Climate Change and Capitalism: A Political Marxist View

By: July 15, 2019
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Viewed from the perspective of geological history, our current climatic and economic conditions are unusual. For most of the last 60 million years, the climate has been wildly unstable. It was only 10,000 years ago that it settled into its current stable state, and within this period that the Holocene emerged, during which human societies shifted their relationship with nature though agriculture, and then creating complex settled socio-economic forms, including capitalism.

Despite its omnipresence today, capitalism itself is very young. But it has its roots in that stabilisation of the climate and the subsequent development of agriculture. Fully-fledged global capitalism has been with us for no more than 300 years. In the 4.5 billion year history of the earth, capitalism is a brief moment within the blink of an eye that is human existence.

But this brief moment is a global force. It is capitalism that has placed us on a path to leave the stable climate of the Holocene. Thanks to capitalist development, the earth is currently 0.8 of a degree warmer than the pre-industrial average. Without overthrowing capitalism, we are likely to warm the earth to levels that humans as a species have never lived with.

This should terrify socialists. As I will argue here, the environmental system and the economy have co-evolved. The economy is dependent on the environment. Once we leave the stable climatic conditions of the last 10,000 years, we have very little guidance on how to build a socio-economic system that works. There is no particular reason to think the systems we have developed in one set of environmental conditions will flourish in another. There is also no reason to believe that such conditions provide fertile ground for the development of a more compassionate or humane socio-economic system.

If we want to stand a chance of building socialism in the near future, we must become eco-socialists and stop catastrophic climate change now. At the same time, to stop catastrophic climate change, environmentalists must also become eco-socialists. The dynamics that drive climate change are core to capitalism. Serious action on climate change will necessarily amount to the first steps of a programme to end capitalism.

The economy, the energy system, and the environment: co-evolutionary systems.

The economy, the energy system and the environment have evolved together. They draw on one another, passing materials between them and absorbing one another’s wastes. All economic activity ultimately rests on the transformation of material resources. These must be drawn from the environment and then worked by labour. Marx makes this interdependency explicit:

The use values… i.e. the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements–matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature.1

Marx uses the example of linen–which is produced by workers (labour) who transform the fibres of the flax plant (environment). But this interdependency also holds true for more modern commodities. For example, the servers that host the files for music streaming services are made of up various minerals and metals that have been rearranged by labour.

An additional interdependency comes in the form of energy. At every stage of the production of a commodity, energy is being used to transform matter from one form to another. Metals are heated, melted and transformed into iPhones. Cotton is grown, harvested, woven, and dyed to make scrubs worn by surgeons. The energy used in these processes cannot be created. It can only be transformed.

All energy used in the economy is entropic: it comes from a repurposing of energy found in the earth system, and exacting it in return for a cost. Coal is dug from the ground and burnt, solar energy is captured by photovoltaics, or in plants that we cook and eat. The energy system which enables economic activity is entirely dependent on the environment.

We see here how the environment influences the economy. The economy is the process of transforming materials extracted from the environment by repurposing energy flows from the earth system. The result of this, is, to quote Marx’s citation of the economist William Petty, that when it comes to material wealth, “labour is its father and the earth its mother”.2 But at the same time, the environment and the energy system are shaped by the economy. The priorities of the economic system determine the valuation of each element, as well as which materials are extracted, changing the composition, look and dynamics of the environment.

The practice of extraction itself is not exclusive to capitalism. Agricultural practices that pre-date capitalism have reshaped our landscapes. Take sheep farming, for example.3 Heavy grazing tends to change the biological make up of heathland. Eventually, heathland may lose all of its herbs and woody species and become grassland. As grasses can survive for longer as the sheep eat them than woody plants and herbs, the transition from heathland to grassland can make conditions more favourable for sheep grazing as the sheep have more to eat. This is less helpful for bird life, as the grasses are a poor habitat substitute and the sheep compete with birds for certain types of fruit, and reduce the availability of various insects. Through pastoral grazing economic activity has transformed former heathland landscapes.

Climate change is another example of the co-evolution of the economy and the environment, but this time, one specific to capitalism. As we will see, the two are inextricably linked. Without fossil fuel deposits, capitalism could not have become the dominant force it is today. Similarly, without capitalism, fossil fuels may never have become the backbone of the economy.

Coal, the great divergence and the origins of capitalism

Between the mid 1500s and 1900, there was an explosion of coal use in England. On average, English coal use more than doubled every half century during this time period. By 1900 coal represented 92% of English energy use and was providing 25 times more energy than all energy sources combined had in the mid 1500s.

Over this time period the English economy also grew rapidly. For mainstream economic historians, the period from 1700 onwards marks the start of ‘the great divergence’. England began the industrial revolution and its economy took off, becoming much larger than other economies that had until that point been a similar size.

It is not a coincidence that coal use and economic growth expanded simultaneously. Coal is a high quality fuel. It offers a much greater amount of energy out for every unit of energy required to produce it than wood, for example. Consequently, it enables more work to be done–more materials transformed – than muscle power alone, or even wood or water–the dominant fuel sources in the nascent English industrial economy.

But the geographical distribution of coal is not, by itself, enough to explain English economic growth or the ‘great divergence’. In 1700, China had widespread domestic coal use, just like England. And until 1700 China had a similar sized economy, with similar levels of market activity. But neither Chinese coal use nor the Chinese economy grew exponentially in the way that England’s did.

The difference was the consolidation of capitalist social relations in England. We can locate the pressures that lead to capitalism, and the capitalist exploitation of coal, in the agrarian economy of 1500s England. As these pressures grew, they drove coal use and economic growth in England. Though pre-capitalist China was incredibly well-developed, had an extensive use of wage-labour within markets, it never became dominated by proto-capitalists, and so did not develop the same systematic pressures. Coal use and the economy, subsequently, did not see the same qualitative expansion.

Political Marxism and the Fossil Economy

Archetypical of the Political Marxist approach to modes of production, Ellen Meiksens Wood argues that a capitalist economy is one where a majority of people depend on the market to meet their basic needs.4 This distinguishes capitalism from feudalism, in which there is a large peasant class largely self-sufficient in terms of basic needs, and in which the more powerful classes depend not on market power to support their consumption, but on military and extra-economic power. Wood further distinguishes between the form of markets under capitalism and those that characterise pre-capitalist economies. She argues that markets originally functioned and made profit by providing a means of getting goods that could only be produced in one part of the world to other parts, where those goods could not be produced. She goes on to argue that capitalist markets operate differently: profit here is achieved by reducing costs and improving productivity.

Though substantially debated, this approach was developed by Wood (alongside Richard Brenner) as a reaction to what she saw as ahistorical explanations of the role of markets in the development of capitalism—particular the claim, coming from Adam Smith, that capitalism is “…the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature…the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.”5Against this, Wood argues that capitalism began in England because of its unique constellation of social conditions.

In her landmark work The Origin of Capitalism,6 Wood argues that capitalism could only have begun in agrarian England. Unlike other nations with similarly sized economies, England had the unique combination of a large national market, substantial numbers of tenant farmers (as opposed to peasants, tied to the land by social convention), and highly centralised state power. These three components come together to create a transition to a market dominated economy. Highly centralised state power took political and military power away from land owners. So unlike in Holland, for example, the primary way for landowners to exploit the surplus of their workers was through market means rather than direct coercion. This was possible because of the existence of the large national market in which they could sell goods for a profit, and because of the existence of tenant farmers, which meant they could remove unproductive farmers from their land.

It is the development of capitalist markets, as Wood describes them, that creates the conditions for fossil fuel exploitation. Capitalist markets, like all economic systems, turn on the necessity of using economic tools to extract surplus. This dynamic creates capitalism’s drives to reinvest in productivity growth and to discipline the workforce in order to increase output. Because landowners were now dependent on the market for their own livelihoods, they tried to reduce costs and maximise outputs. This fundamental change in the nature of production created a system in which the ability of energy to do extra work became very attractive. Although Wood never directly discusses energy, her work has influenced Andreas Malm, whose Fossil Capital7 does pick up the energy question.8

Malm argues that under the conditions of capitalism, coal came to be a tool of social control. Coal centralises production, bringing workers under one roof. This serves the dual purpose of making them less able to embezzle from their employers, allowing improved scales of production, and also enabling employers to more easily regulate the times of work and levels of production. In addition, coal—alongside the machinery it allows—improves productivity: by giving them a greater source of energy than food and their muscles alone, coal increases the amount of output that can be produced by workers.

Only in England did the capitalist class benefit from these features of coal. Economic structures elsewhere followed fundamentally different logics that did not reward productivity and output growth. Though markets existed outside of England, central power and surplus was derived from military and political power, and only peripherally from economic power. Consequently, although productivity increases may have occurred by chance, societies were not systematically driven by the need to continuously produce more, or to do so more productively. As Debeir et al. put it, Chinese coal use:

…did not create new social needs, did not constantly push the borders of its own market outwards…proto-industrialisation and economic growth were remarkable achievements but failed to generate an accelerated division of labour.9

To understand this more fully, let us now examine the nature of capitalist markets in more detail.

Capitalist Markets and the Pressures to Grow

The ecological economists Tim Jackson and Peter Victor call the above dynamic the “productivity trap”.10 It occurs because, under capitalism, workers must be able to sell their labour to be able to obtain a decent standard of living. Capitalists depend on market power for their profits and therefore constantly reinvest in productivity gains. Productivity gains mean fewer workers are needed to produce a unit of output. So if output stops growing, employment will fall. This creates a legitimate desire amongst workers for more growth, and gives governments a mandate to do everything they can to expand economic activity.

Moreover, this ‘productivity trap’ is self-reinforcing. The expansion of markets drives the division of labour. Adam Smith argued that as workers become more specialised, they are better able to improve the production processes they’re engaged with. And at a higher level of specialisation you develop whole classes of workers whose job is purely to make production more efficient. In this way market expansion itself leads to productivity gains. But as people become more specialised this means that they come to depend on markets to get more and more of their goods—because (to use a personal example) people who sit in offices reading long-dead economists for a living don’t spend much time growing food, sewing clothes, or saving lives. So the expansion of markets creates both the conditions for further growth and the need for it.

We also need to talk about consumer capitalism. Innovations leading to productivity gains do not in themselves create a market for the greater volume of goods produced. This means that capitalism must alter consumption as well as production. Today, this increasingly involves the stimulation and artifical creation of consumer needs and desires by the capitalist class—who need us to keep consuming if they are to continue earning profits. William Morris argued that in order to get and maintain profits, capitalists must sell a “mountain of rubbish…things which everybody knows are of no use”. In order to create demand for these useless goods, capitalists stirred up:

a strange feverish desire for petty excitement, the outward token of which is known by the conventional name of fashion—a strange monster born of the vacancy of the lives of rich people

A substantial body of more modern work suggests that current society encourages the idea that consumption is the path to self-betterment. Psychologist Philip Cushman argues that the dominant present configuration of the “self” is as an empty vessel that requires filling up with consumer goods.11 The emptiness, he argues, comes from a lack of community, tradition, and shared meaning. These are not things that will be solved through consumption. Under consumer capitalism, there comes a collective inability to imagine social and personal change except through consumption. As a result, even ‘radical’ leftist futures tend to revolve around ever increasing levels of material consumption, rather than imagining new ways to live that prioritise our need for community and purpose beyond consumption.

No decarbonisation under capitalism

Because of the structural drivers towards growth that we see under capitalism, it is extremely unlikely that capitalism can avoid catastrophic climate change. The structural drive for growth means that efforts to reduce carbon emissions will be overwhelmed by the expansion of economic activity. This is controversial to most mainstream environmentalists (and to many socialists). But it is the clear experience of the history of capitalism.

To date, resources have not been conserved under capitalism. Rather when we become more efficient or find new resources, this frees up resources that are used by other parts of the capitalist machine. This explains why, for example, renewable energy and nuclear power remain only a small part of the global energy system (Figure 2). Under capitalism, low-carbon energy sources have grown but they have not replaced fossil fuel at any meaningful scale. Instead low-carbon energy is simply another energy pot available to fuel growth in economic activity in order to generate profits.

Figure 2 Global Primary Energy Use by type, 1900-2014. Source: Author’s own calculations based on data from De Stercke, 2014.

The same is also true of energy efficiency gains. Energy efficiency can be a key contributor for decarbonising the global economy. But only if it is coupled to a plan to limit the size of the economy. Under capitalism, energy efficiency measures actually drive economic growth. This happens for the same reason renewable energy doesn’t lead to decarbonisation. Energy efficiency improves productivity and reduces costs. In this way it reinforces capitalist growth imperatives, driving the expansion of the economy which requires more energy to be used overall.

This is also why progressive action on climate change will undermine capitalism. We will only successfully avoid catastrophic climate change if we are able to break the dominance of the market, and break the social imaginary that ineffectually ties fulfilment to consumption.

So, where do we go from here?

The economy, the energy system, and the environment are all inextricably linked. Combining ecological economics and Political Marxism, I have set out a framework in which climate change can be seen not only as a consequence of capitalism but as fundamental to it. Widespread fossil fuel use was enabled by, and necessary for, the capitalist dynamics of productivity growth and expansion. Climate change is a feature, not a bug of capitalism.

To avoid catastrophic climate change, we have to break the expansionary cycle of the economy. Otherwise technological improvements, renewable energy, and energy efficiency gains will do nothing but add to the stock of ways that capitalists grow the economy and their profits. Likewise carbon taxes and other market mechanisms will simply reinforce the core dynamics of the market and any positive effects will be overwhelmed by growth. Growth will increase energy use, including fossil fuel use. This will plunge us into a world that we do not know how to live in. It is likely that ‘hothouse earth’ will eventually destroy capitalism. But not before destroying the livelihoods of millions through extreme weather, greater incidence of disease, and ecological breakdown. There is no reason to believe this will lead to a better future.

Breaking the expansionary cycle of the economy in a just way requires rolling back markets. We must instead use commons, household, and state-based production as the principal means of meeting the collective needs of society. Only in this way can we break the societal drive for productivity growth and expansion. There is nothing inherently more sustainable in non-market forms of production (all economic activity uses energy), but these systems lack the expansionary drive of markets. Consequently, energy efficiency gains and new technologies can be used to replace fossil fuels rather than add to them.

This transition has the potential to be hopeful, a chance to build a more humane system. This system will be materially poorer than today’s society. But this is not ‘eco-austerity’. Much of the energy we use today is in producing goods that we do not need, that do not fulfil our needs. Richard Seymour articulates this in the context of the labour theory of value:

The overproduction of ‘stuff’ is largely achieved by making a costly withdrawal from the worker’s body, a form of life-impoverishing austerity. And a great deal of that ‘stuff’ is not for workers’ consumption, but rather, where it is not consumed as profit and dividends, is dead labour whose main effect is to achieve a further extraction of labour. We might think of energy conservation as class self-defence.

Put another way, consumption is an ineffective way of building a good life. Collectively limiting our consumption could open a path to a better economic system.

There are links between such a program and other radical leftist programs for change. Freedom from the market and repurposing of production along the lines of social need rather than profit are central to the post-work movement.12 But this movement lacks a critique of consumerism, and its analysis of capitalism fails to engage rigorously with insights from ecological economics. Visions of mass space flight continue the fantasy that consumption can fulfil us, and rely on the notion of continued expansion of output and energy use. It is unclear why those who advocate ‘fully automated luxury communism’ (for example) believe that a political programme whose key appeal lies in having more stuff will find itself able to break free from the expansionary cycle that lies at the heart of the ecological catastrophe. If the promise is more mass consumption, doing away with the most reliable and efficient energy sources to which we have access will be a hard political sell. There can be no avoiding growth in fossil fuel use under capitalism. But this does not mean that anti-capitalist programmes are all equally good solutions. The route forward is to embrace these radical impulses, but critique their obsession with consumption, and highlight the destructive dynamics they share with capitalism.

This marks out the terrain for political struggle. Socialists must engage mainstream environmentalists and work with them. We have a common foe in the big capital of the fossil industry. Many environmentalists are critical of the economy as it is, but lack a full analysis of its mechanics. Extinction Rebellion is a key example of this: a critical yet ‘apolitical’ movement. Yet they offer perhaps our best hope for building institutions that give us community, autonomy, and purpose, and for breaking with the expansionary capitalist fossil economy.

  1. Marx, Karl. (1856) 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, p.133 ↩
  2. ibid. p.134 ↩
  3. Ross, L.C., Austrheim, G., Asheim, LJ. et al. ‘Sheep grazing in the North Atlantic region: A long-term perspective on environmental sustainability’. Ambio (2016) 45(5):551-566. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-016-0771-z ↩
  4. Wood, Ellen Meiksens. 2017. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso. ↩
  5. Smith, Adam. (1776) 1976. An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.17. ↩
  6. Wood (2017). ↩
  7. Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso. ↩
  8. ibid. p.258, 263 ↩
  9. Deléage, Jean-Paul, Jean-Claude Debeir, Daniel Hémery. 1991. In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilisation Through the Ages. London: Zed Books, p.59 ↩
  10. Jackson, Tim and Peter Victor. ‘Productivity and work in the ‘green economy’: Some theoretical reflections and empirical tests’. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions (June 2011) 1(1):101-108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2011.04.005 ↩
  11. Cushman, Philip. ‘Why the Self is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology’. American Psychologist (1990) 45(5):599-611. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.45.5.599. ↩
  12. Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Anti-Work Politics and Post-Work Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ↩

Originally posted at New Socialist.

In Defense of Socialist Internationalism: Answering the Propaganda of the Authoritarian “Left”

By: July 14, 2019
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We have been slimed. An article by Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal on the recent Socialism 2019 Conference — which appears on their rancid website, The GrayZone, and is apparently being widely circulated — is a scurrilous attack not only on the conference itself, but also on one of our editors, Dan La Botz, and indeed on the entire political outlook of socialism from below, which has always been the defining perspective of our journal.

New Politics was a sponsor of the conference, a major gathering that drew 1,500 participants – members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), former members of the now defunct International Socialist Organization (ISO), and a host of unaffiliated radicals and socialists as well as people from other groups. We were proud to support the event, which featured dialogue and debate among people who, in stark contrast to Blumenthal and Norton, recognize the centrality of democracy, labor rights, and civil liberties to socialism.

Norton and Blumenthal characterize the conference speakers as “a motley crew of regime-change activists” eager to “demonize Official Enemies of Washington” – by which they mean the authoritarian governments of Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Nicaragua. For Norton and Blumenthal, this “demonization” consists in “exploiting the cause of human rights or labor rights to undermine and destabilize foreign governments that Washington has targeted for regime change.” To them, denouncing China’s mass incarceration of up to a million members of the country’s Uyghur minority in concentration camps, or even drawing attention to it, to take but one example, is nothing more than carrying out the agenda of the State Department.

What Norton and Blumenthal, and their co-thinkers in what they call the “anti-imperialist left,” exhibit is essentially a revival of Cold War thinking, with a distinctly neo-Stalinist flavor: the world is divided into two camps, one dominated by the United States, and the other consisting of its enemies. The left must solidarize itself with the anti-Washington camp, no matter how brutal, corrupt and dictatorial its leaders, no matter how many of its citizens languish in prison cells, suffer in torture chambers, or lie dead in the streets. We at New Politics unreservedly reject this morally bankrupt politics. We have always stood for vigorous, consistent opposition to both U.S. imperialism and to the tyrannies that pose as socialist or anti-imperialist.

Norton and Blumenthal do not merely claim that those in the socialism from below tradition “objectively” promote the interests of U.S. imperialism; they falsely accuse us – and other speakers at the Socialism 2019 Conference, such as the heroic journalist Anand Gopal, who delivered a powerful talk on the death of the Arab Spring in Syria — of actually supporting Washington’s wars and actively promoting the work of the CIA and the State Department. These are shameless lies that defame lifelong principled radicals and socialists. Even a cursory examination of the New Politics journal and website will demonstrate with the utmost clarity that we have never given any support to U.S. imperialism. Our co-editor Dan La Botz has fought against every war and military intervention launched by Washington since Vietnam. At the same time, we stand by our critique of the governments of Cuba and Nicaragua as part of our consistent defense of democratic rights and opposition to the rule of elites everywhere.

Norton and Blumenthal make much of the fact that some of the conference speakers were affiliated with human rights and labor rights groups that have received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy. New Politics has carried articles exposing and condemning the NED and its influence on groups such as the American Federation of Teachers; quite often members of such groups have little or no idea what the NED represents, but we think unions, human rights and left groups should have nothing to do with it. We reject, however, the crude claim that receipt of NED money automatically discredits an organization or a movement.

The soulless realpolitik of Norton and Blumenthal has nothing in common with an authentic left, “anti-imperialist” or any other kind. The left with which New Politics identifies is a political tradition of generous sympathies, always ready to offer solidarity to struggles for democracy and human dignity wherever they occur, a left that believes in the right of all people to control their governments and societies. It is of course true that Washington only invokes the crimes of Putin, Xi, Assad, Ortega, etc., hypocritically to justify its own imperialist aims. But it is entirely different for an independent left that combats its own government’s reactionary foreign and domestic policies to denounce these despots and their regimes and defend their victims. New Politics, as we have said, rejects the “campism” of Norton and Blumenthal. But there is one camp that we support wholeheartedly: the third camp of the oppressed and exploited everywhere. Neither Washington nor Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, Havana, and Managua! For the third camp of socialist freedom!

Aaron Amaral
Saulo Manuel Colón Zavala
Thomas Harrison
Michael Hirsch
Nancy Holmstrom
Dan La Botz
Scott McLemee
Jason Schulman
Stephen R. Shalom
Bhaskar Sunkara
Edward Tapia
Lois Weiner
Julia Wrigley

Against the GrayZone Slanders

By: July 12, 2019
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A recent article in the GrayZone viciously slanders the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Jacobin magazine, and Haymarket books, accusing these sponsors of the Socialism conference in Chicago last weekend of hosting paid government agents engaged in attempts at regime change in several countries. In addition to those three organizations, the longtime leftist journal on Latin America NACLA and the Brooklyn-based Marxist Education Project are also similarly defamed. And I myself am particularly singled out, with the suggestion that I am complicit in some Republican plot to overthrow the government of Nicaragua.

The GrayZone article makes the crude, simplistic argument that any criticism of nations that are the enemies of the United States—such as Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, China, or Russia—is “anti-anti-imperialism.” After the events of the last hundred years is it really necessary to reply to such sectarian and simple-minded smears? Apparently it is.

The opening sentence of the GrayZone article sets the tone: “Socialism is now apparently brought to you by the U.S. State Department.” It also represents the method: bundle together and tar everyone. Only the most naïve reader could believe that the entire Socialism conference, an institution on the far left for years, and DSA, with its 60,000 members and a wide variety of views, were bought and paid for by the State Department. The Socialism conference, an internationalist event in which a wide variety of radical views were presented and argued, involved dozens of speakers and over 1,500 participants, organized on the basis of furthering the anti-capitalist, socialist, and anti-imperialist movements. (One can consult the We Are Many website for a decade’s worth of Socialism conference talks on war, imperialism, and U.S. foreign policy.)

The GrayZone attack is based on a conspiracy theory, the notion that the omniscient and omnipotent State Department and other U.S. government agencies finance and control the most important organizations and institutions on the American left with the goal of furthering regime change in other countries. Presumably a great U.S. government puppet master in Washington, D.C., a kind of State Department Wizard of Oz sitting at a console, perhaps in the hollow interior of the Washington Monument, dispatches his robot-like minions to deliver instructions and cash to DSA, Jacobin, and Haymarket. Anyone who has followed discussions in DSA, read Jacobin, scanned the list of titles of Haymarket, or perused NACLA will be surprised at how little the puppet master is getting for his money, for in all of those spheres internationalism and anti-imperialism thrive and socialist points of view clash in democratic debate.

One could hardly begin to reply to the many wild accusations in the article and I should not speak for others, so I will only discuss here the accusations made against me, which suggest that I am a State Department agent calling for the U.S. to bring about regime change in Nicaragua.

Socialism from Below 

I am a proponent of what was historically called “third camp socialism” and is today often called “socialism from below.” It might simply be called Marxism or revolutionary socialism. I learned this internationalist socialism in the movement in which I have been involved for almost fifty years. In the 1960s and 1970s I was a conscientious objector and anti-war activist during the U.S. war against Vietnam, and in the 1980s a part of the Central America Solidarity movement. From 1994 to 2015 I was the editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis, a joint publication of the United Electrical Workers (UE) and the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo created to promote solidarity between U.S. and Mexican workers. I’ve been active in International Socialists (I.S.) and today am involved with Solidarity and DSA.

Throughout my years in the movement, my comrades and I firmly believed that we must support working people everywhere in their struggles for democracy and for workers’ power and that this was essential to the struggle for socialism. I think it would be worthwhile to explain the principles that guided us in our thinking and our work, for while the GrayZone article is slander, its authors subscribe to a very different underlying political position that should be analyzed, understood, and rejected. While the position they hold has its roots in Stalinism, among some it has evolved into support for modern capitalist and authoritarian states and it sometimes merges with far right positions of neo-fascists. (For an article that discusses these developments see here.)

Let’s go back over the last fifty years and see how these positions developed and differed. During the Vietnam War, opposition to the United States and support for national self-determination for the Vietnamese among young activists sometimes developed into support for the Vietnamese Communist Party and its leader. One often heard at the protest demonstrations, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is Going to Win.” While this drift from opposition to the U.S. government to support for the Vietnamese government was understandable as a gut reaction to the horrors of the U.S. war, it was also very problematic. Most people chanted this slogan naively, but some gradually became supporters of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist government, and of the Soviet Union that was backing it. Few in the movement pointed out that Ho and the Vietnamese Communists were Stalinists who had murdered their leftist competitors and strove to construct a Soviet-style state in Vietnam, which is eventually what happened.

We in the I.S. supported the Vietnamese people in their struggle against U.S. imperialism, though we did not back the Vietnamese Communist party-government. Still, we believed the Vietnamese had the right to their national independence and to make their own decisions about their political leadership, but we thought they should be able to do so democratically. The Vietnamese would clearly need democracy if they were to construct socialism, but under Ho and the Communists there would be none. So while we were for national self-determination for the Vietnamese people in their fight against the United States, we did not support the Communist government.

In 1969, when I joined I.S., its slogan, “Neither Washington nor Moscow—For International Socialism” appealed to me because while the United States was invading Vietnam to prevent the country from achieving its national sovereignty, at the same time the Soviet Union was invading Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring movement for democracy. Genuine anti-imperialists, I believed, had to oppose both U.S. imperialism and Soviet imperialism. The Vietnamese and the Czechs, I thought, had the right to determine their own fate. While the ruling parties of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia called themselves socialists, in reality they were Communist dictatorships that oppressed and exploited their own people.

