Remembering and Forgetting: No to War with Iran!

By: January 18, 2020
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The criminal negligence of the Iranian regime and military — shooting down a passenger airliner that had just taken off from their own Tehran airport — should immediately remind us of the dozens, if not hundreds of occasions when United States forces have caused the same kind of civilian collateral carnage.

We don’t have to go all the way back to July, 1988 when the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian jetliner, Flight 655 with 290 victims aboard — for which the United States eventually paid compensation but never apologized. From 2001 till the present moment, in the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, just think of the wedding parties bombed from the air, civilian convoys annihilated by laser-guided “smart bombs,” journalists targeted by an attack helicopter, families wiped out when the “wrong” house was bombed or raided, the Blackwater massacre of civilians at the Baghdad traffic circle — just those cases that have been revealed, to say nothing of so many more unknown ones.

I say the Ukraine Flight 752 disaster “should remind us” of these things, but of course that’s not happening. Quite the opposite: Thanks to corporate media and the vast majority of politicians on the conservative-to-liberal spectrum, focusing on the Iranian military’s latest crime serves to make the U.S. public forget what our own country’s wars and interventions have done to the populations of so many other nations. That includes what our strategic ally Saudi Arabia, with its U.S.-trained pilots, U.S.-supplied planes and bombs has done to the population of Yemen.

Similarly, the U.S. assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani — and the ever-shifting lying pretexts put out by Trump and his administration about an “imminent threat” — should remind us that this same “terrorist” figure and Iran itself over the past two decades had also been a partner of the United States in fighting against the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the “Islamic State.” Instead, of course, the pundits’ debate over whether this murder was “sound policy” makes people conveniently forget almost everything that came before.

The crude lying coverup attempted by the Iranian regime for three days after the plane shootdown should also remind everyone of the Saudi kingdom’s efforts to hide its targeted kidnap-murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul — for which the United States has imposed no penalties worth mentioning. Again, that’s all but forgotten now.

The Iranian regime’s lies to its own people have re-ignited the wave of popular protests against the murderous brutality, corruption and incompetent administration of the Islamic Republic. On this and other important points, everyone should read Iran Popular Protests Against Regime Intensify in Response to Iran Downing of Passenger Plane on the website of the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists.

For the movement here in the United States, our focus must be on the threat of war and the final dismantling of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA).

Clearly the Iranian regime wants no part of a war with the United States, and it seems that the U.S. administration doesn’t want war either with the exception of the neocon holdovers who infest the White House’s national security apparatus. Certainly the American people want no part of it.

This doesn’t alleviate the danger of the present moment. U.S.-imposed sanctions have crushed the Iranian economy, which has reportedly shrunk by an incredible 9.5% over the past year. At this writing, European states that promised to hold the JCPOA together appear to be abandoning it under Trump’s bullying. The Iranian people, to whom Trump cynically tweets his “support,” are suffering the collapse of their living standards, medical infrastructure, and food security.

The predictable results will be more asymmetric conflict, more U.S. targeted killings — and perhaps ultimately Iran’s attempt to achieve a deterrent nuclear weapons capability (which it had no longer wanted after 2003 with the fall of its traditional great enemy, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq).

If the momentary outlook isn’t clear — whether toward escalating tension or a period of relative relaxation — what’s absolutely clear is the necessity of mass antiwar resistance that speaks to the people of this country. Demonstrations that are happening in dozens of cities are a good thing, but more is needed. It’s not only a question of exposing the daily lies of Trump and his enablers. Every Democratic candidate should be asked point-blank whether they repudiate war, the threat of war, and crippling sanctions against Iran, with no weasel words and evasions allowed.

At a time when the planet is already burning, we must not forget that another war for empire is absolutely unacceptable.

No War With Iran — U.S. Troops Out of the Middle East Now!

Originally posted at the Solidarity (U.S.) website. 

France at a Crossroads

By: January 16, 2020
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The nationwide general strike in France, now in its record seventh week, seems to be approaching its crisis point. Despite savage police repression, about a million people are in the streets protesting President Macron’s proposed neoliberal “reform” of France’s retirement system, established at the end of World War II and considered one of the best in the world. At bottom, what is at stake is a whole vision of what kind of society people want to live in – one based on cold market calculation or one based on human solidarity ­– and neither side shows any sign of willingness to compromise.

Now or Never?

On one side, the Macron government has staked its legitimacy on pushing through this key “reform” intact as a matter of principle, however unpopular. On the other side stand the striking railroad and transit workers, who are bearing the brunt of this conflict and have already sacrificed thousands of Euros in lost pay since the strike began last Dec. 5. After six weeks, they cannot accept the prospect of returning to work empty-handed, and they have set their sights high: withdrawal of the whole government project.

This looks like a “now or never” situation. Moreover, it seems clear that the transport workers mean business. When the government (and the union leaders) proposed a “truce” in the transport strike during the sacred Christmas/New Year vacation period, the rank and file voted to continue the struggle, and their leaders were obliged to eat their words.

Nor are the transport workers isolated, despite the inconvenience to commuters and other travelers. They have been joined by emergency-room nurses and doctors (who have been on strike for months over lack of beds, personnel and materials), public school teachers (protesting undemocratic and incomprehensible “reforms” to the national curriculum), lawyers and judges (visible in their judicial robes), and the dancers at the Paris Opera (visible in their tutus) among the other professions joining the strike.

Strikers and “Yellow Vests” Together

Alongside the strikers, and quite visible among them, the so-called Yellow Vests are a crucial element. For over a year, they have been setting a “bad example” of self-organized, largely leaderless, social protest which captured the public imagination and through direct action in the streets won some real concessions from Macron in December 2018. This victory impressed the rank-and-file of the French organized labor movement, which after three months of disciplined, but limited, stop-and-go strikes in the Spring of 2018, failed utterly to wring any concessions and went back to work poor and empty-handed while Macron pushed through a series of neoliberal privatizations and cuts in unemployment compensation. [1]

Although their numbers diminished, the Yellow Vests continued their spontaneous protests throughout 2019 despite savage government repression, distorted media coverage stressing Black Bloc violence, and snubbing on the part of the union leadership; but their “bad example” was not lost on the union rank and file. Today’s general strike was originally sparked last September by a spontaneous walkout by Paris subway workers, who, contrary to custom, spontaneously shut down the system without asking permission from their leaders and management.

Meanwhile, the Yellow Vests, initially suspicious of the unions but isolated in their struggle with Macron, had begun to seek “convergence” with the French labor movement. Finally, at the Yellow Vest national “Assembly of Assemblies” last November, their delegates voted near-unanimously to join the “unlimited general strike” proposed for Dec. 5 by the unions. Reversing his previous standoffishness, Philippe Martinez, head of the CGT labor federation, immediately welcomed their participation.[2]

Government Provocation

Today’s intractable nationwide confrontation over retirement – a sacred cow, like Social Security in the U.S. – is best understood as a deliberate provocation on the part of Macron, both in its form and its substance. There was no urgent reason for pension reform, nor for abolishing the venerable system outright and hastily replacing it from above with an abstract neoliberal plan based on “universality.” The pension program was not in debt, and the alleged need to replace the twenty-odd “special” retirement funds – negotiated over the years with the representatives of different trades and professions – with a single “point system” in the name of fairness, efficiency and rationality was only a smokescreen.

In fact, these “special funds” cover only about one percent of retirees – a million or so miners, railroad workers, transit workers, sailors, ballet dancers and such – who get to retire early because of the physically or mentally taxing nature of their specific labors. (Even if you include the four million public employees as “special,” the figure rises to under 25%). Moreover, Macron has himself recently violated this principle of “universality” by giving special exceptions to the police and army (whom he cannot afford to alienate) and the ballerinas of the Opera (whom no one can imagine toe-dancing at the age of sixty).

Behind this confusing smokescreen of “fairness to all” is an old con: equalize benefits by reducing them to the lowest common denominator. Indeed, according to independent calculations, under Macron’s point system the average pension would be reduced by about 30%. And since these “points” would be calculated over the total lifetime number of years worked before retirement, rather than on the current criterion of 75% of the worker’s best or final years, Macron’s point system would particularly penalize those whose careers were irregular – for example women who took off  years for child-care. Yet the government brazenly claims that women will be “the big winners” in this so-called reform!

A Pig in a Poke

However, the biggest con embodied in this point system is that the actual cash value of each accumulated point would only be calculated at the time of retirement. The sum in Euros would then be determined by the government then in power on the basis of the economic situation at that moment (for example in 2037 when the plan goes into full effect). Thus, under the present system, every school-teacher, railroad worker and clerk can calculate how much s/he will received when s/he retires at 62 and plan accordingly (for example opting for early retirement). Macron’s point system would leave her in total darkness until it is too late. His system resembles a gambling casino where you buy 10 chips for a certain amount (say 10 Euros each), place your bets, and later take your winning chips to the cashier’s window only to discover that your chips are now worth only five Euros each. Surprise! The house wins!

Today, thanks to their existing pension system, French people live on the average five years longer than other Europeans. Moreover, according to the New York Times: “In France the poverty rate among those older than 65 is less than 5 percent, largely because of the pension system, while in the United States it approaches 20 percent, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In France, life expectancy is increasing, while in the United States it is diminishing in significant sectors of the population.”  And although the pro-government French media have presented Macron’s confused and confusing reform in the best possible light, it is a hard sell. So why change it?

Not an Ordinary President

When Emmanuel Macron took power in 2017, he vowed he would not be “an ordinary president.” From the beginning he has openly proclaimed his iron determination to revolutionize French society in order to bring it into line with the neoliberal Thatcher/Reagan revolution of the 1980’s, and his methods have been authoritarian. He has imposed his program of privatizations and counter-reforms from above, mainly by decree, deliberately circumventing negotiations with “intermediate bodies” like the parliament, the political parties, the local authorities and above all the labor unions, who have traditionally been the “social partners” (official designation) of government along with the employers’ associations (who are Macron’s main base of support).

Backed by the mainstream media (controlled by the government and three big corporations) Macron has been so far largely successful in steam-rolling through his neoliberal program, openly designed to improve French “competitivity” (i.e. corporate profits) by lowering living standards (thus increasing inequality).  If successful, his proposed “reform” of pensions would open the gates to his ultimate goal, the “reform” of France’s socialized healthcare system (Medicare for all), already on the road to privatization.

Naturally, all these moves have been unpopular, but until now Macron, whose executive style has been characterized as “imperial,” has been successful in dividing and destabilizing his opposition – if necessary, through massive use of police violence. This has been the fate of the spontaneous movement of Yellow Vests, who have been subjected to routine beatings and tear-gas attacks as well as hundreds of serious injuries (including blindings, torn-off hands and several deaths) – all with police impunity and media cover-ups. Now the government’s savage repressive methods – condemned by the U.N. and the European Union ­– are being applied to strikers and union demonstrators traditionally tolerated by the forces of order in France.

This repression may turn out to be like throwing oil on the flames of conflict. On January 9, at the end of the peaceful, legal, mass marches (estimated half-million demonstrators nationwide), members of the particularly brutal BAC (Anti-Criminal Brigade) in Paris, Rouen and Lille were ordered to break off sections of the marches, surround them, inundate them with teargas, and then charge in among them with truncheons and flash-ball launchers fired at close range, resulting in 124 injuries (25 of them serious), and 980 sickened by gas.

These brutal attacks, which focused particularly on journalists and females (nurses and teachers) were captured on shocking videos, viewed millions of times on YouTube, but pooh-poohed by government spokesmen.[3] Far from discouraging the strikers, this deliberate violence may only enrage them. And, what with the “bad example” of the Yellow Vests,” the labor leaders may not be able to reign them in.

The Center Cannot Hold

Why is Macron risking his prestige and his Presidency on this precarious face-off with the labor leadership, traditionally viewed as the compliant hand-maidens of the government on such occasions? Historians here recall that in 1936 Maurice Thorez, leader of Communist-affiliated CGT (General Confederation of Workers), brought the general strike and factory occupations to an end with the slogan “We must learn how to end a strike” and that at the Liberation of France in 1945 the same Thorez, fresh from Moscow, told the workers to “roll up your sleeves” and rebuild French capitalism before striking for socialism. Similarly, in 1968, during the spontaneous student-worker uprising, the CGT negotiated a settlement with De Gaulle and literally dragged reluctant strikers back to work.

Not for nothing are today’s government-subsidized French unions officially designated as “social partners” (along with government and business), yet Macron, loyal to neoliberal, Thatcherite doctrine, has consistently humiliated the CGT’s Martinez and the other union leaders and excluded them – along with the other “intermediary bodies – from the policy-making process.

Something’s Got to Give

France’s “not-an-ordinary-President” has from the beginning remained consistent with his vision of an imperial presidency. Although seen by many abroad as a “progressive,” Macron, like Trump, Putin, and other contemporary heads of state, adheres to the neoliberal doctrine of “authoritarian democracy,” and he is apparently willing to stake his future, and the future of France, on subduing his popular opposition, particularly the unions, once and for all.

Thus, what is at stake today is not just a quarrel over pension rights, which would normally be negotiated and adjudicated through a political process including political parties, elected representatives, parliamentary coalitions and collective bargaining with labor, but a question of what kind of future society French people are going to live in: social-democratic or neo-liberal authoritarian. The seasoned Paris bureau chief of the NY Times Adam Nossiter put it simply in his revealing Jan. 9 article: “A fight between the rich and the poor amplified by 200 years of French history.”[4]

A technocrat and former Rothschild banker, Macron rose to power unexpectedly in 2017 when the traditional Left and Right parties fell apart during the first round of the Presidential Election, leaving him alone as the lesser of two evils candidate in a face-off with the proto-fascist National Front of LePen. Considered “the President of the rich” by most French people, Macron must remain inflexible because he has nothing behind him but the Bourse (Stock Exchange), the MEDEF (Manufacturers’ Association), and the police.

Second Thoughts

On the other hand, as the struggle enters its seventh week, it occurs to me that if this were true general strike, if all the organized workers had walked out on December 5, if the railroads, the subways, the buses, the schools and the hospitals – not to mention the refineries and the electrical generators – had been shut down, it would all have been over in a few days.

But this is not the U.S. where in Sept-Oct. 2019, 48,000 members of the United Auto Workers recently shut down 50 General Motors plants for more than six weeks, and where not a single worker, not a single delivery of parts, not a single finished car crossed the picket lines until the strike was settled.

In France, there are no “union shops” much less closed shops, few if any strike funds, and as many as five different union federations competing for representation in a given industry. Here picket lines, where they exist, are purely informational, and anywhere from 10% to 90% of the workers may show up on the job on any given day during a strike. Today, for example, seven out of ten TGV high-speed bullet-trains were running as many railroad workers returned to the job to pay their bills while planning to go back on strike and join the demonstrations later in the week. How long can this go on?

“When in irresistible force meets an immovable object, something’s got to give,” goes the old saying, and a show-down seems to be in the offing. With his arrogant intransigence over the retirement issue, Macron is apparently risking his presidency on one throw of the dice. Only time will tell. And Macron may be betting that time is on his side, waiting for the movement to slowly peter out so as to push through his reforms later in the Spring.

Update: French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe’s much ballyhooed Jan. 12 declaration of a “provisionary” withdrawal of his proposal to extend the “pivotal” age of retirement from 62 to 64 is yet another smokescreen designed to divide the opposition and further prolong the struggle, as suggested above.

Although denounced as such by the CGT and other striking unions, the government’s promise was immediately accepted by the openly class-collaborationist (“moderate”) CFDT union, to their mutual advantage. The CFDT will now be included in the negotiations over the financing of the proposed point system, which the CFDT, having collaborated with previous governments in earlier neoliberal reforms, supports.

Philippe’s declaration is obviously an empty promise, as there are only two ways of increasing the retirement fund: either by extending the number of years paid in or by increasing the amount annual contributions, which are shared by labor and management. And although labor has signaled its willingness to raise its dues, the MEDEF (manufacturers’ association) has adamantly refused to pay its share, ruling out the obvious solution to this manufactured crisis. Even if the official “pivotal” retirement age is retained, if the value of their pensions is reduced, employees will be obliged to continue working past age 62 in order to live.

 

[1] For details on 2018 strikes, please see my http://divergences.be/spip.php?article3348

[2] Please see https://newpol.org/french-unions-yellow-vests-converge-launch-general-strike-today/ by Richard Greeman.

[3] https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/110120/le-prefet-lallement-libere-l-extreme-violence-policiere

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/world/europe/france-strikes-pensions.html

Review: “Tramps and Trade Union Travelers” by Kim Moody

By: January 15, 2020
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Kim Moody, Tramps and Trade Union Travelers: Internal Migration and Organized Labor in Gilded Age America, 1870–1900. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019.

Kim Moody has written another very interesting and provocative book on labor. His other books have generally been about contemporary labor issues. This one focuses on the key issue of American Exceptionalism.

This conservative/elitist formulation says that American workers are different from other workers. They supposedly have always had less class consciousness than other workers. Exceptionalism openly says or implies that U.S. workers can never be the subjects of their own liberation. It is therefore a pessimistic support for apathy and inaction.

This position was most famously put forward in Werner Sombart’s Why There is No Socialism in the United States? He felt the “ship of socialism crashed on reefs of roast beef.” In other words, the high living standards of American capitalism blunted working class consciousness and determined that workers in the U.S. would not become the subject of the self-emancipation that Marx predicted.

This argument has been echoed through out history. In the 1960s elements of the New Left said that workers benefited from imperialism and were too “bought off” to ever make a revolution. Even today after 40 years of declining and stagnating living standards, some leftists still cling to the notion of inevitably conservative, affluent workers. Many liberals and some leftists blame Trump’s victory on the working class, even though Trump voters were more upper income than voters as a whole. Further voters are more upper income than the population as a whole.

Finally, American Exceptionalism assumes that the reason there is no labor party or militant unions in the U.S. is because of a low level of class consciousness among U.S. workers.

Moody rightly opposes this attitude. He reaffirms the high level of class consciousness of workers in the period he is studying, 1870-1900.

On face value, the proposition that blames the working class for the lack of a strong union movement and labor party seems absurd: a large proportion of American workers at any given period were immigrants! If they were not uniquely conservative in their home countries, why were they in the U.S.?

Of course, it is true that the U.S. is different than many other countries of the Global North in particular ways. It is the only Northern “democratic” country without a mass labor or Socialist Party at the national scale. The problem is blaming the working class for this difference.

Kim refutes some of the usual explanations: prosperity, the open land on the frontier, class mobility etc. On prosperity: he notes that other countries also had “prosperous” workers who were militant labor activists. On class mobility: it didn’t really exist here any more than in other countries and sometimes less. On the open land: In fact, the major movement for the period he covers, 1870-1900 was from rural areas to the cities. He also says the two-party political system is given too much credit, noting breaks from it later in the book.

The author does credit two other causes historians often cite—the divisions caused by racism and ethnic differences and repression by the state to some extent. However, on the issue of repression, he discounts the impact, noting the rarity of actual state intervention.

The factor that he thinks is most important is one that historians have downplayed: working class mobility, including mass immigration. This includes country and small-town movement to cities within a state and movement across state lines. He provides impressive statistics to show how important this factor was.

His overall thesis is that the massive mobility of the working class undermined its ability to form strong unions. He further argues that organized labor, unions and the Knights of Labor were the basis of local labor parties. Thus, mobility indirectly undermined the possibility of a labor party.

The mobility of the working class was directly related to the structure of the developing capitalist economy. Industry spread across the U.S. pulling workers in as it went. The way work was organized was more sporadic than it is today. Employers offered far less permanent employment. Work was offered only when there was an immediate market for particular products. This meant that most workers faced layoffs on a regular basis. Instead of the current pattern of long periods of steady employment followed by long periods of layoff, many or most workers only worked part of the year at any one employer. More workers worked on a similar schedule to construction workers today.

When laid off, workers would travel. if necessary, to find other work. This led to constant movement for large sections of the working class. This situation was superimposed on the overall growth of industry across the country. The most traveling took place in boom periods. In depressions workers could not afford to travel and there was less incentive.

This description of work is important in confronting an argument today: Is there a “precariat” which is separate from the proletariat? In fact, at least in this period the whole working class was precarious. Today’s partial return to this level of precarity is not a unique development. The more stable long-term employment of the post WWII period is actually the aberration in capitalist history. In other words, there is no precariat separate from the proletariat.

Also important is that the Gilded Age was actually the period of the widespread creation of a working class in the U.S. Until this period, most people including most workers saw wage labor as a temporary phenomenon. Wage workers were expected to save money and then go out on their own and become independent craftspersons or business people. Workers at first resisted being converted into proletarians. Over the course of this period, working class consciousness developed out of the general producer consciousness. “Producers” had included independent crafts people and the petit bourgeoisie. Producer consciousness was  more common before the Civil War. Working class consciousness grew as more and more workers understood wage work was likely permanent.

