America has seen almost two weeks of protests against the murder of George Floyd. The anger and disappointment against this hate crime and a spate of others over the last few months are palpable. Floyd’s death appears to have sparked a civil rights movement the likes of which Americans have not seen in decades. Even mainstream media are acknowledging the need to address systemic and structural racism in this country.
But as this movement against systemic anti-blackness continues to take shape, and while we protest the brutalities of individual anti-black actors and the institutions they represent, it’s really important that we call out this “system” by its name–racial capitalism,which has always functioned through racial domination and class hierarchies, on appropriated land. Regardless of our race, ethnicity, gender identities, and class positions–and whether we are American citizens, aspiring citizens, permanent residents, or temporary immigrant workers in this country–it’s vital that we confront this truth that, to some of us, might still appear to be “too left-wing” and/or “mere academic talk.” Following the decimation of the Native American tribes and the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade, “democratic” capitalism in America has, since its inception, fed on racialized violence and devalued labor.
This argument, while not novel, is worth reviving and bringing into the public conversation about systemic racism, simply because it still remains unpalatable to many American citizens and immigrants in this country, including some progressive liberals protesting Floyd’s murder and the racial injustice it represents. And in the spirit of making black lives matter, it also makes sense to turn to W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the first black voices to diagnose the workings of racial capitalism.
Written during the Great Depression, Du Bois’s short essay “Marxism and the Negro Problem” remains a hard-hitting primer on this topic. In this essay, Du Bois stresses the importance of racialized labor, specifically the division between African American and white labor that had begun to shape American capitalism since the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century: “It is white labor that deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education . . . expels him from decent houses and neighborhoods, and heaps upon him the public insults of open color discrimination.” For Du Bois, whiteness is not just a skin color but the system that values the work done by white bodies far more than the work done by African American and other non-white bodies. Non-white labor is integral to the “flourishing” of this system, but it must also be devalued by the system. It is this systemic privileging of white labor that drives a wedge between the black and white working classes, even as both groups are exploited by the white owners of capital. Thus, Du Bois does not romanticize the “American dream.” For him, this dream is also a narrative of exploitation and cutthroat opportunism: “In America, we have seen a wild and ruthless scramble of labor groups over each other in order to climb to wealth on the backs of black labor and foreign immigrants.”
The engine of racial capitalism, then, is not just racism but the desire for socioeconomic mobility that remains bound up with the class and racial status that whiteness represents. Racial capitalism is successful because it is able to sow this desire in the working class. As Du Bois writes: “Common labor in America . . . far from being motivated by any vision of revolt against capitalism has been blinded by the American vision of the possibility of layer after layer of the workers escaping into the wealthy class and becoming managers and employers of labor.” Class mobility becomes a lure for a new managerial “petty bourgeois” class that emerges from the American working class. Crucially, African American and other non-white workers–while having to work much harder than their white counterparts to become petty bourgeois–are not immune to this lure of lucre. The more privileged among the racially oppressed thus come to occupy a contradictory social position. Du Bois sees this group as emulating white labor, exploiting and devaluing “Negro labor . . . here and there” while also facing racial discrimination “since they express . . . the aspirations of all black folk for emancipation.” Thus, in addition to blatant discrimination, racial capitalism also creates a situation where some minorities (and some progressive whites) protest racism but are unwilling to challenge class hierarchies that sustain divisions both across and within racial categories. Racism and liberal antiracism work together to keep intact the value of whiteness and white capital.
George Floyd was lynched not in 1933 but in 2020. And yet, the fact that he was murdered over a $20 bill tells us that the devaluation of black life and labor remains endemic to what Stephen Gill calls “disciplinary neoliberalism.” The brutal force of the “law” – representing, above all, the interests of individual and white capital–is produced by the same system that ensures that the wealth gap between blacks and whites is still as wide as it was in 1968. This is also the system that acknowledges America’s reliance on the labor of undocumented immigrant farmworkers, workers whom it calls “essential,” and yet whose health it refuses to protect during a pandemic. Fighting this horrific exploitation and deprecation of racialized labor has to be a priority of any movement to change the system.
At the same time, non-white complicity needs to scrutinize itself while protesting white supremacy. Take the police force for instance. BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of color – ed.] activists and scholars are rightly reminding us that the origins of policing lie in slave patrols in the American South. But we also need to confront the reality that the police in its current form, while being primarily white, includes black and other minorities in its ranks. According to a 2015 New York Times report, 25% of America’s police officers are minorities. We don’t need statistics or studies to argue that this diversity has not made the police more racially sensitive. In fact, a 2017 study demonstrated that, as a minority in the police force, African American officers are likely to adhere to the racist and repressive norms of this institution, to prove that they “belong.” Minority police labor serves the interests of white capital, and perhaps not least because it bears the promise of rising above poverty and oppression by representing the law, along with an income that, in 25 of 50 American states, is 150 percent or more than the median salary.
Think here of the complicity of the Hmong American police officer Tou Thao who was managing the crowd while his superior white officer Derek Chauvin asphyxiated Floyd. We cannot, for obvious reasons, equate Thao’s actions with the white privilege and supremacy that Chauvin demonstrated. Rather, Thao’s complicity needs to be viewed through the hierarchy between the Hmong American and the white American in Minneapolis, a long history of socioeconomic tensions between Hmongs and African Americans in that city, the low-income status of the Hmong American community among Asian Americans, and indeed the CIA’s recruitment of Hmong tribesmen to fight communist North Vietnamese in Laos during the Vietnam War.
Dismantling white privilege and “white fragility,” alongside rethinking policing, are no doubt essential for making black lives matter in the face of white supremacy. But these measures alone, while curbing manifestations of racism, won’t be enough to snuff out its systemic nature. We cannot undo the system of racial capitalism until we also take a hard look at our own complicities with the regimes of labor and profit within which our own lives–non-white and white–remain embedded. Let’s also not forget here the complicity of an administration led by the first African American president, one that contributed very significantly to the militarization of the police and, therefore, very directly to anti-black violence in America. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor reminds us in a recent article in The New Yorker, “the weakness of the U.S. social-welfare state has deep roots, but it was irreversibly torn when Democrats were at the helm.” We cannot unsee this violence while talking about reforming or defunding the police.
This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.
George Floyd, the black man whose murder by white police officer set off weeks of national protests against police brutality and racism, was buried on June 9 in his hometown of Houston. Still demonstrations continued in myriad forms, from rallies and marches to car caravans and protest parades of hundreds of bicyclists. Local governments have now restrained the police who attacked earlier demonstrations so violently. In Seattle, after the mayor closed a local police station and removed police from the Capitol Hill neighborhood, local radicals and residents declared it an autonomous zone that some have compared to the Paris Commune of 1871. President Donald Trump, of course, has called upon the mayor to take back the city.
Polls show that 80 percent of Americans support the protests that took place in 700 cities in all 50 states and which have fostered in virtually every institution, from public agencies to private businesses, a national discussion about racism.
The entire country is involved in debates over the role of the police and the use of the National Guard in violently suppressing the demonstrations, as well as over Trump’s use of the Guard to attack peaceful protestors at the White House and his threat to use the Army to crush the movement. Both the secretary of defense and the top American general broke with Trump on those issues. Many retired military leaders have spoke out against Trump’s threat to use the Army. Political leaders, mostly Democrats but also some Republicans, criticized Trump’s posturing as a dictator.
There is also a deeper discussion over demands to defund the police. The demand to defund the police comes from the left movement that calls for defunding, disarming, and abolishing the police and prisons. While a majority of the Minneapolis city council says that it will abolish its current police force and create a new public safety organization, almost everywhere else the slogan defund is interpreted by politicians, the press, and many in the movement to mean cuts in the police budget and the reallocation of funds to mental health, drug programs, and other social services. The Democratic Socialists of America have launched a national campaign to defund the police. And in Congress the Democratic Party has introduced legislation for police reform.
Also being debated is the role of police unions that defend police officers who are accused of racist behavior and violent acts. The police unions, many of which support Trump, also often take conservative positions on criminal justice issues, such as opposing parole. Some on the left want the AFL-CIO, the national labor federation, to expel the police unions, but the AFl-CIO has called for their reform.
Other institutions have begun to take steps on questions of race. NASCAR, the corporation that organizes car races, where nearly all of the drivers and 80 percent of fans are white, has banned the Confederate flag, the flag of the southern slave states in the Civil War, which has often been flown by drivers and fans. Top generals in the U.S. Army expressed a willingness to rename ten U.S. military bases in the South that now bear the names of Confederate generals. There is also renewed debate over removing statues of Confederate generals, some in Southern states and others in the national Capitol building.
Meanwhile, in the midst of the national reopening of the economy, the coronavirus surges once again in the southern Sunbelt from Florida to Arizona as 22 of 50 states have rising case numbers. And 40 million workers remain unemployed, as Trump is about to restart his presidential campaign with mass rallies, further endangering public health. At present only 38 percent of voters approve of Trump’s while 57 percent disapprove; and the president has fallen 10 points behind Joseph Biden, the Democratic Party candidate. At the moment, Trump seems headed for defeat.
The passionate uprising that began in Minneapolis after police murdered George Floyd quickly spread across the country and around the world, is now the biggest upheaval since 1968. It beautifully illuminates the power and possibility for revolution in the raging fires of burning police precincts and cop cars. But in order for this passion, this righteous rage, to succeed in the face of intensifying police repression, mobilized National Guards, and a military standing ready for urban warfare, the movement must transform itself for sustained rebellion.
From the moment Trump announced his candidacy for president, many have warned that he is a fascist and of the broader threat he represents. He admires dictators and wants to be president for life, uses phrases like “civil war” as trial balloons, asserts he has absolute power, and is blaiming Democrats for trying to steal the upcoming election, while the Attorney General weaponizes this rhetoric in a dangerous narrative of theocratic crusade. Reacting to the uprising, Trump has incited whitesupremacist violence, branded anti-fascists as terrorists, deployed an unmarked army in DC, and wants to “dominate” the nation. We must confront the possibility that this imperialist metropole, settler-colonial empire, and authoritarian state otherwise known as the US republic will further degenerate toward fascism. Trump is using the passionate uprising as an excuse to continually intensify state repression, sowing chaos and fear as a means to remain in power. Trump, like Hitler and his own coup, wants to “provoke the semblance of civil war.”[1] The uprising may be his own “Reichstag fire moment.”
We need militantinfrastructure organized as part of a growing systemic alternative; people’s assemblies rooted in the mutual aid necessary to sustain the rebellion and coordinate strike waves as the election draws near. We are witnessing rising worker militancy in wildcat strikes, rent strikes with rapidly spreading tenant unions, mutual aid proliferating in response to pandemic, and now a passionate uprising in over 500 cities. There is widespread recognition of the fascist threat that stands against us. To not seize this moment to help sustain the passionate uprising in the streets, we risk annihilation. In the recent words of a Jewish Auschwitz death camp survivor, “one day you wake up and it’s too late.” We must make sure that day does not arrive, again.
Prior to the murder of George Floyd and the passionate uprising sparked by his death, an organization in Mississippi called Cooperation Jackson put out a call for an ongoing series of monthly strikes. Together with those who responded, they established People’s Strike with actions that began May 1st. The monthly actions were not intended to be a general strike, a work stoppage at a singular point in time with the intent to sustain until demands are met. They are a series of actions on the first of each month going forward; “non-violent direct action conducted in a coordinated campaign” in hopes of leading to a general strike in the future. Against the threat of a broader fascist seizure of power, building a sustained rebellion capable of launching a general strike around the elections is critical.
As part of their own efforts, Cooperation Jackson built what they call “People’s Assemblies.” They are “a vehicle of democratic social organization that, when properly organized, allows people to exercise their agency, exert their power, and practice democracy…in its broadest terms.”[2] Their first assembly came out of mutual aid work within the Mississippi Disaster Relief Coalition that emerged in response to Hurricane Katrina.[3] Today, the disaster is white supremacist violence, a police state, and a fascist threat. If People’s Assemblies were to spread within the passionate uprising as a form of self-organization, their role would likely fluctuate with the ebb and flow of a sustained rebellion itself, that is, for both offense and defense.
They “can function as a genuine ‘dual power’ and assume many of the functions of the government,” while also to “defend the people…fight to maintain as many of the gains it won as possible, and prepare for the next upsurge.”[4] People’s assemblies can be democratic spaces for the articulation of movement goals and demands, the coordination of mutual aid like solidarity kitchens to sustain the struggle, for community-based self-defense forces, and more. The question becomes whether or not we will see these forms of democratic self-organization proliferate. With Trump intensifying state repression as the threat of fascism barrels toward us with the November elections, time is fleeting. We can, however, turn to numerous recent examples from around the world for inspiration and lessons, just as we can look to the history of struggles here.
Mutual Aid, People’s Assemblies, and Strikes: Puerto Rico, Chile, and France
In response to Covid-19, communities come together in mutual aid efforts throughout the so-called United States withwidespreadmediacoverage. Practices include aggregating and delivering groceries, medicine, and other essential supplies. Some make and deliver pre-packaged, prepared meals. Some provide services including translation or interpretation, running general errands, childcare, eldercare, and mental health support. Some have also taken on the DIY production of face masks, hand sanitizer, and cleaning solution.
It’s Going Down and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief both maintain growing lists of these undertakings, while Resource Generation maintains a list of mutual aid funds. Amidst the economic depression triggered by pandemic, mutual aid practices will only increasingly become necessary in order for this passionate uprising of righteous rage to sustain itself. We are already seeing it emerge within protests in Brooklyn and DC, though it will take more than “ad hoc supply chains” to sustain this struggle. To sustain, we will also need systems like People’s Solidarity Brigades. Yet, it is within the experience of rage then passionately taking to the streets that imbues within us a feeling and recognition of our power, that the systems we put in place to sustain this rebellion are the tools of our collective liberation.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria September 2017, mutual aid efforts proliferated throughout Puerto Rico. Out of the horrific devastation, communities came together to provide immediate necessities that, coupled with longstanding political efforts, would eventually be utilized to support a mass uprising, forcing Governor Rossello to resign late July 2019. Indeed, in the depths of trauma there is also passion, seared into our hearts, aching to be unleashed against those responsible.
As part of the uprising, communities formed democratic assemblies as spaces for the coordination of mutual aid and to build popular power against the neocolonialist government. Together, these neighborhood-based assemblies continually reproduced the capacity for sustained rebellion as the kernel of a systemic alternative. To feel freedom in the streets is one thing. To feel freedom in a growing system built for liberation is another and it is this feeling that sustains our passion. Though mutual aid efforts arising in response to the pandemic across the 50 states are not yet accountable to or coordinated by neighborhood-based democratic assemblies, they could be.
Recent strikes in Chile, temporarily halted only by pandemic, found support within a decades-long history of territorial assemblies. Amidst the uprising, assemblies proliferated in neighborhoods throughout the country, providing space for the articulation of movement goals and demands. Alongside these political dimensions, they were simultaneously spaces to coordinate mutual aid for neighbors to both survive an economy brought to a halt and to maintain capacity for sustaining collective struggle.
These assemblies were also an “antidote to people’s anxiety and isolation” just like they were used to organize community self-defense forces and foster an “emerging culture of rebellion.” Popular assemblies became the form of self-organization for the movement itself, rooted in a growing systemic alternative that not only fed and sheltered the uprising, but fueled its spirit, the passion to endure against all odds, and a feeling of liberation found in the struggle itself.
With France and the movement of the Yellow Vests (YVs), weekly Saturday mass demonstrations began November 2018. They included street blockades with some turning into occupations, while others were temporary measures to shut down main transportation routes. By the end of January 2019, the movement had over a hundred autonomous assemblies across the country that sent delegates to the first “Assembly of Assemblies.” As part of the ongoing struggle, assembly delegates gathered three more times; in April, July, and then November, where they ratified support for the December 5thgeneral strike called by labor unions.
The YV’s form of radical democratization became the system of self-organization for the general strike itself, keeping power in the hands of striking workers and communities, not established labor bureaucracies. What began as mutual aid arising out of the blockades, occupations, and assemblies took on an additional form as well; that of democratically self-managed strike funds. Emerging from and being controlled by strikers, these funds both ensured greater capacity to sustain the strike, while enhancing the movement’s autonomy. To those who felt our collective power as they watched cop cars burn, imagine the feeling of being part of a rebellion sustained by a rising system that we, ourselves, govern. When organized, we can “set fire” to everything.
Each of these three examples point to an intimate relationship between mutual aid, democratic assemblies, and strikes. They are, by far, not the only useful sources of inspiration or lessons. The history of struggles for Black liberation is also a history of mutual aid in service of militant movements. We can also go back through the entire history of the labor movement and find countless examples of mutual aid, including its role in general strikes. But what this should really teach us is the power within us to build the world anew, even amidst its darkest moments.
Mutual Aid in Struggles for Black Liberation
Returning to Cooperation Jackson, Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya look to revolutionary Amilcar Cabral; advocating “cooperatives and the practice of democratic self-management, mutual aid and solidarity” for “the Black working class in Jackson (and well beyond)” in order to “respond to their here-and-now daily needs,” while offering “a vision of how to solve the major issues confronting society that limit their freedom and constrain their aspirations.”[5] In addition to the People’s Assemblies, they are building a solidarity economy, defined as “a process promoting cooperative economics that promote social solidarity, mutual aid, reciprocity, and generosity.” In part, it “is inspired by the Mondragon Corporation, a federation of mostly worker cooperatives and consumer cooperatives.”[6] This is not Cooperation Jackson’s only inspiration by any means, but when it comes to building a solidarity economy to sustain a rebellion capable of defeating fascism today, emulating Mondragon now risks annihilation. Fortunately, the history of mutual aid in struggles for Black liberation point to another approach, and one that can emerge from the uprising itself.
Mondragon was started in Spain not to fight fascism, but to peacefully coexist with Franco’s authoritarian regime that had violently seized control, utilizing support from Hitler to defeat a revolutionary left that had gained power. Amidst pandemic, economic depression, intensified state repression, and Trump itching to destroy the last democratic vestiges of the republic to remain in power, starting cooperative businesses that compete in the capitalist market will only heighten our vulnerability.
Before he was assassinated in 1969, Fred Hampton warned us: “Nothing’s more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.” In this era of ascendant christian nationalism and white supremacy, the continuation of a long legacy of American fascism that inspired Hitler himself, Trump now has “The Surge;” militarized police allies standing with him and brutally repressing protests, yet this is further galvanizing public support for those in the streets. We need a solidarity economy that emerges from this passionate uprising, becoming the infrastructure necessary for it to become a sustained rebellion.
In RaceBaitr, Nakia S. argued that “Black life is a constant practice of mutual aid work” today. Looking historically, Angela Davis argued there is an “unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery.” For political economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard, mutual aid in the struggle against this “unbroken line” of violence goes all the way back to at least 1780, organized as informal mutual aid cooperatives or assemblies.[7] Importantly, “for two centuries,” collectively pooling resources for mutual aid was a constant practice, especially for those who “did not earn a regular wage or even own their own bodies.”[8] For those today who “feel we are drowning, slowly going insane with rage,” not fighting to overthrow a white supremacist system risks death by despair. In passionately rising, we each reconnect with our trauma, feel the pain passed down to us, harnessing it as a weapon to sustain rebellion and defeat the fascist threat that stands against us.
Early mutual aid provided the means and structure for “maroon outlaw communes,” utilizing informal “cooperatives in the form of insurrection.”[9] Mutual aid would eventually proliferate across many parts of the country as democratic assemblies for a solidarity economy.[10] In these “mutual aid societies,” people each contributed an initial small sum of money to join, which would go into a common fund. Communities came together to pool “‘meager resources’…that even the ‘poorest women managed to contribute’ to meet vital social needs.” Each person would contribute an ongoing fee into this common fund as well, much like union dues. Members would decide how funds were to be used based on the democratic principle of one member, one vote.
Most often, funds would be used to provide “basic needs of everyday life – clothing, shelter, and emotional and physical sustenance.”[11] In NYC alone, “By 1898, 15 percent of Black men and 52 percent of Black women…belonged to a mutual-aid society.”[12] These democratically governed mutual aid societies were like People’s Assemblies, but with an organized capacity for mutual aid. This could become the form of self-organization for a sustained rebellion. Existing mutual aid efforts, especially newer efforts that emerged in response to pandemic, could look to this history and evolve. In doing so, by becoming a radically democratic form of self-organization as incipient systemic alternative, they would more closely embody “solidarity not charity,” while building capacity to support a sustained rebellion.
Looking to this history within struggles for Black liberation is not only something for existing mutual aid efforts to consider. People’s Assemblies rooted in mutual aid could also emerge from sites of struggle in streets throughout the country. This approach fosters autonomy and self-organization, including through the democratic governance of a grassroots fund whose usage can evolve with the needs of the rebellion. This too can become a weapon for tough minds and soft hearts in the battles to come.
Modeled after the Black Panther Party’s “National Committees to Combat Fascism,” communities are coming together for organized resistance. Though the Panther’s approach was criticized as placating white liberals, for this new effort to become a “fighting united front,” it will require coordinated self-defense forces, which can be funded and organized through mutual aid assemblies. In the Panther’s hometown of Oakland, we see a local food system reorient itself around sustaining the uprising, while addressing food deserts at the same time. Those on the front lines of the struggle know what they need better than anyone and the formation of People’s Assemblies grounded in mutual aid can foster what is required to sustain this passionate rebellion. We must imagine the collective power we would feel when thriving beyond the reach of toxic systems dedicated to our subservience, and build accordingly for our liberation.
A sustained rebellion grounded in People’s Assemblies for the coordination of mass non-violent direct action, while being rooted in mutual aid, could become a systemic alternative that sufficiently addresses what Akuno and Nangwaya advocated; meeting the “here-and-now” and embodying the necessary “vision.” Looking to mutual aid societies in historical struggles for Black liberation could do both from below and to the left. Though it remains to be seen whether or not a united front would coalesce in support of a sustained rebellion, there are groups who would be well-positioned to help a solidarity economy grow out of these assemblies, empowering a sustained rebellion that amounts to what Huey P. Newton said with regard to the Black Panther Party’s “survival programs,” that is, “survival pending revolution.”[13]
Mutual Aid, Assemblies, and Strikes: Historical Struggles of the Labor Movement
Despite the fact that major labor unions remain mired in their support for cancerous police unions, the labor movement itself overflows with reasons to remain hopeful in the revolutionary potential of a sustained rebellion against fascism. This is true today outside of the traditional union bureaucracies just as it is in the history of mutual aid, assemblies, and strikes in labor struggles.
Labor militancy erupted in 2019 with a wave of wildcat strikes now spreading across the country in the wake of pandemic. Workers at large corporations struck May 1st. Outside the traditional labor unions, these self-organized workers are assemblies unto themselves, adding to an emergent systemic alternative. Amazon workers in Chicago recently struck without a union for paid time off and won, a workers’ assembly of sorts that utilized mutual aid through a “solidarity committee” to ensure their capacity for struggle. Coordinated mutual aid has been part of the labor movement from the beginning. When systems of oppression inflict trauma upon us, we turn to those similarly afflicted and fight together.
Workers in 1768 organized what historian John Curl called the “first recorded wage earners’ strike against a boss in America.” Without union or strike fund, they built an informal cooperative based on mutual aid in order to democratically share resources to endure the struggle.[14] The more formal unions that emerged in the 1830s began as similar mutual aid efforts.[15] This same approach would even be used as the basis for their earliest political parties and could be used today for explicitly revolutionary “parties of autonomy.”[16] During the strike wave of 1877, mutual aid spontaneously erupted as forms of self-organization among striking workers and communities, one prominent example being the “Pittsburgh Commune.”[17] Even without the major unions, history shows us that sustained rebellion is possible and that the kernel of our revolutionary alternative can be but moments away.
Out of this strike wave, the Knights of Labor would grow to prominence and, initially at least, regarded their local unions as autonomous mutual aid assemblies for the purpose of enhancing labor militancy.[18] The revolutionary Socialist Labor Party would adopt a similar approach with Albert Parsons, a Haymarket martyr, calling these assemblies, these workers’ councils, “an autonomous commune in the process of incubation.”[19] Their broader “Pittsburgh Proclamation” further codified this approach.[20] With a passionate uprising taking place in streets across the country, this should give pause to every worker, recognizing both the necessity of struggle and the power to be found in one another.
In the early twentieth century, the Indstrial Workers of the World would organize transitory “encampments with cooperative survival networks” to support and organize among migrant workers.[21] During the 1919 Seattle General Strike, cooperative grocery stores provided food to strikers, while mutual aid efforts were organized across the city, including “twenty-one eating places” with “thirty thousand meals a day served to whoever needed one.”[22] In the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, newly emerged self-help or mutual aid cooperatives like the Universal Exchange Association became a way for striking workers and communities to support one another.[23] In those moments where we depend on one another for survival against tremendous odds, this history shows us that people rise to the occasion.
What could emerge from workplace and community-based assemblies, supporting a sustained rebellion against fascism, is only limited by our imagination and preparation. If these sorts of workers’ assemblies were to more prominently emerge within the increasingly militant grassroots labor movement, together with assemblies proliferating from the passionate uprising in streets across the country, this kernel of a systemic alternative could become a sustained rebellion with revolutionary potential, especially if Trump attempted a broader fascist seizure of power and we were ready to grind this country to a resounding halt.
Broadening Support for a Sustained Rebellion
The fascist threat Trump represents seeks to intensify all systems of oppression, while leading us down the path of climate destruction. As long as this threat is widely felt and perceived, there is every reason to believe support for this passionate uprising will grow, along with the recognition that our future rests in each other’s gentle, yet powerful hands. Without compromising the necessity of a sustained rebellion being Black-led, where else can we look for other terrains of struggle coalescing in support for a sustained rebellion?
On May 1st, then again on June 1st, the largestrent strike in decades took place as the latest expressions of a risingmovement around formations like We Strike Together and the Autonomous Tenants Union Network. As it is being practiced today, mutual aid is necessary to survive these tumultuous times, including among tenants. The proliferating tenants unions or councils are forms of community-based assemblies, mutual aid efforts much like early labor militancy. With the pain inflicted by the pandemic and what will likely be a prolonged depression for many, the need for tenant organizing and rent strikes will only continue to grow. Coordinated mutual aid and a sustained rebellion will no doubt be required in order to succeed. We certainly cannot count on Congress.
Amidst pandemic, recession, and the threat of fascism, climate devastation has not gone away. We have now witnessed what Trump’s climatepoliciesamountto, so him remaining in office willresultinuntold suffering. Over 600,000 people in all 50 states joined the September 2019 climate strike. 350.org recently called on the climate movement to support the passionate uprising taking place in cities across the country. A renewed climate strike effort supporting the formation of people’s assemblies, rooted in mutual aid to sustain a rebellion against the fascist threat, is necessary to avoid climate annihilation. If the upcoming elections do amount to a tipping point in the rise of fascism, the struggle against climate crisis will either become impossible or require precisely this degree of militancy. But what can emerge in even the most treacherous of circumstances can be as beautiful as it is powerful and profound.
Standing Rock should remain a lesson for all of us in these trying times, as should other forms of indigenous mutual aid. From April 2016 to February 2017, Water Protectors withstood massivestateviolence to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. Despite the powerful forces standing against them, mutual aid within the encampment proved stronger. In “A Lesson in Natural Law,” Marcella Gilbert recounted the spirit that emerged in the heart of the movement as “people immediately began to resurrect our original systems of governance.” What began as modest systems of social reproduction would eventually become “the fourth largest ‘town’ in North Dakota.” Reflecting on it, Gilbert wrote that the “world of humanity hopes for proof: proof that life will sustain itself in the face of recklessness” and that “Standing Rock provided a place for life to thrive within a world of war, violence, and hopelessness.”[24] The passionate uprising is more of this proof, yet it needs to be capable of sustaining itself, including to be able to hold territory like Water Protectors, who have fought white supremacycountless times before.
Violent hate groups continue to reach record highs and the relentless murdering of trans folk must be combated. LGBTQ communities remain particularly vulnerable to the pandemic and righteous calls to communize the family are growing again. For those who lived through the HIV/AIDS crisis, governmental ineptitude is familiar, yet abounding threats drives them to fight harder, much like the legacy of the Stonewall Riot. Coordinated assaults on Roe v. Wade are part of a multi-pronged attack on women that has intensified throughout Trump’s presidency, and now under cover of pandemic. From the 2016 Women’s March to recent remarks by co-chair Tamika Mallory, the trauma inherent in Trump’s threat of hetero-patriarchy is palpable and interconnected, as is the fury to fight back.
Women ran mutual aid societies in the struggle for Black liberation from the 18th to the early 20th century.[25] It played a role in the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s as “an emotional support group” to learn from trauma. With 19th century revolutionary socialist feminist struggles in France and Russian communist feminist movements in the early 20th, mutual aid has long been a critical component in the struggle for women’s liberation.[26] In one example, women led rent strikes in NYC during the 1918 “Spanish flu” outbreaks, which also required mutual aid. Women’s leadership in mutual aid efforts remains the casetoday as well, however, we must also communize care work to equitably, collectively, and emotionally sustain us in struggle.
Horrific concentration camps now bring death by pandemic, yet hunger strikescontinue. ICE forces people to seek refuge in places of worship, so over 1,100 communities stand together in a Sanctuary Movement to build collective defense with the undocumented. From the beginning, these efforts were grounded in mutual aid, exemplified in the Sanctuary in the Streets network. Built by the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, this too is grounded in assemblies. Furthermore, the Day Without Immigrants in 2017 could be organized again for the near future, rising with sociedades mutualistas. From recent Supreme Court terror to Trump’s deployment of “border patrol tactical units;” the fascist threat is widely feltandperceived. If the 2020 elections do amount to a tipping point and the threat standing against us is clear, with the right preparations, we could be unstoppable. But we must sustain a passionate rebellion, including to strike when our enemy is most vulnerable to rid the country of fascism once and for all.