Retrospectively, we could see that the same had been the case in Hungary when in 1956 a workers’ revolution broke out against the Hungarian Communist government, a rebellion that was crushed by Soviet tanks. Thousands of Communists around the world left their parties after that because it had become clear that Communism had nothing to do with workers interests or with the goal of democratic socialism. The small European far left had supported the workers’ uprising against the Hungarian Communists, but the revolt was crushed too soon for them to have any impact.

Let’s take another related example for our experience in the movement. In 1980 shipyard workers in Gdansk formed the Polish Solidarity Labor Union (Solidarność) and ten million workers in Poland went on strike against the Communist dictatorship. It was the most important movement for democracy in Eastern Europe’s post-war history. In Poland Solidarność had various political currents, from far right, supported by Pope John Paul II and U.S. President Ronald Reagan, to a left wing of Polish democratic socialists supported from abroad by French and other European revolutionary socialists. We supported the movement for democracy as a whole, while promoting the left over the right. The Polish Army backed by the Soviet Union crushed the movement, but Solidarność had undermined the Communist system and helped to contribute to its eventual collapse a decade later.

If the Soviet Union under its bureaucratic Communist rulers was already a reactionary imperialist state, so too is the capitalist, imperialist Russia that followed and is today ruled by the reactionary and authoritarian Vladimir Putin. Today we support those in Russia, the journalists (some of whom have been assassinated), the LGBTQ movement that has been violently repressed, and the workers in struggle for a better life and a voice in their society. While opposing the Russian government, which we would be delighted to see overthrown by its people, we oppose any U.S. efforts at regime change. Similarly in China we support the Uyghurs’ and the Tibetans’ struggle for autonomy against cultural genocide, the peasants’ fight against the vast land-grabs taking place, and the workers’ fight for genuine independent labor unions.

While it is true that Russia and China today oppose the United States, it has nothing to do with anti-imperialism. They do so because we have a return to great power struggles for the re-division of the world, such as we saw before World War I and World War II. Russia and China, the United States and Europe, and to a lesser extent Japan are today’s great powers that use economic and political methods to attempt to dominate various regions, strategic geographical locations, oil and other valuable minerals, and, of course, lesser states. Some of these powers form alliances, such as the United States with Israel and Saudi Arabia, sub-imperial powers in the Middle East. This is little different from the struggles between Britain, France, Germany, the United States, and Japan at the time of World War II, and in that period the United States paraded as an anti-imperialist power against the European empires, while Japan put itself forward in Asia as the shield against the white colonialists of Europe and the United States. It would be ludicrous to talk about the anti-imperialist United States and Japan then and it should be similarly laughable today to talk about the anti-imperialism of China or Russia.

In the 1980s, during the Central America solidarity movement, we supported the peoples of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in their struggles against their own authoritarian governments, their ruling classes, and above all the domination of the United States. Some of us went to those countries, particularly Nicaragua, to help. We supported a variety of movements in Central America through myriad organizations in the United States. We worked in opposition to the United States and for the victory of the revolutionary forces in Central America. Yet at the same time within the solidarity movement here we discussed the weaknesses of some of these organizations. Within some of the movements there were Stalinist Communist groups aiming at creating a Soviet-style government; others were weakened by the adoption of the elitist guerrilla foco model, the notion that a handful of armed revolutionaries would liberate the nation; yet others failed to find a way to unite the mestizo and indigenous elements. Some, however, had come to the conclusion that only a democratic movement of working people, mestizo and indigenous, could liberate their societies. While within the solidarity movements we discussed the weaknesses and the strengths in these groups and advocated worker power and democracy, we did not stop supporting the movement as a whole nor did we give up fighting the U.S. government.

Let me turn to another case and talk about it more personally. When the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) led the rebellion of indigenous people in Chiapas, Mexico in 1994, I wrote pamphlets in their support and toured several cities and campuses speaking on the need to support and defend the Zapatistas against the Mexican government. As a result of my work, when the EZLN called the National Democratic Convention of Mexico in August of 1994, I was an invited guest to their convention in the jungle. While I had doubts about their formerly guerrilla leadership and differences with the Zapatistas’ political views, I stood on their side against their government and mine. To educate people about the movement, I wrote a book, Democracy in Mexico, to support the various peasant, labor, women’s, and political struggles taking place in Mexico, including the Zapatistas. I did not have to agree with the programs of teach of these movements to support their fight for democracy.

Bear with me for one last example. In the mid-1990s, while living in Mexico City, I along with others organized a protest demonstration of Americans and Mexicans in front of the U.S. Embassy to protest the U.S. government’s tacit support for a rightwing Cuban émigré group called Brothers to the Rescue that was invading Cuban airspace. Though I am not a supporter of the Cuban Communist one-party state, I helped to organize that protest because I believed that the Cubans had the right to freedom from U.S. aggression. At the same time, the socialists and organizations with which I work—while opposing all U.S. sanctions, boycotts, and embargoes and any military intervention—have supported Cuban dissidents (some small “d” democrats, some anarchists, and some socialists) who advocate independent labor unions, civil rights, or a multi-party democracy.

My Involvement with Nicaragua

I went with friends to Nicaragua in 1985, following the Sandinista revolution and during the Contra War, taking medical supplies to a hospital there in solidarity with the besieged Nicaraguan people. The U.S.-backed Contras were attacking non-combatant school teachers, farmers, and communities and medical supplies were badly needed. Like many others, because I was earning a living, raising a family, and involved in other political activities, after the Sandinistas lost the election of 1990 and the right wing came to power, I had not paid much attention to Nicaragua. Then in 2013 a colleague asked me to accompany a student group that would live and work there for four months. While in Nicaragua, we toured the country visiting many local social organizations and NGOs and met with people of a wide variety of political opinions. I was delighted, for example, to be able to talk with Father Fernando Cardenal, the Jesuit priest who championed Liberation Theology and had played an important role in the first days of the Nicaraguan revolutionary government.

While in Nicaragua, I read many memoirs of former Sandinista leaders, histories of the country, and contemporary accounts of developments there. What became clear to me from my reading and from my discussions with Nicaraguan organizations and individuals, as well as from personal observation, was that President Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista party had evolved over the decades from Cuban-inspired revolutionaries to become the leaders of a right-wing and repressive capitalist government. While claiming to be leftist, Ortega and his wife and now vice-president Rosario Murillo had formed an alliance with big business and the right wing of the Catholic Church, while at the same time reaching a working relationship with the U.S. military and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Ortega’s government had suppressed independent union organization in the maquiladoras, repressed the farmers and environmentalists who protested the construction of the Chinese-financed transoceanic canal, and harassed, threatened, and taken legal action against the feminist movement fighting the government’s reactionary and severe laws against abortion under virtually all circumstances.

When I returned to the United States I continued my research and then sat down and wrote What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis (Brill, 2016) in which I told the story of how the revolution had degenerated and how Ortega betrayed it. In the conclusion of the book, I also predicted that an opposition to such an authoritarian and reactionary government would inevitably develop. Two years later the book was released in a Haymarket paperback almost simultaneously with the popular rebellion that broke out in Nicaragua in April 2018.

Given events in Nicaragua, I was anxious to get my book before audiences of both the left and of the Nicaraguan community. Originally I had planned with people from the Marxist Education Project and NACLA to do a talk with one or two other people at the Brooklyn Commons. I met and talked with Nicaraguan activists in New York who were supporting the rebellion, and they were glad to have an American ally and interested in working together. Through a series of small meetings, a plan for a lager solidarity event developed and changed location. We agreed on St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan, which had a large Latinx congregation including some Nicaraguans. The plan was now that I would present my book and a couple of Nicaraguan speakers would comment on the current situation. At the last moment, one of the Nicaraguans informed us that some students on their way to Florida and to Washington, D.C. to talk to human rights groups and to lobby legislators would also like to speak. Neither I, nor Professor Lisa Knauer, the chair, nor Father Octavio Altamirano, a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, nor Lutheran Minister Fabian Arias had met the students prior to the event. They were described as participants in the recent protests in Nicaragua and since students had been at the forefront of the movement and had suffered most from its repression, we agreed to have them on the panel.

What was clear to me was that this had become a Nicaraguan community event and an event of the church and its congregation and that I as an American could not and should not attempt to control its agenda, but that I could present my analysis of Nicaraguan history and the current situation and as a socialist scholar state my views. The students, whose ages were about 20 to 24, described their experiences in the popular rebellion, pledged to continue a peaceful movement to force the resignation of Ortega and bring to power another government. None of them appeared at that meeting to have a very clear ideological point of view.

I wrote a report for the NYC DSA leadership and for the DSA International Committee about the event and about my statements there. Here is what I wrote about the event:

The meeting took on the character of a patriotic rally of the Nicaraguan community appalled by the government’s killing of 150 citizens. In general there was a call for the resignation of Daniel Ortega and his party, the Frente Sandinista por la Liberación Nacional (FSLN). I and other DSA members were struck by several things about this meeting. First was the virtual unanimity of the panel and the public in their opposition to Ortega and the FSLN; surprisingly there [were] no regime supporters either Nicaraguans or others. Second, the Nicaraguans both on the panel and in the public had virtually no political analysis and no vision or program for the future of their country. I would attribute this to the long period of authoritarian government in Nicaragua, which made it impossible to develop alternative political views and organizations. There was very good participation from the public, both men and women. The organizers considered the event a success.

And this is what I wrote as a summary of my statements there:

I, speaking as a historian and the author of the book What Went Wrong?, attempted to make three points both in my presentation and in response to questions. The first was that any sort of intervention by the United States would not be good for Nicaragua. (A point that was applauded.) Second, that neither the Nicaraguan capitalist class organized in COSEP, the business council, nor the hierarchy of the Catholic Church could be relied on to save the country. I pointed out that both groups had gotten along well with both the Somoza and the Ortega dictatorships. Third, I argued that the crisis taking place required the organization of a new social force from below, not only the students who are leading the struggle at present, but the working class and the farmers.

(There is a video here and my presentation and discussion, as described above, can be found at these times: 48:57, 58:10, and 1:50.)

While at the time of the June 13 event we knew nothing about it, we later learned that the students, financed by the conservative Freedom House, had gone on to Washington, D.C. where they were received by Republican Senators and Congressional representatives. Had we been aware of these connections, we no doubt would have handled things differently, but in any case, we had nothing to do with their later activities. [After posting this, I was told by one of the Nicaraguan activists that the students who spoke at our event in New York were not the same students who were hosted in D.C.]

I have stated in articles on Nicaragua—and one didn’t have to obtain “leaked” emails to learn this—that “there is no left to speak of in the movement.” Why is that the case? Why is there no significant socialist current today in Nicaragua? The answer is simple. The authoritarian and reactionary Ortega government and the FSLN party have utterly discredited the idea of socialism in the public mind of the majority of Nicaraguans. Many American leftists are unaware that over the last several decades virtually all of the Nicaraguan comandantes, the leaders of the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979, have broken with Ortega and the FSLN, as have most of the leaders of the Theology of Liberation movement that supported the revolution. While some of those leaders attempted to establish new social democratic or socialist political parties, the Ortega government’s domination of the political machinery made that impossible. So unfortunately socialism has virtually disappeared from the Nicaraguan political scene.

Why then, I have been asked, would I support a movement against the Ortega government? I support it because it is a popular movement from below—meaning a movement of many social classes—that aims to replace the current dictatorship with some sort of democracy. Within the Nicaraguan movement there are those in the business class—who have until recently gotten along just fine with Ortega—who would like a parliamentary government that they could control. But there are others who want a popular democracy that would represent the country’s majority, its working people. I support the fight for democracy against dictatorship but within that the demand for a popular democracy, and beyond that for genuine socialism from below. My position is not unique; throughout Latin America many leftist parties support the Nicaraguan popular rebellion against Ortega.

I urge anyone interested in my thoughts about Nicaragua to read my book and my articles at New Politics where you can find a systematic presentation of my views. I am, as I have stated often, opposed to any U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua and opposed to sanctions against Nicaragua, since they would principally bring greater suffering to the Nicaraguan people. I am, however, for a victory of the popular rebellion and hope that by itself and with expressions of solidarity from the left throughout Latin America and the world, it will be able to push the Ortega government aside and establish democracy and, one day, socialism.

That these views could be denounced as imperialist or in cahoots with the U.S. State Department is astonishing. The harm done to the global left by such denunciations – and the political perspective behind them – is alas all too evident.

 

 

Sunday, July 21: Livestream Facebook Dialogue Between Venezuelan, Syrian and Iranian Socialists

By: July 12, 2019
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The Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists is hosting a panel to discuss these questions:

  • The attitude of the majority of the left toward the Syrian Uprising of 2011 and the mass protests opposing the governments in Iran and Venezuela has been to side with the governments as “anti-imperialist.” What is the economic/political/social nature of each of each of these states?
  • Who are the progressive and revolutionary forces in Iran, Venezuela and still struggling inside Syria and among Syrian refugees? How can they be helped?
  • Why have revolutionary socialists inside Venezuela, Iran and Syria not been able to offer an emancipatory alternative to all regional and global capitalist and imperialist powers, nationalism, racism, sexism, heterosexism?
  • Can international revolutionary solidarity building on the Sudanese and Algerian uprisings emerge to challenge the counter-revolutionary drive of U.S. imperialism/Allies, and authoritarian rulers in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America and all their imperialist backers?

Speakers:

Simon Rodriguez

Venezuelan political activist, alternative journalist and musician. Founder and coordinator of Laclase.info during the years 2008-2015 and currently part of the editorial committee of Venezuelanvoices.org. Co-author of the book Why did chavismo fail? Author of hundreds of articles translated into seven languages. Member of the Socialism and Freedom Party, Venezuelan section of the International Workers’ Unity-Fourth International, and former congressional candidate in 2015. He has worked with the Unitary Federation of Oil Workers of Venezuela.

Eva Maria

Venezuelan socialist-feminist, teaches Latin American literature to Latinx high school students. She also writes and speaks about the challenges of left-wing governments in Latin America to provide a truly democratic and emancipatory socialist alternative in the region.

Yasser Munif

Assistant professor in the Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies. His forthcoming book is about Syria, the politics of death, and grassroots struggles.

Joseph Daher

Academic and socialist activist. Author of Syria after the Uprisings, the Political Economy of State Resilience (Pluto Press and Haymarket, 2019) and Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God (Pluto, 2016). He is the founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever.

Frieda Afary

Philosophy M.A. and a 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, Marx’s Capital, Marxist Feminism, and Marxist critiques of state capitalism. She has also taught community classes on the 150th Anniversary of Marx’s Capital and on Socialist Feminism.

Sina Zekavat

Anti-war activist and member of the Alliance of MENA Socialists, has written articles on the student movement in Iran and solidarity with Syrian revolutionaries.

Moderator:

Sara Dehkordi

Teaches Political and Social Sciences in Berlin on the subjects of critical peace and conflict, decolonial theories and critique, colonial genocide, repressed archives and collective memory building. Her book, On the City’s Shoulders – Forced Evictions and Criminalisation Practices in Present-Day South Africa, will be released in late summer this year. She is also a member of Manjanigh, a group of Iranian socialists living in exile (manjanigh.com).

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

For the livestream on Sunday July 21 from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Geneva time, go to https://www.facebook.com/Alliance-of-MENA-Socialists-2196931800604746/

Or share this link to the Alliance website with your friends:

https://www.allianceofmesocialists.org/livestream-facebook-dialogue-between-venezuelan-syrian-and-iranian-socialists-on-the-challenges-of-offering-an-emancipatory-alternative-sunday-july-21-2019/

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

A Protest for Zero Tolerance for Migrant Detention with My 5-Year-Old

By: July 10, 2019
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I was able to attend a rally against immigrant detention in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago today. Called “Zero tolerance for Migrant Detention“, it was organized by the Little Village Solidarity Network and other supporting organizations.

My schedule unexpectedly opened up, so I was able to attend. I was spending a lovely Saturday with my daughter. I had taken my 5 year old daughter to brunch after her swim lesson. We went to a playground nearby and ran into the Music in the Parks program, which had stationed a piano and a piano teacher in the park who patiently taught her and other kids how to play a few notes. The other children seemed to be siblings from an immigrant family; perhaps Ethiopian. Even as we were enjoying this cherished and rare mother daughter time, I had been despondent about not being able to attend the protest against immigrant detention centers that was starting soon. It was not far from where we were at the moment and I really wanted to go. It felt important because I feel so powerless. It would be good to be in community with organizers and be reminded of our collective power. It would be good to confront the ugly corollaries of the shallow sense of safety and well being I was cultivating for my child this morning.

Well, the universe made it possible. My partner was able to continue looking after our twin toddlers so that my daughter and I could have more of our rare one on one time together. My sense of relief for being able to attend the protest was soon disrupted by the realization that I will have to tell my 5 year old what the protest was about and why we were going there. How do you tell a young child that children as small as her and her toddler brothers are being separated from their families and jailed?

After thinking it over for a few moments, I decided to be direct. I told her that I wanted to go to a protest with her because some people were putting kids and others in jail. We were going to go to where they were and demand that they free the kids. We talked about how nobody should be in jail, something we have been discussing since her school brought in police officers to show off their fancy squad car and talk about how they “put bad guys in jail” to keep everyone “safe”.

She walked beside me as we headed to the car and started singing a song about demanding the release of the “children and everybody”, and breaking down prisons, and saving the day. And taking care of the earth because that is always a given with her. She is big on ‘saving the day’, inspired by PJ Masks and other heroes. On the car ride over, she kept singing a very thoughtful, compassionate, powerful song about saving/freeing the children. We thought up and chanted chants. I think protest songs and chants were more comforting than sitting with the idea of kids in jails. But I know my daughter takes her time to think and feel things through. She will be asking me a lot of questions soon.

We gathered at two Heartland Alliance run “shelters” in the heart of East Rogers Park, a prosperous and diverse, progressive neighborhood on the north side of Chicago; home of the north campus of Loyola University. The facilities looked deceptively like houses. I would not have given them another look if it wasn’t for the 80 – 100 people gathered outside. You can see some of the signs in the pictures. “Abolish ICE” was one of them and my daughter asked me what it said. I gave her a short and simple explanation: “ICE is a government agency that captures immigrant people and puts them in jail or throws them out of the country. We don’t want anybody to be treated that way. So, we want to make them stop.” She nodded. As I was wrestling with whether this was a good opportunity to bring up borders agian, or to wait till after the protest, she took my hand and led me to the front of the protest.  Right next to the speakers. She really wanted to be there. And to know what people were saying. She was absorbing and listening, applauding, and chanting. She wasn’t just a kid brought to a protest by her parent. She was leading me and directing our participation in the protest.

As the organizers ended the protest with chants of “No estas solo” to let the children inside know that we were here with them, she asked me what they were saying and started chanting with them, banging her little hands on her cardboard sign which said, “Libertad para todos.”

A word about Heartland Alliance. It is a huge nonprofit, which has worked with refugee communities for years. However, they are working with the government, on contract with the government’s refugee resettlement program, housing “unaccompanied minors”. They claim that their internal investigation has revealed no abuse of children, contrary to reports in the NYT and other papers. Their keynote speaker at their annual shindig this year was Hillary Clinton. ProPublica and Mother Jones published an expose of their “shelters”, showing how hand in glove they work with immigration agencies. It lays bare how seemingly innocuous nonprofits are actually willing accomplices in terrifying government policies, helping the government with their dirty laundry. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) folks also organized a protest against their “shelters” a few days ago and some DSA members were present at today’s protest too.

Not only did this protest take place on the anniversary of Trump’s family separation policy going into effect, but also during an expected onslaught of ICE raids this weekend. While the Trump administration announced a delay in the raids, unverified reports of ICE raids are coming in. The city is in the grip of palpable fear. My newly elected alderman, Rosanna Rodriguez’s office has been holding know your rights trainings, recruiting volunteers, and disseminating useful information. Chicago’s new Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has made a couple of moves to declare the city unhospitable to ICE, including forbidding the police department to cooperate with ICE. However, due to carve outs in the sanctuary city ordinance, secured by Chicago’s last Mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, the Chicago Police Department works with ICE to report folks on the much maligned Gang Database. Illinois Governor Pritzker just signed three separate bills to protect immigrant rights.

One bill banned local police cooperation with federal ICE immigration enforcement. Another bill banned the construction of any new private immigrant detention centers in Illinois. However, many organizers call it a smokescreen, pointing to the Dwight Detention Center downstate. They don’t trust the enforcement of the bill and think that Dwight may actually become operational.

The speakers and organizers shared a couple of upcoming events that they want people to support and come out for. The flyer for one is here: F*** the 4th. A Migrant Caravan Benefit Show on July 6th at 7pm in Logan Square. Others they will share on the protest’s event page.

There are many ways in which people are organizing against this inhumane and gruesome practice of familiy separation of refugees and asylum seekers. Please see below for more information about actions and groups. There are many ways in which we can support local and national efforts to end this practice and support those affected.

 

Further Readings and Resources for Action

1) The Chicago Teachers Union issued an  excellent statement in defense of their immigrant students and families. It inlcudes a list of great resources for organizing against raids and supporting people at risk.

2) In headlines that sound like a sarcastic late night news flash: Advocates say the Fastest Way to Help Immigrants Separated From Their Children: Post Their Bail. There are several immigrant bail funds and here is the link to one of them.

3) In conjunction with efforts to bail immigrant/refugee/asylum seeker detainees, there are is a 4th of July fundraising initiative to bail immigrant parents out. Follow these twitter accounts to support and inform as many people as possible: @MsKellyMHayes @RehmahSufi @IMHO_Journal. Follow the hashtag: #FreedomDay on Twitter and this event page on FaceBook.

4) There are vigils being held around the country on July 12. Details here.

5) There is a mobilization of Japanese American detainees of internment camps as Tsuru for Solidarity. You may have seen coverage about their action on June 22 when they protested the site of an internment camp being turned into a prison camp for refugees. Follow them here.

6) Wayfair, the online furniture and home furnishings giant, is going to supply furniture for some camps. Their employees protested and tried to convince the company not to cooperate with the government on its policy of imprisoning children. Over 500 employees walked out at their headquarters in Boston. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal published a scolding editorial. You can follow them here: @wayfairwalkout.

7) There is a Chicago specific immigrant caravan support event on the 6th of July, mentioned above.

8) On July 13, there is a demonstration in Chicago to Take Action to End Criminalization, Detention, and Deportations.

8) Here is a great list of resources and ways to assist support efforts.

Originally posted at The International Marxist-Humanist. 

Reactionary Populism, meet Great Britain

By: July 7, 2019
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If you’ve had the displeasure of tuning in to Fox News at any point over the last ten years, you’ll know that they’ve played no small part in turning the U.S. into a right-wing hellscape. A place where male political analysts scream over each other about women’s reproductive organs and companies can price-gauge lifesaving medication at the expense of the very worst-off in society.

Fox News hosts Brett Baier and Tucker Carlson often refer to Britain’s cradle to grave healthcare system, which is free at the point for those who need it, with the dreaded term: “socialised medicine.”

Referencing waiting lists and one-off horror stories, the likes of which you are likely to read in The Daily Record, as a way of discrediting the National Health Service and its benefits for the UK

Kingsfund.org.uk ran a survey in 2017 that showed that around 90% of people in the UK support the NHS’s founding principles and 77% people in the UK supporting maintaining the NHS in its current form.

Does Fox News know better than the British public?

The British public might not agree with Fox, but there is one political group that almost always do. A fairly-new wave of conservatives, commonly referred to as “alt-right,” seem to endorse the idea that bad = socialist, regularly using terms like “Cultural Marxism” to belittle anything they consider to be remotely politically progressive.

Whether it be the LGBT Community, female video game protagonists with proportioned bodies or just the rise of Islam in countries they’ve never been to. You’ll very likely have someone complaining about their freedom of speech being infringed by an invisible, all-seeing Communist institution preventing modern society from functioning in a bizarre range of ways.

For a sub-culture that claims to be completely anti-establishment, the American alt-right sing from the American mainstream media’s hymn sheet on a regular basis with regards to immigration, political correctness, healthcare and their choice of insult.

You may have caught an example of this on British television recently when U.S far-right pundit Ben Shapiro appeared on This Week to be interviewed by BBC Political presenter Andrew Neil.

Shapiro gave reference to the “radically left-wing media bias” in the U.S., whilst yelling over Neil as is commonplace on U.S political news.

He eventually became flustered with the veteran presenter and accused Neil, who is the current chairman of Press Media Group who own right-wing magazine The Spectator, of being a member of the left.

Shapiro later apologised by saying he: “misinterpreted his antagonism for political leftism.”

Luckily the U.S American right helped elect a candidate its working-class following could rely on in 2016, the current U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump has done wonders to tackle the evils of socialism by putting harsher sanctions on Venezuela and introducing 2017’s intelligently named Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The TC&JA was a hard-line conservative economic initiative which saw tax cuts for corporations and left 13 million Americans without health care.

The billionaire-turned-President then did something else entirely anti-socialist; he scrapped the Paris Climate Agreement – the United Nations’ initiative for dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, mitigation, adaption and finance.

While no one could accuse Mr. Trump of being a socialist, I think many people in America may have the wrong idea about what has happened.

Corporate America is sucking the planet dry and Trump is a prominent and long-standing billionaire right at the heart of that culture. With the alt-right provocateurs railing against invisible socialism they’ll never admit they’ve been duped into giving their support to Trump at the cost of the U.S. public.

The danger of U.S. reactionary populism reared its ugly head in the UK during the Brexit referendum. Following the shocking Leave vote, British journalists uncovered that Vote Leave and LeaveEU illegally purchased 2.7m of Brexit ads on Facebook.

These ads are un-affectionately referred to as “dark-ads.”

Some dark-ads told outright lies about Turkey joining the EU, whereas others were even more ridiculous, amongst those were sad looking polar bears, an ad where Boris Johnson said he “is pro-immigration but” and exaggerated statistics about the migrant crisis.

VoteLeave and LeaveEU were not the only ones in the “dark-ads” game either. lobbying firm Lynton Crosby also purchased £1m worth of creepy Facebook ads of the same type, whilst posing as a grassroots organisation of Brexit activists.

It is widely believed that this made a substantial impact on the way people voted in the referendum. Facebook refused to disclose any information to the U.K parliament regarding how much they were given and who by.

