is that so few challenged this. According to the electoral commission, 72.2 per cent of the electorate voted in the referendum. Of this, 51.9 per cent – i.e. 37.4 per cent of the electorate – voted to leave, and 34.73 per cent of the electorate voted to remain. So, the leavers were a minority of the electorate as a whole even at the time of the referendum, since 27.87 percent did not vote. In this referendum, above all, 16- and 17-year-olds should have been allowed to vote, since the results would have the longest-lasting impact on them, but they were not. Saying that Brexit represented ‘the will of the people’ amounts to saying that 34.73 per cent of the electorate who voted to remain, 27.87 per cent who didn’t vote, and the 16- and 17-year-olds who were not allowed to vote are all non-people. This is a common tactic of the far right – ‘only those who agree with us are part of “the people”’ – but should have been challenged vociferously by anyone who believes in democracy.

In addition, there were the multiple ways in which the Leave campaign acted illegally, including breaching spending limits.[11] A whistle-blower who was formerly an employee of Cambridge Analytica commented that if it had been an election, such irregularities would have invalidated the results and made it necessary to rerun it.[12] Brexit is arguably more important than an election since its results define the future for much longer, yet even among Remainers, hardly anyone made this point. Evidence of Russian meddling in the Brexit referendum created an even stronger argument for a People’s Vote. Indeed, the involvement of Donald Trump’s then campaign manager and chief strategist Steve Bannon as well as Russian state media and oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin in providing material assistance to the Brexit campaign suggests that the referendum result represented anything but the will of the British people.[13]

Yet Corbyn’s advisors as well as some Lexiteers, rather than making these points, opposed even a confirmatory referendum until the ‘Brexit-embodies-the-people’s-will’ propaganda was too entrenched to challenge. In fact, their position throughout was a weaker version of Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’. Their contention that Labour lost because it supported a People’s Vote is contradicted by the fact that Labour lost over 2.5 million votes while the Tories and Brexit Party picked up just 335,000, and Labour lost almost twice as many voters to the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Scottish National Party as the 700,000-800,000 they lost to the Tories and Brexit Party. In January 2019, officials from Hope not Hate and the TSSA union had presented Corbyn with polling evidence that in the event of an election, Labour would get a lower share of the vote in every seat in the country with a pro-Brexit position than it would with an anti-Brexit position, but the warning was dismissed. Corbyn’s U-turn from his original position destroyed his credibility, and his personal rating slumped to -50.[14] Can you trust a leader who in 2016 argues cogently that Britain should stay in the EU and a few years later changes his tune? The advisors who recommended such a shift played a significant role in trashing Corbyn’s reputation, because it convinced many progressives – precisely the people who were less likely to be swayed by the right-wing media – that he was untrustworthy.

Some Remain voters who had abandoned Labour drifted back after it announced its support for a People’s Vote, but others did not. Some didn’t vote at all. Leavers preferred to stay with Johnson’s more consistent position. By contrast the SNP, which had a social-democratic programme and consistent Remain position, gained votes and seats at the expense of the Tories. If Corbyn had argued consistently for a confirmatory referendum on any Brexit deal and promised to campaign for Remain, it is entirely possible that Labour could have done the same.

Does any of this matter, now that the election has been lost and Britain has left the EU? It certainly matters to the future of the Labour Party that it should display solidarity with EU citizens who, like the Windrush immigrants, settled in Britain when it was perfectly legal to do so and now face an uncertain future, perhaps arguing for their right to UK citizenship. It is also important to highlight every job, grant, consumer protection and environmental protection lost, every problem arising from Johnson’s Brexit, as well as work out an economic policy that takes account of global changes in capitalism, if Labour is to combat fascist assaults on immigrants and have a chance of winning the next election.

It is important to challenge the argument of the Labour right and Lexiteers that the working class supported Brexit and abandoned Labour. This presupposes an obsolete definition of ‘the working class’ as mainly engaged in industrial labour, mainly white, and mainly in permanent employment, whereas the new working class is mainly employed in the service sector, often on insecure contracts, and much more diverse in terms of ethnicity, age and gender. Many do not earn enough to support a decent standard of living. As Phil Hearse observes, these sections of the working class voted massively for Remain in the 2016 referendum, and did not abandon Labour in 2019. It was mainly a cross-class section of white pensioners in towns in the North and Midlands who were won over by the UKIP/Brexit Party/Tory right, voted heavily for Leave in 2016, and abandoned Labour in 2019. Hearse concludes, ‘The December 2019 election showed a working class divided on key issues of nationalism, immigration, and the xenophobia currently undergoing rehabilitation as “patriotism” … Labour’s Brexit position got mangled because it tried to… unite the working class behind incompatible positions… The right-wing offensive can only be countered by fighting, not by capitulation and accommodation.’[15]

A flawed foreign policy

In October 2016, commenting on the targeting of civilians by Russian airstrikes in Syria, Corbyn’s spokesman suggested there was too much focus on Russian atrocities in Syria ‘which sometimes diverts attention from other atrocities that are taking place,’ implying that civilian casualties from US-led coalition air-strikes were comparable in scale. On the one hand, even if that were true, the remark shows little compassion for the Syrians being killed and driven out of their homes; on the other, a reality check showed that the rate of civilian deaths resulting from Russian airstrikes was 8 times the rate resulting from coalition airstrikes.[16] Most importantly, the absence of solidarity with a democracy movement in a developing country demonstrated a sad lack of internationalism.

The attempt by the Corbyn team to cover up the brutality of Russian airstrikes in Syria illustrates what I call their pseudo-anti-imperialism: opposition only to Western imperialisms while supporting non-Western imperialisms like Russian imperialism and Iranian regional imperialism, which share responsibility with brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad for over half a million dead and over half the population displaced in Syria.[17] Putin’s is a far-right regime which has provided funding and other support to neo-fascist parties throughout Europe,[18] and to far-right politicians – including Trump – in the rest of the world. Evidence has emerged that it has supported Boris Johnson too.[19] One reason why it has bombed Syrian civilians and democracy activists in support of Bashar al-Assad is to entrench its power in the Middle East; but another is to support its neo-fascist allies in Europe by giving them an ‘enemy’ to demonise, namely millions of Syrian refugees fleeing for their lives.[20] It is disturbing that Corbyn’s team would want to cover up the crimes of such a regime; equally disturbing is the implicit contempt for Syrian working people struggling against unemployment, poverty and authoritarianism.

This attempt to whitewash the Russian war on Syrian civilians made it possible to represent Corbyn’s opposition to the US/UK war on Iraq as anti-Western rather than a principled anti-war position. Failing to condemn the Iranian state and its allied militias (including Hezbollah) for killing Syrian civilians, driving them out of their homes and taking over their land, while condemning the Israeli state for doing exactly the same to Palestinians, made it easier to portray Labour as antisemitic rather than a party that was taking a principled stand in opposition to crimes against humanity; similarly, failure to condemn the extreme right-wing Islamic Republic’s barbaric treatment of political prisoners made it possible to misrepresent condemnation of the extreme right-wing Israeli regime’s barbaric treatment of political prisoners as antisemitism rather than principled support for human rights, secularism and democracy. Support for Russian imperialism in Ukraine by neo-Stalinist elements of Corbyn’s team[21] made it possible to misrepresent his support for the Irish struggle for freedom from British imperialism as anti-British rather than anti-imperialist. In short, the Corbyn team’s incoherent anti-imperialism and selective solidarity with some struggles for national liberation and democracy but not others made it more difficult for Corbyn to defend correct positions he had taken in the past, and allowed the far right to demonise him.

There has been a tendency in sections of the left to define ‘right-wing’ simply in terms of neoliberalism and austerity policies, failing to recognise that right-wing politics are defined by ultra-nationalism, authoritarianism, racism and bigotry, and can coexist with state capitalism and/or neo-protectionism. If the far right has been gaining ground throughout the world in the past few decades, it is partly because a section of the left has been supporting it in the name of ‘anti-imperialism’ or opposition to the ‘elite’ or the ‘establishment’. It is important that the Labour left, while continuing to be critical of Western imperialisms and their authoritarian allies, should be equally critical of non-Western imperialisms and their authoritarian allies.

For example, at this moment, when Syrian civilians in Idlib are being slaughtered by Russian imperialism in alliance with Bashar al-Assad,[22] it is important to express solidarity with the victims and with Syrian democracy activists now either in exile or facing imminent extermination.[23] It is crucially important to extend solidarity to the mass uprising of Iranian workers, women, youth and oppressed minorities opposing exploitation, discrimination, authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, misogyny and militarism, rather than implicitly or explicitly siding with the corrupt, theocratic, repressive, militaristic imperialist regime they are opposing.[24] In the wake of the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, it is necessary, while criticising Trump for authorising it, to acknowledge that Soleimani was in Iraq as agent-in-chief of Iranian imperialism, which has reduced Iraq to the status of a colony;[25] that the majority of Iraqis (apart from the collaborators) want to be free of both US and Iranian imperialism;[26] and to support the Iraqi people’s struggle for democracy and national liberation rather than endorsing the agenda of Iranian imperialism in Iraq.

In other words, recognising ultra-nationalism, authoritarianism, racism and bigotry as hallmarks of the extreme right and fighting against them worldwide with all the resources at their disposal should be a central part of the agenda not just of the Labour left but of all those who claim to be socialists. It is important that the Labour left – and indeed all socialists – abandon the simplistic notion that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ which has been used to support anti-Western tyrants and imperialists, and take a consistent position in solidarity with all struggles against oppression and exploitation. They need to be able to deal with complexity; to understand that it is possible to oppose military assaults on Iran and sanctions that hurt ordinary Iranians, and at the same time oppose the repressive, extreme right-wing Islamic regime; to acknowledge that prejudice against Jews is racist and antisemitic, but denying Palestinians the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is also racist, and campaigning for those rights is not antisemitic.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that Corbyn was subjected to a barrage of right-wing abuse and vilification by the media, and that there were English nationalists among former Labour supporters, including a small section of the working class, who rejected him because he didn’t share their hostility to immigrants. But to explain the Labour defeat by these factors alone ignores a host of other reasons. It is crucial to acknowledge that their confused and confusing message was outmatched by Johnson’s clear and consistent message, however dishonest the latter might have been.

The Brexit campaign unleashed a wave of English ultra-nationalism and anti-immigrant hostility similar to the racist upsurge accompanying the 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech by Enoch Powell (who was also a Eurosceptic), in which he argued that immigration would erode the national character.[27] Like the Brexiteers, he claimed to be speaking on behalf of the people against a powerful elite, and referred to Black children as ‘piccaninnies’ as Boris Johnson did after him. At that time, he was countered by a powerful anti-racist movement in solidarity with immigrants, but a similar movement failed to materialise this time, despite Corbyn’s record of anti-racism in the past. The Labour Party and non-Labour Lexiteers need to acknowledge that in building a wall against immigrants who had hitherto been free to enter the UK, Brexit in any form is a right-wing measure, and not all their valid criticisms of the EU could justify supporting it. It should have been opposed by a campaign of solidarity with all immigrants and refugees, which is now needed more urgently than ever.

