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  • A Brief on the Metal Workers’ Strike in Turkey

    A Brief on the Metal Workers’ Strike in Turkey

    Dear Friends,

    Dear Comrades,

    First of all, let us thank you at the beginning and once again, for your show of solidarity with the metal workers of Turkey.

    The bargaining process which covered more than a hundred thousand workers was a candidate to become an important turning point for the current political situation in the country. The despotic regime of Erdoğan and his government had openly sided with bosses in the previous years’ collective bargaining and the same would happen in this one also. It was almost certain that Erdoğan would ban the strike. This objectively meant that the workers’ struggle with plain economic demands was moving towards a head on confrontation with the regime. This would obviously bring about a situation where working class would act like the driving force of the whole countries’ struggle for freedom against the despotism or even might undertake the lead of it. This was explicit in the enthusiasm, massiveness and resoluteness of the workers during the union meetings, demonstrations and alert actions like short hourly work stoppages etc. This would potentially create a situation where the struggle for bread and freedom (two main branches of struggle in Turkey flowing from separate roads) would be united strong and change the whole scene.

    Under these conditions, international solidarity was extremely precious…

    The international statement of solidarity was published on RedMed and Gerçek in English and that the call for the solidarity has been translated, apart from Turkish, into 6 languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, Persian and Bulgarian) and was widely distributed internationally. As a result of this, more than 200 signatures from across 22 countries (Argentina, Greece, Russian Federation, France, Cuba, Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Iran, India, Lebanon, Canada, USA, Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Brazil, Peru, Italy, Spain, Austria and Sweden) were collected just within days. In addition, there were numerous messages of solidarity directed to the workers which have all been conveyed to their addressees together with the international statement in an earlier stage.

    Just days before the workers were about to launch their strike, there came a blow to their struggle from the trade union bureaucracies. First, the largest trade union (Turkish Metal Workers Union) signed an agreement with the bosses days before the strike was due to start, also taking the union ranking third in the industry with it, the one that is close to the government party. Then the left-wing United Metal Workers Union was called to a meeting with the bosses at midnight which they conformed to. It seems that, in this meeting the administration of the United Metal Workers Union, too, accepted the same terms with the others. But this was rejected next day where majority of the factories and workers denounced the conditions of the deal. The decision was eventually taken after an hours long discussion of union representatives of all the factories and by the workers chanting the slogans echoing the catchwords of our international call of solidarity: strike, occupy, resist!

    But only several days after this meeting, deliberately, United Metal signed the very same deal -which was rejected earlier by the workers- under great pressure from the government and the bosses. Despite their disappointment, the majority of the workers, understood that they were on favorable ground feeling the strength of their long-awaited unity enough to reclaim the unofficially proscribed right to strike and whose fervent will of continuing the fight was still alive but were betrayed by their leaders, were not organized enough to overcome the limiting conditions and de facto carry out the strike and launch occupations. Yet the combative spirit that came alive made possible gains. The sheer strength of the workers’ movement which forced the bosses to triple their initial proposal on the wage increases and more importantly to cast aside the longer contract terms that they tried to impose which was pretty disadvantageous for the workers.

    The entire process, including the international solidarity shown, undoubtedly added to the experience of the workers, especially the most class-conscious ones. DIP, the Revolutionary Workers’ Party, was very active during the whole struggle both in the factories or within the trade unions and also in the bosom of the sections of society that leaned to develop concrete acts of solidarity.

    Long live international proletarian solidarity!

    Strike, occupy, resist!

  • What are the Lessons of the UK Election?

    What are the Lessons of the UK Election?

    There have been many articles attempting to explain the crushing defeat of the Labour Party in the UK election of 12 December 2019. Some of them are very insightful, and list reasons that undoubtedly played a part in that defeat. However, I have not come across any which highlight two factors that are important, namely insufficient internationalism and a failure to uphold democracy strongly enough. Let me explain – but first, a brief summary of other viewpoints.

    Reasons for defeat

    Kim Moody’s excellent analysis of the UK election results suggests that the most mistaken conclusion to draw from Labour’s defeat is Joe Biden’s allegation that Jeremy Corbyn failed because he went too far to the left. As Moody points out, the centrists in the election fared even worse, and this has been true not just in Britain but in many other countries, where voters have deserted centrist parties to vote for parties further to the left or the right. In such a scenario, for a party challenging the far right in the UK or elsewhere, moving to the centre sounds like a recipe for defeat. Moody and other commentators also point out that most of the individual items in the Labour Party manifesto were popular; it was the haphazard presentation of them that made it look as if the party was promising new freebies every day without properly costing them, leading to scepticism that they could deliver on their promises.[1]

    Another major reason for defeat, according to Moody and many others, was Corbyn himself, and this is supported by anecdotes from Labour campaigners who were told by prospective voters that they could not vote for the party while it was headed by him. Corbyn supporters counter that he faced a concerted campaign of vilification from the media and his opponents within and outside the party, and this is certainly true. Surveys showed that as a result of repeated allegations of antisemitism, many people thought that a third or more of Labour Party members were accused of antisemitic remarks or attacks when in fact it was fewer than 1 per cent. As Rivkah Brown observed, selective targeting of the Labour Party for antisemitism, when all evidence points to antisemitism being far more prevalent on the far right, left Jewish leaders bewildered when, soon after Johnson’s victory, which they clearly favoured, South Hampstead Synagogue and several shops in the locality were daubed with antisemitic graffiti by neo-Nazis.[2]

    However, Corbyn’s failure to respond adequately to the media campaign against him even when he had a chance to do so on TV interviews was also part of the problem. Moreover, Moody points out that the decline in Labour votes in the constituencies of the North and Midlands that went over to the Tories had been going on for a long time, partly due to a decline in local grassroots organising. In addition, it is likely that Corbyn’s Brexit policy – crafted not by the party as a whole, not even by the shadow cabinet, but by a group of advisors and officials around him – played an important role in the Labour defeat. Weaknesses in foreign policy also contributed.

    The Brexit debacle

    An internationalist position on Brexit would require explaining to working-class voters in deindustrialised regions that the cause of their misery was not the EU or immigrants, as the far right had been telling them, but British government policies (including attacks on employment conditions, privatisation of utilities, and running down of public services), and changes in global capitalism, including technological changes.[3] This is of course a much more complex message than the anti-immigrant message presented by the far right, but conveying it is crucial to finding realistic solutions to the problems being experienced. Given the changes capitalism has gone through since the latter part of the 20th century, even a social-democratic programme cannot be achieved in one country: ‘The world is more globalised, more integrated and joined up than ever before. There is no going back. There are no national solutions to our economic and social problems.’[4]

    This is exactly what Jeremy Corbyn argued in a thoroughly internationalist speech during the run-up to the 2016 referendum: ‘In the coming century, we face huge challenges, as a people, as a continent and as a global community.  How to deal with climate change. How to address the overweening power of global corporations and ensure they pay fair taxes. How to tackle cyber-crime and terrorism. How to ensure we trade fairly and protect jobs and pay in an era of globalisation… All these issues are serious and pressing, and self-evidently require international co-operation. Collective international action through the European Union is clearly going to be vital to meeting these challenges. Britain will be stronger if we co-operate with our neighbours in facing them together… Over the years I have been critical of many decisions taken by the EU, and I remain critical of its shortcomings… Europe needs to change. But that change can only come from working with our allies in the EU.’[5] He reiterated this conviction as late as October 2017, which shows that his personal stance was unchanged even if the party position had shifted,[6] and this undoubtedly played a major role in winning enough votes and seats for Labour to eliminate Theresa May’s majority in the 2017 election.

    However, a factor underemphasised by Corbyn was the racist underpinnings of Brexit. According to Moody, ‘The primary motivations for many of those who voted in favour of leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum were informed by English nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment, but in 2019 these were reinforced by the argument that a democratic decision had been made, the people had decided.’ While anti-immigrant sentiment was ostensibly directed against EU citizens, in practice it also extended to Black and Asian immigrants, especially Muslims, as the significant rise in racist attacks since the referendum shows.[7] Hostility to refugees was revealed in a UKIP poster, which had an eerie resemblance to a Nazi poster, depicting thousands of Syrian and other refugees whom Britain would allegedly be compelled to admit if it remained part of the EU.[8] Anti-Muslim bigotry was stirred up, for example by allegations that Turkey was about to be admitted to the EU, and millions of Muslims from that country would then migrate to Britain.[9]

    These were the themes hammered out 24/7 by the far right, but this hate campaign was not counteracted strongly enough except by a few Labour MPs like Jo Cox, who opposed Brexit, supported immigrants and refugees, took action in solidarity with democracy activists and humanitarian workers in Syria, and was murdered by a neo-Nazi.[10] If Labour had launched a powerful anti-racist campaign depicting immigrants as friends and neighbours, teachers, doctors, nurses and care workers, people whose work benefits society and whose tax and National Insurance payments contribute to Britain’s economy, if it had promoted compassion for refugees and attempts to help them in their home countries, it might have been able to attract many of those who had not voted in the referendum as well as new young voters, and perhaps even Leave supporters who were not hardcore English nationalists.

    Instead, as in earlier avatars of the party, anti-immigrant sentiment was appeased rather than being combated. Even if one concedes that in current circumstances it would be suicidal for a party seeking to be elected to power to take a fully internationalist position supporting open borders, there is absolutely no excuse for seeking to close borders that are already open, or take away rights that immigrants already have, which is precisely what Brexit entails. For anyone who claims to be an internationalist, that should be a red line: a line that was crossed by Corbyn when he refused to make a commitment to campaigning for Remain in any future referendum.

    By 2019, the Labour Party’s Brexit position seemed designed to alienate Leavers and Remainers alike. Corbyn’s proposal for a soft Brexit encountered the criticism that although creating less economic disruption than a hard Brexit, it would leave the UK subject to EU rules in which it would no longer have any say, thus resulting in a loss, not gain, of control. In addition, Labour Leavers impatient to get Brexit over and done with were offered the prospect of yet another period of negotiations with an uncertain outcome. On the other side, the position offered nothing to Labour Remainers. The debacle was amplified by Labour MPs who voted in parliament for the Tory Brexit deals, leaving Labour Remainers in their constituencies – probably the majority of Labour voters even in predominantly Leave constituencies – with no one to vote for.

    Then there were Corbyn’s advisors who opposed a confirmatory referendum or People’s Vote on the grounds that the result of the 2016 referendum embodied ‘the people’s will’. It is entirely in accordance with the politics of the far right that they would represent the result of the 2016 referendum as embodying ‘the will of the people’. What is astonishing is that so few challenged this. According to the electoral commission, 72.2 per cent of the electorate voted in the referendum. Of this, 51.9 per cent – i.e. 37.4 per cent of the electorate – voted to leave, and 34.73 per cent of the electorate voted to remain. So, the leavers were a minority of the electorate as a whole even at the time of the referendum, since 27.87 percent did not vote. In this referendum, above all, 16- and 17-year-olds should have been allowed to vote, since the results would have the longest-lasting impact on them, but they were not. Saying that Brexit represented ‘the will of the people’ amounts to saying that 34.73 per cent of the electorate who voted to remain, 27.87 per cent who didn’t vote, and the 16- and 17-year-olds who were not allowed to vote are all non-people. This is a common tactic of the far right – ‘only those who agree with us are part of “the people”’ – but should have been challenged vociferously by anyone who believes in democracy.

    In addition, there were the multiple ways in which the Leave campaign acted illegally, including breaching spending limits.[11] A whistle-blower who was formerly an employee of Cambridge Analytica commented that if it had been an election, such irregularities would have invalidated the results and made it necessary to rerun it.[12] Brexit is arguably more important than an election since its results define the future for much longer, yet even among Remainers, hardly anyone made this point. Evidence of Russian meddling in the Brexit referendum created an even stronger argument for a People’s Vote. Indeed, the involvement of Donald Trump’s then campaign manager and chief strategist Steve Bannon as well as Russian state media and oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin in providing material assistance to the Brexit campaign suggests that the referendum result represented anything but the will of the British people.[13]

    Yet Corbyn’s advisors as well as some Lexiteers, rather than making these points, opposed even a confirmatory referendum until the ‘Brexit-embodies-the-people’s-will’ propaganda was too entrenched to challenge. In fact, their position throughout was a weaker version of Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’. Their contention that Labour lost because it supported a People’s Vote is contradicted by the fact that Labour lost over 2.5 million votes while the Tories and Brexit Party picked up just 335,000, and Labour lost almost twice as many voters to the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Scottish National Party as the 700,000-800,000 they lost to the Tories and Brexit Party. In January 2019, officials from Hope not Hate and the TSSA union had presented Corbyn with polling evidence that in the event of an election, Labour would get a lower share of the vote in every seat in the country with a pro-Brexit position than it would with an anti-Brexit position, but the warning was dismissed. Corbyn’s U-turn from his original position destroyed his credibility, and his personal rating slumped to -50.[14] Can you trust a leader who in 2016 argues cogently that Britain should stay in the EU and a few years later changes his tune? The advisors who recommended such a shift played a significant role in trashing Corbyn’s reputation, because it convinced many progressives – precisely the people who were less likely to be swayed by the right-wing media – that he was untrustworthy.

    Some Remain voters who had abandoned Labour drifted back after it announced its support for a People’s Vote, but others did not. Some didn’t vote at all. Leavers preferred to stay with Johnson’s more consistent position. By contrast the SNP, which had a social-democratic programme and consistent Remain position, gained votes and seats at the expense of the Tories. If Corbyn had argued consistently for a confirmatory referendum on any Brexit deal and promised to campaign for Remain, it is entirely possible that Labour could have done the same.

    Does any of this matter, now that the election has been lost and Britain has left the EU? It certainly matters to the future of the Labour Party that it should display solidarity with EU citizens who, like the Windrush immigrants, settled in Britain when it was perfectly legal to do so and now face an uncertain future, perhaps arguing for their right to UK citizenship. It is also important to highlight every job, grant, consumer protection and environmental protection lost, every problem arising from Johnson’s Brexit, as well as work out an economic policy that takes account of global changes in capitalism, if Labour is to combat fascist assaults on immigrants and have a chance of winning the next election.