This lead UK journalist Carole Cadwalladr to do a Ted Talk entitled “Facebook’s Role in Brexit and the Threat to Democracy,” where she said: “Mark Zuckerberg, you are on the wrong side of history.”

The lies in the ads were amplified, just like in the U.S., by alt-right figures like Paul Joseph Watson and Milo Yiannopoulos.

To me, this shows that we’re not we Brits aren’t that different from our American cousins. If nothing else it shows that establishment figures are able to ride the populist wave to make political gains at the expense of the public.

Look at Boris Johnson, the only politician to be featured in the dark-ads. Johnson’s comments last year about Muslim women in the Daily Telegraph were repeatedly compared to Trump’s tirades against Muslims and Mexicans in the run-up to the 2017 Presidential Election.

A bad attitude masked by perceived stupidity isn’t the only thing these two have in common. In July 2018 Johnson began meeting with ex-Breitbart.com editor and Former White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

The British mainstream media celebrated the brilliant advice this mentor would give him, Johnson continued spewing his vitriol, at one point comparing Brexit talks to a “suicide vest.”

This is typical of Steve Bannon and his influence, a former investment banker and self-professed expert in right-wing populism who, although having very little credibility remaining in intellectual circles, is incredibly far-reaching in certain more extreme Internet circles.

His tenure at Breitbart means that he has ties all over Europe and has used them to promote right-wing populists all over the continent since leaving the Trump Administration.

Bannon’s most recent endeavour has been the implementation of what has been described as an “alt-right Academy.” The Academy for the Judeo-Christian West’s founders describes it as a “gladiator school for the next generation of populist and nationalist leaders.”

Essentially a “Fight Club” of sorts, it appears the plan is to train skinheads and Nazis in the ways of intolerance and manipulation at an ex-monetary somewhere in Italy, no doubt for the purpose of putting money in the pockets of people like Leave.EU founder Aaron Banks and Nigel Farage in the future.

Bannon is the ideologue behind Trump’s populism, which managed to elect a billionaire as U.S. President on an “anti-establishment” platform.

Our in the UK options appear to be to reject U.S. style personality-based, reality TV politics or accept privatised health care and Nazi training camps.

Trump is a lunatic and should be called one at every opportunity. His foul, reactionary politics are a disease spreading across Europe. If Boris Johnson is to become Prime Minister, he will go down in history as the man who let Bannon get his claws into Brexit Britain and shook the life out of it.

DSA 2019 Convention Breakdown

By: July 6, 2019
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The 2019 Convention for Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is fast approaching, and there is a lot to sort out. The Convention will debate and vote on the approved resolutions and constitution/bylaw changes and elect a new sixteen (16) person leadership body, the National Political Committee (NPC). Resolutions will commit DSA to political positions, organizational changes and/or specific projects or courses of action. All of these will have to take into consideration the organization’s budget, staff and member capacity.

On June 24th, the approved eighty-five (85) resolutions and thirty-three (33) constitution/bylaw changes were released publicly for consideration and potential amendments. With that many proposals, the number of documents alone is overwhelming and it can be difficult to grasp what is being debated, especially as resolutions don’t explicitly name out an author’s affiliation to any group in DSA. In what follows, I’ll analyze what’s been proposed, the players involved and what it tells us about the state of DSA.

For purposes of disclosure, I’m not a member of any caucus within DSA. I was briefly associated with Socialist Majority, and I wrote an early draft of its fundraising plank. I independently wrote a resolution that commits DSA to a “Bernie or Bust” perspective on the 2020 election. Below I’ll try to be objective, though I’m not impartial.

Background: Nuts and Bolts of the National Organization

The document from the Resolutions & Amendment Committee gives some useful background for understanding the state of the organization. For nearly 60,000 members, DSA National runs on a meager budget of roughly $4.4 million, 75% of which comes from dues. Most of the money the National spends is on staffing costs, and for 2019 DSA is intentionally running a deficit of about $350,000 (spending reserves), largely to subsidize convention.

For staffing, the Resolutions & Amendments Committee notes:

This spring we finally felt we could afford to expand staff, so we began hiring. Our staffing now stands at 16 full time and 1 part time, with 5 more positions projected and in the hiring process. Once that hiring is complete we will have 23 full time and 1 part time staff – still small for an organization of our size, but almost double what we were a year ago. For comparison, during the 2017 national convention we had a staff of 7 full time and 1 part time workers.

Most of the staff are assigned to running the organization’s office, membership information, finances, website and the like. Just four staff are dedicated “Field Organizers”, supporting 175 locals as well as each being attached to a national priority. DSA staff have a union, represented through the Newsguild-Communications Workers of America (CWA).

The Players: Caucuses and “Not-Caucus” Caucuses

The presence of organized factions isn’t new to this convention, but they play an important role in the politics of DSA. Caucuses count members in the dozens or low hundreds, so the vast majority of DSA members are not affiliated to any grouping, however a plurality of proposals and candidates are affiliated to an organized group.

There’s nothing innately wrong about caucusing with like-minded comrades, and as DSA has ballooned in size the effectiveness of any individual to influence the organization has diminished. In order to influence the Convention process (which is the point), members are basically required to caucus. To avoid being flooded with resolutions, the Convention Committee instituted a rule that proposed resolutions would need at least fifty (50) members in good standing to sign onto them for it to be considered at convention. Fifty isn’t overly burdensome, but it does encourage members to self-organize to ensure 1) their proposals make it to convention and 2) they can count on support when the vote is taken.

For the NPC, name recognition makes a large difference with so many members. No one knows everyone, so running as a caucus slate rounds out the chances that you and your people get elected. While it gives the appearance of greater unity, it’s likely that formations will change or disband following convention when they’ve met their immediate purpose.

Existing caucuses going into convention are (in no particular order):

  • Bread & Roses (B&R): Formerly “Spring”, an explicitly Marxist caucus descended from last Convention’s “Momentum” slate. B&R probably has the most articulated idea of what they want DSA to be, which is a group that can create a mass workers’ party largely through a combination of labor organizing and socialist electoralism. They tend to see the National organization’s purpose as creating a united and coherent organization. “We oppose horizontalist practices that distort democracy into a series of endless meetings, replace accountable leadership with the tyranny of structurelessness, and drain decisions of consequences. We must make decisions about priorities and then commit to carrying them out.”
  • Build: The original “not-caucus” caucus. Descended from Praxis, the other big slate in 2017. Somewhat apolitical in their outlook, they publish a zine about what chapters are doing on the ground and have a vision of “base-building” that is much more local. “We believe that most of the national organization’s troubles are the direct result of escalating factionalism, personal attacks, and a zero-sum approach to internal political differences.” They generally favor decentralization/dispersement and distrust the national organization to accomplish tasks.
  • Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC): Comprised largely of chapter leaders, national working group leaders and former DSA staff, they largely want to stay the course but improve upon old structures that haven’t worked particularly well with the growth of the organization. They also house some members of the smaller “North Star” caucus of old guard DSA. “We believe DSA should be a national organization governed democratically and openly from the bottom up.”
  • Collective Power Network (CPN): Another formation that says it isn’t a caucus but accomplishes basically the same goal. CPN similarly comprises some former DSA staffers, with supporters based largely in DC and New Orleans. CPN argues that DSA is limited in its appeal until it addresses organizational challenges. They have a federated vision for DSA, a stratified form of organization between local, regional and national. “The broad goal of building a mass organization of workers fighting for a democratic socialist society is seriously undermined by our current membership composition and lack of diversity.”
  • Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC): Anarchists, council communists and autonomist Marxists. Argues for abolishing the National Political Committee and shifting dues from National to locals. “…the Libertarian Socialist Caucus is suspicious of centralized forms of governance and decision making…Instead, we wish to promote the ability of individuals and communities to set their own priorities, both inside and outside the DSA. Governing authority is illegitimate in itself and can only be justified if it is delegated by and subordinated to a democratic assembly.”

Where I can I’ve tried to associate proposals with a caucus that developed them. At present, the convention committee only notes the immediate authors, which can make it difficult to decipher which factions are involved in a given proposal. Only CPN explicitly attached their formation to their resolutions in the description; some caucuses have promoted associated resolutions online. In keeping with LSC’s structure, they haven’t really put things out collectively but have visible caucus members who have put forth proposals – I’ve chosen to attach them to LSC even though they aren’t formally endorsed. I’ve researched as best I could, but readers should be aware of the potential for error in associating proposals with a faction in my analysis below.

Resolutions at a Glance

As stated above, there are eighty-five (85) resolutions for consideration; just under half (40) are associated with an organized caucus within DSA. If we passed every single resolution as they are, they would cost $7,053,287.64 and require and require 28 additional full-time staff[1]. I’ve sorted resolutions into categories according to what they’re addressing. The breakdown is as follows:

Type Number of Resolutions
Organizational 28
Electoral 11
Financial 8
Labor 7
Anti-Racism 6
International 5
Gender 4
Ecosocialism 4
Political 3
Immigration 3
Housing 3
Prisons 2
Fascism 1

 

Based off the number of resolutions alone, we get a sense of what our priorities are in 2019. A third of the resolutions are concerned with the internal organization of DSA; if you fold in anything having to do with how money is raised or distributed, that figures approaches nearly a half of all resolutions. (The “Political” category regards two resolutions about making a platform and one on changing our name, which are also about how we operate but are somewhat distinct.)

Thirteen resolutions call for committing to an issue as national priority, which touch on six common subjects: labor, immigration, climate/ecosocialism, elections, prisons, and housing. The 2019 Convention does not set a limit on the number of priorities DSA will have, which is different from 2017 where only three were chosen (Elections, Labor and Medicare for All). That could become a problem in 2019 if the Convention over-commits; if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.

Overview of Resolutions by Topic

Without oversimplifying, topics can be either be viewed as mutually compatible, where the thrust of the resolutions are largely the same with differences in details, or competing, which have major differences that cannot be reconciled. Overall, there seems to be more agreement on perspectives and less agreement on organization. I’ll focus on the two continuing priorities (labor and elections) and then the organizational prescriptions.

The remaining nine topics are fairly equally distributed and collectively make up less than a third of the total resolutions. There are some very interesting individual resolutions, but it’s hard to evaluate their significance with much confidence when there are only a handful of resolutions regarding gender, race, immigration, ecosocialism, etc. At best, one could say that there isn’t a consensus about what the new third leg of the priorities stool should be. There is a curious absence of Medicare for All (M4A) in the resolutions, considering it was a core priority in 2017. I suspect that the difficulty in making concrete progress on M4A has been disheartening, but there isn’t an issue that looks like it has the common interest to be a replacement priority.

Labor

Approximately seven resolutions were submitted with perspectives on labor, which boils down to proposals by B&R (#32 “Labor Strategy and the DSLC”), CPN (#3 “Towards a Clear, Multifaceted Strategy for Labor”), and Build (#66 “Prioritizing Labor”, #67 “Organizing the Unorganized”, #68 “New Operation Dixie”).

Where they all agree is that they seem to be evaluating the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission (DSLC) as a success, and one that needs to be expanded upon. They all call for an additional staff person assigned fully to labor in DSA: national coordination of the DSLC, an expansion of support for local chapters’ labor work, and encouragement for DSA members to take up labor organizing as a priority.

Build’s “New Operation Dixie” is absurd. The AFL-CIO’s original Operation Dixie was an enormous undertaking to organize the US South during the heyday of industrial unionism and was beaten back in the 1940s. To think that just half of one DSA staff’s time could effectively encourage and oversee such a venture is ridiculous.

The most significant difference between labor proposals is on the guiding philosophy behind the labor work. Bread and Roses explicitly favors “The Rank and File Strategy” (RFS), a perspective articulated by socialist labor activist Kim Moody and most closely associated with the work of Labor Notes; CPN, Build and Socialist Majority (as expressed on their website) do not.

For the uninitiated, RFS places emphasis on organizing as worker-activists (whether in unions or not), building reform movements inside unions that call for more militancy and democracy, and views “shop floor” activism as paramount. RFS is not against working as union staff, but rather believes that union staff are part of a complex labor bureaucracy that does not have the same opportunities for engaging workers as agents of change. For example, when the CORE group in Chicago Teachers Union won control of their union, inspired by the RFS, staff were important to the administration of the union and its new militant character, but were ancillary to the activity of teachers themselves.

The emphasis on the RFS coming from B&R will be a sticking point at the Convention, as the organization has historically favored working with “progressive union officials.” The ensuing conversation will have implications for DSA’s vision for socialism and our sense of how to get there.

Elections

Resolutions involving electoral politics can be subdivided as follows: prioritizing elections, 2020 election-related, and endorsement criteria. Given the role elections have played in bringing people into DSA, it’s no surprise that there are multiple resolutions reaffirming DSA’s commitment to running socialist candidates, again with perspectives by B&R (#31 “Class Struggle Elections”), SMC (#82 “DSA National Election Priority”) and an old guard-type resolution (#13 “Defeating Trumpism and Electing Democratic Socialists and Progressives”).

#13 “Defeating Trumpism” effectively argues for an ‘Anyone But Trump’ perspective, hoping to push the Democrats to the left, but supporting them against the Right regardless. SMC’s #82 “National Election Priority” articulates the center position of being involved in electoral activity, prioritizing coalition work, having left aspirations but leaving it up to chapters to decide what minimum program is acceptable. #31 “Class Struggle Elections” (B&R) stakes out a left pole for electoral politics, putting forward a perspective of running as open socialists, using the office to build movements, and trying to build a “party within a party” to prepare along the lines of a “dirty break” – a strategy for building a new political party in the U.S. by operating in the Democratic Party and eventually taking gathered forces and ‘breaking them off’ to form the new party.

Apart from electoral strategy, #48 “Candidate Litmus Test” sets up a questionnaire that candidates must affirm completely for them to get a DSA endorsement, which is by far the most restrictive, but in its attachment to specific bills in Congress, I suspect it’ll have too many limitations to pass. #52 “Not One Penny” sets a pledge that candidates for U.S. Congress must vote against militarism and all foreign military operations; I don’t know the viability of this considering how the military is woven into nearly all federal budgets. No resolutions explicitly call for a break with the Democratic Party.

Two resolutions are aimed at DSA’s orientation to Sanders. My own #15 is essentially a “Bernie or Bust” resolution, which accepts the decision DSA has already made in endorsing Sanders but rejects any other candidate should he lose. #39 “Petition Bernie Sanders for a People’s Foreign Policy Platform” might be called the “No Tankies” resolution, aiming for DSA to try and push Sanders to have better international policies – importantly this contains language for solidarity with Palestine and Venezuela.

In sum: Elections? Yes. How should DSA do them? Within the Democratic Party. The minimums are going to have to be negotiated.

Financial

Whatever decisions are made regarding DSA’s finances are going to affect every other resolution, since it’ll have an impact on staffing levels and available resources. There are a surprisingly large number of resolutions concerning how DSA’s money is spent. DSA dues are cheap: an annual membership is only $65 (a little less than $6 a month). Compare that to other socialist organizations where the dues are between $20-$50 a month. The 2017 Convention voted in favor of a dues sharing policy, where 20% of dues collected would be given to locals. The particulars of this policy were left up to the NPC, who decided that the 20% should apply only to monthly dues for chapters with organizational accounts. This created an incentive for locals to build local infrastructure and sign up their members on recurring monthly dues. Dues sharing is pretty unusual and fairly progressive for an organization of this type; normally members pay directly to the national, and any funds a local has is what it can independently raise.

Of the eight resolutions concerning finances, half of them want to increase the share of dues going to the locals. On the lower end, Build’s proposal (#83) earmarks 8% of all income for resources directed at locals to the tune of $380,000; the infamous “Pass the Hat” $100/month flat stipend to every chapter is being presented as a constitutional amendment, but is estimated to siphon $215,000 from the National. LSC has four proposals (fully half of the financial resolutions) that a) increase the dues share to locals to 50% of ALL dues (#37), thereby cutting the national budget by roughly $2 million; b) allow the locals to handle memberships and dues rather than the national (#22), c) discourage large donations, dropping our income by about $500,000 (#16) and d) increasing the convention subsidy to delegates (#29). Less money in, more money out.

SMC’s fundraising proposal “Grassroots Fundraising and Small Chapter Growth” (#55) essentially calls for an extension of the program DSA currently uses. Grassroots Fundraising calls for a plan for a national dues drive to encourage members to switch from annual to monthly dues, which provides more security for the National’s income (since they don’t have to worry about lapsing memberships) while also increasing the volume of dues shared with locals. The policy doubles the share for the first 50 members in a chapter (which is a greater benefit for smaller chapters) and looks to reduce the financial transaction costs, so we don’t lose money to credit card companies. This aims to grow the pie rather than cut it differently.

Organizational

So far, I’ve only looked at resolutions, but as we approach organizational proposals the difference between a resolution and a bylaw change is a legalistic distinction, so I’ll consider both as they pertain to DSA’s Organizational Structure. To avoid tediousness, I’ll highlight trends and reserve commentary for interesting or outrageous proposals only.

There are twenty-eight (28) resolutions aimed at DSA’s internal functioning, and an additional thirty-three (33) constitution/bylaw changes, for a total of sixty-one (61) proposals. LSC leads these, having submitted approximately one quarter of all proposed organizational changes, followed by a handful each for Build and CPN; neither B&R nor SMC submitted any bylaw revisions. LSC is ideologically motivated against representative leadership, so most of their proposals have to do with either shrinking DSA National (and abolishing the NPC outright) or putting the national bodies under intense scrutiny – some of their proposals for transparency are reasonable enough, but that’s more a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day.

While there are a few miscellaneous proposals, most of what’s being put forward concerns the NPC, Conduct/Grievances, YDSA, Member Trainings, and Organizational Structure. They’re not so much an a la carte menu of nice ideas as they are responses to some prominent issues DSA has had in the last three years. A few examples:

  • There are several resolutions barring police from membership in DSA, and some resolutions establishing a recall procedure by the membership. They follow the Danny Fetonte scandal, where an elected member of the NPC didn’t disclose that he worked as an organizer for police unions. The incoming 2017 NPC immediately had to deal with the problem and didn’t think they could remove him on those grounds alone. Members were upset and found that they didn’t have the right to recall NPC members.
  • Resolutions about direct voting, town halls, transparency and the like largely grow out of this year’s advisory referendum on whether DSA should endorse Bernie Sanders for President. LSC and the Afrosocialist Caucus made public their objections to the process. Some called it a fait accompli, and others noted the fact that the vote itself wasn’t binding on the organization.
  • The tasks voted on at the last Convention haven’t all been accomplished by the NPC. Praxis and Momentum offered competing visions of the organization in 2017, and the term started off with distrust that leaked into the Twitter-verse. Praxis became the NPC minority and then had their own internal issues between caucus leaders which led to dissolution. The messiness of the whole situation has led to general skepticism about how the NPC functions, particularly with gossip about faction fighting. As a result, one third of all organizational resolutions are about the NPC. These resolutions follow accusations of strategic caucus voting and NPC dysfunction, calling for proportional or regional representation and new standards or conflict resolution mechanisms for the NPC. Especially given the volume of LSC’s organizational resolutions, there are some partisans that skew the sense of the conversation with overcorrections.
  • Caucuses are getting more attention as they become more prominent. DSA’s mechanisms are still largely designed for a network of book clubs rather than a sizable activist organization. Where staff and NPC members have been involved with caucuses, some have cried foul that they’re using organizational resources to support their faction.
  • The growth of chapters has outpaced National’s ability to support them, especially with staff attention. This seems especially true for YDSA, where resolutions call for dedicated full-time staff to support the youth organization; according to the Convention Committee report, a hire is in the works. Some resolutions see this as an infrastructure problem, hence calls for more intermediary bodies between local chapters and the NPC; for creating more standard trainings and materials to guide members; and for a change in how locals are chartered to speed up chapter recognition.

Conclusions: What Kind of DSA?

I made the argument earlier this year that despite the presence of caucuses in the organization there is broad agreement on DSA’s core politics, and the contention is largely about how the organization functions. After reading through these resolutions, I stick by that claim. Differences in the political resolutions appear to be more of degree rather than kind. Elections and labor have multiple proponents affirming that they should be a priority and given dedicated staff to expand the program. There’s a growing sense of support for anti-racism, ecosocialism, gender justice and the immigration crisis as central to the work of DSA. The problem is going to be deciding a political strategy where DSA can feasibly put its energy and avoid devolving into moralistic virtue signaling.

The bigger issue for the Convention is what will happen to the national organization? With half of the proposals being about organization, it is sure to be a slog for delegates. Ultimately, what’s being put forward amounts to a “to be or not to be?” question. Either gut the National and act as a network of locals under the DSA brand or figure out how significant the issues with the structure are and adjust accordingly. There are actual stakes involved for the socialist project in the United States, and while DSA has benefited from the looseness of the “big tent”, it looks like the convention is going to have to draw a line on what is ultimately incompatible in DSA.

 

[1] Figures come from estimated costs attached to each resolution. Staffing number is where “Hours” = .1; “1/4 time” = .25, “1/2 time” = .5, and full time = 1.

On the Istanbul Municipal Elections and Ekrem İmamoğlu’s Victory

By: July 5, 2019
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In Istanbul the joy was expressed along the two extremes of the Bosphorus, from the district of Besiktas to Kadiköy, through Sisli, Esenler, Beylikdüzü. Klaxons blowing, songs, flags being waved in cars running the avenues — the city has voted for a change and with hope they celebrated on the night of June 23. All over there were sellers in the street with scarves, flags and badges with winner Ekrem İmamoğlu’s slogan « Everything will be alright! ».

On the other hand, the pro-government journal Yeni Akit has attributed the victory of Imamoglu to foreign press support and the European deputy Kati Piri, who « backs terrorism and rejoices with the results at Istanbul ».  İmamoğlu is being “blasted”: « he didn’t see the 16 million Muslims (at Istanbul), he preferred the 170 000 non-Muslims ! »

Istanbul citizens, 10 million of them, enrolled in the electoral lists, went to vote and defend their choice (again). The ballot was presented for the second time, two months after the first mayoral vote on March 31 was annulled by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP, Islamic-conservative) due to “irregularities” in the process when the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), led by İmamoğlu, defeated its candidate for the first time. Regardless if whether the results are a local celebration or an enormous scandal with a medium or long-term scope, the truth is that Istanbul citizens have raised their voice for a change, just few months after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s reelection.

A Glance to History

Since 1994, the richest city in Turkey has been a political bastion of the AKP, aligned with the ruling party, acknowledging itself as a formidable political ally to the government. The recent electoral result is a symbolic defeat to Erdoğan and his party in his hometown, where he was mayor in the period 1994-1998. “Whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey” declared the country’s strongman president, assuming this was once again a gamble he would win. The outcome (twice) revealed a disastrous miscalculation.

Rarely has a local election had such national importance, and in this case a wide international tracking. Erdoğan has built his political career over twenty-five years on a “sense of victory, an aura of invincibility and has thrived on seeming unchallengeable.” During his political career he has transformed Turkey and filled its spheres of political power with loyalists who back him in return for favors, a clientelist system of politics. But beyond the figure that he represents nationally, Istanbul’s importance resides in that the city is Turkey’s economic and political powerhouse.

Turkey’s Economic Bastion

The city’s GDP represents 31,2% of the national GDP, above the capital Ankara, with 9%, and the city of Izmir with 6.2%. Regarding GDP per capita, in 2017, it was $17,723, while Ankara reported $14,253. In demography, it accounts for nearly 20% of the aggregate population in Turkey. As well, due to its location, Istanbul is a geopolitical strategic city at the country’s peninsula, surrounded by the Marmara Sea, Bosphorus Straits and Golden Horn. For this reason, in recent years important infrastructure projects have been developed. The Istanbul New Airport, which is known as the Third Airport, will be able to handle 200 million passengers per year, positioning it as the world’s biggest airport regarding passenger traffic. Another mega-project which will equip the city to be an important trade and geopolitical bastion will be the Kanal Istanbul, which plans to build 10 bridges to connect the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean. The government is hoping to complete it by 2023, as a symbolic work marking the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. Furthermore, the “first 10 companies listed among the top 500 Turkish companies announced by the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce” are based in Istanbul.

Political Implications

But “economics” does not uniquely define the value of the city. For 25 years it was dominated by Erdoğan’s influence, being an important source of support during his political career. Thus, Istanbul’s public administration was completely aligned to official AKP discourse and policies. In government, the president has presented a mixed track record regarding religious minorities, swinging between gestures of benevolence as well as persecution and segregation of the same groups, and sometimes painting them as a threat, such as Kurdish people. In this fashion he developed an strategy of “instrumentalizing” minorities to achieve specific political goals, boosting his international image but also consolidating his power at home by positioning himself as the strongman of Turkish politics. Nevertheless his controversial platform was eventually going to be challenged, and the time finally arrived.

In contrast, İmamoğlu pushed his message in the direction of an “inclusive Turkey and greener, fairer Istanbul, freed of the corruption and nepotism that has built up over a quarter of a century of conservative rule”. With his buoyant style and inclusive politics he was capable to unite in one direction the vote of different sectors of the population, including religious Turks of the Anatolian heartland and metropolitan trade center. In such fashion he managed to present himself as an attractive alternative, providing a sense of hope for change, at least in Istanbul.

After the election results were published, at his outdoor meeting, İmamoğlu said he will also “be the mayor of the national minorities of this city.” He also stated “tear down all prejudices in your mind. We do not care about anybody’s lifestyle or beliefs. We have come to embrace everyone. We have come to embrace everyone, Alawite or Sunni. We do not have a concept of ‘minority’ in this city, we will embrace the Armenians, the Assyrians, the Jews, everyone. We will build democracy in this city.” These statements constitute a new discourse and a challenge to Erdoğan’s government as the persecution of minorities has been a “sensible” affair in domestic and international politics.

Conclusion

Ekrem İmamoğlu rose up to question and defeat a regime that had the control of the richest city in Turkey for 25 years; moreover, he beat Erdoğan’s stronghold. Probably, in an alternative reality, if the AKP hadn’t canceled the first election, it would have been less complicated to recover from a close defeat, and surely with less scandalous resonance at the domestic and global level. However, the AKP complicated its own fate, positioning itself in a weak condition as it was defeated by the opposition twice, and again in the rerun with a “significant expanded margin of more than 800,000 votes.”