Many foreign policy positions of Corbyn and the Labour Party under his leadership have been absolutely correct, opposing Western imperialisms and extreme right-wing regimes allied with them. But refuting attacks on Corbyn based on his past positions was made more difficult by lack of consistency in abiding by the principles underlying these positions. There is a need to forge a foreign policy offering consistent support to all struggles for democracy. As the courageous students of Amir Kabir University in Tehran affirm, ‘The only way to escape the current crisis is to return to a policy based on people’s democratic rights, a policy that will not rush into the arms of imperialism due to its fear of despotism, and one that in the name of resistance and fighting against imperialism will not legitimize despotism.’[28]

 

References

[1] Kim Moody, ‘The UK election: A car crash on the left side of the road,’ New Politics, 28 December 2019. https://newpol.org/the-uk-election-a-car-crash-on-the-left-side-of-the-road/

[2] Rivkah Brown, ‘The antisemitic monster rising from the slime is not Corbynism – it is white nationalism,’ The Independent, 31 December 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/antisemitism-london-graffiti-hate-crime-corbyn-johnson-tories-a9264746.html

[3] Rohini Hensman, ‘Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India,’ 2011. New York: Columbia University Press and New Delhi: Tulika Books

[4] Andrew Burgin and Kate Hudson, ‘Election defeat: What happened and what next?’ Public Reading Rooms, https://prruk.org/the-election-defeat-what-happened-and-what-do-we-do-next/

[5] Jeremy Corbyn, ‘Europe needs to change… but I am voting to stay: Corbyn’s full speech on the EU,’ Labourlist, 14 April 2016. https://labourlist.org/2016/04/europe-needs-to-change-but-i-am-voting-to-stay-corbyns-full-speech-on-the-eu/

[6] Rob Merrick, ‘Brexit: Jeremy Corbyn says he would still vote Remain after Theresa May ducked the question,’ Independent, 12 October 2017. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-jeremy-corbyn-remain-vote-second-referendum-eu-negotiations-theresa-may-a7996996.html

[7] Robert Booth, ‘Racism rising since Brexit vote, nationwide study reveals,’ The Guardian, 20 May 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/racism-on-the-rise-since-brexit-vote-nationwide-study-reveals

[8] Anealla Safdar, ‘Brexit: UKIP’s “unethical” anti-immigration poster,’ Al Jazeera, 28 June 2016. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/06/brexit-anti-immigration-ukip-poster-raises-questions-160621112722799.html

[9] James Ker-Lindsay, ‘Did the unfounded claim that Turkey was about to join the EU swing the Brexit referendum? LSE British Politics and Policy blog, 15 February 2018. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/unfounded-claim-turkey-swing-brexit-referendum/

[10] Ishaan Tharoor, ‘Jo Cox, slain British politician, was a champion of refugees,’ The Washington Post, 16 June, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/16/jo-cox-slain-british-politician-was-a-champion-of-refugees/

[11] Adam Ramsay, ‘The High Court found that Vote Leave broke the law in a new way,’ OpenDemocracy, 14 September 2018. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/high-court-found-that-vote-leave-broke-law-in-different-way/

[12] Christopher Wylie, ‘Brexit is a crime scene. When are we going to wake up?’ The New European, 5 July 2018. https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/whistleblower-christopher-wylie-on-why-the-uk-still-seems-unconcerned-by-allegations-of-referendum-wrongdoing-1-5592572

[13] Peter Jukes, ‘Explosive report exposes the molten core of the Brexit, Trump, Russia scandal,’ Byline Times, 18 February 2019. https://bylinetimes.com/2019/02/18/explosive-uk-parliamentary-report-exposes-the-molten-core-of-the-trump-brexit-russia-scandal/

[14] Paul Mason, After Corbynism: Where next for Labour? 2019, pp.2-5.

[15] Phil Hearse, ‘Must Labour move right to secure its working-class base?’ International Viewpoint, 8 January 2020. http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article6353#nb6

[16] Emma Graham-Harrison, ‘Reality check: Are the US-led airstrikes on Syrians as bad as Russia’s?’ The Guardian, 12 October 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/reality-check/2016/oct/12/reality-check-are-us-led-airstrikes-on-syrians-as-bad-as-russias

[17] Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-imperialism, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018.

[18] Anton Shekhovtsov, ‘Russian Connections to the Far Right in Europe,’ 2019. https://www.neos.eu/_Resources/Persistent/d2f58c9e0cd688efcd9d926c27a60edda5fa7286/Anton%20Shekhovtsov%20-%20Russian%20Connections%20to%20the%20Far%20Right%20in%20Europe.pdf

[19] Adam Bienkov, ‘Boris Johnson was photographed with a suspected Russian spy who called him a “good friend”,’ Business Insider, 25 November 2019. https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/news/boris-johnson-was-photographed-with-a-suspected-russian-spy-who-called-him-a-good-friend/articleshow/72224920.cms

[20] Ben Judah, ‘Those who call for Brexit are handing European power to the Kremlin,’ Independent, 9 March 2016. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/those-who-call-for-brexit-are-handing-european-power-to-the-kremlin-a6921386.html

[21] Paul Canning, ‘How the shooting down of a Malaysian jet reveals Corbyn’s Putin problem,’ Byline Times, 9 July 2019. https://bylinetimes.com/2019/07/09/how-the-shooting-down-of-a-malaysian-jet-reveals-corbyns-putin-problem/

[22] Simon Tisdall, ‘Don’t call them Syria’s child casualties. This is the slaughter of the innocents,’ The Guardian, 4 August 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/03/syria-idlib-child-deaths-airstrikes-assad-putin-russia

[23] Waad al-Kataeb, ‘Winner’s acceptance speech for For Sama, Documentary, British Academy Film Awards, 2 February 2020. http://www.bafta.org/media-centre/transcripts/waad-al-kateab-winners-acceptance-speech-documentary-ee-british-academy

[24] Frieda Afary (interviewed by Emma Wilde Botta), ‘Why the latest uprising in Iran matters,’ Jacobin, 21 December 2019. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/12/uprising-iran-protests-fuel-price-us-sanctions

[25] James Risen, Tim Arango, Farnaz Fassihi, Murtaza Hussein and Ronan Bergman, ‘A Spy Complex Revealed: Leaked Iranian intelligence reports expose Tehran’s vast web of infuence in Iraq,’ The Intercept, https://theintercept.com/2019/11/18/iran-iraq-spy-cables/

[26] Ali Mamouri, ‘US Embassy attack backfires on Iran-backed militias in Iraq,’ Al Monitor, 2 January 2020. https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/01/iraq-iran-us-embassy-militias-pmu.html

[27] Lewis Goodall, ‘Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood: The speech that divided a nation,’ Sky News, 24 April 2018. https://news.sky.com/story/enoch-powells-rivers-of-blood-the-speech-that-divided-a-nation-11339291

[28] Frieda Afary, Fatemeh Masjedi and Sina Zekavat, ‘Iran popular protests against regime intensify in response to Iran downing of passenger plane,’ Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists, https://allianceofmesocialists.org/iran-popular-protests-against-regime-intensify-in-response-to-iran-downing-of-passenger-plane/

 

13 theses on the imminent ecological catastrophe and the (revolutionary) means of averting it

By: February 6, 2020
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I. The ecological crisis is already the most important social and political question of the 21st century, and will become even more so in the coming months and years. The future of the planet, and thus of humanity, will be determined in the coming decades. Calculations by certain scientists as to scenarios for the year 2100 aren’t very useful for two reasons: a) scientific: considering all the retroactive effects impossible to calculate, it is very risky to make projections over a century. B) political: at the end of the century, all of us, our children and grandchildren will be gone, so who cares?

II. As the IPCC explains, if the average temperature exceeds the pre-industrial period’s by 1.5°, there is a risk of setting off an irreversible climate change process 1. The ecological crisis involves several facets, with hazardous consequences, but the climate question is doubtless the most dramatic threat. What would the consequences of this be? Just a few examples: the multiplication of megafires such as in Australia; the disappearance of rivers and the desertification of land areas, melting and dislocation of polar ice and raising the sea level, which could reach dozens of meters. Yet, at two meters vast regions of Bangladesh, India and Thailand, as well as the major cities of human civilisation – Hong Kong, Calcutta, Venice, Amsterdam, Shanghai, London, New York, Rio – will have disappeared beneath the sea. How high can the temperature go? From what temperature will human life on this planet be threatened? No one has an answer to these questions.

III. These are risks of a catastrophe unprecedented in human history. One would have to go back to the Pliocene, some millions of years ago, to find climate conditions similar to what could become reality in the future, due to climate change. Most geologists consider that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, when conditions on the planet have been modified by human action? What action? Climate change began with the 18th Century Industrial Revolution, but it is after 1945, with neoliberal globalisation, that it took a qualitative leap. In other words, modern capitalist industrial civilisation is responsible for the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, thus of global heating.

IV. The capitalist system’s responsibility in the imminent catastrophe is widely recognised. Pope Francis, in his Encyclical Laudato Si, without uttering the word ‘capitalism’ spoke out against a structurally perverse system of commercial and property relations based exclusively on the ‘principle of profit maximization’ as responsible both for social injustice and destruction of our Common House, Nature. A slogan universally chanted the world over in ecological demonstrations is ‘Change the System, not the Climate!’ The attitude shown by the main representatives of this system, advocates of business as usual – billionaires, bankers, ‘experts’, oligarchs, politicians – can be summed up by the phrase attributed to Louis XIV: ‘After me, the deluge’.

V. The systemic nature of the problem is cruelly illustrated by governments’ behaviour. All, (with very rare exceptions) acting in the service of capital accumulation, multinationals, the fossil oligarchy, general commodification and free trade. Some of them – Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison (Australia) – are openly ecocidal and climate deniers. The other, ‘reasonable’ ones set the tone at the annual COP (Conference of the Parties or Circuses Organised Periodically?) meetings, which feature vague ‘green’ rhetoric and total inertia. The most successful was COP 21, in Paris, which concluded with solemn promises from all governments taking part to reduce emissions – not kept, except by a few Pacific islands. Scientists calculate that even if they had been kept, the temperature would still rise up to 3.3° higher…

VI. ‘Green capitalism’, ‘carbon markets’, ‘compensation mechanisms and other manipulations of the so-called ‘sustainable market economy’ have proven perfectly useless, while ‘greening’ with a vengeance, emissions are skyrocketing, and catastrophe gets closer and closer. There is no solution to the ecological crisis within the framework of capitalism, a system entirely devoted to productivism, consumerism, the ferocious struggle for ‘market shares’, to capital accumulation and maximizing profits. Its intrinsically perverse logic inevitably leads to the disruption of ecological balance and destructions of ecosystems.

VII. The only effective alternatives, capable of avoiding catastrophe, are radical alternatives. ‘Radical’ means attacking the root of the evil. If the capitalist system is at the root, we need anti-system alternatives, i.e. anticapitalist ones, such as ecosocialism, an ecological socialism up to the challenges of the 21st century. Other radical alternatives such as ecofeminism, social ecology (Murray Bookchin), André Gorz’s political ecology, or degrowth have much in common with ecocialism: relations of reciprocal influence have developed in recent years.

VIII. What is socialism? For many Marxists, it is transformation of the relationships of production – by the collective appropriation of the means of production – to allow the free development of productive forces. Ecosocialism lays claim to Marx, but explicitly breaks with this productivist model. Of course, collective appropriation is indispensable, but the productive forces themselves must also be transformed: by changing their energy sources (renewables instead of fossil fuels); b) by reducing global energy consumption; c) by reducing production of goods (‘degrowth’), and by eliminating useless activities (advertising) and harmful ones (pesticides, weapons of war); d) by putting a stop to planned obsolescence. Ecosocialism also involves transformation of consumption models, transport forms, urbanism and ‘ways of life.’ In short, it is much more than a change of property forms: it is a civilizational change, based on values of solidarity, equality, and respect for nature. Ecosocialist civilisation breaks with productivism and consumerism, in favour of shorter working time, thus more free time devoted to social, political, recreational, artistic, erotic etc activities. Marx referred to this goal by the term ‘Realm of freedom’.

IX. To achieve the transition towards ecosocialism, democratic planning is required, guided by two criteria: meeting actual needs, and respect for the ecological balance of the planet. The people themselves, once the onslaught of advertising and the consumption obsession created by the capitalist market are eliminated – who will decide, democratically, what their real needs are. Ecosocialism is a wager on the democratic rationality of the popular classes.

X. This requires a real social revolution. How can such a revolution be defined? To carry out the ecosocialist project, partial reforms will not suffice. We could refer to a note by Walter Benjamin, on the margins of his theses On the concept of history (1940): ‘Marx said that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But things might work out otherwise. It is possible that revolutions are the act by which humans travelling in the train activate the emergency brakes.’ Translation in 21st century terms: we are all passengers on a suicide train, which is named Modern Industrial Capitalist Civilisation. This train is hurtling towards a catastrophic chasm: climate change. Revolutionary action aims to halt it – before it is too late.

XI. Ecosocialism is at once a project for the future and a strategy for the struggle here and now. There is no question of waiting for ‘the conditions to be ripe’. It is necessary to provoke convergence between social and ecological struggles and fight the most destructive initiatives by powers in the service of capital. This is what Naomi Klein called Blockadia. Within mobilisations of this type, an anticapitalist consciousness and interest in ecosocialism can emerge during struggles. Proposals such as the Green New Deal are part of this struggle, in their radical forms, which require effectively renouncing fossil energies – but not in those limited to recycling ‘green capitalism’.

XII. Who is the subject in this struggle? The workerist/industrialist dogmatism of the previous century is no longer current. The forces now at the forefront of the confrontation are youth, women, Indigenous people, and peasants. Women are very present in the formidable youth uprising launched by Greta Thunberg’s call – one of the great sources of hope for the future. As the ecofeminists explain to us, this massive women’s participation in the mobilisations comes from the fact that they are the first victims of the system’s damage to the environment. Unions are beginning here and there to also get involved. This is important, because, in the final analysis, we can’t overcome the system without the active participation of workers in cities and countryside, who make up the majority of the population. The first condition, in each movement is associating ecological goals (closing coal mines or oil wells, or thermal power stations, etc) with guaranteed employment for the workers involved.

XIII. Do we have any chance of winning this battle, before it is too late? Unlike the so-called ‘collapsologists’ who clamorously proclaim that catastrophe is inevitable and that any resistance is futile, we think the future is open. There is no guarantee that this future will be ecosocialist: this is the object of a wager in the Pascalian sense, in which we commit all our forces, in a ‘labour for uncertainty’. But as Bertolt Brecht said, with grand and simple wisdom: ‘Those who fight may lose. Those who don’t fight have already lost.’