Like in Charlottesville in 2017, countless communities have cometogether to protest against fascist marches and events, recognizing the inherent threat they pose. After the white “Christian” supremacist murders at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh 2018, thousands took to the streets when Trump came to town. Violence against Jewish people has continued to rise, yet those like Never Again Action push forward with directactions to shut down ICE and its concentration camps. On January 27th, 2020, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, over 200 survivors came together to remind the world that we must be prepared. Meager impeachment attempts came and went, so will the plethora of progressive organizations that supported impeachment rallies now mobilize for a sustained rebellion? Or will they choose vital electoral efforts at the expense of all other preparedness?
There is tremendous power and potential now seething in anger out of the suffering forced upon us. In preparing for the possibility of a broader fascist seizure of power, weaving together the kernel of our own systemic alternative, forging the mutual aid assemblies necessary for a sustained rebellion and strikes against fascism, we can emerge victorious. Though the future is unwritten, counting on the republic being able to endure Trump and the “death cult” formerly known as the GOP is a dangerous gamble with people’s lives. We must ensure we do not follow the path of the democratic socialists in Germany against Hitler, who “had dampened the powder so long, in their fear lest it should explode, that when they finally and with a trembling hand applied a burning fuse to it, the powder did not catch.”[27] Supporting this passionate rising, building our collective capacity for a sustained rebellion as the November elections draw near, is the only guarantee we have against the fascist threat that seeks to plunge our world into darkness. Fascism is like an animal afflicted with rabies; desperate and dangerous. But it is not long for this Earth and the most humane thing to do is put it out of its misery.
[1] Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971). P. 341.
[2] Kali Akuno, “People’s Assembly Overview: The Jackson People’s Assembly Model,” in Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi, edited by Cooperation Jackson and Ajamu Nangwaya, (Ottawa, Daraja Press, 2017). P. 86-97.
[3] Ibid, “The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle for Black Self-determination and Economic Democracy,” in Jackson Rising, 73.
[4] Ibid, “People’s Assembly Overview: The Jackson People’s Assembly Model,” in Jackson Rising, 96.
[5] Kali Akuno & Ajamu Nangwaya, “Toward Economic Democracy, Labor Self-management and Self-determination,” in Jackson Rising, 53.
[6] Kali Akuno, “The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle for Black Self-determination and Economic Democracy,” in Jackson Rising, 76-77.
[7] Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), P. 40-47.
[13] David Hilliard, The Black Panther Party: service to the people programs, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). P. 3-4.
[14] John Curl, For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America, (CA: PM Press, 2009). P. 32-33.
[26] Carolyn J. Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004). P. 24-26. & Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1877). P. 54-55.
[27] Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, 190.
This spring, as some countries began to reopen after months of COVID-19 lockdowns, youthful rebellions broke out inside the two most powerful states in the world, the USA and China. The Black youth of Minneapolis, their allies, and countless others across the USA expressed their anger on the streets over yet another police murder, which was one too many. During the same days, the youth of Hong Kong renewed their protests against new anti-democratic moves by the Chinese government. The US protests, which grew into a massive nationwide Black Lives Matter uprising, also had a major international impact. In both cases, the USA and China, the youth did not flinch in the face of brutal police repression, inspiring their elders and many others around the world. These youth face a world of mass unemployment, precipitous economic inequality, and growing racial oppression fueled by right-wing populism, all of it worsened by COVID-19 and the economic meltdown.
From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, workers also resisted attempts by capital and the state to keep production going, endangering their very lives. Here, the Italian working class, with its long militant tradition, led the way with mass strike actions. In March, according to a report from CGIL, the main union federation,
“From the Dalmine steel mills of Bergamo to those of Brescia, from the Fiat-Chrysler plants of Pomigliano in Naples to the Ilva steel plant in Genoa, from the Electrolux factory of Susegana in Treviso to many small and medium-sized companies in Veneto and Emilia Romagna, from the Amazon warehouses in the provinces of Piacenza and Rieti, to the poultry and meat processing companies in the Po Valley, there were thousands of striking workers who came out into the squares and streets, strictly at a safe distance of one meter apart from each other, as prescribed by the government decree” (Leopoldo Tartaglia, “Dispatch from Italy: Class Struggle in the Time of Coronavirus,” Labor Notes, March 20, 2020).
This forced the state and capital to concede, leading to better safety measures and for workers to be paid during safety-related work stoppages.
This limited victory in Italy affected unionized workers, but not the most precarious and marginalized workers, many of them immigrants. It was from this kind of milieu in the USA, the oppressed Black communities of Houston and Minneapolis, that George Floyd, murdered by four Minneapolis police, emerged. Like so many Black working-class women and men, Floyd was semi-unemployed due to COVID-19 at the time that police choked him to death in slow motion in broad daylight, as witnesses from the Black community looked on and pleaded for mercy. Floyd’s unconscionable death has been seen as a form of lynching, but it also recalls the torture and executions carried out for centuries inside US slave plantations, where the audience was other enslaved people, and the purpose was to create dread by “making an example” of someone.
As many have also pointed out, the strangulation of George Floyd needs to be seen in the context of 400 years of slavery and the obdurate objective structures of racial oppression in the USA, from outright slavery, to Jim Crow, to today’s mass incarceration. The poison of racism oozes through the sectors of employment, housing, education, healthcare, and policing, among others. Racialized capitalism in the US actually began under British colonialism as part of their widely-used policy of “divide and rule,” from Ireland, to the Indian subcontinent, to Virginia. That strategy favored one sector of the populace against another, in order to prevent class unity against the rulers. In seventeenth-century Virginia, this meant arming poor but formally free whites and giving them police power over all Black people, most of them enslaved. This policy was enacted in order to prevent another outbreak uniting white and Black labor, as had occurred in Bacon’s rebellion in 1676. Today’s police forces originate in part in the white militias that received rewards for capturing fugitive slaves.
But the racial history of the US needs to be understood subjectively as much as objectively, in short, dialectically, if we are fully to grasp the current juncture. For today’s rebellion on the streets can also trace itself to that uprising in early Virginia. In this sense, US history needs to be grasped as one of constant revolt and resistance in the face of racial and capitalist oppression. Here, one could mention (1) the slave revolts led by Denmark Vesey (1822) and Nat Turner (1831), (2) the whole period of Abolitionism, Civil War, and Reconstruction from the 1830s to the 1870s, (3) the southern rural Black Populists and their white allies in the 1890s, (4) the massive and socially progressive Black nationalist Garvey Movement after World War 1, (4) the mass interracial labor and Civil Rights movements of the 1930s, (5) the Civil Rights and Black liberation movements of the 1950s throughout the 1970s, and (6) the current period exemplified by movements like Occupy and the Sanders campaign against economic inequality and the development of Black Lives Matter, which preceded even the 2016 Sanders campaign, into a mass movement this spring that has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets.
Today, as with the greatest of those previous movements, the Black masses have taken a vanguard role, but a wider movement has emerged involving youth of all races and ethnicities. As so many times before, the rulers and their representatives have tried to distinguish between “good” protesters and “illegal,” “violent,” and “outside” ones. Thus, after the mass rebellion against police brutality in 1965 in the Black ghetto of Watts, Los Angeles, some tried to blame “Cuban agents,” but even the official McCone Commission led by a former head of the CIA could find none. Similarly, today’s far-right Trump administration blames left-wing agitators from the Antifa movement, although they can show no concrete examples. What is true is that hundreds of thousands came onto the streets all across the country under the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” that a police station was burned to the ground in Minneapolis, and that luxury shops in the Los Angeles area were attacked by protesters who scrawled slogans like “eat the rich” on walls. After over a week of rebellious actions across the land, all four Minneapolis police murderers were finally arrested, but this came after no less than 13,000 protesters had been detained.
Demonstrators were cruelly gassed and clubbed near the White House by direct presidential command, in order for Trump to show “toughness” at a photo op after it had been reported he was cowering in the basement. Even Trump’s threat to use the regular army on the streets did not deter the demonstrators, but it did cause dissension within the military leadership, especially after it was reported that officials had used the term “dominating the battle space.” As even retired General Martin Dempsey noted in protest, the law and military tradition restrict the use of such tactics to foreign enemies. But it is equally true that two decades of endless war abroad, of occupation and torture of civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, is blowing back into the USA itself, with police forces that are militarized as never before. Another form of blowback can be seen in how Minnesota’s police have received training, at a half-day conference in Minneapolis, from the US-funded occupation police force of one of the most reactionary powers in the world, Netanyahu’s Israel, where chokeholds and other “physical pressure,” i.e., torture, of Palestinian detainees is totally legal. These facts show that moves in the USA toward an authoritarian state are not limited to the Trump administration, but can also be found in liberal Minneapolis.
Less noticed but also extremely significant has been the resurgence of the youth movement in Hong Kong against Chinese government attempts to extinguish all democratic rights in that semi-autonomous city. As the threat of COVID-19 lifted a bit, the youth of Hong Kong were the first anywhere in the world to reassert their pre-COVID movement on a truly mass scale. Inside China, quieter dissent exists amid deepening repression, especially in Wuhan, where the regime covered up the full extent of COVID-19 for weeks, thus extending the suffering in China and the world. On June 4, the 31st anniversary of the crushing of the China-wide student and worker uprising of 1989, tens of thousands of Hong Kong youth gathered for the annual commemoration, despite the event having been banned due to COVID-19. Thwarted by popular protest in their attempts to get a series of repressive measures through the Hong Kong legislature, China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has decided to act directly, an extremely ominous turn. It should also be noted that the Hong Kong protests have never been only about political issues, as residents also face a precipitous increase in economic inequality, as investment capital from the rest of China has led to skyrocketing rents and other forms of heightened capitalist oppression. For its part, while some governments have issued verbal protests, unelected global capital is solidly backing Xi’s repressive measures, with all due cynicism: “There will be some unhappy people for some time,” said John L. Thornton, a former president of Goldman Sachs who has close ties with the Chinese regime, “But the drum rolls, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. That’s the political judgment” (Alexandra Stevenson and Vivian Wang, “Why China May Call the World’s Bluff on Hong Kong,” New York Times, June 4, 2020). Thornton’s racist comparison of the Chinese people to dogs should also be noted.
Particularly in the USA, spring 2020 marks the beginning of a new era of radical opposition to the status quo on the part of a generation of youth facing bleak prospects, in a world not of their making. A veil has been lifted by a wrenching series of events – COVID-19, economic depression, and racist police murder – and by the creativity and persistence of the uprising, revealing the putrescent, racist structure of capitalism for all to see.
Protesters in Los Angeles in the US and in Delhi in 2017. | Frederic J Brown, Sajjad Hussain/AFP
The death of the African American citizen George Floyd on 25 May 2020 in Minneapolis at the hands of police has sparked off countrywide protests in the United States. Both Black and White citizens have taken to the streets to protest against the entrenched racism in public structures and prevailing attitudes of the American people. Police brutality and racism in America are being condemned globally, particularly from South East Asia and the Middle East, whose citizens have also suffered through racism and discriminatory immigration policies at the hands of the US administration and its people.
Given South Asian solidarity with the African-American demand for political and social equality, Indians are amongst the first to speak against the racism that has now proven to be endemic in the US. However, the same Indians who abhor racism and protest racial discrimination in the US, choose to remain silent about caste and its practice in India and abroad. This is a virulent reality that is much closer to home and has been documented as a two-thousand-year-old form of discrimination practiced against Dalits (a term which means ‘oppressed’ or broken and has been self-appropriated by lower castes in India). It is practiced even today in the form of untouchability and remains uncontested by these apparently ‘woke’ Indians who publicly question race.
That is because there are two types of Indians who have tried to express solidarity with the African-American cause. The first are the bourgeois, diasporic upper castes who stand to gain directly from the abolition of racism by getting sought after jobs in the U.S. from which they have been excluded because of systemic racism. They only question racism and not casteism because they speak from a position of upper-caste privilege which can only play a limited role abroad when confronted with racism. The second are Dalits who have historically drawn strength from the African-American struggle through organizations like Dalit Panthers inspired by the Black Panthers; the solidarity between B.R. Ambedkar and W.E.B. DuBois; slogans such as #DalitLivesMatter and Dalit literature which is protest literature like African-American literature with which it has had a productive relationship.
To White Americans who are asking why the slogan #AllLivesMatter is not preferable to #BlackLivesMatter, it must be pointed out that by subsuming black lives under all lives, the systemic discrimination against Blacks and the social construction of ‘race’ is made invisible. This invisibility produces, as the civil rights advocate and legal scholar Michelle Alexander asserts in her book The New Jim Crow, a “color blindness”, which prevents us from seeing certain acts, such as a policeman pressing down on the throat of an African-American, as effects of racist ideology. This is similar to the acts of upper caste Indians who wish to rewrite history from the perspective of the upper-caste and view the inclusion of caste politics in mainstream history as muddying or polluting of the hegemonic Indian image abroad. It results in, as the social psychologist Yashpal Jogdand stresses, a “caste-blindness”, which is the product of a deliberate refusal to see the role of caste in an individual’s professional and personal success or failure.
‘Black Reason’ is what the philosopher Achille Mbembe calls a set of practices “whose goal was to produce the Black Man as a racial subject and site of savage exteriority”. He argues that racism has the “power to distort the real and to fix affect”. Individual failures in society are attributed to Blacks and Dalits being naturally stupid, ugly and brutish, as opposed to their being subjected to centuries of racial discrimination. They are made to feel inferior in every way possible because of these failures. This is what the psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon referred to as the “psycho-affective” predicament of the Black and Dalit who has to look at himself or herself through the White man’s or the upper caste’s eyes. It would be insidious to see this failure as individual for it is deliberately caused through the structural implementation of race which ensures that the African American or Dalit cannot succeed.
The particular problem of upper castes speaking against race while not speaking against caste is due to a host of factors. The Dalit has often been represented as abject, as an object of disgust, or at most pity, in upper caste literature and media. Hence, the Dalit’s thoughts and consciousness have been harshly under-represented for an upper caste audience who is not moved to protest at the repeated, horrifying torture, rapes and deaths of Dalits that occur across the country routinely. On 13 January 2020, a 19-year-old Dalit woman was hanged from a tree in Gujarat after her rape and murder by three men. On 16 February 2020, two Dalit youths were physically tortured in a village in Rajasthan on the petty and unverified account of stealing. On 25 May, a case was reported of 13-year-old minor Dalit girl who had been gang raped by three men of her village and had consequently become pregnant. On 31 May, a 17-year-old boy called Vikas Jatav was shot dead by upper caste men because he dared to enter a temple as a Dalit. On June 7, a 20-year-old man called Viraj Jagtap was lynched by upper caste men because as a Dalit he fell in love with an upper caste woman. These gruesome cases are barely discussed in the national media and are far from inciting national outrage and attracting the attention of international media. Despite being filmed by onlookers, the perpetrators of the crime often get away because of a penal and judicial system that does not incriminate those who commit crimes against lower castes.
What stands apart is the rare case of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit scholar who was harassed by his university and forced to commit suicide. His death sparked off student protests all over the country. His death was seen as lost potential because he left a suicide note and his death came at a moment of productive contagion: increased campus protests and the rising consciousness of Dalit students. Notwithstanding this case, the kind of public outrage that George Floyd’s death received is unimaginable for Dalit deaths in India. This is because the Dalit life has been made to appear as superfluous (excessive and unnecessary) to the imagination of an upper caste Indian society. The Dalit’s life is not viewed as valuable, and this is a direct result of casteist ideology.
Caste discrimination is still not recognized as an internationally occurring phenomenon. Intellectuals who are Dalit from B.R. Ambedkar in the last century to Suraj Yengde, Yashica Dutt and Thenmozi Soundararajan in the present day have helped to make caste an international issue and enabled it to be understood in racial terms. Achille Mbembe asserts that “race does not exist as a physical, anthropological, or genetic fact”. It is crucial to understand that caste is as much of a social construct as race. Caste has the scriptural backing of religious texts such as Manu-Smriti (The Laws of Manu) and Bhagavad-Gita, which make it appear as a holy, divine concept of Hinduism which must be followed. This ensures that the Dalit is stranded in the cycle of discrimination for perpetuity. The fact that average upper-caste Indians speak up about racism but not about caste shows their duplicity, hypocrisy and armchair activism for believing in a concept that should be discarded. The upper castes in India and abroad have deliberately blinded themselves to the question of caste so as to retain their own sense of superiority. This is what is challenged through Dalit literature and politics which shows the hypocrisy of upper castes who are only motivated by self-interest and not any genuine sense of activism for transformation.
Sparked by the police murder of George Floyd and fueled by Minneapolis authorities’ reluctance to arrest and charge the murderer’s three police accomplices, mass protests have been sweeping across the United States with an intensity not seen since the 1960s. In over 150 cities, African Americans and their allies have flooded the streets, braving the COVID-19 pandemic, braving police violence, challenging centuries of racial and class inequalities, demanding liberty and justice for all, day after day defying a corrupt, racist power structure based on violent repression.
1. Breaches in the System’s Defenses
Today [June 7—ed.], after ten consecutive days in the streets, this outpouring of popular indignation against systematic, historic injustice, has opened a number of breaches in the defensive wall of the system. The legal authorities in the state of Minnesota, where George Floyd was murdered, have been forced to arrest and indict as accomplices the three other policemen who aided and abetted the killer, against whom the charges were raised from third to second degree murder. A split has opened at the summit of power, where the Secretary of Defense and numerous Pentagon officials have broken with their Commander-in-Chief, Donald Trump, who has attempted to mobilize the U.S. Army against the protesters.
This historic uprising is an outpouring of accumulated black anger over decades of unpunished police murders of unarmed African-Americans. It articulates the accumulated grief of families and communities, the sheer outrage over impunity for killer cops in both the North and the South. It reflects anger at capitalist America’s betrayal of Martin Luther King’s “dream” of non-violent revolution. and horror at the return to the era of public lynchings cheered on by the President of the United States. It impatiently demands that America at long last live up to its proclaimed democratic ideals, here and now. In the words of one African-American protester, William Achukwu, 28, of San Francisco: “Our Declaration of Independence says life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Right now, we are only dealing with the life part here. This is a first step. But liberty is what a lot of people out here are marching for.”
2. Violence and Non-Violence
It came as no surprise that local and state officials across the U.S. reacted to largely peaceful, spontaneous mass protests against police brutality and racism by unleashing a maelstrom of militarized police violence.[1] For a generation, the Federal government has been quietly gifting huge stocks of surplus military equipment, including tanks, to local police forces and sheriff’s offices eager to play with lethal new toys designed for counter-insurgency in places like Afghanistan. Under both Democrats (Clinton, Obama) and Republicans (Bush, Trump) the federal state has been arming law enforcement in preparation for a preventive counter-revolution. This is precisely what President Trump is calling for today: “full dominance” by means of military crackdowns, mass arrests and long prison sentences in the name of “law and order.” Thanks to the determination of these masses of militant but largely non-violent protesters, the military is divided and Trump will not have his way.
Apropos of violence, it was feared at first that the numerous incidences of setting fires, smashing shop fronts, and looting, especially after dark when the large, orderly crowds of mixed demonstrators had gone home, would in some way “spoil” the uprising and provide a pretext for the violent, military suppression of the whole movement, as called for by Trump, who blamed it all on an imaginary terrorist group called “ANTIFA” (short for “anti-fascism,” in fact a loose network). At the same time, reports of gangs of young white racists wearing MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) hats committing vandalism, of “Accelerationists” systematically setting fires in black neighborhoods to “provoke revolution,” and of violent police provocateurs are not entirely to be discounted.
Such actions play into Trump’s hands. On the other hand, the more reasonable voices of the hundreds of thousands of angry but nonviolent protesters, might not have been listened to by the authorities if it had not been for the threat of violence from the fringes if their voices were ignored. Instead of burning their own neighborhoods, as has happened in past riots, today’s militants are strategically hitting symbols of state repression and capitalism – lighting up and destroying police property, trashing the stores of million-dollar corporations, and even pushing against the gates of the White House. In any case, as far as “looting” is concerned, as the spokeswomen of BLM argued at George Floyd’s funeral, white people have been looting Africa and African-Americans for centuries. Payback is long over-due.
3. Black and White Anti-Racist Convergence
What is especially remarkable and heartening to see as we view the impassioned faces of the demonstrators through images on videos, newspaper photos, and TV reports, is the realization that at least half the demonstrators in the crowds proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” are white people! Here again, a serious breach has been opened in the wall of systemic, institutionalized racism that has for centuries enabled the U.S. ruling class to divide and conquer the working masses, pitting slave laborers and their discriminated descendants against relatively “privileged” white wage slaves in a competitive race to the bottom. Today, they are uniting in the fight for justice and equality. Equally remarkable is the continuing. leadership role of women, especially African-American women in the founding of both the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the Women’s March against Trump’s Inauguration. The participation of young and old, LGBT and physically challenged folks is also to be remarked.
This convergence of these freedom struggles across deeply rooted racial divides promises to open new paths as U.S. social movements emerge from the COVID confinement. Even more remarkable, albeit limited, are incidents, also recorded on citizen video, of individual cops apologizing for police violence, hugging victims, and taking the knee with demonstrators. Public officials, like the Mayor of Los Angeles, have also been obliged to meet with the protesters and to apologize for their previous racist remarks. Moreover, as we shall see below, serious cracks have emerged in the unity of the U.S. military, both among the ranks, which are 40 percent people of color, and even among top officers. Such is the power of this massive, self-organized, inter-racial movement demanding “freedom and justice for all.”
4. Cracks Within the Regime
Today, after ten days during which the protests have continued to increase numerically and to deepen in radical content, cracks have opened in the defenses of the ruling corporate billionaire class and have reached the White House, where Donald J. Trump, the self-deluded, ignorant bully and pathological liar supposedly in charge, has finally been challenged by his own appointed security officials.
It must be said that in Trump, today’s billionaire ruling class has the representative it deserves, and the Donald’s ineptitude, visible to all, is symbolic of its historic incapacity to retain the right to rule. Trump’s flawed, self-centered personality incarnates the narrow class interests of the 0.01 percent who own more than the bottom 70 percent of the population. His obvious selfishness exemplifies that of the billionaires he represents (and pretends to be one of). Out of his willful ignorance, Trump speaks for a corporate capitalist class indifferent to the global ecological and social consequences of its ruthless drive to accumulate, indifferent to truth and justice, indifferent indeed to human life itself.
Trump’s clownish misrule has embarrassed the state itself. First came the childish spectacle of the most powerful man in the world hunkering down in his basement bunker and ordering the White House lights turned off (so the demonstrators outside couldn’t see in?). Then came the order to assault peaceful protesters with chemical weapons to clear the way for President Trump to walk to the nearby “Presidents’ Church” (which he never attends and whose pastor he didn’t bother to consult) in order to have himself photographed brandishing a huge white Bible (which he has most likely never read) like a club.
Trump, who’s only earned success in life was his long-running reality-TV show “The Apprentice,” apparently devised this bizarre publicity stunt to rally his political base of right-wing Christians and show how “religious” he is. But it backfired when the Bishop of Washington pointed out that Jesus preached love and peace, not war and vengeance. The next day, even demagogues like Pat Robinson of the far-right wing Christian Coalition spoke out against him, while the anti-Trump New York Times triumphantly headlined: “Trump’s Approval Slips Where He Can’t Afford to Lose It: Among Evangelicals.”
Let us pause to note that American Christianity, like every other aspect of American civilization, is a knot of contradictions all rooted in the fundamental problem of “the color line.” Although the racist, conservative, pro-Israel, Christian right has been the core of Trump’s support, liberation theology and the black church have long been the base of the civil rights movement for equality. Indeed, George Floyd (known as “Big Floyd” and “the Gentle Giant”) was himself a religiously motivated community peacemaker. So are many of the demonstrators, white and black, chanting “No Justice, No Peace.”
Trump’s phony populist act may have helped catapult him into office in 2016 (thanks to Republican-rigged electoral system and despite losing the popular vote by three million votes), but as Abraham Lincoln is often supposed to have said of the American public, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Today, Trump’s time is up.
5. Police: The Vicious Dogs of the Bourgeoisie
To me, the most emblematic image of the moment is that of a self-deluded Donald Trump, huddled (like Hitler) in his underground bunker with the White House lights turned off, shivering with fear and rage at the demonstrators outside, and threatening to sick (purely imaginary) “vicious dogs” on them. Trump has the Doberman mentality of the junkyard owner from Queens he incarnates; he is the spiritual descendant of the slave-catcher Simon Legree chasing the escaped slave Eliza with his dogs (see Uncle Tom’s Cabin).
Vicious dogs of the bourgeoisie—that’s what the police are paid to be (even if a few of them may turn out to be basically friendly German Shepherds underneath, like those who took the knee with the protesters). Their canines are the sharp teeth of the American state. Along with the Army, cops are the essence of the actual deep state which Marx defined as “special bodies of armed men, courts, prisons etc.” (as opposed to “the people armed” in democratically-run popular militias).
Although subservient to the bourgeois state, this police apparatus, like the Mafia with which it is sometimes entwined, has a corporate identity of its own based on omertà or strict group loyalty. This unwritten rule is the notorious “Blue Wall of Silence,” which prevents cops who see their “brothers” committing graft and violent abuses from speaking out or testifying against them. The blue wall assures police impunity, and it is organized through police “unions” that, although affiliated with the AFL-CIO, are violently reactionary, anti-labor and pro-Trump. The President of the International Police Union has been filmed wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat and shaking hands with Trump at a political rally, while protesters in Minneapolis have been calling for the ousting of Bob Kroll, the local police union president who has been widely criticized for his unwavering support of officers accused of wrongdoing.
The Blue Wall of silence extends up the repressive food chain to prosecutors, District Attorneys and even progressive mayors, like New York’s Bill de Blasio, who defended N.Y. police driving their SUVs straight into a crowd of demonstrators, although his own mixed-race daughter was arrested as a Black Lives Matter demonstrator! De Blasio—like his reactionary predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, former “law and order” District Attorney and current Trump advisor—knows that his political future is dependent on the good will of the Police Union. (Even junkyard owners are afraid of their own vicious dogs.)
This customary coddling of the police even extended to the New York Times initial coverage of violent police attacks on members of the press in Minneapolis and elsewhere. In its report, the Times hid behind a twisted notion of “objectivity” (blame both sides) to avoid pointing fingers at cops, thus observing the “blue wall of silence” even when reporters are victims. (At this writing over a thousand such attacks have been recorded). Using passive voice rather than naming the actual assailants (brutal racist cops), the NYT report conflated a single isolated incident where a crowd attacked news people from Trump’s FOX network, with systematic, nationwide police attacks on members of the media.[2]
A week later, that sacrosanct Blue Wall is beginning to crumble. Not only have the D.A. and Governor of Minnesota been forced to escalate the charges against Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s killer, to second degree murder and arrest his three police accomplices, the latter have begun to rat each other out. Facing 40 years in prison and a bail of at least $750,000, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng, both rookies, are blaming Chauvin, the senior officer at the scene and a training officer, while Tou Thao, the other former officer charged in the case, had reportedly cooperated with investigators before they arrested Chauvin.
6. Cracks in the Military Wall
Such is the power of today’s mass Black Lives Matter uprising, that it has opened a breach in U.S. capitalism’s most important defense wall: the military. For if the police are American capitalism’s junkyard Dobermans, the Armed Forces are the basis of its domination over the world. And if the cry for equal justice has opened a tiny crack in the Blue Wall of Silence, the breach in the ranks of the U.S. military, which is 40 percent people of color and recruited from the poorest classes of American society, is more like a gulf.
The rank and file in today’s U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force are a reflection of American society, of a population of mainly poor and minority people for whom the military provides one possible solution to unemployment and discrimination. The mood of the troops reflects that of the communities they are recruited from, and their officers, who are responsible for their morale, discipline, and loyalty, must be sensitive to their feelings. This situation is epitomized by the following quotations from the New York Times:
‘“The Navy’s top officer, Adm. Michael M. Gilday, said in a message on Wednesday to all sailors: “I think we need to listen. We have black Americans in our Navy and in our communities that are in deep pain right now. They are hurting.”
Although Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, released a message to top military commanders on Wednesday, June 3 affirming that every member of the armed forces swears an oath to defend the Constitution, which he said “gives Americans the right to freedom of speech,” the Generals and Admirals, retired and active, who have been speaking out for racial justice and the rights of demonstrating citizens this week are not all sudden converts to the cause of peace and justice. Rather, the American officer class is sharply focused on its global mission, which is to protect American domination around the world by leading these troops to kill and be killed in bloody civil war situations in mainly non-white countries.
The New York Times article cited above also quotes an email from Adm. Sandy Winnefeld, a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
“We are at the most dangerous time for civil-military relations I’ve seen in my lifetime. It is especially important to reserve the use of federal forces for only the most dire circumstances that actually threaten the survival of the nation. Our senior-most military leaders need to ensure their political chain of command understands these things.”
For the troops, policing the world for capitalism is an endless, incomprehensible and demoralizing mission of violent counter-insurrection from which they return physically and psychologically damaged, often haunted by guilt, only to face unemployment and lack of support from the public and the underfunded Veterans’ Authority. As for the officers, it is a question of maintaining discipline and morale. The top brass know that deploying troops trained in counter-insurrection to control civil disturbances on U.S. soil would inevitably have one of two negative results (if not both): 1. unacceptable violence against civilians and/or 2. fraternization with the protesters, mutiny, and disobedience among the ranks. Hence the Pentagon’s open break with their “law and order” Commander-in-Chief. The danger of fraternization is especially real in National Guard regiments, whose troops are drawn from the populations of the states their families live in. As another Times article noted:
‘Senior Pentagon leaders worry that a militarized and heavy-handed response to the protests, Mr. Trump’s stated wish, will turn the American public against the troops, like what happened in the waning years of the Vietnam War, when National Guard troops in combat fatigues battled antiwar protesters at Kent State… Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denounced the use of the military to support the political acts of a president who had “laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country.”’
