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  • Voter Suppression, Democratic Party Style

    Voter Suppression, Democratic Party Style

    Voter suppression has become a real issue in recent years. Mostly, what we hear on voter suppression are Democrats correctly accusing Republicans of disenfranchising people of color and poor and working-class people. I want to call your attention to the voter suppression activity by the Democratic Party in the 2020 election. In a number of states, Democrats are actively trying to keep the Green Party off the ballot.

    The best-known example of this occurred in Wisconsin. Green Party candidate for Vice-President Angela Walker changed her address during the petitioning period. The Hawkins campaign notified the Wisconsin Elections Commission. In response, the campaign was notified by the Commission to include a notarized statement of candidacy with Angela’s new address when submitting the petitions. That was done.

    A Democratic Party spokesperson then filed a challenge against the Green Party petitions, claiming the change of address by Walker invalidated some of the petitions. The hearing on the challenge before the state Elections Commission had all the trappings of a kangaroo court. The attorney for the Democratic challenger huddled with the Democratic chair of the Elections Commission to restrict the testimony of Green Party attorneys.

    The Commission upheld the Democratic challenge and the signatures on those petitions were invalidated—conveniently just enough to keep the Greens off the ballot. The Greens filed suit in the Wisconsin Supreme Court where they lost 4-3.

    Wisconsin is not the only state where Democratic operatives acted to deprive people of the opportunity of voting for Hawkins/Walker. In Montana, the State Supreme Court removed the Green Party from the ballot five months after the Secretary of State determined that the Greens had qualified. Somehow the Democrats got copies of the Green’s petitions and went to signers and encouraged people to remove their signatures.

    On this pretext, the Democrats sued to reverse the Secretary of State’s decision. Because the Greens were not a party to the suit, they had no opportunity to defend themselves. A lower court upheld the Democrats’ challenge. The Secretary of State appealed to the State Supreme Court where the lower court was upheld 5-2.

    In Pennsylvania, the Democrats went to the state Supreme Court to remove Hawkins and Walker from the ballot. They were victorious on the flimsy technicality that the Greens did not submit signed filing papers in person but had mailed them in.

    In Texas, the Democrats sued the Green Party to remove Green Party congressional and state office candidates for not paying filing fees, even though a state court had declared the fees unconstitutional. Nevertheless, the candidates were removed.

    Earlier this year in New York, Democratic Governor Cuomo signed a bill greatly raising the number of votes needed for third parties to retain ballot status.

    So, what should we make of these actions? The most obvious is the total hypocrisy of the Democratic Party. As the national Green Party said in a statement about Wisconsin. “By kicking Howie and Angela off the ballot in Wisconsin and then publicly celebrating this naked act of self-serving disenfranchisement, the Democrats have made plain their intention to ‘save democracy from Trump’ by killing it themselves first and then dancing on the grave.”

    It should be noted that there has not been a public outcry about this undemocratic behavior, even from the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. I would add that these undemocratic acts reveal how many Democrats feel about Biden and the poor campaign he is running. Biden should be winning in a walk, but the race is uncomfortably close.

  • Don’t Hope for a Biden Pick, Dream of Abolishing the Supreme Court

    Don’t Hope for a Biden Pick, Dream of Abolishing the Supreme Court

    The thing we knew would happen any day now happened. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead.

    Trump is now on the verge of being able to place a nightmare Justice on this court, giving it a 6-3 imbalance in favor of the conservative Justices.  Similar to basically everyone he appoints to any position in government, his nominee is an absolute villain for the job.

    A judge from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (the Federal appeals court seated in Chicago) Amy Coney Barrett is anti-LGBT, anti-choice, hyper-religious, and anti-healthcare—not the traits you’d look for in someone who would be called by the title “Justice.”

    Trump hopes that Barrett would replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who made her judicial mark with, among other things, her work on gender equality, abortion access, and voting rights.  I am an employment rights’ attorney and a woman.  I owe a lot to Justice Ginsburg’s work and her legacy.

    As far as Supreme Court justices go, she was good.  But, of course, you know that. The internet bursts with inspirational eulogizing. In life, she was hailed a hero, in death, she is absolutely sanctified.  Just look her up on Etsy.com and you’ll see what I mean.

    In three decades on the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg had great power to shape our lives and little accountability outside her colleagues on the bench. While we applaud her sharp dissents and groundbreaking work, we must also be cautious of the superhero sheen that blinds us to her harms.

    Historically, Ginsburg sided against indigenous sovereignty.  She called Colin Kaepernick’s protest “really dumb.  She had just one Black clerk in thirty years on the bench.  She voted to reject the argument that pretrial detention does not qualify as imprisonment in federal law. She sided with conservatives to endorse the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.  She agreed with the Trump administration to expedite deportation of asylum seekers. Justice Ginsberg, despite her important work for gender equality, was not so reliable on racial equality.

    ***

    Understandably, Justice Ginsberg’s death caused a wave of panic among reproductive rights activists. If you google Roe v. Wade, the first listing on the auto-complete is “overturned.”  Lots of people are rightfully freaking out. The anti-abortion movement has a long line of hopeful cases, which, if taken up by the Supreme Court, pose direct threats to Roe.

    Overturning Roe would be devastating.  It would not make abortion illegal but would leave the matter to be determined by state law. Four states have automatic bans at the ready. Ten states have pre-Roe bans that could automatically return, and many other states have vowed to ban abortion to the fullest extent possible.

    That said, the threat of “losing Roe” has been the siren song of mainstream abortion rights organizations to lure activists onto the rocky coast of the Democratic Party, steering energy away from protest and speakouts, and into lobbying and electoral campaigns.

    Now, with Justice Ginsberg’s death, the internet is bursting with (mostly white) women who are terrified (rightfully so) about losing the constitutional right to abortion. The answer for them is to vote for Biden so he can nominate the right kind of Supreme Court Justice who will save Roe.

    The Democratic Party’s promise to save Roe rings hollow for thousands of people who have effectively already lost Roe. For people on Medicaid who can’t borrow enough money to pay for the procedure—Roe is gone. For people in the military who are not victims of rape or incest or impending death from the pregnancy—we are already post-Roe. For people who live too far from a clinic in a state without public transit, for people who will lose their jobs for taking too much time off to meet onerous counseling requirements, for minors who fail to convince a judge that they are mature enough, or minors who are undocumented. Or for anyone tricked by a fake pregnancy clinic into believing their pregnancy is still in its earlier stages so the deadline for a legal abortion passes without notice. For all those people, Roe is already lost.

    Moreover, abortion is just a part of reproductive justice. Recently, mass hysterectomies have allegedly been forced on women in detention centers. The assault on the reproductive lives of women of color is threaded through US history. This violence is not only our history but rather also continues today.

    Based on her history, Judge Barret would likely vote to overturn Roe. Still, Supreme Court Justices can be unpredictable. Justice Ginsburg, historically anti-indigenous sovereignty, sided with the tribes in the McGirt v. Oklahoma decision this year in support of indigenous sovereignty. She also apologized about her comments on Kaepernick.

    Also unpredictably, this year the Court upheld LGBT workplace protections in Bostock v. Clayton County, struck down a Louisiana anti-abortion law in June Medical Services v. Russo, and rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to end DACA. In all three cases, Chief Justice Roberts, generally conservative, sided with generally liberal Justices Kagan, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor in the majority opinion.

    In Bostock, Justice Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion! Justice Gorsuch replaced his late judicial icon, the raging homophobe Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch endorses the same juridical principles as Scalia. But Gorsuch blindsided us when he used a textualist approach to find that transgender workers are protected by federal law.

    Roe v. Wade was passed by a Court with four justices appointed by Nixon, two by Eisenhower.   One of the Nixon appointees wrote the opinion and two joined it. Probably less because those judges took a closer look at the constitution and realized that it protects the bodily autonomy of people with uteruses, and more because there was a mass movement pounding at the door. That said, since the 1980s, Republican presidents have been more careful to nominate only hard-right justices (with the one exception of Souter).

    This might sound confusing, because the Supreme Court is supposedly a nonpolitical body that is removed from democratic election so that it may be an impartial check on undemocratic or tyrannical actions by the Executive or Legislative branches.

    Of course, we know that’s not true. First, the Supreme Court is nine un-elected people appointed for life who make consequential decisions that impact the lives of millions of people. Those decisions are nearly always founded in precedent, which necessarily means looking backward.  This has no place in a democracy, which is supposed to be based on the will of the people.  (That is, the will of the representatives elected by the majority of voters, which in reality also operates undemocratically as campaign promises are rarely fulfilled and recalling an elected official is nearly impossible.  But that discussion is outside the scope of this article).  The reason the Court sometimes responds to mass movements is that the Justices recognize their decisions must have broad legitimacy and that their role is to maintain social stability. That’s why they have been so cautious to overturn Roe wholesale even though it’s been challenged since it was first decided.

    Second, the Court is very much a political body. Despite the alleged political neutrality, we still know who the conservative and liberal judges are. The Supreme Court does not actually act as a check on undemocratic rule of the other branches. Instead, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in a brilliant article, “The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It” published in  The New Yorker argues, the Supreme Court appointments “reflect the current balance or imbalance of political power, making it impossible to neatly untie them from the political bodies that determine who sits on the Court and who does not.” One need only recognize that Trump is likely to appoint a full third of the Supreme Court before he leaves office, giving him, in Taylor’s words, “one more opportunity to limit the political rights of the minority populations that he disparages and despises.”

    Taylor explains the legacy of the Supreme Court as enforcing conservative social order, which it has done for most of its existence with one limited exception in the 50s and 60s. That decade stands out as an anomaly because the U.S. state was under tremendous pressure here and abroad and needed to project itself as a beacon of democracy to hide the racial injustice raging at home.  With that exception, Taylor explains, the Court is a force of conservatism. Even in socially progressive decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court often merely undoes the harm of its own earlier decisions.

    I won’t list all the cases that any decent human would consider were decided the wrong way (looking at you, Plessy v. Ferguson, Koramatsu v. United States, Bowers v. Hardwick). The law is the smoke and mirrors that legitimizes a system of exploitation and corruption. “Legal” doesn’t mean “just,” “moral,” or “humane.” It means lawfully permissible. The Supreme Court, when it decides cases in the interest of social justice, simply tails the social standards that we have already set.  The Court does not disrupt the status quo.

    These days, the status quo is failing. For some people, the status quo is fatal. The status quo is cracking and everything about our society is up for debate. The Left is thinking it, the far-Right is thinking it. We know what we don’t want; we must also be re-thinking what kind of society we do want.As a socialist, I believe the way forward is collective action. As Taylor said on Democracy Now, we have the parts of a mass movement: numbers, discontent, passion. Trump is not as popular as the media make him seem. The right wing is not as big as they pretend they are.  Trump has almost a 40% approval rating, right? Well, 100 million people didn’t vote at all in the 2016 Presidential election. According to the New York Times, 15-26 million people participated in Black Lives Matter protests this summer – that was the largest movement in U.S. history.

    We deserve a better world and we can make one. On our way, we need to abolish the Supreme Court. We’re obviously not there yet. We can call this a “yes, and.” Yes, we must abolish the Supreme Court because it is the antithesis of democratic decision-making. AND right now we need to organize to stop Trump’s nomination of a super-villain  for a lifetime appointment on the highest judicial body.

  • Trump Contracts COVID, Aides Also Sick, His Campaign in Crisis

    Trump Contracts COVID, Aides Also Sick, His Campaign in Crisis

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

    The American election and the country’s future are once again a question. Early on the morning of October 2, President Donald Trump tweeted that he and wife Melania Trump had both contracted the coronavirus. Since then it was revealed that others, including the director of the presidential office and the head of Trump’s campaign, had also tested positive for COVID, as well as others in his inner circle. Three Republican Senators have tested positive too.

    The White House and Capitol Hill cases appeared to be the result of recent Republican political events, all of them ignoring public health practices such as social distance and masking and some held indoors. Trump and others who tested positive will have to be quarantined for fourteen days, slowing down the president’s campaign.

    Trump being a male, 74-years old, and obese is in a high-risk category with a much greater chance of severe illness or death. His doctors had him flown to Walter Reed Military Hospital where he was given a still experimental cocktail of monoclonal antibodies, as well as Rendesevir, which has become a standard treatment for severe cases of COVID.

    Trump has over the last several months called the coronavirus a hoax, downplayed its severity, saying it was no worse than a cold or the flu; he has constantly contradicted public health officials’ warnings, suggested dangerous treatments and not only wouldn’t he wear a mask but he discouraged his family, friends, and coworkers, and his millions of followers from wearing them. At the first presidential debate a couple of days before, he ridiculed his Democratic opponent Joseph Biden for wearing a mask. To many the president’s illness appeared to be poetic justice or divine retribution, but it is simply science: with his refusal to wear a mask and to social distance he brought the illness upon himself.

    Early reactions to these events suggest that they will contribute to the continued downward spiral of Trump’s campaign, which has been losing support because of his poor handling of the pandemic. But it is too early to say for sure what the effect will be.

    While Trump has been the focus of news reports, about 800 Americans are dying of the disease each day, and 210,000 have died altogether so far because of the president’s maladministration of the government response to the disease. Trump’s failure to provide leadership leaves the United States with inadequate testing, ineffective contact tracing, and no authority to insure quarantine or isolation for those affected. Some 7.4 million Americans have been diagnosed with the disease, but few if any will receive the kind of care that Trump is receiving from the best physicians at one of the country’s leading hospitals.

    The American presidential election, which will take place on November 3, will be the most important since the 1930s. It may well determine whether American democracy—such as it is—continues to exist or is replaced by an authoritarian government, perhaps even by a dictator. At the time Trump fell ill, most polls showed Biden leading by roughly 10 points over Trump and as of October 3 the Financial Times predicted Biden winning the Electoral College by 279 to 125. Winning the votes may not be enough.

    President Donald Trump, authoritarian and racist, has polarized the country, encouraging the growth militant white nationalist movements that include armed quasi-fascist organizations. Trump has said that he will not necessarily accept the results of the election; he will try to tie up the election in the courts; and it is feared that no matter who wins he will claim victory and use his authority to perpetuate himself in office. All the major news media and the social media have discussed openly the possibility of a coup d’état in the United States.

    How Trump’s illness will change the election remains unclear. Whatever happens, we on the left will all be on guard, prepared to resist.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Bolivia: Amid new crisis, coup government seeks to divide spoils, impunity

    Bolivia: Amid new crisis, coup government seeks to divide spoils, impunity

    Protester in La Paz holds up a sign that reads: “Anez: hunger does not wait”. Photo: Radio Kawsachun/Facebook

    Just weeks out from the October 18 elections, Bolivia’s coup government is again in crisis following the departure of three key ministers over an unconstitutional attempt to privatise an electricity company.

    It comes as polls show Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) presidential candidate Luis Arce potentially winning in the first round, less than a year after his party was thrown out of office by a right-wing coup.

    Relatively unknown senator Jeanine Áñez was sworn in as “interim president” last November following the coup against then-MAS president Evo Morales.

    Despite pledging to only occupy the post for 90 days until elections could decide a new president, Áñez’s illegitimate regime has instead attempted to use its power to roll back anti-neoliberal measures implemented by the Morales government and unite the various anti-MAS factions.

    Her regime, however, has been marked by its catastrophic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has, so far, left almost 8000 dead and left Bolivia with the third-highest COVID-19 death rate in the world.

    This failure has been compounded by her government’s poor economic management — with more than 1 million Bolivians dropping below the poverty line — and more than 20 high-profile cases of alleged corruption within her cabinet — which has had 17 changes of ministers in 10 months.

    Corruption

    The most notorious corruption case was the use of a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) to purchase 179 ventilators in May, at more than twice their regular price, which led to the arrest of the health minister and other top health officials for corruption.

    Another similar scandal involved the purchase of overpriced tear gas for the police by the defence minister.

    The latest cabinet crisis was triggered by fallout over a push to reprivatise the Cochabamba regional electricity company, ELFEC, which was nationalised by the Morales government in 2010.

    The disagreement led to the sacking of economics minister Oscar Ortíz and the resignation of the labour and productive development ministers on September 28.

    A week earlier, state general prosecutor José María Cabrera was also dismissed for questioning the constitutionality of the privatisation decree. Cabrera was overseeing the investigation in the questionable purchase of tear gas by the defence minister.

    Speaking to the media, Ortíz said he refused to sign the privatisation decree as it went “against the legal system” and did not have “sufficient legal support.

    “I do not think that the government, in its last weeks, should allocate new contracts or important tenders, which should be left for the next administration.”

    Ortíz also denounced the government for attempting to push through with several other purchases and contracts in its final weeks in office, including more than $7 million on new vehicles.

    The Plurinational Legislative Assembly has announced it will open an investigation into this and other questionable purchases, as well as several irregularities and alleged acts of corruption that have occurred within various state-owned companies.

    In Ortíz’s place, Áñez promoted planning minister Branko Marinkovic, who was quick to announce he would travel to the United States to solicit new loans from, among others, the IABD.

    Impunity

    With Arce leading the polls — despite the wave of government and right-wing paramilitary repression against the MAS, which has only escalated during the election campaign — various government factions are seeking ways to protect themselves and their ill-gotten gains.