Originally posted at International Viewpoint.

“Politics Isn’t Poker”: A Response to Andy Sernatinger on DSA and Bernie Sanders

By: February 5, 2020
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Andy Sernatinger’s New Politics article “Bern After Reading: Sanders and Socialist Strategy” raises important questions to think through, whether you’re a member of Democratic Socialists of America or not. Even in the heat of the moment—and the Sanders challenge is “berning” very hot, against all the odds, with the first primaries finally here—it’s still valuable to step back and evaluate the campaign and its impact in light of DSA’s initiatives to support Sanders.

The analysis is especially important to me because I’ve been working out my own thoughts on this. I recently wrote a (very) long article meant mainly for my comrades of the former International Socialist Organization (ISO) that retrospectively assesses our discussions about Sanders and DSA before the ISO’s dissolution.

I’ve appreciated Andy’s previous articles about DSA and quoted from one in my article. I think his most recent piece starts from where I end up. Andy disagrees with how DSA’s initiatives have taken on an “all in” character, but his article is premised on socialists being in. He urges socialists to support Sanders’s campaign for the presidential nomination of a party of capital by using a “class struggle approach” that will build working-class and left organization beyond the elections. I won’t repeat what I wrote, but I agree with this and think socialists need to question old assumptions and attitudes that hinder us from embracing that approach.

I’ve only been a DSA member for a few months, but I share Andy’s concerns about comrades not looking beyond the Sanders campaign to a struggle for socialism that will require, even if Sanders were actually elected president, mass mobilizations of the working class to achieve even a reformist agenda. Some of the talk about “only shots” and “last hopes” are rhetorical flourish, but there’s obviously much more to socialism than a single election campaign, even this one, and we should make that plain now.

I attended the Chicago DSA chapter meeting where the proposal to go “all in” for Bernie that Andy singled out was discussed. I was convinced and voted yes. For one thing, the opportunity is historic. The unique platform of a presidential campaign as Sanders has used it only comes around every four years, and it may be a while after 2020 before there is a figure with the same stature and appeal as him.

I was also persuaded that the proposal was meant to devote resources to an independent campaign that would spread a socialist message beyond voting for Sanders. It seemed to me then, and does now, that the “all in” proposal was about more than “building a movement for Bernie” alone, as Andy characterized an article by CDSA member Sean Duffy.

In fairness, I think Sean was at pains in that article to explain the advantages of an independent campaign. “While we are obviously trying to win Chicago for Bernie in the March primary, and thus increase his delegate totals for the convention,” they wrote, “the primary goal of our Bernie campaign is to raise class consciousness in Chicago, to grow our organization in the city, and to train up organizers and develop new leaders.” I was “all in” with that.

As long as we’re using gambling metaphors, maybe another poker term is worth considering: pot-committed. When you’ve already bet a significant number of your chips, it doesn’t make sense to fold your hand or make a weak bet to save what you have left since the odds may be worse later on. When you’re pot-committed, the move is to make a strong bet, even if you aren’t certain you have a hand that will beat anything else.

DSA’s growth has been tied up with the mass popularity of the Sanders campaign and the other socialists who have won election to Congress and other offices. The organization already has a lot of chips in the pot. At a moment when there’s a historic opportunity (not to say the last chance) to achieve even more, for the socialist movement in general and DSA in particular, it doesn’t make sense to make a weak bet.

And besides, it isn’t actually all or nothing, the “all in” metaphor notwithstanding. There’s still a lot to win if Sanders doesn’t get the nomination or become president—because politics isn’t poker, and sometimes a turn of phrase is just a turn of phrase (to paraphrase another turn of phrase).

In my experience in Chicago since the “all in for Bernie” strategy was approved in early January, the chapter’s activities haven’t been subsumed into the Sanders campaign, nor has the organization’s message narrowed to elections alone.

For example, the January meetings of North and South Sides branches each got big turnouts for publicly advertised presentations not on Sanders but on “Who Is the Working Class?” (readings by Karl Marx and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor) and “What Is Chicago DSA?” Weekly canvassing has alternated between South, West, and North Side neighborhoods, and they usually promote both Sanders and Anthony Clark, a DSA comrade running a strong, left-wing primary campaign for Congress against Democratic Party fixture Danny Davis. Each canvassing generally has a theme connected to a longstanding CDSA campaign, such as housing and rent control.

I think CDSA’s efforts have not only built support for Sanders but tangibly helped to build DSA. I’ve canvassed with comrades who were paper members before and became active because of the Sanders campaign—and in the process started attending meetings. Plus, CDSA is tabling and canvassing in areas of the city where it doesn’t necessarily have a base, expanding its profile in ways that could help future organizing.

Thus, I think election activity, even when it is the immediate priority for DSA, doesn’t have to overshadow everything else and neglect building socialist and left-wing organization for future struggles.

(As an aside, last fall, the Chicago chapter went “all in” to build solidarity with the strike by Chicago teachers and school workers. A chapter that had gained further prominence and experience by helping elect six socialists to the City Council earlier in the year devoted resources and comrades’ hard work to strike solidarity—explicitly emphasizing in the process that DSA’s vision of winning socialism involved mass struggles of the working class.)

Again, my experience of DSA is limited to a brief period in one city. And I’m not saying there aren’t times when the excitement of the moment limits comrades’ focus. Then again, no one imagined that Sanders would be going into the first primaries as the frontrunner, with the “Not me, us” groundswell so far withstanding an increasingly frantic opposition from the Democratic Party establishment. To be honest, it seems unrealistic to expect comrades not to go a little overboard in those circumstances.

What’s more, I think there may be more to gain for the left from being “all in” in this unusual circumstance than can be judged just yet.

The radicalization around the Sanders campaign in 2016 didn’t disperse and descend into despair. By 2018, it had been reinvigorated by local and national election successes that in turn laid the basis for a stronger Sanders campaign in 2020. Even more important was the growth of a more substantial left after 2016, with an explicitly socialist organization, DSA, at its core that has a promising and ongoing, if still developing, life beyond elections through involvement in labor and social struggles. Plus, one of the most exciting developments of the 2020 campaign is how it has cohered a broad array of left forces and figures beyond DSA around a collective identification with socialist election campaigns, making connections between activists and struggles that can be important in the years to come.

It seems like those building blocks for the left will remain if Sanders is again defeated for the presidential nomination, which is still the most likely outcome. (If Sanders manages to win the nomination, it will usher in months of chaos, instability, and upheaval that would scramble all our speculations today—but we can at least assume that it will produce enormous possibilities for the left, along with enormous challenges.)

My point is that it’s too early to judge that election activity around the Sanders campaign hasn’t built working-class organization—the test of that is still to come. Going “all in” to take advantage of a unique opportunity in this election could pay off in a larger, more coherent, more determined, and politically more developed left, capable of setting labor and social struggles on a higher level, with an even bigger prize at stake.

Philly Educators Have a Chance to Make History

By: February 5, 2020
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Members of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) have a chance to improve lives of Philly school educators and students, challenging control of schools by corporate elites, as did Chicago teachers when they elected a new generation of leaders from the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) to head their union a decade ago.

The choice is stark: Continue with policies and personalities that have allowed the city and state to neglect Philly schools, teachers and kids or bring in the Caucus of Working Educators (CWE), better known as the Caucus of WE, or Working Educators, or WE, a hardworking, savvy group of union members committed to union democracy who understand kids and teachers need teachers unions that will organize and fight to reverse the attacks on public education.

PFT’s longtime officers say they deserve to be re-elected because they know how to negotiate contracts and have the expertise to deliver the goods to members. They argue it would be foolish to change negotiating teams before they’ve clinched the deal for a new contract. These claims ring false if you’ve followed how the best union contracts are won these days. Negotiating a union contract is a lot like selling real estate: You can always make the sale if you don’t ask for much and settle for less, which is what the PFT machine and Jerry Jordan do. They won’t face their strategy has failed to win real improvements because they’re overlooking the resources the union has to tap to win significant improvements: an informed, mobilized membership and grassroots alliances with parent and advocacy groups challenging powerful money interests in the city.

In contrast to the way the old guard thinks and acts, Working Educators has organized for change in the PFT essential to maximize the union’s clout.  Caucus activists know education back and forth because they live it – unlike PFT officials who’ve been out of schools for ages. Though the current PFT officials claim they are the experts, Working Educators has been educating them through example about how to organize and win.  The caucus has helped members and parents on countless issues when the union wouldn’t step up, pushing to remove asbestos in buildings, defend teachers whom the district tried to punish for advising parents of their right to “opt” their children out of standardized tests. Working Educators has taken the lead in exposing paraprofessionals’ need for livable wages and demanding good contracts when the leadership said it wasn’t possible. The activists know the union needs community support to reverse losses in funding and political power and has shown up for social justice struggles, like working with community organizations in Black Lives Matter, going beyond the lip service and token contributions union officials consider meaningful support.

When a union has been irrelevant and remote from workers’ lives, as has the PFT for many years, some members don’t realize they can vote in an election for union leaders or a contract.  Others are resigned to the status quo, however dissatisfied they are with it.  When the leadership’s control hasn’t been contested by reform groups, some members may not realize challenges from a caucus are not only quite normal but important to help members know and use their rights.  Another reason members ignore union elections is they’re buried and overwhelmed in their work, like young teachers struggling to do their jobs well with little or no support from administrators or the union.  Paraprofessionals, overwhelmingly women of color, struggle for economic survival because the union has ignored them in its contract negotiations, allowing the district to pay them shamefully low wages, below the poverty level if they’re raising a family.

When a union wants members to vote and uses the American Arbitration Association (AAA), the union has AAA use all options for voting – mail, phone, and online. The PFT leadership has shown (again) its resistance to change and (dis)regard for members’ participation by restricting voting to a ballot mailed to members’ homes. The ballot comes in a large white envelope it’s easy to mistake for junk mail and discard. (I know because I’ve done it and had to phone AAA for a replacement.)  Though this is a union election, it has ramifications for the  city, its schools and kids, the national teachers unions, and the labor movement because there’s a reform movement sweeping teachers unions that’s fueling huge changes in local and national politics.  CWE joins education activists throughout the country in pushing for real improvements in schools.

What  PFT Members Can Do

Even if you’ve never been to a union meeting, never read the contract, and feel you don’t have a moment for yourself because work and life are too demanding, take five minutes in the next two weeks to vote in this election. Ballots are being mailed out on Thursday, February 6. Look for that big white envelope from the AAA, open it, check off the CWE (Caucus of WE) slate, put it back in the return envelope and mail it.

If you feel like you have five minutes more to invest in your future, when you’re at work, tell two co-workers you voted and ask them if they have. Encourage them to look out for that white envelope, check the box for CWE, and mail it.

Philly educators can elect new union officers ready to lead, organizing to win. PFT members along with kids and families that depend on public schools deserve more and better, and this election can make that happen. Seize the moment – and that white envelope.

“Capital, It Fails Us Now”: Andy Gill of Gang of Four, 1956-2020

By: February 4, 2020
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For people of a certain age — Generation X, they used to call us — it’s something of a cliche that if you loved punk rock and had leftist leanings you’d find your way to hearing a Gang of Four album. That album was probably their debut LP Entertainment! — sorry, I meant the “seminal post-punk/experimental album recorded in 1979 that drew inspiration from punk, dub [reggae], and Marxist ideology.” (It’s important to provide all the essential details.) I was one such person blown away by said album, in part because I’d never heard anyone play guitar like Andy Gill, who died on February 1 at the appallingly young age of 64.

“Post-punk” refers to rock bands that emerged soon after or simultaneously with bands that came to define the phrase “punk rock” — the Ramones, the Damned, the Sex Pistols, the early Clash, etc. — but that sounded much less like their ’60s predecessors such as the MC5 and the Stooges. They were even more “other” in comparison with mainstream ’70s rock, especially the bands most popular in the U.S. (Compare the Eagles with Joy Division and one might think the two bands came from different planets, not just countries.)

It’s rarely said, but the post-punks were making new versions of art rock, especially in the UK, where art-rockers like David Bowie and Roxy Music were far more popular than they ever were in the U.S. But what Gill and Gang of Four did that was genuinely new was to create what reviewers often called “punk funk”: mixing punk’s brevity, confrontational stance and rejection of ostentatious displays of virtuosity with a version of, yes, funk. Not quite the funk of James Brown or Parliament-Funkadelic, of course. But Gill, at least, wasn’t interested in “copying various icons of black music. (It was) more through simply deconstructing the nature of drumming and where you place the beats. It was like starting from ground zero with the drumming.” Hence, songs like “At Home He’s a Tourist” and “Natural’s Not In It” and “In The Ditch,” where the vocals and sometimes the guitar suddenly drop, and “the drums and bass are right in your face.”