Although the eternal showman Trump apparently appointed Mark Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the basis of the General’s physical resemblance to John Wayne, Milley happens to be a serious military historian. So is Secretary of Defense Esper. Both are aware that revolutions can only happen when there is a split in the ranks of the soldiers. In their West Point courses on counterinsurgency, they have certainly read of the classic example of Russia in 1917 when the Cossacks were sent to block the demonstrators in St. Petersburg. These fierce cavalry men sat passively still on their horses as the strikers dove between their legs, leading Trotsky to famously remark that “the revolution passes underneath the belly of a Cossack’s horse.” And indeed, not long after this incident the Russian soldiers formed “soviets” (councils) and joined the workers’ and peasants in overthrowing the Czar.
Of course, in 1917 Russia was in the middle of a social crisis, ruled by an inept, self-deluded autocrat and an outdated, parasitical aristocracy, heedlessly bleeding lives and treasure into an endless, pointless, unpopular foreign war. Nothing even vaguely similar could ever happen in optimistic, triumphant, happy, America under the firm leadership and uniting presence of our loveable President, Donald J. Trump.
7. Race and Class in U.S. History
American society has been riddled with contradictions since its beginnings, and these contradictions, rooted in race and class, are still being played out today in the streets of over 150 U.S. cities. Today’s uprisings, interracial from the beginning, express popular frustration that after centuries of struggle against slavery, after a bloody fratricidal Civil War in the 1860s and after the “second American revolution” of Reconstruction, after the Civil Rights movement and the urban riots of the 1960s, the lives of the descendants of black slaves are still not safe in the land that first proclaimed the human right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The murder of George Floyd is said to be the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” It was the straw that set fire to the haystack of anger and frustration that was smoldering for generations. Will this blaze be yet another fire of straw, fated to die out? I think not. The context has changed. U.S. society, like the whole capitalist world, is in crisis. The economy, with productivity declining, with inequality and unemployment increasing, with debt and speculation ballooning was already in crisis. The pandemic pushed it over the top, and the resulting recession has only just begun. Thirty years after the post-Cold War “new world order” of democracy, peace and un-ending grown was proclaimed, few Americans believe that their lives and those of their children likely to improve, what with social and ecological doom impending. The system has little to promise them and its leaders little to inspire confidence in them. In other words, they are no longer politically and socially ‘hegemonic’ and must depend on coercion to hold power. Today, the credibility and legitimacy of that coercive power, the cops and army, is being called into question by the masses, white and colored, demanding justice and equality.
The police may well continue to attack the demonstrators and while Trump and his followers call for militarization of the country in the name of protecting property, law and order, it is clear that a breach has been opened in the Blue Wall of Silence protecting the privileges of the billionaire class against the power of the working masses who today face not only a political crisis but also the crisis of an ongoing pandemic, the crisis of poverty and mass unemployment, and the impending climate crisis of which COVID is a symptomatic forerunner.
Throughout U.S. history, from the white Abolitionists, to the Yankee Civil War volunteers, to the Northern “carpet-baggers” who worked for Reconstruction, to the white Civil Rights marchers of the 1960s to the millions of whites in the streets proclaiming Black Lives Matter today, the unity in struggle of America’s racialized peoples has brought about whatever progress in freedom and democracy this race-benighted Republic as ever known.
Today’s “privileged” white demonstrators—themselves victims to a lesser degree of American capitalism—know in their hearts that they can “never be free” and never be safe from state violence until black lives really do matter. They know that “Black and White Unite and Fight” is the only possible way to block authoritarian government, prevent fascism, establish democracy, institute class equality, and face the future with a modicum of hope.
[2] “A Reporter’s Cry on Live TV: ‘I’m Getting Shot! I’m Getting Shot!” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/minneapolis-protests-press.html. See the following phrases in italics: “From a television crew assaulted by protesters to a photographer struck in the eye, journalists have found themselves targeted on the streets of America. Linda Tirado, a freelance photographer, activist and author, was shot in the left eye Friday while covering the street protests in Minneapolis. Ms. Tirado is one of a number of journalists around the country who were attacked, arrested or otherwise harassed—sometimes by police and sometimes by protesters—during their coverage of the uprisings that have erupted nationwide after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis… With trust in the news media lagging, journalists have found themselves targeted.”
Every week, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)’s National leadership, the National Political Committee (NPC), posts a brief report of the votes they take at their meetings on the DSA Discussion Board. Probably most members don’t follow this, either because they don’t know about the Discussion Board or have found the Board to be unpleasant and stopped looking, but since the 2019 NPC took office they have posted these regular updates as a measure of transparency, using the Discussion Bulletin to keep the information restricted to DSA members only.
Roll Call of NPC Vote
The NPC report posted on 5/4/20 showed an alarming question that had come to a vote: “Should DSA ask members in swing states to consider voting for Biden?”
That the NPC brought this question to a vote raises both democratic and political issues, since the 2019 DSA National Convention – the highest decision-making body in DSA—had already decided our position: “the Democratic Socialists of America will not endorse another Democratic Party presidential candidate should Bernie Sanders not prevail.” Democratic, because of how it affects member democracy in DSA; political not because of dissent on a majority opinion, but because of the questionable motivations in pressing the issue.
Method: Process For This Article
Writing about internal DSA politics is always difficult, and there’s a high bar set for how you come by information and represent it. While I’ve never been a bystander in DSA politics, in this situation I’m closer to the events because the source of the conflict is a resolution I submitted to Convention in 2019; clearly I have an interest in defending that position. That said, I tried to get as objective an account of the events as I possibly could.
In writing this article, I contacted the NPC on 5/11/20 and asked for details[i] on the vote that was reported on 5/4/20, asking about the discussion, process, who made the motion, who seconded, etc. Additionally, I invited NPC members to contact me for comment by Thursday, 5/14/20. I was called on the phone later on 5/11/20 by a representative of the NPC who asked me not to publish this article until minutes from the meeting were released on Friday, 5/15/20. No member of the NPC gave comment on the vote or the process, and minutes were not released on the promised time. On Sunday, 5/17/20 I followed up and asked the status, and was told the minutes were approved 5/15/20 and should be released by email to all members on Wednesday, 5/20/20. Minutes were finally sent Thursday evening, 5/21/20.
The minutes themselves are sparse: there are few attributions on comments in the discussion, there is no explanation of process in how Loomio online votes are advanced, nor is there any clarification on the context of the vote (“Should DSA ask members in swing states to consider voting for Biden?”).
For more, I used the only other sources of information available: the DSA discussion board reported posted by Jen M, with comments by Erika P and Jenbo, and public twitter posts by NPC members on this subject (Jenbo and Erika P). With no other comments to draw from, Jenbo and Erika are overrepresented in this article.
As of 6/3/20, minutes have not been available for any meeting since October 2019 (the most recent NPC minutes were for October 12-13, 2019, released on 12/20/2019); my understanding is that staff are charged with posting minutes. For reference, 11 of the 16 sitting NPC members signed the NPC Transparency Pledge ahead of the 2019 Convention, which included commitments:
Minutes for all regular and special NPC and NPC/SC meetings are posted no more than 7 days following the meeting they record; or
A notice is published that the minutes release has been delayed within 7 days following with an estimated time of publication and reason for delay.
List of NPC Meetings With Minutes. Blue have minutes available; black do not.
What Happened with This Vote?
At its biennial National Convention, delegates from DSA chapters elect a national leadership, the NPC, to serve until the next Convention. Sixteen members are elected to the NPC, with two representatives sharing a vote from YDSA, DSA’s youth section. The NPC meets quarterly and selects among them a smaller “Steering Committee” (SC) of five members to meet biweekly to make decisions, craft agendas and direct the staff.
In addition to these official meetings, the NPC keeps an online vote through a service called Loomio; decisions made through Loomio aren’t tracked with formal rules of order or minutes the way that in person/video conference meetings are.
The story seems to be this: the Steering Committee was preparing to issue statements on the 2020 Election and Joe Biden, as drafted by Kristian H of Socialist Majority, and invited the full NPC to the discussion[ii]. In their discussion, it became clear that there were some disagreements about how to frame the statement:
“There would be a clear material difference between a Biden presidency and Trump presidency, what are we telling people who ask us how we’re voting and how our members are voting? We need to be realistic about our ever expanding base, we need to take political leadership, there is a material difference between Obama and Trump (ex. ICE, deportations). Need to be clear about coalition-building. Have also seen chapters retweeting Howie Hawkins. Chapters need to think about what they are doing, is it actually relevant and about power?…key questions: what segments of the working class are we alienating by not relating to this election at all? Are losing opportunities to relate to coalition partners? I think we need an answer for the press. Trump is materially worse for all oppressed people than a Democrat was. Should include in any statement that we ask members in swing states to discuss and consider voting for Biden” (no attribution)
Natalie M noted that there were unresolved questions, including, “Should we tell our members in swing states to consider and discuss voting for Joe Biden?” The meeting concluded, but conversation continued over email, culminating in a vote on the Loomio online voting-system, “Should DSA ask members in swing states to consider voting for Biden?”
NPC member Erika P, writing on the discussion board, explained the position of those advancing the argument was that: “[I]t would’ve been language telling members in swing states to consider and debate voting for Biden. The position was that encouraging a subset of members to engage with the question isn’t an endorsement.”
There were some objections to the consideration of the question (unclear how many), with Jenbo writing to the rest of the NPC:
“…the NPC guiding chapters to even consider voting for Joe Biden goes against the spirit of Resolution 15, “In the Event of a Sanders Loss,” passed at the 2019 National Convention. People can argue semantics of “endorsement,” but comrade [name] said it best when she very succinctly wrote during the NPC meeting, “This sounds like an endorsement to me.” It does to me, too, and will to our membership. As such, I am formally objecting to this even going up for a vote.”
The vote was taken, with all the Socialist Majority Caucus members on the NPC (Abdullah, Hannah, Maikiko, and Kristian) voting “YES” and every other member voting “NO”: 4 for, 13 against, 0 abstain. None of the four who voted YES are in “swing states”, but in New York, Kansas, California and Texas respectively.
In the aftermath, members of SMC tried to explain that this wasn’t a “formal motion” and was a harmless point of discussion. The minutes released do not make any distinction, and the result is the same: members of the NPC asked for a decision to be made about encouraging members to vote for Joe Biden.
Democratic Organization
What’s the problem? It got voted down!
There are both political and organizational problems here. Let’s talk about organizational democracy first. DSA is a democratic socialist organization. As a historical marker, that’s emphasized to be a corrective to the perception of past undemocratic views of how socialism would function, but also how a socialist organization operates internally. If “democratic” is to mean anything, the organizational norms of DSA need to be taken seriously. In short: the NPC can’t just make decisions on whatever the fuck they want.
Convention and Member Democracy
DSA operates much more like a federation than a centralized group, and chapters are given a lot of leeway to make decisions for themselves, but we still maintain a national organization in common. DSA’s structure places the biennial National Convention as the “highest decision-making body” in the organization, and from there the National Political Committee is elected to execute the objectives the Convention has laid out and provide leadership in between Conventions. The Convention, not the NPC, is the ultimate authority, particularly because it is the most representative gathering of members; in 2019, this was over 1000 delegates representing 55,000 members – far more representative than 16 members of the NPC.
The first and primary issue is that the National Political Committee cannot supersede or relitigate the decisions the Convention makes – it does not and should not have that power. When the Convention makes a decision it is imperative that we respect it as an organization.
In the case of the Democratic candidate endorsement, the Convention made a clear resolution and yet the NPC considered a question that ran counter to the resolution. Whether they affirmed it or not is beside the point (though, let’s be clear, props to the 13 and 2 who voted to uphold our Convention position!) – they shouldn’t have held that vote in the first place. If the NPC could wield the power to override the Convention, then what is the political significance of the Convention? The body would cease to have any political weight and would only serve to perform the function of electing the NPC and approving committees.
Consider for a moment if the vote had gone the other way: how would we feel if our Convention resolution were reversed by the NPC? The vote would create an existential crisis for DSA, undermining the democratic process that make us democratic socialists. Like the decision or hate it, DSA members should see this as an action that was out of order; it should be retracted post facto.
Lastly, the “swing state” vote raises questions about the operation of the NPC. To be clear, I am not a person who believes the NPC is illegitimate or shouldn’t exist or something; it must and should. The comrades who serve on the national leadership do us a necessary service. But they also have serious responsibilities to the membership. Here we should ask how this process of online voting for the NPC functions where decisions are made when there is not a process that is clear and transparent. For an organization our size, the national leadership absolutely needs a decision-making method between meetings, but the process and relationship should be explicit and follow rules that govern consistently.
The Politics of Non-Endorsement and Joe Biden
The second part of this is a more directly political question. First, let us be clear: what they were suggesting is a tacit endorsement of Joe Biden; this is particularly clear in citing “seen chapters retweeting Howie Hawkins” as evidence of a problem. “You should vote for Joe Biden” is an endorsement, you’re saying that this candidate is acceptable and preferable – that runs exactly counter to the spirit of the resolution which anticipated this scenario (“Whereas, DSA should prepare a position in the event Sanders does not win the Democratic nomination for president”). The 2019 Convention decided that we would in fact not offer this kind of validation of a neoliberal imperialist candidate, let alone one who is the subject of a major sexual misconduct claim.
What is the purpose of encouraging DSA members in swing states to consider voting for Joe Biden? It is not as though there are enough DSA members in any swing state that their individual votes could be the deciding factor on who wins or loses; we’re talking about members in the hundreds or low thousands. No, instead this is a gesture that has political motivations and is a signaling move to other organizations (particularly nonprofits) that DSA can be considered a “safe” organization to work with. Jenbo alludes to this in the email she sent to the rest of the NPC:
As leadership of the organization, we have a duty to our membership, not to coalition partners. As socialists, every move we make must be toward class independence from capitalist politicians. Any support, even the most staunch critical support, of Joe Biden would be undermining the values and hard work of ourselves and our comrades…
Imagining ourselves to be junior partners in a liberal-lefitst coalition against Trump is pure fantasy. This shit was rigged against us, it was in 2016, and if we cave we show we’re willing to let that happen again and again. Asking chapters to “grapple with the question” of bending to the goals of coalition partners who do not share our revolutionary vision in hopes of attracting them to socialism is not leadership. I refuse to advocate for chapters to compromise their values for the sake of peace and friendship. We should all refuse to compromise the socialist movement.
This is the crux of the political issue. Who one person individually votes for, or even chapters with a few hundred members, is inconsequential. Elections in the United States have much more to do with how prominent figures, politicians and organizations broadcast public support, who they campaign for, and who they presume is a legitimate figure. What’s more, members don’t need to be told to “grapple” with the problem of who to support in swing states – I live in one: we do it all the time, and it is a fraught process where every member is going to make calculations in a highly personal way. Telling people to consider voting for Joe Biden is an endorsement, and the motivation has less to do with our socialist aims and more to do with politicking with “coalition partners”.
The Convention resolution said we will abstain from endorsing. It intentionally left how individual members vote and campaign up to them – if one feels like they really have to vote for Joe Biden, at least they can do so knowing it was a transaction and that our socialist organization recognizes that this is the result of a broken system that we collectively reject.
Where does that leave us? Democratic Issues With Democratic Socialism
This ends up being a challenging issue because its at the intersection of process and politics – and people hate process. The difficulty in crafting this story had to do with lack of information: minutes have not been regularly posted for over half a year, information had to be requested and was delayed, NPC members did not give comment, and minutes did not explain what happened, who did it or why. I knew where to go and who to talk to, and still had trouble getting that information – most members will not have the benefit of that knowledge.
These are democratic issues because members need access to information to participate in the organization – this has been the consistent theme of my writing about DSA, starting with Convention. When information is (chronically) unavailable, our ability to be democratic actors in our organization is limited. If we want our leadership to be accountable, we need a clear record of what they’re doing – I disagreed with the “NPC Transparency Pledge” when it came out because it looked to be more about posturing than politics, but as the majority of NPC members have signed it I find it ironic that it has not been observed. It concerns me that it appears to be a general silence among the NPC, and that much of the information has been provided by individual members of the NPC taking to discussion boards and social media for us to have some semblance of understanding. We still do not have clarity on some key questions regarding who raised this issue to be voted on, and if, as some have insisted, it was not a motion, what was it?
As I mentioned above the right thing to do would be for the NPC acknowledge this was a problem and retract this vote post facto – it already happened, the mechanics of the process was messy, but it should be recognized that it was not appropriate for the NPC to consider the question since they didn’t have the power. We don’t need to go through the drama of saying anyone should be removed or that they’re bad people – these are our comrades, and let’s all learn together, but part of moving forward is correcting our mistakes when we’re able. Convention has to be preserved. The tail can’t wag the dog.
It takes but a few minutes for the ruling elite to recast collective calls for an end to state violence against blacks into images of criminality of black protestors and a call to end looting. How quickly the government wants us to get back to the status quo where the ruling elite has been looting from the working poor every single day of our lives. Looting from the labor of black workers over 200 years of slavery in our country. Looting from the labor of black workers in the 100 years of convict-leasing and forced contractual tenant-farming under the Black Codes. Robbing working people, and always the hardest hit black and brown people among them, their schools, their homes and communities, their labor, their health, their rights, and their lives. Even during the three months of this pandemic, a handful of billionaires have already looted $434 billion from the backs of the working people while people continue to suffer.
If we’ve learned anything from the legacy of the Black Codes, which were created by former slaveholders after the Civil War to re-enslave freed blacks into a system of enforced labor, perpetual inequality and second-class citizenship, we know that all this looting by the ruling elite cannot occur without a legalized system of criminalization and state violence.
In Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall looked at the law-and-order policies that mirror Ronald Reagan’s manufactured campaign against drugs and muggings in the black community. Hall argued that at every turning point or crisis when people come together to challenge the legitimacy of the government, when we unmask the illusions of our “civil democracy,” that the ruling elite do two main things to hold on to their power in order to continue looting from working people: a) They refashion and rename the laws that criminalize sections of the working class, legally making them an underclass of second class citizens without rights. b) They will intensify state violence and terror. Law and order.
While Derek Chauvin and his fellow police officers must be prosecuted and convicted for homicide, we must see what the real role of the police is in our society. It is to flex the muscle of the ruling class and to maintain ruling-class interests. To manage dissent as our collective exploitation deepens. To keep order as the disorder in our lives becomes unbearable. Police violence sets the stage for intensifying inequality so the ruling class can manage to maintain order as they continue to loot from us.
Police power is sanctioned by laws of criminalization. Thus, the slave laws became the Black Codes after the Civil War, and then the Drug Reform Act after the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. But during the same year that Reagan signed into law the Drug Reform Act and introduced the mass incarceration system we know today, he also signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act, including employer sanctions provisions.
Following the same form of the slave laws and Black Codes, this law makes it a crime for undocumented workers to sell their labor freely, relegating them into an underclass of workers with no rights. At a time when workers across racial divides were just beginning to unite and fight for better conditions, not only did this law lead to the criminalization and incarceration of countless undocumented workers, but it pit undocumented workers against other workers, particularly poor black workers, forcing them into a cycle of unemployment, underemployment, mass incarceration, and poverty.
So at this critical juncture, when we face another turning point, a crisis of legitimacy, what will be the result of the spontaneous actions of the multitudes of people that have united together to denounce our government:
Will we release some steam for a few days, be satisfied with the prosecution and conviction of a few cops, accept a few reforms of a police system that will never be accountable to anyone else but its maker, the ruling class?
Will we settle for mere survival, not to be killed, so that we can live under the peace of everyday violence and robbery forced upon our labor, our communities, our health, and our lives?
Will we hang onto the illusions that equate equal opportunity to be as exploited as a vanishing group of white middle-class workers, or equal opportunity for a few black and brown faces to rise into positions of power and wealth to be the liberation of us all?
If we’ve learned anything from our history, it is that our history’s turning points failed to turn towards true transformation and liberation for people because at each critical juncture, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, the ruling power has been able to disunite working people—poor white farmers from freed slaves, industrial from agricultural workers, citizens from immigrants, and consequently succeeded in deceiving people into accepting reforms that served only a fraction of the working class while undermining the collective unity of the 99 percent.
We must see that these state-sponsored killings are a war not only on black people, but on all working people. And it is time that working people, the 99 percent, provide political leadership, starting with a clear demand to end the criminalization that divides working people, and fight for equal rights for all workers. Only then will we be able to unite together against our common oppression and exploitation and realize our unfinished revolution.
“Dirty Break” for Independent Political Action or a Way to Stay Stuck in the Mud? was written in response to an article by Eric Blanc that appeared on the Jacobin website in December 2017. Blanc’s article concerned the formation of the Minnesota Farmer Labor (MFLP) Party in 1922. Blanc argues that organized labor in Minnesota, under socialist leadership, ran in major party primaries in the 1920 election cycle, presumably for the purpose of gaining electoral support, prior to breaking and forming the MFLP. This, he argues, was a “dirty break” as compared to a clean break which would have avoided the major party primaries altogether. The purpose of Blanc’s article was to propose a similar “dirty break” approach to electoral political today by running in Democratic primaries with the idea of eventually breaking to form an independent working class-based party at some point in the future. This “dirty break” has since gained popularity within DSA. I have written extensively in New Politics, on the Jacobin website, and in books about why I think pursuing electoral action through the Democratic Party is a dead end or worse. I wrote this critique of Blanc’s article for the Jacobin website in 2018 because I thought his arguments were original enough to demand a response. Although a rebuttal from Blanc was promised, Jacobin has yet to publish my article after two years. So, I thank New Politics for putting this up on their website.
– Kim Moody, June 10, 2020
Although the union-backed Working People’s Non Partisan League (WPNL) ran statewide candidates in the major party primaries in the 1920 elections, as Eric Blanc reports, “In the cities, where local electoral rules removed the need to run in primaries in the first place, the union-based WPNPL (Working People’s Non Partisan League) ran an independent slate of ‘Labor Candidates’ against Republicans and Democrats alike.” Since they didn’t have to run as independents, this points to a political desire to do so, a desire to break from the major parties, which they did in the next election round, while the primarily farmer-based Nonpartisan League (NPL) didn’t. And since, as Blanc argues, organized labor would become the organizational and financial backbone of the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP), the secret of its eventual success, it seems the scenario of major party primaries as a building block for the FLP is only one part of the story, perhaps not the most important part, and perhaps even a drag on the process of breaking with the old parties. The left-wing of urban labor made a break in practice in 1920, even as the rural wing of the movement didn’t, well before the FLP was formed. This, as we will see below, was a reflection of the division between the NPL and the labor party movements nationally in this period.
The importance of the “dirty break” interpretation of the history of the FLP appears to be that it holds a precedent for today. Run or support candidates in the Democratic Party primaries and then you will have the forces to make a break—a neat two-stage strategy. Given the differences in the level of organization, funding, and professionalism of today’s state parties from those of the 1920s, the analogy is questionable, as I will argue below. Nevertheless, what is clear in Blanc’s account is that the NPL’s overall “inside-outside” strategy, as some would call it today, did not work in electoral terms in Minnesota. That is, as long as it ran “inside” the major party primaries it lost elections. Furthermore, the major parties grew tired of having their primaries invaded by candidates who refused to remain loyal to the party once they lost. So, in 1921 they passed a state law prohibiting those who ran in a major party primary and lost from subsequently running as an independent or candidate of another party. The “inside-outside” strategy not only failed in Minnesota, it was foreclosed. What next?
After the 1920 elections, as Blanc reports, socialist William Mahoney and his supporters in the unions, abandoned the failed strategy, which he had apparently gone along with (the “dirty” part) and led the organization of an independent FLP backed by the unions and with the support of some NPL farmers in 1922, something Mahoney said he had wanted all along. In that year they made the break complete (clean?), rejecting a fusion-type alliance with the Democrats and forming a party that would run its own candidates. Eventually they turned this party into “a well-structured, mass workers party,” as Blanc writes, with organizational and financial backing from the unions—a classic labor party. In the 1922-23 midterm elections the FLP elected a US Senator and Congressman. The new independent strategy was working and the FLP went on to become the state’s “second party,” as one the FLP militants Blanc quotes put it until 1948 when it merged with the Democrats.
A Look Back at the Farmer-Labor Party Movement
To put Mahoney and Minnesota in context we need to look at the national farmer-labor party movement of the post-WWI years. This movement arose from the conditions of the time: the enormous strike wave and rise of union militancy in 1918-1919, general strikes in Seattle and Winnipeg, the break-up of the Socialist Party, a vicious employers’ offensive, and a recession in 1920-21. It could not have happened if hundreds of thousands of workers had not taken to the streets and workplaces of the US in opposition to capital’s post-war offensive. This movement for a labor or farmer-labor party was part of the international worker upsurge of strikes and revolutionary actions that followed WWI. In the US it received inspiration from the Russian Revolution, that in Germany, and above all the growth of the British Labour Party.
From 1918 to 1923 the center of this movement in the US was the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), which labor historian Sidney Lens called “the hub of the labor movement at that time” and Philip Foner called “the hub of the labor party effort.” In 1918 the CFL led the formation of a Chicago and state-wide Illinois farmer-labor party with significant union backing in the wake of the huge, but unsuccessful meatpacking strike. While its initial electoral ventures were not very successful, it nonetheless set the tone of the national movement by opposing endorsement for or by either of the major parties, the so-called “Chicago Program”—a clean break strategy. Like most such developments in history the broader national movement was messy with plenty of factionalism, splits, failures, and successes. Nevertheless, by 1919 there were independent labor or farmer-labor parties in a dozen states and by the following year in 23 states. Minnesota was behind the learning curve.
The national movement was backed in many states by progressive union leaders, members and former members of the Socialist Party like Mahoney, a little later by the Communist (aka Workers’) Party (CP) which jumped on the band wagon in 1922, and many of the important unions in manufacturing—the centers of Socialist, Communist, and “militant minority” strength—though not for the most part in construction and transport, which were bastions of “pure-and-simple” unionism. The idea of a labor party completely independent of the major parties was also put forth by the CP-backed, rank and file-based Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) inside the AFL beginning in 1922. The TUEL, which advocated industrial unionism via amalgamation of craft unions, had a large presence in several unions and influence far beyond those between its launch in 1920 and 1923 when CP sectarianism derailed this promising rank and file-based organization. In other words, from 1918 through 1922-23 there was a large movement within the broader labor movement and upsurge for a “clean” break.
There was also, at that time, the Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA), which also had support from the NPLs, some union leaders, and even some FLP leaders, but mostly favored the “nonpartisan” approach of running in the major parties, which muddied the waters. Mahoney was one of those who fought within the CPPA for an independent direction.
The Minnesota labor leaders around Mahoney were, thus, part of that broader movement and favored a break with the major parties. In the formative period of the FLP, in 1922, Mahoney worked with the Communists. When, in 1923, Mahoney proposed that the Minnesota FLP host a meeting to discuss creating a national FLP, there was a weak turnout from the unions and Mahoney argued against the Communists’ proposal for an immediate launch of a national FLP, most likely correctly, on the grounds that this was premature. In any case such a move was side-lined by the 1924 Progressive Party presidential campaign of Robert LaFollette, who won 5 million votes. The recession and the employers’ offensive saw union membership plummet from its highpoint in 1920 of just over 5 million to 3.6 million in 1923. This, of course, was a major factor in undermining the movement for a labor party in the 1920s.
During these years the mostly farmer-based Non-Partisan Leagues and their national organization grew from 188,000 members in 1918 to 235,000 at its height in 1920. The NPL pursued the “nonpartisan” major party primary strategy everywhere it had strength, mostly in the Great Plains and upper Midwest. In its birthplace, North Dakota, where farmers greatly outweighed workers, the NPL had considerable success in electing its candidates in both the Republican and Democratic state-level parties—one reason why North Dakota did not develop a farmer-labor party. Had the Minnesota NPL been more successful in this strategy there might never have been a FLP in that state.
Most of the NPL leaders who followed NPL founder Arthur Townley from North Dakota, opposed the formation of an independent farmer-labor party everywhere, including, as Blanc points out, in Minnesota. Despite their growth, politically in this context they were the major grassroots opponents of independent political action, not its predecessors. The minority of labor NPL affiliates, such as that in Minnesota, generally favored a farmer-labor party, according to Foner. Hence, the independent labor candidates of 1920. In Minnesota the farmer-based NPL and its strategy were probably a factor in that state’s delay in completing the break it had started in 1920. In other words, there were two, slightly overlapping, sometimes allied movements, which represented different social bases and presented opposed political strategies.
Was the 1922 break in Minnesota clean or dirty? While Mahoney and other socialists who had generally supported the SP before the war temporarily embraced the “nonpartisan” strategy after the war, “in a great emergency” as Mahoney put it, my interpretation is that the 1922 break was a clean break with the past NPL practice of running in major party primaries. The new FLP did not run candidates in the major party primaries as far as I know. Blanc’s view is that it was “dirty” because the movement had built strength during the failed NPL strategy of running in the primaries. You choose.
The point I get from this history, however, is that the old “non-partisan” strategy failed and the majority of the movement made a break from the muddy past by 1922, following the precedent set by the Minnesota urban unions in 1920, that in Chicago and Illinois earlier, and the farmer-labor parties in other states formed before that in Minnesota. It did this, in other words, in the context of a broader labor-based movement for a complete break with the old parties and the formation of a labor party. In this it opposed the forces, mostly in the NPL and CPPA, that pushed for continued work in the major parties despite some overlap in membership. Had there not been a large labor-based movement for a clean break, it is doubtful the NPL’s “inside-outside” phase of the Minnesota movement would have gone anywhere. Minnesota labor’s 1922 break seems pretty clear and clean to me.