    A day after right-wing think tank Jubilee Foundation released a poll showing Arce winning in the first round, Áñez announced she was stepping down as a presidential candidate on September 17.

    While presented as a move to help unify the fragmented anti-MAS bloc, currently divided behind several opposition candidates, it is more likely that her withdrawal was motivated by a desire to strike a deal for immunity under any potentially victorious anti-MAS candidate.

    Rather than endorse any particular candidate, Áñez — who will still appear on the ballot due to the late timing of her withdrawal — instead called on voters to unite behind the candidate with the best chance of defeating Arce.

    Meanwhile, the state attorney general told the Assembly that the military is refusing to cooperate with the investigation into the massacres at Senkata, Sacaba and Yapacaní last November, which left at least 32 anti-coup protesters dead.

    Given all this, many are questioning whether the elections will be free and fair — or if they will happen at all. The elections have already been postponed twice and the October 18 deadline was only established following mass nationwide protests in August.

    With the future of Bolivia’s democracy and economy at stake, much more will no doubt occur in the coming weeks.

    First published by Green Left Weekly.

  • Trump Refuses to Promise a Peaceful Transfer of Power Should He Lose

    Trump Refuses to Promise a Peaceful Transfer of Power Should He Lose

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

    U.S. President Donald Trump has refused in repeated interviews to promise a peaceful transfer of power should he lose, his statements causing consternation among the public, the Democratic Party opposition, and even in his own Republican Party. Trump claims that mail ballots—being more widely used because of the coronavirus pandemic that has left 205,000 dead—are a “scam.” He says there will be massive voter fraud, though mail ballots have been used by some states for years and there is no evidence of fraud. All of America is now discussing the possibility of an illegal seizure of power by Trump.

    Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi told Trump, “You are not in North Korea; you are not in Turkey; you are not in Russia, Mr. President, and by the way, you are not in Saudi Arabia. You are in the United States of America. It is a democracy, so why don’t you just try for a moment to honor your oath of office to the Constitution of the United States?” Even Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell who has strongly supported Trump felt obligated to make he statement, tweeting out, “The winner of the November 3rd election will be inaugurated on January 20th. There will be an orderly transition just as there has been every four years since 1792.” Most Republican politicians try to avoid comment.

    Trump’s opponent, Democratic Party presidential candidate, Joseph Biden, is leading in the polls in battleground states. And many women, some white working class voters, and older voters are deserting Trump. So he has been working to steal the election. He has reduced U.S. Postal Service resources, which will impede the timely return of mail ballots. He has brought lawsuits against four states—Iowa, Nevada, New Jersey, and Montana—and against the Navajo Nation to make mail voting more difficult. He claims that mail ballots will make it impossible to determine who has won the presidential election. It is expected that in some states final election tallies might not take place for days or perhaps even weeks after Election Day. Trump is pushing to fill immediately the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, saying the court may have to decide the election.

    What could happen on Election Day?

    • It is virtually impossible for Trump to win the popular vote, but if he wins a clear majority in the Electoral College he will be the winner and retain office, proceeding with his authoritarian transformation of the U.S. political system.
    • If Trump wins an election that Democrats believe to be unfair or stolen, the Democratic Party can and will file court cases to overturn the election, though his Attorney General would fight the lawsuit to delay any decision. There will no doubt be massive protests. Trump might call out the military to suppress the protests. His supporters, many armed, might also come out to battle his opponents.
    • If Trump clearly loses the election but refuses to acknowledge defeat and leave the White House by January 20, this could open up an even more profound conflict. The U.S. military might become a decisive factor in removing Trump and installing Joseph Biden in office. If that should happen, the military’s role in American society would be fundamentally changed. The military would become the guardian of American democracy, a prospect that would seem to vitiate the idea of democracy itself.
    • Almost any scenario we can imagine might well lead to armed conflicts in American streets between Trump’s supporters and his opponents on a scale much larger and more violent than anything we’ve seen so far.

    Part of the left—myself included—urges a vote for Biden to make it more difficult for Trump to claim victory and justify seizing power. Facing Trump, the Democratic Socialists of America has thousands of new members and the entire left can play a more important role in building a powerful resistance movement and the new socialist party we need.

  • Hearts on Fire for the 43  

    Hearts on Fire for the 43  

    [September 27, 2020 ] On the sixth anniversary of the forced disappearance of the 43 Ayoztinapa college students, a flurry of developments is spurring optimism among long traumatized relatives of the students and their dedicated core of supporters.

    Nonetheless, frustration and outrage boil among relatives as well as the latest generation of Ayotzinapa students and other student teachers from colleges across Mexico, who waged militant demonstrations last week in Iguala, Guerrero, where the students were forcibly disappeared by Mexican security forces the evening of September 26-27, 2014, and in the Guerrero state capital Chilpancingo. Both actions ended in the partial destruction of state government buildings and property.

    The students demanded punishment for officials linked to the mysterious disappearance of videos presumably recorded at Iguala’s court building which could show the students carted off the evening of their disappearance.

    “The lack of truth is part of the social inequality gap that we suffer in Mexico,” wrote in La Jornada Abel Barrera Hernandez of Guerrero’s Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of the Mountain, a leading advocate for and ally of Ayotzinapa parents and relatives who’ve waged a relentless struggle for years that’s kept the 43 students on the national agenda.

    “Those of us who work in the countryside are not only burdened by centuries of abandonment but also strongman governments, military repression, persecutions, tortures and forced disappearances….Our heart is on fire waiting for the shining moment of truth.”

    Barrera’s sentiments were very much on display September 26 and 27, when thousands of Mexicans marched in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Mexico City, Morelos, Guerrero, Michoacan and Chihuahua, according to press reports.

    At a September 26 press conference, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) vowed to get to the bottom of the Ayotzinapa affair.

    “I want to reaffirm my commitment to continue with the goal of clarifying what happened, and that the truth-the authentic truth-be known. That is the commitment,” said Lopez Obrador. “And as always that we know the whereabouts of the young men and punish the responsible parties.”

    The President’s office says 80 people have been detained so far this year in the Ayotzinapa investigation and 70 arrest warrants issued for individuals, including Tomas Zeron, a former high-ranking federal justice department official who is accused of cover-up and document falsification.

    According to officials, efforts are underway to extradite Zeron from Israel. Many of the legal charges pursued by AMLO’s government relate to the alleged torture of suspects in the disappearance and the fabrication of a now largely discredited “historic truth” under the previous presidential administration of Enrique Pena Nieto which held that the 43 students were abducted by police and paid killers and all the victims were taken to the Cocula dump, where they were killed and burned in a large fire.

    An investigation of the world renowned Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, however, did not find evidence of the type of fire required to incinerate 43 bodies at the Cocula site; no remains of the students were ever discovered at the dump.

    The all-died-at-the-dump story was further weakened when Austria’s Innsbruck University recently identified remains belonging to missing Ayotzinapa student Cristian Alfonso Rodriguez Telumbre; the young man’s remains were previously recovered about a half mile away from the dump.

    An alternative line of investigation that the students were divided up and whisked to different places was bolstered by comments made by Mexican Federal Prosecutor Alejandro Gertz Manero to La Jornada newspaper last July that the 43 students, who formed part of a larger group engaged in seizing buses in Iguala for use as transportation to a planned demonstration were confused with members of a rival drug organization, detained by multiple security forces and then summarily executed.

    Other developments portending progress in the search for the truth include the establishment of an Ayotzinapa truth and justice commission promoted by parents, a new investigation announced by the head of Mexico’s official National Human Rights Commission and formal agreements with a host of international partners. These include the United Nations, Innsbruck University, the Argentine forensic specialists and the Inter-American Commission on Human Right’s Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), an investigative body of foreign experts which was invited in by the former Pena Nieto government but not allowed to continue its work in Mexico after issuing a couple of inconvenient reports that departed from the premises of the “historic truth.” Under AMLO’S administration, the GIEI is back in town.

    To be sure, serious obstacles crowd the road to the truth, not the least among them the resistance of powerful interests which might be involved in the crime as well as the notoriously bureaucratic and reputedly corrupt judicial system where the Ayotzinapa cases have been fragmented and delayed.

    Another glaring example of justice denied surrounds the outright murders of six people in Iguala on the evening of September 26-27, three Ayotzinapa students and three civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gathering cobwebs in the court system, the murder cases have largely been overshadowed by the mass abduction of the 43 missing students.

    Mario Patron, longtime Mexican human rights attorney and former director of the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center which has represented Ayotzinapa parents, identifies another huge barrier standing in the way of truth and justice.

    “The environment of macro-criminality that was operative in Guerrero at the time of the events has not been clarified,” Patron recently wrote in La Jornada. According to Patron, one of the strong points in the previous GIEI reports was zeroing in on the largesse and mechanics of an operation that disappeared dozens of students over an eight hour period and with ample resources drawn from throughout the northern region of Guerrero state.

    “That could only happen by means of a criminal structure that connected organized crime with distinct levels of government,” Patron continued. “It’s pertinent to reiterate that, when we speak of macro-criminality, we refer to criminality strengthened from the State, in which public institutions work for the interests of organized crime.”

    Six years after the Night of Iguala, the case of the 43 perhaps stands as the litmus test in determining the nature of the Mexican State. What will prevail?  A viable State committed to human rights, justice and democracy or an endlessly corrupted and brutal version of it.

  • Why I’m for Voting For Biden and Urge You To Do So

    Why I’m for Voting For Biden and Urge You To Do So

    For the first time in my life, in fifty years of voting in America, I am voting for a Democratic Party presidential candidate and urge others to do so as well. As an activist on the left, a writer on politics in various publications, and an editor of New Politics, I feel that I must publicly acknowledge that I have changed my position on this question and explain why I recently signed a letter advocating a vote for Joseph Biden.

    I became an activist in the 1960s in the movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam. Our enemy was the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson which was carrying out the war. The reactionary Republican Party was of course beyond consideration. I cast my first presidential vote in California in 1968 for Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther leader who was the candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party, an attempt to give political expression to the two great social movements of that era: civil rights and opposition to war. Like many others at that time, I became convinced that the Republican and Democratic parties were both dominated by the capitalist class, both parties of racism at home and imperialism abroad. I still believe that to be the case.

    In my part of the left, we took the position that we stood for what we called “independent political action,” that is for supporting candidates and parties to the left of the Democrats that were independent of the capitalist class. So I supported and voted for years for the Green Party and supported the Labor Party when it was founded in 1996, though unfortunately it never found the courage to run candidates against the Democrats. I helped Medea Benjamin with her Green Party campaign for governor of California in 2000 and I voted for Ralph Nader in that same year when he was accused of being a spoiler leading to the defeat of Democrat Al Gore and the election George W. Bush. In 2010 the Socialist Party, having won a ballot access lawsuit asked me to stand as its candidate in Ohio for the U.S. Senate, which I did to propagandize for socialism.

    When Bernie Sanders declared himself a “democratic socialist” candidate for president in 2015, I worked for his election, while maintaining my Green Party registration. When Sanders ran again in 2019 I was opposed to supporting him because I believed his campaign would not have the impact it had had in 2015-16 (which turned out to be true) and because I believed he and his supporters had become more integrated into the Democratic Party (which is debatable). I regret none of those former positions I have taken nor do I repudiate the logic that led me to take them.

    The Democratic Party remains a capitalist and imperialist party. I do not believe that reformers can have much impact on its general policies and direction, and I certainly do not believe that it can be taken over by the left. Joseph Biden is a repugnant candidate, as Branko Marcetic detailed in his book Yesterday’s Man. He helped the Democratic Party to carry out the neoliberal turn from the working class to the professional classes, and he supported the racist and imperial policies of the Clinton and Obama presidencies. I am not a political supporter of either the Democratic Party nor of its candidate Joe Biden, but I urge a vote for him on narrow and pragmatic grounds: to prevent Trump from having a second term.

    I have come to the conclusion that this election—with the possibility of massive electoral fraud, the likely refusal of Trump, should he lose, to leave the White House, and a possible coup d’état—is quite different from anything in my life time or in American history. All the major media institutions, TV, press, and social media, are discussing the possibility of a rightwing seizure of power by Trump. I am not urging a vote for the Democratic Party because it necessarily can or will stop a coup. I do NOT believe that the Democratic Party is a bulwark against an authoritarian or fascist coup. But I do believe that a large vote for Biden everywhere, even in safe states where one might vote for the Green Party, makes it more difficult for Trump to justify to the Republican Party, to his base, and to the American people that he has the right to stay in office. I do not wish to make it easier for Trump to move ahead by claiming he won the election if he did not. Voting for Biden certainly does not represent in any way on my part a commitment to the Democratic Party or its candidates in the future. But this time I will vote for Biden.

    Unfortunately, much as I admire Howie Hawkins, I see no way that voting for the Green Party will do anything but make it easier for Trump to win or to claim victory and fight to stay in office, to become a dictator. I am not convinced that there is a strong connection between voting Green and building social movements, in fact, I think there is little connection. I do not believe that voting Green will somehow have an impact on the political consciousness of many Americans, since the current crises push everything else to the margins. I understand that some will want to vote Green to demonstrate to themselves their continued commitment to the left, but I think that is better done by stopping Trump for now—if we can—while also working to build the movements we need to overcome Biden’s administration and policies.

    I wish I could vote for the Green Party, a labor party, a socialist party, or some other progressive party on the left that represented a mass movement. Unfortunately there is no such alternative. It has not been easy for me to arrive at this position or to publicly advocate it. But I have and I am. I urge all voters to vote for Biden to stop Trump’s reelection. As I said, I regret having to make this decision, but I would regret even more a second term for Trump.

     

  • The greater evil

    The greater evil

    Stephen R. Shalom criticizes the arguments against lesser-evil voting and makes the case for the Left both to support Biden and build the social movements.

    Ashley Smith and Charlie Post present a case against lesser evil voting that is convincing neither in terms of logic or evidence.

    They begin their analysis by telling us that Biden “appears headed for victory” but the “Democratic establishment” is “haunted” by the defeat of their sure-win candidate in 2016.

    But it’s not just the Democratic establishment that is haunted by the failure to anticipate Trump’s victory in 2016. Anyone who cares about the future state of American society ought to feel chastened by the 2016 election and avoid glib predictions about 2020. Yes, the Democratic establishment got 2016 wrong, but so did much of the left. When the left touted polls showing Jill Stein garnering 3.5 and even 7 percent of the vote they were no less engaged in wishful thinking than were the corporate Democrats.

    And though pollsters have improved their techniques since the debacle of 2016, the threat of unprecedented voter suppression and disenfranchisement, not to mention other ways in which Trump might try to steal the election, make the drawing of firm conclusions from Biden’s current lead in the polls especially dangerous this year.

    Stein only ended up with 1 percent of the votes in 2016, but had her supporters instead cast ballots for Clinton in three battleground states, the election outcome would have been different. Trump was the result of rejecting lesser-evil voting—either by voting for Stein or by abstaining—yet in their analysis of the “trap” of lesser-evil voting, Smith and Post don’t discuss this rather significant case at all. Did the benefits of voting for Stein or staying home outweigh the horrors of Trump’s presidency? This seems relevant to the topic at hand, yet Smith and Post say nothing about it.

    It is true that some Stein voters might have voted for Trump or stayed home if the Greens weren’t on the ballot, so we can’t actually know the impact of Stein’s candidacy on the outcome (though it’s hardly a ringing endorsement of a Green Party campaign that its appeal may be to Trump voters). But what matters is that Smith and Post are trying to convince those who are today wavering between the lesser evil and the Greens to vote Green. So, to the extent that they succeed, they will swing the election towards the greater evil.

    Social Movements and Lesser-Evil Politicians

    Smith and Post get wrong the relationship between electoral work and social movements, and use the recent anti-racist protests to try and make their case. They counterpose the victories of Black Lives Matter to the actions of lesser-evil politicians and in so doing misunderstand the way social reform takes place.

    As an initial matter, the authors tell us that the “Black Lives Matter uprising scored more victories in a few weeks than decades of voting for the lesser evil.” Yet many analysts are rather less impressed with BLM victories than Smith and Post, noting that much of what has been accomplished is symbolic — removing Confederate flags and taking down statues – rather than fundamental changes in policing and criminal justice, where progress has stalled.

    But let’s accept that Black Lives Matter victories have been substantive. Where did the victories take place? Almost all of them have been in Democratic states (like California and New York) or in Democratic-controlled cities. But on the national level, where the lesser-evils are not in control, the record is rather different. Trump issued an Executive Order but it offered “anemic reforms,” with “only cosmetic changes.” In Congress, where the Republicans hold the Senate, the bill that the Democrats passed in the House has been blocked.

    It is absolutely true that left to their own devices, the Democrats have done and will do nothing. They need social movements, powerful social movements, to compel them to act. But it is also true that social movements can rarely push politicians who are beholden to the most reactionary forces in society. The Fraternal Order of Police and the International Union of Police Associations have both endorsed Trump for re-election and Trump will accommodate their concerns, not those of Black voters. Lesser-evil Democrats, on the other hand, are beholden to Black voters, and therefore susceptible to pressure on this issue.

    A local police union endorses Trump. Trump: “No one will be safe in Biden’s America.