And then, again, there’s Gill’s guitar style. Reviewers labeled it “angular,” “spiky,” referred to “shards of guitar noise” and such. All of which is correct. Long before Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (who was a fan), Gill created the “anti-solo,” a “Morse code” consisting of “shrieking chords or runs of aggravation along his high strings, all outbursts kept as brief as possible.” (So sayeth Chris O’Leary of Billboard, accurately.) Especially when compared with so many boring, interminable ’70s and ’80s rock and metal guitar solos, Gill’s aesthetic choices still sound bracing.

So what does any of this have to with socialism and why eulogize Gill in the blog of a socialist publication? The name of Gill’s band partly gives it away: it refers to the Maoist faction of the Chinese Communist Party which ruled China in the final years of the Great Proletarian [sic] Cultural Revolution. Of course, this was meant as a joke. But let’s be clear: Gang of Four was a Marxist rock & roll band.

Yes, by the early 21st century Gill was effectively saying that he and original Go4 singer Jon King weren’t really Marxists: “[Our] lyrical approach was very often kind of observation in a way and not dragging the listener to a particular conclusion. Or demanding that the listener shares in some condemnation of something. It’s much more of an observational position, pointing out a few interesting things.”

OK, Andy. Mostly true. But you also wrote “Capital, it fails us now/Comrades, let us seize the time.” And pretty much every Go4 song is clearly Marxist in some way — is romantic coupling “a contract in our mutual interest?” Isn’t it true that history is “Not made by great men“? In “Why Theory?” Gill and King point out that “We’ve all got opinions/Where do they come from?/Each day seems like a natural fact/And what we think/Changes how we act.” Antonio Gramsci would approve. And Go4’s influence on ’80s and ’90s underground and “alternative” bands like the Proletariat, the Minutemen, Fugazi, and Rage Against the Machine went beyond just the sonics — commies all, these guys, even if they refused to make it plain. (Well, the Proletariat and RATM made it plain, repeatedly.)

Gang of Four was a great, distinctive rock band that played Marxist songs and Andy Gill was a brilliant, innovative guitarist. As we’re now entering a second decade where no strand of rock counts as popular music anymore, the world could stand to see more musicians draw from them — aesthetically and politically. The major music labels aren’t going to sign them anyway. What’ve they got to lose?

Rest in power, Comrade Gill.

Welcome to the Global Ecosocialist Network

By: February 2, 2020
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The Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN) is being launched at a moment of extreme danger for humanity.  The intensity of the crisis and the scale of the danger is hard to grasp or express adequately because, unless you are in one of the parts of the world currently experiencing extreme weather, it cannot yet literally be seen. And even where the danger is actually being experienced there are very powerful forces at work to obscure its real causes.

Nevertheless it is clear that over the last year or so, especially since the IPCC report in October 2018 and the coming of the school climate strikes, the global awareness of the threat posed by climate change and many other aspects of the Anthropocene has skyrocketed. Increasing numbers of people internationally now understand

  1. that in the not too distant future all humanity and countless species face an existential threat;
  2. that right now and in the immediate years to come hundreds of millions face escalating extreme weather situations and disasters that will cause immense suffering, especially in the Global South, and generate vast numbers of climate refugees.

Faced with this prospect many people’s immediate reaction will be to say this is so dreadful and urgent that it is ‘beyond politics’. We should all simply drop all political differences and disagreements and unite with the single aim of saving the planet. Understandable as this response may be it is not the view upon which the Global Ecosocialist Network is based. Our starting point is two key ideas: that the principle cause of the environmental crisis is the global economic system of capitalism and that stopping climate change and related catastrophes will require socialist policies and responses.

What we mean by capitalism and the exact nature of the socialist responses required are things we can and will discuss but we are ecosocialists – that is basis of this Network and it will be focused on combating the capitalist system and the ruling classes, parties and ideologies associated with it, while advocating socialist solutions. Within this broad framework, however, we welcome all strands of socialism and we are not affiliated or tied to any particular party or tendency.

Our immediate aim is to facilitate the development and spread of ecosocialist ideas and relevant information internationally so as to ensure that socialist ideas are heard within the current explosion of ecological debate.  Anyone who wishes to contribute a report or article to the website please forward it to webeditor@globalecosocialistnetwork.net  (John Molyneux).

We welcome debate and controversy within a left and progressive framework.

If the Network develops in terms of its membership and support we will move to a more formal structure and look to convene meetings and conferences in different parts of the world. And if circumstances are right we may be able to issue certain calls for action or for solidarity with other actions.

We are particularly pleased that the Network and this website are launched with an impressive list of sponsors from round the world that includes both outstanding activists and some of the most distinguished writers from the field of ecosocialism. [See Our Sponsors.]

So we invite all socialists, wherever they are, to join us as individuals (€10 waged/ €5 unwaged) and socialist organisations to affiliate (€150.00).

Please go to the membership section of this site. Members will receive our regular newsletter and be invited to international events.

The environmental crisis is set to be the decisive struggle of our times and GEN, in all modesty, aims to play a small part in this battle for the future of humanity.

Originally posted at the Global Ecosocialist Network website.

Meanwhile, what do we do about Bernie?

By: January 30, 2020
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While I found the article critiquing the electoral road to socialism by Kit Wainer and Mel Bienenfeld found in the in the current issue of New Politics quite interesting and informative, I also found it problematic. This is mostly because it treated issues, which to me are not immediately on the agenda, as questions that might virtually lead to a split, questions that because they are not immediately on the agenda are necessarily speculative and abstract.

To me an immediate question is whether or not people who consider themselves revolutionaries should support Bernie Sanders for President and why or why not. Wainer and Bienenfeld acknowledge that in all probability, if he were elected, Sanders would have to rule, pretty much, by decree (that is, executive order). Sanders himself acknowledges this in a back handed way When asked how he could get any of his programs through in the face of a hostile Congress. But he also tips his hat to exactly the perspective Wainer and Bienenfeld are talking about in his most fundamental slogan, “Not Me, Us.” Granted, many of his most enthusiastic supporters don’t really get this and tend to see him as something of a savior, despite his sincere protestations to the contrary.

Besides their absence of any concrete advice regarding what we should all do now, what I find problematic in their review is its level of abstraction. Not that they don’t give loads of concrete examples, but for me they don’t seem to have much to do with what is actually going on in the United States, especially now. The closest thing we have to workers’ councils are the decrepit and moribund county labor councils or perhaps the episodic mass teachers strikes. Impressive, absolutely, but getting from there to revolution isn’t exactly self evident.

Comparisons to the Russian Revolution are unconvincing to me. Russia in 1917 was, after all, the last absolutist regime on Earth and there was nothing democratic about the Provisional Government. Presumably any genuinely democratic workers’ state would be governed by some kind of representative assembly. For all its shortcomings, is that not what Congress is? Granted there are many provisions in the Constitution designed to specifically protect property rights, but is that true of every jot and tittle of the entire document? I for one do not think so and while it is highly speculative it’s hard for me to imagine a revolution in which some alternative system of representation went head to head with the existing representative bodies. Even the National Assembly of the French Revolution was essentially the Third Estate reconstituting itself on the basis of one person one vote.

I realize that here I am doing exactly what I accuse Wainer and Bienenfeld of doing: raising a lot of issues that basically have nothing to do with the issue at hand: what should our position be on Sanders as socialists? Most of the revolutionary struggles of the 20th century were either against Stalinist regimes or Third World dictatorships. The two most prominent examples of something approximating a workers government in an industrialized democracy are probably the French Popular Front in the 1930s and Allende’s Chile. In both cases workers parties had a plurality in such governments, but not a majority. Even Kautsky, prior to World War I, counseled against such coalitions. After World War I it is my understanding that Kautsky was not against soviets or workers councils as instruments of civil society. Rather, he opposed them as instruments of state power because he saw them as less representative and therefore less democratic than a geographically based parliamentary assembly. It seems to me that any revolutionary movement in the United States, no matter how massive, would run up against the same problem.

In his excellent exposition of Russian soviets prior to Stalin some time ago in New Politics Tom Harrison characterized their structure as pyramidal, at least that’s how I understood his explanation. When challenged he defended this system in which, as I understand it, workers would vote only for the first, local, level of representation. Every higher level of representation would not be elected directly by the workers but chosen rather by the next lower level of representation. How is this different from when state legislatures used to pick U.S. Senators? I’m not suggesting that existing models of worker representation can’t be improved upon, but neither are they necessarily perfect models.

In his 1932 campaign book Norman Thomas, perennial Socialist Party candidate for President, devoted an entire chapter to whether a parliamentary system or a government of workers councils is more democratic. Thomas was hardly a great Marxist intellectual, nor did he think of himself as one. Nevertheless, he was and important public figure and the standard bearer of democratic socialism in the United States from 1928 until his death in 1968. As such his views on this matter are worth consideration and he concluded that there was simply not enough evidence to suggest that one or the other system was more democratic.

I am not suggesting here that a successful democratic socialist movement would not require a massive popular upsurge. Of course it would and Sanders says as much. But it does not follow from that that a government of workers councils is some how inherently more democratic than a geographically based parliamentary system. Indeed, quite the opposite may well be the case. In any event I acknowledge again that this is all highly speculative, which is my basic point. This is not on the agenda, and it is most certainly not a split question. At least not at this point.

Wainer and Bienenfeld bring up the issue of bureaucracy as though this is a problem inherent specifically to capitalism rather than a problem that any large, complex society necessarily faces. Of course bureaucratic institutions, by definition, are inherently undemocratic and as such are an impediment to the democratization of society, but it is not exactly self evident to me how a government of workers councils would be better equipped to democratize bureaucratic structures than would a geographically based representative assembly.

Finally, Wainer and Bienenfeld point out that our state based federal system provides geo-political spaces where reaction could continue to fester, but the opposite is also the case. The federal system also provides some limited protection where radical experiments could take place relatively protected from interference from the central government. The whole issue of dual sovereignty is extremely complicated and has as much to do with the geographical size of the United States as it does specifically with capitalism. In the here and now and in terms of historical experience, state based radical parties have generally had more success than something that starts from the beginning at the national level.

To summarize, I completely agree that a socialist revolution cannot take place without violence. Violence is already here. Capitalism is inherently violent, but insurrectionary violence is another matter. I also agree that a democratic socialist revolution cannot take place without the active engagement and involvement of a majority of society or at least a substantial minority and in the course of this activity both new institutions such as workers’ councils will be formed and existing institutions will be reformed and transformed. To say definitively that a government of workers’ councils will necessarily replace and displace geographically based parliamentary assemblies is essentially speculative. We don’t know how a democratic working class will chose to govern itself and society.

Meanwhile, what do we do about Bernie?

Urgent call for international solidarity with the metal workers strike in Turkey!

By: January 29, 2020
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More than 100,000 metal workers in Turkey are getting prepared to launch a strike, a sizable section on the 5th of February, 2020. This comes after a months-long bargaining process with the bosses in the metal industry – which constitutes a strategic core by providing a large share of exports vital for Turkish economy. The industry covers sectors like automotive and production of every kind of white goods and machine parts as well as casting, essential for other lines of business. Both historically and during recent years, metal workers have been the most active division of the Turkish working class in the class struggle.

From 2018 onward, the Turkish economy has been passing through a crisis where stagnation and recession accompany inflation and high cost of living as well as towering unemployment. This, as one might guess, creates unbearable conditions for the toiling people in the grip of a deep poverty. Metal workers, now once again, act like an icebreaker for the whole population to shake off and break the chains of despotism that puts immense barriers against the struggle of the working class, the youth and the people in general. Metal workers preparing for the strike know this very well due to their previous strikes banned by the government with the lame excuse of violating national security. The government has banned three metalworkers’ strikes as well as large strikes in the glass, petrochemicals, public transportation and banking industries.

Once again, the bosses threaten the strikers with a ban. Such a forbidding of the strike will indisputably be illegitimate, unacceptable and unlawful! The constitutional court has ruled that previous strike bans signed by president Erdogan and the government were unlawful and even ordered them to pay indemnity! Relying on that resolution, one of the metal workers’ trade union – the United Metal Workers Union (Birlesik Metal-Is), a member of DISK (Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey) and IndustriALL – has already declared that they will not acknowledge another ban and carry on the strike come what may.

This was stated in a lively demonstration of workers in Gebze, one of the working-class cities where thousands attended the rally. On the same day in another working-class city, Bursa, tens of thousands gathered in a huge demonstration upon a call of the Turkish Metal Workers Union (Turk Metal, member of Turk-Is, Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions) and warned the bosses to accept their demands. Even a third union, close to Erdogan’s government party AKP, is getting prepared for the strike. Almost every day, workers march in their factories in thousands during shift changes, put into practice work stoppages for hours and start forming strike committees to reject the extremely low wage rises and a three-year contract proposed by the bosses instead of the long-established biannual collective bargaining system.

