On India’s Revocation of Jammu & Kashmir’s Autonomous Status

By: August 19, 2019
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As the Indian government resorts to annexation of the state of Jammu and Kashmir at gunpoint, detaining its political leaders and cutting off all means of communication, we extend our solidarity to the people of Jammu and Kashmir as they struggle for their most basic rights and freedoms.

The people of Kashmir were never given the option of having their own state. Since 1947, their land has been fought over by India and Pakistan and divided between the two. At Independence in August 1947, Jammu and Kashmir was a princely state ruled by Maharaja Hari Singh, and was given the choice to join either India or Pakistan. Since J&K was a Muslim-majority state, many expected it to join Pakistan. On the other hand, the party leading the independence struggle, the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, was secular and allied to the Indian National Congress. As the Maharaja dithered over the decision, there was a Pakistan-backed invasion of tribesmen from the west in October 1947, and Hari Singh appealed to India to help fight them. India agreed on condition that J&K accede to India, and the Maharaja signed the instrument of accession which on the Indian side was conditional on approval by the people of the state. As fighting continued, the UN Security Council passed a resolution requiring Pakistan to withdraw its forces, India to withdraw most of its forces, and a plebiscite to be held to decide whether Kashmir should join India or Pakistan. However, neither side withdrew their forces, the plebiscite was never held, and the state has remained divided to this day.

In 1952, on the Indian side, Article 370, which specified the conditions on which the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) had acceded to India, was incorporated into the Constitution of India on the recommendation of the Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir.  In 1954, Article 35A was added with the agreement of the J&K Constituent Assembly.  Since the Constituent Assembly dissolved itself on 25 January 1957 without recommending revocation of Article 370, it has been deemed to be permanent by the Supreme Court of India.

On 5 August 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of India revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which had given the state of J&K a considerable degree of autonomy, including having its own constitution and its own flag.

The Constitution of India does allow Article 370 to be revoked, but only with the prior approval of the Kashmiri people’s elected representatives in J&K’s constituent assembly. Even the approval of J&K’s legislative assembly was not sought because it had been dissolved in November 2018 by the BJP-appointed governor.  On August 5, he fraudulently provided consent on behalf of millions of Kashmiris as they were held in captivity in their homes at gunpoint, while elected political leaders, even those who have been in coalitions with the BJP, were detained and all means of communication, including cellphones, landlines and the internet, were cut off.

The Revocation of Article 370 also involved the scrapping of Article 35A of the Indian constitution, which, crucially, reserved the right to own land and immovable property, as well as the right to vote and contest elections, to seek government employment and obtain state welfare benefits, to permanent residents of the state.  Now, J&K has been carved up into two Union Territories ruled directly from Delhi, a move designed to further humiliate the already subjugated population.

This revocation by the Indian government is the most impressive feat yet achieved in the BJP’s steady demolition of India’s democracy over the past five years. The central government’s unilateral abrogation of the terms on which Kashmir acceded to India means that the state is no longer legally linked to India, and India becomes a foreign occupying power. Previous governments have been guilty of grievous violations of Article 370 as well as human rights violations in Kashmir, but this is the first time that the Indian military occupation of Kashmir has no legal basis whatsoever.

The excuses provided by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah for making this move – to end separatist violence and develop J&K to the level of the rest of India – make no sense. Separatist violence will not be ended by enraging even those Kashmiris who previously wanted to be part of India by demolishing their democratic rights. The economic arguments the Indian government  gives are bogus too.

Far from lagging behind the rest of India, Kashmir is ahead of many states in India, including Modi’s and  BJP president and government minister, Amit Shah’s home state of Gujarat. Kashmir has much lower infant and under-five mortality rates, lower percentages of underweight children and women, higher percentages of fully immunised children and girls aged 15-19 with at least 8 years of schooling, and higher life expectancy despite the ongoing conflict. Most strikingly, the poverty ratio in Kashmir is much lower than the national average. This is in large part due to Kashmir’s own constitution, under which extensive land reforms were undertaken in the 1950s, drastically reducing the landlessness and rural poverty which haunt the rest of India. Kashmir’s special status has been responsible for this reduction in poverty, both by allowing for the land reforms and by preventing non-Kashmiris from acquiring land in Kashmir.

This brings us to the real reasons, political, economic and ideological, why this drastic move has been made by India: it opens the door to a land-grab by settlers from the rest of India, which will also make it possible to change the demography of J&K. Muslim-majority Kashmir has always been a thorn in the flesh of Hindu supremacists, who in 1948 had killed and expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Jammu. The abrogation of Article 370 allows them to ‘integrate’ J&K into India by changing its ethnic composition. In other words, the intention is to turn Kashmir into a settler-colony like Palestine. It is not a coincidence that India, which from Independence had been a strong supporter of the Palestinian liberation struggle, has under Modi – the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel and literally embrace Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu – become a staunch ally of Israel.

At the same time, Pakistan-backed Islamic fundamentalists (both armed and unarmed) who call for uniting Kashmir with Pakistan offer an ‘alternative’ that would be disastrous for women, religious minorities, and the secular majority. They have acted in tandem with the Hindu supremacists to silence progressive voices and undermine democracy in Kashmir.

Meanwhile, the war hysteria whipped up by Hindu supremacists in India and Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan serves to divert attention from the abysmal failure of both these states to satisfy even the most basic needs of their people, and can lead to an escalation of the armed conflict between them. Russia backs India, China backs Pakistan, and the US calls on India and Pakistan to remain calm, while Trump’s overt racism and anti-Muslim bigotry serves to encourage the same attitudes in India.

At this moment of unprecedented trauma and repression, we, the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists,  express our wholehearted solidarity with the people of Jammu & Kashmir and reaffirm their fundamental right to determine their own future in their own land. At a time when support for Jammu & Kashmir’s freedom is treated as treason in both India and Pakistan, we would especially like to extend our solidarity to socialists and progressives there and their counterparts in India and Pakistan.

Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists

August 12, 2019

Originally posted at the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists website.

“We’re All Hong Kongers Now”

By: August 19, 2019
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Ecosocialists must stand in support of the millions of democracy protesters in Hong Kong and call on American trade unions and the left to join us. The Chinese Communist Party is on a suicide mission to destroy planet Earth in its all-out drive to maximize economic growth to save the party-state ruling class even if that growth produces CO2 emissions that precipitate planetary ecological collapse. China’s emissions are already more than twice as large as those of the U.S. and growing, with a GDP just 63 % the size of the U.S. The Communist Party cannot rein in those emissions in because cutting emissions means cutting growth and even the slightest economic slowdown threatens their grip on power. Xi Jinping already faces wide and growing opposition to his policies which is why he’s cracking down so brutally, jailing dissidents, democrats, trade union activists, Marxist students, feminists, locking up millions in “re-education” concentration camps in Xinjiang and Tibet, and openly threatening to massacre Hong Kong democracy activists as Deng Xiaoping did 30 years ago in Tiananmen.[1] Right now, the main threat to Xi Jinping is the incredibly brave democracy protest movement in Hong Kong led by young Chinese who feel they’re literally fighting for their lives because if they lose, they face imprisonment or worse, much worse.[2] Xi is terrified that this movement will spread to China and he has reasons to fear exactly this.[3] Hong Kong will never be free until all of China is free. Correlatively, the Chinese will never be able to suppress their country’s suicidal global warming emissions so long as the Communist Party remains in power. Thus replacing the Communist Party with bottom-up multi-party mass democracy must be the common objective of democrats, Chinese and all workers, socialists and ecosocialists everywhere. We must condemn Donald Trump’s despicable support for Xi Jinping against the democracy protesters. And we must warn Xi Jinping that if he sends in his army to crush the protests, the world won’t stop until  the Chinese Communist Party is swept into the dustbin of history.

Even as his own State Department supports the Hong Kong protesters’ right to freedom of expression, even as his State Department demands that China immediately release veteran human rights activist Huang Qi (sentenced to 12 years in prison on July 29th)[4], even as tens of thousands of Hong Kong civil servants joined the protests demanding their employer withdraw its hated extradition law, even as the Chinese Army’s Hong Kong Garrison published a video on August 7th threatening another and far more violent Tiananmen crackdown against an entire city of seven million,[5] the disgraceful fascist-loving POTUS Donald Trump denounced China’s protesters as “rioters,” parroting Beijing’s line and announced that his administration would take a hands-off position on Hong Kong: “That’s between Hong Kong and China.”[6] With these words, Donald Trump greenlighted what could be the bloodiest crackdown in history.

The Hong Kong people’s fight against Beijing-imposed Carrie Lam government’s extradition law and against China’s dismantling of what few democratic institutions and freedoms still remain from the 50-year “One Country Two Systems” treaty of 1997 is our fight and labor’s fight as much as theirs. Around the world, we find ourselves engaged in a global struggle for democracy against authoritarianism and totalitarianism, a struggle in which, to add to our difficulties we have the spectacle of Donald Trump joining with the world’s worst authoritarians against democracy – “America against the West” as one author put it.[7] In his open support of thug regimes from Saudi Arabia to China, Brazil to the Philippines, as well as his embrace of American Nazis and the KKK, Donald Trump is nothing if not consistent: As an authoritarian economic nationalist, it’s rational and consistent for him to levy tariffs on China’s imports while, simultaneously, politically backing Chinese police state totalitarianism.

At this critical moment in history, the global struggle for democracy is centered in the former British colonial entrepot of Hong Kong. Hong Kong is Communist China’s Berlin – an island enclave where citizens enjoy free speech, a free press, the right to freely associate and organize, top-flight universities that teach critical thinking instead of Xi Jinping Thought, free trade unions, and (limited) democracy – none of which exist in China and all of which are under relentless attack by Xi’s “socialist” government. To be sure, Hong Kong is a capitalist enclave. But it’s no small irony that Hong Kong workers enjoy democratic rights and freedoms including the right to vote for (some) office holders and the right to organize independent trade unions that are denied them in the PRC police state. That’s why Hong Kong poses a mortal threat to the Chinese Communist Party and this is why as democratic socialists we must resolutely and unequivocally support the Hong Kongers’ fight against Xi’s government.

The Communist Party postures as a “socialist” “victim” of U.S. imperialism and warns the U.S. and the rest of the world to mind our own business. But it’s not socialist, it’s not the victim, this is no reprise of the Opium Wars and Hong Kong should be the whole world’s concern. The Chinese Communist Party is victimizer not victim. It built its industrial economy by means of relentless and pitiless exploitation of hundreds of millions of its own powerless and coerced migrant workers, by expropriating hundreds of millions of peasant farmers, by systematically ripping off tech and intellectual property from Western firms, universities and governments, and by denying China’s citizens of any say in government whatsoever. What’s more, the Chinese party-state is a full-blown and fiercely repressive imperialist occupier of Tibet and Xinjiang where it’s imposing Han settler states. The Communist Party in no way represents socialism or any progressive values whatsoever. It is a repressive totalitarian party of gangster capitalists running the world’s most powerful police state.[8] If Xi is not stopped, he will invade Hong Kong, possibly massacre thousands of people and turn Hong Kong into a vast concentration camp. As democratic socialists and ecosocialists we call on Western democratic governments, Western trade unions, and all progressive organizations to come to the aid of Hong Kong’s desperate citizens.

We say to Western trade unions: China’s workers are not your enemy. They did not steal your jobs. Your own employers abandoned their factories in the U.S. and Europe and offshored your jobs to China to take advantage of China’s police state-enforced ultra-low wages and lack of an effective OSHA and EPA. The way to get jobs back in the U.S. is not to beat up on Chinese workers but to support their struggles to raise their own wages, win free trade unions, and equalize industrial wages around the world, thus rendering offshoring unprofitable. This is both a moral imperative and in your own material interest.

We say to the U.S. Congress and particularly to AOC and her newly elected leftist comrades, the democracy movement in Hong Kong presents you with an opportunity as well as an obligation to act on the principles for which the U.S. government claims to stand but which it so often violates – to stand up for democracy, free speech, a free press, the freedom to organize. There are practical steps they can take. For a start, since the U.S. is the main supplier of crowd control gear to the Hong Kong police, Hong Kong democracy activists and Amnesty International are calling on Western governments to stop arming the police. On August 3rd Joshua Wong  tweeted: “All these weapons are imported from the United States. Given the innumerable proof of police brutality in recent protests, all countries should call a halt to the sale of arms to the notorious Hong Kong Police.”[9] Demosisto, the main pro-democracy party sent a petition to the White House (with more than 55,000 signatures as of July 31st) urging the US government to “suspend any export application of crowd control equipment to Hong Kong to prevent further brutality against Hong Kongers.” Trump backs Xi but Congress could stop those weapons shipments. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other DSA elected representatives should take the lead in supporting democracy in Hong Kong as in the U.S. and in so-doing shine a klieg light on Trump’s outrageous hypocrisy in posturing as a defender of “Western values” against China, while simultaneously arming democracy’s enemies in Hong Kong.

————-

Related readings

Tom Grundy, Hong Kong Free Press (July 30, 2019) ‘I am a Hongkonger’ – Artist Ai Weiwei on why he supports the city’s ‘brave, clever, beautiful’ protest movement

Chris Cheng & Holmes Chan, Hong Kong Free Press (July 9, 2019) In Pictures: ‘Lennon Wall’ message boards appear across Hong Kong districts in support of anti-extradition bill protesters

[2] Nathan Law interviewed by Julian Kay Melchior, “Hong Kong’s Millennial Dissidents,” Wall Street Journal, August 10-11, 2019.

[4] “Huang Qi sentenced to 12 years in prison,” Human Rights In China, July 29, 2019, https://www.hrichina.org/en/press-work/case-update/huang-qi-sentenced-12-years-prison.

[5] “Chinese police drill video seen as a thinly veiled warning to Hong Kong protesters,” Hong Kong Free Press,  August 7, 2019, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/08/07/chinese-police-drill-video-seen-thinly-veiled-warning-hong-kong-protesters/.

[6] Derek Wallbank and Iain Marlow, “Trump calls Hong Kong protests ‘riots,’ adopting China rhetoric,” Bloomberg, August 1, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-02/trump-calls-hong-kong-protests-riots-adopting-china-rhetoric.

[7] Kori Schake, America vs. the West (Penguin, 2018).

[8] Richard Smith, “China’s communist-capitalist ecological apocalypse,” Real-World Economics Review, No. 71 (May 2015), pp. 19-63, http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue71/Smith71.pdf.

Originally posted at System Change not Climate Change. 

Prominent Centrists and the Fiction of the White Working Class

By: August 18, 2019
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In the centre of the city of Manchester, there is a place called Lincoln Square, named for the statue of Abraham Lincoln which stands there. The story of how that statue came to be there is a fascinating part of working class history. The industrial North of England, reliant on raw cotton from the Confederate states to supply its mills, was suffering the effects of Lincoln’s blockade of the South. Unemployment was skyrocketing, and people’s lives were so impacted that the period became known as the Cotton Famine.

Yet despite this, and despite the mill owners trying to break the blockade and the real risk of the United Kingdom entering the war on the Confederate side, the mill workers of Manchester and Lancashire supported Lincoln, and the cause of anti-slavery more generally. While we should not over-romanticise the politics of the time, the prevailing sentiment among the working people of Northern England was one of support for Lincoln, despite the hardships that his war was bringing down on their heads. In workers’ meetings across the region, people recognised that they had common cause with the enslaved workers who picked the cotton that fed their looms, and pressed for support of the Union. In recognition of this, Lincoln dispatched ships carrying food aid for the people of Manchester.1

When Robert Peston stumbled onto the internet to claim that working class people have historically preferred “a constructive relationship between the US and UK,” he might well have harked back to this extraordinary period in history. He did not, though, because he was not trying to offer any real analysis, nor seeking to place events in any historical context, but rather was having an idle go at Jeremy Corbyn, who was speaking at the protest against Donald Trump’s state visit. “Why does Jeremy Corbyn want to be Northern Working Class on Brexit but London Middle Class on Trump?” mused Peston, absently flattening the majority of the country into an undifferentiated mush, picking up handfuls to throw at the Labour leader without stopping to inspect their contents. This kind of abject hackery is infuriating, but it does represent an opportunity to hold a lens up to these intellectually incurious court jesters and really ask ourselves: why the fuck are they like this?

When Peston insisted that Corbyn speaking at an anti-Trump rally would upset the working class base, he was not referring to any particular real group of people. Indeed, this would be impossible. The northern English working classes, like every other group of people known to history, are a complex, varied, multifaceted group of people, in which of all the same virtues and vices that you’ll find everywhere else on the planet are represented. What Peston refers to is, rather, a kind of platonic, immutable, ideal concept known as “the White Working Class.”

A White Working Class person, definitionally, is a racist, loves the trappings of authority as represented by the Queen and military, has some vague pro-American sentiment that never extends to caring whether the president at the time is Barack Obama or Donald Trump, rejects “liberal identity politics,” and so on. The phrase coined by Alberto Toscano to describe this person is “sociologically spectral”. They do not exist so much as they are invoked, like a demon being summoned and bound in a pentagram, and from there put to work on behalf of the summoner, the liberal journalist. The archetypical northern ghost, dripping coal dust and broad-accented bigotry, stands between the journalist and the need to engage on any kind of moral level with the work they do as the courtiers of the powerful. “It’s not us,” they say, as they push their glass across the Ouija board they believe parts the veil of the M25. “It’s the real, authentic, honest, noble, virtuous working class. It’s those people that hate the left and Corbyn, they made us do it.”