    Take the example of Pentagon transfers of excess weapons and equipment to local police forces. This initiative, known as the 1033 Program, was instituted under George H. W. Bush and continued under subsequent administrations. Under Obama, huge transfers to local departments were made. But after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged, Obama felt compelled to issue an Executive Order modestly curtailing the program. So yes, without the pressure of social movements, Democrats won’t do much. And under the pressure of the movement, Obama acted. However, after the lesser evil was defeated in 2016, Trump issued his own Executive Order, reversing Obama’s. Thus, today – despite what has been by some measures the largest protest movement in U.S. history – we are worse off in terms of the legal status of military equipment transfers to local police than we were under the last lesser-evil president.

    Other Examples of the Relationship

    The September 2019 climate strike was a huge mobilization, with 250,000 people marching in NYC. But less than two months later, the Trump administration gave formal notice of its intention to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Despite the outpouring of environmental activism, we have seen a “stunning rollback in less than four years of environmental regulations that go back decades, including not just Obama-era climate change rules but even the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock law signed 50 years ago, which [Trump] has moved to unilaterally weaken.” Environmental activists could win a thousand local victories and they wouldn’t come close to reversing the new harms introduced by Trump.

    And the pattern holds historically as well. The famous Selma to Montgomery march was a high point of social protest, with the tremendous dedication and heroism of the protesters moving the nation. But if there had been greater-evil Barry Goldwater in the White House, would the marchers have been protected by 3,000 federal troops and federalized national guard? Would Goldwater – who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, who thought Brown v. Board of Education was “against the law,” and who opposed using federal troops to integrate Ole Miss – have pushed for the 1965 Voting Rights Act as lesser-evil Lyndon Johnson did?

    National Guard troops returning from Flint, MI in 1937.

    The great sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan, in 1936-37, represented a tremendous upsurge of labor militancy. But their success was not unrelated to the fact that lesser-evil Gov. Frank Murphy called out the National Guard not to evict the strikers, but to protect them from police and company thugs. Murphy also declined to follow a court order to expel the strikers. A month later, General Motors recognized the UAW.

    So it’s not a question of lesser-evil politicians or social movements. Rather, it’s a question of which politicians will provide a more favorable environment for social movements. Movements need to get the most sympathetic politicians in office and then, when they’re in office, fight like hell to push them in a progressive direction.

    Enabling the Right

    Smith and Post tell us that “the lesser evil strategy always enables, rather than hinders, the growth of the right.” Note that they don’t say that sometimes the lesser evil strategy fails. They claim that it “always” enables rather than hinders the growth of the right. This claim is bizarre.

    Smith and Post know that Trump has strengthened the right. They want us to know that lesser evils are not reliable, consistent, nor socialist opponents of the right. Granted. But that’s not the issue. The question is whether the right would be weaker or stronger today if those who rejected the lesser-evil strategy in 2016 – who voted for the Greens or who abstained in that election – had instead voted for Clinton.

    Would the right be doing better today with Hillary Clinton in the White House rather than the past four years of Trump? Would Clinton have supported the white supremacist protesters in Charlottesville? Would she have filled the courts with the most rigidly far-right judges in decades? Would she have sent Homeland Security forces to Portland? Or pressured Homeland Security to underplay the role of white supremacists? Or emerged as an inspiration for the German far right?

    Those who rejected the lesser-evil strategy in 2016 enabled Trump to win. Some who did so probably didn’t expect that outcome and may well regret their decision. But even in retrospect Smith and Post are claiming that it was those who voted for Clinton who “enabled” the growth of the right, not those who might have tilted the Electoral College towards Trump by rejecting lesser-evilism.

    Why do shrewd rightwing operatives try to quietly promote the Green party? Is it because they think this will harm the right? Or is it because they know what most people know, namely that every vote that can be diverted from the Democrats to a third party with no chance of winning furthers the prospects of the right? Why did GOP operatives help try to get Kanye West on the ballot in Wisconsin? For the same reason.

    Historical Examples

    Smith and Post state that two historical examples “prove” their claim that “the lesser evil strategy always enables, rather than hinders, the growth of the right.” One is drawn from the Spanish Civil War, where the workers movement had to decide between social revolution and supporting the popular front government that was backed by the Communist party. This example seems particularly inappropriate to the current American context: there is no substantial workers movement, still less the possibility of social revolution. In any event, it’s not at all obvious that the workers movement would have been any more able to survive by taking the path of revolution given that they (and the Republic) had a desperate lack of weapons, which Stalin controlled, and given that they already didn’t need much incentive to fight in the face of the likely massacres that the fascists would commit upon their victory.

    Their second example is the presidential election in Germany in 1932, where the Social Democrats supported Hindenburg to stop the Nazis’ rise, but Hindenburg ended up appointing Hitler chancellor. It’s true that voting for Hindenburg didn’t block Hitler, but was there a better, non-lesser evil strategy? Here are the results of the second round of voting (where only a plurality was needed):

    The Social Democrats (SPD) were about 20 percent of the electorate. What would Smith and Post have had them do? Vote for Thälmann? Then Hitler wins. Run their own candidate? Then Hitler wins again. Now maybe this makes no difference at all, but it’s hard to see why having Hitler take power a year before he actually did would have been a great victory. Nevertheless, this is supposedly a decisive piece of historical evidence against lesser evil voting.

    Campaigning in the 1932 German election.

    Germany in those years of course offers another lesson about lesser evilism, but not the one mentioned by Smith and Post. The Communist Party (KPD) considered the SPD to be “social fascists,” given its collaboration with capitalist parties and its support for authoritarian and austerity policies. It may have been a lesser evil than the Nazis, but to the KPD it was still evil and thus the KPD refused to partner with it in a United Front to oppose the Nazis, with disastrous consequences.

    If one were actually concerned with relevant historical evidence then one would look at cases where progressives had a choice between voting for a lesser evil or for their preferred candidate who had no chance of winning, and try to assess the costs and benefits of each of the voting options. Sometimes this assessment will lead to the conclusion that one should vote for the lesser evil and sometimes not. Sometimes the assessment will be a close call. But Smith and Post never undertake this assessment generally, and they don’t do it for the 2020 U.S. presidential election in particular, where the difference between the two major party candidates is one of the most extreme in modern history.

    Short-Term and Long-Term Impacts

    It is sometimes suggested that we unfortunately need to accept some short-term pain of the greater evil in order to get future benefit. So we have to accept the greater evil now because we are building the movement and institutions that will give us substantial long-term progressive change.

    But the long-term and the short-term are not so simply separated. In the short run, Trump undermines democracy by disenfranchising voters and by appointing rightwing judges who will be issuing rulings for decades to come. And these are not just short-run harms; they hurt the long-term prospects for social change. Had a few thousand Nader voters in Florida in 2000 cast votes instead for the lesser evil, George W. Bush might not have had the opportunity in his second term to elevate John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, rather than two justices who might have been chosen by a re-elected Al Gore. That outcome led to the 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, gutting a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, with long-term negative consequences for the political clout of African Americans. (Gore needn’t have chosen Angela Davis to the Court; one can assume any non-rightwing ideologue he chose would have voted with the four Clinton and Obama justices.) Likewise, Trump’s two new justices helped provide the 5-4 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, allowing partisan gerrymandering far into the future.

    There are many other short-term policies with awful long-term effects. Trump makes it harder for workers to unionize or exercise their rights. This reduces the long-term prospects for worker organizing and for building a labor party. Trump’s tax policies have made the rich richer, providing greater resources for rightwing causes over the long term. And of course, Trump’s dismantling of the environmental regulatory structure in the face of imminent irreversible climate catastrophe threatens long-term human survival, let alone long-term social progress.

    So how do Smith and Post assess the costs and benefits of Trump versus Biden on these issues? They don’t mention Trump’s climate policies, despite environmentalists’ warnings that we have very few years left in which to avert disaster. They don’t mention the judiciary – except to say that Biden “backed the appointment of right-wing judges” (though he voted against Clarence Thomas, Rehnquist for chief justice, Roberts, and Alito). Labor rights are not mentioned at all. Democratic rights are discussed in their claim that Trump is not a literal fascist – true enough, but irrelevant to the question of whether he will institutionalize authoritarian structures. And if you think Trump has been dangerous to democracy so far, consider how much worse he will be as the judiciary becomes less of a check on him.

    Spoilers

    Smith and Post recommend third party campaigns in “one party” cities and towns “where we can’t be accused of being spoilers.” No disagreement there, but why don’t they care about being the biggest spoilers of all in the presidential contest?

    Howie Hawkins offers an inadequate discussion of the spoiler issue (if the Democrats can’t beat Trump, “it’s their own damn fault,” don’t “blame the little Green Party”). But a party can be very small and still act as a spoiler in a closely contested race, or a race where one side uses massive voter suppression to overcome its lack of popularity. And whatever the faults of the Democrats, the left can’t control those; all it can control is its own contribution to the looming catastrophe. But where Hawkins provides an unconvincing discussion of the spoiler problem, Smith and Post don’t discuss the problem at all. They don’t acknowledge that if enough leftists listen to their advice and refrain from voting for Biden in battleground states, that could swing the election to Trump.

    One can’t vote for Biden and still be critical of him, say Smith and Post. We shouldn’t be diverted into trying to “turn out the vote for someone who opposes everything we’re fighting for.” But this is an extremely misleading formulation. Yes, Biden opposes socialism and our radical agenda. But he doesn’t oppose our defense of DACA or our rejection of leaving the Paris climate agreement, the Iran deal, and nuclear arms control agreements, or our opposition to Homeland Security forces in Portland, or our call for Covid to be addressed with science, or our battle to protect reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights, etc., etc. Not all lesser-evil leftists who are trying to turn out the vote for Biden are doing it for Biden or for the Democrats. Many are doing it for the well-being of the American people, of the world’s people — and the future of the left.

    This article was originally posted on: The Tempest.

  • Pandemic, Polarization, and Resistance in the US; an Interview with Ashley Smith

    Pandemic, Polarization, and Resistance in the US; an Interview with Ashley Smith

     

    This interview of Ashley Smith was conducted by Joseph Daher for the newspaper of the Swiss socialist party Solidarités, and the French leftwing website, Contretemps. 

     

    Joseph Daher: Can you tell us about the current situation in the US regarding the COVID-19 Pandemic? 

    Ashley Smith: We are in the midst of a humanitarian catastrophe with distinctly US characteristics. Over 7 million people have been infected with the virus, more than 200,000 people have died, and experts predict that as many as 400,000 could lose their lives by the end of the year. The vast majority of those that have died are the elderly in nursing homes, people of color, and essential workers required to work through the outbreak of the pandemic. 

    Of course, no capitalist nation state has been spared from the ravages of the pandemic. All of them have been compelled by the logic of capitalism to reopen their economies from lockdowns to get profits flowing again. But the US, along with other states also led by right wing governments like the ones in Britain, India, and Brazil, have been particularly callous in putting corporate interests before life. 

    In the US, as the revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book Rage document, President Donald Trump deliberately disguised the severity of the crisis and even went so far as to block a plan developed by the Post Office to distribute masks free of charge through the mail.

    Trump put profits, his re-election campaign, and frankly his ego first, and the lives of workers and oppressed people last. 

    From the beginning he was reluctant to support any lockdown and quickly pressured states across the country to reopen as quickly as possible. Why? Because the economic expansion under his watch was the only chance to secure his reelection to the presidency. 

    Those crass economic and personal political interests drove him to deny then mismanage the crisis, and deflect blame for the catastrophe onto everyone else from China to the Democratic Party. He has stooped to science denial, toxic macho posturing against the wearing of masks as a sign of weakness, and plain old misanthropic contempt for working class people and especially people of color to justify his criminal misbehavior.

    Meanwhile, the bodies pile up in the morgues across the country. 

    Joseph Daher: What about the socio-economic situation of the US economy? What have been the effects of COVID-19? 

    Ashley Smith: It’s important to understand that the world economy was headed for a recession even before the pandemic struck. Its three powerhouses—China, the US, and the European Union (EU)—were already showing all the signs of an onrushing crisis.

    COVID-19 was thus the trigger, not the cause, of the global recession. The pandemic then  exacerbated the depth of the recession in countries throughout the world. In the US, it forced states and cities to impose lockdowns on all but essential economic activity. 

    The scale of the economic crisis is staggering. Real GDP in the US contracted by 31.7 percent in the second quarter and by 5 percent for the year. The collapse in the economy threw 20 million people out of work, raising unemployment to close to 15 percent. 

    While the economy has started to recover and unemployment has dropped to around 8 percent, millions of workers remain unemployed, survive on reduced income, and face mass eviction for failing to pay their mortgages on their homes and rents for their apartments.

    The US government rushed to stop the economic freefall just like did they during the Great Recession in 2007. The Federal Reserve poured over $2.3 trillion into the economy—slashing interest rates, printing money, buying securities, and extending loans to banks, corporations, and state and municipal governments. 

    The Federal Government poured another $2 trillion into the economy to keep it alive. While the Democrats got some important benefits for workers like increased unemployment and one time individual payments of $1,200 per person, Trump and the GOP ensured that the bulk of the bailout went to corporations, keeping alive all sorts of zombie firms that otherwise would have gone belly up.

    But, contrary to bourgeois hopes and predictions, this bailout has not produced a sharp recovery. The ongoing pandemic has forced states and cities into periodic lockdowns, preventing normal economic functioning. 

    But Trump and the Republicans have refused to pass another stimulus package. They are reluctant to drive up the government debt and deficit and oppose increased unemployment benefits and individual cash payments based on the myth that they will stop workers from looking for jobs. 

    Nevertheless, the US state has yet again saved capitalism. But in doing so, it has prevented the cleansing of the system’s unprofitable corporations, ensuring that we will not see a deep recession followed by a sharp rebound in growth, but a protracted slump, plagued by too many corporations producing too much stuff that they cannot sell at high enough profit rates. 

    These conditions have intensified the deep political polarization in the country. On the right, Trump, while not a fascist, has lurched further to right with his law and order racism against the Black Lives Matter movement. He has also greenlighted the far right and fascist formations, which are developing rapidly in the petty bourgeoisie, a section of the working class, and the lumpen-proletariat. 

    Despite Trump’s disastrous mismanagement of the pandemic and economy, he retains support of about 40 percent of the country. This new right is here to stay, no matter what the outcome of the fall elections. 

    On the left, pandemic and recession has powered the surge in membership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as well as all sorts of emerging formations on the left. Those form the core of a new socialist movement amidst sections of students, the working class, and oppressed groups.

    Joseph Daher: What is the status of the Black Lives Matter’ movement? Is it still dynamic? Is it structured as a movement? What are its main demands?

    Ashley Smith: This summer’s Black Lives Matter movement is the single largest wave of protests in US history. As many as 26 million people have participated in the demonstrations that swept the country since the racist police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The video of his killing rocked the consciousness and conscience of the entire country driving people into a mass rebellion. 

    This is the second major wave of the movement. The first erupted in 2014 in the wake of the racist cops killing Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City, and then exploded after the police killing of Freddie Gray into a full scale rebellion in Baltimore, Maryland that forced the city and state to call in the National Guard to impose order. 

    This second wave is far larger and, in some ways, more radical than the first. This time Black activists have galvanized far more support from white people than the last time. Demonstrations against police racism have occurred not only in Black and brown urban areas, but in majority white suburbs and small towns all across the nation. 

    This Black-led multiracial rebellion appears largely spontaneous, but at its core are activists networked in national and local formations. Black militants are organized in formations like the Movement for Black Lives, Critical Resistance, and many other national and local groups.

    Beyond this core, there is an informally organized mass layer of young students and workers who have read and discussed anti-racist books and staged various actions in their schools and communities since the first wave of protests. As a result, there were pre-existing activists-in-waiting armed with ideas and also Black Lives Matter posters, banners, and t-shirts. 

    The movement’s central and radical demand is to defund the police. The left wing of the movement is very clear that the goal is police abolition as part of a fight for system change through mass collective struggle in the streets, communities and workplaces.

    By contrast, liberal currents and the Democratic Party aim to contain this radicalism, redefine defunding as merely budget cuts to police departments, and redirect it into the dead-end of police reform and increased investment in police training. The Democrats hope to get the movement off the streets and into campaigning for Biden in the presidential election. Thus, there is a struggle at the core of the movement over its politics, strategies, and tactics.

    The movement has proved yet again that mass social and class struggle is far more effective than electoral politics in winning reforms. It has scored more victories in a few short months than decades of voting for and lobbying Democrats. It has forced cities to cut police budgets, expel police from schools in various cities, and redirect money into social services and education. 

    Despite these advances, we are still far from winning the defunding of the police let alone their abolition. They continue to brutalize and kill Black people with impunity. Frustration with this situation compelled perhaps the most radical action yet—the strike led by Black professional basketball players in the NBA.

    They shut down the NBA playoffs and triggered a wave of job actions by women players in the WNBA as well as by athletes in sports with few Black players like baseball and even hockey. This multiracial strike by worker-athletes electrified the nation. 

    With the sports industry facing spreading work stoppages, former president Barack Obama intervened to help broker a deal to get the NBA players to go back to work. The sports bosses promised to support the movement for Black lives and Obama encouraged the players to help turn out voters for Biden. 

    At this point, the movement is in an ebb, but the constant killing of Black and brown people by the police continues to provoke explosions of protest in various localities. The cops’ endless murder spree guarantees that the movement will explode again and again over the coming months and years until systemic change is won. 