Indeed, concerning the “nonpartisan” strategy of the NPL, Blanc himself argues “Had there not been a sufficiently principled and influential political current willing to push back against these intense external and internal pressures, the farmer-labor party movement would have been absorbed back into the two-party system in 1922.” Agreed! So, why the positive emphasis on the NPL’s major party primary strategy and the alleged “dirty break?”
For farmers, the NPL was only the latest in a series of such organized political efforts, going back to the Grangers of the 1870s and 1880s and the Farmers’ Alliances of the late 1880s and 1890s, both of which tried to work through the major parties in the states where they had strength. The Grangers never broke from this. The Farmers’ Alliance, on the other hand, became the major base of populism and the People’s Party of the 1890s. In this latter case, the break was made, if only for a few years. The failure of the People’s Party by 1896, just 21 years before the formation of the NPL, probably influenced the NPL leaders of the post-WWI period against another third party attempt.
For labor from the mid-1880s, after the failure of the labor party movement of that period due to the collapse of the Knights of Labor, the unions of the new AFL typically engaged in “nonpartisan” major party electoral and legislative action through the city-based central labor councils and the state federations of labor. This labor version of the “nonpartisan” strategy was the policy of Samuel Gompers and the “pure-and-simple” wing of the AFL—not a means to a future break. So, the prior period of working through the major parties was not some Minnesota aberration, but the norm.
It was generally the socialists of various stripes who led the push away from this norm for a labor-populist alliance in the 1890s, the formation of the Socialist Party in 1901, and the farmer-labor parties after WWI. The scenario of socialists leading the fight for independent political action to make a break with the older practice of working through the major parties was also the norm for the post-war period. It was no accident that it was those with experience in, and commitment to, independent working-class politics through the Socialist Party (SP) who often led the movement for a farmer-labor party once the SP had declined and splintered in the post WWI period.
Minnesota was not an exception. Rather, it was the disillusionment with and opposition to the NPL strategy, not its advocacy, that allowed socialists and left labor leaders and activists to draw others into a break in two dozen states. They had to make a choice between the two directions for the movement. In American politics, by definition, there is always a prior ”dirty” phase of captivity in one or another major party or there would be nothing to break from. But he decisive force, as Blanc indicates, wasn’t those advocating the “inside-outside” “nonpartisan” strategy, but those calling for and organizing a clean break with that approach.
The Lesson for Today
The lesson for today is clear: there has to be a significant pole fighting for a clean break if those attempting to work (in any way, with or without illusions) within the Democratic Party framework are to be drawn to a political break with that party. The social, economic, and political forces within the Democratic Party today, and the national spoiler effect to which they are so attuned, make a sui generis internally-based split a virtual impossibility. (See Kim Moody, “From Realignment to Reinforcement”, updated in the Verso e-book Socialist Strategy and Electoral Politics.)
Furthermore, the idea of a tendency that juggles both strategies simultaneously by advocating a “dirty” phase and only projecting a break somewhere in the future is a recipe for confusion and delay in actually making the break, if indeed it ever happens. In any case, it is not justified by the Minnesota NPL/FLP case where a break became possible because there was a labor-based tendency that fought for such a break. Furthermore, the “dirty break” approach does not overcome the spoiler effect that keeps people voting Democratic, and Democratic office holders loyal to the party’s caucus in state legislatures and Congress, because any split in the Democratic ranks or among its office holders will throw things to the Republicans—unless the socialist have taken over the entire Democratic Party (and it has a majority), in which case it tuns out the “realigners” were right all along.
As to the city election rules that made independent labor candidates easier in Minnesota, I would argue that in today’s cities across the US there are few Republicans in limited election districts and hence little or no spoiler effect. Look at any electoral map of the US and you will see that the cities are blue and the countryside red, with the suburbs contested territory. Thus, in cities it is possible to by-pass the Democratic primaries in order to establish a “second party,” even if it loses elections for some time, if there is grassroots organization, and if there is a social base—this latter being the real question for socialist or “progressive” electoral action today. Unfortunately, we are not (yet?), despite some hopeful signs, in a period of mass upsurge such as spawned the FLP movement in the US and more revolutionary events abroad in the years following the First World War.
Is there any evidence that running in Democratic primaries builds a social base for a break in today’s circumstances or at any time in the last half century or more? After all, socialists and union members have been running in Democratic primaries for some time. The AFL-CIO notes from time to time that hundreds of its members run for office, almost exclusively as Democrats, but we see no “regenerated labor movement” from that activity. Blanc argues that the “mass workers’ organizations” have the power to overcome co-optation by the Democrats, but since their leaders do not even dream of using that power for this purpose or even to impose the policies of the movement on the Democrats, this remains a non sequitur. The US labor leadership in entirely the captive of the Democratic Party. With a few possible exceptions, they will not lead a break. This appears to be the “dirty” or “inside-inside” strategy de jour. And it is unlikely they would abandon it unless there was a strong political pole of attraction working in the labor and social movements to demand a clean and clear break with the Dems, starting in the cities and states.
Even with Blanc’s more positive interpretation, what does the Minnesota case tell us about today’s situation when the primaries are drenched in business and wealthy-donor organization and money to an extent unknown in the 1920s, and both national and state Democratic Parties are far better organized, (business) funded, professionally staffed, and disciplined in legislative votes than in the early 1920s or even the 1960s, and hence better able to repel or absorb dissident “progressives” as they have for decades. Or when scores of socialists and other leftists run in Democratic primaries with no idea of running as independents. And, most tragically, when there is no significant organized “influential political current” or pole demanding a clean break to attract labor and social movement activists. Unfortunately, it appears that Bernie, who is now focused entirely on electing Democrats, including Biden, will not be our William Mahoney.
Isn’t it the job of socialists to help build an active mass social base, a “militant minority”, through work in the unions, workplaces, and social movements, on the one hand, and a clear political pole for independent political action that can attract activists, on the other hand, as Blanc states? Wouldn’t it be a big step forward if DSA, or at least a majority of it, composed such a clear political pole of attraction within the labor and social movements, instead of being stuck in the mud of the “inside-outside” treadmill in which there is no actual “outside”?
The decision to retain a senior advisor who broke lockdown rules during the Covid-19 pandemic has damaged Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government, causing distrust at a time when trust is essential. Wider policies to aid the ‘socially’ as well as ‘clinically’ vulnerable would help prevent the feared ‘second wave’ of infections, and help regain trust.
As many as 81 percent of the public believe that Dominic Cummings, a key aide to Johnson, broke lockdown rules through an undisclosed decision to relocate with his family and later take them on a thirty-mile outing, according to an Opinium survey for the Observer.
The issue has seen Johnson’s approval rating collapsing into minus figures, while his party’s lead over the Labour opposition has dropped to only four points against 26 points two months ago.
To understand his plunging approval, Johnson first needs to accept that it’s more than a result of political campaigning by the press. Over the last couple of months, the pandemic and the lockdown have prompted revisions in public beliefs and values, presumably because the death of tens of thousands of people and hundreds of health and other key workers has a way of deepening perspectives.
There has been a nationwide increase in respect for the NHS, carers and key workers; greater awareness of the unfairness of social and financial inequality, more skepticism over anti-migrant rhetoric given the contribution of BAME [Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic – Ed.] and migrant workers in fighting Covid-19 and saving lives. And now: zero tolerance of government misconduct.
Albeit slowly, the government has taken some measures that show an appreciation of these new, changing circumstances. Among them, a ten-year-old ‘hostile environment policy’ bluntly aimed at ostracizing migrants, has had some of its most glaring aspects revised. This, however, does not go far enough.
On 21st May, the government finally scrapped the visa surcharge for migrant NHS staff, extended a bereavement scheme to the families and dependents of NHS support staff and care workers who die as a result of the Coronavirus, and has increased temporary visa extensions for migrants. But more measures are needed to amend policies still in place that are harming the most vulnerable through preventing protection from Covid-19.
Depending on wealth and living circumstances, conditions under lockdown might vary from ‘inconvenienced’ for some, to ‘barely surviving’ for others. It’s the latter category that needs greater attention with regard to both the current and future outbreaks, as well as for this government’s credibility.
As we ease out of lockdown, the government would do best to pay special attention to the UK councils where infection and death rates were highest – most of which were the UK’s more deprived areas with poor living conditions and overcrowded housing. This is where second or third wave infections risk taking off quickly if councils are not adequately supported.
By the same token, the government could easily do more to limit Covid-19 infections and deaths if it prioritized putting an end to the hostile environment policy that continues to put lives at risk through obligatory poverty and the fear of deportation.
Asylum seekers and undocumented migrants in particular are not only likely to live in locations where adherence to social distancing rules are difficult or ultimately impossible – with the risk of Covid-19 infection much higher – but are also largely exempt from the government’s financial support schemes. Asylum seekers are expected to survive on a budget of just £5.39 per day, which currently plunges many into destitution.
Increasing the financial support available to migrants – including asylum seekers and those with insecure immigration status — would not only protect their lives but those of the wider public.
Last week, Johnson was questioned by Labour MP Stephen Timms on the matter of hundreds of thousands of migrants in the UK living under the No Recourse to Public Funds Policy. Those subjected to this policy have not been granted the right to permanent settlement, and as such are not entitled to any form of public funds whatsoever, including means-tested free school meals for their children. Under the lockdown – with job losses and furlough increasingly common – it is difficult to understand quite how they are expected to survive without access to the government’s financial schemes like the rest of the nation.
The Scottish National Party has warned the Home Office that the policy should be scrapped because of the risks of spreading Covid-19 – those who cannot access financial support are being deprived of the option to self-isolate; they must work or starve. Alarmingly, Johnson seemed unaware of this policy in an infuriating display of ignorance within the hearing.
In addition to the lack of financial support available to migrants as a result of the Hostile Environment, a change to the immigration rules in 2018 – which sees some migrants charged upfront for health care – has created significant barriers for many. Similarly, the government’s implementation of data sharing between the NHS and the Home Office is not only threatening but has actually contributed to the deaths of vulnerable migrants throughout the Covid-19 crisis who are afraid to seek medical help for fear of arrest or excessive bills.
It has become clear that countries which were the quickest to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic have been the most successful in containing it. Portugal, for example, has had just under 1,400 deaths. But along with speed, the country instantly applied common-sense policies too, such as granting all immigrants temporary citizenship rights during a state of crisis to prevent the spread of the disease.
The UK now has the world’s second highest death toll, with 8,000 new infections per day as it introduced an easing of lockdown rules on 1st June. The adoption of similarly humane policies – which prioritize migrant safety as opposed to hostility – is critical in avoiding a ‘second wave,’ and restoring some of Johnson’s now non-existent approval rating.
Trump not only invokes the past, he makes his reactionary nature explicit. His most memorable slogan, Make America Great Again (MAGA), recalls a distant, but unspecified and therefore mythic past—a past when white Christian families might prosper, pray, and act as they wished, an America whose military ruled over a free world, slaying the Communist dragon and its socialist spawn. Not simply the America of the neoliberal Reagan years, it is also the America of the 1924 immigration law. It is the America of the 1930s, identified not with the New Deal, but rather with America First and tariff-based isolationism. It is the America of 1950s anticommunism, an America where blacks, women, and immigrants knew their place in a time before political correctness.
The politics of Trumpism is both a continuation and a negation of neoliberalism, personified in the authoritarian father figure of Trump himself. If neoliberalism equals markets + globalization + austerity, Trumpian post-neoliberalism equals markets + ethno-nationalism + qualified austerity, with a generous portion of religious fundamentalism thrown into the mix.
Trump’s neoliberal continuity may be seen most clearly in his disruption of the regulatory state, eviscerating environmental protections (including withdrawal from the Paris climate accords), furthering the privatization of public education, attempting (so far unsuccessfully) to reverse Obamacare, attacking support for public housing and food security, just to cite a few of the most prominent examples. His judicial appointments at all levels have been carried out with clear ideological intent both to defend traditional (i.e., market-based, Christian fundamentalist) morality, especially with respect to abortion, and to provide a judicial backstop in support of deregulation and against state intervention in the economy. Anyone reading this surely will be able to provide their own favorite examples.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Trump, however, is not so much his continuity with neoliberalism, but rather his break with the neoliberal tradition, a break that reflects the neoliberal crisis of legitimacy.
Trump’s ideological break with neoliberalism has been expressed in what might be called the politics of displacement. By his understanding of the ways in which neoliberalism has been experienced and perceived as failing his core constituencies, Trump has displaced class-based opposition into his reactionary program. Most importantly, this displacement takes the form of white American ethno-nationalism, expressed both through his consistent attacks on immigrants, Muslims and those who cross the southern border seeking work and safety. It is also represented by his abandonment of neoliberal globalization, in favor of trade wars (tariffs) and bilateral (as opposed to multilateral) trade deals.
He displaces working-class consciousness away from confronting the capitalist class to the privileged coastal liberal elites, seen to be out of touch with the lives of real Americans in the heartland. The capitalist ruling class disappears into a geographic and cultural phenomenon, rather than an organic part of the economic system itself.
Clearly, the politics of right-wing displacement have worked for Trump. His erstwhile advisor and chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has recently bragged that “[w]e’ve turned the Republican party into a working-class party,” implicitly identifying the US working class with the white, male, Christian and older members of both the working and middle classes. As Kim Moody points out, the relatively small working-class shift to Trump in 2016, although apparently real, is also more complicated. It continues a longstanding shift away from the Democratic Party going back at least to 1980, more than a shift specifically to Trump or the Republican Party.
To phrase it differently, the failure of third-way centrism, especially on the part of Democrats like the Clintons, Obama, and (presumptively) Biden, has, in significant part, contributed to the electoral rise of the right. In 1984, for example, only 48 percent of union households voted for Mondale against Reagan. This was actually less than the 51 percent of a smaller, weakened union movement who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Lest we forget, in a notorious lack of foresight in 1980, the air traffic controllers’ union, PATCO, endorsed Reagan, only to be unceremoniously destroyed by the very candidate that they had supported only weeks earlier.
It would be overly generous to describe Trump’s eclectic economic policies as a plan. He is a neoliberal on deregulation, supply-side tax cuts, and privatization, On Federal budget deficits and interest rates, he governs like a neo-Keynesian. A wannabe isolationist on military strategy and foreign trade, he is a cynic when it comes to individual rights and family values. This eclecticism derives from Trump’s ignorance and arrogance in roughly equal measure, filtered through his experience as a real estate speculator.
His economic policies, in other words, are a patchwork with three principal competing aspects. First, in the classic neoliberal tradition, there is deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and cutbacks for the poor and working class. The effect of the tax cuts has been to further redistribute wealth upwards, fueling what appears to be an expanding speculative bubble in both securities (the stock market in particular, as became apparent in March 2020, and also corporate bonds) and in residential housing.
Second, there has been a substantial rise in the federal deficit, since increased military expenditures have been far larger than cuts in the social wage. This is reminiscent of the Reagan economy of the early 1980s. Domestically, Trump’s economic policies appear to be an eclectic mixture of neoliberalism and neo-Keynesianism. Until the COVID-19 pandemic caused the global economy to crash, deficit spending, coupled with historically low interest rates, prevented the economy from falling into a new recession. However, this was insufficient to restore growth rates to earlier levels. The historic weakness of the labor movement (low union density and, at least until recently, relatively few strikes) has allowed this approach to proceed without the threat of potentially destabilizing inflation, even when confronted with apparently low unemployment rates.
The third leg of Trump’s economic policies consists in international trade and investment, and, in particular, the tariff war with China. More broadly, this embodies a rejection of multilateral globalization. Based on his ethnonationalism, this is a rejection of trade policies at the heart of the neoliberal agenda going back to the end of World War II. Consequently, Trump’s isolationist trade policies may be the single largest cause of policy concern among the more farsighted members of the capitalist class, especially those in the financial sector.
Figure 1: A. Profit share (net operating surplus as percent of gross domestic income), 1947-2019.
In spite of all this, there has been a tendency since 2015 for profit share to fall while wages rise, as shown in Fig 1A. So far, this has not led to an increase in prices, probably due in large measure to international competition, the organizational and political weakness of the working class, and an exodus of workers from the labor market since 2000. However, this is an unstable situation. There will be significant pressure in the near term to reverse this trend in favor of increasing profits at the expense of wages, raising the likelihood both of inflation and of intensified class conflict.
As the world faces the climate crisis, Trump’s policies, including his dilatory and dismissive response to the COVID-19 pandemic, his penchant for deregulation, and his withdrawal from the Paris accords (weak and inadequate as they might be), have been nothing short of a disaster. Trump, like a 21st-century Nero, tweets while the planet burns. In the absence of a devastating war (in the Middle East or East Asia, perhaps), his rejection of the reality of the climate crisis may be seen as his most important, and most damning, legacy.
Sanders
If Trump is inspired by a return to the halcyon days before Roosevelt’s 1932 election, Sanders sees his task as completing the Rooseveltian New Deal for the 21st century. Anyone wishing to gain an understanding of Sanders’ world view, would do well to pay careful attention to his speech on the 21st Century Bill of Rights. Although presented early in the 2020 campaign, it laid out a coherent perspective from which Sanders hardly deviated in the following months.
Sanders identified his goal as taking “up the unfinished business of the new deal and carry it to completion.” As he put it last December, “It is about transforming this country, it is about creating a government and an economy that works for all people and not just the 1%” by confronting “unfettered capitalism” and “oligarchy.”
The polarization in US politics in response to neoliberal attacks on living standards, especially the capture of the Republican Party by Trump and the ideologues of Christian ethno-nationalism, combined with the historically quiescent class struggle, has opened up the possibility for a social democratic left to emerge within the Democratic Party. It has also exposed deep ideological division within the party between the neoliberal centrist wing and the progressive wing, itself divided between the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez social democrats and the Warren progressives.
This ideological division is a reflection of the class divisions among supporters of these wings. The centrists (for lack of a better term) represent the vast body of party functionaries and office holders, whose material existence depends on the continued electoral success of the party. They depend on continued financial and organizational support from those more farsighted sections of the capitalist class (especially Wall Street), along with the bulk of the labor bureaucracy. The social democratic wing, on the other hand, depends for its support on a largely atomized working-class base. The centrists and social democrats also split along race, age, and gender lines. Older voters, both black and white, tend to support the centrists, while younger voters are inclined to support the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez wing.
As is well-known, Sanders self-identifies as a democratic socialist, effectively equivalent to a European social democrat. In brief, he stands for reforming the capitalist system in the interests of working people. Its systemic replacement, if such a thing is even considered, remains for the indefinite, but distant, future. The reforms that Sanders advocates have broad popular support, especially after decades of attack from the neoliberals. They represent both a defense of reforms won previously, now lost or diminished under neoliberalism (free public higher education, for example), or reforms once promised but not yet won, like universal health care. The realization of these reforms would represent important gains for working people. The Green New Deal, in particular, is an elementary necessity for the preservation of human civilization.
These reforms, including his intention to strengthen organized labor, are widely supported, especially among the young, working-class and middle-class (e.g., teachers, nurses, engineers) voters, who provide the mass base, as well as the financial support, for the Sanders campaign. Among the Democratic candidates, Sanders gets the most support (measured by number of contributors) from working class donors, including some support from within the trade union leadership. Yet, by and large, the union bureaucracy has remained loyal to the Democratic establishment.
It is not difficult to understand why Sanders, who started his political career independent of the two corporate parties, has nevertheless chosen to align himself in practice with the Democrats while still remaining nominally independent. By running in the Democratic primaries, he sought to overcome many of the limitations that make the US electoral system so profoundly undemocratic. These include winner-take-all elections[14], the electoral college, and the (informal yet real) media blackout of third-party candidates (a legacy, in part, of Reagan’s neoliberal repeal of the fairness doctrine, along with the exemption of independently hosted political debates from the equal time rule). These benefits, however, come at a price for the development of an independent working-class movement.
What I and some others who identify with the tradition of socialism from below find most problematic in Sanders’ social democracy, is his choice to work within the Democratic Party, even to the point of endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016 after Sanders lost the nomination at the Philadelphia convention, and now his endorsement of Biden in 2020.
Sanders personifies an alternative politics of displacement, but in a radically different manner than does Trump. For Sanders, the left-wing displacement takes form by identifying the problems of capitalism as ones that can be addressed through policy changes within the existing system. They appear to be amenable to symptomatic relief, rather than as systemic, constitutive elements of capitalism itself. The problem that social democracy has faced historically with this approach is one that is faced by Sanders and his successors: the fight over the class division of the productive surplus (profit). Will the capitalist class meekly agree to relinquish its profits in the service of the people as a whole? This is exceedingly unlikely, at best.
This results in the fundamental contradiction of social democratic reformism. In order to obtain the reforms that their program promises, they must rely on the continued profitability of the capitalist system to fund these programs. In periods of profitability crisis (which occur sooner or later, but whose onset is difficult to predict), social democrats are forced to choose between a rejection of capitalism or an abandonment of the reform program.
The inequality that results from neoliberal profitability restoration at the expense of working-class wages justifies Sanders’ claims on the billionaire class. However, this redistribution is not politically and economically feasible without a strong, independent working-class movement. In such confrontations between labor and capital, it has been social democracy that has capitulated to the needs of capitalist profitability, choosing the side of renewed profitability through austerity. Hollande in France and Syriza in Greece may be the most notable post-2008 examples, but far from the only ones. This pressure is likely to grow as the COVID-19 depression lingers.
It may be worth recalling in this context that although Sanders cites Eugene V. Debs as a role model, not only did Debs run on the Socialist Party ticket, he also ran on a revolutionary, rather than a social democratic, program. As Michael Zweig points out, “[e]economic problems arise not because some people are rich but because private profit and the power of capital are the highest priorities in the economic system.”[15]
The two major periods during which reforms were won in the United States during the twentieth century, the 1930s and the 1960s, were periods of immense social struggle and class conflict. Roosevelt, the former governor of New York, was elected as a moderate in 1932, following the failure of Republican Herbert Hoover to overcome the worst aspects of the Great Depression (using pro-market austerity methods similar to those that would later be identified with neoliberalism). The working-class upsurge of the 1930s, especially the 1934 general strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo, and San Francisco, and the 1937 autoworkers’ factory takeovers that led to the creation of the CIO, were the foundation that made important reforms like Social Security and the Wagner Act possible.
Similarly, the Black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s made possible not only important civil rights legislation, but also the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. It is not an accident that the growing strength of the antiwar movement, the Black freedom struggle, the second wave feminist movement, along with a series of militant strikes, coincided with Nixon’s establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) in 1971. In Howard Zinn’s memorable phrase, “What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but ‘who is sitting in’ and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change.”
Although there seem to be some recent signs of growing working-class militancy, the relatively low level of organized class struggle on the job, in the streets, and in the communities has displaced political resistance to neoliberalism into electoral reformism within a capitalist party. Can the Berniecrats both be the catalyst for a new wave of mass movements and also the standard bearer of the Democratic Party? If so, to what extent will it channel this potential into Democratic Party electoralism?
To carry out this program, Sanders has famously called for a political revolution: “And let me also be clear, the only way we achieve these goals is through a political revolution where millions of people get involved in the political process and reclaim our democracy by having the courage to take on the powerful corporate interests whose greed is destroying the social and economic fabric of our country.”
It appears from this that Sanders’ understanding of political revolution entails the reform of capitalism through the electoral (i.e., political) process. This understanding gains credibility by looking at Our Revolution, the organization created by Sanders supporters in the wake of his 2016 presidential campaign. The work of Our Revolution has been limited essentially to support for the Sanders campaign, along with endorsement of several progressive Democratic Party candidates. Over time, Our Revolution seems to have withered, as energy and funds have gone directly to the Sanders 2020 campaign itself.
Bernie’s organizing approach is largely top-down, as was Jesse Jackson’s in 1984. This is not surprising, since he is organizing an electoral campaign, not a social movement. The energies of thousands of self-identified socialists were channeled into door-knocking for Sanders’ nomination by the Democratic Party.
Looking forward
With Trump’s unhinged and erratic behavior, with his obsessive lying and self-aggrandizement, with his failure to adequately address the COVID-19 pandemic, and with the Republican Party no longer representing the interests of the ruling class as a whole, control of the Democratic Party takes on greater significance than at any time in the last several decades.
Fearful of the growth of social democracy within the Democratic Party, there has been an influx of billionaire support for centrist Democratic candidates, including, for example, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. The party establishment has united in support of the hopelessly inept and underpowered Biden, rather than risk the possibility of an arguably more popular Sanders nomination.
Those of us who identify with the tradition of socialism from below have been divided over whether to support the Sanders campaign within the Democratic Party. The fundamental contradiction for many socialists when considering Bernie’s candidacy is simple. He ran as a socialist (or at least a social democrat) within a capitalist party. Furthermore, winning the nomination was a long shot at best, and he had pledged to support the Democratic nominee, whomever that may be, as he did in 2016, a promise that he has now fulfilled. As Chris Morrill writes, “intentionally or not, progressives are coaxing us back into a corporate party.”
This is not the first time that an arguably social-democratic tendency has emerged within the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign was social democratic it all but name and was arguably stronger on race and support for third world liberation movements than is the Sanders campaign. Yet it died a bureaucratic death within the party.
If we recognize that organization is a necessary mediating factor between theory and practice, what does this entail for work by socialists within the Democratic Party? Socialists have advanced several justifications for working on the Sanders campaign within the Democratic Party, including both the inside-outside and the dirty break strategies. Their ultimate success, however, depends on the emergence of a working-class alternative developing outside the Democratic Party. I would argue that on the electoral plane and at the present time, the Green Party is the best, actually existing, hope for nucleating an electoral alternative that can facilitate independent organizing in the workplaces and the communities.
There are three principal reasons in support of this claim. First, the Green Party is not only independent of capital and its parties, it will be running ecosocialist candidates (presumptively Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker) on an ecosocialist platform in 2020. Second, it will be on the ballot in a majority of states in the 2020 election. Third, as Linda Thompson and Steve Bloom argue, the Green Party doesn’t have to win to have a significant effect on US politics. By supporting a credible candidate running an anti-capitalist, ecosocialist campaign, Greens can advance a real Green New Deal. At the same time, a Green campaign can effectively challenge the reactionary policies shared by both the Democratic and the Republican parties on war, racism, and their defense of a fundamentally undemocratic system.
The Green Party’s advocacy of the Green New Deal for over a decade before its assimilation, dilution, and popularization by the Democratic left, is strong evidence of the success the party has had in influencing political perceptions. This has occurred despite its relatively low poll numbers, and the media blackout on its campaigns, relieved only occasionally by attacks on Greens as spoilers.
Polling shows majority support in the US for a third party, albeit for a variety of reasons. As Thompson and Bloom argue, “[t]he stronger an alternative like the Green Party becomes, the more votes it has the potential to win, the greater the possibility that the U.S. ruling class will at some point be faced with a truly mass political force to the left of the Democrats which it cannot control.” Supporting a Democratic Party candidate, on the other hand, strengthens ruling-class ideological hegemony channeled through its captive organization, the Democratic Party.
We need to work to build an independent alternative, while always remaining open to making the necessary strategic and tactical adjustments as circumstances change. As Bernie Sanders wrote in 1985, “What would be a tragedy, however, is for people with a radical vision to fall into the pathetic camp of the intellectually bankrupt Democratic Party.”
[14] To his credit, Sanders has endorsed ranked choice voting, although one must search his website carefully in order to find it.
[15]The Working Class Majority (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) p.77.
Thousands of protesters gathered in the Shattuck Picnic Grove in Franklin Park during the Black Lives Matter vigil. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
The protests against police violence that have been sparked by the police lynching of George Floyd have now entered their second week and have involved hundreds of thousands of mostly youthful, often multiracial protesters in large and small cities throughout the country.
Many of these overwhelmingly, peaceful demonstrations have been met with mass arrests and police repression. Governors have called in National Guard units, while Donald Trump berates governors who balk as “weak” and threatens to send in the armed forces.
This violence is an extension of the police violence that took the life of George Floyd and, more generally, the state violence visited on Black and other people of color on this continent over the last five hundred years.
The repression of peaceful protest is also a serious attack on our democratic right to assemble. The arrest of journalists reporting on the protests, with encouragement from the White House, and reports that internet access is being cut off in areas where protests are occurring, is an ominous threat against free speech.
The protesters have had to weigh the need for social distancing against the need to protest racist violence, during a pandemic which continues to rage with particular virulence in communities of color. That millions have chosen to protest despite the risk is a powerful testimony to the depth of pain and anger felt in the Black community.
The nationwide and often multiracial character of these protests indicates a breadth and depth of anti-racist sentiment not seen in previous uprisings against racist police violence. It shows the potential for the emergence of a mass anti-racist movement of unprecedented proportions. In the days and weeks ahead, anti-racist activists will have the opportunity to discuss, debate and reflect upon the connections between police violence and the social structures that make them possible, and the way forward for the emerging mass anti-racist movement.
Systemic Racist Violence
The helicopters, sophisticated military equipment, and even tanks that have been used in police confrontations with protesters have terrorized Black people for years. Much of this expensive hardware has been acquired as part of the racist “war on drugs,” which fueled mass incarceration to the point that 25% of the world’s incarcerated people are in the U.S. African Americans convicted of nonviolent offenses constitute an outsized proportion of the incarcerated.
The pent-up anger expressed in the streets reflects the oppressive structural racism of U.S. capitalism. Endemic police repression of communities of color is accompanied by intertwining structures of capitalist and state exploitation, racist housing policy, all exacerbated by several decades of neoliberal social policy that have hit people of color especially hard.