İmamoğlu stated that “more than a municipal election, it is about a fight for democratization in Turkey”. His victory provides a different connotation to the national political stage due to his promises and the economic influence Istanbul has. Whether the electoral results represent the the beginning of the decline of Erdoğan’s power — in my point of view, it is too early yet to evaluate the opposition’s victory in such a way — or is merely a fleeting “wind of change” that will be overshadowed along the years, it indicates the emergence of a new generation with new visions of politics in Turkey.  Thus, the opposition finally has a sense of power to shape the country’s political reality. If the new Istanbul’s mayor satisfies his electorate, fulfills his campaign promises in an optimal way and appeals to new supporters, it could have a major impact on the national elections in 2023. Regardless, nationally and internationally “whispers will now grow louder about the beginning of President Erdoğan’s end.” İmamoğlu’s victory is most important because of his gift of a “new hope” to a city ruled by the same “premises” for years, hope for a marginalized and distressed population that is looking for a substantial change. Maybe his victory is the “wonderwall” Turkish people need, the light in the dark.

Climate Crisis – Worse Than We Think?

By: July 5, 2019
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If you are a reader of New Politics, you almost certainly believe that the climate crisis is real, that it poses an existential threat to human society as we know it, and that the capitalist mode of production is the root cause of the crisis. I am not going to spend much time on  these questions directly[1]. Rather, I will look at the current state of the climate and its likely trajectory over the next several years, with an eye to understanding the choices that confront those of us who are ecosocialists in responding to the crisis.

First, let’s take a  quick look how the climate is changing now, and how it is likely to change in the near future. Spoiler alert: there is little reason for optimism.

To have even a 50% probability of keeping the global average temperature change to under 1.5°C, global net CO2 emissions need to decrease by about 5% per year starting now, according to generally accepted climate models[2]. However, even if all the countries that signed the 2015 Paris Agreement were to meet their obligations under the treaty, global emissions would stay at about their current level, or even increase, from now until 2030[3]. The likely prognosis is even worse than this. The Paris Agreement national contributions voluntary and unenforceable. The US, historically the world’s largest net CO2 polluter, withdrew from the agreement following Trump’s election. In May 2019, the global atmospheric CO2  levels reached a record high, the highest in at least 800,000 years[4]. In June, temperatures in Europe saw new record highs[5].

Our chance for keeping CO2 emissions below 1.5°C global warming threshold is likely to be exhausted by about 2030[6]. Since there is an uncertainty of about ±10 years in this estimate, we may have already overshot this limit as you are reading this. At best, we probably have until about 2040. After that, we’re toast.

To compound the tragedy, technologies such as solar and wind power, along with the necessary storage technologies for all-day, all-weather reliability, are now available at costs comparable to conventional fossil fuel electrical power generation[7].  It is the political economy of capitalism that stands as the largest obstacle to halting and eventually reversing global heating.[8]

If, as seems likely, current trends continue, we can expect a transformation of global political, social, and economic relations, although the nature of the transformation remains undetermined. Without our effective intervention, the most likely outcome is a world of increasing inequality, war, and suffering, a world of climate apartheid, to use Philip Alston’s evocative term[9].

What should our response be? It must be grounded both in politics and in technology.

From a technological standpoint there are three approaches to the climate crisis: mitigation (decarbonization), adaptation (also known as resilience; addressing the present and future harmful effects of global heating) and remediation (practices that reduce the already emitted atmospheric CO2 levels, or reduce their effect on global heating).

Socialists, along with others on the broad left, have generally focused (correctly, in my opinion) on mitigation. We have for decades emphasized the importance of a just and rapid transition to a net-zero-carbon-emissions economy. This is the focus of  the Green New Deal, developed by Green parties internationally for over a decade, and more recently adopted in more limited form by sections of the Democratic Party in the U.S. and by climate activists, including Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement. The fight for decarbonization is essential, and something we must continue to support and develop. However, while this is necessary, it is not sufficient for our project.

Remediation technologies are more problematic. Some, like reforestation and improved agricultural practices, are clearly desirable and should be supported. Others, especially atmospheric and oceanic geoengineering approaches, are based on technologies that are not currently available, with  unknown but potentially dangerous consequences.

Socialists need to pay more attention to the question of adaptation. As heating increases, the changes that we have already begun to observed (e.g., dangerously hot summer temperatures, increased severity of storms, increased frequency of flooding and wildfires, warming of the polar regions, and so forth), will only continue to grow both in frequency and intensity. We need to address how these changes effect working people’s lives around the world, We need to identify their consequences, and propose solutions in a consistent and coherent way.

Let’s look more closely at some of the social and political  issues that are influenced by uncontrolled global heating. This includes the increased risk of war, migration, public health, land and water use, and agriculture.

At the international level, the climate crisis is dominated by the interrelated issues of war and migration. As sea level rise, temperatures soar, and extreme weather events become the new normal, more and more of the earth will no longer sustain human society, at least with current social relations and agricultural practices. The G7 (representing the world’s largest economies) have identified resource competition, livelihood insecurity, volatile food prices, and trans-border water management as among the key factors leading to instability, migration, and the increased likelihood of war[10], calling climate change “the ultimate threat magnifier”.  U.S. military planning, under both Republicans and Democrats, has integrated the climate crisis into its strategic planning[11], and other nations are doing the same. In a world already divided into the rich nations, largely in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, and the remainder, especially in tropical and sub-tropical regions, this global division can only intensify under the pressure of global heating, given the continued hegemony of capital.

As the climate crisis deepens, trans-border as well as intra-border migration will continue to grow. Although climate is not the only issue accelerating migration[12], as the century-long history of U.S. imperial intervention into Central America clearly demonstrates by example, the contradictions of imperialism are magnified by the effects of global heating. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that there may be as many as 200 million climate migrants by 2050, although this estimate is subject to considerable uncertainty[13]. Migration has already become one of the main sources of rising far-right nationalism and xenophobia in both the US and Europe. This trend is likely to continue without a strong and coherent response from the left.

The health effects of global heating include increased heat exposure (especially dangerous to vulnerable populations,such as the elderly), occupational health (including labor-time lost), under-nutrition, mental health, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and vector-borne diseases, including the spread of tropical diseases to previously temperate regions, according to a recent survey article in the respected medical journal Lancet[14]. The monetized global cost of climate-change-related health effects has been estimated to be in the trillions of dollars[15]. Savings from improved health are likely to be twice as large as the investments required to keep global heating below 1.5°C.  In other words, the savings from improved health alone would most likely more than pay for the costs of decarbonization. Could there be a clearer example of capitalist irrationality?

Land use patterns, both rural and urban, are influenced by global heating both directly (through  mean and extreme temperatures) and also indirectly (through changes in rainfall, extreme weather, and sea level rise).

Agriculture, including farming, fisheries, and forestry, are among the sectors most threatened by global heating. Food production in a vast variety of differing ecosystems must adapt to the shocks of climate change, including both long-term changes in temperature and water availability, as well as short-term changes, like the increased frequency extreme weather events. It must do so in the face of increasing population and the pressure of expanding urbanization. Global food production is responsible for as much as half of global greenhouse gas emission, with livestock production as a central problem[16]. Producing healthier, more nutritious food more sustainably in the face of changing climate will require adaptations in the use of land and water, including improved conservation methods for soil, water, and forests. It will also entail an assessment of crop suitability based on expected changes in weather and climate,  and changes in consumption patterns to reduce livestock, especially beef, production. Other changes that are not specifically climate related, but are required for a healthy environment, will also be needed, including the reduction in food waste and in the use of pesticides and herbicides. The adaptation of agriculture to climate change is absolutely critical if we are to have any hope of prospering as a global society.

Urban land use patterns must also adapt to the necessities of climate change. Beyond simply infringing on agricultural land, urban sprawl creates problems of its own. First, it makes ecologically sound transportation planning far more difficult. Second, it  has increased exposure to wildfires, seen recently in California and Spain, for example. Third, and perhaps most immediately, coastal regions, both urban and rural, are exposed directly to the already existing threat of rising sea levels. It has been estimated that the U.S. federal, state, and local governments will have to spend over $1.4 trillion in the next 20 years to defend coastal communities from rising sea levels[17], and this is probably only about 10-15% of the total (public+private) expenditures needed just to adapt to rising sea levels. In south Florida, for example, flooding and  heating have increased noticeably over the last several years. As Miami sinks into the sea, “climate gentrification” has become a real problem for working class and minority communities. Real estate developers and speculators are moving into once undesirable neighborhoods like Little Haiti, which are built on higher ground and further from the ocean floods than are the beach communities for which Florida is known[18].

How then, should the left adapt its response to the current state of the climate crisis? To begin, there are three points, that may be obvious (to some of us, at least), but are still worth emphasizing.

First, in spite of the discouraging progress so far, we must not concede defeat on the centrality of mitigation/decarbonization. Decarbonization is the only real, long-term solution.

Second, we need to develop our strategies at a range of levels, including the global, national, regional, and local. This implies that programmatic demands will vary (but not conflict) depending on the geographic and political context.

Third, the central role that capitalism has played in the origin and deepening of the climate crisis needs to be our north star in orienting towards real and lasting solutions. Market based solutions, along with reliance on capitalist political parties, have failed and will continue to fail. Individual lifestyle changes, while they may make some of us feel better, are clearly inadequate.

There is an additional, fourth point, that perhaps not all ecosocialists would agree on. That is, our response to global heating must address not only mitigation, but also adaptation. In other words, we need to propose solutions for the immediate consequences of as yet uncontrolled global heating. The requirements of decarbonization and adaptation are not opposed to one another. Rather they point together towards a a potentially sustainable future. In what follows, I focus on the issues of adaptation, along with their connection to decarbonization.

Like many other ecosocialists, I favor the use of a transitional perspective when developing programmatic demands[19]. Working within social and political movements, we should specify concretely what changes are needed to solve the climate crisis, independent of what capitalism is capable of providing. Working people did not create the crisis; working people should not be expected to pay for it, nor to suffer from it. Because I am most familiar with the U.S., my comments have a U.S.-centric approach. I would hope that others with differing experiences who may share my goals will continue to contribute to this ongoing discussion.

While the root causes of both war and migration extend beyond the climate crisis, it is clear that global heating will continue to play an substantial casual role. This means that we should see both antiwar and immigrants rights activism as an integral part of the climate movement.

Unfortunately, following the failure of the antiwar movement to prevent the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the movement has fallen on hard times. In the U.S., it is weak and poorly organized at the national level, and almost non-existent in most places at the local level. Recent events in Iran and Venezuela (among other places) underscore the importance of common work by both antiwar and climate justice activists.

A similar approach should also be applied to migration and immigrants rights. This is an issue of special importance now, given the odious policies of reactionary nationalists worldwide, and of the Trump regime specifically, which has continued and deepened the worst aspects of immigration policy under Obama. The climate justice movement must support the right of safe passage for migrants, that is, open borders.

The question of war is also related to the question of funding both climate mitigation and adaption. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will soon be proposing grants totaling $16 billion to protect cities against natural disasters[20]. This probably less that  2% of the amount actually needed just for the effects of rising sea level and extreme weather. We need fully fund disaster relief and climate adaptation. The funding could easily come from the military budget, currently at over $1 trillion per year, when considering overall costs. If the U.S. war machine was a nation, it would rank about 55th in the world for greenhouse gas emissions, comparable to those of Sweden or Portugal[21].

Adaptation at the local level needs to be addressed with local specificity. However, when looking at both short-term changes (e.g.,.responding to the the immediate effects of heating, sea level rise, and extreme weather by building seawalls), and longer term adaptation (e.g., more resilient urban planning), there are some general principles that emerge.

We must advocate adequate pubic funding at all levels to protect against rising temperatures directly, and also against the indirect effects, such as sea level rise, extreme weather, and threats to public health. As a recent study[22] points out, there are at least 241 cities with a population over 25,000 in the US that will each require at least $10 million each, just to protect against a typical annual storm. In addition, “communities will need to protect drinking water resources, replace water mains and upgrade sewer treatment facilities, raise and repair roads, control larger and more frequent wildfires, re-nourish beaches as rising seas lead to increased erosion, provide aid to growing numbers of climate refugees (especially low-income families of color displaced by climate gentrification), retrofit stormwater drainage infrastructure, build cooling centers and air-conditioned public housing, adjust to longer, hotter droughts, recover from more severe storms, and respond to the spread of vector-borne diseases like Lyme, West Nile virus and Zika.”

Pro-market neoliberals will certainly advance the idea of privatization as the solution, as they did in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  The city then privatized essentially all of its public education system. While there have been some measurable improvements in school performance following privatization, these are due principally to increased public spending flowing to the private school system[23], along with other factors unrelated to privatization, rather than to benefits of privatization as such. In addition, privatization has led to the loss of unionized teaching jobs.

Resilient urban planning must be driven by popular needs, not real estate speculation and financial gain. We need safe, affordable, high quality social housing and free quality public transportation.

A market-based economy is not the solution – it is the problem. It is capitalism in general, and the fossil fuel and the banking and financial sectors in particular, that are responsible for creating the climate crisis. They are the ones who should be held to account. If they are unable or unwilling to do this, they need to be socialized so that we can get the job done.

[1]    Recent articles in New Politics on the climate crisis may be found here and here.

[2]    IPCC Global Warming of 1.5°C: Summary for policy makers (2018). To stay below 2°C, global net CO2 emissions need to decrease by about 3% per year

[3]    Lawrence and Shäfer, Science 364, 829 (2019)

[4]    Nature, 7-13 June 2019

[5]    https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2019/06/28/world/europe/28reuters-europe-weather-france-record.html

[6]    Peters, Nature Geosci, 11, 378 (2018)

[7]    Can the world thrive on renewable energy?, Economist, 13 July 2017

[8]    Other major sources of industrial CO2 emission such as cement production still await satisfactory technical progress, however; see https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/63-ways-cut-global-warming-impact-cement

[9]    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/25/climate-apartheid-united-nations-expert-says-human-rights-may-not-survive-crisis

[10]  https://www.newclimateforpeace.org/

[11]  https://climateandsecurity.org/2019/01/18/new-pentagon-report-the-effects-of-a-changing-climate-are-a-national-security-issue/

[12]  It is unlikely that climate change played a critical role that the Syrian uprising against Assad in 2011 and later, for example, see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.05.007.

[13]  International Organization for Migration, Migration and Climate Change (2008)

[14]  https://www.thelancet.com/climate-and-health

[15]  https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(18)30029-9/fulltext

[16]  Science 570, 275 (2019)

[17]  http://www.climatecosts2040.org/files/ClimateCosts2040_Report-v4.pdf

[18]  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/us/miami-democratic-debates.html

[19]  e.g., Booth, https://www.marxist.com/transitional-programme-for-the-environment.htm (2018), Romer, https://newpol.org/issue_post/what-do-eco-socialists-have-to-say-about-the-climate-movement/ (2019)

[20]  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/climate/seawalls-cities-cost-climate-change.html

[21]  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/12/pentagon-greenhouse-gas-emissions-portugal

[22]  http://www.climatecosts2040.org/

[23]  https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/09/04/real-story-new-orleans-its-charter-schools/?utm_term=.2eacd636a4c3

What Defines Revolutionary Politics? A Response to Dan La Botz

By: July 4, 2019
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I dislike criticizing my good friend Dan La Botz, but I have to disagree with aspects of his review of The Socialist Manifesto, the new book by Bhaskar Sunkara, our fellow New Politics editorial board member and editor of Jacobin. To me, Dan’s review has a bit of a sectarian and unearthly air. Read more ›

The Socialist Manifesto of Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin: Socialism without Revolution  

By: July 3, 2019
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Bhaskar Sunkara, the young, left, entrepreneurial genius who founded and publishes Jacobin, has written a book, The Socialist Manifesto, in which he puts himself forward as the spokesperson for his generation’s socialist movement in America. He is certainly in a credible position to do so. His magazine Jacobin has the largest circulation both in print and online of any left publication in many decades, and for those who want something deeper he also publishes Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy. And if you don’t have time to read, there is also Jacobin radio. He is an important figure, though not an elected officer, in the Democratic Socialists of America or DSA, a group that now has more than 60,000 members, the largest left organization since the Communist Party of the 1940s. Bhaskar’s publications can claim credit for attracting and educating many of them. He is a public figure profiled in and writes opinion pieces for The New York Times and interviewed in its podcasts. And his pieces appear in The Guardian as well. During the last several years, Bhaskar had become American socialism’s public face.

Since the death of Michael Harrington in 1989—the same year Bhaskar was born—there has until now been no public intellectual capable of playing the role of spokesperson for socialism in America. Harrington, a longtime socialist activist, speaker, and writer, achieved national stature with the publication in 1962 of his book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which opened doors for him to leading figures in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations. During the Vietnam War, Harrington led a group out of the old Socialist Party and created a new group, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), which later became DSA.

In his book Socialism, published in 1972, Harrington did something very much like what Bhaskar attempts in in his Manifesto, that is, he explained (though in a lengthier tome) socialism’s fundamental ideas, traced its history, and put forward a vision and a strategy for bringing socialism to America. His strategy was an alliance between the progressive labor unions, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement to drive the southern racists and corrupt big city machines out of the Democratic Party and take it over. His strategy failed and for a variety of reasons soon became irrelevant. Now we have a new person putting himself forward as the socialist spokesperson and advocating a somewhat different strategy.

Reviewing a Friend’s Book

I should note that in writing about this book, it’s hard for me to talk about the author as one usually does by his last name. Since I moved to New York City about five years ago, I have gotten to know Bhaskar some, and while I can’t say that we’re close friends, we’re certainly friendly. So naturally, since I know him, when I read his book I couldn’t help but hear his voice and I couldn’t help but think how like him the book is. The book speaks to the reader in a straightforward, down-to-earth fashion, beginning with an amusing story about industrial workers in the fictional Jon Bon Jovi pasta sauce bottling plant in New Jersey and about another workplace in Sweden, describing the conditions workers face, their union, their government, and what would be necessary to improve the lives of “the pasta sauce proletarians.”

Soon one enters into the body of the book, Bhaskar’s overview of the history of socialism: European Social Democracy and the Socialist Party of America, the Russian Communists and the Third World liberation movements. One is struck by how ecumenical and sympathetic to earlier socialists Bhaskar is, how much he wants to find something good to say about almost every socialist experiment, though ultimately, and not surprisingly, he cannot find much of anything good to say about Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Tse-tung’s China. Nor would I, since they have nothing to do with the notion of democratic socialism as working people in power.

Social Democracy versus Democratic Socialism

Bhaskar draws the conclusion from his panorama of socialism that we have the most to learn from European social democracy, lessons both negative and positive. For Bhaskar and for some of the new young leaders of DSA, social democracy refers to the European experiments in creating post-war social welfare states in Britain, Scandinavia, and France and to a much more limited extent it includes the Democratic Party in the United States. The social democratic governments managed capitalism during the post-war period of economic expansion and succeeded through Keynesian programs such as public housing, health care, and education in both raising the standard of living for millions and keeping the economy humming. What Bhaskar does not note was the significant role of military Keynesianism; that is, the vast expenditures on arms, what was called the permanent arms economy. Ultimately, however, as capitalism went into crisis, the various socialist governing parties moved to the right, imposed the neoliberal regime and implemented austerity, undoing much of the welfare system they had created. That is why DSA at its National Convention in 2017 voted to leave the Socialist International.

The political heart of the Socialist Manifesto is to be found in Part II, the last fifty pages, where the author lays out his political strategy for today. Bhaskar contrasts social democracy to what he sees as the alternative: democratic socialism. By democratic socialism, he means a more militant, class-struggle movement that through labor union organization, winning increasing political power in state legislatures and Congress, as well as through social protests, and political strikes will bring about a transformational change. Bhaskar recognizes that social democracy failed, but he believes that today the struggles of the left must take place principally within the old social democratic parties. Or in some cases the democratic socialists can work in new broad left parties such as Podemos in Spain. As he writes in an interesting and problematic formulation, “Class struggle social democracy, then, isn’t a foe of democratic socialism—the road to the latter runs through the former.”

For Bhaskar, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders represent what he calls the contemporary class-struggle current within the larger formerly social democratic parties, in this case, Labour and the Democrats. Bhaskar believes that working in these currents we can build the democratic socialist organization that will one day take power. He praises Bernie for his class struggle approach that has challenged the 1% and called for a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class.” Sanders, Bhaskar argues, is quite different than the wonky Elizabeth Warren who focuses not on social struggle but on reforming liberal institutions.

The appearance of this class-struggle current, says Bhaskar, raises the possibility of what Seth Ackerman calls “the electoral equivalent of guerrilla insurgency.” Developing that idea, Bhaskar goes on to put forward the key element of his political strategy for the United States today:

What we need is to create the first traditional mass-membership party in the United States, an organization based on the delegate model of representation. Imagine a workers’ party created outside the Democratic Party that runs hundreds if not thousands of candidates and that is composed of various factions that debate one another and put together a democratically decided-on program. In the short term, it might run some candidates as independents, others as Democrats….The immediate goal would be to create an independent ideological and political profile for democratic socialism.

And of course this political organization—presumably DSA today—would be coordinated with inclusive social and labor movements. That combination of legislation, union power, and mass social protest, Bhaskar suggests, will carry us forward to socialism. Sometimes at DSA meetings people chant, “I believe that we will win.” Clearly so does Bhaskar, or at least he believes we have a fighting chance.

Unlike his predecessor Michael Harrington, Bhaskar does not believe that the left can simply enter and take over the Democratic Party. He thinks the left will need its own organization working outside so that it can at some point can take over the Democratic Party’s base, pull the party apart and create a new party. And, like Harrington, Bhaskar has come to the conclusion that socialism will be achieved primarily through an electoral party and labor movements, not come about through revolution that destroys the old state.

What About the State and Revolution?

While he contemplates opposition from the bourgeoisie, for example through capital strikes (withdrawal from investment), giving as an example the experience Léon Blum’s Popular Front government in France in the 1930s, still Bhaskar believes that working class using mass political strikes will be able to counter the capitalists and to push through to socialism. While he concedes that there will be capitalist resistance, the style and tone of his book, his narrative of socialist history, and his optimism toward the future all tend to suggest that the rise of socialism with be a gradual process made up of the accumulation of union members and legislators and accompanied by what are described as mass strikes but, it appears, with little violence. We get no sense of the actual nature of capitalism as a system that not only produces ordinary exploitation, oppression, and inequality, but that also generates economic and political crises, depressions and wars, authoritarian dictators and fascism.

Future struggles for socialism are quite unlikely to look like the rise of social democracy in postwar Sweden and France. Early attempts at democratic socialist striving for power in other countries—take Spain in the 1930s for example—took place amidst attempts at socialist revolution, counter-revolution, and civil war. We can see today in Europe and we have the first examples in the United States of what right-wing populist movements and the right in power look like when they control the state, and one can see that electoral alternatives and mass strikes, while important, will not ultimately be adequate to deal with the problems.

The German Civil War

What Bhaskar does not discuss at all, is the question of the capitalist state, that is the ruling class core of government and in particular the highest levels of the bureaucracy, the military and the police with which government ultimately enforces its rule. His otherwise impressive short history of socialism does not deal with the most important cases where in modern democratic societies socialists attempted to fight for socialism but failed, not only failed, but were crushed. While he spends a good deal of time discussing a half century of the history of German Social Democracy, Bhaskar, with an appropriate gesture of respect toward Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, passes over the violent struggles that took place in Germany’s Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1924.

When after World War I the Social Democrats in alliance with the German military took power in 1918, they overthrew the monarchy and established a liberal democracy, but they opposed any movement toward socialism. When the Communist Party organized and began to grow, the governing Social Democrats collaborated with the capitalist class to frustrate any attempt at socialist revolution. The German army, the Reichswehr, colluded with a vigilante movement of former officers and soldiers, known as the Frei Korps, and organized them into the paramilitary Black Reichswehr to smash the left. The army and the vigilantes moved into various German states and cities murdering leftist and labor leaders and sometimes massacring large numbers of working class people. Hundreds, perhaps thousands were killed. The Social Democratic Party, the ruling party of the Weimar Republic, collaborated with the Reichswehr, while the Communist prepared for and then backed out of a revolution 1923. Later many of those right-wing forces gravitated to Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Party.

While this was an utterly different era than the one we live in, this experience was the most significant attempt at establishing socialism in a modern, democratic European country. But it is not discussed in the Socialist Manifesto. While that era was unique, we can expect to see new periods of economic and political crisis in the future, and perhaps just as violent. One has to ask Bhaskar: why didn’t he take this up? And, how would democratic socialists respond to such a situation? What would Bhaskar advocate we do in the United States in a period of such intense class conflict? There are no easy answers to these questions, but one wants to know what he thinks.

The Chilean Experience

Then too, there is the more contemporary case of Chile, another modern democratic nation, at the time one of the more developed nations of Latin America. In 1970 Salvador Allende, a self-proclaimed Marxist and the candidate of the Socialist-Communist coalition called Popular Unity (UP), was elected president of Chile by a plurality. The UP carried out the nationalization of major industries, which encouraged the working class to strike and seize other property. Employers responded not only with capital strikes, but some also closed their plants while independent truckers went on strike against the government. At the same time the working class formed its own organizations, such as the coordinating committees that united striking workers. The economic and political crisis made the society ripe for socialist revolution, but Allende, the democratic socialist, did not prepare for one.

Allende trusted the military to defend his government, even praised the professionalism and loyalty of the military, and was shocked when it turned against him. The Chilean ruling class, its right-wing politicians and the military chiefs, working with the U.S. President Richard Nixon, the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the ITT corporation, organized a coup on September 11, 1973 that murdered Allende, overthrew the UP government, and imposed a military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet. The military junta killed some 3,000 leftists, leaders of political parties, labor unions, and peasant organizations. While the U.S. supported the coup, it was Chile’s ruling class using the state it controlled who carried it out. The junta then brought in University of Chicago economists, the “Chicago boys,” who used Chile as their pilot program for creating what came to be called the neoliberal economic model.

Surely “the Chilean road to socialism,” as it was called, is practically the scenario that Bhaskar envisions, a socialist government in power supported by a mass working class movement aiming to achieve a socialist society. Since it is such an obvious case, one wonders why Bhaskar failed to raise it and discuss it. And the reader wonders: what he would say about it?

The French Model

The contemporary experience that looks most like what Bhaskar seems to be proposing is the François Mitterand government of 1981-1995, the longest in the country’s history. The Mitterand government came to power as a result of the economic crisis of the 1970s that had led to a decline in employment and wages. Mitterand led a Popular Front type government, that is, an alliance of the Socialist and Communist parties, very like Léon Blum’s in the 1930s. While Mitterand led a Socialist Party, it talked like and initially behaved like the radical democratic socialist movement that Bhaskar advocates. Mitterand began by nationalizing 39 banks, several large industrial corporations, including electronics and computers as well as pharmaceuticals and chemicals. But the government, which attempted to maintain a strong currency, had no economic plan, and the labor union movement, while granted new rights and powers, did not engage in mass mobilization in support of the government.