    For now, though, most organized forces are being pulled into the fall elections to campaign for Biden. But, far from being an advocate for the movement, Biden opposes its main demand of defunding the police. Nevertheless, most see no alternative but to support him in order to defeat Trump. 

    Meanwhile Trump has demonized the movement and rallied his base to support the police. He placed law and order racism at the center of his reelection campaign and stooped to some of the worst white supremacist demagogy in the history of modern bourgeois politics. 

    Joseph Daher: Any other major movements you want to mention having any influence? Labor Movement? Women’s Movement? Migrants’ Movements?

    Ashley Smith: Since the Great Recession, we’ve seen episodic explosions of struggles. These began with Occupy, the Black Lives Matter movement, and a handful of strikes most importantly the Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2012, which set the model of teachers strikes in the following years.

    Since his election, Trump has provoked a new round of protest beginning with the Women’s March right at the start of his rule. Since then, we have seen protests against his attacks on immigrant rights and Muslims and a strike wave among teachers, beginning with the Red State Teachers Revolt in 2018 when teachers illegally struck in several Republican controlled states. That revolt inspired teachers to stage strikes in Democratic Party controlled cities like LA, Chicago, and Denver. 

    The pandemic and recession have compelled workers, especially Black and brown workers,  in essential industries to take job action to protect their health. Workers at hospitals, schools, Amazon, and meat processing plants to name a few have staged protests and, in some cases, strikes to secure personal protective equipment and hazard pay. 

    We are clearly in the early stages of increasing militancy after decades of retreat, defeat and disorganization. But the major institutions of our side—social movement organizations, NGOs, and the unions—are transfixed by the election. They are subordinating the building of struggle to electoral politics in the vain hope that the election of Joe Biden and the Democrats will provide a solution to the catastrophes of US capitalism. 

    Nevertheless, the growing and deepening class and social inequalities of US capitalism will compel the rank and file of the unions and movements to build organizations willing to push for higher levels of militancy to take on the bosses and the growing far right. We are in the early stages of a whole epoch of crisis, political polarization, and struggle.

    Joseph Daher: Is there anything left of the Sanders’ movement? Was the Left able to build on the dynamics of Sander’s candidacy? DSA? 

    Ashley Smith: Bernie Sanders’ dramatic runs for the Democratic Party presidential nomination were contradictory expressions of this episodic explosion of social and class struggle. On the one hand, Sanders cohered students and young multiracial workers radicalizing through activism behind the idea of socialism as an alternative to capitalism. He helped make socialism common sense for a whole generation.

    On the other hand, Sanders trapped the project of fighting for socialism inside the Democratic Party. But that party is a capitalist one, not a social democratic party or labor party. It is tightly controlled by its wealthy funders, party bureaucrats, and bourgeois politicians. 

    Sanders running in that party had two negative impacts. First, Sanders diverted energy from building a new party of our own into the dead end of trying to take over the Democrats. Second, in the process of trying to get votes in that party, Sanders redefined socialism as  Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism. 

    The DSA positioned itself as the prime beneficiary on the left of Sanders’ campaigns. They grew from a moribund organization of aging reformists committed to the Democratic Party into a new, young organization of 70,000 socialists, inspired by the struggles from below and attracted to Sanders’ version of socialism and his proposal for social reform like Medicare for All. 

    Tragically and predictably, however, the Democratic Party blocked both Sanders’ attempts to win their presidential nomination. In 2016, the establishment rallied to Clinton and then did the same behind Biden. In fact, Sanders did considerably worse in 2020 than he did in 2016, proving that while the Democrats are happy to tolerate leftists in their midst to keep them from building a new socialist party, they block every attempt by them to take over the party. 

    After his defeat, Sanders fulfilled his promise to support the Democrat’s nominee, and rallied his supporters behind Biden. Even worse, he’s giving Biden a facelift, predicting that he has the potential to become the most progressive president since FDR. Any even cursory reading of what Biden and his handlers say to his Wall Street backers makes a mockery of this claim.

    As a result, Sanders has largely disorganized his movement and attempted to reorient it and its organizations into supporting Biden at best as a progressive and at worst as a lesser evil to dethrone Trump. DSA has been challenged in this changed situation to reorient the organization.

    While DSA chapters and members have been active in the waves of struggle, the Sanders campaign and similar down-ballot electoral runs inside the Democratic Party came to occupy a central focus for the organization. While DSA has continued to score some electoral victories especially in New York City, it has lost its orienting focus with Sanders’ defeat.

    And the organization’s overwhelming electoral focus has led it to take its eye off the ball when it comes to the new waves of struggle. For example, while its members have joined the Black Lives Matter protests, DSA as a national organization and most of its chapters have not played a prominent role in the movement. 

    Joseph Daher: How is the Left in the USA positioning itself for the presidential elections?

    Ashley Smith: The November presidential election is not what the Left and DSA expected. Many if not most wrongly expected Sanders to win the Democrat’s nomination. Now, DSA and the Left face the unappealing and classic trap of an election between a right wing Republican, Trump, and an establishment Democrat, Biden, who’s committed to restoring bourgeois norms through a government of national unity.

    Faced with this “choice,” the Left breaks down into three predominant currents. First, the liberal left is all in for Biden with varying degrees of illusions in his program. Some are fooling themselves into thinking he will be as progressive as Sanders claims while others more soberly are voting for him in full recognition that he is a neoliberal capitalist but the only way to get Trump out of office.

    On the socialist left, the main current is one that accepts the traditional position of lesser evilism—of voting for the lesser evil to stop the greater one. The best of this current is promising to campaign and vote for Biden and then fight him on day one, while others are sowing illusions that having Biden in the White House will make it easier to win progressive reforms. 

    A small current of revolutionary socialists, which I’m part of, argues against both these positions. We contend that you cannot fight the greater evil by voting for the lesser one for three reasons. First, once the Left accepts the choice and lines up behind the lesser evil, we get taken for granted and our demands ignored.

    Second, if and when the lesser evil wins, the Left that has supported that evil will be tempted to cooperate with it in office, some even going so far as to join the administration, and others  that remain outside giving it a honeymoon hoping it will deliver reforms. That leaves the far right as the only opposition. 

    In that case, the Left will be tempted to defend the administration, completing the Left’s cooptation and neutralization. Meanwhile the lesser evil in power will cut deals with the greater evil. Biden has made a career of making just such rotten deals. 

    Third, campaigning for the lesser evil is not an individual decision but a collective one with enormous consequences. If the Left backs Biden it will aid and abet the bureaucracies that control the unions, social movement organizations, and NGOs in redirecting activist’s time, money and energy from building struggle to fight for what we want into campaigning and voting for what we don’t want—a neoliberal lesser evil.

    DSA as the main organization of the Left has all these currents inside it. It is barred as an organization from endorsing Biden by the “Bernie or Bust” resolution it passed at its last convention. But members of some of its caucuses are actively campaigning for Biden and many if not most of its leaders and members will individually vote for Biden however much they distrust or despise him. 

    Joseph Daher: What future for the DSA and more generally the Left in the USA?

    Ashley Smith: We are in the midst of a profound crisis of the capitalist system, one with multiple interconnected features—a protracted global slump, an ongoing pandemic, climate change, and intensifying inter-imperial rivalry between the US and China. It is the gravest systemic crisis since the 1930s.

    In the US, it is producing profound political polarization to the left in the form of DSA and the new socialist movement and to the right in form of Trump at the top of the GOP and the growing ranks of organized far right and fascist militias. The capitalist establishment is increasingly oriented to the Democratic Party in the desperate hope to stabilize what appears to be a failing state and economy. 

    In conditions of a deep recession and pandemic, workers and oppressed people are being driven to fight for their very lives from the Black-led multiracial uprising against police brutality to strikes. The emerging left will have to cohere itself into a force, eventually a new socialist party, that can help lead these struggles from below and provide an alternative to challenge both the capitalist establishment in the Democratic Party as well the Trumpite GOP and far right. 

    DSA is best positioned to launch the effort to build a new party. But its many currents are not united behind that project: some remain committed to Sanders’ project of taking over the Democratic Party; many hope to use the Democratic Party ballot line to build a force of elected politicians to eventually launch a new party in the future; and most are oriented on an electoral road to the formation of that new party. 

    The question will be whether the revolutionary left inside and alongside DSA can argue for a different strategy, one focused on class and social struggle and local electoral work independent of the two capitalist parties, with the goal of launching a new socialist party as soon as we possibly can. Everyone inside the Left and in DSA are debating these ideas now in the run up to the election. 

    In the unlikely though possible event of a Trump victory, we are in for the fight of our lives against an emboldened right. In the more likely event of a Biden victory, we will have to  agitate for DSA to engage in a two-front struggle—one focused on forcing the Biden administration to deliver what we want and another against a right far more radical, militarized, and dangerous than the Tea Party was under Obama. 

    If Biden wins, the biggest danger is that Biden is given a honeymoon by the Left, opening the door for the right to go on the offensive and set the terms of struggle in politics, on the streets, and in the workplaces. We are midst of a deep crisis of historic proportions, one fraught with great dangers on the right and pregnant with enormous opportunities for the Left. Our future hangs in the balance. 

    Joseph Daher is a Syrian-Swiss anti-capitalist academic and activist. He currently teaches at Lausanne University and is a part time affiliate professor at the European University Institute, Florence (Italy). He is the author of Hezbollah: Political Economy of the Party of God (Pluto Press, 2016) and Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience (Pluto Press 2019). He created the blog Syria Freedom Forever.

    Ashley Smith is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in Burlington, Vermont. He has written in numerous publications including Truthout, Jacobin, New Politics, Harpers, Spectre, Tempest and many other online and print publications. 

  • A Letter to the Progressive International

    A Letter to the Progressive International

    When a new “Progressive International” invited Syria’s Yassin al-Haj Saleh to join, he was happy to accept. When he then submitted this letter for their publication, they ceased contacting him without explanation.

    [Al-Jumhuriya Editor’s note: In April, the Syrian writer and Al-Jumhuriya co-founder Yassin al-Haj Saleh was invited to join the advisory council of the Progressive International, a new movement seeking to “unite, organize, and mobilize progressive forces” around the world, involving well-known figures such as Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, and Yanis Varoufakis. The below letter was to be al-Haj Saleh’s inaugural contribution to the movement’s media arm, Wire; envisaged as a platform “for the world’s progressive forces, translating and disseminating critical perspectives and stories from the grassroots around the world.” The letter, however, was never published by Wire, which ceased correspondence with al-Haj Saleh without explanation. It is published here by Al-Jumhuriya, with minor edits, for the first time.]

    Dear comrades and friends,

    It is a pertinent and timely moment for us to come together and work for a new international, active, progressive, and genuinely democratic world. So many of our problems today are global in nature, with no possibility of finding merely national solutions for any of them. The Coronavirus crisis shows this with renewed clarity, although environmental degradation has been demonstrating it for a generation at least. I would add another global problem: the double-headed beast of racism and the “War on Terror.” This War is by no means an actual war, but rather in effect the torture of whole societies, and I see torture as a socio-political practice of creating races. Torture belongs to a family of evils, the other members of which are slavery, colonialism, and genocide. By torture, which is a cruel game played by torturers on the boundaries between the lives and deaths of the tortured, masters and slaves are created: races, in other words. No shortage of “theory” is invoked to justify and legitimize this. Everything can be employed in the service of the racist scriptures: modernity; secularism; the War on Terror; even anti-imperialism.

    It happens that my country, Syria, was a torture state for decades before it became a major theater of the War on Terror, in which so many of the world’s crime agencies have demonstrated their skill by joining this torturous war; Bashar “Chemical” Assad leading their way. After the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, Assad’s regime abolished the state of emergency that had been in effect in the country since the first Baathist coup of March 1963, only to replace it with laws of “combating terror,” moving thus from one form of what Agamben calls a state of exception to another. The move was simply a continuation of an exterminatory war on political organizations and independent initiatives.

    In Syria today, which has now been ruled by the Assad family for a whole half-century, and where the privatized state called on foreign powers to protect its ownership of the country, we enjoy no fewer than five occupations: Israeli; Iranian; American; Russian; and Turkish. There are plenty of sub-state actors as well: Hezbollah, which is a Lebanese satellite of Iran; additional Shia Islamist militias from Iraq and Afghanistan; the Kurdish PYD, which is the Syrian branch of the PKK in Turkey; the al-Qaeda offshoot currently known as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham; and various other smaller Salafi-jihadist groups. In its heyday between 2014 and 2017, the Islamic State/Daesh managed to attract jihadists to its ranks from almost half of the world’s countries, a feat rivaling the UN and its organizations as an international body. Jihadism is a sort of Islamic international, whose imaginary is haunted by specters of transnational Muslim empires of the past.

    With so much of the world in Syria, and as many as 6.5 million Syrians (just under 30% of the population) displaced outside the country, scattered around the world, present-day Syria is a denationalized nation, a non-homeland. If we understand internationalism as a progressive and positive denationalization of the world, then the curious situation of Syria should be an analytical starting point. The country is a microcosm of a world which has become a macro-Syria. To understand Syria greatly helps us understand the world today, and I believe the failure of understanding and analysis is worse than the failure of solidarity with the subaltern millions in the country. I mean not to be harsh, but most of the prevailing analysis is truly pathetic, showing rare levels of oversimplification and poverty of knowledge: sheer ignorance, in short. One cannot but be amazed at the active worldlessness that has been rebellious Syrians’ lot: to be told that Putinist Russia’s protection of a genocidal regime is legitimate; or to hear sympathy expressed for a serial murderer like Iran’s Qassem Soleimani, rather than the victims on whose blood he walked victoriously in Aleppo and many other parts of Syria. These are just two among innumerable examples of dehumanized people being told for almost a full decade now that they are irrelevant, indeed ostracized from the world. That is why I believe a new international that ignores or marginalizes the gravest international crime of this century so far, or that does not challenge these conditions of worldlessness and misrepresentation in both theory and practice, is dooming itself to failure.

    It came to many of us Syrian leftists and democrats as a shock that our struggle for democracy, justice, and dignity was dismissed by anti-imperialists in the West, and indeed globally. It appears the regime narrative was accepted by many. The wised-up came to convince themselves that there were “no good guys” over there; a catchphrase formulated by that close friend of Syria’s murderous mukhabarat, the British journalist Robert Fisk (whose knowledge of Arabic, after more than 40 years living in the region, is such that he believes the word is “muhabarat”). This is worse than a mistake. It replaces knowledge of the present with a remembrance, even nostalgia, for the past; put simply, it sticks to early Cold War ways of thinking and judging. This is a recipe for an old and reactionary international, not a new and progressive one. Syria is a privatized state, owned by a ferocious dynasty of mafiosi, whose highest aim is to stay in power forever, even at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and surrendering the country to such cruel “protectors” as Iran, Russia, and their satellites.

    The comprehensive failure of international forces, anti-imperialists included, vis-à-vis this century’s principal struggle is symptomatic of an even larger crisis: their disorientation, and lack of a vision and project.

    We are in need, at the global level, of what might be called a third solidarity movement. The first came after Bandung, and survived for some two decades. Its center of gravity was the newly-independent countries, where ideas of Afro-Asian solidarity, or the peoples of the “Tricontinent,” were widely held. It was the time of decolonization and the socialist ideal. This first solidarity occurred between nationalist governments in the Third World, and it unraveled in the 1980s with the ascendance of brutal oligarchic regimes in many Asian, African, and Latin American countries, and the gradual decline from the 1970s onwards of the communist and socialist bloc that supported nonalignment against the common enemy; the capitalist West.

    By the late 1980s, capitalism had achieved its biggest victory in a century. In the ‘90s, a second movement of solidarity with the victims of oppression, dictatorship, and discrimination against minorities started to appear in the West. Progressive-minded people adopted causes from the “Third World,” or oppressed communities in Europe itself, building organizations and networks to support this cause or that, usually in a patronizing way. The politics of solidarity have been atomized, with no efforts to bring the disparate causes together. Perhaps supporters of the Palestinian cause, for example, might cooperate with anti-racism activists, but in general causes and the solidarity movements attached to them are separate, intellectually and organizationally. One easily discerns an unequal power relationship in solidarity activities, whereby the causes of the oppressed and their agents are patronized by Western solidarity networks, and a “market” of causes emerges, with oligopolistic tendencies. Like many Syrians, I have had unhappy experiences with this sort of solidarity activism in Turkey and Europe, on which I reflected in my article, “A critique of solidarity.”

    Now, then, is the time for a third solidarity movement on a global scale. It should be more affirmative, aimed at global regime change. To pit causes against one other, granting some solidarity while ignoring others, is by no means a progressive policy. We need more systematic analyses that show the roots of the problems of racism and poverty, and the crises of health and the environment. The clash of victimhoods to which the second solidarity structure was susceptible must be avoided, indeed condemned. The stage of this third solidarity is the world. International ideals are irreconcilable with Eurocentric visions and visualizations. What brings us together is partnership based on equality and equity, though asymmetric temporalities and different autonomies of struggles are basic principles for a decentralized and radically democratic international.