It is not that you can’t find people on the streets of Bolton or Stockton who fit the useful archetype beloved by the middle class journalist. It’s more that, once encountered, the journalist lavishes these people with a love and affection which is deeply weird. They are viewed not as one point of data in a complex world, but a vindication of a deeper faith, a fulfilment of ancient prophecy, the statue weeping blood to which they make joyful pilgrimage. The actually-existing ‘provincial’ bigots are reassuring, comforting even: everything is as it should be. They are more real than their gay neighbours, more authentic than their communist neighbours, more truly connected to the soil than their Muslim neighbours. And, should the middle class journalist ever meet a gay, Muslim, communist working class person, they will not have a change of heart, or consider the possibility that their incredibly specific definition of ‘working class’ might be too restrictive. Instead they will say, “how curious, how unusual.” They will not re-evaluate their model of class composition: indeed, they will instinctively recategorise as middle class anybody who contradicts their notion of the ideal prole. The north of England is thus, somehow, peopled with inauthentic, middle class shelf-stackers who exist mainly as anthropological subjects for prole-whispering experts from London to study. Their political commitments—or even simply their lack of overt bigotry—overrules the more prosaic fact of their material conditions, because to allow them to be fully realised, three dimensional human beings with complex lives would throw the whole analysis into jeopardy.

Through this process, such people are, as Joe Kennedy has noted, almost incidentally marked out as less real, inauthentic, deviant, in a harmful feedback loop that the journalist neither knows nor cares about, despite their instrumental role in it. Though it would horrify someone like Peston to be accused of supporting the far right or fascism, the belief that a particular class of white person is more British, more deserving, more rooted than their neighbours who do not fit this narrow archetype is a fundamental cornerstone of far right belief. The constant reinforcement of this “truth” simultaneously empowers the right wing, bullying bigots in working class communities and disempowers their victims.

Not every lazy and wrong assumption will allow you to keep your job as a highly paid journalist in the London media. However, there is a certain package of such assumptions which runs through the national discourse like ‘Blackpool’ through a stick of rock . It’s by no means necessary to hold these beliefs in order to get a highly-paid position as a political editor, but it certainly seems to help.

“Working class people are unsophisticated bigots” is not a conclusion that Peston or any of the other commentators have arrived at through study. It is an axiomatic belief, a foundational principle. It can never be disproved because it forms part of a constellation of carefully-balanced creeds that must always be held to be self-evident. Others include believing that the Tory party is the natural party of government; that left wing thought is childish naïveté; that the British state is, deep down, fundamentally good (and states that exist outside of its sphere of colonial influence are, deep down, fundamentally suspicious); and that if everyone just stopped bloody disagreeing with each other and ‘got on with things’, that the world would be a lot nicer and simpler. It is from these articles of liberal faith that pronouncements like Peston’s spring, and it is in service of them that their arguments are deployed like theologians fleshing out the doctrine of original sin.

Challenging these ideas isn’t simply an attack on the ideas themselves, but on the self-image of those who occupy the Isle of Westminster and its incestuous archipelago of media establishments. And once we understand this, we have an analytic framework through which we can begin to understand the many odd and idiosyncratic tics common to this group. Their rage and fury at the impudence of left wingers who dare to be taken seriously, their wistful longing for a return to a mythological age of sensible Conservatives, their constant quest to find the ultimate centrist messiah who will restore balance to a world they find themselves increasingly unable to understand.

At its root, this comes from the self-perceived role of “centrism,” “liberalism,” “moderation,” or any of the other terms that surround the small-but-vocal group that dominates the media discourse. Left wing thought is held to be woolly—occasionally well-meaning but basically unserious—while right wing thought, conversely, is both sensible and serious, but lacks the emotional understanding of the left. The moderate liberal’s self-perceived role—as it has been envisaged since the heyday of Blairism—is to take the hard-boiled, ‘rigorously-tested’ economics of the right and filter out some of its inhumane ‘excesses’. The fact that Brown’s great experiment in moderation ended in a financial crash, or that a coalition of the right and centre enacted an economic policy which was both wilfully inhumane and economically garbage, are facts which do not fit the narrative, and are thus ignored. What use, after all, is a moderate trying to ‘soften up’ right wing economic policy, if that policy is to willingly destroy the economy in order to teach the poor a valuable lesson about thrift and responsibility?

It is a salutary example of the sunk cost fallacy. The discourse has been tied to this framework for decades, and many people have highly paid positions—and, more importantly, personal credibility—because of it. If these things are not true, the subtext is that many of our self-appointed best and brightest have utterly wasted the last 20 years of their lives on a fool’s errand. This is unconscionable, and therefore reality must be disciplined and subordinated to the greater truth—the one that supports the self-image of people like Robert Peston.

Challenging these viewpoints is not simply an exercise in marshalling the facts, because the very conception of what is factual is precisely what’s under discussion. Working class people simply have to be uncomplicated ciphers whose interests map entirely onto those espoused by man-of-the-people cosplayers like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage. Disputing that “fact,” or any of the other axiomatic beliefs of centrism, pulls on a loose thread which threatens to unravel the whole sweater, and leave the liberal establishment naked and exposed. But a system that ignores swathes of the country—their lives, their beliefs, their needs—deserves to be unravelled. We should not have to deny our existence just so that privileged people never have to engage critically with their own beliefs. It is, in a very real sense, us or them.

Originally posted at New Socialist.

  1. NS Editor’s note: Working class expressions of common cause did not, at this point, and for whatever reason, appear to extend to the Indigenous peoples being dispossessed and slaughtered by white settler governments, including that of Lincoln. At Wounded Knee, Lincoln presided over the largest mass execution in US history (to date), in which 38 Lakota Sioux were killed. The executions followed on the heels of a genocidal massacre in which at least 150 Lakota Sioux were slaughtered, indiscriminately, by settler troops who openly claimed their wish to “utterly exterminate” the Sioux people. This excerpt from David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is an excellent starting-point for those who want to learn more. ↩

Greece’s Struggle Over Academic Asylum

By: August 17, 2019
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The restriction of academic asylum in Greece under the new right-wing government has become – again – the epicenter of an intense debate. The debate over academic asylum has both a pretense and a rationale. The pretense is about “safety and order.” The reason is the ending of safe spaces for progressive ideas in Greek Universities, something that every reactionary government wishes to end to restrict democracy.

UNIVERSITY ASYLUM IN GREECE: THE UNIVERSITY AS A PILLAR OF RESISTANCE TO THE RIGHT

Historically we have the establishment of university asylum with the establishment of the first university, 1088 in Bologna, Italy. The first wording for asylum is contained in the Authentica habita or Privilegium Scholasticum text which became law in 1155 and is the founding text for the University of the Middle Ages.

The issue of University asylum in Greece is not new. It first arose in 1859 in what came to be known as the “Skiadika”, when the army’s entry into the university was denounced in the Greek Parliament as abuse to abusing the “asylum of science” – a first reference to the disputed (then unwritten) law. In the next century, university asylum was formally recognized even under conditions that were not politically liberal. In Greece it was continuation of ancient Greek tradition: if the university is a temple of knowledge, then it can be an asylum. There were temples in Ancient Greece where everyone could get protection.

The current law is a legacy of the crackdown by the then military junta on students on Nov. 17, 1973, when a tank burst through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic, killing dozens, and leaving a deeply rooted painful national memory among Greeks toward the dictatorship – and USA’s intervention to install it. On each anniversary students march solemnly through Athens to the American Embassy with the blood-stained flag marking the day as a national memory day of the resistance to the junta. The prospect of the law being scrapped has brought some students out onto the streets.

After the restoration of democracy in July 1974, the police were forbidden to enter the university campuses and Greek universities have been largely out of bounds to police. Only the university rector had the right to call the police, and that only in cases where serious criminal activities were taking place. The thinking behind the academic asylum was the free flow of ideas and knowledge.

University asylum was legislated in 1982, a result of  the student movement’s conquests and claims, although it was always challenged by the hard core nationalists, who stubbornly resisted the democratization of public life. The legislation did not, of course, prevent a few asylum violations by police bodies, some not all violent. Between 1983 and 2006  research indicated there were at least 13 police or military incursions into campus sites, 9 without the permission of the relevant university institutions (Eleftherotypia, 26.11.2006). The stormy reactions forced the governments of the time to fold, but not to abandon efforts to reduce “left-wing” inter-university “lawlessness.”

In 2007, changes were made to the law’s wording, with the concept of “asylum” and free movement of ideas replaced by “the protection of the right to knowledge, learning, work of the members of the academic community against any attempt to disrupt it.” This change enabled university authorities to dismiss asylum if  student protest in universities, occupations or mobilization,  “infringed on the right to work as part of a staff in the institution.” Furthermore, the asylum was limited to areas where research and training are being carried out.

During the riots of 2008, which shook Athens after the killing of Grigoropoulos by a policeman at the National Polytechnic University of Athens (NTUA), NTUA  was a base of young people waging an undeclared war on the state. Despite the intensity of the clashes, the government did not allow the police to invade the NTUA in fear of escalations. “The university authorities did not call the police because they feared that the violence could escalate,” the Rector Christos Kittas then confidentially informed the US Embassy, stating that when the riots began he was threatened, “so he took this step, fearing the anarchists would unite with the demonstrators.”  In one of the huge haul of diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks in 2010, Daniel V. Speckhard, the former U.S. ambassador in Athens, said the law was “nothing more than a legal cover for hoodlums to wreak destruction with impunity” and “threatens the academic and student communities”. (WikiLeaks, Report No. 997, 9/6/2009). This shows the interest of the American Embassy to end the asylum right.

In 2011, Law 4009 of Anna Diamantopoulou to end university asylum passed with 255 parliamentary votes out of 300.  One of the most interesting comments during the discussion of the law was made by an ultra-right wing member of the parliament that made a Gramscian-Althauserian analysis of why asylum should end.  M. Voridis, an ex-fascist and anti-Semite, then member of LAOS, an ultra-right wing party, now Minister of Agriculture in the new right wing government, has reasoned the university, from its post-dictatorship era, has been a space for the dissemination and crystallization of “left” ideology, resulting in it being a dominant pillar and transmitter of anti-systemic messages to the people and the working class. As a constant unit of production and reproduction of a left-wing ‘life-world’ (in Gramscian terms), the university is, for M. Voridis, the most powerful constituent of the Left for a potential, cultural hegemony that could be conquered by building portions of the Greek people (and not just the working class) on a single, anti-system front.  Vordis has made the rationale for destroying asylum explicit: “What is abolished by the bill is [what] was built by the generation of the Polytechnic, this is their defeat today, this is what we are voting for.”

University asylum was reinstated by SYRIZA and the Ministry of University under Kostas Gavroglou, reinstalling the authority of the Rector’s Board, and declaring  the institution protects – in addition to academic functions – “the safeguarding of democratic values.” The law explicitly allows police to intervene, “in the case of crimes and crimes against life.” The  2017 law required unanimity of the Rector’s Council to decide, while the new law required a majority.

PRIVATIZATION AND THE CRACKDOWN ON ASYLUM

The recent emergence of asylum at the heart of Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ election campaign seems at least odd: in the four years that followed, we had neither a student-led movement nor impressive clashes between police and protesters. The bitter truth behind this attempt is that in Greece, the Constitution does not allow private Universities and this neoliberal government has pledged to change that. They know that this will lead to protests and reactions of the student movement and they are preparing the ground for a crackdown of dissident voices. What Syriza attempted, by using a left rhetoric to calm down dissident voices, for the implementation of neoliberal measures, this right wing government will continue by force. Academic asylum does not fit well with precepts of competition, the free market and profit-making.

“With a single phone call by a citizen or a student, police can enter universities campus,” Education Minister Niki Kerameos said about the hot potato of the so-called “university asylum” the new conservative government wants to abolish. This will create more chaos than ever before. One thing is sure: this winter in Greek universities will be very “hot”.

Originally posted at TeacherSolidarity.com.

Reflections on El Paso

By: August 15, 2019
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The intense revulsion over the horrific slaughter in El Paso has shifted politics. But beware of ruling class solutions to crises caused by the ruling class.

The revulsion at white supremacy has even forced a temporary change in Trump’s rhetoric. On August 5, he denounced both racism and “white supremacy,” a marked contrast to his response to Chalottesville in August 2017 when he praised the “fine people” on both sides.

The likely response of fascists is to see it as a wink and a nod, something he was politically required to do and doesn’t mean. A TV clip from a rally in the Florida panhandle shows Trump nodding and laughing as an audience member calls for shooting people who cross the border. But the liberal response, to create a new crime of “domestic terrorism,” will likely ramp up repression of the Left and people of color. Senator Ted Cruz has already called for naming Antifa a terrorist “organization.” And Trump’s willingness to take guns away from particular people would no doubt take weapons from his political opponents and scapegoats – blacks, other people of color, and victimized groups.

Though the movement against gun violence especially by young people is a positive sign, each measure of gun control needs to be assessed on its merits. Removing the ban on health and safety research on gun violence would be a step forward. So would allowing law suits against gun manufacturers and banning the production of assault rifles. Background checks are quite popular but in today’s climate would be applied in a racist way and against poor people.

The U.S. government, as said by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is the “greatest purveyor of violence” in the world. With an average of over 1,000 civilians killed by police in the U.S. every year, guns in the hands of police are a major source of the gun death problem. Gun control advocates should take up disarmament of the police and military as a major priority. Not only would this cut the number of gun deaths but it would also reduce the fetishization of guns in society. (For more discussion of a socialist view on gun control see Danny Katch’s excellent piece in Socialist Worker.)

Trump’s identification of mental illness as a source of mass killing is much debated, and it is important to oppose attempts to further victimize the mentally ill, as Trump intends – for instance by increasing the use of involuntary commitment. Obviously, quality mental health services aimed at creating loving, empathetic, socially engaged, egalitarian, humane people would be a step forward. Many practitioners try to do this. But funding for such mental health services are limited.

What is considered mentally ill is based on the prevailing ideology. Obviously no fully mentally well person walks into a public place and slaughters multiple strangers. But the mental state of individuals is reflective of the societies they live in. The issue of mental illness is not generally raised about other horrific acts. Were the government officials who decided to drop the first A-bomb on Hiroshima mentally ill? How about the drone pilots who sit in trailers in Las Vegas and slaughter civilians from afar?

Is the idea of using nuclear weapons in war mass insanity? Could it be cured by enough psychiatrist couches and proper meds?

Politicians who express horror at the events of El Paso and Dayton vote without apology to spend trillions of dollars on a military budget and foreign policies that kill tens of thousands of civilians. They shed tears over the children of El Paso killed by a violent racist, but shed few tears over Palestinian children killed by Israel, the largest recipient of U.S. aid. They say it is wrong to kill 20+ innocent victims on U.S. soil, but they don’t notice it when the same number of innocent Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis are slaughtered via U.S. bombs, dollars and political support.

The individual mental status of mass murders has to been seen in light of the values and operation of our sick social system, capitalism, that prioritizes profit over human needs. It institutionalizes and justifies racism, misogyny, war, environmental destruction. The problem is not aberrant mental illness but sick capitalist normalcy.

The level of alienation that capitalism produces is so great that the wonder is that there are not more episodes of mass slaughter. Human compassion, solidarity, and sociability are constantly at war with the nasty, individualistic, patriarchal training of capitalism. We can only marvel at the examples of heroic self-sacrifice reported in every situation like El Paso. There is a constant war for the soul of humanity and capitalism is doing all it can to win the war against human decency.

Finally, we need to look at how politicians are using this tragedy. Obviously, politicians who criticize Trump are correct to do so. However, the Democratic Party politicians are responsible for the conditions that cause El Paso as well. The Democrats continue to preside over a system that spends trillions on warfare but cannot fix crumbling roads and bridges, provide affordable education, ensure access to decent health care that won’t end in medical bankruptcy, or provide enough jobs that pay a living wage.

Democratic politicians are quite willing to oppose Trump’s open racism. However, they are not willing to do anything about the racist conditions that are the basis of racist attitudes.

For example, they oppose Trump’s new border wall, but they have voted for border fences and walls in the past. More fundamentally, they are mostly for “comprehensive immigration reform.” This is founded on a racist premise: that people should be granted and denied rights based on where they were born.  It legitimates deportation and the breakup of families – whether in the “kind” Democratic way or the nasty Republican way. Any form of border control legitimates discrimination against people based on national origin. In U.S. conditions, this discrimination will always be exercised in a racist way. Hispanics and Blacks are much more likely to be arrested and deported than white Europeans. Obama deported more people than any previous president.

Confronting the conditions that cause racism would require a direct confrontation with capitalism. Democrats are unwilling to do this since their party is funded and run by big business.

Those who really oppose future slaughters like the one in El Paso cannot rely on politicians to alleviate the problem. We need to directly confront white supremacist movements but also the conditions that encourage racism and misogyny. We need to provide a positive alternative to the misery that people face. We need to focus the anger people feel on the capitalist system and those who benefit from it – rather than on other oppressed members of the working class.

200 years after Peterloo, do we face a new wave of repression?

By: August 11, 2019
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The left and labour movement has always been the subject of state repression. The failure of the Peterloo massacre to silence working class dissent led to the foundation of the modern police force, intended to deliver non-lethal violence against unrest (Farrell, 1992). While perhaps their murder rate is lower than the yeomanry or the parachute regiment, the police have not kept their violence below lethal levels, as witnessed by hundreds of black people from Joy Gardner to Jean Charles de Menezes and protesters from Blair Peach to Ian Tomlinson. Mass police violence was essential to Thatcher’s victories over miners, print workers and more. The police have been involved in illegal blacklisting of trade unionists and the left, and undercover cops have spied on victims of police violence and anyone who challenged the establishment. It is a result of the weakness of working class resistance in recent years that so many people think the police are there to deal with crime against ordinary people – a task which is a low priority and for which they are almost useless. Labour’s pandering to this foolishness with demands for extra police have played into the hands of Boris Johnson, who has now pledged to increase numbers by 20,000. That will be more police to prevent working class people securing what we need. Johnson is so keen on repression that he wasted over £300,000 on unusable water cannon when London Mayor. He will be delighted to have more cops at his disposal as the struggle unfolds over whether the social collapse from climate breakdown means changes to tackle it, or repression by the rich to protect themselves from its consequences and from the majority.