The French capitalist class became extremely hostile to the government and the capitalists exported billions of dollars, declining to invest in what threatened to become some sort of socialist society. The crisis of the 1970s had not been overcome and the Mitterand government had failed to establish a new economic model. So by June 1982, as one historian has written, Mitterand “made a U-turn.” He returned much of industry to private hands and he launched France’s international initiative, that is, a neoliberal globalization model. Later governments, whether right or left, pursued more or less the same strategy up until the collapse of the French party system and the rise of populism in the last elections.

Bhaskar himself criticizes the Mitterand Social Democratic government for taking the neoliberal course, but the example raises the question of whether or not, as he has argued, “Class struggle social democracy, then, isn’t a foe of democratic socialism—the road to the latter runs through the former.” On the contrary, it seems clear from the Mitterand experience that a democratic socialist movement or party will have to challenge, compete with, and defeat social democracy. It will have to run not through it, but run over it.

And in America Today?

One has to ask why Bhaskar and many in the DSA, who consider themselves Marxists, decline to engage the question of revolution. Marx himself initially held the view that socialist might either through elections or a political revolution conquer the capitalist state and use it for their own purposes. But after witnessing the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx 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. Influenced by a variety of socialist modern theorists—such as Nicolas Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband—Bhaskar and others in DSA have drawn the conclusion that a revolution is either impossible or unnecessary in the contemporary world. The modern state, they argue, is no longer what it was in Marx’s time. Things, they say, have gotten more complicated.

Bhaskar seems to believe that the social and labor movements and the socialist legislators will eventually be in a position leave or split the Democratic Party and create a labor party. The problem for democratic socialists would then be that such a labor party would become the government and come under all the usual pressures to accommodate to capitalist system. One can foresee, based on historical experience—Blum, Allende, Mitterand—that the tendency would be for the labor party government to begin by compromising and to end by capitulating. Consequently the democratic socialists would have to constantly criticize the government from the left and organize mass movements to press it to carry out its program.

The democratic socialists, fighting against the social democratic labor party, might then themselves become the government—but they would face not just capital strikes but right-wing parties and collusion between the military and fascist forces in society. A socialist party would then have to organize among the rank-and-file soldiers and police officers and turn as many of them as possible against their officers. And the socialists would have to create and arm their own extra-legal police and military forces. The democratic socialists would be forced to become revolutionaries or go down to defeat. These are not simply hypothetical examples; this is the historical experience of the most modern states in Europe and Latin America in the last century.

Why Does It Matter?

One might ask: What does it matter today whether or not we talk about the state and revolution? After all, we have no prospects today or in the near future for revolution in the United States. The Republicans hold the presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court and most state governments, while the Democrats are deeply divided, and though there has been a slight uptick in strikes, particularly among teachers, the level of class struggle remains quite low. If there will one day be a revolution, one might reply, it’s a long way down the road, so we don’t need to think about it today.

I think this is a mistaken attitude. The reason that the questions of the state and revolution are important today is because they are fundamental political principles that will influence a socialist party’s form of organization, its day-to-day activities, its policies, and its long-term strategies. The concept of a legal, peaceful, gradual, democratic road to socialism—the Chilean road—affects a political organization’s mentality and its culture. A democratic socialist organization focused on elections, labor unions, and work in community organizations—but which does not foresee the need for a revolutionary transformation—will tend over time toward the gradualist and pacifist outlook that Bhaskar’s book implies. And then if the opportunity for revolution presents itself, as in Chile, such a party will not know how to seize day.

A democratic socialist organization will look to advance by small steps, as any socialist organization must, but a revolutionary organization will also be capable of leaping. A revolutionary socialist organization that looks for opportunities for confrontation, for disruption, and for conflict may in fact have a more difficult time winning elections or leading unions for any protracted period of time. But it will create a mentality and a political culture utterly opposed to the existing system, looking to destroy it, root and branch. A revolutionary socialist organization would prepare its members to lead the unions, the movements, and the parties in which they work toward the long-term goal of overthrowing capitalism and the capitalist state.

In one passage of The Socialist Manifesto Bhaskar discusses the importance of cadres (meaning a kind of officer corps, though he doesn’t use the word). He writes:

We need democratic socialists who are skilled speakers, effective writers, and sharp thinkers—who are humble enough to learn but bold enough to inspire confidence. Our organizations depend upon a disciplined core of such people if we hope to rebuild working class power that can exert an alternative pressure to that of capital. Even though their efforts won’t be enough in and of themselves, we can’t achieve socialism without them.

While party cadres need all of those things he lists, the thing they need above all is an understanding of the nature of the capitalist state and the need to carry out a working class revolution to overthrow it.

No to U.S. War with Iran! End the Sanctions Now! Solidarity with Iranian Workers!

By: July 2, 2019
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Democratic Socialists of America emphatically and unreservedly opposes a U.S. war on Iran. It would be another “war of choice,” just like the Iraq War of 2003, and would likely be just as colossal a humanitarian disaster.

National security adviser John Bolton, who works closely with the Mujahedeen Khalq (MEK), a warmongering Iranian cult that receives U.S. funding, has been urging an attack on Iran for many years — and it was Bolton and Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, who pushed hardest for crippling sanctions on Iran. As a result of the sanctions, the value of Iran’s currency has plummeted, leading to shortages of imported goods and products that are made with raw materials from abroad and a dramatic increase in living costs. U.S. sanctions are also preventing Iranians from access to life-saving medicines and are contributing to record-high youth unemployment.

On June 20, after Iran shot down a U.S. military drone it claimed was on a spy mission over its territory, Donald Trump came very close to striking Iran before calling it off when a general told him that a “disproportionate” 150 Iranians would likely die in the attack. But Trump’s plans to deploy 1,000 more soldiers, Patriot missiles and manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft to the region, in addition to the planned 1,500-soldier increase after the May tanker attacks have not been rescinded.

All this saber-rattling is occurring within the context of the U.S. unilaterally withdrawing from the nuclear agreement it (along with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany) signed with Iran in 2015. While the Islamic Republic has remained compliant with the terms of the agreement, it recently announced that, unless the U.S. sanctions are offset by the European signatories, it will increase its nuclear stockpile beyond the limit set in the agreement.

The U.S. has long claimed its aggression against Iran was predicated on preventing the country from developing nuclear weapons. While both the U.S. and its regional ally Israel have nuclear weapons, a 2007 National Intelligence Assessment concluded Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Like the Gulf of Tonkin or Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, this widely parroted claim is yet another example of Washington’s willingness to manipulate facts to create a pretext for war.

The threat of war also comes at a time when working-class Iranians have been organizing in the face of the theocratic government’s anti-labor repression, most famously against the Haft Tappeh Sugar Cane strike and other such strikes. The government also arrested demonstrators on May Day 2018. There are signs that labor resistance is again rising — but a U.S. war on Iran would be disastrous for this movement and likely breed the conditions for a “bunker mentality” that effectively squashes working-class organizing. Iranian dissidents, trade unionists, human rights and civil society activists overwhelmingly oppose U.S. military intervention and sanctions, and favor the nuclear deal that the Trump administration disastrously abandoned in order to lay the foundations for confrontation.

DSA therefore urges active opposition to the threat of yet another war, an end to U.S. sanctions on Iran, and also an internationalist campaign for the release of all Iranian political prisoners and incarcerated workers, such as those involved in the Haft Tappeh strike like Esmail Bakhshi and Sepideh Gholian.

 

This statement was published on the DSA website on June 27, 2019.

Sudanese and Algerian Uprisings: Vantage Points for Global Solidarity

By: June 30, 2019
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Since the outbreak of the Sudanese and Algerian uprisings in early 2019, there has been much hope that these developments would move beyond the many barriers that destroyed the revolutionary process that began in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011.

In Sudan, continuous mass protests against poverty and repression (which began in December 2018), and the defection of low-ranking soldiers and junior military officers who joined the uprising, forced the leadership of the military to depose the brutal dictator,  Omar al-Bashir on April 11. A sit-in of thousands of protesters in front of the military headquarters in the capital city of Khartoum lasted for more than six weeks, grew in size and diversity and demanded an end to military rule. Sudanese revolutionaries have  also opposed their military’s involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen and the use of Sudanese children as soldiers there.

After a three-day effective general strike in late May, the Sudanese military regime used its paramilitary Rapid Support Force or RSF (previously known as Janjaweed and trained in genocide in Darfur) to assault and crush the sit in, and to kill over one hundred and injure hundreds there and  around the country. The RSF attacked hospitals and various centers of protest, raped and killed nurses and other medical staff, and threw bodies of the murdered in the Nile river.

Since the June 3rd massacre, the revolutionaries in Sudan, mostly young working class women and men, have organized a massive civil disobedience campaign, which has paralyzed the country. They have put up barricades in many streets and  have continued to resist. They also continue to be targeted, killed, detained and raped.

Although the Forces for Freedom and Change, an alliance of political parties and trade unions, agreed to an Ethiopian government negotiated plan to create a civilian majority (8 civilian to 7 military) governing body for a political transition to an election, Sudan’s ruling general rejected Ethiopia’s proposal on June 24. Most protesters refuse to trust any deal with a military that has continued to massacre them over the years.  The Sudanese Professionals’ Association (part of the Forces for Freedom and Change) has now called for mass demonstrations on Monday June 30 to demand the handover of power from the military to civilians.

In Algeria, nationwide mass protests of millions that began in February forced the stepping down of president Abdelaziz Bouteflika on April 2. These Friday protests which consisted mostly of youth with strong participation by women, were followed by protests by workers in education, health, the justice system, the petrochemical industry and other labor unions.  They have not only opposed unemployment, crippling austerity measures and corruption, but have also demanded an end to the entire military regime and the old guard that has been in power since Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962. In the words of many youth participants, “It’s a rejection of the whole system” and a demand for radical democratic change.

Although the Sudanese and Algerian uprisings are currently under assault, this is no time to lose hope.  n order to help save these uprisings and move forward, it is necessary to begin by singling  out and comprehending their new features.

The New Features of the Sudanese and Algerian Uprisings

Both uprisings have opposed religious fundamentalism and military regimes. In the case of Sudan, the hated military regime is also an Islamic fundamentalist one that has imposed Shari’a law on the population.

The role of women and women’s struggles against patriarchy have been prominent in both uprisings. In Sudan, women have been fighting against police brutality, Shari’a law, the morality police and the dress code. Feminist organizations have been part of the leadership of the revolution. In Algeria, they have been fighting patriarchal practices promoted both by the secular military regime and by the religious fundamentalist opposition. The country’s Family Code discriminates against women and treats them as minors.

Labor struggles of rural, industrial and service sector workers have been an integral part of both uprisings. In Sudan, doctors and teachers have been the backbone of the leadership of the struggle in the form of the Sudanese Professionals’ Association. In Algeria unemployed youth (women and men), members of labor unions and labor activists have been in the forefront of the struggle.

Opposition to anti-Black racism and to the marginalization of parts of the population such as Amazighs in Algeria and Christian animists in Sudan has been strong in both uprisings but especially prominent in the Sudanese uprising.  Slogans apologizing for the genocide of Black people in Darfur have been on the lips of many in Sudan. The recognition that “we are all Darfur” has manifested itself in the fact  that the Janjaweed militia responsible for the Darfur genocide are being used by the Sudanese regime to crush the nationwide uprising.

There is also a new element in the counter-revolutionary assault on the Sudanese uprising. Whereas in 2011, various regional and global powers claimed to take different sides concerning the uprisings in Egypt or in Syria, now all the regional and global powers are together in their efforts to crush the Sudanese uprising. The military regime in Sudan is backed by Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar,  Egypt and Turkey.  It is also indirectly supported by the Iranian regime.  China and Russia have investments in Sudan and have vetoed a proposed mild United Nations resolution by Britain and Germany to condemn the June 3 assault on the Khartoum sit-in. The U.S. and Israel back what is in the interest of Saudi Arabia. The European union has been funding the Rapid Support Force (Janjaweed) of the Sudanese military regime to stop the flow of migrants beyond Sudan.

It can be argued that these regional and global powers are together in wanting to see an end to the Sudanese uprising not only because of their economic interests but also because the Sudanese uprising’s  anti-patriarchal and anti-racist dimensions make it the most progressive in the Middle East and North Africa. It challenges the dominant narrative about what the region is supposed to represent:  Religious fundamentalism, militarized authoritarianism, patriarchy, racism, ethnic prejudices and sectarianism.

In the face of these new developments, it is incumbent upon all  Middle Eastern and North African revolutionary socialists to reach out to fellow Sudanese and Algerian revolutionaries and  help create the kinds of regional and international connections that would allow these uprisings to continue and spread.

Vantage Points for Regional and Global Solidarity

So far, within the region there have been expressions of support from progressives and revolutionaries in  Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria (Idlib), Egypt. Algerian and Sudanese revolutionaries have also expressed support for each other.

The fact that both the Sudanese and the Algerian uprisings involve the wide participation of industrial and service workers, rural workers, teachers, nurses and doctors represents the kind of labor solidarity that can be an inspiration to the rest of the region and the world.

The struggles against patriarchy and racism and the wide participation of women and oppressed minorities in the Sudanese and Algerian uprisings can be an inspiration to feminists and oppressed minorities in the region and around the world.

There are also important lessons that can be drawn from the history of the Algerian and Sudanese struggles against colonialism.  The  current Algerian regime symbolizes the tragic fact that part of a generation of revolutionaries involved in the struggle against French colonialism transformed into their opposite and became a new brutal ruling class. Frantz Fanon, the Martinican/French thinker and revolutionary summed  up his experiences in the Algerian and  other African struggles against colonialism in his Wretched of the Earth, and continues to offer us important lessons. He argued that for a revolution to continue, capitalist alienated labor, racism, sexism must be uprooted, a new humanity and a new internationalism must be defined.

Let’s build on all the new elements and openings created by the Sudanese and Algerian uprisings. Let’s create regional and international links on this basis to change the course of events in the Middle East and North Africa from endless wars, authoritarian capitalism, religious fundamentalism and imperialism to an emancipatory direction.

Suggested Readings/Audio links:

Audio link of online panel on the state of the Sudanese & Algerian Uprisings

http://youtu.be/71U70vPNHCE

Sudan: Women at the Heart of Mobilizations

https://www.allianceofmesocialists.org/sudan-women-at-the-heart-of-mobilizations/

Statement of Solidarity with the Sudanese and Algerian Uprisings

https://www.allianceofmesocialists.org/statement-of-solidarity-with-the-sudanese-and-algerian-uprisings/

Algeria in Revolt: What Makes This Movement Really Unique

https://www.allianceofmesocialists.org/algeria-in-revolt-we-woke-up-and-you-will-pay/

Welcome to the New Algerian Revolution: An Interview with Hamza Hamouchene

https://www.allianceofmesocialists.org/welcome-to-the-new-algerian-revolution-an-interview-with-hamza-hamouchene/

From Syria to Sudan: State Violence and Spectacle

https://www.allianceofmesocialists.org/from-syria-to-sudan-state-violence-and-the-spectacle/

Sanders’ “Socialism” Is Old-Fashioned Liberalism

By: June 30, 2019
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Give Bernie Sanders props for popularizing the term “socialism.” It used to be a conversation stopper. Now it is a conversation starter.

But Sanders isn’t helping the socialist cause by confusing it with the old New Deal liberalism of FDR. As Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party’s 1936 presidential candidate, famously quipped in a radio address, “Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher.”

Socialism has traditionally meant social ownership and democratic administration of the economy. That’s the dictionary definition. That’s the socialist tradition. One can see that from this old membership card of the UK Labour Party, a party nominally committed to democratic socialism from 1918 until the Tony Blair’s “Third Way” neoliberals got this Clause 4 deleted from the party constitution in 1995):

Now Bernie Sanders is deleting economic democracy based on social ownership of the major means of production from our understanding of socialism.

As he said in his November 2015 speech on democratic socialism, “So the next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this: I don’t believe government should own the means of production….”

When he returned to the topic of democratic socialism again on June 12 this year, he never said a word about any kind of social ownership. Nothing about the worker cooperatives he touted in his 2016 book, Our Revolution. Nothing about the idea Sanders had floated just two weeks before the speech of socializing companies by requiring them to regularly put a portion of their shares in a fund controlled by workers.

Democratic socialism for Sanders in his speech is simply fulfilling an updated version of President Roosevelt’s 1944 call for an Economic Bill of Rights, which Sanders defined as:

  • The right to a decent job that pays a living wage
  • The right to quality health care
  • The right to a complete education
  • The right to affordable housing
  • The right to a clean environment
  • The right to a secure retirement

These are rights that socialists support. I have campaigned for this sort of Economic Bill of Rights in three campaigns for New York governor since 2010. It was our Green alternative to the public austerity that both Democrats and Republicans were proposing in the wake of the 2008 housing and financial meltdown. We called it the Green New Deal.

Socialism Means System Change

Socialism is a different system of economic organization from capitalism. Sanders never addresses how capitalist property relations divide society into class hierarchies with the billionaire class on top.

Under capitalism, workers are exploited. The owners, not the workers—the takers, not the makers—grab for themselves the wealth that workers create with their labor. Workers get a fixed wage, while capitalists take all the profits. Under socialism, workers receive the full value of their labor. The net income after paying for production costs (equipment, materials, supplies, taxes, etc.) is distributed to the workers in proportion to their labor contribution. This socialist system of distribution yields an equitable distribution of income in the first place at the point of production. Sanders’ tax and transfer social programs only partially compensate after the fact for exploitation and its inequitable distribution.

Capitalism is prone to economic crises due to overproduction during market booms, leading to excess inventories and layoffs during market busts. These recessions and depressions impoverish workers and further concentrate wealth as the bigger capitalists buy up assets at deflated prices. A socialist economic democracy can plan for stable production without boom and bust cycles, but Sanders gives no indication that this is part of the case for socialism.

Socialist economic planning also enables an ecological socialism of sustainable production of enough to meet people’s material needs without exceeding ecological limits. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a system of blind, relentless growth driven by its competitive structure, which requires capitalist firms to grow or die in the competition for market shares and profits. Capitalist growth disregards ecological limits and is destroying the ecological foundations of the human economy.

Sanders’ call for “the right to a clean environment” requires ecosocialism. But Sanders’ says nothing about how “democratic socialism” is needed to realize this right, particularly with respect to the climate crisis. Exxon, Chevron, and the Koch Brothers will never reinvest their earnings from fossil fuels into clean renewables. Big Oil must be socialized along with power utilities, railroads, banking, and other key sectors in order to plan the rapid transition to 100% clean energy across all productive sectors, from electricity and transportation to agriculture and manufacturing. The federal government took over or built a quarter of US manufacturing capacity during World War II in order to turn industry on a dime into the “Arsenal of Democracy” that helped beat the fascists. We need nothing less to defeat climate change.

Capitalist competition also generates war. Global corporations enlist their home-based nation-states and militaries in an international competition for resources, markets, cheap labor, and geopolitical military positioning. This capitalist international structure produces endless wars and the inevitability, sooner or later, of global nuclear annihilation by the nuclear-armed states if we don’t change the system. Socialism’s international cooperation would build peace based on mutual aid in place of capitalism’ competitive nationalistic militarism.

The jingoistic display of a dozen American flags as the total backdrop for Sanders’ 2019 socialism speech was the antithesis of socialist internationalism. The speech said nothing critical about the U.S. global military empire or about socialism as the alternative to capitalist imperialism and the path to peace.

Democracy Requires Socialism

Sanders’ presentation of liberal social programs as “socialism” fails to address the power rooted in the private ownership and dictatorial control of the means of production. Dictatorial control extends well beyond the workplace where employees work as directed by supervisors without many of the constitutional protections of the Bill of Rights. Capitalist economic dictatorship encompasses the whole economy and the government. Without socialist economic democracy, programs to implement the Economic Bill of Rights will be resisted or, if passed, rolled back by the capitalists because power will remain in their hands.

Concentrated economic power under capitalism yields concentrated political power for the capitalist class. This power is obviously exercised through campaign donations, advertising, and lobbying. But it is also expressed directly in the economy. Capitalists can strike, too. They can refuse to finance government borrowing. They can withhold or offshore investments, depress the economy, and blame the reformers. Usually, the threat of these measures is sufficient to bring progressive reformers to heel. The capitalists who exercise this private economic power are not up for election.

Sanders’ liberalism is vulnerable to the capitalist veto because it depends on taxing the capitalist economy to fund the social programs. Capitalists don’t want to pay taxes and are especially opposed to taxes that fund social programs that strengthen the economic security and therefore the bargaining power of the working class. A Sanders administration would have to pander to the capitalists or face economic sabotage. Bill Clinton found this out. He was instructed during the transition planning for his presidency by Goldman Sachs’ Robert Rubin, who became his top economic advisor and treasury secretary, that he would have to drop his modest reform program of education spending, public works, and middle-class tax cuts in order to show the investor class the fiscal austerity they demanded. Clinton exclaimed, “You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Clinton found out that the U.S. bond market—a few thousand traders working for a handful of investment banks—had veto power over his economic program.

Democracy needs socialism. Political democracy requires economic democracy. Socialist economic democracy based on social ownership and democratic administration of the economy is needed so people have the power to enact and maintain an Economic Bill of Rights.

The Economic Bill of Rights as an Anti-Racist Program

Sanders’ Economic Bill of Rights will be popular with working class voters. Public opinion polling has consistently shown majority support for government action to realize these rights from the 1940s up to today. I am again campaigning for it as I have in past campaigns.

But in addition to calling for socialist economic democracy as necessary for securing these economic rights, I am also saying the Economic Bill of Rights must be implemented in a way that reverses the growing racial wealth gap and the increasing segregation in housing and segregation that we have experienced since the 1980s. It was disappointing that in Sanders’ unvarnished praise of FDR’s New Deal that he did not acknowledge and correct for the racial bias in its implementation. Social Security at first excluded sharecroppers, farmworkers, and domestic workers, which disproportionately excluded black people and poor people of every color. The administration of the Home Ownership Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and the public housing program discriminated against black people and increased segregation, as did the education and housing programs of the GI Bill. New Deal policies increased the economic gap between black people and white people.

It was Martin Luther King Jr., whom Sanders cites favorably in his speech, and other civil rights leaders who picked up the torch for FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights in the 1960s. With their 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1966 Freedom Budget, and 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, they demanded an Economic Bill of Rights, but this time with the indispensable addition that the programs be administered equitably without racial discrimination. That is the anti-racist torch we must pick up today in campaigning for the Economic Bill of Rights. Anti-racism is one of the reasons we call for a Green New Deal in order to distinguish it from the racism of the old New Deal.

Those 1960s civil rights leaders saw their demands for universal economic rights as a means of undermining the white racial backlash that was then mounting in reaction to the passage of federal civil rights laws. White workers were being mobilized against civil rights and desegregation by the Dixiecrat Democrats and the Goldwater Republicans. Blacks were scapegoated as a threat to white workers’ jobs and economic well-being. Competition for limited opportunities and resources provided a material underpinning for white racism. In turning “from civil rights to human rights,” the civil rights movement believed they needed to secure economic rights for all in order to secure civil rights for black people. They intended to undercut racism by leading an interracial movement of poor and working people for economic rights for all. As A. Philip Randolph, the socialist labor leader who conceived of the March on Washington, put it, “We must liberate not only ourselves, but our white brothers and sisters.”

The failure of the Democrats to implement the Economic Bill of Rights during the Johnson administration when they held the presidency and both houses of Congress in the 1960s ultimately led to the white backlash taking power today in the form of Donald Trump. An important part of the way to beat back his negative program of racist scapegoating is still the same: a positive program of economic rights for all. Old-fashioned New Deal liberalism is not enough. It will take socialist economic democracy to secure economic rights for all.

Localism’s Contradictions in Hong Kong

By: June 29, 2019
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Earlier this week, Hong Kong had been rocked by perhaps the largest demonstration ever in the city’s history. In response to a murder case committed by a Hong Kong man in Taiwan, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) proposed a bill that would establish the transfer of fugitives between the city, Taiwan, Mainland China, and Macau. As protesters argue, this would legally allow the Hong Kong government to transfer political prisoners to China, a huge step forward for China and Hong Kong government to continue curbing political dissent. Two million people reportedly participated in the protests, more than a quarter of the city’s population. Chief Executive Carrie Lam had since agreed to indefinitely delay the bill, signaling at least a major, if not temporary, victory of the pan-democratic camp. Protests continue this week as the citizens surround the police headquarters to hold the police accountable for abuse of authority and violence in the last week and to pressure Lam to decidedly drop the bill.

Yet unlike 2014, media outlets and pundits across the globe struggled to make sense of the fact that Hong Kong’s biggest protest is being led by no clear political entities. While the Umbrella movement and its aftermath saw the upsurge of youth-led groups like Demosisto and rising political stars like Joshua Wong and Nathan Law, this year’s protests developed without any discernible leaders or political parties, and with that, particular ideologies, rising to the fore. Alice Su reflects in the Los Angeles Times that the protesters were “impeccably organized, yet no one is in charge.” The rapid shifting of forces on the ground rendered each of the Umbrella movement stars merely some of many participants and organizers on the streets. Timothy McLaughlin, in The Atlantic, locates some central organizing responsibility to the broad, united front Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF), which includes most pan-democratic parties and other NGOs and existed since 2002. But even CHRF’s organizers themselves denied this theory, seeing themselves as widely pluralistic and as “facilitators,” not “organizers.” In any case, Ngok Ma’s critique of the CHRF ten years ago still stands true: “while the form was flexible and organic, allowing maximum participation of groups without having a high level of consensus, the form did not have a stable core…it was relatively difficult for this organizational form to sustain a movement for long periods of time.”

This lack of ideological consensus in mass movement makes it difficult and superficial to say that these weeks’ protests are a definitive step forward for a left, anti-capitalist movement. This is not to say that there were not impressively progressive and radical forces, like the self-organized rally by thousands of mothers, the individual efforts of bus drivers helping to block the roads, or the teachers’ union voting to suspend classes in support of the protests. But the absence of political leadership belies a key issue in Hong Kong’s vibrant but contradictory history of political mobilization: the complex diversity of ideologies in the pan-democratic and localist opposition camp. Localism, as a recent political phenomenon in the Hong Kong political landscape, stresses Hong Kong’s political and cultural autonomy as distinct from that of China, while older pan-democratic organizations tend to stress this continuity between democratic struggles in Hong Kong and China. Localism has politicized the younger generations in many ways – but is localism a coherent political ideology, and how does it square with an anti-capitalist, mass-led political practice?