    The Progressive International can be an active agent in this third solidarity. I would have preferred a different name for the initiative; a young friend suggested “Planetary Dignity,” which I find more creative and progressive. The name refers to the home of humans and non-humans alike who are existentially threatened by capitalism and the worship of power and profit. Dignity is the value that encompasses other values, and that requires respect for ourselves, everyone else, and life itself. Regardless, I believe we are indeed heading toward a new wave of international and planetary-minded movements. Plurality is needed within each movement, as it is essential for a more democratic world.

    May we be partners in the struggle for a better life for humans, and better humanity for life.

    Yours,

    Yassin al-Haj Saleh

    This aritcle was originally published in Al-Jumhurya.

  • The Me Too Movement in Iran: What Is New About It? What Can It Learn From Abolitionist Feminism in U.S.?

    The Me Too Movement in Iran: What Is New About It? What Can It Learn From Abolitionist Feminism in U.S.?

    For the past month, an unprecedented development has started to take place in Iran. Thousands of women and some men have started to speak publicly on social media about their experiences of sexual harassment, abuse, assault and rape. Although in the past, some individual women and men have occasionally spoken about sexual abuse online, the current wave has lasted longer and embodies a more diverse group.

    The perpetrators include an IRGC (army) commander and member of parliament, clerics, journalists, university professors, artists, various professionals, students and ordinary people including brothers, fathers and other family members. What stands out, however, is the cases of famous men of arts and letters who claim to be defenders of women’s rights.

    Multiple complaints about a well-known sociologist and anthropologist, Kameel Ahmady’s sexual abuse of women and abuse of power, has led to the suspension of his membership in the Iranian Sociological Association until further investigation. Ahmady is an academic with a focus on gender, children, ethnic minorities and child labor. He is the author of works on female genital mutilation and on child marriage in Iran.

    There are also 22 mostly anonymous allegations of sexual abuse and attempted rape against a prominent artist, Aydin Aghdashloo. One case involves a woman journalist, Sara Omatali who met him at his office for an interview in 2006 only to be confronted with a naked Aghdashloo attempting to rape her. Laleh Sabouri, a film actress and student of Aghdashloo has also claimed that sexual misconduct was a natural part of his behavior.

    The public exposes have included many stories of incest and abuse by women of a variety of backgrounds. However, the voices of working-class women speaking for themselves are still faint.

    For now, a socialist feminist activist in Tehran has started publishing a series of interviews with working–class women who have been sexually abused for a lifetime and have been forced to turn to sex work to earn a living. These testimonials have been confirmed by social workers helping the interviewees as well.

    The reactions to the current Iranian Me Too movement online have ranged from enthusiastic support to contempt. Some are encouraging more women to speak out. Some are calling women “spoiled brats” who are “making a big fuss.”

    Context of Emerging Me Too in Iran

    These public disclosures mark a very important development in a country in which women have been subjected to the repressive and misogynistic Islamic Republic for 40 years, and where there is a great deal of shame and fear of becoming outcasts associated with talking about sexual abuse. Under the previous regime, the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-1979), which claimed to be Iran’s first modernist government, even though women had some limited rights, they were still subjected to sexual harassment and assault at home and at work, as well as political repression imposed on society as a whole.

    It is not surprising, however, that more Iranian women are now speaking publicly about sexual abuse and assault. The Islamic Republic has not been able to stop them from attending universities and getting bachelors’ and post-graduate degrees. Over 60 percent of Iran’s college graduates are now women. Women have published novels and translations of feminist works. Whether college graduates or not, women are now more literate and have also been exposed to the world through the internet. There was a failed but nevertheless important Million Signatures Campaign for gender equality initiated by women activists in 2005. Women have also participated in various waves of popular protests against the regime since December 2017. In fact, a wave of women taking off their headscarves in public places began a day before the December 2017-January 2018 mass protests which called for an end to the Islamic Republic and an end to its military interventions in the region. During the November 2019 and January 2020 popular protests, women played a much more visible role as leaders of protests.

    There have also been internet campaigns by Iranian women, men and LGBTQ activists against honor killings and other forms of femicide, and in support of women political prisoners. Iran’s most famous woman political prisoner, Nasrin Sotudeh, is a feminist human rights attorney who is currently serving the third year of a fifteen-year prison sentence for her defense of women who removed their headscarves in public and for her opposition to the death penalty. She is currently on hunger strike. Another well-known woman political prisoner, Kurdish activist Zeynab Jalalian has been in solitary confinement for months and is going blind after thirteen years of imprisonment. Other women in prison include working–class women who used drugs or took the blame for their husband’s debt or defended themselves against an abusive partner. Some are in prison along with their babies and small children. All are suffering from exposure to COVID-19 in a country where the pandemic is raging.

    What Can We Learn from Me Too in Iran & What Can It Learn from Abolitionist Feminism in U.S.?

    There is no doubt that an important force in propelling the new campaign of Iranian women speaking publicly against sexual abuse has been the global Me Too movement. It has had a powerful impact on the minds and hearts of Iranian women who have gained courage and realize that they should not remain silent about sexual harassment, abuse and rape.

    Among those who have written about the new Me Too movement in Iran in the English-language media, Masih Alinejad and Roya Hakakian argue that Iranian women have come to the conclusion that the hijab will not protect women from predators. Rather “what can actually shield them from sexual harassment is the rule of law, and a society in which no individual figure can reign above the constitution.”

    Alinejad and Hakakian believe that “in contrast to the Me Too movement in the countries of the West, which aimed to upend gender inequality, the current outpouring in Iran does not see gender inequality as the problem but merely as a symptom of a more serious affliction: the regime itself.”

    In response, Sara Tafakori has argued that “the primary referent of the women speaking out is neither the state nor the regime; it is the very misogynist and patriarchal structures of both workplace and society.” She emphasizes that this movement’s “points of orientation are . . . global and universal.” She also challenges Alinejad and Hakakian for being uncritical of western imperialism and proposing western liberalism as a model for Iranian women.

    This is an important debate. There is no question that the Me Too movement arising in Iran demands laws that support women, and in doing so also strongly opposes both the Iranian regime and patriarchy and misogyny on a global and universal scale. However, there is more to say about the actuality and potentiality of the Me Too movement in Iran.

    In a recent article, Narges Imani, a young socialist feminist translator and researcher living in Iran argues: “But there is an important and partially contradictory point which has received less attention: Explanations based on patriarchy as a mental construct. . . see the education of more and more men concerning respect for women’s rights as the solution for confronting the lack of culture leading to sexual harassment. In fact, however, the main perpetrators of the current assaults are “very cultured” men, some of whom are famous figures in the field of art or science or ideas. Fundamentally, one of the main reasons for the shock brought about by the recent exposes is not so much the mere fame of these assaulting figures but the damage which these exposes have done to “the cultural explanation of patriarchy”.

    Imani goes on to argue that the impact of the logic of capital on the body and the mind needs to be addressed. In this article and others, she addresses the ways in which capitalism uses both precapitalist forms of domination such as “masculine-centeredness” or religion and more modern forms of domination to discipline the body or to shape our desires, to commodify and instrumentalize human relations.

    In light of the important questions and ideas raised by Imani, we can also return to the origins of Me Too movement in the U.S. and draw out critically important dimensions that can help the Me Too movement in Iran and globally.

    The Me Too movement arose in the U.S. in October 2017 when Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano publicized the many accusations of sexual harassment and rape against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The Me Too campaign, however, was originally started in 2007 by an African American woman Tarana Burke, who had been conceiving such an effort for ten years since 1997 after a conversation with a thirteen-year old young woman victim of rape.

    In a 2017 interview, Tarana Burke has emphasized that her goal and vision in starting the Me Too campaign was to take the conversation beyond the level of individuals, whether the accuser or the accused, and focus on challenging and uprooting structural foundations of power and privilege in our society. She started with the aim of focusing on women of color, transgender folks and people with disabilities who experience the highest rate of sexual violence in the U.S. Her preoccupation has been “real structural change” and transformative justice because “many perpetrators are themselves survivors of sexual violence, particularly child sexual abuse. And that complicates a lot of things. We’ve got to get a clearer understanding of what justice is and what people need to feel whole. And if we’re ever going to heal in our community, we have to heal the perpetrators and heal the survivors, or else it’s just a continuous cycle.”

    Abolitionist Feminism, a movement started in the U.S. by African American women concomitant with their theorizing and struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex, also further articulates the goals and vision of the Me Too movement. Abolitionist Feminist leaders such as Tarana Burke, Angels Davis, Ruth Wilson Glmore, Joy James, Avery Gordon, Romarilyn Ralston, Mariame Kaba, oppose gender violence and see it as part and parcel of the racist, sexist and heterosexist capitalist system which is carceral in its foundation. They oppose capitalist dehumanization, commodification and all relations of domination.

    In the Feminist and the Sex Offender, Abolitionist feminists, Judith Levine and Erica R. Meiners also emphasize that gender violence cannot be separated from state violence. They argue that “Me Too is evidence that without thoroughgoing social change, the law does little to protect people from sexual harm.” (p. 30) Furthermore, “freedom from violence is not an end in itself but rather the atmosphere in which all can flourish.” (p. 5)

    Iranian women who are speaking out against sexual abuse, assault and rape can find much inspiration in Tarana Burke’s definition of the Me Too campaign and in Abolitionist Feminism. Living under an authoritarian police state which currently holds 240,000 prisoners including hundreds of political prisoners, they have no trust in the Iranian criminal justice system.

    Conclusion: Need for Solidarity

    The Iranian Me Too movement and struggle against femicide is a critically important development that is raising important questions for the global feminist movement.

    This movement needs support from feminists around the world. It also needs active support from Iranian labor activists. Currently there is a wave of ongoing labor strikes in Iran which oppose non-payment of wages, dangerous working conditions and the “privatization” of formerly state enterprises which are facilitating greater state exploitation of labor.

    Although Iran’s labor movement includes many women including teachers and nurses, the struggle against gender and sexual violence has not entered the public conversation within the labor movement. Such a separation is hurting both the labor struggle and the struggle for women’s emancipation.

    Will labor activists and women demanding an end to gender violence join forces to defend women’s right to self-determination and help move the struggle forward?

  • Mexico’s AMLO Is No Leftist, as His Handling of Covid Demonstrates

    Mexico’s AMLO Is No Leftist, as His Handling of Covid Demonstrates

    Since he took office in December of 2018, some on the left have argued that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is a leftist, even a socialist. Some like Kurt Hackbarth defend AMLO’s record, despite his alliance with the banks and big business, his political coalition with a rightwing party, his commitment to maintaining Mexico as a leading petroleum producing country, and his dedication to the Maya Train that threatens indigenous communities and the environment. They defend AMLO’s presidency despite the fact that he has overseen an increase in the country’s already extraordinarily high murder rate. In the first half of 2020, there were 17,439 murders, a 1.7% increase on the same period last year, as well as a 9.2 percent rise in femicide, the murder of women. And finally there is AMLO’s subservience to U.S. President Donald Trump, acting as his cop in policing Mexico’s border to keep migrants out of the United States.

    Maybe it is unfair to criticize AMLO for those things, as some say. Well, the coronavirus pandemic has given us yet another measure with which to judge AMLO’s government. Amnesty International recently reported that since the pandemic began over 7,000 health workers have died around the world, and that “at least 1,320 health workers are confirmed to have died in Mexico alone, the highest known figure for any country.” The United States is second, with 1,077 health worker deaths, but the U.S. has a population almost three times that of Mexico.

    There have been many articles in Mexico, the United States, and other countries criticizing AMLO for his handling of the pandemic in a way that resembles the terrible policies of Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Much as in the United States the government did not act swiftly, it has not had a consistent policy, and there is not enough testing and not enough tracing. But there are other problems as well.

    The Lancet, the distinguished British medical journal decided to look more specifically at why Mexico should have such high numbers. First comes the lack of everything.

    Less than three weeks after Mexico recorded its first COVID-19 case, staff from a Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) hospital blocked a Mexico City road, demanding medical supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE). At least 70 protests have followed, according to a report by six former health secretaries, with medical staff decrying shortages of supplies and tests, along with a lack of hospital infrastructure and even proper training.

    While Mexico did finally get more supplies, health officials say they were often of poor quality.

    There are many factors affecting Mexican health care workers. “A lot of people in the health sector workforce are basically working on informal contracts,” Madeleine Penman of Amnesty told Lancet. “That affects a lot of things in terms of job security and access to sick leave.”

    Lancet also reported that Rafael Soto, an IMSS nurse and spokesperson for the National Union of Health Workers, said that unions representing health workers were keeping quiet on issues of workplace safety, preferring to please the government rather than address members’ demands. Some protest leaders, he said, have had their jobs terminated by their employers or have been sanctioned by their unions. Unfortunately, such behavior, kowtowing to the boss and punishing the members, is typical of many Mexican unions.

    While the unions play a role, government is most responsible. Mexico has several government health agencies that cover most workers and the pubic in general, but for decades the budgets for these programs have been cut, including by AMLO. Defunding the public health systems and the low pay of public health physicians led many of them to take private sector jobs in addition to their government positions, as well as teaching. So doctors have divided loyalties and work too many hours.

    Lancet also pointed out that many Mexican health workers suffer from some conditions common to the population at large, such as obesity and diabetes. These are conditions, present in the Mexican population only for the last 40 years, that a good public health system would work to eliminate.

    As president, AMLO has responsibility for what happens on his watch, but clearly he inherited a profoundly corrupt system that he has failed to reform. The neoliberal governments of the last 40 years, and AMLO’s government which is so proud of its austerity, have failed to maintain the health system. Mexican labor unions, in most cases creations of the state, fail to fight for workers. Not only is AMLO’s government not socialist, it is not democratic, it is not competent, and it is not socially responsible. AMLO is a populist with a leftist image and rightist policies.

    The Mexican people deserve better. Some of them are fighting to reform their unions and to organize forces to reform the government. We stand in solidarity not with AMLO’s government but with those like the health workers mentioned here who are fighting from below to change it.

     

     

  • Economics for the People

    Economics for the People

    Review of Hadas Thier, A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics (Haymarket Books, 2020)

    This is a well-written, accessible introduction, which is also stimulating even for those familiar with Marxist Economics. It covers the basics with extensive quotations from Capital and some  of Marx’s other writings and does an admirable job of covering the key features of Marx’s explanation of the inner workings of capitalism in a clear manner. The author uses current examples and explains that the fundamental principles Marx laid out in Capital still apply, while integrating the changes that have taken place since Marx’s time. The book also includes a very helpful glossary of Marxist economic terms at the end.

    This is not an abstract economics book. It is written by a socialist activist for other activists. It follows Lenin’s aphorism that “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” The purpose of the book is to arm activists with an understanding of the capitalist economy to help them overthrow it. The main points that the author wants to get across are summarized on page 234:

    • “These [the fundamental problems of capitalism] are not accidents. They are not isolated incidents of greed. They are simply the way the system works…”
    • “These same processes of accumulation necessarily lead to contradictions that threaten the very profits that the capitalists seek…”
    • “’The point however is to change it’ argued Marx… Better understanding the system, as Marx wrote ‘to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society’ is a critical first step.”

    For those already familiar with the basics of Marxist Economics, the most interesting sections of the book will be the  brief examination of various theories of capitalist crisis. In a section called “Why Mainstream Economists Get it Wrong” (150-55) the author skewers explanations of crisis found in bourgeois economics, including Say’s Law—the idea that every purchase is also a sale and that capitalism therefore tends toward equilibrium.

    Thier also takes on various Marxist explanations of crisis. She rejects the “underconsumptionist” explanation that crisis is caused by the inability of workers to buy all they produce, because “capitalists don’t just  produce commodities for workers to consume. They also produce luxury goods for the rich and more importantly raw materials and means of production for other productive capitalists” (158).

    Thier makes the important and often ignored distinction between underconsumption and overproduction. The former focuses on the chronic inability of workers to consume all they produce. She notes that this would result in a permanent crisis, since workers never receive the full value of what they produce.

    Overproduction, on the other hand, can be sporadic and is related to the fundamental drive of capitalists to increase profits. From page 163 on, Thier explains the boom-bust cycle of capitalism:

    “Businesses hustle to produce more, knowing  that it is likely that their goods will find buyers”(163), but “Alas, the fever pitch of expansion eventually oversaturates the market. Too many goods have been produced to be able to sell at the exaggerated prices produced by the boom, or even at their value. Profits begin to tumble.”(165)

    The disproportionalities between different industries exacerbate this process.

    Thier also notes that there is a debate on the significance of the “tendency of the rate of profit to decline,” which Marx noted was caused by the displacement of labor by machinery. Since labor is the source of surplus value, there is a downward pressure on profit rates.

    Some modern Marxists discount this. Others see it as the immediate source of every crisis. Thier takes an intermediate view. She says that it is important in the long run and is one of the most important contradictions of capitalism: over time, the drive for profit undermines the ability of the system to generate profit. She also argues that the downward pressure on the rate of profit increases competition and intensifies crises. However, she does not see the immediate cause of every recession or depression as the decline in profit rates.

    Thier also follows Marx in seeing economic crises as coming from dislocations and overproduction in the real economy. This is also controversial, since many economists see the source of crisis as financialization of the system. The author extensively addresses the growth of financial capital, examining the creation of new financial instruments and the growth of this sector. However, she sticks to the fundamental Marxist idea that profit comes from the direct exploitation of workers in production.