In July, right wing think-tank the Policy Exchange published a report titled Extremism Rebellion, urging new legislation to counter mass civil disobedience and a more robust police and court crack down on Extinction Rebellion (XR), not satisfied with 1200 arrests. August saw the publication of a report commissioned by the UK Commission for Countering Extremism which sought to portray the far left as extremist and a potential terrorist threat, and calling for more monitoring. When the government has been forced into a review of its racist and counterproductive Prevent strategy, this looks suspiciously like the right trying to ensure it is widened rather than dropped.

Anti-terror legislation has been used to persecute Muslims and there has been no shortage of academics prepared to concoct half-baked theories to justify government policies. The failure of the labour movement to provide enough solidarity with Muslims to resist these policies is now coming home to roost as the state security ideologues turn their attention to the left. Having abused the language of “safeguarding” to justify Islamophobia, they now want to use counter terrorism and anti-extremism against left opinions held by millions of people. We should not underestimate how exposed we are. The Terrorism Act 2010 introduced a definition of terrorism so wide that Gandhi, let alone Mandela, would today be branded a terrorist, and anyone in Britain who supported them would be criminalised.

So far, the application of the repressive legislation has affected few white British people. But it has now been normalised to the point where right wingers want to go further. So what are the arguments being made for a new wave of repression?

Walton and Wilson, who wrote the attack on XR, both come from an anti-terrorism background. They label XR an “extremist organisation” because “those who accept planned mass law-breaking in a liberal democracy to further a political cause, are effectively condoning the breakdown of the rule of law”. So the word “extremist”, which has been loaded with violent connotations from anti-terrorism, is now applied to mass, peaceful, direct action. They call for prosecutions to deter others from illegal protests, and demand that

“The Commission for Countering Extremism should ensure that far left, anarchist and environmentalist extremism are sufficiently recognised and challenged within a wider national strategy on extremism”.

Having labelled XR’s objectives as extreme, they then argue that it is “not inconceivable that some on the fringes of the movement might at some point break with organisational discipline and engage in violence”. The report works itself into a frenzy about the connections between environmentalism and anti-capitalism. They worry that XR leaders are unlikely to “settle for any accommodation that proposed to address environmental damage while keeping the present economic and political system in place” (as if such a solution is plausible). Their view of “extremism” isn’t about protecting the population from violence, but about protecting the system from opposition. When it comes to justifying Islamophobia we are used to hearing people disapprove of what is said, but expressing the willingness to defend to the death the right to say it. It appears this applies to racist ideas, but not to environmentalism or socialism. The authors work themselves up into a lather about the Labour leadership’s positive response to XR. Ironically, the hostile report’s detailed analysis of XR funding should lay to rest many of the scare stories which circulate online. Walton and Wilson call for firmer policing, harsher prosecutions and sentencing, and for the use of incitement and conspiracy charges (infamously used to frame the Shrewsbury 24 and murder Des Warren).

The report into the far left is even more extraordinary. It uses YouGov polling on the general population, just 3% of which self-defined as “very left-wing”. Most of these were Guardian or Observer readers, NRS social grade ABC1 and voted Remain, and only 16% were union members. Allington, McAndrew and Hirsh, by a confused reading of Socialist Worker, Weekly Worker and Counterfire, come up with fifteen statements which they believe represent the views of the “sectarian” (by which they mean sect-like) far left, which they also characterise as revolutionary workerist. They pick five of these to measure people’s alignment with the ideas of far-left groups:

  • Capitalism is essentially bad and must be destroyed
  • Industry should produce for need and not for profit
  • This country needs revolutionary change
  • The wealthy make life worse for the rest of us
  • I would like to see workers rise up against their bosses

They are horrified to discover that only 41% of the whole population disagreed with all these, but instead of concluding that these are widely held views, they adopt the conspiracy theory that the population is “open to the ideology which the sectarian far left disseminates”, while treating as conspiracy theories the concept of “the 1%” and the idea that the media reflects the interests of the rich. The widespread support for these views doesn’t stop the authors arguing that this ideology “may from a certain point of view be considered extremist in and of itself”. The “certain point of view” would appear to be that of 21st century McCarthyites. Similarly, they believe attempts by the far left to gain influence by participation in campaigns and unions “may cause certain forms of social harm in their own right: for example, by interfering in the normal functioning of institutions created for another purpose”. Allington, McAndrew and Hirsh take it upon themselves to decide what the purpose of institutions of the labour movement and left is, rather than purposes being contested by those who take part. For the authors, democracy is a bit like a Vietnamese village was to the US military – to protect it they have to destroy it.

The report also bases its understanding of the far left on an odd understanding of imperialism (which it smears with antisemitism along the way). People were asked to choose the three of the US, UK, Israel, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran which they see as the greatest threats to world peace. The authors assume that people’s answers to this question will be based on ideological views rather than anything as irrelevant as say, involvement in wars or breaking treaties. Apparently, most of the far left only sees the first three as great capitalist powers. This is an odd reading of Socialist Worker and Counterfire, upon which the majority of their view of the far left was allegedly based. Just as with Muslims, the test is whether you support the UK and its allies, and failing to do so is a sign of extremism.

Having concocted these half-cocked measures of alignment with the sectarian far-left, Allington, McAndrew and Hirsh proceed to look for correlations with a modified version of the SyFoR “sympathy for radicalism” scale (Bhui, Warfa and Jones, 2014). People were asked to rate six statements about violence on a seven-point scale, showing the extent to which they sympathise or condemn them when carried out in this country. Four were about terrorism or using bombs, but two were “violence as part of political protests” and “street violence against anti-democratic groups”. The questions gave no other context, so will have been interpreted in radically different ways by different people. Some may have considered the questions in the context of planned violence in otherwise peaceful situations. Others may have been thinking about situations when under attack from the police or fascist gangs. Others again could be imagining a future where the rich are hoarding scarce food after climate breakdown causes crop failures. It is far more likely that working-class people, migrants from conflict zones, ethnic minorities and others with experience of violence from the state or the far right would express sympathy in response to these questions – this is no indication whatsoever that they are planning terrorist attacks. Yet this is precisely how the authors interpret the answers. To make matters worse, the threshold they use for their analysis is sympathy for one or more of the statements, so those with slight sympathy for defensive violence against fascist gangs are lumped in with those committing terrorist acts. They assume, without evidence, that left wingers who exceed this modified SyFoR threshold are more likely to behave violently.

It is through this series of ideologically motivated leaps of logic and analysis that Allington, McAndrew and Hirsh manage to acknowledge that the far left in Britain has “no history of using terrorist tactics”, find no evidence that is likely to change, and yet conclude that “it would be prudent to monitor all developments carefully” because the findings “give no reason to assume that left-wing ideas would be incapable of” encouraging terrorist violence. Predictably, they give no consideration to the strong political objections that most of the British far left have to terrorism.

The reports are a threadbare attempt to justify surveillance and repression against the left by linking it to terrorism. Naturally, they take for granted highly subjective definitions of terrorism and violence. Support for the Iraq war crime, imposing benefit sanctions on terminally ill people, or deporting people to countries they left decades ago don’t count as extremism. British military adventures overseas don’t count as violence. A foreign policy based on threatening nuclear annihilation doesn’t count as terrorism. At most, the authors deserve to graduate from the University of No Shit Sherlock, having shown that people who are satisfied with the status quo are less likely to sympathise with violence not carried out by the establishment.

The left, however, shouldn’t be complacent because these reports are so ludicrous. They are intended to provide an intellectual gloss to cover for an extension of the application of anti-terror surveillance and repression against the left. We know there are storms coming as a result of climate chaos, an expected recession, years of austerity, and Brexit – and so do the Tories. Johnson has announced more prison places and police powers. The Tories are preparing – so must we. That must include robust opposition to new state powers and the wider application of old ones. We can’t rely on the state to stop the rise of the far right. And we can’t afford to neglect solidarity with the Muslims and migrants upon whom repression is tested out and normalised.

For information about Peterloo and events marking the bicentenary, see peterloo1819.co.uk. The Peterloo March For Democracy will converge on a rally in the city centre from ten assembly points on Sunday 18 August.

Bhui, K., Warfa, N. and Jones, E., 2014. Is Violent Radicalisation Associated with Poverty, Migration, Poor Self-Reported Health and Common Mental Disorders? PLoS ONE, 9(3).

Farrell, A., 1992. Crime, class and corruption: the politics of the police. Bookmarks.

Originally posted at rs21.

DSA Convention 2019—Overcoming Divisions—Votes to Maintain Strong National Organization, Takes up Ambitious Organizing Agenda

By: August 5, 2019
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Some 1,056 delegates to the Democratic Socialists of America convention, representing some 55,000 DSA members, met in Atlanta over the weekend and voted to adopt a series of resolutions that will continue to build a strong national organization capable of carrying out ambitious campaigns in labor and community organizing as well as electoral politics. The central division in the convention, largely driven by rival caucuses and fought out over a number of resolutions, was between those who wanted a stronger central organization capable of organizing strategic national campaigns and those who wanted a more decentralized organization that would encourage local organizing initiatives.

Beyond those debates, the delegates adopted significant political positions, such as a motion stating that in the event that if Bernie Sanders loses the Democratic Party nomination, DSA will not support any other Democrat in the 2020 national election. And they passed a measure requiring nationally endorsed candidates to run as open socialists. The assembly also adopted a radical position in support of open borders, came out in support of an ecosocialist priority and the Green New Deal, and carried a resolution opposing U.S. imperialism. And by a very narrow majority the convention voted to support anti-fascist work. The convention reasserted the centrality of union work, adopting several resolutions on labor organizing. On-going efforts, such as work on the Bernie Sanders primary campaign and the fight for Medicare for All, were implicitly endorsed by the convention.

The convention elected DSA’s new leadership, a 16-member National Political Committee (NPC) made up of individuals from various caucuses or independents who more or less proportionally reflected the convention divide, with about ten members committed to the more centralized organization and half a dozen leaning toward the decentralization position. The previous NPC, riven by factionalism, failed to work together harmoniously or very efficiently, and the challenge for this leadership will be to find a way to implement the convention decisions and to face new challenges collectively and effectively. Overall, despite debate that was sometimes heated, all of the delegates left the convention committed to building a larger, stronger, and more active DSA.

The Nature of the Convention

The previous convention held in 2017 had only 700 delegates expressing the will of 25,000 members. This 2019 convention was made up of 1,056 delegates from every state, many cities, and suburban and rural areas throughout the country. Unfortunately in numerous DSA chapters, many members did not vote in the delegate elections, reflecting a larger problem that, as members stated in convention remarks, in many locales only perhaps ten or twenty percent of the members are active.

The convention delegates were mostly young (a great many between 25 and 35), much more white than people of color, but with an important role played by women and LGBTQ comrades throughout. For many delegates, some of whom had only been members for a year or two, this was their first national convention. A visiting Latin American comrade observed, “In truth, this seems more like a youth congress than a national political organization.” Yet it is also true that this was a more mature convention than the last, reflecting that in the last two years DSA has done an enormous amount of work in political campaigns, labor union strikes, the fight for immigrant justice, housing issues, and other areas.

The general organization of the convention unfortunately made it difficult to hold extended political discussion and to debate such important issues as the American political scene, DSA’s relationship to the Democratic Party, U.S. foreign policy, or the question of oppressed groups in the United States. The convention was not organized around major political issues but rather around a series of short summary reports, resolutions, and constitutional amendments. At the same time, certainly scores and perhaps hundreds of members rose to speak on these items in what was a highly participatory convention.

Originally more than 125 such items were presented which were reduced through a series of pre-convention delegate votes (with a low level of participation) to a short consent agenda and about 30 remaining items to be taken up over the convention’s more or less 16 hours in working sessions. The political convention novices spent a great deal of time in procedural motions and “questions of personal privilege” that frequently frustrated the body. And on a few occasions resolutions on complex questions were bundled together and dealt with in haste. Nevertheless, by and large the convention rules worked, the delegates behaved respectfully toward each other, and the convention accomplished its business. Several international observers commented on being impressed with the democratic character of the convention and by the attention given to making all members feel comfortable and able to participate.

Several caucuses organized around political platforms—Build, Bread and Roses, Socialist Majority, Collective Power Network, the Libertarian Socialist Caucus, Reform and Revolution and others—drove much of the debate and whipped vote on crucial issues. Build and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus tended to lead the decentralizers, while Socialist Majority and Bread and Roses led the centralizing forces. The upstart Collective Power Network that appeared shortly before the convention tended to muddy the waters with some centralizing and some decentralizing proposals. Many members not in caucuses, however, wavered in their views, voting one way on one motion and another on the next. No caucus or alliance of caucuses dominated the convention.

The Great Divide and the Political Significance of the Convention

The great divide in the convention between the centralizing and the decentralizing forces could be characterized as a difference between those who want a democratic socialist party-type organization based on indirect representation by conventions and national committees and those who want something more like a of regional and local activists groups based on participatory democracy. In a series of votes on questions of political education, organizer training, dues and the national budget, as well as other organizational issues the centralizers tended to win about 55 percent of the vote, while the decentralizers got about 45 percent. Yet it would be a mistake to draw the lines too deeply to suggest that it was socialists versus anarchists, because that would certainly be wrong. People on both sides of the divide appreciate having a national group and those on both sides want a vigorous democratic would lay claim to participatory democracy as part of that agenda.

The convention was devoid of any references to Marxist theory and there were few references to socialist history, and as already mentioned, the organizing structure of the convention made deep political discussion and debate on the convention floor virtually impossible. While the International Committee of DSA arranged for international guests from left parties and social movements in a variety of countries—among them Brazil, Japan, and Venezuela—who spoke in a few special sessions, foreign policy remains one of DSA’s weakest areas. A hasty bundling of several motions on international questions including Palestine, Cuba, and anti-colonialism—while motivated by the delegates strong desire to express their anti-imperialism—led to a short and inadequate discussion and the adoption of a problematic document. All of this reflects the insufficiency and unevenness of political education over the last few years, which a resolution on political education passed by the convention, should help to remedy.

What the Convention Says about DSA’s Politics

While the convention issued no general analytical document or manifesto, our organization’s politics can be inferred from the conventions resolutions and the discussion around them.

First, DSA remains a democratic socialist organization committed to bringing to power a socialist government, socializing the means of production, creating an egalitarian and democratic society. To do so, DSA continues to see its role as building a socialist presence through campaigns in the Democratic Party combined with the construction of a stronger labor movement and more powerful social movements (as expressed in the class-struggle election resolution that passed). Different than the Socialist Party of America in its heyday at the turn of the last century or the Communist Party in the 1920s, or elements of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, DSA does not in general talk in terms of either a workers’ party, a workers’ government, or the need for socialist revolution, nor do any of its caucuses—though many individual members would describe themselves as revolutionary socialists. The adoption of the Bernie or bust resolution represents an important statement, as does the requirement (in Resolution 31) reinforcing previously adopted positions that all nationally endorsed candidates run as open socialists.

Second, DSA placed an enormous amount of emphasis at the convention on the discussion of labor. While far from it now, DSA clearly wants to be a working class organization. The invitation to Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, to speak at the convention emphasized that commitment. The Bread and Roses caucus has been (under various names) the principal advocate of the rank-and-file strategy, largely influenced by the International Socialists (IS) and Solidarity from the 1970s to the 2010s. B&R caucus adopting that strategic outlook and looking to the examples of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) in Chicago, as well as Labor Notes, worked to get DSA members into union jobs, to work in rank-and-file movements, and to transform the labor movement. The newly created Collective Power Network, a rival caucus that also emphasizes labor offered a broader, decentralizing proposal, putting less emphasis on the rank-and-file approach. Members of the San Francisco DSA put forward a resolution that passed the convention calling for DSA to work directly with labor unions to organize, as the SF DSA chapter did with the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers (ILWU) at Anchor beer. In the end, a series of labor proposals, somewhat contradictory in their emphases were adopted, but nevertheless continuing the emphasis on the need for militant grassroots unionism. What has often been missing in all versions of the union debate is a clear analysis of the labor bureaucracy as a social caste within the unions—balancing between the corporations and the workers—with its own ideology and the power and perquisites of office.

Third, DSA once again adopted resolutions expressing its desire and its plans to work with communities of color, such as the resolutions adopted in the omnibus consent agenda on immigrant and refugee rights, support for open borders, and orienting to Latinx communities, as well as other resolutions on community organizing and housing. Taken together with early decisions, such as the creation of the Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus, all of this is very good. Still, turning this corner will be very difficult, especially establishing relationships with Black working class people through their unions and communities and winning them to socialism. The long history of American racism, including in the Democratic Party, in the labor unions, and sometimes in the left, presents formidable obstacles, as does the fact that up largely out of white, college-educated people trained for work in high skilled jobs and professions. What DSA must also do is find organized, political Black and Latino organizations and find a way to work with their leaderships and members, that is the historic path to an integrated left party, though this is not at this time part of the strategy.

Finally, foreign policy, that is, international questions and the issue of imperialism, remains one of DSA’s weakest areas. Once again, there are no doubt historic reasons for this. The old DSA of the 1980s worked closely with the Democratic Party and aligned itself internationally with the Socialist International, inevitably placing it on the Western side of the Cold War divide. The new DSA arose in the effervescence of the Bernie campaign of 2016 with its emphasis on domestic issues and Bernie’s own weaknesses on foreign policy questions. While the terms “internationalism “and “anti-imperialism” appear in DSA resolutions and discussions, the group an its members have not actually done much thinking about these issues. The DSA International Committee has begun to develop positions on these questions, and needs to continue to develop an internationalist and democratic foreign policy.