This is one of the key arguments that the author makes: U.S. workers had a high degree of class consciousness as shown by strikes and attempts at working class organization during the Gilded Age. This is an important argument against American Exceptionalism.

One expression of this new consciousness was the Knights of Labor in the period of most rapid immigration and growth of capital, the 1880s. Some of its official statements echoed the previous producer consciousness but in most respects it was working class and working class oriented. In his evaluation of the Knights as working class, Moody differs from many historians who see it as producer oriented. However, its most prominent leader, Terrence Powderly, rejected strikes and reflected the old producer consciousness. This caused problems for the Knights when workers struck, especially in the mid-1980s.

This developing consciousness crystallized into many attempts to form labor parties in opposition to the interest of capitalists. Moody outlines several attempts. One was in 1877 after the massive nationwide railroad strike when along with the Greenback party workers elected 14 congress people. This effort came under middle class domination and collapsed with the decline of unions in the depression of 1873-79.

In the mid-80s there was another attempt across the country. This fell apart with the decline of the Knights which was the basis of labor party efforts.

The author explains the decline of the Knights from 1886-87 as a result of loss of strikes which increased precarity and the general looseness of the Knights organization. These weaknesses accelerated the underlying problems caused by the mobility of the working class. He gives ideas about how the Knights could have been organized better: Support of strikes, national trades organization and more attention to solid organizing.

Finally, the AFL in 1893-4 came close to endorsing a reformist socialist platform including a call for a labor party. Moody believes that this attempt was not defeated just by pure and simple unionism but also by differences over relations with the Populists. A majority of union members supported the radical program—again showing U.S. workers did not differ markedly in attitudes from their European counterparts.

Moody relates this failure to the weakness of the overall union movement during this period. Again, this in turn was based on precarity/mobility.

The author differs from many historians who see economic struggle as separate from political struggle. Many see electoral organizing as coming out of defeated economic struggle. Moody instead sees both as coming together, political being based on economic organization. When economic organization declined, so did the basis of electoral organizing.

Moody’s refutation of conservative dismissals of the American working class is important and very helpful. His inclusion of the mobility issue which was unique to the U.S. is also a crucial addition to our understanding of working-class development.

This book is very useful in expanding the understanding of this period and hence working-class history in general. However, in putting so much stress on mobility, Moody does underestimate other factors. He downplays the importance of repression and totally neglects the resolute opposition of the U.S. ruling class to political reformism. Though mass repression using troops and even injunctions by the courts were less prevalent than some historians suggest. exemplary actions can set a tone and certainly did in U.S. labor history.

More important even than repression is the commitment of the ruling class to laissez-faire. Until the 1930s the courts struck down many attempts at social reform including child labor laws. This allowed very little space for reformism through political action, especially on a national scale

Moody may be correct about the Gilded Age attempts at forming labor parties. However, after this period, many working class activists saw little hope in political reform and national labor parties never got too far. After the 1893-4 period that he discusses the American Federation of Labor (AFL) grew but became dominated by “pure and simple” unionism. It actively rejected legislative reform. Part of this had to do with the opening provided by the National Civic Federation, liberal bosses who wanted stability through collective bargaining. This on the ground economic reformism by the bosses was echoed by the growing labor bureaucracy which wanted to confine benefits to its members rather than providing them through legislation.

This intransigence of the ruling class to political reform bifurcated the labor movement. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) also rejected legislative reform but from a revolutionary direction. It only wanted to win gains through the class struggle on the way to revolution. This led finally to a division between the IWW and the growing Socialist Party though at its founding political socialists were part of it.

Why the U.S. ruling class was more repressive and more opposed to regulation or social legislation than other ruling classes is an open question. In Europe, the capitalist class had become the ruling class by this period. However, it still had to compete for allegiance with the remnants of the formerly feudal class and its noblesse oblige. In the U.S. after the Civil War the old slaveocracy had been replaced by capitalist land owners so there was no separate class to compete with the capitalists. Further, the U.S. was a late developing capitalist nation in a competitive world economy. The ruling class was determined to expand capital at any cost, including even nominal welfare of the working class. Whatever the cause of the ruling class’s resolutely reactionary politics, its record is clear.

In spite of underplaying some important aspects Moody’s book is a crucial addition to our understanding of working class history.

How Mayor Lumumba was Bought: The Closed Bloomberg Meeting in Jackson, Mississippi

By: January 14, 2020
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The saying that politics makes for strange bedfellows is a statement that speaks to the many allegiances, alliances and compromises that one must make when engaging in electoral politics. One might think that there could be no more stranger bedfellows in politics than Jackson’s self-proclaimed “radical” mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. However, the alignment of Lumumba and Bloomberg is not so strange at all. State power, as a crossroads of ethnic patronage politics, is not very weird unless we believe that black power means nothing without power to the common people even after people of color retain coveted positions above society. How many of us believe in that today?

Many black politicians, especially the young ambitious ones, enter office with the idea that the office they seek is merely a steppingstone to some higher office or some lucrative position as an appointed government bureaucrat or in a capitalist firm. So, while they claim to be working for the people, they are busy making allegiances with forces above them that will help to ensure that they have a safe and profitable landing once they leave their present public office.

Considering this reality, we must look at Bloomberg’s campaign event in Jackson and ask what role did his money play in his being given a platform to stump for the Democratic Party presidential nomination by the Lumumba administration? Did he buy Lumumba? There have been many accusations made by Bloomberg’s opponents, who receive donations from forces that they would be beholden to if they win the office of US president in 2020, regarding his attempts to buy the presidency. Given the millions he has spent on campaign advertising in the initial weeks of his campaign, it appears that he is trying to. Bloomberg also spent a million dollars in Jackson. Given this fact, it is an appropriate question: Did he buy Lumumba? And what in this case was recently purchased?

Bloomberg Foundation Makes a Grant

A year ago, the city of Jackson was the recipient of a million-dollar grant from the Bloomberg Foundation. Bloomberg came to Jackson to award the grant for an art project that aims to raise awareness about food insecurity issues and the importance of Jacksonians making healthier choices when it comes to food. Though drinking fewer soft drinks is a good thing, Bloomberg in the past has been the subject of ridicule and controversy for seeking to regulate how much soda and sugary drinks can be purchased. In an economic system that views whole foods as a commodity and not the necessity they are, there is no such thing as food security except for among the ruling elites and capitalist aspirants.

The project of promoting “food security” in this fashion evinces how out of touch bureaucrats are with working people and that such individuals cannot represent the interests of commoners. Where price controls on necessities like whole and healthy foods are advocated, or guaranteeing them to all as a transitional demand, are found in historical freedom movements and would be constructive, what is really being promoted by Lumumba and Bloomberg is the premise of corporate social responsibility as a mask for those that monopolize crucial resources. Further, the idea that backward commoners need to be taught about the dangers of their unhealthy lifestyles is paternalistic and pathologizes the poor. But why Jackson?

Oligarchs like Bloomberg don’t give money out of the kindness of their hearts. Kindhearted people would not seek to squander the Earth’s resources to the point that most of the society is denied basic needs while they enjoy decadence and luxury. Capitalists make investments. When capitalists invest, they always seek a return on their speculations. Bloomberg’s recent criminal justice reform roundtable event held in Jackson on December 3rd was Bloomberg collecting his return on his investment.

On December 8, The New York Post reported that Jackson is among one of a small group of cities that Bloomberg has donated millions to that he is now hosting campaign events in. For those who might think that The Post’s analysis is a stretch, we can listen to Bloomberg’s own words to provide further insight into the thinking of an oligarch. In a CBS This Morning interview with Gayle King he stated, “Nobody gives you anything unless they expect something from you, and I don’t want to be bought.” This statement was made in reference to Bloomberg financing his own campaign and the criticism he has received from other candidates for doing so. Given Bloomberg’s statement, should we believe that Bloomberg was not seeking a return on the investment he made in Jackson? Should we believe that Mayor Lumumba gave him a platform merely because he thinks he’s a nice guy?

Bloomberg’s Visit to Jackson

His appearance in Jackson was not a coincidence. We believe that Bloomberg’s campaign staff took note of Lumumba’s popularity among many black people and young progressives particularly in the south. Given Bloomberg’s own racial baggage, his staffers know that he must capture a significant amount of support from Black voters if he wishes to win the Democratic Party nomination and have a legitimate chance of winning the U.S. presidency. He has drafted the likes of Lumumba, Stockton, Calif. Mayor Michael Tubbs and prominent Black clergy to help him do this, regardless of Lumumba’s public declarations to the contrary.

Hours after Bloomberg’s Jackson event, Lumumba took to Facebook to post that he’s met with several Democratic Party presidential hopefuls, but that he has not endorsed any candidate. This evasion has some truth in it. The “radical” mayor has met with the standard-bearers of the political party captured by the left bloc of capital and supported by half the ruling class. Lumumba also has ties to Bernie Sanders, the “democratic socialist” and “critic of capitalism” running for the Democratic Party nomination. Does this most “radical” of mayors think the critique of neoliberalism is a game? Does opposing neoliberalism include dialogue with transparent unapologetic capitalists who think it is normal to police our lives?

Who believes working class black people are more stupid, Lumumba, who wants us to believe he is not compromised by taking Bloomberg’s money, or Bloomberg, who wants black people to believe that he is truly apologetic for the racist policies he instituted while Mayor of New York City?

Mayors Lumumba and Bloomberg both have nefarious histories as heads of the police states in their respective cities. This is despite the fact that the former claims to be some kind of Black Power activist and the latter claims to be a philanthropist who offers aid to urban communities as both subordinate them. What makes the choice of hosting Bloomberg in Jackson for a criminal justice reform event hypocritical and arrogant?

Lumumba, before his rise to power, traveled to Ferguson in October 2014 to protest with certain leaders and organizers in the Black Lives Matter network, who at the time were still faking as if they opposed the Democrats and the State. Having left the militant “woke” activist Lumumba behind, Mayor Lumumba froze when within six months of his taking office the Jackson Police Department killed several poor Black people. Instead of taking quick and decisive action, Lumumba genuflected and babbled about officer safety, independent investigations, and police control boards and hand-selected a “task force” (really a task farce) of his closest political allies, relatives and friends to determine when the identities of killer cops should be revealed.

Although Bloomberg has recently given a half-hearted and politically scripted apology for the police occupation, harassment and arrest of mostly non-white people via his stop and frisk policy in New York, he initially doubled and tripled down on the racially motivated program’s merits in stopping crime in the Big Apple.

Recent developments in Jackson and within Bloomberg’s campaign show that their histories with the police are not the only things that are questionable.

Lumumba’s police department is participating in a federal law and order initiative from Donald Trump’s Department of Justice known as Project Guardian. From December 17 to 20, Trump appointee, U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst directed the raiding and terrorizing of poor and Black communities led by the U.S. Marshals and supported by local law enforcement agencies, including the Jackson Police Department. What part of “freeing the land,” the slogan of the Black Nationalist organization Lumumba is affiliated, is this?

In recent weeks, it has been reported that Bloomberg “unwittingly” exploited incarcerated women’s labor by having them make phone calls on behalf of his campaign. Of course, the Bloomberg campaign issued an apology stating they ended the relationship with the company with whom they had a contract that used an unknown third-party contractor who utilized prison labor. Not to be outdone, Lumumba, who claims to be a critic of mass incarceration of Black people and a criminal justice “reformer”, when one looks at the public records of the donors to his electoral campaign, one finds an architecture firm, M3A, who among other things has built three Mississippi jails and prisons including in Hinds County, where Jackson is located!

Shouldn’t these mayors, the phony black radical and phony white apologist, and their “activist” friends have known that experienced observers could gather information to put forward independent thinking and perspectives of our own? Did they expect that “progressives” could suppress the truth for all time?

Jacksonians attempted to attend the Bloomberg event in Jackson but were turned away because the event was exclusive to a few individual bourgeois professionals referred to by the media as “community leaders.” Who chose these leaders? Who and what are they leading? It is imaginable that these individuals were hand selected by Lumumba not for their leadership qualities, but because these individuals are politically safe and would raise no dissent or criticism. Clearly, in Lumumba’s eyes, the “unwashed” masses cannot be trusted. Neither can those who might propagate the destruction of hierarchy.

Residents of Jackson seemed disappointed about being denied access to the event. They talked about how they were going to call to the mayor’s office and tell him that he calls for “participation,” but denied the public access to the event. Were these people disappointed because they were being denied an opportunity to denounce the ruling class and their black hirelings or was the disappointment merely rooted in the fact they could not participate, as in passively listen, observe and “network” with Jackson’s black elites? If it was the latter, there is much work to be done.

Direct Democracy and Popular Governance

We must stop settling for mere dependent participation. “Participatory democracy” is worthless where it obscures who must govern. What makes elected officials and their chosen sycophants more worthy to run the affairs of society than everyday people themselves? Is it because they wear fancy clothes, drive luxury vehicles and speak “proper” English? Anything short of direct democracy and popular self-governance should be unsatisfactory. Popular self-government is a process, but it blooms outside hierarchy. The hierarchy is not an asset or legitimate player in facilitating this. Sometimes their buffoonery and mystification can be a trigger in waking us up. The ruling elites have exploited the Earth’s vast resources and have caused the political, social and economic catastrophes the masses are facing. Why do we accept this ruling class above us? Why is it less insulting when its’ chosen standard-bearers are “black” and make a big show of this alone with no substance or content?

Political and economic serfdom should be repudiated because these aspiring rulers above society (and their richer associates) pursue their own personal prerogatives and neglect the pain, suffering and exploitation of poor people because they are committed to the status quo. They benefit from it. If any change is to come, we, the self-organized and self-governing masses, will bring it about. We know many otherwise “radical” people don’t think so. Mayor Lumumba thinks he is sensitive to the burdens of toiling Black people. This sensitivity, intermittent and really nonexistent as expressed in his actual policies and alliances, is his personal social capital. It is what he trades on. How many really grasp this? It is what makes him useful to politicians and members of the ruling class, like the billionaire Bloomberg.

Some wish to retain state power above society by hob-knobbing with those who are against capitalism and those who are for it. They wish to align themselves with those who denounce the police state and those who cheer it on only to turn around and apologize for its’ brutality. Those who wish to defend the Earth and those who monopolize its resources. Those who speak of Black people as misbehaving consumers and potentially self-reliant producers. We should be clear that Lumumba is not simply “independent” because he hasn’t endorsed any candidate yet. He has no special political values. Lumumba, as he and his supporters might claim, is not gathering capital and resources from every possible sector to benefit all of Jackson. Lumumba is compromised as a community leader and will be known, ultimately, by the instinctive social movement he undermined by befriending and bedding the wealthy and the apologists for the police state. That someone did not stand up and clarify these contradictions at the public meeting in Jackson sponsored by Lumumba for Bloomberg is what was purchased not art installations and false education about food security. What was purchased was the silencing of Black radical and other community voices that are not blind and deaf but can speak for themselves.

The city of Jackson’s website proclaims that Mayor Lumumba is an active member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM). In 2013, before some leaders and organizers within the “Black Lives Matter” network gained prominence by aligning themselves with the Democratic Party and undermining the legitimate and genuine rage, resistance and rebellion from below in places like St. Louis and Baltimore, the MXGM propagated a report that stated every 28 hours a Black person is killed by the police in the U.S. and played a central role in the civil lawsuit Floyd, et al vs. City of New York, whose judicial opinion struck down Mayor Bloomberg’s gestapo stop and frisk policy as unconstitutional. Yet, Mayor Lumumba provided a safe space and became a political prostitute for Mayor Bloomberg who now that he is running to win the Democratic Party nomination wants to avoid accountability for his racist and fascist “stop and frisk” policies as New York City’s mayor by offering a pitiable apology and a criminal justice reform policy platform. How fast we circulate propaganda and discard the facts of our own existence! Only the veil of “black power,” purchased and manufactured so it is not distinguished by the community control of ordinary people, can mask such crimes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico needs your help

By: January 12, 2020
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We are reposting this appeal from No Borders News.

Hundreds of thousands remain without power and running water and tens of thousands more have been forced from their homes by a powerful earthquakes and aftershocks this week in Puerto Rico. This tragedy comes on the heels of devastating hurricanes Irma and Maria and neoliberal robbery carried out by the island’s elites and their patrons in Washington, D.C.

No Borders News appeals to our readers to support this Go Fund Me fund-raising effort organized by international solidarity activist Monique Dols. Dols is a member of the American Federation of Teachers and the Movement of Rank and File Educators based in New York City.

The Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico (FMPR) needs international solidarity and financial support! 

  • The FMPR defends public education. For years the educator union, the FMPR has fought against school closures, for smaller class sizes, against overcrowding, for funding for special education programs, against the charter school take over, and for just wages and a decent retirement for educators in Puerto Rico.
  • The FMPR is a target of repression.At the beginning of October of 2019, the FMPR’s building was firebombed and there was more than $100,000 of damage. The target of the terrorist attack, the Central General de Trabajadores (CGT), who the FMPR rents the space to, led a victorious strike the month before.
  • The FMRP fights austerity.The FMPR is helping to lead the struggle against the Fiscal Control Board plan for austerity in Puerto Rico. If passed, this plan will eviscerate public sector employees pensions and rights in Puerto Rico.
  • The FMPR builds rank-and-file power. The FMPR organizes to build strong organization at the school level. They organize workshops, build solidarity, mobilize these forces nationally, and are training a new generation of educators to stand up for the future of Puerto Rico.
  • The FMPR doesn’t back down.The Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (AMPR), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) affiliate in PR is a boss’s union who is negotiating away educator rights. The FMPR, on the other hand rejects privatization and organizes to leverage the power of the rank and file over the power of the privatizers and colonial vultures in Puerto Rico.
  • A call for solidarity: The Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico (FMPR) has a collection center to collect and distribute needed supplies to those most affected by the recent earthquakes that have rocked Puerto Rico and devastated many parts of the south and south west of the island. Money donated here will be used to buy the following items, which will be directly distributed to those who need it, including:

Doug Henwood Has It Wrong This Time

By: January 10, 2020
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Doug Henwood, who often has so many intelligent and useful things to say about economics and politics, has it wrong this time. A few days ago on his Facebook page he commented on an article that I had written about the U.S. assassination of Qassim Suleimani in which he attributed to me views I do not hold and also misunderstood and mischaracterized views I do hold.

My article began by strongly condemning U.S. imperialism, but also recognized that there are other imperial powers, major and minor, in world and in the region: among them Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. I argued that we as American socialists must stand first against U.S. imperialism, but that as internationalists we had a responsibility to stand with others who are being bullied and sometimes butchered or bombed by other powers. I take that to be the essence of a socialsist anti-imperialist position.

Let me provide here Henwood’s FB comment in full:

Trotskyists, man. Two-thirds of this is devoted to criticizing Iran and Russia, and a third to condemning US imperialism. This must be some holdover from the Cold War, when you had to go through your ritual denunciations of both sides. Stalin has been dead for over 65 years, the USSR for almost 30. As American leftists we have no leverage at all over the governments of Iran and Russia. We do have some potential leverage over our own. Drop the phobia over condemning US imperialism without covering it over with all this both-sides-ism. (Doug Henwood, Facebook, Jan. 5, 12:51 p.m.)

First, I might mention that I am not a Trotskyist, though that is not really relevant to this discussion. Second, like Henwood, I know that Stalin is long dead and that the USSR collapsed a few decades ago. And, third, I am well aware, as a person who was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and an activist against that and every U.S. war since, that we have and should use most of our leverage against our own government.

The critique of our own government, however, does not require us to pretend that we are ignorant of the imperialist or tyrannical behaviors of other governments. Nor does our knowledge of or discussion of those others weaken our fight against the United States government. We are obligated as international socialists to express our solidarity with the victims of imperialism and tyranny everywhere, believing as we do that we must build an international movement to overthrow capitalism everywhere.

No one wants a revival of the Cold War (except perhaps some Neocons) but the persistence of the idea that the world is divided into two camps—an imperialist camp (the U.S., the EU, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, etc.) and an anti-imperialist camp (Russia, China, Syria, Iran, etc.)—is a problem for the left. For while Stalin is dead and the Soviet Union has collapsed, the campist view lives on—with its origins in Stalinism, Maoism, the Third Worldism and some Trotskyisms of the 1960s and 1970s. At that time they referred to the “socialist” camp. That camp was not socialist then and its successors are not progressive now.

In the 1970s, this campist view led some people in the U.S. anti-war movement not only to oppose the U.S. government’s war in Vietnam—as rightly we did—but also to support the totalitarian Communist governments in Vietnam, the Soviet Union, or China. Today it leads some people who oppose the U.S. attack on Iran—as rightly they should—to also embrace Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and Ali Khamenei of Iran. All of those are governments where democratic rights are suppressed, where workers have no rights, and where protestors like ourselves would be imprisoned and tortured. Acknowledging this does not weaken our anti-war position or our anti-imperialism.