    It is important to challenge the argument of the Labour right and Lexiteers that the working class supported Brexit and abandoned Labour. This presupposes an obsolete definition of ‘the working class’ as mainly engaged in industrial labour, mainly white, and mainly in permanent employment, whereas the new working class is mainly employed in the service sector, often on insecure contracts, and much more diverse in terms of ethnicity, age and gender. Many do not earn enough to support a decent standard of living. As Phil Hearse observes, these sections of the working class voted massively for Remain in the 2016 referendum, and did not abandon Labour in 2019. It was mainly a cross-class section of white pensioners in towns in the North and Midlands who were won over by the UKIP/Brexit Party/Tory right, voted heavily for Leave in 2016, and abandoned Labour in 2019. Hearse concludes, ‘The December 2019 election showed a working class divided on key issues of nationalism, immigration, and the xenophobia currently undergoing rehabilitation as “patriotism” … Labour’s Brexit position got mangled because it tried to… unite the working class behind incompatible positions… The right-wing offensive can only be countered by fighting, not by capitulation and accommodation.’[15]

    A flawed foreign policy

    In October 2016, commenting on the targeting of civilians by Russian airstrikes in Syria, Corbyn’s spokesman suggested there was too much focus on Russian atrocities in Syria ‘which sometimes diverts attention from other atrocities that are taking place,’ implying that civilian casualties from US-led coalition air-strikes were comparable in scale. On the one hand, even if that were true, the remark shows little compassion for the Syrians being killed and driven out of their homes; on the other, a reality check showed that the rate of civilian deaths resulting from Russian airstrikes was 8 times the rate resulting from coalition airstrikes.[16] Most importantly, the absence of solidarity with a democracy movement in a developing country demonstrated a sad lack of internationalism.

    The attempt by the Corbyn team to cover up the brutality of Russian airstrikes in Syria illustrates what I call their pseudo-anti-imperialism: opposition only to Western imperialisms while supporting non-Western imperialisms like Russian imperialism and Iranian regional imperialism, which share responsibility with brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad for over half a million dead and over half the population displaced in Syria.[17] Putin’s is a far-right regime which has provided funding and other support to neo-fascist parties throughout Europe,[18] and to far-right politicians – including Trump – in the rest of the world. Evidence has emerged that it has supported Boris Johnson too.[19] One reason why it has bombed Syrian civilians and democracy activists in support of Bashar al-Assad is to entrench its power in the Middle East; but another is to support its neo-fascist allies in Europe by giving them an ‘enemy’ to demonise, namely millions of Syrian refugees fleeing for their lives.[20] It is disturbing that Corbyn’s team would want to cover up the crimes of such a regime; equally disturbing is the implicit contempt for Syrian working people struggling against unemployment, poverty and authoritarianism.

    This attempt to whitewash the Russian war on Syrian civilians made it possible to represent Corbyn’s opposition to the US/UK war on Iraq as anti-Western rather than a principled anti-war position. Failing to condemn the Iranian state and its allied militias (including Hezbollah) for killing Syrian civilians, driving them out of their homes and taking over their land, while condemning the Israeli state for doing exactly the same to Palestinians, made it easier to portray Labour as antisemitic rather than a party that was taking a principled stand in opposition to crimes against humanity; similarly, failure to condemn the extreme right-wing Islamic Republic’s barbaric treatment of political prisoners made it possible to misrepresent condemnation of the extreme right-wing Israeli regime’s barbaric treatment of political prisoners as antisemitism rather than principled support for human rights, secularism and democracy. Support for Russian imperialism in Ukraine by neo-Stalinist elements of Corbyn’s team[21] made it possible to misrepresent his support for the Irish struggle for freedom from British imperialism as anti-British rather than anti-imperialist. In short, the Corbyn team’s incoherent anti-imperialism and selective solidarity with some struggles for national liberation and democracy but not others made it more difficult for Corbyn to defend correct positions he had taken in the past, and allowed the far right to demonise him.

    There has been a tendency in sections of the left to define ‘right-wing’ simply in terms of neoliberalism and austerity policies, failing to recognise that right-wing politics are defined by ultra-nationalism, authoritarianism, racism and bigotry, and can coexist with state capitalism and/or neo-protectionism. If the far right has been gaining ground throughout the world in the past few decades, it is partly because a section of the left has been supporting it in the name of ‘anti-imperialism’ or opposition to the ‘elite’ or the ‘establishment’. It is important that the Labour left, while continuing to be critical of Western imperialisms and their authoritarian allies, should be equally critical of non-Western imperialisms and their authoritarian allies.

    For example, at this moment, when Syrian civilians in Idlib are being slaughtered by Russian imperialism in alliance with Bashar al-Assad,[22] it is important to express solidarity with the victims and with Syrian democracy activists now either in exile or facing imminent extermination.[23] It is crucially important to extend solidarity to the mass uprising of Iranian workers, women, youth and oppressed minorities opposing exploitation, discrimination, authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, misogyny and militarism, rather than implicitly or explicitly siding with the corrupt, theocratic, repressive, militaristic imperialist regime they are opposing.[24] In the wake of the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, it is necessary, while criticising Trump for authorising it, to acknowledge that Soleimani was in Iraq as agent-in-chief of Iranian imperialism, which has reduced Iraq to the status of a colony;[25] that the majority of Iraqis (apart from the collaborators) want to be free of both US and Iranian imperialism;[26] and to support the Iraqi people’s struggle for democracy and national liberation rather than endorsing the agenda of Iranian imperialism in Iraq.

    In other words, recognising ultra-nationalism, authoritarianism, racism and bigotry as hallmarks of the extreme right and fighting against them worldwide with all the resources at their disposal should be a central part of the agenda not just of the Labour left but of all those who claim to be socialists. It is important that the Labour left – and indeed all socialists – abandon the simplistic notion that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ which has been used to support anti-Western tyrants and imperialists, and take a consistent position in solidarity with all struggles against oppression and exploitation. They need to be able to deal with complexity; to understand that it is possible to oppose military assaults on Iran and sanctions that hurt ordinary Iranians, and at the same time oppose the repressive, extreme right-wing Islamic regime; to acknowledge that prejudice against Jews is racist and antisemitic, but denying Palestinians the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is also racist, and campaigning for those rights is not antisemitic.

    Conclusion

    There is no doubt that Corbyn was subjected to a barrage of right-wing abuse and vilification by the media, and that there were English nationalists among former Labour supporters, including a small section of the working class, who rejected him because he didn’t share their hostility to immigrants. But to explain the Labour defeat by these factors alone ignores a host of other reasons. It is crucial to acknowledge that their confused and confusing message was outmatched by Johnson’s clear and consistent message, however dishonest the latter might have been.

    The Brexit campaign unleashed a wave of English ultra-nationalism and anti-immigrant hostility similar to the racist upsurge accompanying the 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech by Enoch Powell (who was also a Eurosceptic), in which he argued that immigration would erode the national character.[27] Like the Brexiteers, he claimed to be speaking on behalf of the people against a powerful elite, and referred to Black children as ‘piccaninnies’ as Boris Johnson did after him. At that time, he was countered by a powerful anti-racist movement in solidarity with immigrants, but a similar movement failed to materialise this time, despite Corbyn’s record of anti-racism in the past. The Labour Party and non-Labour Lexiteers need to acknowledge that in building a wall against immigrants who had hitherto been free to enter the UK, Brexit in any form is a right-wing measure, and not all their valid criticisms of the EU could justify supporting it. It should have been opposed by a campaign of solidarity with all immigrants and refugees, which is now needed more urgently than ever.

    Many foreign policy positions of Corbyn and the Labour Party under his leadership have been absolutely correct, opposing Western imperialisms and extreme right-wing regimes allied with them. But refuting attacks on Corbyn based on his past positions was made more difficult by lack of consistency in abiding by the principles underlying these positions. There is a need to forge a foreign policy offering consistent support to all struggles for democracy. As the courageous students of Amir Kabir University in Tehran affirm, ‘The only way to escape the current crisis is to return to a policy based on people’s democratic rights, a policy that will not rush into the arms of imperialism due to its fear of despotism, and one that in the name of resistance and fighting against imperialism will not legitimize despotism.’[28]

     

    References

    [1] Kim Moody, ‘The UK election: A car crash on the left side of the road,’ New Politics, 28 December 2019. https://newpol.org/the-uk-election-a-car-crash-on-the-left-side-of-the-road/

    [2] Rivkah Brown, ‘The antisemitic monster rising from the slime is not Corbynism – it is white nationalism,’ The Independent, 31 December 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/antisemitism-london-graffiti-hate-crime-corbyn-johnson-tories-a9264746.html

    [3] Rohini Hensman, ‘Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India,’ 2011. New York: Columbia University Press and New Delhi: Tulika Books

    [4] Andrew Burgin and Kate Hudson, ‘Election defeat: What happened and what next?’ Public Reading Rooms, https://prruk.org/the-election-defeat-what-happened-and-what-do-we-do-next/

    [5] Jeremy Corbyn, ‘Europe needs to change… but I am voting to stay: Corbyn’s full speech on the EU,’ Labourlist, 14 April 2016. https://labourlist.org/2016/04/europe-needs-to-change-but-i-am-voting-to-stay-corbyns-full-speech-on-the-eu/

    [6] Rob Merrick, ‘Brexit: Jeremy Corbyn says he would still vote Remain after Theresa May ducked the question,’ Independent, 12 October 2017. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-jeremy-corbyn-remain-vote-second-referendum-eu-negotiations-theresa-may-a7996996.html

    [7] Robert Booth, ‘Racism rising since Brexit vote, nationwide study reveals,’ The Guardian, 20 May 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/racism-on-the-rise-since-brexit-vote-nationwide-study-reveals

    [8] Anealla Safdar, ‘Brexit: UKIP’s “unethical” anti-immigration poster,’ Al Jazeera, 28 June 2016. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/06/brexit-anti-immigration-ukip-poster-raises-questions-160621112722799.html

    [9] James Ker-Lindsay, ‘Did the unfounded claim that Turkey was about to join the EU swing the Brexit referendum? LSE British Politics and Policy blog, 15 February 2018. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/unfounded-claim-turkey-swing-brexit-referendum/

    [10] Ishaan Tharoor, ‘Jo Cox, slain British politician, was a champion of refugees,’ The Washington Post, 16 June, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/16/jo-cox-slain-british-politician-was-a-champion-of-refugees/

    [11] Adam Ramsay, ‘The High Court found that Vote Leave broke the law in a new way,’ OpenDemocracy, 14 September 2018. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/high-court-found-that-vote-leave-broke-law-in-different-way/

    [12] Christopher Wylie, ‘Brexit is a crime scene. When are we going to wake up?’ The New European, 5 July 2018. https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/whistleblower-christopher-wylie-on-why-the-uk-still-seems-unconcerned-by-allegations-of-referendum-wrongdoing-1-5592572

    [13] Peter Jukes, ‘Explosive report exposes the molten core of the Brexit, Trump, Russia scandal,’ Byline Times, 18 February 2019. https://bylinetimes.com/2019/02/18/explosive-uk-parliamentary-report-exposes-the-molten-core-of-the-trump-brexit-russia-scandal/

    [14] Paul Mason, After Corbynism: Where next for Labour? 2019, pp.2-5.

    [15] Phil Hearse, ‘Must Labour move right to secure its working-class base?’ International Viewpoint, 8 January 2020. http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article6353#nb6

    [16] Emma Graham-Harrison, ‘Reality check: Are the US-led airstrikes on Syrians as bad as Russia’s?’ The Guardian, 12 October 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/reality-check/2016/oct/12/reality-check-are-us-led-airstrikes-on-syrians-as-bad-as-russias

    [17] Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-imperialism, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018.

    [18] Anton Shekhovtsov, ‘Russian Connections to the Far Right in Europe,’ 2019. https://www.neos.eu/_Resources/Persistent/d2f58c9e0cd688efcd9d926c27a60edda5fa7286/Anton%20Shekhovtsov%20-%20Russian%20Connections%20to%20the%20Far%20Right%20in%20Europe.pdf

    [19] Adam Bienkov, ‘Boris Johnson was photographed with a suspected Russian spy who called him a “good friend”,’ Business Insider, 25 November 2019. https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/news/boris-johnson-was-photographed-with-a-suspected-russian-spy-who-called-him-a-good-friend/articleshow/72224920.cms

    [20] Ben Judah, ‘Those who call for Brexit are handing European power to the Kremlin,’ Independent, 9 March 2016. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/those-who-call-for-brexit-are-handing-european-power-to-the-kremlin-a6921386.html

    [21] Paul Canning, ‘How the shooting down of a Malaysian jet reveals Corbyn’s Putin problem,’ Byline Times, 9 July 2019. https://bylinetimes.com/2019/07/09/how-the-shooting-down-of-a-malaysian-jet-reveals-corbyns-putin-problem/

    [22] Simon Tisdall, ‘Don’t call them Syria’s child casualties. This is the slaughter of the innocents,’ The Guardian, 4 August 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/03/syria-idlib-child-deaths-airstrikes-assad-putin-russia

    [23] Waad al-Kataeb, ‘Winner’s acceptance speech for For Sama, Documentary, British Academy Film Awards, 2 February 2020. http://www.bafta.org/media-centre/transcripts/waad-al-kateab-winners-acceptance-speech-documentary-ee-british-academy

    [24] Frieda Afary (interviewed by Emma Wilde Botta), ‘Why the latest uprising in Iran matters,’ Jacobin, 21 December 2019. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/12/uprising-iran-protests-fuel-price-us-sanctions

    [25] James Risen, Tim Arango, Farnaz Fassihi, Murtaza Hussein and Ronan Bergman, ‘A Spy Complex Revealed: Leaked Iranian intelligence reports expose Tehran’s vast web of infuence in Iraq,’ The Intercept, https://theintercept.com/2019/11/18/iran-iraq-spy-cables/

    [26] Ali Mamouri, ‘US Embassy attack backfires on Iran-backed militias in Iraq,’ Al Monitor, 2 January 2020. https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/01/iraq-iran-us-embassy-militias-pmu.html

    [27] Lewis Goodall, ‘Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood: The speech that divided a nation,’ Sky News, 24 April 2018. https://news.sky.com/story/enoch-powells-rivers-of-blood-the-speech-that-divided-a-nation-11339291

    [28] Frieda Afary, Fatemeh Masjedi and Sina Zekavat, ‘Iran popular protests against regime intensify in response to Iran downing of passenger plane,’ Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists, https://allianceofmesocialists.org/iran-popular-protests-against-regime-intensify-in-response-to-iran-downing-of-passenger-plane/

     

  • 13 theses on the imminent ecological catastrophe and the (revolutionary) means of averting it

    13 theses on the imminent ecological catastrophe and the (revolutionary) means of averting it

    I. The ecological crisis is already the most important social and political question of the 21st century, and will become even more so in the coming months and years. The future of the planet, and thus of humanity, will be determined in the coming decades. Calculations by certain scientists as to scenarios for the year 2100 aren’t very useful for two reasons: a) scientific: considering all the retroactive effects impossible to calculate, it is very risky to make projections over a century. B) political: at the end of the century, all of us, our children and grandchildren will be gone, so who cares?