This struggle of the metal workers can open a new phase of the people’s fight with the despotism of Erdogan. It has a potential to condition the whole agenda of the society around the rights and demands of the working class and the toiling people. In the bosom of this struggle, naturally would the flowers of fight for freedom blossom whose examples could well be found in the revolutionary struggle of the working peoples of the region in the Middle East and North Africa (Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran), as well as struggles farther away in Europe (France) and Latin America (Haiti, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia and Colombia).

The workers bring forward the famous slogan of the people’s rebellion that started with the Gezi Park protests: “This is just the beginning, let’s carry on the fight!”

International solidarity is necessary and urgent! Bosses rely on the despotic regime favouring them, on the other hand, the only thing workers can trust is their organized force and international proletarian solidarity. Factories in the process of strike include Ford, Renault, Fiat, Mercedes and many similar international companies, imperialist exploiters of fraternal workers of other countries too.

We ask you to sign the following brief petition on behalf of your union, association, society, professional organisation, mass organisation, neighbourhood committee, political party or organisation, socialist magazine or journal or in your own name as a union organiser or activist in other areas, an intellectual, militant of a political party as a show of solidarity with what promises to become one of the most important movements in this country that has living been too long under the iron fist of Erdogan’s despotism.

Please send an email to sungur.savran@gmail.com before or on the 1st of February to sign a petition that reads:

“We, the undersigned parties, trade-unions, leaders as well as rank-and-file activists of class struggle and intellectuals, support this important fight of the metal workers of Turkey against international and local capital and declare our full solidarity with their strike. In case of a ban on the strike, we declare that, according to Turkish legislation and jurisprudence, as well as established international legal norms, it is their right to resist this unlawful act, defend their right to strike and refuse to leave their workplaces.

We pledge to organize concrete actions of solidarity with the strikers, who through their fight are uniting the struggle for bread and freedom in Turkey. We will react in response to a possible intervention by the government in this lawful right to strike to ban this very important action.

We call on working class forces and progressive movements in all countries to take sides with the strikers against the increasingly despotic regime of Erdogan and his government in the service of capital.

Metalworkers of Turkey, we are in solidarity with your action! Rest assured that the whole world of international labour is with you in this struggle!”

Bern After Reading: Sanders and Socialist Strategy

By: January 28, 2020
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In March of 2019, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsed Bernie Sanders’ bid for President of the United States. DSA members voted on an advisory referendum that simply asked if the Democratic Socialists of America should endorse Bernie Sanders for President. 76% of the 13,324 members who participated (24% of the membership) voted YES. NO votes cited the particulars of the endorsement: the referendum only had members vote on whether to endorse, not whether to adopt the plan for an Independent Expenditure (IE) campaign, which was adopted immediately following the endorsement.

The formal endorsement debate between then-NPC member Ella Mahony (for) and Dan La Botz (against) articulated the political positions at stake: the danger of the Democratic Party (La Botz) versus the potential of the Sanders campaign (Mahony). Mahony writes,

Bernie Sanders is running for president, and he might actually win. What we can do—what we must do—is use the organizing opportunity of the Sanders campaign to reach millions of people when they are most open to politics—and socialist politics particularly! We have to convert them into committed fighters for the democratic socialist program, and make sure they don’t recede into pessimism or inactivity after the presidential election is over.

Mahony’s argument embodied the perspective of many DSA members, who agreed that the Sanders campaign provided opportunities and that it would be a mistake not to take advantage of them. The combination of Sanders’ outsider status (a candidate running against the political establishment), a social democratic platform, and the sense of a historic opportunity clearly won the majority of DSA members to endorsement.

For those skeptical of the Democratic Party, a compromise was offered – the pro-Sanders argument was able to acknowledge the problems with electoralism[1] and chart a path forward that argued for conditional involvement for the purpose of movement-building, class consciousness and socialist organization.

The 2019 DSA Convention articulated these conditions in the electoral resolutions it passed. These stated, specifically in the class struggle elections strategy, that DSA will “commit to using campaigns and elected offices…independent of candidates’ campaigns and the Democratic Party”; that it has a desire to break from the Democratic Party[2]; that it commit to only endorse Bernie Sanders and no other Democrat (disclaimer: I am the author of this resolution); and finally:

“that DSA will adopt a class-struggle approach to the Bernie Sanders campaign. This includes creating independent socialist political propaganda; building a strong DSA for Bernie campaign; supporting Labor for Bernie efforts to democratize union endorsement processes and win union backing for Sanders; and preparing to build working-class organization beyond the Sanders campaign, whether Sanders wins or loses.”

These discussions showed awareness of the issues that being involved with a presidential campaign would have and created qualifications for involvement. Campaigning for Sanders was presented as an instrumental relationship, leading from electoral politics as a site of politicization to labor and social movement activity. DSA would use the space opened by the campaign to create organizations that survive past November, discuss socialism beyond our milieu, and move us closer to a place of establishing a viable workers’ party (at some point in the future). These are the arguments that were presented by DSA leaders and adopted at Convention.

Are We Doing What We Said We’d Do?

Following the August 2019 DSA Convention, campaigning for Sanders began in earnest. DSA invested into the DSA for Bernie Independent Expenditure, providing materials and direction. Members eager to organize were guided to campaign activities that mirrored Sanders’ official volunteer program: canvass locally, enter data into ActionNetwork, and phonebank to voters beyond your locale. Based on the campaign data, the centers of this activity in DSA are New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, Chicago, Phoenix, East Bay and Miami. Chicago DSA’s proposal to prioritize Sanders work in their chapter, for example, interprets campaigning as consisting of four elements: canvassing, outreach to students, internal mobilization, and propaganda (local media outlets, literature and “a strong social media presence”). DSA is not officially coordinating with the Sanders campaign.

The media campaign, what we’re saying about Sanders, has been a central component of DSA’s activity. A concerted campaign to boost the Sanders message by DSA authors and fellow travelers has been ongoing in various publications, particularly Jacobin and In These Times, which have posted dozens of articles and multiple print issues about Sanders. In 2019, Jacobin alone posted 340 articles with “Bernie” or “Sanders” in the title or summary on its website, typically arguing why Sanders can win or why he is the candidate for every issue.

As the official Bernie Sanders campaign has gotten off the ground, DSA members have been encouraged to attend the conference calls of the campaign and download and use the official Bern app. DSA members have taken staff jobs in the Bernie Sanders campaign, as field staff, advisers and running campaign affiliates, and are encouraging DSA members to participate in official Bernie Sanders functions and “Barnstorms”.

Cause for Concern

Based off this presentation of what is publicly available, we can begin to make some evaluations. First, this activity focuses nearly exclusively on individual voter turnout: canvassing, phone banking, tabling – these are routine activities for any electoral campaign, and though they may give purpose to DSA members looking for where to direct their efforts they do not in themselves contribute to a deepening politicization or activation into labor or social movements. If these efforts are directed at campuses and neighborhoods where Sanders already has support, campaigning would not extend our audience beyond the existing bounds.

Second, if the class struggle elections perspective is what guides us, we are to be “independent of candidates’ campaigns and the Democratic Party.” DSA has generally run its operations parallel to the Sanders infrastructure, which blurs the lines between DSA and Sanders, especially as our members become staff for his campaign. Whether you think that is good or bad, it is not politically independent. The danger is substituting the candidate’s electoral strategy (de-prioritizing local efforts in favor of phonebanking/canvassing in early primary/battleground states) in place of DSA’s efforts to build a lasting political force, as the Convention agreed.

Take the example of a debate at the end of 2019. An article from the Atlantic reported that DSA chapters in Iowa were not pursuing election campaigning – they weren’t “doing nothing”, but instead made a decision to focus on local organizing: “Individual members would be welcome to volunteer for Sanders on their own time…but campaigning for him as a chapter would distract from [Central Iowa’s] local efforts…”; “As much as many of our members love Bernie, we see our importance more so in building class consciousness and working-class power in our communities, because that will ultimately last longer.” This was met with a widely read rebuke by a DSA member in New York: “Iowa DSA chapters’ failure to help energize the progressive Iowa voters and new caucus-goers is a giant mistake.”

An important part of the 2016 Sanders campaign was the emergence of Labor for Bernie, a grassroots effort of union members to support Sanders. In 2020, Labor for Bernie has been eclipsed by the official Bernie Sanders’ “Union Members for Bernie” initiative, directly affiliated to the campaign. What’s the difference? Jonah Fuhrman, DSA member and staff for Union Members’ for Bernie, writes, “L4B is more about activists trying to move their unions towards Bernie (which is awesome and which the official campaign cannot politically participate in!) and the official campaign is trying to do more conventional things like Voter ID, persuasion, and GOTV on the member level, engaging members who are in unions that are not going to endorse Bernie.” In theory there should be no conflict, but where L4B organizers have taken up with Union Members for Bernie, it diminishes the capacity of the independent initiative in favor of the campaign-driven one.[3]

The Narrative of Sanders

Let’s consider the de facto analysis that seems to inform DSA’s campaign for Sanders. If we look at what’s being put out in publications like Jacobin, circulated articles about Sanders, and social media, then try to make some coherent sense of it, there is a narrative being advanced:

  1. Bernie Sanders made a historic bid[4] for the presidency in 2016, bringing socialism into the national conversation. Just why he was able to do this isn’t entirely clear, but on the whole people were ready for an alternative to politics as usual[5]. While he found popular support, he was either cheated out of the nomination[6] by tricks of the Democratic Party, unable to mount a strong campaign because of the late start[7] he got and his own surprise at being so popular, or both.
  2. The political landscape was transformed[8] by this campaign. The evidence we have for that is the growth of DSA[9] to become the largest socialist organization in over 50 years, and polls that show people’s preference for “socialism” over “capitalism”.
  3. A Sanders campaign with more time, money, and support would be able to expand these the radicalization and reach more people, which would be a major gain for the left[10].
  4. Sanders’ popularity, especially when matched up against Trump, show that he should win the nomination in a democratic contest; even those who may not like Sanders should accept his nomination as the best chance to defeat Trump, who they hate.
  5. The viability of democratic socialism at the polls is demonstrated by the election of socialist candidates at local, state and federal offices.
  6. The major problem is that the political establishment attempts to suppress Sanders by ignoring him, demonizing him and his supporters, or refusing to acknowledge his popularity and standing
  7. Therefore, a central task for the left is to counteract this media campaign and boost Sanders to increase confidence among voters in the Democratic Primary.
    • The way to do this is through canvassing, phone banking, social media, union resolutions and donations. Every effort should be made to link issues back to Sanders
    • Special attention should be paid to early primaries, like Iowa, to signal to voters Sanders’ viability and popularity. Socialists can be the difference between winning or losing a primary with efforts to talk directly to voters.
  8. After mobilizing this vote, Sanders will win the Democratic Party nomination and go on to defeat Trump in November 2020. He will then preside as “organizer-in-chief” and oversee a “workers’ government.”

This is an entirely different orientation to the Sanders campaign. The goal posts have moved from “converting the electoral energy of 2020 into a durable labor and social movement organization” (Mahony) to building a movement for Bernie, “Why Chicago Should Go All In For Bernie” (Sean Duffy); parenthetically, going “all in” is a gambling term that means you either win big or leave with nothing.

Taking this presentation seriously, there are holes in the argument and leaps over important problems. Let me just consider three items. First, the narrative completely sidesteps the nomination process, which is designed to prevent unwanted candidates from becoming the nominee. The Sanders campaign made that reality painfully evident in 2016 by shining light on the workings of the Democratic Party that are normally hidden from sight – and that public confrontation, laying bare the operation of the Democratic Party, was one of the most important things that Sanders was able to accomplish in 2016.

This reality has not changed. The Democratic Party nomination is not a democratic contest – it is an orchestrated event that is constructed to ensure that the neoliberal candidate always surfaces. Like the rest of capitalist democracy, this operates on multiple levels that reinforce each other: first there is the contest for campaign money to even be able to stand for election; then there is the “invisible primary” of the media to siphon support away from any undesirables; pledged support from sitting Democrats; then the state primaries with their arcane rules; and finally the Democratic National Convention and the superdelegate system.[11] And that’s just the structural stuff.

A major reason this works is because it rests on an illusion of democracy, and the process creates a sense of affinity with the eventual candidate (“our guy”). The superdelegate system, which in 2016 pledged to Clinton before the primaries even began, is still intact – remember that this was introduced after George McGovern to fend off “outlier candidates,” and no remotely left candidate has taken the Democratic nomination since. This is not spoken of in the Sanders narrative because it interrupts the story – how can Sanders win in this environment?