Overall, the Convention 2019 demonstrates that while DSA has firmly established itself as the most important organization of the American left in decades, it is also true that it has not yet consolidated itself, certainly not in the working class or communities of color. Nor has DSA developed a full-fledged Marxist analysis and strategy to deal with American politics, much less international question. And that is not surprising, given that it is such a new, youthful group and still a relatively small socialist organization (55,000 in a nation of 327 million). Still, for leftists in America, DSA remains the place to be and to fight for revolutionary socialist ideas.

 

 

 

Climate Change is Growing the Fossil Fuel Industry

By: July 31, 2019
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“The problem with Americans is they think something is better than nothing.”

– Alfred Stieglitz

“Carbon capture is total bullshit.”  – Michael Bloomberg

 

Capitalizing on D-Day to peddle U.S. oil (which he still thinks is his job), Rick Perry told the European Union:

Seventy-five years after liberating Europe from Nazi Germany occupation, the United States is again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent.  And rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas.[1]

Of course, it’s nonsense.  U.S. CO2 emissions are 8X the EU’s highest producer, Germany, and 15X-150X the rest.  Following our lead would increase pollution.  And pollution takes freedom away.

But put that aside.  Consider his analogy — if it’s analogy.  Almost 75 years after Nazi Germany fell, and almost 30 after the Cold War there remain over 60,000 US troops in Europe, 170,000 abroad, and U.S. bases in over 150 countries.  Not to mention we still have 30,000+ nuclear missiles aimed round the world.

I suspect remaining occupied took the shine off liberation.  But if one needs convincing, since WWII we’ve toppled more than a dozen governments and tried in at least 50 other cases. That’s not counting how many times we’ve simply meddled (numbers might not go that high.)[2]

Still, America’s held fast to the title of “liberator.” At least enough to fool (if not everyone) a voting majority of Americans, and to keep a mostly straight face when talking to the rest of the world.  Yet we can’t earnestly say we’ve helped, considering the outcomes.  Nor even meant to, considering the means; ecocide in Vietnam, more bombs on Baghdad than on the Axis Powers, etc.

It’s boggling we all haven’t died of freedom, already.  75 more years would kill us for sure.  Burning fossil fuels at our current rate would heat the Earth at least four degrees by 2100.  75% of us – about 8.4 billion people – would face 20 or more days of deadly heat per year.[3]  In comparison, on average 12 million – 0.6% – died per year in WWII.

Looking back, gas may have “liberated’”America.  At least it made U.S. industries exceedingly rich.  Investors pumped post-war capital back into America, mainly through sprawl.  Cars meant freedom from the crisis of our cities that their rigged market was busy inventing.  But since it entailed guzzling a quarter of the world’s oil, we obviously didn’t -then- plan to free anyone else.  On the contrary, some we produced, but the rest we got cheap by knocking over other oil-producing countries, starting with Iran in 1954.  One recalls ‘the humanity’ with which we freed Iraq in 2002.

Of course, no country stays “great” forever.  America’s social progress has declined 40% since the post-war heydays.  If Perry’s goal is to export “freedom,” bear in mind we now rank 10th, according to the UN.  Not the worst, but hardly a blueprint.  And to unpack that, we rank 19th in mobility, 19th in happiness, 48th in press freedom, and 64th in life-expectancy.  We have the 4th-highest income disparity, and the highest incarceration.

Free the world?  We might finally be ready.  Perry was in Europe to sign agreements that would double the amount of gas we sell them.  But consider – before 2008 U.S. production was in decline.  It’s nearly tripled since, thanks to a financial coup that poured capital -that otherwise wouldn’t have gathered – into fracking.  JP Morgan, Citigroup, Wells Fargo (and others) each lent hundreds of millions of (our) dollars to the nascent industry, before it was proved either safe or profitable.  So, besides indebting us, evicting us, killing our democracy, and other kicks to the gut, bailouts spurred global warming.[4]

Now that we’ve figured how to gut our own country our trips abroad are more to open markets than taps (though it still spills blood).  Mind, fracking was sold to us as a path to energy independence, which implied cheaper costs, but also fewer fiascoes like the Iraq War.  Now we are the world’s #1 oil producer, and the bulk of it gets exported.  (And we still import.)  NAFTA has made great strides addicting oil-rich Mexico to our gas, about 2/3 of all exports. The remaining 1/3 scatters to China, Russia, and 30 other countries.

Bolton unabashedly claims we want access to Venezuela’s oil.  But, ironically, Chavez brought electricity to the poor of Caracas, and now they’re in need of fuel to power it.  Violating the spirit of our own embargo, we’ve been selling oil to Venezuela since 2015.  Not really violating.  The embargo, as intended, has opened a hostage market.  At the cost of more than a few lives.

Perry may be dim, even for a Trump swampling.  He named his ranch “Niggerhead” and couldn’t count to five on TV (whoops!).  And he took his Energy Secretary job without knowing what it was.  (Hope no one’s squeamish; it’s managing our nuclear weapons.)  But, like his boss, he’s just what the mostly liberal 1% needs.  Someone to perform the terrors that secure their petrol-empire, yet won’t get caught winking at them afterwards.

As Perry’s words belie, global warming is a bigger political hurdle than a technological or economic one.  Is there a political solution?

Well, history is rife with ruling classes that chose catastrophe over yielding a bit of their power.  2016 was plenty convincing; ours would prefer losing to the four horsemen than to even modest reformers.  For a more current example, the mainstream version of the Green New Deal hardly seeks to abolish capitalism.  On the contrary, it’s predicated on private green growth.  Yet it gets stonewalled by entirely political accusations of socialism.

Ominously, the point was and remains to avoid a political crisis, to profit second, and our survival is tertiary, at best.  But that’s not to protect the economy, if by economy you mean the common market.  Because we know for sure global warming will hurt it more.  Rather there’s the political economy, which right now is defined by the 1% and the .001% through tax structures and regulatory policies that privilege them, almost beyond measure.

Yes, almost.  We estimate U.S. fossil fuel subsidies are between 20 and $50 billion per year.  That does not include the social costs of pollution the industry avoids, which research out of Stanford University puts at $220 per ton, or $1.76 trillion, annually.[5]  Subsidies, held-fast by a client-government.  For measure, 22 of the 55 Congressmembers on the Committee assigned to address global warming hold stock in fossil fuels to the tune of at least $16 million.[6]

Together, business and government protect their hill with two lines of bullshit:  Technology and Economics.  And these turn into more world-eating boons.

For example, the alleged center-path between Trump’s nihilism and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s so-called socialism draws heavy on carbon capture.  Problem is, not a soul, including the industry lobby/ alleged authority, the Carbon Capture Coalition (CCC) believes carbon capture reduces emissions.  In their words, carbon capture “extends domestic oil production” and “achieves significant CO2 emissions reductions from oil, natural gas, coal, and ethanol and from key industrial processes essential to modern society.”[7]

Significant?  Direct air capture, despite its scale and expense (what attracts the industry) could reduce global emissions by at most 2%.  And prior to that, carbon storage would require a nation-wide grid of pipelines to move the CO2 from the capture facilities to proper geological caverns. Then it would take several hundred years of constant vigilance to ensure it doesn’t escape.[8]

Moreover, large scale implementation would slow the transition to renewables.  In fact, most captured CO2 is used for fracking. Compressed CO2 is injected into depleted reservoirs, inflating and pushing oil upward for extraction.  In other words, its introducing new oil worth an estimated 90% of its own carbon back into the air, in a continuous cycle.[9]

Moreover, government funding for carbon capture is helping the fossil fuel industry build new infrastructure.  Last year the CCC-authored 45Q Bill expanded tax credit for carbon capture.  This year the Coalition gifted Senate the Use It Act, which, if passed, allots Federal and State Resources for building pipelines to transport carbon, again, most to oilfields.

Another policy think tank, the Carbon Capture & Storage Association (CCSA), an arm of BP, says its crucial for governments to fund carbon capture.  However, BP says it will not undertake “material” projects without government funding.[10]

Spencer Dale, BP’s chief economist, just released a report warning us against relying on green options.  Renewable energy would have to grow at twice its current rate just to offset our coal use.  According to Dale, the same could be achieved by replacing a mere 10% of coal energy with natural gas.

Of course, replacing all coal plants with new gas plants will not cut emissions by nearly enough to keep temperatures under +2.5 degrees.[11]  Not to mention, doubling our rate of transition to renewables is entirely within reach, and full transition isn’t far, cost-wise, beyond what we’d recover by ending fossil fuel subsidies.  Reforming our upper tax bracket would supply the rest.

If we need further convincing, Perry just awarded $24 million in Federal Grants for carbon capture research, so clearly, it must not work.  However, Trump just lifted Obama’s order that coal plants use it, which doesn’t bolster gas use at all.  If he goes far too far, liberals might retake the Hill.  Good thing we have Democrats to oppose him.

…Right?

Joe Biden’s environmental plan “could include fossil fuel options like natural gas and carbon capture technology, which limit emissions from coal plants and other industrial facilities.”  However, Biden had to retract his first draft of said plan because it literally plagiarized the Carbon Capture Coalition!

Kirsten Gillibrand’s website brags of her and Chuck Schumer procuring $1.2 million for the Pall Corporation for Carbon Capture Research.

Cory Booker helped procure $800 million for Princeton Research on the matter.

Michael Bennet recently co-sponsored a bill, the Carbon Capture Improvement Act, that would allow businesses to use private activity bonds (PABs) issued by local or state governments to finance a carbon capture project.  He quotes: “This is significant step to ensure we…keep our air clean as the threat of climate change continues to grow.”[12]

John Hickenlooper, who calls himself a scientist, will also begin “large-scale investment in government-funded climate technology research. …One of the pathways is to invest in carbon capture, utilization, and storage technology.”  “The market,” he adds, “is the key, not the enemy.”

Beto O’Rourke’s plan isn’t crystal clear, but his website promises more than $1 trillion in tax incentives to “accelerate the scale up of nascent technologies enabling reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”

Most deliriously, John Delaney “will make rural and heartland America the center of a massive new industry – carbon capture.” According to his website a “$15 (tax) per metric ton of CO2 with costs rising $10 per year will reduce carbon emissions by 90% by 2050 while virtually eliminating rural poverty.”

All seven received oil money for their campaigns.[13]

Carbon capture does have one high-ranking critic.  “Carbon capture is total bullshit” according to Michael Bloomberg.  Bloomberg just pledged $500 million (.00009% of his wealth) to carbon neutrality.  The money will go to “influencers”, including personalities, think-tanks, etc. as well as politicians, active against fossil fuel.

Bloomberg also chairs the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (FSB) which urges companies to self-report their carbon emissions.  The gist is (in a presumably greening market), disclosure warns investors of your long-term viability.  Thus, discharging less CO2 increases your value.  In his words, “Increasing transparency makes markets more efficient, and economies more stable and resilient.”

Maybe.  A small aside, but does someone who funds “influencers” to the tune of $500 million seem faithful that transparency’ is a climate solution?  Or think; Bloomberg’s partner, Diana Taylor is a board member of Citigroup.  As we mentioned, Citigroup has poured hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ money into fracking with no market repercussions, and in fact, no disclosure from her or Michael Bloomberg.

And why should we place our fate in the hands of stockholders to police corporations?  We are talking about the same group of people.  40% of all stocks belong to the top 1% and the top 10% hold almost 90%.  Moreover, since Trump’s tax break, companies have spent most of their winnings buying back their own stock.  Some are on their way to becoming their own majority shareholders.

More likely, since data is a hot commodity, and data is what they’re collecting, a little transparency should enhance their skill, not discourage it.[14]  Fact is, we used more energy last year because it was hotter.  Global warming may be growing the fossil fuel industry!  A “stable and resilient” fossil fuel economy might kill us faster than coal’s last hurrah will under Trump.

In sum, it’s hard to overstate capitalism’s debt to fossil fuels.  Only with large scale coal operations did free labor out-profit slavery.  Only with oil was it able to manufacture at rates that reduced the cost of both goods and labor without killing the workers, as 19th century coal industries had.  Only with the advent of cheap manufactures like plastic could the poor routinely consume beyond needs, opening new markets.  Post-war atomization coerced more buying, but more buying takes either more income or lower prices.  Since higher wages don’t easily translate to higher profits.  Only by opening less-advanced markets -made possible by cheap global transportation- could they lower prices.  And only with the petrol-dollar could the arch-capitalist U.S. maintain this hegemony after WWII reconstruction.  And when it tottered, fossil fuel proved “too big to fail.”

Expect, the same next time, when it’s a life system, not just a financial one.  In 2020, peddling a fake cure isn’t bullshit, it’s genocide.  Calling genocide bullshit – when you have billions of dollars in your account – is genocide too.

Hell awaits them.  They didn’t have to bring it here.

 

[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/freedom-gas-us-opens-lng-floodgates-to-europe/#link=%7B%22role%22:%22standard%22,%22href%22:%22https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/freedom-gas-us-opens-lng-floodgates-to-europe/%22,%22target%22:%22%22,%22absolute%22:%22%22,%22linkText%22:%22according%20to%20EURACTV%22%7D

[2] https://williamblum.org/essays/read/overthrowing-other-peoples-governments-the-master-list

[3][3]https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3322.epdf?referrer_access_token=49vVZLvYYRvoLhM598ayH9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0P1ZmqVLxKfxqQX-KqJzVRLBBVboAWW8gu7iH3qRbNOyoSZixdvmecfrM29-bZ-9tEU1PEFzZfG3TQ61hdmfmv00c_K7lE3ReGyKmPOWLzD_HFhfaQmzAdL8H7tUQA_pxo_jSp_PXhN52wXbsIdFDBvbeWZlisFjktbszXDBkrvVQ%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=news.nationalgeographic.com

[4] https://newrepublic.com/article/151700/bank-bailout-hobbled-climate-fight

[5]https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/02/understanding-the-social-cost-of-carbon-and-connecting-it-to-our-lives/

[6] https://readsludge.com/2019/01/30/members-of-house-committee-overseeing-the-environment-have-millions-invested-in-fossil-fuels/

[7] https://carboncapturecoalition.org/about-carbon-capture/

[8] https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/03/13/carbon-capture-fossil-fuels-ciel-report/

[9] ibid.

[10] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/11/energy-industry-carbon-emissions-bp-report-fossil-fuels

[11] http://priceofoil.org/2019/05/30/new-report-debunks-gas-bridge-fuel-myth/

[12] https://www.bennet.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/6/bennet-portman-reintroduce-bill-to-reduce-overall-carbon-emissions-and-boost-domestic-energy-production

[13] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2019/jun/20/democrats-2020-fossil-fuel-donations

[14] https://newpol.org/microsofts-plan-ai-runs-on-gas/

Marxism, the Democratic Republic, and the Undemocratic U.S. Constitution

By: July 30, 2019
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The debate over socialist strategy that kicked off with Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign has now been going on for almost four years.  Over that time parties to this debate have delved deeper into the history of socialism and Marxism in search of analogies and justifications to support their positions.  Earlier this year there was an important discussion concerning the political legacy of Karl Kautsky on Jacobin involving James Muldoon,[1] Charlie Post,[2] and Eric Blanc;[3] and now Dan La Botz’s recent review[4] of Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto has been added to the mix.  Like all of these writers, I think it is useful to search through the history of Marxism for clues that might be helpful in understanding the political challenges we face in our own day, but the first requirement of such comparisons is that we get the history right.  I think these writers get that history wrong in important ways.  I’ll start with La Botz because he starts with Marx.

La Botz’s central historical and theoretical claim is that Marx changed his views on the nature of the capitalist state and the necessity of revolution after witnessing the Paris Commune of 1871.  La Botz writes that before the Commune Marx initially held the view that socialists “might either through elections or a political revolution conquer the capitalist state and use it for their own purposes,” but that after the Commune Marx changed his mind and “came to believe that a revolution would be necessary to ‘smash the state’ and that a new temporary socialist state would have to be created on the road to communism.”  La Botz uses this characterization of Marx’s views on the state and revolution to argue against Sunkara’s nonrevolutionary road to socialism.

The first part of La Botz’s claim is that after 1871 Marx no longer believed that a peaceful transition to socialism was possible; but in his La Liberté speech in 1872 after the last Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association and in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx still granted that a peaceful transition to socialism might be possible in some countries, as did Engels in his Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic [Erfurt] Program of 1891 .  Peaceful, however, did not mean directly through elections.  No country in Europe in the nineteenth century was a democracy with universal and equal suffrage by which a workers’ government could be voted into office with the power to make laws.  That is why Marx said in the Communist Manifesto that the first step in the revolution by the working class was to win the battle for democracy, and both Marx in Gotha and Engels in Erfurt repeated that the democratic republic (which they both equated with the dictatorship of the proletariat and which the Commune exemplified) was the form of the state through which the working class would come to power and rule until the dissolution of the state in communist society.  For Marx and Engels, revolution in the broad sense meant the conquest of political power, whether by peaceful or violent means, and only in a separate narrower sense did it refer to the tactics of violent insurrection.  La Botz just gets Marx’s and Engels’ thinking on these matters wrong.  La Botz further misinterprets who Marx was arguing against when he said that the workers had to “smash the state.”  La Botz suggests that Marx was critiquing his own previously held theory of the state, but the fact is that Marx first used the phrase “break the state” in 1852 in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In regard to the Commune in 1871, Marx’s admonition that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” was directed not at his own previously held views but at those of Auguste Blanqui and his followers who had long envisioned seizing the state in a coup and imposing a Jacobin-style dictatorship.  Marx also later directed the same criticism at the Lassaleans in Germany who did think they could bring about socialism by peaceful, electoral means in cooperation with the Prussian monarchy.  In short, La Botz wants to cast Marx’s political thinking as a binary choice between the tactics of peaceful electoral reform and violent revolution, which he says was resolved in Marx’s mind by the example of the Paris Commune.  Marx and Engels saw things differently.  They were never advocates of a direct electoral road to socialism for the simple reason that no system of electoral democracy existed in Europe while they were alive. The primary political problem they faced was how to get democracy when you don’t have it.  Until the end of their days, they were advocates for the democratic republic, which they thought might be achieved relatively peacefully in some countries but most likely would involve violent conflict in the rigid autocracies of Germany and Eastern Europe.  Whether peaceful or violent, they thought that winning the battle for democracy was the primary political goal of the working class and the precondition for the advance into socialism.