    II. As the IPCC explains, if the average temperature exceeds the pre-industrial period’s by 1.5°, there is a risk of setting off an irreversible climate change process 1. The ecological crisis involves several facets, with hazardous consequences, but the climate question is doubtless the most dramatic threat. What would the consequences of this be? Just a few examples: the multiplication of megafires such as in Australia; the disappearance of rivers and the desertification of land areas, melting and dislocation of polar ice and raising the sea level, which could reach dozens of meters. Yet, at two meters vast regions of Bangladesh, India and Thailand, as well as the major cities of human civilisation – Hong Kong, Calcutta, Venice, Amsterdam, Shanghai, London, New York, Rio – will have disappeared beneath the sea. How high can the temperature go? From what temperature will human life on this planet be threatened? No one has an answer to these questions.

    III. These are risks of a catastrophe unprecedented in human history. One would have to go back to the Pliocene, some millions of years ago, to find climate conditions similar to what could become reality in the future, due to climate change. Most geologists consider that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, when conditions on the planet have been modified by human action? What action? Climate change began with the 18th Century Industrial Revolution, but it is after 1945, with neoliberal globalisation, that it took a qualitative leap. In other words, modern capitalist industrial civilisation is responsible for the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, thus of global heating.

    IV. The capitalist system’s responsibility in the imminent catastrophe is widely recognised. Pope Francis, in his Encyclical Laudato Si, without uttering the word ‘capitalism’ spoke out against a structurally perverse system of commercial and property relations based exclusively on the ‘principle of profit maximization’ as responsible both for social injustice and destruction of our Common House, Nature. A slogan universally chanted the world over in ecological demonstrations is ‘Change the System, not the Climate!’ The attitude shown by the main representatives of this system, advocates of business as usual – billionaires, bankers, ‘experts’, oligarchs, politicians – can be summed up by the phrase attributed to Louis XIV: ‘After me, the deluge’.

    V. The systemic nature of the problem is cruelly illustrated by governments’ behaviour. All, (with very rare exceptions) acting in the service of capital accumulation, multinationals, the fossil oligarchy, general commodification and free trade. Some of them – Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison (Australia) – are openly ecocidal and climate deniers. The other, ‘reasonable’ ones set the tone at the annual COP (Conference of the Parties or Circuses Organised Periodically?) meetings, which feature vague ‘green’ rhetoric and total inertia. The most successful was COP 21, in Paris, which concluded with solemn promises from all governments taking part to reduce emissions – not kept, except by a few Pacific islands. Scientists calculate that even if they had been kept, the temperature would still rise up to 3.3° higher…

    VI. ‘Green capitalism’, ‘carbon markets’, ‘compensation mechanisms and other manipulations of the so-called ‘sustainable market economy’ have proven perfectly useless, while ‘greening’ with a vengeance, emissions are skyrocketing, and catastrophe gets closer and closer. There is no solution to the ecological crisis within the framework of capitalism, a system entirely devoted to productivism, consumerism, the ferocious struggle for ‘market shares’, to capital accumulation and maximizing profits. Its intrinsically perverse logic inevitably leads to the disruption of ecological balance and destructions of ecosystems.

    VII. The only effective alternatives, capable of avoiding catastrophe, are radical alternatives. ‘Radical’ means attacking the root of the evil. If the capitalist system is at the root, we need anti-system alternatives, i.e. anticapitalist ones, such as ecosocialism, an ecological socialism up to the challenges of the 21st century. Other radical alternatives such as ecofeminism, social ecology (Murray Bookchin), André Gorz’s political ecology, or degrowth have much in common with ecocialism: relations of reciprocal influence have developed in recent years.

    VIII. What is socialism? For many Marxists, it is transformation of the relationships of production – by the collective appropriation of the means of production – to allow the free development of productive forces. Ecosocialism lays claim to Marx, but explicitly breaks with this productivist model. Of course, collective appropriation is indispensable, but the productive forces themselves must also be transformed: by changing their energy sources (renewables instead of fossil fuels); b) by reducing global energy consumption; c) by reducing production of goods (‘degrowth’), and by eliminating useless activities (advertising) and harmful ones (pesticides, weapons of war); d) by putting a stop to planned obsolescence. Ecosocialism also involves transformation of consumption models, transport forms, urbanism and ‘ways of life.’ In short, it is much more than a change of property forms: it is a civilizational change, based on values of solidarity, equality, and respect for nature. Ecosocialist civilisation breaks with productivism and consumerism, in favour of shorter working time, thus more free time devoted to social, political, recreational, artistic, erotic etc activities. Marx referred to this goal by the term ‘Realm of freedom’.

    IX. To achieve the transition towards ecosocialism, democratic planning is required, guided by two criteria: meeting actual needs, and respect for the ecological balance of the planet. The people themselves, once the onslaught of advertising and the consumption obsession created by the capitalist market are eliminated – who will decide, democratically, what their real needs are. Ecosocialism is a wager on the democratic rationality of the popular classes.

    X. This requires a real social revolution. How can such a revolution be defined? To carry out the ecosocialist project, partial reforms will not suffice. We could refer to a note by Walter Benjamin, on the margins of his theses On the concept of history (1940): ‘Marx said that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But things might work out otherwise. It is possible that revolutions are the act by which humans travelling in the train activate the emergency brakes.’ Translation in 21st century terms: we are all passengers on a suicide train, which is named Modern Industrial Capitalist Civilisation. This train is hurtling towards a catastrophic chasm: climate change. Revolutionary action aims to halt it – before it is too late.

    XI. Ecosocialism is at once a project for the future and a strategy for the struggle here and now. There is no question of waiting for ‘the conditions to be ripe’. It is necessary to provoke convergence between social and ecological struggles and fight the most destructive initiatives by powers in the service of capital. This is what Naomi Klein called Blockadia. Within mobilisations of this type, an anticapitalist consciousness and interest in ecosocialism can emerge during struggles. Proposals such as the Green New Deal are part of this struggle, in their radical forms, which require effectively renouncing fossil energies – but not in those limited to recycling ‘green capitalism’.

    XII. Who is the subject in this struggle? The workerist/industrialist dogmatism of the previous century is no longer current. The forces now at the forefront of the confrontation are youth, women, Indigenous people, and peasants. Women are very present in the formidable youth uprising launched by Greta Thunberg’s call – one of the great sources of hope for the future. As the ecofeminists explain to us, this massive women’s participation in the mobilisations comes from the fact that they are the first victims of the system’s damage to the environment. Unions are beginning here and there to also get involved. This is important, because, in the final analysis, we can’t overcome the system without the active participation of workers in cities and countryside, who make up the majority of the population. The first condition, in each movement is associating ecological goals (closing coal mines or oil wells, or thermal power stations, etc) with guaranteed employment for the workers involved.

    XIII. Do we have any chance of winning this battle, before it is too late? Unlike the so-called ‘collapsologists’ who clamorously proclaim that catastrophe is inevitable and that any resistance is futile, we think the future is open. There is no guarantee that this future will be ecosocialist: this is the object of a wager in the Pascalian sense, in which we commit all our forces, in a ‘labour for uncertainty’. But as Bertolt Brecht said, with grand and simple wisdom: ‘Those who fight may lose. Those who don’t fight have already lost.’

    Originally posted at International Viewpoint.

  • “Politics Isn’t Poker”: A Response to Andy Sernatinger on DSA and Bernie Sanders

    “Politics Isn’t Poker”: A Response to Andy Sernatinger on DSA and Bernie Sanders

    Andy Sernatinger’s New Politics article “Bern After Reading: Sanders and Socialist Strategy” raises important questions to think through, whether you’re a member of Democratic Socialists of America or not. Even in the heat of the moment—and the Sanders challenge is “berning” very hot, against all the odds, with the first primaries finally here—it’s still valuable to step back and evaluate the campaign and its impact in light of DSA’s initiatives to support Sanders.

    The analysis is especially important to me because I’ve been working out my own thoughts on this. I recently wrote a (very) long article meant mainly for my comrades of the former International Socialist Organization (ISO) that retrospectively assesses our discussions about Sanders and DSA before the ISO’s dissolution.

    I’ve appreciated Andy’s previous articles about DSA and quoted from one in my article. I think his most recent piece starts from where I end up. Andy disagrees with how DSA’s initiatives have taken on an “all in” character, but his article is premised on socialists being in. He urges socialists to support Sanders’s campaign for the presidential nomination of a party of capital by using a “class struggle approach” that will build working-class and left organization beyond the elections. I won’t repeat what I wrote, but I agree with this and think socialists need to question old assumptions and attitudes that hinder us from embracing that approach.

    I’ve only been a DSA member for a few months, but I share Andy’s concerns about comrades not looking beyond the Sanders campaign to a struggle for socialism that will require, even if Sanders were actually elected president, mass mobilizations of the working class to achieve even a reformist agenda. Some of the talk about “only shots” and “last hopes” are rhetorical flourish, but there’s obviously much more to socialism than a single election campaign, even this one, and we should make that plain now.

    I attended the Chicago DSA chapter meeting where the proposal to go “all in” for Bernie that Andy singled out was discussed. I was convinced and voted yes. For one thing, the opportunity is historic. The unique platform of a presidential campaign as Sanders has used it only comes around every four years, and it may be a while after 2020 before there is a figure with the same stature and appeal as him.

    I was also persuaded that the proposal was meant to devote resources to an independent campaign that would spread a socialist message beyond voting for Sanders. It seemed to me then, and does now, that the “all in” proposal was about more than “building a movement for Bernie” alone, as Andy characterized an article by CDSA member Sean Duffy.

    In fairness, I think Sean was at pains in that article to explain the advantages of an independent campaign. “While we are obviously trying to win Chicago for Bernie in the March primary, and thus increase his delegate totals for the convention,” they wrote, “the primary goal of our Bernie campaign is to raise class consciousness in Chicago, to grow our organization in the city, and to train up organizers and develop new leaders.” I was “all in” with that.

    As long as we’re using gambling metaphors, maybe another poker term is worth considering: pot-committed. When you’ve already bet a significant number of your chips, it doesn’t make sense to fold your hand or make a weak bet to save what you have left since the odds may be worse later on. When you’re pot-committed, the move is to make a strong bet, even if you aren’t certain you have a hand that will beat anything else.

    DSA’s growth has been tied up with the mass popularity of the Sanders campaign and the other socialists who have won election to Congress and other offices. The organization already has a lot of chips in the pot. At a moment when there’s a historic opportunity (not to say the last chance) to achieve even more, for the socialist movement in general and DSA in particular, it doesn’t make sense to make a weak bet.

    And besides, it isn’t actually all or nothing, the “all in” metaphor notwithstanding. There’s still a lot to win if Sanders doesn’t get the nomination or become president—because politics isn’t poker, and sometimes a turn of phrase is just a turn of phrase (to paraphrase another turn of phrase).

    In my experience in Chicago since the “all in for Bernie” strategy was approved in early January, the chapter’s activities haven’t been subsumed into the Sanders campaign, nor has the organization’s message narrowed to elections alone.

    For example, the January meetings of North and South Sides branches each got big turnouts for publicly advertised presentations not on Sanders but on “Who Is the Working Class?” (readings by Karl Marx and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor) and “What Is Chicago DSA?” Weekly canvassing has alternated between South, West, and North Side neighborhoods, and they usually promote both Sanders and Anthony Clark, a DSA comrade running a strong, left-wing primary campaign for Congress against Democratic Party fixture Danny Davis. Each canvassing generally has a theme connected to a longstanding CDSA campaign, such as housing and rent control.

    I think CDSA’s efforts have not only built support for Sanders but tangibly helped to build DSA. I’ve canvassed with comrades who were paper members before and became active because of the Sanders campaign—and in the process started attending meetings. Plus, CDSA is tabling and canvassing in areas of the city where it doesn’t necessarily have a base, expanding its profile in ways that could help future organizing.

    Thus, I think election activity, even when it is the immediate priority for DSA, doesn’t have to overshadow everything else and neglect building socialist and left-wing organization for future struggles.

    (As an aside, last fall, the Chicago chapter went “all in” to build solidarity with the strike by Chicago teachers and school workers. A chapter that had gained further prominence and experience by helping elect six socialists to the City Council earlier in the year devoted resources and comrades’ hard work to strike solidarity—explicitly emphasizing in the process that DSA’s vision of winning socialism involved mass struggles of the working class.)

    Again, my experience of DSA is limited to a brief period in one city. And I’m not saying there aren’t times when the excitement of the moment limits comrades’ focus. Then again, no one imagined that Sanders would be going into the first primaries as the frontrunner, with the “Not me, us” groundswell so far withstanding an increasingly frantic opposition from the Democratic Party establishment. To be honest, it seems unrealistic to expect comrades not to go a little overboard in those circumstances.

    What’s more, I think there may be more to gain for the left from being “all in” in this unusual circumstance than can be judged just yet.

    The radicalization around the Sanders campaign in 2016 didn’t disperse and descend into despair. By 2018, it had been reinvigorated by local and national election successes that in turn laid the basis for a stronger Sanders campaign in 2020. Even more important was the growth of a more substantial left after 2016, with an explicitly socialist organization, DSA, at its core that has a promising and ongoing, if still developing, life beyond elections through involvement in labor and social struggles. Plus, one of the most exciting developments of the 2020 campaign is how it has cohered a broad array of left forces and figures beyond DSA around a collective identification with socialist election campaigns, making connections between activists and struggles that can be important in the years to come.

    It seems like those building blocks for the left will remain if Sanders is again defeated for the presidential nomination, which is still the most likely outcome. (If Sanders manages to win the nomination, it will usher in months of chaos, instability, and upheaval that would scramble all our speculations today—but we can at least assume that it will produce enormous possibilities for the left, along with enormous challenges.)