**

Those trying to make sense of who’s left and who’s right in Hong Kong’s political landscape in the States usually fall into three broad camps of analysis. The first view, more prevalent in mainstream liberal narratives, positions the pan-democratic and localist camp as generally progressive, standing up for human rights against the right-authoritarianism of the Chinese regime and pro-Beijing legislators in the LegCo. The second view, more nuanced, accepts that there is a complex jockeying of power between left-leaning, centrist liberals, and right-leaning forces within the large umbrella of opposition. The third view is essentially reactionary, and receives little support beyond a few pundits and ultra-left sects: parroting the Chinese government’s official talking points, these ‘left’ critics demonize any opposition to China’s neoliberalism and neo-colonialism as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and imperialist.

But all of these perspectives fail to understand that behind the fervent and inspirational self-organization of the Hong Kong people lies a different understanding of political organization. We can begin by noting the general weakness of political parties in building their base throughout the last few years. Demosisto, once hailed as the shining light of Hong Kong’s youth movement, listed a membership count of 25 in 2017. Neighbourhood and Worker’s Service Centre (NWSC), one of the city’s oldest social democratic group in the left wing of the opposition saw a major internal split last year, in protest of long-time leader and founder Leung Yiu-chung’s dissolution of the workers’ rights committee. The liberal Democratic Party, the largest political party in the city, now boasts a membership of around 700, but presumably no more than one or two hundred are active organizing members.

This sobering reminder of the political parties’ perennial inability to expand their membership base makes the occasional outbursts of mass-scale political mobilization even more striking. These contradictions are no more apparent than in this month’s anti-extradition bill protests. Efficient and self-organized networks of first aid care and supplies support stations reported throughout the city are a definitive improvement from those in the 2014 mobilizations. The now-viral footage of Hong Kong youth protesters working together to swiftly douse a nearby can of tear gas with their water-bottles impressed viewers across the globe. The populace has cultivated these skills through the series of mass upsurges in the past years, not through the political parties. If anything, the Gramscian strategy of building political opposition in the electoral sphere has become less and less effective. With the disqualification of some pan-democratic and localist LegCo candidates in 2017 and 2018 like Leung ‘Long Hair’ Kwok-hung, Agnes Chow, and Yau Chi-wing, the prospects of influencing the council from within look increasingly grim. And political forces have largely failed to maintain the momentum in building their movements from the Umbrella protests – at least up to this point.

Youngspiration leader Baggio Leung’s suggestion that this type of spontaneous efficiency suggests “a new model” of political mobilization may be an unsustainable optimism. By unsustainable, I do not mean the Hong Kong people’s capacity for powerful episodes of mobilization, but its capacity to promote and sustain a truly radical movement of anti-capitalist insurgency. While the conditions for working class and disenfranchised people of all sorts – from street hawkers and small business owners to the elderly – continue to decline, the key factor that mobilizes people out into the street, regardless of political affiliation and even class status, is still the sense of opposition to Chinese encroachment of civil liberties. In other words, the discernible political compass for most Hong Kongers is not left and right, but pro-Beijing or pan-democracy.

**

The complex sentiment of xenophobia against the Mainland Chinese by some pan-democratic political parties is another symptom of this distinctive political milieu. Localist, pro-independence groups like Hong Kong Indigenous and Youngspiration run on this virtually single-issue platform that incoherently intersects with broader economic concerns. Increased Chinese influence in Hong Kong is an extremely diverse set of phenomena, involving actors from the Chinese government and bourgeois investors to the Chinese working-class, but this is often reduced into one thing. It would be impossible to simply correlate Hong Kong’s anti-Chinese sentiment with the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the world, from Syrian refugees to Latinx populations crossing the U. S. border. On the one hand, studies have shown that lower-class Chinese immigrants suffer from wage and other forms of discrimination and mental health issues upon entry to Hong Kong. On the other hand, Chinese investors, often with the support of the Chinese regime, have been actively promoting efforts to gentrify long-time communities with small to large-scale development projects, like the 2010 displacement of Choi Yuen Tsuen village by the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link. Progressive grassroots collectives such as Land Justice League (also labeled ‘localist’) have been organizing and raising awareness of such projects, while other localist groups focus their efforts on targetting Chinese immigration in toto, regardless of class or gender background. In 2015, Youngspiration spearheaded efforts to deport an undocumented Mainland Chinese boy, arguing that this case may risk establishing a precedent for more illegal immigration. People Power, another localist party, developed from a complicated series of splits in some older pan-democratic activists and a new influx of younger leaders. Its vague adherence to ‘populism’ bypasses any coherent basis of political unity around economic policy and other key issues.

Localism, in this sense, designates a broad array of political forces and positions that often renders the relationship between material economic analysis and civil liberty obscured. There are also important differences between localist groups on what Hong Kong’s political autonomy should look like. Advocates of ‘independence’ are different from those of ‘self-determination’, despite often organizing closely with each other. In most cases now, more civically-minded left localists like Demosisto and militant localist nativists like Youngspiration and People Power stand alongside older pan-democratic groups like the Democratic Party and League of Social Democrats (LSD). Just like the Tiananmen Square protests thirty years ago, the indigenous opposition to the Chinese regime is a contradictory mix of working-class interests and liberal and middle-class-centered youth politics. These are not simply contingent alliances between working-class and middle-class forces in the face of a common enemy: many are politicized in the same milieu, and their material conditions and concerns are refracted incoherently through the heterogeneity of the movement. The disturbing elements of the warm reception of the U.S. government’s gestural support and even nostalgia for the British colonial past, while relatively fringe, stem from this confused populism.

To put it another way, many of these new parties and activists do not descend from any traditional leftist or right-wing tendencies. In fact, arguably speaking, left-wing formations have never quite existed as strong independent political forces in Hong Kong history. To be sure, there have been Trotskyists and anarchists in the city even before the communist revolution in China in 1949. But these tendencies have struggled to thrive (in the face of both British colonial suppression and internal sectarian conflicts), and survived only in very small numbers up to this point. Some of the few organized remnants of these movements formed the older left-wing of the pan-democratic camp, the social democratic LSD and NWSC. Anything traditionally Maoist lost almost all credibility with the Hong Kong people in the riots of 1967, when ultra-left insurgents, influenced by China’s Cultural Revolution, set off a series of random and targeted bombs in the city that killed more than 50 people and injured hundreds. Many Communist Party sympathizers and members at that point followed the late Chinese premier Deng Xiao-ping’s turn to capitalist market reforms and established what is now the backbone of the city’s pro-Beijing camp. Some, like Martin Lee and Sze-to Wah, distanced themselves from the party and became the founding members and stalwarts of the Democratic Party.

Localist leaders, in many ways, found their political identities in isolation from the messy histories of the 20th-century Hong Kong left. Only later as they found themselves propelled into the spotlight of the 2014 protests as new co-leaders of the pan-democratic camp did they work in close collaboration with traditional parties like LSD and the Democratic Party. Demosisto’s leaders, for example, began as a pressure group of secondary school students against propagandistic school curriculum reform, Scholarism, that was propelled into the political center over the course of a summer. This generation of political leaders grew up fully in the ever-looming influence of the Chinese regime, not as leftists still making sense of the transition between colonial rule and authoritarian socialism. Their politics are decisively shaped by China and its contradictions.

The rise of localist politics, in other words, is a double-edged sword. The insidious extradition bill spontaneously mobilized millions on the street, most of whom have not been politically active besides participating in the 2014 protests. But this force can cultivate a sense of myopia for the city’s populace when it comes to the globalized threat of neoliberal capital that threatens the everyday people of Hong Kong. The widespread support of even international bankers like HSBC and Standard Chartered, that allowed flexible working hours for employees to participate in the protests, further erodes any possibility of anti-capitalist leadership in the movement. The threat of capital to one of the world’s most inequitable cities, in reality, deeply connects Hong Kongers to their counterparts in the Mainland. The ever-growing population of migrant rural workers from China’s countryside and the country’s increasing wage gap continues to be exacerbated. The government’s ambition to virulently deregulate its markets for the bourgeoisie renders any attempts to attend to the interests of the working-class, rural population, and environment as merely half-hearted. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to expand its influence affects the geopolitical, socio-economic, and ecological security of regions from Malaysia to Gabon.

But Hong Kong’s recent pattern of mobilizations suggests that these larger phenomena are still not the motivating factor for mass politics. In fact, the key struggles for workers’ rights often still exist in isolation from each other in recent history. Filipino, Indonesian, and other Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, almost all women, comprise five percent of the city’s total population. The rampant forms of wage, gender, sexual, and racial discrimination faced by these people are only ameliorated by their consistent militancy and brief, but powerful, history of activism. These movements generally operate separately from the mainstream localist and pan-democratic parties, and both sides reach out in collaboration only on an occasional basis. Hong Kong-based migrant worker organizer Eni Lestari observes that

“Much of Hong Kong’s political movement does not recognize globalization as a major issue. While political groups would often organize against symptoms of capitalist exploitation, the deeper structural issues of globalization and imperialism are not talked about as much. Many groups understand their fights against the Hong Kong government as independent issues, so it is difficult for our movement to campaign, even among migrants, against neoliberal globalization.”

Some mainstream Hong Kong unions under the pan-democratic Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) will collaborate with some of these migrant workers groups in some demonstrations with common interests like wage increase, but these groups struggle to build a collaborative movement to engage larger numbers of people against broader issues of globalization and neoliberalism. These disconnections and ambiguities continue in even today’s massive protests.

**

While the pan-democratic camp wins an important victory against the pro-Beijing forces and China in the anti-extradition bill campaign’s temporary success, the problem of mobilizing civil society and workers against the deeper roots of exploitation and social injustice remains in the city. The protests continue its momentum now into the second and third weeks, with demands for the chief executive’s resignation and accountability for police violence. But what of explicitly class-based demands? Chuang magazine’s interview with a local contact and participant laments that “we haven’t seen even a single clearly left-wing banner in this movement.” Upsurges of political consciousness do not necessarily translate into class consciousness – of material support for the working classes against Chinese state capitalism and its bourgeoisie. China’s recent workers’ strikes, while comparatively much smaller in scale, may be even more substantively radical than the Hong Kong situation. But as some recent commentators note, it may be premature to speak of a developed working-class movement there as well. Hong Kong-based labor activist Au Loong-yu recognizes the radical possibility of students risking their lives to organize with workers in the Jasic situation, but ultimately questions whether it is now feasible to speak of a developing sense of class consciousness “based on the actions of a less than 100 people in a single workplace.”

These views, while sobering, can help us come to a more objective analysis of the material conditions of forces in Hong Kong, China, and beyond, in the aftermath of the anti-extradition bill upsurge. The mass mobilization of youth this year and in the Umbrella movement undoubtedly have demonstrated that the city can be politicized in powerful ways. But so far, every large mobilization has failed to see a corresponding growth in the actual movements and political groups. This new type of insurgency, in the form of the leaderless masses of Hong Kong self-organizing like a well-oiled machine, may expose less the rise of a budding anti-capitalist movement than a core weakness of how politics are conducted and directed in the city. The absence of a vigorously anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist left leaves the increased sympathy for the U.S. government and its neoliberal ideology a constant potential for some young localist leaders and participants. And despite the efforts of new political parties to politicize more individuals, the reality is that the aims and direction of localist politics, with respect to neoliberal globalization and the interests of the working class in and beyond Hong Kong, often remain sharply contradictory or muddled.

At the same time, we must remember the last week’s protests are a powerful reminder of the Hong Kong people’s explosive political potential. Years of struggling in the streets cultivate the best kind of political education. This victory may be an important step to a long struggle, and the stakes are only going to increase in the shadow of China’s ever-threatening but also highly unstable geopolitics. The contradictions of the localist parties do not necessarily suggest inevitable political failure. If anything, only by attuning ourselves to these contradictions, not any paradigms of the past, can the masses find the ways to liberation.

Theoretical Lies of the World Bank

By: June 26, 2019
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In 2019, the World Bank (WB) and the IMF will be 75 years old. These two international financial institutions (IFI), founded in 1944, are dominated by the USA and a few allied major powers who work to generalize policies that run counter the interests of the world’s populations.

The WB and the IMF have systematically made loans to States as a means of influencing their policies. Foreign indebtedness has been and continues to be used as an instrument for subordinating the borrowers. Since their creation, the IMF and the WB have violated international pacts on human rights and have no qualms about supporting dictatorships.

A new form of decolonization is urgently required to get out of the predicament in which the IFI and their main shareholders have entrapped the world in general. New international institutions must be established. This new series of articles by Éric Toussaint retraces the development of the World Bank and the IMF since they were founded in 1944. The articles are taken from the book The World Bank: a never-ending coup d’état. The hidden agenda of the Washington Consensus (Mumbai: Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, 2007), or The World Bank: A critical Primer (Pluto, 2007).

The World Bank claims that, in order to progress, the Developing Countries [1] should rely on external borrowing and attract foreign investments. The main aim of thus running up debt is to buy basic equipment and consumer goods from the highly industrialised countries. The facts show that day after day, for decades now, the idea has been failing to bring about progress. The models which have influenced the Bank’s vision can only result in making the developing countries heavily dependent on an influx of external capital, particularly in the form of loans, which create the illusion of a certain level of self-sustained development. The lenders of public money (the governments of the industrialised countries and especially the World Bank) see loans as a powerful means of control over indebted countries. Thus the Bank’s actions should not be seen as a succession of errors or bad management. On the contrary, they are a deliberate part of a coherent, carefully thought-out, theoretical plan, taught with great application in most universities. It is distilled in hundreds of books on development economics. The World Bank has produced its own ideology of development. When facts undermine the theory, the Bank does not question the theory. Rather, it seeks to twist the facts in order to protect the dogma.

In the early years of its existence, the Bank was not much given to reflecting upon the type of political economy that might best be applied to the developing countries. There were several reasons for this: first, it was not among the Bank’s priorities at the time. In 1957, the majority of the loans made by the Bank (52.7%) still went to the industrialised countries [2]. Secondly, the theoretical framework of the Bank’s economists and directors was of a neo-classical bent. Now neo-classical theory did not assign any particular place to the developing countries [3]. Finally, it was not until 1960 that the Bank came up with a specific instrument for granting low-interest loans to the developing countries, with the creation of the International Development Association (IDA).

However, the fact that the Bank had no ideas of its own did not prevent it from criticising others. Indeed, in 1949, it criticised a report by a United Nations’ commission on employment and economics, which argued for public investment in heavy industry in the developing countries. The Bank declared that the governments of the developing countries had enough to do in establishing a good infrastructure, and should leave the responsibility for heavy industry to local and foreign private initiative [4].

According to World Bank historians Mason and Asher, the Bank’s position stemmed from the belief that public and private sectors should play different roles. The public should ensure the planned development of an adequate infrastructure: railways, roads, power stations, ports and communications in general. The private sector should deal with agriculture, industry, trade, and personal and financial services as it is held to be more effective than the public sector in these areas [5]. What this really meant was that anything which might prove profitable should be handed over to the private sector. On the other hand, providing the infrastructure should fall to the public sector, since the costs needed to be met by society, to help out the private sector. In other words, the World Bank recommended privatisation of profits combined with the socialisation of the cost of anything which was not directly profitable.

An ethnocentric and conservative vision of the world

The World Bank’s vision is marked by several conservative prejudices. In the reports and speeches of the first 15 years of its existence, there are regular references to backward and under-developed countries. The Bank sees the reasons for under-development from an ethnocentric point of view. In the World Bank’s 8th Annual Report, we read that: “There are many and complex reasons why these areas have not been more developed. Many cultures, for instance, have placed a low value on material advance and, indeed, some have regarded it as incompatible with more desirable objectives of society and the individual…” [6]. One of the causes of backwardness identified in the Report is the lack of desire or absence of will to make material progress and to modernise society. Hindus’ deep respect for cows becomes shorthand for the inherent backwardness of India. As for Africa, World Bank president Eugene Black declared in 1961: “Even today the bulk of Africa’s more than 200 millions are only beginning to enter world society ” [7]… The reactionary nature of World Bank vision has by no means been attenuated by the passing years. In the Global Development Report of 1987, the Bank wrote: “In his Principles of Political Economy (1848), John Stuart Mill mentioned the advantages of ‘foreign trade’. Over a century later, his observations are as pertinent as they were in 1848. Here is what Mill had to say about the indirect advantages of trade: “A people may be in the quiescent, indolent, uncultivated state, with all their tastes either fully satisfied or entirely undeveloped, and they may fail to put forth the whole of their productive energies for want of any sufficient object of desire. The opening of a foreign trade, by making them acquainted with new objects, or tempting them by the easier acquisition of things which they had not previously thought attainable, sometimes works a sort of industrial revolution in a country whose resources were previously undeveloped for want of energy and ambition in the people: inducing those who were satisfied with scanty comforts and little work to work harder for the gratification of their new tastes, and even to save and accumulate capital, for the still more complete satisfaction of those tastes at a future time.” [8]

The massive return of the neo-conservatives in the administration achieved by G. W. Bush (2001-2008) exacerbated its deeply materialistic and reactionary tendencies. The appointment of Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading neo-cons, to the presidency of the Bank in 2005, has further entrenched this orientation.

Growth and development planning (in both industrialised and developing economies) is given remarkable importance in World Bank documents and the literature of the time dealing with development issues from the 1950s until the 1970s. Until the end of the ‘70s, planning was considered important for several reasons: first, planning emerged during the prolonged depression of the 1930s as a response to the chaos resulting from laisser-faire policies; secondly, the reconstruction of Europe and Japan had to be organised; thirdly, this was still part of the thirty years of continuous economic growth that followed the Second World War and had to be managed and planned for; fourthly, the success, real or supposed, of Soviet planning undoubtedly exercised a great fascination, even for the sworn enemies of the so-called “Communist bloc”. The idea of planning was completely rejected from the early ‘80s, when neo-liberal ideologies and policies came back with a vengeance.

Another major preoccupation in the early days which was rejected after the 1980s was the decision by several Latin American countries to resort to import substitution and the possibility that other newly independent countries might follow their example.

Let us briefly review some of the economists whose work had a direct influence on and in the Bank.


The HOS model (Heckscher – Ohlin – Samuelson)

Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantages gained force in the 1930s through the studies of Swedish economists, Heckscher and Ohlin, later joined by Samuelson. It is the synthesis produced by the latter that is known as the HOS model. The HOS model raises the issue of factors of production – these factors are work, land and capital – and claims that each country has an interest in specialising in the production and export of goods which make greatest use of that country’s most abundant production factor – which will also be the cheapest. Free trade would then make it possible to balance out what the factors earn among all the countries taking part in free trade agreements. The abundant factor, which would be exported, would grow scarcer and thus more costly; the rare factor, which would be imported, would increase and its price would fall. This system of specialisation would bring about optimal distribution of factors in a now homogenous market. This model would enable all economies to aim for maximal integration in the global market with positive outcome for all the trading partners. Various studies carried out later, especially those by Paul Krugman [9], to test the HOS model have shown it to be inaccurate.


The Five Stages of Economic Growth according to Walt W. Rostow

In 1960, Walt W. Rostow [10] postulated five stages of development in a book entitled The Stages of Economic Growth: a Non-Communist Manifesto [11]. He claimed that all countries fell into one of the five categories and that they can only follow this route.

The first stage is traditional society characterised by the predominance of agricultural activity. Technical progress is nil, there is practically no growth in productivity and minds are not ready for change.

Next, in the stage before take-off, exchanges and techniques begin to emerge, people’s mentalities become less fatalistic and savings rates increase. In fact, this is how European societies evolved from the 15th to the early 18th century.

The third stage is take-off, a crucial stage corresponding to a quality leap, with significant increase in savings and investment rates and a move towards cumulative growth [12].

The fourth stage is the “march towards maturity”, where technical progress takes over in all fields of activity and production is diversified.

Finally, the fifth stage coincides with the era of mass consumerism [13].

Walt W. Rostow claimed that at the take-off stage, an influx of external capital (in the form of foreign investments or credit) was indispensable.

Rostow’s model is marred by over-simplification. He presents the stage of development reached by the USA after the Second World War both as the goal to aim for and the model to reproduce. Similarly, he considers that the British take-off model, with the agricultural revolution followed by the industrial revolution, should be reproduced elsewhere. He thus completely ignores the historical reality of other countries. There is no reason why each country should go through the five stages he describes.


Insufficient savings and the need to resort to external funding

In neo-classical terms, savings should precede investment and are insufficient in the developing countries. This means that the shortage of savings is seen as a fundamental factor explaining why development is blocked. An influx of external funding is required. Paul Samuelson, in Economics [14], took the history of US indebtedness in the 19th and 20th centuries as a basis for determining four different stages leading to prosperity: young borrowing nation in debt (from the War of Independence in 1776 to the Civil War of 1865); mature indebted nation (from 1873 to 1914); new lending nation (from the first to Second World Wars); mature lending nation (1960s). Samuelson and his emulators slapped the model of US economic development from the late 18th century until the Second World War onto one hundred or so countries which made up the Third World after 1945, as though it were possible for all those countries to quite simply imitate the experience of the United States [15].

As for the need to resort to foreign capital (in the form of loans and foreign investments), an associate of Walt W. Rostow’s, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, found the following formula: “Foreign capital will be a pure addition to domestic capital formation, i.e. it will all be invested; the investment will be productive or ‘businesslike’ and result in increased production. The main function of foreign capital inflow is to increase the rate of domestic capital formation up to a level which could then be maintained without any further aid” [16]. This statement contradicts the facts. It is not true that foreign capital enhance the formation of national capital and is all invested. A large part of foreign capital rapidly leaves the country where it was temporarily directed, as capital flight and repatriation of profits.

Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, who was the assistant director of the Economics Department of the World Bank between 1946 and 1952, made another monumental error in predicting the dates when various countries would reach self-sustained growth. He reckoned that Colombia would reach that stage by 1965, Yugoslavia by 1966, Argentina and Mexico between 1965 and 1975, India in the early 1970s, Pakistan three or four years after India, and the Philippines after 1975. What nonsense that has proved to be!

Note that this notion of self-sustained growth is commonly used by the World Bank. The definition given by Dragoslav Avramović, then director of the Economics Department, in 1964, was as follows: “Self-sustained growth is defined to mean a rate of income increase of, say, 5% p.a. financed out of domestically generated funds and out of foreign capital which flows into the country…” [17].

Development planning as envisaged by the World Bank and US academia amounts to pseudo-scientific deception based on mathematical equations. It is supposed to give legitimacy and credibility to the intention to make the developing countries dependent on obtaining external capital. There follows an example, advanced in all seriousness by Max Millikan and Walt W. Rostow in 1957: “If the initial rate of domestic investment in a country is 5 per cent of national income, if foreign capital is supplied at a constant rate equal to one-third the initial level of domestic investment, if 25 per cent of all additions to income are saved and reinvested, if the capital-output ratio is 3 and if interest and dividend service on foreign loans and private investment are paid at the rate of 6 per cent per year, the country will be able to discontinue net foreign borrowing after fourteen years and sustain a 3 per cent rate of growth out of its own resources” [18]. More nonsense!


Chenery and Strout’s double deficit model

In the mid-1960s, the economist Hollis Chenery, later to become Chief Economist and Vice-President of the World Bank [19], and his colleague Alan Strout, drew up a new model called the “double deficit model” [20]. Chenery and Strout laid emphasis on two constraints: first, insufficient internal savings, and then insufficient foreign currency. Charles Oman and Ganeshan Wignarja summarised the Chenery – Strout model as follows: “Essentially, the double deficit model hypothesises that while in the very first stages of industrial growth insufficient savings can constitute the main constraint on the rate of formation of domestic capital, once industrialisation is up and running, the main constraint may no longer be domestic savings per se, but rather the availability of currency required to import equipment, intermediary goods and perhaps even the raw materials used as industrial input. The currency deficit can thus exceed the savings deficit as the main constraint on development.” [21] To resolve this double deficit, Chenery and Strout propose a simple solution: borrow foreign currency and/or procure it by increasing exports.

The Chenery – Strout model is highly mathematical. It was the “in thing” at the time. For its supporters, it had the advantage of conferring an air of scientific credibility upon a policy whose main aims were, firstly, to incite the developing countries to resort to massive external borrowing and foreign investments, and secondly, to subject their development to a dependency on exports. At the time, the model came under criticism from several quarters. Suffice it to quote that of Keith Griffin and Jean Luc Enos, who claimed that resorting to external inflow would further limit local savings: “Yet as long as the cost of aid (e.g. the rate of interest on foreign loans) is less than the incremental output-capital ratio, it will ‘pay’ a country to borrow as much as possible and substitute foreign for domestic savings. In other words, given a target rate of growth in the developing country, foreign aid will permit higher consumption, and domestic savings will simply be a residual, that is, the difference between desired investment and the amount of foreign aid available. Thus the foundations of models of the Chenery-Strout type are weak, since one would expect, on theoretical grounds, to find an inverse association between foreign aid and domestic savings” [22].


The wish to incite the developing countries to resort to external aid seen as a means of influencing them

Bilateral aid and World Bank policies are directly related to the political objectives pursued by the USA in its foreign affairs.

Hollis Chenery maintained that “The main objective of foreign assistance, as of many other tools of foreign policy, is to produce the kind of political and economic environment in the world in which the United States can best pursue its own social goals” [23].

In a book entitled The Emerging Nations : their Growth and United States Policy, Max Millikan [24] and Donald Blackmer, both colleagues of Walt W. Rostow’s, clearly described in 1961 certain objectives of US foreign policy: “It is in the interest of the United States to see emerging from the transition process nations with certain characteristics. First, they must be able to maintain their independence, especially of powers hostile or potentially hostile to the United States (…) Fourth, they must accept the principle of an open society whose members are encouraged to exchange ideas, goods, values, and experiences with the rest of the world ; this implies as well that their governments must be willing to cooperate in the measures of international economic, political and social control necessary to the functioning of an interdependent world community”. [25] Under the leadership of the USA, of course.

Later in the book, it is explicitly shown how aid is used as a lever to orient the policies of the beneficiary countries: “For capital assistance to have the maximum leverage in persuading the underdeveloped countries to follow a course consistent with American and free-world interests the amounts offered must be large enough and the terms flexible enough to persuade the recipient that the game is worth the effort. This means that we must invest substantially larger resources in our economic development programs than we have done in our past” [26]

The volume of loans to developing countries increased at a growing pace throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as the consequence of a deliberate policy on the part of the USA, the governments of other industrialised countries and the Bretton Woods institutions, whose aim was to influence the policies of countries in the South.