The hope for the future does not lie with the governments of Russia, China, Syria, or Iran but with all of the millions of people around the world—from Algeria and Sudan to Ecuador and Chile—who in the last few months have been in the streets fighting for democracy, for economic and social reform, and in some cases for socialism. Those like myself who stand against all imperialisms, and stand for democracy and socialism everywhere, have no interest in reviving the Cold War or creating a new one.

I will be marching in the same anti-war movements with Doug Henwood and others, but I will not have emptied my head of everything I know about what’s going on in the world. And I will also be at demonstrations with those who support in China the labor union organizers in Guandong, the democracy protestors in Hong Kong, and the Uighurs being imprisoned and driven into forced labor in Xinjiang. I will be with those who support the democracy movement in Iran and Syria—while opposing intervention by the U.S. the European nations, Russia, or Turkey.

I hope that Doug will be in those places too, because our future is international—or we have no future.

The Boeing and Volkswagen Debacles

Ruling Class Errors and Working Class Imperatives
By: January 10, 2020
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The Boeing Company, a huge global, high tech aerospace corporation has stumbled badly with enormous adverse financial consequences. The Boeing Max 8 tragedy and other corporate tech blunders should encourage us, especially those of us in the labor movement, to develop alternative perspectives and identify important strategic choices.

In order to compete with the advancing Airbus A320 series, a decision was made to upgrade the aging Boeing 737 series to the Max 8 rather than commit to a new design. Some flight control problems at low speeds resulted with the Max 8 and so an automatic control system was installed but not acknowledged or explained in pilot instruction manuals. Meanwhile Boeing (and the industry) had successfully assumed control over critical levels of review and inspection in the airworthiness process from the FAA and the Max 8 was cleared for sales to the great benefit of Boeing over Airbus; 5000 Max 8s are on order worth $500 billion dollars.

These critical decisions had dire consequences. After two crashes the Max 8s were being grounded in other countries all around the world and the FAA caved within days. Since then, as Boeing repeatedly announced that a fix was imminent, evidence has accumulated, some of it leaking out of Boeing and some extracted in Congressional testimony, showing that critical and precautionary thinking was not welcome at Boeing. In December 2019 with hundreds of new Max 8s in quarantine, production was suspended affecting tens of thousands of workers and thousands of suppliers around the world.  On Dec. 23 Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg was fired by the Board of Directors, following several other earlier departures of high level executives.

A few years prior, at Volkswagen and related companies in Germany, including electronics supplier Bosch, Audi, Porche and Mercedes, engineers were instructed to implement an engine control system using the on-board computer to defeat emission testing for diesel engines. The scheme was discovered by researchers at University of West Virginia and others, and resulted in enormous financial losses in fines, re-calls and rejected automobiles exceeding $9 billion. Top-level executives were prosecuted. But, like the engineering staff at Boeing, the automotive engineers clearly understood the intent behind what they were told to do.

The extremely costly Boeing debacle, like the VW diesel-cheating disaster before it, came from management behaviors that will undoubtedly be studied and taught in Harvard Business School case studies. Serious and thoughtful concern will be marshaled to attempt to rebalance risk calculation in corporate decision-making. But beyond the obvious explanations, like the bullying dominance of the finance and marketing people in strategic technical decision-making, there are the bigger issues that rise to the level of class power in technological societies. Based on massive data appropriation Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon are selling products for surveillance, social engineering (targeted advertising and news manipulation) and military activities that fundamentally degrade and erode the public interest, technologies that are largely opaque even to boards of directors. For example, half the Boeing board members actually know little about aircraft development; they are either finance people or generalists (Nickki Haley, for, example) who were enthralled with the seemingly endless potential for profit at the Boeing Company, offering advice on performance, and political and regulatory problems. But even Board members with high-level technical competence cannot reach down into management decision-making at the engineering level when top management is running defense and crafting disclosures to the Board.

The problem with contemporary technological decision-making is that it is almost entirely the purview of private corporate power.  Regulators themselves, in a corporate friendly environment, cannot begin to compete with the secret technology gurus in assessing options and consequences. The FAA does not design, build and test airplanes. In the political process of evaluating technological policy choices, the public is totally out-gunned, as are the politicians who of course, defer to their constituencies (the people that own them). This problem is everywhere: even in the legions of app-ers creating algorithms with undisclosed adverse capabilities on a daily basis. From taxi-drivers to newspaper moguls to department store chains, the system is being up-ended and the capitalist ruling class is facing novel, perplexing challenges. The traditional institutional controls of public information and opinion have been hijacked; political power is now less reliable or predictable. But like they did in the Nineteenth Century and at the beginning of the Twentieth Century in devising and refining the corporate model of public ownership of private property (the stock market, etc.), the ruling class will come up with solutions (if the system doesn’t implode before then). We won’t like them and we need to study, analyze, construct and promote alternatives. In the old days, new technology was pretty transparent – railroads, oil wells, electricity; their development took some imagination and cunning but consequences were discernible and appropriate laws and regulations, from the point of view of the ruling class, were more or less able to keep pace with change. Today technological development seems to be outstripping the power of even the capitalist class to control it.

We need a political party that is not beholden to corporate wealth, whose goal is to advance the interests of the (international) working class, including substantial parts of the “middle class.” With global supply chains and coordinated, sophisticated suppression of workers’ rights across national boundaries, international worker solidarity is more essential than ever. To succeed that party must attract technology workers at all levels; they need to learn from workers and workers need to learn from them and both need to learn from history if we are going to survive this mess. They have to subject technology thinking to collective, critical, public review, and mount challenges to the corporations’ technology choices. To do this will require breaching proprietary information and knowledge, and examining the trade secrets of the information and other technology sectors. Microsoft, Google and other IT workers have already started to resist corporate policies, challenge sexual discrimination, improve working conditions and to thwart the worst corporate forays into repressive technologies but with minimal protection and resources and insufficient guiding theory. These will be major battles ending in court challenges and new laws that we can win if the working class is there with us. Unions should embrace, promote and protect technology workers and bring them into the labor movement.

The “PMC” Does Not Exist and Why it Matters for Socialists

By: January 9, 2020
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2019 was the year when “PMC” entered the vocabulary of many radicals in the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the Anglosophere. As Alex Press observes, “’Professional-managerial class’ (PMC), a term coined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in a 1977 essay for Radical America, has recently emerged from academic obscurity as a shorthand, of sorts, for technocratic liberalism, or wealthier Democratic Primary voters, or the median Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member, depending on who you ask.”

The term was originally meant to refer to “salaried mental workers” who are separated from the capitalist class because they don’t control any means of production, but who are also said to have, in Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich’s words, “an objectively antagonistic relationship” to the working class because of the function of their work – reproducing capitalist society – and their high status within workplace hierarchies. The PMC was said to include “teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, writers of advertising copy and TV scripts” as well as “middle-level administrators and managers, engineers, and other technical workers.”

There’s no doubt that lots of people do such paid work. But are they a distinct social class? This takes us to the heart of the issue: what’s class? Ellen Meiksins Wood was right to argue in Democracy Against Capitalism (1995) that “There are really only two ways of thinking theoretically about class: either as a structural location or as a social relation. The first and most common of these treats class as a form of ‘stratification,’ a layer in a hierarchical structure… In contrast to this geological model, there is a social-historical conception of class as a relation between appropriators and producers.”

The concept of the PMC combines elements of both models. It “confuses a group’s function with its class position,” as Peter Meiksins argued. Having a particular function doesn’t by itself make a group of people a social class. People who don’t control any means of production are employed to perform many different functions for capitalists and state managers. Many are directly involved in one way or another in producing goods and services as commodities and then selling them. Others aren’t. Many of the latter work for the state, whether in education, social services, public health care (where it exists), government administration, prisons or policing. “One must be careful,” Meiksins warned, “not to assume that a group of workers is in a different class simply because of a distinctive function.”

Does their place within the structure of capitalism really make the relationship between most so-called PMC members and other wage-earners so antagonistic that they constitute a separate class? Or are most better understood as part of the working class, some of whose segments experience friction with other segments because of how capitalism organizes our lives? Conflicts between students and parents on the one hand and teachers on the other, or between parents and social workers, are similar to bus drivers’ conflicts with riders. The frictions are real, and they’re often shaped by racism and other forms of oppression. But they’re not antagonism between classes.

What about the status and working conditions of people often seen as belonging to the PMC? Peter Meiksins hit the nail on the head: “Privileged, skilled, autonomous workers are still wage-labourers, whose privileges, skills and autonomy are under constant threat of removal by capitalists” and public sector bosses.

In short, most of the people labelled “PMC” by users of the term should instead be understood as part of the working class (a minority are not, chiefly middle managers). This means that the working class is both broader and more internally-divided by workplace hierarchies, educational credentials, and other cleavages than many socialists realize, as well as divided by gender, racial and other forms of oppression.

There’s nothing new about deep internal divisions in the working class. For example, in the second half of the 1800s skilled craftworkers often had helpers whom they hired and fired and paid out of their own wages. One thing that is distinctive about advanced capitalist countries today is the division in the class connected to the larger share of jobs classified as “professional,” for which workers are required to have university degrees (of course, many workers with degrees don’t work in such jobs). As Jeff Schmidt argues in Disciplined Minds – a book that every leftist considering graduate or professional school should read – employers expect professional workers to be creative “but within strict political limits.”

There are real differences between workers often dubbed PMC and other workers. In the workplace, professional workers are often assigned what Karl Marx called the “function of direction” (supervising other workers). Outside of work, they often associate with each other and self-employed university-trained people like doctors and lawyers more than with people in other layers of the working class. These differences have political consequences and shouldn’t be ignored. However, they are differences within the immense majority who make up the collective labourer, to use another of Marx’s phrases, not evidence of a separate PMC.

This argument about class theory matters politically. PMC theory reinforces narrow notions we’ve inherited from earlier eras in the history of capitalism about who the working class is. Such notions can get in the way understanding and participating in the struggles of the actually-existing working class in our time.

People thinking of themselves as PMC reinforces the idea that “we’re not workers” which is extremely common among workers with graduate or professional degrees. That belief is an obstacle to such workers figuring out what side they’re on, unionizing, striking, and finding common cause with the majority of the working class that doesn’t have professional status. It can also encourage guilty moralism (“are we asking for too much? after all, others have it much worse than us”) among university-educated workers who start organizing and fighting collectively.

PMC theory can easily lead to socialists arguing for watering down demands in order to create an alliance between the working class and PMC. In contrast, recognizing that most people labelled PMC are actually part of the working class and that their relatively better conditions are also threatened by austerity and employers’ drive to intensify work avoids this danger. This helps us to look for commonalities in the experiences of quite different segments of the working class.

Taken to its logical conclusion, PMC theory would lead to questioning the inclusion of members of the so-called PMC in working-class organizations; after all, the PMC’s interests are supposedly antagonistic to those of the working class. That’s precisely the opposite of the approach best suited for undermining the elitism and narrow-minded sectionalism rampant among higher-status workers with professional credentials: promoting as much egalitarian convergence and association with other workers as possible. The more workers with professional status come together with other workers in settings where they don’t have the kind of control they do in the workplace, the more they’re likely to recognize both shared class interests and which of their advantages that are denied to other workers ought to be given up for the common good. This makes unions in which professional workers participate alongside other workers – like Ver.di in Germany, which includes many kinds of service workers, or SITUAM at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico, which includes faculty members as well as “blue collar” and “white collar” support staff – preferable to craft unions of professional workers alone. But that’s not the kind of organization to which PMC theory points.

In 2020 let’s give up talk about a PMC and focus on the challenge of how to contribute to forging bonds of solidarity within a deeply divided working class.

Neo-Colonial Economics in Central Africa: A Very Short History

By: January 7, 2020
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Word War Two as the death-knell for colonial empires is a well-trodden and essentially erroneous narrative. Empires’ relationships with their colonies were uprooted, modified and given the gloss of ‘independence’ but retained injustice and exploitation at their core. In Central Africa, neo-colonialism is abundant in its forms. This article will explore a particular system of neo-imperial economic exploitation known as the CEMAC zone.

After World War Two, people throughout Africa fought for national independence. Unable to quell the uprisings in their colonies, France eventually accepted that the era of direct colonial stewardship had come to an end. However, reluctant to lose a fruitful source of labour and material, President Charles de Gaulle sought to formulate a strategy that would benefit French military and business interests in Africa throughout the modern era.

To achieve this, France accepted independence, but with certain conditions. France would be allowed to station military units in their former colonies and would retain a monopoly on key industries. France would also have control over her former colonies’ exports and imports. Finally, all former colonies would continue to use the CFA Franc (Franc of the French Colonies of Africa). In the Central African colonies, this would be known as the Central African CFA Franc. Those countries comprising West Africa would use the West African CFA Franc.

Since 1964, Central African membership of this monetary union has taken place within the framework of the CEMAC (The Economic and Monetary Committee of Central Africa). This article’s focus is primarily on how this monetary committee problematizes economic development for its member-states. In particular, it will draw on Cameroon, a useful case-study for understanding exactly how colonial economic rule permeates all levels of society.

The CFA Franc as a Colonial Weapon

Those countries comprising the CEMAC still use the CFA Franc today. This includes Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of Congo. Described by economist Martial Ze Belinga as a ‘predatory relationship’, it is a colonial economic system cloaked beneath a veil of co-operation.

The CFA Franc harms Central African economies in two main ways. Firstly, it denies these countries of their capacity for economic development and industrialisation. Secondly, it eliminates the possibility of a sovereign monetary policy.

The CFA Franc achieves these effects in two main ways. Firstly, under the terms of the CEMAC, African nations are obliged to place two-thirds of their foreign exchange reserves in a special French treasury ‘operating account’. Foreign exchange reserves are a country’s way of stockpiling foreign currency so that their own currency can remain competitive. The benefits this incurs for France is clear. By building up their foreign currency reserves, Paris is able to protect the value of the Euro, thereby ensuring that other countries remain accessible markets for French exports. However, this has a devastating impact on Central African economies.

Due to CEMAC stipulations, two-thirds of Central African wealth sit in European banks. This makes it very difficult for Central African businesses to obtain the credit loans they need for further development. Every time they want to access their own money, they must borrow it at crippling interest rates. Furthermore, France holds a de facto veto on the boards of the two central banks within the CFA franc zone. Consequently, Central African nations can only invest in their own economy if France allows it.

France is a beneficiary of this economic stagnation. Without the industrial capacity to convert raw materials into valuable secondary commodities (clothes, televisions, cars, etc), Central African nations are forced to sell their primary products to France for desperately low prices.

France promotes this deeply unjust relationship another way – by pegging the CFA to the Euro. This means that the conversion rate of Euro to CFA is always kept within a certain range. Consequently, the European Central Bank has de facto control of the CFA Franc. Any economic policy devised in Brussels will have a direct impact on the CFA. The problem is that CEMAC nations have no representation in Europe. The people of Central Africa therefore find themselves at the mercy of European bureaucrats who devise monetary policy with no regard to Central African interests. The most notable example of this came in 1994 when the CFA Franc was devalued overnight. Vital imports such as medication and sanitary products doubled leading to protests throughout the region.

Moreover, the competitiveness of CEMAC products is severely penalized. Exchange rates between the Euro and CFA are structurally overvalued meaning that local producers pay an additional form of tax for the export of their products. By pooling Central African wealth and selling it back to them at extortionate rates, France constrains the development of African enterprises, thereby ensuring that it remains a fruitful producer of cheap raw materials for French business.

Arguments in Favour of the CFA Franc

In an article written for American Express, Frances Coppola, a respected economic journalist, comes out in favour of the CFA Franc. She summarizes that the nations of the CEMAC enjoy relative stability and low inflation. Economists also often claim that they benefit from close trade-links with France. Unfortunately, these claims are at best falsifications, and at worst outright lies.

Take for example the first statement – ‘countries in the CFA zone enjoy relative stability’. This initially seems like a fair statement. According to the IMF, countries in the CEMAC tend to experience lower inflation rates than their non-CEMAC neighbours. In the last year, no CEMAC member endured an annual inflation rate greater than 3%.

However, a stable economy does not necessarily entail prosperity. In fact, the CEMAC region is a case-study in how ‘stagnation’ can be re-packaged and marketed as ‘stability’.  By the logic of Coppola, low inflation is a self-evidently positive thing. If that was the case, Cameroonians who benefit from a low inflation rate of 2.1% should be experiencing far better standards of living than those living in Sudan, where the inflation rate is at 50.4% and has been above 10% since 2007. In reality, according to the World Bank, in Sudan 14.9% of people live beneath the poverty line while that figure is at 23.8% for Cameroon.  This demonstrates that the stability of a currency is no guarantee of better living standards.

Not only does Cameroon’s fantastically ‘stable economy’ act as a fertile breeding ground for abject poverty, but it also appears incapable of long-term development. In Cameroon, real per capita GDP is less than it was 40 years ago. In fact, during the last two decades, the CEMAC’s economic growth has been, on average, slower than that for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. It’s become increasingly unclear what exactly economic ‘stability’ has achieved.

Effects in Cameroon

I currently live in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. I have, therefore, experienced the effects of this economic system first-hand. However, for an expat like myself, the impact is minimal. For example, buying a 700CFA (£1) beer with even a 5000CFA (£6.50) note is practically impossible because there simply isn’t enough money in circulation to give out that much change. An inconvenience – but not a tragedy. For the people of Cameroon, however, the implications of the imperial stranglehold find themselves crudely etched into the lived reality of everyday life.

With such little domestic investment, unemployment is rife. The stated minimum wage in Cameroon is 36,720CFA (£47) per month but many people are forced to work for far less than that. The work which is available tends to be extremely underpaid. Furthermore, because Cameroon is so reliant on agriculture, much of the work is seasonal. Consequently, countless families are forced to live-by-day, hand-to-mouth. For the majority, vagrancy is the inescapable reality.

What does this ‘inescapable reality’ look like? Well, it looks like emaciated figures picking their way through seething piles of rubbish. It looks likes skinny, jaundiced young men huddled together in the darkness of derelict buildings. It looks like children fetching water from malarial swamps when the shop next door sells it for 250CFA (35p) per bottle. We must be careful not to victimize these people too excessively. Cameroonians are breathtakingly industrious. From the crack of dawn, everyone from the twelve-year-old boy to the old woman is out on the streets hustling, carrying and bartering. There is an astonishing drive to better one’s circumstances regardless of the adversity. However, one cannot help but feel that they’re swimming against the tide.

Why Does it Persist?

If CEMAC nations are so perilously aggrieved by this system, why do they continue to participate in it? The reasons pertinent to Cameroon are the same throughout Central Africa. For Paul Biya, President of Cameroon, his support for this French-dominated system hinges on two things; his need for power and his fear of losing it.

Let’s first address the ‘need for power’. The Cameroonian government has long relied on French military assistance for legitimacy. France provide the Cameroonian army with both materiel and training and has done so since independence. The vitality of French military assistance was evidenced when, in 1984, they were instrumental in suppressing a coup against the Cameroonian leadership. Although Cameroon’s military is relatively strong, they rely on the French army as much as ever. With Ambazonian rebels in the West and Al Shabaab fighters in the north, there is no shortage of threats to Biya’s position, even as his reign enters its twilight years.

Biya has proved that, for him, power is everything. Whether it means manipulating his nation’s constitution, sanctioning police atrocities or submitting his nation to a state of French economic vassalage, he will do anything to remain in power. French military assistance will only continue if the CEMAC system remains in place. Biya is thus unlikely to bite the hand that feeds.

Lust for power isn’t the only vice the French government seeks to exploit. Fear has proved an equally effective weapon. France has a long and proud history of murdering leaders who don’t toe the economic line. In 1963, President of Togo Sylvanus Olympio was assassinated after he had tried to set up a Togolese currency. In 1987, President of Burkina Faso Thomas Sankara met the same fate under similar circumstances.

The most recent victim of French power was Laurent Gbagbo President of Ivory Coast. For years he had spoken out against the fallacy that was Ivorian independence and after three decades of non-violent struggle, was elected President in 2000. France responded to this by bombing both the military barracks and the presidential palace for several days. In April 2011, the French army station in Abidjan launched a full-scale assault against the Ivorian army. Alassane Ouattara was soon installed as France’s puppet of choice.

France rules over Central Africa with the indignant insolence of a spoilt child, but one which wields the power of an Empire. The leaders of Central African nations know this all too well and behave appropriately. In a toast to then-president Francois Hollande, Biya reiterated “the strong true friendship existing between France and Cameroon”. In reality, this is no declaration of affinity or co-operation, but rather the trembling utterances of a fearful subject.