The parallel I now want to draw between Marx’s and Engels’ writings on the democratic republic and our situation here in the U.S. is that we don’t have a democracy either.  La Botz doesn’t seem to be interested in this problem, but Sunkara is.  In his list of travel tips on the road to a democratic socialist society, Sunkara rightly emphasizes that “We need to democratize our political institutions.” (p. 233) He cites the absurdly disproportionate system of representation in the Senate, Trump’s victory in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote, the near impossibility of amending the Constitution, and the desirability of replacing winner-take-all elections with proportional representation.  However, despite these sensible observations, in other places he continues to refer to the U.S. as a “capitalist democracy” (p. 231) and proposes that “socialists must secure decisive majorities” in what he acknowledges are severely malapportioned legislatures. (p. 222) Sunkara muddles the meaning of democracy here, is too vague about what elections in an undemocratic political system are capable of accomplishing, and is silent on how exactly to go about making the political system truly democratic; and this vagueness pervades his entire survey of the history of socialism.  The Kautsky debate at Jacobin gets a little more specific about these problems.

James Muldoon started off the Kautsky controversy with a defense of Kautsky’s proposal for a “democratic road to socialism” that outlined a course midway between the liberalism of the post-WWI Social Democratic Party leadership and the Spartacist support for workers’ councils.  The problem with Muldoon’s recommendation is that it is utterly disconnected from any sense of historical reality.  By the time Kautsky wrote his “Guidelines for a Socialist Action Program” in late 1918 he was already an inconsequential political figure, and the “liberal” leaders of the Social Democratic Party to whom he was offering his program were already preparing to crush the workers’ movement and the Spartacists with the aid of the Freikorps.  Kautsky had already missed his chance to help build a mass movement for democracy and socialism in 1910 when he opposed Rosa Luxemburg’s support of strikes and demonstrations demanding reform of the undemocratic Prussian voting system.  Muldoon says that Kautsky supported a strategy that combined “contesting elections and building a strong workers’ movement,” but in practice Kautsky sided with the conservative leaders of the Social Democratic Party and favored winning elections in an undemocratic political system over building a strong workers’ movement demanding real democracy.

These same criticisms of Kautsky can be found in Charlie Post’s response to Muldoon, but there is one important historical point that Post does not develop fully. Post does mention that Luxemburg supported the mass demonstrations and strikes for electoral reform that had broken out in Prussia and advocated raising these scattered protests to the level of a general political strike.  He also mentions that Kautsky opposed these tactics as “premature,” rejected Luxemburg’s submissions to Die Neue Zeit, and sided with the Party leadership’s tactic of focusing all its energy on the upcoming 1912 election.  However, Post does not mention that this Prussian voting rights struggle did not stay confined to “reforms.”  Although the struggle began as a protest against the egregiously unequal Prussian system of political representation within the Prusso-German monarchical state, the conflict eventually escalated into a demand for the complete abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a democratic republic, a demand prohibited under the German censorship laws.  This demand was considered revolutionary at the time because all Marxists, including Luxemburg and Lenin, still followed Marx and Engels’ thinking that the democratic republic was the form of the state through which the workers would come to power and then rule.  Post leaves out this part of the story.  As he makes clear, Post, like La Botz, considers revolution to mean only one thing: insurrection against the capitalist state and the establishment of a system of workers’ councils.  Of course, Post is free to believe what he wants about current political conditions and revolutionary strategy, but he has left a hole in his historical account of what revolution meant to Marxists prior to the establishment of Bolshevik power and the invention of the new theory of a state comprised of workers’ soviets.

In his response to Post, Eric Blanc is silent on the dispute between Luxemburg and Kautsky over the struggle for a democratic republic.  Blanc instead sets up his debate with Post about Kautsky’s legacy as a disagreement over “how today’s socialists respond to a central strategic question:  How can class rule be overcome in a capitalist democracy?”  This framing is doubly incongruous because pre-WWI Germany was not a democracy and neither is the U.S. today, as Blanc acknowledges at the end of his article when he refers to the United States’ “extremely undemocratic political system.”  It seems that in his haste to reject the Leninist tactic of insurrection and justify participation in electoral politics, Blanc, like Sunkara, did not take the time to straighten out these inconsistencies.  Yes, there are still some socialists who dream of a replay of the Bolshevik Revolution.  Yes, they still fulminate against reformism, reject any involvement in the Democratic Party, and call for revolution and workers’ councils; but countering just those political stances should give no sense of satisfaction that the job is done.  The main problem facing the left in the U.S. today is not how to overcome class rule in a capitalist democracy but how to get democracy in the first place.  That is what the dispute between Luxemburg and Kautsky in 1910 was about.

If I remember correctly, in his panel discussion of The Socialist Manifesto at the Socialism 2019 Conference, Sunkara said in passing that the recent explosion of interest in socialism was a “quirk.”  I think what he meant, first of all, is that no one foresaw how popular Bernie Sanders’ primary run in 2016 would be or how his self-identification as a democratic socialist would fuel such a meteoric rise in the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America.  Another part of this quirk is that Sanders’ definition of socialism as a New Deal Economic Bill of Rights is not the traditional definition of socialism as ownership and control of the means of production, hence the ongoing discussions in the DSA, Jacobin, New Politics, and other socialist publications about how to relate to what is undeniably a genuine mass movement within the Democratic Party led by a self-declared socialist whose policies don’t really add up to socialism.  But there is also another quirky part to this debate that goes back to the original creation of Jacobin.  Seth Ackerman’s article, “Burn the Constitution,” appeared in Jacobin’s second issue.  Since then there have been numerous articles on the undemocratic structure of the U.S. Constitution on the Jacobin website, many of them by Daniel Lazare, author of the ground-breaking 1996 book, The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy.  There have also been many articles recording the unending struggle of workers, socialists, and Marxists for democratic rights and institutions beginning with the Chartists and continuing to the present day.  It wouldn’t have taken much for Sunkara and Ackerman to put two and two together to arrive at the conclusion that the primary political task in the U.S. is to win the battle for democracy as the precondition for the advance into socialism, as proposed straightforwardly by Marx in the Communist Manifesto and Gotha, by Engels in Erfurt, by Luxemburg in Theory and Practice, and by all of Lenin (until 1918) as documented by Neil Harding and Lars Lih.  Instead they have opted to cobble together a strange hybrid that seeks to combine winning elections in an admittedly undemocratic political system with building mass struggles aimed at defending the legislative gains resulting from those electoral victories.  It is not likely that things will work out that way.  Long before there will be legislative gains to defend, progressive legislative proposals on the “democratic road to socialism” will be blocked by an undemocratic political structure, throwing the movement back into the realization (which, of course, it already knows) that we don’t live in a democracy.  The battle to democratize the political system is not just a plank among others in a democratic socialist platform: it is the leading edge of the class political struggle that makes socialism possible.  Kautsky and the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party always waffled and temporized on this issue.  Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, and the democratic Lenin did not.

[1] “Reclaiming the Best of Karl Kautsky,” Jacobin, 1/5/2019

[2] “The ‘Best’ of Karl Kautsky Isn’t Good Enough,” 3/9/2019

[3] “Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care),” 4/2/2019

[4] “The Socialist Manifesto of Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin: Socialism without Revolution,” New Politics, 7/3/2019

Boris Johnson and Cynical Optimism

By: July 28, 2019
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It’s easy to be pessimistic. Since 1979 the key industrial battles have all been lost by the left, resulting in the imposition of the economic settlement we now groan under. And while it looked like social liberalism was all-conquering and irreversible, the appointment of Boris Johnson, the Windrush scandal, the cynical manipulation of Labour’s antisemitism wars by the right, and the rising hate crime figures against women, ethnic minorities, and sexual minorities underline how we can never be complacent about such things. We’re in a bit of a funk because the world is looking gloomy. To find some reasons to be cheerful would be nice.

Cheerfulness is the cornerstone of Johnsonism, if we can now speak about such an abomination. His first appearance at the dispatch box as Prime Minister was pretty terrible, all told. Jeremy Corbyn’s statement fired no less than 10 questions, to which Johnson replied that he didn’t hear a single one. This then is how it’s going to be. As we’ve already seen, Johnson’s first day in the job was geared around the impression of getting to grips with things, but all done with a smile and a thumbs up. The Commons performance was part of the same piece. As the otherwise guileless Jeremy Hunt observed in his first leadership debate with Johnson, while you’re chuckling away at his response you’ve forgot that he didn’t answer your question. The Johnson fans lapped it up, but not everyone was convinced. As an inveterate crowd-pleaser, that more than a few Tory MPs were sitting there wrapped in scowls and frowns should give his team pause for thought.

But Johnson is on to something. You don’t need to pretend Number 10 has read Gramsci to observe that the new Prime Minister and friends have read the country’s mood, and are responding accordingly. Looking back at Theresa May’s first few months in office, she was able to speak vaguely about a better future with her remarks about tackling injustice and poverty. At the spectacular level she made a break with Dave’s grim vision of austerity forever, while appearing to be the best figure to consolidate any post-Brexit national renewal. We know how that turned out. And then in 2017 we saw the unexpected happen. You will recall how, as soon as the election was called, Labour’s polling inexorably rose which gave the party its second best vote tally for 50 years. According to recent rewrites of history, this was because many mistook Labour for a remain party. In fact, as actual polling at the time indicated Brexit was not the primary concern of the bulk of Labour voters. Corbyn’s message of a different future, of, again, a break with the tired status quo and actually holding out the possibility of hope and how things could get better resonated.

And now? Johnson and co know people are fed up of Brexit, are sick to the back teeth of hearing about Brexit, and can’t wait for Brexit to be over. Alas, if you’re one of these people I’ve got some unwelcome news for you … So the public don’t want to know or would prefer it gone sooner rather than later. Therefore the huge stress, some might say overemphasis, Johnson has placed on the 31st October deadline. There is more to it than placating the kamikaze base — he thinks the done and dusted approach has a wider purchase beyond the Leave-committed. The second is, well, folks are pretty teed off more generally. In the months to come Johnson will tediously talk about the record numbers of people in jobs yadda yadda, but behind the scenes Dominic Cummings and some of the smarter Tories know that low wages, low prospects, high debt, unaffordable housing prices and rising rents, and substandard services are stirring up real trouble for the Tories, especially for voters under 50, i.e. the majority of the working population. The immediate sticking plaster is to talk up the eye-catching items, like 20k more police (pinched from Labour’s manifesto) and a bit of money to improve rail links between Manchester and Leeds, and wax lyrical about how these are going to help catapult a “global” Britain into a new golden age with a new economics. That and all the bluster about industries of the future and high-paying jobs. Well, some who should know better have fallen for it.

By talking things up all the time and unveiling a set piece improvement here and there, Johnson’s hope is this will be enough to distract attention, or at least soften awareness of the difficulties arising from a likely no deal Brexit. Because, in early November, if we leave without a deal the sun will still rise the next day and the apocalyptic predictions of no flights and no medicine won’t come to pass, Johnson can claim the absence of cataclysm as proof of the power of can-do. And this is how it will be until his ejection from Number 10. However, when you look at the people he’s appointed to his cabinet — easily the most right-wing ever — you’ve got to ask how Johnson hopes to square his everything-is-fine messaging with his coterie of arch-neoliberals, cutters, privatisers, corporate welfare enthusiasts, and the rest. Because when the axe starts to fall, no amount of bluster and funny ha-ha hi-jinks will save Johnson from the political fall out of this idiocy.

Originally posted at All That is Solid…

Livestream Dialogue Between Sudanese, Algerian, African American, Syrian and Iranian Socialist Feminists

By: July 27, 2019
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The Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists is hosting a panel to discuss these questions:

  •  What is new in the Sudanese and Algerian Uprisings in terms of women’s consciousness, participation/organizing, opposition to patriarchy and affirmative demands for women’s emancipation?
  • What can Sudanese, Algerian, Syrian, Iranian and African American women learn from each other’s history and experiences?
  • What socialist feminist concepts can help us deepen and expand our struggles?
  • What does international socialist feminist solidarity mean? How can we promote it by connecting our struggles?

Questions from the Facebook audience will be taken during the last 30 minutes.

Speakers:

Sara Abbas: Doctoral candidate in political science and a feminist who researches social movements in Sudan. She has written for Transition magazine, OpenDemocracy and The Nation. The views expressed are her own and do not represent those of institutions she is affiliated with.

Selma Oumari: Algerian French member of the New Anticapitalist Party in France. She is involved in antiracist struggles as well as international solidarity.

Julia Wallace: Black anti-racist socialist activist and contributor for Left Voice. She served on the South Central Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles, organizes against police brutality and in defense of tenants’ rights, LGBTQ, women and immigrants’ rights.

Lara al-Kateb: Syrian gender studies student and contributing writer for the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists’ website. One of her recent articles is “The #MeToo Movement in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Frieda Afary: Librarian, translator, producer of Iranian Progressives in Translation (www.iranianprogressives.org) and member of the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists. She has published articles in English and Persian on the Middle East, Marxist Feminism, and has taught community classes on Socialist Feminism.

Moderator:

Fatemeh Masjedi: Iranian academic historian and activist based in Berlin. Member of the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists. Former political prisoner in Iran because of her women’s rights activities.

To find the Facebook link, go to:

https://www.facebook.com/Alliance-of-MENA-Socialists-2196931800604746/

The Ruling Class Does Rule

By: July 26, 2019
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Throughout the mid-20th century, discussions and theoretical debates concerning the nature of the capitalist state persisted within Marxist circles. Some names are tightly connected with these events, including Ralph Miliband, Nicos Poulantzas, and Fred Block. In the end, it appeared that a focus on the structural power of capitalism and its proponents won out, with its emphasis on the limitations that capitalism places on the policy decisions of lawmakers.

Fred Block most succinctly rendered the argument in his now iconic piece from The Socialist Register: “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule.” In this article, Block pointed out that capitalist dictates tied the hands of lawmakers and state leaders, and, in the end, the ruling class need not directly govern the state in order to achieve its will. Instead, corporate elites, or the ruling class, could rely on lawmakers to ensure that corporate interests, broadly conceived, prevail, and that no serious threat to capitalism would develop.

Over the last few decades, thereafter, debate concerning the nature of the capitalist state largely subsided. Several developments, however, have resurrected discussions concerning the capitalist state, and incited new discussions concerning its nature.

Roughly a decade ago, the world witnessed a severe economic crisis which culminated with President Obama bailing out the same banks that had generated the economic crisis. We have also witnessed new social movements, particularly Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, both of which have centralized issues of inequality, poverty, and the failure of state elites to address these issues. And, finally, we have seen the rehabilitation of socialism within the U.S. as politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have garnered much popularity and, in the instance of Sanders, even a serious run – for a second time – to represent the Democratic Party in the country’s presidential elections.

In my own recent work, I have revisited one particular question concerning the state, which was initially taken up by sociologist Peter Freitag during the heyday of state-theoretical debates and ensuing research on the topic (often titled “power structure research” and involving folks like G. William Domhoff). In his own work, Freitag looked at whether or not corporate elites indeed populated the state, that is, by looking at presidential cabinet appointees from the late 1800s until the Nixon presidency. Since nearly a half century has elapsed since Nixon, my own work updates this study, looking directly at the question of whether the ruling class actually does rule.

Like Freitag, I find that a large majority of presidential cabinets have included corporate elites, which we both defined as: an individual who either possessed a high-ranking managerial position within a corporation (such as a President), a corporate board director, or a corporate lawyer. While Freitag found that 63% of members from 1897-1973 came from the elite corporate sphere, I arrived at a similar, albeit less elevated, number: 52%.

In recent years, though, administrations have evidenced levels higher than this average figure. The last three administrations, for instance, have had levels of 64% (Bush II), 52% (Obama), and 72% (Trump), the latter being the highest level over the past half-century. And, while some might draw distinctions between what interests Democrats and Republicans ultimately cater to, there is little difference between Democrat and Republican administrations on their corporate appointments, with Republicans appointing only a bit more (54%) than Democrats (48%).

In addition, some positions appear much more dominated by corporate elites than others – not surprisingly Commerce and Treasury, but also Homeland Security, HUD, and the State Department. Only Education and Labor have remained interlocked at a rate below 30% across the last several decades.

It should also be noted that cabinet members are slightly more likely to enter into the elite corporate sphere following their tenure in office at a rate of nearly 72%, with Republicans once again sending more into this world (75% vs. 66%). Both dynamics taken together, though, illustrate the obvious presence of a continued revolving door between politics and corporations.

My work on this issue is only descriptive. But, entertaining the basic question of whether or not the ruling class rules: Freitag’s and my own recent work provides an answer in the affirmative.

Block’s and Poulantzas’ contentions that the structural power of capitalism readily prevails despite who occupies the state, directs scholars’ attention to important societal dynamics, namely the dependence states have upon capital and investment. However, would nothing change should Bernie Sanders win the presidency and populate cabinet positions with individuals not immediately drawn from the corporate sphere? Is it possible that such moves could ultimately diminish the structural power of capitalism?

Despite my work not examining the consequentiality of particular cabinet members, a cursory glance at how cabinet members under the Trump administration have operated, provides some indication of their importance: Pruitt targeting EPA requirements, Pompeo/Bolton openly praising the business opportunities in a Venezuela without socialist rule, and Steve Mnuchin recently denying that tariffs will affect consumers, particularly low-income consumers.