Similar issues exist when we consider what might happen after the primary if Sanders is awarded the Democratic nomination. The corporate backers of the Democratic Party are unlikely to accept Sanders[12] as a presidential candidate. Sanders of course leads among voters making less than $50,000, though he also has the least support among wealthier voters. This is significant in the United States where the more money you have, the more likely you are to vote.[13] Sanders’ response is that he has attempted to turn out new voters by giving them a reason to vote, but this is notoriously difficult.

The New York Times reported, “The matter of What To Do About Bernie and the larger imperative of party unity has, for example, hovered over a series of previously undisclosed Democratic dinners in New York and Washington organized by the longtime party financier Bernard Schwartz.” Bret Stephens, writing more recently in an NYT op-ed, adds: “What [the Democrats] can’t do is nominate a reckless candidate of their own and insist it’s the only moral choice. For some of us, none-of-the-above is a viable option. For far too many others, it’ll be the devil they know [Trump].” All this is to say it is not a given that Sanders will command the support of all Democratic voters if he were to win the nomination, and there is a real possibility that the class differences will be too much for wealthier Democrats.

Finally, DSA’s approach to winning the election for Sanders is essentially the same as Momentum’s plan for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party: use social media, door-knock, canvass and phonebank like a motherfucker and win the election through the inhuman effort of a small army of volunteers. Target young voters, since they’re most interested in a left program, and appeal to the old bastions of the industrial working class to defect from establishment candidates and see the left as the best way out of the present situation.

The guiding perspective boils down to the “left populism” articulated by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. Left populism suggests that the absence of organizations of civil society mean that the left must shift to a populist orientation. Neoliberalism rules a “void” without consent, so a populist appeal can defeat establishment politics. To create a base for the future, Anton Jager writes, “A disorganized society simply might need an organizational stir from above.” Groups like Momentum and DSA can substitute for activity of the class, which can work because a little organization in a disorganized world has an outsized effect. It’s like throwing a political Hail Mary and hoping that completing that pass quickly creates organizations of the working class.

This is backwards. Left parties have historically come to power in periods of social struggle with strong class organizations, where workers have organizations that can act, see that it is necessary to fight, believe that fighting can win, and they raise their expectations. Presenting an alternative by itself can rally opposition votes, but many workers will evaluate the balance of forces and think that the left is unrealistic. Elections will play a role in advancing struggle, but they cannot leap over history.

We don’t have an issue like Brexit in the U.S., but Labour’s loss gives us a glimpse of a possible future: there was no “Youthquake” to shift the voter demographics, many Labour voters abstained or voted out of party, and the popularity of the Labour Manifesto didn’t translate into support that could overcome the hurdles. The Tories didn’t have to “win”; they only picked up 360,000 votes since 2017 – Labour just had to lose, dropping 2.6 million votes. Kim Moody writes, “The election season activists need to become perennial participants in branches, constituencies, unions, and workplaces who go beyond electoral mode to on-going grassroots organization, support for union struggles, and mass direct action… If, that is, the project Jeremy Corbyn…launched in 2015 and thousands picked up is to outlive his formal leadership.”

A Different Formulation

There’s no doubt that the Bernie Sanders campaign has been a landmark for left politics. The problem that I’m posing here is that we haven’t been particularly clear on what it means for the left. We can agree that there is an opportunity, but exactly what that opportunity is or how best to take advantage of it has been largely undefined. In this ambiguous space, we can easily slide into being uncritical surrogates for the official Sanders campaign.

DSA’s criteria for how to engage with the Sanders campaign was useful and convincing – I’m just not sure that it’s being observed. DSA members may be using the Sanders space to create something beyond the election, but this isn’t apparent when we look at the message socialists are putting forward.

The primacy put on the obstacles for mass movements and the value of reform flips our understanding of how society changes, with a view that without a Sanders victory, we’re finished. This is exemplified in the title of a recent Jacobin article: “The Long Shot of Democratic Socialism is Our Only Shot.” There’s a sense of desperation here, and that appears to be born of a lack of confidence in workers and social movements to develop as a force beyond this election.

Let me present a different formulation: Bernie Sanders was able to break through in 2016 because of the weakness of the neoliberal political establishment, not the strength of the left.[14] While Sanders might have generally had more support than Clinton, there is no doubt that the Democratic primary was rigged in her favor.

The issue we face is that the political crisis that allowed for Sanders will not continue forever – it is still at play in 2020, but the Democratic Party is quickly attempting to recompose itself to prevent future contests. Sanders offers a genuine alternative to neoliberalism, though the barriers to winning the nomination and then the presidency are formidable.

While he might have articulated the political moment, the depth of the politicization around Sanders is at best uneven and directs towards more electoral activity unless there is a conscious effort to send it elsewhere. Noam Chomsky has been arguing for years that public opinion is consistently to the left of policy; the Sanders effect arguably has not changed class consciousness but provided an avenue for existing grievances that have not had political expression for decades at a time when establishment politics are the most troubled. If our goal is to develop class consciousness, this will be through mass movements and confrontation with employers. Our message should explicitly create a path from Sanders to on the ground organizing; as it stands, the formulation is inverted where organizing flows to Sanders.

Essential to the campaign is that we must remain rooted and self-critical. If DSA follows Sanders’ lead on campaigning, deprioritizing local campaigning in favor of early primaries and battleground states, not only are we not creating anything lasting, we’d be parachuting in door knockers to questionable effect. This is one of the major concerns with staff positions, which by their nature preclude serious criticism of Sanders because their paid job is to win votes, not build a left.

Raising these issues is not a radical departure – I’ve tried to demonstrate that this was the view put forward by DSA as recently as six months ago, and it should continue to guide us. This comes down to four things: 1) that election campaigning explicitly should lead to labor and social movement organizing, and not the other way around; 2) that our first priorities should be moving existing organizations towards democratic endorsements to strengthen collective bodies and create the infrastructure that can move more people; 3) that we not refrain from criticizing Sanders and that we inoculate against the potential of Sanders losing and the counterattacks that will come; 4) that we favor local activity and organization building over national contacts. This does not preclude canvassing but is intended to shift the center of activity.

We should have the larger view of how our forces can come out of this election stronger rather than employ a get-rich-quick scheme of going all-in for Sanders. The opportunity is to use the campaign of a politician who is favorable to a view of changing society through mass movements – connecting Sanders supporters back into labor union organizing, community groups, local campaigns and other efforts that are recognized by Sanders as being important. We should prioritize grassroots efforts like Labor for Bernie over campaign-affiliated ones precisely because it is self-organization, it is directed at power-holders, and it prepares the basis for more longstanding activity.

 

[1] “Second, electoralism misunderstands the primary source of socialists’ power: organized, militant workers. Elections can be a vehicle for class struggle, and redistributing power and resources to workers will indeed require an ambitious legislative agenda and ultimately a socialist political party taking state power and initiating a formal transition to democratic socialism. But the power to achieve and defend these gains rests primarily in organized workers and their capacity to mobilize a mass social base to win these demands.” The Call, 1/30/2019.

[2] “In the longer term, our goal is to form an independent working-class party, but for now this does not rule out DSA-endorsed candidates running tactically on the Democratic Party ballot line.”

[3] The Democratic Party relies on unions to endorse neoliberal candidates, often undemocratically, and unions are a major pillar of its support. Opening the endorsement process can have an outsized effect on democratizing the electoral process because of the role labor continues to play in the Democratic Party coalition.

[4] “Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination was historic. The expectations were, to say the least, modest…But, against all odds, within months Sanders would raise over $200 million in small contributions, and win more than thirteen million votes (43 percent of the total) and twenty-three states. Though he fell short of the nomination, Sanders left an impact on a generation of new voters and the political discourse in the country.”

[5] “It turned out that many people were tired of having to choose between conservative pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism and liberal meritocratic elitism to explain the economic inequality and hardship they experience every day. They heard what Bernie had to say: that the economy is rigged, and that aggressive action to democratize it is necessary and achievable. And they agreed.”

[6] https://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-wasserman-schulz-rigged-primaries-against-sanders/

[7] “Sanders and many of those in his inner circle didn’t believe he could win until very late in the campaign, instead intent on running as a protest candidate who would drag Hillary Clinton to the left.” https://theintercept.com/2020/01/03/bernie-sanders-democratic-party-2020-presidential-election/

[8] “Without the electoral revolt on the Left inspired by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and carried forward by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, the socialist movement in the United States would likely be stuck in the same rut it has been in for decades.”

[9] “DSA’s explosive growth is inextricably linked to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Bernie popularized the concept of democratic socialism, and his call for a “political revolution” against the billionaire class resonated with millions of Americans.”

[10] Heather Gautney, Crashing the Party (Verso, 2018), pp. 134-135.

[11] “Should no bargain be struck by the time of the first roll call vote at the 2020 convention in Milwaukee — such as a unity ticket between a pair of the leading delegate-winners — the nomination battle would move to a second ballot. And under the new rules crafted after the 2016 race, that is when the party insiders and elected officials known as superdelegates would be able to cast a binding vote.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/us/politics/bernie-sanders-democratic-party.html

[12]“Bernie Sanders is the Democratic Party’s version of Donald Trump. Thank god we are smart enough to stop him,” said Democratic strategist Michael Trujillo, who served as an aide to Clinton  (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/477721-democrats-voice-concerns-over-sanders). See also https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/464048-why-small-business-owners-should-fear-the-sanders-and-warren-tax-plans and https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-wall-street.html. More telling quotes:

“Trump may be a loose cannon on international stuff, but domestically Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are loose cannons on restricting business,” Mr. Gimbel said. “Giving things away for free is a slap in the face for people who played by the rules. Where does it stop? Are we going to start paying off mortgage debt?” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/business/economy/economy-democrats-business.html

“’If Bernie Sanders becomes president, I think stock prices should be 30 percent to 40 percent lower than they are now,’ Stanley Druckenmiller told CNBC last year…’The biggest risk for 2020 is the presidential election,’ the New York Times quotes a JPMorgan researcher, Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou.” https://reason.com/2020/01/13/wall-street-seems-worried-by-potential-sanders-warren-presidencies/

[13] https://www.demos.org/blog/how-reduce-voting-gap and https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/low-voter-turnout-increasing-household-income-may-help.

[14] Richard Seymour, Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso, 2017), p. 10.

An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of money invested in the DSA for Bernie campaign.

Institutional Obstacles Can be Overcome

By: January 22, 2020
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This essay is a reply to “Problems with an Electoral Road to Socialism in the United States,” published in the Winter 2020 issue of New Politics. – Editors

Thanks to Kit and Mel for this engaging essay.

A response to “Problems with an Electoral Road to Socialism in the United States” by Kit Wainer and Mel Bienenfeld in the Winter 2020 issue of  New Politics.

I think the issue of an “electoral road to Socialism in the United States should be reformulated into two somewhat different questions:

  1. Is there an electoral road to Social Democracy (meaning reforms of the kind proposed by Bernie Sanders) in the United States?
  2. Is there an electoral road to Socialism (meaning the replacement of the capitalist system by a democratically controlled, egalitarian economic system) in the U.S. or elsewhere?

I believe that the answer to the first question is a cautious and qualified “yes,” and to the second question is uncertain, but very dubious.

I’m not ready to offer a complete argument on these questions, but I want to raise some questions about what I think is Kit’s and Mel’s overly pessimistic assessment of the possibilities for radical change posed by the existing constitutional structure.

Kit and Mel say that for a working class movement to enact major reforms “would require not just a single victory in federal elections but a series of consecutive victories in both branches,” implying that this would be impossible or nearly so. Yet pro-reform forces have done so at two critical junctures in U.S. history.

The first was Reconstruction, when Radical Republicans won three consecutive national elections (in 1864, 1866 and 1868), winning two-thirds majorities in the House each time, and making  corresponding gains in the Senate (by 1868, when one might assume that the reform wave would have begun to ebb, the Republicans held an incredible 57 to 9 majority in the Senate).  The Radical Republican performance was so powerful that it allowed them to overturn Andrew Johnson’s white supremacist Reconstruction plan, impeach him, institute their own plan, bar Johnson’s supporters from taking their seats in Congress, and force ratification of the 14th Amendment.  (While Johnson was acquitted by one vote in the impeachment trial, he was finished as a political force).

The second juncture is in the Great Depression. In 1932, Democrats won 313 of 435 House seats, a gain of 97; in 1934 they won 9 more, giving them 322 of 435 seats, and in 1936 they won 12 more, for 334 of 435). Senate numbers were similar, with Democrats holding a 74 to 17 margin after the 1936 election.

They also raise the question of obstruction by the courts. It is true that the Supreme Court did overturn New Deal measures early on, and conventional wisdom holds that FDR’s attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court was a severe defeat. But that’s not really what happened. The “court packing” plan was introduced in Congress February 5, 1937; on April 12, 1937, the Supreme Court completely reversed its direction, upheld the Wagner Act in NLRB vs Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., and continued to uphold New Deal legislation thereafter.  While Roosevelt did not increase the size of the Court, the personnel of the Supreme Court was almost completely replaced (due to retirements, deaths etc.) by 1941.