Priority on exports

In one of their main contributions, Chenery and Strout claimed that resorting to import substitution is an acceptable method of reducing the deficit in foreign currency [27]. They later abandoned this position, when maintaining import substitution policies as practised by certain developing countries became one of the main criticisms levelled by the Bank, the IMF, the OECD and the governments of the major industrialised countries.

This is how other studies by economists directly associated with the World Bank turned to measuring the effective rates of protection of economies and the resulting bias in terms of utilisation of productive resources and of profitability of investments. They favoured redirecting strategies towards exports, abandoning protectionist tariffs, and, more generally, a price-fixing policy more closely related to market mechanisms. Bela Balassa, Jagdish Bhagwati and Anne Krueger [28] systematised this approach and their analyses were to leave their mark on the international institutions and become the theoretical justification for opening up trade during the 1980s and 1990s. Anne Krueger [29] wrote: “A regime promoting exports can free a country’s economy from the Keynesian yoke of under-employment since, unlike a regime of import substitution, the effective demand for its products on international markets may be virtually infinite, and thus it can always get closer to full employment, unless there is a world recession. A small export-oriented economy will be able to sell whatever quantity of goods it may produce. In other words, the country’s only constraint will be its capacity to supply the goods.” [30]. More eyewash.


The trickle-down effect

The trickle-down effect is a trivial metaphor which has guided the actions of the World Bank from the outset. The idea is simple: the positive effects of growth trickle down, starting from the top, where they benefit the wealthy, until eventually at the bottom a little also reaches the poor. This means that it is in the interests of the poor that growth should be as strong as possible, if they are to be able to lap up the drops. Indeed, if growth is weak, the rich will keep a larger part than when growth is strong.

What are the effects of this on the World Bank’s conduct? Growth should be encouraged at all costs so that there is something left for the poor at the end of the cycle. Any policy which holds back growth for the sake of (even partial) redistribution of wealth or for the sake of protecting the environment reduces the trickle-down effect and harms the poor. In practice, the actions of the World Bank’s directors are conducted in line with this metaphor, whatever the more sophisticated discourse of certain experts. Moreover the World Bank’s historians devote about twenty pages to discussions of the trickle-down31 theory and acknowledge that “This belief justified persistent efforts to persuade borrowers of the advantages of discipline, sacrifice, and trust in the market, and therefore of the need to hold the line against political temptation” [31]. They maintain that the belief gradually fell into disrepute from 1970, due to cutting remarks from an impressive number of researchers concerning the situation in both the United States and the developing countries [32]. Nevertheless, the historians note that in practice, this did not have much effect [33], particularly since, from 1982 on, trickle-down theory made a triumphant comeback at the World Bank [34]. Obviously the trickle-down issue is inseparable from that of inequality.


The question of inequality in the distribution of income

From 1973 on, the World Bank began to examine the question of inequality in the distribution of income in the developing countries as a factor affecting the chances of development. The economics team under the direction of Hollis Chenery gave the matter considerable thought. The major World Bank book on the subject, published in 1974, was co-ordinated by Chenery himself and entitled Redistribution with Growth [35]. Chenery was aware that the type of growth induced by the Bank’s loans policy would generate increased inequality. The World Bank’s main worry was clearly expressed by McNamara on several occasions: if we do not reduce inequality and poverty, there will be repeated outbursts of social unrest which will harm the interests of the free world, under the leadership of the United States.

Chenery did not share Simon Kuznet’s point of view [36], that after a necessary phase of increased inequality during economic take-off, things would subsequently improve. The World Bank was firmly convinced of the need for increased inequality. This is borne out by the words of the president of the World Bank, Eugene Black, in April 1961: “Inequalities in income are a necessary by-product of economic growth (which) makes it possible for people to escape a life of poverty” [37]. Yet empirical studies carried out by the World Bank in Chenery’s day disproved Kuznets’ claims. [38]

However, after Chenery’s departure in 1982 and his replacement by Anne Krueger, the World Bank completely abandoned its relative concern about increasing or maintaining inequality to the extent that it decided not to publish relevant data in the World Development Report. Anne Krueger did not hesitate to adopt Kuznets’ argument, making the rise of inequality a condition for take-off of growth, on the grounds that the savings of the rich were likely to feed into investments. Not until François Bourguignon became chief economist in 2003 did the Bank’s show any real renewal of interest in this question [39]. In 2006, the World Bank’s World Development Report subtitled Equity and development again refers to inequality as a hindrance to development [40]. At best, this approach is considered to be good marketing by J. Wolfensohn (president of the World Bank from 1996 to 2005) and his successor, Paul Wolfowitz.

Translated by Vicki Briault

Footnotes

[1] The terms used to designate the countries targeted for World Bank development loans have changed through the years. At first, they were known as “backward regions”, then “under-developed countries”, and finally, “developing countries”. Some of these have gone on to be called “emerging countries”.

[2] “The period during which the Bank held firm views on the nature of the development process but did little to reach into it extended roughly up to the late 1950s, and coincided with a phase in Bank lending in which most lending was still made to developed countries (by 1957, 52.7% of funding still went to such countries) ”, Nicholas Stern and Francisco Ferreira. 1997. ‘The World Bank as “intellectual actor’ ” in Kapur, Devesh, Lewis, John P., Webb, Richard. 1997. The World Bank, Its First Half Century, Volume 2, p.533.

[3] “The instruments of neo-classical analysis can be applied in a general way, quite unspecifically, to the questions posed by under-development. Under-development or blocked development is not subjected to systematic analysis in neo-classical theory” translated from Azoulay, Gerard. 2002. Les théories du développement, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, p.38.

[4] STERN Nicholas and FERREIRA Francisco. 1997. “The World Bank as “intellectual actor” in Kapur, Devesh, Lewis, John P., Webb, Richard. 1997. The World Bank, Its First Half Century, Volume 2, p.533.

[5] Mason , Edward S. and Asher, Robert E. 1973. The World Bank since Bretton Woods, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., p.458-459.

[6] World Bank (IBRD). 1953. 8th annual report 1952-1953, Washington DC, p. 9.

[7] Eugene Black, “ Tale of Two Continents ”, Ferdinand Phinizy Lectures, delivered at the University of Georgia, April 12 and 1 ”, 1961 in Kapur, Devesh, Lewis, John P., Webb, Richard. 1997. The World Bank, Its First Half Century, Volume 1, p. 145. Eugene Black was president of the World Bank from 1949 to 1962.

[8] World Bank. 1986. Global Development Report 1987, Washington DC, p. 4.

[9] The predominance of exchanges between economies endowed with similar factors (exchanges of similar products between industrialised economies) was established in the work of P. Krugman and E. Helpman in the 1980s.

[10] Walt. W. Rostow was an influential economist. He was also a high-ranking political advisor, becoming advisor to Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. Some of the notes he addressed to McNamara can be consulted on the Net, dealing with the politico-military strategy to follow with regard to the North Vietnamese and their allies in 1964. One note entitled “Military Dispositions and Political Signals” dated 16 November 1964 is particularly interesting for it shows quite impressive mastery of the arts of war and negotiation (www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon3/doc232.htm). It is worth mentioning since it highlights once more the political stakes behind the operations of the IMF and the World Bank in countries of the Periphery. Thus economic policy has to be considered in the light of its political motivation and levers.

[11] Rostow, Walt W. The Stages of Economic Growth: a Non Communist Manifesto, Washington D.C. 1960.

[12] Note that W.W. Rostow claimed that Argentina had already reached the take-off stage before 1914.

[13] W.W. Rostow also claimed that the USA had permanently reached the stage of mass consumerism just after the Second World War, followed by Western Europe and Japan in 1959. As for the USSR, it was technically ready to reach that stage but first needed to make some adjustments.

[14] Samuelson, Paul. 1980. Economics, 11th edition, McGraw Hill, New York, p. 617-618.

[15] Payer, Cheryl. 1991. Lent and Lost Foreign Credit and Third World Development, Zed Books, London, p.33-34.

[16] Rosenstein-Rodan, Paul. (1961). ‘International Aid for Underdeveloped Countries’, Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol.43, p.107.

[17] Avramović, Dragoslav et al. 1964. Economic Growth and External Debt, Johns Hopkins Press for the IBRD, Baltimore, p.193.

[18] Millikan, Max and Rostow, Walt Whitman. 1957. A proposal : Keys to An Effective Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, p. 158.

[19] In 1970, Hollis Chenery became advisor to Robert McNamara, then president of the World Bank. Soon after, in 1972, the post of vice-president linked to that of chief economist was created for Hollis Chenery by Robert McNamara. Since then, it has become part of the tradition. Chenery served as chief economist and vice-president of the World Bank from 1972 to 1982. Chenery remains the longest-serving occupant of the post of chief economist. Previous and later incumbents stayed between 3 and 6 years, according to each case. Source: STERN, Nicholas and FERREIRA, Francisco. 1997. “ The World Bank as ’intellectual actor’ ” in Kapur, Devesh, Lewis, John P., Webb, Richard. 1997. The World Bank, Its First Half Century, Volume 2, p.538.

[20] CHENERY Hollis B. and STROUT Alan. 1966. “Foreign Assistance and Economic Development”, American Economic Review, n°56, p.680-733.

[21] OMAN Charles and WIGNARJA Ganeshan. 1991. The Postwar Evolution of Development Thinking, OCDE, cited by Treillet, Stephanie. 2002. L’Economie du développement, Nathan, Paris, p.53.

[22] GRIFFIN, Keith B. and ENOS, Jean Luc. 1970. ‘Foreign Assistance : Objectives and consequences’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, n°18, p.319-20.

[23] CHENERY Hollis B. 1964. ‘Objectives and criteria of Foreign Assistance’, in The United States and the Developing Economies, ed. G. Ranis, W.W. Norton, New York, p.81.

[24] Max Millikan, who was a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) then of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as it became, was the director of CENIS (Center for International Affairs at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology), with direct links to the State Department.

[25] MILLIKAN Max and BLACKMER Donald, ed. 1961. The Emerging Nations: Their Growth and United States Policy, Little, Brown and Co., Boston, pp. X-xi.

[26] Ibid.,p.118-119.

[27] CHENERY Hollis B. and STROUT Alan. 1966. “Foreign Assistance and Economic Development”, American Economic Review, n°56, p.682, 697-700.

[28] BALASSA Bela. 1971. ’Development Strategies in Some Developing Countries: A Comparative Study, John Hopkins University Press for the World Bank, Baltimore; Jagdish BHAGWATI. 1978. Anatomy and Consequences of Exchange Control Regime, Ballinger for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge; Anne KRUEGER. 1978. Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic Development: Liberalization Attempts and Consequences, National Bureau of Economic Research, New York.

[29] Anne Krueger became chief economist and vice-president of the World Bank in 1982 (when president Ronald Reagan let Chenery go and brought in supporters of his neo-liberal orientations) and kept the post until 1987.

[30] Krueger, Anne. 1978. Trade and Development : Export Promotion vs Import Substitution, cited by Treillet, Stephanie. 2002. L’Économie du développement, Nathan, Paris, p.37.

[31] Ibid.,p. 218.

[32] See especially James P. Grant, “Development: The End of Trickle-down”, in Foreign Policy, Vol. 12 (Fall 1973), pp.43-65

[33] For the period 1974-1981, they wrote: “Attention began to shift away from direct targeting of Bank investments on the poor to the enhancement of indirect benefits through increased urban employment. In effect, the strategy was falling back on the trickle down approach” in Kapur, Devesh, Lewis, John P., Webb, Richard. 1997. The World Bank, Its First Half Century, Volume 1, p. 264.

[34] On the change of direction of 1981-1982, they wrote: “Poverty reduction would thus have to depend on growth and trickle-down” in Kapur, Devesh, Lewis, John P., Webb, Richard. 1997. The World Bank, Its First Half Century, Volume 1, p. 336.

[35] Chenery Hollis B. et al. 1974. Redistribution with Growth, Oxford University Press for the World Bank and the Institute of Development Studies, London.

[36] Kuznets Simon. 1955. “ Economic Growth and Income Inequality ”, American Economic Review, n°49, March 1955, p.1-28.

[37] Cited by Kapur, Devesh, Lewis, John P., Webb, Richard. 1997. The World Bank, Its First Half Century, Volume 1, p. 171.

[38] More recently, in Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Harvard University Press, 2014), Thomas Piketty has presented a very interesting analysis of the Kuznets’ curve. Piketty notes that Kuznets originally doubted of the validity of this theory, but that didn’t stop it becoming well renowned, and for a long time.

[39] François Bourguignon. 2004. “The Poverty-Growth-Inequality Triangle”, paper presented at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, New Delhi, February 4, 2004, 30 p.

[40] World Bank. 2005. Global Development Report 2006. Equity and development, Washington DC, 2005
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDR2006/Resources/477383-1127230817535/WDR2006overview-fr.pdf

Originally posted at the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt website.

Ada Colau Remains Mayor of Barcelona

By: June 25, 2019
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Ada Colau of Barcelona en Comú (BComú) remains mayor of Barcelona thanks to the promise of a pact with the PSC (Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya) whose content is not yet known but which will involve a distribution of power in the town hall, and three votes of the Barcelona pel Canvi-Ciutadans group, led by Manuel Valls. This article analyses how this situation came about, how other possible solutions have been ruled out and what the possible consequences are. [1]

A tripartite arrangement with the ten Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, (ERC, Republican Left) councillors plus the ten of Bcomu and 8 of the PSC would have given an absolute majority of 28 out of 41 councillors. But it became apparent very quickly that this was not feasible because the other two parties rejected it. This left three options, reaching an agreement with just the ERC, reaching an agreement with the PSC alone or going into opposition.

There was no clear discussion of these options. The debate was held in a BComú plenary a week before the deadline, in an assembly of 450 activists which agreed to what the leadership proposed: that is to present Ada as mayor in order to be stronger in the negotiations. Only that formula could be put to a vote, with a yes or no in the assembly, without even the option of abstaining.

Thus, other options were eliminated, and the necessary open debate was impossible. The leadership claimed they were seeking a tripartite agreement and that the risks of going into opposition were debated, but nothing could be further from reality. The same people who said this later recognized that opposition was never an option, the only important thing was to be in government, and preferably with the PSC. That is, we discussed whether we wanted Ada to be mayor or not in the abstract (obviously it is normal for everyone in BComú to want this), but what should have been discussed in the assembly was if we wanted to agree with the ERC, with the PSC, or go into opposition if there was no tripartite agreement. This was not allowed.

Then, no further debate was possible: you could only vote whether you wanted the pact with the PSC or with the ERC, because this is what the leadership decided would go to a referendum among those registered; those who have registered on the web, but who do not participate in activities or meetings. The statutes have established two forms of decision making, some things are decided by 500 activists and others by 9,000 registered people. The leadership campaigned all out for a single position, that of the pact with the PSC, without even mentioning in the question that this also involved the support of Manuel Valls, who guaranteed three votes of support to Ada (of the six councillors of Barcelona pel Canvi-Ciutadans) to reach 21 of the absolute majority. So, the debate left much to be desired in terms of a new politics and radical democracy, since the option chosen days ago by the leadership was only one: to have power and the post of mayor.

It was not possible to meet or discuss programmatic content of the discussions with the PSC. No comparisons were made of the ERC and PSC programs. The BComú program has much more in common with that of ERC. This is true over the environment, waste, mobility and public transport, the commitment that 30 per cent of new housing will be affordable social housing, the creation of a public funeral service, the possibility of municipalizing water and more.

But it is true that, when governing in the Catalan Parliament, the Generalitat with Junts per Catalunya (JuntsxCat, Together for Catalonia), the practice of ERC across the whole of Catalonia was very much criticized on several issues, such as the over Guaranteed Citizens’ Income; not paying the promised €664 for thousands of applicants who have no income. It is also true that in the past four years the political attitude of ERC has not been collaborative. At the same time, the neoliberal reality of the state government of the PSOE, without repealing the Mordaza law, or the employment reform of the PP, and many other things, meant that in Madrid, in the Congress of Deputies, the ERC and Unidos Podemos voted together much more than with the PSOE. [2] In Barcelona, the rupture between BComú and the PSC government occurred when article 155 was applied to Catalonia and the PSC supported the repression, but there were also differences on issues such as the municipalization of water, now in the hands of the multinational Agbar, whose lobby has close links with some members of the PSOE. [3]

Remember that ERC won the municipal elections in the city of Barcelona with 5,000 votes more than BComú, and that it is very different to decide to addition votes with the PSC to prevent Albiol of the conservative People’s Party becoming mayor of Badalona, than to agree with PSC and not with ERC in Barcelona. The ERC has not been involved in any cases of corruption and is as much or more to the left than the PSC, and we have seen in practice how the PSC has included in its electoral lists the people of the ex- Democratic Union of Catalonia of Duran Lleida. On the other hand, the current law makes municipalities very presidential and not very republican, and the mayor’s office is key, since many decisions and appointments must be made through it.

But the negotiations with ERC could have allowed creating the position of deputy mayor, delegating powers of the mayor to the government commission, where they would be tied to 10 councillors and avoid arbitrariness or gestures from the PSC’s Maragall. The agreement could include distributing everything to the maximum and ample freedom for Ada, sharing 50 per cent of the presence at institutional events or in the media, or that she would always inaugurate what had begun during her term of office, having a voice on national themes and raising Catalan sovereignty with confederal fraternity and so on. In the end, there was no debate or vote on what ERC offered at the last minute, two years of mayoralty for Ada and two for Maragall.

The benefits of having the mayor’s office are totally clear but I do not support the idea of having the mayor’s office at any price; a large part of the electorate will pay a heavy price for this manoeuvre. Of course, as always on the old left, for now there is no self-criticism for having lost votes and a councillor; the analysis is closed with a shallow “we have resisted the state pull of the PSOE”.

On the other hand, it is not true that to agree with PSC is avoiding the logic of blocs. The PSC is part of a block, that of Article 155 which defends the monarchical regime of 1978. [4] A pact with ERC would be better from at this point of view, since it would at least favour the disengagement of the latter from the current Catalan right of the JuntsxCat in the Generalitat; a JuntsxCat still dominated by the ex-Convergence, now Partit Demòcrata Europeu Català (PDeCAT, Catalan European Democratic Party. It would have been an example that would project throughout Catalonia, demonstrating that the Comunes could unite most leftwing voters, from the PSC and ERC, to have a mandate with each.

No matter how fraudulent the institutional procedures of Puigdemont and Junqueras may be, we cannot deny that we are facing an abuse of authority and intolerable violence on the part of the state, and, let’s face it, the same thing would happen tomorrow to communists or to Podemos if they obtained 60 per cent in a regional Parliament and disobeyed any law to bring greater social justice in the face of growing inequality imposed by European capitalism. [5] A referendum on taxes on the banks, or on a better minimum wage in Catalonia or on measures for an effective right to housing, when what is voted on is not within the competence of the “autonomous” government, are acts of disobedience that can accumulate forces to change the system and which we cannot give up practicing. We see other struggles where the idea of direct democracy also predominates, such as the demand of the gilets jaunesin France, where they state that proposals for legislation can be made by popular assemblies and that they must be voted on and the result observed. The judgment of the referendum trial held in Catalonia on 1 October will be released in the coming months and when it comes out, it will always be preferable to be on the side of the repressed rather than the 155 jailers.

All options always have risks and the worst thing about ERC is its electoral list, starting with Maragall. This is not because he is 75 years old and has been a political full-timer for 40 years, but because his was the worst stage of the PSC in Barcelona City Council when – during the previous Tripartite of Catalonia with Montilla (PSC-ERC-ICV) – he, as minister of education, introduced a teaching law, the LEC, which provoked big unitary mobilizations. In the end he guaranteed subsidies to private education by law, even those segregated by gender, like the Opus Dei schools. [6] But we must remember that some people left Catalunya en Comú a few months ago to join the ERC lists: Joan Josep Nuet of Esquerra Unida i Alternativa (EUiA, United and Alternative Left) – now only of Comunistes.Cat – was presented by ERC in the state-wide elections and Elisenda Alemany, of Sobiranistes, was second on the ERC municipal list. [7]

It is worrying that in the left’debate on these coalitions, the issue of moving into opposition is always omitted, together with the essential debate about building and creating popular unity. It is necessary to debate how to create unitary and democratic organization everywhere, how to involve activists in making all social movements expand and develop so that we have some day a correlation of forces that can change the monarchical and neoliberal regime, with a daily praxis that creates another hegemonic culture, based on solidarity and community against consumerism and individualism.

The practical result of this phrase of one foot inside and one hundred feet outside the institutions has been a disaster; we are assimilated by the institution because it is prioritized over political organization and the sad reality of our demobilization forces us into this debate. In a metropolis of 2 million people we cannot be only five thousand demonstrators, when a demonstration is called to demand from the PSOE that rents are limited, or to repeal the gag law, while we have no prospect of general strikes against the reduction of wages after 10 years of crisis, and the urgent environmental struggle begins with a few young people and is so limited. This is the main thing that needs to be debated on the left.

The absence of these debates is highly significant, our daily practice in society and in the neighbourhood is not analysed, and when there is a possibility of institutional power, we too often forget what is important. We are reduced to digital voting, to some very oriented questions, where it seems that the decision is made to feel Spanish or Catalan, never knowing what it means to be federalist or what competencies should be decentralized, or worse, we vote for a new kind of leader worship in the case of Ada. . The effects of accepting the votes of Valls and Cs was not debated, nor is how we should fight for the right to decide our future as Catalans, which has widespread (almost 8per cent) support. Nobody knows how the people of Barcelona in Comú and Podemos will fight for an amnesty for prisoners, all of them, both political prisoners and those repressed for social struggles, but in September-October there will be a bigger general strike. The last general strike, called by a single pro-independence union in Catalonia, on 21 February 2019, was much bigger than that called on 8 March for genuine equality for women.

The final result of the digital voting was 70 per cent in favour of the pact with the PSC and about 30 per cent of the pact with ERC, with a 40 per cent participation (4,040 people). The BComú leadership called a rally in Plaza Sant Jaume to support Ada as mayor with banners, but it was obscured by a mass of pro-independence people fighting for the freedom of political prisoners, who screamed at Ada and shouted “Not with Valls”, while the PSOE and Pedro Sánchez had to listen to “Not with Rivera”.

The result is that the two opposing blocs will continue, just what was not wanted, and that BComú is positioned first and foremost next to a bloc, despite saying again and again that Ada is neither pro nor anti-independence. In short, a socialist republicanism remains to be built, both socially and nationally.

Originally posted at International Viewpoint.

South Africa: Something’s Got to Give

By: June 24, 2019
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The election of a new government should be a time of celebration. 25 years since the end of Apartheid should be the time of immense celebration. Yet, 25 years since the “dawn of democracy” and South Africans are engulfed by extreme forms of anger, disillusionment and alienation. 22 million adults of voting age are so alienated that they did not even bother to participate in the national elections that brought the new Ramaphosa government into being.

Behind this disaffection lies a wasteland. Instead of a flourishing society freed from racism, division and violence, post-Apartheid South Africa is a society of social decay. Most of us have become numbed to its everyday violence and brutality. Incidents like these scarcely register:

  •  Three children hanged by their father, after which he hangs himself;
  • Four children found burnt to death by their mother, who left them unattended and locked up in their home;
  • school student stabbed to death by a fellow student who had waited patiently outside the school for him to finish his exams; two other students left with serious stab wounds;
  • church services commonly attacked and congregants robbed.

Underlying this depth of social decay is a frightening level of unemployment. More than 10 million people are unemployed. This translates into an unemployment rate close to 40%.

And there is no sign that things will get better. Quite the reverse. The economy is weakening rather than strengthening. The first quarter of this year saw the biggest drop in what the South Africa economy produces (GDP) since the financial crash more than ten years ago. And this is getting on for a year and a half since Ramaphosa took office as president, promising a new dawn on the back of economic growth.

With an economy teetering on another recession, debt levels rising, credit rating agencies banging at the door, something has got to give. The last time we were in such a situation, the newly elected Mandela government gave us GEAR – a home-grown structural adjustment programme, that effectively crushed the dream of a new South Africa, for the millions made poor by Apartheid. Are we headed for a new wave of austerity, privatisation, retrenchments and wage cuts?

ESKOM will be decisive

What happens with Eskom will be a clear indication of the role and nature of Ramaphosa’s government and signal the likely direction of its macro-economic  policy.  Will Ramaphosa, and now his new man overseeing the energy sector, Gwede Mantashe, be able to break the resistance of NUM and Numsa to the restructuring of this key state owned enterprise at the engine room of South Africa’s economy? It is clear that the unbundling of Eskom will result in retrenchments and privatisation of parts of the electricity sector. NUM and Numsa have sworn they will resist this at all costs.

Big capital sees Eskom as a testing ground. Can Ramaphosa finally rise above the factional battles in the ANC and deliver the market reforms they insist on before they will open the investment flows? A recent IMF report on South Africa was very clear on this:

“Public enterprise efficiency needs to be improved with measures that strengthen their finances and harden the budget constraints they face. In particular, Eskom will require bold action to redefine its business model so that it becomes self-sustained and ensures affordable and reliable electricity supply. Without fundamental reforms in Eskom’s finances and operations, continued budget transfers or assumption of its debt by the government will not resolve the company’s issues. Postponing the needed adjustment of the entity will only force greater difficulties down the road.”

And here lies the rub. This will entail pushing through a harsh anti-poor and anti-working class agenda. This is why, for the IMF and capital, Ramaphosa is their man. He has the ability to be all things to all people. His mastering of the politics of social compacting will be used to obscure the coming assault on the poor and working class. We have already seen him at work. It was Ramaphosa who oversaw the adoption of a minimum wage proposal while placing curbs on the right to strike. It was Ramaphosa who soldthe Investment Summit to the unions with a meaningless jobs summit. His ability to paper over acute class differences can also be seen  in the way he has taken the sting out of the land expropriation debate.

Eskom would not, one imagines, have been Ramaphosa’s choice as his first protagonist. He takes on all the key organised components of the labour movement – Cosatu, Saftu and Fedusa. In particular he needs to neutralise the resistance of NUM, the very union where he comes from. It probably explains why he put NUM’s other former General Secretary, Gwede Mantashe, in charge of the energy portfolio.