    My point is that it’s too early to judge that election activity around the Sanders campaign hasn’t built working-class organization—the test of that is still to come. Going “all in” to take advantage of a unique opportunity in this election could pay off in a larger, more coherent, more determined, and politically more developed left, capable of setting labor and social struggles on a higher level, with an even bigger prize at stake.

  • Philly Educators Have a Chance to Make History

    Philly Educators Have a Chance to Make History

    Members of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) have a chance to improve lives of Philly school educators and students, challenging control of schools by corporate elites, as did Chicago teachers when they elected a new generation of leaders from the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) to head their union a decade ago.

    The choice is stark: Continue with policies and personalities that have allowed the city and state to neglect Philly schools, teachers and kids or bring in the Caucus of Working Educators (CWE), better known as the Caucus of WE, or Working Educators, or WE, a hardworking, savvy group of union members committed to union democracy who understand kids and teachers need teachers unions that will organize and fight to reverse the attacks on public education.

    PFT’s longtime officers say they deserve to be re-elected because they know how to negotiate contracts and have the expertise to deliver the goods to members. They argue it would be foolish to change negotiating teams before they’ve clinched the deal for a new contract. These claims ring false if you’ve followed how the best union contracts are won these days. Negotiating a union contract is a lot like selling real estate: You can always make the sale if you don’t ask for much and settle for less, which is what the PFT machine and Jerry Jordan do. They won’t face their strategy has failed to win real improvements because they’re overlooking the resources the union has to tap to win significant improvements: an informed, mobilized membership and grassroots alliances with parent and advocacy groups challenging powerful money interests in the city.

    In contrast to the way the old guard thinks and acts, Working Educators has organized for change in the PFT essential to maximize the union’s clout.  Caucus activists know education back and forth because they live it – unlike PFT officials who’ve been out of schools for ages. Though the current PFT officials claim they are the experts, Working Educators has been educating them through example about how to organize and win.  The caucus has helped members and parents on countless issues when the union wouldn’t step up, pushing to remove asbestos in buildings, defend teachers whom the district tried to punish for advising parents of their right to “opt” their children out of standardized tests. Working Educators has taken the lead in exposing paraprofessionals’ need for livable wages and demanding good contracts when the leadership said it wasn’t possible. The activists know the union needs community support to reverse losses in funding and political power and has shown up for social justice struggles, like working with community organizations in Black Lives Matter, going beyond the lip service and token contributions union officials consider meaningful support.

    When a union has been irrelevant and remote from workers’ lives, as has the PFT for many years, some members don’t realize they can vote in an election for union leaders or a contract.  Others are resigned to the status quo, however dissatisfied they are with it.  When the leadership’s control hasn’t been contested by reform groups, some members may not realize challenges from a caucus are not only quite normal but important to help members know and use their rights.  Another reason members ignore union elections is they’re buried and overwhelmed in their work, like young teachers struggling to do their jobs well with little or no support from administrators or the union.  Paraprofessionals, overwhelmingly women of color, struggle for economic survival because the union has ignored them in its contract negotiations, allowing the district to pay them shamefully low wages, below the poverty level if they’re raising a family.

    When a union wants members to vote and uses the American Arbitration Association (AAA), the union has AAA use all options for voting – mail, phone, and online. The PFT leadership has shown (again) its resistance to change and (dis)regard for members’ participation by restricting voting to a ballot mailed to members’ homes. The ballot comes in a large white envelope it’s easy to mistake for junk mail and discard. (I know because I’ve done it and had to phone AAA for a replacement.)  Though this is a union election, it has ramifications for the  city, its schools and kids, the national teachers unions, and the labor movement because there’s a reform movement sweeping teachers unions that’s fueling huge changes in local and national politics.  CWE joins education activists throughout the country in pushing for real improvements in schools.

    What  PFT Members Can Do

    Even if you’ve never been to a union meeting, never read the contract, and feel you don’t have a moment for yourself because work and life are too demanding, take five minutes in the next two weeks to vote in this election. Ballots are being mailed out on Thursday, February 6. Look for that big white envelope from the AAA, open it, check off the CWE (Caucus of WE) slate, put it back in the return envelope and mail it.

    If you feel like you have five minutes more to invest in your future, when you’re at work, tell two co-workers you voted and ask them if they have. Encourage them to look out for that white envelope, check the box for CWE, and mail it.

    Philly educators can elect new union officers ready to lead, organizing to win. PFT members along with kids and families that depend on public schools deserve more and better, and this election can make that happen. Seize the moment – and that white envelope.

  • “Capital, It Fails Us Now”: Andy Gill of Gang of Four, 1956-2020

    “Capital, It Fails Us Now”: Andy Gill of Gang of Four, 1956-2020

    For people of a certain age — Generation X, they used to call us — it’s something of a cliche that if you loved punk rock and had leftist leanings you’d find your way to hearing a Gang of Four album. That album was probably their debut LP Entertainment! — sorry, I meant the “seminal post-punk/experimental album recorded in 1979 that drew inspiration from punk, dub [reggae], and Marxist ideology.” (It’s important to provide all the essential details.) I was one such person blown away by said album, in part because I’d never heard anyone play guitar like Andy Gill, who died on February 1 at the appallingly young age of 64.

    “Post-punk” refers to rock bands that emerged soon after or simultaneously with bands that came to define the phrase “punk rock” — the Ramones, the Damned, the Sex Pistols, the early Clash, etc. — but that sounded much less like their ’60s predecessors such as the MC5 and the Stooges. They were even more “other” in comparison with mainstream ’70s rock, especially the bands most popular in the U.S. (Compare the Eagles with Joy Division and one might think the two bands came from different planets, not just countries.)

    It’s rarely said, but the post-punks were making new versions of art rock, especially in the UK, where art-rockers like David Bowie and Roxy Music were far more popular than they ever were in the U.S. But what Gill and Gang of Four did that was genuinely new was to create what reviewers often called “punk funk”: mixing punk’s brevity, confrontational stance and rejection of ostentatious displays of virtuosity with a version of, yes, funk. Not quite the funk of James Brown or Parliament-Funkadelic, of course. But Gill, at least, wasn’t interested in “copying various icons of black music. (It was) more through simply deconstructing the nature of drumming and where you place the beats. It was like starting from ground zero with the drumming.” Hence, songs like “At Home He’s a Tourist” and “Natural’s Not In It” and “In The Ditch,” where the vocals and sometimes the guitar suddenly drop, and “the drums and bass are right in your face.”

    And then, again, there’s Gill’s guitar style. Reviewers labeled it “angular,” “spiky,” referred to “shards of guitar noise” and such. All of which is correct. Long before Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (who was a fan), Gill created the “anti-solo,” a “Morse code” consisting of “shrieking chords or runs of aggravation along his high strings, all outbursts kept as brief as possible.” (So sayeth Chris O’Leary of Billboard, accurately.) Especially when compared with so many boring, interminable ’70s and ’80s rock and metal guitar solos, Gill’s aesthetic choices still sound bracing.

    So what does any of this have to with socialism and why eulogize Gill in the blog of a socialist publication? The name of Gill’s band partly gives it away: it refers to the Maoist faction of the Chinese Communist Party which ruled China in the final years of the Great Proletarian [sic] Cultural Revolution. Of course, this was meant as a joke. But let’s be clear: Gang of Four was a Marxist rock & roll band.

    Yes, by the early 21st century Gill was effectively saying that he and original Go4 singer Jon King weren’t really Marxists: “[Our] lyrical approach was very often kind of observation in a way and not dragging the listener to a particular conclusion. Or demanding that the listener shares in some condemnation of something. It’s much more of an observational position, pointing out a few interesting things.”

    OK, Andy. Mostly true. But you also wrote “Capital, it fails us now/Comrades, let us seize the time.” And pretty much every Go4 song is clearly Marxist in some way — is romantic coupling “a contract in our mutual interest?” Isn’t it true that history is “Not made by great men“? In “Why Theory?” Gill and King point out that “We’ve all got opinions/Where do they come from?/Each day seems like a natural fact/And what we think/Changes how we act.” Antonio Gramsci would approve. And Go4’s influence on ’80s and ’90s underground and “alternative” bands like the Proletariat, the Minutemen, Fugazi, and Rage Against the Machine went beyond just the sonics — commies all, these guys, even if they refused to make it plain. (Well, the Proletariat and RATM made it plain, repeatedly.)

    Gang of Four was a great, distinctive rock band that played Marxist songs and Andy Gill was a brilliant, innovative guitarist. As we’re now entering a second decade where no strand of rock counts as popular music anymore, the world could stand to see more musicians draw from them — aesthetically and politically. The major music labels aren’t going to sign them anyway. What’ve they got to lose?

    Rest in power, Comrade Gill.

  • Welcome to the Global Ecosocialist Network

    Welcome to the Global Ecosocialist Network

    The Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN) is being launched at a moment of extreme danger for humanity.  The intensity of the crisis and the scale of the danger is hard to grasp or express adequately because, unless you are in one of the parts of the world currently experiencing extreme weather, it cannot yet literally be seen. And even where the danger is actually being experienced there are very powerful forces at work to obscure its real causes.

    Nevertheless it is clear that over the last year or so, especially since the IPCC report in October 2018 and the coming of the school climate strikes, the global awareness of the threat posed by climate change and many other aspects of the Anthropocene has skyrocketed. Increasing numbers of people internationally now understand

    1. that in the not too distant future all humanity and countless species face an existential threat;
    2. that right now and in the immediate years to come hundreds of millions face escalating extreme weather situations and disasters that will cause immense suffering, especially in the Global South, and generate vast numbers of climate refugees.

    Faced with this prospect many people’s immediate reaction will be to say this is so dreadful and urgent that it is ‘beyond politics’. We should all simply drop all political differences and disagreements and unite with the single aim of saving the planet. Understandable as this response may be it is not the view upon which the Global Ecosocialist Network is based. Our starting point is two key ideas: that the principle cause of the environmental crisis is the global economic system of capitalism and that stopping climate change and related catastrophes will require socialist policies and responses.

    What we mean by capitalism and the exact nature of the socialist responses required are things we can and will discuss but we are ecosocialists – that is basis of this Network and it will be focused on combating the capitalist system and the ruling classes, parties and ideologies associated with it, while advocating socialist solutions. Within this broad framework, however, we welcome all strands of socialism and we are not affiliated or tied to any particular party or tendency.

    Our immediate aim is to facilitate the development and spread of ecosocialist ideas and relevant information internationally so as to ensure that socialist ideas are heard within the current explosion of ecological debate.  Anyone who wishes to contribute a report or article to the website please forward it to webeditor@globalecosocialistnetwork.net  (John Molyneux).

    We welcome debate and controversy within a left and progressive framework.

    If the Network develops in terms of its membership and support we will move to a more formal structure and look to convene meetings and conferences in different parts of the world. And if circumstances are right we may be able to issue certain calls for action or for solidarity with other actions.

    We are particularly pleased that the Network and this website are launched with an impressive list of sponsors from round the world that includes both outstanding activists and some of the most distinguished writers from the field of ecosocialism. [See Our Sponsors.]

    So we invite all socialists, wherever they are, to join us as individuals (€10 waged/ €5 unwaged) and socialist organisations to affiliate (€150.00).

    Please go to the membership section of this site. Members will receive our regular newsletter and be invited to international events.

    The environmental crisis is set to be the decisive struggle of our times and GEN, in all modesty, aims to play a small part in this battle for the future of humanity.

    Originally posted at the Global Ecosocialist Network website.

  • Meanwhile, what do we do about Bernie?

    Meanwhile, what do we do about Bernie?

    While I found the article critiquing the electoral road to socialism by Kit Wainer and Mel Bienenfeld found in the in the current issue of New Politics quite interesting and informative, I also found it problematic. This is mostly because it treated issues, which to me are not immediately on the agenda, as questions that might virtually lead to a split, questions that because they are not immediately on the agenda are necessarily speculative and abstract.

    To me an immediate question is whether or not people who consider themselves revolutionaries should support Bernie Sanders for President and why or why not. Wainer and Bienenfeld acknowledge that in all probability, if he were elected, Sanders would have to rule, pretty much, by decree (that is, executive order). Sanders himself acknowledges this in a back handed way When asked how he could get any of his programs through in the face of a hostile Congress. But he also tips his hat to exactly the perspective Wainer and Bienenfeld are talking about in his most fundamental slogan, “Not Me, Us.” Granted, many of his most enthusiastic supporters don’t really get this and tend to see him as something of a savior, despite his sincere protestations to the contrary.

    Besides their absence of any concrete advice regarding what we should all do now, what I find problematic in their review is its level of abstraction. Not that they don’t give loads of concrete examples, but for me they don’t seem to have much to do with what is actually going on in the United States, especially now. The closest thing we have to workers’ councils are the decrepit and moribund county labor councils or perhaps the episodic mass teachers strikes. Impressive, absolutely, but getting from there to revolution isn’t exactly self evident.

    Comparisons to the Russian Revolution are unconvincing to me. Russia in 1917 was, after all, the last absolutist regime on Earth and there was nothing democratic about the Provisional Government. Presumably any genuinely democratic workers’ state would be governed by some kind of representative assembly. For all its shortcomings, is that not what Congress is? Granted there are many provisions in the Constitution designed to specifically protect property rights, but is that true of every jot and tittle of the entire document? I for one do not think so and while it is highly speculative it’s hard for me to imagine a revolution in which some alternative system of representation went head to head with the existing representative bodies. Even the National Assembly of the French Revolution was essentially the Third Estate reconstituting itself on the basis of one person one vote.

    I realize that here I am doing exactly what I accuse Wainer and Bienenfeld of doing: raising a lot of issues that basically have nothing to do with the issue at hand: what should our position be on Sanders as socialists? Most of the revolutionary struggles of the 20th century were either against Stalinist regimes or Third World dictatorships. The two most prominent examples of something approximating a workers government in an industrialized democracy are probably the French Popular Front in the 1930s and Allende’s Chile. In both cases workers parties had a plurality in such governments, but not a majority. Even Kautsky, prior to World War I, counseled against such coalitions. After World War I it is my understanding that Kautsky was not against soviets or workers councils as instruments of civil society. Rather, he opposed them as instruments of state power because he saw them as less representative and therefore less democratic than a geographically based parliamentary assembly. It seems to me that any revolutionary movement in the United States, no matter how massive, would run up against the same problem.