    A People’s Guide to Capitalism brings Marx’s analysis of private capitalism up to date with current examples. But there is one area that it does not develop in detail: Marx’s view of unproductive labor. For Marx “productive” labor creates surplus value and therefore profit. It is at the heart of the system.

    However, even in Marx’s time, there were many “ unproductive” workers—i.e., workers who did not directly produce surplus value and were not directly exploited. In Marx’s time, these included the domestic servants of the rich, who Marx said lived off the revenue that capitalists received from the surplus value created by the productive workers they employed.

    In modern times, “unproductive workers” would include, for example, public school teachers , public hospital nurses, etc. A direct profit is not made from their labor. However, these workers are also part of the working class. They are also necessary for the maintenance of the capitalist system. They too are paid comparable wages to productive workers. They have the power to shut down parts of the system and would benefit from a socialist transformation of society. The author mentions some of these workers as part of the working class but she does not theorize how they fit into her analysis of directly exploited workers.

    This omission aside, A People’s Guide to Capitalism is a tremendous contribution to the understanding of economics today, and more importantly how we can get rid of capitalism. It will be very useful both to veteran Marxists and people new to the subject. Everyone interested in this topic, and indeed anyone interested in fundamentally changing the world, should read this book.

  • Abortion Clinic Defense: A Testimony

    Abortion Clinic Defense: A Testimony

    I escort patients at an abortion clinic. My role is to be a friendly face, ready with an open umbrella when patients arrive, to escort them in and out past anti-abortion protesters. I do my best to bear the brunt of the abuse, shielding my patient both physically and emotionally. Some hide behind my umbrella, some walk defiantly inside while I smile proudly at them, some just seem bewildered— all have made the decision to come to the clinic. Here, I have seen firsthand how the patriarchy harms everyone.

    I have been doing this work for a long time, though I didn’t always know it. I was born and raised in the Evangelical Church, where purity doctrine is held as high as Jesus Himself: sex is only permitted within the confines of a legally binding marriage between one man and one woman. We girls were to keep ourselves pure for our husbands. Not only were we responsible for our own choices, we were responsible for not tempting the boys with how we dressed and behaved.

    One of the girls in my youth group got pregnant. She couldn’t bear the shame her extremely conservative family would heap upon her for being an unwed mother— held up as a disgraced example (for the rest of her life) to her siblings of what not to become, believing no one would ever want to marry her now that she was “damaged goods.” So she had an abortion and I covered for her. She never told anyone except me and the doctor.

    Many anti-abortion protesters come from a similar background. Those who’ve had abortions are placed front and center to wail and plead with patients about the psychological torture they’ll endure for life if they go through with it. Statistics show that less than ten percent of people regret their abortions, but these facts don’t matter when one believes they’re “saving babies.” Anti-abortion women refer to themselves as “post-abortive” and call out dire warnings to patients as they enter and exit the building. I often wonder if they’d still regret it if their families and churches hadn’t told them they should.

    There’s a very young woman who comes regularly with her infant. She told me, crying, “You’re a baby killer, would you kill my baby? He is no different. Go ahead, judge me for being a teen mom. Yeah, I’m unmarried. I got pregnant and chose life.”

    I wanted to tell her I support her. She’s not a slut and fuck them for making her feel ashamed. If a teenager wants to have a baby and needs a ride to her prenatal appointment, I got a car, hit me up. Wanna let me rock your baby while you hang out with your friends for a few hours? I love taking care of babies!

    But I can’t help her. I couldn’t talk to her or even give her an encouraging smile. I had to just stand there, stone faced, bearing witness to her attempt to shame other women. She has internalized the patriarchy, she does not recognize it and cannot see beyond it.

    In a way, she humanizes the need to liberate women as part of class struggle. But my compassion for these people only goes so far. I also wanted to tell her to put sunscreen on her very red baby and take him home, he’s overheated. And to quit crying at and pleading with my patients, she’s harassing them.

    Each individual has their own reason for seeking an abortion. As a clinic escort, that is not my concern. They’re there because they’re pregnant and don’t want to be. I help them gain access to the health care they need. But I know that women from vocally pro-life families can be driven to seek an abortion out of desperation to keep their sexual history a secret. I sometimes wonder if they might have made a different decision if their families had been willing to support them as an unwed parent. (I use the word “parent” because I have made inclusive language a habit. But the term “unwed” is most often applied to mothers, rarely fathers. She’s an unwed mother, a teen mom.)

    Many times, the reason is a complex one— poverty. Access to health care, prenatal and a continuum of care after birth until death, is a luxury for those who can afford it. Add to that a lack of affordable housing and education, and the prospect of raising a child under these conditions is daunting. The pro-life movement sneers at this as not a valid justification. “You got yourself into this, you did it to yourself, now accept the consequences of your actions.” But children are full human beings in their own right, they are not punishment for sex.

    Some protesters bring and weaponize their children. After one such instance, I felt compelled to write about it in my journal.

    Trigger Warning: child abuse

    Dear little boy,
    The image haunts me… two adults pointing down at you asking over and over, “Can we kill him? Can we murder him?” I saw your eyes widen. You looked scared and I was powerless to protect you. Later, I smiled at you and you smiled back at me… I’m worried I got you in trouble for that. I won’t make eye contact with you next time— not because I don’t like you anymore, but because I am afraid to endanger you.

    I reported everything I witnessed to Child Protective Services today. I’m trying to send someone to help you since I can’t do it myself. I don’t know your name but I love you. Hold on.

    He was six and a half years old, being used as a weapon against abortion. His guardian brought him the following week, and I never saw him again. His guardian still comes to the clinic but I don’t know what happened to him.

    Anti-abortion protesters are abusive towards male-presenting people who bring their partners for an abortion. Women who have an abortion are murderers but their partners are cowards. Men scream “real men protect women and children!” at these faithful, supportive partners. He is a coward for helping her— for not stopping her— you’re not a real man if you’re not controlling her body. The patriarchy and toxic masculinity is very much a part of the pro-life movement.

    If anti-abortion protesters truly cared about ending abortion, it would be far more effective to alleviate poverty. Living wages, affordable housing, free health care (medical, mental health, dental, vision, addiction treatment, etc.), affordable/free education beyond high school, all help to reduce abortion rates. Studies consistently prove that comprehensive sex education and access to contraception is the number one way to prevent teen pregnancy and abortion, but the same churches insist upon abstinence-only curriculum in the public schools and continually block legislation that might provide these things.

    Pro-lifers tear down women. All of us. Even their own. They call themselves pro-life, but they’re really just pro-control. They care nothing for quality of life outside the womb. They would rather stand between a person seeking health care and reproductive justice than stand between a bulldozer and a tent that is someone’s home. They would rather pray on the street corner for all to see than quietly do what they can to ease human suffering and end the cause.

    And in all of this, there is still my patient, who is just trying to get to the door for their appointment.

  • Joe Allen’s ‘Package King’ Delivers a Modern History of the Essential Worker

    Joe Allen’s ‘Package King’ Delivers a Modern History of the Essential Worker

    Joe Allen. The Package King. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020.

    On May 1, workers at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target and FedEx protested for better health and safety protections as they are forced to work during the coronavirus pandemic. While most of the job actions were small, they nonetheless were further signs on the traditional international workers’ holiday that old-fashioned class struggle is beginning to emerge inside some of the most powerful U.S. corporations. In The Package King, socialist historian and former UPS worker Joe Allen makes a compelling case that if these initial sparks become a powerful fire, one of the primary colors in that blaze will be the Pullman Brown worn by the 250,000 uniformed employees of UPS.

    The Teamsters have been home to the most-organized and long-term presence of both mobsters and socialists in the American labor movement.

    Long before the coronavirus pandemic gave them the official title, transportation and warehouse workers had become “essential” to the U.S. and global economy — and logistics industry giants like Amazon, Walmart and FedEx had become the engines of 21st-century capitalism the way that manufacturers like Ford and General Electric were in the 20th.UPS stands out among these modern behemoths as one of the only companies with a largely unionized workforce. In fact, UPS is the largest private-sector union employer in the country. UPS workers also make up the largest section of the Teamsters union, an incredibly polarized organization that has been home to the most-organized and long-term presence of both mobsters and socialists in the American labor movement. The Package King is subtitled A Rank-And-File History of UPS, and Allen centers his story on the century-long fight of UPS workers to wrest a livable job out of a company that treats them as machinery and to organize within a union that too often has treated them as a dues-paying cash machine. Package King is in part a business history or rather an anti-business one. Throughout the book, Allen uses Greg Niemann’s laudatory Big Brown: the Untold Story of UPS as a foil, turning Niemann’s narrative of a corporate success story on its head as a workers’ nightmare of ever-increasing micromanaging and exhaustion. Eschewing celebrity CEOs like Jeff Bezos, UPS promotes a corporate culture as bland as its uniforms, but under the radar, it has long been a leading corporate influencer in Washington, with a relentless focus on weakening the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which received more worker complaints about UPS than any other company.The other side of the story told by Package King is that of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), which began representing UPS workers when company founder Jim Casey went looking for a conservative, compliant union in the aftermath of the militant Seattle General Strike of 1919.For most of its history, the Teamsters have been led by autocrats like Dave Beck, who is said to have once asked, “Why should truck drivers and bottle washers be allowed to make decisions affecting [Teamster] policy? No corporation would allow it.” Current IBT president James Hoffa Jr., who in 2018 rammed through a concessionary contract with UPS even after a majority of voting members said no, is unfortunately cut from the same cloth.

    Package King shows how massive concessions by these and other union mis-leaders — especially the one-two punch of allowing a lower pay tier for part-time workers in 1982 and then establishing in 1987 that the growing air delivery business would be handled mostly by part-timers — helped facilitate UPS’s growth into a global behemoth.

    But the Teamsters are also a union with immense potential power that has been built by class struggle fighters, from the socialists whose 1934 general strike in Minneapolis laid the basis for Hoffa’s legendary father to organize the trucking industry, to former Queens UPS driver Ron Carey, who led multiple strikes against UPS — first in New York City’s Local 804 and then the historic national strike of 1997.

    Carey was subsequently driven out of the union by an unholy alliance of employers like UPS, anti-labor Republicans, and old guard Teamster leaders, but the fight for militancy and democracy is still carried on by Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the longest-running union reform movement in the country. Through the narrative lens of one company and one union, Package King tells an effective story about the rise, fall and hopeful return of the organized working class in the United States.

    In the introduction, Allen explains that the book is written in the tradition of The Flivver King, Upton Sinclair’s 1937 exposure of Ford Motor Company that the United Auto Workers sold for a quarter as part of its successful organizing drive at the company. There will be no similar campaign under the current IBT leadership, so get a copy of Allen’s book for yourself and then pass it on to a UPS driver the next time you get a delivery. She is part of the most organized section of what is possibly the most important industry in 21st-century capitalism, and the outcome of her story will have a lot to do with what our world looks like on the other side of this pandemic.

    This review was originally published in The Indypendent.

  • World Congress in Defense of Public Education, Sept 26-27

    World Congress in Defense of Public Education, Sept 26-27

    The following invitation to participate in the First World Congress in Defense of Public Education and Against Educational Neoliberalism was written by a broad coalition of educators in Latin America and Europe. Educators from all over the world are encouraged to register and take part. For more information about how to take part, email: congresomundialdeeducacion2020@gmail.com. First published in Spanish by Otras Voces en Educacíon, translated by No Borders News.

    —–

    The COVID-19 pandemic has generated an unprecedented global paralysis and exposed the deep inequalities of the neoliberal system. Big capital is using this crisis to deepen exclusion and domination in its own interest. Waves of privatizations of basic services and social rights over the last few decades mean that the pandemic has hit the impoverished and the working class the hardest.

    The paralysis on all levels generated by the pandemic has been intertwined with an economic crisis of capital that is expressing itself in a new global economic recession. In this context, we see the emergence of neo-conservative governments with fascist policies (for instance, Trump or Bolsonaro) who, by their denialist policies with respect to COVID-19’s health risks, have sent thousands of human beings to the hospital or to their deaths. Many governments, following the examples of Trump and Bolsonaro, have privileged profits over human life. This must be challenged by the world’s peoples and their social movement organizations and trade unions at the level of ideas, mobilization, and organization.

    The current situation is one of deep global capitalist crisis, a crisis that places the costs of this situation on workers’ shoulders. The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a pretext to advance the neoliberal agenda in the field of public education, concretized by new forms of educational privatization, associated with the lack of access to the internet and the necessary equipment for participating in virtual classes.

    The experiment of remote learning is being used to settle a conflict that hardly existed in February 2020, a controversy between face-to-face education at school versus virtual education at home. The capitalist system cannot rapidly stifle public schools with impunity, but it is creating a social imaginary that suggests that schools are obsolete. This initiative seeks to open up digital educational content to technology corporations and to the “educational market,” and it is accompanied by a sustained disinvestment in teacher training for digital contexts such as the current one.

    Despite this, the international teaching profession has assumed, on its own account and with the support of its unions, the task of preparing itself to face the current pedagogical challenges. The educators of the world have proven themselves worthy proponents of the right to education, even under increasingly adverse conditions. They have safeguarded the maintenance of pedagogical bonds with their students.

    But educators’ efforts cannot hide the emergence of new forms of privatization, those transferring the responsibilities of the world’s nation states to guarantee the minimum conditions for the education of a new generation onto our families, teachers, and students. It is now families, teachers, and students who must purchase or upgrade computers, pay for data plans for internet access, and even acquire private platforms to be able to teach or receive virtual classes. This privatization is hidden behind a thick governmental public relations smokescreen that speaks of the supposed educational successes achieved during the pandemic, with opportunistic phrases about teachers’ heroic mystique.

    Teachers have been overworked, stuck in their homes, left on their own to continue their students’ educational progress. This has been accomplished by the world’s teachers with little or no recognition from governments.

    In just months, millions of students across the world have been expelled from educational systems. Virtual, hybrid, and multimodal education proposals have left millions of students with no real possibility for continuing their studies. It is not young people who are leaving their studies, it is the capitalist system that is abandoning them, by disrupting schools’ role in creating greater equity.

    Some governments have irresponsibly called for a return to classes in the midst of rising infections, without a vaccine and without adequate health precautions, actions that clearly demonstrate that their greatest concerns lie in reactivating the capitalist economy, by putting the lives of children and education workers at risk.

    While capitalism today supports public schools as institutions to provide childcare and a place to transmit functional knowledge useful for the current mode of production, we defend schools as centers for critical thought, solidarity, human interaction, and a site for social transformation.

    The current crisis confirms old certainties while raising new challenges. For one, the certainty that education must be a face-to-face – so reviled by the neoliberal educational commodification – has reasserted its value for the practice of teaching. Having said this, the return to school and in-person learning must not be simply a naturalized return to the reality of inequalities that existed long before March 2020, inequalities that were dramatically highlighted during the pandemic.

    The challenge facing our generation of education workers is even greater: we must imagine and then construct responses that move beyond today’s crisis, responses capable of connecting the current resistance to a strategic horizon. This challenge flows from the need to develop pedagogical alternatives that can support new concepts of school.

    Taking on this challenge in the most consistent and responsible way implies going beyond national borders since what is at stake is precisely the overcoming of a crisis of globalized neoliberal education.

    Public universities have been pushed by capital towards models of privatization, a fact which demands a renewed commitment to their public character, a necessity that we must make central to our concerns.

    With this purpose in mind, and with the recognition, solidarity, and trust of those who are fighting in defense of public education, we have been building an international meeting space, one that is open, horizontal, plural, and inclusive. We call it the International Contact Group (GCI), its aim is to continue thinking about these and other educational challenges in a collaborative process.

    The International Contact Group has promoted debates, reflections, and analyses, regarding the characteristics of the current capitalist offensive against education during these five months of pandemic and we have decided there is an urgent need to convene a First World Congress in Defense of the Public Education and Against Educational Neoliberalism.

    The First World Education Congress 2020, which will be held online, raises the challenge of facing neoliberalism in all its forms; therefore, we will works towards the establishment of an International Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CITE). This committee will form a permanent space for dialogue, gatherings, and organization for those fighting in defense of public education and against educational neoliberalism. We invite all organizations, unions, social movements, and individuals who share these ideas to join in the debates and deliberations on September 26 and 27, 2020.