Social scientists should assuredly keep the structural constraints of capitalism in mind when developing state theory in the 21st century. However, we should not lose site of the fact that individuals also make history, and that a single-minded focus on the structural constraints of capitalism may only lead to a functionalist interpretation of the state, alongside a cynical approach to politics.

Originally posted at the Marxist Sociology Blog. 

Message of Solidarity with Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese Youth from a Young Iranian Socialist

By: July 24, 2019
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Comrades, students and youth of Hong Kong and Mainland China:

Once again Chinese youth have made history in the streets by standing up for people’s basic civil liberties and the right to self-determination!

Many Iranian youth support the mass protests in Hong Kong against an extradition law that would send dissidents/human rights activists to mainland China to be prosecuted as criminals.  We stand with you in your struggle and offer our unconditional solidarity!

People in both China and Iran live under authoritarian police states which present themselves as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-imperialist”, yet they use the same tools of capitalist and imperialist repression against unprotected communities inside and outside their borders. Supporters of the Chinese and Iranian states argue that “there are better social services in these countries”, but we know that such comparisons are false at best and dangerous at worse. We know very well that there is nothing “communist” in China’s foreign and domestic policies, just like there is nothing “revolutionary” in Iran’s foreign and domestic policies. But since their “enemies” are U.S. and European capitalists, they easily get away with wearing a hypocritical mask of “populism”.

In both Iran and China temporary contracts have become the bourgeoisie’s favorite weapon against the people. Safety and stability have become a luxury belonging only to the 1% elite while the rest of the society pays the heavy price of endless instability, greed and corruption. Even when students survive the increasingly privatized and commodified higher education, the unjust conditions of job and housing markets makes the prospect of a dignified life almost impossible.

Just like the United States, the Iranian and Chinese states are spending more and more of the national budget on militarism and imperialist adventures abroad while they cut more and more of the basic social services at home. They care more about crushing other people’s movements for dignity than fixing the unbearable living conditions of the poor and the working-class communities at home. They have no plan to end the growing capitalist structural deficiencies and contradictions, because they themselves are the crisis and the contradiction.

Their only solution is to blame everything on “foreign actors” and arrest those who dare to show the way out of this crisis. From the oppression of the Uyghur community in China to the oppression of Arab, Kurd, Baluch, Azeri, Bahai and other national or religious minorities in Iran, these racist states are a threat to pluralism, diversity and coexistence in our societies. Chinese and Iranian states have also been united in the democidal war against Syrian revolutionaries who have been struggling against all local-global forces of fascism, capitalism and imperialism for more than 8 years.

But  the yearnings for a better future are beginning to emerge today. The unbearable living conditions in Iran are giving birth to a new popular labor movement which is rising from the peripheries. The fresh wave of leftist student movement has also been standing firmly next to the workers despite mass arrests, raids, torture and forced confessions. Women are demanding their rights and refusing the compulsory hijab.

However, as expected, right-wing nationalism and xenophobia has also started to mobilize in times of change. They have began hijacking people’s imagination and representing themselves as an “alternative”. It is our responsibility to expose their chauvinistic and hateful politics. We know very well that in reality, what right-wing nationalism and localism want is to keep the center-periphery oppressive social and economic relations of the current regimes and simply replace the old capitalist elite class with a new one. We’ve been here before.

Many Iranian youth admire the radical direct actions and the mass mobilizations of Hong Kong youth in the streets. We honor the memory of the rebellious youth in Tiananmen Square who were massacred by the Chinese regime in June 1989. Your struggle is our struggle. Your victory will be our victory, and your loss will be our loss.

For international solidarity against authoritarian capitalism everywhere!

For dignity, equality, justice and popular self-determination!

Originally posted on the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialist Website.

An Eco-Socialist Electoral Politics Strategy for 2020

By: July 23, 2019
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“What Revolutionary Socialism Means to Me” by Sam Farber (on the Jacobin site) is a fine article and deserves to be studied. However, I believe it lacks a detailed strategy for left engagement in electoral politics especially for the 2020 election.

I agree that electoral politics should not be ignored, and that the Democratic Party is the graveyard to progressive politics and that attempts to “take it over” are fruitless. The problem is building a third party or in Sam’s terms supporting “independent and socialist candidates.” How do we do that when the president is arguably the most right-wing and corrupt U.S. president in history and when we have less than a dozen years to radically change world economies before we reach world climate tipping points?

In the last presidential election Jill Stein of the Green Party received 1.45 million votes. An article written before the final electoral vote count was done showed that if all Stein’s votes went for Hillary Clinton and half of Libertarian Gary Johnson’s vote went for Clinton four crucial states would have gone over to Clinton. I know that wouldn’t have happened. Many or most of those voters would just have stayed home and most of Johnson’s people would have voted for Trump. (In 2000, of course, Ralph Nader received 2.9 million votes and was deemed a “spoiler” by liberals. Rather than fighting to change the electoral college liberals have preferred to demonize Nader.) My point is not to argue about these elections, but to claim that even weak as they are, third parties are significant and that the Democratic Party bosses don’t just ignore them.

I had thought the Electoral College was insurmountable until I heard about the growing success of the “National Popular Vote” movement. It’s a way of bypassing the winner-take-all vote within states and with occasional grotesque outcomes of one candidate getting more votes nationally than the one elected by the Electoral College. As they explain it: “The National Popular Vote interstate compact will go into effect when enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—that is, enough to elect a President (270 of 538). At that time, every voter in the country will acquire a direct vote for a group of at least 270 presidential electors supporting their choice for President. All of this group of 270+ presidential electors will be supporters of the candidate who received the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC—thus making that candidate President.

What does this mean for socialists and electoral politics? First look at parliamentary countries like France.  There the left votes for whichever party they prefer in the first round.  In 2017 the far-left parties combined received over 20% of the presidential vote. In the second round all that remained were Macron and Le Pen.  I assume most on the left then voted for the “lesser of two evils” while some just stayed home.  Now there’s a system that has some merit.  The left can show how much actual support it has in the first round and then in the second round do the practical thing.

Obviously, we can’t duplicate that system in the short run, but can we engineer some work-arounds, like people are doing with the electoral college?  Could we say to the Democrats, “We propose a formal written deal. We are going to run hard to demonstrate the strength of the socialist left. We want to be part of the polls, and the debates and get fair coverage from the media that you control (MSNBC and the like).  If that happens, at the start of November our socialist candidate will cancel her/his campaign and call on all socialists to vote anti-Trump, that is, for the Democratic Party candidate.  If there is no deal or the deal isn’t honored, we’ll campaign hard for our socialist candidate and let the chips fall where they may.”

Is this a viable electoral strategy for socialists?

One friend remarked about this idea, “It’s nothing new.  It’s basically what Bernie Sanders did in 2016.” I disagree. First, Sanders is in all but name a Democrat. He wants people to be canvassing, phone-banking and registering voters for the Democratic Party. I’m talking about building an independent party, one that follows the principles of structure that Sam Farber listed in his piece, like elected officials turning over their salaries to the party and living on a working person’s salary from the party, like office holders being required to vote according to the resolutions of the party.  The strategy I outline would not give any support for the Democratic Party, only a vote for the Democratic candidate against Trump.

Second, Sanders was not allowed to run freely. Clinton’s people did all they could to sabotage his effort, most notoriously with the way she took over the Democratic National Committee 15 months before her nomination.

Third, Sander’s socialism doesn’t go nearly far enough.  He doesn’t demand public take-overs of the fossil fuel producing and using industries and other drastic measures need to overhaul our economy by 2030.  He doesn’t talk about a replacing capitalism with a planned economy with full employment.  His foreign policy statements are weak.  It took him until 2017 to see the Saudi princes as implacable foes.  His criticism of Israeli apartheid and its massacres are tepid at best.  He has not shown any leadership in supporting democratic forces in Syria who have suffered genocidal levels of violence.

How would a socialist (or Eco-Socialist) party be created?  Perhaps the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 might give us a clue. In 1905 there were large radical trade union federations bitterly unhappy with the American Federation of Labor. There were also lots of Marxists, anarchists and other socialists looking for a new vehicle with which to organize. They came to Chicago that year and formed the IWW. Certainly there’s nothing like that ferment in U.S. unions, but among the youth and others concerned about collapsing climates there is that energy and anger.  This will increase as both Trumpian eye-shutting and green capitalism prove farcical in the face of environmental catastrophes. These forces and leading feminist, LGBTQ, immigrant rights activists, supporters of Palestinian and Syrian rights and anti-capitalists from within the Green Party could become the core of an independent socialist political party.

Campaign for a socialist and vote for a Democrat for president in 2020; I admit the whole notion gives me the willies. Yet, unless we abandon the electoral realm completely to the Democrats and rely only on getting people into the streets, I don’t see much alternative.  The clock is ticking, the oceans warming and the tipping points growing near.

From Classroom to Underclass

By: July 22, 2019
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Neither a policy paper nor a career guide, Gary Roth’s The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility (Pluto Press) is, in the author’s words, “an examination of that edge of reality where education and economy produce results just the opposite of what in theory it is claimed that they do.” Roth is a lecturer in sociology and anthropology, and former vice chancellor and dean, at Rutgers University at Newark.

I won’t revisit much of the ground covered in the interview with him that ran at Inside Higher Ed earlier this year. My intent, rather, is to draw out an implication or two of the author’s challenge to some prevalent ways of understanding contemporary American life.

In the quarter century or so following World War II, it is said, someone graduating from high school could find ready employment in the local smokestack industry. Assuming he (no sic here) stayed on the job long enough, he would soon bring home a paycheck ample enough to provide his wife with appliances — and even to begin saving to send their 1.8 children to college, where they would get degrees and soon be white-collar.

All of this was normal and expected: security prevailed. Racial and other inequities that also prevailed will be either ignored or deplored, depending on who tells the story. But one thing not in dispute is that every figure depicted in this myth could (and did) consider themselves middle-class.

“As a lived experience, class is quite complicated,” Roth says. Sociologists — and socialists, for that matter — tend to “apply a limited set of categories” when defining class differences “in order to keep matters simple and intelligible, but they end up distorting the circumstances that people actually live through.” True, a factory worker and his degree-holding professional daughter occupy very different locations relative to the means of production or within the American status system. But the likelihood of both identifying themselves as middle-class has been a major factor in the “lived experience” of class for two or three generations now.

And the role of higher education in consolidating the middle-class standing of both parents and offspring is central — at least, in principle. For one thing, there was the “degree premium.” The holder of a bachelor’s degree tends to earn twice as much as someone who did not finish high school, while the difference in income between the former and someone with a high school diploma “is also substantial,” Roth says, “a divide that over time has only grown wider.” And educational attainment lends “a decided caste-like quality to the transmission of social class across generations.” The book’s first bar graph shows that not quite a third of children raised in families from the highest quartile of income graduate from college if their parents didn’t do so. As for parents who did not go beyond high school, “slightly more than half (53.1 percent) of their children seek more education than they had by attending college.” By contrast, over 80 percent of children from college-educated parents attend college.

In these figures, then, we can make out the formation of a layer of the population — a caste, if you prefer — possessing both educational capital and earning power (if not wealth) transmitted from one generation to the next. Missing from the picture is the capitalist dynamic known as creative destruction.

Or rather, it is cropped out of view, since part of the story of the self-identified American middle class is de-industrialization. Roth supplies the facts and figures showing that huge structural changes were underway well before that factory with the smokestack, mentioned earlier, was shut down. Between 1950 and 1970, “white-collar professions overtook traditional manual occupations and accounted for nearly half of all employment nationwide,” with blue-collar jobs falling to about a third of the total.

This transformation is often postdated to later decades and equated with a turn away from manufacturing and the rise of the service sector, though the number of service workers grew more than three times faster than manual workers did over the same period between 1950 and 1970. Both white-collar and service-sector employment have bifurcated into “high-waged positions within the managerial, professional and technical fields” at one end and a far larger pool of worse-paid, more precarious jobs at the other.

Colleges and universities have been major centers for research that have boosted worker productivity, whatever the color of the collar. In doing so, they help generate jobs requiring new skills and cognitive capacities, while also developing and certifying the pools of those who can perform them. Existing jobs are wiped out by innovation and automation, to be replaced by new jobs — for however long they are needed before the next round of innovation wipes them out. “Higher education has become a type of warehousing … whereby the academically gifted among the potentially unemployed are transformed instead into the underemployed.”

The waste of human capacity Roth describes is phenomenal. But his major point is that it is not new. The millennials are feeling the worst of it, perhaps, but only the worst so far.

“To be born near the bottom or the top of the income and wealth spectrums increases dramatically your chances of remaining nearby throughout your life,” Roth writes. “For everyone else in the vast middle, intense pressure and frequent movement up and down the income spectrum ultimately result in very little change at all. Temporary fluctuations can be quite dramatic, but generally not long lasting enough to permanently alter your life circumstances. Stagnation and near-stagnation have engulfed 80 percent of the population for three generations already.” Three and counting.

Originally posted at Inside Higher Ed.

Declaration of Solidarity with the People of Puerto Rico

By: July 20, 2019
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We express our solidarity with the people of Puerto Rico in their struggle against the corrupt government of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. This Friday marks seven days of massive protests demanding the resignation of the governor and his followers. In spite of attacks with tear gas, rubber bullets and assaults and arrests by police these protests have grown in the capital San Juan and in all corners of the island. On Wednesday, July 17th more than 350 thousand people marched through the streets of the capital, a demonstration without precedent.

The protests began with the accusations and arrests of various heads of government agencies of the Roselló administration. Among these was that of the ex-Secretary of Education, Julia Keleher.  Keleher, besides granting contracts to her followers, distinguished herself by implementing the privatization of the public education system and the closing of more than 400 schools. The affected communities as well as the teachers’ organizations have been fighting these policies since 2017. Now the entire population has come together to denounce Keleher and all that she represents, neo-liberalism and its accompanying corruption.

Adding to the accusations against Keleher and the other government functionaries is the publication of the chat in which they participated and circulated comments made by Rosselló, other administration officials and certain followers. The more than 800 published pages reveal or suggest an enormous number of crimes such as obstruction of justice, the dismissal of workers on political grounds, the punishment of opposition leaders such as Manuel Natal of the Victoria Ciudadana Movement, and the use of public funds for personal ends.

But, above all, the chat unveils the machista attitudes, and the homophobic and racist views, of its participants.  It offers a snapshot of the mentality of the privileged class that governs the country as it would its own private property with contempt for the population even though it publicly presents itself otherwise.  Within the chat one can see the manner in which they ridicule the deaths of government critics, the stored cadavers that were a result of Hurricane Maria, and the grassroots activists from the same government party.

The people of Puerto Rico have decided that such a person cannot continue to be governor and for the past week have demanded his resignation.

We know that Rosselló is only a part of the problem.  Puerto Rico is living in an economic crisis of more than a decade. It has lost 20% of the employment of 2007. The economic crisis has translated into a crisis of public debt that has reached 70 billion dollars. In order to pay the debt the Board of Fiscal Control installed by the Congress of the United States have decreed austerity measures that impoverish the country and deepen the crisis. Because of this the call for Rosselló to resign is accompanied by the rejection of the Board and the demand to audit the debt. We do not doubt that a victory against Rosselló would be the best basis for continuing the struggle on these other terrains.

We are expressing our admiration for the persistent struggle by the people of Puerto Rico, an example for all struggles throughout the world.  We demand the release of those arrested and accused as a result of participating in the resistance.  We unite to the call of the immediate resignation of the Governor Ricardo Rosselló.

Luis Bonilla-Molina, Coordinador Portal Otra voces en Educación

Stalin Pérez, LUCHAS, Venezuela.

Olmedo Beluche, Panamá.

Edgard Sánchez, México.

Josie Chávez, México

Luis Rangel, México

José Martínez, México

 Alicia Mendoza, México

Mafer Arellanes, México

Melisa Morán, México

Luz Mayorga, Venezuela

FROM MÉXICO:  Frente Socialista.: Frente del Pueblo (FP), Comité de Unidad popular (CUP), Consejo popular Magonista (COPM), Partido Revolucionario del Pueblo (PRP), Sendero Socialista (SS), Grupo Obrero Socialista (GOS), Organización Proletaria Emiliano Zapata (OPEZ histórica), Organización Política del Pueblo y los Trabajadores (OPT) y Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT)

Director Stéphane Brizé Depicts Class Struggle With Dark Realism in “At War”

By: July 19, 2019
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Few films portray working people realistically. One thinks of rare movies such as Hollywood’s Norma Rae, the independent Salt of the Earth, Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike or the Italian classic, The Organizer. These films portray struggle mixed with joy, no matter the success or failure of the plotline. So the screening of At War, set to debut in New York at Village East Cinema on July 19 and later in Los Angeles, is a welcome event.

The French-language film is a raw-boned, deep dive into modern labor relations that has the feel of an on-the-spot documentary. The plot, foreshadowed by the classic injunction, “Whoever fights can lose; Whoever does not fight has already lost,” is alternately uplifting, sobering and depressing as hell. The aptly named At War is no day at the beach unless the beach is Dunkirk.

Vincent Lindon, the star of Measure Of A Man, for which he won the Best Actor award at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, plays Laurent Amedeo, the strike leader of the 1,100 workers at the fictive Perrin Industries-Agen car parts plant in a remote corner of France. These workers are not radicals. What sparks their anger in undertaking a three-month job action is the company’s abrogating of an already burdensome agreement.