Breaking the resistance of the unions, to Eskom’s restructuring will entail dividing NUM and Numsa, which up to now have been working very closely at Eskom, in spite of the previous antagonism between them. Somehow, Ramaphosa and Mantashe need to break this collaboration, otherwise they can expect a long, hard battle to unfold. Eskom is designated an essential service, which means strike action is illegal. But that did not prevent NUM and Numsa from striking together against the zero wage increase that the ESKOM management first offered in 2018.

And although the labour movement has been substantially weakened over the years, NUM and Numsa were able to win a credible wage increase of 7.5%. Can the NUM leadership be persuaded to retreat and support Eskom unbundling, in the face of fierce opposition from Numsa? This would almost certainly lead to them losing a large number of members, something they can hardly afford after the Marikana debacle.

Given the pressures from foreign investors, who Ramaphosa courts, and the influence of the credit rating agencies, it is likely that the interests of big capital will prevail. His strategy is rooted in foreign investment, and he knows full well that he must satisfy their needs if they are going to come to South Africa. That’s why his victory at Nasrec was so celebrated, and why his election victory was both promoted and celebrated by such mouthpieces of big capital as Business Day and Sunday Times journalist, Peter Bruce, and The Economist. They have invested in Ramaphosa to pull the economy out of crisis. Dealing with state capture and the Zuptas is just the first and easy part of what he is expected to deliver. Now he must take on the public sector, restructure state owned enterprises, contain state debt and reduce the public sector wage bill.

It all begins with ESKOM.

Resisting the break-up ESKOM will need more than the labour movement standing together. It will require alliances with social movements and the broader public. A successful strategy to defend ESKOM from unbundling and privatisation will require that the unions go beyond a defensive posture. They will need to re-imagine a public utility able to serve the interests of the vast majority, who suffer energy poverty. For this reason, it will be necessary to develop a vision of Eskom as an efficient public utility, at the centre of a transition to clean, affordable and democratically run energy production and distribution. The unions must develop a programme capable of forging a broad and progressive alliance of social forces.

For this reason, it will be necessary for NUM and Numsa to clearly articulate a commitment to drive the transition in Eskom to a public utility that serves the interests of the poor. It will entail the reform of Eskom from top to bottom, with transparent and effective governance structures introduced that give decision making powers to workers, middle management, and representatives of communities and municipalities. Such a vision would include expanded provision of free electricity for the poor, the rapid development of socially owned renewable energy through Eskom and a low carbon industrial strategy to create decent jobs.

Such a strategy would provide a model for the type of alliance and programmes needed to resist the coming Gear 2019 programme of the new Ramaphosa government. Defensive piecemeal struggles will not cut it. Without a vision of social justice, the unions will be isolated, divided and defeated and we will all suffer at the expense of the corporate elite.

Originally posted at the Alternative Information & Development Centre website.

The Revolt of the Fearless Generation

By: June 24, 2019
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When in early February Algeria’s ailing octogenarian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his intention to run for the presidency for a fifth term, millions of Algerians took to the streets in response. After weeks of rallies, Bouteflika was forced to resign on April 2, only to be replaced by a triad of government cronies: Abdelkader Bensalah as interim-president, Noureddine Bedoui as prime minister and Major General Ahmed Gaid Salah, who has emerged as the key power broker in the country.

Despite the arrests of two of the country’s former prime ministers and several business leaders on corruption charges, the protests are continuing with protesters demanding a radical overhaul of the military-backed regime. Fresh elections that were originally planned for July 4, were postponed by the constitutional council in early June, allegedly due to a lack of candidates. The postponement of the elections was seen as a victory by the protesters, who feared that hastily organized elections in the short term would benefit the old powers and leave little opportunity for civic parties to prepare.

Leïla Ouitis, a feminist, housing activist and a French-Algerian teacher living in Seine-Saint-Denis, close to Paris, regularly travels to Algeria to visit her family. She has witnessed the protests first-hand, and in this three-part series she offers her reflections on the socio-economic roots of the popular uprising, the background of the different groups and individuals involved with the movement, and the role played by feminists and women’s rights activists in the protests.

In this first part of the series, Ouitis looks at why Algeria remained relatively undisturbed during the Arab Spring that started in 2011, but is now — eight years later — rocked by some of the largest protests the country has witnessed in history.

Although Algeria shares similar characteristics with other countries in the region — massive unemployment among the youth, who account for half the population, polarization of job opportunities over just a few sectors, systemic corruption by clan-like oligarchies in a rent-seeking management of resources — we should be careful with the expression “Arab Spring,” which has been used to describe the current uprising. Commentators tend to forget that it actually refers to a second wave of popular contestation in the Arab world.

The first wave occurred between 1985 and 1989; it began in Sudan and came to Algeria in 1988. Forgetting that first wave means omitting the specificity of Algerian history: 40 years of perestroika in the context of a rentier economy dependent on gas and oil. When Algeria gained independence, it chose the path of socialism, but despite the Algerian bourgeoisie’s developmental projects — surely the most extensive in the region — the Algerian economy has remained totally dependent on hydrocarbon-generated wealth.

What would at first seem to be a source of wealth turns into the opposite: the so-called “Dutch disease,” which refers to the link between exporting natural resources and the decline of the local manufacturing industry. Increased export revenues lead to currency appreciation. In all other sectors, exports become less favorable than imports.

Algeria remains locked in a rent economy, completely dependent on hydrocarbons. Gas and petrol generate 95 percent of external revenue and 60 percent of the state budget, so any changes in the price of oil affects state revenue and the real economy. The country finds itself stuck in growth concentrated in few sectors: manufacturing industry is declining, as are formal occupations, which today account for less than 10 percent of jobs in the country. Manufacturing value added per capita is the lowest in the region and has been dropping since the 1990s. As a result, the employment rate is 40 percent, one of the lowest in the world. Rent allows for reductions in poverty during oil booms, but it does not improve the employment rate.

To keep the peace in this context, the state absolutely must provide support for basic necessities (flour, milk, oil) and it must tolerate the black market, the trabendo, which employs hundreds of thousands of youth. In general, when someone tells you they do not work, what that means is they are caught up in one form or another of informal business and related frauds.

From the Black Decade to the Black Spring

For nearly 40 years, the history of Algeria has been profoundly determined by the price of hydrocarbons. In the 1980s, Algeria began transitioning to a market economy, but in 1986, the price of oil collapsed. The state coffers ran dry as income inequality surged. The 1988 riots, savagely repressed, brought an end to the single-party system. Political Islam emerged as both an expression of marginalization and a way to manage and maintain social polarization.

One year after the 1991 military coup d’état, Algeria was in default and resorted to financial institutions that imposed a structural adjustment plan and new liberalization measures. Those 10 years of austerity devoted to paying off the debt were also the years of the decade-long civil war that left between 100,000 and 200,000 people dead.

During that décennie noire (the “Black Decade”), privatization continued in bouts of clientelism and corruption, allowing for the formation of a rentier oligarchy: state property was ceded to certain dignitaries, some of the public companies were privatized, the old state monopolies on foreign trade were destroyed and replaced with a system of agreements authorizing certain venders and wholesalers to import consumer goods and industrial material to sell back to the state. These monopolistic positions were adopted from within the state, allowing each group to collect a kingly rent. In this way, behind each fraction of the bourgeoisie specialized in this or that import sector, there was a multinational, a major capitalist state and a major Algerian bureaucrat and/or general. This is what is called “the system”: a mechanism supplied with oil revenues that flow into all the little hustles of the informal economy.

At the end of the Black Decade, the explosion in hydrocarbon prices as well as a policy of valuing natural resources following the opening to foreign direct investments (FDI) made it possible for Algeria to stay on schedule and pay off its debt after 10 years of austerity. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who came to power at that time, had the advantage of full state coffers, which allowed him to launch a series of stimulus plans in the early 2000s and again with accelerating public investment programs between 2005 and 2009.

Compared to the civil war, Bouteflika’s first four mandates seemed relatively peaceful. This, however, would be forgetting all the regional struggles of the 2000s: the Black Spring of 2001 in Kabylie; the 2003 “movement of the children of the south for justice,” whose members were reduced to silence and terrorism; the struggles of the Mozabite minority; the struggles of the unemployed since 2011, notably those of the Ouargla activists who have suffered police and legal repression for years; the resistance in Adrar and Béchar; and the protests of In Salah locals against fracking.

So actually, over the last 20 years, Algeria has seen myriad struggles and dissent, but these fights have not yet converged. Still, despite the repression, there have been some victories. In 2010 alone, the national military counted 11,500 riots, public demonstrations or gatherings throughout the whole country. These riotous contestations play an almost natural role in the forms of rent negotiation and redistribution as they are both repressed and implicitly accepted by the state. The class struggle is expressed in a rather clear way for everyone involved, and you could say that the power relations are laid bare: given all the money here from gas and petrol, everyone should be rich, were it not for the system hoarding so much of the wealth.

A New Generation

In this context, the riots in the winter of 2011 decidedly resonated with the international situation and the Arab Spring, but their frame of reference, if not origin, was the attempt of a fraction of the state’s liberal bourgeoisie to limit the informal economy. Indeed, since the mid-2000s, the boom in oil prices has reinforced a bourgeoisie made up of private entrepreneurs working in construction and industry, making it more rebellious in its confrontations with a bureaucratic bourgeoisie that maintains control of administrative authorizations; with what Algerians call the “system.”

In reaction to measures to control and tax a portion of the informal economy, the barons of the black market immediately included the new value-added tax (VAT) in their prices. The price of basic necessities (notably oil and sugar) exploded, instantly ruining thousands of youths working in the informal economy. Riots spread like wildfire. With the help of the international community, the Algerian government, which in 2011 still possessed an enormous amount of foreign currency reserves, immediately lifted its measures and released several billions in social aid: raising salaries and offering a series of micro-credit initiatives.

So what changed in 2019, eight years later? First, generational renewal. The population is exploding. And this new generation is experiencing what has been called the exhaustion of a dual rent system based on political and oil rents. Algeria is a very young country, with nearly half the population under the age of 25. During the civil war, people put off having children and the birth rate practically doubled after the Black Decade. The increase in oil prices during the 2000s allowed for home construction and rising salaries. The fertility rate reached 3.1 births per woman in 2015.

In addition, this new generation is not afraid like the previous one. The attempts by those in power to instrumentalize the specter of civil war no longer work on the younger generations: at the beginning of the demonstrations we saw people over the age of 40 crying with emotion. As Adlène Meddi aptly put it, “Our generation was too traumatized by those years of civil war to dare to go out and protest. And then we saw all these young people in the streets. … We felt so old, but we were so happy!”

This generation, who grew up knowing only Bouteflika, is today old enough to demonstrate. In Meddi’s telling, the humiliation of having a bedridden president was the trigger, but it quickly became obvious that they were not protesting against a man, they were protesting against a “system that wants to survive on the back of a living corpse.” In fact, since independence, all the presidents of the republic come from the “November generation” of 1954 — the start of Algeria’s war of independence — which has until now been the foundation of all political legitimacy in Algeria.

Any conflict between successive governments was immediately associated with the war of national revolution. But this is over now. That generation is coming to its end: Bouteflika was practically the last survivor of that generation of combatants, apart from Ahmed Gaid Salah, head of the Algerian army. It is the end of political rent.

Also, this new generation is the most educated in Algerian history, with more women than men in higher education. Despite the deterioration in the quality of education and health — the privatization of both has been constant — the oil boom of the 2000s has nevertheless made possible an increase in spending in these domains. Today there are over 1.8 million students. We are talking about a youth population that cannot afford to travel but reads the news and is very active on social networks. So the situation is very different from the one in 1988 when the coffers were empty. At that time, when young people from poor neighborhoods and workers from large metro areas rioted, they were fiercely repressed.

Now, the social bases of the revolt have expanded, and the popular movement, the hirak, includes both the middle classes and part of the bourgeoisie. On this point, there are effectively quite a few aspects in common with the Arab Spring, which likewise came into existence after periods of improvement.

The presence of the middle classes gives a very political, civic dynamic to the movement. It is not about a revolution in the way a leftist would use the term. For the moment, it is much more a gigantic interclassist movement of the radical democratic sort.

Next Stop: Demanding Bread?

Even if what triggered the hirak is not immediately connected to the economic situation, the economy has always been of central importance. The demographic boom of 2000 has encountered the progressive exhaustion of the oil rent. The new generation has been hit with a rate of structural unemployment and a slow but steady pauperization that also affects the middle classes. Since 2014, oil prices have again sharply declined (~65 percent for Brent between July 2014 and February 2016).

The Algerian state is no longer in the financial position to buy social peace. The foreign currency reserves have dwindled from $200 billion in 2014 to just $95 billion in 2016. And in 2015, unemployment hit a new high, further limiting the prospects of young people. The term dégoutage has resurfaced in daily language to express disgust and frustration with poor living conditions. Inequality between regions has deepened with major difficulties in the interior where the unemployment rate can reach 60–70 percent.

Hundreds of thousands of youth are stuck where they live, in the less developed mountains, countryside or urban zones, because the exorbitant cost of housing, especially in Algiers, prevents them from working in the cities where jobs might be had.

In these conditions, as was pointed out in Le Monde, Algeriens have started to leave their country again: both legal and illegal emigration is on the rise. As far as legal migration is concerned, we are observing a very significant brain drain, including youths who have completed their studies. Nonetheless, they have little illusions about the possibility of finding a qualified job in France. With regards to illegal migration, Kouceila Zerguine, lawyer of the Collective of families of disappeared harragas — undocumented migrants — has remarked that “since a year or two, there are young women but also entire families who are leaving, whereas previously it was mainly men who left by sea”. There are even minors among them. It is a both a social and a global tragedy.

In short, for the moment, we are still looking at a large-scale movement that is very political, interclassist, against corruption and for a reform of the state that would give each social segment its say in proportion to its role in the society. But inflation continues to rise (4.3 percent in 2018, 5.6 percent in 2019, projected at 6.7 percent in 2020). The middle classes and the proletariat keep growing poorer. If images of dancers continue to appear, along with pretty signs demanding “freedom and democracy,” then in three or four years, we could very well expect to see signs demanding bread.

Originally posted at ROAR magazine.

Brazil: Success of the General Strike of June 14

By: June 23, 2019
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In a week of intense political polarization, the movements of the working class, youth and the oppressed again held a strong national demonstration, in continuity with the expressive acts of 15 May and 30 May. There were stoppages in more than 100 cities. Street demonstrations took place in almost 200 cities, according to the G1 website. A survey by the CUT (Central Unica de los Trabajadores) shows a map with more than 380 protest points throughout the country.

Strikes, stoppages, shift delays and street demonstrations occurred in all states and the Federal District. Mainly, in the capitals and in the big cities we saw the resistance expressed by the trade union federations, the Frente Brasil Popular (Brazil Popular Front), the Frente Pueblo Sin Miedo (People’s Front Without Fear), the student movement and the popular movements, among others.

The size of the demonstrations was unequal. In some regions the functioning of the cities was significantly affected, mainly where public transport workers stopped work. In most cities, in practice, a significant national day of struggles and stoppages occurred. In eleven capital cities and in dozens of major cities, the banking system was paralysed.

In the city of São Paulo, the rail unions (affiliated to the UGT-General Union of Workers) and the workers on the trains ended up backing down from strike action, a serious error. But we should highlight the heroic strike of the subway workers, which impacted part of the transport in the largest Brazilian city.

Once again the movements linked to the defence of public education were at the forefront of the paralysis and protests. There was a strong national strike by teachers in the elementary network, in most states and large cities. The federal education workers also struck with force. The student movement was present in all these actions, unifying their struggle with that of the workers. Whether in the roadblocks, or in the big marches, the strength of youth fighting for their right to a future was felt once again.

The MTST (Movement of Homeless Workers) and the MST (Movement of the Landless) also played a prominent role, building basic actions to guarantee the interruption of traffic in several regions of the country. With more difficulty, the workers’ sectors also staged strikes, stoppages and demonstrations, especially in some branches and regions: the oil tankers nationwide, the metallurgists of the ABC of São Paulo, Paraná and the Paraíba Valley (São Paulo), civil construction workers in Fortaleza, among other categories.

Another feature of the day was the big unitary street demonstrations, at the end of the morning and at the end of the afternoon. Again, hundreds of thousands took to the streets for the right to work, to study, to retire. Particularly in Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, there was also repression, violent and criminal, carried out by the military police against legitimate popular demonstrations. Some activists remain imprisoned: we must demand they are immediately released and not criminalized.

We must not exaggerate our strength, we know the obstacles in this war and the strength of the enemy, but we still believe in the fighting capacity of this resistance movement. Overall, nationally, it was a very expressive day of mobilization, a step forward in the resistance struggles against the Bolsonaro government attacks. It is time to continue betting on the strengthening of our mobilizations: we can have no confidence in closed-door negotiations with the government and Congress.

The contradictions of the enemy

The week began on Sunday night (9 June), when the explosive denunciations of the portal “The Intercept” revealed the intrigue of Lava-Jato, especially with the illegal and illegitimate relations between Sérgio Moro, the ex-judge of the operation and current Minister of Justice, and Attorney Deltan Dallagnol.

These denunciations prove, once again, the illegality of the process that condemned Lula. The former president is a political prisoner, whose presidential candidacy was impeded by the intrigue of Lava-Jato. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the #Lulalivre campaign, which will have an important moment on 25 June, with a trial in the STF (Supreme Federal Court), and promote the campaign by #ForaMoro, as he has no legitimacy to remain at the head of the Ministry of Justice and coordinate the investigation against himself.

Also, on the eve of the general strike, the rapporteur on social security reform in the Chamber of Deputies, Samuel Moreira (Party of Brazilian Social Democracy, PSDB) read his report to the Special Commission. In it, we saw a retreat from points the Bolsonaro government proposal presented previously. Despite these changes, which are explained by the conflictive relationship between the Bolsonaro government and its allies in Congress and the growing strength of the mobilizations in defence of Social Security, the report is far from representing a victory of our movement.

In the end, the project continues to represent a strong attack on retirees. The combination of increasing the minimum age and increasing the time of contribution, will mean that millions of Brazilian workers will have the right to retire denied or, at least, hampered.

In that sense, the role of the governors was extremely reactionary, including the governments of the PT and other opposition parties. PT governors and the opposition scored an “own goal” in the week of the general strike, supporting the reforms of Guedes and Bolsonaro, just criticizing four points, which were precisely those that were taken from the report by Samuel Moreira. And they are still going to try to reincorporate in the current reform the attacks on state and municipal public officials.

The proposal for reform, now altered by the report presented in the Special Commission, is entering the decisive time of its progress through the Chamber of Deputies, To move forward, it needs to be approved, first in the commission, and then by the plenary of the Chamber in two rounds, with a minimum vote of 308 of the 513 deputies.

We know that an agreement between the government and its allies opens the possibility of approval of this reactionary reform in Congress. But we are in the middle of the fight, nothing is decided yet. The defeat of this unacceptable pension reform of Bolsonaro, Guedes, their parliamentary allies and the governors, will not be conquered behind closed doors within the palaces and Congress.

The only way to defeat it is to continue investing more and more in a unitary and grassroots national movement that resists the brutal attacks on social and democratic rights launched by this far-right government.

A proposal for continuing mobilization

The Trade Unions, fronts of struggle, the student movement and the opposition parties will meet again next week. In these meetings, the discussion must be the strategy for fighting the Bolsonaro government and its attacks. The meeting should begin by repudiating the policy of collaboration with the reform, with only occasional criticism, which has been applied by the governors of the PT and other parties. Our path must be the opposite.

We must rely on mobilization to defeat the reform, the cuts in public education and other attacks of this far-right government. Therefore, it is essential that a new national day of struggle and paralyzes be scheduled, especially when the reform vote is near. Mainly, it is necessary to mark a new day to hold big demonstrations in the streets, which expressively marked the 15M, and the 30M and, now, the 14J.

A first step in this continuity could be the holding of a demonstration attached to the Congress of the UNE (National Union of Students), which happens next month in Brasilia. These large demonstrations have become an important counterpoint to the reactionary acts of the right and the extreme right, who threaten to return to the streets on June 30. Our priority task continues to be to intensify the mobilizations to defeat the Bolsonaro government in the streets.

Originally posted at International Viewpoint.

For Pride Month: Remembering Doug Ireland

By: June 23, 2019
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Doug Ireland, radical journalist, blogger, passionate human rights and queer activist, and relentless scourge of the LGBT establishment, died in his East Village home on October 26, 2013. Doug had lived with chronic pain for many years, suffering from diabetes, kidney disease, sciatica, and the debilitating effects of childhood polio. In recent years he was so ill that he was virtually confined to his apartment. Towards the end, even writing, his calling, had become extremely difficult.

Once, Doug’s writing — in US publications like the Nation, the Village Voice, New York magazine, his blog Direland, and in France’s Libération and the news website Bakchich — was easy to find. But in recent years, his voice was rarely heard outside of New York’s Gay City News, for which he continued to contribute reportage as international editor and political commentary until this year, and few younger radicals are likely to know about him.This is a pity, because Doug’s voice — his scathing polemical style, the vast breadth of his knowledge — was exceptional. Doug was a tireless champion of the oppressed of all kinds, but especially of those who are punished for loving members of their own sex, wherever they might be. With his uncompromising internationalism and refusal to allow cultural differences to stand as an excuse for denying LGBT people their human rights, there are few on the Left quite like him.

Doug was always a libertarian socialist, who nevertheless had long-standing ties to progressives in the Democratic Party — going back to Allard Lowenstein, George McGovern and Bella Abzug, for whom he worked as a campaign manager, Doug hoped progressives might transform the party (a hope I didn’t share). But he was never an apologist for mainstream Democrats, including Obama; he never pulled punches in attacking their cynical amoralism. Ed Koch, he once wrote, was not a closet gay, but a “closet human being.”

Doug had a special loathing for Clinton. One of his last published pieces was “Should We Forgive Bill Clinton?” in Gay City News in March, after the former President wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post against the Defense of Marriage Act that he had signed into law in 1996.

Noting that the Post piece was timed to prepare for the kickoff of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign a week later, Doug wrote: “The truth is that an old and predatory libertine like Bill couldn’t have cared less if a guy or a gal wanted to marry a Volkswagen. He wasn’t a bigot himself — he just surfed on the bigotry of others like the opportunist he’s always been. And it is that opportunism that led him to write his op-ed piece against DOMA on behalf of his wife’s candidacy.”

Doug reminded his readers that “there is a long list of vicious actions by President Clinton and his administration for which he owes LGBT people an unadulterated apology.” One of the items on this list was the Clinton administration’s use of “aid and trade blackmail targeting Third World countries to stop them from buying or manufacturing cheaper, generic versions of the AIDS-fighting drugs needed to prolong life. . .  How many thousands died because Clinton, in his subservience to the greed of Big Pharma, engaged in this shameful arm-breaking? We’ll never know for sure — but their blood, too, is on Bill’s hands.”

Doug was a friend of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD), an antiwar and human rights advocacy group committed to radical democracy from below where I serve as co-director, and to the socialist journal New Politics, where I sit on the editorial board. In 1988, at a time when the CPD was heavily involved in defending democratic dissidents in the Soviet bloc, Doug reported for the Campaign’s newsletter on the persecution of gays in Eastern Europe:

Of all the taboos in Eastern Europe, none has been more cruel or dehumanizing than the official attitude toward homosexuality. If one of the very first acts of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution was to abolish the laws making homosexuality a crime,  . . . Stalinism recriminalized homosexuality, and the theory that “fags are a product of capitalist decadence” has reigned malignantly in the Eastern bloc ever since, with anti-gay persecutions a favorite weapon of the political police throughout the bloc.

Doug’s understanding of Stalinism’s crimes, and of the whole history of the Left’s troubled relationship to alternative sexualities, was brilliantly expounded in his piece “Socialism and Gay Liberation: Back to the Future.” In it, he paid tribute to the courageous gay socialist pioneers — John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, and Magnus Hirschfeld. But he also described the vicious bigotry that was made official in the Stalin-era Communist movement and persisted long after Stalin’s death.

The great turning point, of course, was the birth of the post-Stonewall radical gay liberation movement in the United States — a movement, in Doug’s words, that was “against the State, which made us criminals; against the medical and psychiatric professions, which declared us sick; and against the cultural heterotyranny, which made us the target of disdain, ridicule, opprobrium, hate and violence.” He quoted the German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim: “It is not the homosexual who is perverse, but the society in which he lives.” Like Doug, gay liberation saw itself as an integral, but never subordinate, part of all liberation struggles — feminist, antiwar, civil rights.

Doug’s broad vision of gay liberation contrasted sharply with the narrowly parochial LGBT organizations of today, which support and shower dollars on any politician of either party who is “good on gay issues,” no matter how reactionary he or she is on anything else. Since the late 1990s, the gay movement has become tamed and institutionalized, symbolized preeminently by the corporate-oriented Human Rights Campaign.

Doug never ceased railing against the established LGBT leadership for its political conservatism and for turning the movement into just another interest group, but he was especially critical of its near-indifference to the persecution of LGBT people in other countries. Doug called for the aggressive defense of gays under attack in Uganda, Russia, and Iraq, where they were being murdered by Shia death squads after a death-to-gays fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Sistani; the gay establishment was largely unmoved.

Doug’s reporting on the persecution of gays in Iran, including the public execution of men and boys, elicited criticism from several quarters, including the director of the LGBT Rights Program of Human Rights Watch. Critics objected that he was improperly imputing a Western-style “gay identity” to same-sexers in Muslim countries, and some insinuated he was providing political fodder for U.S. intervention against Iran.

But Doug continued to expose the homophobic criminality of Ahmadinejad and the Iranian theocrats. I don’t know if Doug would have seen it this way, but to me he was working in the great universalist tradition of the historic left, based on a single norm of human freedom and flourishing — a norm that justifies criticism of cultural traditions, wherever they might be, that support such practices as female subordination, racial and religious discrimination, and homophobia.

As Paul Schindler, the editor of Gay City News put it in an editorial defending Doug’s reporting, “Cultural sensitivity is of course an absolute requirement for effective human rights advocacy. But absolute cultural relativism is a recipe for inertia and defeat.”

In his New Politics piece, Doug insisted on the need “to begin a serious and radical rethinking of homosexualities and gender identities so as to understand at a deeper level why the fear and loathing of same-sex love and gender variants are so deeply engrained in society and culture.” Writing in 2009, he sensed “a hunger for a return to some of the earlier principles of sexual liberation for all with which our movement began, not just here but abroad.”

Doug is no longer with us, no longer able to make his own contribution to the revival of these principles. Let us hope, nevertheless, that they can be revived, for the sake of a truly liberated future.

Originally posted at the Jacobin website.

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