Conclusion

Recently, Macron said he was in favour of the gradual phasing out of the CFA Franc suggesting that there is perhaps light at the end of this tunnel. Such declarations are, however, best taken with a substantial dose of salt. Macron is a master of the ‘non-concession’ concession. Recently, to quell domestic unrest, he said that he’d give up his state pension of €600 per month. Bear in mind, this man with an estimated net worth of $31.5 million. The gesture is so hollow as to be almost laughable.

His talk of phasing out CFA Franc is similarly vapid. Central Africa is one of the world’s most volatile regions. Consequently, ruling regimes need French military assistance to exist and are thus willing to pay the crushing economic price. Macron knows this. For the time being, French colonial rule in Central Africa remains strong, just as it has done for over one hundred years.

México: Year One of the “Fourth Transformation”

By: January 6, 2020
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This is an statement marking the first year in office of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador [AMLO] published in Unidad Socialista, the publication of the Liga de Unidad Socialista, a socialist organization in México. The editorial refers to the “Fourth Transformation,” AMLO’s name for his program that seeks to place it historically among the three great transformations in the country’s history: independence from Spain, the period of liberal reform under President Benito Juarez, and the Mexican revolution. The editorial appeared in Correspondencia de Prensa on December 21, 2019. It was translated by Lance Selfa.

Presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gestures after casting his ballot at a polling station during the presidential election in Mexico City, Mexico July 1, 2018. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido –

Nothing to celebrate

Or very little, because 2019 is already the most violent year of the decade, with the highest number of femicides; and the ongoing murders of journalists that make México the most dangerous country in the world for their work; with a “National Guard” turned into an adjunct of the U.S. Border Patrol in the surveillance of the northern and southern borders of the country; with the first sign of military opposition to the president in decades arising from the events in Culiacan (where AMLO decided to release the captured drug kingpin Ovidio Gúzman to head off a wave of Sinaloa cartel violence). What’s more, the government has made an absolute bet on the exploitation of the oil fields when all over the world, steps are being taken to create a world without hydrocarbons. And there is a stagnant economy, with zero or negative growth, along with uncertainty about where the governing party wants to take the country. MORENA (AMLO’s party, the National Regeneration Movement) is not a true party that brings together disparate forces that disagree with each other, but a weak conglomeration held together by AMLO’s leadership.

The huge turnout at a rally in the Zócalo [the main government square in México City] on December 1 testifies to AMLO’s continued popularity. Yet he and his government continue to propagate the same message, ad nauseum, in the president’s daily briefings. That is, that his government “inherited” a “mess” that won’t be easy to clean up and, of course, won’t be done by the end of 2019. How long will the government be credibly able to offer these excuses for a situation where things don’t change, and where we continue to live in the hell of a decaying society indelibly marked by the precariousness of life for the absolute majority of the population? Events in South America and throughout the world tell us that those times of satisfaction and apathy are coming to an end. México will not be exempt from those winds of rebellion and conflict.

In fact, all of AMLO’s supporters, both ordinary people and the most sophisticated intellectuals, recognize that while there has been no coherent expression yet, there is considerable opposition to the government. [The mainstream historian] Lorenzo Meyer estimates that a third of the population opposes him. But Meyer, like the great majority, considers the government to be on the “left” and destined to carry out the “difficult and dangerous” task of what Machiavelli called “a change of regime”. An in-depth reading of the electoral tsunami of July 1, 2018 [when AMLO was elected in a landslide] points to this widely held desire for change among the country’s population—a population of poorly paid workers, subjected to long working hours, job insecurity and a future with few prospects. This is a population that longs for a radical change that, in this first year of México’s pompously titled “Fourth Transformation,” is far from being realized.

When one looks at the main points of AMLO’s policies, they can be reduced essentially to government anti-poverty programs. What’s forgotten is that, historically, these policies don’t really work if they aren’t also combined with an economic project for large-scale productive investment. The fact that 50 percent of families receive state aid (eight million senior citizens, one million scholarship students, among others) is no small thing, as is the 16 percent increase in the minimum wage. But these programs are based on México’s anemic economy: a decline in foreign investment, under-utilization of government financial resources, and a total dependence on large México-based private investors (clearly favored by the president) to move a stagnant economy forward.

The next five years in AMLO’s term will be more contentious. Already in the first year of the “Fourth Transformation,” and in spite of AMLO’s speeches (which are also increasingly moderate, moralizing and vague), his government is basically a continuation of previous neoliberal governments. The aspiration for radical change in the political regime, which powered AMLO’s victory on July 1, 2018, remains unrealized. The government’s daily briefings and its demagogic rhetoric can’t evade the harsh reality that savage, neoliberal capitalism continues to dominate society and will deepen social inequality in the country that, according to the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, ranks above only Haiti, Honduras, and El Salvador in the region. This will be the real reason why the electoral tsunami that brought AMLO to power will continue to be frustrated. And it will be the reason why sooner, rather than later, other tsunamis—and not just electoral ones— are coming in México.

The Socialist Position on the Latest U.S. Attack on Iran: The Assassination of Suleimani

By: January 4, 2020
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President Donald Trump has virtually declared war on Iran with the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, in an airstrike near Baghdad International Airport. The assassination of Suleimani will very likely lead to war, though it is unclear how such a war will develop and what form it will take. How do American socialists decide our position on this new situation?

Oppose U.S. Imperialism

First, we oppose the U.S. government’s latest attack on Iran, the most recent of a series of diplomatic, economic, and military measures against the Iranian government. The economic measures have affected the entire population, In May of 2018 Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement and then in June and then again in September of 2019 he announced new economic sanctions against Iran. All of these were building toward the latest attack on Iran in the form of the assassination of Suleimani. Now the Trump administration has sent an additional 3,000 troops to the Middle East. We socialists must stand against U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military pressures or attacks on Iran.

Trump has created an imperial presidency and has acted in an authoritarian and completely undemocratic manner in taking the United States to war. In carrying out the attack on Iran, Trump did not ask Congress for a new War Powers bill, nor did he invoke the old war powers acts, now outdated, nor did he even consult Congressional leaders. According to the U.S. Constitution, of course, only the Congress can declare war, though congresses have since World War II declined to take responsibility for declaring or refusing to declare war.

Wars depend ultimately on the military budget, which last July passed the Senate 67 to 28 and passed the House 284-149; that is both Republicans and Democrats voted to fund arms and war. To his credit, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has either voted against or not voted for the last several military budgets by not being present.

For decades, Washington has sought to maintain its dominance in the Middle East, particularly over its immense petroleum resources. This has meant invading Iraq, propping up dictatorial regimes, imposing deadly sanctions, and providing the diplomatic support and weaponry to enable Saudi Arabia to wage its brutal war in Yemen and Israel to wage multiple deadly assaults on Gaza. While attempting to maintain a reactionary order, U.S. intervention has wreaked havoc on the region and its people. We oppose U.S. imperialism in all of its economic and political forms.

The Democratic Socialists of America, of which I am a member, put out an excellent statement opposing the United States attack on Iran and here in New York, where I live, organized a protest against a war on Iran at the home of Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, demanding that he too oppose the attack. We should demand that he and all Democrats take a forthright stand against a war on Iran and not simply on procedural grounds. We demand that every Democrat take a stand against war in Iran and those who don’t should receive no future political support.

No Political Support for Iranian Government

Our opposition to the U.S. attack on Iran does not imply any political support to the authoritarian, right-wing, theocratic government of Iran. Within Iran, we stand on the side of the movement for democracy, for political pluralism, for civil rights, for freedom, and within that democratic movement, we stand with the working class and socialist forces. As the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists write:

In Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other government forces brutally suppressed the nationwide popular protests that broke out on November 15 in opposition to a rise in the price of petroleum and called for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and an end to its military interventions in the region. According to Reuters, at least 1,500 protesters were killed in four days. Between 8,000 and 10,000 mostly young protesters have been arrested and most have not been heard from. Many political prisoners, including labor, feminist, and oppressed minority activists languish in prison from previous protests. These and revolutionary protesters in Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and Algeria are the forces that socialists around the world need to reach out to and support.

We oppose U.S. imperialism but also support the democratic forces in Iran, knowing that in the short run Trump’s attack on their government will make their tasks more difficult, but that in the long run the war could undermine the Iran government’s credibility and support. We as socialists would certainly support a political or democratic revolution in Iran, though we would oppose any U.S. intervention in such a situation.

Oppose U.S. and All Other Imperial Powers

At the same time, as international socialists, while we focus our attention on opposition to the United States’ role in the Middle East, we also oppose the intervention of other powers in the area. We oppose Russia’s authoritarian ruler Vladimir Putin and his aid to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad by bombing the province of Idlib, the last refuge of the Syrian opposition, including bombing of schools and the killing of civilian men, women and children. We must oppose Saudi Arabia’s role in the terrible destruction and slaughter of human beings in Yemen, and also Turkey, which has sent troops into Libya.

Even while opposing the U.S. attack on Iran, we must also oppose the Iranian-Russian-Chinese naval drills in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman. Both Russia and China have demonstrated their imperial ambitions, Russia in seizing the Crimea and China in annexing Tibet and in seeking to obliterate the culture of Tibet and of the Uighurs, while also building new islands and naval bases in the South China Sea to intimidate neighboring states.

In all of these situations, we as socialists oppose the great imperial powers like the U.S, Germany, France, Russia and China, and we also oppose the regional imperial powers such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey. And we stand for self-determination for all of the nations and peoples in the Middle East, such as the Yemenis and the Kurds. We place ourselves on the side of the democratic and, where they exist, on the side of the socialist movements in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Everywhere we stand with the working people against the tyrants.

How General Strike Rhetoric Became A City-Wide Reality

By: January 4, 2020
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Cal Winslow, Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919. Monthly Review Press, 2020. 220 pp.

Calls for a general strike have long been a staple of “resolutionary activity” on the U.S. left. During moments of crisis and militancy—from the mass firing of air traffic controllers in 1981 to Occupy Wall Street and last winter’s federal government shutdown—rousing speeches are invariably made and motions duly adopted, which urge all workers to walk out in protest.

Such efforts represent a triumph of hope over experience. In our entire history, only a handful of labor disputes have mushroomed into broader, city-wide work stoppages. On the “left coast,” this has occurred, most recently, in San Francisco in 1934 and Oakland twelve years later.

The one notable 21st century exception to this historical pattern was the “day without immigrants” protests in 2005, when talented organizers, with deep roots in their own immigrant communities, managed to mobilize up to five million people in 160 cities.

In contrast, most general strike calls—if workers even knew about them— fall on deaf ears because of the widespread disconnect between individual advocacy of such action and the working-class base and organizational leadership necessary to undertake it.

A century ago, as we learn from labor historian Cal Winslow, there was far more grassroots connectedness between would-be instigators of general strike activity and unions in Seattle, the author’s hometown. Winslow’s new book, Radical Seattle, shows how “labor’s most spectacular revolt”—which occurred 101 years ago this February—was many years in the making. It drew on the experience of previous “workplace struggles and political battles, in which working people built an infrastructure for radical politics” and became class conscious “political actors in their own right.”

An Activist CLC 

The Seattle general strike was coordinated by an activist central labor council (CLC), quite unlike the multi-union bodies that exist in Seattle and other U.S. cities today. The 110 local unions affiliated with it operated under the banner of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). But, as Winslow notes, CLC leaders were sympathetic to industrial unionism and they had previously used the threat of a general strike “as a bargaining chip in fights for wages and benefits.”

In January of 1919, thirty thousand Seattle shipyard workers went on strike for better pay and working conditions, in the wake of a punishing World War I wage freeze. At a CLC membership assembly in Seattle’s “Labor Temple,” the local Metal Trades Council asked for broader union solidarity—in the form of a city-wide walk-out involving workers of all kinds. More than 65,000 union members responded with a shut-down that lasted five days and engaged thousands of others in the community.

During that general strike, a 300-member committee, largely composed of rank-and-file representatives, coordinated its activities. Their role included taking responsibility, in a highly disciplined way, for “the health, welfare, and safety” of a city then populated by 300,000 people. As Winslow writes:

“Garbage was collected, the hospitals were supplied, babies got milk,  people were fed, including some 30,000 a day at the strikers’ kitchens. There may have been no other time, before or since, when no one went hungry in the city.’

The streets were safe, rarely safer—patrolled by an unarmed labor guard. Off the streets, Seattle was a festival—in union halls, the co-op markets, the “feeding stations,” and neighborhood centers where workers and their families gathered. Meanwhile, the worker representatives who packed the rowdy, emotion-filled Strike Committee meetings came prepared—they were making history and they knew it.”

Among those patiently paving the way for this upsurge were radical street speaker Kate Sadler, a critic of unions which excluded black and Asian workers, and Anna Louise Strong, a crusading labor editor who served on the Seattle school board. Like Kshama Sawant today, Strong was a strong left-wing voice much reviled by Seattle conservatives; unlike Sawant so far, she was driven from elected office because of her controversial views.

Sadler, Strong, and others did succeed in turning Seattle into “a Socialist Party stronghold, its members proponents of industrial unionism and thorns in the side of national Party officials who supported Samuel Gompers, conservative president of the craft-based AFL.” The Union Record, with a peak circulation of 120,000, became Strong’s platform for education and agitation about labor causes, at home and abroad.

As Winslow documents, the city also served as a “base camp” for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), whose free speech fights, mass arrests, and militant strikes had roiled timber camps and saw mills throughout the Pacific Northwest.  According to the author, many workers held “an AFL card for the job and IWW card for the principle,” creating a working-class culture in which “social democracy and revolutionary unionism intermingled.”

Straddling both political currents was CLC secretary Jimmy Duncan, a Scottish immigrant always at odds with AFL national officers who “supported strict jurisdictional divides, opposed sympathy strikes, and considered the IWW to be dual unionists.” Under Duncan’s unusual leadership, “skilled workers enjoyed no permanent place of privilege, the CLC represented skilled and unskilled alike, its Labor Temple was home to all.” The local labor movement backed consumer co-ops and expanded public ownership. It sponsored the Union Record, whose daily news coverage spanned workplaces and neighborhoods, local politics and world events.

Labor-Management Opposition

Labor and management foes of the 1919 uprising were greatly concerned that it might lead to a worker take-over of industry, per the IWW’s “One Big Union” scenario. So, Seattle employers persuaded federal and state authorities to deploy thousands of soldiers, police officers, and newly deputized civilians against the strikers. Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson denounced them as Bolshevik agents and threatened to impose martial law. The city’s two major newspapers were filled with fear-mongering headlines and demands to know “under which flag” Seattle workers were marching—the “red, white and blue” or just a red one.

Equally terrified labor bureaucrats responded with “telephone calls, telegrams, a deluge of intimidation, threat and vilification from union headquarters.” The strike was denounced by Gompers and the national AFL. The Teamsters Joint Council in Washington state ordered strikers back to work. Other International union officers threatened to rescind local union charters and seize the property of striking locals.

Unfortunately, too many other west and east coast ship builders failed to join the work stoppage which triggered the general strike. This lack of solidarity and industry-wide coordination resulted in members of the Seattle Metal Trades returning to work without achieving their own strike objectives.

Despite this setback, and later attempts to downplay the impact of the general strike on worker consciousness, labor in Seattle remained very “strike prone” until the recession of 1920-21 hit the city long and hard. The Central Labor Council continued to press for industrial organization, although this running battle with AFL headquarters was not won until the mid-1930s. That’s when some AFL unions created an industrial worker organizing committee and then a rival national federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations CIO), which remained separate until the two merged in 1955.

Open Shop Conditions, Then and Now

 Winslow’s account of local movement building in Seattle is extremely valuable for present-day radicals trying to reconnect labor to the left, build new unions, or remake old ones. His history lessons are particularly relevant to the situation of “red state” teachers. They have been organizing and striking under “open shop” conditions in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona, where bargaining or work stoppages by public employees have no more statutory support than private sector labor militancy did in Washington state a century ago.

In our modern day “red states,” neither the American Federation of Teachers or the National Education Association can create formal bargaining units or be legally recognized as the exclusive representative of teachers. Yet thousands of members of both unions—or neither—have been involved in state-wide strike activity.  In the absence of collective bargaining rights, their demands were directed, out of necessity, at governors and state legislators responsible for funding teacher salary and benefit increases or making other public education improvements.

Two years ago, in West Virginia, a statewide struggle involving more than 20,000 teachers and school aides was greatly influenced by new rank-and-file leaders. Through membership mobilization from below, they were able to prevent full-time union officials from settling short. And when right-wing Republican legislators tried to nullify some of the gains made during the 2018 strike a year later, teachers took direct action again to defend them.

Before this kind of strike activity developed and spread, it was widely assumed that the only way educators could make real gains was by winning a signed contract with their local school board—like teachers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, and Oakland have done recently, using more traditional strikes for collective bargaining purposes. However, on this familiar “blue state” terrain, fragmentation of union bargaining power is institutionalized via separate bargaining units and different contract expiration dates for each school district. In contrast, recent struggles by teachers in “open shop” America have been far more political, fluid, and worker-driven than contract fights confined to a single city or county school system.

Out of this new mix of local contract campaigning and statewide work stoppages or mass protests—occurring in the absence of formal collective bargaining—public school teachers are forging bonds of solidarity, personal and political relationships, and rank-and-file networks like those which prefigured the Seattle uprising. Although largely limited to just one part of the public sector today, the recent teacher strike wave demonstrates how worker solidarity can occur unexpectedly and on a large scale, with workplace radicals playing a catalytic role (a process well described in Eric Blanc’s Red State Revolt.)

Anyone interested in encouraging similar trends, elsewhere in the public and private sector, should take a close look at Radical Seattle. Winslow’s work provides not just a window into the world of left-wing labor activism during its last century glory days. His book contains many illustrative examples of socialist agitators and organizers steadily expanding the audience for their ideas, becoming working class organization leaders, and then transforming those ideas into action—in a fashion worthy of emulation by those following in their footsteps today.

Trump’s Reckless Assassination of Iranian General Is an Act of War

By: January 3, 2020
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The Middle East and the world woke up on the morning of Friday, January 3 to the shocking news that U.S. missiles had struck the Baghdad Airport, in a targeted assassination of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani.

Donald Trump’s cold-blooded assassination is nothing short of an act of war. Moreover, it rivals the most reckless actions ever taken by imperialist powers in the Middle East or elsewhere.

The U.S. missile attack on the Baghdad Airport followed a 2-day demonstration by pro-Iranian militias outside the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, which itself followed US airstrikes against these militias in response to their killing of a U.S. military contractor.

Such a targeted assassination of a foreign leader like Soleimani violates US and international law. It also constitutes a gross violation of Iraqi sovereignty, especially since the US also claimed to have “arrested” a number of pro-Iran militants on Iraqi soil.

Trump’s breathtaking shoot-from-the-hip warmongering brings to mind George Bush’s 2003 war in Iraq or his father’s 1989 invasion of Panama.  It is also a violation of the sentiments of the U.S. populace, who have no desire to become entangled in yet another war in the Middle East. And if the Iraq war was a disaster, what will happen if the U.S. gets into war with Iran, a far larger country with a more solidly entrenched ruling class and some significant regional allies?

But such a war is exactly what Trump’s attack might bring about, for Iran might respond with some kind of attack of its own, after which the U.S. could easily bomb Iran, leading to further escalations….

Soleimani, a top commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) was the country’s top military strategist.  As a major force in Iranian subimperialist politics, Soleimani’s writ extended into Syria and Lebanon, where the militias he supported helped the murderous Assad regime to survive the Syrian revolution and also helped rule Lebanon. In addition, he was a major political arbiter in Iraq, where he could make or break prime ministers. This influence due in large part to the Shia militias he trained and supported that were instrumental in driving ISIS out of Mosul and northern Iraq.

In recent months, the Iranian regime and its allies in the region have come under the pressure of revolutionary youth movements in the streets. This has occurred in Lebanon, Iraq, and inside Iran itself. These movements, with youth and women in the forefront, have attacked their local power structures for authoritarianism, corruption, religious sectarianism, and obscene levels of economic inequality. But this attack will give the Iranian regime and its allies ideological arguments for the further repression of the mass unrest in the streets.

While there is no need to mourn Soleimani, his assassination provokes fear above all. Fear of another war in the Middle East, between a nuclear-armed U.S. and a Shia fundamentalist regime that has missiles and drones, as well as potential nuclear capability. Fear that the Iranian regime and its allies will profit from their “martyr,” mitigating the public revulsion against them in Iran and the region that had helped to spark some positive movements for change.  Fear for all of those who could die in the coming weeks.

Now is the time to hit the streets in opposition to Trump’s reckless militarism, while in no way minimizing our critique of the Iranian regime and its allies.