Vastly underfunded schools and massive unemployment are part and parcel of the system of racist violence that oppresses Blacks as people of color and as workers. The notion of a “school to prison pipeline” for Black people captures the connections between underfunded schools, police repression and mass incarceration, and gives context to calls to “defund” the police.
An international anti-racist struggle
Demonstrations against Floyd’s murder and in solidarity with the anti-racist struggle in the U.S. have taken place throughout the world, often using the same slogans seen in U.S. demonstrations. Protesters chanted “I can’t Breathe” in Sydney, Australia and “Black Lives Matter” banners have appeared in demonstrations in several European countries. Protesters have often linked police violence in their countries to racist violence in the U.S.
As millions march against racist police violence throughout the U.S., 20,000 people defied a government curfew in Paris, France, on June 2 to protest the police murder of Adama Traoré, a son of African immigrants killed by police on his twenty-fourth birthday in 2016 under conditions chillingly similar to those under which George Floyd was killed.
The demonstrations which have taken place in several French cities have been led in large part by young women from the working-class and immigrant communities of color, who suffer daily police violence in segregated housing projects located far from urban centers.
These demonstrations also reflect processes of colonialism, imperialism and oppression that have been an integral part of capitalism for centuries. Immigrants and their children from former French colonies in north and sub-Saharan Africa suffer much of the same oppression as Blacks in the U.S.: daily police brutality, inferior public schools, and discrimination in the labor market, reflected in rates of unemployment greatly higher than among whites.
Apartheid-like polices of social exclusion and neoliberal capitalism have produced impoverished urban and suburban centers of misery from the U.S. “ghettos,” to their French equivalents, to the Brazilian “favelas,” where millions of poor people, usually of color, endure lives of poverty and violence.
The struggle against racist police violence begins with defending the right to protest free from police violence and the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and mass arrests.
Arrest and prosecute all racist police!
Stop the police repression against peaceful, anti-racist protesters everywhere!
For the Immediate release and dropping of charges against all protesters!
Criticizing labor is hard for socialists. On the one hand we know the unions are the underdog in the class struggle, and it’s painfully apparent that our society has suffered because unions are so weak. At the same time, it’s clear most unions can’t or won’t live up to their social and political obligations.
Nowhere is this hard truth more apparent than in Rich Trumka’s statement for the AFL-CIO about the George Floyd protests in Washington. Trumka starts on a strong note, asserting racism plays “an insidious role in the daily lives of all working people of color.” He commits labor to “fight for reforms in policing and to address issues of racial and economic inequality.” But there are no specifics about what labor should do differently to make these unassailable ideals a reality. Trumka’s statement is silent about what labor will demand of the candidate it endorses for President in terms of defunding police, creating jobs, and providing health care and affordable housing for those most impacted by the pandemic’s intensification of inequality, low-income blacks and hispanics. He ignores calls to boot the police unions out of the house of labor because they are used to repress the challenges to social, economic, and political inequality such as we see now in our streets, the kind of struggle that has historically won significant gains for working people.
Instead, Trumka’s anger is aimed at “fringes who are engaging in violence and destroying property,” such as the AFL-CIO headquarters. These actions, he proclaims, are “senseless, disgraceful and only play into the hands of those who have oppressed workers of color for generations and detract from the peaceful, passionate protesters who are rightly bringing issues of racism to the forefront.” Equally problematic in the statement is absence of reflection about the continuing reality of racism within unions and among union members. Though Trumka notes racism is a “workplace” and “community issue” because unions “are the community” his statement shows labor’s refusal to own up to its historic complicity, going back to the 1930s, in the federal government’s discriminatory labor-market policy, as summarized by Richard Rothstein: “… at the behest of Southern congressmen, New Deal labor standards, like minimum wages and the right to unionize, excluded from coverage, for undisguised racial purposes, occupations in which black workers predominated. The federal government granted exclusive collective bargaining rights to segregated private-sector unions, including some that entirely excluded African-Americans from their trades, into the 1970s. Government thus depressed income levels of African-American workers below levels of comparable white workers, contributing to black families’ inability to accumulate the wealth needed to move to equity-appreciating white suburbs.”
In contrast to the way Trumka analyzes labor’s relationship to racial justice struggles, Julius Jacobson, one of New Politics’ founding editors, writing in 1968 described the hard truth about working class racism and labor’s failure to combat it effectively:
“The racist attitudes of American Workers are a social problem with roots that are deep and complex. The unions are certainly not responsible for this state of affairs. The AFL-CIO does not preach discrimination. On the contrary, its formal educational material invariably advances the ideas of racial equality and nothing said here is intended to detract from what the labor movement has contributed to civil rights legislation. The point is that the good that the union movement does is primarily on an elitist level, i.e. it is done from above. There has been no corresponding effort to bring the principles of racial equality home to the rank and file. For this reason, the union movement, bureaucratized and elitist, must assume its share of responsibility for the racial savagery and ignorance exhibited by so many rank-and-file workers.” (Introduction to his edited collection, The Negro and the American Labor Movement,Anchor Books)
Having union executive boards pass motions supporting BLM or the protests, which even transnational corporations have now done, is a milestone. However unions, unlike corporations, are supposed to have policy set by members. Few unions have tackled the difficult work of educating members about why their interests cannot be separated from the success of this movement, and yet without at least passive support from members, statements or monetary support for “social justice” causes can backfire. As David Roediger argues, failing to address the inseparability of race and class has resulted in a retreat from both. Yet in the past several years activists in unions, including reform caucuses in teachers unions, have begun the difficult, intensive work of fusing racial justice work with defense of union members’ economic needs. Central to this work is creating democratic spaces to navigate the tensions. As one ethnographic study concluded “social justice caucuses fight racism through practices that democratize their unions, and at the same time, the focus on racial justice drives the need for greater union democracy.”
Very often appeals to unions to fight for social justice ignore this reciprocal relationship between fighting for racial justice and democratizing a union. In the process, analysis ignores the intensity of racism in the working class and divorces it from the functioning of the labor apparatus, as Jacobson describes. While the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) has indeed “given a glimpse of the best of American labor — one at the forefront of fighting all forms of oppression” with its support for bus drivers who refused to transport protestors to prison, a bitter struggle to democratize the union laid the basis for its leadership to defend black members taking action in defense of the protests. The Association for Union Democracy (AUD) newsletter summarizes that history in its obituary for Larry Hanley, the ATU’s longtime president, who in 1979 became a bus driver and member of ATU Local 726 in Staten Island, New York’s most racially segregated and politically conservative borough.
The obituary recounts how “Hanley was on the receiving end of threats and even beatings from the union higher-ups for daring to speak out at membership meetings or seeking to run for office…Assaulted and brought up on internal charges for speaking out, he sought help from AUD” and with help from Herman Benson (AUD’s founder), Hanley successfully fought off slander charges. By December, 1984, Hanley was elected secretary- treasurer of the local “because he established a reputation as a fighter for the local’s members.” Hanley’s fight against corruption in the national union eventually led to his election as ATU president. Hanley’s start as a union activist in his Staten Island local began with a campaign to stop passenger assaults on bus drivers, asking “How many more funerals do we have to have before we put a stop to assaults on bus drivers?” He used the campaign for driver safety to engage rank-and-file workers to make demands on their union, to drive the union’s direction. Unlike Trumka who lashes out at the vandalism and looting, not the ruling class, Hanley put the onus on the boss for solutions. The problem of bus driver safety persists and in 2016 Hanley directed attention to investing in new buses, which haven’t been “redesigned in probably 60 years,” rather than casting the issue in law-and-order terms.
As Larry Hanley’s work demonstrates, struggles for union democracy count when we’re figuring out why some unions are leaders in fighting for racial justice. Yet, not all battles for union democracy have received the same attention. Consider this report on a union convention by dissidents contesting the politics and policies of their union’s officials: In a local of 7,000 members only 400 vote for delegates to their national convention; international representatives appointed by the officers and general executive board “entered the locals just prior to elections and had themselves elected as delegates” and used “ filibustering methods” that make meetings drag on and on, sending” most of the members home” until the supporters of the leadership “have a majority to elect their delegates.”
Activists trying to reform their unions today are familiar with all of these practices, but this report isn’t about trying to oust union bureaucrats today. It describes the 1942 convention of UERMW (United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America), a CIO union. The rest of the story describes how its leading officials, members or supporters of the Communist Party (CP), retained control of union policies. The report continues “The UE convention did not represent its 435,000 rank and file members… It was controlled from start to finish by the Stalinist machine, and practically every resolution might have been lifted bodily from the yellow pages of the Daily Worker.” The rest of the article documents how each resolution corresponded to political positions the CP took.
It’s not just the CP’s politics per se that were objectionable but also its use of the union apparatus to advance positions members did not necessarily know about or support. Both undercut claims CP-controlled unions are examples we should follow to make labor stand up for racial justice. While there is ample evidence militants in these unions bravely championed social justice, the context of those accomplishments undercuts the singularity of their legacy. Union officers loyal to the CP often used their power to suppress ideas they opposed and destroy livelihoods of reformers they despised, as revolutionary socialist dockworker Stan Weir chronicled in his life-long battle against Harry Bridges and the leadership of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Weir was also involved in shop-floor struggles against union officials who gave away workers’ rights, trading the union’s political and economic independence for cozy personal relationships with politicians. Exploring Weir’s remarkable personal relationship with James Baldwin takes me beyond this article, but it is worth noting as it invites reflection on how his life-long career as a worker and union activist encouraged social relationships that transcended his membership in white socialist organizations that defended principles of anti-racism but had few black members. Moreover, leaders who controlled the Party and unions treated racial justice struggles as instrumental to the CP’s primary goal – supporting Moscow’s directives. Hence the party dropped campaigns against racism during World War II, even opposing plans for a march on Washington by A. Philip Randolph, whom the CP labeled “subversive.”
I’ve described elsewhere how transforming teachers unions requires framing teachers’ labor struggles so they speak both to racial justice and teachers’ self-interest as workers, and this challenge applies to the entire labor movement. The specifics of this process depend on many factors, including the sector; however the key is redefining workers’ interests, away from what researcher Diane Goodman calls “a short-sighted and short-term perspective on self-interest, concerned with immediate benefits, most often material in nature.” Goodman argues for a different notion, self-interest as mutually beneficial: Work on behalf of others is simultaneously work on behalf of ourselves since our lives and fates are so intertwined.
The work of CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators) offers us an inspiring example – not a template – of how we can bring white workers and workers of color together in struggles that fight explicitly and simultaneously for racial justice and for economic gains. After winning leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union, CORE engaged in the kind of political education unions must. “The Schools Chicago Students Demand,” its program for change in Chicago schools, embedded contract demands for improvements in working conditions and economic security in a framework that centered racism. Naming Chicago schools an “apartheid” system encouraged the trust from communities of color essential for the CTU to win its strike and battle with Rahm Emmanuel and the powerful capitalist elite that controlled the schools. The CTU did not prioritize “class-wide” demands, as some socialists have suggested we should. It redefined the self-interests of members, bringing them into struggle in a strike that fused both class and race demands.
The understanding that white workers’ self-interest cannot be separated from the struggle for racial justice, and that fighting for both economic and racial justice challenge the capitalist status quo, has begun to reverberate in the streets. Goodman’s definition of self-interest is really another way of articulating one of labor’s defining principles, solidarity. Solidarity, in turn, depends on making the unions democratic, putting workers back in control of the organizations they rely on to speak for them collectively. Defending truths about union democracy and the inseparability of racial and economic justice in our society has shown to be extraordinarily demanding work, yet it is an unavoidable goal if the organized power of the working class is to (help) free the human race. The consequences of not accomplishing it grow more apparent each day, as do the possibilities.
Thanks to Thomas Harrison for his thoughtful comments on a previous version of this article.
This article was originally written for Viento Sur, a newspaper of the Left in the Spanish state.
A march came by my house in Brooklyn a few nights ago, a river of thousands of young people of all races, wearing masks because of the pandemic, walking together, shouting out the name of George Floyd, demanding justice. I saw history making its way through the city, the young people carrying the future on their shoulders. So it has been everywhere in America for more than a week. And still the protests continue and grow in size. Cracks are appearing at the top of the society and attitudes are shifting at the bottom, and forces are in motion seeking to find a political expression for this inchoate demand for change.
Hundreds of thousands of people in cities and town across the United States have over the past ten days joined in demonstrations protesting the police murder of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That day a local store manager had called police to say that Floyd had passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Police arrived, handcuffed Floyd, lay him on the ground and then one of them, Derek Chauvin, kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for almost 9 minutes. Floyd kept repeating, “I can’t breathe.” Bystanders asked the police to stop the strangulation, but they did not and Floyd died. While all four officers involved in the killing were fired the next day, Derek Chauvin was not charged with third degree murder until three days later. It was the failure of the authorities to charge Chauvin and then the other four men that led to the eruption of protests first in Minneapolis, where protestors burned the police station, and then throughout the country.
The protests spread in the first few days to all of the major cities in the country and during the next week to over 700 cities and towns in all 50 states. In the big cities with their diverse populations, black, white, Latino, and Asian marched together, but in cities and towns with mostly white or Latino populations the same sort of demonstrations took place. Even in Montana, where less than one percent of the population is black, there were protests. Everywhere people take up the slogan of 2014 in signs and chants: “Black Lives Matter.” Everyplace people link the murder of Floyd to police racism, violence, and murder in their own cities. In Louisville the demonstrators also protested the police murder of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year old African American emergency medical technician, whose home police invaded on March 13 without warning, looking for drugs, and short her eight times, killing her. No drugs were found in the home. In Georgia people took up the right for justice for Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year old man who while jogging on February 23 was shot and killed by a former police officer, his son, and a third man who claimed they thought he was a thief. It took over four months for the authorities to arrest and charge the killers.
The murder of Floyd reminded everyone of the police strangulation of Eric Garner in New York in July of 2014. Garner had been accused of illegally selling individual untaxed cigarettes, was arrested, restrained, and like Floyd suffocated as he said, “I can’t breathe.” Garner’s murder and that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August ignited the Black Lives Matter protests that also swept the United States that year, though the current demonstrations have been more numerous and more militant. Police killings of black men and women, often innocent of any crime and unarmed, have taken place regularly throughout the history of modern America. Though they make up only13 percent of the U.S. population, Black Americans are two-and-a-half times as likely as white Americans to be killed by the police.
So it is not only the police murder of Floyd, but the long history and continuing practice of police harassment, mistreatment, and murder of black people that motivates the protestors. The demonstrators, most of them between 12 and 30, have come out to protest, wearing their masks, despite the continuing spread of the coronavirus, willing to risk their own health and lives to protest the police violence that has taken so many black lives. While the protests were peaceful, after dark arson and looting took place in some cities, though protestors themselves often tried to stop it. In many places the police violently and sometimes viciously and sadistically attacked the peaceful protests, gassing, beating, and tasing them. Police arrested over 10,000 people, but still the rivers of humanity continue to flow through the boulevards and avenues of America. On June 3, the movement won a victory when the Minnesota Attorney General charged all four officers leading to cheers in the streets.
The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national lockdown form an important part of the context of the uprising. The pandemic has taken 110,000 American lives, and blacks and Latinos have died at twice the rate of white Americans, their deaths attributable to years of lack of access to health care, to crowded living conditions, and to their continuing labor as “essential workers” in health care, grocery stores, and as bus drivers or postal workers. At the same time, 43 million Americans have lost their jobs and while most have received state unemployment benefits and additional supplements from the federal government, some have not, among them about 4.3 million undocumented immigrants. Even before the police murder of George Floyd the COVID-19 pandemic had starkly revealed the racial inequities in the society and before his deat people lay dying in hospitals with inadequate supplies and equipment saying, “I can’t breathe.”
A Crack at the Top, Shift at the Bottom
In response to the protests governors in 24 of the 50 states called out some 62,000 troops of the National Guard, the state-based military reserve, to attempt to reestablish order. Still the protests persisted and spread. Many cities attempted to impose a curfew, but it was ignored or defied, and police again often violently attacking peaceful demonstrators. With the protests continuing, Trump in a telephone call with state governors called them weak and said they must use force “to dominate” the situation. In Washington, D.C., Trump mobilized, in addition to the Secret Service that usually guards him, virtually every imaginable federal agency to protect the White House: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Agency, Federal Protective Services and others. The mayor of Washington called it “disgraceful,” the nearby State of Virginia recalled it police rather than have them stand along federal troops, and Illinois and Texas rejected any such approach.
The worst was yet to come. On June 1 Trump threatened to call up active duty U.S. troops using the 1807 Insurrection Act. As Senator, Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, tweeted, “The fascist speech Donald Trump just delivered verged on a declaration of war against American citizens.” That same day Trump had police and troops use tear gas and force to clear peaceful demonstrators so he could walk across the street from the White House with the Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and General Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dressed in fatigues, to an Episcopal Church where Trump posed holding a Bible in his hand. The Episcopal Bishop, Mariann Budde was outraged at the president’s violation of a sacred space. She declared that, “In no way do we support the President’s incendiary response to a wounded, grieving nation. In faithfulness to our Savior who lived a life of non-violence and sacrificial love, we align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd.”
Trump’s threat to call out troops led several important figures in the American military establishment to turn against him. His own Secretary of Defense defied Trump, saying that military troops were not necessary or appropriate. Trump’s former Secretary of Defense, U.S. Marine Corps General James Mattis, issued a scathing statement that did not mention the president’s name, but compared him to the Nazis and said that Trump’s call to use the military was a threat to the Constitution and to society. Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chief of staff, criticized Trump for his “disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country.” Retired Adm. William McRaven, the Navy SEAL commander who led the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, said on a talk show, “You’re not going to use, whether it is the military or the National Guard or law enforcement, to clear peaceful American citizens for the president of the United States to do a photo op. There is nothing morally right about that.” John Allen, a retired U.S. Marine Corps four-star general, former commander of the NATO International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, wrote a caustic attack on Trump and warned that we could be witnessing the end of American democracy but ended his essay, “So mark your calendars—this could be the beginning of the change of American democracy not to illiberalism, but to enlightenment. But it will have to come from the bottom up. For at the White House, there is no one home.”
The generals were not the only critics. All four living former U.S. presidents—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—issued statements expressing their concern about the racist and violent treatment of George Floyd. Bush also delivered a scathing attack on Trump, saying, “Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and compromises the moral education of children.” Such criticism of a sitting president by a former president is a break with protocol and tradition. And, as has rarely happened, three Republican senators—Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and the only black Republican senator Tom Scott of South Carolina–also criticized Trump. Even televangelist Pat Robertson, the aging leader of the white Evangelical movement, blasted the president for his role.
While there is a split at the top there is also a shift in opinion at the bottom. Polls indicate that there has been a tremendous leftward shift in American attitudes toward racism and the police since the 2014 Black Lives Matter protests. A poll by Monmouth University found that 76 percent of Americans, including 71 percent of white people, thought that racism and discrimination were “a big problem” in the United States. That’s remarkable increase of 26-percentage points since 2015. The same poll found that 57 percent of Americans believed demonstrators’ anger was “fully justified,” while another 21 percent thought it was “somewhat justified.” Another poll by CBS News found that 57 percent of all Americans thought that police were likely to treat black people unfairly.
The Demands of the Movement
When the Black Lives Matter movement developed in 2014 it inspired tens of thousands across America to demonstrate against racist police violence, and held many regional meetings, but it failed to bring activists together in some sort of convention to form a new organization. Early on the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, both of whom had been candidates for president in the Democratic Party, moved in on the new movement to attempt to draw it into the historic civil rights channels leading to the Democratic Party. At the same time the philanthropic foundations, NGOs, and Democratic Party moved in to attempt to attract the BLM leadership to their various reform programs. Two years later sixty black organizations produced “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice,” a remarkable document that laid out six demands intended to end all forms of violence and injustice suffered by black people by redirecting resources from prisons and the military to education, health, and safety; creating a just, democratically controlled economy; and obtaining black political power within a genuinely inclusive democracy. Yet without a national organization and some independent political power to fight for that program it could go nowhere.
This time, once again, the power broker Rev. Al Sharpton wangled his way in front of the movement, giving the moving eulogy at the funeral for George Floyd in which he said, “The reason why we are marching all over the world is we were like George, we couldn’t breathe, not because there was something wrong with our lungs, but that you wouldn’t take your knee off our neck. We don’t want no favors, just get up off of us and we can be and do whatever we can be.” Sharpton has called for a march in Washington on Aug. 28, the anniversary of the original March on Washington in 1963 where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Sharpton may once again have found a way to commandeer the movement for his own purposes as a power broker for the Democrats.
Understandably, only a week old, the national rebellion has not yet been able to put forward its own leadership, at least not nationally, so there is no center to put forward a political platform. In some cities with a more radical tradition, such as Oakland, California, speakers at the rallies talk about socialism and revolution, but in most places this is not the case. In general demands have been limited to the question of police reform. The vast protests in the street carried their program on their placards; “Defund the Police” and “Demilitarize the Police” were the most common, with calls to fund education and health care instead. Other protesters demanded that the authorities “End Choke Holds.” Some national and local political leaders have called for some time for an end to the practice of the U.S. military giving its outdated equipment such as armored cars, tanks, and weapons to police forces. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has raised the slogan “defund the police,” but it is phrase that may to the general public mean anything from cut the police budget to abolish the police, the latter being the slogan of some socialist and anarchist groups.
The Democratic Party, and especially its black members are seeking to play the role of interpreters of the movement and its representatives in politics. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said that the Democratic Party would introduce reforms. “We want to see this as a time where we can go forward in a very drastic way,” said Pelosi. “Not incrementally but in an important way to address those problems.”
Hakeem Jefferies, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, made up of dozens of black Democrats, said that the caucus was considering various proposals would be proposing police reform legislation in the coming session. Representative Adriano Espaillat of New York said that he would introduce the Harlem Manifesto to end police brutality, a ten point document that calls for: 1) curbing excessive police use of force; 2) demilitarizing police departments; 3) transparency, meaning standards and accountability; 4) de-escalation and awareness training for officers; 5) establishing dialog and deepening relationships between law enforcement and communities they serve; 6) eliminating inequities in enforcement; 7) removing profit-incentives for policing and incarceration; 8) ending mass incarceration and making a transition to restorative justice; 9) recognizing and accounting for past injustices; 10) making a transition away from a policing first model. In fact, these reforms have been on the American agenda since the 1960s, but have never been adopted. Many would argue they are not possible without more profound changes in American capitalism, including the dismantling of structural racism in all areas of life, from housing and education to employment.
The American Left was completely overwhelmed and unable to play a significant role in the recent protests. The anarchist Left, generally disdainful of the massive peaceful movement that often engaged in peaceful civil disobedience, worked to augment the militancy of the movement, sometimes leading attacks on property. In many places black community activists opposed the destruction that would damage their communities, and even when the attack was on luxury stores in rich neighborhoods, peaceful protesters sometimes tried to prevent the violence. There have also been suggestions that far right organizations also joined the protest in an attempt to create more conflict that might lead to a race war. There is no doubt that the after-dark violence became an excuse for more violent police repression.
DSA, while it issued a strong statement condemning police violence, failed to mobilize the organization. Local DSA chapters did generally organize themselves and join the protests as did thousands of it individual DSA members. And about 1,500 new new activists joined the organization that boasts more than 60,000 members. Still, the Left—despite the COVID-19 crisis, the Second Great Depression, and the national rebellion against police racism and violence—has not been capable of raising a broader social program to seize the imagination of the broader society.
The task of the Left at the moment is to develop an analysis and a political perspective that can respond to the complex political crisis—environmental, health, economic, and racial—and to create an organization with a strategy to fight for a broad, socialist political alternative. There are activists in DSA and other socialist organizations working to develop such a perspective, strategy, and organization. Our principles remain the same: rise up from below, fight for democracy, and advance the struggle for socialism.
Over the past few days, an uprising has raged in Minnesota and elsewhere in the United States in response to the murder of George Floyd by police. In the spirit of solidarity with those on the streets, I was prompted to think about the lessons from the Syrian revolution that might be applicable to the US context.
People rise up when they can no longer breathe
In Syria, the first protest to take place was a direct response to police brutality. On 17 February, 2011, some 1,500 people gathered in the Damascene neighborhood of Hareeqa following an incident in which traffic police beat up the son of a local trader. Yet the wider context for the uprising was four decades of political repression and socioeconomic injustice under the Assad dictatorship, and the impetus given by the transnational revolutionary wave that was emerging across the region. Protests grew exponentially in response to further acts of violence by the state against protesters. The brutal killing of 13-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb, who died in police custody after being detained at a protest in Daraa, caused thousands to take to the streets. The more vicious the state’s response to the protests, the more it galvanized the Syrian people. Soon demands for “reform” became cries for “revolution.”
The brutal killing of George Floyd also acted as a catalyst for protests in the US. It comes, however, on the back of long-term, systemic societal and institutional racism; the social, political, and economic marginalization of black communities; and a long history of police brutality which disproportionately targets black men. The response of the state to the current protests will be one factor determining the future direction the movement takes.
Social movements are diverse and contain many different currents
The Syrian revolution was characterized by its diversity. It contained men and women from all of Syria’s different localities and ethnic and religious groups united around the aims of freedom, democracy, and social justice. Undoubtedly it also contained diverse political currents, as beyond these immediate aims no political program for the future of Syria was articulated; it was assumed that would be worked out through an electoral process. Whilst the movement certainly contained many contradictory elements, extremist Islamists did not have a visible presence initially, despite propaganda to that effect by the state and its supporters. Extremist Islamism grew over the years in response to the violent chaos wrought by the state, following the trajectory of the peaceful protest movement towards armed struggle. Free Syrians then had to battle on two fronts; against both the Assad regime and extremist Islamist elements which tried to hijack the movement.
By contrast, in the US, far-right elements are visible on the streets from the outset, trying to capitalize on and hijack the protests for their own ends. Their presence is not a reason to reject the whole movement. Progressives should stand in solidarity with progressive elements and communities most impacted by state violence. Through solidarity, we give strength to those who reflect the values and ideals we hold, and support them to grow and effectively challenge their opponents.
The state will slander a movement as extremist, while targeting progressives and letting extremism flourish
In Syria, peaceful protesters were smeared as “Islamist extremists.” This tarring of the movement was used as justification for the state’s escalation of violence and acts of repression, and aimed to justify its crackdown on the opposition to both internal and external audiences. At the same time as the state began rounding up thousands of peaceful pro-democracy protestors for probable death-by-torture, it released Islamist extremists from prison. Some of those released from state custody in 2011 and 2012 went on to form the most hard-line Islamist brigades, such as Zahran Alloush, the former head of Jaysh al-Islam; Hassan Abboud, the former head of Ahrar al-Sham; and numerous figures who became part of the leadership of the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as ISIS. Assad also encouraged acts of violence by shabbiha (sectarian regime-aligned militias) in order to galvanize a violent response from the opposition and encourage a spiral of violence, in which the state—being better-armed—would always have the upper hand.
In the US context, numerous videos have emerged of police targeting peaceful demonstrators with tear gas and arrest, as armed fascists roam the streets unmolested and appear to provoke acts of violence. Donald Trump has already declared the anti-fascist movement (ANTIFA) as the main threat, accusing it of responsibility for all acts of violence and looting, and announcing his intent to designate it a terrorist organization. Trump supporters and far-right groups are using tactics designed to instigate a violent response.
Democrats will always be the main threat to authoritarian regimes, as they embody the alternative. Framing the opposition as “terrorists” enables the state to justify an extreme crackdown on the opposition, portraying its actions as a security response (a “War on Terror”) designed to re-establish stability. It further allows the state to dehumanize its opponents, to encourage support for their liquidation. Assad labeled Syrian protesters “germs;” Trump sees protesting Americans as “thugs.” The threat of violence will be used to try to deter people from protesting. Both Assad and Trump threatened to use the military to crush the movement (Assad followed through on his threat).
Opponents of the movement will accuse protesters of being outside-agitators or hirelings of foreign powers
Syrian revolutionaries have been denied all agency for instigating an uprising against a repressive regime. From the outset, the regime’s public response to the protests was framed by conspiracy theories. State media spoke of “infiltrators” and “armed gangs” causing chaos, and of “foreign powers” and “Salafist terrorists” inciting violence. In Assad’s first televised address to the People’s Assembly in response to the protests in March 2011, he warned that Syria’s “enemies work every day in an organized, systematic, and scientific manner in order to undermine Syria’s stability.” The Syrian state was cast as a victim, despite holding an absolute monopoly on violence. Over the years, both the regime and its supporters have stuck to this narrative. Syrian revolutionaries have been slandered as agents of the US, Israel, and the Gulf states, notwithstanding the absolute idiocy of the claim that the CIA could somehow mobilize hundreds of thousands of people from Qamishli to Daraa, or that Syrians would be content to have their children tortured to death until some clever white man told them to do something about it.
In the US, Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz has claimed that the majority of those looting and destroying property are from outside the cities, bent on “attacking civil society” and “instilling fear.” Insinuations have also been made that the protest movement is supported or indeed instigated by Russia. On CNN, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice said, “I would not be surprised to learn that they have fomented some of these extremists on both sides using social media … I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are funding it in some way, shape, or form.”
In times of uprising conspiracy theories will flourish. They are meant to distract from the fact that there are real people involved with real grievances, and their aim is to support the state by discrediting the opposition. At some point the conspiracies will inevitably take on an anti-Semitic turn and lead back to George Soros and “the Jews.” Conspiracy theories may be spread by people formally seen as allies. The best way to guard against this is to listen to the voices of those directly involved in the movement on the ground and constantly check the accuracy of sources.