    Signatories:
    Mercedes Martínez (Federación de Maestros y Maestras de Puerto Rico, FMPR), Pedro Hernández (CNTE, México), Luis Bonilla-Molina (Centro Internacional de Investigaciones Otras Voces en Educación), Alfredo Velásquez (SUTEP, Perú), Laura Isabel Vargas (UNE, Ecuador), Fernando Abrego (ASOPROF, Panamá), David Lobâo (SINASEFE, Brasil), Eduardo González (MUD, Chile), Luis Tiscornia (CONADU-H, Argentina), Denis Solís (APSE, Costa Rica), Eblin Farage (ANDES, Brasil), Jurjo Torres Santomé (A Coruña, España), Marc Casanova (USTEC, España), Vladimir Laura (CONMERB, Bolivia), Fernando Lázaro (CEIP-H, Argentina), Julieta Kusnir (EEUU), Nelva Reyes (CGTP, Panamá), Luis Bueno (CNSUESIC, México), Eliana Laport (FeNaPes, Uruguay), Sebastián Henríquez (SUTE, Mendoza, Argentina), Yesid González (La Roja, Colombia), Claudia Baigorria (CONADU-H, Argentina), José Cambra (ASOPROF, Panamá), Richard Araujo (APEOESP, Brasil), Luz Palomino (CII- OVE), Ángel Rodríguez (APPU, Puerto Rico), Carolina Jiménez (UN, Colombia), Cássio Sindserv Santos (Rede Pública Municipal, Brasil), Daniel Libreros (CADTM, Colombia), Diógenes Sánchez (Coalición Panameña por la Defensa del derecho a la Educación), Edgar Isch (Académico, Ecuador), Fernando Gómez (Rosario, Argentina), Hugo Aboites (Académico, México), Laura García Tuñón (ENDYEP, Argentina), Luis Sánchez (AEVE, Panamá), Marco Raúl Mejía (Planeta Paz, Colombia), Mauro Jarquín (Investigador, México), Rosa Cañadel (Cataluña, España), Sandra Lario (Colectivos de Educadores populares del Sur, Argentina), Rosemary Hernández (FOVEDE, Venezuela), Toninho Alves (FASUBRA, Brasil), Verónica del Cid (Red Mesoamericana Alforja), Lev Velásquez (profesor, equipo de la CNTE, Sección XVIII, México), (Zuleika Matamoros (Movimiento Pedagógico de Base, Venezuela), Estela Gramajo (Intergremial de Formación Docente, Uruguay), Jorge Adaro (Ademys, Argentina), Mariano Isla (Asociación de Pedagogos de Cuba), Albert Sansano (Foro Mundial de educación del Foro Social Mundial), Sheila Ceccon ( FME /Foro Social Mundial), Albert Croce (Argentina), Sirle Marciel (Consejo dde Directores de SINTEPS, Sao Paulo, Brasil), Vicent Mauri (Intersindical de Valencia, España), Leopoldo Muñera (MANPUP, Colombia), Andrés Felipe Mora (MANPUP, Colombia), Richard L ( SEPE, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil), Daniel Jorge (FERC CGT, Francia),Ezequiel Alfieri (Educador popular, Argentina), Teresa Garduño Rubio(Pedagoga y Educadora Popular, México), Angela Zambrano (Profesora universitaria, Ecuador), Lourdes Velásquez de Urbáez (Sociedad Venezolana de Educación Comparada), César Valdovinos (CINPECER, México), Miguel Ángel Hernández (SITIEMS, México), Raúl Gil (Uruguay),Claudio Katz (Economista y profesor universitario, Argentina), Eric Toussaint (Comité Mundial por la Abolición de las Deudas Externas, Bélgica), Tim Anderson (Profesor Universitario, Australia), Luis Hernández Navarro (periodista, México), Orlando García (ASOMOGRERP, Panamá), Allen Cordero (Profesor Universitario, Costa Rica). List of individual signatories to follow.

    For more information, please write to: congresomundialdeeduacion2020@gmail.com

    Reposted from No Border News.

  • Presidential Election Amidst Conflagration and Coronavirus

    Presidential Election Amidst Conflagration and Coronavirus

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

    Bob Woodward, the famous journalist, has just published a book titled Rage based on 12 hours of interviews with Trump, that has confirmed what many of us believed. Trump told Woodward that from the beginning he knew that the virus was highly contagious and more deadly than the flu and admits that he didn’t tell the American people the truth because “he didn’t want to create a panic.”

    H. Holden Thorp, editor of the journal Science, said, “As he was playing down the virus to the public, Trump was not confused or inadequately briefed: he flat-out lied, repeatedly, about science to the American people. These lies demoralized the scientific community and cost countless lives in the United States.” Trump continues to claim that the virus is under control, though about 1,200 people are dying each day. The United States now has close to seven million confirmed cases and 200,000 coronavirus deaths.

    Trump has also been hurt by reports that he called American soldiers who fought in various wars “suckers” and “losers.” He also called America’s top military officers “war profiteers” who got the country into unnecessary wars. Several former military chiefs blasted Trump for both remarks. Remarkably polls show that Trump core supporters—about 40 percent of voters—have not been moved by either his handling of the coronavirus or his remarks about the military. Independent voters, however, may be turning from Trump.

    Fires in California, Oregon, and Washington, the result of high temperatures and powerful winds caused by climate change, have over the last three weeks claimed more than two million hectares, an area nearly equal to the island of Sicily. Q-Anon, the conspiratorial group that claims that “pedophiles control the deep state” in America and which supports Trump, blamed the fires on arsonists from Black Lives Matter and Antifa. That claim, spread rapidly on social media, leading some people to arm themselves and interfering with the emergency response, so that fire and police departments and the FBI had to refute the malicious rumors. President Trump, who denies climate change and has forbidden government agencies from discussing it, has ignored the fires, though he is now planning a trip to California where Democratic Party Governor Gavin Newsome has attributed the fires to climate change.

    The Republicans have done everything to make it hard for Democrats to win the election, passing state laws and creating regulations that for one or another technicality remove Black, poor, and student voters from the rolls. Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy have also seen to the removal of postal machinery and street corner mailboxes, and have reduced the hours of postal workers, all to impede mail-in voting. On Election Day, as happened in the past, Republicans will use robocalls, social media, and leaflets to spread misinformation to confuse voters.

    There are other candidates. Trump and the Republicans are supporting the presidential campaign of Black rap singer Kanye West, hoping he will take Black votes away from Biden. Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate and a socialist, remains marginal in an election where votes for him might help reelect Trump. The Democratic Socialists of America and the rest of the left oppose Trump, but remain divided on the election between those, the majority, who will vote for Biden, some who will vote for Hawkins, and those who reject voting.

  • Lysenko Comes to the CDC: Exploring the Relationship Between Science and Politics

    Lysenko Comes to the CDC: Exploring the Relationship Between Science and Politics

    When I was a pre-med student in 1971, taking a course in genetics, the very first lecture was about Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), the Soviet biologist who, in the 1930s and 1940s, had great influence during the years of Stalin’s rule, becoming the Director of the Soviet Union Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Services. The point of the lecture was to show how politics can pervert science, contrasting Lysenko’s methods under Stalinist rule to the “scientific method” under Western democracies, which purportedly allows science to be free from political pressures.

    Who was Lysenko?

    Lysenko became famous for his rejection of Mendelian genetics and natural selection. He believed that environmental changes, acquired changes in an organism, could be passed on to its offspring.[1] Lysenko’s belief fit with the doctrine of Soviet historical materialism which viewed Marxism as a “science” of materialism, and which defined people (or plants in the case of Lysenko) as determined solely by their socio-economic environment. A change in material conditions would lead to a change in people. This “scientific socialism” provided the philosophic justification for Stalin’s totalitarian state. Lysenkoism and Stalinism had in common a deterministic and reductionist distortion of Marx’s notion of dialectic materialism, addressed further below.

    Lysenko’s theories of acquired changes led to his methods of subjecting crops to freezing water—this was supposed to force plants to sprout all year long, and to create future crop generations which would “remember” these acquired changes. The theory thus promised year round sustainable agricultural bounty, and was just what Stalin needed as he began instituting forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture.

    There were two major consequences of Lysenkoism. The first was that his methods led to mass failure of crops, and subsequent famine and starvation of tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union, in the 1930s, and in its ally, China, in the 1950s. The second was that it allowed no dissent–any scientist who disagreed with or questioned Lysenko’s theory and method was considered an “enemy”. During this time over 3,000 biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed.

    Lysenkoism and the current pandemic

    I thought of Lysenko when I read of the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) recent revision of its coronavirus testing guidelines. These new guidelines, supported and promoted by the Trump administration, state that people with asymptomatic COVID-19 infection need not be tested, nor do people who have been in close contact with an infected person if that person is asymptomatic. It is clear that the new recommendations are consistent with Trump’s promotion of less testing, with the absurd argument that too much testing was driving COVID-19 case numbers up, reflecting poorly on his administration.

    The impetus for these revisions came from Brett Giroir, assistant HHS secretary who oversees testing. Giroir said that the revisions were supported by CDC Director Robert Redfield, as well as by all the physicians on the Coronavirus Task Force. This included Dr. Scott Atlas who is close to Trump and a frequent commentator on Fox News. Scott Atlas has also questioned the efficacy of mask wearing , and has stated that children do not transmit coronavirus. Both assertions have been proven untrue. Another doctor on the Task Force is Dr. Stephen Hahn, the current Commissioner of Food and Drugs, who agreed to the FDA’S precipitous emergency approval for the use of immune serum from recovered COVID19 patients as treatment for actively infected COVID-19 patients, without strong evidence that the treatment is effective. These are the new Lysenkos, doctors and other political appointees who promote methods and theories which support Trump’s administration. Giroir also claimed the support of Anthony Fauci. Fauci has subsequently distanced himself from the new recommendation stating that he was undergoing surgery at the time the decision for revised guidelines was made. He did not sign off on the new recommendations and has expressed “concern” about them. But he has not directly spoken out against them, even as the Infectious Disease Society of America has called for the “immediate reversal of the abrupt revision of the CDC Covid-19 testing guidelines.”

    These revisions of testing recommendations are exactly the wrong thing to do—they are counter to the clear evidence that asymptomatic individuals are significant transmitters of the virus. They hobble our ability to better understand and control transmission of the virus. The new revisions come at a time when cases in the US are at an all time high of nearly 6 million cases, with over180,000 deaths, and when contact tracing can be a significant method to reduce further spread. Testing and contact tracing are particularly important at a time when students and teachers may be returning to colleges and schools, and when even more “essential workers” are being called upon as businesses are clamoring for opening. These revised recommendations increase public confusion, and will likely increase the spread of Covid-19, with more deaths ensuing.

    During my career as an Infectious Disease physician, the CDC has been a respected source for investigating outbreaks and for making evidence based recommendations. It is tragic that this previously renowned agency has been pressured by Trumpian politics to promote policies at the expense of public well-being. Indeed, the specter of Lysenko is haunting the CDC and the entire Trump administration, revealing that the perversion of science is as likely in a capitalist democracy as it is in a Stalinist state, and always with dire consequences.

    The relation of science and politics

    The larger issues raised by contemporary Lysenkoism have to do with the relationship of science and politics (or ideology and religion). Clearly there are historical precedents for the control of science by those in power. The most well known example is that of Galileo (1564-1642), whose theory of heliocentrism (the earth and planets revolve around the sun), was investigated by the Inquisition and deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Galileo was forced to recant.

    Of course, scientific investigation does not occur in a vacuum; it always occurs in a social and historical context. But if the scientist’s goal is to understand the world in which she lives, then the scientist must, as Thomas Kuhn has described:

    “extend the precision and scope with which (the world) has been ordered. That commitment must, in turn, lead him (sic) to scrutinize, either for himself or for his colleagues, some aspect of nature in great empirical detail. And if that scrutiny leads to pockets of apparent disorder, then these must challenge him to a new refinement of his observational techniques…” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

    The problem with Lysenko and contemporary Lysenkoism is first the denial of this basic methodology of conventional science, the use of precision and scope to understand the world, second, the obliviousness to the ever changing nature of science and research, and third, the willingness to disregard the safety and health of the earth and all its life forms.

    Lysenko accepted the most deterministic interpretation of Marx’s philosophy promulgated by the Stalinist Soviets, which to this day is still accepted by mainstream media. Lysenko’s theory of acquired change in crops as products of changed environment was consistent with Stalin’s version of historical materialism, in which human beings were merely the “products of circumstances.” For Stalin, historical materialism justified the totalitarian imposition of forced change upon people, rather than allowing change to be created by people. Marx himself was critical of this kind of historical materialism:

    “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. (Third Thesis on Feuerbach)

    For Marx, it was the element of human activity, the ability of human beings to alter their conditions, which gave life to his theory of dialectic materialism and made it a revolutionary philosophy.

    If this more humanistic and dialectic aspect of Marx’s theory is applied to scientific inquiry, it is not through the control of science, but rather through the possibility of a more profound basis for scientific inquiry—a method which allows the scientist more creative agency in approaching problems and in exploring the world.

    There have been many scientists, including Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Gould, and others, who have seen the value in applying a dialectical approach to scientific research. In The Dialectical Biologist, Levins and Lewontin point out that conventional science tackles a problem in a piecemeal fashion, looking only at a part of the problem, and therefore leading only to partial solutions. Conventional science often neglects the contradictions and complexities that exist beneath the superficial aspects of a problem. Conventional science, said Levins, was unsuccessful “at recognizing the shared biases of a whole scientific community, the beliefs that are so much a part of the community that that they are not even recognized as biases.” (Talking about Trees). Thus, he believed that looking at the natural world as a fixed entity, and in a piecemeal fashion, with perfectly adapted organisms, neglects ongoing evolutionary processes and the potential for ecologic crises that lie beneath the surface. This perspective bears resemblance to Lenin’s notion of dialectics—“Dialectics demands the all sided consideration of relationships in their concrete development and not pulling of a piece out of one thing and a piece out of another.” (Selected Works, Vol. 9)

    In my own field of infectious diseases, I have seen the contrast between conventional science and dialectical science. The whole history of infectious disease as a specialty has been based on the germ theory of infections, and has been devoted to eliminating infections by developing specific antibiotics for specific infections. This has led to an enormous armamentarium of ever new antibiotics, but has also led to the opposite of the intended outcome—rather than controlling infection, we have seen the proliferation of new infections due to increased bacterial resistance to these antibiotics. These new infections are often more virulent and difficult to treat and often associated with life-threatening adverse effects.

    A more dialectical approach would be to understand the many contradictions that lie beneath the surface of infectious diseases. Such an approach would explore the ecosystems in which particular bacteria survive, how antibiotics are prescribed and how they are over used. It would look at the role of pharmaceutical companies in developing new and more expensive antibiotics, and pharmaceutical marketing influences on doctors. It would look at the effects of hospital management of nursing quotas, of custodial staff, the effects of crowding patients in small rooms, inadequate ventilation systems, and the poor quality of care in long term care facilities. This approach would also look at the role of class and race, and the access to healthcare in outside communities, as well as issues of increased susceptibility of particular people to infection.

    Finally, the current pandemic of Coronavirus itself provides a striking example of the differences between a conventional approach and a more comprehensive dialectical approach. Conventional scientists, physicians and epidemiologists, knew that a pandemic such as we are experiencing was inevitable. But even without the recklessness and incompetency of the Trump administration and its contemporary Lysenko’s, the experts’ best preparations for and responses to this pandemic have proven inadequate. We find ourselves, in 2020, not much more advanced than in the 1300s with the Black Plague:

    “The condition of the people was pitiable to behold. They sickened by the thousands daily, and died unattended and without help.” Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1353

    In the absence of an “all-sided consideration” of the reasons this pandemic occurred, and neglecting the contradictions, those natural and human crises that exist beneath the surface of the pandemic, conventional experts have not been able to assure public safety. They have been unable to provide consistent messaging and education about, and implementation of, such basic measures as mask wearing physical distancing, and of enforced quarantines when necessary. The response has been reactive rather than proactive, with the focus on treatments and vaccines. This is not to deny the importance of treatments and vaccines, but to say that these alone cannot effectively control the current pandemic or prevent future pandemics. What has been ignored or underestimated occurs at both a national and global level, and includes multiple biologic, environmental, and social forces.

    At the national level, we have witnessed the inability to assure quality care for all due to the current private insurance system, allowing major disparities in care by class, race, and geographic location. We have witnessed the inability to provide a consistent strategy for prevention and response to such pandemics due to the absence of a fully funded, centralized public health agency with the authority and accountability to act in such situations. Rather we have a chaotic conglomerate of departments, agencies, services, each in their separate silos, and unable to provide leadership of a centralized strategy that could be rapidly implemented. Without the integration of universal health care combined with a strong national public healthy agency, there can be no consistent policy or messaging, no guarantee that treatment will be available to all, no coordination of protection for health care workers, for dissemination of necessary medical equipment and supplies, or for the availability of testing materials and contact tracing. Further, with a central public health agency, coordination with the efforts of other countries would become possible.[2] The pandemic is, after all, not just an American problem, but a global problem

    At the global level, a comprehensive and dialectic approach would address the intricacies of relationships between and among human beings, animals, and the changing environment. It would address climate change in general and in particular how climate change has led to massive shifts in human and animal populations, with increases in global poverty. It would explore the ways in which the effects of climate change impinge on ecosystems, creating conditions for the evolution of new pathogens, mostly viral, and new ways for these pathogens to multiply, and shift their transmission from animal hosts to human hosts. As Ed Yong wrote recently, “Humanity has squeezed the world’s wildlife in a crushing grip—and viruses have come bursting out.” (“How the Pandemic Defeated America,” Ed Yong, The Atlantic, Sept. 2020.) Today, any disease anywhere can spread within days to involve everyone.

    The coronavirus pandemic is not the result of “a perfect storm”, which implies forces of nature beyond human control. The pandemic is primarily the result of human activity, and the solution can only be the result of human activity. We will have to consider the myriad and complex forces leading to pandemics and understand what cripples our response to them. This requires a major shift in scientific perspective, a paradigm shift, to use Thomas Kuhn’s term, to a more dialectic science, a scientific revolution in which the scientific imagination is allowed to expand its approach to problems. It is time for our human activity to “change circumstances,” to become educated and learn the lessons that this pandemic, catastrophic as it is, can teach us.