It’s also important to bear in mind that electoral victories can reflect events outside the electoral realm. For example, the Republican victory in the 1864 election owed much to the Union Army’s defeat of Confederate forces and capture of Atlanta that summer. And the 1866 Republican victory followed outbreaks of racist violence in Memphis and New Orleans that aroused anger in the North.

Similarly, the Supreme Court’s willingness to reverse course in 1937 and approve New Deal legislation may well have been influenced by the UAW’s victory in the Flint sit-down strike just a few months earlier after a struggle that appeared to pose a threat to capitalist private property.

I think these examples indicate that a working class based popular movement for reform might well be able to brush aside institutional barriers, even those that seem set in constitutional stone.  What would be required would be resolute and determined leadership, grounded in a strong mass base. Reconstruction faltered and ultimately collapsed not because legal obstacles couldn’t be overcome, but because the Republican Party began to fragment politically by 1868 or so, and the movement as a whole was not able to overcome its internalized racism.

Mel and Kit also argue that the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution gives states “power over trade and economic regulation within state boundaries.” That may be true, and yet the Federal government has very broad control over the domestic economy under the Interstate Commerce clause, the Federal Reserve system, taxing powers, etc.

Donna Cartwright is a longtime rank and file labor activist.

IASWI’s Statement on Assassination of Qasem Soleimani and its Aftermath

By: January 20, 2020
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The US military’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani, one of the top military commanders of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s expansionist regional policies and its proxy wars in the Middle East, can lead to retaliation by the Islamist regime. Such retaliation, the threat of further US retaliation and a chain reaction could further destabilize the region and endanger the lives of thousands of Iraqis, Iranians and other ordinary people in the Middle East. IASWI strongly condemns the Trump administration’s military adventurism in Iraq, which is a continuation of the catastrophic US invasion of this country. Furthermore, we denounce IRI’s bloody interventions in Iraq and its participation in repression of the Iraqi protesters. We support the demands of many Iranians and Iraqis, particularly during the recent uprisings, calling on both American and Iranian military and paramilitary forces to leave Iraq immediately and refrain from further endangering the lives of Iraqis and other people in the region.

At the same time, IASWI cautions against fear mongering that we have witnessed by both US Imperialism and the IRI regime and also on both mainstream and the social media. Many concerned people are calling for calm and deescalation on all sides and clearly point that any military escalation is strongly condemned by peace loving people around the world. If escalated, military conflicts between US Imperialism and the Iranian regime will be disastrous and its main casualties will be as always the working and ordinary people. It is important to emphasize that the current mounting tension is also used as a pretext to disrupt and derail the internal issues in the US against the racist and criminal Trump administration and the growing dissatisfaction and anti-regime protests in Iran against repression, poverty and corruption. The increased militarization will be used to broaden attacks on workers’ and human rights by both sides of the current conflict.

Our position, informed consistently by the Iranian labour movement and socialist forces on the ground, has been clear throughout the years. We continue to look at this prolonged conflict between a globally criminal imperial power and a brutal and corrupt regional power from an internationalist anti-capitalist perspective. We unreservedly oppose economic sanctions and military interventions and wars by the US and its reactionary allies, i.e. Saudi Arabia, Israel …, while simultaneously supporting the class war against the reactionary ruling capitalist system that has been taking place in Iran.

The class war between the repressive capitalist regime and employers and the working class and oppressed people in Iran have taken tens of thousands of lives throughout the years. Within the first three days of the recent uprising in Iran, November 15, 2019, hundreds to reportedly 1500 protesters, mostly young people from working class areas, were killed and up to 10,000 were arrested while thousands got injured. Families of those killed and arrested have been threatened not to speak out publicly or to hold public memorials. Security forces, including the notorious killer members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that Soleimani belonged to, have been everywhere to prevent and crush any grassroots gatherings except those sanctioned by the government. Unfortunately, these protests received little pro-active support from progressive groups in the West although many trade unions internationally condemned the suppression of the protesters.

In the past 40 years, tens of thousands of labour activists, communists, feminists and real anti- imperialists have been executed, imprisoned, tortured, flogged and banned from workplaces and schools in Iran by the Islamic Republic of Iran. All socialist, communist, left and labour groups are banned and oppressed by the IRI, and that’s not a new phenomenon but a common practice for almost 40 years. Workers and labour activists organizing for their most basic rights have been violently persecuted, tortured and imprisoned.

We reiterate our position for the past 20 years: “A working class and progressive position defends a real peace and the independence of the workers’ movement: an anti-capitalist position not only opposes economic sanctions but also any attempts by the US and its allies to pursue war against Iran, while, at the same time, supporting the ever-increasing workers’ struggles against the repressive Islamic regime and capitalists in Iran, that have been viciously implementing the most aggressive and ruthless anti-worker, totalitarian and neoliberal policies in this country’s contemporary history.”

We believe the workers’ and socialist organizations and progressive forces in the West are rightly confronting their own capitalist governments especially the US Imperialism. A victorious class war against capitalism in the US and anywhere else in the West can help the working class around the world particularly in the Global South. However, this is a long process and will require enormous organising, mobilization and sacrifices by the progressive forces in the West; thus and in the meantime, expecting the Iranian working class, oppressed people, women, socialist and other progressive forces to endure all these sufferings and stop organizing and fighting for their rights against the brutal capitalist regime in the name of the US threats is not acceptable, and frankly it is a racist and pro-capitalist approach, which amounts to apologism for a brutal regime.

Say no categorically and proactively to US warmongering and stand firmly in solidarity with the working class and the poor and oppressed people of Iran, and not the tyrannical Iranian regime, and help strengthen anti-capitalist, anti-poverty and social and economic justice movements in Iran and across the region.

No War But Class War!
Long Live International Working Class Solidarity!

International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran (IASWI)
January 4, 2020
info@workers-iran.org;
www.workers-iran.org;
http://etehadbinalmelali.com/ak
https://twitter.com/IASWIinfo

Yes, the PMC Exists: A Reply to David Camfield

By: January 20, 2020
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In a recent New Politics essay David Camfield argues that the “PMC” (shorthand for “professional-managerial class”) does not exist and that belief in it hinders socialist organizing. He presents a simplified, partly inaccurate version of the concept and rehearses an age-old critique: that different social functions ≠ different social classes. The upshot of his argument is that ‘we are all workers’ except “middle managers” and actual capitalists as well as (presumably) the petit bourgeoisie. While admirable and even correct in its activist thrust—yes, both workers and professional-managers share a common antagonism with capital and no, teachers, journalists and tech workers should not feel guilty about organizing, striking or advancing their interests collectively—Camfield’s argument is wrong in its theoretical understanding of class. His attempt to define away the structural domination of most workers in their day-to-day lives by professionals and managers is also potentially harmful: it obviates the need to address this inequality head-on in activist circles and try to overcome it through practice. Here I’d like to provide two counterpoints: 1) the PMC does exist, and 2) acknowledging this does not have to paralyze organizing but can actually empower workers within cross-class movements—including, and especially, those for socialism.

Camfield correctly attributes the PMC concept to Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s influential 1977 article. He also correctly reproduces their basic definition of the group as “salaried mental workers” who “reproduc[e] capitalist society” through their various occupations as “teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, [and] writers of advertising copy and TV scripts,” among many others. What he fails to provide is even a short recap of the Ehrenreichs’ structural explanation of this group’s formation and role, which is indeed part and parcel of their designation as a class. Camfield’s inaccurate focus on “status,” “skill” and “autonomy” as allegedly defining features of PMC membership is also strange, along with his simple assertion—via Ellen Meiksins Wood—that there are only two mutually exclusive ways to define class: “either as a structural location or as a social relation” (as if one’s role in a social relation does not simultaneously place one in a socio-structural location vis-à-vis other actors). Let’s consider these deficits, starting with definitions.

The Ehrenreichs’ full definition of the PMC is as follows:

“salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations. Their role in the process of reproduction may be more or less explicit, as with workers who are directly concerned with social control or with the production and propagation of ideology…Or it may be hidden within the process of production, as is the case with mid-level administrators and managers, engineers and other technical workers whose functions…are essentially determined by the need to preserve capitalist relations of production.”

They frame this not as a scholastic definition valid across space and time, but as a functional role produced for a group through more than a century of capitalist development and class struggle. Specifically, they cite the rise of “monopoly capital” (or what we might term ‘big-firm’ capital since actual monopolies are in no sense intrinsic), the deskilling of labor in production, a series of pitched battles between workers and employers and the massive expansion of state functions aimed at shoring up social reproduction and ‘order’. These combined processes, which are clearly demonstrable in the U.S. from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War, accomplished two things, according to the Ehrenreichs. On the one hand, big firms with increased productivity and the explosive character of working-class resistance convinced large sections of capital that investing in a permanent corps of administrators, officials and experts was both possible and necessary. On the other hand, deskilling on the shop floor and state intervention into education, childrearing and medicine as well as expansion of repression (police, prisons, courts) served to extract skills and practice from working class members and re-assign them to designated experts and officials—engineers, teachers, doctors, cops—who were then placed in positions of authority over them. “It is simultaneously with these developments in working-class life,” the Ehrenreichs argue, or “(more precisely, in the relation between the working class and the capitalist class) that the professional and managerial workers emerge as a new class in society” (16).

This is class as a social relation, but a double relation. The PMC is dependent on capital for their share of the surplus (paid as salary) and tasked with fulfilling capital’s needs for profitability and social quiescence. A latent conflict exists between them and capital over the share of surplus paid out and the degree of autonomy granted PMC members to perform their jobs. Yet their jobs do not involve, in the vast majority of cases, producing commodified use values but either directly (e.g. supervisors, police officers, social workers) or indirectly (e.g. engineers, programmers, advertisers) steering the behavior of working class people who often experience PMC directives, “suggestions,” blueprints and algorithms as forms of domination, however benevolent. Hence a double social relation—one with capital, another with workers—and thus a socio-structural location between labor and capital.

Whether or not one accepts it, this is at least a more complete picture of the Ehrenreichs’ concept than the strawman Camfield provides. Status, autonomy and skill are nowhere constitutive of PMC membership except insofar as they are deployed to dominate, direct or supervise others, typically members of the working class. None of this, however, answers the theoretical question of “class”.

Class is a socially defined relationship to the means of production. This can take the form of juridical property (or lack thereof) but need not in every case, as the wide variation in legal forms of ownership and actual productive practice throughout history attest. What is decisive is whether a group plays a distinctive role in production vis-à-vis other groups involved in the same collective process. To simplify, we can say that juridical property furnishes three largely uncontroversial class groups in developed capitalism: 1) capitalists who reap profits from large shares of productive property that employ many wage workers; 2) workers who don’t own such shares and must sell their labor power for a wage; and 3) petit bourgeois who own small shares of productive property, employ few or no workers and often engage in the productive process itself. The problem, however, is that the second category is so universal that it conceals more than it reveals. While only 1-2 percent of the economically active population of the U.S. are capitalists and 9-10 percent are self-employed (largely coterminous with the petit bourgeois), nearly 90 percent are “wage and salary workers”. This includes architects, doctors and corporate PR directors alongside retail salespersons, construction laborers and home health aides. More to the point, if left undifferentiated, this class category would include frontline, value-producing workers alongside top-level managers and professionals whose plans and directives they work under and who have great sway over their livelihoods.

Though one could dig in and assert that this is just a very big, internally-divided class, most don’t, including David Camfield. Though each draws boundaries somewhat differently, writers as diverse as C. Wright Mills (1951), Nicos Poulantzas (1975), Harry Braverman (1974), Erik Olin Wright (1986, 1997), Michael Zweig (2000) and Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992) all place groups largely identical to the Ehrenreichs’ PMC outside the working class. Wright and Mills define their ‘middles’ as largely non-agentic ‘no-man’s lands’ between true classes; Goldthorpe sees one “pole” of administrative and professional “employees” counterpoised to “unskilled manual and entirely routine grades of nonmanual” employees, as well as to employers and the self-employed; while Poulantzas and Zweig group most professional-managers in one class with the petit bourgeoisie (though with different political conclusions).

Kim Moody, founding member of the socialist organization Solidarity, Labor Notes and advocate of bottom-up, militant unionism as a pathway to socialism, makes much the same distinction between PMC and working class that the Ehrenreichs propose. In his most recent survey of U.S. labor, On New Terrain (2017), he places “managerial” and “professional” employees in a “middle class” separate from the working class (p. 40). He categorizes 23 percent of this middle—including teachers and registered nurses—in a “proletarianizing” sub-tier, due to the declining real power they have over clients and other employees in the face of tightening capital-state pressure and routinization. But he still places them outside the working class and even uses Camfield’s (via Wood’s) forbidden language of ‘location’: “‘Middle class’ refers not to those statistically in the middle-income range…but those socially located between capital and the working class in the production of society’s wealth” (ibid; emphasis added).