The legitimacy of government resides in the people
Syrians have been repeatedly told by outsiders that they should abandon their struggle, and accept being tortured, raped, gassed, bombed, and starved because Assad is the “legitimate” ruler of Syria. This is said despite the fact Assad has never once won a free and fair election, but rather inherited the dictatorship from his father. Indeed, holding elections was and remains the key demand of the opposition to the regime. Apparently, Syrians are not ready for democracy, and, should Assad fall, what would take his place would be worse than the current genocidal regime. Yet in areas liberated from the regime, Free Syrians held the first democratic elections in four decades; set up local councils to self-govern their communities; and fought hard to defend their autonomy despite repeated attacks on these civil structures by both the regime and authoritarian Islamists.
The US, by contrast, is a democracy, and Trump was elected president. Given the grievances of a large section of the population, however, this is not a reason to oppose the current protests. People always have the right to challenge and change their leaders, elected or not.
Whether foreign states support or condemn a movement (or the state) will solely be based on their own interests
Many states rhetorically supported Syria’s protest movement, but few gave practical support. The US itself, for example, issued many statements calling for Assad to go, but prevented the armed opposition from receiving the heavy weaponry it needed to defend communities from the aerial assault which was the main cause of Syria’s destruction, massive death toll, and waves of displacement, and which could have changed the balance of power on the ground. The US’s support was driven by a desire to force Assad to the negotiating table, rather than overthrow the regime. When Washington did eventually intervene militarily in Syria, it was only in the context of the “War on Terror” against ISIS. By contrast, foreign powers such as Russia and Iran gave significant military and diplomatic support to the regime. Russia’s interest was likely determined primarily by a wish to provide a counter-balance to US interests in the region (rather than by any love for the Syrian regime), as well as to test out new weaponry on the Syrian people. Iran has always seen the Syrian regime as an ally providing a link between Tehran and Iran’s client Hezbollah in Lebanon.
As for the US, figures from the European Union have stated they are “shocked and appalled” by the killing of George Floyd, and have reiterated their support for peaceful protest, in language very similar to that used in response to Syria’s protests over eight years ago. China, furious at Washington’s support for the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, and criticism over its handling of the Coronavirus, has been more outspoken. It has rhetorically backed the protest movement, saying it highlights the country’s “chronic disease” of racism, never mind that the Chinese state is currently holding more than a million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps.
Of course, states are not our allies. Thankfully, Americans are not in a situation where their state is using weaponry designed for inter-state conflict against protesting communities, rendering them more dependent on outside assistance to protect themselves from annihilation. Despite their declarations, at the end of the day states will work together to support state stability and crush any popular demands seen as too radical or threatening the existing order in a way they cannot themselves control. What is important is that people stand together, shoulder to shoulder, in solidarity against authoritarian regimes, police brutality, racism, patriarchy, and socioeconomic injustice. In this regard, the US protest movement has so far attracted the solidarity of people and communities across the globe. Free Syrians were not so fortunate. Through people-to-people solidarity we can exchange views, tactics, and experience of struggle. Having lived nine years and counting of revolutionary struggle, Syrians have a lot to offer to Americans in this regard. Together we are strong.
An authoritarian state will target the media
Under the Assad dictatorship, Syria has never had a free media. During the revolution, journalists became key targets for arrest and assassination due to their witnessing and reporting on state brutality. Countless Syrian citizen journalists have lost their lives trying to report the regime’s crimes to the world. They have been targeted not only by the state but also by other authoritarian groups that have clamped down on independent voices and civil society. Foreign war correspondents, too, have been deliberately assassinated by the regime, such as the American journalist Marie Colvin, killed while covering the 2012 siege of Homs. Meanwhile, the regime and its supporters attempt to control the narrative through state and sympathetic media.
In the US, there have been multiple examples of police deliberately targeting journalists during the protests for George Floyd. Sometimes these have included a clear racial element, such as the arrest of a black CNN reporter while his white colleagues were left alone. According to a report by independent open-source investigators at Bellingcat, “journalists have been shot with rubber bullets, targeted with stun grenades, tear gassed, physically attacked, pepper sprayed, and arrested.”
It’s important to give as much support as possible to independent media, and especially citizen journalists, who are on the ground and can give better-informed analysis of the situation as it unfolds, providing vital context and links to those most immediately affected by events.
Everyone will have an opinion, including people who know absolutely nothing
When an uprising breaks out everyone will become an “expert” on the country overnight. And, with that, I’ll finish this piece. Because whilst I’m fortunate enough to speak English and have some contact with people on the ground participating in the current protests, allowing me limited access to information regarding what is happening, I’m no expert. I’ve spent a total of only six weeks in the US, and have never been involved in political organizing there, nor have I spent years researching and studying the country, its politics, economy, and culture, which might enable me to give an informed opinion. Now really is the one time we should be centering American voices and listening to, and learning from, the people directly affected.
Since the the murder of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, MN, on May 25th, the city of Minneapolis has become the center of a national uprising against the murder of black and brown people by police.
By now most people have seen the horrifying video. Floyd, 46, can be seen lying face down, with Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee pressing into the back of his neck for nearly nine minutes, as witnesses plead with him to stop. Floyd can be heard on the video, posted by a 17-year-old Minneapolis resident, telling the police that he cannot breathe, and calling out to his deceased mother.
The following day, as news spread through the Twin Cities about the brutal killing, a memorial was erected at 38th and Chicago, where Floyd was murdered. Local organizers called for a march to demand the officers involved be held accountable for Floyd’s murder, which drew out close to 20,000 residents, despite the danger posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The march went from the site of the murder, to the Minneapolis 3rd Police Precinct building, where protesters rallied peacefully. During the course of the protest, some windows of the precinct were broken, which the police used as the pretext to violently disperse the crowd with tear gas, rubber bullets, and marker rounds.
While the mayor and governor had by this time both called for charges to be pressed against the officers involved, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman once again dragged his feet. Freeman is well-known in Minneapolis for failing to bring charges in cases of police violence, as was seen in the case of Jamar Clark, who was shot by police in 2015, resulting in an 18-day occupation by Black Lives Matter activists outside the Minneapolis 4th Police Precinct.
Protests against the killing of George Floyd resumed on May 27th. Throughout the day, as neighbors peacefully gathered outside the 3rd Precinct, police occasionally fired rubber bullets and marker rounds indiscriminately into the crowd. Gas was also deployed on multiple occasions throughout the day. After a full day of being antagonized by the police, the crowd eventually turned their frustration towards the surrounding businesses. Several nearby businesses were subject to looting—individual expropriation—and some buildings were burned.
While there has been some suggestion that provocateurs—cops, white supremacists, or both—began the property destruction, what followed was, in no uncertain terms, an expression of the frustration and grief of a community that had seen justice denied time and time again.
Minneapolis is one of the most segregated cities in the United States, and is no stranger to racist police violence. Residents of the Twin Cities have marched, occupied, and protested peacefully for years to demand justice for the victims of brutality at the hands of the police. Despite promises from elected officials that claim to be taking racial inequities in policing seriously, very little has actually changed.
Following the property destruction and looting of the night before, a group of residents descended on a Target store in Saint Paul’s Midway neighborhood, which primarily consists of strip malls, department stores, and other commercial buildings. This resulted in clashes with Saint Paul police that extended late into the night, and resulted in several businesses being burned.
Over the course of the day, news broke that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was calling up the National Guard to suppress what was quickly becoming an open rebellion.
That evening, protestors returned to the 3rd Precinct. More businesses were burned, as police continued to employ so-called less-lethal munitions and tear gas against protestors. At one point in the night, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey ordered the police to abandon the 3rd Precinct. Protestors overran the security barriers that had been erected to protect the building. They set the building alight, burning the headquarters of the officers that murdered George Floyd.
The burning of the 3rd Precinct represented the climax of the phase of the struggle for George Floyd that had been marked by burning buildings and clashes with police. The next day, the Governor announced a strict curfew. Elected officials began promoting the idea that the rioting and looting was the doing of out-of-state agitators.
They also arrested Derek Chauvin. He was the officer that had his knee on Floyd’s neck, and therefore was the one most clearly responsible for his death. County Attorney Mike Freeman charged him with 3rd degree murder, and second degree manslaughter. This was the first time in the history of the state of Minnesota that a white police officer had been charged for the murder of a black person.
The charges brought against Chauvin were the first major victory for Black Lives Matter activists and organizations in the struggle to get justice for George Floyd. Over the course of the following weekend, and into the next week, peaceful protests of thousands took place across the Twin Cities, sometimes at the same time. That weekend ended with the announcement that the governor was appointing Minnesota Attorney General, and former Congress member, Keith Ellison to take over the Floyd case from Mike Freeman.
In the days that followed, Minneapolis Public Schools voted to end their contract with the Minneapolis Police Department, effectively removing cops from Minneapolis schools, and at the time of this writing the Minneapolis Parks Board is considering ending their relationship with the cops, as well. (The University of Minnesota had ended their contract that stationed MPD officers at sporting events in the early days of the uprising.) The state and regional labor federations put out the call for the resignation of police union head Bob Kroll, who has been a consistent cheerleader in defense of killer cops in Minneapolis. Most strikingly, the Minneapolis City Council began discussing the possibility of disbanding the police entirely.
Attorney General Ellison, since taking over the case, has increased the charges against Derek Chauvin to second degree murder, and has brought aiding and abetting charges against the other three officers involved. It is, however, worth noting that Ellison does not have a spotless record with Black Lives Matter leaders in town, related to his inaction in the Jamar Clark case, while he was still in Congress.
The struggle for justice for George Floyd, and against the racist criminal justice system, has now spread throughout the country, with uprisings cropping up in almost every major city in the United States. For the first time, there appears to be some momentum to actual see the kind of changes that Black Lives Matter activists have been fighting for since before the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. Now is the time to keep the pressure on, and keep fighting to ensure that black lives matter.
Amidst the backdrop of now international uprisings sparked by yet another wave of racist killings by the police, law enforcement agencies nation-wide have armed their envoys with taxpayer-funded, military-grade hardware in hopes of quashing what have become some of the country’s most dissident protests of the millennium.
Social media streams are currently overrun with images and videos–very few of which have, without some form of dog whistling, been shown on prime-time media outlets–of mace, tear gas, and rubber bullets being savagely deployed against unarmed citizens.
In certain municipalities, however, police squads have been documented temporarily laying down their weapons and kneeling before the protests they were dispatched to control.
From Minneapolis to Kansas City, Fargo to Ferguson, Portland to Santa Cruz, these police officers have been applauded by many for their supposed compos mentis at a pivotal moment. Photos of police on one knee (some chose instead to raise their fists or clasp hands and bodies with protesters) have made the rounds, ostensibly as a reminder that, to quote one kneeling officer’s handmade sign, “We are one race… The HUMAN race.”
Here’s the problem – biologically speaking, we may very well all be one race (“species” is really a better term), but we aren’t all agents of the capitalist state surveillance apparatus and its monopoly on violence. All police, however, are. For over 400 years this country has been built upon the backs of black, brown, and indigenous bodies, and for at least 300 of them organized militias in the form of police forces both public and private have had the role of disciplining and butchering those bodies. And when, on rare occasions, it was not explicitly racialized, policing was still there to protect the vested interests of a burgeoning merchant class (who literally conned the commonwealth into paying for it– a funding structure we’ve retained to this day) which profited immensely from the national proliferation of racist policy.
There is a raw and dark history to law enforcement in America, and no amount of cops briefly kneeling can erase it. But they can try, and that’s an issue. Because lauding these cursory gestures of amity, as much as they may seem to shed light upon our common humanity or the ways we can spiritually eclipse the larger stakes that divide us, reinforces the “bad apple” myth: the cognitively dissonant notion that the transgressions of police officers are symptomatic of individual, rather than structural, failings. To believe this, then, also means to believe in the myth of the “good apple”: that a percentage (often argued to be the majority) of police are valiant, selfless, and benevolent. All the same, from this viewpoint, the problems of policing become personal. Good cops and their behaviors are examples of the policing system’s natural arc towards justice. Bad cops and their behaviors are the exceptions.
Buying into the “bad/good apple” delusion is what convinces people in the first place that hugging, smiling at, and kneeling with protesters is somehow friendly (or, god forbid, analogous) to real abolitionist work. It’s not. What kneeling and hugging is, is optics. Publicity. Placatory, distracting, politically expedient, and self-preservative in nature – the equivalent of a serial abuser publicly apologizing with a bouquet of flowers. It’s meant to deflect against the fact that each and every officer has willfully taken an oath to act as part and parcel of an organization that pushes for compliance, by threat of force, with the avalanche of inequities that paved and continues to pave the way for white supremacy and exploitative capitalist modes of accumulation. The kneeling is propaganda, plain and simple. It’s what makes the absolutely tone-deaf phrase from Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson “I want to make this a parade, not a protest” sound rational at best and good-hearted at worst. And it’s what tries to complicate the fact that, when the kneeling is all said and done, officers will put on their masks to uphold elite interests nonetheless.
How many cops do you see remaining on their knees after curfew, after the media gets their photos and videos, then rising to actively defend protectors against gas attacks, rubber bullet barrages, and weaponized vehicle crashes? How many do you see physically preventing their colleagues from spraying mace into the faces of unarmed demonstrators and their children during a global respiratory pandemic? How many defied their orders and attempted to keep riot-control weapons off the streets to begin with? How many have spoken out against the dramatic increases in state and federal policing budgetsince Covid-19 paralyzed the economy? How many, in the face of all these obscenities, have decided to go on strike, give up their badge, or actively obstruct the multilayered orders of oppression they once swore to uphold? How many have actually gone beyond the showmanship of denouncing their murderous colleagues and engaged in actions that would obstruct the very system which created them?
The answer: about the same amount that intervened to prevent Derek Chauvin from killing George Floyd.
Defunding, Not Reforming, Is The Way Forward
Politically, trusting in the integrity of individual officers backstops the narrative that reformist methods of controlling police can prevent police murders and brutalities from recurring. Reformist logic has it that, if police departments are put under greater scrutiny to hold their own accountable via specialized training, greater public oversight, body cameras, etc, the result will be safer, more community-oriented forms of law enforcement.
This is simply not true.
For proof, look no further than Minneapolis. In 2015, on the heels of the killing of Jamar Clark, the MPD was one of the first departments to be pressured by a series of reforms outlined under Obama’sTask Force On 21st Century Policing. Included in the president’s legislation were mandatory trainings on implicit bias, de-escalation techniques, and crisis intervention methodologies. The department’s leadership was diversified, body cameras became required, use-of-force standards were tightened, “warrior mentalities” were cracked down upon, mechanisms were implemented for identifying problem officers early on, and community dialogues were put in place. In 2018, the MPD even summed up these adjustments to their procedural justice approach in a self-congratulatoryreport.
At base level, as Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, notes, these reforms have “nothing to say about the mission or function of policing.” In other words, they identify ways to more justly uphold laws without actually questioning whether the laws themselves are just. The bona fides of institutional policing are granted by simply presuming our laws organically benefit everyone so long as they are enforced in good faith.
Sure enough, blind allegiance to the rule of law has ensured that, as public utilities and services are chronically cut back year after year, policing fills the voids that remain. Poor and non-white communities are denied the most basic social alms – healthcare, schooling, food, jobs – then billboarded as prime examples of why police must exist. This is like generationally starving, harming, and isolating a breed of animal, then arguing that any resulting turbulent behaviors are intrinsic to the breed.
Reformism is a product of this sort of decontextualized thinking, which by its nature cannot address how the fundamental grounds for law enforcement are inexorably tied to the structural inequities and hierarchies of the United States. Amidst a sea of evidence to the contrary, it still accepts police as the de facto solution to the problems facing disenfranchised populations.
Thus, advocates of reform can only imagine fixing the issue of policing by, paradoxically, throwing more money to the police. Make no mistake, reform measures inevitably require more money to be pumped into the already bloated budgets of U.S. police departments ($100 billion is spent annually – an average of $274 million a day). Body cameras and training programs are costly. Community policing techniques are contingent on larger forces and thus bigger hiring budgets. And while not directly tied to department funding, prosecuting and jailing deviant officers via greater oversight and stricter standards is incredibly expensive, and reifies the grotesquely exploitative industrial prison complex (which is funded to the tune of another $80 billion).
Sadly, reformist approaches make up the bulk of the so-called “progressive” justice system agenda of the Democrats. Upon the news of George Floyd, it’s representatives were quick to condemn racist forms of policing, but offered little more. On her Twitter feed, Amy Klobuchar, who has an outstanding record of failing to prosecute killer cops as Hennepin County’s former attorney, seemed more concerned with the damages caused by the rebellions than with the reason for the damages themselves, commending those that were sweeping the streets clean of debris and ultimately calling for little more than yet another DOJ investigation. DNC Chair Tom Perez yet again invoked the names of recent victims of police violence under the vague banner of justice and left it at that. Barack Obama dubiously highlighted the need for and value of police reform, then suggested the best way to achieve it was through peacefully voting for the right persons. All in all, the center-left response has been, predictably, paltry and pandering.
There are, however, alternatives to police reform. And they have precedent. Cities such as Dallas are proving that social workers are more effective first responders to mental health and drug related emergencies. Elsewhere, violence intervention organizations and mutual aid networks have pursued public safety by centering transformative justice ideologies that eschew the presence of police in favor of non-punitive collective action interventions. Nationwide there is real work being done to reclaim the glut of social responsibilities that have, over the past several decades, been pawned off onto police. Given the already dismal clearance rate of crimes that most would agree law enforcement should handle, moving in this direction is a no-brainer.
So the blueprints are there. Only the funding is lacking.
As was made patently clear by the Fed’s recent Covid-19-fueled corporate sweepstakes giveaway, there’s no real shortage of cash. But neither is there the plumbing that would practically get any form of helicopter money where it really needs to go.
More realistically, then, we must slash the gratuitous amount of funds already given to police (New York City alone spends more on police than on health services, housing development, and community outreach combined); funds that, among other things, are used to purchase lists of gear straight out of a Tom Clancy wet dream. We can instead redirect the money to be invested in curbing the real issues threatening public safety such as homelessness, drug abuse, housing, and employment, while ensuring that the other safety issue, the one some mistakenly believe is necessary, loses its edge. Indeed we can and need to if police violence is to end any time soon.
We continue to live in the shadow of the Great Recession of 2008. The protracted and partial economic recovery has led to a political and ideological crisis of neoliberalism. Understanding its causes and scope can give us insight into U.S. politics, both left, right, and center. In the first part of this article, I consider the neoliberal role in reshaping the postwar U.S. political economy. In part two, I will consider its current implications, as embodied especially in the politics of Trump and Sanders. along with the potential role that the Green Party might play.
Neoliberalism is based on an ideology of capitalist political economy that emphasizes the central role of so-called free markets both within nations and across national boundaries (identified with free trade, globalization, and multinationalism), and the primacy of traditional morality (especially traditionally-derived Christian morality), centered on individuals and family, while diminishing, or entirely denying, the role—and even the existence—of society.[1] The role of the state is seen as protecting the market from hostile forces on the outside and sometimes from itself, but only when absolutely necessary. Over the last several decades, it has become largely hegemonic in most of the capitalist world, with China arguably the most prominent exception.
The need for neoliberal reforms arose from the secular profitability decline following the postwar boom, illustrated in Fig. 1A. This was amplified in the 1970s both by stagflation and by the 1973 oil crisis. The initial steps of neoliberal policy implementation were taken under Democratic President Carter, most prominently through the deregulation of the airline industry in 1978 and the Volker shock of 1979 (a sharp increase in interest rates to reduce inflation). Prefigured by the rightward shift of the Carter administration in both domestic and foreign policy, the neoliberal drive to deregulate and privatize accelerated under Reagan, most notoriously through the so-called supply-side tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, and the destruction of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) following the defeat of their 1981 strike.
The further implementation of neoliberal policies continued as a bipartisan effort of both Republican and Democratic administrations. Among the most salient examples of this bipartisanship are Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, and Obama’s private-based Affordable Care Act of 2010. On the judicial level, it included the Citizens United vs. FEC case of 2010, in which the Supreme Court determined that money is a form of protected political speech. It was the adoption of these and other neoliberal policies by the Democratic Party, especially after the defeat of Mondale in the 1984 presidential election, that began a process leading to the defection of a significant section of its working-class and middle-class base.
Measured in narrow economic terms as profit, neoliberalism has been a success. Fig. 1A shows profits as a percentage of gross domestic income (GDI) for the U.S. economy as a whole from 1947 to 2019. From the end of World War II until about 1980, the period that includes the postwar boom, the profit share declined tendentially from historically high values immediately following the war. This tendency of declining profit share reversed during the Reagan years as neoliberal policies were put in place, and today has reached levels similar to those seen during the 1950s. In Marxian terms, and by most measures, the rate of profit declined during the 1950s through the 1970s, and then was restored, at least partially, during the subsequent decades.[2]
Profits up, wages down
There is no secret to the restoration of profit share. It has come directly from wages, as Fig. 1B shows. Employee compensation as a percentage of Gross Domestic Income (GDI, quantitatively equivalent to GDP) rose during the postwar boom as profits declined. From the 1980s onwards, employee compensation declined as a percentage of GDI, until it reached its current level, back to where it was in the early 1950s.
Profit share and employee compensation share show a similar, but inverted, pattern. Profits fell during the 1947-1980 period, then tended to rise following 1980. Employee compensation shows the obverse pattern, rising during the initial period, and then falling. In Marxian terms, neoliberalism succeeded by increasing the rate of exploitation.[3]
Profits have not risen as much as wages have fallen due to an increase in the cost of fixed capital (mainly machinery and facilities), especially during the late 1960s through the 1970s. Fixed capital rates increased during both periods, but at a smaller rate in the more recent years. Taxes on production tended to rise somewhat during the first period, then fall slightly, with a decline apparent from the early 1970s. Although taxes declined somewhat in the 1970s, this had only a small quantitative influence on profit share.
To understand the current conjuncture, it is helpful to look more deeply into the conditions that made profit share restoration possible. Key factors include sectoral shifts (including the rise of service and finance at the expense of manufacturing), foreign trade and globalization, the decline of union power, and the commodification of everyday life and social reproduction. These factors taken together underlie our understanding of the current political conjuncture, and most importantly, the rise in inequality.
Figure 1: A. Profit share (net operating surplus as percent of gross domestic income), 1947-2019.
Figure 1: B. Employee compensation as percent of gross domestic income, 1947-2019.
The 1970s were a turbulent time for capitalism, both in the United States and internationally. This was the period of the Vietnam War, the oil shock, stagnation, and the growing pressure of imports, especially from Germany and Japan, on the U.S. domestic production sector.[4] It also saw the growth of the service and financial sectors, and a decline in the manufacturing sector. Trade union density, especially in the private sector, continued its secular decline. The increase in wages that had previously characterized the postwar U.S. economy was reversed. At the same time, a decrease in the Federal tax rate had two effects. It facilitated the transfer of wealth to the already wealthy and it encouraged investment in rapidly developing automation, communication, and information technologies. Coupled with a downward pressure on wages, this new technology led to a systemic rise in profitability.
While the development of technology is often recognized as an important causal component in influencing historical development, it does not act in isolation from other forces, most importantly class. The last several decades have seen a significant increase in the use of temp workers, day laborers, contractors, management consultants, adjunct professors, and even military mercenaries. All these jobs and others like them have some things in common: they are temporary, insecure, and profitable to capital. The apparent freedom these jobs provide comes at the price of open-ended insecurity. Recently developed technology, like the Internet, the laptop computer, and the smartphone, simply facilitate these ongoing developments. That they make work precarious is a circumstance of capitalism, not of technology. It is easy to imagine a non-exploitative economy where the use of these technologies would help to transform work in a liberatory direction.
It is important to note that the share of profits going to the productive sector (principally manufacturing) declined by about 50 percent from 1947 to 2020. Although financial sector profits increased by about 90 percent during these years, this does not appear to be the principal sources of shifting sectoral profits away from the traditional productive sectors. The biggest change arose from the rapid growth of the services sector, whose profit share increased by over 1000 percent during that period. The service sector is now the second largest profit source in the economy. The share going to the trade sector remained largely unchanged.
Fictitious and real profits in the financial sector are based on loans to industry, loans to households, and speculative profits (bets on future earnings).[5] Financialization, amplified by neoliberal deregulation, clearly played a determinative role in precipitating the crisis of 2008.[6] However, econometric data suggest that over the postwar period, the decline in profit rate in the traditional productive sectors cannot be attributed principally to an increase in financial profits (either real or fictitious) at the expense of productive profits. Productive profits declined from about a 70 percent share of total profits to less than 40 percent from 1948-2017, about a 30 percent decline. In the same interval, financial profit share rose by somewhat over 5 percent. The largest shift is seen in the service sector, whose profit share rose from about 2 percent in 1948, to approximately 30 percent by the 2000s.
Globalization
Liberalization of capital flow across borders (but not liberalization of labor flow) has been a shared centerpiece of capitalist political economics since the end of World War II, with the establishment of Bretton Woods, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Globalization was also facilitated by several technological developments, including containerization, developed in the 1950s, and improved communications and information technologies.
By the 1970s, threats to U.S. economic hegemony came from Germany and Japan, and militarily from the Soviet Union. At present, the biggest threat to U.S. capital comes from China, both economically and militarily. The United States has responded to China’s expansion through the rise of multilateral trade deals like NAFTA (now the USMCA), CAFTA (later CAFTA-DR), and the TPP (now the CPTPP without U.S. participation). In a more recent reversal of conventional neoliberal policies, Trump has resorted to tariff protection, of which more later.
Capital flows to those regions that are able to maintain a comparative advantage. For the U.S. economy that meant that capital could take advantage of cheaper labor costs in foreign markets. The result was a downward pressure on U.S. wages which acted in parallel with the downward pressure on wages coming from the implementation of computer-based technologies.
Working-class organization
Both union density and the incidence of strikes have declined in the United States over the last several decades to historically low levels, although there has been a modest uptick in strikes in the last year or two. The decline in union density following WWII correlates well with the decline in the U.S. domestic manufacturing sector, which facilitated the ongoing attacks on organized labor. The shift from manufacturing to service meant that work had become more dispersed. The social ties of work became frayed. At one time you may have worked in a factory whose workers could be counted in the hundreds or thousands. Now you might work in a convenience store, seeing perhaps only one or two co-workers during the course of a day. As plants closed in the former industrial centers like Detroit and other Midwest factory cities and towns, the urban working-class communities were devastated. Plants closed in the heavily unionized Rust Belt, while new ones opened in union-hostile, often rural, areas in the South and elsewhere.
The changing sociology of work in the interests of profit realization accounts for only one thread in the story of diminished working-class organization and power. Workplace sociology is entangled with the class struggle, locally, nationally, and internationally. There were a number of additional factors, both objective and subjective, whose interaction first reversed, then later retarded the development of working-class consciousness in the postwar United States. The subjective factors all played out against a background itself dominated by two factors. First, the defeat of the Axis powers in WWII led directly to the Cold War between the two major international blocs, one led by the United States, the other by the Soviet Union. The second was the emergence of the United States as the principal beneficiary of the war, expanding its domination of the world’s capitalist economies that had already begun following World War I.
Anticommunism was the leading edge and public face of the assault against the working class. The Smith Act, passed in 1940, made illegal any activity with the revolutionary intent to overthrow the government. The Smith Act prosecutions of the 1940s and 1950s acted as a springboard for the ousting of thousands of Communists and other leftists from their jobs, both in industry and in the trade-union leadership.
The Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act, is perhaps the single most important (and lasting) legislative attack on workers’ rights that arose during this period. It had two principal goals. The first was to drive Communists out of the organized labor movement. Within two years of passage, all but two international unions had submitted to the provisions of the act, effectively driving most Communists and other leftists out of the union leadership.[7]
Second, Taft-Hartley went far beyond simple anticommunism to weaken fundamentally the entire organized labor movement. According the socialist historian and journalist Art Preis, the law was a compendium of many of the most onerous anti-labor proposals.[8] Among other features, it outlawed jurisdictional strikes, closed shops, and secondary boycotts and strikes. It also prohibited independent expenditures for federal elections, and allowed the U.S. President to intervene in strikes that supposedly endangered national security.[9] In the words of Preis, Taft-Hartley “thus sought to impose direct continuous governmental regulation over the unions in the selection of their officers, in their economic and organizational struggles and in their political activity.”[10] The union leadership attempted to push back against Taft-Hartley through their friends within the Democratic Party, but without success. President Truman vetoed the bill, knowing his veto would be overridden. Later, Truman used provisions of Taft-Hartley as a strike-breaking tool.[11] Taft-Hartley is a continuing frontal assault on organized labor that has largely succeeded.
The net result was and is a labor movement that has lost its power as an independent force and has largely come to depend on its diminishing influence within the Democratic Party. Attacks on the unions are attacks on both the trade union bureaucracy and the rank and file. Since these attacks are often carried out by Republicans, this has cemented the ties between the trade union bureaucracy and the post-FDR Democratic Party, that promises much but delivers little. In over 70 years, the Democrats have failed to repeal the notoriously anti-labor Taft-Hartley act, for example.
The commodification of everyday life
Capitalism is an economic system dominated by the production of commodities for sale at a profit. Neoliberal market fetishism leads naturally to the commodification of everyday life and social reproduction, including, among other examples, household functions like child-rearing and education, either directly through school privatization or indirectly by, for example, financing higher education through student debt. As everyday life deteriorated, mass incarceration increased the prison population. Seeing a profit source, many new inmates, disproportionately black, have been housed in private, for-profit prisons. More recently, undocumented migrants have shared a similar fate.
Facilitated by deregulation and a sympathetic judiciary, capital owns and controls the channels of mass communication, including social media and the Internet. Reagan’s repeal of the fairness doctrine, followed by broadcasting deregulation, has led to privatizing the public airways, and by extension, the Internet. The result has been a bifurcation between right-wing Trump media (e.g., Fox, Sinclair, talk radio, Breitbart) and mainstream centrism (Times, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC). While nominally non-profit, public broadcasting relies on corporate funding along with corporate party legislative support, which together exercise direct and indirect control over its ideological orientation.