Originally posted at The International Marxist-Humanist.

Writing an Obituary for Neocons

By: January 2, 2020
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The New York Times obituary of neocon historian Gertrude Himmelfarb shows why  neoconservatives remain a potent political force in U.S. politics: many liberals can’t imagine a socialist challenge to capitalism that doesn’t apologize for authoritarianism.

The NYT’s sentimental gloss of Himmelfarb’s life avoids mention of the actual positions she and her neconservative co-thinkers adopted that justified social inequality at home and slaughter abroad, from their anti-feminism and tirades against black liberation to their endorsement of U.S. military invasions overthrowing democratically elected governments, as in Chile. In contrast, Himmelfarb’s one-time comrades, Phyllis and Julie Jacobson, who founded and edited New Politics, dedicated their political activity and intellectual work to a consistent defense of democracy, social equality, and peace—a worldview the NYT and many liberals can’t fathom.

Ironically, it was Phyllis Jacobson who “recruited her childhood friend… Gertrude Himmelfarb, to the movement,” as Barry Finger notes in his obituary of Phyllis. But unlike Himmelfarb and the Commentary set, the Jacobsons “accommodated their views to fit no political fashion; to curry favor neither with academia nor with any left mainstream. They fought against the war in Vietnam, without succumbing to illusions about Ho Chi Minh and the NLF; they struggled against American intervention in Nicaragua, without closing their eyes to the Sandinistas’ infringements on democracy; they fought against CIA-inspired overthrow attempts of Castro, while exposing the Castro regime’s repressive anti-democratic nature. They engaged the struggle for democratic unions, while condemning racism both in the ranks and in leadership policies of the labor movement. And they saw no contradiction in fighting for both at once.”

In its utterly uncritical take on Himmelfarb, her husband Irving Kristol, and Commentary magazine, the mouthpiece of neoconservatism, the NYT obituary avoids any mention of their consistent, vicious efforts to discredit challenges to the capitalist status quo.  In contrast, writing in New Politics, historian Martin Duberman noted how Himmelfarb, then chair of the CUNY Graduate School History Department, insisted he had no place in the Department because “sexual history wasn’t ‘real’ history at all; it had been spawned by political polemics, not scholarly necessity.” Duberman observes about Himmelfarb’s rebuke: “As if a scholar’s political and social views don’t always, consciously or not, color his/her narratives (Himmelfarb herself—a right-wing conservative—being among the more notorious current examples).” Duberman also recalls Himmelfarb warning that his “standing as a legitimate scholar… might well be at stake.”

The NYT obit ends with an apt quote from their friend and fellow neoconservative, Daniel Bell, who called the union of Himmelfarb and Kristol “the best marriage of our generation.” The quote, like the obit, with its expression of neoconservatives’ blind love (of capitalism) belonged in the Sunday weddings.

Taking Stock, Settling Accounts: Coming to Terms with Stalinism

By: December 31, 2019
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I have written at some length about my experience as a member of Workers World Party, which I left due to the organization’s flawed political practice. What I’ve said less about is my psychological and ideological state during this time. If “Where’s the Winter Palace?” was a critique of the concrete practices of modern Marxism-Leninism, then this piece will be an account of the political, ideological, and psychological mindset I adopted within this milieu. I lost sight of my original thirst for truth and justice that radicalized me in the first place, instead internalizing a dogmatic and sectarian, even cultic, closed worldview.

In my original resignation letter from the party, I made what I still feel are insightful critiques of WWP’s practices, but within a broader argument that WWP’s problems stemmed from it not being sufficiently Leninist, from failing to properly practice “democratic centralism.” The only tools I had at the time were to critique WWP by measuring it up against its own proclaimed orthodoxy.1

It is also worth noting that my time spent in the Stalinist milieu was consumed mostly by “leftbook,” which I participated in for several years, which dwarfs my short five-month stint in WWP (although I regularly worked with WWP for the majority of those three years). Many who are reading this blogpost are familiar with the toxic group dynamics in leftist cliques on Facebook and Twitter. I don’t think I have anything interesting to say about these cultic parasocial groupings, and I believe it’s readily apparent that these group dynamics function independently of ideology. Similar trends of bullying, browbeating, and infighting have been reported across ideological tendencies.

However, I also believe it can be said that Stalinism’s unique characteristics of authoritarianism and apologism make it a particularly potent ideology for online sects. I spent hundreds or even thousands of hours in a state of anxiety, arguing online about the USSR, North Korea, etc. I believed I was fighting the good fight by cyberbullying. I cannot fathom how much time and energy I wasted on this fruitless endeavor; I often wonder how many times I caused an interlocutor to have an anxiety attack. During my time as an internet Stalinist, I became withdrawn from essentially all non-political activity. I alienated my friends through my abrasive argumentation and denunciations; I consciously built my social surrounding into an echochamber. I began to see everyone in my life as either potential recruits or sworn enemies.

When I first became disillusioned with “leftbook” and its unhealthy dynamics, which happened far in advance of my break from Stalinism, I at least believed that I may have educated some people, despite the negative aspects. Now I don’t even believe in the gospel I was spreading.

It was only later that I began to question the actual theoretical and historical suppositions of “Marxism-Leninism,” and in the process start to reconstruct my politics. Upon deconstructing the mythologies of modern “Marxism-Leninism” and its hodgepodge of ideologies and movements (some of which are in direct contradiction), I was confronted with that bugbear of the twentieth-century, the thorn in the side of every modern-day Marxist: Stalinism.

Confronting Stalinism was not an easy mountain to climb, as I had for years internalized the dogma that “Stalinism isn’t real, it’s just Marxism-Leninism.” Mass executions, routine party purges, ethnic deportations, brutal collectivization campaigns: if Stalinism is not real, what was all this? Indeed, perhaps the reverse is slightly closer to the truth: Marxism-Leninism isn’t real, it’s just Stalinism. (Of course, Khrushchev’s partial de-Stalinization and Maoism’s internal critique of Stalinism are worth noting.) I began to accept that Stalinism was something real, something to come to terms with, through reading various dissident and ex-Stalinist Communists, including Italo Calvino, Victor Serge, Isaac Deutscher, Russell Jacoby, Leon Trotsky, and Herbert Marcuse. Alongside them I read revisionist Soviet historians, chiefly Moshe Lewin and Sheila Fitzpatrick.

While the most heinous crimes of Stalinism are firmly buried in the twentieth-century, its echoes are still heard today, else I never would have taken up such an abhorrent ideology. In the post-2008 world of rising student debt, looming climate catastrophe, endless war in the Middle East, and the rise of a new populist Right, young people are increasingly dissatisfied with a world in which we feel that we have no future. Some have turned to democratic socialism, nihilism, social media humor, or some combination of the three. A small set have turned backwards towards the late Eastern Bloc, mourning the collapse of a possible socialist future. Indeed, “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”2

The most devoted adherents of modern Marxism-Leninism have turned additionally towards modern China, the last remaining bastion of Communist officialdom with a sizable role in global politics. Lacking a coherent alternative, these young “Dengists” see brutal Chinese capitalism as precisely its opposite, a thriving (if complex) socialist society. I am only grateful that I broke from Stalinism when I did, else no doubt at this very moment I would be ardently defending the atrocities in Xinjiang committed against Uyghur Muslims in the name of “anti-terrorism.”3

The incredible thing about Stalinist ideology is that I was amongst very sharp, critical thinkers who could build sophisticated analyses of capitalism, imperialism, etc. But when it came to any critical inquiry into state socialism, it was as if our brains switched off. Many a time I ardently defended for example the deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar people during WWII as necessary, if unfortunate. I argued that Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, all deserved to die for their alleged transgressions. If I’d known about the hundreds of KPD members that Stalin handed over to the Gestapo,4 I would have figured out a way to defend that too. I actually believed that by arguing as such, I was on the side of freedom and justice. The novelist and former PCI member Italo Calvino aptly described this mindset required to defend Stalin’s crimes:

We Italian Communists were schizophrenic. Yes, I really think that that is the correct term. One side of our minds was and wanted to be a witness to the truth, avenging the wrongs suffered by the weak and oppressed, and defending justice against every abuse. The other side justified those wrongs, the abuses, the tyrannies of the party, Stalin, all in the name of the Cause.5

We built simplistic narratives around a deceptive interpretation of certain scattered facts. Our arguments were built almost completely on official Soviet propaganda and the works of Grover Furr, a thoroughly discredited non-historian who takes confessions extracted via torture at face value. When we actually read reputable revisionist Soviet historians like Sheila Fitzpatrick or J. Arch Getty, it was only to extract isolated facts from their research, discarding their actual arguments and biting criticisms of Soviet bureaucracy. “Totalitarian narrative is flawed? Good enough for me, I knew Stalin was great,” so the logic went.

We argued that the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was primarily fascist in character, without even bothering to cite any sources other than Soviet government statements. In one of our most impressive acts of mental gymnastics, we cited Stalin’s statement condemning antisemitism as evidence that antisemitism did not exist in the USSR, or at least was not sanctioned by the government. The doctor’s plot and the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism” were of course chalked up to Western propaganda.

We dismissed the Holodomor famine as Nazi propaganda, using the research of Tauger and Wheatcroft to essentially argue that the Soviet government had no complicity whatsoever in the famines. But even if the famines were not a Ukranian genocide (after all, they did hit the Kazakhs just as hard), it does not mean that the famine could be fully explained by bad weather, kulak subversion, and imperialist pressure. If we could so incisively argue that a hurricane devastating Houston, Texas could not be called a “natural disaster,” why were we so resistant to say the same thing of hunger on the Eurasian steppe in the early 1930s?

A lot of my writings from this time are innocuous enough, if a bit naive. But I want to turn specifically towards a few pieces which I believe most reveal the ugly flaws of my old views.

Towards the end of my time as a Stalinist, I started churning out pieces in defense of the basic orientation of the Communist Party of China. Again I am all too happy that I ceased this practice before getting the chance to write something about Xinjiang or Hong Kong. I wrote two naive articles in defense of the PRC’s environmental policy, “Disaster Relief: Capitalism and Socialism,” and “Socialism is the future: China leads the way on the environment.” More substantially, I wrote a sprawling blog post in defense of Deng Xiaoping and the “capitalist roaders,” against the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. While I am still critical of Mao’s regime, especially the horrific consequences of the GLF, such a critique in no way vindicates the leaders and factions that ushered in the integration of China into global capitalism, with the simultaneous progress and suffering that entails.

I also wrote several articles on the war in Syria. While I remain critical of most of the militarized opposition forces, my writings on the topic amounted to apologism for the crimes of the Syrian government, mostly by way of omission. Anti-interventionism and a broad anti-imperialist outlook are vital for any sort of socialist movement in the United States, the principal global military power on the planet. Nonetheless, that is no excuse to downplay, deny, or justify the atrocities committed by the Assad regime. The logic of such apologism is nearly identical to defenses of Stalin.

My most regretful article is “Russophobia and the Logic of Imperialism.” In the piece, I draw on the scholarship of Domenico Losurdo contra Hannah Arendt and the “totalitarian” school of Soviet history. All that is fine enough, and I still side with the critique of the “double genocide” theory of WWII, but the article is deeply flawed. First, I make bold claims about the racialization of Russians and Slavs that were based on little to no research or historical evidence. I can only imagine I accepted this narrative through internalizing the ambient Great Russian chauvinism of Stalinist mythos.

Second, and this was the most crucial mistake, I equated any sort of critique of Stalinism (or, Christ, even the Russian Federation under Putin) with Orientalism. In my mind, any critique of Stalin was by necessity racist and anti-communist. Given that many of Stalin’s victims were oppressed minorities such as Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and Kazakhs, this claim hardly holds weight and carries a regretful irony. Of course, there are Russophobic critiques of the Soviet Union, but to lump all critiques under this umbrella is cynicism and bad-faith argumentation of the highest order. Ironically enough, I now quite enjoy the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya and Hillel Ticktin, both of whom I chastise in the piece.

Coming to terms with and eventually abandoning Stalinism was a long process involving numerous stages of research and self-reflection. It did not happen overnight. My old views grow more incomprehensible by the day, and while my politics are still evolving as always, I hope now I’m moving in the right direction, towards a more rigorous and consistent socialist outlook.

What do I mean by “Stalinism”?

What follows is my broad strokes understanding of Stalinism. It is not meant to be a comprehensive historical account of the Stalin period, nor is it much of a rigorous analysis. Rather, it is a gesture towards understanding some of the key features of Stalinism, which is primarily defined by, but not limited to, the Stalin era itself (~1928-1953). The phenomenon includes not just the actions of Stalin but also those of figures such as Beria and Yezhov, and more importantly the institutions and practices characteristic of the period. The ‘Further Reading’ section at the end of this piece enumerates the most important sources from which I derived my understanding of Stalinism.

Substitutionism

A major hallmark of Stalinism, which continues to this day, is the uncritical accepting of State propaganda, and more broadly siding with the State against the workers, if it’s a state deemed “good,” either due to its ostensible socialism or its ostensible anti-imperialism (or mere anti-Americanism). But the basic defense of the existence of a state (whether it be the socialists defending the USSR or liberals defending the United States) does not have to entail the defense of every action taken by said state, nor does it have to entail the defense of the state against internal rebellion. For Victor Serge, the elevation of Marxism to State ideology undermined its critical character:

All the same, I cannot help considering as a positive disaster the fact that a Marxist orthodoxy should, in a great country in the throes of social transformation, have taken over the apparatus of power. Whatever may be the scientific value of a doctrine, from the moment that it becomes governmental, interests of State will cease to allow it the possibility of impartial inquiry.6

Thus, the basis was laid for a “Marxist” justification of Stalinism’s state violence. This ‘statism’ is tied with a warped view of class. In Stalinist, as in much traditional Marxist thought, “the proletariat” is defined as a coherent political category with its own interests, cohesion, and even psyche. We can see how the heroic belief in the proletariat as a revolutionary subject devolved into authoritarianism. If the proletariat is the vanguard of humanity, of progress, and the Party is the vanguard of the proletariat, then the Party’s ruling clique can justify the most heinous crimes as being “objectively” in the interests of humanity.

This understanding of class often vacillates between basing itself on relations of production and on political outlook.7 Thus not only were the former bourgeoisie, expropriated kulaks, and their respective social circles politically suppressed, but so too were “objective agents” of the old ruling class, “counter-revolutionaries,” and “Trotskyites.” These dubious political categories were extended to eventually engulf the majority of the delegates to the 1934 Party Congress, 1,108 of whom were arrested and 848 shot during the Great Terror.8

The interests of the class are defined by the Party Line, and thus the Party substitutes itself for the class, “acting out its deepest desires.”9 Once the Bolshevik Party was in power, the interests of the proletariat were defined by the interests of the State, and thus “the cruelest and most repressive forms of the primitive accumulation of capital [were] carried out against the empirical proletariat, in the name of a metaphysical proletariat.”10 This subtle substitutionism was even explicitly argued by Stalin himself when he spoke about how the Moscow Trials should be written about:

…Stalin and the other leaders are not isolated individuals but the personification of all the victories of socialism in the USSR, the personification of collectivization, industrialization, and the blossoming of culture in the USSR, consequently, the personification of the efforts of workers, peasants, and the working intelligentsia for the defeat of capitalism and the triumph of socialism.11

In other words, to disagree with Stalin is to betray the Party, and hence socialism and the proletariat. Stalin’s words send shivers down my spine.

Productivism and Carceralism

The repressive and statist aspects of Stalinism were only one side of the coin: the other was primitive accumulation, in a nakedly brutal form. To be absolutely clear, Soviet industrialization was not uniquely violent. One only has to consider European wars of conquest, the genocide of Indigenous Americans, slavery, and the never-ending death toll of capitalist modernity. But neither was it uniquely peaceful and painless. The collectivization campaign, driving millions of peasants from the land, was proletarianization on an unprecedented scale and pace (only to be surpassed later by post-Mao China). Laws against absenteeism, internal passports, colonial relations with nomadic peoples (notably Kazakhs and Roma), and a general regime of labor discipline and modernization marked the political economy of Stalinism, its own mirror image of “the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”12

Perhaps this is one of the most important lessons of Stalinism: that certain institutions and economic imperatives command their own logic, relatively autonomous from political ideology or “class” (itself a fraught and culturally/historically contingent category). In this sense, there’s no “class character” to labor camps, industrialization, mass execution, secret police, and the like. No matter who is in charge, these institutions will likely operate on similar lines. I believe this is especially true of the economic necessities of industrialization, which by necessity squeeze the peasantry and discipline a laboring class, whether or not this process of primitive accumulation is led by the State or by market forces. This, to me, is a more compelling critique of Stalinism than the anti-revisionist accounts of socialist collapse: it is not the danger of a new or reconstituted bourgeoisie, but rather the institutions themselves and the dynamics they engender.

Stalinism may be appealing because it appears to be a radical break from the neoliberal consensus, but in fact its mechanisms of population control, mass incarceration, and labor discipline were endemic features in its contemporary counterparts, both liberal and fascist. For example, concentration camps, a hallmark of Stalinist political repression, were first pioneered by the British in India and South Africa. Similarly today, camps in Xinjiang and El Paso are both manifestations of the policing and disciplining paradigms of modern global capitalism. We don’t have to accept the now discredited totalitarian paradigm to recognize the authoritarian and violent nature of Stalinism’s core political and legal institutions. The Great Terror (which claimed the lives of at least 600,000 people) was in many ways a unique historical event, but its carceral backdrop was not unlike those of other nation-states of capitalist modernity.

The Question of Liberalism

On a broader point, I think the legacy of 20th century state socialism proves that Marxism in fact never really squared the circle in terms of its relationship with political liberalism and democracy. Some argue that Marxism is a negation of political liberalism; others its culmination. I think it’s a bit of both. But one thing is clear, the profound strides in positive and material rights (housing, food, education, healthcare, etc.) made under state socialism were unfortunately not paired with an equal increase (or in some cases, even maintenance) of democratic rights in the tradition of the French Revolution’s liberalism and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It is too simplistic to denounce political liberalism as “bourgeois”, for it is readily apparent that workers themselves did not enjoy certain freedoms under Stalin. For example the right to an attorney and a fair trial was not awarded until Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign.13

At stake here is the question of universal principle. Are we to organize to abolish the death penalty under capitalism only to reinstate it under a socialist regime?14 Stalinism answers this question by rejecting universal principles, making allowance for various mechanisms of violence as long as they serve the “class interests” of a mystified proletariat. However, I believe Marxists should hold onto at least some notion of universal principles. The ends do not necessarily justify the means: “Alright, I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelette of yours?”15 Not only do repressive measures such as torture and mass execution likely warp the psychology of their purveyors, but additionally, plenty of innocent workers, peasants, and revolutionaries got caught up in the dragnet of a carceral system ostensibly functioning on their behalf.

Czechoslovak dissident Jiri Pelikan wrote in an open letter to Angela Davis, urging her to support Czechoslovak political prisoners:

… [my Western friends] reply that of course it’s a disagreeable situation but that one mustn’t say so too openly so as not to “play into the hands of socialism’s enemies,” and that one must start from “a class position.” But what “class” can benefit if people are arrested without trial, if trade unions are enslaved, if all free discussion is suppressed, if socialist countries accuse each other of imperialism, betrayal, revisionism, and invade each other by turn?16

Tragically, Angela Davis’s response was not sympathetic. According to the London Times, “a close friend of Angela Davis, who claimed that she spoke on her behalf, said that Angela Davis held the view that those who were jailed in Eastern Europe were trying to undermine their governments and that those who went into political exile were attacking their own countries and therefore undeserving of her support.”17 This sadly mirrors the logic used to vilify political dissidents in capitalist regimes. Even if one by-and-large supported the political systems of the Eastern Bloc, it’s difficult to imagine that support extending to such repressive measures.

On “Necessity”

If it is simplistic to dismiss democratic rights as bourgeois, is equally simplistic to apologize for Stalinism’s crimes and the limitations on democratic rights just because they were “historically necessary.” As Calvino said:

Stalinism relied on necessity, things could not happen any other way from the way they happened, even though the face of that history had nothing pleasant about it. Only when I managed to understand that even inside the most iron necessity there is a point where choices are possible, and Stalin’s choices had been largely disastrous, did any justification of Stalinism become unthinkable.18 (emphasis original)

When we investigate the specifics of the Stalin era, it becomes apparent that few if any of the worst excesses could be explained away as “necessities.” But the point of this essay is not to argue that Stalin’s crimes were indeed abhorrent and unnecessary. Only the most hardened apologists would deny as such; I used to be one of them, and one thing I believe is that they can only change their minds by their own accord. Lord knows no person, fact, or book could have changed my mind about Stalin when I was so dead set on defending his every action.