In exchange for worker concessions — raising the workweek from 35 to 40 hours with no increase in pay while saving the company tens of millions of Euros in wages — the company pledged to keep the plant operating for five years. Now tearing up the agreement, management charges that the workers are in denial over economic realities, read declining profits. The company wants to boost its bottom line, claiming its 3 percent profit margin is below the industry-wide 7 percent. A boost is needed to assuage investors who don’t think the company is sufficiently profitable. Savings coming from closing the plant in an area with already high unemployment would mean economic disaster for the largely middle-aged workforce. A token company offer of outplacement services and a small severance package is summarily rejected.

Efforts by workers to involve the French employment minister, get the French president to intervene, obtain a high court injunction to enforce the work agreement and keep the plant open, as well as persuade the German-based multinational Dimke Group’s president to intervene all fail, as does a months-long plant occupation.

There’s no lack of information in the workers’ arsenal. The facts are known. How the company pays huge salaries to top management. How the multinational plans to build a replacement parts plant in Romania where the workers make five times less. How even a buyout spearheaded by the unions from a rival firm that would keep the French plant open is rejected by management because, as they note, “we are not forced by French law to sell,” no matter how attractive the offer. Why indeed create competition for the company? The workers understand the cold-blooded motivation well enough.

What loses the strike is the collapse of worker solidarity. Splits among the workers over the three-months-long job-action outweigh the pressure on capital to settle. A section of the workforce — the workers are segregated into three separate unions and French law doesn’t mandate membership in any union — want to rethink the severance package offer, but an ill-advised physical assault on corporate managers makes even that deal moot. Add to that no left-wing parties intervening to offer even picket line support and no effort made to solicit aid from German unions in the fight against the multinational, so when the splits come among workers, it’s a wonder they didn’t happen sooner.

What the film does well is show the mendacity of management, the pusillanimity of the French government, the class bias of the courts and the inordinate skill of union activists, especially their ability to quantifiably nail the corporation on its rubbishy economic defense of its decision to close the plant. International capital takes a solid beating ideologically from the film at least. All worth establishing.

At its best, At War is like Salt of the Earth as a teaching moment, with its clear, grim view of industrial relations. You forget it’s a staged film and think you are watching actual, contentious negotiations with a recalcitrant management and real-life caucus meetings of unionists. It’s also a revealing dive into international economics and its religious-like faith in boosting stock dividends over the survival needs of employees. Why the company wants to close the productive plant is also eye-opening.

At War also does something Salt of the Earth never quite explains, which is why the latter film’s predatory mining company refused to negotiate with the miners, except for the cryptic remark that “you have to see the big picture.” In At War, we see the big picture; it’s the well-versed workers who live it, understand its parameters and suffer the consequences

The film’s director Stéphane Brizé said he aimed to present “a union representative who deploys no political rhetoric, just the necessity of giving voice to his pain and indignation as well as that of his coworkers.” He pulls it off, if perhaps too well because if the film has a fault, it lies in its dour mood. There are few joyous moments featured, which even for a grueling strike is unrealistic. No celebration occurs during the plant occupation, which is something that would have happened in real life, and did happen in the United States during the industrial sit-down strikes of the 1930s. The film need not be all joie de vivre, but its mordant quality seems paramount.

See the film. If its realism is oppressive, it’s message of how class struggle manifests in real life is true, which is rare enough for modern cinema.

At War (En guerre)
Dir. Stéphane Brizé
mk2 Films, 2018
July 19–July 25 at Village East Cinema

Originally posted at the Indypendent.

Fortieth Anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution; Twenty-Ninth Anniversary of the Counter-Revolution in Power

By: July 19, 2019
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I can only outline here the complex history of the Nicaraguan revolution and counter-revolution, but cannot do them justice in a short article. I have given a more detailed account in my article “Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s Nov. 6 Election, and the Betrayal of a Revolution,” New Politics, October 17, 2016. But I urge those who are interested in these developments to read the account in my book What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis. I argue here once again that we must oppose U.S. imperialism, but support the Nicaraguan people in their struggle for democracy.

Forty years ago, we greeted the Nicaraguan Revolution with cheers. For the left around the world the late 1960s and early 1970s had been both tremendously thrilling and extremely disappointing at the same time. With the Sandinista overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, suddenly we on the left had a victory. And many of my generation rushed to Nicaragua to offer our help in one way or another while at the same time protesting U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s backing of reactionary forces in Central America, including the Contras, in Nicaragua.

The Frustration of the Left of the 1960s and 70s 

To appreciate just how important the Nicaraguan Revolution was for us all, let me remind of you of the situation we faced by the late 1970s. In France in May of 1968 the countrywide student protests and the general strike by 11 million workers was betrayed by the Communist Party and then in the election that followed, the authoritarian nationalist Charles de Gaulle was elected president.

That same year the Alexander Dubček became head of the ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and began to put forward democratic reforms accompanied by rising social movements throughout the country. The possibility of democratic socialism seemed on the agenda, but then Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party and President of the Supreme Soviet, sent Russian tanks to invade Czechoslovakia and crush the movement.

And in Mexico in 1968, national movement for democracy, initiated by students but with massive public support, was crushed when President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz sent police and soldiers to repress a large demonstration at Tlaltelolco, the Plaza of Three Cultures, in Mexico City. Police killed hundreds, arrested over 1,300 and followed up with further repression of the pro-democracy movement.

The “Hot Autumn” of 1969-1970 in Italy, which saw over 400 strikes in the northern industrial region, but the Christian Democrats won the largest plurality in the 1972 election.

In Portugal, the Carnation Revolution of 1975, led by young military officers, overthrew fascist government of Marcello Caetano and brought liberation to Portugal’s African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, where African revolutionaries had been fighting for independence. The young officers, far left political parties, and workers’ organizations fought for socialism, but in 1976 the moderate social democrat, Mario Soares of the Socialist Party was elected president, saving capitalism.

In the United States the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement declined and then virtually disappeared by 1975 and the women’s movement lasted only a few years longer. The great U.S. strike wave of the late 1960s reached its apogee in 1970 then with the recession of 1974-75 went into a steep decline as the period called “deindustrialization” began, with the wide spread closing of steel mills, auto plants, and other industrial facilities. With the election of President Ronald Reagan politics and the culture generally shifted to the right. By the late 1970s it seemed that the post-war world, the capitalist West and the Communist East, were returning to Cold War normality. Pessimism began to engulf the left.

And then came Nicaragua. ¡Que Viva Nicaragua, Libre y Socialista!

A Revolutionary Organization and a Popular Rebellion

The Nicaraguan Revolution was a tremendous victory over imperialism. Imperial powers—Spain, Great Britain, and the United States—had long dominated the small nation of Nicaragua. With its victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States took control of the Caribbean and Central America, using its economic and military power to install governments that would do its bidding. Whenever that failed the United States would invade and occupation nations in that region, such as Haiti from 1915-1934 and Nicaragua from 1912-1933. Augusto César Sandino, a mystic, patriot, and radical, led a rag-tag army that heroically fought the U.S. Marines until they were withdrawn in 1933.

In the early 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, concerned about the developing world war in Europe and about America’s image, initiated the Good Neighbor Policy that ended U.S. military occupations in the Western Hemisphere. But the United States Marines left in its place pro-American governments and new military forces. In Nicaragua the Marines trained a new military force, the National Guard and chose Anastasio Somoza García to be its commander. Through a combination of elections and coups Somoza García made himself the heard of the government in 1936.

Elements of the Liberal and Conservative parties at times opposed Somoza, and in 1936 a patriot assassinated him, but he was succeeded by his two sons, Luis Somoza deBayle and Anastasio Somoza deBayle, establishing a dynastic dictatorship that lasted form 1936 to 1979. In the early 1960s a small revolutionary group that had come out of the pro-USSR Communist Party and was influence by both Sandino and the Cuban Revolution created the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista Front for National Liberation or FSLN) with the goal of overthrowing Somoza.

For years the FSLN courageously pursued a combination of rural guerrilla warfare and spectacular urban kidnappings, though without success, with many young revolutionaries sick and starving in the mountains, dying in combat or captured and tortured. Then in the mid-1970s, Daniel Ortega, one of the Sandinista leaders, proposed a new strategy, a combination of alliances with Nicaraguan middle class forces, support from a wide variety of European and Latin American governments left, right, and center, and the creation of a real army that would coordinate with local groups in a national uprising. As the FSLN strategy gained ground, the fighting became fierce on the ground and the Nicaraguan air force bombed working class communities. Somoza deBayle was willing to bomb his own country into oblivion in order to stay in power. But on July 19, 1979 Somoza and his entourage fled and the Sandinstas took power.

Throughout Latin America and around the world, there were cheers for Nicaragua, even as we soon recognized that a tiny nation of three million people could only be successful in winning their freedom in the context of a broader revolutionary movement. We worked to support not only the Nicaraguan revolution, but also the revolutionary movement in in Guatemala and El Salvador, hoping to see victories there too and the creation of a United Socialist States of Central America, which with broader Latin American and European backing might be able to survive the inevitable attacks from the United States.

The FSLN in Power

The Sandinistas had presumed that they would take power in coalition with more conservative political parties, but virtually all-political organization had collapsed. The FSLN created a Junta de Gobierno, a governing committee of five made up of two businesspeople, two known Sandinistas, and a fifth supposedly neutral member who was actually also a secret Sandinista. When the conservative businessmen resigned from the Junta, the Sandinista nine-man Sandinista directorate became the rulers of the country. The Junta de Gobierno created a kind of parliament in the form of a Conseo de Estado, though virtually all of its members were made up of Sandinista-led mass organizations.

In a party meeting, the Sandinistas pledge to create a Cuban-style government and to join the Communist camp, but publicly they called for political pluralism, a mixed economy, and non-alignment. In any case, the continued presence in Nicaragua of large landowners and businesspeople as well as the reviving Conservative and Liberal parties, and even small leftist opposition parties, made it impossible to create the one-party state the FSLN desired.

The Sandinistas began their government by mobilizing young to carry out spectacular literacy and health campaigns and drawing up plans for other social programs, but the Contra war that began in 1981, organized and financed by the United States made it impossible for the FSLN government to pursue its plans. At the same time, mistakes by the Sandinistas led some peasants who were denied titles to their land and some indigenous people who felt their autonomy was threatened, to join the Contras. Under pressure from the United States and European governments, the FSLN government held its first elections in 1985, with Daniel Ortega being elected president after the rightwing candidate withdrew at the suggestion of the U.S. government.

To continue to fight the violent attack, which was financed and supplied by the United States, Ortega’s government initiated conscription. The draft too turned many Nicaraguans against the government. The U.S. Contra war finally work down the Nicaraguan people, led them to reject the FSLN government, and to vote for the U.S.-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro, a political novice, for president at the head of coalition that stretched from the Communists to the Conservatives.

Counter-Revolution

Immediately upon her election to the presidency, Chamorro’s coalition collapsed, but she still controlled the executive branch, which maintained connections to the United States, European governments, and international financial institutions. Daniel Ortega for his part led the Sandinista delegation in parliament and the mass organizations of workers, peasants, and women, while his brother Humberto Ortega headed the Nicaraguan Army. With both Ortega and Chamorro frustrated in their attempts to govern, Chamorro’s son-in-law, Antonio Lacayo negotiated a deal with the Ortega brothers: behind the façade of the legal institutions, the three of them would run the country. So began the counter-revolution in Nicaragua.

In fact, the counter-revolution had begun just before Chamorro put on the presidential sash. The Sandinista leaders had distributed state property to various FSLN mass organizations, theoretically to protect it from confiscation by the right, but had also distributed a good deal of real estate to themselves in what came to be called the piñata. During the Chamorro presidency and then under presidents Arnoldo Alemán Daniel Ortega and the FSLN continued to make deals with the former political allies of Somoza, most shamefully protecting Alemán who was guilty of corruption as long as he would protect Ortega who was accused by his stepdaughter of sexual abuse. Ortega’s power also survived the more right-wing but also less politically adroit presidency of somocista Enrique Bolaños.

During the years between 1990 and 2006, Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo completely transformed the Sandinista Front for National Liberation from the Cuban-inspired revolutionary group that it had been into a bourgeois political party whose principal function was electoral politics. Whatever revolutionary ideals had initially inspired Ortega and his comrades, during those years they sloughed them off. One after another former Sandinista comandantes began to resign from the party, some creating social democratic or socialist opposition groups. But Ortega’s political machine, perfectly willing to use its goon squads against political opponents, maintained itself in power.

Elected by a plurality, Ortega became president for a second time in 2007, and was reelected in 2011 and 2016. To win theses election, Ortega and Murillo had established an alliance with the rightwing of the Catholic Church, themselves marrying in the church, and then after Ortega’s election they pushed through the legislature one of the most draconian anti-abortion laws on the planet. Murillo launched a fierce attack on Nicaraguan feminist organizations, arguing that feminism was an imperialist project.

During his post-revolutionary years as president, Ortega formed ties to Nicaraguan capitalists, , for example, working with them to prevent independent union organization in the country’s maquiladoras. With Nicaragua unable to provide jobs for all, the government facilitated Nicaraguan migration to work in Costa Rica. While regularly condemning U.S. imperialism, Ortega negotiated relationships with the U.S. military and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. At the same time, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela provided Ortega with petroleum and Alba, Chávez’s development bank also provide millions in grants, personally controlled by Ortega.

Under Ortega and Murillo, Nicaragua’s government came to function much like that of Mayor Richard J. Daley in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, or like that of Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from the 1930s to the 2000s. The Ortega political machine used its control of jobs and the social welfare system to win elections, though hooliganism was employed when necessary. Ortega controlled not only the executive branch, but also the legislature, and the Supreme Court, and his children owned and managed most of the country’s TV and radio stations. Ortega still controlled most of the mass organizations created in the 1980s, though now hollowed out and largely controlled by promises of government handouts.

Protest and Popular Uprising

In 2013 Ortega announced that his government would construct a 50 billion dollar canal financed by Wang Jing, a magnate with ties to the Chinese government, Nicaraguan environmentalists and farmers who would be affected by the canal began to protest. Police and FSLN loyalists attacked the protesters, foreshadowing the response to the popular rebellion five years later. When in April of 2018 the government announced reforms in the social security system that would adversely affect retirees, some pensioners began to protest. Then students and others joined the protests which spread from Managua to half a dozen other cities.. Faced with the challenge the Ortega government deployed the police and within days 26 people were killed.

Negotiations that had begun in May sponsored by the Church between the government and the opposition broke down because of Ortega’s intransigence. Over the next few months Nicaragua witnessed a popular rebellion as students occupied the universities and people throughout the country blocked highways and fortified their towns. Ortega deployed not only the police but also FSLN shock troops who together over the next six months killed approximately 300, wounded thousands, and arrested hundreds, and eventually suppressed the rebellion. The government shut down opposition TV and other media and closed non-governmental organizations.

Today Ortega, the former revolutionary transformed into a counter-revolutionary, remains in power. The largest and most significant independent organizations in the country are on the right: COSEP, the Superior Council of Private Industry and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Both got along quite well with both the Somoza and Oregta dictatorships. They will not be forces for the liberation of the Nicaraguan people. The closing of critical media outlets and NGOs has weakened the popular movement, though networks of opposition activists still exist and come together in the Articulación de Movimientos Sociales y Organizaciones de Sociedad Civil (Nicaraguan Platform of Social Movements and Civil Society Organizations). Ortega and the FSLN have largely discredited the idea of socialism, and within Nicaragua, there is no organized left political party of any significance, though some of the students have an interest in the left.

The United States government can play no progressive role in Nicaragua and we in the United States should oppose economic U.S. sanctions, political pressure, and above all any military intervention. At the same time, the Nicaraguan people, their movement suppressed for the moment, continue to yearn for an end to the Ortega dictatorship and we should stand on their side.

The Protests in Puerto Rico Are About Life and Death

By: July 19, 2019
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Police donning anti-riot gear—many with their names and badge numbers covered—used teargas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and batons to dislodge protesters from the streets surrounding the Puerto Rican governor’s mansion in Old San Juan on Wednesday evening. Earlier that day, tens of thousands assembled at the Capitol building before marching to the governor’s mansion to demand the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. This marked the fifth day of protests and a significant escalation in police violence against civilians. A series of leaked chat conversations involving the governor and other members of his inner-circle provided an unlikely spark that ignited mounting frustrations with the abuses of local elites and the colonial government.

Last Tuesday, a small trove of messages from a private chat between Rosselló and a number of high-ranking officials sent on the encrypted messenger service Telegram were leaked to the press. The messages showed Rosselló and members of his administration using derogatory language to mock political rivals. Although the 11 pages of the chat initially released were damning on their own, Puerto Ricans were shocked by what they read when the Center for Investigative Journalism released a total of 889 pages to the public on Saturday.

The full leaked chat—although there are rumors that more leaked chats involving additional members of the Rosselló team could be on the way—demonstrated the utter contempt and disregard that the political ruling class has for the people of Puerto Rico. The chat paints Rosselló and his inner circle as little more than a pack of overgrown frat boys. The men in the chat engage in all manner of homophobic, transphobic, and misogynist “locker room talk,” calling political opponents putas (whores) and mamabichos (cocksuckers), commenting on women’s bodies, and insulting feminists and members of the LGBTQ+ community. While this alone is certainly worthy of condemnation, protesters are not taking to the streets because of the profanity in the chats. Rather, protesters are situating the chats within a broader context of structural violence, degradation, and exploitation that mark contemporary Puerto Rican society.

The combined catastrophes of the island’s debt crisis and Hurricane María have forced Puerto Ricans to endure an onslaught of both symbolic and material violence that must be negotiated on a near daily basis. From a surge in police killings and repression to rampant government corruption to the regular insults emanating from the colonial government, Puerto Ricans are confronted with constant attacks on their communities, bodies, mental health, and very humanity. The leaked chats painfully show how the current political formation in Puerto Rico, and the economic and political elites who sustain it, devalue life and facilitate the premature deaths of Puerto Ricans—particularly those who occupy the most vulnerable positions in society. The rhetoric and attitudes of the governor and his closest allies captured in the chat are ones that promote harm and death in myriad ways, from the outright incitement of violence to the promotion of a neoliberal politics of deadly neglect. This is something that protesters have been clear about since the beginning of the protests, although the mainstream media, and particularly U.S. based outlets, have narrowly framed the story around the governor and his associates’ inappropriate language and conduct. To suggest that thousands upon thousands from across the political spectrum are pouring into the streets with an intensity that has not been seen in years over foul language minimizes the ways that, for Puerto Ricans, these protests are quite literally about life and death.