The contemporary crisis of neoliberalism
The Great Recession of 2008, its aftermath, and now the COVID-19 pandemic, have called into question the fundamental assumption of neoliberalism that the market must be free to work out its trajectory, independent of state intervention. More importantly, the partial post-2008 recovery was a recovery of profitability, but not of wages or of living standards. U.S. hegemony has also been threatened by the failure of U.S. imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hindering Washington’s ability to take on economically and militarily the growing threat from China and, secondarily, Russia. And behind all of this is the looming climate crisis.
What we might identify as the current crisis of neoliberalism is principally a social and political crisis—a crisis of legitimacy. Capital will always hope that profit rates were higher, but, overall, profits and wealth have been growing over the last several decades, with rising inequality following it its wake.[12] The real fight, as always under capitalism, is over the division of the surplus. The political and social divisions are largely blowback from the (partial but real) success of neoliberalism in restoring the postwar profit rate at the expense of working-class income. This was amplified by the response to the economic crisis which began in 2008, in which the banks and large corporations were bailed out at the expense of the working class.
As Gramsci presciently observed in his Prison Notebooks: “At a certain point in their historical lives, social groups become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organization form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognized by the class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny.’”[13]
The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and now the COVID-19 pandemic have opened new forms of ideological competition, both between and within the principal social classes. On the plane of U.S. electoral politics, three responses have emerged to address this. First is the reactionary ethno-nationalism personified by Donald Trump. Second is the reformist and social democratic response identified with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The third tendency, personified currently by third-way centrist Democrat Joe Biden, doubles down on classical neoliberalism, including neoliberal globalization. The United States is not unique in this regard. Similar patterns have been playing out both in Europe and in south and west Asia.
In a curious way, all three of these tendencies echo the past, although in different ways. While the third-way Democrats objectively represent the present as the direct continuity of neoliberalism, Trump and Sanders look towards more distant models in U.S. political history, while adding somethings distinctively new to the debate.
To be continued…
[1] See, e.g., W. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
[2] Deepankar Basu and Ramaa Vasudevan, “Technology, distribution and the rate of profit in the U.S. economy: understanding the current crisis,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 37:1, 57-89 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bes035.
[4] Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (New York: Verso, 2006).
[5] Costas Lapavitsas, “Financialization and Capitalist Accumulation,” Research on Money and Finance, Discussion Paper No. 16 (2010). Murray Smith and Jonah Butovsky, “Profitability and the Roots of the Global Crisis,” Historical Materialism, 20:4, 39-74 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341273.
[6] David McNally, Global Slump (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011). Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2012).
For the past four months Covid-19 has revealed the contradictions and unsustainability of global capitalism perhaps in a manner that no other single phenomenon has ever done in history. The virus has become the latest and arguably the bleakest reminder that capitalism’s systemic dynamics and imperatives, i.e. its relentless drive for competitiveness and profitability, is bound to sooner or later disrupt the very foundations of human existence as a whole. Furthermore, the biological blitzkrieg activated by the coronavirus has arrived at a time when the global political economy has already been going through two other major crises – crisis of ‘development’ and crisis of democracy – which will be aggravated by the current pandemic. This short essay provides a synopsis of capitalism’s triple crisis, which is critical to develop a balanced assessment of what the post-pandemic world may look like.
Coronavirus: Beyond ‘Green Capitalism’
The link between capitalism, ecological crisis and Covid-19 has been amply documented. Very briefly, critical biologists and epidemiologists foreground industrial agriculture and global warming as the root causes of the emergence of new pathogens since the 1990s. Factory farming and extractive industries have now reached the last virgin forests and peasant lands in the world, subjecting them to the logic of capitalist markets. Under the invasive pressure of animal husbandry, monocrop production and resource extraction, huge tracts of forests have lost their ecological diversity. The damage on ecological complexity, combined with the disruptive impact of global warming, has forced or allowed previously boxed-in pathogens to leave their natural habitats and hosts. Hence our increasing interaction with and vulnerability to the pathogens for which we have no medical cure or immunity.
Covid-19 has epitomized the fundamental contradiction between the limitedness of our planet and the endlessness of capital accumulation. The ‘endless’ and ‘contradictory’ character of capital accumulation is rooted in the fact that capitalism institutionalizes a mode of life that needs to continuously expand, and while doing so, systematically subordinates the ‘natural and human substance of society’, i.e., land and labour, to the imperatives of the marketplace. That is, capitalism conditions people’s utilization of nature and enjoyment of life to their ability to increase market competitiveness, profitability and productivity. Therefore, it is characterized by a persistent drive to increasingly commodify land and labor, the living substance of the planet.
The result of capitalism’s competitive compulsions has been contradictory, to say the least. For, on the one hand, capitalism has enabled massive technological advancements in all spheres of life. This, in turn, has generated, above all, an unprecedented potential to feed, clothe, and accommodate an ever-increasing world population. Yet, on the other hand, as Ellen Meiksins Wood argues, by subordinating all other considerations to the imperatives of market competition, capitalism has also created environmental destruction and pandemics, alongside poverty and homelessness. Billions of people who could be fed and housed are subjected to immense doses of insecurity, living their lives under the constant threat of joblessness, homelessness, loss of status and starvation. In a similar fashion, the environment that could be protected is systematically destroyed for profit, and killer viruses that could be contained are unleashed.
In short, capitalism has had an inherent tendency to expand in a manner unlike any other socio-economic system. Undoubtedly, capitalism’s birth and expansion has been a conflict-ridden and often violent process, underlined by dramatic changes in social relations and a ‘metabolic rift’ in age-old patterns of human interaction with nature. Yet, capitalism has ultimately managed to turn society and nature (however fictitiously) into an ‘adjunct’ to the market, i.e. the market is no longer a space wherein surplus labor and surplus product are occasionally sold, as has been the case for millennia, but has turned into an imperative for social reproduction as a whole.
What ensues from this brief exposition is two-fold. First, Covid-19 is not an accidental or temporary phenomenon; the virus has not (and any of its future incarnations will not) emerge like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky but have been a constant possibility built into the very structure of market society. Second, Covid-19 has exposed in the starkest way the imminence of the ecological crisis brought about by capitalism’s global march. This, in turn, sheds further doubt on the liberal expectation that markets, if provided with right signals, can themselves fix the ecologically destructive impacts of market competition by means of eco-friendly innovations and technical changes. Put differently, it seems that we have neither the time nor resources to create a ‘green capitalism’. Even before Covid-19, there were several scholars confirming that even if we did everything ‘right’, from investments in more efficient to eco-friendly technologies to implementing a global carbon tax, it would still be impossible to run a successful global market economy without causing some form of ecological collapse. For example, ‘to keep global warming to only 2 °C simply by technical means, about 80 percent of all of the energy used in the world…would need to be replaced by CO2-neutral technologies’. Achieving this, as estimated by the entrepreneur and inventor Saul Griffith,
“would require building the equivalent of all the following: a hundred square metres of new solar cells, fifty square metres of new solar-thermal reflectors, and one Olympic swimming pool’s volume of genetically engineered algae (for biofuels) every second for the next twenty-five years; one three-hundred-foot-diameter wind turbine every five minutes; one hundred-megawatt geothermal powered steam turbine every eight hours; and one three-gigawatt nuclear power plant every week” (quoted in Magdoff and Bellamy-Foster 2015).
Therefore, the goal of keeping markets and economic growth intact while simultaneously decreasing their negative impact on the ecosystem looks unattainable. The immediacy and severity of the ecologically-induced health crisis forces us to think beyond the mere ‘greenwashing’ of the markets. Unless the very structure of the global political economy changes, unless we alter the political-economic relations and institutions as well as reorient our personal priorities and expectations in life, we should expect more environmental problems, hence more pandemics in the future.
This ecological barrier also provides the necessary background against which to analyze two other, yet interconnected crisis of global capitalism: crisis of ‘development’ and crisis of ‘democracy’, both of which have been exacerbated by the present crisis and are critical to develop a balanced assessment of what the post-pandemic world may look like.
Capitalism and the End of ‘Development’
The term ‘development’ has always been contentious, bearing different consequences and implying different legacies for the Global South and the Global North. Yet, regardless of the spatial and temporal differences that mark the North-South divide, it seems that capitalism has been hardly generating any form of ‘development’ in both milieu for a long time. The vast majority of the Global South, with the exception of a few countries that have managed to establish a manufacturing base, has been doomed to permanent underdevelopment due to, before everything else, the structure of the global political and economic system. In particular, the massive technological and infrastructural gap between the northern and southern countries, combined with continuing neo-imperialist and neo-colonial practices, have left only little space for capitalist ‘development’ in the Global South.
In the Global North the overwhelming majority of workers have been working longer hours for stagnating or declining real wages since the 1970s. The pressure of increased global economic competition and global capital mobility on the one hand, and decades of supply-side policies on the other have exhausted most of the economic and social rights the working classes previously obtained. The new reality of fiscal austerity, high unemployment, stagnant wages, deteriorating public services, long work hours, precarious jobs and lower social mobility has been concealed for a while by a debt-driven growth, the unsustainability of which has been bitterly testified by millions of people since the 2008 crisis. Unsurprisingly, since the financial crash the underlying problems of the world economy have not been remedied; to the contrary, global economic growth ‘has been lower than in any decade since World War II…while aggregate debt (the total debt of governments, corporations and households), already mountainous before the 2008, has more than doubled in size’. All in all, today market imperatives govern human lives almost worldwide, yet with no or little prospect of capitalist ‘development’ for a large majority of the world population.
Capitalism’s Worsening Democratic Deficit
The crisis of capitalist development is firmly connected to the crisis of liberal democracy. This is not only because the imperatives of competitive austerity have increasingly undermined the states’ fiscal ability to tackle socio-economic grievances, hence debilitating the legitimacy and usefulness of democratic institutions and actors. Equally important, decades of austerity have forced capitalism to go back to its ‘default’ settings in terms of its relation to democracy and mass politics. Let me explain.
Capitalism and democracy have always been strange bedfellows. For, capitalism owes its existence to its ability to continuously de-politicize very political issues. In other words, capitalism creates the fiction of ‘self-regulating’ markets by systematically cutting off essentially political issues (for ex. control of labor, production, property and nature) from the political arena, displacing them to a separate ‘economic’ sphere. Yet, the paradox is that it is precisely the de-democratization and privatization of the ‘economic’ sphere that may make thinkable a political arena in which subjects are formally equal despite their socioeconomic inequalities. In other words, as capitalism effectively denies any rights of participation in decisions related to the organization of production and nature, thereby shielding itself from any kind of democratic accountability at the workplace, it may also create and widen a narrowly understood ‘political’ space consisting of formally equal subjects.
Indeed, during the first three decades following World War II, that’s precisely what happened in the Global North. Massive productivity increases, alongside working-class struggles, allowed for steady increases in wages, job security, institutionalized wage bargaining, expansion of welfare state, improvements in the living conditions of the majority of the labouring masses as well as the expansion of civil and political liberties. Yet, this brief period of generalized prosperity and stability also facilitated the incorporation of the western working classes into capitalist institutions and ideology. The demands for higher wages were effectively separated from the demands for radical equality and political autonomy within the institutionalised mechanisms of wage bargaining. As Charlie Post argues, mere ‘reliance on routine collective bargaining, lobbying, and electing pro-labor candidates to office’ pacified, bureaucratized and depoliticised most of the radical elements within the western working classes, causing them to gradually give up and forget earlier forms of working class solidarity and protest such as massive and long-lasting strikes, occupations of workplaces and public spaces and street demonstrations. A hypercompetitive, consumerist and politically docile subjectivity, fortified and controlled by new technologies of surveillance and debt, has eventually prevailed among the working classes, rendering increasingly difficult to imagine a world beyond capitalism.
The implication is that when the economic downturn came in the 1970s, working classes were by and large demobilized, devoid of most of their earlier radicalism to resist the looming neoliberal turn in the global political economy. Forms of popular sovereignty and socio-economic rights that prevailed during the so-called ‘golden age’ of capitalism could now be sent to the neoliberal slaughterhouse without much outcry. Against this background, it is scarcely surprising that since the end of the 1970s capitalism has persistently removed the institutions of ‘economic’ decision-making from democratic scrutiny either by resorting to explicitly authoritarian measures or by creating technocratic institutions of governance. The remaining ‘democratic’ institutions have been unable to change anything substantial in the lives of ordinary people amidst growing social inequality, high unemployment and lower social mobility. As a result, especially since the new millennium, the masses, disappointed by ‘establishment’ political parties, have increasingly turned to right-wing and left-wing ‘populist’ movements for transformative politics.
On the left, populism has been structurally disadvantaged in carrying out the tasks it set out for itself. As evidenced by the retreat of the leftist ‘pink tide’ in Latin America and Syriza in Greece, the ability of 21st century reformist left governments to deliver anti-neoliberal policies has been severely constrained by the structural requirements of globalized production and finance. The mobility of global capital and fluctuations in primary commodity prices, combined with capital’s ability to withhold investment and employment in the face of unfavorable government policies, renders a left reformist strategy to overcome neoliberalism very hard to implement on a sustainable basis. Right-wing populism too has been unable (if not utterly unwilling) to ‘reform’ neoliberalism. Despite the rise of a mercantilist discourse among some of its proponents, right-wing populism is equally subjected to the rules of competition in a globalized marketplace; hence compliance with, instead of defiance of neoliberalism has remained to be the norm. Yet, unlike populism on the left, right-wing populists have taken a xenophobic, sexist and nationalist stance. They have usually associated the negative outcomes of neoliberalism (e.g. chronically high unemployment, precarious jobs, decline of public services etc.) with immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and the intrusion of foreign and domestic ‘enemies’ (real or imaginary). Right-wing populisms have taken many forms, differing from country to country; yet all right-wing populisms have shared a reactionary, chauvinist and authoritarian way of doing politics.
What’s Next?: Socialism or the ‘Varieties of Fascism’
All in all, even before Covid-19, capitalism seems to have been leading the vast majority of the world to a future which is ecologically impossible, economically futile and politically catastrophic. The implication is that any meaningful attempt at solving the present, and future crises needs to take the bull by the horn. There is literally no choice to be made between ‘capitalism’ and ‘capitalism with a human face’. As long as the underlying dynamics of our lives remain the same, as long as we keep treating nature and human beings as commodities, no cosmetic surgery will do. To the contrary, historical experience suggests that such minimal interventions will sooner or later backfire, re-legitimizing capitalism pure and simple. The only way to ‘re-embed’ our economies and save our lives from ecological and social collapse is by intervening in the very heart of the beast: land and human beings need to be taken out of the market. The beast is not tame-able; it needs to be killed.
Obviously, such a decisive way out of this conundrum rests on the organizational ability of socialists to radicalize and internationalize societal demands for change. Imagining and realizing a non-capitalist future, albeit a herculean task, is the only feasible solution to the economic, political and ecological deadlock in which we have found ourselves. Undoubtedly, this requires a working-class strategy that seeks to challenge the limits of legality and transcending the dominant forms of individual subjectivity and national identity. Winning any significant and enduring gains will require massive resistance on a global scale, and the construction of a new mode of life that will nurture egalitarian, ecological, and internationalist modes of being and solidarity.
Should the socialist alternative fail to emerge, it is very likely that the pandemic will exacerbate the present deadlock in the global political economy, ultimately leading to further radicalization of already-existing far-right tendencies. As alluded to earlier, capitalism has always had an in-built tendency to undermine democracy. During the inter-war years, for example, fascism emerged not as a ‘political freeze of or simple reaction’ to capitalism as often argued, but was underlined by the aim of ‘rationalizing’ capitalism. Against what they conceived to be a ‘wasteful’, ‘egoistic’ and ‘rentier’ capitalism, devoid of social harmony and subject to cycles of boom and bust, fascist regimes aimed to reorient economic life on the basis of totalitarian ‘productivist’ ideologies. In the face of inflationary pressures and militant trade unions, fascisms aimed to deepen the commodification of labor, and while doing so, they obliterated or subordinated the potentially radical aspects of modernity (such as radical interpretations of ‘equality’, ‘democracy’ and ‘rule of law’) to capitalism.
In the contemporary context, it does not require great foresight to predict that capitalism will resort to increasingly authoritarian measures to pre-empt and suppress societal reactions (spontaneous or organized) to its unsolvable problems. Furthermore, most states, equipped with mass surveillance technologies and ‘extraordinary’ measures to rule for indefinite periods of time, are very likely to respond to societal reactions against global warming, economic woes and lack of democracy by sending the last crumbs of political liberalism to the dustbin of history. New security concerns, legitimized through medicalized discourses, are likely to gain prominence within and among polities, leading to the rise of fascist or fascist-like regimes around the world. These new forms of governance will seek to vindicate capitalism by ever more aggressively individualizing, externalizing and medicalizing the responsibility for capitalism’s failures. In the face of ‘careless’ citizens who do not pay enough attention to social-distancing instructions, as well as ‘invasive’ immigrants who steal domestic jobs and bring in new pathogens, civic universal ideas will be totally discarded to maintain the health of capitalism. Furthermore, one should not forget that this contemporary wave of fascism will ‘find itself better placed than historical fascism when trying to court the workers, the unemployed and the fearful lower-middle-class’. For, while in the 1920s and early ’30s ‘the Nazis found the unemployed, who had turned en masse to the Communists, almost unapproachable, today, the situation has clearly changed’. Therefore, unless a socialist alternative is immediately built, one can expect that the reactions to capitalism’s failures will usher in a new era of capitalist barbarism.
The working class in the United States faces tremendous difficulties, but there are some hopeful signs of movement in workplaces and unions, in communities, and on the left. As this article was being edited, the national uprising against the police murder of George Floyd spread across the country, complicating in ways that remain uncertain both the coronavirus and the planned reopening of the country intended to end the depression. Clearly, however, all of these events taken together suggest that we are entering a new era in the struggle for democracy and socialism.
WALNUT CREEK, CA – MARCH 23: Nurses line up to protest outside the Kaiser Permanente Walnut Creek Medical Center in Walnut Creek, Calif., on Sunday, March 22, 2020. California Nurses Association held a rally today to protest the lack of coronavirus supplies at the hospital. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
The American working class today faces three enormous problems. First, the coronavirus that continues to spread across the United States bringing suffering and death. We have now had 104,000 deaths. We may see soon a second wave of the pandemic as a result of a hasty reopening of the American economy without proper attention to protecting the health of working people and the society in general.
Second, we find ourselves in an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions, a second Great Depression that may be worse than the first. We have 43 million unemployed, a rate of about of 25 percent. A recent study estimates that 42 percent of these layoffs may become permanent; that is, at the other end of this slump we may still have an unemployment rate of 15 percent!
Third, under President Donald Trump, we have a new kind of government in the United States, an authoritarian government, hostile to unions, workers, people of colour, women and LGBT people, that is violating many of the norms and customs of all previous administrations and has created what we might now call a permanent constitutional crisis. Trump not only conquered and disciplined the Republican Party, he has also maintained his hard core following of about 40 percent of the electorate, and mobilised far right movements that include neo-Nazis and armed militias.
The working class before the current crisis
To understand how the situation of the US working class we have to ask a number of questions. What is the starting point? That is, what was the situation of US workers before the pandemic? What is the situation at present? And what sort of worker resistance is taking place now?
The US working class has been in decline since about 1980; that is, for 40 years, two generations, unions shrunk in size and social weight, strikes virtually disappeared, and labour’s voice in the country’s social and political life became weaker. Before the pandemic only 10 percent of all workers in America belonged to unions, and only 6 percent in the private sector. Few union members attended union meetings and many did not vote in union elections for their officers. During those 40 years wages stagnated, and in many workplaces conditions worsened and benefits declined.
In February 2018 a teachers’ strike in West Virginia led to a series of education workers’ strikes that lasted through 2019 in Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, North Carolina, Colorado, Los Angeles and Oakland, California. In Chicago there was a 15-day strike by the Chicago Teachers Union and there was also a nine-day strike by the United Teachers of Los Angeles, both locals where more militant, rank-and-file caucuses had taken leadership of the union. The strikes involved about 500,000 teachers and other workers and in many cases won substantial gains. Yet the strikes did not spread to other public employees and seemed to have no impact on private sector workers.
There have also been dozens of strikes by nurses and other healthcare workers, some working for public, some for non-profit, and some for private hospitals. These strikes led by a variety of unions involved tens of thousands of workers, and all occurred before the current coronavirus pandemic.
There were several private sector strikes of note too in this same period of a few years before the coronavirus crisis. The Communications Workers of America led several of these strikes or followed its members when they led. On 13 April 2016 the Communication Workers of America (CWA) led a strike of 39,000 Verizon workers and after 45 days “they beat back company demands for concessions on job security and flexibility, won 1,300 additional union jobs, and achieved a first contract at seven Verizon Wireless stores.” The CWA also struck AT&T in 2016, Pacific Bell in 2017, and in 2018 9,500 CWA workers walked out at AT&T Midwest in a wildcat strike.
Service workers’ strikes grew in 2017-2019 as well. Seven UNITE HERE locals spread across seven time zones from Hawaii, San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, San Jose, Detroit, to Boston, raising the slogan “One Job Should Be Enough”, and struck Marriott (Marriott, Westin and Sheraton) Hotels for two months in 2018. They won higher wages, improved benefits, and greater job security.
The Stop & Shop strike should also be mentioned. Thirty-five thousand members of five United Food and Commercial Workers locals in the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut walked out on April 11 for better pay and to defend their healthcare plans. The strike, whose picket lines were honoured by the Teamsters, proved very effective, and the union demonstrated that it could successfully defend its members.
The United Auto Workers strike against General Motors in 2019 involved 48,000 workers at 50 plants across the United States and lasted from September 15 to October 16, but it failed to achieve what many workers thought should be its chief goal, the elimination of the many tiers – different pay rates – among GM workers. While each of these was a significant strike – one a success and the other not – they had little impact on the labour movement as a whole.
Taken together, all of the private sector strikes mentioned here demonstrated that labour unions were overcoming the myth of the 1980s to the 2000s that the strike was dead. The strike still lives.
Labour union activists often talk about the “labour movement”, but in reality, it is a misnomer. There are many labour union organisations, but for decades there has not been much movement. Why is that? During the entire post-war period, but particularly after the mid-1970s, American union leaders largely gave up the struggle against employers, against the capitalist class. Even before that, beginning in the late 1930s, the labour bureaucracy became a social caste in the working class, no longer working in the industry they came from, earning higher salaries, enjoying special health and retirement programs and perquisites such as cars and expense accounts, and often spending their working time with company and government officials. The union officials believed that their location in industrial relations and in society gave them a privileged position and that they better understood the choices facing the union than its members did.
The officials by and large adopted a philosophy of “partnership” with employers, working to protect the employers from government supervision or foreign competition, believing that the profitability of the corporations insured their members’ jobs and wages. Anxious to avoid confrontation to defend their members and enhance their situation, they turned to the Democratic Party to pass “labour law reform” that would make labour organising easier, though one Democratic Party president after another let them down year after year. All of this contributed to the decline in membership, the disappearance of the strike, and the stagnation of wages.
Map above: Immigrant demonstrations at the peak in May 2006.
While the AFL-CIO and some unions offered token support for these movements, in truth organised labour failed to fully embrace them. The labour bureaucracy does not form alliances with such movements when they come along, it does not mobilise its members to support these movements, nor does it use its economic power – the power of the strike – to defend immigrants and Black workers when they face racist policies. When social movements occur, generally they do so on their own, and labour goes its own way. The two seldom converge except where rank-and-file workers or some local union officer decide to take up the movement issues – and that is rare.
Map above: Occupy Wall Street occupations and demonstrations in US in 2011.
The social movements, which are clearly workers’ movements, tend to be episodic. They sometimes arise in reaction to positive proposals from the government, as happened with the immigrant movement of 2006, which responded to Republican President George W. Bush’s proposal for immigration reform. Or more typically they respond to an adverse development, as Occupy Wall Street did to the 2008 recession and Black Lives Matter reacted to police racism and violence. In any case, these movements of working people tend not to form permanent organisations. A wide variety of immigrant groups, from the Washington, D.C.-based National Council of La Raza to local hometown clubs and soccer teams, created the immigrant reform movement, but never coalesced into a new national organisation.
Map above: Created by students, showing Black Lives Matter protests in 2014-15.
Occupy Wall Street drew in many individuals concerned about the issues of economic inequality and the role of money in politics, but when Barack Obama’s White House organised suppression through coordination with local police forces, with 8,000 arrests, it never recovered. Black Lives Matter never called a national convention to create a new group, and afterwards the philanthropic foundations, NGOs and the Democratic Party swooped down on it and drew off a number of its leaders. It ceased to be a movement, though some local protesters adopted its name and continue to do so. The Me Too movement against men’s sexual assaults on women began with wealthy and powerful women in high places, such as actors, but it also had a powerful influence among women in all social classes including the working class; however no new women’s organisation and movement arose.
The Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020
Bernie Sanders’ two campaigns for president clearly captured the energy of the Occupy Wall Street movement and adopted two of its principal ideas: America’s growing economic inequality and the inordinate role of money in politics. Sanders developed an economic program that spoke to the issues facing millions of Americans, with the emphasis on health insurance for all (Medicare for all), free higher education, higher wages of at least $15.00 per hour. He also called for labour union reforms that he argued would double the size and strength of labour. Sanders has had a reputation for years of supporting unions and their strikes, something he continued during his campaigns.
In 2016, most US labour organisations followed the historic pattern and endorsed Sanders’ opponent Hillary Clinton, the candidate of the Democratic Party establishment and of a very large section of the American bourgeoisie. Very few national labour unions endorsed Sanders in 2016 and/or in 2020. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), National Nurses United (NNU), the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), United Electrical Workers Union (UE) and the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) did endorse Sanders, and so too did dozens of state, regional, and local unions, and many, many individual union members supported him.
In 2020, with 29 Democratic Party candidates in the race at first, most unions delayed making endorsements, in part because they feared problems with their many members who personally supported Sanders in 2016. The presence in the primary of the progressive Elizabeth Warren in 2020 also complicated the situation and led some unions to hesitate. None of the candidates got very many union endorsements in 2020 until Joe Biden had won the South Carolina primary and the endorsement of his most significant opponents. Then in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic Sanders dropped out of the race and also endorsed Biden. Biden and Sanders then formed an alliance to work on policy issues, moving Biden a little to the left at least on paper, which made it clear that virtually all labour unions would endorse Biden for president.
There is no doubt that Bernie Sanders’ two campaigns had an enormous impact on popular consciousness and the working class. His campaign platform and his speeches popularised and legitimated the rights of labour unions and workers and working-class demands for a better work life and a better life in their communities. Sanders may indirectly have helped to inspire the teachers who went on strike in 2017, mostly in “red states” dominated by the Republican Party. Yet in the last five years of Sanders’ campaigns, apart from the teachers, we saw no significant uptick in union organising or strikes. Sanders changed consciousness, but, at least so far, that has not resulted in significant union action.
There appears to be an interest in independent political alternatives to the left of the Democratic Party among some Sanders followers. In Los Angeles in 2020, after his withdrawal, Sanders’ campaign organisation, Our Revolution, voted to leave the Democratic Party and explore an alliance with the People’s Party Movement; but it is small, not a political party, and is running no candidates in 2020, so it is not a genuine option.
There is no significant alternative to the left of the Democratic Party that can provide an option for the working class. The Green Party, which has never won more than 2.2 percent of the total vote for president, won only 1 percent in the last couple of elections. Its importance is that it has a national presence on state ballots. In New York State Howie Hawkins, a retired truck driver, an open socialist, and the 2020 presidential candidate, has been an indefatigable campaigner and won enough votes in his last race for governor (50,000) to keep the Green Party on the state ballot, but elsewhere the party is not very significant.
The effect of the coronavirus crisis on workers
American workers have been affected by the coronavirus in quite different ways. It is estimated that about 29 percent of all American workers have been able to work from home; this includes many technical employees, engineers, architects, professors and teachers and other white-collar professions. About 40 million workers, or 25 percent of the American workforce, has been laid off. Still, millions of essential workers continue to perform their duties, often risking exposure to coronavirus from co-workers, the public, or passengers on public transportation.
Economic and racial inequality is also quite evident. A higher proportion of Blacks and Latinos have become sick and died. In Chicago Black people make 32 percent of the population, but they make up 72 percent of the coronavirus deaths. In New York both Blacks and Latinos are dying at twice the rate of whites. This is largely due to underlying conditions – high blood pressure, diabetes and respiratory disease – but also to working in essential jobs, as well as lack of healthcare and overcrowded housing.
Racism appears everywhere in this crisis. Asian Americans have experienced verbal abuse and violent attacks as the bearers of what Trump called the “Chinese virus”. Trump closed the border to asylum seekers and has now ordered that for 60 days the government will issue no green cards, which grant immigrants permanent residency and the right to work in the United States.
While men die at higher rates, the pandemic also disproportionately affects women. Many are homecare workers, nursing home workers and other low-wage caregivers with less protection. Women make up 87 percent of registered nurses and 71 percent of cashiers. There is also concern that under stay-at-home orders women are experiencing more domestic violence. At the same time, conservative officials in Ohio, Mississippi and Texas have declared abortions to be “non-essential” and have suspended the procedure during the coronavirus pandemic. The courts have overruled some of those orders.
Workers take action
Throughout the pandemic, federal and state governments and public and private employers failed to protect workers’ health and their income. Essential workers who were forced to continue working without adequate safety and health protection either protested or walked off the job in hundreds of mostly small, brief, and localised wildcat strikes. Some of these, like a small walkout at an Amazon warehouse in New York, garnered publicity but failed to find a mass following. Others had a bigger impact.