While there are many lessons to learn from 20th century state socialism, positive and negative, a critical appraisal of our past is only possible by shedding the apologist mindset of modern Stalinism. My hope is that a critical distance from past and present State doctrines will allow us to reinvigorate Marxism’s spirit of “ruthless critique” and a robust commitment to intellectual honesty.

Further Reading

  • Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris
  • Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet
  • Arch Getty and Oleg G. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks
  • Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism
  • Sheila Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931
  • Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times
  • Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalinism: New Directions
  • Russell Jacoby, The Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism
  • Russell Jacoby, “Stalin, Marxism-Leninism and the Left”
  • Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century
  • Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Soviet Marxism
  • Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism
  • Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary
  • Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed
  • Slavoj Zizek, “Stalinism”

Notes

  1. Although WWP had Trotskyist origins, Marcyist ideology trends towards a certain Stalinist logic especially around international politics and “defending” anti-American regimes. My problem with Marcyism, initially, was precisely that it was not Stalinist enough. But none of what I discuss below is characteristic of Trotskyism as such.
  2. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire.
  3. See Adam Hunerven, “Spirit Breaking: Capitalism and Terror in Northwest China” in Chuang 2: Frontiers.
  4. ‘September 1939. Hitler and Stalin have just carved up Poland. At the border bridge of Brest-Litovsk, several hundred members of the KPD, refugees in the USSR subsequently arrested as “counter-revolutionaries”, are taken from Stalinist prisons and handed over to the Gestapo. Years later, one of them would explain the scars on her back — “GPU did it” — and her torn fingernails — “and that’s the Gestapo”. A fair account of the first half of this century.’  Gilles Dauvé, “When Insurrections Die,” Endnotes 1.
  5. Italo Calvino, “The Summer of ‘56” in Hermit in Paris 203.
  6. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 441.
  7. The latter case was taken to its extreme with the Maoist concept of “two-line struggle” and the identification of individuals with classes based on their views.
  8. Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century  105.
  9. Raphael Samuel, “The Lost World of British Communism, Part III” New Left Review 57.
  10. Robert Kurz, “The German war economy and state socialism.”
  11. Stalin to Kaganovich and Molotov.
  12. Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, “Chapter 31: The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist.”
  13. Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century.
  14. It is worth noting that the Paris Commune abolished the guillotine, that timeless symbol of Jacobin radicalism. See Crimethinc, “Against the Logic of the Guillotine.”
  15. Panait Istrati, quoted in Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 323.
  16. Jiri Pelikan, “An Open Letter to Angela Davis.”
  17. Ibid.
  18. Italo Calvino, “Was I a Stalinist Too?” in Hermit in Paris 195.

Originally posted at The Left Wind.

The UK Election: A Car Crash on the Left Side of the Road

By: December 28, 2019
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It was probably no surprise that Joe Biden announced that the huge victory for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives and the mauling defeat of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s radical leadership was a warning to fellow Democrats to shun the leftism of Sanders and Warren and seek safety in the political center if they hoped to beat Trump in 2020. In fact, in this nasty slugfest between the now seriously right-wing Tory party and left social democratic Labour there was little space for centrists. Despite gathering in a slice of the remain vote, the high hopes of the Liberal Democrats collapsed, their leader lost her seat to the (social democratic) Scottish Nationalists, while all the “moderate” defectors from both main parties who ran as Lib Dems, the Independent Group for Change or as independents lost badly.

Thirteen of these centrist candidates (2 Lib Dems, 4 Change, and 6 independents) lost seats to Corbyn’s allegedly ultra-left Labour Party. Another 25 loudly proclaimed moderates (10 Lib Dems, 1 Change, and 14 independents) lost their seats to the Tories or withdrew before the election. Nor were self-proclaimed Labour centrists, such as Blairite Phil Wilson in Tony Blair’s old mining town seat, spared defeat at the hands of the Tories. As lefty commentator Owen Jones wrote in the Guardian, “… there is still no sign that voters have a burning appetite for centrism in any form.”

In terms of absolute losses, Labour’s decline of 2.6 million votes cost them 60 seats: 6 to the Scottish National Party (SNP), 6 to the Tories in Wales and 48 to the Tories in England, 45 of those in the old Labour heartlands of the heavily deindustrialized Midlands and North. According to YouGov’s exit poll, Labour retained 72% of its 2017 vote, with the net shift to the Conservatives amounting to 11%. Labour also lost an estimated 9% of its previous pro-EU remain voters to the Lib Dems. Some Labour votes also went to former UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s newly minted Brexit Party. These, however, are total percentages which don’t tell us where votes were won or lost. Labour’s losses to the Lib Dems was concentrated in those heavily middle class remain areas in the South of England where the Lib Dems have 6 of their 7 English seats and gained most of their 1.3 million votes. All of this would have had little or no effect on working class defections or votes in the formerly industrial Midlands and North. Labour’s lost votes that counted were mainly those in these two deindustrialized regions of England. More on this below.

As Table II shows, the younger the voter, the more likely they were to vote Labour. Despite an upsurge in youth voter registration, however, the expected “youthquake” was more a tremor with turnout of new voters far less than expected. Indeed, a study at Brunel University showed that constituencies with a higher proportion of 18-24-year-olds had a lower turnout rate than those with fewer. Furthermore, the percentages of young people voting for Labour were lower this time than in the 2017 general election. The 18-24’s went 67% for Labour in 2017 compared to 57% this time, while 58% of the 25-34s voted Labour in 2017 compared to 55% in 2019. Voters 18 to 24 also voted at a higher rate than average for the Brexit Party.

The big tectonic shift in demographic terms was that of class, as defined here by occupation in line with the British classification system. In 2017, 39% of skilled workers voted for Labour while the semi-and unskilled and pensioner group voted Labour by 46%, compared to 30-31% and 34-37% respectively this time as Table II shows. The inescapable conclusion is that it was working class voters who made the difference. The question is why?

Analysis or blame game?

In the debate now raging in and outside the Labour Party fingers have been pointed at two major sources of blame for the defeat: Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn. The media certainly helped demonized Jeremy and his ambitious Manifesto (party program). Corbyn’s opponents blame him, his politics, and to a lesser extent his radical Manifesto. Corbyn supporters counter that it was Brexit that led traditional Labour voters who voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum to turn to the Tories in 2019. Indeed, the correlation between those previously Labour electoral constituencies (districts) that voted for Brexit in 2016 and Tory in 2019 is too great to doubt that this was a major factor in the shift of Labour voters to Conservative. Boris Johnson’s misleading slogan of “Get Brexit Done” not only appealed to hard core Brexiteers, but to many of those “undecided voters” weary of three years of wrangling and indecision on what to do about the EU as well.

The primary motivations for many of those who voted in favour of leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum were informed by English nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment, but in 2019 these were reinforced by the argument that a democratic decision had been made, the people had decided. Attempts to impose another referendum on EU membership were seen as undemocratic. Furthermore, the problem of holding on to Labour’s remainers (those who voted to stay in the EU in 2016) while abiding by the 2016 vote was a serious dilemma for the party as a whole. The choice Corbyn and the leadership made in 2019 to fudge the matter by promising to negotiate a “soft” exit deal with the EU, put it to a vote (the second referendum hated by Brexiteers), and then remain neutral on how to vote alienated both remainers and leavers. It also contributed to the impression that Corbyn was an indecisive leader in a time of crisis. Labour was damned if it did and damned if it didn’t, but ultimately double damned by doing neither. So, many of Labour’s remainers voted Lib Dem, while leavers voted Tory or to a lesser extent for the Brexit Party which in parts of the North and South Wales got more than 15% of the vote.

The main criticism from Corbyn’s internal opponents wasn’t about the fudge on Brexit, however, but about Corbyn himself. The endless attacks on Corbyn from Labour centrists, magnified by both the right-wing and liberal media (Guardian and BBC included), helped convince many that Corbyn was, indeed, an ineffective leader. The evidence that Corbyn was disliked by many traditional Labour voters is strong. A poll of those who usually voted Labour but rejected it this time found that 37% blamed the leadership and 21% Brexit. Anecdotal remarks from many Labour campaigners also revealed a dislike of Corbyn among working class voters. For most such voters, of course, the only way they knew much about Jeremy other than that he was from London was through the media or from the Tories and Lib Dems who repeatedly said he was personally not fit for office and politically out of touch with moderate “hard working” England. As one Labour MP put it, “How can anyone like Jeremy when all they hear about him is bad.” The relentless campaign against Corbyn explains part of the difference between the 2017 election and this one. Labour did well in 2017 when Corbyn was relatively new and not yet thoroughly demonized, picking up both votes and seats and depriving the Conservatives of their majority. Such attacks as took place on Corbyn between his taking leadership in 2015 and the 2017 election were not enough to cost Labour seats. Yet they certainly accelerated in the last two years.

That said, in 2019 Corbyn failed to handle a number of important issues or problems well. In strategic terms the (unconscious?) decision to take the Northern working class vote for granted was a disaster. Labour’s new, enthusiastic members and those in Momentum went after marginal seats and for the most part left MP’s in the Midlands and North to their own devises. As a result, 45 of the 48 seats Labour lost in England were in the North (29) or Midlands (16). The impression that there is a London/South England bias in the leadership whether accurate or not was reinforced by this practice. To make matters worse, Jeremy’s handling of the charges of antisemitism was poor. Despite the fact that those accusing Labour of failing to take antisemitism in the party seriously or even that Labour was allegedly “institutionally antisemitic” came back again and again, Jeremy seemed perpetually unprepared to answer direct questions about antisemitism in the party or what the party was doing about it. This despite the fact that the party was processing accusations, suspending and even expelling members. Nevertheless, so poor was the leadership’s handling of this that surveys showed that many people thought that a third or more of Labour Party members were accused of antisemitic remarks or attacks, when in fact it was fewer than one percent—a proportion bad enough to require a far more satisfactory response. How many of even these incidents of alleged antisemitism were actually criticisms of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians or of Zionism, rather than anti-Jewish statements was never publicly considered.

Watching Jeremy answer tough questions on this and other matters in various TV interviews was agonizing. Corbyn supporter Owen Jones’ remark that the leadership “was often afflicted by a destructive bunker mentality” was also painfully on the mark. The presentation of the leadership’s radical program for change was haphazard and unsystematic giving the impression Labour was promising some new freebee each day in hopes of garnering votes instead of a worked-out plan for change—even though most of the individual proposals were popular. The Manifesto that finally presented the program was over a hundred pages long and also seemed more like a shopping list than a plan with the finances behind it in a separate document. As a result, the attacks on its credibility from Tories, the media, Lib Dems, etc stuck.

In the final analysis, however, I think the most fundamental problem behind Labour’s loss of much of its traditional base lay in what Corbyn and the radical movement he inspired didn’t do over the past four years. Namely, the undoing of the previous weakening of Labour’s most basic local branch and constituency organizations, on the one hand, and the technocratic centralism of the party that was the legacy of Blairism, on the other. “Reform” of the Labour Party’s structure, its relationship with the affiliated unions, and the role of the membership has been an ever changing, often confusing process for decades. Tony Blair, in line with the “Third Way” of doing things, however, knew just what he wanted from his “reforms” in the 1990s: an efficient, professionalized, centralized party machine; diminished influence for the unions; and a large, but fragmented, individualized membership.

Blair: From mass party to hollow shell

There is no doubt that since the 1980s and the deindustrialization of much of industry in Scotland, the Midlands and North of England, the old working class culture, the informal political education provided by shop stewards and (some) lefty activists, along with the intense union organization of the pit villages, steel towns, and urban “engineering” (metal working) and shipbuilding communities of these areas that supported Labour for generations has been undermined even though union density remains much higher in the North than the rest of England. This led to a sharp decline in Labour Party membership in the 1980s and contributed to a long string of electoral defeats. Tony Blair’s attempt to make the Labour Party electable, “a party of government”, involved reviving a slumping membership on a large scale, while professionalizing the party’s central apparatus as well as introducing an allegedly “realistic” neoliberal program. Flooding the party with new members and increasing the role of individual voting in electing officers and other matters was meant to dilute the influence of the left and its local activists who Blair saw as an obstacle to dumping the party’s old socialist baggage and introducing his “Third Way” political and economic program.

The model for party growth was his Sedgefield constituency in Durham’s former coal mining country which grew to 2,000 members by 1997. The national party did, indeed, grow from a little over 300,000 in 1994 to just over 400,000 in 1997, the year Blair became Prime Minister. But the influx of thousands of individual members was not the same thing as building a stronger organized base or regular engagement in community and class issues. After the initial growth the result was, as one study put it, “a significant decline in activism both in long-term members who were less participative than they had been and the new members who were less engaged in party activities than the more established participants.” The strategy produced a large, but passive and as it turned out temporary membership.

By the time Blair was replaced as party leader by Gordon Brown in 2007 the party was down to 176,891 members. Many had simply let their dues lapse, something that is much less likely to happen when there is more intense organization. No doubt his policies were behind much of this decline. The “parachuting” in of middle class candidates by Blair’s central apparatus also aliened local members. The number of constituencies with more than 500 members dropped from 132 in 1993 to 54 in 2010. The average size of a party constituency declined from 591 in 1997 to 279 in 2010. Significantly, by 2010 Blair’s Sedgefield “model” constituency party had lost 80% of its 1997 membership and the local Labour club had closed. Similarly, Gordon Brown’s Dunfermline constituency, the model of New Labour growth in Scotland, which initially tripled its membership had lost 70% of its members over this period. Presumably, other constituencies in the North and Scotland followed a similar course. This obviously contributed to the weakness that would underlie the future defeats in 2010 and 2015. What this demonstrates is that simple growth in numbers as desirable as that may be does not equate to strong, well-organized local or national party organization.

Since 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn ran for and won party leadership, Labour Party membership has soared from about 200,000 in 2014 to a high of 564,442 in December 2017. Furthermore, despite the efforts of centrist MPs, Corbyn has been elected party leader twice indicating popularity among party members for himself and the sharp left turn he proposed. Yet, evidence is strong that once again solid organization at the base did not follow numerical growth or leadership popularity. Constituency membership figures are no longer published, but it is significant that according to a survey by Queen Mary University’s party members project, 64% of those who joined between 2014 and 2017 did so via the national party rather than through a local branch or constituency organization and did so mostly at their personal initiative. Furthermore, 53% of those surveyed joined as a result of “observation of political news in the national media” rather than any efforts by the party. Contrary to some impressions, only 5% joined due to party communications on social media. Clearly growth was not a consequence of conscious, let alone systematic organizing efforts on the part of the party or its leadership.

Active participation has also been low. A 2019 report by the House of Commons Library published before the election that year found that only 23% of Labour Party members had even attended “a party meeting” (emphasis added) and only 28% had “delivered party or candidate leaflets in an election”. These may not sound so low to Americans where parties have no members and, hence, no tradition of regular participation, but they were the lowest rates of actual participation of any political party in the UK! None of this indicates organized grassroots recruitment, integration or likely retention under Corbyn’s leadership. To be sure, large numbers of new members and Momentum’s activists played an important role in the 2017 and 2019 general elections, but such relatively brief mobilizations are not the same things as participatory organization. And, indeed, by late 2019 before the election party membership had fallen by nearly 80,000 members since 2017.

There are also indications that much of the new membership comes from middle class backgrounds in the South of England. Indeed, the proportion of party members from London and the South of England has risen from 39% in 1990 to 45% in 2010 and 46% by 2017 when Labour hit its highest membership level since the 1950s. In class terms, only 23% of members are from the social categories representing Blue Collar workers of all skill levels, the unemployed, those on “welfare”, and pensioners. Despite the decline of the Blue Collar working class, these groups still represent 45-47% of the UK population: i.e., about twice their representation in the Labour Party. These are precisely the groups that compose much of the so-called “left behind” working class in the North and Midlands that Labour lost in 2019.

This was not inevitable. The Tories had been gradually gaining both votes and seats at Labour’s expense in the North and Midlands for the last couple of elections. The party leadership ignored the signs of votes lost to the Tories in 2017 when despite doing well overall, significant shifts in votes from Labour to Conservatives occurred in about four dozen constituencies that Labour held in that year. Most of these were in the North or Midlands in many places where Labour would lose in 2019. This is all the more shocking as a pamphlet entitled “Northern Discomfort” was submitted well before the election to the leadership by members of Corbyn’s own “shadow cabinet” which warned that some 50 northern seats were in danger. According to one of the authors, the pamphlet was “unwelcome and suppressed” by the leadership. (This pamphlet is not to be confused with a post-election Blairite pamphlet of the same title which blames the defeat entirely on Jeremy Corbyn.)

That much of the Midlands and the North did not receive aid or reinforcements during the 2019 election from the party’s center or its new troops, who were busy storming marginal seats rather than old “safe” Labour seats, can be seen in the complaint of an MP who lost her Greater Manchester area seat. She told the Guardian “I feel that the party was complacent about my seat. Most mornings I would have a team of half a dozen fantastic local activists. In the afternoon, I’d get two or three people and then a few more in the evening…I was eventually sent an organizer for the last few days, but it was too late.” Obviously, such a small cadre of activists is not enough to deal with a constituency that had 80,000 voters. Another MP who lost her northern seat also complained to the Guardian of a lack of support from Labour HQ and there were certainly others who felt the same.

The weakness of local organization in many of the lost constituencies shows up in the differences in regional voter turnout with the average in the South at 70% while that in the North and Midlands averaged 65%, a 5-point spread. It is further suggested by the below average turnout in over half of those constituencies lost in England in 2019. Of the 48 English constituencies Labour lost, 26 had turnout rates at least two percentage points below the average of 67.4% for England. This may sound respectable to many in the US where turnout is lower, but in Britain turnout in general elections ran above 70% from the mid-1960s through 1997 and was 69% in 2017. Some English constituencies fell near or even below 60%, while a few were below 50% in 2019.Virtually all of these were in the Midlands or North. Many of these constituencies also had a low turnout in 2017 indicating that the problem is not new or simply a result of displeasure with the party’s radical program, its leader, or even its confusing Brexit position.

Putting aside a scandal of Trumpian proportions or other unforeseeable catastrophic events the Tories will rule for five years with a solid majority. Labour in parliament can do little to stop their rampage. Corbyn will be replaced as leader, but the left may hold on to the leadership in what is already a nasty contest for a post-Corbyn party leadership. If that is the case, action on building or rebuilding a left Labour Party from the ground up needs to be a priority—even to stem the tide of slumping membership. That will have to be done in the streets and workplaces around issues that matter to local people in working class areas as well as the big issues like living standards, inequality, the NHS, climate change, etc. which, tragically, played too small a role in the general election despite Corbyn’s best efforts. On top of all of this, Labour will increasingly face a new type of “foreign” policy challenge as the United Kingdom moves past devolution toward disintegration.

Four elections and a funeral

The story above is mostly one about England rather than the UK. The 2019 British election was really four elections: one for each UK nation with distinct characteristics. The big Labour meltdown this time was largely an English affair. Of the total of 60 seats lost by Labour 48 were in England. 345 of the Tories’ 365 seats are in England. Wales saw Labour lose six seats but remain the dominant party in that small nation with 22 of its 40 seats at the Westminster parliament. On the other hand, Labour had been all but wiped out in Scotland in 2015 when it lost 40 of its 41 parliamentary seats. It regained 6 in 2017, but lost those in 2019, retaining only one seat in Scotland—a virtual funeral for Labour “north of the border” in what was once a Labour stronghold. The Labour Party as such never had a presence in Northern Ireland, which has its own distinct party system.

In Scotland and Northern Ireland social democratic leaning nationalist parties won gains. In Scotland the Scottish National Party (SNP) took 48 of that country’s 59 seats in Westminster, setting it on course for another independence referendum. In Northern Ireland, the two Irish nationalist parties, Sinn Fein with seven seats and the Social Democratic and Labour Party with two composed a majority of seats for the first time, while the “cross-community” Alliance Party took its first seat. The right-wing unionist (British nationalist) Democratic Unionists (DUP) were down to seven having lost two seats and the Ulster Unionists (UUP) with none were out of the picture This political shift has enormous implications for the future of Northern Ireland as those favoring union with Great Britain lose ground to those seeking a united Ireland.

Brexit played a role in these elections by convincing more voters that the English-dominated parties and the Westminster parliament really didn’t take their interests or concerns at all seriously. This increased nationalist sentiment toward a break with the United Kingdom. In Scotland, which had voted by 62% to remain in the EU, the imposition of Brexit by Westminster and the Tories is seen as defying the will of the Scottish people and has renewed the demand for another independence referendum. In the case of Northern Ireland, the Tories’ agreed to a border in the Irish Sea between the island of Ireland and the rest of Britain as part of the Brexit agreement with the EU. This, along with changing demographics contributed to a nationalist political majority and, for the first time ever, a slight majority (51%) in some opinion polls for uniting with the Republic of Ireland.