    In his excellent exposition of Russian soviets prior to Stalin some time ago in New Politics Tom Harrison characterized their structure as pyramidal, at least that’s how I understood his explanation. When challenged he defended this system in which, as I understand it, workers would vote only for the first, local, level of representation. Every higher level of representation would not be elected directly by the workers but chosen rather by the next lower level of representation. How is this different from when state legislatures used to pick U.S. Senators? I’m not suggesting that existing models of worker representation can’t be improved upon, but neither are they necessarily perfect models.

    In his 1932 campaign book Norman Thomas, perennial Socialist Party candidate for President, devoted an entire chapter to whether a parliamentary system or a government of workers councils is more democratic. Thomas was hardly a great Marxist intellectual, nor did he think of himself as one. Nevertheless, he was and important public figure and the standard bearer of democratic socialism in the United States from 1928 until his death in 1968. As such his views on this matter are worth consideration and he concluded that there was simply not enough evidence to suggest that one or the other system was more democratic.

    I am not suggesting here that a successful democratic socialist movement would not require a massive popular upsurge. Of course it would and Sanders says as much. But it does not follow from that that a government of workers councils is some how inherently more democratic than a geographically based parliamentary system. Indeed, quite the opposite may well be the case. In any event I acknowledge again that this is all highly speculative, which is my basic point. This is not on the agenda, and it is most certainly not a split question. At least not at this point.

    Wainer and Bienenfeld bring up the issue of bureaucracy as though this is a problem inherent specifically to capitalism rather than a problem that any large, complex society necessarily faces. Of course bureaucratic institutions, by definition, are inherently undemocratic and as such are an impediment to the democratization of society, but it is not exactly self evident to me how a government of workers councils would be better equipped to democratize bureaucratic structures than would a geographically based representative assembly.

    Finally, Wainer and Bienenfeld point out that our state based federal system provides geo-political spaces where reaction could continue to fester, but the opposite is also the case. The federal system also provides some limited protection where radical experiments could take place relatively protected from interference from the central government. The whole issue of dual sovereignty is extremely complicated and has as much to do with the geographical size of the United States as it does specifically with capitalism. In the here and now and in terms of historical experience, state based radical parties have generally had more success than something that starts from the beginning at the national level.

    To summarize, I completely agree that a socialist revolution cannot take place without violence. Violence is already here. Capitalism is inherently violent, but insurrectionary violence is another matter. I also agree that a democratic socialist revolution cannot take place without the active engagement and involvement of a majority of society or at least a substantial minority and in the course of this activity both new institutions such as workers’ councils will be formed and existing institutions will be reformed and transformed. To say definitively that a government of workers’ councils will necessarily replace and displace geographically based parliamentary assemblies is essentially speculative. We don’t know how a democratic working class will chose to govern itself and society.

    Meanwhile, what do we do about Bernie?

  • Urgent call for international solidarity with the metal workers strike in Turkey!

    Urgent call for international solidarity with the metal workers strike in Turkey!

    More than 100,000 metal workers in Turkey are getting prepared to launch a strike, a sizable section on the 5th of February, 2020. This comes after a months-long bargaining process with the bosses in the metal industry – which constitutes a strategic core by providing a large share of exports vital for Turkish economy. The industry covers sectors like automotive and production of every kind of white goods and machine parts as well as casting, essential for other lines of business. Both historically and during recent years, metal workers have been the most active division of the Turkish working class in the class struggle.

    From 2018 onward, the Turkish economy has been passing through a crisis where stagnation and recession accompany inflation and high cost of living as well as towering unemployment. This, as one might guess, creates unbearable conditions for the toiling people in the grip of a deep poverty. Metal workers, now once again, act like an icebreaker for the whole population to shake off and break the chains of despotism that puts immense barriers against the struggle of the working class, the youth and the people in general. Metal workers preparing for the strike know this very well due to their previous strikes banned by the government with the lame excuse of violating national security. The government has banned three metalworkers’ strikes as well as large strikes in the glass, petrochemicals, public transportation and banking industries.

    Once again, the bosses threaten the strikers with a ban. Such a forbidding of the strike will indisputably be illegitimate, unacceptable and unlawful! The constitutional court has ruled that previous strike bans signed by president Erdogan and the government were unlawful and even ordered them to pay indemnity! Relying on that resolution, one of the metal workers’ trade union – the United Metal Workers Union (Birlesik Metal-Is), a member of DISK (Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey) and IndustriALL – has already declared that they will not acknowledge another ban and carry on the strike come what may.

    This was stated in a lively demonstration of workers in Gebze, one of the working-class cities where thousands attended the rally. On the same day in another working-class city, Bursa, tens of thousands gathered in a huge demonstration upon a call of the Turkish Metal Workers Union (Turk Metal, member of Turk-Is, Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions) and warned the bosses to accept their demands. Even a third union, close to Erdogan’s government party AKP, is getting prepared for the strike. Almost every day, workers march in their factories in thousands during shift changes, put into practice work stoppages for hours and start forming strike committees to reject the extremely low wage rises and a three-year contract proposed by the bosses instead of the long-established biannual collective bargaining system.

    This struggle of the metal workers can open a new phase of the people’s fight with the despotism of Erdogan. It has a potential to condition the whole agenda of the society around the rights and demands of the working class and the toiling people. In the bosom of this struggle, naturally would the flowers of fight for freedom blossom whose examples could well be found in the revolutionary struggle of the working peoples of the region in the Middle East and North Africa (Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran), as well as struggles farther away in Europe (France) and Latin America (Haiti, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia and Colombia).

    The workers bring forward the famous slogan of the people’s rebellion that started with the Gezi Park protests: “This is just the beginning, let’s carry on the fight!”

    International solidarity is necessary and urgent! Bosses rely on the despotic regime favouring them, on the other hand, the only thing workers can trust is their organized force and international proletarian solidarity. Factories in the process of strike include Ford, Renault, Fiat, Mercedes and many similar international companies, imperialist exploiters of fraternal workers of other countries too.

    We ask you to sign the following brief petition on behalf of your union, association, society, professional organisation, mass organisation, neighbourhood committee, political party or organisation, socialist magazine or journal or in your own name as a union organiser or activist in other areas, an intellectual, militant of a political party as a show of solidarity with what promises to become one of the most important movements in this country that has living been too long under the iron fist of Erdogan’s despotism.

    Please send an email to sungur.savran@gmail.com before or on the 1st of February to sign a petition that reads:

    “We, the undersigned parties, trade-unions, leaders as well as rank-and-file activists of class struggle and intellectuals, support this important fight of the metal workers of Turkey against international and local capital and declare our full solidarity with their strike. In case of a ban on the strike, we declare that, according to Turkish legislation and jurisprudence, as well as established international legal norms, it is their right to resist this unlawful act, defend their right to strike and refuse to leave their workplaces.

    We pledge to organize concrete actions of solidarity with the strikers, who through their fight are uniting the struggle for bread and freedom in Turkey. We will react in response to a possible intervention by the government in this lawful right to strike to ban this very important action.

    We call on working class forces and progressive movements in all countries to take sides with the strikers against the increasingly despotic regime of Erdogan and his government in the service of capital.

    Metalworkers of Turkey, we are in solidarity with your action! Rest assured that the whole world of international labour is with you in this struggle!”

  • Bern After Reading: Sanders and Socialist Strategy

    Bern After Reading: Sanders and Socialist Strategy

    In March of 2019, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsed Bernie Sanders’ bid for President of the United States. DSA members voted on an advisory referendum that simply asked if the Democratic Socialists of America should endorse Bernie Sanders for President. 76% of the 13,324 members who participated (24% of the membership) voted YES. NO votes cited the particulars of the endorsement: the referendum only had members vote on whether to endorse, not whether to adopt the plan for an Independent Expenditure (IE) campaign, which was adopted immediately following the endorsement.

    The formal endorsement debate between then-NPC member Ella Mahony (for) and Dan La Botz (against) articulated the political positions at stake: the danger of the Democratic Party (La Botz) versus the potential of the Sanders campaign (Mahony). Mahony writes,

    Bernie Sanders is running for president, and he might actually win. What we can do—what we must do—is use the organizing opportunity of the Sanders campaign to reach millions of people when they are most open to politics—and socialist politics particularly! We have to convert them into committed fighters for the democratic socialist program, and make sure they don’t recede into pessimism or inactivity after the presidential election is over.

    Mahony’s argument embodied the perspective of many DSA members, who agreed that the Sanders campaign provided opportunities and that it would be a mistake not to take advantage of them. The combination of Sanders’ outsider status (a candidate running against the political establishment), a social democratic platform, and the sense of a historic opportunity clearly won the majority of DSA members to endorsement.

    For those skeptical of the Democratic Party, a compromise was offered – the pro-Sanders argument was able to acknowledge the problems with electoralism[1] and chart a path forward that argued for conditional involvement for the purpose of movement-building, class consciousness and socialist organization.

    The 2019 DSA Convention articulated these conditions in the electoral resolutions it passed. These stated, specifically in the class struggle elections strategy, that DSA will “commit to using campaigns and elected offices…independent of candidates’ campaigns and the Democratic Party”; that it has a desire to break from the Democratic Party[2]; that it commit to only endorse Bernie Sanders and no other Democrat (disclaimer: I am the author of this resolution); and finally:

    “that DSA will adopt a class-struggle approach to the Bernie Sanders campaign. This includes creating independent socialist political propaganda; building a strong DSA for Bernie campaign; supporting Labor for Bernie efforts to democratize union endorsement processes and win union backing for Sanders; and preparing to build working-class organization beyond the Sanders campaign, whether Sanders wins or loses.”

    These discussions showed awareness of the issues that being involved with a presidential campaign would have and created qualifications for involvement. Campaigning for Sanders was presented as an instrumental relationship, leading from electoral politics as a site of politicization to labor and social movement activity. DSA would use the space opened by the campaign to create organizations that survive past November, discuss socialism beyond our milieu, and move us closer to a place of establishing a viable workers’ party (at some point in the future). These are the arguments that were presented by DSA leaders and adopted at Convention.

    Are We Doing What We Said We’d Do?

    Following the August 2019 DSA Convention, campaigning for Sanders began in earnest. DSA invested into the DSA for Bernie Independent Expenditure, providing materials and direction. Members eager to organize were guided to campaign activities that mirrored Sanders’ official volunteer program: canvass locally, enter data into ActionNetwork, and phonebank to voters beyond your locale. Based on the campaign data, the centers of this activity in DSA are New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, Chicago, Phoenix, East Bay and Miami. Chicago DSA’s proposal to prioritize Sanders work in their chapter, for example, interprets campaigning as consisting of four elements: canvassing, outreach to students, internal mobilization, and propaganda (local media outlets, literature and “a strong social media presence”). DSA is not officially coordinating with the Sanders campaign.

    The media campaign, what we’re saying about Sanders, has been a central component of DSA’s activity. A concerted campaign to boost the Sanders message by DSA authors and fellow travelers has been ongoing in various publications, particularly Jacobin and In These Times, which have posted dozens of articles and multiple print issues about Sanders. In 2019, Jacobin alone posted 340 articles with “Bernie” or “Sanders” in the title or summary on its website, typically arguing why Sanders can win or why he is the candidate for every issue.

    As the official Bernie Sanders campaign has gotten off the ground, DSA members have been encouraged to attend the conference calls of the campaign and download and use the official Bern app. DSA members have taken staff jobs in the Bernie Sanders campaign, as field staff, advisers and running campaign affiliates, and are encouraging DSA members to participate in official Bernie Sanders functions and “Barnstorms”.

    Cause for Concern

    Based off this presentation of what is publicly available, we can begin to make some evaluations. First, this activity focuses nearly exclusively on individual voter turnout: canvassing, phone banking, tabling – these are routine activities for any electoral campaign, and though they may give purpose to DSA members looking for where to direct their efforts they do not in themselves contribute to a deepening politicization or activation into labor or social movements. If these efforts are directed at campuses and neighborhoods where Sanders already has support, campaigning would not extend our audience beyond the existing bounds.

    Second, if the class struggle elections perspective is what guides us, we are to be “independent of candidates’ campaigns and the Democratic Party.” DSA has generally run its operations parallel to the Sanders infrastructure, which blurs the lines between DSA and Sanders, especially as our members become staff for his campaign. Whether you think that is good or bad, it is not politically independent. The danger is substituting the candidate’s electoral strategy (de-prioritizing local efforts in favor of phonebanking/canvassing in early primary/battleground states) in place of DSA’s efforts to build a lasting political force, as the Convention agreed.

    Take the example of a debate at the end of 2019. An article from the Atlantic reported that DSA chapters in Iowa were not pursuing election campaigning – they weren’t “doing nothing”, but instead made a decision to focus on local organizing: “Individual members would be welcome to volunteer for Sanders on their own time…but campaigning for him as a chapter would distract from [Central Iowa’s] local efforts…”; “As much as many of our members love Bernie, we see our importance more so in building class consciousness and working-class power in our communities, because that will ultimately last longer.” This was met with a widely read rebuke by a DSA member in New York: “Iowa DSA chapters’ failure to help energize the progressive Iowa voters and new caucus-goers is a giant mistake.”