Nurses and other hospital workers organised demonstrations to demand masks, gowns, and ventilators. Many nurses protested at their hospitals, but some from the National Nurses United went to the White House to demand that Trump invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) to order the production of masks, ventilators and coronavirus test kits. While there, in a moving tribute, they read the names of their co-workers killed by the virus. Federal and state governments and hospital managers responded by making greater efforts to provide supplies for workers.
Nurses were not alone. In mid-March, led by the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) teachers threatened a sickout to force the closure of the New York public schools when Mayor de Blasio and their own union, the United Federation of Teachers, failed to do so. In late April about 50 workers walked off the job at the Smithfield meatpacking plant in Nebraska over health and safety issues. The governor promised to bring testing and contact tracing to the plant. In Washington, where there is a long history of worker strikes, hundreds of fruit packers struck for safer working conditions and hazardous duty pay.
The protests are myriad: Truck drivers who own their own trucks have organised protests over their falling rates in several states, and Uber drivers in San Francisco organised a protest at a stockholder meeting against their attempt to repeal a law that protects Uber workers’ rights. Fast food workers in several states have walked off the job, some in strikes coordinated by the “Fight for $15” movement. Retail workers walked off their jobs at the American Apparel clothing plant in Selma, Alabama. The protests, while plentiful and diverse, still remain mostly small and brief and most have not had a significant impact on management, though some have won improvements in health protection or higher wages.
Payday Report “Strike Map” claims some 250 wildcat strikes in May 2020, but the claim is somewhat misleading since many of the actual events were not strikes at all but simply protests.
Some unions have provided leadership. The Amalgamated Transit Union has supported bus drivers who have struck over health concerns in Detroit, Birmingham, Richmond, and Greensboro. The Carpenters Union, which represents about 10,000 workers in Massachusetts, ordered its members to strike on April 5 over concerns about COVID-19 and did not end the strike until April 20. Many unions issued statements calling for employers and government to protect their members and provided helpful information. And unions have also lobbied Congress.
With the exception of the nurses’ unions, by and large most labour unions have provided little more leadership than government or business in this hybrid health and economic crisis. Many unions issued statements calling for employers and government to protect their members and provided helpful information. And unions have also lobbied Congress. But in general union leaders have not attempted to raise the level of class struggle to the extent that might be possible.
Some important unions capitulated to reopening factories and resuming production, even though it is clear that it may put their members’ health at risk. As early as May 5 the United Auto Workers conceded that the company had the contractual authority to resume production in May in the GM, Ford, and Fiat-Chrysler plants, without strong guarantees of health protections. Ford, after reopening, shut down two plants, one in Chicago and another in Dearborn, Michigan because of new COVID-19 cases.
Fearing the coronavirus, demobilised by the shutdown, then recalled to work without adequate protections, the crisis has further divided and demoralised much of the working class. As we write at the end of May, there has been no mass mobilisation of workers on an industrial, regional, or national scale. Though some in the left have that in mind.
The left organises
Labour Notes, the newspaper, website, and educational centre, represents the most important institution of the labour left in the United States. Its biannual conferences generally bring together a few thousand union activists, while hundreds attend its travelling schools held in different cities around the country. Its books provide useful tools for organisers and it has helped to bring together workers in the same industry so that they can build movements to revitalise their unions. Labour Notes, for example, helped to create the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators (UCORE), a network of caucuses in the teachers unions – in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York and Massachusetts, and other cities and states – is now also building a similar network for those in higher education.
The largest left organisation in the United States, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – with some 60,000 members in every state, in all major cities and many towns and rural areas – had been active before the current crisis among nurses and teachers. DSA has undertaken some new initiatives. It has joined forces with the small United Electrical Workers Union known as the UE, which organises in a variety of industries, and together they have created the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC). EWOC, adopting the “distributed organising” techniques of the Sanders campaign, is now training hundreds of volunteer organisers to help shop-floor activist organisers in their workplaces. DSA has also begun to organise a network of restaurant workers in several cities and towns. These new DSA initiatives raise the possibility of organising thousands of workers and helping them to take action, with or without a union, to solve their immediate problems. It also may make possible the recruitment of large numbers of workers to DSA.
And mutual aid?
Some on the left, especially the anarchist and anti-capitalist left, have also been engaged in organising what is called “mutual aid”, though their projects are few in number and small. While leftists sometimes talk about mutual aid as leading to “dual power” – a period in a revolutionary situation where there are two rival governments – there is no evidence of such projects representing any significant working class movement or any alternative to government on any level, admirable as the attempt to build solidarity may be. Far more important than left-led groups in that work are the thousands of mutual assistance projects across the country that have sprung up from block clubs and neighbourhood associations in local communities that involve bringing food to the hungry, checking in on the elderly and handicapped, providing health education, sharing books and educational materials, and myriad other good works. Those largely traditional community groups, however, seldom have a political dimension.
Latino immigrant communities, organising through their neighbourhood groups, workers’ centres and other advocacy organisations, represent some of the strongest and most genuine examples of real mutual assistance, and some of those centres engage as well in some lobbying for legislation for their communities. One of the largest and most important of them, Make the Road New York, a community organisation with around 25,000 dues-paying members, provides food pantries, takes part in efforts to organise Amazon warehouse workers and carwash workers, as well as domestic cleaners and others, does health and safety for essential workers, and advocates for legislation, including laws to provide undocumented immigrants with access to many of the benefits afforded to US citizens.
And rent strikes?
As we have noted, the class struggle takes place not only in the workplace but also in communities, and sometimes the fight isn’t against the boss but against the landlord or the bank. The shutdown that threw tens of millions out of work led to what we might call a de facto rent strike, as nearly one third of all renters were unable to pay the landlord on April 1. Others couldn’t rearrange their payments, though banks generally granted extensions. Without much prompting from below, various state governors, legislators, and supreme courts stopped evictions early on, generally to last until June 1 – though when the various orders to stop evictions end, tenants will still owe rent.
Signs at the entrance to a public park in the author’s neighbourhood in Brooklyn.
In any case, community organisers focused on housing saw an opportunity to organise a tenants’ rent strike. So organisations in New York State, Pennsylvania, and California called for a national rent strike on May 1, International Labour Day. In New York City organisers targeted the largest and wealthiest realty companies and some 12,000 people signed a pledge not to pay rent, but that’s a tiny number considering the city has over two million renters. The Los Angeles Tenants Union said that 8,000 of its members would not pay rent, but LA has 5.5 million renters. In New York and some other cities, tenants in some buildings, often buildings with a pre-existing tenants’ union, did strike their landlords. But no mass movement seems to have developed out of the May 1 strike call.
Resurgence of the movement against police violence
The racist police murder of George Floyd, strangled under the knee of a police officer for over eight minutes while gasping, “I can’t breathe,” led to immediate mass protests by thousands at the end of May. While the police chief fired the killer and three other officers who stood by and watched, no charges were brought against any of the officers and the Black community erupted in first in a day of peaceful protest demanding that the officers be charged. Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey asked, “I’ve wrestled with, more than anything else over the last 36 hours, one fundamental question: Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail. If you had done it, or I had done it, we would be behind bars right now.”
When the District Attorney failed to act, a second day of protests in Minneapolis involved riots, looting and arson. The Minnesota State Police (mostly white officers who live in suburban and rural areas) who had been sent into Minneapolis after the second day of rioting arrested a Black CNN reporter and his crew. On the third day, protesters burned down a police station. The governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, of the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party, called out the National Guard to suppress the violent protests. At the same time, despite the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, protests by thousands spread beyond Minneapolis to many major US cities: New York, Columbus, Memphis, Denver, Albuquerque, Portland, Oregon, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
The belated arrest on May 29 of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd, failed to appease protesters’ anger. Indeed, they expressed further outrage that the charge was only the lesser one of third-degree murder, and that none of the other police officers, who stood by and watched as Floyd died, have been charged with any offence.
George Floyd’s death followed two other recent murders of Black people. One was the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by a former police officer and his son. While Arbery, who was out jogging and unarmed, was shot and killed on February 23, the two white killers, one a former police officer, who were not arrested until May 7. The other was the police murder of Breonna Taylor on March 13, when police forcibly broke into her apartment to present a search warrant in a drug investigation and shot her eight times, killing her. No drugs were found in the apartment.
These most recent police murders of Black people resemble the notorious cases in the summer of 2014 of Eric Garner of New York, killed for selling untaxed cigarettes on the street, and Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, who was suspected of petty theft. In both cases the officers who murdered those men walked free. Those two murders ignited the Black Lives Matter movement of that year.
What often began as peaceful demonstrations became violent clashes between demonstrators and police in at least 75 cities where buildings and police cars burned, stores were looted, many people were injured, and at least four were killed. The protests are reminiscent of the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s and a more militant version of the Black Lives Matter movement of 2014. In response to the protests, mayors established curfews and called out the riot police, in some states governors called out the state police and the National Guard. President Donald Trump called the Minneapolis protestors, “thugs,” and tweeted that, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Everywhere the police have violent attacked demonstrators with tear gas and pepper spray, beatings protestors with their batons, and arresting hundreds, Curfews have been implemented in many major cities, yet thus far Black activists and their many white and Latino supporters defiantly assert their right to protest. In response to the protests over Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, President Trump tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”, encouraging further police violence. Trump has said he would declare Antifa to be a terrorist organisation, though there is no such organization and though he has no legal right to do so.
Though we are in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, infuriated by the racist police murders of Black people, a new multi-racial social movement against racism may be in the process of being born.. Regardless of what comes, the nation-wide rebellion has already left a mark on US politics.
The coronavirus crisis and its economic impact have revealed the enormous economic, racial and gender disparities in society. It has lifted the veil on the relentless exploitation that existed even before this crisis. So far we have not seen this change in consciousness lead to significant mass action, but we’re still early in the crisis, and attempts to reopen workplaces without adequate health protections or with changes in employment security and wages could spark new actions and perhaps on a larger scale. Taken all together, workers’ movements, the mutual aid projects, and the left represent a very small and not very weighty force in American society at this time.
Future prospects
For the next few years workers will face several major challenges. First, unemployment – now at 25 percent – will not improve rapidly and may take years to get down to 10 percent. GDP in the United States will fall by 30 percent according to the chair of the Federal Reserve Bank. Many of America’s largest corporations have been halted or at least stalled: airline manufacture and airlines, shipping companies, cruise lines and hotels. Production of durable goods – cars, stoves, refrigerators, washers and dryers – has already been cut back because unemployment means a lack of consumers for these goods, and likewise with computers. The same is true for wholesale and retail trade; no customers, no trade.
Various surveys suggest that between a third and a half of all small businesses will fail in the next several months. The retail business was already in the period from 2010 to 2019 undergoing what was called a “retail apocalypse,” that is the closing of dozens of major and minor brick and mortar companies with hundreds of stores that had been unable to compete with online stores and delivery services; and now the coronavirus crisis and the shutdown have added to the catastrophe, sweeping away companies like J. Crew and Neiman Marcus. Various other industries have also see large-scale business failures, from restaurants and food chains to cinemas and gymnasiums, some with hundreds of stores. Some 110,000 restaurants out of one million are expected to close permanently and three million restaurant workers have already lost their jobs so far. Small restaurants may simply not survive and big chains may move in and take over, but recovery and employment will still be a long way off.
Historically high unemployment, especially when it first develops, tends to inhibit working class resistance, since workers with jobs hesitate to risk losing the jobs they have by engaging in union organising or strikes. In the United States the Great Depression began with the crash of 1929 and high unemployment followed soon after, but the first big upheavals did not occur until 1933 and they did not culminate until 1937. The two recessions of the late twentieth century, 1973-75 and 1981-82, put a definitive end to the wave of working class activism of the early 1970s and started the nation’s labour movement on its long downward slide. After that union activism, with a few notable exceptions like the Teamsters’ strike against UPS in 1997, didn’t pick up again for almost 40 years, until the 2018 teachers’ strikes. Organising during a period of deep and long-term unemployment will require patience and persistence, waiting for the working class to assimilate the experience, take small steps of resistance, and reconstitute itself for struggle in the coming years.
The fiscal crisis of government at all levels
The government shutdown of the economy has meant that neither employers nor workers are paying taxes, at least not as they did before the crisis. Consequently governments at all levels – cities, counties, water, sewage, and school districts, and states – face an enormous fiscal crisis without the funds to continue to run government, to provide services and to pay workers. Forty-four of the 50 states have laws requiring them to present balanced annual budgets. Since states aren’t allowed to go bankrupt and don’t have the power to print money, only the federal government could actually possibly save the states, but the Republican Senate has refused to do so, at least so far.
As the crisis became clear over the first month or two, government officials announced that they would have to cut their budgets, which meant cutting virtually all services to the public, but particularly the big ticket items like health and education. So throughout the country virtually all state governors and legislators are now contemplating and planning cuts to public education in primary and secondary schools and in public colleges and universities. Many of these proposed cuts will be deep, resulting in layoffs of teachers and other staff.
The unions that represent government workers are some of the biggest in the country: the National Education Association (NEA) has 2.7 million members and its rival the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has just under one million; the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has 1.9 million members and its competitor the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has about 1.5 million. Some states limit their right to strike. A number of other unions, from the UAW to the CWA and the Teamsters, also organise public employees. The unions representing federal workers, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) with 670,000 members, and the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), with 150,000 members, are much weaker unions, forbidden by law from striking. While these unions are large, have great resources and are potentially powerful, they are extremely bureaucratic and the leadership by and large collaborates with management and avoids fights.
New York State faces a 13.3 billion loss in revenue and is demanding cuts from virtually all government agencies. At the enormous City University of New York, with 25 campuses serving 275,000 students, there are 7,800 full-time professors, more than 5,000 professional staff members, and some 12,000 adjuncts who make up the largest share of employees. The Gothamist reports that “A CUNY budget memo distributed to the PSC in April said up to $95.3 million could be cut from the system”. CUNY administrators plan to deal with the crisis with a mass layoff – through letters of non-reappointment – of adjuncts who teach an enormous number of classes. The CUNY union, the Professional Staff Council, says such layoffs are unacceptable, and has launched an ad campaign against the budget cuts, but so far no other action is planned. The situation is similar in the University of Massachusetts system. One non-tenure-track (fixed term) professor there suggests that capping salaries of all university employees at $100,000 or even $150,000 would save those jobs.
Governments at all levels are asking the unions to help them make the budget cuts through furloughs, pay cuts and service reductions, and few so far show signs of resisting. The United Caucuses of Rank–and-File Educators that brings together a number of teacher caucuses believes in principle that schools should only reopen when they are fully funded, without debt, and safe for teachers, staff and students. Yet it is not clear how teachers can convert that ideal into a strategy to stop the budget cuts and to protect the health of everyone who forms part of the educational community. The attack on public employees is playing out right now and so it may be just a little too early to see what’s developing. We may only see resistance movements when schools attempt to reopen in the fall.
What about unemployed organising?
Unemployed organising represented an important factor in the workers’ movement of the 1930s. The organisers of the Unemployed Councils came from the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, particularly the latter. In 1934 socialists organised the unemployed in Toledo to help win the Toledo Auto Lite Strike. The Communists in the unemployed movement fought evictions, restoring evicted tenants to their buildings, and in Minnesota, the Trotskyists cooperated with Farmers Holiday Association to resist foreclosures and the sale of farmers’ land. Usually the unemployed were organised in protest demonstrations and marches to demand relief from the city, state and federal government, so the movement had an inherently political character, making demands on politicians and elected officials. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” responded at the national level to the pressure from below, creating such programs as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration that created jobs for hundreds of thousands.
During the recessions of 1973-75 and 1981-2 the International Socialists (IS), as did other left groups (mostly Maoist then), undertook unemployed organising. In Chicago I was involved with other IS branch members in some attempts at unemployed organising. At that time, we leafleted unemployment offices where we met and talked with workers and invited them to come to meetings of the unemployed so that we could begin organising to make demands for jobs or greater assistance. We found that those who had lost their jobs proved very difficult to keep track of and to keep organised.
The lives of the unemployed are hard, and not just because of loss of income. The principal structure and discipline of their own lives had disappeared with the loss of their jobs and they were often at loose ends. Some unemployed people become depressed; they may turn to alcohol or drugs and self-medicate, they may engage in domestic abuse, taking our their frustrations on their families. Most unemployed workers spent time hustling jobs or doing work outside their usual trade, paid under the table. Our most successful unemployed organising took place among workers who maintained an attachment to their union. The union provided an institution with information – the workers’ names, addresses, and phone numbers – with resources such as meeting halls, and as fellow union members we had something in common. And workers felt they had a right to call upon the union to help them. Still, in truth, we were not very successful in our unemployed organising.
During the economic crisis of 2008, Occupy Wall Street provided a movement that the unemployed and many others in society could relate to. In many cities and towns Occupy Wall Street encampments provided a community and activities of all sorts, including protests to demand assistance for the unemployed. In some places Occupy Wall Street organised “Occupy the ’Hood,” an outreach to Black and Latino communities, and in many places OWS helped to fight evictions. In several cities OWS brought its members out to stay outside the homes of families facing foreclosure, gaining publicity and in a few cases preventing the eviction. Barack Obama’s administration coordinated the national repression of the movement – including the arrest of 8,000 protesters, with some accused of terrorism – effectively ending the movement.
All of those experiences of the 1930s, the 1970s and 80s, and the 2000s suggest that unemployed organising can be done, but it is difficult. History suggests it is most successful when connected to a left political party or to a labour union.
The Trump administration
Donald Trump’s administration is the most right-wing American government in modern history and it represents a dangerous threat to the labour movement. Trump is known for his racist, misogynist and xenophobic views and rhetoric, and for his political platform of “defending” America from Mexican and other Latino immigrants, from Arab and other Muslim “terrorists”, and from Chinese competition. Trump has praised and encouraged the armed white protesters carrying swastikas and Confederate flags who invaded the Michigan legislature demanding reopening. His administration has rounded up tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants and put them in private prisons, it has put children in cages, and was putting asylum seekers in concentration camps – that is until it closed the border to virtually all immigrants. Trump has pledged to make the Republican Party a “workers’ party” – meaning a defender of white men’s jobs against their competitors, Black, Latino, female and immigrant. He has courted the building trades and won the votes of tens of thousands of their members. Trump’s rhetoric and policies work to divide society and the working class.
While he began his career as simply as a racist and corrupt businessman with some racist and right-wing opinions, Trump has evolved in the last few years into a genuine far-right authoritarian figure who has taken control of the Republican Party and disciplined it to his will with the carrot of tax cuts and the stick of presidential condemnation at election time. The Republican Senate follows Trump’s lead and blocks legislation he rejects. Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court and to other federal courts have transformed the judiciary into something resembling tribunals of the Gilded Age, when rich old white men in black robes defended the interests of rich white men in top hats. Trump’s government is well poised to crush the labour movement, should it begin to act. Everything Trump does, from his trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the rich to his rush to reopen the economy, benefits the right and hurts working people.
Trump ignored many early warnings of the COVID-19 pandemic from a variety of government agencies, from the Centers for Disease Control to the National Security Council. His policies are responsible for the needless death of tens of thousands of Americans in the first few months of the plague; one study suggest that 36,000 lives might have been saved had the government acted quickly and correctly. Now he has lifted the federal shutdown and encouraged state governors to reopen the economy, even though the states don’t meet the guidelines of falling cases and don’t have adequate testing and contact tracing. His reopening order threatens the health and the very lives of workers returning to their jobs at schools, stores and factories.
There is little doubt that as workplaces reopen, fights over the protection of workers’ health will be at the center of class struggle, as they already are in some places. The pandemic and the shutdown have taken a toll, but they now provide an opportunity to rebuild the American labour movement from the bottom up. While the challenges will be great, working-class resistance is growing, and socialists with a rank-and-file strategy and a class struggle perspective are involved in the fight.
Nearly six years ago in Staten Island, New York, Eric Garner was murdered by the New York Police Department. As gruesome as this murder was, liberals who advocated police reform thought it might be a turning point on the issue of police use of force in the United States. After all, Fox News and similar racist defenders of the police did their best to pick apart the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri to give every possible justification to his murderer. With Garner, what made the murder so gruesome also seemed to make it so powerfully undeniable. It was on video. The violence was clearly one-sided. And most heartbreakingly, Eric Garner was telling the police officers “I can’t breathe” seconds before they killed him.
Five years have passed. Despite the video, the seemingly undeniable evidence, a Richmond County grand jury decided not to indict the cop who killed Garner, Daniel Pantaleo. And on May 25, 2020, yet another police murder of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, was captured on video, once again pleading with the police officers “I can’t breathe” before he was killed. Sadly those who organize against police murder and violence knew that video footage was not going to change anything. Decades before George Floyd and Eric Garner, Adolph Lyons was choked by the LAPD until he passed out. While he survived, his lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles revealed that sixteen people–twelve African-American–had been killed by chokeholds by LAPD officers. His lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court where, in 1983, the Court held that he did not have standing to challenge the LAPD’s chokehold policy.
What happens in reaction to the seemingly unstoppable nature of police murder in the United States is rage. As Black liberation fighter George Jackson wrote in one of his many letters compiled in the book Soledad Brother:
“When the peasant revolts, the student demonstrates, the slum dweller riots, the robber robs, he is reacting to a feeling of insecurity, an atavistic throwback to the territorial imperative, a reaction to the fact that he has lost control of the circumstances surrounding his life.”
And thus the city of Minneapolis went into open revolt against the police that murdered George Floyd. There are two common reactions on the Left to these kinds of uprisings and both could be seen in reaction to the one in Minneapolis. One seeks to totally disavow the revolts as part of a revolutionary socialist project, the other seeks to define the revolts as revolution. This discourse lasts for a few days, and then dissipates until the next revolt.
Socialists are not spectators. It is not our job to provide commentary on revolts that happen in reaction to police murder. Rather, the question we should seek to answer is what to do after the revolts are over. How can the cycle of police murders be broken? What are the steps we must take to end racist police violence?
The answers of liberals have been varying degrees of dysfunctional and feckless. Because the details of the murder of Michael Brown were so hotly debated, requiring body cams on police was often held up as the solution. But police violence has been captured on video for decades now and nothing has happened. Thus liberals have fallen back on the vague promises of so-called “community policing” (a euphemism for increasing the number of police officers occupying neighborhoods) and implicit bias trainings. These misunderstand the problem entirely–the problem is not merely the quality of police interventions but the quantity of police interventions.
The modern police force is treated as a general emergency response force though it is trained to arrest and kill. In addition to targeting Black communities and other communities of color, people with mental health problems are also often the victims of police violence. Police are the proverbial hammer that sees everything as a nail; they do not protect and serve, they assault, detain, and murder.
Thus an increasing number of socialists see that the solution to the problem of police violence is the end of modern policing itself, not its reform. There are still some segments of the Left that view this goal of police abolition as “maximalist” or “utopian,” and indeed dismantling one of the most powerful armed forces in human history (which with “Blue Lives Matter” flags and Punisher tattoos becomes more and more like a kind of nationalist gang) is no small task. But the road to this supposed utopia is fairly straightforward, and the decarceration platform of a DSA candidate shows the steps we should take down this road.
While all of New York City DSA’s candidates are running on a decarceration platform, I am going to focus particularly on Phara Souffrant Forrest and the goal of defunding the police. Defunding the police may seem like an underwhelming solution to police violence, but it is a great platform for socialists to campaign on because it is a concrete demand that can be made by both our electeds and membership generally and it is a demand that fits nicely into our broader orientation of class struggle, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
New York City is haunted by the memory of its near bankruptcy in October of 1975, a major political moment in U.S. history where neoliberalism won a major victory by forcing the City to adopt a range of austerity cuts to social services in return for being bailed out. And that fear is not irrational – just like President Gerald Ford told New York City in 1975 to drop dead (contrary to popular belief, not literally), Mitch McConnell is insisting that the federal government tell local governments in need of bailouts to also drop dead. With this in mind, the City government under Mayor Bill de Blasio is looking at several cuts to social services, such as not opening public pools, eliminating the Summer Youth Program, and so forth.
What has not been on the chopping block is the budget of the New York Police Department. This is neoliberalism at its essence, a recognition that, to protect the status quo from the rage of desperation described by George Jackson in reaction to police violence and to capitalist immiseration in general, a large police force is needed. The NYPD budget has steadily grown over the years, including with the express approval of the NYC City Council, despite crime in the City decreasing.
Thus the debate over the budget embodies how racist police violence is situated in class struggle. At the time when working people need support more than ever just to survive, particularly Black workers who are disproportionately in “essential services” and disproportionately dying of COVID-19, that funding is instead going towards brutalizing them. The Policing & Social Justice Project has proposed a $1 billion cut to the NYPD over four years. Phara helpfully connects her platform of Medicare for All, cancelling rent, and a Green New Deal to the goal of defunding the police. As her platform says, police budget cuts can redirect funding to community investment, healthcare, housing, and jobs. Those budget cuts can be supported with other demands of decarceration aimed at reducing the number of police interventions, such as decriminalizing simple drug possession and sex work. The so-called War on Drugs (in reality a war on Black America in response to the Black Panthers and others terrifying the ruling class) expanded police department budgets to create the monstrous militaristic departments we have today–defunding the police can deflate them and thus save lives while redirecting money to better our communities.
One of the most foolish actions of the NYPD in its history was their quasi-strike in late 2014 and 2015 in response to what they saw as insufficient support from Mayor de Blasio against the backlash from the murder of Eric Garner. They perhaps bought too much into their own lies that they are the only thing standing between “good citizens” and inhuman “criminals.” Rather than showing the public how important the police were, the slowdown resulted in a decrease of major criminal complaints and showed that less policing actually made communities safer.
A major decrease in police budgets can show working people that the police have been harmful to our communities rather than protectors. To prevent more racist murders by the police, to stop austerity, and to support social programs, socialists must work to defund the police.
The New Politics Summer 2026 issue is now in the hands of subscribers, featuring articles on Democracy versus Degeneration in the United States (with contributions by Dan La Botz, Ellen Schrecker on McCarthyism Then and Now interviewed by Elizabeth Rapaport, Ben Silverman on the fascism debate, Samuel Farber on free speech, Samuel Barney on rural prisons, and Raoul Cansino and Bill Kelly on nativism), Imperialism Around the World (with articles by Lisbeth Moya González on Cuba, Husam Mahjoub on Sudan, Siyavash Shahabi and imperialism and the working class, and Matt Benson on the Mapuche in Chile), interviews on labor struggles and Russian political prisoners, a history of the International Socialists, review essays by Frieda Afary on AI, Javier Sethness on Western Marxism, and Peter Drucker on Molly Crabapple, as well as reviews on Ukraine, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, white rage, South Asia, and Afghanistan, plus a letter on women under the Taliban.
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America has seen almost two weeks of protests against the murder of George Floyd. The anger and disappointment against this hate crime and a spate of others over the last few months are palpable. Floyd’s death appears to have sparked a civil rights movement the likes of which Americans have not seen in decades. Even mainstream media are acknowledging the need to address systemic and structural racism in this country.
This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France. 
The passionate uprising that began in Minneapolis after police murdered George Floyd quickly spread 
This spring, as some countries began to reopen after months of COVID-19 lockdowns, youthful rebellions broke out inside the two most powerful states in the world, the USA and China. The Black youth of Minneapolis, their allies, and countless others across the USA expressed their anger on the streets over yet another police murder, which was one too many. During the same days, the youth of Hong Kong renewed their protests against new anti-democratic moves by the Chinese government. The US protests, which grew into a massive nationwide Black Lives Matter uprising, also had a major international impact. In both cases, the USA and China, the youth did not flinch in the face of brutal police repression, inspiring their elders and many others around the world. These youth face a world of mass unemployment, precipitous economic inequality, and growing racial oppression fueled by right-wing populism, all of it worsened by COVID-19 and the economic meltdown.
Every week, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)’s National leadership, the National Political Committee (NPC), posts a brief report of the votes they take at their meetings on the 
It takes but a few minutes for the ruling elite to recast collective calls for an end to state violence against blacks into images of criminality of black protestors and a call to end looting. How quickly the government wants us to get back to the status quo where the ruling elite has been looting from the working poor every single day of our lives. Looting from the labor of black workers over 200 years of slavery in our country. Looting from the labor of black workers in the 100 years of convict-leasing and forced contractual tenant-farming under the Black Codes. Robbing working people, and always the hardest hit black and brown people among them, their schools, their homes and communities, their labor, their health, their rights, and their lives. Even during the three months of this pandemic, a handful of billionaires have already looted $434 billion from the backs of the working people while people continue to suffer.
Part One of this article is 
Figure 1: A. Profit share (net operating surplus as percent of gross domestic income), 1947-2019.
Criticizing labor is hard for socialists. On the one hand we know the unions are the underdog in the class struggle, and it’s painfully apparent that our society has suffered because unions are so weak. At the same time, it’s clear most unions can’t or won’t live up to their social and political obligations.
Amidst the backdrop of now 
Figure 1: B. Employee compensation as percent of gross domestic income, 1947-2019.
For the past four months Covid-19 has revealed the contradictions and unsustainability of global capitalism perhaps in a manner that no other single phenomenon has ever done in history. The virus has become the latest and arguably the bleakest reminder that capitalism’s systemic dynamics and imperatives, i.e. its relentless drive for competitiveness and profitability, is bound to sooner or later disrupt the very foundations of human existence as a whole. Furthermore, the biological blitzkrieg activated by the coronavirus has arrived at a time when the global political economy has already been going through two other major crises – crisis of ‘development’ and crisis of democracy – which will be aggravated by the current pandemic. This short essay provides a synopsis of capitalism’s triple crisis, which is critical to develop a balanced assessment of what the post-pandemic world may look like.
This article is being published simultaneously in the Australian journal 