 

It’s not just that Rosselló and others in the chat referred to women as putas and gatitas (kittens)—it’s that they did so in a context where feminist organizers have been calling on the governor to declare a state of emergency to deal with high rates of gender-based violence for over a year. The governor, when asked about the misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic language used throughout the chat, said that he was overworked and blowing off steam. But as feminists in Puerto Rico are quick to note, dozens of women have been killed at the hands of stressed out men who were just blowing off steam. The governor’s words aren’t just profane— as he has repeatedly refused to address the high rates of violence that women and queer people confront in Puerto Rico, they translate into lives lost. As Vanessa Contreras Capó, a spokesperson for the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción put it, “His attack was not that he called us ‘whores,’ ‘kittens,’ or any other macho epithet; the governor’s attack is that he still has not declared a state of emergency against gender violence.”

In one of the most disgusting exchanges in the chat, the “brothers,” as the participants refer to themselves, made light of the unprocessed bodies that accumulated in the Office of the Medical Examiner following Hurricane María. In response to comments made by Rosselló’s chief of staff Ricardo Llerandi, Rosselló notes in the chat that they have to work to bury the story—“Hay que matar esa historia rápido” (We have to kill that story quickly). Former chief financial officer and the governor’s representative to the Financial Oversight Board, Christian Sobrino, then replies, “Now that we’re on that subject, do we not have a corpse to feed our crows? They clearly need attention.”

As numerous studies have shown, thousands lost their lives as a result of government ineptitude following Hurricane María. Yet the dead emerge in the chat as little more than a problem of optics. The punchline of this macabre joke drives home what many Puerto Ricans already knew—that their lives mattered little to the local government or Washington, and that their deaths mattered only insofar as they represent a problem to be managed. The past couple of days have seen protesters outside of the governor’s mansion holding signs with the names of loved ones who died as a result of the crisis provoked by Hurricane María. These protestors connected the chat’s disrespect of the dead to the larger structural violence of the Rosselló administration’s mishandling of the recovery, as well as its efforts to cover up the true scale of the disaster. For Puerto Ricans, this wasn’t just a crude or distasteful joke—it was proof of the callousness and disdain for the public with which elites govern.

For Puerto Ricans, the leaked chat was only the latest reminder of the ways that their lives are devalued and their futures circumscribed by both colonial rule and the avarice of local elites. Protesters are speaking out against the content of the chats, but they also are voicing a set of much broader demands to fundamentally reshape Puerto Rican society. People are demanding a life-affirming and more just society as they fill the streets of Old San Juan. They are demanding an end to the austerity measures that have already caused great suffering and threaten the ability of future generations to remain in Puerto Rico and live a dignified life. They’re demanding an audit of the island’s $124 billion debt and the dissolution of the Financial Oversight Board, which critics slam for deepening Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States. They’re demanding that government officials be held responsible for acts of corruption and profiteering that further deplete public funds and strip nurturing institutions of necessary resources. They’re demanding a future where lives are valued and deaths are mourned.

What the chat makes clear is that the current political arrangement cannot provide that future for Puerto Ricans. That’s why people are taking to the streets—not only to demand Rosselló’s resignation, but also to clearly express that the current political situation is unacceptable. Wednesday’s protest was one of the largest in recent history and some are even likening the protests of the past few days to the mobilizations to eject the U.S. Navy from the island municipality of Vieques. Indeed, the protests have brought together an important cross-section of Puerto Rican society speaking to widespread discontent with the current political situation.

Tellingly, one of the most galvanizing figures of the protests has been El Rey Charlie, who mobilized motorcycle and four track enthusiasts to join the protests and wage audio warfare against the governor by revving their engines outside of the governor’s mansion at night. El Rey Charlie has successfully brought working class Puerto Ricans who are often ignored by both political elites and activists into the heart of these protests. On Wednesday night, El Rey Charlie and his crew rode through working class neighborhoods and public housing communities encouraging people to join their caravan to the governor’s mansion. Just as a motorized cavalcade of an estimated 3,000-4,000 people were about to ride into Old San Juan, the police declared the protest over, said the constitution no longer applied, and started to forcibly remove people from the area, nearly causing a stampede.

Protesters have committed to remain in the streets until Rosselló resigns despite threats from police commissioner Henry Escalera to defend the “democratic” government of Puerto Rico “to the last drop of blood.” It’s not clear what exactly will come next, as the governor refuses to step down in the face of mounting protests. Still, one thing is certain: For people taking to the streets, Rosselló and the elite boys’ club that he represents have no future in Puerto Rico.

Photograph by José Fuentes. 

Originally posted at the NACLA website.

A Possible Road to Independent Leftist Electoral Action

By: July 17, 2019
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Some months ago, a Gallup poll established that a majority of Americans, 57%, believe there is a need for a third major political party. Granted, this particular poll says nothing about the political orientation of this hypothetical third party. But given how other polls have made it clear that “fewer than half of young Americans view capitalism positively,” it should be obvious that at least most millennials want to vote for a party of the left that promotes — at least — robustly social-democratic policies, which the Democratic Party is not.

At the moment, Democratic Socialists of America is divided over what an effective socialist electoral strategy should look like. The barriers to forming an independent left-wing party with a chance at winning many seats at the national level are considerable: a combination of winner-take-all, single-member district elections instead of proportional representation in the House of Representatives and their state equivalents; extremely difficult party qualification requirements that vary from state to state; a presidential rather than a parliamentary electoral system; the existence of U.S. parties as state-run ballot lines with no real members except those who get elected on said ballot lines; and the two-party monopoly (or duopoly) which both Democrats and Republicans agree on maintaining. All of this leads to an extraordinarily firm structural bias toward only two national parties being electorally viable in the U.S.

This was the justification for the “realignment” plan of both DSA and its precursor, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), to turn the Democratic Party into a social-democratic party. Of course, despite our best efforts, along with those of the most principled left-liberals, realignment didn’t occur. At least since 1993, DSA’s de facto electoral strategy has been “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.” This usually means working for progressives who run in Democratic Party primaries (if said progressives are socialists and are loud about it, that’s even better), with occasional support for progressives who run as independents or Greens where those candidates have a serious chance at winning their races.

But this never constituted an actual strategy. On the contrary, it reflected DSA’s lack of a strategy. No “end-goal” was every clearly articulated. Furthermore, the innate flaws of the realignment strategy were never interrogated.

DSA members historically pointed out that the lack of a “tight” structure in the Democratic Party, with little party disciplining of its “members,” meant that when leftists, relying on “people’s cash” rather than corporate cash, run as Democrats, this isn’t some kind of betrayal of the working class. I agree. But precisely how is it possible to realign what isn’t even a real party — an independent organization with a clearly defined structure and dues-paying “ordinary” members — in the first place? How does one change a non-party into a party?

Furthermore, the realignment strategy was always excessively electoralist, with little vision beyond electoral gains for building a broader left movement. It effectively said that progressives winning every single Democratic primary, and every general election, was DSA’s greatest priority. This is wrong.

Electoral work is important; it’s a vital sphere of struggle and education and even power. Moreover, at the existing level of social consciousness, electoral victories make the left seem like a credible force in American society. But winning government elections should never be priority number one. It matters, but it’s not as if we’re going to change which social class runs society through executive signatures on bills. Only a broad, mass grassroots movement can do that. The realignment strategy was innately wrong-headed in the first place if one sees socialism as a necessary goal and not merely an ethical ideal or humanity’s best possible option.

The question is: how DSA can pursue an electoral strategy that isn’t “electoralist” and has a chance of overcoming the “Democratic Party problem?” Here are my thoughts.

After Realignment – What? 

Despite DSA no longer having an official commitment to realigning the Democratic Party, an increasing number of DSA members are running for office as dissident Democrats. Given that in most cases, there’s little choice in the matter (one runs as a Democrat or else one runs as a candidate that probably won’t even have an effect on the outcome of the race, let alone win the race), I am not completely opposed to this. But this doesn’t constitute a full electoral strategy. DSA still does not have one.

It does seem that an increasing number of DSA members advocate a “dirty break” with the Democratic Party, a plan recently articulated by Eric Blanc to use the Democratic ballot line right now in a way that can eventually implode the two-party system. This is closely related to the widely read Jacobin article by Seth Ackerman which advocates a sort of “party within a party” approach: creating a left-wing, dues-paying membership organization (which would consist not only of DSA but also members of grassroots activist groups of different types and would be supported by the best existing unions) that “would have chapters at the state and local levels, a binding program, a leadership accountable to its members, and electoral candidates nominated at all levels throughout the country…[and] all candidates would be required to adhere to the national platform.”

Of course, this real party, presumably, would usually run candidates on the Democratic ballot line, at least initially. This is understandable, but it leaves unanswered the question of when in the future the “dirty break” will happen. It leaves socialists with a sort of halfway-house between “realignment” and full-blown independent political action.

How do we translate the ideal of a “dirty break with the Democrats,” which currently exists (so to speak) in a future that may never come, with a real prospect of independent leftist electoral politics?

I offer a provisional perspective, extrapolated from what worked for Bernie Sanders in Vermont. Let DSA members run in Democratic primaries – not to win as Democrats, but to lock the Democratic establishment from running a candidate against them. In other words, if our candidate wins, let them be in office, change their affiliation from “Democrat” to “Independent,” and run again as independents, but do so unopposed on the center-left.

Sanders regularly runs in the Vermont Senate Democratic primary, wins, then refuses the nomination and runs (again) as an Independent. I am arguing that DSA members running for office should engage in a variant of what Sanders does. Those who have already won office as Democrats ought to also drop the “D” next to their name and put an “I” in its place. To the best of my knowledge, this is legal in all 50 states. We might ask our not-quite-socialist elected allies to do the same. Then we’ve “locked out” the corporate-funded Democrats. After all, how dare they run as spoilers! Do they want the Republicans to win?

Getting many unions to back this strategy will be a struggle. It will require a radically different labor movement: one that is class-conscious, militant, and more sympathetic to independent political action. But that’s what the rank-and-file strategy is focused on: radically changing, expanding, and improving organized labor.

It seems clear to me that there currently exists a mass base for left-wing policies, for radical reform: increasingly disaffected with the status quo, but unable to see much beyond the Democrats — largely out of justifiable fear of the Republicans and the “spoiler problem.” The strategy I’m suggesting eliminates the spoiler issue, while remaining answerable to this base (much like what Ackerman describes), and the fundraising apparatus (DNC, DCCC, etc.) of the establishment Democrats becomes irrelevant. DSA and our progressive allies would also simultaneously urge independent-minded voters to support a membership stream of dues that provides funds for candidates who refuse to accept corporate donations, and then use that stream to fund left-wing independents who run in Democratic primaries and promise to run again as independents should they prevail, and also for independent candidates in places where no independent arises with the Democratic primary system.

And yes, we should ask DSA members who have already won office as Democrats to change the letter after their names from (D) to (I). I don’t know if all of them, or any of them, will do this. But we should ask anyway. It’s a crucial step towards actually breaking with the Democrats: even if we aren’t able to fully break with running candidates as Democrats immediately, we are making clear through our “Democrat turned Independent” strategy that we do want to move outside the Democratic ballot line as soon as possible.

Conclusion

What I’ve sketched in this essay may be the only way to introduce truly independent leftist political action into the U.S. electoral system. I don’t claim it is “the” answer. But to me it seems both feasible and desirable.

What the Green Party and others have been trying to do for decades clearly doesn’t work. It can’t overcome the structural barrier of the two-party system. But realignment is dead and merely doing the “dissident Democrat” thing won’t automatically lead to a break with the Democrats at some unknown point in the future. What I’ve outlined can make the dirty break begin now. It can block the “real” Democratic Party as an electoral competitor, so that the left-wing vote isn’t divided.

Special thanks to DSA member Barry Finger for his help in articulating this strategy in the first place – I’m merely expanding upon his ideas.

Originally posted, in slightly different form, at DSA’s Socialist Forum.

A Plant Closing War, Viewed From Inside

By: July 16, 2019
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Last winter, protesters wearing yellow vests commanded center stage in France. Their grassroots challenge to the neoliberal regime of President Emmanuel Macron drew on a long tradition of labor militancy, including factory closing fights. When these protesters still had blue collar jobs and belonged to unions, they probably looked a lot more like the red-vest-wearing strikers in At War.

At War, a new movie from Cinema Libre Studio, vividly portrays shop floor resistance to corporate power in small-town France. The dialogue is in French with English subtitles. But the cast is largely actual factory workers. And the film opens with a scene familiar to anyone ever involved in manufacturing union bargaining in the U.S.

A workforce of 1,100 employed in a rural auto parts plant has already agreed to 8 million euros worth of givebacks to keep the place open. The Agen plant is still profitable but, according to management, no longer globally competitive. So now, the fictional Perrin Industries is terminating its local job protection deal that was the quid pro quo for labor concessions. By order from corporate headquarters in Germany, the factory will be closed and production shifted elsewhere.

Before meeting with the company about this sudden decision, union delegates hold a tense caucus among themselves. There is palpable anger and a sense of betrayal. Their principal shop floor leader is Laurent, played by award-winning French actor Vincent Lindon. Laurent, a fiery speaker, tries to lay down initial ground rules that include “no insulting management.” Instead, he urges everyone to “fight intelligently.”

Bargaining table restraint doesn’t last long when the plant manager informs union negotiators that “it’s not bosses versus workers anymore. It’s all of us together in the same boat.” As Laurent angrily points out, the area around Agen is already an “employment wasteland,” with few new job opportunities. Severance packages are not what the workers want. They intend to fight for the jobs they already have.

The rest of this hyper-realistic film depicts a factory occupation and a public campaign to keep the plant open. Few movies have ever done a better job of capturing the rollercoaster ride of a long strike, plus the look, sound, and feel of local union life, viewed from the inside.

Road Warriors

Among the challenges facing workers in any plant closing fight is getting public officials on their side, even in situations where the employer has benefited from past state subsidies or tax incentives. (“The Constitution protects private enterprise,” one French government envoy primly reminds the Perrin workers.)

The strikers in At War become “road warriors,” a group of roving union activists who travel to seek support and put pressure on targets elsewhere. They confront riot police during a mass demonstration at the Confederation of Industries in Paris. They defy an unfavorable court ruling and send roving pickets to shut down a sister plant 500 miles away. They solicit strike fund donations from other embattled union members. “Hello Perin workers,” says one message of solidarity, arriving at strike headquarters with a check enclosed. “We have the same assholes running our firm.”

Throughout their struggle, they seek a face-to-face meeting with the German CEO of the Dimke Group, the parent company of Perrin which has decided to close the Agen plant instead of selling it, as the strikers demand. Meanwhile, heated exchanges between worker representatives and their management counterparts continue at the bargaining table, as workers and their families face mounting economic pressure.

Two months into the strike, fissures develop between the various labor organizations represented in the plant—the FO, CGT, and a less militant enterprise union. Laurent discovers that the company unionists, worn out and discouraged, have been side-barring with management about “bumping up the check” (i.e. getting a better severance deal in return for accepting the plant closing).

Laurent and his outspoken ally Melanie accuse their co-workers of “licking the bosses’ boots.” But both face wider doubts about the viability of their strike strategy and leadership. “The plant’s closing down. It’s done,” says Bruno, a bargaining committee member ready to throw in the towel. With police and management protection, Bruno and others take off their strike stickers (which proclaim the unity of “1,100 in Struggle”) and return to work.

A “Quality Dialogue?”

Nevertheless, the struggle briefly takes a brighter turn when Martin Hauser, the German CEO, finally agrees to a meeting, mediated by the French ministry of employment. Hauser proves to be a world class corporate smoothie, fluent in French. He mentions that he has a French mother-in-law and a second home in the French countryside. He welcomes what he calls a “quality dialogue” (of the German labor relations sort).

That “dialogue” deteriorates fast when the Dimke Group dismisses a rival firm’s “unrealistic” offer to buy the Agen plant. “French law requires an owner to look for buyers, but does not require them to accept any offer,” Hauser reminds the trade unionists. In exasperation, the CEO accuses them of “refusing to see market reality,” which he likens to “demanding a whole new world or living in another world,”

It’s not union negotiators who have the final word in this frustrating exchange. An angry crowd of strikers make the evening news by surrounding Hauser’s car, after the meeting, and over-turning it. The CEO and two bodyguards emerge bloodied and shaken up. In the ensuing media and political backlash, union members are thrown on the defensive, leading to bitter personal accusations and recriminations.

At War pulls no punches about the personal sacrifices and weighty responsibilities of workers who become strike leaders. This film should be required viewing during union training of shop stewards, local officers, and bargaining committee members.

Cinema Libre Studio wants to reach a much broader audience when the film opens in New York, Los Angeles and other cities in July. It’s also looking for labor organizations to sponsor showings to their own members. Let’s hope that some unions take advantage of this offer—because the war on workers, whether in France or the U.S., shows no sign of letting up.

Upcoming Screenings

New York
Opens July 19
Village East Cinemas
181-189 2nd Ave. @ 12th St.

Los Angeles
Opens July 26
Laemmle’s Royal Theatre
11523 Santa Monica Blvd.

For more information on screening the film before a labor audience, contact Jen Smith at jsmith@cinemalibrestudio.com or 818-588-3033.

Originally posted at Labor Notes.

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