    [1] It should also be noted that there has been a new interest in Lysenko in Russia, under Putin’s regime, partially due to the interest in the field of epigenetics. But Lysenko’s beliefs should not be confused with contemporary epigenetics. Epigenetic theory is based in an understanding of genes and DNA, and the issue of repressed and de-repressed genetic material. Lysenko did not believe in genes at all, and the description of DNA by Watson and Crick did not become known until 1953.

    [2] The United States is not alone in its neglect of public health. As Laurie Garrett points out in her book, Betrayal of Trust, the neglect and collapse of public health is also an international problem.

  • Living As If Another World Were Possible: Goodbye, David Graeber!

    Living As If Another World Were Possible: Goodbye, David Graeber!

    Having grown up hearing his father recount experiences in Anarchist-run Barcelona as a Lincoln Brigade volunteer, David Graeber, a renowned anthropologist and organizer, lived according to a lifelong belief that a far fairer world was possible. His father and his mother, a garment worker who was briefly the lead singer in the union-produced Broadway musical Pins and Needles, were Jewish working-class bookworms who filled their shelves with books about radical possibilities. Graeber, born in 1961, recalled:

    “There were a lot of books around the house when I was growing up, but almost no books of critique. I mean I’m sure my parents had Capital, at least volume one, but very few books about how awful the world was. They had lots of science fiction, lots of history, and lots of anthropology. I think their attitude was ‘I spent my nine to five working, experiencing how this system sucks for myself; I don’t need to read about that; I want to read about what other ways of existing might be like.’”

    This is interesting, because as a public intellectual (who taught at Yale and London School of Economics), Graeber was probably most well known for his social critiques. Heavily influenced by the autonomist Marxist tradition, Graeber viewed neoliberalism as primarily a political project masquerading as an economic one, and he exposed the system’s convoluted methods of keeping people demoralized, resentful, and hopeless about building a better world. These instruments of hopelessness included debt (Debt: The First 5,000 Years), corporate bureaucracy (The Utopia of Rules) and pointless work (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory). Graeber aptly described that last book as “an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization.” It argued that most of our working hours are not producing anything useful, and that the workweek could easily be reduced to fifteen or even twelve hours if it weren’t for capitalists’ drive to keep us perpetually busy. “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger,” he wrote, “Think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.”

    To me, however, Graeber’s more inspiring works focused on discovering and building alternatives. He had a keen eye for spotting utopia in seemingly unlikely places. During field work in highland Madagascar in 1989 to 1991, he found that the IMF-weakened state performed only nominal functions, and communities actually governed themselves with consensus decision-making on most matters. His study of the Iroquois League’s Constitution challenged notions that democracy, feminism, and anarchism are of exclusively European origin. And in contrast to the mass media’s dismissal of “incoherent” U.S. protesters, Graeber’s Direct Action: An Ethnography and The Democracy Project explained how the horizontal structure of the alter-globalization and Occupy Wall Street movements prefigured the world they sought to build. Over the last few years, Graeber championed the direct democracy experiments in Northen Syria (Rojava). And, with co-author David Wengrow, he dismantled the widespread assumption that early civilizations were uniformly hierarchal. To the contrary, “Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace.”

    You can read in other obituaries how much of an intellectual giant he was. Within his field, Maurice Bloch called him “the best anthropologist of his generation” and his advisor Marshall Sahlins called him “the most creative student I ever had.” When Yale decided to end his contract in 2004, it was clearly due to his involvement in radical direct action, not the quality of his scholarship and teaching.

    As a deeply engaged activist, Graeber was famously pivotal in launching Occupy Wall Street in New York in 2011, and I remember seeing him there when I brought a group of Wesleyan University classmates to the first night of the encampment. He didn’t stick around very long, because he didn’t want to become a leader or figurehead. As my friend explained at the time, “He’s very good at being an anarchist.”

    Back on campus, I convened a meeting of student activists, many of them newly radicalized by Occupy, and we initiated a horizontally-run course on “Direct Action and Radical Social Theory” inspired by a course of that title that Graeber had taught at Yale in 2004. Thanks to the sponsorship of two hands-off professors, Wesleyan actually allowed dozens of students to take it for credit, and of course we were very welcoming to non-students who showed up to participate. We wrote to Graeber letting him know we were going to use his 2004 syllabus, and he wrote back humbly, “This sounds great, and I’m really rather flattered that you’re doing it. The syllabus must be quite out of date by now.” We took his advice and rewrote it democratically, using consensus to decide on readings on and by the Zapatistas, Argentinian autogestion, Black Panthers, Clamshell Alliance, Social Ecology, Ecofeminism, Earth Liberation Front, Situationists, and other movements. For one meeting, we read and discussed a debate between Graeber and Chris Hedges over black bloc tactics, and, unsurprisingly most of us were convinced by Graeber’s “Concerning the Violent Peace Police” which defended the black bloc. I surely was not alone in finding that course to be the most enlightening I’d ever taken. When I think of how common activist burnout is, it’s noteworthy that many, probably most, of my classmates are still involved in radical organizing projects even now almost a decade later.

    I think part of the reason we stayed involved is that we were infected, at least indirectly, with Graeber’s hopeful attitude that “Mass direct action — especially when organized on democratic lines — is incredibly effective.” He wrote this in 2007’s “The Shock of Victory,” which, like many of his best writings, was published not in an academic journal but in the radical press (in this case, the Anarchist journal Rolling Thunder). It argued that the United States’ two most recent examples of mass direct action, the anti-nuclear and alter-globalization movements, achieved their medium-term goals without anyone really noticing. Specifically, these movements were followed by a halt on new nuclear power plants, the derailing of ambitious “free trade” deals, and a weakening of the IMF and World Bank.

    Instead of joining the chorus asking why Occupy Wall Street failed, he asked, “Why did it work?” I sympathized with that question, because I remember my friends and I discussed on the first night how we’d probably be cleared out by police pretty rapidly without leaving much permanent impact. Instead, we spread and sparked deep shifts in the country’s common sense, paving the way for a fringe leftist Senator to become the country’s most popular politician and for ideas like anti-capitalism and the abolition of police to become acceptable dinner table conversation topics. Adopting Immanuel Wallerstein’s terminology, Graeber claimed Occupy and the Arab Spring jointly comprised a “world revolution of 2011” whose effects may one day be understood as comparable to 1848’s, 1917’s, or 1968’s.

    In contrast to more dogmatically “anti-imperialist” parts of the Left, Graeber held a nuanced, internationalist stance that prioritized the needs of democratic rebels worldwide. For example, he refused to accept the crude geopolitics that reduced Libya’s situation to solely a conflict between NATO and Gaddafi. In a 2011 comment that we at New Politics are happy to make once again publicly available, Graeber likened both statist powers to “Darth Vaders” and reserved his solidarity for the popular rebellion.

    In his last few years of life, Graeber’s politics were rapidly moving in exciting directions. Softening his earlier gradualist approach to social change, his writings on Rojava began championing “‘revolution’ in its classical sense, let’s say: the overthrow of an existing structure of power and the ruling class it supports by a popular uprising of some sort, and its replacement by new forms of bottom-up popular organization.” Although I sometimes disagreed with Graeber’s rosy portrayal of Rojava’s Democratic Union Party (PYD), I found myself eagerly watching his evolving views as the dire climate and ecological situations make revolution, whatever that might mean in our time, a matter of ever-increasing urgency.

    Beyond being an extraordinary anthropologist and organizer, Graeber was a brilliant philosopher, and his very best essay may be a little-known 2014 Baffler contribution titled “What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?” Drawing on fields as diverse as animal studies, subatomic physics, and cosmology, it makes a surprisingly convincing case that the universe may be fundamentally conscious and playful. What a rebuke this is to the dominant view that we live in a “mindless, robotic universe” and its depressingly conservative and anthropocentric implications. Had he lived longer, Graeber might have penned an expanded treatise on reality that would be every bit as important to the Anarchist canon as Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom. And given Graeber’s engaging, fun writing style, I’m sure the book would be read far outside of activist circles.

    I never personally knew him, but I understand that he was generous and compassionate to those who did. His death last week came as a devastating surprise. He was only 59, and he had much more to contribute to the building of a world beyond capitalism and beyond hierarchy. Undoubtedly, he would want us all to keep building that world and to have fun doing so.

    As Graeber wrote in the preface to Direct Action: An Ethnography, “[T]o live as a rebel—in the constant awareness of the possibilities of revolutionary transformation, and amongst those who dream of it—is surely the best way one can live.” He genuinely lived by these words. No one was more skilled at finding possibilities and hope in unlikely places, and he lived according to his rational, radical convictions. Goodbye, David Graeber!

  • When NYC Jewish Organizations Enthusiastically Supported Boycotts

    When NYC Jewish Organizations Enthusiastically Supported Boycotts

    The Jewish establishment has condemned the NYC Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for asking candidates if they would forgo plans to take trips to Israel as an act of solidarity with Palestinians. The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), which arranges these trips for City Council members, expressed outrage and that group and a number of politicians raised a cry of “anti-Semitism”. Of course it’s a croc. It’s also hypocrisy.

    There were times when leaders of the Jewish community (very properly) embraced boycotts as necessary measures of self-defense. At the start of the 1900’s New York City banker Jacob Schiff led a bankers boycott of the intensely anti-Semitic Imperial Russia. In the 1920’s there was a successful boycott of the company owned by the then world’s most famous anti-Semite, Henry Ford. In 1927 he gave in, wrote a public letter of apology to Jews and sold his anti-Jewish paper, the Dearborn Independent.

    The most serious boycott, though, started in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor. In his book Mein Kampf he had outlined his murderous plans for Jews and his goons had beaten and harassed German Jews for years. Within weeks of Hitler’s appointment (January 30, 1933) calls sounded for a boycott of Germany.

    Its earliest proponent was the JWV (Jewish War Veterans), made up of men who had fought in the Great War. After hearing accounts of Nazi thugs in German cities rioting and calling for anti-Jewish boycotts, the JWV announced a boycott campaign on March 12. On the 23rd the JWV led thousands down New York City streets to City Hall where they presented Mayor John O’Brien with a resolution calling for a boycott of Germany.

    Four days later, on March 27, 1933, major Jewish organizations held a huge rally in Madison Square Garden. It was jammed full and tens of thousands were outside on the streets around it and in Columbus Circle. The New York Times account the next day was headlined, “55,000 Here Stage Protest on Hitler Attack on Jews”.

    A photo of Madison Square Garden of the rally shows the huge size of the crowd that evening. Up on the stage there’s one giant poster. It’s a picture of a man with some kind of tool ripping apart a swastika and above it the words “Boycott Nazi Germany”. Speakers denounced Hitler and Nazi attacks on Jews. Besides Jewish leaders, important non-Jews spoke, like the head of the American Federation of Labor and Senator Robert Wagner.

    The idea behind the anti-German boycott was to harm German manufacturing and get the owners of the big companies to pressure Hitler and his gang to stop its violence and discrimination against Jews. In many ways it had a very similar motive to the BDS campaign against the Israeli Apartheid of today.

    The Jewish War Veterans was the first group to go into the streets with boycott activities. They gave out flyers and picketed stores that sold German products.

    By the end of ’33 the main leader of the boycott was millionaire and NYC Tammany Hall politician Samuel Untermeyer. He raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for boycott offices, flyers, telephones, etc. Offices were set up all over the country.

    Another leader of the boycott was Rabbi Stephen Wise, a famous U.S. Zionist leader and head of a very important Manhattan synagogue. He was put in charge of boycott activities by the World Jewish Conference, an international group formed to fight Hitlerism.

    In May 1933 there was an immense march in New York City lead by Untermeyer, Wise and the American Jewish Congress. Former Congressman (and future mayor) Fiorello LaGuardia was one of the speakers before the march. Untermeyer spoke too and urged all Americans to ban all German products and services. Edwin Black describes the march dramatically in his book “The Transfer Agreement”. He writes, “Roars of applause and volcanic cheers greeted a hat-waving Stephen Wise at every corner. For hours, Wise, 100,000 behind him, marched south toward Battery Park.” Marchers were showered with ticker tape. On their way from Madison Square to Battery Park thousands of labor unionists joined the march. Mayor O’Brien sat on the reviewing stand and watched the march pass by for four hours.

    The boycott started in 1933 and went on until World War II. It obviously did not succeed in moderating Hitler, but few today would argue it was a wrong thing to do. Nor would anyone (but Nazis) argue that it was racist to be so “anti-German”.

    An Important Difference

    There is a big difference between the boycott of the 1930s and BDS today. BDS is led by a movement of Palestinian civil society organizations. (It was never advocated by the Palestinian Authority.) BDS is targeted against entities cooperating with or enriching themselves from oppression. The boycott of the 1930s was against all German goods.

    The BDS movement site explains, “the BDS movement is impactful when it focuses its consumer boycotts and campaigns on a number of companies that are most deeply involved in Israel’s occupation and apartheid.” As far as boycotts of Israeli colleges the site states, “The academic boycott is a boycott of complicit Israeli academic institutions not individuals.” In answer to the question about boycotts of artists, the site explains, “BDS does not target artists. It targets institutions based on their complicity in Israel’s violations of international law.”

    The boycott of the 1930s was not selective. It targeted all German goods from gloves to cheese products to medicines. For instance in Newark, NJ in 1935 squads of women went into Bamburger’s department store to make sure there were no German products.

    Neither boycott was racist. Both were attempts to use peaceful economic pressure to fight for human rights. Clearly though the Palestinians are going the extra mile to show their boycott is principled and not based on ethnic hatred.

    New York Jewish leaders had a proud role in the anti-Nazi boycott of the 1930s. The Rightists who control the big Jewish organizations today don’t measure up to them in the slightest. It’s sheer hypocrisy for them to criticize the Palestinian-led BDS movement struggling against modern-day apartheid and oppression.

    Footnote: Zionist Sabotaging of the Anti-Nazi Boycott

    In 1984 Lenni Brenner wrote about something that had been buried for decades, a deal bargained by Zionist leader of British Palestine and Nazi officials, the “Transfer Agreement”. Under the agreement German Jewish wealth was taken out of the Germany in the form of products and sold in Palestine. The refugees got a lot of the proceeds and Zionist organizations got a slice, too. Realize though that when Jews of the world were boycotting German goods, Palestinian Jews were selling German goods. Whatever it did for Zionism and refugees the Transfer Agreement, in the words of Zionist historian Edwin Black, “pierce[d] a stake through the heart of the Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott “. I write about this in one section of my book, “Zionist Betrayal of Jews” (2019).

     

  • Presidential Candidates and Society Debate Protest and Violence

    Presidential Candidates and Society Debate Protest and Violence

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

    Protest, sometimes with conflict between anti-racist and rightwing groups, continues in various U.S. cities—Portland, Louisville, and Rochester—over 100 days since the killing of George Floyd. America has not seen such street fighting between ordinary people since the days of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The anti-racist protests have been driven by continued police killings of black men and women and the failure of mayors, prosecutors, and police chiefs to fire or indict the officers responsible. Armed rightwing counter-protestors have been showing up at demonstrations and three people have been killed in street battles so far.

    While the violence is limited to just a few cities it has become the central issue in the presidential election. After the police shot Jacob Blake in Kenosha, President Donald Trump went there to meet with the police, while Democratic Party candidate Joseph Biden met with Blake’s family. Trump claims that if Biden is elected, violence will spread across America and the mostly white suburbs will be destroyed, while Biden supports the protests but condemns violence and advocates reconciliation.

    Trump’s appeal to white voters afraid of Black protestors is quite clear. He suggests that Democrats want more public housing, (presumably filled with Black tenants) in the white suburbs. Sales of guns and ammunition, mostly to white buyers, have reached unprecedented levels of hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time the unofficial armed militia groups are proliferating, growing, and becoming bolder.

    By focusing on ”law and order” Trump is trying to turn the campaign away from the disastrous health and economic situations. The United States is approaching 190,000 deaths and the virus is spreading, most recently rising in the plains states. With school, bars, restaurants, and gyms now reopening in many places, epidemiologists fear new outbreaks. It is also expected that winter weather and the flu will contribute to a second wave in the fall.

    Meanwhile the economic situation has improved only slightly; there are still about 30 million unemployed and the federal government supplement to state unemployment has fallen from $600 per week to $300. The Centers for Disease Control issued an order preventing landlords from evicting some 30 million people who face eviction for nonpayment of rent, though the process is complicated and renters will still owe back rent. As the election campaigns go on for the next two months the question is will voters reject Trump because of his handling of the virus and the economic crisis or will they embrace him because of his promise to defend them from violence?

    The left continues to support and to participate in protest in those few cities where they continue. The far left focuses on the fight against police racism and violence, while more moderate leftists emphasizes the election of Biden—even if they don’t like his politics—and the need to drive Trump from the White House. Some on the far left defend looting, though most emphasize peaceful protest. Socialists have become more active in attempts to organize workers, though our campaigns are still small and marginal to most of the labor movement. Until the election is over, a vaccine is available, the pandemic ends, and the economy revives we will all be waiting for the end of the terrible year 2020 and a return to a more vigorous fight for socialism.