Although Corbyn and Labour’s “shadow chancellor” John McDonnell personally favour a united Ireland and may be sympathetic to Scottish independence on principle, the Labour Party is officially committed to preserving the “union” of the four nations of the United Kingdom. The Tories under Johnson have made it clear they will refuse Scotland a legal referendum. Just what the SNP, on the one hand, and Labour in England and Wales under a new leadership (left or otherwise), on the other, will do about this while they are also trying to resist a new era of privatization, deregulation, a “hostile environment” toward immigrants, and unequal trade with the United States is hard to imagine.

What seems clear, however, is that if the left is to keep Labour on a radical course, and at the same time make it viable in electoral terms both locally and in a future general election, the activists will need to do more than elect a new leader, fill up a left-leaning “shadow cabinet”, pump up the numbers, and take comfort in their written program. It also seems clear that dependence on one person, “The Leader”, is always a mistake, one that tends to go with electoralism and that is too frequently repeated; be it a Jeremy, a Bernie, or anyone else.

To save what was a promising movement Labour must win back and win anew the working class base its name bespeaks. This includes not only those “left behind” in the Midlands, North and elsewhere, but those in newer working class occupations around the country who are sinking into poverty and need help unionizing, as well as those in-and-out-of-work. The election season activists need to become perennial participants in branches, constituencies, unions, and workplaces who go beyond electoral mode to on-going grassroots organization, support for union struggles, and mass direct action. If, that is, the project Jeremy Corbyn almost inadvertently launched in 2015 and thousands picked up is to outlive his formal leadership.

The if signifies the reality that the precedents for transforming a social democratic party into a radical, not to say revolutionary, class-based movement are not encouraging. The demands of electoralism, further distorted by the increasing digitalization of political strategy and outreach and the built-in careerism of elected politicians, do not encourage grassroots democracy or transformational politics. Nor will the party’s center and right sit still in the face of the recent defeat or cease to believe that the electoral pot of gold lies not at the end of the rainbow, but at its center.

Still, few past efforts at changing the direction of Labour in the last few decades have seen the type or size of the influx that the party saw between 2015 and 2017. It would be a tragedy to lose the momentum (small “m”) or see this upsurge squandered either in continued mass exit or simply internal squabbling. Although this movement has taken an electoral form initially, it is, after all, part of the worldwide social and political upheaval now in progress. There are workers’ struggles to be supported, the NHS to be defended, and the planet to be saved. As left journalist Gary Younge put it mildly in the Guardian, “In a moment when we can expect a significant attack on living standards, workers’ rights, environmental protection and minorities, the left might focus more on local and national [issue] campaigns than holding positions and passing resolutions.”

Beyond Impeachment: Challenges Facing the U.S. Left in 2020

By: December 26, 2019
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So, Trump has finally been impeached—or at least sort of. The House voted two articles of impeachment—one for abuse of power for withholding military aid to Ukraine unless it provided Trump with dirt on Joe Biden, the other for trying to undermine Congress’s investigation (it did not however charge Trump with the much more serious crime of obstruction of justice). However, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has deferred for now sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate because of a dispute with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell over the terms and procedures of the trial to be held there. That suits McConnell and the Republicans just fine, since they don’t want a trial in the first place—even though it is perfectly clear that if one is held they will acquit him on all counts.

Hence, as of this moment (December 22) Trump hasn’t actually been impeached and won’t be until the Senate trial is held. It is not clear what leverage Pelosi and the Democrats have at this point to extract concessions from Senate Republicans over the rules and procedures, but this much is clear: the rather rushed and narrowly-focused impeachment process has not substantially moved the needle one inch in terms of undermining Trump’s hold on power.

This is not to say Trump doesn’t deserve to be impeached for flagrantly trying to pressure a foreign country to interfere in a U.S. election and lying through his teeth through the whole process. Yet it’s also the case that he should have been impeached long before his call to the President of Ukraine for far much more egregious crimes.

What about his disastrous unilateral immigration policies, which include tearing children from their arms of their parents—a policy that has led to at least a dozen deaths and produced trauma in many children that may take decades to mend? When Obama used an executive order to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, many Republicans immediately began to talk of impeaching him for “violating the Constitution.” But when a small but important number of left-wing Democrats in the House raised the specter of impeachment over Trump’s actions on immigration, Pelosi waved them off as irrelevant.

And what about his infamous phone call with another President, this one Erdogan of Turkey, in which Trump gave him the green light to attack the Kurds of northern Syria with the clear intent of destroying the zones of liberation in and around Rojava, which had provided the best hope for a democratic, feminist, and socialist alternative in the Middle East? Thousands have died because his actions (in no doubt at least in part inspired by his own business interests in Turkey) but somehow that didn’t make the articles of impeachment either.

One can of course list a whole litany of crimes committed by this racist demagogue, not least of them appointing as Attorney General William Barr, who clearly cares nothing about the rule of law but serves exclusively as Trump’s private attorney on all matters. Trump used to boast that he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and still retain his supporters; it’s now gotten to the point that the Attorney General of the U.S. would officially sanction it!

When it comes to the political impact of the impeachment process one cannot blame Pelosi and the centrist Democratic Party leadership for the fact that the bulk of Trump’s backers continue to support him. The vast majority of that ilk would support him whatever the case because they favor his decrepit policies. The Republican Party today is less a party than a cult—a cult centered on egotistical self-aggrandizement run amok. For a large section of bourgeois society, there is nothing to believe in any more other than grabbing as much as you can at the expense of those less privileged than yourself—even if it means destroying society in the process.

The more pertinent issue is whether the impeachment process as conducted by the House Democrats has done anything to mobilize the majority of people in this country who oppose Trump and want to see him gone? There is little evidence that it has. If anything—and especially thanks to the recent British elections—there is a growing sense of despair that he may be headed to re-election.

If you face a powerful and serious enemy, you’ve got to fight him with all the political ammunition at your disposal. Narrowing the terms of impeachment to two items in a series of hearings (initially closed to the public at that!) and which lasted barely a month hardly counts for that.

Moreover, that the effort to undermine Joe Biden spurred the Democratic establishment to impeachment makes it clear that the gravest affront in their eyes is to come after one of their own. Would they have tried to impeach Trump if he were recorded trying to undermine the campaign of Bernie Sanders? It’s hard to imagine that they would, since the emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016 purportedly obtained by the Russians showed that the DNC and Hillary Clinton conspired, in ways bordering on illegality, to deny Sanders the nomination.

Despite the mess that the House Democrats may have made of things, this is no time to despair, withdraw from politics, or presume that denying Trump a second term doesn’t really matter. It does matter. Political democracy is under attack around the world today, from Iran and Turkey to China, from Poland to Russia, from Brazil and Bolivia to India. Trump is just the vile American expression of a global phenomenon. If this effort to undermine and destroy political democracy succeeds, the door will be closed to even discussing the path to a new, non-capitalist future, let alone actualizing one. Trump will remain in power through 2020, regardless of the impeachment process; our job is to ensure he remains there no longer.

Originally posted at The International Marxist-Humanist.

Mataron a Frank Ordoñez

By: , December 22, 2019
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[This article also appears in English here. Este artículo también se encuentra en inglés aquí.]

El jueves 5 de diciembre de 2019, Frank Ordoñez, de 27 años de edad, un chofer de UPS y padre de dos hijas, fue matado en un tiroteo entre la policía y dos sospechosos que huían de la escena de un robo. Ordoñez fue tomado como rehén mientras le cubría la ruta a otro conductor que estaba enfermo cuando el camión que conducía fue secuestrado. Ambos sospechosos, Ordoñez, y un transeúnte, Rick Cutshaw, de 70 años de edad, un representante sindical con OPEIU Local 100, fueron asesinados en la balacera en una intersección llena de gente en Miramar, Florida.

En este momento, no se ha determinado oficialmente si las balas que acabaron con la vida de Ordoñez fueron disparadas por la policía o por los secuestradores, aunque las versiones de los testigos coinciden en que la policía le disparo centenares de veces al vehículo mientras peatones y otros vehículos estaban presentes; la Asociación Benevolente de la Policía de Broward confirmo que por lo menos 18 agentes de policía le dispararon al vehículo. Steadman Stahl, presidente de la Asociación Benevolente de la Policía de Sur de la Florida, defendió las acciones de la policía: “Si nos disparas, vamos a enfrentarte. Vamos a para la amenaza.” 

La familia de Ordoñez ha sido clara en que culpa a la policía por la muerte de Frank. Genny Merino, la hermana de Ordoñez, dijo en Twitter: “Hoy perdí mi hermano por la puta negligencia y estupidez de la policía. En vez de negociar en una situación de toma de rehenes simplemente le dispararon a todo el mundo.” El padrastro de Ordoñez, Joe Merino agregó, “Esto fue como el viejo Oeste…Estoy seguro de que si el rehén hubiera sido alguien como un hijo del alcalde hoy estaría vivo.” Luz Apolinario, la madre de Ordoñez, una inmigrante de Ecuador, dijo, “No puedo creer que mataron a mi hijo. Yo vine a este país a salir para adelante no para que me maten a mi hijo.”

Al comentar sobre la muerte de su empleado mientras trabajaba, UPS le dio las gracias a la policía, “Apreciamos el servicio de las fuerzas del orden y cooperaremos con las autoridades mientras continúan la investigación” UPS tiene vínculos estrechos con departamentos de policía en todo el país; la compañía contrata a muchos agentes de policía en su tiempo libre y a antiguos agentes del FBI en su departamento de “Prevención de Perdidas.”

Los actos de solidaridad por parte de los compañeros de trabajo de Ordoñez han sido poderosos. Compañeros de trabajo y demás miembros de la sección 769 del sindicato de los Teamsters cubrieron el carro de Frank, todavía estacionado en el lote de UPS después de su muerte, con fotos, cartas, y flores en su memoria. Cientos de Teamsters, choferes de entrega de paquetes, y miembros de la comunidad fueron al funeral a presentar sus últimos respetos. La pagina de GoFundMe de la familia para apoyar a la familia de Frank, pagar el entierro y contratar a un abogado recaudó mas de diez veces su meta dentro de pocos días de su lanzamiento.

Miles de choferes de UPS después organizaron un momento de silencio para honrar la vida de Frank Ordoñez el 10 de diciembre a las 5pm. Fueron acompañados por trabajadores de UPS en el Reino Unido como también por demostraciones de solidaridad por parte de choferes de FedEx y otras compañías de entrega de paquetes. Estos actos de solidaridad son normalmente reservados para huelgas u otras acciones en el trabajo. UPS, al recibir criticas por sus declaraciones iniciales y al darse cuenta de que no podían impedirlo, reconocieron y transmitieron el breve paro de trabajo. El apoyo generalizado y los actos conmovedores en honor a Frank Ordoñez revelan la profundidad del dolor y la identificación con las condiciones de trabajo para choferes de entrega de paquetes a través de los Estados Unidos. Cada día en las calles de EE.UU. hay 60,000 vehículos de UPS, un numero equivalente de FedEx, un creciente numero de Amazon, y muchos mas del venerable correo postal USPS.

Mientras muchas secciones de los Teamsters han emitido declaraciones de apoyo y hecho esfuerzos para recaudar fondos para la familia de Ordoñez, la respuesta de la Hermandad Internacional de los Teamsters ha sido limitada. El Presidente General de los Teamsters James P. Hoffa difundió un breve mensaje: “Los pensamientos y las oraciones de los 1,4 millones de miembros del Sindicato de los Teamsters están con la familia del Hermano Ordoñez, sus amigos, colegas, y compañeros del Local 769.” Esta apagada declaración refleja la que fue emitida después del asesinato de Philando Castile, quien también fue un Teamster del Local 320, y fue matado por la policía en Minneapolis. Los Teamsters, como muchos otros sindicatos, representan decenas de miles de policías, ayudantes de alguaciles, empleados de las cortes, oficiales que supervisan a presos con libertad condicional, y guardias de prisiones a través del estado carcelario, y tienen un fondo para la defensa legal de los policías.

La trágica muerte del chofer de UPS Frank Ordoñez también recalca los riesgos que los trabajadores de entrega de paquetes corren a diario. Aunque los secuestros y los tiroteos pueden ser raros, los robos, asaltos, amenazas, acoso sexual, y riñas de tránsito son comunes. Un chofer de UPS en Ohio recibió un impacto de bala en octubre, y varios robos de camiones de UPS ocurrieron en California en los primeros días de diciembre. En general, los conductores de comercio y de entrega de paquetes son quienes sufren las tasas de homicidio en el trabajo mas altas en los EE.UU.

A estos riesgos hay que sumarle las realidades para las y los trabajadores de UPS de presión intensa de productividad, vigilancia constante, la falta de respeto por parte de los jefes y un racismo sistémico. El asegurar el bienestar físico de los trabajadores en UPS, por parte de la gerencia, es reducido a entregar agua y bananos durante los meses de calor en el año y echarle la culpa a los trabajadores cuando se lesionan. A la vez que lamentamos la muerte del Hermano Ordoñez es también un momento para preguntar que han estado (o no) haciendo los patrones de UPS para proteger a los choferes de la violencia cuando están afuera trabajando sus rutas.

Si el pasado es un indicio, muy pocos policías van a ser juzgados y hechos responsables por la masacre que ocurrió. La única justicia para Frank Ordoñez y Rick Cutshaw será la justicia que ganen la familia, la comunidad y los compañeros de trabajo. UPS se sintió obligado a retirar lo dicho inicialmente y a permitir que se hiciera una pausa en la jornada de trabajo no solo por la furia publica, sino porque los Teamsters de UPS se organizaron ellos mismos y no le pidieron permiso a la compañía – enfrentados con esta movilización, UPS tuvo que obeceder. La increíble resonancia de la muerte de Frank entre los trabajadores de entrega de paquetes ilumina el deseo que existe para luchar contra sentirse uno como desechable, en el trabajo y en la calle. Las y los trabajadores están dirigiéndose a sus sindicatos para direcciones sobre como defenderse de abuso por parte de los empleadores, acelerones en el trabajo, racismo, y, si, la violencia de la policía – si va a haber una revitalización del movimiento laboral, los sindicatos van a tener que ofrecer mas que condolencias y apoyar las luchas de sus miembros en cualquier forma que tomen.

Por favor contribuyas a la pagina de GoFundMe de la familia Ordoñez y al fondo de la seccional 769 de los Teamsters para los sobrevivientes de la familia de Frank Ordoñez; escribe “For the family of Frank Ordonez” en el cheque:

Envíalo por correo postal a:

Teamsters Local 769

C/O The Ordonez Family

12365 West Dixie Hwy

North Miami, FL 33161

A Juarez Refugee Christmas

By: December 21, 2019
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As temperatures dip near or below freezing, scores of Mexican refugees huddle in their makeshift tents of layered plastic sheeting at the foot of the Santa Fe Bridge that connects Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, with El Paso, Texas. Many small children form part of the group. No colorfully wrapped packages wait below a Christmas tree. No heart warming lyrics from mariachi singers enliven the site, though a small figurine of the Virgin of Guadalupe watches over the people who wait and wait and wait for their chance to argue a case for political asylum in the United States.

Some of the asylum seekers report a presence at the bridge of two months, and like others in their predicament before them recite a litany of aggressions and atrocities that expelled them from their homes: murders of relatives, gang extortion and the forcible recruitment of the young, teenagers, into the criminal underworld, or as many contend, the real government where the line between officials and outlaws melds into one obscure if powerful and suffocating structure.

“We are fleeing delinquency,” they exclaim almost in unison.

Many former residents of Guerrero and Michoacan, states long embroiled in narco-violence, constitute the group encamped along a narrow side street. For the southerners from warmer climes, the borderland’s deep December chill presents a real challenge. El Diario de Juarez reported that the temperature plummeted to 25 degrees Fahrenheit on December 18.

Like their recent predecessors, the campers complain of lack of support from the Mexican government. No portable bathrooms, such the ones installed at a similar encampment outside another international bridge a few miles down the road, service the site; two men say they must pay five pesos to access the bathrooms on the Mexican portion of the Santa Fe Bridge and 50 pesos to take a shower in nearby hotels.

Food and clothing, however, are provided by a voluntary outpouring of Good Samaritans from Juarez, El Paso and other parts of the United States, especially from Christian churches. “Really, the local people have behaved beautifully,” an asylum seeker says. As the man talks, smiling folks swoop through the camp, delivering fresh burritos. If it weren’t for the civil society solidarity, hunger would prevail, he says.

In contravention of U.S. asylum law, two men say they were prevented from entering El Paso on multiple occasions, according to one man’s words, about “30 times” by CBP guards posted on the Santa Fe Bridge who argue there is no room to accommodate them at the moment.

Instead, they are part of a “metering” system in which families and individuals are called in small groups by CBP to come over and make their initial asylum claim. According to the Santa Fe Bridge group’s spokesperson, 67 families and 250 persons are currently on their list to cross.

A man who claims two months at the bridge says nobody was allowed into this country the day of interview, one family was permitted in the day before and not a single soul two days prior.

Many people who were previously at the encampment gave up and returned home, he adds. A group of women complain that children, including toddlers, who did make it across were asked inappropriate questions for their age by U.S. immigration authorities about violence.

In recent days, about 50 people from the Santa Fe Bridge encampment who were earlier permitted to enter the U.S. were deported back to Juarez, according to a pair of men. The asylum hopefuls report that some members of their group who were admitted into the U.S. wound up with family members, while others were held in immigrant detention centers in El Paso and New Mexico- sometimes for weeks at a time.

Dashing along the line of rudimentary tents, a young man says he was released from a New Mexico detention center after a judge decided he had no “credible fear” and agreeing to a voluntary departure instead of appealing the case. For now, he’s waiting for his brother to be released from immigrant detention. What will the siblings do?  “We don’t have family here,” the rejected asylum seeker says.” They’re all over (in the U.S.). My brother and I will return alone.” The U.S. officials have given him no real option, he says, even though the cartels pose a danger in the particular neck of the woods he fled.

He makes a prediction based on his experience with the U.S. asylum process: Many more deportees are going to trod through the streets of Juarez soon. And he gives the new deportees a moniker: “No Credible Fears.”

As pointed out by the Texas Tribune’s Julian Aguilar in a recent article, the sending of migrants back to Mexico stands in contrast to the Trump administration’s travel warnings to U.S. citizens about Mexico. An updated State Department travel advisory dated December 17, warns U.S. visitors to not visit either Guerrero or Michoacan, places from which many of the refugees stranded in Juarez hail. Similar warnings stand for Tamaulipas, Colima and Sinaloa.

Added to this contradiction can be the White House’s insistence on building a border wall as well as the President’s contemplation of designating the cartels as terrorist groups. In other words, the same country is not safe for U.S. citizens but safe for Mexican citizens, according to the varied pronunciations of federal officials.

At a December 17 meeting in Juarez, Mexican municipal, state and federal officials along with unnamed migrant advocates discussed consolidating the interview wait lists from the three international bridges in the city where refugees are camped out. In a press release, Rogelio Pinal, chief of Juarez’s municipal human rights department, was quoted as saying that children’s exposure to the cold and health conditions was likewise considered by the participants.

According to Pinal, the number of people at the camps has dropped to 650 individuals. Other accounts report that some Mexican asylum seekers are not camped out at the bridges because they have found lodging with relatives or friends or at hotels if they can afford the rent.

Separately, El Diario cited a senior Chihuahua state migrant official December 18 as stating that time has run out for the campers at the bridges and authorities would place the asylum seekers in migrant shelters. “They can’t be (there) any more, for the safety of the children,” Enrique Valenzuela of the Coespo state migrant agency was quoted.

Until now, many refugees at the Santa Fe Bridge have opposed to moving to the migrant shelters because of their distance from the international bridges and due to fears of losing a place on the waiting lists.

A fellow who’s says he’s left everything behind-job, property and home-and waited patiently for his turn at an asylum claims he will weather the bitter winter. He vows not to agree to voluntary departure, struggle through the entire legal process and endure detention if that is what it takes.

“We are looking for protection, not to live the good life as they say,” the man insists. “The American Dream doesn’t exist.” New people are still trickling into the refugee camp, but at far lower numbers than in recent months, he reports. But in his estimation, that situation could change after the winter passes and more people undertake a risky asylum odyssey.

On Student Peer-to-Peer Economic Power

By: December 20, 2019
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You can’t get the right answers if you don’t ask the right questions.

“What are the jobs of the future?” is the wrong question to ask about both work and education. It presumes a capitalist class determining the structure of employment and therefore the structure of schools.

The right question is: “How will communities organize themselves to meet their needs?”