Even Camfield explicitly excludes one segment of employees—“middle managers”—from the working class. But given his insistence that “the PMC does not exist” it is unclear where or in what social relationship he situates this group and on what criteria he excludes them from the working class. Are they capitalists? Maybe, but this would bend any straightforward understanding of the term since “middle managers” typically don’t own the companies they work for or the divisions they manage, aren’t paid dividends, are employed at the discretion of top managers and shareholders, etc. Should they be grouped with the petit bourgeois? Again, since they don’t own and control their own independent small capital this match is equally ill-fitting. So on what basis does Camfield justify excluding only “middle managers” from the larger group of working-class employees? We don’t know, because he doesn’t elaborate. If he were to make this justification in the plausible direction of power relations this would immediately beg the question as to why only middle managers and not lower or frontline managers—who also have institutional authority over employees—are separated out. If institutionalized power were the question—and again we don’t know if it is—why are only middle managers and not police officers, detectives or criminal court judges separated out, since these groups have ostensibly even greater power over citizens and defendants, the bulk of whom are working class?

Following the power criterion to its logical conclusion would likely result in separating out from the working class proper a group of professional and managerial employees that looks remarkably similar to the Ehrenreichs’ PMC. Indeed, this is what I and a colleague did in order to chart the growth and decline of U.S. classes from 1970 to 2010 (Ikeler and Limonic 2018). Using Census data and the active workforce as our universe, we found petit-bourgeois stasis over the period (around 9 percent), PMC growth (from 19 to 32 percent), working class decline (from 72 to 57 percent—still the clear majority), and ruling class growth (from 0.4 to 1.2 percent) (Figure 1). More dramatic, though by no mean constitutive of class difference by Marxist standards, was the persistent and growing income gap between the working class and the PMC. Since at least 1980, average PMC members consistently earn double or more than average working-class members, and this only includes the actively employed shares of either class (Figure 2).

Figure 1: Class Percentages of U.S. Active Workforce, 1970-2010


Figure 2: Median Annual Earnings (2010 $) for U.S. Classes, 1970-2010

 

So what does it mean in practical terms if we accept “PMC theory”? Does it “get in the way of understanding and participating in the struggles of…the working class,” as Camfield argues? Does it pose an insurmountable “obstacle” to PMC members’ “unionizing, striking, and finding common cause with…the working class?” Does it “encourage guilty moralism…among university-educated” employees? Aside from the logical error Camfield is making here—that an objective concept should be ditched because of its uncomfortable practical implications—he also overgeneralizes. The answer to each of these questions is no.

Assignment or belief in oneself or someone else as part of a class with systematically defined relationships with other classes is not a moral judgment. To say architects have authority over estimators and laborers, to say teachers have the same over paraprofessionals and students, to say fashion designers have remote but real authority over garment producers—or to recognize one’s own institutional authority in any of the first three occupations—is not to say “bad” architect, “bad” teacher, or “bad” designer. It is simply to acknowledge the very real—even if beneficial or benevolent—power asymmetries between such groups.

Both the working class and the PMC have beef with capital: the former vis-à-vis surplus extraction and state repression, the latter vis-à-vis salary, autonomy and ability to serve the long-term interests of their clients. Teachers in Chicago, West Virginia and L.A., while acknowledging their relative empowerment over working-class students and communities, have fought militant successful strikes in recent years for those students’ interests, as well as their own. Registered nurses in Illinois, California, Arizona, Florida and New York struck or almost struck in 2019, primarily over staffing levels to ensure patient care and safety. And engineers and programmers at Google have been organizing proto-unions—and some of them fired because of it—that simultaneously fight sex discrimination and the pursuit of ICE contracts by their employer. In all of these cases, PMC members are using historically working-class methods of struggle to fight for both their interests and those of worker-clients. In a more nefarious example, many police unions mobilized against greater oversight of their members’ use of lethal force in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests. Here, one group of PMC members used working-class-type organizations to press their interests over and against those of mostly working-class constituents. The point is that the PMC itself is divided between those tasked with developing human and productive forces, what we call the “liberal-professional” segment, and those tasked with maintaining accumulation and social order, what we call the “financial-managerial” segment (Figure 3). It is with the former that working-class interests are more often aligned, though by no means identical.

Figure 3: U.S. PMC Segment Percentages, 1970-2010

Classes are of course fuzzy at their boundaries and the PMC is no exception. Is a college student on track to become a professional or manager but currently working retail in the PMC or the working class? Is the upper-level manager who’s paid increasingly out of profitability bonuses in the PMC or the capitalist class? Is the construction worker who starts a side business repairing rooves a worker or petit-bourgeois? Is the daycare director who used to teach classes but no longer does and now administers a growing cadre of employees petit bourgeois or capitalist? These are Sorites paradoxes not exclusive to the PMC. The fuzziness is the same in each case. The point is that classes are not micro-level concepts designed to sort each and every individual; they are socio-structural concepts designed to explain the internal tensions, interest configurations and long-term development of large human groupings (“societies,” “social formations,” “modes of production”). And none of this even touches on the more anthropological or culturalist conceptions of class, namely as bounded intergenerational groupings that pass on not only property and productive roles but also distinctive habits, practices, worldviews, etc. Suffice it to say there is plenty of evidence on this front as well of meaningful differences between working class and PMC patterns of social and ideological reproduction (Lareau 2003; Jensen 2012; Streib 2014; Cherlin 2014; Willis 1977).

Aside from its objective validity, the practical utility of the PMC concept is its ability to shed light on oft-unspoken divisions within social movements and organizations. For those of us involved in such efforts, how often have we seen leaders, strategizers and thinkers drawn from or self-selected from participants who hold professional or managerial jobs? Without denigrating any of their contributions, we should also ask ourselves—and not just in passing—to what extent these patterns recreate for working-class participants the same dynamics of inequality they experience in late-capitalist workplaces and society? We (the left) regularly ask ourselves these questions vis-à-vis race, gender and sexuality—and rightly attempt to correct them within our organizations and movements, with varying degrees of success. Why shouldn’t we do the same for internal class or semi-class divisions?

Clearly there are bigger objectives for the 21st-century left than sorting out our own internal hang-ups, and none of this is to suggest that PMC/working-class divisions are ‘the’ issue we need to deal with before all else. But they are an issue that has been known to creep into and distort left organizing in the past. Acknowledging and understanding such divisions are first steps toward overcoming them in practice which could help today’s left avoid key snags encountered by our mid-twentieth-century predecessors. Denying the class-based reality of such divisions, as Camfield would have us do, forecloses this development.

 

References

Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Cherlin, Andrew J. 2014. Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in  America. New York: Russell Sage.

Ehrenreich, Barbara and John Ehrenreich. 1979. “The Professional-Managerial Class.” Pp. 5-45 in Walker, Pat (ed), Between Labor and Capital, Boston, MA: South End Press.

Erikson, Robert and John H. Goldthorpe. 1992. The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ikeler, Peter and Laura Limonic. 2018. “Middle Class Decline? The Growth of Professional- Managers in the Neoliberal Era.” The Sociological Review 59(4): 549-570.

Jensen, Barbara. 2012. Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mills, C. Wright. 1951. White Collar:  The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moody, Kim. 2017. On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Poulantzas, Nicos. 1975. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. London: New Left Books.

Streib, Jessi. 2014. The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages. New York: Oxford University Press.

Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wright, Erik Olin. 1986. Classes. New York: Verso Books.

Wright, Erik Olin. 1997. Class Counts, Student Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Zweig, Michael. 2000. The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. Ithaca: ILR/Cornell University Press.

 

 

Fighting back is the only way out of Bolsonaro’s Brazil

By: January 19, 2020
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Brazil dominates Latin America’s economy. And although the coup in Bolivia, uprisings in Chile, Ecuador, and Columbia, Trump’s threats against Iran, Australian megafires, mass strikes in India and France, anti-government protests in Lebanon, and the British elections have pushed Brazil off the front of the international pages, what happens in Brazil will go a long way to determining the social and politic balance of power in Latin America in the coming period. In just one year, far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has done a lot of damage. The Amazon rain forest is burning, social services, education, culture, women’s rights, and unions are under attack. Bolsonaro and his followers have given the green light to the murder of indigenous activists, they have threatened LGTBQ people and elected officials, their fingerprints are all over the assassination of Party of Socialism and Freedom Rio de Janeiro city councilor Marielle France, and they have launched a campaign against “cultural Marxism.” Yet, despite legitimate fears, Bolsonaro has not managed to consolidate a neo-fascist party, his administration is enmeshed in growing corruptions scandals, and the judiciary was forced to release former Workers Party (PT) president Lula in October, who stands as a unique electoral threat to Bolsonaro’s reelection in 2022. 

Esquerda Online is a widely-read political site in Brazil associated with Resistência, a revolutionary socialist current within the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL). The following editorial outlines strategic perspectives for fighting Bolsonaro and mobilizing Brazil’s still-powerful labor, feminist, Afro-Brazilian, indigenous, youth, and poor people’s movements. Originally published at Esquerda Online, translated by No Borders News. 

It is common to joke that in Brazil the year begins after Carnival (the last week of February this year), our biggest festival of popular culture, marked by irreverence and political satire. But in these times of Bolsonarism we cannot afford to lose any time. And this new year, in particular, Brazil’s exploited and oppressed must confront unprecedented challenges. We want to point out three themes around which we believe the Brazilian left must focus its attention, themes which demand social mobilization and unity.

Attacks on democratic freedoms

One of the most sensitive issues in the current Brazilian political scenario is that of democratic freedoms. We must be rigorous in our analysis: in Brazil, we no longer live in a liberal democracy, but neither do we live in a dictatorship. At the same time, the direction is clear, we are experiencing an authoritarian escalation in the country.

Bolsonarism’s strategic project is the eradication of Brazil’s democratic regime. However, it does not yet enjoy majority support among the different fractions of the bourgeoisie, nor of their representatives in parliament. Although there is a powerful unity among the ruling class around neoliberalism, there is, as yet, no such consensus for the installation of an openly authoritarian regime.

The year began with the scandalous decision of a judge in Rio de Janeiro authorizing censorship against the producer of the popular and irreverent Porta dos Fundo program that recently produced a “gay Jesus” film for Netflix. Fortunately, the Supreme Court reversed the magistrate’s decision. Yet, if threats of censorship were not enough, the headquarters of the production company Porta dos Fundos came under attack by fascists on December 24. To date, only one of the criminals has been identified and, after he was issued a judicial warning and released from custody, he left the country. Nobody has been arrested.

Unemployment and privatizations

Unemployment is one of the biggest social wounds in Brazil today. The year ended with more than 12.5 million unemployed. Another 4.6 million people are discouraged and have given up looking for work.

Neoliberal measures sold as necessary reforms to make the economy grow and modernize labor relations were mere deceit. Only the big businessmen, bankers, and international moneylenders won while workers’ protection and retirement are under attack.

At the start of 2020, the official line is that only by privatizing the Petrobrás state oil company, Banco do Brasil, and Caixa Econômica Federal (the largest state-owned financial institution in Latin America) will the country grow again and generate jobs. But this is just another lie from Minister of Finance Paulo Guedes and Bolsonaro to deliver our national wealth into the capitalists’ eager hands.

Subservience to US imperialism

Brazilian diplomacy is in shambles. Bolsonarism destroyed important assumptions within the Foreign Ministry that guaranteed Brazil’s international policy not be linked to the United States on many issues. One such recent example was Brazil’s United Nations vote against a resolution condemning the criminal and inhuman U.S. economic blockade against Cuba. The only countries that voted with the U.S. were Brazil and Israel.

In 2020, Brazil’s tethering to American interests is growing tighter. For instance, in the confrontation between the U.S. and Iran after the assassination of General Soleimani, Brazilian diplomats sympathized with the U.S., referred to Iran as a terrorist state, and failed to condemn the death of the Iranian military leader. President Bolsonaro even declared that Soleimani was not a general.

Fighting back is the only way out

It is wrong to think this new year will be easy. Year II of Bolsonarism promises many attacks on democratic and social rights and our national sovereignty. On the other hand, we can, and must, place our bets Brazilian workers’ capacity to resist. When hundreds of thousands of teachers, education workers, and students struck in May and June of 2019 creating what we called an Education Tsunami, we managed to prevent attacks by Bolsonarism against public universities and federal education institutes.

And we need only look to the intense mobilization in France as an example, where a long and decisive general strike in public transportation has pushed the government back from its plans to raise the minimum retirement age. French workers are providing an important example to inspire the Brazilian working class, building resistance to Bolsonaro’s attacks is the only way out.

Reposted from the translated post at No Borders.

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