    An important part of the 2016 Sanders campaign was the emergence of Labor for Bernie, a grassroots effort of union members to support Sanders. In 2020, Labor for Bernie has been eclipsed by the official Bernie Sanders’ “Union Members for Bernie” initiative, directly affiliated to the campaign. What’s the difference? Jonah Fuhrman, DSA member and staff for Union Members’ for Bernie, writes, “L4B is more about activists trying to move their unions towards Bernie (which is awesome and which the official campaign cannot politically participate in!) and the official campaign is trying to do more conventional things like Voter ID, persuasion, and GOTV on the member level, engaging members who are in unions that are not going to endorse Bernie.” In theory there should be no conflict, but where L4B organizers have taken up with Union Members for Bernie, it diminishes the capacity of the independent initiative in favor of the campaign-driven one.[3]

    The Narrative of Sanders

    Let’s consider the de facto analysis that seems to inform DSA’s campaign for Sanders. If we look at what’s being put out in publications like Jacobin, circulated articles about Sanders, and social media, then try to make some coherent sense of it, there is a narrative being advanced:

    1. Bernie Sanders made a historic bid[4] for the presidency in 2016, bringing socialism into the national conversation. Just why he was able to do this isn’t entirely clear, but on the whole people were ready for an alternative to politics as usual[5]. While he found popular support, he was either cheated out of the nomination[6] by tricks of the Democratic Party, unable to mount a strong campaign because of the late start[7] he got and his own surprise at being so popular, or both.
    2. The political landscape was transformed[8] by this campaign. The evidence we have for that is the growth of DSA[9] to become the largest socialist organization in over 50 years, and polls that show people’s preference for “socialism” over “capitalism”.
    3. A Sanders campaign with more time, money, and support would be able to expand these the radicalization and reach more people, which would be a major gain for the left[10].
    4. Sanders’ popularity, especially when matched up against Trump, show that he should win the nomination in a democratic contest; even those who may not like Sanders should accept his nomination as the best chance to defeat Trump, who they hate.
    5. The viability of democratic socialism at the polls is demonstrated by the election of socialist candidates at local, state and federal offices.
    6. The major problem is that the political establishment attempts to suppress Sanders by ignoring him, demonizing him and his supporters, or refusing to acknowledge his popularity and standing
    7. Therefore, a central task for the left is to counteract this media campaign and boost Sanders to increase confidence among voters in the Democratic Primary.
      • The way to do this is through canvassing, phone banking, social media, union resolutions and donations. Every effort should be made to link issues back to Sanders
      • Special attention should be paid to early primaries, like Iowa, to signal to voters Sanders’ viability and popularity. Socialists can be the difference between winning or losing a primary with efforts to talk directly to voters.
    8. After mobilizing this vote, Sanders will win the Democratic Party nomination and go on to defeat Trump in November 2020. He will then preside as “organizer-in-chief” and oversee a “workers’ government.”

    This is an entirely different orientation to the Sanders campaign. The goal posts have moved from “converting the electoral energy of 2020 into a durable labor and social movement organization” (Mahony) to building a movement for Bernie, “Why Chicago Should Go All In For Bernie” (Sean Duffy); parenthetically, going “all in” is a gambling term that means you either win big or leave with nothing.

    Taking this presentation seriously, there are holes in the argument and leaps over important problems. Let me just consider three items. First, the narrative completely sidesteps the nomination process, which is designed to prevent unwanted candidates from becoming the nominee. The Sanders campaign made that reality painfully evident in 2016 by shining light on the workings of the Democratic Party that are normally hidden from sight – and that public confrontation, laying bare the operation of the Democratic Party, was one of the most important things that Sanders was able to accomplish in 2016.

    This reality has not changed. The Democratic Party nomination is not a democratic contest – it is an orchestrated event that is constructed to ensure that the neoliberal candidate always surfaces. Like the rest of capitalist democracy, this operates on multiple levels that reinforce each other: first there is the contest for campaign money to even be able to stand for election; then there is the “invisible primary” of the media to siphon support away from any undesirables; pledged support from sitting Democrats; then the state primaries with their arcane rules; and finally the Democratic National Convention and the superdelegate system.[11] And that’s just the structural stuff.

    A major reason this works is because it rests on an illusion of democracy, and the process creates a sense of affinity with the eventual candidate (“our guy”). The superdelegate system, which in 2016 pledged to Clinton before the primaries even began, is still intact – remember that this was introduced after George McGovern to fend off “outlier candidates,” and no remotely left candidate has taken the Democratic nomination since. This is not spoken of in the Sanders narrative because it interrupts the story – how can Sanders win in this environment?

    Similar issues exist when we consider what might happen after the primary if Sanders is awarded the Democratic nomination. The corporate backers of the Democratic Party are unlikely to accept Sanders[12] as a presidential candidate. Sanders of course leads among voters making less than $50,000, though he also has the least support among wealthier voters. This is significant in the United States where the more money you have, the more likely you are to vote.[13] Sanders’ response is that he has attempted to turn out new voters by giving them a reason to vote, but this is notoriously difficult.

    The New York Times reported, “The matter of What To Do About Bernie and the larger imperative of party unity has, for example, hovered over a series of previously undisclosed Democratic dinners in New York and Washington organized by the longtime party financier Bernard Schwartz.” Bret Stephens, writing more recently in an NYT op-ed, adds: “What [the Democrats] can’t do is nominate a reckless candidate of their own and insist it’s the only moral choice. For some of us, none-of-the-above is a viable option. For far too many others, it’ll be the devil they know [Trump].” All this is to say it is not a given that Sanders will command the support of all Democratic voters if he were to win the nomination, and there is a real possibility that the class differences will be too much for wealthier Democrats.

    Finally, DSA’s approach to winning the election for Sanders is essentially the same as Momentum’s plan for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party: use social media, door-knock, canvass and phonebank like a motherfucker and win the election through the inhuman effort of a small army of volunteers. Target young voters, since they’re most interested in a left program, and appeal to the old bastions of the industrial working class to defect from establishment candidates and see the left as the best way out of the present situation.

    The guiding perspective boils down to the “left populism” articulated by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. Left populism suggests that the absence of organizations of civil society mean that the left must shift to a populist orientation. Neoliberalism rules a “void” without consent, so a populist appeal can defeat establishment politics. To create a base for the future, Anton Jager writes, “A disorganized society simply might need an organizational stir from above.” Groups like Momentum and DSA can substitute for activity of the class, which can work because a little organization in a disorganized world has an outsized effect. It’s like throwing a political Hail Mary and hoping that completing that pass quickly creates organizations of the working class.

    This is backwards. Left parties have historically come to power in periods of social struggle with strong class organizations, where workers have organizations that can act, see that it is necessary to fight, believe that fighting can win, and they raise their expectations. Presenting an alternative by itself can rally opposition votes, but many workers will evaluate the balance of forces and think that the left is unrealistic. Elections will play a role in advancing struggle, but they cannot leap over history.

    We don’t have an issue like Brexit in the U.S., but Labour’s loss gives us a glimpse of a possible future: there was no “Youthquake” to shift the voter demographics, many Labour voters abstained or voted out of party, and the popularity of the Labour Manifesto didn’t translate into support that could overcome the hurdles. The Tories didn’t have to “win”; they only picked up 360,000 votes since 2017 – Labour just had to lose, dropping 2.6 million votes. Kim Moody writes, “The election season activists need to become perennial participants in branches, constituencies, unions, and workplaces who go beyond electoral mode to on-going grassroots organization, support for union struggles, and mass direct action… If, that is, the project Jeremy Corbyn…launched in 2015 and thousands picked up is to outlive his formal leadership.”

    A Different Formulation

    There’s no doubt that the Bernie Sanders campaign has been a landmark for left politics. The problem that I’m posing here is that we haven’t been particularly clear on what it means for the left. We can agree that there is an opportunity, but exactly what that opportunity is or how best to take advantage of it has been largely undefined. In this ambiguous space, we can easily slide into being uncritical surrogates for the official Sanders campaign.

    DSA’s criteria for how to engage with the Sanders campaign was useful and convincing – I’m just not sure that it’s being observed. DSA members may be using the Sanders space to create something beyond the election, but this isn’t apparent when we look at the message socialists are putting forward.

    The primacy put on the obstacles for mass movements and the value of reform flips our understanding of how society changes, with a view that without a Sanders victory, we’re finished. This is exemplified in the title of a recent Jacobin article: “The Long Shot of Democratic Socialism is Our Only Shot.” There’s a sense of desperation here, and that appears to be born of a lack of confidence in workers and social movements to develop as a force beyond this election.

    Let me present a different formulation: Bernie Sanders was able to break through in 2016 because of the weakness of the neoliberal political establishment, not the strength of the left.[14] While Sanders might have generally had more support than Clinton, there is no doubt that the Democratic primary was rigged in her favor.

    The issue we face is that the political crisis that allowed for Sanders will not continue forever – it is still at play in 2020, but the Democratic Party is quickly attempting to recompose itself to prevent future contests. Sanders offers a genuine alternative to neoliberalism, though the barriers to winning the nomination and then the presidency are formidable.

    While he might have articulated the political moment, the depth of the politicization around Sanders is at best uneven and directs towards more electoral activity unless there is a conscious effort to send it elsewhere. Noam Chomsky has been arguing for years that public opinion is consistently to the left of policy; the Sanders effect arguably has not changed class consciousness but provided an avenue for existing grievances that have not had political expression for decades at a time when establishment politics are the most troubled. If our goal is to develop class consciousness, this will be through mass movements and confrontation with employers. Our message should explicitly create a path from Sanders to on the ground organizing; as it stands, the formulation is inverted where organizing flows to Sanders.

    Essential to the campaign is that we must remain rooted and self-critical. If DSA follows Sanders’ lead on campaigning, deprioritizing local campaigning in favor of early primaries and battleground states, not only are we not creating anything lasting, we’d be parachuting in door knockers to questionable effect. This is one of the major concerns with staff positions, which by their nature preclude serious criticism of Sanders because their paid job is to win votes, not build a left.

    Raising these issues is not a radical departure – I’ve tried to demonstrate that this was the view put forward by DSA as recently as six months ago, and it should continue to guide us. This comes down to four things: 1) that election campaigning explicitly should lead to labor and social movement organizing, and not the other way around; 2) that our first priorities should be moving existing organizations towards democratic endorsements to strengthen collective bodies and create the infrastructure that can move more people; 3) that we not refrain from criticizing Sanders and that we inoculate against the potential of Sanders losing and the counterattacks that will come; 4) that we favor local activity and organization building over national contacts. This does not preclude canvassing but is intended to shift the center of activity.

    We should have the larger view of how our forces can come out of this election stronger rather than employ a get-rich-quick scheme of going all-in for Sanders. The opportunity is to use the campaign of a politician who is favorable to a view of changing society through mass movements – connecting Sanders supporters back into labor union organizing, community groups, local campaigns and other efforts that are recognized by Sanders as being important. We should prioritize grassroots efforts like Labor for Bernie over campaign-affiliated ones precisely because it is self-organization, it is directed at power-holders, and it prepares the basis for more longstanding activity.

     

    [1] “Second, electoralism misunderstands the primary source of socialists’ power: organized, militant workers. Elections can be a vehicle for class struggle, and redistributing power and resources to workers will indeed require an ambitious legislative agenda and ultimately a socialist political party taking state power and initiating a formal transition to democratic socialism. But the power to achieve and defend these gains rests primarily in organized workers and their capacity to mobilize a mass social base to win these demands.” The Call, 1/30/2019.

    [2] “In the longer term, our goal is to form an independent working-class party, but for now this does not rule out DSA-endorsed candidates running tactically on the Democratic Party ballot line.”

    [3] The Democratic Party relies on unions to endorse neoliberal candidates, often undemocratically, and unions are a major pillar of its support. Opening the endorsement process can have an outsized effect on democratizing the electoral process because of the role labor continues to play in the Democratic Party coalition.

    [4] “Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination was historic. The expectations were, to say the least, modest…But, against all odds, within months Sanders would raise over $200 million in small contributions, and win more than thirteen million votes (43 percent of the total) and twenty-three states. Though he fell short of the nomination, Sanders left an impact on a generation of new voters and the political discourse in the country.”

    [5] “It turned out that many people were tired of having to choose between conservative pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism and liberal meritocratic elitism to explain the economic inequality and hardship they experience every day. They heard what Bernie had to say: that the economy is rigged, and that aggressive action to democratize it is necessary and achievable. And they agreed.”

    [6] https://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-wasserman-schulz-rigged-primaries-against-sanders/

    [7] “Sanders and many of those in his inner circle didn’t believe he could win until very late in the campaign, instead intent on running as a protest candidate who would drag Hillary Clinton to the left.” https://theintercept.com/2020/01/03/bernie-sanders-democratic-party-2020-presidential-election/

    [8] “Without the electoral revolt on the Left inspired by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and carried forward by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, the socialist movement in the United States would likely be stuck in the same rut it has been in for decades.”

    [9] “DSA’s explosive growth is inextricably linked to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Bernie popularized the concept of democratic socialism, and his call for a “political revolution” against the billionaire class resonated with millions of Americans.”

    [10] Heather Gautney, Crashing the Party (Verso, 2018), pp. 134-135.

    [11] “Should no bargain be struck by the time of the first roll call vote at the 2020 convention in Milwaukee — such as a unity ticket between a pair of the leading delegate-winners — the nomination battle would move to a second ballot. And under the new rules crafted after the 2016 race, that is when the party insiders and elected officials known as superdelegates would be able to cast a binding vote.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/us/politics/bernie-sanders-democratic-party.html

    [12]“Bernie Sanders is the Democratic Party’s version of Donald Trump. Thank god we are smart enough to stop him,” said Democratic strategist Michael Trujillo, who served as an aide to Clinton  (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/477721-democrats-voice-concerns-over-sanders). See also https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/464048-why-small-business-owners-should-fear-the-sanders-and-warren-tax-plans and https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-wall-street.html. More telling quotes:

    “Trump may be a loose cannon on international stuff, but domestically Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are loose cannons on restricting business,” Mr. Gimbel said. “Giving things away for free is a slap in the face for people who played by the rules. Where does it stop? Are we going to start paying off mortgage debt?” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/business/economy/economy-democrats-business.html

    “’If Bernie Sanders becomes president, I think stock prices should be 30 percent to 40 percent lower than they are now,’ Stanley Druckenmiller told CNBC last year…’The biggest risk for 2020 is the presidential election,’ the New York Times quotes a JPMorgan researcher, Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou.” https://reason.com/2020/01/13/wall-street-seems-worried-by-potential-sanders-warren-presidencies/

    [13] https://www.demos.org/blog/how-reduce-voting-gap and https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/low-voter-turnout-increasing-household-income-may-help.

    [14] Richard Seymour, Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso, 2017), p. 10.

    An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of money invested in the DSA for Bernie campaign.

  • Institutional Obstacles Can be Overcome

    Institutional Obstacles Can be Overcome

    This essay is a reply to “Problems with an Electoral Road to Socialism in the United States,” published in the Winter 2020 issue of New Politics. – Editors

    Thanks to Kit and Mel for this engaging essay.

    A response to “Problems with an Electoral Road to Socialism in the United States” by Kit Wainer and Mel Bienenfeld in the Winter 2020 issue of  New Politics.

    I think the issue of an “electoral road to Socialism in the United States should be reformulated into two somewhat different questions:

    1. Is there an electoral road to Social Democracy (meaning reforms of the kind proposed by Bernie Sanders) in the United States?
    2. Is there an electoral road to Socialism (meaning the replacement of the capitalist system by a democratically controlled, egalitarian economic system) in the U.S. or elsewhere?