A democratic system of education should never accept the neoliberal economy as a given. Instead, we should understand how a new economy, a new politics, and a new educational system must all be created together.

Emerging out of Ella Baker’s work in the 1960s with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Algebra Project is exploring this nexus of economics, politics, and education. In Baltimore alone, Algebra Project students have earned more than $4 million over the last decade by sharing mathematical and organizing skills with their peers. Their local organization is a youth-run, democratically governed collective that has inserted itself into political questions at the local, state and national levels while advancing the participants’ education—both inside and outside of school. (See, for example, The Nation’s 2012 article, “Baltimore Algebra Project Stops Youth Detention Center.”)

Another Algebra Project affiliate, The Young People’s Project (TYPP), has sites in many states where young people have earned millions more dollars in a cascade of near-peer relationships. College students teach math and coding to high school students, who run number theory games with middle and elementary school students. The National Science Foundation has awarded TYPP extensive grants to try to understand better how this structure helps construct mathematical identities.

We should understand these initiatives and others like them as much more than a “program” supplementing existing educational structures. Paying young people to share knowledge and skills with peers is an organizing strategy to challenge the distribution of economic and political power. In fact, this strategy could be key to the long-term success of the new radical teacher movements and to bottom-up, community-based political insurgencies.

Millions of oppressed young people in the United States and elsewhere have already rejected schooling as a false promise. Their power is greatly underestimated. Even unorganized they interrupt the educational authorities at every turn. They have made sure that every technocratic reform for fifty years has failed miserably. Those reforms would work if young people just did what they were told. But they don’t. They refuse to learn what they are “taught,” and instead they learn what they want—which is a great deal, but it doesn’t show up on the schools’ tests.

Young people under oppression interrupt the educational authorities because they have correctly analyzed the economics and the politics of neoliberalism and racial caste. There’s no room for the poor, except as disposable, part-time, seasonal, low-wage labor at best. In the Algebra Project, we label what the schools offer now as “sharecropper education.” Sharecroppers were only allowed as much education as they needed to do the work allotted to them—planting and harvesting crops owned by someone else on land that wasn’t theirs. Millions of public-school students today also receive only as much education as they need to do the work allotted to this generation: sweeping malls, cleaning hotels, working cash registers, patrolling whiter spaces as security guards. Six years after graduation, the median annual earnings of former Baltimore City high school students is $15,000. Those students have been “prepared” for $15,000 a year jobs. The official line is that they’re entitled to a “world-class” education, but the masters won’t invest in what that takes. They won’t invest because they only need oppressed poor to perform low-skill work, so why educate for better? Most young people see through the ruse by about the sixth grade.

The Algebra Project, The Young People’s Project and similar organizations create economically viable structures parallel to schools where young people from schools of poverty are startled to find (1) that they can learn, (2) that they can organize for power, (3) that money isn’t only given by capitalists to wage-earners like food to dogs, but can be generated and shared by collectives through work that is democratically determined. The experience of participating in such an organization creates radical consciousness and leads to new possibilities of many kinds.

Changing the structure of education in poor communities to accommodate paid peer-to-peer knowledge work will also change economic and political structures. Throw out the 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. babysitting structure. Picture this instead: A group of friends starts their day going to a local rec center for an exercise class taught by paid peers, cooling down afterwards at a student-run snack bar/teen-health hub that offers nutritious food, health information, referrals for students with worries, and free condoms. They then go to their own jobs at a nearby elementary school where they do math with fifth graders. Their specialty, for example, might be geometric art, showing the amazing but relatively simple forms that can be constructed with a ruler and compass, or with dynamic software on a computer or phone. Their fifth graders eventually share with parents how they make circles inscribed in triangles by finding the intersection of angle bisectors. The high schoolers then make their way to their own high school math class, where, in addition to a skilled teacher, older or same-age peers help them learn new ways to explore circles and triangles at a more advanced level, using ideas from trigonometry, for example. In the afternoon, one of the friends attends play rehearsal, run by paid peers, where she is developing a role in an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, while another friend goes off to work on an oral history project with some paid youth researchers. A third member of this group goes to a scheduled stint at a worksite, learning from a peer how to do electrical wiring in a house that is getting renovated, supervised by a licensed electrician from the community. Another student, a strong athlete, ends the afternoon in a varsity practice, and another, who loves basketball but isn’t very good at it, plays in a youth-run intramural league. In the evening the friends watch a live-streamed political poetry slam managed for pay by some other young people at a cultural center downtown.

The academic and economic benefits of such a structure are immediately obvious. No one doubts, and all available research confirms, that young people like to learn from other young people. They also like to teach each other. In fact, they exchange knowledge all the time outside the competitive confines of modern schooling: transportation routes, dances, gaming strategies, relationship networks, apps, song lyrics, fashion. Many schools do dabble in peer or near-peer tutoring, but very few think much beyond a tutoring relationship and almost none include wages in the structure.

For students in poor communities, the wages are crucial. Pressure mounts on adolescents to bring home cash as their needs begin to expand. They eat more, take up more space, care more about how they look, stay more connected to their peer group, travel further afield, and develop more interests than they did when they were small. All those things cost money. Teenagers can bring home cash. They have most of the capacities of adults. But our current political economy is structured to keep adolescents economically inactive—except for menial or underground labor.

When democratic practices are added to peer-to-peer knowledge structures, possibilities expand even further. Students learn that they don’t have to defer to people who are older, but undertake to make their own work assignments, budgets, and program plans. They negotiate contracts with schools to pay them for leading study groups or athletic camps. They even market themselves as capable of running professional development activities for teachers. Why not? They know how young people learn. Their knowledge is valuable. All these things take place currently in Baltimore’s peer-to-peer organizations.

Harold McDougall in his wonderful book Black Baltimore explains how grassroots political organizing requires “base communities”—bigger than a family, smaller than a church. A base community is a place where communities in struggle develop political skills, make plans, reflect on what is working and what is not, regroup and hold each other accountable. The Algebra Project founder, Bob Moses, explains that small, grassroots meeting spaces served the same function for what he calls the “Mississippi Theater” of the Voting Rights Movement in the early 1960s. I have heard the same sentiment from veterans of the South African freedom struggle: the oppressed learn in small spaces how to make demands on themselves and on each other, so that they can grow strong enough to turn outward and make demands on the larger society.

Peer-to-peer knowledge exchanges create exactly this kind of base community. They meet young people’s need for cash at the same time as they shift community understanding of who produces knowledge: not only a teacher, not only an employer, not only adults, but also young people themselves. Two Baltimore students—now adults—who “grew up” in after-school structures like these are working on a film project to show how a different economic and political consciousness can develop. They remarked that virtually every employed young person depicted in film or television is flipping burgers, washing cars, or sweeping something. Their film, by contrast, shows typical Baltimore scenes and dramas, but the heroes do peer-to-peer knowledge work, and so operate with a different consciousness. They expect each other to know things of a technical nature. They have experience determining their own employment structures. They have some understanding of the intersection of politics, economics, and education, and they have collectively intervened in the arrangements society has made for them, to make those arrangements better.

The new, radical teachers’ union movement across the United States is crucially important. And we should also remember that the interests of public-school teachers are not always identical to the interests of public-school students. Radical teachers recognize that supporting youth power strengthens teacher organizing, but organized young people may sometimes push their own agendas, and teachers should be prepared to follow them. They want to work, and they want to work in jobs that advance their education and their interests, not jobs that track them towards the bottom.  They want a say not just in the dynamics of classrooms, but also in the structure of schools more generally, in the relation between school and work, in requirements for diplomas, in curricula that addresses their material and cultural needs, in who they allow to teach them, and in how public resources are allocated. Currently, the most adults generally envision is “youth voice.” What young people want is youth power.

The great benefit of youth employment in knowledge work for teacher/student partnerships is that older students can mitigate one of the major problems radical teachers face: large class sizes, too much student need, and disengaged students. Bored high school students waste their days avoiding adult authority, while a few blocks away distressed teachers try to respond to thirty young children’s needs and demands all at once. Help the high school students organize themselves into knowledge-work collectives, and then pay them to spend part of each day inspiring elementary schoolers with their commitment to learning and youth power. In the process, radical teachers get breathing room to support great lessons, positive community relationships, and a new vision of economic and political possibility. Young people learn to differentiate people—old and young—who are supportive of what they themselves identify as in their interest, as opposed to others—mostly older—who are afraid of them, judgmental, or dismissive. Many radical teachers do ally with student leaders. We need to go a step further so that radical teachers understand how to create space for and then support a whole economy of student knowledge production which will necessarily evolve its own politics.

What do we need to make these visions a reality? Three things:

First, we need great lessons, curriculum, things to do with students that respond to their material and cultural conditions. Work on this front has been going on all over the country for decades and is flourishing. It’s not mainstreamed for the most part, but it’s also not hard to find.

Second, we need money to pay young people year-round, and to support 20-30-year-olds in full-time careers giving stability and continuity to the youth-run enterprises. In Baltimore we estimate that 10% of the city’s education, police, and carceral budgets would be enough to fund $5,000-$10,000 a year in employment for every high school student in the city, with millions left over to pay for a cohort of 20-30 year old near-peer leaders.

Third, we need organizers to find adults who already have great relationships with young people (both inside and outside of schools) and to help them develop peer-to-peer structures that match young people’s interests and community needs. Organizing strategies need to be developed bottom-up so that students can, for example, earn credit through their participation in a peer-to-peer activity instead of through seat-time in a boring class. And strategies need to be developed to interrupt schooling and policing as we know them, so that funding can start to get reallocated into youth employment in knowledge work.

In many parts of the country, these three pieces are nascent and ready to combine in powerful ways. Building awareness of the radical change emerging from paid peer-to-peer collectives will be an important next step. Millions of young people are essentially sitting idle. They represent billions of hours of lost productivity in economic terms, and they represent a source of political energy that in historical terms has been crucial to most revolutions. We should hold their gifts in high esteem, and should listen to their own articulations of what they need in order to commit themselves to organized struggle. They need cash, and they need meaning.

A Brief Introduction to the Saga of the Labor Movement for Emerging Militants

By: December 20, 2019
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This piece is the text of a talk given to the Democratic Socialists of America Lower Manhattan Branch’s Political Education Working Group on December 4, 2019, serving as introduction to “Bernie and Labor” part of its series “Why Bernie?”

The picture on the right represents the Haymarket Riot, Chicago, May 4, 1886, when police attacked a labor demonstration demanding the eight-hour day and protesting the May 1 disruption of an earlier protest march. The massacre was one of many attacks by police against labor initiatives.

I have ten minutes to present the briefest of introductions on some few salient points pertaining to a history of workers’ struggles in the U.S. Good luck to that! Offering a systemic view of the nearly 200 years of domestic labor struggles, triumphs, tragedies and legacies in just one sixth of an hour is akin to tackling the briefest histories of the Roman Conquests, resurrection in the fractured Holy Roman Empire and its homicidal if not its farcical reiteration in the Nazi Thousand Year Reich that mercifully lasted just 12 years. But like a centurion, I shall soldier on.

What follows are some basic if necessarily sketchy assumptions.

First, we need to understand that most if not all of labor’s key breakthroughs, including the huge industrial union upsurges that followed immediately after World War I and then repeated so magnificently in the 1930s, were not primarily the product of either progressive politicians such as FDR and his brain trust or even talented, foresighted labor leaders like John L. Lewis, but were initiatives originating at the base.

We can thank the late former seafarer, longshoreman and talented socialist writer, Stan Weir, for developing the idea of informal work-groups that in the worst of times for labor maintained a militant resistance on the job to capital’s many plans, especially for slowing down production and asserting workplace rights. It was their solidarity at work that was the seedbed for future breakthroughs. To put it simply, it was a centuries long battle over workplace control.

Even from the heights of wisdom of a Eugene Debs, who presciently said “I would not lead you to the promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out,” to the depths of the mendacious Dave Beck, the corrupt leader of the 1950s Teamsters Union, who bragged that “unions are big business. Why should truck drivers and bottle washers be allowed to make big decisions affecting union policy. Would corporations allow it?” I would argue that the key to union success is less the talented perpetual leader and more the recognition and nurturing of rank-and-file working class self-activity. For DSA work in labor, even more than the recognition and lionizing of a scattered, precious few sublime labor leaders—and such did and do exist—it is working class self-activity that ought to be our socialist lodestone

Even prior to the three huge, radically lead strikes in 1934 that preceded and were catalytic in forming the mass unionization drives of the 1935-42 period –those being the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike, lead by independent radicals, the Minnesota Teamsters Trotskyist militants successes in organizing over-the-road drivers and the Communist-led San Francisco General Strike—was the prior growth of those informal work groups that determined the real pace of work and became the shock troops for effecting mass actions in the face of business and government opposition.

Working people were their own emancipators when it came to halting such malign corporate practices as upping the speed of the line, promoting the discriminatory tyranny of the “Open Shop,” using invidious race and gender discrimination to divide workers, and encouraging vigilante and private police attacks. Theirs was in great measure if not exclusively a movement from below, and much ensuing labor history was a struggle not just between unions and management but just as today between rank-and-file workers and an increasingly bureaucratic trade union leadership counter-intuitively comprising even former shop-floor militants doing management and government’s job of tamping down shop-floor militancy, all in the name of labor peace and contract unionism.

The term of art used to describe the goal of workers enfranchisement was “industrial democracy,” meant as the corollary to “political democracy” and itself understood by socialists as far more subversive than were such palliatives as German-style “co-determination” and “labor-management teams” expressing an alleged but bogus cross-class interest.

Industrial democracy was always about control of the workplace. The early strategy for achieving that control goal was to form industrial unions, that is, unions representing not just skilled workers, the modern equivalent of artisans, but all workers, be their skills and/or payment high or low. The early Knights of Labor, formally the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, was an industrial union. It couldn’t survive police and military repression or one of many economic downturns.  The unions that emerged in the late 1930s to become the core of the Congress of Industrial Organizations were at long last industrially based, though entire histories are now being written showing that even these unions were laggard in enfranchising women and people of color into leadership positions.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886, was a coalition of existing craft unions representing skilled artisans and journeymen—yes, exclusively white, non-immigrant men—that eschewed not only semi- and unskilled workers, but for the most part refused to admit women, blacks and new immigrants. Its saving grace over earlier union efforts was its ability to survive a series of economic collapses, the first U.S. labor organization to do so. Its fault, as socialist saw it, was practicing “business unionism” in contradistinction to a much preferred and necessary “class struggle” unionism.

An exception to the rule of AFL affiliates abjuring the unskilled was the Mine Workers, established on industrial lines and who organized every worker it could involved in bituminous (or soft coal) and anthracite (or hard coal) extraction.

But for radicals, the sterling example of organizing across craft and unskilled lines was the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, the Wobblies) who stressed direct action and not contracts to win what workers needed. (And note the IWW’s correct name. I wish I had 100 dollars for every time I saw the name rendered as International Workers of the World; I’d have retired earlier than I did.) The IWW’s strength, as you’d expect from syndicalists, was in leading direct-action struggles. Their weak point was an aversion to signing any contracts, no matter how fine-tuned the package, an expression less of ideological rigidity than a reflection of their origins in the American West, where work was seasonal and employers rapacious.

Unlike the Wobblies, socialist trade unionists sought to “bore from within” the AFL in an effort to make it representative of all industrial workers, not just the skilled; their intentions were anti-capitalist. A sterling example was the post World War One Trade Union Education League, led by former Wobbly and sadly later Stalinist hack William Z. Foster, who in his better days was a key organizer of the massive but ill-starred 1919 Steel Strike. As an ex-Wobbly professor of mine once joked, “boring from within means you can only bore half way.”

Another point worth stressing in trying to get a handle on labor history is distinguishing between strategies and tactics. The two are not the same, though they are commonly rooted, and they bear understanding in current DSA discussions about industrializing comrades into union jobs. The effort to do so is indeed tactical, but that doesn’t minimize its importance. A tactic is what enables a strategy to succeed. It is the workable adjunct of an overarching strategy. If as I would argue, the left’s strategy regarding labor is to assist its worker members and allies in forming a militant minority in the workplace—a strategy best if not only exemplified by the militant shop stewards’ movements in both Britain and Germany post WWI—the process of implanting young radicals as catalysts into key union work-sites is the tactic most likely to build a coherent, fire-breathing opposition in workplaces. Salted as they will be, they can come to understand that the fight is not just for wages, hours, and health care and retirement benefits, but is just as viscerally to challenging the employers’ right to manage. From the imposition of time and motion studies (Taylorism)  to maximizing a workers’ output  unto exhaustion, including today’s battle with the predatory Amazon over turning workers into adjuncts of robots, the battle for control over the pace of production and distribution is ongoing still.

That’s a key reason why I believe the “rank and file strategy” much bruited about in DSA makes sense. It’s a mistake to write it off, as some have, as “fetishizing” a tactic at the expense of strategizing. If any fetishizing goes on, it doesn’t so much come from advocates of industrializing as from academicized and literary Marxists who sadly view our class in the abstract. It means at bottom that militants have to fight on two fronts. The first is the widely understood need to defend and advance labor interests against employers. The second is no less important: to build militant oppositions capable of turning unions into democratically run, fighting organizations against entrenched, compromised leaderships.

Spend any time in a unionized or non-unionized job and any romantic notions are replaced with some hard if countervailing facts. Working people are exploited, abused, and in a key position to be their own liberators. Nothing in that vein at least has changed for centuries.

Case in point as to what’s really missing on the left: I spent two hours at a Verso event recently. The topic was Bernie, whom all the speakers supported. So far, so good. The use of “working class” was also much cast about by panelists, but with almost no specificity. Ditto labor. Unions in that discourse didn’t exist, even as targets for needing to get aboard Bernie’s bandwagon, which to date they have not. Even the ostensibly pro-worker Working Families Party has opted for Elizabeth Warren. No mention by panelists even of the exemplary if sparse cases so far (ex: the National Nurse United, the United Electrical Workers and especially how the huge UTLA teachers union in Los Angeles county is the sterling example of getting Bernie right, despite its parent union the AFT tops’ aversion to the left and the mainstream twaddle that dominates the Teachers union here in NYC, which recently honored Joe Biden). The Verso meeting’s exchanges were all inside the beltway politics, though thankfully of a better and more thoughtful kind at least than the pap routinely exuded on CNN and MSNBC.

The reality is that the left will never be a force against capital so long as key sections of its proponents are not largely at the point of production and distribution, both leading and learning. As Sean O’Casey once put it to a young radical miner looking for advice on how to become a writer, “A Communist [for that was what he was] has to know how to talk to a shepherd about sheep.” But most of all, O’Casey added, “he has to know how to listen.”

To my mind, helping to build a militant minority in the workplace is in many ways even more important than electoral work, if dealing a death blow to capital is the long-term goal, though the two needn’t be counterpoised. Bernie himself knows this, as when he says “I can’t do this alone.” The old socialist isn’t just calling for more door-knockers, nor should we DSAers.

Today’s labor movement shows signs of reviving, even though much needs to be done. In 1955, when the AFL and CIO merged, slightly more than one in three workers was organized. Today less than one in ten are represented by unions, with the largest number being public sector employees. Growth since the 1970s has been largely in the public sector; private sector workers comprise just some six percent of the total.

A late 1940s effort to organize the South, “Operation Dixie,” in a section of the U.S. notorious for stymieing union efforts, is explainable in part due to the unions’ failed efforts to bridge the racial divide along with its purging of Communists and assorted radicals from union positions—in effect crippling the organizing effort by expelling some of its most talented organizers. A post-1998 effort to create a more robust trade union alliance, lead by the Service Employees International Union, the Teamsters and a few others went nowhere, while seriously disrupting long-needed organizing efforts aimed at growing the movement and ginning up the bulk of the remaining AFL-CIO affiliates. The effort was then sold as building “union density,” which in practice meant selling out present workers, forcing through inferior contracts, trusteeing dissident locals—all to acculuate new if ill-served members, in effect a zero-sum game.

SEIU’s then president, Ivy League graduate Andy Stern, is gone from the labor movement and now a prime adviser to the nefarious, privatizing Broad Foundation, a billionaire-backed charter-school group. The renegade Stern sits on other corporate boards, advocating for a universal basic income in contradistinction to empowering a resurgent labor movement.

Without necessarily buying into the conservative argument that explains such selling out as part of an “iron law of oligarchy,” it is worth noting that it’s what the class does as a whole and not the depredations of individuals that is key. Without discounting setbacks, from the routinization of the talented and innovative William Z. Foster to the once seemingly sparkling and now despicable Andy Stern (how naive we were!), or today’s emerging scandals attaching to top leaders in the United Auto Workers and American Federation of Government Employees, to name a few, it’s what the class does in the main that matters most. Anything we Reds can do to advance that insurgent control agenda by the base of our working class needs doing now.

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