    I believe that the answer to the first question is a cautious and qualified “yes,” and to the second question is uncertain, but very dubious.

    I’m not ready to offer a complete argument on these questions, but I want to raise some questions about what I think is Kit’s and Mel’s overly pessimistic assessment of the possibilities for radical change posed by the existing constitutional structure.

    Kit and Mel say that for a working class movement to enact major reforms “would require not just a single victory in federal elections but a series of consecutive victories in both branches,” implying that this would be impossible or nearly so. Yet pro-reform forces have done so at two critical junctures in U.S. history.

    The first was Reconstruction, when Radical Republicans won three consecutive national elections (in 1864, 1866 and 1868), winning two-thirds majorities in the House each time, and making  corresponding gains in the Senate (by 1868, when one might assume that the reform wave would have begun to ebb, the Republicans held an incredible 57 to 9 majority in the Senate).  The Radical Republican performance was so powerful that it allowed them to overturn Andrew Johnson’s white supremacist Reconstruction plan, impeach him, institute their own plan, bar Johnson’s supporters from taking their seats in Congress, and force ratification of the 14th Amendment.  (While Johnson was acquitted by one vote in the impeachment trial, he was finished as a political force).

    The second juncture is in the Great Depression. In 1932, Democrats won 313 of 435 House seats, a gain of 97; in 1934 they won 9 more, giving them 322 of 435 seats, and in 1936 they won 12 more, for 334 of 435). Senate numbers were similar, with Democrats holding a 74 to 17 margin after the 1936 election.

    They also raise the question of obstruction by the courts. It is true that the Supreme Court did overturn New Deal measures early on, and conventional wisdom holds that FDR’s attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court was a severe defeat. But that’s not really what happened. The “court packing” plan was introduced in Congress February 5, 1937; on April 12, 1937, the Supreme Court completely reversed its direction, upheld the Wagner Act in NLRB vs Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., and continued to uphold New Deal legislation thereafter.  While Roosevelt did not increase the size of the Court, the personnel of the Supreme Court was almost completely replaced (due to retirements, deaths etc.) by 1941.

    It’s also important to bear in mind that electoral victories can reflect events outside the electoral realm. For example, the Republican victory in the 1864 election owed much to the Union Army’s defeat of Confederate forces and capture of Atlanta that summer. And the 1866 Republican victory followed outbreaks of racist violence in Memphis and New Orleans that aroused anger in the North.

    Similarly, the Supreme Court’s willingness to reverse course in 1937 and approve New Deal legislation may well have been influenced by the UAW’s victory in the Flint sit-down strike just a few months earlier after a struggle that appeared to pose a threat to capitalist private property.

    I think these examples indicate that a working class based popular movement for reform might well be able to brush aside institutional barriers, even those that seem set in constitutional stone.  What would be required would be resolute and determined leadership, grounded in a strong mass base. Reconstruction faltered and ultimately collapsed not because legal obstacles couldn’t be overcome, but because the Republican Party began to fragment politically by 1868 or so, and the movement as a whole was not able to overcome its internalized racism.

    Mel and Kit also argue that the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution gives states “power over trade and economic regulation within state boundaries.” That may be true, and yet the Federal government has very broad control over the domestic economy under the Interstate Commerce clause, the Federal Reserve system, taxing powers, etc.

    Donna Cartwright is a longtime rank and file labor activist.

  • IASWI’s Statement on Assassination of Qasem Soleimani and its Aftermath

    IASWI’s Statement on Assassination of Qasem Soleimani and its Aftermath

    The US military’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani, one of the top military commanders of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s expansionist regional policies and its proxy wars in the Middle East, can lead to retaliation by the Islamist regime. Such retaliation, the threat of further US retaliation and a chain reaction could further destabilize the region and endanger the lives of thousands of Iraqis, Iranians and other ordinary people in the Middle East. IASWI strongly condemns the Trump administration’s military adventurism in Iraq, which is a continuation of the catastrophic US invasion of this country. Furthermore, we denounce IRI’s bloody interventions in Iraq and its participation in repression of the Iraqi protesters. We support the demands of many Iranians and Iraqis, particularly during the recent uprisings, calling on both American and Iranian military and paramilitary forces to leave Iraq immediately and refrain from further endangering the lives of Iraqis and other people in the region.

    At the same time, IASWI cautions against fear mongering that we have witnessed by both US Imperialism and the IRI regime and also on both mainstream and the social media. Many concerned people are calling for calm and deescalation on all sides and clearly point that any military escalation is strongly condemned by peace loving people around the world. If escalated, military conflicts between US Imperialism and the Iranian regime will be disastrous and its main casualties will be as always the working and ordinary people. It is important to emphasize that the current mounting tension is also used as a pretext to disrupt and derail the internal issues in the US against the racist and criminal Trump administration and the growing dissatisfaction and anti-regime protests in Iran against repression, poverty and corruption. The increased militarization will be used to broaden attacks on workers’ and human rights by both sides of the current conflict.

    Our position, informed consistently by the Iranian labour movement and socialist forces on the ground, has been clear throughout the years. We continue to look at this prolonged conflict between a globally criminal imperial power and a brutal and corrupt regional power from an internationalist anti-capitalist perspective. We unreservedly oppose economic sanctions and military interventions and wars by the US and its reactionary allies, i.e. Saudi Arabia, Israel …, while simultaneously supporting the class war against the reactionary ruling capitalist system that has been taking place in Iran.

    The class war between the repressive capitalist regime and employers and the working class and oppressed people in Iran have taken tens of thousands of lives throughout the years. Within the first three days of the recent uprising in Iran, November 15, 2019, hundreds to reportedly 1500 protesters, mostly young people from working class areas, were killed and up to 10,000 were arrested while thousands got injured. Families of those killed and arrested have been threatened not to speak out publicly or to hold public memorials. Security forces, including the notorious killer members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that Soleimani belonged to, have been everywhere to prevent and crush any grassroots gatherings except those sanctioned by the government. Unfortunately, these protests received little pro-active support from progressive groups in the West although many trade unions internationally condemned the suppression of the protesters.

    In the past 40 years, tens of thousands of labour activists, communists, feminists and real anti- imperialists have been executed, imprisoned, tortured, flogged and banned from workplaces and schools in Iran by the Islamic Republic of Iran. All socialist, communist, left and labour groups are banned and oppressed by the IRI, and that’s not a new phenomenon but a common practice for almost 40 years. Workers and labour activists organizing for their most basic rights have been violently persecuted, tortured and imprisoned.

    We reiterate our position for the past 20 years: “A working class and progressive position defends a real peace and the independence of the workers’ movement: an anti-capitalist position not only opposes economic sanctions but also any attempts by the US and its allies to pursue war against Iran, while, at the same time, supporting the ever-increasing workers’ struggles against the repressive Islamic regime and capitalists in Iran, that have been viciously implementing the most aggressive and ruthless anti-worker, totalitarian and neoliberal policies in this country’s contemporary history.”

    We believe the workers’ and socialist organizations and progressive forces in the West are rightly confronting their own capitalist governments especially the US Imperialism. A victorious class war against capitalism in the US and anywhere else in the West can help the working class around the world particularly in the Global South. However, this is a long process and will require enormous organising, mobilization and sacrifices by the progressive forces in the West; thus and in the meantime, expecting the Iranian working class, oppressed people, women, socialist and other progressive forces to endure all these sufferings and stop organizing and fighting for their rights against the brutal capitalist regime in the name of the US threats is not acceptable, and frankly it is a racist and pro-capitalist approach, which amounts to apologism for a brutal regime.

    Say no categorically and proactively to US warmongering and stand firmly in solidarity with the working class and the poor and oppressed people of Iran, and not the tyrannical Iranian regime, and help strengthen anti-capitalist, anti-poverty and social and economic justice movements in Iran and across the region.

    No War But Class War!
    Long Live International Working Class Solidarity!

    International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran (IASWI)
    January 4, 2020
    info@workers-iran.org;
    www.workers-iran.org;
    http://etehadbinalmelali.com/ak
    https://twitter.com/IASWIinfo

  • Yes, the PMC Exists: A Reply to David Camfield

    Yes, the PMC Exists: A Reply to David Camfield

    In a recent New Politics essay David Camfield argues that the “PMC” (shorthand for “professional-managerial class”) does not exist and that belief in it hinders socialist organizing. He presents a simplified, partly inaccurate version of the concept and rehearses an age-old critique: that different social functions ≠ different social classes. The upshot of his argument is that ‘we are all workers’ except “middle managers” and actual capitalists as well as (presumably) the petit bourgeoisie. While admirable and even correct in its activist thrust—yes, both workers and professional-managers share a common antagonism with capital and no, teachers, journalists and tech workers should not feel guilty about organizing, striking or advancing their interests collectively—Camfield’s argument is wrong in its theoretical understanding of class. His attempt to define away the structural domination of most workers in their day-to-day lives by professionals and managers is also potentially harmful: it obviates the need to address this inequality head-on in activist circles and try to overcome it through practice. Here I’d like to provide two counterpoints: 1) the PMC does exist, and 2) acknowledging this does not have to paralyze organizing but can actually empower workers within cross-class movements—including, and especially, those for socialism.

    Camfield correctly attributes the PMC concept to Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s influential 1977 article. He also correctly reproduces their basic definition of the group as “salaried mental workers” who “reproduc[e] capitalist society” through their various occupations as “teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, [and] writers of advertising copy and TV scripts,” among many others. What he fails to provide is even a short recap of the Ehrenreichs’ structural explanation of this group’s formation and role, which is indeed part and parcel of their designation as a class. Camfield’s inaccurate focus on “status,” “skill” and “autonomy” as allegedly defining features of PMC membership is also strange, along with his simple assertion—via Ellen Meiksins Wood—that there are only two mutually exclusive ways to define class: “either as a structural location or as a social relation” (as if one’s role in a social relation does not simultaneously place one in a socio-structural location vis-à-vis other actors). Let’s consider these deficits, starting with definitions.

    The Ehrenreichs’ full definition of the PMC is as follows:

    “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations. Their role in the process of reproduction may be more or less explicit, as with workers who are directly concerned with social control or with the production and propagation of ideology…Or it may be hidden within the process of production, as is the case with mid-level administrators and managers, engineers and other technical workers whose functions…are essentially determined by the need to preserve capitalist relations of production.”

    They frame this not as a scholastic definition valid across space and time, but as a functional role produced for a group through more than a century of capitalist development and class struggle. Specifically, they cite the rise of “monopoly capital” (or what we might term ‘big-firm’ capital since actual monopolies are in no sense intrinsic), the deskilling of labor in production, a series of pitched battles between workers and employers and the massive expansion of state functions aimed at shoring up social reproduction and ‘order’. These combined processes, which are clearly demonstrable in the U.S. from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War, accomplished two things, according to the Ehrenreichs. On the one hand, big firms with increased productivity and the explosive character of working-class resistance convinced large sections of capital that investing in a permanent corps of administrators, officials and experts was both possible and necessary. On the other hand, deskilling on the shop floor and state intervention into education, childrearing and medicine as well as expansion of repression (police, prisons, courts) served to extract skills and practice from working class members and re-assign them to designated experts and officials—engineers, teachers, doctors, cops—who were then placed in positions of authority over them. “It is simultaneously with these developments in working-class life,” the Ehrenreichs argue, or “(more precisely, in the relation between the working class and the capitalist class) that the professional and managerial workers emerge as a new class in society” (16).

    This is class as a social relation, but a double relation. The PMC is dependent on capital for their share of the surplus (paid as salary) and tasked with fulfilling capital’s needs for profitability and social quiescence. A latent conflict exists between them and capital over the share of surplus paid out and the degree of autonomy granted PMC members to perform their jobs. Yet their jobs do not involve, in the vast majority of cases, producing commodified use values but either directly (e.g. supervisors, police officers, social workers) or indirectly (e.g. engineers, programmers, advertisers) steering the behavior of working class people who often experience PMC directives, “suggestions,” blueprints and algorithms as forms of domination, however benevolent. Hence a double social relation—one with capital, another with workers—and thus a socio-structural location between labor and capital.

    Whether or not one accepts it, this is at least a more complete picture of the Ehrenreichs’ concept than the strawman Camfield provides. Status, autonomy and skill are nowhere constitutive of PMC membership except insofar as they are deployed to dominate, direct or supervise others, typically members of the working class. None of this, however, answers the theoretical question of “class”.

    Class is a socially defined relationship to the means of production. This can take the form of juridical property (or lack thereof) but need not in every case, as the wide variation in legal forms of ownership and actual productive practice throughout history attest. What is decisive is whether a group plays a distinctive role in production vis-à-vis other groups involved in the same collective process. To simplify, we can say that juridical property furnishes three largely uncontroversial class groups in developed capitalism: 1) capitalists who reap profits from large shares of productive property that employ many wage workers; 2) workers who don’t own such shares and must sell their labor power for a wage; and 3) petit bourgeois who own small shares of productive property, employ few or no workers and often engage in the productive process itself. The problem, however, is that the second category is so universal that it conceals more than it reveals. While only 1-2 percent of the economically active population of the U.S. are capitalists and 9-10 percent are self-employed (largely coterminous with the petit bourgeois), nearly 90 percent are “wage and salary workers”. This includes architects, doctors and corporate PR directors alongside retail salespersons, construction laborers and home health aides. More to the point, if left undifferentiated, this class category would include frontline, value-producing workers alongside top-level managers and professionals whose plans and directives they work under and who have great sway over their livelihoods.

    Though one could dig in and assert that this is just a very big, internally-divided class, most don’t, including David Camfield. Though each draws boundaries somewhat differently, writers as diverse as C. Wright Mills (1951), Nicos Poulantzas (1975), Harry Braverman (1974), Erik Olin Wright (1986, 1997), Michael Zweig (2000) and Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992) all place groups largely identical to the Ehrenreichs’ PMC outside the working class. Wright and Mills define their ‘middles’ as largely non-agentic ‘no-man’s lands’ between true classes; Goldthorpe sees one “pole” of administrative and professional “employees” counterpoised to “unskilled manual and entirely routine grades of nonmanual” employees, as well as to employers and the self-employed; while Poulantzas and Zweig group most professional-managers in one class with the petit bourgeoisie (though with different political conclusions).

    Kim Moody, founding member of the socialist organization Solidarity, Labor Notes and advocate of bottom-up, militant unionism as a pathway to socialism, makes much the same distinction between PMC and working class that the Ehrenreichs propose. In his most recent survey of U.S. labor, On New Terrain (2017), he places “managerial” and “professional” employees in a “middle class” separate from the working class (p. 40). He categorizes 23 percent of this middle—including teachers and registered nurses—in a “proletarianizing” sub-tier, due to the declining real power they have over clients and other employees in the face of tightening capital-state pressure and routinization. But he still places them outside the working class and even uses Camfield’s (via Wood’s) forbidden language of ‘location’: “‘Middle class’ refers not to those statistically in the middle-income range…but those socially located between capital and the working class in the production of society’s wealth” (ibid; emphasis added).

    Even Camfield explicitly excludes one segment of employees—“middle managers”—from the working class. But given his insistence that “the PMC does not exist” it is unclear where or in what social relationship he situates this group and on what criteria he excludes them from the working class. Are they capitalists? Maybe, but this would bend any straightforward understanding of the term since “middle managers” typically don’t own the companies they work for or the divisions they manage, aren’t paid dividends, are employed at the discretion of top managers and shareholders, etc. Should they be grouped with the petit bourgeois? Again, since they don’t own and control their own independent small capital this match is equally ill-fitting. So on what basis does Camfield justify excluding only “middle managers” from the larger group of working-class employees? We don’t know, because he doesn’t elaborate. If he were to make this justification in the plausible direction of power relations this would immediately beg the question as to why only middle managers and not lower or frontline managers—who also have institutional authority over employees—are separated out. If institutionalized power were the question—and again we don’t know if it is—why are only middle managers and not police officers, detectives or criminal court judges separated out, since these groups have ostensibly even greater power over citizens and defendants, the bulk of whom are working class?

    Following the power criterion to its logical conclusion would likely result in separating out from the working class proper a group of professional and managerial employees that looks remarkably similar to the Ehrenreichs’ PMC. Indeed, this is what I and a colleague did in order to chart the growth and decline of U.S. classes from 1970 to 2010 (Ikeler and Limonic 2018). Using Census data and the active workforce as our universe, we found petit-bourgeois stasis over the period (around 9 percent), PMC growth (from 19 to 32 percent), working class decline (from 72 to 57 percent—still the clear majority), and ruling class growth (from 0.4 to 1.2 percent) (Figure 1). More dramatic, though by no mean constitutive of class difference by Marxist standards, was the persistent and growing income gap between the working class and the PMC. Since at least 1980, average PMC members consistently earn double or more than average working-class members, and this only includes the actively employed shares of either class (Figure 2).

    Figure 1: Class Percentages of U.S. Active Workforce, 1970-2010


    Figure 2: Median Annual Earnings (2010 $) for U.S. Classes, 1970-2010

     

    So what does it mean in practical terms if we accept “PMC theory”? Does it “get in the way of understanding and participating in the struggles of…the working class,” as Camfield argues? Does it pose an insurmountable “obstacle” to PMC members’ “unionizing, striking, and finding common cause with…the working class?” Does it “encourage guilty moralism…among university-educated” employees? Aside from the logical error Camfield is making here—that an objective concept should be ditched because of its uncomfortable practical implications—he also overgeneralizes. The answer to each of these questions is no.

    Assignment or belief in oneself or someone else as part of a class with systematically defined relationships with other classes is not a moral judgment. To say architects have authority over estimators and laborers, to say teachers have the same over paraprofessionals and students, to say fashion designers have remote but real authority over garment producers—or to recognize one’s own institutional authority in any of the first three occupations—is not to say “bad” architect, “bad” teacher, or “bad” designer. It is simply to acknowledge the very real—even if beneficial or benevolent—power asymmetries between such groups.

    Both the working class and the PMC have beef with capital: the former vis-à-vis surplus extraction and state repression, the latter vis-à-vis salary, autonomy and ability to serve the long-term interests of their clients. Teachers in Chicago, West Virginia and L.A., while acknowledging their relative empowerment over working-class students and communities, have fought militant successful strikes in recent years for those students’ interests, as well as their own. Registered nurses in Illinois, California, Arizona, Florida and New York struck or almost struck in 2019, primarily over staffing levels to ensure patient care and safety. And engineers and programmers at Google have been organizing proto-unions—and some of them fired because of it—that simultaneously fight sex discrimination and the pursuit of ICE contracts by their employer. In all of these cases, PMC members are using historically working-class methods of struggle to fight for both their interests and those of worker-clients. In a more nefarious example, many police unions mobilized against greater oversight of their members’ use of lethal force in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests. Here, one group of PMC members used working-class-type organizations to press their interests over and against those of mostly working-class constituents. The point is that the PMC itself is divided between those tasked with developing human and productive forces, what we call the “liberal-professional” segment, and those tasked with maintaining accumulation and social order, what we call the “financial-managerial” segment (Figure 3). It is with the former that working-class interests are more often aligned, though by no means identical.

    Figure 3: U.S. PMC Segment Percentages, 1970-2010

    Classes are of course fuzzy at their boundaries and the PMC is no exception. Is a college student on track to become a professional or manager but currently working retail in the PMC or the working class? Is the upper-level manager who’s paid increasingly out of profitability bonuses in the PMC or the capitalist class? Is the construction worker who starts a side business repairing rooves a worker or petit-bourgeois? Is the daycare director who used to teach classes but no longer does and now administers a growing cadre of employees petit bourgeois or capitalist? These are Sorites paradoxes not exclusive to the PMC. The fuzziness is the same in each case. The point is that classes are not micro-level concepts designed to sort each and every individual; they are socio-structural concepts designed to explain the internal tensions, interest configurations and long-term development of large human groupings (“societies,” “social formations,” “modes of production”). And none of this even touches on the more anthropological or culturalist conceptions of class, namely as bounded intergenerational groupings that pass on not only property and productive roles but also distinctive habits, practices, worldviews, etc. Suffice it to say there is plenty of evidence on this front as well of meaningful differences between working class and PMC patterns of social and ideological reproduction (Lareau 2003; Jensen 2012; Streib 2014; Cherlin 2014; Willis 1977).

    Aside from its objective validity, the practical utility of the PMC concept is its ability to shed light on oft-unspoken divisions within social movements and organizations. For those of us involved in such efforts, how often have we seen leaders, strategizers and thinkers drawn from or self-selected from participants who hold professional or managerial jobs? Without denigrating any of their contributions, we should also ask ourselves—and not just in passing—to what extent these patterns recreate for working-class participants the same dynamics of inequality they experience in late-capitalist workplaces and society? We (the left) regularly ask ourselves these questions vis-à-vis race, gender and sexuality—and rightly attempt to correct them within our organizations and movements, with varying degrees of success. Why shouldn’t we do the same for internal class or semi-class divisions?

    Clearly there are bigger objectives for the 21st-century left than sorting out our own internal hang-ups, and none of this is to suggest that PMC/working-class divisions are ‘the’ issue we need to deal with before all else. But they are an issue that has been known to creep into and distort left organizing in the past. Acknowledging and understanding such divisions are first steps toward overcoming them in practice which could help today’s left avoid key snags encountered by our mid-twentieth-century predecessors. Denying the class-based reality of such divisions, as Camfield would have us do, forecloses this development.

     

    References

    Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

    Cherlin, Andrew J. 2014. Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in  America. New York: Russell Sage.

    Ehrenreich, Barbara and John Ehrenreich. 1979. “The Professional-Managerial Class.” Pp. 5-45 in Walker, Pat (ed), Between Labor and Capital, Boston, MA: South End Press.

    Erikson, Robert and John H. Goldthorpe. 1992. The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Ikeler, Peter and Laura Limonic. 2018. “Middle Class Decline? The Growth of Professional- Managers in the Neoliberal Era.” The Sociological Review 59(4): 549-570.

    Jensen, Barbara. 2012. Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Mills, C. Wright. 1951. White Collar:  The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Moody, Kim. 2017. On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

    Poulantzas, Nicos. 1975. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. London: New Left Books.

    Streib, Jessi. 2014. The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Wright, Erik Olin. 1986. Classes. New York: Verso Books.

    Wright, Erik Olin. 1997. Class Counts, Student Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Zweig, Michael. 2000. The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. Ithaca: ILR/Cornell University Press.

     

     

  • Fighting back is the only way out of Bolsonaro’s Brazil

    Fighting back is the only way out of Bolsonaro’s Brazil

    Brazil dominates Latin America’s economy. And although the coup in Bolivia, uprisings in Chile, Ecuador, and Columbia, Trump’s threats against Iran, Australian megafires, mass strikes in India and France, anti-government protests in Lebanon, and the British elections have pushed Brazil off the front of the international pages, what happens in Brazil will go a long way to determining the social and politic balance of power in Latin America in the coming period. In just one year, far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has done a lot of damage. The Amazon rain forest is burning, social services, education, culture, women’s rights, and unions are under attack. Bolsonaro and his followers have given the green light to the murder of indigenous activists, they have threatened LGTBQ people and elected officials, their fingerprints are all over the assassination of Party of Socialism and Freedom Rio de Janeiro city councilor Marielle France, and they have launched a campaign against “cultural Marxism.” Yet, despite legitimate fears, Bolsonaro has not managed to consolidate a neo-fascist party, his administration is enmeshed in growing corruptions scandals, and the judiciary was forced to release former Workers Party (PT) president Lula in October, who stands as a unique electoral threat to Bolsonaro’s reelection in 2022. 

    Esquerda Online is a widely-read political site in Brazil associated with Resistência, a revolutionary socialist current within the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL). The following editorial outlines strategic perspectives for fighting Bolsonaro and mobilizing Brazil’s still-powerful labor, feminist, Afro-Brazilian, indigenous, youth, and poor people’s movements. Originally published at Esquerda Online, translated by No Borders News. 

    It is common to joke that in Brazil the year begins after Carnival (the last week of February this year), our biggest festival of popular culture, marked by irreverence and political satire. But in these times of Bolsonarism we cannot afford to lose any time. And this new year, in particular, Brazil’s exploited and oppressed must confront unprecedented challenges. We want to point out three themes around which we believe the Brazilian left must focus its attention, themes which demand social mobilization and unity.

    Attacks on democratic freedoms

    One of the most sensitive issues in the current Brazilian political scenario is that of democratic freedoms. We must be rigorous in our analysis: in Brazil, we no longer live in a liberal democracy, but neither do we live in a dictatorship. At the same time, the direction is clear, we are experiencing an authoritarian escalation in the country.

    Bolsonarism’s strategic project is the eradication of Brazil’s democratic regime. However, it does not yet enjoy majority support among the different fractions of the bourgeoisie, nor of their representatives in parliament. Although there is a powerful unity among the ruling class around neoliberalism, there is, as yet, no such consensus for the installation of an openly authoritarian regime.

    The year began with the scandalous decision of a judge in Rio de Janeiro authorizing censorship against the producer of the popular and irreverent Porta dos Fundo program that recently produced a “gay Jesus” film for Netflix. Fortunately, the Supreme Court reversed the magistrate’s decision. Yet, if threats of censorship were not enough, the headquarters of the production company Porta dos Fundos came under attack by fascists on December 24. To date, only one of the criminals has been identified and, after he was issued a judicial warning and released from custody, he left the country. Nobody has been arrested.

    Unemployment and privatizations

    Unemployment is one of the biggest social wounds in Brazil today. The year ended with more than 12.5 million unemployed. Another 4.6 million people are discouraged and have given up looking for work.

    Neoliberal measures sold as necessary reforms to make the economy grow and modernize labor relations were mere deceit. Only the big businessmen, bankers, and international moneylenders won while workers’ protection and retirement are under attack.

    At the start of 2020, the official line is that only by privatizing the Petrobrás state oil company, Banco do Brasil, and Caixa Econômica Federal (the largest state-owned financial institution in Latin America) will the country grow again and generate jobs. But this is just another lie from Minister of Finance Paulo Guedes and Bolsonaro to deliver our national wealth into the capitalists’ eager hands.

    Subservience to US imperialism

    Brazilian diplomacy is in shambles. Bolsonarism destroyed important assumptions within the Foreign Ministry that guaranteed Brazil’s international policy not be linked to the United States on many issues. One such recent example was Brazil’s United Nations vote against a resolution condemning the criminal and inhuman U.S. economic blockade against Cuba. The only countries that voted with the U.S. were Brazil and Israel.

    In 2020, Brazil’s tethering to American interests is growing tighter. For instance, in the confrontation between the U.S. and Iran after the assassination of General Soleimani, Brazilian diplomats sympathized with the U.S., referred to Iran as a terrorist state, and failed to condemn the death of the Iranian military leader. President Bolsonaro even declared that Soleimani was not a general.

    Fighting back is the only way out

    It is wrong to think this new year will be easy. Year II of Bolsonarism promises many attacks on democratic and social rights and our national sovereignty. On the other hand, we can, and must, place our bets Brazilian workers’ capacity to resist. When hundreds of thousands of teachers, education workers, and students struck in May and June of 2019 creating what we called an Education Tsunami, we managed to prevent attacks by Bolsonarism against public universities and federal education institutes.

    And we need only look to the intense mobilization in France as an example, where a long and decisive general strike in public transportation has pushed the government back from its plans to raise the minimum retirement age. French workers are providing an important example to inspire the Brazilian working class, building resistance to Bolsonaro’s attacks is the only way out.

    Reposted from the translated post at No Borders.

  • Remembering and Forgetting: No to War with Iran!

    Remembering and Forgetting: No to War with Iran!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • France at a Crossroads

    France at a Crossroads

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

    Now or Never?

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

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

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

    Strikers and “Yellow Vests” Together

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

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

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

    Government Provocation

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

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

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

    A Pig in a Poke

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

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

    Not an Ordinary President

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

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

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

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

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

    The Center Cannot Hold

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

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

    Something’s Got to Give

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

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

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

    Second Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Bloomberg Foundation Makes a Grant

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

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

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

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

    Bloomberg’s Visit to Jackson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Direct Democracy and Popular Governance

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico needs your help

    The Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico needs your help

    We are reposting this appeal from No Borders News.

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

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

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

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

    Doug Henwood Has It Wrong This Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Boeing and Volkswagen Debacles

    The Boeing and Volkswagen Debacles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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